“The slow and meticulous reorganization of the Muslim religion into a militant ideology began in Egypt”

LEgyptian writer Alaa El Aswany expresses, in a column in Le Monde published on August 20, its support for Salman Rushdie in terms to which any defender of freedom of expression can only subscribe. His voice is all the more precious in the demonstrations of indignation that followed the attack on the perpetrator satanic verses that he himself was, because of his writings, insulted, threatened, attacked, forbidden to publish until he found himself obliged, in his turn, to leave Egypt. His remarks, when he exposes the origin of Islamist extremism in the world or when he denounces the part of responsibility of the Western States, however seem to me marked by a certain naïveté.

Alaa El Aswany contrasts the current era, characterized by intolerance and terror, with a bygone era when intellectual freedom reigned in Egypt, when Egyptian cinema reflected the cheerfulness of an open-minded society and when the behavior of women was not fixed by rules of piety. However, Islamism did not suddenly replace a golden age of tolerance and freedom in Egypt.

The influence of Egyptian theologians

The slow and meticulous reorganization of the Muslim religion into a militant and revolutionary ideology aimed at reforming souls, society as a whole and, ultimately, political institutions, in order to snatch them from the grip of the disbelievers, begins in this same Egypt where it was so good to live. If the mathematician and atheist poet Ismail Adham, whose fleeting existence Alaa El Aswany recalls, was born in 1911, in Alexandria, how can we forget that Hassan el-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood movementwas born in 1906, in the heart of the Delta?

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This is why it is also surprising that Alaa El Aswany accuses the “Wahhabism” of being at the origin of religious extremism and its progression, financed by the oil-producing States since the crisis of 1973. It seems to neglect the influence of Egyptian theologians in the construction of state Islam in Saudi Arabia in the 1920s.

He also underestimates the consequences of Saudi Arabia’s hosting of the Muslim Brotherhood persecuted by Nasser [président égyptien de 1956 à 1970] and their role in the creation of the current Saudi ideology, and especially in the globalization of its thought and practices. Among these Egyptian theorists who had taken refuge in Arabia was Mohammed Qutb, the younger brother of Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966 and the spiritual father of most of the Islamist organizations that today advocate criminal violence.

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