Religion and Morals in Sisi’s New Republic

Over the past weeks, Egyptian authorities renewed their crackdown on TikTok content creators and social media influencers. The police have already carried out dozens of arrests, including that of a student in Sharqiyya accused of making ‘offensive’ comments online, and a woman accused of “dancing in attire offensive to public decency.”

The chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Communications and Information Technology, Ahmad Badawi, said the campaign—ongoing and expanding—aims to prepare lists of offenders for prosecution under the cybercrime law. Officials claim the campaign seeks to “protect family values” and shield society from moral corruption, with some MPs and pro-regime commentators stressing that Egyptian society must not be exposed to “immoral deviations.” Badawi added that the drive will also cover individuals posting or sharing images deemed offensive.

Most of the arrested are usually charged with “violating family values” under the vague Article 25 of the 2018 Cybercrime Law, used to penalize working-class women in particular. Rights activists have condemned the crackdown as a blend of “security repression, class discrimination, and moral panic” aimed at policing the appearance, speech, and digital success of marginalized Egyptians.

Besides the online crackdown, the Interior Ministry’s platforms are updated daily with news of operations by the Vice Police, mainly involving arrests of locals and foreigners for alleged “acts contrary to public morals”—a euphemism in that context for prostitution.

This is not a culture war sideshow. Since 2013, Sisi has fused religious language, security prerogatives, and conservative social policy into an architecture of rule. He centralized control over key Islamic and Christian institutions, weaponized moral discourse to legitimize repression and austerity, and cast dissent as theological deviance or “extremism.” The State’s message is blunt: the Second Republic, as Sisi likes to refer to his regime, guards faith, family, and order—and it will police every sphere, including the digital one.

Ministry of Awqaf

Historically, a regime workhorse for controlling mosques’ and Waqf’s (religious endowments) wealth, the Awqaf Ministry became a primary instrument of Sisi’s centralized religious governance. Under Muhammad Mukhtar Gomaa—appointed immediately after the coup—the ministry imposed a unified Friday sermon nationwide, often weeks in advance, to ensure themes that serve regime goals. It restricted prayers during religious seasons—reflecting the state’s blanket sensitivity to crowds—while publicly demanding that media and institutions unite behind Sisi.” Gomaa’s ministry also entered the security-ideology lane: mandatory seminars on “Fourth Generation Warfare” and “electronic terrorism” primed imams to mirror state narratives. By 2023, amid the push to hyper-militarize state bodies, new Awqaf hires and mosque imams were required to complete a six-month indoctrination boot camp at the Reserve Officers College in Ismailiya, where hundreds were screened out on “physical fitness” grounds.

The July 2024 cabinet reshuffle replaced Gomaa with Usama al-Azhari, Sisi’s longtime “religious advisor” and regime loyalist who publicly casts the president as “Egypt’s savior.” Al-Azhari lectured detainees at Scorpion Prison and joined the Interior Minister to inaugurate three new prisons in 2023. That same year, he toured Xinjiang and praised China’s “counterterrorism efforts,” aligning himself with security-first logics well beyond Egypt’s borders. The message to clerics is continuity, not reform: the ministry’s job is to moralize policy, bless coercion, and help manage society.

Al-Azhar

Appointed by Mubarak in 2010, Grand Imam Ahmad al-Tayyib’s efforts after the revolution to gain more institutional autonomy from the executive branch led to securing al-Azhar’s role in the December 2012 Constitution as the country’s highest religious authority, whose head is elected from its scholars and cannot be dismissed by the Presidency.

The institution’s prestige and partial autonomy have made it both a cooperative partner and a bargaining counter to Sisi’s centralization project. Public commentary often chalks up friction between Sisi and Tayyib to theology—e.g., over “renewing religious discourse”—but the real contest is institutional control: an autocrat consolidating all levers of the State versus a bureaucratic chief defending turf. Sisi has sought legal changes to bring al-Azhar fully to heel; Tayyib, backed by regional allies, has resisted while offering compromises.  

Al-Azhar also leveraged the post-coup crackdown on Islamist charities to expand its footprint. The 2014 creation of the Egyptian Zakat and Charity House handed Tayyib unprecedented financial and administrative control over a large charitable body that operates with minimal oversight. As the State squeezed independent civil society, it promoted “safe” service-delivery actors—among them the Zakat House—to blunt anger amid austerity. The result: al-Azhar deepened its social role and political leverage while reinforcing the regime’s managed retreat from welfare and narrowing space for inconvenient NGOs.

Despite periodic tensions, al-Azhar has functioned as a pillar of the Second Republic’s ideological machine. Tayyib endorsed Morsi’s ouster on 3 July 2013. In 2015, he launched a multi-language “Observatory for Combating Extremism” that tracks, reframes, and counters ideas the state labels extremist. He sits—alongside the Awqaf Minister and the Coptic Pope—on the Supreme Council for Combating Terrorism and Extremism. Al-Azhar regularly showers the military and police with praise and issues statements supporting the regime’s domestic and foreign policy.

The Coptic Church

Pre-2011, the state managed Church relations mainly via the ruling National Democratic Party intermediaries and, more decisively, through the State Security Police’s Sectarian Activity Group and its Church Activity Section—officers who were all Muslim and who monopolized Church-community files. Exclusion of Copts from the State Security Police reflected entrenched discrimination within      a worldview that treated Christians as a separate loyalty bloc, according to Hesham Sabry, a former agency officer. After 2013, Homeland Security reassumed primacy over the Church portfolio, with far deeper reach than before 2011—now with top-level Church coordination.

If Pope Shenouda III (1923-2012) allied mainly with Mubarak while occasionally pushing back, his successor, Pope Tawadros II, has been the most collaborative in modern Church history. He portrays Sisi as divinely sent and calls the Arab Spring a “big lie” that brought ruin. Under his leadership, the Church’s upper echelons have worked hand-in-glove with Homeland Security to stifle dissent among priests and youth activists, even as ordinary Christians continued to face systemic discrimination and periodic sectarian attacks, say rights campaigners Sherif Azer and Wael Eskandar. The state’s bargain with the Church mirrors its deal with al-Azhar: political loyalty and social pacification in exchange for institutional prerogatives.

Minorities and “Heresy”

Smaller sects—Shia, Baha’i, Quranists—remain constrained in worship and public expression; arrests and torture recur. Public atheism and heterodox ideas are policed with catch-all charges like “contempt of religion,” and prosecutions veer into inquisitorial territory. The point is not doctrinal debate; it is boundary-setting under state monopoly.

Gender, Class, and Moral Panic

Women were central to the 2011 uprising and to the June 30 mobilization against the MB, expecting a post-2013 order friendlier to their rights. The National Council for Women’s leadership now celebrates Sisi and frames women as the regime’s “third line of defense after the military and the police.” In practice, the Second Republic has unleashed a conservative backlash: women who defied social norms online or off were arrested en masse under elastic charges like “violating family values” and “inciting debauchery.” In parallel, the state ran the largest campaign against LGBTQ Egyptians in modern history. Rights groups tracked a marked spike in moral crackdowns during COVID-19’s lockdown period, when online life intensified.

Three logics underpin this governance of gender and sexuality. First, it is organic to security-sector ideology steeped in toxic masculinity and misogyny. Second, it is class politics: while some celebrities were targeted, most victims came from working and lower-middle classes; disciplining them burnishes the state’s image as guardian of middle-class morality. Third, it is a distraction: moral panics crowd out conversation about economic failure and austerity’s pain.

The Prosecutor as Cyber-Patrol

The prosecutorial arm has been refitted as a proactive online police force. On 28 February 2018, Public Prosecutor Nabil Sadeq announced monitoring of mainstream and social media to confront “lies by the forces of evil”—a break from the office’s traditional reactive posture. Sadeq was succeeded by Hamada al-Sawy on 12 September 2019; two months later, Sawy created three units: mainstream-media liaison, social-media public communication, and a “Monitoring and Analysis Unit.” This unit scoured the internet to build cases around the 20 September 2019 protests and then widened its dragnet to “protect family values,” becoming central to the “TikTok women” crackdown.

On 2 May 2020, the Public Prosecutor declared cyberspace Egypt’s “fourth border”—to be defended like land, sea, and air—because it is “abused by the forces of evil.” This framing legitimized permanent, preemptive intervention: surveillance, charges assembled without waiting for police reports, and selective “protection” of women that tracks class rather than justice. Elite perpetrators of sexual violence rarely face consequences; the poor and the visible do.

What This System Does

Sisi’s moral-religious governance is not about piety; it is about power. It enlists Awqaf to script the sermon and militarize the clergy; presses al-Azhar and the Church into the counter-terror consensus; sidelines independent civil society by elevating “safe” charity; and turns prosecutors into cyber-border guards. It fuses spiritual vocabulary with security priorities to justify repression at home and to market austerity as a national duty. It narrows permissible speech, pathologizes dissent as sin, and recasts social policy as moral policing.

The approach is also classed. Crackdowns fall heaviest on the working poor and the digitally entrepreneurial—especially women—whose online visibility threatens status hierarchies the regime seeks to restore. And, it is opportunistic: moral panics are dialed up when inflation bites or scandals loom, redirecting anger toward “debauchery,” “heresy,” or “foreign plots” online.

Fault Lines

This machinery carries risks. Centralization breeds friction—witness Sisi’s tug-of-war with al-Azhar—and overreach creates resentments among clergy and laity alike. Systemic discrimination against Copts remains unresolved beneath the Church–state alliance, and sectarian attacks still erupt. Digital repression incubates new cycles of outrage and cat-and-mouse evasion. Above all, moral policing cannot fix an economy strained by debt, austerity, and militarized mismanagement; it can only smother debate. The more the state leans on piety to paper over policy failure, the more brittle the bargain becomes.