Religious dynamics in post-revolutionary Egypt/Dynamiques religieuses dans l’Égypte post-révolutionnaire

On 10 and 11 February 2014, Reverend Samiḥ Maurice of the Qaṣr el-Dubbara Church in Cairo, and the Coptic Orthodox cantor (murranim) Mahir Fayiz, organised a large gathering in Hurghada on the coast of the Red Sea. The poster for the event was entitled ‘For the love of Egypt. A cry from the heart’ (Fī ḥubb Miṣr, ṣarḥa min al-qalb). This prayer meeting, held right at the beginning of the presidential election campaign, ¹ aimed to bring together people of the Christian faith of all denominations to unite their voices, to pray and to sing for the nation. But above all, the clearly declared objective of these prayers was to support the candidate – and future president – Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi. The title of the event, Fī ḥubb Miṣr, was in fact the main slogan of his presidential campaign, and would thereafter become the name of the coalition of parties in favour of the new president during the parliamentary elections of 2015. As is so often the case for this type of gathering, the meeting in Hurghada could be followed across Egypt thanks to live transmission by the Christian satellite channel Sat7. By putting their prayers and those of their followers at the service of Sisi’s victory, Maurice and Fayiz gave them an obvious political slant, although this was nothing new. Prior to 2011, charismatic evangelicals had attempted to influence society through their prayers of intercessions, to the point that the faithful of Qaṣr al-Dubbara considered that the uprising was the result of their prayers (Dowell, 2015).

In terms of its daily expression, the religious arena has experienced important changes in post-2011 Egypt, which have been more or less rapid depending on the areas in question. While aspects of ritual, beliefs and behaviour connected in one way or another to religion, in other words, religious expression, may change, they nevertheless change less quickly than the configurations that couple religion and politics. These latter have known different twists and turns since the revolutionary uprising, which point out to the observer the closeness and the complexity of the links that unite these two fields. The events that took place post-2011 have contributed to the politicising of certain ritual activities in an often-novel fashion, as was the case in the organisation of Coptic prayer meetings, exemplified by the event in Hurghada of February 2014. There is no shortage of such examples, whether it be the revolutionary prayers held in Tahrir Square or the sudden proliferation of politico-religious martyrs (Lachenal, 2018): the Coptic demonstrators massacred by the army at Maspero in October 2011, for example, were Christian martyrs for some and revolutionary martyrs for others. The figures of Mina Daniel and of the imam ‘Imad ‘Effat – to whom the former was often associated in graffiti representing national unity – are yet more examples (Hellyer, 2019). Going beyond the politicising of the religious, these cases illustrate the blurring of the political-religious boundaries that has been occurring in Egypt during these past eight years.

The first weeks of the uprising in 2011 were hardly religious: any pushing of sectarian slogans was rare, as were any claims to Islamic identity. Nonetheless, religious symbols and practices were some of the tools mobilised to protest against power. Religion, notably as represented by the rift between Islamists and ‘secularists’, was effectively employed as a standard in the name of ‘democratic transition’ (Steuer, in this issue). As time went on this rift became deeper, especially when the Muslim Brothers took power. The army’s coup d’état under the leadership of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, then Minister of Defence, was justified in the name of a nation at war against terrorism (Guirguis, 2016; Schielke, 2017). Despite having advocated ‘a reform of religious discourse’ (Paonessa, in this issue), Sisi revealed himself to be less than secular when he chose to couple his nationalist crusade with a moral struggle against homosexuality and atheism, with the support of the official religious authorities of both Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church.

But what was the impact of these political and religious games on the everyday life of the individual? The extent of these ambiguous relationships, as well as their consequences, is still to be evaluated. As has been pointed out by Cécile Boëx and Paulo Pinto (2018), the revolution has not yet revealed all its aftereffects and, some eight years later, the researcher still lacks the necessary distance to understand the impact that political events have had on contemporary religious dynamics, and vice versa. Moreover, the sensitive nature of issues surrounding Islamism and its relationship with democracy, and the relations between Muslims and Christians, sometimes inhibit the scholar’s endeavours, whose aim would be to analyse these phenomena in a comprehensive manner using the methods of sociology and religious history. It is nevertheless certain that important social changes are underway, particularly amongst the youth of the big cities. The authoritarian government of the Brothers, deposed in July 2013, was rejected by many of the young. This was especially true of women who, feeling that they were being dispossessed of their religious choice, decided to take off the veil in order to protest against the imposition of what they considered to be a personal choice. The gleeful anarchy of the revolution – which many Egyptians perceived as intolerable disorder – left room, for a few years, for freedoms that were previously unknown in the history of the country. While repression and the economic crisis have, for the time being, smothered these aspirations towards liberty, the powers that be will have serious difficulty in erasing the memory.

Today, the rather delicate mission of the social sciences is to continue the study of these social and religious evolutions: such observations will be crucial to the understanding of the country in the years to come. For this, it will most probably be necessary to sidestep the wave of studies that have been published within the context of the revolution. These works have looked most particularly at the ability of Islamists to manage the country, at the relationship between Salafism and politics, and also at the outbreak of Coptic activism in the wake of Tahrir (Lukasik, 2016; du Roy, 2016; Barbary, 2016). But beyond the ‘wild’ times of the revolution, the task is to reveal the entangling of the temporalities and the social spheres that make up the fabric of Egyptians’ religious experience. This thematic review thus aims to shed a preliminary light on the impact of the revolution on post-2011 Egypt through four case studies that closely mix the issues of representation, both political and religious.

Religion of the everyday since 2011

Our respective research in history and in anthropology has always led us to pry into the everyday of the individual. Egypt is a country in which Islam and Christianity sit deep within the day-to-day life of the citizen. It is worth remembering the changes that have marked Egypt throughout the 20th century: both Copts and Muslims have been touched by religious reform movements that considerably modified the place of the individual within the confessional group. Religion, increasingly defined as a separate social domain, was seen to stamp its mark on other emerging spheres of social life, whether the law, the economy, education or leisure. These religious reform movements were accompanied by vigorous activism in the fields of politics, voluntary associations and also charities. The public space became Islamised, whilst Christians have tended to develop refuges within the heart of their parishes (El Khawaga, 1993) and under the supervision of an authoritarian clergy. Today, this omnipresence of the religious domain can manifest itself in very banal ways, for example, through the possibility of programming one’s mobile phone to broadcast specific tones for the five daily Muslim prayers, or else by hanging a cross or a misbaha, the Muslim rosary, from the rearview mirror of one’s car. While these simple gestures may say much about the rooting of religion in the day-to-day, they also suggest a sort of trivialising of religious markers through over-use. Thus, the Islamic veil has become as much, or even more, a fashion accessory as an outward sign of piety. One might ask whether the failure of the Muslim Brothers to take power and the unbending support of the Coptic patriarch first for Mubarak, and then Sisi, could represent a pivotal moment in the religious escalation. At the same time, signs of a sort of religious disaffection have appeared. These do not necessarily mean that individuals are simply breaking with confessional identity, but rather they are experiencing a certain distancing from religious institutions that are perceived as being too conservative. For example, we have noted in the field that some middle class Copts of Cairo have stepped away from the activities of the parishes, which previously determined their socialisation. Other researchers have recorded the sudden visibility of Egyptians advertising their lack of belief. Since 2011, there have been Facebook groups of young atheists, who will also gather in certain downtown cafés in Cairo (Schielke, 2012). The general questioning of authority at the time of the revolution seems to have continued in a less visible and specifically less political manner. To a greater extent, the changes are touching the way in which one leads one’s social and private life.

In our desire to understand what is driving these religious phenomena within the normality of the everyday, we hope to develop a deeper consideration of the religious dynamics in contemporary Egypt through the prism of religion as lived. Such an approach constitutes a means of bypassing the current setting of ‘popular religion’ against ‘scholarly religion’ by encompassing all types of religious phenomena. It is also a way of organising our thoughts around the historical and political aspects of religions just as well as around those aspects that spring more directly from the socio-cultural analysis of rituals. Robert Orsi sums up neatly the approach that interests us when he defines the analytical category of lived religion:

Rethinking religion as a form of cultural work, the study of lived religion directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas – all as media of making and unmaking worlds. (Orsi, 2010: xxxvii)

Orsi places strong emphasis on the fact that his approach aims above all at understanding ‘what people do with religious idioms’ (Orsi, 2010: xxxvii). This is not to say that the political domain and that of religious practices should be sealed of from each other, but rather to see how scholarly discourse can be mobilised within ordinary contexts and how ideas are applied or twisted from their original meaning in the normal course of social practices. The article by Sebastian Elsässer in this issue well illustrates the links that can exist between the world of the personal and the spheres of power. He demonstrates that the acceptance of a certain flexibility in the rules for divorce is essentially motivated by a fear of losing control of the faithful, who might well distance themselves from the Church if it does not exercise a minimum of effort in responding to their expectations. As for the article by Mina Ibrahim, it pays attention to an everyday circumstance of certain Coptic men that is often neglected in any analysis: that of alcohol consumption in bars, which is a prohibited by their Church. Ibrahim shows in great detail the painful tensions of identity in a society dominated by communitarian and religious sensibilities, and all the more so when one does not belong to the dominant religion.

Religious dynamics in contemporary Egypt

This notion of the religious in the everyday led us to organise an international conference in Cairo on 11, 12 and 13 September 2017 dedicated to religious dynamics in contemporary Egypt. The aim was to take into account the different social logics that crisscross religious questions in the context of Egypt. We targeted religious dynamics – not specifically Islam or Christianity – and contemporary Egypt – not exclusively the period of the revolution. The areas for consideration were deliberately vast in an attempt to encompass all the forms that the interrelations between religions and the society of our day could take: religiosity, diasporas, changes in discourse about religion, and so on. Many contributions emphasised the ambivalence of certain practices within the fabric of everyday life. The case of the religious authority of Salafist women, as presented in a lecture by Naïma Bouras, provides a fine example of the sometimes circuitous routes that religious logic in Egypt might follow (Bouras, 2017). Bouras studies the role of female Salafist preachers in Cairo. In her presentation she underlined the changes in religious rhetoric relative to citizenship, especially as regards the emergence of political parties arising from the da’wa salafiyya and the establishing of female quotas within them. But at the same time, Bouras highlighted the contradictions of this politico-religious discourse by showing how the Salafist women were engaging in practices that are considered deviant, both morally and socially, particularly by the very movements to which they belong. This is the case, for example, for those of them who take part in the possession ritual known as zar (Gabry-Thienpont, 2017). While religious discourse goes along with the enactment of rules for a virtuous life – these being in keeping with dogmatic tenets – in pratice, individuals can reconcile religion, different beliefs, some of which may be denounced as superstitions by the Salafist, and cultural references in a very personal manner. We should note the example of a Muslim woman who, during a zâr session, wore a medal with an image of the virgin and child on one side and the saints Paul and Anthony on the other. These Christian figures would appear (yaẓhar) regularly in her dreams and she was thus undertaking this ritual to please them. This did not in her eyes question the depth or the legitimate nature of her piety, and even less so the fact that she was a good Muslim (Gabry-Thienpont, personal communication, 2016). This type of sharing and transference of beliefs is not new. As Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen has demonstrated in the case of pilgrimages (mawlid), the forms of shared piety in Egypt permeate the forms of religiosity and the changes in beliefs and practices that are associated (Mayeur-Jaouen, 2005).

These sometimes unexpected contacts and overlaps ought to attract more attention from scholars. Within the specific case of studies on Egyptian Christianity, we have noticed how Christians, their history and their practices are rarely considered in works bearing on religious changes in contemporary Egypt. They are often reduced either to a sort of test of the democratic openness of Islamist movements, or to the status of eternal victims of confessional violence, even to the role of witness to a millennial past whose practices are laden with unchanged ancestral virtues. Of course, a new generation of scholars is re-examining the field and is attempting to start a dialogue with Islamic studies (Armanios, 2017; Elsässer, 2013; Guirguis, 2012; Heo, 2018; Tadros, 2011), but these practices of sharing the sacred or, on the other hand, erecting confessional barriers, strike us requiring a more systematic approach.

These different observations fed our ambition to provide an open space for interdisciplinary exchanges and to break down the barriers within the field as much as possible. The three-day conference in the Egyptian capital allowed scholars working on very different subjects – though all linked to religion – to discuss, debate and compare. One of the results while the debates were on was to dismantle the barriers between the field of studies concerning Islam and that concerning Christianity

Another aim of this conference was for it to take place in Cairo and to accept contributions in French, English and Arabic, so that we could include colleagues from Egyptian institutions in these academic discussions, which too often take place in the West. This meeting allowed us to develop bonds with the teachers in the francophone section of Al-Azhar University. From among them, we should highlight the contribution of Ahmed Khalifa who analysed the outcomes of the implementation of the ‘Al-Azhar Memory Project’ in which he participated as a teacher in Al-Azhar University and as a translator. This project was launched in 2011 at the instigation of the Grand Imam and the Minister of Communications. The aim was to promote the intellectual and architectural heritage of Al-Azhar, firstly as part of a desire to ‘canonise’ the institution within Egyptian society, and then in an attempt to modernise its image, especially in the eyes of the outside world. Ahmed Khalifa’s paper was an invaluable contribution to understanding the economic, political and religious forces at work behind this heritage development process. Other interventions, particularly from independent researchers should be mentioned, including that of Ohoud Wafi, who presented a paper on a project conducted with Howeida Fouda entitled ‘El Mosharka’. This project, supported by the Egyptian society Misr el Kheir, was one of the few contributions to the conference that did not concern Cairo and it took place in the southern Red Sea region where a documentation programme has been looking into the life of the Beja, a nomadic East African community with a presence in Upper Egypt. The two scholars examined the mixing of what they called ‘ethno-tribal traditions, Egyptianisation and modernisation’ in an effort to decipher the influence of religion on the everyday in the region and also the influence of the central religious powers (notably, Al-Azhar and Al-Awqaf) on the exercise of local piety. The critical view of such scholars, who are at the same time local actors, gave us a glimpse of a sort of ‘embedded’ anthropology of individuals invited because of their professional competence but willing as scholars to take a critical look at the whys and wherefores of projects in which they are actively participating.

And lastly, the fact that the conference was held in 2017 allowed, as we have pointed out, the organisation of an academic meeting on Egypt without being solely concentrated on the revolution. Far be it from us to want to criticise the interest that this event has provoked: it was indeed essential to look into this crucial period in the history of the country, however, it would now seem necessary to widen the scope of research in order to understand better the historical sequence that began in 2011. The comprehension of the role of heritage and of changes, of influences and local dynamics requires this.

Religion and politics

On the political level, religion found itself swept along with the ups and downs of the revolution. The article by Clément Steuer underlines the extent to which the Islamic character of the political sphere, of laws and of parties very swiftly became the major issue. He also shows that the public domination of Islam as a legitimate political idiom was not fundamentally questioned by the ‘liberal’ political actors, except for those at the margins. While these latter did not reject the article of the constitution that made sharia the source of the law, their enemies ascribed this intention to them, which polarised the debate considerably. The Islamists’ crushing victory in the first parliamentary elections did little to help the division of opinion and caused the Copts to fear for their place in society. Thus, the Church got involved in the different political campaigns, supporting certain parties and candidates and calling on the Copts to get out and give them their votes (du Roy, 2013). The Coptic clergy used religious arguments to push the faithful to vote in a way that they considered desirable while at the same time criticising Muslims for voting for candidates that their religious authorities indicated.

The post-revolutionary period witnessed a wave of examinations into the Muslim Brothers’ relationship with democracy, their role in the transition and, finally, their fall from power (see, among others, Deschamps-Laporte, 2014; Meijer, 2014; Moussa, 2015; Pahwa, 2017). The sudden politicisation of the Salafists was scrutinised with interest, as was the appearance of a revolutionary Salafism (Lacroix and Zaghloul Shalata, 2018). These questions attracted particular attention at the time of the legislative and presidential elections: the study of Egyptian elections suddenly became a legitimate academic subject (Steuer, 2013). From the perspective of the artistic expressions of the protest movements, a lot of work – of variable quality – concentrated on the revolutionary activism, especially street art (among the most relevant studies, see Mehrez, 2012; Carle and Huguet, 2015). But the great novelty was the interest shown in the activism of Egyptian religious movements, notably those of the Copts. This new phenomenon was analysed from quite a variety of perspectives. Some authors went back to the classic problem of the Copts’ place in contemporary Egypt, so acute had it become in a period of change when anti-Christian violence reached a new peak (Tadros, 2013: 139–159; Shenoda, 2011). In fact, the Christians were caught within the same collective dynamics as their Muslim compatriots, but at the same time they had to deal with the consequences of an Islamist victory in the elections. A last and much less explored angle of study concerned the manner in which religious practices and discourse contributed to making sense of the events, or even to affecting the course of events. Such analyses bear upon the way in which the religious actors adopt political positions, and also how they engage in politics through religious practices (Moll, 2012; du Roy, 2018; Ramzy, 2015).

Costantino Paonessa (in this issue) takes a wider view by looking at the positions held by another important religious actor, the representatives of the Sufi brotherhoods. While Sufis are sometimes presented in a somewhat irenic manner as being more open-minded than the Islamists, Paonessa demonstrates that the views of both concerning the role of religion in everyday life are quite similar and at heart they share the same type of social conservatism. There is, however, a certain competition at play between Sufis and Islamists and it does not only appear within their visions of society or in the field of doctrine. There is also a struggle for power that is fuelled on the Sufi side by a fear of Islamist movements. This fear helps to explain the enthusiasm of numerous Sufis for the ‘renewal of religious discourse’ that has been promoted by Egypt’s strong man. Nevertheless, the waves of criticism that led to the downfall of President Mohamed Morsi are still having aftereffects, especially as regards the desire to prohibit religious parties (Steuer, in this issue) and in the rants of the well-known journalist Ibrahim Issa against Al-Azhar, whose pretentions to religious moderation he challenges. The camp that claims to be ‘liberal’, though sometimes less than democratic, grasped the occasion to reinforce the discredit dumped upon the Islamist movements after the Muslim Brothers had been denounced as enemies of the nation. These debates are often coupled with a certain class disdain: some members of the middle and upper classes suggest that Islamist electoral support was basically due to the vote of the illiterate masses and thus they propose a suffrage based on educational level (Steuer, in this issue). Once again, it is difficult to get a clear idea of the changes in relations between religion and politics in a context where freedom of expression is increasingly reduced every day and at a moment when Sisi has obtained a change to the constitution that will in theory allow him to remain as president until 2030. It would seem that if the Christian and Muslim voters hope to put their religious views in the service of political change, then they need to go somewhat off-piste and think up new politico-religious combinations.

Conclusion

The profound and rapid dynamics of change at work in Egypt since 2011 require a rethinking of our approach to the evolution of religious phenomena. These phenomena are right at the heart of the everyday life of Egyptians and must constantly be reappraised by scholars when faced with new trends and even forms of hybridisation. The work conducted until now recognises the sometimes paradoxical dimensions of the socio-religious changes that Egypt has experienced since the revolution. These changes are marked by the maintenance of steady interreligious relations, by an increasingly distinct segregation – associated with the reiteration of confessional, or even inter-confessional, boundaries –, and by the political upheavals that contain deep uncertainty, particularly in connection to an international terrorism that sees the Copts as a target of choice. Through distinctly different themes, the four articles that follow reveal to what extent the religious dynamics in contemporary Egypt are steeped in politics. They direct our attention to the complexity of the role and of the impact of religion in the lives of Egyptians, both in their political dimensions and in their social organisation since 2011.