Religion still leads the way in post-Morsi Egypt

When protesters successfully called for the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi last year, part of their rhetoric played on fears that Egypt's first democratically elected president and his Muslim Brotherhood were seeking to turn the country into a theocracy. Yet 14 months on, religion and politics are as interwoven as ever – and Morsi's successors in government are leading the way.

The work of Neamat Saty, a civil servant at Egypt's youth ministry, shows how. She is setting up a taskforce to combat atheism among the young. Under her plans, hundreds of lecturers, religious leaders and psychologists will go to the 27 provinces next year to discourage the young from turning to what she says are the two faces of extremism: jihadism and atheism.

"Atheists say there is no resurrection, no heaven or hell – so they think they're free to do whatever they want," said Saty. "If you don't believe in life after death, you won't have limits in your life – and that causes problems in society."

Saty's views are not unusual. Though Egypt's post-Morsi constitution outlaws faith-based parties, and a Morsi-era clause about religious legislation was cut, religion has otherwise been a frequent touchstone for the various wings of President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi's administration.

Weeks before Saty's scheme was announced, the police chief in Egypt's second city, Alexandria, promised to arrest a group of atheists who had publicised their beliefs on social media. In the past month, Dar el-Ifta, the wing of the justice ministry that issues religious edicts, may have condemned the extremism of Isis – but it has also condemned both belly-dancing and online communication between men and women. Elsewhere, convictions on blasphemy charges have continued, and the oppression of Egypt's gay community has intensified.

More widely, religion is being used to promote subordination to the state. Preachers have been dispatched to justify the government's actions, and thousands of others – deemed by the government to be too supportive of the Brotherhood or other Islamist groups – have been barred from work in state mosques. The head of Al-Azhar University, the seat of global Sunni learning, has helped to buttress the state narrative, ignoring state-led rights abuses, as has Pope Theodoros II, the spiritual leader of Egypt's Copts, who account for about 5% of the country's 80 million people.

Decisions over the content of Friday sermons have been centralised, while Sisi has often used religious rhetoric to rally both soldiers and the public. "We are God-fearing people," he said in a televised speech just weeks after deposing Morsi. "If anyone thinks they can defeat those who fear God, they are delusional."

All this has had the intended effect of strengthening the state's authority in the eyes of a pious population – and, perhaps, of outdoing the piety of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"These moves illustrate profoundly why the term 'secularism' just doesn't belong in an Egyptian context," said Nathan Brown, a professor at George Washington University in the US who has written widely on religion and the Egyptian state. "Nobody is talking about separating religion from politics or compartmentalising it from public life. That's just not an issue. What is an issue is: who speaks for religion?"

For Brown, the main difference between the attitudes of the current government and those of Morsi's administration is in their approach to the state-linked religious institutions. The new regime wants to shore up the control of incumbent figures at Azhar, which wields considerable influence over Sunnis in Egypt, and at the ministry of religious affairs. In contrast, Morsi ultimately wanted to replace these figures with scions of Brotherhood thought.

"The Brotherhood came from outside the state," said Brown. "When it wanted to understand what Islam is, it wouldn't go to the top of the state apparatus. It would go to second-tier people [or] people outside the country. That's different to what we see right now – which is a state that takes upon its shoulders the task of guiding Egyptians on a religious path, with the help of [incumbent] religious scholars."

Others report a reduction in religious incitement since Morsi's overthrow. Under Morsi, Islamists had a free rein in parliament and in the media to make reactionary statements. This led to an environment that was permissive of incitement against religious minorities – culminating in a siege of Cairo's Coptic cathedral by police and vigilantes, and the lynching of four Shias, who form a tiny minority in Egypt.

But while Morsi's successors have not shied away from either inciting against the Brotherhood or using religion for their own ends, the climate has largely cooled, according to Ahmed Samer, the founder of The Secularists, a tiny group that campaigns for a civil state. Samer says he and his colleagues feared their fellow Egyptians as much as the state during the Morsi presidency, and expected to be attacked by civilians egged on by reactionary discourse prevalent in the media. Now he's not so worried. "Under the Brotherhood, the aggressive speech was very loud, and it pushed people in a certain direction," says Samer. "Because of that, people who refused this kind of speech were accused of being infidels. But now that rhetoric has a quieter tune."

A project such as Neamat Saty's – which aims to tackle both jihadist and atheist thought – exemplifies the state's approach: a silencing of extremist rhetoric that nevertheless goes hand in hand with the use of religion to solidify government control. "It's not interfering in people's lives," she said. "It's correcting wrong concepts. We are just putting the youth on the right path."

This approach scarcely marks the dawn of a wholly civil state. Governments of all stripes will pursue similar projects as long as religiosity remains so prominent across Egyptian society, said Saber. "The problem is not from the government – it's from society," he said. "The government is taking its lead from society. Society needs to be secularised first."

Additional reporting by Manu Abdo