Amira Mittermaier

THE BOOK OF VISIONS: DREAMS, POETRY, AND PROPHECY IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPT

It was a warm November night in 2003 when I first heard about the Book of Visions. Shaykh al-Qusi and his followers were holding a Ramadan gathering on a large parking lot in one of Cairos more affluent neighborhoods. Next to me at the gathering sat a middle-aged, wealthy Sudanese woman who was wearing an elegant green silk veil and many golden bracelets. She was visiting from Australia to spend the month of fasting in Cairo, close to her spiritual teacher. The woman had been among Shaykh al-Qusis followers for many years. I, in contrast, had met him only recently but was already intrigued by his charismatic aura, his cosmopolitan demeanor, his habit of smoking Marlboros while talking casually about the saints as if they were his next-door neighbors, and, finally, his own saintlike status.

Death and Martyrdom in the Arab Uprisings: An Introduction

ABSTRACT Death lies at the beginning of the Arab uprisings and continues to haunt them. Most narratives about the ‘Arab Spring’ begin with Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit vendor who set himself on fire. Egyptian protesters in turn referred to Khaled Said, a young man from Alexandria whom the police had beaten to death. This special issue places death at the centre of its engagement with the Arab uprisings, counterrevolutions, and their aftermaths. It examines martyrdom and commemoration as performative acts through which death and life are infused with meaning. Conversely, it shows how, in the making, remembering, and erasing of martyrs, hierarchies are (re)produced and possible futures are foreclosed. We argue that critical anthropological engagement with death, martyrdom, and afterlife is indispensable if we want to understand the making of pasts and futures in a revolutionary present.

Invisible Armies: Reflections on Egyptian Dreams of War

In January 2011, people around the world turned their attention to Cairos Tahrir Square. The news network al-Jazeera quickly became a window onto the square and surrounding streets, and news reporters became eyewitnesses to historical events. Aware of the media spectacle unfolding around them, Egyptian protesters over the following weeks held up signs in Arabic and English and, maybe unknowingly, staged highly photogenic scenes, for instance when Christians formed a human chain to guard Muslims during their prayers, and vice versa. During the first few days of the uprising, the regime shut down cell phone and Internet networks to prevent activists from communicating, but it could not stop their taking pictures and filming with cell phones and cameras. Every moment was carefully recorded, and today multiple initiatives are collecting films, photos, and audio recordings to preserve them in digital archives. In July 2011, activists set up an open-air cinema at Tahrir Square to screen and discuss footage of the protests. Subsequently video materials became crucial pieces of evidence in the courtroom where the former President Mubarak and ex-Interior Minister Adly were being tried. The Egyptian revolution was a highly visible and “mediatized” event. Its history can and has been told in images.

Muslim Prayer on Picture Postcards of French Algeria, 1900–1960

Abstract From 1900 to 1960 French soldiers and visitors to North Africa sent home striking postcards showing Muslims in prayer. As inscribed objects they linked separated family and friends, and were collected, compiled and stored. Based on 2500 of these cards offered on an Internet auction site, this study examines the senders, the receivers, and the attitudes to the prayers in the messages. The latter range from indifference, apprehension, and ridicule to respect and a profound fascination that points to a desire to imagine a shared humanity (“union in prayer”). Like the widely popular Angelus images in France at the time, the Muslim prayer images fed a sustained interest in piety in the natural, public space and offered a visual counterpoint to France’s emergent secularism.

How to do things with examples: Sufis, dreams, and anthropology

In this paper I explore how members of a Sufi community in Egypt use dream-stories as examples to evoke an otherwise invisible realm, and how I, in turn, use their stories ethnographically. My Sufi interlocutors use examples to invite others into the realm of the imagination, to draw listeners into the shaykhs spiritual aura, and to offer a model for emulation that sometimes triggers similar experiences in others. Their approach to examples poses a challenge to the logic of representation, in which a particular stands in for a larger whole. Instead it points to an evocative logic in which examples do not merely represent; they also do things. Whereas ethnographic examples tend to oscillate between representation and evocation, referential language ideologies largely obscure the examples evocative power. I suggest that my interlocutors’ use of, and approach to, examples can help us think about the example as evocative and performative, including the ways in which examples act upon and through anthropologists. Comment faire les choses avec des exemples : soufis, reves et anthropologie Resume Le present article explore la maniere dont les membres d’une communaute soufie egyptienne utilisent les recits de reves comme exemples pour evoquer un royaume invisible par ailleurs, et comment l’auteure, a son tour, utilise ces recits a des fins ethnographiques. Ses interlocuteurs soufis utilisent des exemples pour inviter les autres dans le royaume de l’imagination, pour attirer les auditeurs dans l’aura spirituelle du sheikh et pour offrir un modele a imiter qui declenche parfois des experiences similaires chez les autres. Leur approche des exemples est un defi a la logique de la representation selon laquelle un element particulier represente un tout plus grand. Au lieu de cela, elle suggere une logique de l’evocation, dans laquelle les exemples non seulement representent, mais aussi font les choses. Alors que les exemples ethnographiques oscillent souvent entre representation et evocation, les ideologies du langage referentiel occultent largement le pouvoir evocateur de l’exemple. L’auteure suggere que l’utilisation des exemples par ses interlocuteurs et leur approche de ceux-ci peuvent nous aider a envisager l’exemple comme evocateur et performatif, notamment dans la maniere dont il agit sur et a travers les anthropologues.