Egypt’s Religious Endowments and Education ministries announced a project to establish educational nurseries inside mosques, with a summer pilot in Qena, southern Egypt. The proposal envisaged one nursery in a mosque in each village or neighbourhood.
According to the official announcement cited in the original report, Religious Endowments Minister Osama El Azhari and Education Minister Mohamed Abdel Latif signed a cooperation protocol. El Azhari said the initiative would support literacy, moral and religious values, national belonging and children’s connection with Egypt’s cultural heritage.
Abdel Latif said ministry teachers would provide morning educational activities, with suitable learning materials and toys. Furnishings would be put away before noon prayers so that the space could return to worship. Critics interpreted this arrangement as a direct combination of education and a religious setting.
The project followed El Azhari’s December 2024 initiative to revive the kuttab, the traditional Quranic school, which he presented as a way of renewing religious and educational instruction and countering extremism and atheism.
Although the stated aims include early learning and literacy, rights advocates and educators question whether locating the service exclusively in mosques can provide equal access. Their concerns centre on religious discrimination, children’s opportunities and the state’s obligation to offer education that includes all citizens.
What about non-Muslim children?
The proposal does not explicitly exclude Christian children. Nevertheless, sociologist Saeed Sadek argues that its location creates practical and social barriers for families who cannot afford private alternatives but would not feel able to send their children to an Islamic religious institution.
“If you are a Christian child from a poor family and cannot find a place in overcrowded public schools, what is the alternative?” Sadek asks. “Will you turn to the mosque? Can the church provide a parallel nursery? And will the child be treated equally in those institutions?”
He also questions whether mosques are ready to provide an appropriate educational environment. What curriculum will they use? Who will supervise teaching? What religious and moral content will be offered? He says some buildings lack the infrastructure required for young children.
Article 53 of Egypt’s Constitution guarantees equality before the law and prohibits discrimination on grounds including religion, belief, sex, origin, disability and social status. Article 19 establishes education as a right and identifies citizenship, tolerance and non-discrimination among its purposes.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Egypt in 1990, requires protection against discrimination, including discrimination connected to children’s or parents’ religion. Article 14 protects freedom of thought, conscience and religion, while respecting parental guidance consistent with children’s evolving capacities.
Those provisions establish protections for children and families; they do not themselves prohibit every religiously affiliated educational institution. The issue raised by the interviewees is whether the proposed public service would offer genuine choice, equal access and safeguards against exclusion.
Will early education reinforce religious separation?
Ishak Ibrahim, who leads the equality and non-discrimination programme at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, says that an apparently developmental initiative can carry troubling implications when the state endorses one religious model of provision.
He does not object in principle to nurseries affiliated with religious institutions, including churches, provided they are run by specialists and subject to clear educational oversight. His concern is the expansion of one model as an officially supported answer to early-childhood needs.
Ibrahim stresses that nursery provision is an important educational stage, rather than merely recreation, and should meet recognised standards of quality and supervision. This is an argument for the status and regulation of early learning, not evidence that all nursery attendance is legally part of compulsory basic education.
He distinguishes between an educational institution affiliated with a religious organisation but supervised by the Education Ministry, and religious authorities directing learning inside places of worship without equivalent educational accountability. The announced project does involve ministry teachers; his questions concern how that supervision would work in practice.
Elham Eidarous, a founding representative of the Bread and Freedom Party, which was still under establishment at the time of reporting, fears a wider process of religious separation beginning in early childhood. Poor communities with few secular alternatives, she says, are especially vulnerable.
In the pattern she anticipates, Muslim children would attend mosques and Christian children, where resources permit, church nurseries. Children would have fewer opportunities to learn and play together across religious lines.
Eidarous warns that separating children at the nursery stage can make shared citizenship an exception rather than an everyday experience.
She contrasts the proposed religious setting with the later introduction of formal religious instruction in primary school. Her broader concern is that a child’s first educational environment could be organised around religious affiliation before meaningful contact with children from other backgrounds.
For Eidarous, the project also has a class dimension. Families with more resources can choose private or international nurseries, while poorer families may be offered a religious setting as their only affordable option. She argues that the state should instead fund public nurseries open to everyone, rather than leaving families to negotiate separate alternatives.
The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination protects equal enjoyment of rights, including education and religious freedom, within its defined scope of racial discrimination. It should not be cited as a blanket ban on religious schools. More directly relevant to the concerns here are guarantees of non-discrimination, freedom of belief and meaningful access to education.
A low-cost solution—or a retreat from public education?
Ibrahim sees the project as a possible withdrawal from the state’s responsibility to provide fair and inclusive education. He asks whether the nurseries will use official curricula and meet the same quality standards as other public institutions, or whether children will encounter a parallel religious-educational programme.
At this age, he says, education shapes more than academic skills. An environment organised around isolation or religious sorting can affect a child’s later understanding of citizenship.
Sadek describes the proposal more sharply as a sign of what he calls educational and institutional failure. He argues that insufficient investment in modern facilities, particularly in poorer areas, has encouraged improvised solutions. In his words, it is “a return to the kuttab in the age of artificial intelligence”.
He points to classrooms that he says contain 80 or 90 children, sometimes without enough seating. Those are examples cited in the interview, not a verified national classroom average. Using mosques, he argues, does not address the underlying shortage of suitable classrooms and educational resources.
Sadek also criticises education spending. Article 19 of the Constitution sets a minimum allocation of 4% of gross national product, with a gradual increase towards international levels. His claim that spending falls below that requirement is part of a wider dispute over how education expenditure is classified and measured.
He contrasts limited options for poorer families with private and international education available to wealthier households. In his view, the government is moving away from future-oriented education instead of investing in technology and modern teaching.
Eidarous links the initiative to the direction of the State Ownership Policy, whose final version was approved in 2022, rather than 2021 as stated in the original article. She interprets the policy’s approach to preschool investment as part of a reduction in direct public provision.
She also points to what she describes as a decline in nurseries affiliated with the Social Solidarity Ministry, leaving religious institutions to fill gaps. No time series is supplied in the interview, so this remains her assessment rather than a quantified trend established here.
“Instead of establishing civil nurseries that respect diversity and serve everyone, we hand the task to Religious Endowments,” she says. Her objection is both to the potential exclusion of non-Muslim children and to the absence of a broadly accessible public alternative for poorer families.
UNESCO’s 2020 Global Education Monitoring Report calls for inclusive systems in which religion, poverty and other aspects of identity do not become grounds for educational exclusion. It does not establish the categorical rule attributed to it in the original article that early-childhood education must always be separated from religious institutions.
The practical questions therefore remain central: who can attend, whether families have a real alternative, what curriculum and staffing standards apply, and how children’s safety and equal treatment will be protected. The critics interviewed argue that expanding access must go together with public accountability and an environment in which every child can feel they belong.
