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Harat al-Yahud: The politics of the “Jewish Return” between the regime and popular culture
Abstract
In December 2012, ‘Issam al-‘Iryan, Muslim Brotherhood activist and the president of its ruling Freedom and Justice Party, called for Egyptian Jews who immigrated to Israel to return back to Egypt. He promised them full rights stipulated in the Islamic Sharia. Controversies about this surprising call witnessed unleashed anti- Semitic comments and rising hopes that Egypt would go back to the pre-Nasser “good old days”. On the other hand, a similar call by current president ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi in February 2019 faced silence inside Egypt. Between al-‘Iryan’s and al-Sisi’s calls, Egyptian audiences watched with a great interest the TV series Harat al-Yahud (the Jewish Alley) in 2015. Aired during the prime time of Ramadan, the show provided a narrative on the daily life in 1940s. The show depicted a love story between a Muslim army officer who fought in Palestine in 1948 and the daughter of his Jewish neighbors. After the girl immigrated to Israel, she returned back home to Egypt. This paper discusses the politics of calling Jews to return to Egypt since the Tahrir Revolution. I argue that despite the radical differences between the Muslim Brotherhood short-lived regime and the current regime, Egyptian ruling elites have manipulated the unlikely Jewish return to coverup the structural intolerance towards political oppositions and existing religious minorities, i.e. Copts and Baha’is. With the suffocating public sphere under al-Sisi’s dictatorship, popular culture has been a main vehicle for liberal Egyptians to imagine their past and refashion their Egyptian-self as tolerant and pluralistic.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries