Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T08:25:16.964Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Invisible Armies: Reflections on Egyptian Dreams of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2012

Amira Mittermaier
Amira Mittermaier*
Affiliation:
Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
*
amira.mittermaier@utoronto.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In January 2011, people around the world turned their attention to Cairo's 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 392 - 417
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1999. The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women. American Ethnologist 17, 1: 41–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apolito, Paolo. 2005. The Internet and the Madonna: Religious Visionary Experience on the Web. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Asad, Talal, Brown, Wendy, Butler, Judith, and Mahmood, Saba. 2009. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: Doreen Townsend Center for the Humanities.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Attār, ‘Abd al-Khāliq al-. 1992. Qawā‘id wa Usūl ‘Ilm Ta'wīl al-Ru'a wa Tafsīr al-Ahlām fī Daw’ al-Qur'ān wa al-Sunna. Cairo: Maktabat al-Tibb al-Islāmī.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism. In Selected Writings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, vol. 2, 3–5.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bilu, Yoram and Abra-Movitch, Henry. 1985. In Search of the Saddiq: Visitational Dreams among Moroccan Jews in Israel. Psychiatry 48, 1: 83–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, Judith and Connolly, William. 2000. Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion between Judith Butler and William Connolly. Theory and Event 4, 2. At: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.2butler.html (accessed 25 Jan. 2012).Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincialzing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chittick, William. 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Christian, William Jr. 1984. Religious Apparitions and the Cold War in Southern Europe. In Wolf, Eric R., ed., Religion, Power, and Protest in Local Communities: The Northern Shore of the Mediterranean. Berlin: Mouton, 239–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ChristianWilliam, Jr William, Jr. 1999. Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Clarke, David. 2001. Rumors of Angels: A Legend of the First World War. Folklore 113: 151–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Claverie, Elisabeth. 1991. Voir Apparaître: Les apparitions de la Vierge à Medjugorje. Raisons Pratiques 2: 1–19.Google Scholar
Crapanzano, Vincent. 2003. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edgar, Iain. 2004. The Dream Will Tell: Militant Muslim Dreaming in the Context of Traditional and Contemporary Islamic Dream Theory and Practice. Dreaming 14, 2: 21–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelke, Matthew. 2008. The Objects of Evidence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14: 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ewing, Katherine P. 1994. Dreams from a Saint: Anthropological Atheism and the Temptation to Believe. American Anthropologist 96: 571–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. 2000. Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabian, Johannes. 2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Fahd, Taoufiq. 1966. La divination arabe: Études religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur le milieu natif de l'Islam. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Hamdy, Sherine. 2009. Islam, Fatalism, and Medical Intervention: Lessons from Egypt on the Cultivation of Forebearance (Sabr) and Reliance on God (Tawakkul). Anthropological Quarterly 82, 1: 173–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, Valerie. 1997. The Role of Visions in Contemporary Egyptian Religious Life. Religion 27: 45–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kinberg, Leah. 1994. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā: Morality in the Guise of Dreams. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Kwon, Heonik. 2006. After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambek, Michael. 2003. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Lamoreaux, John. 2002. The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
McGreevy, John T. 2000. Bronx Miracle. American Quarterly 52, 3: 405–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mittermaier, Amira. 2007. The Book of Visions: Dreams, Poetry, and Prophecy in Contemporary Egypt. International Journal of Middle East Studies 39: 229–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mittermaier, Amira. 2011. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Moll, Yasmin. 2011. Seeing God in Tahrir: Ethics of the Revolution. 17 Feb. At: http://therevealer.org/archives/6045 (accessed 23 Jan. 2012).Google Scholar
Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munn, Nancy D. 1992. The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 93–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Cynthia. 1974. Religious Experience, Sacred Symbols, and Social Reality. In Humaniora Islamica. Paris: Mouton, vol. II, 253–66.Google Scholar
Niccoli, Ottavia. 1990. Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
O'Neill, Kevin. 2009. City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Palmié, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Pandolfo, Stefania. 1997. Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pandolfo, Stefania. 2007. The Burning: Finitude and the Politico-Theological Imagination of Illegal Migration. Anthropological Theory 7, 3: 329–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Punamaki, Raija-Leena and Joustie, Marja. 1998. The Role of Culture, Violence, and Personal Factors Affecting Dream Content. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 29, 2: 320–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sabahi, Ahmed. 2002. Al-Ahlām al-Siyāsiyya: Fikr Jadīd Aidan. Cairo: n.p.Google Scholar
Scheer, Monique. 2006. Rosenkranz und Kriegsvisionen: Marienerscheinungskulte im 20. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Tübingen Vereinigung für Volkskunde.Google Scholar
Scheer, Monique. 2011. Catholic Piety in the Early Cold War Years or: How the Virgin Mary Protected the West from Communism. In Vowinckel, Annette, Payk, Marcus M., and Lindenberger, Thomas, eds., Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies. New York: Berghan Books, 129–51.Google Scholar
Schimmel, Annemarie. 1998. Die Träume des Kalifen: Träume und ihre Deutung in der islamischen Kultur. München: Verlag C. H. Beck.Google Scholar
Stoller, Paul. 1989a. In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stoller, Paul. 1989b. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Edith. 2003. The Reality of Spirits. In Harvey, G., ed., Shamanism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 145–52.Google Scholar
Tylor, E. B. 1970 [1871]. Religion in Primitive Culture. Gloucester: P. Smith.Google Scholar
Wojcik, Daniel. 1996. Polaroids from Heaven: Photography, Folk Religion, and the Miraculous Image Tradition at a Marian Apparition Site. Journal of American Folklore 109, 432: 129–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar