DI/VISIONS. Culture and Politics of the Middle East - texts

Market and Religion in Egypt by Mona Abaza

"Egyptian society seems to evidence a paradoxical phenomenon in the relationship between religion and market. Observers argue that the growing Islamization of the whole society was first instigated by the Sadat government to counteract the secular and communist tendencies. Later, when the Islamic movement expanded, the regime perpetuated a strategy of islamization from the top to counteract the underground Islamic protest movements..." more...

The politics of presence by Asef Bayat

"Congruence between Islam and democracy is not simply a philosophical issue, but a political one. It is a matter of struggle. The pertinent question is not whether Islam and democracy are compatible, but rather how and under what conditions Muslims can make their religion compatible with desired notions of democracy; how they can legitimize and popularize and inclusive reading of their doctrine in the same way democrats have been struggling to broaden narrow (white, male, propertied, and merely liberal) notions of democracy..." more...

Egypt's Culture Wars by Samia Mehrez

"The Mubarak era has witnessed the Egyptian state’s renewed active involvement in the cultural field if compared to late President Sadat’s marginaliztion of the field and its actors. Control of the cultural field has been the state’s consistent strategy in countering the rising influence of the Islamist movement and groups (a legacy of the Sadat policies) as well as the more amorphous and deeply rooted “Islamic Trend,” to use Gregory Starrett’s formulation to describe how civil society and public space have been penetrated by the discourses of religion through the school, the media, and the market..." more...

The negation of exile by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin

"In Israel, the negation of exile is the central concept behind the major characteristics of consciousness, the conception of history, collective memory, and politics. This concept should be considered in the context of its corollary, ‘the return to history’, as claimed by the ‘Zionist enterprise’. These two concepts are not identical, but they combine with and complement one another in defining the self-perception of Zionism and the State of Israel..." more...