Having just returned from a trip to Egypt, I am no longer quite so worried about an impending Islamic revolution in the troubled state. When I left the country over a year ago, it seemed like the bull market for Wahhabism was unstoppable, fueled by political and social oppression, a vanishing middle class, and growing anger over food, water and housing crises. But I see growing signs of resistance. They make me wonder whether Wahhabism has reached the saturation point in Egypt, andmay now begin its inevitable decline.
Next to oil, Wahhabism is the Gulf’s chief export. Brought home to Egypt by returning guest workers in the 80’s, the sect has met with unqualified success there, filling the void left by Mubarak’s non-government. Today, it is no exaggeration to call Egypt an unofficial Wahhabi state. The vast majority of mosques, waqfs, religious media and religious charities are Wahhabi-controlled. What resistance exists comes mainly from Egypt’s ancient Sufi brotherhoods, but limited funds mean that their counter-propaganda reaches only a small number of Egyptian Muslims. ‘Moderate’ Sunni Islam is disappearing with the middle class, which has remained relatively insulated from extremist ideology by its traditions of economic and political progressivism.
But in the last couple of weeks I have seen signs of positive change. More and more mainstream Egyptians seem exhausted by the joyless edicts of the Saudi sect. They’re inclined to see its demands for total gender segregation, erratic financial practices (“Islamic banking”) and myopic obsession with dress as impractical, if not absurd. Many are now familiar with a series of infamous advertisements comparing unveiled women to uncovered sweets. But during Ramadan this year, a very different advertisement aired on Egyptian TV. It showed a young man driving through downtown Cairo traffic before sunset, stopping as a crowd of pedestrians passes in front of him. Quickly, he ducks down and takes a bite out of a banana. A veiled middle-aged woman frowns severely at him as she passes. The implication is that she looks down on him for his failure to fast. But all is not what it seems. The man arrives at a hospital to donate blood. A girl is shown being wheeled out of an operating room, followed by a doctor who tells the young man that his blood saved the girl’s life. Her mother follows, and tearfully thanks the young man for his good deed, apologizing to him for causing him to break his fast. (You can’t donate blood while fasting.) The advertisement closes with the message “My life, my religion.”
My life, my religion. For people brought up on religious freedom, this seems like common sense. But in conservative Egypt, where public displays of piety are a basic requirement of social life, it is deeply defiant. And there’s more: for the first time, I’ve heard the words ‘wahhabism’ and ’salafism’ (Wahhabayya and Salafayya) used by mainstream Egyptian Sunnis. Previously, Wahhabism was a silent infection, seen not as an individual sect but as the right (the only) way to practice Islam. Salafism was something unheard-of, an attempt by conservative western Muslims to strip Wahhabi ideas of their historical inadequacies and make them timeless; a return to “real” Islam. In the west, the need for this is clear–where there is a diversity of Muslim thought, Wahhabism becomes one sect among many, and loses its claim to infalibility. In Egypt, Wahhabism needed no such legitimization. So to hear these two words enter the common Egyptian vocabulary–and enter them in conjuction–was surprising. People are beginning to see Wahhabism for what it is: historically isolated, unprecedented, and like all human interpretations of divine will, faulty.
What does this mean? I think that like the Gulf’s oil wealth, its domination of Islam has a definite shelf life. With peak oil may come peak religiosity. Wahhabism’s downfall is built into its DNA–it does not evolve, and once it has saturated a population, cannot offer it anything new. As the needs of that population change–which they must inevitably do–Wahhabism cannot change to answer them. To change would be to admit falibility, at which point the sect’s claim to religious perfection would be permanently undermined.
The solution to the Gulf’s monopoly on Islam may be like the solution to its monopoly on fossil fuels: a gradual shift to less finite and more dynamic sources of power. The showdown between Wahhabism and other interpretations of Islam that many have predicted may never occur. Instead, like all absolutist sects before it, it may simply peak and then fade as the world changes around it. There is only one constant in history: everything ends. The end of Wahhabi domination was always certain, but it may be less glorious, and driven by more practical needs, than many of us imagined.