Collective Amnesia

Reading the latest book (Chicago) by the Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany recently one section stood out from the rest: a conversation between an Egyptian academic, Muhammad Salah, and his first love Zeinab. Dr Salah had left Egypt at an early age to pursue a PhD in America and went on to carve out a successful career for himself at the University of Illinois, leaving Zeinab behind in Egypt to idle away her days at the ministry of planning.

However, several decades later and driven by a failed marriage to his American wife, acute homesickness and a deep sense of nostalgia for his homeland, Salah plucks up the courage to contact Zeinab, whereupon his nostalgic view of the Egypt he left behind in the 1950s comes face-to-face with the harsh realities of modern life in many Arab countries.

“Egypt is living its worst days” Zeinab tells him. “Everything has changed for the worst. Reactionary ideas are spreading like the plague. Can you imagine that I am the only female Muslim in the department of planning, out of fifty employees, who is not wearing the veil? … Egyptians have given up on justice in this world, so they are they are waiting for it in the next.”

The growth in religious symbolism here in Jordan is a subject that has caught my attention for some time now. The most obvious expression of this is a perceived increase in the number of girls wearing the Hijab (headscarf), particularly the younger generation. In the absence of any hard statistical data, a fairly rough way of gauging the situation is to talk to university lecturers, most of whom agree there has been an increase. The decision of Muslim women to wear the Hijab is a personal choice and I’m all for that. However, I believe this phenomenon reflects much deeper societal fault lines.

For example, the growing religiosity appears to have little to do with religion in any meaningful sense of the word, i.e. an inward journey to improve the self. Neither does it appear to be driven by Qu’ranic injunctions on modesty. Many women who wear the Hijab do so in combination with skin tight jeans and tops, not to mention layers of make-up. And it’s not just an issue of the Hijab. In a recent column for the Independent, Robert Fisk noted that “civil "servants" and government officials are often scrupulous in their religious observances – yet they tolerate and connive in rigged elections, violations of the law and prison torture.” The same article also recalled how doctors abandoned their patients at a Cairo hospital to attend prayers during Ramadan. The same phenomena can be found throughout the region, a kind of mass religious façade in which the meaning of Islam has become associated with its physical representation, however threadbare that may be.

The character in al-Aswany’s novel, Zeinab, puts this phenomena down to repression, poverty and having no hope in the future, describing as a “ collective depression accompanied by religious symptoms.” Driving this sense of collective amnesia has been the failure of Arab regimes to introduce democratic institutions, good governance, a thriving civil society and clear national goals. In the absence of effective governance, including a lack of checks and balances on power, the whole concept of citizenship, as a person enjoying equal rights and obligations to co-citizens under the law, has been undermined. Under these circumstances the retreat into religious symbolism is perhaps a way of rationalizing both the present and the future in repressive societies where cronyism and corruption rein supreme and where patronage and connections, rather than merit, are the key factors which determine social mobility.

Nevertheless, it can hardly be a sign of healthy and advancing societies but more a descent into mass schizophrenia.