Good evening. Thanks to the Village Centre and thanks to you again for the invitation. And thanks to Thomas for the famous presentation. It's very kind of you. You said you were my friend, so I guess everyone knows at this point that you don't believe anything that you said because this is just friendship. But thank you. I start my talk with the description of three events that happened in Egypt, more or less at the same time, and that was in April 2012. So we're going back a little while.
April 2012 was the run up to Egypt's first presidential post-revolution election, and the country was boiling with politics in Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, was organising his last big electoral meeting in Abdeen, next to the former palace. And the Line-Up for the event was striking, some would say surprising. Mohammed Morsi did, of course, give a full speech. He was the candidate.
But before and after the show was run by two sheikhs, both of whom were clearly identified with Salafism, Mohammed Abdul Masood, a prominent Salafi figure from Cairo's Shubra neighbourhood. And suffered because he was a member of what became known in the 2000 as the Muslim Brotherhood said if you wake. Outside the electoral meeting as you left place the books of Right of a Sajani, another sheikh, a member of the Brotherhood Salafi wing, were being sold a large stables.
One of those was on the left of Mohammad, adopted Wahab. Another one argued that the Brotherhood was a Salafi organisation and that Salafis should support it. In the line-up, shall you? A character who until the 2000, had been considered as the Muslim Brotherhood's global mufti. Too close to quote from Yakub Scott Peterson. Well, he was nowhere to be found. He was completely absent. And indeed, what remained in Qatar, he actually never officially backed Mohammed Morsi.
Around the same time as this was happening with Mohammed Morsi, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh was a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood who had left the organisation and had decided to run for president. And as you know, he would end up force with 70% of the vote. So Abdel Fattah was organising his own electoral meeting in Alexandria with the support of Egypt's biggest Salafi organisation.
That that was set up for you. All of this was happening as the streets of Cairo were recovering from clashes in front of the army headquarters, led by supporters, led by supporters of another Salafi sheikh, Hassan Saleh Abouzeid, a maverick Salafi husband, had decided to run for president and an enormous social movement had taken shape around his split in early 2012.
The streets of Egypt's main cities were full of posters to Hasan, and some of the early polls ranked him first among all presidential candidates. It was his exclusion from the presidential race in early April by Egypt's electoral commission on the grounds of the alleged dual American Egyptian citizenship of his mother.
That prompted the clashes with his supporters. I'm telling those stories because they reflect how in the post-war revolutionary period, Salafism had become the dominant and unavoidable religious idiom in Egyptian politics, an idiom even adopted by groups and individuals that historically had had little to do with Salafism. Starting with the Muslim Brotherhood. How did this come to be, and what consequences did this have for Egypt's political transition?
My argument here is that in Egypt, 2011 was the culmination of two parallel and completely distinct processes that collided in the wake of the revolution. The first of these processes is well known and well studied. It is the political process that led a mostly young generation of activists, most of whom had little to do with Islamism and even less with Salafism. To trigger a succession of events that would end was the ouster of Hosni Mubarak on the 11th of February.
But the second of those processes is much less studied and took place within a much longer time frame. That process is what I called the hedge harmonisation of Salafism with an Egypt's religious sphere explaining how this humanisation came to be. It's a daunting task, and I have just finished a book about this, but what I do here is that I briefly sum up some of my main arguments.
But first, let's start by defining Salafism and explaining why it needs to be considered as a phenomenon analytically distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood's Islamism. In the Egyptian context, Islamism and Salafism both emerged in the 1920s in an organised form as two possible outcomes of the movement of Islamic reform that have taken hold in the country since the late 19th century.
Established in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was Islamism as first organised manifestation and it would remain the matrix of Islamism throughout the 20th century. What is less known, though, is that two years before, in 1926, Egypt's first Salafi organisation had been established on sort of Sunni Ahmadiyya that supporters of the Prophet's tradition.
And from now on I would call them unsatisfied, as they usually called in the Egyptian debates, the two organisations, the brothers and also the Senate would remain at odds. For all of their history. And although also the sooner was smaller than the brotherhood in size, both organisations would come to exert a massive influence over Egyptian society. Salafism here can be defined as both a religious discourse and initially, at least as what I refer to as a grammar of action.
In terms of religious discourse, Salafism represents a ultraconservative version of Islam, inspired by a select number of medieval and more modern authors from even Samia and his students even pay homage to the cathedral to Mohammed than Abdel Wahab, the co-founder of Saudi Arabia and his later intellectual peers. What characterises Salafi religious discourse is its strict and uncompromising definition of the Muslim creed the archetype.
Based on that definition, the adherents of Islam's dominant theological school, the Ashes, opponents of the ushering school, but also the Sufis and of course, the Shia. All of those are not considered to be proper Muslims and sometimes not Muslim at all. That attitude, all creeds, goes with a ultraconservative reading, reading infidel, supporting the set of social practices that would become seen in the 20th century as distinctively Salafi.
For instance, regarding women who most, but not actually all Salafis consider should cover their faces in public of music, which is banned except for acapella chants. The famous Nasheed's and Nasheed pro-reform. Or regarding Christians, for instance, whom, according to Salafis, it is forbidden to congratulate on their religious holiness. And you would see that in Egypt, you would see the Brotherhood putting up signs congratulating Christians on Christmas, but Salafis wouldn't do that.
So, you know, those are practices that would distinctively set Salafis apart. This ultra conservative religious discourse often goes with what I've called a distinctive grammar of action. And I'm using that term on boring it from pragmatic sociology of authors like Russell Lemieux, liberal, dusky, etc. Some of these believe that the reform of the Ummah should happen primarily through the purification of the Crete and the propagation of the purified creed through education and preaching.
This is what a leader and very famous Salafi figure Sheikh Mohammed, must have had been. And Ambani called a post the epitome of purification and education. This explains why Salafis have generally shunned oppositional politics. For them, no change can come from above. Before, society has been religiously purified at the level of both discourse and drummer of action. Salafism is thus this thing from Islamism as represented by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood understands reform as fundamentally a political process, one that ends with the creation of an Islamic state. The thing is, though, that the summit of the Brotherhood later taken on by other groups, and that has prompted the brothers to enter the political sphere as active participants from quite early on in their history, as you remember, has a lot of himself run for election, for elections already in the early 1940s.
Salafis, in return, see politics as corrupting and unnecessary at this stage, and again, quoting from Satan and banning what they say is being a see us advocacy us. The good policy is to abandon politics or to step away from politics. Salafis have thus usually thought a modus vivendi with the different regimes as a way to protect their preaching enterprise. Finally, in terms of Islam, there are also clear differences between Salafis and brothers.
While Salafis see religious reform as their primary goal. As I've said, the brothers main focus is political reform. And for the brothers, Islam is a given, not an ideal to be reached. And the goal for the brothers is therefore to try to unify conservative Muslims across their differences around a common political goal. This is therefore clear from the trajectory of hasn't been there.
For instance, who welcomed Sufis and he was a former Sufi himself who was active in rapprochement efforts, agreed with the Shia for instance, and that him already at the time the harsh criticism of the Sunni Salafis. Explaining what I called the hedge. Harmonisation of Salafism requires an analysis of the shifting relations within the triangle of actors made up of the state Islamism and Salafism.
Right. That's the triangle I'm looking at that that hedge embolisation took place in different stages. And I'm going to walk you through these different stages, and I'll have to be quick again. That will be much more detailed in the book that will come out next year.
From the 1940s to the 1940s from the 1920 sorry, to the 1940s, the Egyptian Salafis main effort was geared towards publishing and thus making accessible to a large audience the writings of a select group of authors that form the backbone of their Corpus Ibn TV calling, even getting it from Wahab, Suleiman, even Salman, etc., etc. Most of these authors were little known in Egypt before the 1920s, and when they were,
they were generally denounced by the country's dominant Islamic tradition represented by Al-Azhar. The Salafi effort was thus aimed not only at rehabilitating its authors, but also at saturating the emerging book markets with their writings. The early Egyptian Salafis displayed an impressive entrepreneurial ethos that made their publishing campaign eventually quite successful.
Despite the radical opposition of Al-Azhar and at the time, you know, some of the more senior civil authorities are constantly denouncing what they see as the corrupting enterprises of the Salafis were digging into the tradition to bring out divisive works, etc., etc. That's the language, of course, that is used by some of the most prominent Shias that Azhar at the time she that this was one of the many many names. What Ibn Casey is famous to fear, for instance, and everyone today knows the see.
And Kathy, you're right, it's the most famous. Exactly. The Koran these days, considered so. Well, it was only published in 1924 in Egypt for the first time. And at the time, it was not very known.
It would take a few decades for it to become seen as the reference in theatre, pushing aside as a luxury i al-balawi and even who used to be considered until the early 20th century as the core representatives of the Shah, counter-intuitively, the coming to power of the free officers and later Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954 turned out to be a blessing for the Salafis. Most of the country's Islamic associations were either banned like the Muslim Brotherhood or put under the heavy control of the state.
I love her was also domesticated, especially after the 1961 nationalisation law. Among the only organisation that were spared from repression were the Salafi organisations, starting with Sara Sidner, who, since they shunned institutional politics and did not hesitate to sing the praises of the new regime, were never seen as a threat. In other words, Nasser's religious policies created an immense void in the religious sphere, and that void was partly filled by the Salafis.
During the Nasser era, they also continued their publishing enterprise, but with even less competition than before. One interesting I reviewed from the time, for instance, is that of the first major international conference on even time that took place in Damascus in 1958 to celebrate the unification of Egypt and Syria.
That's interesting, right? To celebrate what was seen at the time as an Arab nationalist projects project, even trivia would be the figure that would kind of link the two countries together. And, you know, even to me, it was a Syrian style part of his life in Egypt, was jailed in Egypt. He was seen as a symbol of that. But the fact that the figure of him in time would take so much importance is also a sign of the times.
So as I said. Right, they continued their publishing enterprise. But was even less competition than before. And. Salafi spaces became the only non-state religious spaces available in the country. That explains why the Egyptian religious revival of the late 1960s sprung from Salafi spheres.
It is a fact that most of those who would become the leaders of the 1970s Islamic organisations in Egypt had their early religious socialisation as Salafis, either with an onset of some knock off or on Sunni mosques or within mosque pertaining to another organisation called Sharia, which in the 1960s had also adopted a clear Salafi outlook more than an Islamic revival. This was a Salafi revival and a Salafis.
Many of these activists were initially more focussed on questions of correct creed and Islamic behaviour than they were on questions of politics. And this is obvious from the student groups that emerged in Egyptian universities. The famous Jemaah Islamiyah, which actually only became politicised during the second half of the 1970s, and especially after Sadat's famous trip to Jerusalem in 1977.
Before that, their demands concern gender segregation, stopping classes for prayer, or removing Sufi content from religious classes. Here, I think that there's actually some kind of historical problem in the literature carving that periods. Most of that literature reads the 1970s decade retrospectively from Sadat's assassination in 1981 and analyses that decade as leading eventually to the assassination of Sadat.
And by doing so. It emphasises the figure of side put up as the main inspiration for the activists of that decade. And yes, I'm not debating that the writings that said would have had importance. They did have a major importance in the seventies. But only at a later stage and on a generation whose religious understanding was already informed by a Salafi vision.
Let's look at the timeline here. It is only in 1973, 1974, that the largest group of Muslim Brotherhood detainees were released from prison. And this is once then YouTube's writings became known to a larger audience. So we do know that the 1970s generation was already active on campuses by that.
There were two consequences here. First, that activist generation as a result of the troops, you know, influence at a second stage, as I said, yes, it did become gradually politicised, mixing its early Salafi vision with some of its political ideas. And that produced a brand of political Salafism that was at the time, an entirely new thing breaking from the old Salafi grammar of action that I mentioned earlier.
Right. And the same thing happened exactly at the same time in Saudi Arabia with the birth of the Sahwa, which was the subject of the book I did before that one second, the Brotherhood when they came out of jail in 73, 74. They were actually shocked to discover that a new generation of activists had emerged in their absence, and they would direct all their efforts at trying to co-opt that new generation of activists to revive the Brotherhood.
And to do so, they would themselves have to adopt a clearer Salafi outlook. This is the moment when basically Muslim Brotherhood members started doing that. I mean, again, not one but many brothers in their forties, fifties didn't have one. So that was the moment when, again, they felt that they needed not just in their appearance, by the way, but what they would say and how they would present their project.
And they would feel the need to use Salafi references that would speak to that generation. The Brotherhood ended up being reborn, but with a Salafi element within it. And from the eighties and nineties, the Brotherhood would become increasingly divided on the question of Salafism, with a growing Salafi wing, especially among the new generation of religious figures such as those that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk.
Support Hegazi wrote for the society. And on the other hand, as opposed to those, the old generation of scholars of the Brotherhood, such as Mohamed al Ghazali or Yusuf Corado, who actually wrote against the influence of Salafism in those decades. And you have two books actually from from causality from the eighties, denouncing what he sees as the creeping influenced Salafism.
So it was indeed a debate within the Brotherhood. By the late 2000s, the leadership of the Brotherhood was clearly leaning towards the Salafis, and that was another sign of the growing Salafi hegemony. This is what my friend, the deceased Hassan Tamam. Some of you who follow Egypt probably know his name and he left us in 2011.
He was one of these Egyptian scholars who really, you know, provided an enormous amount of study to that question of political Islam in Egypt in the 2000 and and really, you know, brought up a lot of new things. So for some, in 2010, wrote an article which you called to salute the required right on what he called the certification of the Brotherhood. And he was looking at these types of phenomenon within the Brotherhood. So let me go back to the late 1970s and leave the Brotherhood aside for.
In 1981. That decade, yes. Did end with activists identifying with what they would call a radical radical politicised Salafi worldview, Lutheran Jihad and Jemaah Islamiyah that things to group that killed Sadat. Well, they did kill Sadat in 1981. Yes. And that led to a widespread repression of all activists done as well as a change of era with the coming to power of Mubarak. And Mubarak, as you know, would stay in power for the next 30 years.
The Mubarak era would see Salafism continue its process of religious hedge harmonisation. During the 1970s, Salafism have become the dominant idiom within Egypt's religious activist milieu. From the 1980s, Salafism would gradually become a mass phenomenon, reaching all parts of Egyptian society at large. That is the difference between the seventies and what happened from the eighties. And what happened from the eighties was the result of a number of dynamics, which I'll mention briefly here.
First in the late seventies, the first grassroots activists therapy organisation had been established and it was called First and Madrassas Sellafield, the Salafi School. And later on that was Sellafield, the Salafi Court. The organisation was created by members of the Alexandria branch of the student Jemaah Islamiah, who were unhappy with the decision of many other Jemaah Islamiyah members to join the Brotherhood.
In contrast, the founders of the DAR was Salafi. You were hoping to bring Salafism back to its original premise of action, purification and education while shunning any political involvement and thus to break from the politicisation that Salafism had undergone in the 1970s. What made them different from inside of some another told you that there was another Salafi group that was organised since 1926. So what's the difference with the new guys?
What's made them different then is that they had learned from their years as student activists of a number of things which they took with them. Well, answer the signal, which at that point had become a pretty sleepy institution. Well, unsolicited, it was more akin to what I would call the traditional league of almost, you know, Robitussin, which is a common form of organisation in the Muslim world.
Right. So on Sundays, something had become kind of a sleepy legal dilemma that that was sort of fear was designed as a grassroots preaching movement with a relatively complex architecture resembling that of the Muslim Brotherhood to some extent. And that obviously the fire even has a guide, as you know. And he's called the column.
He's the Salafi equivalent of some kind of Muslim writes the youth column, by the way, to tell you the story, because a poem was the title given in the old days in the medieval times to the rector of a school. Right. So in claiming Jose is I mean, his name comes from he's the son of the client of the madrassa founded by it. And Jose. Right. Hence the name. Right. So the name calling is important because it's known it in 5 minutes, an omen that refers to someone who heads a school.
And as I told you at the beginning, they were called the Salafi school. So and they took on that. But he kind of acts as a mentor of the group in ways that are certainly different from the Brotherhood and claiming that it's the same. But they also have their guiding figure. Right. And the new methods of mobilisation that the DA was sort of adopted from its student years.
Explain in large part why within three decades the DA sort of became the largest Salafi group in Egypt, with a membership only second in number to the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition to that was said, a few smaller Salafi groups, sometimes more politicised, continued to exist during the Mubarak era. So what we had was a blooming grassroots Salafism here it with one central group that was sort of fear, which was bigger than all the others.
And then smaller Salafi communities. Some of them, you know, are continuing the kind of more politicised Salafism of the 1970s. There are two reasons for this blooming of Salafism on under Mubarak. The first has to do with what I would call the political economy of Salafism during those years.
I'm sure you've noticed, and you've probably been surprised that I haven't mentioned Saudi Arabia much yet in that talk, and that is actually on purpose, because I believe that the role of Saudi Arabia in the development of Egyptian Salafism is actually largely overrated in the academic and non academic literature. Yes. So you did play a role. I'm not denying that they did it, but they did at certain moments. Right. One of those moments actually was not the one you would expect.
It wasn't the 1920s and thirties when Onset of Sun was founded and King Abdulaziz was trying to normalise, you know, what a day in the days was called? Wahhabi Islam, Salafism, Saudi Islam, whatever you want to call it. You know, just after he'd taken it, conquered Medina. Right. And and, you know, that there was a hostile reaction from many parts of the Muslim world, because the you know, as in the times of the Ottomans, the Wahhabi or the Salafis were seen as extreme right.
So he was trying to make himself known and make his Islam known and make himself known, which led to him supporting certain groups such as ISIS and Egypt. But what's interesting is that this is a known yet oil Saudi Arabia. It's not the oil money of the 2020s and thirties. It's not huge sums. But he's sending money grants. The answer is indeed. And helping them with manuscripts, which is crucial. Right.
Because what unsettles Sunni those, remember, is publishing books that are not found in Egypt. And the Salafi networks going through Saudi Arabia and especially the Hejaz, would play a big role in providing them with some of these medieval books that they would later publish to constitute the 20th century Salafi corpus. So yes, there was Saudi support at some moments yet. For instance, in the 1970s, the Islamic revival that I described was actually Salafi for the reasons that I explained.
And as you could see, those reasons happened before Saudi Arabia exerted any influence over it. Right. It was, you know, the events of the forties and Nasser coming to power and the elimination of the other groups. You felt you was not involved in them. So the 1970s revival was Salafi before the Saudis could influence it, not think that the Saudis didn't try to influence it afterwards, especially after 1973. But he was already sort of. Right.
And this is also where, you know, I think some of because demography is problematic or so going back there right after the eighties, the role of Saudi Arabia to me in the Gulf become a bit more clear. Right. And that role would be to make Egyptian Salafism economically sustainable by allowing Salafis to connect to a booming economic space. And that would help solve one of the issues that Salafis face in a country like Egypt.
Because their conservative views prohibit them from entering many careers. When you're a Salafi, you don't want to work for a secular state, so you can't you can't have a state job in Egypt. It's pretty common to have a state job anyway. Even if you decided that, well, I really need that state job, they probably wouldn't take it as your bit. So you wouldn't you wouldn't be accepted.
The way you look, if you're a Salafi, would also avoid service jobs because you could be in contact with the other gender. And so that would put you in situations that you would not accept as a Salafi. So basically what you have done, you know, the preferable way of earning a living for Salafi is business as long as it is as it is in business of right.
Business and things that are there. And the Gulf provided them with such excellent business opportunities either because they would go to the Gulf or because they would do business with Saudis, with Saudi companies from within Egypt. And many of these Salafis import export with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. They did these types of things, so they would use those connections.
Here again, I would partly disagree with the dominant narrative that sees Egyptian Salafism as a result of Egyptian work migration to the Gulf. I'm not denying that this happened. Of course, you did have Egyptians who went to work in the Gulf and came back instead of denying that there are plenty of cases.
But at the same time, we shouldn't forget that many of those who actually were Salafis before they went and it was being Salafi, that open careers for them in Saudi Arabia because they could connect to that network. So again, I think here again, you know, the story has been a little bit imbalanced, right. So my argument here is that the Gulf, more than creating the Egyptian Salafi phenomenon, made it economically sustainable.
Right. And I think that was crucial in the blooming of Salafism in those years. Now, let's look at the second reason why I which I believe explains the Salafi boom during the Mubarak era. And that second reason is the regime's strategy of considering the Salafis as a lesser evil in comparison to the Brotherhood and to the other Islamist groups.
Though the Salafis would sometimes face repression, they were generally less persecuted, and they actually sometimes benefited from the benevolence of the security apparatus. And you have plenty of stories about how state security on the dollar would help Salafis take hold of a neighbourhoods which it feared was too supportive of the Brotherhood or of the get on Islamist.
So those stories are plenty. That strategy became particularly obvious in the 2000, when Salafis were granted the right to open a large number of satellite TV channels broadcasting online at the national satellite. And of course, that was something that the Brotherhood could never even dream of. That was completely impossible for the president to do any such thing. So the fact that the Salafis could open those channels was a key political decision.
By the late 2000. Those channels were the most popular channels among Egyptian viewers. And watching them as one entered a shop or home was unavoidable for anyone visiting Egypt in the late 2000. I don't know if some of you have seen this, but I'm sure you have if you've been that. So at that point, Salafi sheikhs like Mohammed Hassan Abu Wani, Mohammed Hassan Yakubu, they have become household names for Egyptians. By late 2010 were just a few months before the revolution.
Salafism had become so religiously hegemonic that the regime finally reconsidered its earlier strategy. In October 2010, four months before the revolution, three doesn't know that. Of course, in October 2010, the suspension of broadcasts was pronounced against some of the most popular Salafi channels. And a massive campaign denouncing Salafi influence was launched in the Egyptian press.
And that campaign was, of course, aggravated in the wake of the terrorist attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria on Coptic Christmas in January 2011. Three weeks before the revolution in January 2011. A week, ten days after that attack, a magazine like Alamosa, which is one of these Egyptian magazines, a little bit of tabloids in many ways was quite read, as has an audience.
So I just thought we would put, for instance, Yasser Mohammed, the strong man of the dog whistle reveal on its front page with the title The The Most Dangerous Man against Egypt. That's interesting. That's a complete shift in the discourse right back then. Some of them had reached the apex of its influence, but the political tide was beginning to turn against it. And that is when the Salafis were saved by a miracle with which they had absolutely nothing to do.
And that miracle is called the Egyptian revolution. And when I say they actually had nothing to do with the revolution, it's even more than us. For the most part, Egyptian Salafis were fundamentally against the revolution, calling on their followers to stay at home during the protests. That was, for instance, the position of the DA was that a feel for the revolution was worthless.
As one of their sheikhs, Mohammed Ismail Mukundan then famously explained what good can changing the ruler do if the society remains the same? The only Salafis who took part in the event were the smaller, politicised Salafi groups that I mentioned before, and they did represent much smaller numbers, but they did take part, right? And those Salafis joined the politicised ones about three days into the revolution.
You remember that if you have the timeline of the revolution in mind starts in the 21st, on the 28th, the Muslim Brotherhood joins, and that is more or less when some of these smaller, politicised Salafi groups join as well.
At the same time as the Brotherhood strikes and among them, among these people, it's like Salafis who join is Mohammed Abdel Maqsood, who I mentioned at the beginning, the Salafi Shia from Shubra, quite a big name in Cairo among the of committee of Cairo and how something that looks like whom I mentioned as well who would become the revolutionary Salafi talk about later on. Right. So this is the moment when these this tiny faction of Salafis join.
Yet the non-participation of most Salafis in the revolution has no impact on their popularity. Right. And as soon as the revolution succeeded, Salafis were among the first to reap the fruits of it. Within days of Mubarak's fall, massive Salafi conference were organised across all regions. Right. And Salafis couldn't do it with massive conferences under Mubarak. They had they had the margin of of movement that was tolerated.
But big conferences was not something that Mubarak would allow them to do. So now they could do this. And what they did soon as the revolution ended was to organise in Alexandria, the man who is one, you know, big Salafi conferences all across Egypt. Right at the time of the revolution at the top of this made to unify all Salafis. Despite the differences between the more and the less politicised ones, two religious bodies were created.
The first is called the largest short allama, the Consultative Council of the LMA. And the second one, which I'll focus on here, which is more important school, which is like the Committee for Rights and Reform. That body is particularly interesting to study as an arena of interest. Salafi conflict was created right at the end of the revolution. It included members of the DA Setterfield politicised Salafis like Mohammed Abu Masood and members of the Muslim Brotherhood Salafi.
It quickly appeared that each party was trying to use the body to further its own interests. That was considered that since it was the country's largest Salafi organisation, it should take the leading role in unifying the Salafis and that all Salafis should support it. In contrast, the politicised Salafis claimed leadership by putting forward their participation in the revolution, thus trying to compensate their smaller or smaller numbers with this kind of newfound legitimacy.
Finally, the members of the Salafi of the Muslim Brotherhood are trying to channel Salafi support to the Brotherhood and use the comedy for that purpose. It didn't take long for this initial attempt at unity to collapse and for each Salafi faction to go its own way. First, the die was sort of. Let's look at it. The group that always shun politics told you that.
And but in the wake of the revolution, some of the members of the diverse portfolio argued that the group now needed some form of political representation. After much internal debate, the Nour Party has the new was established in June 2011 and it received more than 25% of the votes in the parliamentary election a few months later, coming only second after the Muslim Brotherhood. And that showed the Salafis impressive ability to convert that religious capital into political capital.
After initial tensions and interrogations on the purpose of a Salafi party. And I won't delve into this here because that would make me long. What happened is that the sheikhs at the door was Salafi turned the party into a lobbying arm for their religious organisation. What I mean when I say lobbying arm is that the shoes of the dollar Salafi never changed their grammar of action.
They didn't believe in change or both. And they never envisioned the nor party as a vehicle to seize power or to establish an Islamic state. For them, the party's main function was to defend the interests of the religious association behind it, defend what they call Muslim hatred, their rights. And that was the whole thing that came in their discourse all the time.
So for them, it was all about preserving the control over their mosques and creating the conditions for an expansion of that religious control rights. I have sometimes compared this approach to institutional politics, to that of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties in Israel.
If you see that comparison right, because those parties also care first and foremost about the preservation and the expansion of their religious institutions, and they are not interested in exerting political power per say, which explains why they would make, you know, shifting alliances depending on whom they can get the right promises from and give their votes or their voices enough in the
parliament to the party or the leader that says we're going to give you what you want to go with function very similarly, which will also later on explain many of the shifting alliances has been more of the no party. So in that sense, I have argued that the no party is not an Islamist party. And that takes us back to my earlier distinction between Salafism and Islamism. Right. I think it's a misconception to analyse the more partisan Islamist party, because it is not.
And and you cannot understand what they do if you see them through that lens. In any case, what I'm trying to get at here is that understanding the no parties approach to politics is key to understanding why the sheikhs of the downfall of you would end up turning new into a combat machine against the Brotherhood. Right. Let me explain that point again. As I said, the sheikhs main focus is the preservation and expansion of their religious institutions, and they don't want to exert power.
For them, the nightmare scenario is a muslim Brotherhood electoral victory through which the brothers would end up seizing the state, and after they seize the state, stop converting their political capital into religious capital by appointing brotherhood sheikhs and imams to every position into religious sphere, thereby weakening the Salafi presence and putting the Salafi project in danger.
Counterintuitively, the Salafis feel much more at ease with a secular regime, which at least doesn't compete with them in the religious sphere, which in their view, is the only thing that actually matters. This is key to understanding why the new party Salafis did all they could through up to a year and a half of the Egyptian transition to undermine the brothers they run against them. In the parliamentary elections of late 2011.
In the presidential elections of May 2012, they decided not to present the candidate, and that's coherent with not wanting to exert power. But they also decided not to back Mohammed Morsi. And instead they opted for another, more liberal Islamist candidate, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a former MP member who left because he was on a more liberal line. Obviously, they didn't they didn't do this out of love for Abdel Fattah, whose religious views they shared even less than Morsi's.
But Abdel Fattah was the only candidate carrying somehow the Islamic label that had any chance of winning. And if he had won, he would have been a weak president, which was perfect for Salafis, who would be the only cohesive group supporting him, thereby being able to instrumentalize him for their own purposes. When Abul-fotouh failed in the first round and the second round turned out to be between Mohamed Morsi and former Mubarak Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq.
Noor Salafis felt that they had no other choice if they wanted to maintain credibility with their base to support Mohamed Morsi. And they call for a multi vote. Finally at the very end, Yasser Mohammed, though. But at the same time, the as I said, the sheiks obviously preferred a shuttle option. So now they were torn between what they could say and what they actually preferred.
Right. But it would have not sounded good to their base to support the guy who was the former Mubarak prime minister who was a known secularist. Right. So they called for a Morsi vote. But in the days before the announcement of the results, famous visit from one of the big sheikhs of the dollar said Yasir Mohammed was made to Ahmed Shafiq to tell him that in the end, you know, his victory was desirable and that of course, if he was to win, the Salafis would be behind him.
Eventually, of course, a year into the Morsi presidency, as you know, the more party supported the military coup against Morsi. And if you remember the famous speech by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on the 30th July 2013, you remember he's speaking. And behind him, there's a bunch of people sitting there is the and also there is the Coptic Pope.
There is the representative of tomorrow that the youth group that supported the coup supported the demonstration that led to the coup and galmudug represent because of the no part is that right in that picture. This all shows you how the party with its almost 120 movies turned out to be 110 to 110 turned out to be a headache for the Brotherhood during the whole of 2011. 2013. Yet. This was not the only Salafi headache for the Brotherhood.
There was a second Salafi headache because late 2011 would see the rise of another major Salafi phenomenon, the so-called revolutionary Salafi movement led by himself, Abu Smadi. What I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, if you remember, as opposed to the door, was that if your husband was a politicised Salafi, you were taking part in the revolution. He was also a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He had pertained to the Salafi wing of the Brotherhood and later he had abandoned the organisation. No, Hazem was turning into a charismatic grassroots leader who never missed the protest on the. He was always there with this crowd, and he was gaining immense support among religious Egyptians, both Salafis and Islamists, while denouncing the Brotherhood and the dark side of the US political sell-outs who had abandoned any commitment to the Islamic project.
He was doing something with Islamic populism, if you want. He's above all in what you would call Islamic populist, right. But in the name of Salafism, again, using the same Salafi reference. More importantly, he was a presidential candidate who was ranked first in some of the polls in early 2012. And people who've been in Egypt at the time remember Hazem being absolutely everywhere. And this lasted for a few months in Egypt. You know, you couldn't avoid his picture.
It was just everywhere. It's interesting how easily we forget because a lot of people forgot about that moment. But that was has a moment in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood was thus facing a major Salafi competition coming from both the Salafis and its party have been more and haasan's revolutionary Salafi movement. And this had two important consequences on the Brotherhood's behaviour.
First, the brothers started relying massively on Salafi religious figures, both as a way to appeal to the broader Egyptian public, but also as a means of countering the Salafi criticisms directed against them. The religious figures of the Brotherhood's Salafi wing were note taking centre stage.
In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood met alliances with some of these smaller, politicised Salafi groups that I mentioned, such as the one led by Mohammed Abu Maqsood and other Maqsood, would become a frequent speaker at Brotherhood events. As in the story I told you again at the beginning of the talk. This would continue throughout the Morsi presidency.
And just two weeks before the coup on the 15th of June 2013, Morsi was presiding a major Salafi conference organised in Cairo's stadium to support jihad in Syria. Rights and present were all the pro and the Salafis, either from the Salafi wing or from all these politicised Salafis who decided to side with the army.
But also figures from Saudi Arabia, such as Mohammed Al Arif and others, would come directly from Saudi Arabia, though it's interesting that that conference was often cited by anti-Morsi figures as a proof of the alleged fact that Morsi represented the country. And that was part of the language elements that you'd find, you know, in the wake of the coup to justify why the coup was needed. So that kind of gave arguments to the other side. Second, I'm looking at two consequences here.
So what's the second consequence on the Brotherhood's behaviour? Well, the second consequence was that of. Oh, no. Sorry. I moved too quick on the second half. I was good. No, I just wanted to stress again with you something here before moving to the second consequence. That, again, let me stress that this was not what many had expected. Right. That Morsi would end up being surrounded by side effects.
Right. I mean, most and especially would have thought like, again, someone like you A that we would play a major role in the post 2011 and the religious configuration. I mean, he was in the end, as I said, the global mufti, he was the most well-known figure of the Brotherhood. And yet the Salafi climate that was prevailing then made him completely sidelined and he actually protested against it. And, you know, he was not happy with the events was going on in Egypt.
Second, so I'm going to my second point that the second consequence, the Salafi competition to the mob, also impacted the decisions made by the army, and that would have far reaching consequences. First was the decision made in late March 2012 to present a candidate to the to the presidential election, despite the fact that the Brotherhood had promised throughout 2011 that they would do that as a way of reassuring the country's non-Islamist forces here.
The pressure, the pressure exerted by Hasan for the Abu Ismail and his presidential campaign played a major role. And obviously the Muslim Brotherhood did not know that he would be excluded from the race. Then the Muslim Brotherhood generally feared that this uncontrollable maverick who can claim to carry with them the deep Islamic project would eventually be elected because he would be a nightmare for them.
They would have no control over him. There would be an Islamist president, so they would, you know, get the blame, if anything worthwhile. And so at some point they decided that if there was to be an Islamist president, that it would be better if it was one of them. And so they decided to run. That was not the only reason, but that was, I think, the main reason why they decided to run on breaking the promise that they had made a year before.
And and again, that was a big thing when they decided to break their promise that obviously the fact that they run eventually opened the way to the standoff with the Army, because that was kind of a red line that had been set by the Army from the beginning. The second consequence here was the decision by the Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to adopt a heavily Islamist constitution, and that was in December 2012.
And by adopting that constitution, by relying on the Salafi votes and the constitutional assembly to make up a majority, despite the decision of most non-Islamist members of the Assembly to boycott the vote, that was in part the result of the religious bidding game between brothers and Salafis, in which the brothers was constantly under threat of being accused of being insufficiently committed to Islam.
That was in part also the result of the sense of false security that being able to constitute a majority was the Salafis gave to the brothers.
And the irony is that the Noor party backstopped the brothers as soon as the Constitution was adopted by joining the opposition and the form that was forming with the National Salvation Front at the time and the right after the Constitution, would the new party would move towards the opposition and eventually form some kind of united front and attacking the coup that would bring down Morsi. So the constitutional moment was central in that development.
It is the moment when the non-Islamists feeling existentially threatened by the new constitution broke, was in, was institutional politics, and decided that the only way for them was to knock at the doors of the barracks and get the army in. So let me conclude here what has been a long and danced administration? What I've tried to show is how and why the religious head harmonisation of Salafism happened in the decade until 2011 and how this affected the 2011 political dynamics.
I think this is a crucial element that has not been sufficiently taken into account. For instance, in the now common comparison between the political trajectories of Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of 2011. In Tunisia, it is in part the weakness of Salafism that allowed the Islamist party another to be the sole representative of Islamic politics and to adopt a centrist strategy in the Egyptian configuration.
With the dominance of Salafism in the religious sphere and all the consequences that it had, something similar was highly unlikely to happen. I. What's a couple of last words, but I won't be long on the post 2013 Salafi configuration in Egypt. There is no doubt that Salafism remains a strong religious discourse in Egypt. I think the discourse remains, you know, has still a lot of prevalence, but the post-revolutionary politics have cost Salafi figures and movements a tremendous lot.
And I think now we should distinguish between the discourse and many of these elements of the Salafi discourse that have been present, pervasive in in the Egyptian religious fear for so long that they are still very much there. And the actors, the Salafis themselves, are the movements that have lost enormously from the post-coup era, despite the fact that the political by the way, they backed the coup, but Sisi was not kind to them.
In the end, they are not in jail, which, you know, these days in Egypt is quite a good thing. I mean, very few Islamic actors can say that they are not in jail at this point, but their ability to protect, you know, the interest of the preaching movement at this point are very weak. They've maintained some of their mosques, but they have no opportunity for extension. They have no satellite channels. I mean, all of these tools that they had back in the days are gone at this point.
We'll see how this of what this produces in the long term. This point, what I can see again is that Salafist discourse is still strongly rooted in the Egyptian religious sphere. But again, its main actors and figures at this point have been considerably weakened. Of course, their supporters themselves also have turned away from them quite a bit. Right. I think the many of the Salafi supporters couldn't really understand what the Salafis leaders were doing.
I think, you know, many of these genuinely, you know, committed Salafis who believe that this was a project that was going to save the mind. And so their sheikhs, you know, taking one side and then the other and then shifting. And of course, the sheikh said the logic for it, they knew they thought they knew what they were doing. But again, that was not something that their followers understood very well. I'll finish here and thank you. Thank you very much, Stephane.
By the way, I'm going to sit here and I think we can do the Q&A from here. We just try and speak up. No, not at all. It's it was absolutely fascinating. And I can't wait to read that book. Thanks. So if you look away, I'm going to hack into your computer and back to the file. I mean, you're doing at least three big things in this project. Your one thing is you're chronicling a very important period in Egyptian history and a sort of time around the 2011 revolution.
Secondly, you are identifying and writing the history of the previously almost uncovered strand of Egyptian. Social and religious history, namely the Salafi movement. And in doing so you are setting off a series of historiographical earthquakes and we can debate how high they are on the Richter scale, but some of them are pretty, pretty significant. We can go we'll go into that, I think, in the in the Q&A.
But I want to just kick off the discussion by using my privilege in asking you about the kind of the transition from Saudi to Egypt in your in your kind of intellectual and personal intellectual journey. So my question is, what were the what was the most or the most surprising things that you discovered about Salafism as you entered a new country?
And relatedly, this then this goes more to sort of the the method, the process of research like, well, in what ways where was doing research in Egypt different from doing research in Saudi Arabia? Thank you. Thank you so much for your kind words and for the questions. Well, the research was very different in a way. Yes. In Saudi, there was too little. In Egypt, it was too much in Saudi.
It was very difficult to get people to speak. And when you managed to get a source, you were so happy with it, you know, and it would pose, you know, methodological problems because you would always have to find a second source. And that was difficult when you only wanted to write when the oral history has roots, you know, just for some guy. You need to have enough. And in Saudi Arabia, the difficulty was getting, you know, rights. And and that took me quite a bit of effort. Egypt is a country.
Everyone talks all the time. And and all these guys produce books. I mean, there is even the genre, you know, the you know, the memoirs of an Islamist is a story. So people talk and tell a similar story in ten different ways. So with Egypt, the difficulty is the huge amount of material, right? Which is what that project would be ten years, I mean, 11.
And because there's so much because, you know, all of this, the thing is, you know, you sort of you need to collect hundreds and hundreds of books. You know, there's so many people you can interview. I was lucky to be doing the interviews. Basically most of my interviews from 2010 to 2013, which was the best not to speak to anyone. It was, of course, people were busy with the revolution and you have to forgive them for that.
But when they could get a moment of the revolution, they would they would say they would tell you what you wanted because they think there was no state security watching over your shoulder anymore. So people felt a sense of security that they had never felt. So people talked through very openly what they thought. And and so, so. So yeah, it was a it was a it was it was an interesting experience. I mean, and very different from the one I had in Saudi.
Of course, the difficulty was that after 2013, then the field became closed because as soon as the military regime came, it became increasingly difficult to deal with. I mean, many of the guys in the book are in prison or in exile. At this point. Only the core group of Salafis remain in Egypt, but they're convinced that they're going to be next.
I mean, you know, the even the downside, if you guys did everything right, they backed Sisi for every presidential election to come up with signs for Sisi. But they know that when the regime needs a scapegoat, they're next in line. You know, the regime is going to need to get good at this point because the Muslim Brotherhood scapegoat is losing steam at this point. You know, one kind of the big Muslim Brotherhood conspiracies doesn't look so big anymore.
So you need to find a new conspiracy because these sorts of regimes only live off conspiracies or imagined conspiracies. So the Salafis know that they're in a position where they are very scared at this point. So you can still see the ones who are abroad. But again, they might be disconnected from the fields, which is why I'm also focusing very much on the pre 2013 moment. Also because the post 2013 moment is the moment when politics are done. I mean, there's really not much to study.
I mean, when there is I'm not saying this, but what I'm saying is, you know, the kind of you know, I mean, it's a different thing today. You have to study the regime because the regime is what happens. There's no institutional political arena we're studying. Maybe the parliament would be interesting just to understand, you know, the type how the security services are playing games by, you know, using coalitions against each other. But there's no political parties anymore in Egypt. There's no.
So it's a very different Egypt today. Back to your first question. Well, I started studying Egypt at the beginning because I was interested in trying to understand. Saudi religious influence abroad. And I ended up concluding that it was really not as big as what people thought. Right. I mean, I was there and I'm not denying that, you know, Saudi money did have. But but there are plenty of in genius Egyptian dynamics that explain why.
And then the regime is I mean, if someone is to blame, the blame needs to be given them or blame anyone. My job, I'm academic. You know, if someone is if someone is in a sense, responsible, right for the right, it's a lot for them. It's as much the Egyptian regime as it is the Saudis, because the Egyptian regime has played many, many games with the Salafis. So, again, you know, it was all part of the configuration in which the Salafis and the Salafis were really smart.
By the way, I mean, you might think whatever you want if that rubber of action, but it was coherent until 2011 and it always spurred them from harm, allowed them to continue their project. Project they were convinced would save the country because Salafis are convinced of what they do there. Do not in a sense, I, you know, take their claims for granted in that sense. I think they think they are believers in what they do, even when they do things that we know that we don't understand.
So. So I ended up discovering that Saudi Arabia's influence was not the big question. They was a side question in the end. Let's say that what was at the beginning of the core question only became a side question about the Donald said if he has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia, for instance. Which is it? Because they have nothing to do? The Saudis don't like that. I interviewed the guy who represented them in Saudi Arabia for ten years in the 2000.
And the guy told me, no one speaks to me like I did. We don't we're not taken seriously. There's one side does one guy from the Council of Film School, Mohammed, this made him condemn who has a lot of connections in Saudi Arabia as a person. He's taken seriously by Saudi Salafi scholars. But that was sort of his organisation was not the traditional Saudi scholars.
Nuance understood, not from the from the old days and their connection to Egypt was and so to some that the regime didn't really like the downside of fear because it was an organised group. You know, it was Jamal. The very idea of Salafis becoming a Jamal was not great news for the Saudi regime. They don't want this type of inspiration to get into Salafism and the Saudis tend to do the same thing.
So in that sense, you know what happened after 2011, for instance, you hear plenty of Egyptians telling you it was common at the time. Salafis are 25% because of Saudi money. Not true. I don't I don't think there's much Saudi money. They think they have a big constituency in the country. Lots of rich people giving them money, lots of businesses. Yes, maybe some Saudi money. But I don't think Saudi money was was, was this is it.
And when they back the coup in 2013, again, lots of people would tell you they did so because the Saudis told them to do so. The Saudis wanted Morsi out. I think they did it because of the reasons which I explained. They were like Morsi for their own reasons. They didn't need the Saudis to tell them not to like. Right. Of course. Then to convert with the Saudis. Yes. And do this.
But but again, convergence doesn't mean that these actors are necessarily you know, there's not a Politburo of Salafism in Riyadh with a guy, you know, calling Salafis across the world to tell them, do this and do that. So so, yeah, I think Egypt is a good case, is why there is not this Wahhabi conspiracy run from Riyadh. Right.