In A Quiet Revolution, a cultural and political study of the evolution of religious radicalisation in Egypt, Prof Leila Ahmed mentions that in the 1980s when terror attacks by extremist groups witnessed a surge, the Egyptian government realised that the people associated with various extreme outfits were actually educated middle-class urbanites.

A report by the Chancellor to the Minister of Education suggested that schools in Egypt had been infiltrated by ‘extremist groups’ and had become indoctrination hubs.

Ironically, and as author John Esposito reminded his readers in his book Religion in the Public Sphere, the so-called “Islamisation of the curriculum” was first introduced by the Egyptian state and government.

Why has it become so tough for the government to implement various clauses of the National Action Plan?

Egypt’s defeat against Israel in 1967 had triggered the gradual erosion of the ‘modernist’ and reformist Arab nationalist regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser. In her book, Prof Ahmed explores how the defeat took the sheen off Arab Nationalism championed by Nasser, and how a wave of disillusionment swept across Egypt.

To make sure that the ruling party remained in power, Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat slowly began to dismantle Nasser’s policies. He even allowed the return of the once-shunned Muslim Brotherhood into the mainstream.

As Sadat distanced Egypt from its main ally and donor, the Soviet Union, he began to liberalise the economy and put Egypt in the orbit of influence of its erstwhile adversary, oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

According to Prof Ahmed, Sadat encouraged the re-entry of the Muslim Brotherhood (especially on campuses), mainly to neutralise the protests he had begun to face from groups on the left and by ‘Nasserists.’

Almost the same happened in Pakistan. A stalemate during the 1965 Pak-India War put the economy under tremendous strain, triggering protests against the Ayub Khan regime’s policies of economic, political and social modernisation.

In East Pakistan, the 1971 debacle completely eroded the modernist narrative, setting in widespread disillusionment. And even though a populist, left-leaning government headed by Z.A. Bhutto came to power, in the mid-1970s Bhutto decided to follow the Sadat formula. As Omar Noman in his 2013 book, Pakistan: A Political & Economic History Since 1947 wrote, during a 1974 cabinet meeting Bhutto said, “Most of our troubles are due to leftists.”

French academic and author Laurent Gayer in Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City mentions that it is likely that the meteoric rise of right-wing religious groups on Pakistan’s campuses in the 1970s was aided by the Bhutto regime which, like Sadat, had also begun to court Saudi Arabia (for aid).

In 1977 Bhutto was toppled, not by the dreaded leftists, but by a reactionary general backed by right-wing parties. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated by a breakaway faction of the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to Esposito, as extremist terror attacks in Egypt intensified in the 1980s, the government, in a two-pronged response, launched a crackdown against extreme groups but at the same time increased the number of religious programming on TV and radio. Eventually it installed a conservative minister to head the country’s education ministry.

The idea was to co-opt the post-Nasser ‘religious wave’ which had begun to sweep across the country’s middle and lower-middle classes.

The minister, Ahmad Fathi Sorour, greatly augmented religious symbolism and rhetoric in the curriculum. In 1991 the state realised that it was actually aiding extremism through a misplaced policy of co-option.

Sorour was removed in 1991 and replaced by a former Nasserist, Baha Eddin, who asserted that a new education policy should be linked to Egypt’s national security apparatus.

An inquiry report by him and a magazine Roz Al-Yousaf suggested that 90 schools and 300 teachers had links to extremist groups. The two reports also claimed that (ever since the late 1970s) the Muslim Brotherhood had been “buying up schools and teachers’ training institutes.”

In her study, Prof Ahmed writes that by the 1990s, a number of middle-class professionals had emerged in the country who as youngsters had links with various evangelical and religious political groups that had returned to the mainstream during the Sadat regime.

Prof Ahmed mentions that when the government tried to purge schools of ‘extremists’ and implement a new education policy, its attempts were thwarted by lawyers and judges who had once been members of evangelical movements proliferating from the mid-1970s onwards.

Recently, the controversial crushing of opponents by Egypt’s new military-backed president, Abdel Al-Sisi, and his radical constitutional and policy reforms are often described by pro-Sisi segments as “the only ways left to expunge reactionary elements in the society and, more importantly, within state and government institutions.”

The situation in Pakistan was similar, even though the so-called radicalisation of society here was largely initiated during a conservative dictatorship (Gen Zia). But even this dictatorship attempted to co-opt the surge in religiosity to maintain a certain status-quo in society.

However, unlike what had happened in Egypt in the 1990s when the state became conscious of the possibility of evangelical groups indirectly encouraging recruitment to more belligerent outfits, the state and government(s) in Pakistan did not come to any such realisation until 2014.

In Pakistan, problems in this context have greatly compounded. At least two new generations of young professionals have grown up being informed in matters of faith and politics by a state trying to co-opt the so-called Islamist narrative; and by independent evangelical groups who have been operating freely in state and government institutions, places of worship, educational institutions and in drawing rooms.

This is why it has become so tough for the government to implement various clauses of the National Action Plan (NAP). These implementations are overtly opposed by religious parties and elements within non-religious parties (including the current ruling party).

Also, individuals and groups opposed to NAP have also appealed to the sensibilities of lawyers and the judiciary whose worldviews were influenced by faith and politics of the 1980s.

Suggesting that there’s a consensus regarding NAP in the country is not entirely correct. How can there be, when there is none within institutions and organs that are to implement it?

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 7th, 2017