“I am an atheist… The causes that led me to it are numerous: scientific, philosophical, or personal, but I assure you that atheism gives me a spiritual peace as total as that of faith in the minds of believers. . » This was not written by a Westerner, but in an article published in 1937 by an Egyptian mathematician, Ismaïl Adham (1911-1940), under the title “Why am I an atheist? “.
Ismaïl Adham, who later compiled his articles into a book, was neither arrested nor brought to justice; he suffered no threats or assaults and continued to live normally, giving lectures, frequenting cafes and clubs and chatting with people.
Believing writers have responded to his book in several works titled: Why am I a believer? Where Why am I a Muslim?. The Egyptian reader could thus buy in the same bookshop the book of Ismaïl Adham advocating atheism and another defending the faith to form his personal opinion.
This case was not unique: Chebli Chemayel, a Lebanese thinker and doctor living in Cairo, discussed, in the pages of the journal Al-Manar, with Mohamed Rachid Reda, a thinker of Islam. Thousands of Egyptians followed this respectful and high-level dialogue between atheist and Muslim. It is impossible to cite all the examples of the tolerance of Egyptian society at that time. Just watch any Egyptian film from the 1930s to 1960s to see a different Egypt than today. There was then no hijab or niqab, and all women were unveiled, including the students of the religious university of Al-Azhar.
What happened to the Egyptians? Weren’t they Muslims at the time when they allowed atheists to express their ideas? Why is Egypt (and the Arab world) now deprived of this atmosphere of tolerance and why have extremist and terrorist ideas spread?
soldiers of islam
The answer is Wahhabism. After the 1973 war, the rise in the price of oil gave the Gulf countries unprecedented economic weight. Their ruling families, closely linked to the sheikhs of Wahhabism, have spent billions of dollars spreading Wahhabi thought throughout the world.
Wahhabism advocates the most closed and belligerent reading of Islam. The Wahhabis are enemies of freedoms, of the arts, of women’s rights. They do not accept democracy but they struggle to establish the reign of God. But Wahhabism is the ideological basis of political Islam. You have to understand the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist: the personal values of a Muslim, like a Christian, a Jew or a Buddhist, are based on religion, but for them religion is not a political belief. The Wahhabi Islamist believes that religion is a model for the state and that it imposes jihad (the “holy war”) on it to restore an Islamic caliphate that disappeared in 1924.
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