Policing ambiguity: Muslim saints‐day festivals and the moral geography of public space in Egypt

Abstract

In this article, I explore how the festive culture of mulids, Egyptian Muslim saints‐day festivals, troubles notions of habitus, public space, and religious and civic discipline that have become hegemonic in Egypt in the past century and how state actors attempt to “civilize” mulids by subjecting them to a spectacular, representative order of spatial differentiation. I argue that habitus must be understood as a political category related to competing relationships of ideology and embodiment and that the conceptual and physical configuration of modern public space is intimately related to the bodily and moral discipline of its users. [veneration of saints, festivals, habitus, public space, state, Islam, Egypt]

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

“…As ethnographers of Islam have pointed out, the term confusion, also connoting "public disorder," frequently serves as the stated reason the Egyptian state intervenes in the public realm of Sufi imagination (Gilsenan 2008;Mittermaier 2008;Schielke 2008). CopticMuslim relations are not the same everywhere in Egypt, and two points are to be noted with respect to Port Said.…”

“…For instance, the British colonial authorities banned moulids (saints' festivals) as "classic occasions for 'mob' formation, 'trouble' and 'disorder'" (Gilsenan 2000:611), and Egyptian police during the Mubarak regime aimed to "civilize" moulids by instituting public order through bodily habits and spatial organization ( Schielke 2008). As part of its larger ambition to regulate and control the religious lives of its citizens, the Egyptian state has strategically cemented alliances with religious institutions of Al-Azhar and the Coptic Orthodox Church "in service of the state" (Moustafa 2000;Tadros 2009).…”

From Divine Instruction to Human Invention: The Constitution of Indonesian Christian Young People’s Sexual Subjectivities through the Dominant Discourse of Sexual Morality

“…He simultaneously felt glad and embarrassed, sinful and grateful, transgressive and ethical. By conceptualising Urip's story in this way, I have also provided an empirical narrative that gives expression to some contemporary theorisations of the self as multiple and contradictory in various fields, such Downloaded by [University of Florida] at 18:51 07 January 2018 as Ewing's (1990) work in cultural and religious studies, Schielke's (2008; research in anthropology and morality, and Rudy's (2007) queer theological analyses. For instance, Rudy (2007, p. 43) …”

The political economy of movement and gesture in Cairo

“…The action in recent times – both political and scholarly – has been in Islam. Anthropologists who carry out fieldwork in Cairo have recently had a great deal to say about bodily practice related to Islamic ritual (Mahmood 2005; Schielke 2008; 2009; Starrett 1995). This literature draws heavily on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and body hexis, taking up a suggestion first made by Abu‐Lughod (1989: 296) that anthropologists of the Middle East draw on Bourdieu to think about the organization of space in Muslim societies and the meaning of prayer and pilgrimage in Islam 2 .…”