“I am atheist … The causes that led me there are numerous: scientists, philosophical, or personal, but I assure you that atheism gives me a spiritual peace as total as that of faith in the Spirit of believers. “It was not written by a Westerner, but in an article published in 1937 by an Egyptian mathematician, Ismaïl Adham (1911-1940), under the title” Why I am atheist? “. >
Ismaïl Adham, who then brought together his articles in a book, was neither arrested nor brought to justice; He has not undergone threats or assaults and continued to live normally, to give conferences, to frequent cafes and clubs and to chat with people.
Believing writers responded to his book in several works entitled: Why am I believing? Or why am I Muslim? The Egyptian reader could thus buy in the same bookstore the book of Ismaïl Adham advocating atheism and another defending the faith to make his personal opinion.
This case was not unique: Chebli Chemayel, a Lebanese thinker and doctor living in Cairo, debated, in the pages of the Al-Manar review, with Mohamed Rachid Rachid, a thinker of Islam. Thousands of Egyptians followed this respectful and high level dialogue between the atheist and the Muslim. It is impossible to cite all the examples of the tolerance of Egyptian society of that time. Just watch any Egyptian film from the 1930s to 1960s to see an Egypt different from that of today. There was neither hidjab ni niqab, and all women were revealed, including students from the religious university of Al-Azhar.
What happened to the Egyptians? Weren’t they Muslims when they allowed atheists to express their ideas? Why is Egypt (and the Arab world) now deprived of this atmosphere of tolerance and why have extremist and terrorists spread?
The soldiers of Islam
The answer is Wahhabism. After the 1973 war, the rise in oil prices gave the Gulf countries an unprecedented economic weight. Their ruling families, closely linked to the Wahhabism sheikhs, have spent billions of dollars to disseminate Wahhabite thought around the world.
Wahhabism advocates the most closed and most belligerent reading of Islam. The Wahhabis are enemies of freedoms, arts, women’s rights. They do not admit democracy but they fight to establish the reign of God. Wahhabism is the ideological basis of political Islam. We must understand the difference between a Muslim and an Islamist: the personal values of the Muslim, like the Christian, the Jew or the Buddhist are based on religion, but, for them, religion is not a political belief. The Wahhabi Islamist believes that religion is a model for the State and that it imposes jihad (the “holy war”) to restore an Islamic caliphate disappeared in 1924.
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