‘Repentant’ artists in Egypt: debating gender, performing arts and religion

This article explores the emergent public sphere in Egypt in the early 1990s by analysing the debates about the ‘repentant’ artists. Many artists, mostly women but also a few men, stepped down from art for religious reasons. Some of them even started to preach against art because they considered their former profession haram. The ‘repentance’ of so many famous performers led to fierce contestations in the media. Art became an issue par excellence for debating notions of the ‘common good’ and the ‘good Muslim.’ Media were intensively used by secularists, conservative Muslims, Islamists, the regime and repentant artists to publicise their version of Islam. The different voices in the debate are analysed to investigate whether they constitute a counterpublic.

From ‘Polytheists’ to ‘Partners in the Nation’: Islamist Attitudes Towards Coptic Egyptians in Post-revolutionary Egypt (2011–2013)

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Islamist and Salafi organizations, some of them with a violent past, emerged as political actors and displayed a consistent effort to appear as serious and inclusive political contenders. This article studies the attitudes of actors such as the Salafi Nur Party and al-Gamā?a al-Islāmiyya towards Coptic Egyptians in the post-revolutionary phase (2011–2013). It offers a perspective on how these actors navigated between the new political realities and their ideological positions. It argues that Islamist perceptions of the Copts have changed in response to the actions of the latter and that this is pivotal for understanding political attitudes, which seemed at times both moderate and dogmatic, volatile and contradictory. I therefore aim to go beyond the idea of ‘the Copts’ as a silent and homogenous minority and instead integrate the new form of Coptic activism which became visible and vocal after 2011. This approach helps towards a better understanding of how ‘the Copts’ appeared simultaneously in Salafi political discourses as useful political tools, infidels, enemies and equal citizens.     

Locating religion in victory-making: the 1973 war discourse in Egypt

Most of the literature on the Arab–Israeli war in 1973 takes material gains and military advances as measurements that indicate victory or defeat. Accordingly, based on the magnitude of weaponry used and the associated tactics employed, scholarly works declare Egypt or Israel the winner. This article moves away from such ‘materialistic’ accounts of the war’s conclusion by exploring a similarly significant victory-maker: the use of the discourse of religion. By looking at previously untapped official and semi-official texts from the war’s onset through the eight years of President Anwar Sadat’s rule, the article finds this discourse to be composed of three thematic structures. These structures cohere into patterns that facilitated an account of the war as a massive and unquestionable Egyptian ‘victory’. The study also addresses how the interplay of language and religion was so closely attuned to the broader context that included the use of authoritarianism in politics and in the media as well as a so-called Islamic revival. Rather than supposing that the religious references in this discourse may have been in some way truthful, I show that it relied on a set of intentional falsehoods.     

古埃及医治心理疾病的方法透析

宗教文化是古埃及文明的重要组成部分,对古埃及心理医学产生了重要影响。为预防心理疾病,保障身心健康,古埃及人发明了一整套预防和医治心理疾病的方法。屏弃其中的迷信成分,这些疗法对于我们今天心理医学的发展、个人心态的调整与和谐社会的构建,仍有借鉴意义。     

The Concept of Freedom of Belief and Its Boundaries in Egypt: The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Baha'i Faith Between Established Religions and An Authoritarian State

A number of new religious communities have been emerging in Egypt since the second half of the nineteenth century. The most important of them—both numerically and in terms of the attention they attract—are the Baha'i Faith and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Both groups have been officially dissolved and face strong opposition from the established religions as well as a number of legal problems. Egyptian courts have dealt with Baha'is and Jehovah's Witnesses in a number of contexts, and have on these occasions had to discuss the question of how the principle of freedom of belief, which has been part of all Egyptian constitutions since 1923, affects the status of religious minorities not recognised by the state. Their arguments allow interesting conclusions not only about the prevailing understanding of the principle of freedom of belief, but also about the relationship between Islam, the Coptic Orthodox Church and the state.     

阿拉伯国家饮食文化研究——埃及传统饮食中的历史与文化

埃及是四大文明古国之一,又是重要的阿拉伯国家,其伊斯兰传统饮食中蕴含着深厚的历史、宗教、人文和科学内涵。本文通过对有代表性的埃及传统伊斯兰饮食的研究,展现出其中历史和文化内涵,以及它对其他阿拉伯国家饮食的影响。     

Freud's prehistoric matrix-Owing 'nature' a death

This paper is informed by contemporary literature in two fields-neonatal research, on the one hand, and the burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in Moses and monotheism, on the other. The author postulates that a cluster of traumatic events during the first two years of Freud's life compelled him to repeat what could not be remembered. Embedded in charged implicit schema, these affects remained unprocessed in Freud, who alone of all psychoanalysts did not have an analysis, manifesting in an uncanny dread/allure of the 'prehistoric' as a dark and dangerous era relating to the archaic feminine/maternal matrix and fratricidal murderousness. Furthermore, she cites evidence to suggest that for Freud this unconsciously excluded subtext of the preoedipal era became associated with ancient Egyptian and Minoan-Mycenaean cultures, a passionate fascination actualized in his collection of antiquities yet incongruously absent in his theoretical work, with three exceptions-Egyptian allusions in Leonardo's unconscious attachment to his archaic mother; the 'Minoan-Mycenaean' analogy on discovering the pre-oedipal mother shortly after the death of Freud's own mother; and Egypt as cradle of humanity in his uncharacteristically rambling, troubled text of Moses and monotheism. The author sees Freud's conceptual avoidance yet compulsive reworking of the prehistoric matrix as a symptomatic attempt to expose early unformulated representations that 'return to exert a powerful effect.'     

Boredom and despair in rural Egypt

Boredom is a key experience in the lives of many young people in contemporary rural Egypt. With its calm, predictable rhythm of life offering little excitement and surprises, village life is intrinsically monotonic. But monotony as such does not necessarily bore people. It is turned into intense boredom and despair by the presence of strong but unfulfilled aspirations for a better and more exciting life. Boredom and attempts to escape it form an experience and a discourse of life that stand in a strong albeit often unstated contrast to the ideology of Islamic revival. With the stated purposeless and pointlessness of the discourse on boredom, not only the forms of entertainment, but also the very position of entertainment towards the grand projects of religious revival and nationalist progress appears in a different light that fits in neither the secularist tradition of arts and entertainment nor their revivalist contestation and reinterpretation.

Copts,the State and the 1949–1950 al-Majlis al-Millī Electoral Crisis: Articulating Community in a Time of Anxiety

ABSTRACT

In October 1949, the Coptic Communal Council, al-Majlis al-Millī, failed to run elections as scheduled in the midst of conflict with the clergy. The following April, the Egyptian government intervened by dissolving the Council in favour of an appointed body and by amending its bylaws to allow for the Coptic patriarch and the state to intervene in the case that future elections were delayed. This prompted controversy in the community, as supporters of the Council criticized the intervention for depriving the body of its democratic nature. However, opponents of the Council used the legislation to criticize the body for its aggressive posturing and to assert the authority of the clergy over the laity in communal affairs. This article explores the 1949–1950 intervention alongside the anxieties of late-liberal-era Egypt. By investigating the conversations that occurred in the government and the communal press, I argue that the election crisis served as a flashpoint for parties to lay claim to their particular visions of community by focusing on themes of communal representation, spheres of sovereignty and the maintenance of order.