Conservative Muslim 'morality squads' grow in Egypt

CAIRO, EGYPT -- The self-styled enforcers of religious law issued frequent reprimands to Rasha el Kholy for not wearing a head scarf.

Sometimes her co-workers spoke to her as "concerned friends," and one colleague at the Cairo clothing factory where she worked gave her a CD of a sermon that emphasized the virtues of wearing the veil.

When that failed, the de facto morality squad lectured her on how to stand during prayers, on the need to pray more than the required five times a day and how she should limit her contact with Christian co-workers, Kholy said.

"It bothered me a lot because we were not friends," said Kholy, 36. "You're not doing it for my concern; you're really doing it just because you want to give me these pearls of wisdom that make you in some way a better Muslim than I am."

Self-appointed enforcers of Islamic law are becoming more common in Egypt, a Sunni Muslim nation with a population well above 70 million. Unlike the state-sanctioned morality police of conservative theocracies such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, Egypt's enforcers are ordinary people who take it upon themselves to offer religious "advice," often to strangers.

Unveiled women are the primary targets, but the enforcers also chastise Muslim men for dating, not observing prayer times or allowing their wives or sisters to wear revealing clothes.

Television preachers, Saudi religious literature and religious instruction in mosques all are encouraging practicing Muslims to offer such advice to others, even if unsolicited.

"People I barely knew started walking up to me, saying, 'You have beautiful hair, and you're such a decent girl. Complete the perfect picture and get veiled,' " said Salma Nadim, 24, a telecommunications analyst in Cairo.

Reformation

Egyptian officials have expressed alarm at the conservative Islamist reformation that is spreading across the Middle East and posing a challenge to the secular, authoritarian government of President Hosni Mubarak, one of the United States' closest Arab allies.

While Egyptian security forces regularly round up dozens of Islamist activists from organized movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, they're all but powerless to stop the street preaching, now an everyday occurrence on the subway, at the airport, in the workplace and at sidewalk cafes.

Government-backed clerics fear that their relatively moderate brand of Islam is being replaced by a more militant version fueled by widespread political discontent at home and fury over what is seen as Western meddling in the Muslim world. To add insult to injury, sheiks who have devoted their lives to studying Islam's intricacies are finding themselves upstaged by religious vigilantes with no formal training.

"Preaching has its professionals who know religion and understand how to do their job," said Sheik Omar el Deeb, a senior cleric at Al Azhar, a venerable Cairo religious institute that is struggling to remain a touchstone for the Islamic world. "But for someone to appoint himself as a preacher, on public transportation or on the streets, and then order people to follow religion, could make people shun religion."

State-backed enforcers

Several other Muslim countries are locked in internal struggles over the role of morality squads in public life. The difference is that enforcers in the other countries have full state support.

This year, Shiite Muslim Iran launched one of the widest crackdowns in nearly two decades, allowing paramilitaries and police to harass or detain hundreds of women for wearing snug clothing or not wearing the proper head scarves. Men were accosted if they sported long hair, sleeveless shirts or tattoos.