Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Dramaturgies of Conspiracy: Bakathir, Idris and the July Regime
- 2 Naguib Surur: The Poetics and Politics of Niyāka
- 3 Sonallah Ibrahim’s al-Lajna: Between Critical Theory and Conspiracy Theory
- 4 Gamal al-Ghitani’s Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa: The Fitna of Sexual Deviance
- 5 Paranoia in the Second Degree: Three Recent Novels
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Dramaturgies of Conspiracy: Bakathir, Idris and the July Regime
- 2 Naguib Surur: The Poetics and Politics of Niyāka
- 3 Sonallah Ibrahim’s al-Lajna: Between Critical Theory and Conspiracy Theory
- 4 Gamal al-Ghitani’s Ḥikāyāt al-Khabīʾa: The Fitna of Sexual Deviance
- 5 Paranoia in the Second Degree: Three Recent Novels
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
To review the uses and acceptations of the idea of plot in revolutionary ideology would be an unending task, for it was truly a central and polymorphous notion that served as a reference point for organizing and interpreting action. It was the notion that mobilised men's convictions and beliefs, and made it possible at every point to elaborate an interpretation and justification of what had happened … Above all, it was marvelously suited to the workings of revolutionary consciousness … Like the Revolution, [the plot] was abstract, omnipresent and pregnant with new developments; but it was secret whereas the Revolution was public, perverse whereas the Revolution was beneficial, nefarious whereas the Revolution brought happiness to society. It was its negative, its reverse, its anti-principle.
Historian François Furet speaks here of the French Revolution, although his words may also serve as an apt description of national political discourse in Egypt since 25 January 2011. Like France in the late eighteenth-century, Egypt in recent years has, by many accounts, witnessed a veritable explosion of conspiracy theorising by both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary voices, as well as those who belong to neither of these two currents. Although this is not the place for an extended comparison, we may note, as an aside, some of the eerie textual correspondences between the two revolutions: rumours of brigands and balṭagiyya, of kidnapped children and abducted Muslim girls, of the death of the king and the death of the president, of foreign invasion and neocolonial plots. As in the French case, too, ‘conspiracy’ in Egypt has meant many different things to different people, and provoked a range of emotional, indeed artistic reactions and counter-reactions that has been neither monolithic, nor entirely predictable.
A beautiful synthesis of some of these conflicting perspectives on conspiracy theory is offered in the two-part autobiography of novelist Radwa Ashour (Raḍwā ʿĀshūr) (1946–2014). Athqal min Raḍwā (Heavier than Radwa) (2013) and al-Ṣarkha (The Scream) (2015), Ashour's final published books, interweave vivid reflections on the advances and setbacks of the Revolution with sober descriptions of her battle with cancer. Conspiracy theory is not the primary focus of these two books, but operates as one especially charged node of emotive, literary, and political meanings. Her first remarks on the topic are defensive.
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- Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature , pp. 170 - 173Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018