Is Sufism a good cover?

By Rasha Saad - Al-Ahram Weekly - Cairo,Egypt

Thursday, October 19, 2006

In the late 1980s, while she worked in a Gulf country well-known for Sunni-Shia unease, Naglaa Abdel-Aziz was proud of her good relations with friends from both Muslim sects: for the Sunnis, she was a Sunni just like them; for the Shias, she was a sincere devotee of Aal Al-Bait, as the Prophet Mohamed's descendants -- and the Shia's guiding lights -- are known: "I prayed in Shia mosques as often as I did in Sunni ones, something no Gulf Sunni would ever consider."

A few years before settling in the Gulf, Abdel-Aziz had been stunned when, hosted by an American family on a student exchange programme, she was asked whether she was Shia or Sunni: "I didn't have a clue, so I called my father the next day to ask him what we were. And he said we were just Muslims. I asked him what the difference was between the two sects. He said they were both Muslims."

Such tolerance is in fact typical of Egyptian Muslims, who tend to bypass the sectarian question in favour of a more open version of the creed, with the result that Egyptian Islam has often been defined as Sunni with strong Shia leanings -- a model hardly found in any other Arab country.

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In a spirit of tolerance and solidarity, conversion should be unnecessary: "As Muslims we gain nothing when someone converts from one sect to another. In fact there is more damage than gain, because it scars the people of the sect that person converted from, and contributes to enmity."

Converting to Shiism would change little if anything at all in a Sunni's day-to- day life, El-Ghomi explains: "What difference would it make in one's daily life to believe that Imam Ali should have been in the first Muslim caliph? Or to conjoin two prayers into one? Even mut'a marriage, [the Shia law permitting marriage for a predefined period of time], because it is not socially acceptable, becomes prohibited."

Sunnis convert, rather, to narrowly political ends: unlike its Sunni counterpart, for example, Shia inheritance law grants a brotherless woman as much as half the inheritance of her father. But with Sunni Sharia installed in the legal system, El-Ghomi argues, that would achieve nothing.

Yet for Nabil Abdel-Fattah, who edits the State of Religion in Egypt annual report for the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, Shia jurisprudence is dynamic, flexible and pragmatic -- which makes it attractive to many a Sunni frustrated with lack of change: "For many years Sunnis refrained from ijtihad [independent thought] and tended to adopt a hard-line approach similar to the Saudi Wahabi model."

For Sunnis this tendency, Abdel-Fattah elaborates, has led to a gap separating daily life from religious provisions, driving Sunnis to embrace Shiism. Other factors include the erosion of spirituality from Sunni life, with no provision for anything comparable to the Passion of Christ, to which Egyptians arguably relate.

Less obviously, the fact that millions of Egyptians have worked in the Gulf countries since the 1970s makes the population more open to different schools of thought. Exact numbers are not forthcoming. Even as analysts estimate that there are less than 5,000 Shias in Egypt, Shia leaders insist that, while their numbers are in the millions, many Egyptian Shias are using the principle of taqeya to conceal their identity for fear of oppression.

"Sufism made for a good cover," Saleh El-Wardani, spokesman for the community, explained, describing the moulid context as the opportunity for Shias to gather under cover of Sufism.

El-Wardani is in the process of establishing a Shia political party, Aman (Safety) which, though supported by other Shias like Assem Fahim, professor of science at Cairo University, stands in opposition to a group, led by Mohamed El-Dereini, president of the Higher Council for Affairs of Aal Al-Bait, which claims to be the true representation of the Shia in Egypt, and hopes to found its own party, Al-Ghadir.

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