A Satanic Khamsiin Blows Through Egypt

by James J. Napoli

The young rocker—let’s call him Khaled—was in a panic.

His best friends, including people with whom he had played in a popular rock band, had been arrested in January. There were reports that after being beaten in jail some of those arrested were confessing to such crimes as promoting the cause of Satan in Egypt.

Khaled got a haircut, took down the metallic rock posters in his room and hid his black T-shirts and incriminating CDs. Still, his mother could not sleep. She heard footsteps on the stairs in their apartment building in the middle of the night, and expected police to barge through their front door at 4 a.m., as they had at other people’s homes.

Khaled planned to flee the country which, from Alexandria in the north to Aswan in the south, was abuzz with media-fed rumors of young people joining in orgiastic rites in cemeteries, displaying inverted crosses, and indulging in ritual sacrifices and drinking the blood of cats. And then in February, as suddenly as it had started, this particular frenzy seemed to pass.

The public had a new shock to consider: the murder of 12 Coptic Christians, presumably by Islamic terrorists, in the Upper Egyptian town of Abu Qurqas. The murders became one more justification for the decision by the People’s Assembly to approve a presidential decree extending for another three years the state of emergency, which has been in effect since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Khaled decided not to leave the country, and by late February only three or four of the 100 or so people arrested during the anti-Satanic delirium in Egypt were believed still in jail.

No evidence was ever presented to the public that would confirm the existence of a cult in Egypt that posed a social threat on the order of, say, the one posed by the Japanese cult that sent poison gas through the subway of Tokyo or the suicidal Sun Temple cult in Switzerland.

In fact, most of those arrested were young sons and daughters of the relatively well-to-do whose only crime seemed to be their penchant for foreign, heavy metal rock bands like Whitesnake, AC/DC and Megadeth. They danced, maybe a bit spastically, at concerts by raucous local rock bands, and some of them wore black T-shirts with imprinted skull and crossbones, painted their nails black, put on black lipstick or tattooed their arms. In short, nothing that, in a Western context, wouldn’t meet the approval of Christian-crooner-turned-heavy-metal-rocker Pat Boone.

As suddenly as it had started, this particular frenzy seemed to pass.

But somehow, in Egypt, the bizarre attire of the performers and fans and the sometimes anti-social lyrics of the genre were connected to the practice of Satanism, which was transmogrified into a threatening national phenomenon by the media, spurred by the muckraking magazine Rose el-Youssef. A wave of arrests during the month of Ramadan ensued, accompanied by a wave of grave punditry on the theme “whither Egypt?” by editors, intellectuals and Muslim and Christian clerics. The latter, in particular, made threatening noises about the consequences of apostasy for those who had turned to Satan.

The sudden clamor, which came and went like the khamsiin, the furious wind and dust storm that every year marks the transition to summer, had a familiar feel. Egypt is periodically swept by short-lived hysterias, whipped up by government and opposition media, about everything from aphrodisiacal chewing gum to AIDs. The perfidy of Israel is usually implicated, as it was in the fevered discussions over Satanism.

Cooler heads tended to look for motives behind the government’s sufferance, even encouragement, of the latest mass preoccupation. One prominent Egyptian economist suggested that the government was using Satanism as a sop to keep radical Islamists harmlessly diverted while showing that the regime could be just as tough on more secularist threats.

But the explanation that made most sense was that Egypt was going through a particularly tough passage in its continuous struggle to come to terms with influences from the West, what the late longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer might call the “ordeal of change.”

After the requisite expressions of shock, commentators pointed out that the young people arrested tended to come from wealthy parvenu families, some of which had spent years living in the West. Many commentators suggested that such first-hand exposure to Western secularism, plus the drive toward materialism unleashed by the government’s turn toward a more capitalistic economy, had uprooted Egyptians from their traditional beliefs.

“Unregulated Evolution”

Columnist Salama A. Salama observed in Al-Ahram Weekly, “This phenomenon [Satanism] is an integral part of opening up to other cultures and civilizations, of unregulated evolution toward new mores, conventions, innovations, traditions, thought and beliefs, some of which are positive and acceptable, whilst others are negative and must be resisted.”

But while Salama proposed that resistance to the negative aspects of foreign exposure take the form of “enlightenment and teaching,” others offered the cruder remedy of censorship.

Egypt’s cable television network and satellite dishes, which have proliferated across the roofs of more affluent areas of Cairo such as Zamalek and Heliopolis, are pulling in MTV and other international sources of rock music and films. Some Egyptians feel foreign television is responsible for infecting their youth with such bizarre notions as Satanism—as though cults had previously been unthinkable in a society where evil eyes, djinns and exorcisms are still lively aspects of the culture.

Dr. Said Thabet, a Cairo University obstetrician, was quoted in the press as saying that guidelines should have been established “to filter the flow of broadcasts of alien and destructive programs before they reached our children.”

He had conducted a study that concluded, among other things, that the programs on satellite dishes were “a stimulant of young girls’ sexual desire.”

Another source of exposure to the West, the Internet, which is now provided by about 15 private companies in Egypt, has also been cited as a candidate for censorship. The need to control the Net has been suggested by no less than Hisham El Sherif, chairman of the board of advisers for the Regional Information Technology and Software Engineering Center, and one of the people most responsible for developing the country’s Internet system.

Egypt has emerged from its obsession that Satanism was destroying society. But it’s likely that other threats will get their 15 minutes of notoriety in the future. It’s also likely there again will be calls for blocking out the West through censorship.

But it’s not really the devil, or even the West with which Egypt is wrestling. It’s wrestling with change.