Religion: Bowing to Allah

Blue laws have showered down along the banks of the Nile since Lieut. Colonel Gamal Nasser took over Egypt. Not only is prostitution outlawed, but a boy who whistles at or flirts with a girl in public is liable to three months in jail, and taxis leave their inside lights on when a young couple gets in. Hand-kissing is frowned on, and alcohol is banned from official functions.

The United Presbyterian American Mission in Egypt announced that its eleven schools would comply with another stricture of the Nasser new deal: all schools must teach Mohammedanism to Moslem students, Judaism to Jewish students, and Christianity to Christians. Since most of Egypt’s 284 foreign schools are run by Christian missions, and some 35,000 of their students are Moslems, this poses something of a pedagogical as well as a spiritual problem to the Christian schools. About two-thirds of them have reluctantly agreed to comply, though the Roman Catholics have not yet committed themselves, pending high-level discussions of the “conscientious” issue raised for Catholics by this apparent placing of their religion on the same level as others.

Protestants are less concerned by this objection. “We can teach their religion all right,” said one of them in Cairo last week. “But if they ask us to build a mosque, that will be different.”