This paper examines the tense communal politics of Egypt’s Coptic community in the later years of the liberal era and early Republic as a study on the impact of changes in a state political system on minority institutions. In the 1940s, as faith in the national political sphere as a functional and inclusive system dwindled, Coptic elites increasingly turned their focus to communal affairs as an arena for political life. The result was a period of heightened tensions within the community, culminating in the dramatic unseating of Pope Yusab II. My research will explore the major topics of communal contestation during this often-overlooked period, investigating how debates were framed and argued in the Coptic press, with particular focus on the power struggles that occurred between communal institutions. Based on these sources, I argue that the strife of this period stemmed from the shift of political energy from the national to the communal, which ushered in a distinct period of communal contestation and a reconfiguration of institutional structures and power dynamics within the community. With their renewed interest in communal affairs, the politically active Coptic elite began to re-envision the communal sphere on political terms, utilizing the rhetoric of democracy and governance to challenge clerical authority. What had once been the Church’s uncontested realm of sacred authority became open for contestation on secular terms, leading to a struggle of legitimacy between the will of God and the will of the people. The politicization of communal affairs however proved a double-edged sword for the Coptic elite, as a new generation of Coptic youth, marginalized by the secular leadership and blocked from ecclesiastical mobility by the church hierarchy, began to challenge the exclusive structures of communal institutions. In the new context of communal contestation, these factions used debates over papal character, awqaf management, and the powers of the Coptic Lay Council as their battleground over the future of the Coptic sphere. For the Egyptian context, this study serves to highlight the communal forces that led to the Church-dominated Coptic political sphere after 1956, as well as the new generation of Coptic voices that would come to shape the institution in future decades. On wider terms, my arguments uncover how developments in state politics not only impact minority interest in communal affairs, but contribute to frameworks for how these affairs are contested.

This paper explores the history of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological development, periodizing it into the organization's formative period and two following generations. Using this framework, it describes how the formative period influenced the second and third generations and how the discourse between various factions within each generation of the Brotherhood resulted in a new trajectory for each subsequent generation. In order to do so, this paper compares and contrasts the views of Ḥasan al-Bannā, the founder of the organization, to those of his first three successors: Sayyid Quṭb, who succeeded al-Bannā as the organization’s chief ideologue as well as Ḥasan al-Huḍeibī and ‘Umar al-Tilmisānī, the second and third murshids (General Guides). The main points of comparison are the four men’s views on three key issues related to their understanding of the so-called “Islamic state,” the way of establishing it, and their understanding of sharia. For this comparison, the paper uses the original Arabic versions of al-Bannā, Quṭb and al-Huḍeibī’s writings. As for ‘Umar al-Tilmisānī, it relies mainly on two lengthy newspaper interviews in which he discussed issues related to these three points. The paper also makes use of the writings of the former Muslim Brotherhood senior official ‘Abd al-Munʻim Abū al-Futūḥ who published his “testimony” on the evolution of the Islamist movement in Egypt. The paper argues that the changes in the Muslim Brotherhood ideology under Nasser and Sadat’s regimes had their roots in ambiguities in al-Bannā’s teachings. Both radicals and gradualists found models for their respective political behavior in al-Bannā’s rhetoric and leadership. In addition, the paper argues that the Muslim Brotherhood's complex relationship with the state throughout its history has driven many of its ideological shifts, oscillating between moderation and radicalization based two main variables: the type of the Egyptian regime under which the Muslim Brotherhood operated and the strategic adaptation of the organization’s leadership to the changing political circumstances.

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, large quantities of Turkish opiates flowed across the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, triggering an unprecedented heroin epidemic that swept through the society and claimed nearly four percent of the Egyptian population as addicts. While historians generally attribute interwar Egypt’s precipitous increase in heroin consumption to external sources, such as foreign narcotics traffickers, the British occupation, and the remnants of Ottoman capitulatory agreements in the Egyptian legal system, their analysis largely overlooks the influence that Egyptians themselves exerted over the country’s illicit opiate economy. During this period, Egyptian smugglers, merchants, dealers, and consumers played the dominant role in disseminating opiates throughout the country, which left local government officials, police officers, and the emerging professional class scrambling to address the ensuing epidemic. Drawing on Egyptian police records, memoirs, and periodicals, my research will examine the complex networks of opiate traffickers, distributors, consumers, bureaucrats, and law enforcement agents in order to highlight how they promoted and policed the interwar heroin epidemic. I contend that Egyptians, by participating in the opiate trade, formed profitable networks that helped relieve local economic pressures resulting from the Great Depression, which devastated the national cotton economy and, with it, the Egyptian middle class. While the interwar opiate trade generated considerable illicit economic activity, the government response to the subsequent heroin epidemic created opportunities for Egyptian bureaucrats and politicians to overcome the stringent fiscal austerity of the semi-colonial Egyptian state, build enforcement institutions like the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, and provide public health services such as treatment for drug addiction. Although inherently at odds, these local criminal networks and newly established government institutions grew symbiotically and together shaped the trajectory of Egyptian state development in the early twentieth century.

Dreams of alternative modernities on the Nile This paper studies how Egyptian filmmakers operating during 1919-1952 were able to carve a space for their art and profession under overt and covert censorship regimes. Under overt censorship, I draw on archival material to study the positions of the British colonial authority and the Egyptian colonized state on film as a "modern" medium of cultural expression. Under covert censorship, I study societal and religious discourses that proscribed film as an art and profession, thereby deeming the new medium of expression incompatible with the “standards"(thaw?bit) of a majority Muslim society. I draw on a collection of Islamic legal opinions (fatwas) to deconstruct the narrative of prohibitions of film as a reprehensible form of figurative representation (ta?w?r), a reprehensible entertainment (lahw), and reprehensible innovation (bid’a). In addition, I show the limitations of Islamic legal opinions that tolerate film by relying on the Islamic legal concept of public welfare (ma?la?a). I argue that Egyptian filmmakers, who witnessed the 1919 revolution with its limited success in installing a functional constitutional democracy in Egypt, found in cinema a powerful new communication medium that could be used to break the tight circles of covert and overt censorship. Filmmakers used the screen to construct a public sphere, where they imagined an alternative modernity characterized by a secularizing society— but not anti-religious-society--in which people enjoyed surprising levels of social liberties and social justice for the time period. I am not suggesting here that film was a substitute for a physical public sphere such as public houses. Rather, I aim to show how cinema was an amplifier for the unheard vernacular voices of the marginalized within that wider public sphere fostered by print-capitalism that included newspapers dominated by modern standard Arabic. In my research I have found that the two major characteristics of that cinematic counter-discourse were, first, to lampoon the Cairene bourgeois reductionist understanding of modernity, which reduced “being-modern” in Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s to “appearing-modern” without “acting-modern.” The second characteristic was to position individuals from marginalized social groups such as working class Egyptians (awl?d il-balad), the peasants (fall???n), women and performing artists at the center—not on the margins- of that public sphere, in which Islam was depicted as a substratum of the everyday life practices of film characters, who adapted Islam to their common good.