This book examines a key question through the lens of popular culture: Why did the Egyptian people opt to elect in June 2014 a new president (Abdel Fattah al-Sisi), who hails from the military establishment, after toppling a previous military dictator (Hosni Mubarak) with the breakout of the 25 January 2011 Revolution? In order to dissect this question, the author considers the complexity of the relationship between the Egyptian people and their national army, and how popular cultural products play a pivotal role in reinforcing or subverting this relationship. The author takes the reader on a ‘journey’ through crucial historical and political events in Egypt whilst focusing on multi-layered representations of the ‘military figure’ (the military leader, the heroic soldier, the freedom fighter, the conscript, the martyred soldier, and the Intelligence officer) in a wide range of popular works in literature, film, song, TV drama series, and graffiti art. Mostafa argues that the realm of popular culture in Egypt serves as the ‘blood veins’ which feed the nation’s perception of its Armed Forces.

A biography of the "Cinderella" of Egyptian cinema—the veneration and rumors that surrounded an unparalleled career, and the gendered questions that unsettled Egyptian society. Layla Murad (1918-1995) was once the highest-paid star in Egypt, and her movies were among the top-grossing in the box office. She starred in 28 films, nearly all now classics in Arab musical cinema. In 1955 she was forced to stop acting—and struggled for decades for a comeback. Today, even decades after her death, public interest in her life continues, and new generations of Egyptians still love her work. Unknown Past recounts Murad's extraordinary life—and the rapid political and sociocultural changes she witnessed. Hanan Hammad writes a story centered on Layla Murad's persona and legacy, and broadly framed around a gendered history of twentieth-century Egypt. Murad was a Jew who converted to Islam in the shadow of the first Arab-Israeli war. Her career blossomed under the Egyptian monarchy and later gave a singing voice to the Free Officers and the 1952 Revolution. The definitive end of her cinematic career came under Nasser on the eve of the 1956 Suez War. Egyptians have long told their national story through interpretations of Murad's life, intertwining the individual and Egyptian state and society to better understand Egyptian identity. As Unknown Past recounts, there's no life better than Murad's to reflect the tumultuous changes experienced over the dramatic decades of the mid-twentieth century.

This book comes at a time when the Egyptian nation is facing deep divisions about the notion and definition of ‘revolution’. The articles here aim to look at the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and the central role of women within it from a critical perspective. Our objective is not to glorify the revolution or inflate the role of Egyptian women within its parameters, but to analyse and critique both the achievements and setbacks of this revolution and the contributions of various strata of women to the revolutionary process, which is still unfolding. Women’s participation is part of a broader picture and needs to be considered as an essential element of the ongoing struggle for freedom and social justice, not in isolation of it. The reader will soon realise that the authors in this book, perhaps, agree on one profound aspect of the 2011 Revolution: the struggle is ongoing, and the revolutionary process is still being shaped and recreated. The story of the Egyptian Revolution still resists any kind of closure despite the ascendance of the military regime once again to power. The years to come will no doubt witness an expansion of the political and cultural archive of the Egyptian and Arab uprisings, accompanied by much academic work on their impact and significance. Women’s roles and contributions need to occupy a central position in these academic analyses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

For citizenship education in the 21st century, globalization increasingly presents a new challenge and a new opportunity. Since the time when nationalism played a critical role in unifying new nations, nationality and citizenship have been virtually synonymous terms. As a result, the constructed symbiosis of citizenship and national identity has influenced state supported citizenship education in the most profound way. School curricula, particularly in public schools, produced and reinforced the dominant version of citizenship, which is national citizenship. Schools were expected to prepare future loyal citizens who would identify themselves with the nation. Due to the changing nature and scope of human interactions, the traditional model of citizenship education, however, appears increasingly outdated and deficient to address many contemporary challenges. Thus, schools have become a locus of a potential conflict of two citizenship discourses: the discourse of national citizenship that for a long time has served as the ultimate purpose of public education and the discourse of global citizenship that is forcefully and continuously seeking for a proper place in school curricula despite the lack of curricular heritage. The need for an education for citizenship that has a global scope and is guided by critical and emancipatory approaches becomes more evident. At the same time, the pressure to globalize and internationalize curriculum actively challenges such concepts as patriotism, national identity, loyalty to the state, or national uniqueness of government and democratic development that have been fundamental for citizenship and civic education for decades. In this book, a group of international scholars present their research about the dynamic development, interplay, and interconnectedness of two major discourses in citizenship education, namely national and global. Case studies and ethnographies from China, Cyprus, Egypt, Hong Kong and Singapore, Lebanon, Liberia, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States display a multifaceted but yet comprehensive picture of educators’ attempts to promote social justice, global awareness, and multiple loyalties. The volume will appeal to several constituencies: it will be interesting to teachers and teacher educators whose focus of instruction is citizenship education, social studies education, and global education; it will also be interesting to scholars who conduct research in citizenship and global education.

This book in the Stellenbosch Handbooks in African Constitutional Law series provides a critical analysis of existing paradigms, concepts, and normative ideologies of modern African constitutional identity.

A multivocal account of why Egypt's defeated revolution remains a watershed in the country's political history. Bread and Freedom offers a new account of Egypt's 2011 revolutionary mobilization, based on a documentary record hidden in plain sight—party manifestos, military communiqués, open letters, constitutional contentions, protest slogans, parliamentary debates, and court decisions. A rich trove of political arguments, the sources reveal a range of actors vying over the fundamental question in politics: who holds ultimate political authority. The revolution's tangled events engaged competing claims to sovereignty made by insurgent forces and entrenched interests alike, a vital contest that was terminated by the 2013 military coup and its aftermath. Now a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, Mona El-Ghobashy rethinks how we study revolutions, looking past causes and consequences to train our sights on the collisions of revolutionary politics. She moves beyond the simple judgments that once celebrated Egypt's revolution as an awe-inspiring irruption of people power or now label it a tragic failure. Revisiting the revolutionary interregnum of 2011–2013, Bread and Freedom takes seriously the political conflicts that developed after the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, an eventful thirty months when it was impossible to rule Egypt without the Egyptians.

New media and its enormous diffusion in the last decades of the 20th century and up to the present has greatly increased and diversified the reception of Egyptian themes and motifs and Egyptian influence in various cultural spheres. This book seeks to provide new evidence of this interdisciplinarity between Egyptology and popular culture.

The essays in this Oxford Handbook rethink the modern history of one of the most important and influential countries in the Middle East--Egypt. For a country and region so often understood in terms of religion and violence, this work explores environmental, medical, legal, cultural, and political histories. It gives readers an excellent view of the current debates in Egyptian history.

Mass Communication in the Modern Arab World: Ongoing Agents of Change following the Arab Spring introduces, explains, and explores how unceasing growth of media and communication technologies has acted as an ongoing agent of change in the modern Arab world Each contributed chapter provides evidence of mass communication’s potential to transform society, culture, politics, economies and development in a region where expectations of media and communication are higher than those of the Western world. Studying these media platforms and communication channels and their relationship to governments and other social and religious institutions reveals how an area of over 400 million people has seen both good and bad of transformations from the global communication wave. Case studies of media formats and practices specific to the region illuminate cultural and political factors that impact the growth of media and allow it to positively contribute to all-encompassing democratization in the region. List of Contributors: Azza A. Ahmed, Mohammad Ayish, Tayeb Boutbouqatl, Aliaa Dawoud, Khaled S. Gaweesh, Ahmed El Gody, Kamal Hamidou, Fran Hassencahl,Tara Al-Kadi, Kyung Sun Lee, Deanna Loew, Noha Mellor, Hesham Mesbah, Meriem Narimane Noumeur, Saddek Rabah, Abeer Salem, Hend El-Taher, Leonard Ray Teel, Oshane Thorpe, Karin Wilkins, and Inas Abou Youssef

Egypt's film industry is the largest in the Middle East, with an output that spreads across the region and the world. In the run-up to and throughout the 2011 Revolution, a complex relationship formed between the industry and the people's uprising. Both a form of political expression and a documentation of historical events, 'revolutionary' film techniques have contributed to the cultural memory of 2011. At the same time, these films and their makers have been the target of increasing state control and intervention. Ahmed Ghazal, drawing upon his own background in film-making, looks at the way in which Egyptian film has shaped, and been shaped by, the events leading up to and beyond Egypt's 2011 revolution. Drawing on interviews with protagonists in the industry, analysis of films, and archival research, he analyses the critical issues affecting the political economy of the industry. He also explores the technological developments of independent productions and the cinematic themes of dictatorship, poverty, corruption and police brutality that have accompanied the people's calls for freedom - and the counterrevolution that has tried to suppress them.