Islam egypt

Introduction
The new revolutions in the Arabic countries are generating, these days, many questions about their future. Democracy, dictatorship, religion, Islamism and fundamentalism are the main issues in the media and the opinion articles. We are going to speak about it focusing specially on the religion problem. Firstly, we are going to talk about Islamism in history. Afterwards we will seewhich has been the effect of this ideological past in Egypt in the last months. Finally we will present our predictions and some different possibilities of change in the Egyptian politics.

Islamism in history

Wahabbism (Abd el-Wahhab)
Abd el-Wahhab was born in the Arabic peninsula and lived from 1703 to 1787. He started to defend the strict monotheism, the total fidelity to the coranic textand the Islamic unity between countries without heterodoxies. Finally one tribe of the peninsula centre adopted his discourse, which was governed by Ibn al-Sa’ud. During the First World War this tribe got the control of what is known as Saudi Arabia nowadays, where the regime, as everybody knows, is one of the most fundamentalist of the Islamic countries. This form of Islamism needs to bementioned because, despite being very old, it has had a huge impact in regional and international politics, but in ideology as well.

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First islamist generation (Hasan al-Banna)

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Born in Egypt in 1906 Hasan al-Bana was the creator of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1926. It is a huge social, political, religious and educational organization with a big presence in the Egyptian society, whereusually have been suppliying the shortcomings in services and facilities of the state for a long time. Their program is:

1-Big importance of the society education.
2-The necessity of working in a social base level (schools, hospitals, etc) in addition to the politic level.
3-Compatibility of Islam with representative government and democracy. More than that, they think that Islam isessentially democratic.

Al-Banna belonged to the first generation of the decolonization islamists, who were very important in the fight for the freedom. The problem is that they were not going to be compensated for his efforts and another conflict would start between them and the secular Left.

Second islamist generation (Sayyd Qutb)

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Sayyd Qutb (1906-1966) was a member of MuslimBrotherhood at the beginning and had a paper very active in the decolonization process of Egypt. But when Egypt got his sovereignty the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser banned the Muslim Brotherhood and imprisoned many of his militants in the name of secularization because they were very infiltrated in the public institutions and seen as oppositors. Qutb was one of them and was tortured by the police.After that his mind changed and now is thought to be the creator of the modern Islamic radicalism, what finally would have inspirited Al Qaeda. The ideology of Qutb can be summarized with the next points:

1-Now the way to reach at the ideal islamic society is more politic than educative.
2-Everything related with Occident is suspicious and harmful, specially the individualism. For them theauthentic Islam is based in the community, so the occidental individualism, that he saw in the schools of US, is an anti-islamic factor.
3-The Islam needs to recover the original essence, lost during the colonial times. It doesn’t have to be limited to the privacy, but involve all the society.
4-The fight against the tyranny has to be total and all the ways are acceptable (terrorism, for example).5-The reformism is substituted by the islamic revolutionary way.

Third islamist generation (Rashid Gannushi)

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As we have seen in Egypt the political and religious repression was done by dictatorship whose program had the secularization of the state as one of the main points. So is not estrange that from the 80’ the Left is seen as the antidemocratic position and Islamism, despite...