Islamist Movement Challenges Universities

Sitting on a curb outside the college where she was recently expelled, Eman is defiant.

“I did it for the sake of God,” the 21-year-old Tunisian history student—who asked to be identified only by her first name—said of her insistence on wearing the niqab, the full-face veil. Such a display of piety is banned in the classrooms of the University of Manouba’s Faculty of Arts and Letters, and she has been forced to leave. “He will reward me in other ways.”

Eman is covered head to toe in flowing brown-and-beige polyester. She wears gloves and shields her light-brown eyes from view with a second, transparent veil. Depending on whom you talk to in Tunisia, her attire, and the militant strain of Islamism it is associated with, represents either the future of the Arab Spring—or the greatest threat to it.

To her supporters, Eman is staking a righteous claim for a greater role for religion on campus. To her opponents, she embodies a threat to the university’s liberal values and to academic freedom itself.

Fundamentalists like Eman, says Habib Kazdaghli, a dean at the university, believe that the primary purpose of the university is “not to deliver knowledge but to serve as a place for spreading religion.”

Two years after protesters first took to the streets in the Arab world, universities there are facing more upheaval. Even as two key countries, Egypt and Tunisia, held their first free elections in decades, the revolts have unlocked radical Islamists’ demands, brought to power Islamist governments, and triggered political fights that some say now threaten academe.

“The university has become an ideological battleground,” says Sami Brahem, a specialist in Arabic and Islamic civilization who leads a cultural center in the Tunisian town of La Marsa. Before the dictatorship was swept aside, it was impossible to have a free “intellectual, cultural debate over identity, Islam, secularism” in Tunisia, he says. In the heady and anxious postrevolutionary phase, that debate is finally taking place, but it has turned “poisonous” now. “Every political party and movement is trying to impose itself.”

Both Tunisia and Egypt face questions that could affect higher education across the Middle East and North Africa: Can their new Islamist governments spread conservative religious values and also create vibrant, modern universities? Will they respect or restrict academic freedom? And will the legacy of the Arab Spring be a revitalized academe or a stifled one?

Tunisian and Egyptian universities have arrived at similar crossroads by different paths. Tunisia is a small, Francophone country with a modern history of strong secularism; Egypt is the most populous Arab country and the birthplace of political Islam.

In Tunisia, Islam was kept outside the university for decades. Under the staunchly secular dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Eman wore a head scarf in high school and faced harassment from police on the street and from school administrators. She used to sneak into school every day through a side door, avoiding a principal who would send home any girl wearing the scarf. But the political uprisings in both Tunisia and Egypt emboldened Islamic fundamentalists, known as Salafis, who derive their name from the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, or Salaf, whose lifestyle they aspire to imitate. They call for the application of a literal, repressive interpretation of Islamic law.

For Eman, this meant donning the niqab in December 2011, almost a year after Mr. Ben Ali stepped down. She then enrolled at the University of Manouba.

“At the beginning of the year, I thought I would study normally, like any other student, but I encountered enormous opposition,” she says. “We thought after the revolution we would have a little bit more freedom.”

The university’s Faculty of Arts and Letters, which Eman briefly attended, is a collection of low-slung white buildings on the outskirts of Tunis, surrounded by open fields and orange groves. For the past year, a confrontation between a minority of Islamist students there and the largely secular faculty has simmered, winding its way from the bucolic campus to the Tunisian courts.

In October 2011, shortly after the Islamist party Ennahda, meaning “revival” in Arabic, won the biggest share of seats in Tunisia’s new assembly, some students at the university demanded a prayer room and the right to wear the niqab. The administration allows students to wear the veil on campus but not in class, arguing that for professors, seeing students’ faces is a “pedagogical necessity.” It also denied a request to establish a prayer room, offering instead to set up bus service to a nearby mosque.

The confrontation dragged on. A sit-in by Islamist students led the administration to shut the faculty for several months. After two women in niqabs were expelled, they forced their way into the office of Mr. Kazdaghli, dean of the faculty, to demand an explanation. They said he slapped one of them, an accusation he vehemently denied but for which he is standing trial, risking a five-year jail sentence.

Slideshow

Pressure for Piety on Campuses in Tunisia and Egypt

Academic and human-rights groups rallied to Mr. Kazdaghli’s cause, saying he is being targeted with trumped-up charges. Outside the courthouse where the dean’s trial took place, Tunisian activists and academics held up signs with messages like “No future for Tunisia without valuing its universities.” They looked suspiciously at the plaintiffs’ supporters, men with untrimmed beards and women in niqabs who held up signs of their own: “Where is the right to education? Where is the Tunisian revolution?”

The Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education, headed by a member of the ruling Ennahda party, refused to take a position on the Kazdaghli case. It said individual universities should set their own policies but also urged them to negotiate with students. Mr. Kazdaghli criticizes Ennahda’s position as “ambiguous.”

“They don’t want to confront the Salafis,” he says. “They want to be understanding, accommodating, [and] sacrificing academic and democratic rules.”

In the last two years, Salafis have sometimes taken violent action against institutions and individuals they accused of insulting Islam, including professors. For Tunisia’s largely secular faculty, the demands of Salafis are an opening gambit in a systematic assault on the liberal values of their profession.

“If it wasn’t the symptom of a bigger project, I wouldn’t really have a problem with the niqab in class,” says Nabil Charni, a professor of literature and media at Manouba. “But there’s a tendency to push things further, because it’s not a matter of rights but a matter of changing society, starting with state institutions. Behind the niqab there are other demands. One way or another it’s an Islamization of the university. We can see it coming.”

Ultimately, the debate comes down to what role, if any, religion has in higher education.

“In the mosque, praying is the priority. Here, teaching is the priority,” Mr. Kazdaghli says. “We want autonomous spheres.”

But “religion is part of the human being,” counters Eman. “It’s connected to all aspects of life.”

In Egypt, where the niqab is already allowed at many universities, views such as Eman’s are not uncommon.

Islamist groups and preachers, many of whom espouse a conservative interpretation of Islam that limits free speech and the rights of minorities and women, have been active for decades. Unlike in Tunisia, Islam permeates Egyptian public life and institutions, and academics tread carefully in matters pertaining to religion.

But now some Egyptian scholars also worry that the rise of Islamist parties and groups is leading to greater intimidation and censorship.

The country’s new, Islamist-drafted Constitution requires that laws be scrutinized by religious scholars, criminalizes blasphemy, and enjoins the state and society to protect ill-defined “traditions and values.”

In January a history professor at Minia University was accused by Islamist students of writing about one of Muhammad’s wives in a disrespectful manner. He no longer teaches the class, and the book students objected to is under review by the university.

Perhaps most significantly, Egypt’s al-Azhar University, one of the most venerable institutions of Islamic learning in the world, is now embroiled in such debates. The university has long sought to integrate Islamic teachings with the ambitions of a modern scientific university. After the ouster of the dictator Hosni Mubarak, many on the campus had hopes of reversing decades of educational decline and making the university once again a beacon of knowledge.

Islamists in Egypt have granted al-Azhar a prominent role in the new Constitution, giving its religious scholars the authority to vet laws. But the Islamists have also been caught on tape discussing how to sideline al-Azhar’s leadership, raising concerns that they plan on taking over and radicalizing the institution. Now it has become a bellwether in the region’s struggle between Islamist fundamentalists and moderate scholars.

A landmark in Cairo, al-Azhar University was founded over a thousand years ago. For centuries it was a destination for scholars from across North Africa and the Middle East. The value of education was bolstered by religious principles, such as the Prophet Muhammad’s statement that “to acquire knowledge is binding upon all Muslims, whether male or female,” or the saying that “the ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.”

Starting in the late 19th century, Arab countries established secular education systems, in part because they believed that traditional religious education couldn’t meet the needs of the modern state. In the 1960s, the Egyptian government brought the Islamic university under its control and added secular subjects and degrees to its offerings.

The historic campus is nestled in a medieval neighborhood that is dotted with minarets and winding, bustling alleys. Here turbaned students study to become religious scholars, preachers, and jurists. But al-Azhar also includes new campuses across the country, which are home to nearly half a million students. In separate men’s and women’s colleges, students pursue degrees in dentistry, medicine, engineering, and agriculture.

According to Gamal Serour, who teaches gynecology and obstetrics at the university, the scientific and religious colleges there “make a perfect combination.” Dr. Serour, a renowned clinician who in 1987 delivered Egypt’s first test-tube baby, leads a research center that studies population growth, family planning, and assisted reproduction, topics that are often contentious in religious circles here. (See article on facing page.)

Other professors at al-Azhar say that the relationship between scientific and religious colleges is “not intimate,” and that being part of an Islamic university doesn’t detract from their work.

Showing off the university’s pristine new college of dentistry, Ahmed Gamal, a professor there, says: “There is no difference between studying dentistry at al-Azhar or elsewhere. In fact, our facilities are better.” All students at al-Azhar attend classes in religion, which are meant to inform their other studies. “They are trying to integrate religion with science,” says Dr. Gamal. “The objective is to graduate a dentist who knows his God, is honest, doesn’t cheat his patients.”

The university has ambitious goals to strengthen its scientific faculties while also reforming its religious ones to foster a moderate vision of Islam and be a bulwark against extremist tendencies.

“We are not happy with the quality of our graduates,” says Abdel Dayem Nosseir, a former vice president and a senior adviser to the grand imam of al-Azhar. That is particularly true of the university’s religious schools, whose students make up about 60 percent of al-Azhar’s population and a disproportionate number of its unemployed graduates.

The university wants to add new courses in information technology, sociology, or foreign languages to religious degrees. But such changes are extremely sensitive. When it started small foreign-language programs sponsored by the U.S. Embassy and the British Council, the educational and cultural arm of the British government, an Islamist member of Egypt’s Parliament attacked one such language center as a place where students were taught “depravity and dancing, to have relations with girls and drink alcohol, and bad morals that contradict Islamic Shariah.”

Indeed, to religious conservatives, education reform means strengthening, not diluting, the Islamic component of education. There are some, says Mr. Nosseir, who “want al-Azhar to go back to teaching religious subjects only. But they would also like everyone in Egypt to enroll in religious disciplines. This is nonsense.”

Mr. Nosseir is as wary as Tunisia’s Mr. Kazdaghli of Salafi pressure on universities. But the Tunisian dean’s call for religion and higher education to be “autonomous spheres” is rare in the region.

Traditionally, religion and education have been entwined in the Muslim world. For most of its history, mosques like al-Azhar (from which the university grew) were centers of learning. During the Middle Ages, Arab scholars gathered and translated texts from Greek and Persian and made major discoveries in mathematics and astronomy.

Today religion, a regular part of the curriculum in Arab countries, is sometimes taught in a way that limits debate and breeds intolerance. Textbooks in Saudi Arabia, for example, have been found to demonize non-Muslims. An Islamic university in Yemen has been accused of fomenting extremism. Across the region, evolution is often taught—if at all—as an incorrect theory.

In Egypt, religious teaching doesn’t encourage analytical thinking and is sometimes “to the detriment of pluralistic norms or other religious beliefs,” writes Muhammad Faour, a scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, in a recent report on religious education and pluralism in the Arab world.

Such findings raise a question that gets to the heart of the recent debates in Tunisia and Egypt: Is there a contradiction between Islam and academic freedom? It is an issue that other religions certainly have wrestled with, and it has no simple answers.

For Osama El-Abd, al-Azhar’s president, Islam and free inquiry are entirely compatible.

As Mr. El-Abd notes with pride, he is a typical product of the al-Azhar system. He started his education by memorizing the Koran by the age of 10. He has a degree in Shariah and law from the university and peppers a discussion with religious quotations.

“The Prophet Muhammad said: ‘Seek knowledge wherever it may be, even in China,’” he notes. “Scientific research is the basis of progress, and we absolutely can’t afford to lag behind.” Any topic may be discussed freely in class, he says, as long as it is done “politely” and “within a moral framework.”

The grand imam of al-Azhar, Ahmad El-Tayeb—who also heads the mosque and a network of schools and research centers—has a doctorate in Islamic philosophy from the Sorbonne. He has supported reforms at the university and issued documents aligning Islamic principles with human rights, women’s rights, and democracy.

But scholarly debates and research on the campus remain within the bounds of mainstream religious orthodoxy. Scholars at al-Azhar censor books on religious topics and speak out against novels, films, and scholarship they consider offensive or blasphemous.

And recently, an al-Azhar scholar caused an uproar when he issued a fatwa (a religious opinion) authorizing the assassination of several leaders of Egypt’s secular opposition.

It is precisely the combustible mix of religion and politics—so much a part of the postrevolution landscape in Egypt, Tunisia, and other Arab countries—that may threaten universities and their mission.

Al-Azhar university is exposed “to a political battle between different Islamist forces,” says Ibrahim El-Hudaiby, an expert on contemporary Islamist movements in Egypt. Islamists are more interested in the spiritual authority and political leverage they can get from the institution than in improving the quality of education there, he argues. “This is very dangerous for al-Azhar, which already has enough weaknesses. Those who care for al-Azhar should let it focus on its main mission, which is education and the transfer of knowledge.”

The leadership of the university insists that it is beholden to no one. “We direct,” says Mr. El-Abd, al-Azhar’s president. “We don’t take directions.”

In Tunisia, Mr. Brahem also believes that the education system can withstand the pressure of militant Islamism.

“Salafis want to monopolize, to revise the entire Tunisian higher-education system,” says the professor. “They believe our education system is Westernized, a system of unbelievers.” But there is a deep consensus in Tunisia on academic freedom, and “it is impossible to go back concerning freedom of expression, thought, contestation.”

Well-founded argument is the best weapon, he suggests. Salafi discourse is “reactionary, unbalanced, very superficial,” he says. “It can’t hold out against our educational system. Why be afraid? Why not face these people?”

Facing them may well be unavoidable. The countries touched by the Arab Spring have distinct histories, different Islamist movements, and varied balances of power. But in the years to come, all will be hotly debating the proper relationship of religious belief to learning, the right balance between faith and free inquiry.

Next month, a Tunisian court is expected to rule on Mr. Kazdaghli’s case.

For her part, Eman says she will enroll at another university, whose administration, she has heard, allows the niqab. And she plans to change her major, from history to law.