In recent years, due in part to the broad dissemination of materials over social media and in part to the growing reach of terrorist groups applying literal readings of the scriptures, the voices speaking against religious intolerance in Islamic texts have been multiplying and gaining traction. Public intellectuals argue that students of al-Azhar who are joining terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State are merely practicing what is preached in the classroom, for the arguments of such terrorist groups are anchored in the texts that unequivocally incite violence and hatred. In May 2015, the president of al-Azhar, Abdul Hai Azab, conceded that some of its texts might indeed incite violence and announced that the university is taking steps to change its curriculum. My presentation will analyze the arguments of three prominent public intellectuals. The first case study is Islam al-Bihiri, the anchor of a television show dedicated to questioning the morality and authority of key traditional Islamic texts, including revered collections of hadith. My second case study is Muhammad Abdullah Nasr, himself a graduate of al-Azhar himself who has become a public figure and who frequently appears on both traditional media outlets and social media to expose the violence and intolerance in the texts that he was taught and that contain incitement to violence and intolerance. Finally, I analyze the YouTube channel of Ahmad Harqan, a former extremist who, though well versed in both Islamic history and thought (he knows the Qur’an by heart), became an atheist and an ardent preacher of secularism. These public intellectuals represent a much wider movement that is growing in numbers and influence. Evident in this historic change is the inability of scholars representing the religious establishment to control the narratives. Not only has the religious establishment lost its monopoly over their audiences, but they now have to compete with multiple platforms, including social media.

Through an unparalleled explosion of street art and graffiti campaigns during and after the 25 January 2011 uprising in Egypt, many public spaces in the capital city of Cairo became symbols of women’s revolt against the state. These spaces resembled open-air galleries showcasing street art on a wide range of social, political, and religious issues—women’s resistance to societal pressures and daily humiliation, existing power and gender dynamics, and political and religious injustices. However, many of these iconic graffiti images have been erased or modified and no longer exist on the walls around Cairo. They have, nevertheless, been immortalized in pictures and videos, especially on online social networks (OSNs). OSNs have become popular platforms for people to connect and interact with each other. Among these networks, Pinterest, a popular social curation site where people collect, organize, and share pictures of items, has recently become noteworthy for its growth and promotion of visual over textual content. In this study I perform a rhetorical analysis of the graffiti created by women in Cairo, during and after the 25 January 2011 uprising, that are recorded in two Pinterest boards titled “Egypt Graffiti” and “Women Graffiti Art and Artists #MENA.” The purpose of this study is to: (a) discover what is constructed in the graffiti about women’s social, political, and religious agency in Cairene society; (b) examine the role of Pinterest in aiding women’s social, political, and religious reform efforts in Arab societies, in this case, Cairo; and (c) examine the role of Pinterest in challenging Western stereotypes about Arab-Egyptian women’s agency and offering a new way of viewing Arab-Egyptian women’s reform efforts in contemporary Cairo.

When protesters first rose up against Mubarak's state on 25 January 2011, there appeared to be no single figurehead to follow, no leader to genuflect to, no organizer to manage it, no order to follow, and no authority to preside over the outcomes. That has not, however, changed the extent to which reverence for personhood has been emblematic of the revolution from its early days and prior. These challenge the interchangeability of agents, the horizontal camaraderie, and the unpredictability of improvisation, opened up spaces for the novel inscription of memory, the iconization of sacrifice, and the historicization of the faceless, nameless martyrs. Even those youth who called for the protests, many of whom were at first anonymous or politically inconsequential, had their brief period in the limelight following the toppling of Mubarak and they gradually faded into the background as politics resurrected hierarchy and vertical decision-making. Politicians and institutional operators took over as the revolution quickly lost its innocence and became a battle between pre-existing authoritarians, established orthodoxies, established orders, and the leaderships of “tribalized” constituencies. Today, some five years since the revolution, what is most evident is that Egypt's crises and its presentation as a nation on the edge of the abyss and awaiting deliverance, all remain part of a performance of utopian imaginary. President Sisi was inspired by a divine hand to interrupt the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and rescue the country for assured disintegration. Alternatively, the brutal coup that toppled the religiously-avowed Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi will eventually crumble with divine intervention once Morsi emerges victorious and come out of prison to assume his rightful authority over the country. Youth revolutionaries, largely defeated by the status quo, may hold hope in the spirits of the martyrs who will not let them fail. Copts, who felt curtailed by the Islamists, may be compelled to believe that the Lord intervened to derail a plan that would have spelled their depopulation from Egypt. This paper will examine the power of messianic discourse in the political expressions of various actors in the Egyptian polity, particularly online. This includes supporters of military-man Al-Sisi and Islamist Morsi and other players on the scene. This is a detailed discourse analysis of the convictions and expressions of these groups as well as the way in which they perform, enact, and illustrate messianism.

Scholars of media in the Middle East have tended to discuss state control over media production in a dyadic mode: either as a formal process, whereby political and legal arrangements coerce media producers into omitting subversive narratives (see Amin, 2001; Rugh, 2004; Mellor, 2005; Sakr, 2007; Lahlali, 2011; Guaaybess, 2013), or as an informal one, whereby private organizations or ideological commitment create an environment where non-mainstream narratives are rejected, discouraged, or made unthinkable to media producers (see Ayalon, 1995; Salamandra, 2005; Mehrez, 2010; Sienkiewicz, 2012). While the language of ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ control has some validity in describing the state’s hold over media, it tends to assume that the source of control is some centralized agency – i.e., ‘the state’. Yet, control is in fact distributed over a number of institutions and social agents who cannot all be claimed to be acting at the behest of a central authority. This centralizing view implies, moreover, that the sphere beyond formal and informal control is one of ‘freedom’ when, in fact, media production is always constrained by the kinds of organizational and ideological factors usually subsumed under the label of ‘informal control’. Thus, while it is evident that no purely ‘free’ expression can exist, constraints over content do not necessarily have to do with coercive state intervention, whether formal or informal: they can arise by other means – to give a concrete example, via spontaneous interference with film shoots by ordinary citizens. This paper will work to unsettle the assumption that ‘the state’, as a single agent, can control media production, with a specific case study in mind: the making of film permits in contemporary Egypt. This case study is part of a wider ethnographic investigation into the working practices of the Egyptian film industry, which I conducted in Cairo between 2013 and 2015. The argument will proceed, first, by describing the byzantine process through which film permits are issued in Egypt. Then, I will explain the importance of paper permits in terms of their material efficacy, while giving several examples of their use in the everyday life of a film set. In conclusion, I will argue that the analytical category of ‘state control’ is inadequate, on its own, to account for the social and material effects of film permits, while bringing attention to the importance of street politics in audiovisual media production.