Berkley Center

In Egypt, Islam is practiced very publicly. Egyptian men take pride in their zabeeb—a dark mark on the forehead that results from many years of touching one’s head to the ground during regular prayer. Five times a day the call to prayer echoes through Cairo, and although activity on the street continues, the change in environment is striking. For a few brief minutes, the muezzin’s voice drowns out the sounds of the city as men pull out prayer rugs and bow down in prostration.

In what seemed like too perfect a metaphor for the transformation that occurs during prayer, I would often see the Egyptian police officers that (until the January revolt) occupied every street corner lay down their rifles and pray. This isn’t to say that everyone drops whatever they’re doing at prayer times—many Cairenes simply carry on with their usual business. But for those Muslims who do interrupt their daily activities, there is an almost casual nature about prayer.

No one is surprised by these devoted practitioners openly showing their faith, and Egyptian Muslims embrace the public aspects of their religion with an attitude that seems to say this is nothing special—this is just what we do. The result is a setting in which the practice of Islam is highly integrated into the public sphere.

In Qatar, the public nature of religion is more difficult to distill. Here religious practices, if not religious values, are largely removed from the public eye. The Qatari men wear starched white thawbs and the women wear the black, unrevealing abayas—yet these garments are hallmarks of a conservative culture, and not necessarily of a religious people.

Although Western perceptions tend to automatically equate a hijab with Islam, here the decision to cover up is largely cultural, a fact which many hijab wearing non-Qatari women have rushed to point out to me. At the malls, one of the few places where large numbers of people congregate in a country where summer temperatures reach into the hundreds, the call to prayer is played over the loudspeakers.

Yet in the public eye, nothing changes: seemingly no one stops to pray publicly, and you will see no prayer rugs, no zabeebs, no police laying down their Kalashnikovs. Rather than stopping wherever they may be during the call to prayer, most Qatari Muslims withdraw to prayer rooms to perform their prostrations. As a result, the practice of Islam appears very different in Qatar than it did in Egypt. While expressions such as alhamdulillah (praise be to God) and religious traditions abound, these reminders of Islam manifest themselves primarily through Qatari culture, not through the public practice of religion.

Consequently the lines between what is cultural and what is religious blur together to an extent not found in Egypt. The nature of religion in Qatar is further obscured by the country’s complex demographics. Although nearly 80 percent of Qatari citizens are Muslims, the population of non-citizen residents (mostly guest workers from Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan) outnumbers Qataris. As a result, in Qatar you’re as likely to see Hindus and Buddhists around you as you are to see Muslims.

All of these factors contribute to the odd reality that Qatar is a Muslim country where you have to watch carefully to see how Islam is practiced. The differences between the public practice of Islam in Cairo and in Doha reinforce the reality that Islam is no monolith, and strengthen the idea that in the Middle East, the relationship between culture and religion is rarely straightforward.