Writing in 1999 for al-Usbūʿ newspaper, Hānī Zayyāt and Muṣṭafā Sulaymān expressed their disbelief that the United States’ International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 appeared to condone freedom of worship for Egyptian Bahāʾīs. They noted that the Bahāʾī Faith was ‘not a revealed religion, and nobody could set himself up to be its defender. This sentiment echoes throughout Egyptian society whenever attempts are made to recognise the Bahāʾī Faith in Egypt, whether formally or tacitly.

Throughout this essay, a sense of the dissonance between Western and Egyptian sentiments towards the Bahāʾī Faith should be apparent. This is as important for understanding the situation of contemporary Egyptian Bahāʾīs as an analysis of the various laws and constitutional articles regulating the conditions of their religious existence in Egypt. My thesis is that these laws and constitutional articles reflect deep-rooted negative sentiments towards the Bahāʾīs among the populace, and are enabled by the crystallisation of an argument that the Bahāʾī Faith is inherently inimical to public order, security, and good morals. I especially want to emphasise the role of public attitudes, in order to push back against the common conception that powerful actors in Egypt such as the state, the courts, and the religious authorities have been colluding in a top-down system of oppression against their religious minorities. It also avoids placing the responsibility on the shoulders of the most visible agents of Muslim activism: the Muslim Brotherhood and various Salafi movements. Rather, the tightening restrictions on Egyptian Bahāʾīs are best understood as a complex process in which the regulatory actions of the government, and decisions of the courts; are made in the context of the widespread social movement concerned with increased religiosity and conservative morality: the phenomenon known as the Islamic Revival.

Whilst their numbers are small – only a couple of thousand – Bahāʾīs comprise the largest unrecognised independent religious community in Egypt. Their case is therefore somewhat distinct from that of other minorities in the country such as Coptic Christians or Shiite Muslims.

This essay has five sections. The first section introduces the Bahāʾī Faith and the history of Bahāʾīs in Egypt, including the tropes of argument laid against them, and a literature review. The second examines what is meant by the Islamic Revival, and marshals together various resources which establish that its characteristic religiosity and piety translate into anti-Bahāʾī sentiment: anecdotal evidence, polls about related issues, attitudes in the media, legal opinions (fatwās), governmental actions and statements, and incidents of violence. The third section looks at court cases brought by Bahāʾīs against the government, and pulls out consistent themes and concerns from the rulings. The fourth is an examination of the 2014 Constitution, showing how the aforementioned popular sentiments were framed by the standardised legal arguments during its formulation.The fifth section advances the theory that recent developmentsof the Egyptian Bahāʾīs’ situation show that, although their struggle for religious recognition is intractably mired, the crystallisation of the arguments against their religion has paradoxically opened up space for the seizure of civil rights for the beleaguered community.