And in that way, it becomes far more important to understand who is to be entrusted with interpreting and applying whatever sharia-based rules as it is to search for the precise meaning of various verbal formulas. What should be the structure and role of state religious institutions, including al-Azhar? Much of the international concern about the Islamic sharia in Egypt stems from the growing political role of the Muslim Brotherhood and the party it founded, the Freedom and Justice Party.
The Brotherhood has confused many including, at times, its own members by a variety of statements and proposals on the Islamic sharia. First, the Brotherhood wants a political system that conforms fully and faithfully with Islamic norms, however broadly defined.
That means that important Islamic values should be reflected in legislation; that the state should facilitate rather than obstruct the desire of Muslims to lead lives that conform to Islamic strictures; and that those with religious knowledge and training be consulted and be allowed to speak based on their training and expertise rather than be expected to tailor their interpretations to the political interests of high officials.
The movement has therefore called for a stronger role for al-Azhar and for making the institution far more independent of the executive branch, which has dominated the institution by controlling its finances and senior positions for half a century.
Second, the Brotherhood emphasizes just as strongly change from below and the need for all Muslims to work to understand their religion and take responsibility for educating themselves. Thus, over the past few years, the Brotherhood has developed a series of confusing proposals.
In , the movement bowed to the first impulse when drafting a platform never formally adopted that suggested that legislation be presented to a body of religious scholars within al-Azhar in order to determine its conformity with the Islamic sharia. When that provoked a storm of criticism within and outside of the movement, the proposal was dropped. But even so, movement leaders clearly have not abandoned the idea of giving some role—albeit informal and based on persuasion and consultation rather than authoritative imposition—to religious scholars in the legislative process.
This is what likely led al-Shater to make his recent comment. In general, the Islamic sharia is not gender-neutral in matters of personal status but instead establishes a differentiated web of rights and obligations on husbands and wives and sons and daughters. Broadly, husbands are expected to provide material support and a healthy home environment failure to provide support or abuse can be grounds for a woman seeking a divorce.
A husband can unilaterally divorce his wife; a wife in the sharia-based Egyptian legal order cannot do so, but can petition the court to order a divorce in cases when the husband fails his obligations. For instance, they successfully lobbied for an amendment to the personal status law allowing women to petition a court for divorce if they were willing to abandon most of their material rights and claims in the settlement. In doing so, they were able to call on some religious scholars in support of their position.
For instance, the Freedom and Justice Party has singled out the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women for particular criticism, because of the claim that its provisions violate sharia-based rules about guardianship in the case of divorce.
Debate in Egypt is likely to center around very specific provisions of the personal status law. This includes the circumstances under which a wife can ask a court for divorce, the age of guardianship, or the age of marriage.
Here the current approach of the Egyptian legal order is clear: each recognized religious community is free to have its own affairs governed by its own personal status law. Regular Egyptian courts regularly adjudicate such cases for all Egyptians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but simply shift the law applied; there are not separate courts for each religious community and the judges in personal status courts come out of the regular judiciary. This leads to two problems for such groups.
First, adherents of non-recognized faiths most publicly members of the Bahai religion have no clear legal status; even heterodox groups unrecognized by the state have no ability to follow their own beliefs and teachings. Second, the system seems to encourage opportunistic conversions as a byproduct of marital disputes: a Coptic husband wishing to divorce his wife, for instance, might convert to a different Christian sect or even to Islam in order to make such a step possible.
There has been some effort by Egyptian legal officials to work with Christian leaders in recent years to develop a uniform code of personal status for Christians to curtail this practice. There is little in these debates that threaten Western security.
But there are important implications for human rights and other values that Western actors hold dear. What makes the discussions about the Islamic sharia law so perplexing—and even occasionally alarming—for outsiders is the unfamiliarity of the basic concepts and terms.
Of course, the idea that religion should play a role in public life is familiar even where it is not widely accepted; and all sorts of states have some official status for a particular religion. But the debate about the Islamic sharia seems to pack a special punch, since it can move beyond hortatory and identity to specific and detailed legal norms.
And basic positions are not only unfamiliar to outsiders, they are also difficult to decode. If discussions about the Islamic sharia are simultaneously central to Egyptian politics and also indeterminate and even vague, does this mean that examining debates on the subject is seductive but pointless in the end? Not for long. The process of reconstructing the Egyptian political system may mean that however hazy current answers may be, there will soon be attempts to give them institutional expression.
Business Culture. Egyptians in Australia. Sign up for free. Inclusion Program Join over organisations already creating a better workplace. Download this Cultural Profile. Too busy to read it right now? Where do we get our statistics? Cultural Atlas eBook Purchase. Check out Please provide your email to receive your eBook download and receipt.
Go To Payment. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research.
Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Newsletters Donate My Account. Research Topics. Here are some sources you might want to consult for further information on the subject: Egyptian Demographic and Health Survey Campo, Juan E. Translated by Judy Mabro. Of course, political and religious figures have tussled in the past over policy issues, the autonomy of the religious sphere, and matters of appointment and oversight.
But the current tension between the grand imam and the president is new. Nasser placed religious institutions, including al-Azhar, under much greater control and sought their endorsement of policy initiatives including support for socialist measures consistent with Islamic norms of social justice. But he staked out no religious claims himself. But only Sisi has spoken out on matters of general religious discourse and thought, instructed religious scholars on their tasks, and admonished them not only in the name of the Egyptian state or people but also before God.
And the struggle over religion—while contained and sometimes muted—has taken on a political tone, and sometimes even a personal one for the president. Al-Tayeb took office in upon appointment by Mubarak and has shepherded the millennium-old institution through the tumultuous political and religious events that followed. Al-Tayeb made several statements in the days following the July coup calling for inclusive national reconciliation, in particular objecting to the brutal force Sisi used to crush the Muslim Brotherhood during mass killings in July and August—going so far as to withdraw briefly from public view retreating to the southern city of Aswan.
Sisi became president in and started taking on the religious establishment in January with the call for renewal of religious discourse noted above.
One episode that highlighted the personal nature of the dispute began in January when Sisi, who has a tendency to focus sharply from time to time on what he views as social ills for example, obesity , took on the issue of increased divorce rates.
You are giving me a hard time. Disagreements between Sisi and al-Tayeb over specific issues and broad teachings—and control of al-Azhar—have continued ever since, and in mid, they played out in Parliament as well. In late August, the Parliament postponed further action on the bill until the next assembly was seated in late , as discussed above. Sisi presents his initiatives regarding religion in Egyptian politics and public life as being about modernity, interfaith relations, and opposing extremism, but in the end, they might be fundamentally about who wields authority—and a sense that al-Azhar and the religious establishment as a whole should accept his leadership.
Since Sisi took effective control of Egypt in the July coup and later became president in May , he has brought government institutions to heel to a remarkable extent. It is not surprising that Sisi has exerted far more control than his democratically elected and later deposed predecessor Morsi, but Sisi has been far more controlling than Mubarak, who was president from until the uprising.
Staffed by the elite, they enjoyed some limited margin of independence, for example, in determining senior appointments and observing their own internal procedures. Under Sisi, those institutions have been taken down a peg, and in some cases more than just a peg. The judiciary, previously considered the branch of government with the most integrity and public respect, has been hit hard. The Parliament, a politicized but occasionally feisty body that had opposition representation in most of its iterations under Mubarak, is allowed only to color within the margins sketched by government policy.
The judiciary dissolved the first freely elected Parliament as unconstitutional in , and after Sisi took control the next year, successive steps to outlaw or otherwise exclude opposition parties as well as electoral law changes ensured that only Sisi supporters would serve as parliamentary deputies.
A series of purges began in , removing many prominent diplomats suspected of sympathies with the uprising; for example, then foreign minister Nabil Fahmy resigned after only one year in the job after he reportedly refused to cooperate in politically motivated investigations, reassignments, and dismissals.
Sisi deploys military officers with formal or informal authority over civilians and has introduced programs to indoctrinate civilian bureaucrats about the necessity of military control. Military officers or retired officers have long occupied influential positions throughout the Egyptian system from the level of national ministries down to local governments, but the trend has been deepened and formalized under Sisi.
Al-Tayeb has picked his battles. The traditional deference that many Sunni scholars show to the ruler and indeed to all state bodies—the principle of wali al-amr—is based on an understanding that however imperfect political authorities might be, they are responsible for protecting the social order in a manner that makes it possible for believers to live righteous lives. Why has al-Tayeb been relatively successful in resisting Sisi to date?
He appears to have four sources of resilience: legal, institutional, personal, and international. Moreover, al-Tayeb personally has managed to preserve a modicum of integrity while navigating tumultuous political and religious conditions for a decade; his language, even when sharp, has been respectful and seemingly above partisanship.
The United Arab Emirates and MBZ have encouraged the joint Vatican-al-Azhar activities—for example, by hosting the launch of the joint declaration—and have otherwise cultivated warm ties with al-Tayeb since at least Shortly before the July coup against Morsi, al-Tayeb traveled to the UAE to receive a major award, provoking criticism from pro-Brotherhood circles in Egypt. There are recent indications of some limits, however, to how far al-Tayeb is willing to go to please his Emirati patrons.
When Sisi mandated that senior officials obtain his permission before traveling abroad in January , it appeared to be aimed at least in part at al-Tayeb. The question remains, however, as to whether the steps taken so far have diminished radicalization of youth in the country or materially changed the way Egyptian Muslims practice their faith.
Simply looking at the numbers, violent attacks related to Islamic extremism have gone up and down since Sisi has taken control; they reached a particular peak of lethality in — but were still going on as of and seemed to vary largely due to factors such as the shifting fortunes of the Islamic State.
Human rights abuses—including detention of tens of thousands of youth in poor conditions, forced disappearance and lengthy pretrial detention, unfair trials, torture, and sexual abuse—have continued since and in some ways gotten worse over time.
There are signs that religious observance is beginning to fall—not precipitously, but in a manner that causes concern in official religious circles. A younger generation of Egyptians is simply less inclined than their elders to embrace regular religious practice such as prayer. For instance, according to the Arab Barometer, 53 percent of Egyptians over fifty respond that they always perform the dawn prayer; only 8 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-nine report doing so.
A similar but slightly smaller gap exists over the practice of reading or listening to the Quran. But general attitudes toward Islam are now operating in a different political and social context, one that causes some concern in official religious circles.
The closure of independent religious spaces with nongovernmental organizations, mosques, and other locations more tightly monitored means that when Egyptians hear about religion in public, they generally hear official voices, even if some of those voices try to show some autonomy from the regime.
The religious revival that took place since the s had both very public and more private aspects, but personal observance, informal groupings, and social activity provided much of the energy. The changes imposed by the regime have affected daily lives, for example by denying Egyptians access to thousands of independent mosques, now shuttered, and cutting off services from hundreds of Islamic charitable institutions accused of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Official Islamic institutions cannot always fill the gap, and the close association of some with the regime and its policies can undercut their credibility.
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