Reformist and militant Islam in urban and rural Egypt

Abstract

Egypt is a country with an unusually broad spectrum of Islamic modes of belief and ritual, broader than those of most Middle Eastern and North African countries. The availability of a wide range of sources on this subject contributes to our understanding of the recent Islamic revival, which emerges as a process taking place on different social and cultural levels, rather than as a monolithic phenomenon. While much attention has been focused on the violent or extrovert manifestations of fundamentalist and militant groups and on the motives of their leaders, relatively little has been said of the grass-roots level. At opposite ends of this spectrum we find the orthodox, or official, expressions of Islam both in their militant-fundamentalist and their institutionalized-modernist variants and the range of popular beliefs and rituals, portions of which were Islamicized and reluctantly accepted by generations of fuqaha.' Some of these beliefs and rituals, proven to have pre-Islamic, even Pharaonic, roots, repeatedly found disapproval in the eyes of the religious establishment. Among those are the Nile rituals, superficially Islamicized life cycle rites, the belief in jinns, good spirits and miracles, the use of charms and magic, the exorcist zar, and a system of making vows.2 The many different mawlids and certain spectacular sufi practices were at times condemned by a small orthodox elite or curbed by the government, but rarely forcibly repressed.3 The exponents of Islamic orthodoxy have therefore never been able to eliminate completely the heritage of what has been termed 'the oldest continuous folk-nation in the World'.4 While Islamic orthodoxy can be defined as the normative or official religion, it is adhered to mainly by the educated urban population. The village remains even today to a large extent the domain of popular religion. As in the case of the orthodox-popular religion division, the urban-rural spectrum covers a broad scale. Although the strict urban-rural dichotomy survives on the ideological level, thus pertaining also to mutual concepts of creed, researchers have become much more hesitant to accept its relevance on the socio-economic level in recent years.5 These two frameworks of analysis orthodox-popular religion, urbanrural dichotomy are in Egypt neither congruous nor static. The spread of formal education in particular has led to shifting socio-religious patterns.