From the mid-1930s until the outbreak of the war in Palestine in 1948, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt sponsored an Islamic Theater Troupe as part of its range of charitable, cultural, political, and religious activities. Active in both Cairo and the countryside, the troupe organized performances of Islamic dramas in youth programs and village squares in service of the practice of da’wa (recalling Muslims to the faith) and as a pedagogical technique for the transmission of historical and scriptural knowledge of the Islamic tradition and the strengthening of community ties within its membership. At the same time, the Troupe’s activities were not divorced from the wider theatrical and literary currents of the time, and Brotherhood figures such as ‘Abd al-Rahman Al-Banna (brother of the founder of the organization, Hasan Al-Banna) published their plays, staged them for cultural elites at venues such as the Cairo Opera House, and drew in audiences to their performances by casting stars of the cinema and theater of the day, including Fatma Rushdi and Hasan Al-Barudi. But the Troupe’s activities were not universally approved, and its critics and detractors came from the ranks of both secular intellectuals such as Salama Musa as well as Muslim scholars and preachers. Using the example of the Muslim Brotherhood’s theater troupe before the July 1952 Revolution, this paper explores the relationship between Islamic drama as an aesthetic form and as a religious and ethical practice in modern Egypt. Based on research in the Egyptian national library (Dar al-Kutub) and private archives, the sources for the paper include oral histories, memoirs, text versions of the plays, as well as advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of theater projects published in the organization’s periodicals and pamphlets. Through analysis of the controversies and debates surrounding the Troupe’s activities, the paper analyzes the place of aesthetics – understood as both sensory, bodily experience as well as appreciation of beauty and art – in mediating modern Muslim religious practice, the transmission of the Islamic tradition, and the cultivation of modern forms of ethics, piety, and subjectivity in Egypt. In addressing these issues the paper also seeks to re-think the relationship between modern aesthetic and literary movements in the Arab World and Islamic political activism – two spheres usually seen as distinct and almost always opposed, if not openly antagonistic, to one another.

This paper examines the politics and power of performance in branding specific images of Jordan and its women - at home and abroad. It does so by analyzing the official national dance representations of HM King Abdulla II's regime at the turn of the 21st century. Methodologically, I treat the national repertoire as a cultural text open to multi-leveled interpretations that requires "thick description (Geertz 1973)" and combine choreographic analysis with my own experience as a dancer in Jordan's official dance repertoire. Inspired by Foucault's notion of power (1982), governmentality (1979), and the technology of the body (1975, 1976), this paper aims to show how dance and the female dancing body is used not for the sake of dance itself but in the service of a national politics that is practiced in cultural and corporeal terms. National dance and the images of Jordanian womanhood it portrays becomes a medium through which the Hashemite rule simultaneously links itself to tradition and modernity, satisfying the expectations of diverse audiences (international, national, and local) as means of securing its sovereign status and legitimatizing its rule.

The Turkish soap opera, or dizi, as it is called in Turkey, has come into preeminence as a genre since the turn of the millennium. A nexus of cutthroat competition, market forces allowing for intense investment, and high skill levels among production staff have combined with strong traditions of storytelling to yield a product that has achieved near complete dominance of the Turkish primetime market in the last 15 years. More recently, this content has started to move abroad, dominating the Balkans, Bulgaria, and Greece in the early 2000s, adding much of the Arab world to that list since 2008, and moving on to Russia, Eastern Europe, and even Latin America more recently. This phenomenon has led to claims both within Turkey and without about Turkish "soft power" and its coordination with Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu's diplomatic policy of "strategic depth." While both admirers and critics have called attention to the "neo-Ottoman" aspects of Turkish foreign policy and Turkish drama distribution, the programming clearly does not operate on an agenda coordinated with that of the majority AK-Party, as evidenced by Prime Minister Erdogan's November 2012 condemnation of and threat to the most popular TV export, the 16th Century Ottoman costume drama Magnificent Century. This paper examines the overlaps and disconnects between the cultural movement of Turkish dizis and the diplomatic maneuvers of the AK-Party through an analysis of discourses regarding the shows in both Turkish and international media and through ethnographic engagements with viewers and media workers in Turkey, the Balkans, and the Arab world. It finds that terms such as "soft power" and "neo-Ottomanism" are strategically deployable shifters (Urciuoli 2003, Silverstein 1976), with meanings that vary greatly depending on the context and the actor. It then examines the cross-purposes of these multiple discourses in light of media ownership and political patronage in Turkey, and with regard to national identity in the international media.

Downtown Cairo, the longtime hub of the city’s bookstores, art galleries, music venues, and cafés, became the focal site of political art and protest performance in 2011 and 2012. At this time, an Egyptian cultural operator capitalized on the renewed attention local arts were receiving internationally, and founded the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF), including plays, concerts, and art exhibits by both Egyptian and visiting European artists. This paper analyzes the festivalization in D-CAF of downtown as an arts destination, where it had been an arts milieu. Inviting foreign performers to participate was one means of festivalizing the urban space as a stage. Moreover, D-CAF sold mid-priced tickets for performances (in contrast to the free monthly arts festival al-fann midan) and emphasized high production values, departing from the reputation of downtown’s arts venues as places for amateurs and rising artists. Thus, the festival invested in art, theatre, and music, as cultural products to be appreciated independently of social and political context. D-CAF’s website stated that the festival aimed to attract culturally sophisticated audiences from around the world, in addition to Egyptian audiences who might not otherwise frequent avant-gardist and low-budget arts offerings downtown. What were the implications of arts tourism for downtown’s economy, struggling from a loss of tourist dollars since the revolution? And how did festivalization reorient the practice of art and cultural production for Egyptian participants in D-CAF? This paper will be based on field research at the second edition of D-CAF, in April 2013, as well as textual research and interviews on the inaugural festival in 2012. A working hypothesis is that the festival’s spotlight on downtown as cosmopolitan, creative space (echoing Egyptian literary works, e.g. The Yacoubian Building) sidelines the use of arts in political struggle and represents them instead as means of rising above national identity politics toward global values, thus inviting local and foreign visitors to celebrate the creativity of contemporary artists as part of a cultural heritage. At a time when Egyptian artists feared the imposition of constraints upon their work by Islamist politicians, the festival was part of a range of efforts to elevate art above politics.