Egyptians are rebelling through the electricity power lines

A controversial fatwa — Islamic legal opinion — has been issued in Egypt. It gives a green light to Egyptians to steal electricity, drinking water, gas and other public utilities on the pretext of high prices, inflation and increasing taxes.

The fatwa from Al-Azhar University scholar Sheikh Imam Ramadan Imam — “Steal from them, God will have mercy on you” — has raised controversial questions about people’s right to benefit from state resources, without paying their bills, as a means of protest and civil disobedience against questionable government policies. These policies do not take account of the fact that Egyptians are burdened by poverty and deteriorating living and economic conditions as well as low wages and a very low value of local currency.

Despite Al-Azhar’s decision to suspend the professor of doctrine and philosophy for three months or until the investigations are completed, the video clip of his fatwa has been shared widely on social media. Some Egyptians agree with him, others don’t.

In a second video, the sheikh wondered out loud about who is stealing from the people; who’s making permissible what is forbidden and forbidding what is permissible; who’s making the Egyptian people live in woe and misery; who’s raising prices thousands of times beyond the people’s abilities to pay; and who has humiliated the people, and stole their food, their savings and their precious metals? Who did all of that, and then came to tell us that we are very poor? It was all aimed, of course, at President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

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Imam stressed that he bears responsibility for his fatwa before God, presenting several justifications to support his legal opinion. “Since the government calls the recovery of rights ‘theft’, I say to you: We are stealing from those who stole from us,” he explained. “Steal what’s rightfully yours from those who made the forbidden permissible and the permissible forbidden. They are turning all the lights on in the administrative capital while paying nothing for it. They lit up the defence, infantry and army headquarters, and all the clubs affiliated with the armed forces and police, yet they [these institutions] do not pay a pound to the state for their consumption.”

He cited a verse from the Holy Qur’an, which says: “And for those who retaliate after being wronged — against them there is no blame.”

The Vice President of Al-Azhar University, Dr Mahmoud Siddiq, responded to Imam, and said that the university does not endorse his fatwa, which he claimed is far removed from the teachings of Islam.

According to Egypt’s Dar Al-Iftaa, the official body for issuing fatwas, insisted: “It is religiously forbidden to benefit from the state’s resources, such as water and electricity, through fraud or any illegal means, so as not to pay the bills.” The statement on Facebook added that this constitutes theft, unjust attainment of people’s money, harming the public interest, violating the system, betraying trust, and disobeying the ruler who’s commanded to be obeyed by the Sharia.

Egyptian media viciously attacked Imam, accusing him of inciting against the authorities, and suggesting that he is not qualified to teach or issue fatwas. Nevertheless, the man stuck by his fatwa, and even challenged Al-Azhar and Egypt’s Grand Mufti to a public debate to prove his opinion with arguments and evidence.

Imam received public support from Egyptian journalist Mohamed Al-Qudousi, who announced in a video that the fatwa is consistent with the ruling of the second Rightly-Guided Caliph, Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, who did not punish anyone forced by hunger to steal, but rather punished those who made them hungry in the first place. He added that, by analogy, this permits the taking of electricity, which the government has monopolised and sells to people at high prices that they cannot afford.

The fatwa carries within it a limited degree of civil disobedience, on a religious basis, that permits standing up against the oppressor and reclaiming rights from him. This makes the fatwa more dangerous, as it may find approval among marginalised groups, who fall below the poverty line and are suppressing their anger towards Al-Sisi’s policies.

According to political researcher Anas Al-Masry, Imam’s fatwa has some legitimacy. He bases his opinion on two things: the first is the exaggerated rise in electricity prices, and the second is the power outages which disrupt people’s day to day lives.

The fatwa did not come out of a vacuum.

It stems from the prevailing situation where most people can no longer pay the bills due to unprecedented, spiralling inflation in Egypt.

More than 30 per cent of Egyptians live below the poverty line, while 60 per cent are either poor or at risk of becoming poor, according to World Bank data in 2019. Experts predict that the number of poor people in Egypt will increase, with the middle class being affected by continuous government decisions to liberalise the exchange rate of the local currency. This has already led to the collapse of the Egyptian pound from 18 to 49 pounds per US dollar.

Dr Nader Nour El-Din, a scholar at the Faculty of Agriculture at Cairo University, posted about the increase in electricity prices on his Facebook page saying, “My electricity bill after the price increase is 1,630 pounds ($33).” He wonders if these prices are consistent with average incomes, salaries and wages.

The Egyptian government decided to raise electricity prices in August by 17 per cent. This is the second increase this year, bringing the total electricity increases to more than 1,300 per cent since Al-Sisi came to power in 2014.

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Other increases this year include the prices of bread, medicine, fuel, gas, water and the internet, as well as train, subway and bus tickets, fees for obtaining official documents, school expenses and medical services in government hospitals.

A scholar from the Ministry of Religious Endowments (Awqaf), who requested anonymity, said that there are scholars and preachers who endorse Imam’s fatwa because the matter falls under the rule of obtaining rights. It is the state’s responsibility to provide these public services and benefits of power, water, gas and the Internet to the people. Meanwhile, there have been accusations that the state is stealing the people’s rights, and that only one per cent of the people in Egypt control the country’s resources and wealth, while 99 per cent “live on crumbs”.

He told me: “If anyone can obtain some of their rights without causing harm to themselves, there is nothing wrong with going for it. But, if it will cause them harm or push them into a confrontation with the authorities, then they need to obey the government and pay whatever taxes are imposed on them, based on the jurisprudential rule that says warding off harm takes precedence over bringing benefit.”

Meanwhile, the Egyptian authorities said that they have caught more than 12,000 cases of electricity theft within 24 hours.

This is a worrying number that has indications of a hidden protest that is taking place — if I may say so — via power lines, either by stealing electricity, not paying bills or hacking into electricity meters to escape high bills.

In televised statements last September, the Egyptian president estimated electricity theft in the country at one million incidents per month. He said in his speech at the “Story of a Nation” conference, that ever since former Minister of Electricity, Mohamed Shaker, took over the ministry in 2014, he has been sending him a monthly report on electricity theft cases. He added that over 96 months there were 96 million electricity theft incidents.

About three years ago, it was revealed that a factory owner in Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate had dug a tunnel under one of the electrical transformers to steal electricity and feed his factory with power with an estimated value of 14 million pounds ($285,000).

A union leader, who also requested anonymity, believes that the strict rule of the regime prevents any full-blown civil disobedience. However, he warned that imposing more taxes could push the people to confront it in a different way. This could involve an equation which says that what the state collects from people by force is one of their usurped rights, and therefore it is their duty to recover it by any means.

The fatwa of “Steal from them, God will have mercy on you” may open the door in Egypt to a form of civil disobedience whose scope might keep expanding over time to allow people to obtain what they see as their rights in terms of public utilities. They will be using it as a means to face a Generals-led totalitarian regime that has been accused of deliberately making Egyptians poor.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.