Rising Influence : Islam Seeks to Build Its Own Egypt

At first, there seems nothing about the Al Rayan Islamic Nursery School that would cause anyone concern.

Newly opened in a spacious, $8-million mansion in one of Cairo’s poshest neighborhoods, this school for upscale tots boasts a swimming pool, a children’s zoo and the latest high-tech teaching aids, including a state-of-the-art computerized language lab.

Al Rayan is run according to strict Islamic principles, but there are no portraits of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the wall; instead, there are a lot of pictures of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

Call to Prayer

Indeed, Al Rayan, with its classes taught in English, more closely resembles a nursery in a well-to-do American suburb than it does one of the thousands of overcrowded, fund-famished public schools in Egypt. Unless, of course, you happen to be there at noon, when the muezzin’s deep-voiced call to prayer reverberates across the playground and throughout the classrooms, summoning the children to perform their religious duties.

Lining up in rows of three, the toddlers follow their teachers into a large bathroom where they ritually cleanse their hands and feet before returning to their classrooms to bow down in the direction of Mecca and pray to Allah.

All public schools in Egypt offer compulsory religious instruction, but Al Rayan offers more intensive training because it is one of a rapidly growing number of parochial schools affiliated with mosques and other Islamic institutions.

Islamic Principles

The schools, in turn, are part of a burgeoning Islamic infrastructure that, fed by contributions from home and abroad, has spread throughout Egypt over the past several years. This infrastructure includes not only schools but hospitals and health clinics, movie theaters and social centers, welfare programs and commercial enterprises ranging from fast-food stands and restaurants to banks and investment houses--all run according to what are purported to be Islamic principles.

Although this in itself is not new--Islam has always emphasized helping the poor--the proliferation of Islamic organizations in recent years, and their move into the commercial and banking sectors, “has been nothing short of phenomenal,” according to a Western diplomat who has followed the trend.

Figures are hard to come by, but Western officials estimate that of the roughly 5,000 charitable organizations engaged in social service work in Egypt, between 3,000 and 4,000 are Islamic. Essam Aryan, a member of the national legislature who is also a member of the influential Muslim Brotherhood, estimates that 200 Islamic medical clinics have sprung up in Cairo alone over the last five years.

What the spread of these institutions into nearly every important aspect of life means for Egypt is the subject of an intense debate between adherents of what is referred to here as the “Islamic trend” and secularists who find it hard to fault the charitable work done by Islamic groups but nevertheless view their rising influence with alarm.

Secularists such as Nemat Guenena, an Egyptian sociologist with the American University of Cairo, worry about the increasing appeal of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and believe that the Islamic groups are cleverly capitalizing on the poor quality of government-provided social services to win converts and build grass-roots support for such political goals as the establishment of sharia, the Islamic code of law.

“What they are doing is really propaganda by deed,” Guenena said. “Clinics, banks, restaurants--they are into everything. They publish a book every six minutes.”

Guenena thinks the government’s legitimacy is being challenged by what she views as the rise of a parallel Islamic infrastructure, independent of and in competition with that provided by the state.

‘Alternative Services’

“We are not talking about religion,” she said. “We are talking about a political movement expressing itself in religious terms. They are pulling the rug out from under the government by providing alternative services that are cleaner, cheaper and less bureaucratized than those provided by the government.

“I am a person who would feel very threatened by the movement. But I am also very impressed by what they do. They are taking over in a very intelligent way.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and largest of perhaps 30 to 40 Islamic groupings in Egypt, agrees with Guenena and makes no attempt to hide it. The brotherhood’s aim, its spokesmen say, is to gradually prepare Egyptians for a truly Islamic state, governed according to the sharia, by spreading Islamic values through society first.

It is hard to gauge the brotherhood’s influence, but one measure of its appeal is the fact that it won 36 of 458 seats in last April’s legislative elections, becoming the largest opposition party in the People’s Assembly. This showing was especially impressive because the brotherhood is still technically banned from politics and thus could not campaign openly.

Social Obligations

“The brotherhood is everywhere these days, in business, in politics, in the media,” a Western diplomat said. “They’ve seeded their supporters all over.”

The Muslim Brotherhood not only acknowledges this influence, it almost certainly exaggerates it. But it denies that it is competing with the government. It says the Islamic groups are merely fulfilling the social obligations their religion has always demanded of them.

“We help by taking some of the burden,” said Aryan, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s newly elected legislators. “We are not competing with the government, we are helping it. This is part of our religion. Islam means helping people. It means responding to their needs.”

The government, everyone agrees, needs all the help it can get.

Burdened with a $40-billion foreign debt, drained by a $6-billion-a-year subsidy system and crippled by an unmotivated bureaucracy, the government has been unable to keep pace with the needs of a population of 51 million that is growing at the rate of 3% a year.

Vast Overcrowding

Nowhere is the strain more evident than in the low quality of social services provided to the poor, especially in Cairo and other urban areas. Housing is in critically short supply, and there are vast overcrowded areas in Cairo where no formal housing, roads, sewers or electricity exist. Sail down the Nile in a felucca, a traditional Egyptian boat, and look at the women doing their washing along its banks. To the tourist, it may seem picturesque. But these women are using the Nile’s polluted water to wash in because they have no running water in the huts and shanties that they call home.

Horror stories about government hospitals abound. They are heard too often to make the news, but one that stands out concerns a man who was injured this year in the collapse of an apartment building--a not infrequent occurrence. The man was taken from hospital to hospital but was turned away, either because the doctors on duty had all left to make money at their private practices, or because no blood was available or because no one wanted to take the responsibility for treating a serious injury. In the end, the man, who could have been saved if he had been given prompt medical treatment, bled to death.

The government’s failure to fulfill the social contract that the late Gamal Abdel Nasser made with the people--to provide them with housing, health care, free education and jobs--is one of several factors behind Egypt’s Islamic revival, which has taken hold especially firmly among lower-class and middle-class urban youth, experts agree.

‘Impersonal Forces’

Other factors include declining revenues, rising prices and the vast influx of rural migrants to the slum belts around Egypt’s overcrowded cities.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a sociologist who has studied Egypt’s Islamic terrorist groups, concluded that they draw most of their members from middle-class youth “of recent rural background, experiencing for the first time life in the huge metropolitan areas where foreign influence is most apparent and where impersonal forces are at maximum strength.”

The come-one, come-all system of free education has accelerated this trend, acting like a social catapult that throws millions of rural young people into a new urban life style before they can adjust to it. Many of the young Islamic revivalists are professionals trained in law, engineering or medicine who, upon graduation, find that they cannot get jobs. It is a system that, in effect, gives its youth a passport to a better life but then doesn’t let them past the customs gate.

“The new generation is searching for a role in society, only to find frustration and despair,” Fahmy Huweidy, a prominent journalist sympathetic to the Islamic cause, wrote recently. Discouraged from looking forward, they look backward, “turning to principles which are, after all, enshrined in their religion,” he added.

Faith and Healing

Here, too, the Islamic groups, especially through the clinics, help by providing jobs for young doctors who are just starting out and looking to build a clientele for future private practices.

The question is whether, in mixing faith and healing, these groups also constitute a powerful pressure point for the further Islamization of the system by gradually co-opting, in Nemat Guenena’s words, “the credibility and legitimacy of the secular state.”

Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud, a Marxist turned devout Muslim, runs what a diplomat describes as the “Cadillac” of Islamic clinics in Egypt--a medical, social and religious complex in suburban Cairo that he has named after himself.

With three X-ray units, six kidney dialysis machines and a $1-million CAT scan device, it is easily the best-equipped complex of its kind in Egypt. The clinic has a staff of 375, including 75 doctors, who treat more than 250,000 patients a year from surrounding poor neighborhoods. Medical fees are a fraction of what government care costs. The fee for a general consultation is one pound (48 cents), and even that is waived for the most destitute.

And there is more. Mahmoud, drawing on contributions he says come 60% from Egyptian sources and 40% from Persian Gulf countries and Western donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, pays pensions to 3,000 poor families and has started a trust fund for orphans, who receive 1,000 pounds (about $475) when they reach 21.

Essence of Islam

Mahmoud, who is the host of a weekly television program called “Science and Faith,” believes that he has a mission not only to help the poor but to show them “what Islam really is, to teach them the essence of it, because it is so frequently misunderstood.”

The West, recoiling from Iranian fanaticism, especially tends to misunderstand Islam, to condemn the whole barrel because of one bad apple, Mahmoud complained. Egypt, too, has Islamic fanatics, he conceded, but it is in part to silence their voices that the clinic exists as an example of “peaceful” reform.

“Yes, what we do is political,” he said, “because it is an example of social reform without violence.”

While it is difficult to measure the impact that the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mustafa Mahmoud clinic and other examples of “peaceful Islamic persuasion” are having on Egyptian society, there is little doubt that the Islamic trend as a whole is gaining ground in Egypt.

“Egypt is already a very different country from what it was in 1967 under Nasser,” a Western diplomat said, noting that religion has replaced socialism and pan-Arabism as a populist credo.

‘Islamic-Tinged Evolution’

“The question is whether this is destabilizing or not,” the diplomat went on. “So far, it doesn’t seem to be. In fact, you can argue the opposite, that this type of Islamic-tinged evolution serves to check any Iran-type revolution here.”

Secularists may feel threatened by this trend, and leftists may resent it, but both these groups have failed to articulate an alternative.

“Like it or not, the Islamic groups are the only people in the private sector who are really responding in an organized, large-scale way, to social problems,” said a Western sociologist who has lived in Egypt for many years. “Will they win the hearts and minds of the people this way? I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”