by Dr. Abd El Moneim Said (د. عبد المنعم سعيد)
Published in the 24 April 2006 issue of Nahdat Misr (نهضة مصر), Egypt
Original title: أصحاب البعد الواحد!
(For background on the topic of this article, please see Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt.)
I was invited to begin this article with a kind of beginning that I have never used; I don’t think any other writer would venture to use it either, because in the art of writing, there is nothing worse than beginning with a prediction. To make predictions about human beings and society is to court disaster; it is generally accepted that, the relevant factors and circumstances being highly interconnected and changeable, to state one’s expectations about what may happen is to risk one’s reputation and one’s standing as a scholar. But things are different in this case; I am more certain this time than I have ever been before, or am likely to be in the future. What happened in Alexandria in recent weeks held no surprises for me, except for the identity of the person who attacked churchgoers with his two swords, the identities of the victims and the fact that it took place in Alexandria. I wasn’t expecting any of these details, nor did I know anything about the time or place or the people involved, yet I knew that some sort of ‘sectarian strife’ was going to occur. What I can predict now, before the end of the first paragraph of this article, is that what happened in Alexandria will happen again. This prediction cannot fail to come true, because we have not done, nor will we do, anything different from what we are used to doing in all cases of sectarian strife; therefore, there is no reason to be surprised when the entire situation repeats itself, even though the time, the place, the people involved, and the other details are different.
The certainty of this prediction does not reflect any lack of demonstrations attended by well-intentioned people carrying crescent moons and crosses together, or any shortage of attempts by intellectuals to raise people’s awareness of the rules of citizenship. It is a realistic expectation because the nation has undergone a structural change; it has become a one-dimensional nation, producing only different sorts of bigotry and aggressive behaviour. The most dangerous aspect of this transformation is that is has taken place under the gaze of the government, the political parties (both within and outside the opposition) and the civil society organisations (liberal and otherwise), and that none of them has been able to have the slightest effect on it. This doesn’t mean that what has gone wrong can no longer be set right; on the contrary, it seems to me that we can still return to the normal course of Egyptian patriotism and citizenship, but that we lack the courage and the will to make this happen.
In order to clarify this situation, we must trace it backwards from the end. The basis of the concept of citizenship isn’t simply that a group of citizens, equal in rights and duties, have come together to form a nation — Egypt in this case — but also that they are linked together by a multiplicity of ties. Some of these are political (being Egyptian, for example), some are economic (the exchange of goods and services) and some are social, such as relations between neighbours and colleagues, or even relations of mutual esteem based on good humour. These are the dimensions that come to mind now, but careful researchers will discover other, far greater dimensions. At the moment when two Egyptians, a Muslim and a Christian, meet each other, these dimensions immediately appear, just as other dimensions appear between members of a family, who are linked by kinship and by their shared way of life.
All these dimensions have now come to an end in Egypt. Lest I be accused of exaggeration, let me add that Egypt is headed for ruin. What has happened in Egypt during the past four decades has gradually done away with all these dimensions, and emphasised a single dimension, specifically the Islamic dimension, which has become the basic factor that determines all social relations. This transformation has taken place via a process that has sometimes been planned, sometimes unplanned, sometimes entirely spontaneous. The result is that nothing remains of individuals but a single dimension, associated with a single aspect of their identity and of their social, political and economic relationships. This process, which casts individuals in a certain mould, begins with the use of public space, and ends up taking over the citizen’s private space, such that the individual is no longer an Egyptian citizen, but simply a Muslim who belongs to the vast community of Muslims. When the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood said “To hell with Egypt,” he crowned this tendency, which abolishes geographical citizenship connected to a nation with its borders and its history, and replaces it with religious citizenship based on partnership with people in Malaysia rather than with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Shoubra [in Cairo].
It is very difficult to establish when this process started, but it may have been the moment when it was decided that every mosque in Egypt would broadcast its prayers over loudspeakers at high volume, piercing public space, even though the muezzin’s voice, calling Muslims to prayer, had been sufficient for fourteen hundred years of Islamic history. When the State disregarded this, on the grounds that it was an unimportant matter, a simple expression of Egyptians’ pious nature, religious one-upmanship became inevitable, and it became necessary to deprive Muslims of their responsibility for knowing when it is time to pray, by broadcasting the call to prayer on all television and radio stations. The State, which often joined in with its own programmes, then found it necessary to seek out the opinions of the Mufti [Egypt’s most senior Islamic jurist] and Dar al-Ifta [the Islamic authority responsible for issuing religious edicts] on every subject: on war and peace, on the hereafter and the here-and-now, on administration and decoration. There was really no need for unknown groups to line all of Egypt’s main roads with signs displaying religious expressions, advice, and the 99 names of God. It was not long before this practice was extended to all the public squares in Egypt. According to my limited observations, the concentration of these signs was higher in Alexandria than in any other Egyptian city.
While this was going on in the streets, which were also being blocked [by crowds of worshippers outside full mosques] during the Friday prayers, a process was taking place, in all governmental agencies and national institutions without exception, that moulded citizens so as to rid them of all the dimensions that had governed their behaviour. At first, there was resistance to the appearance of mosques in these institutions, and prayers were therefore organised in front of lifts and stairwells instead. The aim was, on one hand, to obstruct movement and work, and on the other hand to make a kind of political statement, giving a bad reputation to anyone who thought that, except at the time of Friday prayers [at the mosque], they could pray by themselves. It was not long before these gatherings turned into religious and social movements that held readings from the Koran and organised pilgrimages to Mecca. What happened in government institutions also took place, in different ways, in residential areas. Although mosques were already to be found everywhere, the appearance of even more mosques, in every green space, was inevitable. After a short time, the new mosques and prayer rooms became places of religious instruction given by groups that cropped up specifically for this purpose.
All this might just have been an expression of the piety for which Egyptians are known, but this time, it was not just a matter of piety, but rather training in one-dimensionality. Children taking classes in Islamic jurisprudence are told to separate themselves from their Christian peers and not to play with them. There are people who, when discussing health, state right away that they prefer the Christian doctor, but who also discriminate against the Christian grocer, and so on. Along with flare-ups in the regional and international situation, with Egyptian workers returning from the Gulf wearing short white robes, with the spread of salafi beards and other such symbols, the division between Egyptians has grown in different ways. Religion has become the basic factor that determines social relations in Egypt. Even among Muslims, most of the dimensions related to family, neighbourhood, citizenship, profession, market, culture and learning have disappeared, and the only dimension that still forges social relations, friendships and mutually beneficial exchanges is the religious dimension. This has created a psychological barrier between women who wear the hijab and those who don’t, between those who wear the gallabiya [a traditional robe worn by men] and those who don’t.
The one-dimensional person is the one who runs toward a church, carrying two swords, in order to kill Egyptians who are performing Easter prayers. If we are to believe that he was suffering from mental instability, it must have been a special kind of instability, which began with his intense isolation and was shaped by a hostile orientation towards Christians in particular. During the past few weeks and months, the culture of the single dimension has been focused on the unfortunate Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. From amongst all the many possible ways of dealing with this offence, the isolationist mentality seized upon a single formula, which appeared on all the billboards: “O Messenger of God, I would sacrifice my father and mother for you.” Egyptians do not commonly use this expression in contemporary speech; it came directly from the first century AH [622-718 AD], and naturally led to the carrying of swords — not, fortunately, to the carrying of rifles or pistols — and to attacks on those who the perpetrator believed were an extension of the Danes, from whom he had long since dissociated himself.
This infernal mechanism, which has become prevalent in our society in the past few decades, could not fail to produce an opposing infernal mechanism among Christians, which has driven them in the direction of one-dimensionality in Christianity. Although this mostly took place inside churches, rather than in the streets as it did among Muslims, a decrease in the interaction between Muslims and Christians soon divided a nation that has not often known division in its history.
All this is the essence of the problem. Christians certainly have other legitimate grievances, concerning housing, employment in the civil service, and the political system, but these well-known problems are perhaps not commensurable with the greater problem stemming from the one-dimensional individual, isolated and angry with his lot in life and his position in the world. Thus the violence will be repeated, and the disasters will multiply, because we have stopped developing all the other dimensions that make up a balanced personality, and cases of mental instability are therefore on the increase.
