Media controversies and the cultural policies of the Morsi government

Abstract

When in June 2013 the cultural production environment mobilized against President Morsi and his minister of culture, this turned out to be a prelude to massive popular demonstrations and the removal of Morsi by the army. But what were the cultural policies of the Morsi government all about? The article traces the cultural policy agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party, and the major controversies they engendered when in power. It argues that Islamization of cultural life may have been a long-term goal, but not a priority in the Morsi government which, on the other hand, at the end of its reign clumsily pursued a policy of “ikhwanization.” Focusing on two controversial films about Egypt’s Jews and Copts, respectively, it discusses revisionist accounts of the minority issue that has emerged after the revolution, and the Morsi government’s position on it.

When in June 2013 Egypt’s cultural producers mobilized against President Morsi and his minister of culture, this turned out to be a prelude to massive popular demonstrations and the removal of Morsi by the army. Cultural figures in Egypt pride themselves that they defended Egyptian culture against the onslaught of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its Islamizing agenda. But what were the cultural policies of the Morsi government all about? The electoral victory of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in January 2012 and the year of the presidency of Muhammad Morsi provide a rare opportunity to study the kind of policies that Islamists of the MB type would pursue while in office. This could also be said of the Egyptian Constitution adopted by a referendum in December 2012, perhaps the most important Islamist Constitutional document for a long time.

While most analyses of the Morsi/MB era have concentrated on their political performance, and their understanding of the state itself, it is also relevant to look at the cultural policy they promised to pursue, the cultural policies they actually undertook, and the political challenges posed by specific high-profile productions of the cultural sector. This article traces the cultural policy agenda of the MB and its FJP, and the major controversies they engendered when in power.

This article, then, is different from the other chapters in this volume in that it is not about revolutionary expression, but about the lack of it, and the search for it. It is about power holders, not revolutionaries—people who for a long time worked hard to reach power, and yet were ill prepared to actually exercise it. Perhaps nowhere is this as clear as when we look at the field of art and culture. This may in part have been due to the antagonism between the cultural establishment and the somewhat dour Islamists. At another level, it may also be that the idea of culture as an instrument to inculcate the right values stood in the way of releasing the Islamists’ own artistic creativity.

Defending Islam with culture

Almost from its establishment in 1928, the early MB embraced cultural production as a pastime for its young male members, and as a tool of da‘wa, or proselytizing. Its weekly magazine, Majallat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun (The Muslim Brotherhood Review), regularly reviewed films and books. In 1934, it established a theater troupe which staged productions on religious themes, such as Battle of Badr, and it ran a well-known men’s choir which in the early 1950s even performed in a famous film, Bilal: The Muezzin of the Prophet. After the suppression of the Brotherhood under the rule of President Nasser (1954–1970), this artistic tradition was never really revived, and the close collaboration of the artistic elites with the state made them targets of Brotherhood criticism, rather than possible partners. With the more recent tasalluf, or Salafization, of parts of the Brotherhood, some members distanced themselves from performing arts altogether, and there were regular discussions of the permissibility of the various art forms. One of those who have engaged in these discussions is the famed Islamist preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (who himself produced a theater play as a young brother in the mid-1940s). To Al-Qaradawi (2002), art is much too important a tool for da‘wa to be left for the enemies of Islam to employ (p. 197). This attitude of having to “defend Islam” against “intellectual aggression” runs deep in the Brotherhood (Sivan, 1985, pp. 14–15).

The Brotherhood was, however, never very enthusiastic about art for its own sake, as an ever-changing expression of human experience. The brothers who endorsed art defended it as an edifying, missionary, and morally uplifting activity and denounced it when it did not work for these aims. Hassan al-Banna himself regularly called for harsher censorship of depraved novels and films (Mitchell, 1969, p. 292). This demand for censorship has continued in the Brotherhood media, and in the parliamentary group since the 1980s, also sometimes with the ever-present argument that films or books were “tarnishing the image of Egypt.”

In the 1990s, a new initiative of “clean cinema” appeared in Egypt, partly inspired by the popular conservative preacher Sheikh Shaarawi who had also succeeded in persuading several well-known actresses to leave the profession (Van Nieuwkerk, 2007, pp. 54–55). Although Egyptian society had long been moving toward a general Islamization of dress and manners, the “dogma” rules of the clean cinema (not depicting unmarried couples alone in a room, etc.) never caught on with the broader audience. The notion of a “clean cinema” was, however, quite attractive to the Brotherhood, as it chimed with its slogans that Islam was the “solution” or the “alternative,” and opened a venue for private initiative.

Defending culture against Islamist abuse

The Brotherhood’s insistence on the defense of Islam and the promotion of specifically Islamic values has never been a priority for the Egyptian film industry. Until 1951, religious themes were banned in films, but in the 1950s and 1960s, a dozen films on religious themes were produced, and religious scenes are of course common (Shafiq, 1998, p. 170–174; Qasim, 1997, p. 67). But this does not amount to much in a film industry which to date has produced more than 3000 films. After decades of neglect, Islam as a faith and a contemporary social and political phenomenon became the theme of some of the most popular films of the 1990s and 2000s. An early and famous example is the film The Terrorist (1994) which was funded by its protagonist and star, Adel Imam. This film, and others that were to follow, can be seen as (sections of) the film industry’s response to the Islamization of Egyptian society (Armbrust, 2002). In these films, the cultural ignorance of the young men who are being manipulated by elder, power-hungry sheikhs is a recurring feature, sometimes seemingly suggesting that a cultural education and cultural consumption would work as an anti-dote to extremism. Other films may explain the attraction of Islam in more understanding terms than an educational or moral deficit on the part of the believer, and many will put forward examples of “good” piety to be contrasted with bad and intolerant piety. Still, this hardly amounts to a promotion or defense of Islam.

Also in the 1990s, Egyptian television dramas, or musalsalat, began to treat the issue of Islamist radicalism and intolerance, after deliberately ignoring the subject of Islam in Egyptian society for years. This, too, can be dated back to 1993–1994 when government forces were battling militant Islamists in the South of the country. But these serials were generally state productions and broadcast on state TV, and they seemed to have been part of a strategy formulated by the minister of information at the time, Safwat Sharif (Abu Lughod, 2005, pp. 165–167).

Yet, on state television, too, more nuanced portrayals of Islamists began to appear in the 2000s, even some which could be seen to support an Islamist identity and ideology. Three serials in the mid-2000s on leading ‘ulama (religious scholars) of the 20th century (al-Maraghi, ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud, al-Sha‘rawi) must be seen as a compromise between an Islamist producer (and protagonist, Hassan Yusuf) and the state producers, in that it bolstered al-Azhar’s claim to be the true representative of Islam in the country, but only by depicting the sheikhs’ unrelenting struggle against the destructive forces of Secularism. In line with traditional ‘ulama biographies (tabaqat), these musalsals underline the moral rectitude of the ‘ulama and their willingness to speak up against power (Skovgaard-Petersen, 2011, p. 281). But they are also up against the cultural elite; Maraghi in the late 1930s against what he considers anti-Islamic plays at Cairo University, related to the Wafd Party, and al-Shaarawi against the cultural elite in the Nasserist 1960s. In the Shaarawi serial, the hero’s “conversion” of the playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim on the latter’s deathbed (still wearing his signature beret, symbol of the Arab left) represents the coming back to Islam of the cultural elite. And perhaps a new formula of accommodation of the cultural elite with a pervasive Islam in society that these ‘ulama actively defended.

As Abu Lughod notes for the 1990s, the musalsalat dealing with religion are often preoccupied with the relationship of Muslims and Copts and keen to portray it as a deep brotherhood sharing Egyptian cultural and national values and sentiments. Even here, though, the ‘ulama musalsalat evince a new attitude of Muslim paternalism. In the Shaarawi serial (episode 13), Sheikh Shaarawi addresses the Copts and the Muslims in his home village explaining how they are threatened by the same Atheist currents, and how the prophet called upon the Muslims to conquer Egypt and take care of its Copts. I shall return to this theme.

The FJP

After the revolution of 25 January 2011, the MB could finally establish its own party in March 2011, and some of its former members of parliament were tasked with writing a foundation document, the party platform. The priority of the project seems to have been to assure other political forces that the Brotherhood would respect party pluralism, but also to underline its political ambition and make swift preparation for elections (which were meant to be held already in the fall). Accordingly, the party platform expresses its support for the revolution and Egypt’s democratic future, and seeks to argue that not only is democracy compatible with Islam, but it is in fact the best political representation of Islamic doctrine (Rohe & Skovgaard-Petersen, 2015). In the chapter on culture, the old inclination to look at culture in defensive terms is still much in evidence, and a basic distinction is upheld between Egyptian culture, which is religious, and foreign culture, which is anti-religious: “The Egyptian culture with its above-mentioned [religious] characteristics forms a hindering wall protecting against the modes of destructive cultural imperialism, the scheming, dissolving playfulness of foreign cultures that does not edify, but corrupts” (FJP Program, Chapter 7, p. 81). While it rejects state interference, it wants the creative sector to agree on a code of honor respecting the religious values at the basis of Egyptian society. This will entail “developing the quality of the Egyptian TV film and drama and cinema film in order for it to play its role in spreading lofty values and prohibiting low works that excite the instincts and lead to crime” (FJP Program, Chapter 7, p. 84).

Immediately after the establishment of the FJP in the spring of 2011, Muslim Brother activists began to set up cultural production companies: a theater troupe named “Teatro Yanayir” (headed by the Islamist playwright Ali al-Gharib), and a film production company named “Rihab” headed by an MB leader, Mohsen Radi (Al-Waziri, 2011). The most senior Islamic scholar and mufti of the Brotherhood, the Azhar professor Abd al-Rahman al-Birr, expressed his support saying that performing arts were permissible, as long as they expressed the nature of the Islamic principles and values: “it is not permissible to film an unveiled women for anyone but her kin” (Badr, 2011).

Finally, in September, a TV station was established, “Misr 25,” like the theater group with a name which paid homage to the revolution on January 25. Although being funded by businessmen from the Brotherhood, the channel insisted that it did not take orders from the organization. It was, however, closer to the Brotherhood than the other Egyptian channels and employed media people with Islamist leanings, thus also providing a platform for Islamist filmmaking and reflection on the arts in the weekly program Fann bi-jadd (Art, Seriously) with the attractive host Hamid Musa who emphasized that art must come from the heart, be serious, and right (Musa, 2012).

In the parliamentary elections of January 2012, the FJP won no less than 235 seats in parliament, just 20 seats from forming an absolute majority. Several other Islamic parties won seats, and the conservative Salafi al-Nour party won 107. There was thus a comfortable majority to pursue Islamist objectives in Parliament, even if the power-holding Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) retained its appointed government. The new Parliament appointed Abd al-Moneim al-Sawy as head of the cultural committee. Al-Sawy who had been a minister in Shafiq’s government and was the owner of a well-known cultural center was not a Muslim Brother. In the few months of its activity, the cultural committee discussed ways of reforming the Ministry of Culture with an aim to decentralize state cultural institutions and transform the ministry from being a producer and censor of cultural productions to be a funder and facilitator of cultural activities (El-Saket, 2012). This was part of work going back till prior to the revolution, but it fitted well with the new demand for freedom and institutional autonomy.

The FJP was not much involved in the work. In the Brotherhood itself, a group was set up by the name of Hawiya (Identity) to protect Egyptian identity by “sanctifying and respecting revelation and prophecy, and the texts and values based on them; strengthening creative values; and supporting collective initiatives that promote national belonging on the basis of the spirit and foundations of Arab and Islamic civilization” (Shoair, 2012). It seems to have emerged with a sense of unease at the aspirations of unlimited creative freedom that followed in the wake of the revolution. “Building up the Egyptian culture and personality” was also an aim of the Salafi Nour party whose members in these months voiced many proposals for cleansing Egyptian culture of foreign cultural products. These ideas, however, were not taken very seriously in the Egyptian parliament.

The main theme of parliamentary work that spring of 2012 was the establishment of a committee to prepare a new Constitution. From the outset, there was severe criticism of the composition of this committee, as it was dominated by Islamists, many of them members of the parliament that appointed them. The lack of representatives from the fields of culture and art probably reflected their low priority in the FJP. A court verdict in June 2012 dissolved the Parliament which had thus only been operative for some 4 months.

Morsi’s year

In that same June of 2012, Muhammad Morsi of the MB was elected president of Egypt, with a small margin of 51.73%. The FJP, and the Islamist current generally, appeared to have lost support. In his inaugural speech, Morsi stroke a conciliatory note, stressing that Egypt was now a modern constitutional state with freedom of the arts: “I assure my respect and my love for the people of creativity, art, culture and media, loyal to Egypt, and all citizens facing up to challenging disabilities” (Morsi, 2012). Morsi’s first government contained many ministers from former governments. Among them was the Minister of Culture, Muhammad Saber Arab, who had been a minister under the SCAF from 2011, and has continued as the Minister of Culture after the military coup of 2013. Saber Arab was a professor of Arab history at al-Azhar University and later director of the General Egyptian Book Organization.

On the occasion of his accession, a hearing was organized by the State-owned publisher Dar al-Hilal on the cultural policies of the MB, where a number of secularist artists criticized the Brotherhood for being antagonistic to art and not having developed their thinking since the 1930s. This was rebutted, mainly by professor Khaled Fahmy who pointed to major developments in the MB thinking on, for example, women and political parties, and to its history of sponsoring art forms such as poetry (ikhwanweb, 2012). With a minister from the former government, and such a defensive strategy on the part of the Brotherhood, it is not surprising that their political ambitions lay elsewhere. During the remainder of 2012, no Islamist initiatives were taken in the field of culture.

Morsi sought to reinvigorate the work on a new constitution and made new appointments to the preparatory committee. Although the committee was less dominated by Islamists, non-Islamists began to withdraw claiming that their opinions were ignored. Fearing a court verdict dissolving the upper chamber of Parliament, in November 2012, Morsi issued a decree to the effect that court rulings could not overrule presidential decrees, and the new constitution was duly passed first in the upper chamber, and then in a referendum on December 15. The Constitution of 2012 ensures freedom of opinion (section 45), freedom of creative activity (section 46), freedom of information (section 47), and freedom of media in general (sections 48 and 49), and only allows for limited censorship in situations of general mobilization and war. However, other paragraphs prohibit the insult or abuse of religious messengers (section 44), and section 11 states in general terms that “the State shall safeguard ethics, public morality and public order, and foster a high level of education and of religious and patriotic values, scientific thinking, Arab culture, and the historical and cultural heritage of the people.”

Morsi’s decree was met with violent protests and galvanized the opposition against him, and throughout the spring of 2013, Morsi and his government were facing opposition, and sometimes obstruction, in various parts of the Egyptian state apparatus. As Nathan Brown (2014) has noted, during the spring of 2013, talking to MB leaders, one got the impression that they were fighting for survival, not governing a state.

On the occasion of the anniversary of Morsi’s rule, the oppositional Egypt Independent provided a long list of cultural scandals that had taken place during the year (Abou Bakr, 2013). Overall, these are relatively small incidents, and often the government or censorship had to give in. We shall return to the most controversial examples of film censorship. But things had taken a turn for the worse when on May 7 a cabinet reshuffle had replaced Muhammad Saber Arab with Alaa Abd al-Aziz, a teacher at the High Institute for Cinema with much stronger Islamist leanings. Three weeks after his appointment, Abd al-Aziz replaced a number of heads of cultural organizations with people affiliated with the MB. Known as akhwana, or “Brotherhoodization,” this was what many people in the cultural establishment had been expecting all along. In early June, they responded by occupying the Ministry of Culture, and stayed on right until the big demonstrations on 30 June. Abd al-Aziz defended his move by stating that he was liberating the ministry from the claws of a small elite and giving culture back to the people (Ramadan, 2013b). He was supported by the head of the cultural committee in Parliament, Fathy Shehab al-Din, who declared war against the “clique” who had allegedly taken control over the country’s hundreds of cultural centers, and claimed that the Americans had stolen documents in the national archives. In his few weeks in office, Abd al-Aziz took steps to publish Islamic works, and set up a service to study genealogy and other Islamizing initiatives. In a major enquete for the Saudi-owned newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, the interviewed Egyptian cultural personalities expressed various degrees of unease at the specter of akhwana of cultural life; while some were alarmed, others were certain that the Muslim Brothers lacked the skills to produce anything which would be well received by the majority of Egyptians (Azab, 2013).

Three films fighting the censors

In the year of Morsi, there were three films whose directors had to struggle against state censorship and who in the process employed the media and depicted the censorship institution as a relic from the authoritarian era. Which it was, of course: Defending themselves, the censors would emphasize that they were simply following procedures laid down in the law on censorship, dating back to 1954 but amended in 1992. The abolition of censorship was a demand of the revolution, and it was later adopted in the constitution. It was, however, still in place, but now having to defend its decisions.

The first and perhaps the simplest case emerged in October 2012. Amr Salama, a young director who had made the last part of the popular film The Good, the Bad and the Politician, gave 10 comical advices to the dictators of the region. For 5 years, he had worked to get permission to make a comedy about the Egyptian school system, and the Muslim–Coptic relationship. The censorship had denied him the filming license. And when he had finally got it, it was only after changing certain scenes which he was now intending to change back again, risking the license to screen (Al-Shinnawy, 2012). However, Morsi’s new minister of culture, Muhammad Saber Arab, intervened and promised that the production of the film could go ahead (El-Beheiry, 2012).

Salama himself expressed his incomprehension at the difficulties, and when it was suggested that he was finally allowed because the film was set in the ancient régime of the Mubarak era, he pointed out that neither the school system nor the sectarian tension had stopped, and changing the mentality in school would still be a daunting task (Al-Qalyubi, 2014).

La mu’akhadha—hopelessly translated into “Pardon my French”—is about Hani, the only child in a happy Coptic family, whose life changes into misery when his father suddenly dies and his mother is forced to move him from his privileged private school to a run-down public school in central Cairo. When the teacher reads the names of the boys, Hani Abdallah’s name does not reveal his Coptic identity, so the teacher can conclude that “we are all Muslims, praise be to God.” For some time, Hani works to integrate, to the point of winning the school’s Qur’an recitation competition, but class plays a role as much as religion, and he is the target of the school bully. The turning point comes when Hani and his mother again go to church and witness a passion play; especially, the scene of Peter’s betrayal of Christ leaves an imprint; they decide to give up their plan to emigrate, and Hani’s mother starts wearing her crucifix again. When she enters the school to complain about the beating up of Hani, the crucifix paralyzes the headmaster who ventures into the usual tirades about Copts and Muslims being brothers (and gives the bully a solid, deserved beating). In the school microcosm, the vague headmaster seems to represent the Mubarak era authority, while the teachers of religion and gymnastics work more purposefully to impart Islamic discipline on to the boys.

It does not sound like a comedy, but it is, and a very successful one, the most watched film in the spring of 2014. I went to see it in Cairo’s biggest mall, City Stars, and judging from the headscarves, the audience was overwhelmingly Muslim, as is the director, and they seemed to enjoy it. In the most famous film on Coptic–Muslim relations, Hassan and Marcus (2008) by Rami Imam, the director is at pains to show that Muslims and Copts are in a mirror situation equally suffering, and equally to blame, and the solution is to transcend religious identities and embrace a unifying national one. La Mu’akhadha, by contrast, places the bigotry and aggression solely with the Muslims, and lets the Christians be an isolated minority. Moreover, contrary to earlier attempts at raising the issue of Christian–Muslim relations, the point here was not merely that the Copts were good Egyptians, but that they got their strength from their religion.

To the director, Amr Salama, the problem of intolerance and bigotry was not so closely related to the MB, but prevailed in Egyptian society and its institutions. And school would be the first place where Egyptian children internalized the negative view of people with another religion. In a discussion about the film on ON TV, a dominant, Christian-owned channel, Amr Salama related how he grew up in Saudi Arabia in an environment which taught the pupils that Christians were evil. His teacher, for instance, forbade them to watch Egyptian television on the grounds that it would broadcast also Christian rituals. Amr got upset because he watched a lot of Egyptian television, but his parents calmed him down, assuring him that it was not harmful. This was a clever story to relate: Egyptian viewers would probably consider the Saudi attitude excessive and thus reflect upon how it must feel to grow up as a member of Egypt’s Christian minority in a society that has come to take its Muslim identity as the only acceptable one.

The report

In this, they seemed to be right. The productions of the MB-related companies that appeared were minor and amateurish and had difficulties reaching a big audience. Some of them emerged from the productions of Misr 25, the TV station affiliated with the Brotherhood. Others seem to have been produced for distribution solely on the Internet.

An initiative not directly coming from the MB, but receiving their support, was the “Cinema al-Nahda” initiative of 2012, a group of young filmmakers who met over Facebook and wanted to make a new type of committed film. Nahda (Renaissance) was the name of Morsi’s presidential campaign. The initiator, Izz al-Din Duwaidar, was from the Brotherhood youth and working in the Misr 25 TV channel, affiliated to the Brotherhood.

In March 2013, Duwaidar finalized the production of his and Cinema al-Nahda’s first longer film, al-Taqrir (The Report), a 45-minute drama focusing on Egyptians’ response to the film Innocence of Muslims, an anti-Islamic film uploaded on YouTube in July 2012. Surprisingly, the film was never screened as planned. In April, the movie theaters rejected it, and the Sayyed Darwish Hall canceled its premiere, according to Duwaidar in response to a campaign against the film, due to its Brotherhood connections (Said, 2013). The MB’s own website interpreted the cancelation as a flagrant violation of artistic freedom (ikhwanonline, 2013). The censor had prohibited the film because it had no prior permission and used actors who were not members of the actors’ syndicate.

In a discussion on the oppositional ON TV, Duwaidar pointed out that non-commercial films were usually exempt from using organized actors, and that dozens of art films had been produced without these permissions, and even officially sent to international festivals and competitions; his was the only one that had been prohibited in this way. At the end of the interview, the host points out that Duwaidar himself has attacked comedian Bassam Yusuf on his Facebook page for throwing garbage at Egypt every Friday night. Duwaidar explains that television, which enters the home of all Egyptians, should stay within the parameters of society, namely, its morals and religion, and he specifies that in the case of Egypt, by religion is meant the Christian and the Muslim. And he calls for a code of honor (ON TV, 2013).

The Jews of Egypt

Simultaneously with the struggle of Izz al-Din Duwaidar, Amir Ramses fought a similar battle with the state censors, and won. Ramses had produced a documentary, The Jews of Egypt, which had won international attention. This was partly due to the aim of the film, which is stated from the outset: quoting ordinary Egyptian’s negative views of the Jews, and relating it to the school system and the media, it tells about the discovery that, in the first half of the 20th century, the Jews were part of the Egyptian society, and have had lasting influence upon the country’s artistic and political life. The film meets with Jews abroad, mainly in France, and listens to Egyptian historians, politicians, and intellectuals who narrate the story of the Jews of Egypt. It underlines the fact that few of the Egyptian Jews were attracted to Zionism, especially in the upper classes, and shows their attachment to Egypt, even after decades in exile. And it shows how the Egyptian governments after the coup in 1952 made it impossible for them to stay in the country. The viewer is clearly meant to empathize with the Egyptian Jews who speak with such love about Egypt.

Before that, however, the film also tells the story of the MB’s attacks on Jewish property in 1945 and 1947. And even though one of Egypt’s few living Jews affirms that, as a political activist on the Left, he had good relations to the brothers in prison, other voices—one of them himself a MB—testify to the racist position of a least some members of the Brotherhood. This subject made the film very political. In the tense atmosphere of the spring of 2013, many commentators from the opposition took up the subject of the violence of the MB, the current power-holder of the country, and pointed to its lack of tolerance (Bilal, 2013).

The censor denied permissions for screening just before the opening on March 12. Head of the central censorship board, Abd al-Sattar Fathy, explained that the producers had not applied for a license until just days before, and the fact that they had been granted permission to make the film and show it in foreign festivals in no way meant that they were allowed to screen it in Egypt (Ramadan, 2013a). However, in April, a permission was given, and commentators discussed whether this was normal procedure, or the censors had given in to pressure, not least from the West (Al-Amri, 2013).

Conclusion

When Ramadan began in early July 2013, just as Field Marshal al-Sisi had ousted president Morsi, the new season of Ramadan TV dramas did not contain any religious series. On the contrary, the most watched and controversial TV serial of that season was al-Da‘iya, the story of a strict young Salafi preacher who falls in love with a violinist at the Cairo Opera and gradually has to abandon his condemnatory position on music, art, and, indeed, love before marriage. In spite of 1 year of Brotherhood governance, the Egyptian drama industry had not felt the need to accommodate the new political realities. And no Brotherhood producer had had the muscle to produce a full 30-episode serial.

Although the MB has often protested against the Egyptian cultural industries, and the impact of Western cultural products, its own cultural productions have generally been modest. In its publications, it stresses the idea of an authentic Egyptian Islamic culture that is in danger of being eroded and must therefore be defended. After 2011, however, it would be difficult to pursue a strategy of authoritarian censorship. Like the other political forces, the Brotherhood extolled the virtues of the revolution and adopted the word liberty in the name of the party it founded. It maintained long-term goals of cleansing society and culture of the filth of foreign culture, and building up a moral and religious “Egyptian personality.”

During the year of Morsi’s presidency, the censorship struggled with adapting its old laws and procedures to a new era, where the power of the presidency was openly challenged by much of the cultural establishment. When politically and religiously sensitive films such as The Report, The Jews of Egypt, and La Mu’akhadha were released, it came across as confused and inconsistent, and its decisions were not accepted, but challenged, by those whose films it did not license. In two of three cases, its initial denial of license was withdrawn. And here it clearly did not follow a new Islamist line. In fact, the two films which were released both dealt with communal and religious intolerance vis-a-vis non-Muslims in Egyptian society and specifically blamed Islamists. By contrast, the film that was not released was the one produced by a young brother with the aim of defending Islam. In spite of dire warnings, the Brotherhood was far from being in control of the cultural scene—whether the productions or the censorship. When finally a new minister initiated a strategy of brotherhoodization, he only galvanized the opposition of the cultural sector.

This is not to let the MB off the hook. The question of the Brotherhood, authoritarian rule, and religious co-existence is an intricate one. The attacks on Christian property in the wake of the Egyptian army’s massacres of protesters in the Rabaa al-Adawiya and al-Nahda squares in August 2014, and the enthusiastic Coptic support for Field Marshal al-Sisi testify to a deeply acrimonious relationship between the Islamists and the Copts. It should also be pointed out that although La mu’akhadha and especially The Jews of Egypt point to an element of bigotry on the part of the Islamists, they merely consider them the tip of the iceberg. Both are more concerned with the institutional discrimination they see in state institutions and the general prejudice in the population at large.

Moreover, the very idea of focusing on the Jews and the Copts as being not just Egyptians, but Egyptian minorities, with a religious life and identity that must be protected, is in fact very much in harmony with the ideology of the MB. Rather than endorsing the secular Wafd Party’s old adage of “Religion is for God, and the nation is for all,” the party platform of the FJP, and the Egyptian Constitution of 2012, both tend to look at Egypt as composed of religious communities, thus insisting that “Religion is for the milla, but the nation is for all who accept its Islamic identity.”

Cultural expressions are part of any revolution, but revolutions—religious and others—also have their iconoclasts and puritans. The Islamists of the Iranian revolution struggled hard to take control of the cultural sector. The very fact that the MB rushed to establish a TV station and a theater troupe named after the 25 of January is a testimony to their eagerness to tap into and co-opt revolutionary culture. But culture remained marginal to their interests, and beyond their competence. Long alienated from the cultural sector and its close ties to the state and the elite, the MB had clear ideas of what they did not like or want, but very vague ideas about the kind of art and culture they would like Egypt to have, and how to produce it. The cultural production companies and groups which Brotherhood activists set up never established much of a presence, and the actual production of Islamist cultural items such as films were left to a fairly small and inexperienced group of young idealists.

Even these young Islamists never devised a way of moving beyond common moralism and political resistance ideology to investigate more complex issues of society and individual psychology where stark contrasts of Black and White no longer capture human experiences. The instrumentalist view of culture that permeates the party platform and constitution seems to have acted against the intention of protecting the revolution and Egyptian culture. It was left to other, more creative, forces to keep it alive.