Journalist's Assassination Heats Up Debate Over Press Role in Egypt

By James J. Napoli

A week after a controversial Egyptian columnist and critic of religious fundamentalism was shot down by extremists in front of his office in Nasr City, a Cairo outskirt, the international edition of Time magazine published a cover story on Islam: "Should the World Be Afraid?"

Odd question, considering that Islam and its billion or so adherents are conspicuously a part of "the world." And, as Farag Fouda's death brought home, liberal Muslim journalists in Islamic countries probably have more to fear than anyone else from their radical co-religionists.

Prospects for a more open press in Egypt also suffered when Fouda, walking toward his car with his 15-year-old son on the evening of June 8, was gunned down by two men on a motorcycle.

Fouda's assassination not only meant the loss of his tart, tough and often funny columns in the weekly October magazine, but might have chilled other liberal, secular voices in Egypt. Writers have been sent a message: Don't fool with the fundies.

Some of the published commentary after the assassination has also suggested—perversely—that the real culprits in Fouda's death were Fouda himself, who couldn't learn to curb his tongue, and the Egyptian press, which was getting too damn free.

The 47-year-old Fouda was himself a professor of agricultural economy at Cairo's Ein Shams University, but became a national celebrity with his withering satires of Islamic extremists in his newspaper and magazine pieces and his appearances on state-owned television.

His last published article attributed a lot of fundamentalist fuming to sexual frustration, mocking a militant group that sought to ban eggplant and squash because their shapes supposedly were a sexual turn-on for women.

"The forces of darkness are obsessed with sex. I feel very sorry for them," he wrote. "Unemployment, the housing crisis, high marriage costs and sexual impulses give them no rest."

Himself a Muslim, Fouda argued that Islam was a religion of moderation and tolerance. He was active in the human rights movement and pressed for free speech, an end to terrorism and greater protection for Egypt's Christian minority Copts.

One of Fouda's books, a collection of articles called To Be or Not To Be, was withdrawn from circulation in 1990 after it had been condemned by the Islamic Research Foundation of Al-Azhar University, the seat of Islamic learning. He had raked two prominent sheikhs over the coals for their "bogus" scholarship.

Fouda's killers, one of whom was captured just after the attack, were described by Egyptian police as members of the outlawed Jihad (Holy War) organization. The group also was responsible for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and other attacks on officials and police since then.

The murder of a prominent columnist—in a country where columnists have historically had far more clout than any other journalists—could give other liberal intellectuals who take on religious extremism in Egypt reason to worry. The names of people who publish their secularist views allegedly are on fundamentalist hit lists.

Many commentators in the government and opposition press denounced the assassination and tried to put up a brave front. The editor of the opposition daily Al-Wafd, Gamal Badawi, commented gamely in an editorial that "this crime should be a call for all liberal-minded people to come together and support one another. . . In the end, words and opinions will have to be stronger than bullets."

Hasan Ragab, a columnist for the government daily Al-Akhbar, said in an interview that the biggest danger, however, was possible government over-reaction as it keeps upping the ante in its continuing crackdown on extremism.

Several hundred alleged extremists were rounded up in a poor Cairo suburb immediately after the assassination, and there have been many other arrests since then. Meanwhile, fatal attacks on police, Copts and even tourists by Islamic extremists have continued.

“This is not the way to deal with them," Ragab said. "They love to be martyrs and they want to move the government toward confrontation. And the more repressive the government becomes, the more unstable it becomes. If the government takes away civil liberties, the extremists have succeeded. "

The venerable and respected columnist Mustapha Amin said in an October interview in his 9th floor office in the old AlAkhbar newspaper building that the government was making a tactical mistake in tightening the screws on the religious extremists since the assassination.

The extremists, Amin said, "are strong when you hit them—weak when you argue with them." He said Fouda was right to be aggressive and confrontational in print against the extremists.

But not everyone agrees. The assassination was followed by suggestions—in the press itself—that the government also should have tightened up on such feisty, secularist writers as Fouda.

"Unfair Freedom"

"Unfair Freedom" read the headline in T.F. Rashed's column in the government English-language daily, the Egyptian Gazette. "The press also should shoulder the responsibility for this incident. It gave Fouda the fullest chance to spread his views at a crucial time when sectarian violence was rife," he wrote.

And in Al-Shaab, an opposition weekly, Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Ma'moun El-Hodeibi blamed the government-controlled mass media for employing people who "stab the Islamic religion in the heart, attacking the shariah [Islamic law] and slandering advocates of the Islamic mission in a manner which no moral or ethical values could ever permit."

The calls for more press controls are particularly troubling to many journalists, coming as they do in the context of such well-publicized censorship cases as the suppression of a book by the minor novelist Alaa Hamed. He went to jail in July.

It would be ironic if the consequences of the assassination of Farag Fouda, the advocate and example of tolerance and rational debate, should include more censorship, violence and repression.

Mustapha Amin hopes not. "To give the people more freedom—that's the only way to get rid of extremists, " he said. "I hope freedom will win."

James J. Napoli chairs the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at the American University in Cairo.