As part of a new series on youth and religion, the New York Times ran an article today on young people in Egypt. The article, by Michael Slackman, basically argues that economic and social frustration and the inability to get married at a young age has driven many to become more pious:
The despair extends to rural Egypt, always a traditional, religious environment, but one that ambitious young people long to escape. In the village of Shamandeel, not far from Zagazig, it took Walid Faragallah six years after graduating with a degree in psychology to find a job in a factory, and his pay was less than $50 a month. That is an average period of waiting — and average pay — for new entries in the job market. Mr. Faragallah kept that job for a year, and recently found another factory job for $108 a month, two hours from his home.
“It brings us closer to God, in a sense,� Mr. Faragallah said, speaking of the despair he felt during the years he searched for work. “But sometimes, I can see how it does not make you closer to God, but pushes you toward terrorism. Practically, it killed my ambition. I can’t think of a future.�
So far so much usual socio-economic analysis of the religiosity of Arab youth. But it’s interesting that when they provided an Arabic translation of the article and solicited young Egyptians’ points of view on it, this is the reply they got:
After discussing the article with three of four different groups of students, I found that the answers were surprisingly uniform: yes, the government holds them back. Yes, it’s too costly to find an apartment, furnish it, get married and live a happy life in it. But they all asked pretty much asked: “What does this have to do with the religion mentioned in your story?�
“You say our religiosity comes from economical and social pressure,� Muhammad Salah, a 21-year-old engineering student told me. “This is not true. Of course, we are under heavy pressure, but this has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with the government.�
This was the point of contention — they enjoyed the article because it was critical of the government and raised issues they could relate to. But they did not see the connection between government failure and lack of opportunity with their emboldened faith. Being religious, they say, is about leading a good life. For them, it’s a gesture of free will, an individual choice disconnected from larger issues. Determinism plays no part in it.
The thing that struck most about the article, and which I recognized from everyday life in Egypt, is not so much the pervasiveness of religion but the central role idleness plays in young people’s lives — fear of boredom, empty hour to fill, the feeling that it can lead to trouble. From the end of the article:
There is a mosque a few steps from the front door of their house. But an Islamic tradition holds that the farther you walk to the mosque the more credit earned with God. So every Friday, Mr. Sayyid walks past the mosque by his home, and past a few more mosques, before he reaches the Sayeda Zeinab mosque.
“By being religious, God prevents you from doing wrong things,� Mr. Sayyid said, revealing his central fear and motivation, that time and boredom will lead him to sin. “This whole atmosphere we live in is wrong, wrong.�
If unemployed, prospect-less youth are indeed turning to the mosque, it might be less because of despair-induced spirituality than lack of anything better to do: as Franz Kafka said, idleness is the beginning of all vice and the crown of all virtues.
(And incidentally, there is an Egyptian proverb that says “the idle hand is impure” ( الإيد البطّالة نجسة), as well as passages and many interpretations of the Quran that warn against idleness as leading to sin– one Saudi proverb claims “the devil tempts idle men, but idle men tempt the devil. And perhaps most beautiful of all, an old Middle Eastern proverb that may predate Arabic that claims that “The dust of labor is better than the saffron of idleness.”)
Or, as my Lancastrian grandmother used to say, the Devil finds work for idle hands. And she was a low-church Anglican who lived among the cotton mills during the Great Depression. In other words, this is NOT a culture-specific concept.
“Middle Eastern proverb that may predate Arabic that claims that “The dust of labor is better than the saffron of idleness.â€�)
That makes it Arabic as well. Arabism is the natural and sole extension of the ancient near east.
Because Arabs are the only people in the Middle East.
On close reading of Slackman’s story, it’s clear that the link between piety and frustration (mainly social and economic) is a preconception which he mainly imposed on his characters, not something that emerges from what they tell him. As far as I can see, not a single remark by the characters supports such a link. Personally, I have always been sceptical about the theory that religiosity in Egypt is a product of economic deprivation and thwarted ambitions. Overall, unemployment and poverty have gradually declined since the 1970s, so it would be hard to blame those factors for the trend towards overt piety which people have noticed over the subsequent 30 years. Young people complained in those days that it was impossible to get married, for exactly the same reasons, but in those days it was ‘key-money’ they needed — the right to take on a lease in an existing apartment. Since then, the property market has opened up and apartments are readily available at comparatively affordable prices. There are some oddities in Slackman’s story. For example, how come Sayyid’s divorced mother ‘makes a pilgrimage to Mecca every year’, when Sayyid doesn’t have enough money to marry? His $100 a month is no great fortune but many Egyptians manage to marry on that kind of salary.
Jose
that is only part pf the explaination. All th ancint nar eastern civilisations were semitic in language, culture and religous systems. Holly book has got its parallels in the semitic religons of Mesoptamia and Egypt. Pennisula Arabs spoke the most recent of semitic languages, and they were descendasnts of Babylonians, Egyptians, Aramaics, Yemenes according to both history and the Abrahainmic faiths.
The inhabitants of Iranian palteau who are collectively known as Persians have never been considered to be one poeplemaybe untill the Arabic conquests and later on the´the Safavid dynasty. They were Achaemenids, Parthians and Sassanids who spoke different languages of common Indo-Iranian origin and bitter infighting was incesant among those baraberous groups. The same as well goes for the Arabs and their semitic ancestors.
Sphinx, I would be skeptical of the accuracy any figures regarding unemployment and poverty in Egypt, though I also found the mention of the annual hajj trip when the family has no money for marriage to be a bit odd!
I don’t necessarily think that Slackman is arguing that the inability to marry is what is driving increased religiosity, rather it’s unemployment and underemployment among the educated lower-middle classes that causes both of these phenomena. I wish he would have delved into this a bit more. Egypt has a significant human capital problem today that arises from the old free education and guaranteed employment scheme of the Nasser era: a distorted labor market and a lot of “educated” people who come from decaying, over-used, and under-funded universities that do not provide them with skills demanded by the market.
El-Abyad: Did you type your response in Arabic and put it through Google Translate?
Why are people such dicks in the comment sections of blogs?
Have my idle hands gotten hold of the wrong end of the dirty stick here, or is the Arabist equating religiousity with vice and sin? That would seem to be import of the tag at the end of the posting – and even if we are fine in the distinction between “religiousity” (that teenage God-hornyness that seems to give some people an itch that just never goes away) or what was it that you called it in this case? “despair induced spirituality”? and its outward manifestations; going down to the mosque, praying, growing big long beards and whatever else, should we really be characterizing these preenings as implicitly sinful? Obviously I think so, but I’m a little surprised – not to mention happy – to see grown ups agreeing.
I have to agree with Amr on this.
I recently read a book called ‘The Arabic Language’ by Kees Versteegh.
http://www.amazon.com/Arabic-Language-Kees-Versteegh/dp/0748614362/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204411734&sr=8-1
It’s a great book on linguistics, but apart from that it also gives a vast amount of history.
One thing that the author notes early on is that unlike European languages, where each racial group had their own language, Arabic is an amalgam of all the other languages spoken in the area, from the earliest semitic language, Akkadian, to Ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Chaldean, etc etc..
This is thanks to the nomadic lifestyle of the people and their constant trading.
Racially also the people have mixed tremendously. There is the concept of Pure Arabs, descended from Qahtan, and Arabized Arabs (musta3ribun).
Mohammed himself was considered to be Arabized, thanks to his descent from Abraham, who was not Arab.
The author obviously goes into much more detail than this, so I’ll let you pick up the book if your interested.
Anyway, my point is, stop being a dick jose. Take it easy on the sarcasm and internet machismo.
Download unlimited with hotfile, rapidshare, fileserve and megaupload.