The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt

By Samuli Schielke

Mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim "friends of God," have been part of Muslim religious and cultural life for close to a thousand years. While many Egyptians see mulids as an expression of joy and love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, many others see them as opposed to Islam, a sign of a backward mentality, a piece of folklore at best. What is it about a mulid that makes it a threat to Islam and modernity in the eyes of some, and an indication of pious devotion in the eyes of others? What makes the celebration of a saint’s festival appear in such dramatically different contours? The Perils of Joy offers a rich investigation, both historical and ethnographic, of conflicting and transforming attitudes toward festivals in contemporary Egypt.

Schielke argues that mulids are characterized by a utopian momentum of the extraordinary that troubles the grand schemes of order and perfection that have become hegemonic in Egypt since the twentieth century. Not an opposition between state and civil society, nor a division between Islamists and secularists, but rather the competition between different perceptions of what makes up a complete life forms the central line of conflict in the contestation of festive culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9780815651918

Samuli Schielke

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research interests include Islam, festive culture, subjectivity and morality, and migration and aspiration in Egypt.

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The Perils of Joy

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The Perils of Joy

Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt

Samuli Schielke

SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 by Syracuse University Press

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First Edition 2012

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3300-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schielke, Joska Samuli.

The perils of joy : contesting mulid festivals in contemporary Egypt / Samuli Schielke.

p. cm. — (Contemporary issues in the Middle East)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3300-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mawlid al-Nabi—Egypt. 2. Fasts and feasts—Islam. I. Title.

BP186.34.S35 2012

297.3’6—dc232012033974

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Fathi ‘Abd al-Sami‘, who gave me the best ideas and whose book on repression and joy I keep looking forward to

Samuli Schielke was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1972. He received his PhD in 2006 from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a research fellow at Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, where he directs the junior research group on the project In Search of Europe: Considering the Possible in Africa and the Middle East. He also teaches visual anthropology and social and cultural anthropology as an external lecturer at the Free University of Berlin.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. Introduction

2. At the Mulid

3. Festive Experiences

4. Against Ambivalence

5. An Other of Modern Egypt

6. A Cultural Icon

7. Legitimizing Celebration

8. Transformations

9. Conclusion: A Complete Life

GLOSSARY OF ARABIC TERMS

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

1. Tents of Sufi gatherings and vendors’ stands in the Sigar fields

2. Crowds in front of the mosque at the mulid of al-Sayyida Nafisa

3. The shrine of al-Sayyida Fatima al-Nabawiya

4. Opening procession of the mulid of al-Sayyida Fatima al-Nabawiya

5. The khidma of Sheikh Hasan at the mulid of al-Sayyida Fatima al-Nabawiya

6. An ecstatic dhikr led by a munshid and a band

7. The gathering of Sheikh Hasan

8. Serving cinnamon tea as a service for God

9. Amusements in al-Tabbana Street

10. Young men dancing at the side of a Sufi dhikr

11. Cairo Puppet Theatre performs The Great Night

12. Orchestra and choir performance at the mulid of Imam Abu l-‘Aza’im

13. Poster at a music store portraying Sheikh Yasin at-Tuhami

14. Sheikh Yasin concert at the mulid of al-Sultan al-Farghal

15. Sheikh Yasin Ramadan concert at the Bayt al-Harawi cultural center

16. Temporary tent city in the Sigar fields at the mulid of al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi

17. Sidi ‘Abd al-Rahim Square in Qina after the restructuring

18. Sidi ‘Abd al-Rahim Square in Qina during the mulid in 2002

19. Mural representing the mulid on Sidi ‘Abd al-Rahim Square

Preface

This book presents the fruits of nearly fifteen years of research in and about the festive culture of mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim friends of God—or saints, a cruder translation. These years began in 1997, when I was spending half a year as a student in Cairo to learn colloquial Arabic, and friends took me to see the festival of al-Sayyida Zaynab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad believed to be buried in a Cairo quarter named after her. The crowds, the atmosphere, the colors, and, perhaps most of all, the music of the festival immediately drew my attention, but what I found most striking was the degree to which many Egyptians were seriously annoyed and troubled by something that I found simply striking and beautiful.

This sense of annoyance, expressed in the press and other media, eventually became the topic of my magister thesis in Islamic studies, an undertaking that made me aware of the limitations of the inquiry I had undertaken: I could say a great deal about strategies of argumentation in a public debate, but I still knew near to nothing about mulids and their place in Egyptian society. This sense that there was much more to know was the starting point of years of ethnographic and literary research. They started at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden in 2001. In the course of four years of research and fieldwork, I came to see almost everything about the topic differently, and I switched disciplines from Islamic studies to anthropology. By 2005, I submitted a PhD thesis that looked at the contestation of different forms of power, with the festive order of mulids as their crystallization point. This proudly Foucauldian approach focused on the intersections of discourse, governmentality, and power.

Six years later, as I am finishing the work on the manuscript for this book, I have to admit a dilemma. Fifteen years are a long time, especially if they are the years of one’s academic formation. I have changed my mind about key theoretical issues more than once, including the use of a Foucauldian approach that takes discursive, relational power as the key to understanding social reality. Today, I grant more importance to the experiential side of festivity and the phenomenology of festive time and space; and I think that there is need to look more closely at the lives of the people involved to balance the focus on power and discourse that marked the earlier stages of my fieldwork.

The outcome is a layered book that approaches its theme and argues about it from different perspectives, looking at the shifting discourses on religion and society, at the margins and others of modern power and urban planning, and at the experience and consequences of festive time as a part of a complete life. The reader will find a Foucauldian approach on the discursive construction of the social world through a century-long contestation side by side with a phenomenological approach on the festival as something that by virtue of its material and sensual shape does something to the world and our ways of being in it. Such ambiguity, I think, is not only inevitable: it is in fact necessary. Festive culture, I argue in this book, is inherently ambivalent, resisting to be reduced to any single purpose, meaning or explanation—and a successful theory of festive culture should not be too straightforward either.

Acknowledgments

For this book, I owe so much to so many people that there is no way I can give all of them the credit they deserve. I thank Harri Juntunen and Essam Fawzi for initial inspiration and professor Stefan Wild, supervisor of my master’s thesis, for his support and assistance. I owe special thanks to my PhD supervisor Annelies Moors, who was always there to provide good advice when problems or questions arose and gave me both the structure and the freedom I needed for my research. I am grateful to the researchers and staff of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden for an inspiring research environment and to the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo for supporting my fieldwork. My employers after 2006—the University of Mainz, the University of Joensuu, and Zentrum Moderner Orient—generously allowed me the time to work on this book while I was involved in new research projects.

During my fieldwork in Egypt, I became especially indebted to Sheikh Hasan from Cairo; al-Hagga Riham and her family and followers from Alexandria; Ashraf and his family from Kafr al-Zayyat; the splendid craftsmen ‘Abdallah, Sayyid, and Zaynhum from Khalifa in Cairo; Sheikh ‘Ali Abu Nabbut from Asyout; Sheikh ‘Abdallah from Idfu; Mustafa Wafi of Cairo; and the entire Shehata family from Mutubis, who offered me their hospitality, help, and ideas at different times. As I did the research, wrote, and rewrote, so many people offered me materials, ideas, criticism, and suggestions that only few of them can be mentioned. I owe the greatest but not exclusive thanks to Amira al-Tahawi, Omnia Mehanna, Fathi ‘Abd al-Sami‘, Dr. Mungid, Brigadier-General S., Niek Biegman, Wendy Dunleavy, Anna Madoeuf, Delphine Pagès el-Karoui, Jennifer Peterson, Philipp Reichmuth, Kevin Eisenstadt, Dorothea Schulz, Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Georg Stauth, and Patrick Desplat. I am grateful to Syracuse University Press’s series editor Mary Selden Evans, the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism of the manuscript, and Doreen Teumer, Saboura Beutel, and Annie Barva for their assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript.

Daniela Swarowsky, my perfect better half, stood by my side throughout much of this work. And for the first and most important assistance and insights that made my research possible, my mother and father supported me in good and bad times and taught me to be open-minded, to question seemingly evident truths, and to have respect for all people. Thanks to all of these people, writing this book has been great fun!

The Perils of Joy

1

Introduction

A Controversy

In July 2009, Egypt’s Ministry of Health issued a ban on all mulids, Muslim and Christian saints’ festivals. The ban first hit the annual festival of al-Sayyida Zaynab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.¹ The festival was disbanded, and people who resisted the ban were arrested. The reason for the ban was the Mexican swine flu epidemic, which had already inspired the Egyptian government to take other drastic measures. For half a year, almost no Muslim saints’ festivals took place in Egypt (Christian festivals were less severely affected, perhaps out of fear that banning them would be interpreted as discrimination in the international media). In spring 2010, as the panic about the epidemic receded, the ban was reversed, and mulid festivals were allowed again, but the question remained: Why ban mulids in particular? After all, other public gatherings were not banned—cinemas, shopping centers, and football (soccer) matches were unaffected. The markets, streets, and public transportation were as crowded as ever. Schools were more affected, but only for the first few weeks of the autumn term. The epidemic alone does not explain why mulids in particular had to be banned.

Large parts of the Egyptian government and the urban middle classes have long viewed mulids, popular streets festivals that combine amusement and ecstatic devotion, with ambivalence, suspicion, and often open hostility. The ban issued on the occasion of the swine flu was only a most recent step in more than a century of contestation in which the joyful festive culture of mulids has come to appear as something problematic and dangerous, something that puts progressive modernity, orthodox Islam, and urban space in peril. That mulids ignite a greater fear of epidemics than cinemas and football matches do is related to this wider sense of peril. The cheerful crowds of a festival have something in them that deeply unsettles some powerful ideas about the modern city as well as about the modern and pious citizen and believer.

Some years earlier, in October 2002, I was traveling around Egypt to attend mulid festivals doing fieldwork. One of the sites was the northern Egyptian city of Disuq. The annual festival in honor of Sidi Ibrahim al-Disuqi, a Muslim mystic who lived in the thirteenth century,² gradually built up steam, attracting larger crowds day by day. Growing streams of pilgrims and visitors crowded the city, and colorful tents, stalls, and carpets filled its squares and streets. But even as an atmosphere of celebration enveloped the city, not everyone was enthusiastic about the approaching festival.

I was traveling in a service taxi to Disuq two days before the final night of the mulid when I witnessed a heated argument about the festival among the passengers. It began as a matter-of-fact discussion between the driver and the passengers about the growing amount of traffic during the mulid but then became more intense when one of the passengers sitting in the front declared in a loud voice: "But of course the mulid means undertaking a pilgrimage [shadd al-rihal], and the Prophet said: ‘Undertaking the pilgrimage is allowed to only three mosques: the mosque of Mecca, al-Aqsa mosque, and my own mosque [in Medina].’"³

Another passenger, sitting in the middle, disagreed: The people go there out of love! They go there saying, ‘There is no deity but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God [the Muslim creed]’!

The man in the front replied, No, they don’t say ‘There is no deity but God’ at all! Ninety percent of the people there don’t even pray! And there is gambling and drugs and prostitution and all that filth!

Well, go to Cairo, check it out, the man in the middle said. You’ll find the same filth. From Nasr City to the Pyramids, from south to north, you’ll find it all there as well! You shouldn’t judge the whole thing [i.e., the mulid] because of some deviations!

And what about the people who stay there on the street and in tents? You see them using the street as a toilet!

Then why won’t the government build them toilets?

The heated discussion then calmed down a little and turned to the qualities and miracles of saints, until a man in the middle row on the right brought it back to mulids again: "But it’s clear that the mulids are all [raises his voice] a bid‘a [an illegitimate innovation in religion]!"

At which the man in the front cried, Bid‘a!

A man sitting on the left echoed him, Bid‘a!

Even the mulid of the Prophet, peace be upon him, inserted a man on the right, "is a bid‘a that has been invented by the people; he is innocent of it."

The driver took his turn: And these things are an invention of the Fatimids.

The man in the middle tried to add his opinion, but he was clearly the minority in this discussion, and thus the talk moved on to other topics.

The men in this service taxi were not alone in their views. Mulid festivals are highly controversial in contemporary Egypt. Although great numbers of Egyptians attend these festivals in honor of saints and describe them in terms of love, spirituality, and joy, a critical view of mulids is widespread in the public sphere and among a significant proportion of the population. What is so striking about this discussion is not so much the fact that some people like or dislike mulids, but rather the passion with which they do so. Critics’ vehement treatment of mulids has nothing of the easy-going statements of taste that people make in regard to movies or food or of the tongue-in-cheek fanaticism that people display when they speak about football. Of course, there are people who simply do not particularly like mulids, be it because of the crowds, the noise, or any other reason. But for the men in the service taxi who criticized the mulid, the festivity is not a matter of taste that one is free to like or dislike. For them, the mulid is a grave issue, indeed, and much more than personal preference is at stake.

What is it about a mulid, then, that bothers them so much? How exactly can celebrating a saint’s festival be a threat to Islam and modernity? Or, to ask the same question from a different perspective, what view of society and religion informs their critical judgment of the mulid? These questions, straightforward though they seem, will lead us to a complex and far-reaching field that concerns much more than the short nights of celebration at the mulid and with a scope much wider than Egypt, the Middle East, or even Islam.

The contested nature of mulids is not unique. Similar festivals take place around the Muslim world, and they have become the focus of similar debates and policies, albeit with varying outcomes. And if we look at Catholic pilgrimages and annual fairs across Europe and Latin America, we encounter some striking parallels. Around the world, fairs have been banned, pilgrimages reorganized, festivals policed, and the public educated about the proper aims and ways of celebration—all in order to contain the potential damage that may result from the festivity and channel the celebrations to a positive purpose. But what exactly might the damage be, and what purpose is aimed at?

In any given celebration, it is easy to point out some possible damage. A country fair can become the site of fights. A family reunion can turn into a family conflict if painful secrets and unspoken tensions are spoken out. A pilgrimage is likely to host a variety of devotional practices that are not approved by religious establishments. A political demonstration can put unwelcome and unexpected pressure on the political system. Any of this damage makes sense only if we think about the wider sense of order that defines things as harmful and purposeful. The problem does not lie in any specific trouble that is likely occur when people come together in celebration, but in the celebration’s relationship with the world of which it is a part. This relationship is referred to in the shorthand notion of purpose. So what about the purpose? It is exceedingly difficult to say what any given festivity’s purpose is or should be. When asking this question, one is likely to get very different answers. Some may argue that the festivity has no purpose at all; others may say that it serves the wrong purpose; others may claim that its true purpose is something different from what many of the participants assume. The question of purpose is far from trivial; it is in fact central. It is central not because festivities have any inherent purpose—in fact, I argue that very often a festivity’s only purpose is festivity itself—but because in the wake of modernity purpose has become a master theory to make sense of society and selfhood across the world.

The question, then, concerns the ordinary world as much as it concerns the moment of festivity. Regarding how some of the men in the service taxi saw mulids as opposed to religion and the order of the modern city, it is not enough to ask where mulids stand vis-à-vis religion and modernity. The voice of the man in defense of the mulid reminds us that, for some, mulids do express the spirit of religion and are a part of the modern city. Neither mulids nor religion nor the modern city and society can be taken as given if we are to understand this controversy. We have to move beyond the functionalist common sense that subordinates the festive to the quotidian, the extraordinary to the ordinary. To do so, I suggest that we follow a clue Italo Calvino offers in his novel Invisible Cities:

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities. In one there is the great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes, the Ferris wheel of spinning cages, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, the big top with the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle. The other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other temporary, and when the period of sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.

And so every year the day comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand their annual itinerary. Here remains the half-Sophronia of the shooting-galleries and the carousels, the shout suspended from the cart of the headlong roller coaster, and it begins to count the months, the days it must wait before the caravan returns and a complete life can begin again.⁴

Although the festival lasts for only a few days, its festive order may not be so fleeting and unreal after all, just as the everyday order of the city and the society may not be so solid and certain after all. The very constitution of the ordinary in its seemingly self-evident solidity is relativized by festive culture. Herein lies the power and attraction of the mulid, and herein lies its potential for controversy. With its temporary but recurring world of the extraordinary, the festival has a magic permanence that can make the everyday look less real at times—and yet neither side is complete in the absence of its other half.

As I have already noted, this uneasy interdependence of the two worlds of festivity and the everyday is in no way specific to Egypt. Festivals that celebrate the extraordinary exist around the world, and the problems they pose to certain modern notions of religion, public order, and morality in different places are not too different from those that the men in the service taxi addressed. A tone of seriousness and a distrust of joy are common to movements of religious and political reform around the world. They are especially pronounced in the Muslim Middle East, where the constitution of the modern society, the religion of Islam, and the modern Muslim subject are associated, even identified, with the tone of stern, purposeful seriousness. There has been a shift—perhaps one of global historical extent—in the way that the everyday half of the city and its citizens are imagined. This shift has turned the festival from a twin half of everyday life without which it is not complete into a potential threat to that life’s order and even to its existence in the eyes of more—and more powerful—people than ever before.

Asef Bayat has argued that even harmless fun poses an essential problem to revolutionary religious and political movements because by virtue of its spontaneous and unpredictable character it threatens to undermine the paradigm that frames their mastery.⁵ Although Bayat rightly points at a crucial tension between joy and fun, on the one hand, and political and religious power, on the other, his analysis of the reasons of the tension falls short of the complex relationship between festivity and power. Considering the strongly festive and humorous tone of the Arab revolutions of 2011, the fear of fun clearly is valid only for some revolutionary movements. In contrast to Bayat, I posit that there is no such thing as harmless fun, nor is fun as such opposed to religious and political power, nor is the zeal of a religious or political movement a decisive factor for the distrust of joy and fun. There are in fact very different forms of joy and fun, as there are very different forms of power. Some go hand in hand, whereas others collide. The contested nature of mulids is based on their specific configuration of festive time, joy, and relationships of power, which in a fundamental way collides with the configuration of subjectivity, habitus, and power on which the projects of modernity and Islamic reform in modern Egypt (and in much of the Muslim world) have been based. The mulid is not a case of fun in opposition to power; it is a case of one form of power against another.

Mulids are a utopian exception to the order of the everyday where everybody is welcome and many things are possible that otherwise would be deemed out of place. It is more than just a particular form of celebration. It implies a vision of religion, society, and the self where such temporary times out of the ordinary are possible and legitimate. And it implies a festive joy for its own sake, with no grand purpose beyond the utopian time of the festival itself. In contrast, many adherents of Islamic reform and secular modernity (who often are the same people) share a strong common sense about the way religion, society, and the subject should be shaped: they should be structured by norms, boundaries, and hierarchies that are valid at all times, are always guided by a clear purpose, and are solemn in tone.

Although this book focuses on a particular festive tradition, mulids, in a particular place, Egypt, the argument I make in the following pages is more general. When people celebrate, organize, oppose, defend, or describe festivals, they express specific visions of society, religion, and the self. This book is about these visions and their production, contestation, and transformations in and around festive practice. Looking at mulids as both a festive practice and a subject of discourse at once, it takes them as a starting point to explore contested meanings of religion, modernity, class, social order, and moral subjectivity. Focusing on the contestation and dynamics of festive culture, it emphasizes the political nature of festivity, exploring how struggles over festive culture are related to struggles over religion and society in general. In other words, this book is about the relationship of festive joy and fun with different regimes of habitus and power that inform the way religiosity is expressed and what its place is in social practice; the spatial, temporal, and bodily structure of moral and civic boundaries; and the significance of these boundaries for the development of a nation as a whole.

At the same time, this book is an attempt to capture a transformation, a specific historical momentum. It is in the nature of transformations that the events involved may develop faster than a book can be written. The Egypt presented in this book is the Egypt of the late years of the Mubarak regime—a time marked by a rising wave of Salafi-style religiosity, neoliberal entrenchment of the economical and the political, great economic pressure, and a repressive and brutal police state. Since the revolution of 2011, Egypt is becoming a different country, and as the everyday order of things will change, so will mulids and their relation to that order. These changes are beyond the scope of my current inquiry, and the reader should resist the temptation to see this book as representative of anything essential and unchanging. As the world continues to change, some of what I discuss may look very different in a few years time, and much of what appears in this book in the present tense may already belong to the past.

Studying Mulids

Mulid is the Egyptian name for a festive tradition that is widespread across the Muslim world. Since the emergence of Sufi orders after the twelfth century, pilgrimages and festivals of Muslim saints or friends of God (awliya’ Allah, which I have opted to translate as saints even at the risk of leveling important differences between Muslim and Christian devotion) have become an important part of Muslim devotion and festive culture. And yet the festivals of Muslim saints have usually been studied with a rather restricted local focus. Such restriction is due in part to the widespread assumption that these festivals are local, pre-Islamic customs, but also in part to the localizing tendency inherent in ethnography. To date there exists no comparative account of Muslim festive traditions in their relation to each other and to other religious traditions. Some good work exists on the Muslim shrines in South Asia⁶ and Egypt and on Shi‘a martyrs and pilgrimages in Syria and Iran, to name just a few examples, but the comparisons are thin at best.⁷ The same applies to the family resemblances between Muslim and Christian saint-day festivals around the Mediterranean.⁸ It is easy to point at the similarities between Christian and Muslim mulids in Egypt, but it is much more difficult to say exactly how these traditions emerged, who has been influenced by whom, and what possible links across the Mediterranean there may have been.⁹ This book also suffers from this illusion of locality. Although mulids are part of a worldwide Sufi tradition in Islam, and although their contestation is equally part of worldwide historical shifts in the wake of colonialism, the focus of my ethnography and analysis is Egypt. Toward the end of the book, I do my best to look beyond the Egyptian horizon, but in the meanwhile the reader should bear in mind the limitations of my inquiry.

The mulids of Egypt have been described and studied often, most commonly in the context of research on Sufism (Islamic mysticism) and popular Islam. Yet our understanding of the complex nature of these festivities and their place in society has remained limited until recently. This limitation has been caused mainly by a long-standing Orientalist definition