The Chronikler

Egyptian football’s pious turn

By Osama Diab

The national team is increasingly flaunting its Muslim religiosity. Where does that leave Christian, let alone secular Egyptians?

4 February 2010

I am a big fan of Egypt's football team, and I have a jersey with six stars sitting in my closet that I take out proudly on days of decisive games to show support for them. The stars symbolise every African cup Egypt has won since 1957, when it claimed its first. I hope that Egypt will be able to add a seventh title to its impressive record by winning the cup in the tournament currently underway.

But I'm facing a real moral dilemma here. The national team of Egypt is starting to symbolise everything I stand against, namely homogeneity and intolerance. Should I keep rooting for my team despite the fact that it has taken an uncomfortable ideological diversion? Or should I keep my beliefs separate from my team affiliation?

My quandary is rooted in a statement by Hassan Shehata, the Egyptian national coach, who said that his squad selection is not only based on skills and competence, but also on piety. Also, the team's nickname is gradually changing from the Pharaohs to Montakhab el-Sagedeen (literally the team of prostrators). Sogood, or prostration, is an Islamic religious act used to express gratitude for God after achieving something. After scoring any goal, the entire Egyptian soccer team put their faces against the ground to show their thankfulness.

"Without [piety], we will never select any player regardless of his potential. I always strive to make sure that those who wear the Egypt jersey are on good terms with God," Hassan Shehata said, according to AP. Al-Shorouk also quoted Shehata saying that striker Mido, who once had a ponytail and dated Miss Belgium 2000, Joke van de Velde, was dismissed because he did not live up to the manager's pious ideals.

This will soon result in a situation where only practicing Muslims identify strongly with the team. Secular Muslims and religious minorities will feel indifferent at best. The team currently doesn't have a Christian player, in a country where at least 10% of the population are Christians. Hany Ramzy, one of the best defenders in the history of Egyptian football, was a Coptic Christian. However, the next time this happens, the Christian player will feel like an outcast if religious players, like Ahmed Fathy, force everyone to kneel after scoring a goal.

This phenomenon is just one small part of a bigger problem. Egypt is turning rapidly into a homogeneous society, where you need to be male, Muslim, physically able, young and from a middle-class urban area in order not to feel alienated.

I don't believe the phenomenon is just about religious beliefs. It is as much about sticking more than ever to traditional values to protect the fabric of society against cultural attacks from outside. It's a characteristic of weak societies to perceive anything foreign as a threat, including principles of equality, tolerance and justice.

This article will also be considered by some as one more evil attempt to impose western ideas on our pious eastern society, but diversity and tolerance should not only be western values but universal ones.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 29 January 2010. Read the related discussion.

Published here with the author's permission. ©Osama Diab. All rights reserved.

Tweet This

Related posts

• Secularism in a veil (0)
• Polygamy for all (0)
• For Allah’s sake! (4)
• Faith in our children (0)
• Algeria and Egypt play political football (2)

Polygamy for all

By Khaled Diab

A Saudi journalist is demanding that women be given the right to four husbands. Should equality mean monogamy or polygamy for all?

6 January 2010

Tweet This

Related posts

• Egyptian football’s pious turn (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• For Allah’s sake! (4)
• Faith in our children (0)
• Covering heads and veiling poverty (5)

Faith in our children

By Khaled Diab

Much as we’d like our children to hold the same things dear as we do, we should have enough faith in them to let them choose their own belief system.

27 November 2009

Tweet This

Related posts

• Egyptian football’s pious turn (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• Polygamy for all (0)
• Face to faith: Ramadan for the faith-challenged (0)
• The Middle East must look to the future (0)

Good grief!

By Christian Nielsen

There is something of an inner circle to mourning whose circumference varies from culture to culture. Knowing where you fit in takes some research.

4 November 2009

You never greet the ‘real mourners’ at a Jewish funeral. Only the closest family at a Swedish funeral wear a special white tie. And you bring condolence money in a special black and silver decorated envelope to a Japanese funeral.

The news of death is never easy to take but for those not in the inner circle it can also be confusing and awkward, from what to say on the card to what to wear at the funeral, or even if you should attend the funeral or send a card.

Attending funerals in a foreign country, with different traditions and mourning practices, is really a minefield. Do you send flowers? If so, what kind? Do you attend the ‘party’ afterwards – what do you call the party?

Grief seems to be a universal response to death or loss, but just how it is expressed – ritually and emotionally – differs between people, communities and cultures. The Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying – it really exists – even notes a scholarly distinction between grief and mourning on a cultural level.

“Grief is a subjective state, a set of feelings that arise spontaneously after a significant death,” it says, “whereas mourning is a set of rituals or behaviors prescribed by culture's tradition.”

But the concept of grief is a modern construct, it goes on. “Grief as a real subjective state grows from a culture that prizes and cultivates individual experience.”

In Japan, for example, grief can be considered an expression of social harmony – within the family or community – not an individual expression. Hitan, the nearest equivalent word for grief in Japanese, doesn’t necessarily imply a response to death or loss – just sadness or sorrow.

The Irish, on the other hand, appear to embrace both grief and mourning for its individual and ritual significance, typified in the Irish wake where kin and community come from near and far to pay their respects to the departed and his family.

Outward expressions of grief like keening – a mix of wailing and chanting – are less common nowadays, but still form part of the Irish myth. The Catholic religion also obviously plays its role in traditional wakes, with mourners taking turns to kneel by the body to pray or offer a Rosary. After the funeral, people gather again at the deceased’s home or a venue to remember and celebrate his life.

“There’s grief and sadness, but there are also anecdotes and shared memories that collectively celebrate the person’s life, not his death,” an Irish friend tells me. “And then there’s the Guinness – the elixir mediating grief and gaiety,” he adds.

Protestant and private?

Now take the Swedes, whose mourning is more private and inward – more Protestant, dare I say. Only the closest of family and friends attend the funeral. It is altogether more discrete and sombre.

An Englishman recently posted a question on an online forum in Sweden to find out how he should respond to the death of a colleague’s father. The responses were mixed. Many said, yes, he should express sympathy to the colleague (a card, message of condolence) but that it would not be appropriate to attend the funeral or other arrangements.

A similar question was posed in which the person wanted to know how to behave when his girlfriend’s father died… what to say, wear, do, etc. He didn’t feel he could consult anyone close to the deceased, as it felt out of place. The answer he got speaks volumes about the different cultural responses and rituals even from one side of Europe to the other.

And I quote: “It is usual to ring the number on the press announcement to the funeral home and inform them you will be attending (catering). It is usual to take a single flower (like a rose or something) as well as any other flowers you might send to place on the coffin at a particular moment in the service where the vicar asks people to come forward and say their goodbyes.

“Sometimes there is a clue in the press announcement about whether the family want a donation to a charity instead of a funeral bouquet from relatives (although you should still take the single flower).

“There is usually a ‘do’ afterwards – often in the church hall or a nearby restaurant. Usually it is something simple like open sandwiches/salad [sic]. Close relatives and friend[s] make speeches.”

Grief, not all human

Just for interest’s sake, apparently grief is not strictly speaking a human preserve, according to the wonderful Death and Dying Encyclopedia.

“In every culture people cry or seem to want to cry after a death that is significant to them,” it says. Grief could also be an instinctive response shaped by evolutionary development. “Primates and birds display behaviours that seem similar to humans’ in response to death and separation. Instinctual response in this sense is a meta-interpretative scheme programmed into our genetic inheritance, much as nest building or migration is hard-wired into birds.”

It goes on: “Culture, of course, influences how people appraise situations, yet similar perceptions of events trigger similar instinctual responses. A significant death, then, might be regarded as a universal trigger of grieving emotions, although which death is significant enough [to] spark such a response depends on the value system of a particular culture. Universal instincts, then, might provide the basis for concepts that could explain behavior in all cultures.”

So, there you have it.

Published with the author's permission. ©Christian Nielsen. All rights reserved.

Tweet This

Related posts

• The God veto (0)
• The fine art of repression (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• Promises of immortality (1)
• Polygamy for all (0)

Fatwa fads

By Khaled Diab

From fashion tips to adult breastfeeding – rulings by some clerics range from the eccentric to the downright bizarre.

23 September 2009

Tweet This

Related posts

• The God veto (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• What’s the difference between Obama and an Arab? (0)
• Polygamy for all (0)
• Faith in our children (0)

Face to faith: Ramadan for the faith-challenged

By Khaled Diab

Ramadan possesses a certain secular appeal but fasting requires the non-believer to square the philosophical circle.

30 August 2009

Summer Ramadans are the toughest. In northern climes, the yawning chasm that separates dawn from dusk makes the long, meandering days feel less like a pleasant stroll and more like an epic marathon. Further south, the days may be shorter and the hunger less palpable, but the intense heat makes the faster feel lost in a desert of thirst.

Although I no longer do Ramadan, the first time I ever fasted, when I was seven, happened to be one of those endless English summer days upon which the sun never seems to set. Muslim children are not obliged to fast and my parents thought I was too young, but I've always been up for a challenge. Besides, there was a mysterious and exotic appeal to those rituals which transformed life within the confines of our home, but hardly caused a ripple in the routines of the outside world.

That first day, Palestinian friends hosted us for iftar. As our mothers prepared a delicious Middle Eastern banquet to mark the start of the month, the kitchen became a torture chamber – teasing and tormenting me with an array of delicious, mouth-watering aromas.

The last couple of hours were sheer hell: it seemed that time itself had become so hunger-stricken that it could no longer function properly, and crawled from one second to the next like a snail on tranquilisers. All the adults commended me for getting so far and urged me to break my fast, but a stubborn streak inside me insisted that I would eat and drink only when the grown-ups did.

With practice over the years, fasting got much easier physically but much tougher philosophically. Ironically, I took up fasting in a non-Muslim country as a child and abandoned it in a Muslim land as an adult. Even before I lost my faith completely, I was never really a practicing Muslim: I've never prayed regularly, nor have I ever read the Qur'an in its entirety, let alone memorised it. In fact, fasting Ramadan – but not the marathon prayer sessions and Quranic recitals associated with the holy month – is the only aspect of Islam that I have ever stuck to religiously.

I'm not entirely sure why that was. Part of the reason could be the special spirit of solidarity that marks Ramadan. The short fuses, ready tempers and irritability excepted, there is the camaraderie, unison and communalism of the season, the festive air, like Christmas for a whole month, the enchantment associated with the partial reversal of night and day, the bubbling late-night waterpipes, the pre-dawn beans on a Cairo street corner.

More profoundly, another explanation could be that, beyond the religious duty, Ramadan carries a secular appeal. Praying would involve expressing devotion to a being – or creator – and a belief system which have always raised doubts in my mind. In contrast, fasting is not just a ritual for its own sake but is also about self-discipline, exercising control over your body and empathising with the predicament of the less fortunate.

But despite my secularised version of Ramadan, certain tensions between Islamic norms and my a-religious outlook were increasingly thrown into sharp relief. Could girlfriends and later cohabitation mix with fasting? How should I handle my fondness for alcohol? Did I want to be like those non-practicing Muslims who seek salvation for their 'sins' through seasonal devotion, especially as I did not see what I was doing as sinful? As a free-thinker for whom the questions and contradictions in religion multiplied with time – rather than resolved themselves as confident believers assured me they would – could I continue to hold on to an artefact of a faith which clashed with the reality I observed?

Increasingly unable and unwilling to square the philosophical circle, I eventually abandoned this last vestige of my religion because, in the end, I seek food for thought and not for the soul.

This column appeared in The Guardian newspaper's Face to faith series on 29 August 2009. Read the related discussion.

Tweet This

Related posts

• The fast and the furious (1)
• Faith in our children (0)
• Ramadan for drinkers (0)
• On a ring and a prayer (0)
• Do no haram (3)

The God veto

By Khaled Diab

Belief in the sacredness of the holy land has long bedevilled the quest for peace. It’s time to challenge the ‘God veto’.

September 2008

The possibility that Tzipi Livni will become Israel’s next prime minister has re-ignited hopes of a breakthrough in the peace process, but chances are we are probably in for yet another false dawn.

Why is it that, since the 1990s, efforts to reach a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been going round and round in vicious circles, while the situation on the ground has been deteriorating constantly?

There are no shortage of thorny practical issues – from the question of Palestinian refugees to final borders – standing in the way of a deal, not to mention the power disparity between the two sides, but what role does rigid religious or pseudo-religious ideology play in perpetuating the struggle?

To get an idea, we need to rewind to the most hopeful period of the Oslo years. Finally at ease in his role as a dove, Yitzhak Rabin, the one-time hawk, soared on the wings of the biggest mass demonstration in Israeli history. “This rally must send a message to the Israeli public, to the Jews of the world, to the multitudes in the Arab lands and in the world at large,” he urged the 150,000-strong crowd that had turned out to hear him speak in Tel Aviv, “that the nation of Israel wants peace.”

The message was apparently all too clear to the hawks that had been circling around the then prime minister ever since he had decided to talk directly to his one-time archenemy Yasser Arafat and the PLO.

On that autumn night, 4 November 1995, Rabin paid for his “betrayal” with his life. The assassination sent shockwaves across the country, the region and the world, with that rare spectacle of Arabs expressing grief for a slain Israeli politician.

The killer was Yigal Amir, a university student who was a far-right religious Zionist. After his arrest, he told police that he had acted on “the orders of God”. Reflecting the distrust and hate elicited among the settler movement, Amir confessed to a later Commission of Inquiry: “I felt as if I was shooting a terrorist.”

Although religious and revisionist Zionists quickly distanced themselves from the murder, many Israelis are convinced that, even if Amir pulled the trigger, the extremists provided him with the ideological ammo. The settler movement had accused Rabin of planning to withdraw to “Auschwitz borders” and Orthodox rabbis had called on soldiers to disobey any orders to evacuate any part of the West Bank.

Rabin’s grieving widow, Leah, refused to shake hands with the Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu, one of the staunchest and most vitriolic opponents of Rabin’s peace overtures, but shook Arafat’s. “I feel that we can find a common language with the Arabs more easily than we can with the Jewish extremists,” she said.

The Likud and other revisionist Zionists, the right-wing religious parties and the settler movement oppose the peace process because they advocate the annexation and settlement of the whole of Eretz Israel (Land of Israel), the vaguely defined Biblical territory which God “promised” to Abraham. “Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel,” reads the Likud party’s platform.

Even the ostensibly more pragmatic religious party Shas, which is vaguely in favour of making some concessions to the Palestinians, advocates the ‘Greater Israel’ enterprise. Despite his ‘fatwa’ that the sanctity of human lives is more important than that of the land, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Sha’s spiritual leader, instructed his men to leave Rabin’s government in protest against the Oslo accords and, again in July 2000, the rabbi withdrew Shas from Ehud Barak’s government to undermine the Camp David summit.

But it is not just extremist Israelis who believe they own a divine deed to the land, Palestinian Islamists, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad possess the inverse view. According to Hamas’s 1988 charter, “Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf (endowment) throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it.”

Unsurprisingly then, Hamas – created during the first intifada as a reaction to the increasingly oppressive Israeli occupation and the increasing willingness of Palestinian secularists to reach an accommodation with Israel – was incensed by Oslo and started a suicide bombing campaign to undermine the process. This, coupled with the death toll and humiliation inflicted by the Israeli military on the Palestinian population, sought to chip away at public confidence in the peace process on both sides and to restore mutual distrust.

An Arabic proverb talks of people who kill and then lead the funeral procession. And that is what the extremists seem to be on the verge of doing with the two-state solution. On the Israeli side, Rabin’s murder marked the beginning of the end for the moderates and pragmatists. A shaken Shimon Peres was unable to regain momentum and shot himself in the foot with his Grapes of Wrath invasion of Lebanon, and the election of Binyamin Netanyahu sounded the final death knell for the Oslo process.

On the Palestinian side, the continued failure of the Palestinian Authority to deliver an independent state, as well as its endemic corruption, strengthened the hand of the extremists, propelling Hamas to a series of local election victories, crowned by their success in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Israeli and Palestinian extremists achieved this by having the unshakable drive and conviction – one could say ‘delusion’ – to take advantage of the fractured political landscape, by preying on the fear and distrust of the enemy, and by hoodwinking the electorate. For instance, Hamas dropped the call for the destruction of Israel from its election manifesto prior to the 2006 election, while Netanyahu promised to respect the peace process and deliver “peace with security”.

What the extremists have been unable to answer is what to do with the elephant in the room: the millions from the ‘enemy camp’? How do they achieve their fantasies of territorial maximalism without having to oppress an entire people permanently, which is impossible?

Neither Jewish nor Palestinian extremists are likely to abandon their ultimate dreams easily, but there are signs that they can be pushed to become more practical and pragmatic. Ariel Sharon, the die-hard warhorse, broke away from the Likud he founded to take a somewhat more pragmatic path with his new Kadima party. The responsibilities of office have shown that Hamas can be more accommodating than its past suggests, with the Islamist party indicating its willingness to end its armed struggle with Israel in return for a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders. Unfortunately, the Israelis and international community have failed to engage with Hamas.

Despite the best efforts of the extremists, the Israeli and Palestinian public still crave peace, as poll after poll confirms, but agreeing a fair price for it is the challenge. The Oslo process had many faults: its fixation on Israel’s short-term security and its vagueness on the shape and form of a Palestinian state; accelerated settlement building, as well as the deferral of all the thorny issues to the final status talks. However, given the current hopeless mess, one cannot help feel a window of opportunity closed with Rabin’s assassination.

Had Rabin lived, the final status talks which were due to start on 4 May 1996 may have led somewhere, rather than the empty shell they proved to be. After all, six months earlier, with Rabin and Arafat’s blessing, a blueprint for a mutually acceptable deal was hammered out in secret talks under the auspices of Yossi Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas.

The two-state solution is on life-support and if it is to be saved, the passive majority needs to mobilise in opposition of those who continuously veto the quest for peace by invoking the wrath of God. As any just deity would now, it is the sanctity of people, not land, which matters.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 18 September 2008. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

Tweet This

Related posts

• Hallucinatory states (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• Palestinian reconciliation through the ballot box (0)
• Grassroots change we CAN believe in (5)
• Fatwa fads (1)

On a ring and a prayer

By Khaled Diab

God now has a number. Sadly, it goes straight to voicemail, but I’ve got my messages ready. What about you?

March 2009

God, they say, moves in mysterious ways. But he seems to have fallen surprisingly quiet in recent times, after hectic centuries anointing prophets, parting seas, sacrificing his son, writing books on stone tablets in heaven which he then had faxed down to humanity by an angelic PA, and appearing in saintly visions.

In a sign of the changing times, God has gone from voices in the head to voicemail. For the next six months, people can call God in the Netherlands. You could say the Book of Numbers is being brought up to date with a telephone directory in annex. Look out for listings of all the major prophets and angels in the coming months – although the ‘Beast’ has revealed no plans to activate the number 666.

Unfortunately, given God’s busy schedule, (s)he does not actually have time to take your call, but (s)he does invite callers to leave a voicemail message. This irked one of my friends, Stef, who urged the Lord in no uncertain terms to “answer the phone, God damn it”. Meanwhile, Nikolai is worried that, inundated with calls, God may decide to employ an irritating automated call centre which would announce: “For ritual sacrifice, press one…”

As you’d expect from God, who always seems to carry out his divine mission on earth through mediums, the telephone number was set up by a human agent. The Dutch artist Johan van der Dong hopes the mobile phone number can help reconcile an ancient ritual, prayer, with a modern one, mobile telephony. “This will help people to order their thoughts and that is also a form of prayers,” believes van der Dong.

While I appreciate that the faithful may welcome this new channel for their prayers, if I could have a direct line to God, I would use it to ask him about all the things that just don’t add up about religion.

Despite all the questions in my head, I’ll limit myself to ten questions (please feel free to add your own):

1. Do you really exist? If so and given that you are the All Mighty, could you please prove it definitively to dispel the controversy once and for all? On behalf of the Guardian, I’d invite you to write a column about it.
2. Which religion is yours? Most religions believe that they have the inside track on you and that you have chosen the followers of that faith and blessed them above the rest of humanity. Is the Quran equivalent to the Bible? Are you the only god for the three big monotheistic faiths or do you have a couple of competitors out there? Which fundis are your favourites?
3. If you created all humans as equals, why do many of your scriptures condone slavery, class and caste, and the inferior status of women? You've sent us your son. Now, in the spirit of equal opportunities, when can we expect to receive your daughter?
4. Why does it seem that, in your book (or books), ritual is held above substance? Surely, people do not need to pray, go to a temple, embark on pilgrimages or fast, etc., to prove that they are good human beings. Conversely, people can be bad and also do all that you ask. Why do you demand blind obedience? I mean that’s not what I would expect from my kind of supreme and supremely confident being.
5. Why are you so fixated on sex and sexuality? Why does religion seem to regard sex out of wedlock or between people of the same gender as more of a risk to society than war and climate change? Where do you stand on AIDS? Should people really not wear condoms even if it ends up killing them?
6. Why is it that in the toss up between faith and reason, you expect us to choose faith? Surely, you should respect your creations enough to allow them to exercise their minds and reject your commands if they conflict with rationality.
7. How do you explain the contradictions between scientific fact and religion? One example is ‘creationism v evolution’. Although some believers have managed to reconcile the two, there will always remain the conflict between our religious nature as God’s chosen creature and our biological nature as little more than smart apes who aren’t as clever as they think. And if there is no contradiction between science and religion, why have religious establishments often been the most vociferous opponents of scientific progress (note: I do realise that religion has also historically acted as a catalyst for science)?
8. If you are merciful and loving, why did you create hell? Are you really in the habit of choosing one group of humans over another and, if so, how merciful and loving is it of you to condemn untold billions of people to eternal damnation for accidents of birth (i.e. being born into another religion) or choice?
9. Is everything written or do we have free will? If You created us, are omniscient and know everything we are going to do before we do it, how the hell can you hold us accountable for our actions? Surely, they are, by implication, your actions.
10. Why do you refuse to democratise faith? Presuming you’re as omnipotent as the descriptions, I’m sure you’d have no trouble in finding a way to talk to us all directly without the need for prophets and clergy to get in the way.

This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 4 March 2009. Read the related discussion.

This is an archive piece that was migrated to this website from Diabolic Digest

Tweet This

Related posts

• Faith in our children (0)
• Face to faith: Ramadan for the faith-challenged (0)
• The God veto (0)
• Secularism in a veil (0)
• Polygamy for all (0)

Secularism in a veil

By Khaled Diab

An outward appearance of Islamism disguises the increasingly secular reality of some Arab and Muslim societies.

April 2009

Tweet This

Related posts

• Egyptian football’s pious turn (0)
• What’s the difference between Obama and an Arab? (0)
• The God veto (0)
• Should America fear a democratic Egypt? (6)
• Polygamy for all (0)