According to Karoline Kamel, the politicization of religion in Egypt is destroying human rights. She concludes that a thoroughly secular strategy is the only hope for a better rights outcome there, and indeed, everywhere. Her description is accurate, but selective, and her conclusion is not warranted. Kamel is right that religion is currently part of the rights problem in Egypt, but in the long run religion needs to be—and can be—part of the solution.
It is true that there is currently no religion-based mass rights movement in Egypt, but neither is there any meaningful secular-based rights movement. Secular human rights professionals lack a mass base. Typically, they spend their time issuing feckless press releases about what the rights-abusing government of the moment “must” do. Young secular urban protesters could make noise in Tahrir Square but not sustain any coherent political action. Secular organized labor voted in large numbers for the “Nasserite” Presidential candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, who lost because he could not compromise with the moderate Islamist candidate, Abdel Fotouh. When secular organized labor goes on strike, it is normally for higher pay, not an inclusive progressive political agenda.
In contrast to these secular groups, progressives with one foot squarely in the religious camp seem responsible and more effective. In 2012, I met with faculty at Cairo’s venerable Islamic Al Azhar University, who were far more progressive than Kamel’s passing reference implies. One medical doctor there, Ahmed Ragab, a professor of reproductive health, gets funding from the UN Population Fund to collect data on female genital cutting in Egypt and elsewhere in Muslim Africa. Working with the relatively secular regime of the Mubarak period, he helped set up human rights-oriented women’s health clinics in rural Egyptian villages, and writes constructively about the Koran’s teachings on women’s issues. Even some of the Imams at Al Azhar make video tapes that NGOs use to convince Muslim African villagers that the Koran does not endorse female genital cutting.
