Special Report: Inside Egypt’s War On Atheism Rekindled
CAIRO — Sameh Raouf stopped going to church about 10 years ago. His mother noticed, and after weeks of prodding, he confessed he no longer believed in Christianity or Christ.
“All religions are human fabrications,” he told her.
More worried than enraged, she sought help from a priest who tried in vain to bring him back into the fold.
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Raouf was a university student back then. He is now 30 years old.
“My family called me ‘unclean’ and threw me out,” Raouf said.
So he moved to northern Egypt to live with his grandmother, who was his last refuge.
“But still, they wouldn’t let me live in that poor destitute village and threatened to kill me because I had become a source of shame. When they disowned me, I fled to Hurghada,” he recalled.
But it’s not only Christians in Egypt who are turning away from their faith.
Asmaa Hussein, 23, said she rejected the concept of “faith” since she was a teen.
“The notion of a God who simply watched people suffer felt cruel and unfair,” she added. “And I realized that the idea of believing in God stemmed from a conviction that we must accept life’s hardships.”
Hussein is convinced that God is the creation of religious scholars, a belief strengthened each time God’s name is used to justify killing and war. After researching the Abrahamic religions and rejecting Islam, the religion she was born into, she said she no longer believes in the existence of God due to unjustified religious obligations and the corruption and hypocrisy of religious men.
To confront this trend, Egypt’s Ministry of Youth and Sports recently launched “Youth Against Atheism,” a government program partnering with Al-Azhar, the country’s top Sunni Muslim institution and the Coptic Church to combat what officials call “electronic atheism” spreading through social media platforms.
The initiative targets five areas (Cairo, Suez, Minya, Giza and Qena) and marks an escalation in state efforts to address a phenomenon authorities claim has exploded from 866 declared atheists in 2014 to over three million by 2023 — a trend researchers say began in 2012, not long after the 2011 uprising that ousted Egypt’s 30-year dictator Hosni Mubarak.
This is Egypt’s second official anti-atheism campaign in a decade, highlighting the government’s growing concern over religious apostasy among young Egyptians. The program promotes “dialogue not suppression,” yet its very existence underscores the mounting pressure on those questioning faith in a country where atheism can lead to what researchers describe as “civil death.”
A 2021 study by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy documented how Egyptian atheists face systematic persecution, losing jobs, family ties and social standing. Interviews with several sources who say they are atheists reveal the deeply personal stories driving this trend: a senior surgeon predicted “Islam will end in 25 years”; two brothers abandoned their faith after suffocating under their fundamentalist Salafi family’s religious extremism; and a woman rejected Islam not because she was forced to observe it, but over what she sees as systemic gender discrimination in inheritance and marriage laws.
These testimonies expose the complex dynamics fueling Egypt’s atheism surge—not just Western influence or digital corruption, as officials suggest, but genuine grievances with religious authority, gender inequality and intellectual suppression. The irony is stark: a program designed to win hearts and minds through dialogue emerges in a context where questioning faith can destroy lives.
Confronting atheism online
The recently launched anti-atheism initiative comes over 10 years after “Logically-Speaking,” which critics said failed to yield tangible results because it did not focus on the root causes of the phenomenon.
Author Ramy Yahya said confronting atheism is not a priority worth spending taxpayer money on.
“This is an empty initiative,” Ramy said. “Atheism is not a security or social threat to citizens, unlike religious extremism which is a source of violence and harassment. Misspending public resources reflects a flaw in the government’s vision. This money should be allocated to addressing the real causes of violence and extremism in society like ignorance and poverty.”
Professor of Comparative Jurisprudence and member of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar, Atiya Lashin, begged to differ.
“Confronting those who openly declare their atheism through social media is a necessary preventive treatment against these poisonous ideas,” said Lashin, who believes opening channels of dialogue with young people and responding to their doubts in a systematic scientific manner is the best solution.
He added that controversial issues that drive people toward atheism, like inheritance rules or polygamy, reflect weak faith, noting that fighting this open atheism is a means of protecting society. Lashin’s views align with Egyptian laws that punish public contempt for religions.
Article 98(f) of the Egyptian Penal Code, often referred to as the “blasphemy” provision, criminalizes the “exploitation of religion to promote extremist ideologies that incite civil strife, disparage religions or their followers, or harm national unity, inciting sedition,” while Article 161 punishes those who mock religious texts in public places.
These “crimes” carry a penalty of imprisonment between six months and five years or a fine of EGP 500 to EGP 1,000 ($10-20). The laws have been criticized for their vague wording and have been used to prosecute individuals for expressing dissenting religious views or belonging to minority sects.
Karim Al-Banna, for instance, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2015 for a Facebook post where he announced his atheism, which is considered contempt of religion. Sherif Gaber, a star YouTuber, was also sentenced to five years in prison for professing atheism through his content in the same year.
But none of these cases — nor the tens of others that followed — seem to have made much difference.
Bahy El-Din Morsy, a surgeon and Egyptian public intellectual, believes the Ministry of Youth and Sports’ initiative to confront “electronic atheism” is doomed to failure. He explained that electronic atheism is completely different in its nature and the way it spreads from general atheism, which is something the government doesn’t fully understand.
“Electronic atheism is spread through fake accounts that are difficult to monitor and pinpoint, as one person might manage dozens of accounts, while posts calling for atheism remain available through electronic media to attract those with weak faith. This is something that neither Al-Azhar nor any traditional religious entity can effectively address,” Morsy said.
These initiatives lack sufficient knowledge of the nature of electronic atheism and the mechanisms to confront it, said Morsy, noting that the root causes of this phenomenon are so deeply ingrained that such superficial initiatives are bound to fail.
“We need a comprehensive, intellectual approach, not these public posturing campaigns that consume resources but fail to yield tangible results,” Morsy added.
The concerted efforts of one church, however, seem to have had some success.
Father Ephraim Salih, priest of the Church of Mar Yohanna the Beloved in Wadi Natrun, said the church confronts atheism through “youth service” dedicated to the 18–30 age group, supervised by teams of church servants who are trained to deal with the intellectual and psychological problems of this group.
“They receive special training to help them counter atheistic ideas,” said Ephraim, noting that these efforts have already succeeded in returning hundreds of youth to faith.
Annual three-day conferences and recreational programs aimed at spiritual rehabilitation counter what Father Ephraim describes as “contagious” ideas that spread in youth gatherings. These sometimes include interventions that remove those who show signs of atheistic thought from the groups until they are intellectually rehabilitated.
“This is how the church immunizes young people and strengthens their faith when they have existential questions for which they find no convincing answers outside religious frameworks,” Ephraim said.
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.
Shimaa El-Yousef is a writer based in Egypt.