Scholars of the Middle East have privileged the study of radical and revolutionary political movements like socialism or anti-establishment Islamism. We know a great deal, although not enough, about the Arab left and its alternating death and rebirth. Similarly, political Islam has taken shape as a highly detailed set of practices and strategies. Yet, in all of these configurations, the very existence of an Arab right is missing. Powerful conservative currents of political thought and action such as ultra- nationalism, monarchism, militarism, hypercaptialism, and neoliberalism appear in the historical and political record as residual byproducts or archaic leftovers. However, the Arab right has a complicated ideological, intellectual, economic and political trajectory. Continuing to ignore this trajectory confines scholarship to the old divides of political Islamism versus secular authoritarianism. In addressing the power of an adaptable Arab right, this panel brings forward the innovations, alliances, and strategies that transgress these binaries.
This panel examines the modern history and contemporary reemergence of the political right in the Arab world. It approaches this right as a highly fragmented and sometimes opaque set of discourses pervading state policy, intellectual production, and popular culture, thus interrogating the coherence of conservatism as a clearly discernible body of thought. Although the study of Islamism dominates the period following the ideological defeat of revolutionary socialism after 1967, the concurrent conservative political formations, which form the focus of this panel, were just as influential. When they did draw on moralistic Islamic thought, they did so in new ways, resulting in a politics that was both highly reactionary, but also innovative. Its primary ideologues were prolific and engaged in a variety of historiographical, sociological, and economic debates with the aim of preserving the political order, and justifying it in new ways.
In exploring these movements and ideas, the papers on this panel reread the historiography of the post-1967 Arab world. They broaden the interpretive frameworks that address perennial scholarly concerns and contemporary struggles over authoritarianism, and the 'deep state' By attending to the right as at times a coherent and distinct body of thought and practice, and at times imbricated in the more studied phenomena of liberalism and nationalism, the panel explores the formation and persistence of an Arab right. In doing so, rethinks historiographic approaches to intellectual history as well as the successful emergence of a regional conservatism in the post-revolutionary Arab world.
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Mr. Ahmed Dailami
Although the claim that Iran's revolution of 1979 changed the politics of the Arab World is now a truism, we know relatively little about how that transformation occurred. This paper investigates the broader intellectual fallout of the Iranian Revolution in Arab political thought. It argues that the revolution's historical repercussions outside Iran must move beyond the study of transnational religious networks , or the rousing of politically dormant Shi'ite communities. Specifically, it investigates how Arab historians, journalists, politicians, and intellectuals debated the causes of the revolution in Iran. Using popular histories of the revolution written in Arabic, and the intellectual output of economic and political journals of the early 1980s from the Gulf States an Egypt, the paper demonstrates how Arab authors explained the rise of the Islamic Republic in doctrinal, racial, and psychological terms, in order to dismiss it as a revolutionary event. The paper concludes that the core conceptual vocabulary and political practices of right wing populism - containment, stability, and moderation - that emerged during the mid 1980s, have their roots in interpreting and containing revolutionary threats from outside the Arab world and have since re-emerged to perform similar functions within it.
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Dr. Paul Amar
Mainstream views have unquestioningly positioned Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s rule of Egypt as a return to the past. This temporality alternates between a wholesale rollback to Mubarak’s neoliberal era and a revival of a Nasserist military state. This paper ruptures this narrative of continuity by exploring how Sisi’s regime is importing, adapting, and innovating new modalities of governing bodies and spaces. It positions Sisi’s regime in a broader trajacetory of a “new right” that comes into force after 1967 and consolidates in innovative ways after the Arab uprising of 2011. In doing so, it pays particular attention to Saudi, Emirate, and Qatari discourses, practices, and strategies.
This paper focuses on Sisi’s proposed “love curriculum” which replaces previous models of citizenship with notions of charity, moral protection, and leader-subject dependency while emphasizing an eroticized adoration of the military state. This curriculum takes some of its inspiration from Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari doctrines and discourses. However, it is also imbricated in national specificities and concerns. The paper places this “love curriculum” in conversation with escalating policies of workers and consumers in key transportation and infrastructure projects, such as football stadiums, canal projects, and train hubs. This policing in Egypt labels these workers as debauchers, blasphemers, and human traffickers. By detailing Egypt’s adoption and cooptation, since 2012 of moral control in both curricula and the service industry, this paper attends to various regional, national, and local influences in the consolidation of a neo-authoritarian right.
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Dr. Sherene Seikaly
In January 1977, Abd al-Mun’im al-Qaysuni, head of Anwar Sadat’s Economic Council announced the termination of state subsidies on flour, rice, tea, sugar, and cooking oil. He went on to declare that state employees would no longer receive bonuses or pay increases. Qasyuni hoped to stave off the growing pressures of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund while heroically leading Egypt onto a path of economic “reform.” The government’s efforts to encourage private investment had already produced a broad disparity between the growing wealth of a select few and the entrenched impoverishment of the majority. Now the government sought to take their plans one painful step forward and reduce public expenditure. It was the stuff of everyday life, those basic goods that many depended on, that were now the targets of “liberalization.” Prices rose immediately.
Students, workers, and a broad swath of Egyptians, commonly scripted in journalistic and conventional accounts as “hundreds of thousands of lower-class people” took to the streets from Aswan to Alexandria. For two heady days, the voices resonating across the country protested. For many Egyptian activists, the bread intifada of 1977 secured a victory over a neoliberal attack on state services and public subsidies. In other accounts, the shifts that began in 1977 facilitated the slow and steady withdrawal of the state from basic public services. This paper traces the strategies, discourses, and approaches that policy-makers, economists, and intellectuals inaugurated in this period. It attends to the bread intifada of 1977 as both continuity and rupture.
This paper focuses in particular on the policies and representations of poverty as at once a national security threat and domain of pity. In the government’s official announcements as well as in the texts of various intellectuals, including Naguib Mahfouz, Tharwat Abaza and Yusef Idris, the poor in 1977 appear as objects of sympathy and containment. Activists, who self-defined as leftists, similarly understood the urban poor, or the lumpenproletariat, as agents of potential danger and irrationality. By centering the poor and the hungry, this paper traces the emergence and appeal of neoliberalism in economic and political thought. By tracing the innovations of the open-door policy and how these innovations transgressed both political and religious/secular divides, it provides an alternative trajectory of the right in Egypt.
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Dr. Hussein Omar
Liberal Longings in Republican Egypt (1977-2013)
In the months leading to the 2013 coup, social media producers crafted a carefully scripted nostalgia for the halcyon days of the monarchy. One meme juxtaposed a portrait of Queen Nazli (poised, bejewelled) with Mrs. Mursi (head-scarved, bespectacled) to highlight Egypt’s ostensible fall from civilisational grace. By inducing a longing for that bygone age, these commentators formulated an elitist critique of Mursi’s one year presidency. Among certain social sectors, this form of critique fortified, enlisted and mobilized support for Sisi. But this was not the first time that the ‘liberal’ age of the interwar years was posited as a measuring stick for Egypt’s relative civilisation, or lack thereof.
In the late 1970s, after two decades of silence, some Egyptians began to speak favorably and publicly, about the former monarchy, and its so called liberal politics. The timing was hardly coincidental— Sadat had launched his ‘Open Door Policy’ whose mission was to undo the ‘disasters’ of Nasserism by opening up Egypt to the global free-market. Relying on hitherto unseen private papers and interviews, this paper traces how the proponents of Sadat’s liberalising economic programme evoked the memory of the liberal ‘golden age’ to establish political legitimacy, and formulate social critique. Intellectuals and politicians recast liberalism as the mere prehistory of neoliberalism, positioning Nasser as an interruption to an otherwise continuous project. These men presented their enterprise as the continuation of a pre-1952 one, even as they proposed an economic programme that was far more liberalising than that of Sadat himself. Foremost among them was the New Wafd—of which Sirag al-Din Pasha, a disgraced figurehead of the ancien regime, was president— which borrowed its name from the Nationalist party of the interwar years. The party’s polemical embrace of the ‘secularism’ of its alleged ancestor, posited a critique both of the ascendant political Islam and the waning radical left.
This paper interrogates the relationship between the ‘liberal’ age of the interwar period and the infitah of Sadat, which was a prelude to fully-fledged neoliberalism. The New Wafd enlisted influential public intellectuals and historians to shape and reshape its intellectual genealogy, thus making these two histories particularly difficult to disentangle. The paper will end by analysing the mobilization of memories of the liberal past by the New Right in post-2011 Egypt.
