Black Wave by Kim Ghattas

Author:Kim Ghattas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Egypt’s famous filmmaker Youssef Chahine believed that religious fundamentalism was alien to Egyptians and described it as a “black wave” from the Gulf: “The Egyptian has always been a very religious person, but at the same time he is also a lover of life of art and music and theater.” He trusted that his countrymen would find a balance between secular modernity and traditional religious forces.

They didn’t.

Foda’s assassination marked the violent beginning of the siege of Egyptian intellectuals. For the years to come, secular, liberal, progressive writers and thinkers would be hounded, banned, harassed, and assassinated. The long target list included journalists, intellectuals, and plastic surgeons. Even the Nobel Prize–winner Mahfouz, a national symbol, as Egyptian as the Nile, came under attack—stabbed in the neck by two assailants in October 1994. He would survive, but his writing hand was severely impaired.

Religion took over everything, rapidly. In 1985, barely 6 percent of books published in Egypt were religious. In 1994, it was 25 percent, and by 1995, 85 percent of books sold at the Cairo book fair were religious. In the mid-1980s, there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians; by the mid-2000s there would be one for every 745. Taxi drivers played less Umm Kulthum and more Quranic recitations. Family photographs came off walls and mantels and were stored in drawers, especially photos of grandmothers wearing short sleeves and low necklines, or sporting the big hairdos of the 1960s. Modesty was the new norm, and pictures could lead to shirk, idolatry. The most orthodox, literalist concept of shirk and al-shirk al-asghar, the one that the young Sofana Dahlan had been taught in school in Jeddah, seeped into the consciousness of Egyptians, though it was a foreign concept in centuries of Egyptian traditions, art, and culture. Drawing nudes in university art classes was a thing of the past. Everything was now determined by halal or haram, permitted or forbidden in religion. Every second of people’s lives became regulated by religious edicts, the search for heavenly salvation. The beliefs and practices of Islamists, once on the margins, had entered the mainstream.

Decades later, once society had settled into its new cultural and religious references, a speech given by President Nasser in 1965 to mark the anniversary of Egypt’s victory in the Suez crisis would resurface and circulate as people asked themselves, “What happened to us?”—because of a passage in which Nasser had spoken irreverently about the veil. He was the greatest orator the Arab world has ever had, and his speeches—broadcast on the radio—enthralled audiences across the Arab world as he fluidly moved from rousing exhortations to serious explanations to jokes, all delivered in an easy, man-of-the-people style. He was a masterful storyteller.

In front of his usual massive crowd of supporters, a mixed audience of men in suits and women in skirts hanging on his every word, he came to the subject of the antagonism with the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of its members had tried to assassinate him, hence the brutal crackdown. He recounted how he had met with Hassan al-Hodeibi, the leader of the Brotherhood, in 1953.

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