Shredding the veil, one post at a time

Circa 1959. Decades before the birth of Instagram and its many filters, five women are hanging out. Bonhomie, beach chairs, bikinis and bathing suits – it’s just another day at the Sidi Bishr beach in Alexandria, Egypt – the land of Mummies and the Muslim Brotherhood.

It’s understandable if you are experiencing cognitive dissonance. After all, it’s not every day that we come across evidence that contradicts our deeply held beliefs, especially about the Middle East. This is exactly what the Twitter handle @BeforeSharia has been doing: presenting evidence of the existence of secular societies in Muslim-majority countries. Its multimedia timeline, comprising print ads, videos and photos – often times grainy and sepia-tinted – has documented nude university protests, beach days in Iran, school girls in Afghanistan, cigarette ads from Pakistan, school children playing instruments in countries that have today banned musical education and the casual intermingling of men and women that is unimaginable in these nations today.

Afghanistan, 1968.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/KQKEwPCoJ3

— Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) December 1, 2018

Al-Azhar University, Egypt, 1962.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/bQ2fqHNL8u — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) August 26, 2018

Baghdad, 1982.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/YnQerFGRwF — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) November 15, 2018

Pakistani cigarettes ad, 1960s.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/9KTeJ93xG2 — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) September 24, 2018

A girl plays the accordion in Baghdad, 1960s.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/6sIMAyI1sc — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) September 11, 2018

Iran, 1970s.#BeforeShariaSpoiledEverything pic.twitter.com/NsGCWLfUkN — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) July 3, 2018

With each of their 387 posts (thus far) since March this year, the team has often made its more than 20K Twitter followers pause, stare, blink and wonder. A particularly telling post shows a video of Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, laughing off at the idea proposed by the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, to enforce Egyptian women to wear the hijab.

In a 1958 speech, Egyptian President Nasser describes to an audience the idea of the Muslim Brotherhood to force women to wear a hijab. Both he and the audience laugh at the thought of forcing millions of women to cover up.

Today, most Egyptian women wear the hijab. pic.twitter.com/83MBOzV6ig — Before Sharia Spoiled Everything (@BeforeSharia) May 24, 2018

“We seek to paint a different picture of the Middle East, which is too often associated with violence and religious extremism,” says the @BeforeSharia team in an interview over the social media platform. “Our pictures show people who seem much closer to ‘Western’ values than the values radical Islamists now try to portray as ‘true Islamic’ ones.”

Bridge over troubled waters

At a time when there is a pushback against Muslims, especially those fleeing strife-torn regions, and the aggressive stance taken by the leader of one of the world’s most powerful countries, what @BeforeSharia does is debunk the prejudiced notions of Muslims and Arabs as gun-totting and bomb-hurling terrorists. “Nowadays, a lot of people in the West are afraid of, and sometimes openly racist against people in the Middle East or other Islamic countries. Highlighting that they used to (and often still do) dance, drink, or even look like them, might help to reduce the ‘us versus them’ mentality.”

Being the bridge for the West has meant arousing the displeasure of the radical Islamists. The team admits to having received threats and is reluctant to share personal details, except to state that they are Europe-based academics. The inspiration to start @BeforeSharia came after some of them noticed similar pictures on the Internet and thought of creating a dedicated account to put the spotlight on the region’s not-too-distant secular history.

“Most of the pictures are either found in various corners of the Internet, or are sent to us by different people,” the team states. “Sometimes it is difficult to get the exact date or time of when the picture was shot.” And while they try to verify information through the Google reverse picture search, there have been times when they’ve erred in providing accurate dates or localisation. “We immediately received feedback (after posting 1-2 incorrect posts) from some followers and we deleted or corrected the picture.”

Swinging to the extreme

With the exception of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and a few others, popular culture has rarely captured the going-ons of the Middle East and the rapid and often extreme changes that we find in the region today. The @BeforeSharia team explains that the Arab world has witnessed a decline of secular nationalism and the rise of Islamic extremism since the late 1970s. “The nexus between the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabism in the 1970s and the expansion of this ideology all around the world through the Muslim World League and similar entities. With this came a culture of Islamic vigilantism in which Islamic extremists put pressure on all those they believe are guilty of heresy. Thus, people slowly refrained from behaving ‘heretically’: they stopped playing music, drinking alcohol, shaking hands with the opposite gender etc. and started wearing Islamic veils to publicly show their devotion, etc.”

@BeforeSharia’s effort therefore resonates with the collective memory of the older generation. “Many people have written to us saying they still remember these times or that they know from their parents that countries like Palestine, Iran or Egypt used to be more secular and less religious in the past,” states the team.

However, the transition from secular to extreme can be very rapid, as the developments in Turkey demonstrate. “The AKP (President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party) is pushing for a slow Islamisation: Under the AKP, the budget for Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs) has been fourfold, the proportion of imam hatip (Islamic or religious schools) high school students in the total number of high school students is rising, the theory of evolution has been dropped from the curriculum while the concept of jihad has been introduced, alcohol taxes are steadily increasing, no country has jailed more journalists and critical academics. Under Erdogan, Turkey has become the new center of the Muslim Brotherhood,” they point out.  

Interestingly, Turkey and Iran are the two countries from where the team has received the highest number of photographs. “We have received pictures from Turkish people who are not allowed to leave the country,” the team states. “At the same time, most of the criticism we have received has come for posting pictures from Turkey. Some people are very upset that we portray Turkey as a country that has ‘introduced Sharia law’, which is not the case.”

The team concedes that their Twitter name – Before Sharia Spoiled Everything – can be misleading “because we show pictures of many countries which have not introduced Sharia law”, such as Turkey. The team is reluctant to change the name to ‘Before Wahhabism’ or something similar because they do not wish to exclude other branches of political Islam, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Deobandism or Turkish Islamism. “We acknowledge that our name might alienate more moderate Muslims, but this is not our intention. Many people who live in Muslim-majority countries like Somalia, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, or Bangladesh have sent us pictures and support our work. Some have even suggested that we translate our work into their native languages.”