Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy 3030613534, 9783030613532

Table of contents :
Praise for Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy
Contents
List of Figures
Series Editor’s Foreword: An Introduction to Youssef Rakha’s Mummification
Youssef Rakha’s Mummification: An Opening of the Mouth
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Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ARAB CINEMA

Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy Youssef Rakha

Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema

Series Editors Samirah Alkassim Film and Video Studies George Mason University Fairfax, VA, USA Nezar Andary College of Humanities and Social Sciences Zayed University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

This series presents new perspectives and intimate analyses of Arab cinema. Providing distinct and unique scholarship, books in the series focus on well-known and new auteurs, historical and contemporary movements, specific films, and significant moments in Arab and North African film history and cultures. The use of multi-disciplinary and documentary methods creates an intimate contact with the diverse cultures and cinematic modes and genres of the Arab world. Primary documents and new interviews with directors and film professionals form a significant part of this series, which views filmmakers as intellectuals in their respective historical, geographic, and cultural contexts. Combining rigorous analysis with material documents and visual evidence, the authors address pertinent issues linking film texts to film studies and other disciplines. In tandem, this series will connect specific books to online access to films and digital material, providing future researchers and students with a hub to explore filmmakers, genres, and subjects in Arab cinema in greater depth, and provoking readers to see new frames of transnational cultures and cinemas.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15594

Youssef Rakha

Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy

Youssef Rakha Cairo, Egypt

Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema ISBN 978-3-030-61353-2 ISBN 978-3-030-61354-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61354-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam ’s The Mummy

“An anecdotal and ultimately engaging meander through the imagined pasts and disjointed legacies of Egyptian history, setting out from and repeatedly returning to Shadi Abdel Salam’s masterpiece.” —Tim Power, archaeologist and historian, author of The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate “Egyptian novelist Youssef Rakha captures the personal relationship with art that lies beneath all scholarly endeavor, but which too often gets lost in academic analysis.” —Kevin Blankinship, Brigham Young University, USA

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Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword: An Introduction to Youssef Rakha’s Mummification Youssef Rakha’s Mummification: An Opening of the Mouth

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Bibliography

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Index

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List of Figures

Youssef Rakha’s Mummification: An Opening of the Mouth Fig. 1

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Nasser and his Prime Minister Ali Sabri hand Che Guevara (1928–1967) a state decoration in 1966. Touted to this day by his admirers across the Arab world and beyond, Nasser’s regional and to some extent global role as a champion of the anti-imperial struggle and the Liberation of Peoples meant that figures like Che Guevara became friends of the state. (Public domain image from Cuban archives, from Wikipedia) Cropped from the frontispiece of the original Description de l’Égypte to show art work, dating from 1802 to 1822. Bibliotheca Alexandrina image. (Wikimedia Commons) Egyptian prisoners of war being rounded up outside El Arish, north Sinai, in June 1967. Government Press Office of Israel released into the public domain on the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War (Wikimedia Commons) Image of author at age six with his father on the beach in the summer resort of Agami, outside Alexandria. After trying out all kinds of avatars and visual self-representations to brand myself online, this is the image I settled on for both my site (therakha.net) and my Twitter avatar (@Sultans_Seal)

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LIST OF FIGURES

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A late 21st-dynasty linen bandage wrapping the un-mummified body from Deir El Bahari bearing an eye of Horus as a protective emblem, 1000–945 BC. Tomb of Henettawy F (MMA 59), MMA excavations, 1923–1924, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Wikimedia Commons) Partly inspired by ancient sculpture, this statue, Nahdet Masr (Egypt’s Reawakening, 1920–1928), still occupies pride of place near Cairo University, where it was defaced by Islamist demonstrators in 2012. It is probably the best known work by the pioneer sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) (Photograph by Alex Dika Seggerman, from Wikipedia) The sister-in-law of English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) Amy buying antiquities at the site of the ancient city of Abydos near El Balayna, Sohag in Upper Egypt (From the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, London, in Wikipedia) An iconic photo of female demonstrators in traditional ladies’ dress raising the 1922–1953 Egyptian flag during the 1919 Revolution, captioned “Nationalists demonstrating” (From mideastimage.com, on the Arabic Wikipedia) One of the more moving mummy portraits, encaustic on wood, Mummy portrait of bearded man, encaustic on wood, from the Royal Museum of Scotland. Excavated at Hawara by William Flinders Petrie in 1911 (Wikimedia Commons) “Dr Selim Bey Hassan’s excavations close to 4th pyramid in progress” (1934 negative from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress) A 2012 image of Egypt’s best-known pharaonic-themed recreational site, Dr. Ragab’s Pharaonic Village, which shows scenes from ancient life reenacted often live through a boat ride as well as selling papyrus products. This is the mummification scene (Wikimedia Commons) One of the ways in which I envisioned central Cairo photographically. Taken through the windscreen in 2013, it nonetheless seeks out the older vision of the city implicit in the combination of an old car model, colonial architecture and palm trees

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LIST OF FIGURES

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“Port Said, entrée du Canal de Suez” (1890 image published by the Zürich-based Photoglob Company, Library of Congress) Albumen print portrait of Khedive Ismail, circa 1860 (No. 135 in the Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Rome album, Library of Congress) Khedival Opera House, built for the opening of the Suez Canal (Photo dated 1869, from rom the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Memory of Modern Egypt Digital Archive, Wikimedia Commons) Undated portrait of Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer in oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) (Wikimedia Commons) Cliffs at Deir El Bahari by John Singer Sargent, oil on canvas, 1890–1891 (From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons) The Gourna Mosque, famously designed—along with the whole village—on the basis of local materials and culture by the great architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989), one of Shadi’s teachers (Photo by Marc Ryckaert, 2011, from the Arabic Wikipedia) 1889 edition of Les Contes populaires Egypte ancienne by Gaston Maspero (From the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons) Modern human remains from the Battle of 1882 Tel El Kebir between the forces of Urabi and the British, in which the latter prevailed, 1915 (From the W. L. Crowther Library collection, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Wikimedia Commons) 1861 portrait of Auguste Marriette by the great French photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (From the Bibliothèque nationale de France collection, on the Arabic Wikipedia)

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Series Editor’s Foreword: An Introduction to Youssef Rakha’s Mummification

Dear Reader: The creative non-fiction you are about to read is not an argument. It is not a professor telling you what a film means, nor is it a film critic alerting you to the nuances that you as a human being cannot see. It is not an orderly work of scholarship that maintains a continuous search for a position in a conversation you might not be part of. It is a literary experience of myth, memory, modern Egypt, and Youssef Rakha’s mummification. Mind you, he is still alive as I write this. Please allow for some suspension of disbelief. It is, after all, what cinema is about, but allow me to contradict this. Myth and memory weave their fabrics against Time. They beckon us to enter the warm cocoon of beginning, middle, and end. We are veritable mummies, enshrouded in layer upon layer of myths, stories, and images. We concern ourselves with the wrappings and foldings of one particular fabric: cinema! Yes, cinema would have to be accorded pride of place as that most adhesive gauze of the modern age. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, we marched headlong into the cocoon of cinema, feverishly wrapping ourselves within its silken bosom. I envision cinema as composed of the totality of images which spring from our dreams and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Y. Rakha, Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61354-9_1

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fantasies. You don’t have to agree with my definition, but bear with me. Each intimate moment with cinema strips us and then clothes us with new emotions, ideas, and desires. It is a perpetual relationship laden with allegiances and betrayals. Cinema is not innocent, and neither are we. Our confrontations with it are always reciprocal. It is safe to say that, now more than ever before, the cloth of the cinematic image acts to mummify our collectivities and our own personas. So tightly do we find ourselves wrapped in cinema’s aura, so utterly engrossed in its play of light and shadow, that we scarcely see it for what it might be, for what it truly means to us. The prose for which these lines act as an introductory preface is singular for its bold envisagement of precisely this: Youssef Rakha gropes for the moment of intensity in which the very fabric of our relationship to cinema is revealed. His gaze has no claim to transcendence but remains vulnerable and honest. The prose you are about to read reanimates our relationship to and tells us a story about one of the most widely acclaimed and celebrated films in Arab cinema: Shadi Abdel Salam’s Al-Mumiya’ (The Mummy), also titled The Night of Counting The Years (1969). Barra and Zaman: Reading Modern Egypt in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, highlights the work of the creative writer and novelist Youssef Rakha, whose prose inaugurates a new form of writing in English on Arab cinema. Rakha’s work adds depth to the book series, Focus on Arab Cinema, edited by myself and Samirah Al-Kassim, whose goal is to challenge and provoke new forms of writing on Arab cinema. As we all know, books on cinema tend to be written by professors teaching at universities or by film critics with well-established careers. General readers expect explanation, description, and expertise on well-known films. Readers in universities expect the tokens of erudition, a more or less well-adorned rehearsal of the protocols of disinterested, rational argumentation complete with the customary litany of citations and references. Youssef Rakha defies these general expectations, but at the same time enriches both university professors and students, enthusiasts of Arab cinema and history, and readers of creative non-fiction. A literary writer who works in both Arabic and English as well as an established Egyptian novelist, he has written an essay that is no less analytic and perspicacious for its brilliant creativity. Readers should be aware that Rakha’s intellectual and creative efforts resonate in their multiplicity and daring. His novels published in English, such as The Crocodiles or The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, reveal a dexterity

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD: AN INTRODUCTION …

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at interacting with layers of history and politics that continue to afflict the world and more specifically his world of Cairo, Egypt. Both of those novels take risks in the structure of storytelling. However, Rakha’s experimentation goes beyond the novel. His bilingual online hub entitled The Sultan’s Seal: Cairo Cosmopolitan Hotel has been generating a community of poets, essayists and artist from all over the world and his photography has also challenged the representation of Cairo itself. His creative nonfiction which this text exemplifies displays a range of topics and styles from a long essay on Arab Porn to a photo travelogue on the city of Beirut. Rakha’s Barra and Zaman is simultaneously academic, literary, and personal. Numbered paragraphs and aphorism both read like a linear story and also like a Borgesian labyrinth while situating this canonical film, The Mummy, within the history of cinema and the Middle East by way of reference to a broad and inclusive range of scholarship. As mentioned this work belongs to a genre of creative nonfiction, most especially perhaps what has been described as “autotheory”. Autotheory is found in seminal texts such as Cornel West’s Race Matters or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, in which the autobiographical merges with theory in a literary way. Creative nonfiction, we argue, is part the menu of literature and the work Barra and Zaman, is part of a body of writers who have penned literary works on cinema from Robert Bresson’s aphoristic Notes on Cinematographer 1 and the Syrian director Muhammad Malas’ existential record of filming Palestinian refugees in Beirut2 to Mark Cousins’ work Story of Film 3 and Salman Rushdie’s Wizard of Oz.4 This menu of literature bequeaths to us a smorgasbord of piquant delicacies we would rather see alongside names such as fiction, poetry, or drama and not as some genre that begins with a “non.” This vague “non,” however, wafts many flavors that make us compelled to begin changing our menus as scholars, teachers, and intellectuals. Nonfiction literature such as the memoir allows for an exchange between essays, travel literature, polemics, ethnographies, histories and oral histories, journals,

1 Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, New York: Urizen Books, 1977. 2 Mohammad Malas, The Dream: A Diary of the Film (Cairo: American University in

Cairo Press, 2016). 3 Mark Cousins, The Story of Film, London: Pavillion, 2013. 4 Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, London: British Film Institute, 2012.

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literary criticism, graphics, aphorisms, documentary photography, literary journalism, and public science writing. This mixes further with many literary forms and genres found in poetry, fiction, and drama. These days, our multiple forms of informal “nonfiction” on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms will also engage with nonfiction in the future. Rakha’s intimate, aphoristic prose on Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy belongs to nonfiction literature—an approach to Arab cinema seldom seen in English. Scholarly works on cinema tend to eschew literariness, the self, and narrative, or, if not, they severely restrict these to designated portions of the text. However, allow me to contradict myself again. While the rest of this introductory chapter could well be devoted to the formal novelty of the work to come, it is also no less true that this text heeds an ancient calling. In fact, I argue that it is in and of itself ancient. Both the antagonism and the marriage between text and image are radical: they point to a question of roots, of divergent ways of being-in-the-world. The pharaohs themselves, for whom mummification was a divine process, were quite aware of this strife between intuition and concept. It is the contention of CzechBrazilian philosopher Vilhem Flusser that the emergence of writing as a form of textuality some 3500 years ago heralded a renewed distrust of and opposition to the image—attested, perhaps, by the ebb and flow of idolatry and iconoclasm which seems to characterize many world religions and cultural traditions. Writing makes linear that that which has an otherwise unified, situated existence within the image. Writing tears asunder the bounded and unmediated character of the image. And yet the intercourse between word and image are not always in opposition. One example of research that comes to mind is Christiane Gruber in her work on Islamic art history and representation, The Praiseworthy One.5 She reveals how text and image in the earlier traditions of Islam complement rather than contradict each other. The marriage of text and image is ancient and through all fights of the ages the divorce has yet to happen. Before beginning this literary exploration of the film AlMumiya, I ask readers to ponder what is at stake when we write about visual arts such as cinema—to think about how to precisely interweave the two terms “word” and “image”. How do we write about films, images, and pictures? 5 Christiane Gruber, The Praiseworthy One. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.

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In the introduction of Picture Theory, a well-known book that explores said question, W. J. T. Mitchell claims that “We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn’t seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn’t seem necessarily to give us power over them.”6 By pictures, Mitchell also includes cinema, and we are left with the theoretical question of our power over representation. Our wars of class, race, and tribe alongside our patriarchies, greed, and nationalisms have all been mired in competing and often degrading representations of the world, not to mention the “Other.” Is representation ever generous, complete, or dignified? Perhaps having power over representations does not have to be our goal. Why not aim to have the power to negotiate and inhabit them with a certain measure of ambivalence? To meditate on the very fibers, threads, and stitches that hold our images together? To live in them and reanimate them via our own subjectivities? Before beginning this literary conversation with the film Al-Mumiya, I ask readers to ponder what is at stake when we write about visual arts such as cinema—to think about how to precisely interweave the two terms “word” and “image.” How do we write about films, images, and pictures? In the introduction of Picture Theory, a well-known book that explores said question, W. J. T. Mitchell claims that “We are surrounded by pictures; we have an abundance of theories about them, but it doesn’t seem to do us any good. Knowing what pictures are doing, understanding them, doesn’t seem necessarily to give us power over them.”7 By pictures, Mitchell also includes cinema, and we are left with the theoretical question of our power over representation. Our wars of class, race, and tribe alongside our patriarchies, greed, and nationalisms have all been mired in competing and often degrading representations of the world, not to mention the “Other.” Is representation ever generous, complete, or dignified? Perhaps having power over representations does not have to be our goal. Why not aim to have the power to negotiate and inhabit them with a certain measure of ambivalence? To meditate on the very fibers, threads, and stitches that hold our images together? To live in them and reanimate them via our own subjectivities?

6 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 5–6. 7 Ibid..

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Youssef Rakha’s Barra and Zaman achieves this reanimation. Innervated by Rakha’s prose, The Mummy comes alive for the reader, in turn breathing life into timely topics such as nationalism, nostalgia, history, Arab identity, Egyptian identity, and the Arab Spring—not to mention the enduring problematics of country versus city, patriarchy, the Ottoman-European encounter, postcolonialism, father and son relations, and the significance of the mummy. We are all becoming mummies, and Rakha’s writing allows us to see this at an intimate level. For a moment, we touch the gossamer gauze in which we have been wrapped. To read Barra and Zaman is not only an entrance to Shadi Abdel Salam’s film, The Mummy. It is just as much an Opening of the Mouth as a window into ourselves. Rakha’s writing is not explanatory or positivistic. It is not a stage for the convoluted drama of so many academic catchwords or theoretical handles. Rather, the experience of reading this work sheds light on the myriad fabrics which constitute what it means to actively read a film. Just as a work of cinema can be distilled into a series of cuts, a constellation of traces, this text embodies its commitment to the cinematic medium in the peculiar textuality it adopts: enigmatic, visceral, elliptical and idiosyncratic. This is exemplified in Rakha’s relationship to his father, his image reproductions, his position during the pandemic, and the dialectic of barra vs zaman. Barra vs zaman: what does this mean? Simply, “outside” and “time”. But this book imbues these Arabic words with much more meaning. In effect, Rakha accomplishes that masterful “task of the translator” proposed by Walter Benjamin.8 The task, to summarize the latter thinker’s well-known essay, is an attentiveness to form, rhythm, and structures, all the while searching for the radical intent of the text. Benjamin differentiates between “what is meant” by a text and its unique “way of meaning it.” However Rakha does not seek to translate the film in the way that an ethnographer or authoritative film-critic might. Rather, he translates his subjective relationship to the film through a palimpsest of aphorisms, images, and stories. His translation attends to the form and “way of meaning” just as much as “what is meant.” Indeed, Benjamin begins his essay by pronouncing translations as a mode performing reciprocity of languages. While we usually study Benjamin to think about the 8 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock & Michael Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 253.

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translations of linguistic languages such as French, Arabic, or Chinese, I argue here that cinema itself is a language, and Rakha mediates this idea through his own manipulation of words. He wraps language around his own experience of viewing the film. He wraps his thoughts around a canonical masterpiece in the wake and shadow of a failed “Arab Spring.” He wraps his ideas around constructed histories that sustain our identities. He wraps his emotions around the intent of the director. This effort lets us see how we are vulnerable mummies in becoming. I flex this mummy metaphor or mummy complex, but given the ubiquitous image of the mummy in popular culture—from novels of the early nineteenth century and the 1970s cartoon Scooby Doo to the Hollywood blockbuster franchise The Mummy (2017)—Rakha’s project is part and parcel of cinema history and cinematic writing. This idea is explored by cinema critic, Andre Bazin, who begins his well-known essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” by writing: If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned and petrified in sodium.9

This passage is the opening of a text taught to many students in classes on photography, cinema, and art history. The plastic arts also signify photography and cinema. Bazin ends his essay determining that photography is crucial for achieving that unique human desire to preserve itself, for it not only reveals a resemblance of reality, but also registers a recorded image. Bazin will later reveal at the end of this canonical essay the laconic phrase, “Cinema is also a language.” And it is precisely this language that Rakha

9 Andre Bazin, What is Cinema! “ The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 9–16.

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animates, it is the intertextual play of sound, image, and ideas that The Mummy evokes. One excellent example that explores Bazin’s use of the mummy metaphor is Basil Glynn’s The Mummy on Screen: Orientalism and Monstrostity in Horror Cinema.10 Glynn’s book shows us through a brilliant genealogical method how the “the mummy has stalked, sauntered, lurched, and limped its way through the movies, largely unappreciated by critics, academics, and cultural commentators, for well over a century.” While Glynn does not focus on Egyptian cinema except in footnotes, his work reveals the multiplicity of meanings the mummy commands while being a singular figure that world cinema has obsessesed over. He also confronts the same Bazin quote as do other well-known scholars of Shadi Abdel Salam’s film. Glynn reminds us how early cinema’s obsession with Egyptology and the figure of the mummy was based on many novels and writing in popular culture during the late nineteenth century. This is the same historical period in which Shadi Abdel Salam’s film takes place. Rakha’s work not only confronts the histories of Egypt from the pharaohs to the present day—I would argue that his work also develops this global metaphor in the history of cinema and literature. Glynn’s work for example catalogues films on mummies from Brazil, Denmark, France, England, Mexico, Japan, Germany, and Spain. While analyzing the mummy in world literature and cinema, Glynn frames his study within studies of orientalism. The work you are about to read does not embody the typical way orientalism has been misread and misused, a method that sees Orientalism as a theoretical model to reveal how the West did not understand the East, promoting racism and bigotry. This simplification, however, is not where Rakha’s works stands. Barra and Zaman embodies another spirit of Edward Said’s work in Orientalism. The Orient was according to Said constructed by linguists, scientists, historians, archaeologists, and also novelists, poets, and painters. The East was, for the most part, overly represented in opposition to the West as it was conceived in the nineteenth century.11 At the heart of Said’s book was a struggle to reverse how knowledge itself is

10 Basil Glynn, The Mummy on Screen: Orientalism and Monstrosity in Horror Cinema. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. 11 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978.

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constructed in relationship to historical materialist powers, thereby challenging the concepts, hierarchies, and language that have been built up to become monuments. Said’s work like Rakha’s creative writings is not a simple East vs West monument, and I would argue that there are other questions to consider. There is a Friedrich Nietzsche quote that influenced Said’s work, so much so that he quotes it in Orientalism. This quote embodies how I see Rakha’s work and Orientalism connected. Nietzsche, who also used aphoristic prose like Rakha’s, once wrote: What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.12

This might be a foundational quote for much of contemporary literary theory; however, I would argue that Orientalism and the essay Barra and Zaman, are ruled by an abiding desire to search for truth displayed by Nietzsche. Both works are not going to accept ready-made definitions and they are going to examine the armies of metaphors, metonynms, and anthropormorphism that we have presumed as truth. Indeed, Rakha passionately meditates on the effects, paraphernalia, and vestiges of Orientalism and other orientalisms, as this term is also still developing. Rakha’s piece is unique because his prose simply does not apply the work of Edward Said or other influential figures such as Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. Rakha’s words and photographs belong to a specific time and location: Cairo in the year 2020, the city of Egyptology and many torn up, underdressed, and fashionable mummies too. The Egypt of 2020 is draped with more complicated relationships between Easts and Wests then ever imagined by the weavers of Orientalism studied in Said’s well-known text. To write on Orientalism or the

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Penguin, 1982, pp. 46–47, and also Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978, p. 193.

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relationship of Egypt to the West without ambivalance, without contradictions, and without irony is not possible. This work is not a diatribe by a writer telling us how Egypt has been maligned since Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798 and by the British Empire. Instead, Rakha hovers around the corners, shadows, and traces of a multiplicity of cultures, and if the concept of Orientalism is a starting point for some readers, then they will soon discover that this concept also weaves into and out of other issues such as imperialism, development, patriarchy, and a writer’s mind in Cairo during a new era for the world. Barra and Zaman wraps words around Cairo during COVID-19 pandemic as well. Like many of us, the author encountered a lockdown that allowed for new encounters of myth, and memory. In the summer of 2020, he delves into the world of the The Mummy, its director, Shadi Abdel Salam, modern Egypt, and his own passionate, personal, and figurative self-exploration—Youssef Rakha’s mummification. Dear Reader, Please allow a final contradiction. Introductory chapters are not to be trusted. We might not be becoming mummies. Rakha’s work might have nothing to do with Orientalism, Andre Bazin, Arab cinema, Egypt, and World Cinema. He might not be a translator in Walter Benjamin’s sense, his actions might not be new or ancient, but prepare for his creative journey between himself and a film that is still called a masterpiece of Arab cinema to this day. Brace yourself for an enthusiasm for meditating and ambivalence. This is a literary work on a film that will continue to show around the world—I have even heard it called the “ Citizen Kane of Arab cinema.” But what does this mean? Do you trust such a phrase? After watching Shadi Abdel Salam’s film, The Mummy and reading Barra and Zaman, will you become a mummy too? Nezar Andary

Nezar Andary is Associate Professor of Film and Literature at Zayed University in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a filmmaker. His feature film Unlocking Doors of Cinema premiered in 2019. He is coeditor of the Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema series and artistic director of Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival.

Youssef Rakha’s Mummification: An Opening of the Mouth

Cairo and Alexandria were cosmopolitan not so much because they contained foreigners, but because the Egyptian born in them is himself a stranger to his land. —Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, 19641

1 It is the summer of 2020 and I am about to watch a film. But, maybe because I’m not in a movie theater, I am not very excited about it. It’s a film I know well already, though I haven’t seen it since 2009. Was I ever really excited to see it after the first time?

1 London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Y. Rakha, Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61354-9_2

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2 I’ve never felt the need to judge The Mummy (1969) by Shadi Abdel Salam (1930–1986),2 also known as The Night of Counting the Years . It is universally acknowledged to be the greatest masterpiece of Egyptian cinema. This must be my fourth viewing, and I’m as keen on the experience as I was the last time. But, whether because I’m 44 rather than 33 or because this time I know I will be writing about it, I also find myself needing to acknowledge the fact: The Mummy just will not grip or provoke me the way I expect a good film to. How come?

3 With its real-time slowness and meticulous framing—the way it seems to illustrate rather than conjure up its subject matter—the only other film I like that I can compare The Mummy to is the Soviet-Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (made in the same year). Taking narrative out of the equation, The Color of Pomegranates uses the symbolism and allegory inherent to the medieval Armenian troubadour— or ashugh—tradition to illuminate rather than recount the biography of the great poet-musician Sayat Nova (1712–1795). A Georgia-born ordained priest who wrote provocative secular songs in Azerbaijani, Farsi and Georgian as well as Armenian, Sayat Nova lived all over central Asia, initially as a married man, and was killed when the army of the shah Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar (1742–1797) stormed the monastery where he served in Haghpat, Armenia. A sequence of animated tableaux, the film seems to translate the power of Sayat Nova’s poetry—and music—into deeply evocative, always mysterious imagery, something that sets it apart from the history of film as it is generally understood. Like The Mummy, it left me bowled over the first time I saw it, but I still find it hard to get excited about it as a movie.

2 When they follow a person’s name, the dates given in brackets demarcate the life of that person, not their career or reign.

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4 Narrative is minimal in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), too, another Soviet biopic that comes to mind—about the great fifteenthcentury icon painter. But, like the iconoclastic English artist-director Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), The Mummy, by contrast, wants to tell a story. A kind of remix of the Renaissance painter’s life intermingling elements and motifs from different historical periods but using intense emotive acting and taut causal drama to tell its story, Caravaggio is as gripping and provocative as anything I’ve seen. And I could try and persuade myself of an affinity between it and The Mummy, too, but I’d be pushing it.

5 Both The Mummy and The Color of Pomegranates have the peculiar quality of suggesting a cinema wholly different from what we know and love, and that is why the latter has some remarkably withering YouTube reviews despite its breathtaking beauty. It is this same quality of cinematic otherworldliness that makes it hard to place The Mummy in a more local context. As I try to do that any number of great Arab films from the Egyptian Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station (1958) to the Palestinian Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) parade through my head. Not one is remotely like it.3

6 Here’s an interesting tidbit. The Mummy was written right before and shot in the wake of Egypt’s catastrophic defeat in the June War of 1967: the Naksa (or “setback”), as the event was euphemistically called. The third peak in an Arab-Israeli conflict that was not resolved until 1979— war broke out in 1948, 1956 and 1973 as well as 1967—the Naksa was a huge, humiliating defeat that gave the lie to the regime’s claims about a 3 In his indispensable paper “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian Nation-State”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009—Elliott Colla makes the point that in practice the film’s “presence in and influence on the Egyptian cinematic canon is relatively negligible.”

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powerful, in-control army. It spelled the end of a 15-year-old experiment in postcolonial nation building, and it left writers and artists who had been invested in that experiment especially disoriented. If not born of that disorientation, The Mummy definitely reflects it.

7 It is the summer of 2020, nearly 10 years after the Arab Spring demonstrated how skin deep “love of the homeland” could be. But even now the Egyptian intelligentsia are by and large a patriotic bunch. They were probably even more patriotic back when the Naksa hit them, especially those of them who would later become known as the Sixties Generation.4 They had witnessed what must’ve felt like a cosmic transformation. Within four years in 1952–1956—thanks as much as anything to the charisma and ruthlessness of a young army officer named Gamal Abd El Nasser (1918–1970)—Egypt had changed from an ailing kingdom under British occupation to an independent republic leading the struggle against colonialism in Africa or the Middle East where, championing the Palestinian cause, it also spearheaded the Arab nationalist movement. In the young revolutionary-populist leader who steered that transformation the Sixties Generation saw a new brand of patriarch: a pharaoh, but a grassroots, authentic one, egalitarian and progressive. And, rallying around him, they believed or pretended to believe he really was a kind of demigod (Fig. 1).

4 Although widely accepted and used, “the Sixties Generation” is an imprecise term that

refers to a large and diverse group of writers united not so much by age or aesthetic as the fact that their work responded in different ways to the socialist-nationalist zeitgeist of the 1950s and often also the subsequent transformations of the 1970s. The novelists among them include Radwa Ashour (1946–2014), Gamal El Ghitani (1945–2015), Ibrahim Aslan (1935–2012), Bahaa Taher (b. 1935) and many others.

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Fig. 1 Nasser and his Prime Minister Ali Sabri hand Che Guevara (1928– 1967) a state decoration in 1966. Touted to this day by his admirers across the Arab world and beyond, Nasser’s regional and to some extent global role as a champion of the anti-imperial struggle and the Liberation of Peoples meant that figures like Che Guevara became friends of the state. (Public domain image from Cuban archives, from Wikipedia)

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8 “My relationship to Nasser was pathological,” the star lyricist-poet and cartoonist Salah Jahine (1930–1986) famously said in his “last interview.” “To love someone to the point of him spreading in your soul and becoming part of your psychological constitution and a psychiatric condition of yours, so that the person’s rise or fall, his collapse or triumph or defeat reflects on you – that is no doubt a pathological condition… That is why when Nasser, my father died, I was afflicted with a kind of orphanhood.”5

9 No matter how ludicrous they sound today, and no matter how much they helped to advance the careers of their makers, sometimes at the expense of other artists,6 “patriotic songs” like the 1956 Eh.na El Sha b (or “We are the people”)—“You who promised us holy days / your crescent has been sighted / Tomorrow covets a look at the magic of your beauty / Tomorrow is our hero, our efforts’ fruit….”7 —were heartfelt expressions of genuine worship. Practically all the musical and lyrical talents of the time partook in such songs, but the phenomenally famous trio responsible for Eh.na El Sha b—together with Jahine (1930–1986), the composer Kamal El Tawil (1923–2003), and the singer Abdel Halim Hafez (1929–1977)—produced what amounted to hymns in worship.

5 The interview, given to Anwar Abdel Latif, is quoted in “Salah Jahin in His Last Press Interview: ‘Nasser Is My Father, Sadat My Stepfather’” by Ahmad Mohamed Abdel Baset, Al Watan newspaper, 21 April 2018. 6 One unconfirmed anecdote has the playwright and poet Naguib Surour (1932–1978), by then a homeless and destitute veteran of both political detention and psychological internment for his opposition to Nasser, making fun of Salah Jahine’s post-Naksa depression when he bumps into their mutual acquaintance the literary critic and journalist Ragaa El Naqqash (1934–2008) in 1968. 7 My translation of three lines of the song, written by Salah Jahine. The reference to the sighting of a crescent compares Nasser’s emergence to the start of the auspicious holy month of Ramadan, which is marked by the sighting of a new moon, the Muslim calendar being lunar. Following Nasser’s death, the celebrated Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani (1923–1998)—second only to the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) in terms of fame among modern Arab poets—wrote an elegy that opens, “We have killed you, last of the prophets,” giving Nasser one of the central attributes of the Prophet Muhammad in Muslim faith: that he is God’s last envoy to humanity.

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10 After all Nasser was the first indigenous Egyptian to take charge of the country since Nectanebo II (380–340 BC). And he had promised true sovereignty and rapid development. This was all the more reason to be devastated when, after years of repression and rhetoric, the country ended up in dire straits, with Sinai occupied by the enemy and Egyptians as deprived and dependent as they had ever been. Demigod or not, there was no sign of dignity, glory, Arab or African unity.

11 Some such dignity or glory did exist in recent memory, but it was thanks to a different kind of pharaoh and that kind wasn’t in vogue at the time. The Albanian-Ottoman general Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769–1849) was neither egalitarian nor an indigene. In fact the Arab Spring was an occasion to revive at least one attempt at disputing his positive legacy.8 He didn’t look anywhere as sexy. But he did found modern Egypt. For a while before everything changed again, he even made it seem like a good idea. It was Muhammad Ali’s descendent King Farouk I (1920–1965) that Nasser deposed to establish the republic, though—and look what happened within 15 years.

12 When Nasser rose to power the Muhammad Ali lineage—themselves regarded by many patriots as foreigners—had been discredited as the stooges of other, more powerful foreigners: the gentleman conquerors of the British Empire (and, of course, their French rivals before them). Now the Naksa seemed to vindicate the path of constitutional monarchy, which had been abandoned after July 1952, over that of revolutionary republicanism.

8 In his best known work All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1997, Khaled Fahmy applies “Foucault’s archaeological method” to nonofficial military archives, arguing—redundantly and often tautologically—that the Pasha was more interested in himself and his dynasty than in founding an independent modern state for the benefit of the indigenous peasantry.

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13 The Mummy is set in 1881: 86 years before the June War, 76 after Muhammad Ali’s arrival from Istanbul as the deputy to a commander of 300 men sent by the Sublime Porte to fight French troops out of Egypt. This is how everything starts.

14 It is at the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s doomed attempt to turn the country into a French colony that Muhammad Ali arrives in 1801. The Pasha cannot speak a word of Arabic, the official and native language since long before the Ottoman conquest of 1517, and even his grip on Turkish is said to be shaky. Yet while Bonaparte is becoming emperor he insinuates himself into Egyptian political life so brilliantly that, by 1805— the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, an ultimately insignificant defeat for the French and their Spanish allies—Sultan Selim III is forced to appoint him veli or viceroy. Ironically, the Pasha will resume and expand the process of modernization begun by those he came to oust (Fig. 2).

15 Nationalizing agriculture, regulating the religious establishment and building a monolithic bureaucracy with a powerful army at its core— three modes of control that continue to scaffold the Egyptian state to this day—the Pasha was soon presiding over a nascent empire that included not only Egypt, the Sudan and the Libyan coast, much of Greater Syria and Arabia, but also Morea, Thasos and Crete. All that was left for him to contend with was the feudal oligarchy of Mameluke emirs who had remained more or less in charge since the Ottoman conquest of 1517. As the tyrannical and corrupt guardians of a decaying, decadent tradition, they’d been Napoleon’s incompetent but tenacious enemies. The Pasha had a plan for them.

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Fig. 2 Cropped from the frontispiece of the original Description de l’Égypte to show art work, dating from 1802 to 1822. Bibliotheca Alexandrina image. (Wikimedia Commons)

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16 So it goes. In 1811 it was Muhammad Ali’s military might, not the Ottoman sultan’s, that quelled the Saudi-Wahhabi revolt against the Sublime State in Najd. To celebrate giving his son Ahmed Tusun command of the army ahead of the campaign, the Albanian general turned dynasty founder invited approximately 470 Mameluke beys to an enormous feast. After coffee and narghile, they followed the Pasha out of the dining hall, processing down a narrow alley that went through one of the Saladin Citadel gates. Once they were all in the citadel, the gate was unexpectedly shut and an elite Albanian force after the Pasha’s own heart opened fire on them.

17 By 1811, though still going strong, Bonaparte was well on his way to crashing. Within four years, by putting an end to the Napoleonic empire, the Battle of Waterloo will set the stage for the long-term British–French alliance that, ultimately through the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, shapes the modern Middle East. Initially secret, the agreement involves two stuffy diplomats Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, sitting down to divide the Arab world (and the rest of the Ottoman empire) into British and French spheres of influence. By 1916, partly as a result, Arab nationalism will have emerged as the default ideology of the anti-imperial fight. But in the intervening century, under the Pasha’s grandson Khedive Ismail (1830–1895), there is one more all-out attempt at revival.

18 The Mummy is set at the tail end of the Ismaili era, while the khedive’s son Muhammad Tewfik (1852–1892) is in charge. But Ismail’s initiatives don’t seem to figure at all in Shadi’s understanding of modern Egyptian history. This is interesting because those initiatives are crucial to the industry that begot the filmmaker.

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19 It is thanks to Ismail’s policies that, within 15 years of the British occupation in 1882, the first silent films are being created by “dream makers on the Nile,” in the late Mustafa Darwish’s endearing expression.9 The industry grew slowly but surely until sound entered the picture in the late 1920s. The Egyptian Aziza Amer (1901–1952) and the Lebanese Assia Dagher (1908–1986) and Rose Al-Youssef (1897–1958) were the earliest actress-producers. Starring both Amer, its producer, and Dagher, Wadad Orfi’s Laila, a silent film, became the first full-length production in 1927.

20 By 1936, when the patriotic industrialist Talaat Harb established Studio Misr—which was to dominate a thriving Hollywood-like industry for three decades—a Cairo-based community made up largely of Italian and Levantine immigrants, some of them already stage stars, is laying the foundations for the region’s most significant film industry to date (2020): the Egyptian Arabic-speaking cinema that, together with “Arab singing” (Umm Kulthum), Quranic recitation (Mustafa Ismail), Oriental—a.k.a. baladi 10 —dance (Taheyya Kariokka) and, to a lesser extent, literature (Naguib Mahfouz) and the visual arts, is to dominate the region’s media and entertainment for decades, blossoming into a perennially celebrated Golden Age.11

9 Mustafa Darwish, Dream Makers on the Nile: A Portrait of Egyptian Cinema, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1998. 10 The adjective, literally “my country” or “my village,” means “local” or “locally made.” Depending on context, it can have either positive or derogatory connotations. In this case, as in “aish baladi” (or “baladi bread”), it is a neutral. 11 Umm Kulthum (1904–1975), a.k.a. the Star of the East and—remarkably—the Fourth Pyramid, is widely seen as the greatest ever diva of Arab song. She remains as popular today as she was in her lifetime. With his uniquely musical, dramatic style, turning a purely vocal performance into something akin to opera, Mustafa Ismail (1905–1978) infused the devotional art with an arresting theatricality. He remains among the most popular Quran reciters of all time. Famously celebrated by Edward Said (in “Homage to a Belly Dancer,” London Review of Books, Vol. 12 No. 17, 13 September 1990 and “In Memory of Tahia,” London Review of Books, Vol. 21 No. 21, 28 October 1999), the legendary dancer-actor Taheya Kariokka (1915–1999) remains the epitome of Oriental dance at its self-possessed best. She was probably the first in a line of dancers who transformed what had been little more than a kind of strip show into a dignified

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21 Besides Jahine, the last decade of Egypt’s Golden Age (roughly 1965– 1975) is the heyday of unique and phenomenal talents the actor-singer Soad Hosny (1942–2001), and the superstar comedian Adel Imam (b. 1940). One such talent makes his name as the costume and set designer for historical (period) classics like Enrico Bomba and Andrew Marton’s Oh Islam (1961) and Youssef Chahine’s Saladin the Victorious (1963). He also works with European auteurs. A well-to-do lawyer’s son from the formerly cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, he is an architect and an artist. He is also an admirably modest aspiring filmmaker who started out as an assistant director. Like the Golden Age itself, he was born in 1930 and, growing up in the shadow of colonial culture, embraced the nationalist project that informed the 1952 July Revolution, led by Nasser.

22 “My father opposed the monarchy and opposed the British occupation, of course. The [July] Revolution took place in my youth, and I watched everything that happened, although from a distance… There’s not a single artist in my family. Myself, I began to draw when I was a child. In truth, no one encouraged me, but at the same time, no one tried to keep me from pursuing my hobby.”12

23 Shadi is a graduate of Alexandria’s famed Victoria College, which Youssef Chahine (1926–2008) and Edward Said (1935–2003) both attended. After obtaining the secondary school certificate, he studies for an extra two years, one of which he spends in Britain. There he reads history and philosophy and considers a career in the theater. On his return to

and aesthetically arresting performance, commanding unprecedented social respect in the process. 12 Shadi Abdel Salam, Elliott Colla (translator), “Counting the Years: Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd alSal¯am’s Words”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), Wayne State University Press.

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Cairo, he applies himself to graduating from the architecture department of Helwan University’s School of Fine Arts. But within weeks of serving his compulsory year as an army conscript, he is already seeking an apprenticeship with his neighbor in the upper-class Cairo district of Zamalek—perhaps the Golden Age’s quintessential filmmaker—Salah Abu Seif (1915–1996).

24 Like Chahine, Shadi is born to a well-to-do family in Alexandria. Like him, he is widely believed to be gay. Shared incidentally by both Jarman and Parajanov—remember Paragraphs No. 3–5 above?—this is an identity that Chahine will explore in his autobiographical trilogy: Alexandria… Why? (1978), An Egyptian Tale (1982), and Alexandria Again and Forever (1986). Shadi too evidently embraces it in the respectable, semiopen way characteristic of society’s privileged fringe until the late 1970s, when a growing religiosity under the influence of the oil-rich Arabian Gulf drives the cosmopolitan and heterogeneous circles to which Chahine and Shadi belong into greater isolation and secrecy. As far as that goes, the two figures are alike.

25 Unlike Chahine, however, whose Christian family hails from Greater Syria, the Abdel Salam lineage is Muslim and Upper Egyptian. His roots are in Minya (technically Middle Egypt, but usually identified with the southern uplands, not the Nile Delta), a part of the country that has preserved more ancient Egyptian ruins than most.

26 “I am not used to explaining my ideas,” Shadi told one interviewer in 1975, “and anyway I have to travel back to my childhood when I fell in love with Upper Egypt – Mallawi, my mother’s town in Minya – and when I started looking at the temple inscriptions and the Egyptian statues, [asking] what cultural ground we stand on, what are our roots, where does everything start… It’s a big question as you can see, but it inspired

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me to embark on what you might call an expression of the meaning and the life of being Egyptian… They call us the great builders, because all that remains [of our ancient civilization] is the Pyramids, the temples and the statues. But I take a different view, because these buildings were inarguably filled with other arts, with literature and music and acting, which couldn’t withstand the ravages of time.”13

27 It will take Shadi 13 years of patient labor under other artists to make his own Upper Egypt-set, ancient Egypt-inspired dream on the Nile. By the time he dies, having failed to make his second film under Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), this unconventional and arguably elitist aristocrat is holding a top position in uber-populist Nasser’s conservative, patriarchal cultural establishment: head of the Experimental Film Unit at the National Film Center. Thanks to government support through the General Egyptian Cinema Organization, by the time Nasser dies, Shadi and his hand-picked crew will have completed their piece of high-brow cinematic art without concessions.

28 This is possible thanks to Nasser’s most erudite comrade-in-arms, Tharwat Okasha (1921–2012), who was Minister of Culture in 1958– 1962 and again in 1966–1970. In the regime’s drive to control information dissemination, the ministry has co-opted enough progressive and libertarian but relatively apolitical artists and intellectuals to become a positive force in cultural production not driven by profit. That is how Shadi becomes a seamless part of the establishment. His filmography includes not only the October victory documentary Armies of the Sun (1975) but also Horizons (1973), another short documentary about the activities of the Ministry of Culture. Far from a subversive influence or rebellious voice, under Sadat, Shadi sounds like a guardian of the nationalist tradition.

13 Abdel Rahman Abu Ouf, “Interview with the Director Shadi Abdel Salam on the Trilogy of The Eloquent Peasant, The Mummy and Akhenaton”, Kuwait: Al Bayan, No. 113, August 1975. My translation.

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29 “Sometimes we say, ‘We’re seven thousand years old and don’t even know it.’ This phrase has very large implications,” Shadi said two years before his death. “For if, of these seven thousand years, I only know forty, then I’m person who is thirty years old but only remembers the last five. The state of profound personal confusion from which he would be suffering can be compared to the [Nation-] State that is afflicted by the sickness of this memory loss. I believe that we have generations suffering from cultural and historical amnesia. We need to rekindle this memory so that as individuals we are able to say, ‘Tomorrow I shall do this,’ while standing on solid ground. Without this, a person will not believe in his ideas, nor will he have an existence.”14

30 That is why the Naksa remains important. Shadi may not have been a patriot in the conventional sense, but he was attached to the idea of a renaissance under an authentic pharaoh and invested in the project of a powerful, independent Egypt. He can’t have been expecting the catastrophe when it happened.

31 “[The Naksa] naturally had a very strong effect on me, especially since my father had died two months before… and I could not escape the effect of those two afflictions. I remember that when I used to shave every morning I would really avoid looking at my face in the mirror. What The Mummy reflects of this may be the attempt to cling to my roots, not in the sense of showing off what belongs to me in the way of [ancient] monuments but of affirming that those millennia that stretch behind me have not yet completely slipped my grasp, that leaning on them I can still get up.”15

14 Shadi Abdel Salam, Elliott Colla (translator), “Counting the Years: Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd alSal¯am’s Words”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), Wayne State University Press. 15 Sami El Salamouni, “An Interview Not Published in Shadi’s Lifetime”, Cairo: Al Qahira, No. 159, 1 February 1996. My translation.

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32 The Naksa was a locus of distress but the sense that Egypt is in decline— that as Arabs, Muslims or fellahin,16 Egyptians have for centuries been in decline—had been pervasive for centuries when it happened. It was pervasive when I was born nine years later, and remains pervasive today. When you say barra—“abroad” in Egyptian Arabic—the implication is automatically of somewhere better. Likewise zaman (“in the past”): the two components that combine in Shadi to make The Mummy possible— European education, and nostalgia for Egypt’s past—can be described as preconditions for any twentieth- to twenty-first-century discourse on Egyptian identity. Much of what Shadi says about The Mummy—whether to clarify his intentions or to comment on its positive reception in Venice, Locarno, Paris, London and elsewhere—suggests he saw it as an affirmation of Egyptianness. But it would be disingenuous to miss the deeper negative impulse within that affirmation. The Mummy is obviously also about why it hurts (Fig. 3).

16 “FELLAH (pl. Fellahin), Arabic for ‘ploughman’ or ‘tiller,’ the word used in Arabicspeaking countries to designate peasantry. It is employed especially of the peasantry of Egypt, ‘Fellahin’ in modern English usage being almost equivalent to ‘Egyptians.’ In Egypt the name is applied to the peasantry as opposed to the Arabs of the desert (and even those who have settled on the land), the Turks and the townsfolk. Fellah is used by the Arabs as a term of reproach, somewhat like the English ‘boor,’ but rather implying a slavish disposition; the fellahin, however, are not ashamed of the name and may pride themselves on being of good fellah descent, as a ‘fellah of a fellah.’ They may be classified as Hamito-Semites, and preserve to some extent the blood of the ancient Egyptians. They form the bulk of the population of Egypt and are mainly Mahommedan, though some villages in Upper Egypt are almost exclusively Copt (Christian).” From an entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911.

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Fig. 3 Egyptian prisoners of war being rounded up outside El Arish, north Sinai, in June 1967. Government Press Office of Israel released into the public domain on the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War (Wikimedia Commons)

33 It is the summer of 2020, nearly a decade since the last attempt to affirm Egyptianness outside the arena of dream making—the January Revolution of 2011—and autocracy looks more endemic and consensual now than ever before. Hosni Mubarak (1928–2020), the former air force general widely seen as a kleptocrat who had been in charge since 1981, had gradually distanced the army from politics. He had introduced contested presidential elections for the first time in 2005 (before that presidential terms had been renewed by referendum). And, though he was evidently grooming his son Gamal Mubarak to take over from him “democratically,” he did seem to be piloting the transition to a liberal-capitalist order. So Sadat’s policies were radically different from Nasser’s and Mubarak’s were different again. Yet neither military rhetoric nor repressive policing, let alone the pharaoh-headed pyramid, had been abandoned for a moment in 60 years.

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34 So it goes. When, prompted by police brutality and led by liberalminded online activists, unprecedented mass protests broke out against Mubarak in January 2011, it looked as though the people were finally embracing not just democracy, capitalism, globalization and the activist trappings of neoliberalism but also the underlying values that had made it all possible—individualism, secularism, equality, rights and freedoms— modernity as I for one understood and wanted it. It became clear this was not the case when protesters nostalgically invoked Nasser, expressing the need for a new pharaoh to replace Mubarak (who as it paradoxically turns out had championed precisely the kind of neoliberal system those who rose up against him had in mind). But the full extent of the disaster did not register until it turned out the only viable alternative to military patriarchy was political Islam. This was a disappointment because, being little more than a formalization of religious fanaticism, political Islam is undoubtedly another facet of modernity’s failure in Egypt. It is worse, too, because it is more divisive, discriminatory and violent—more, in other words, premodern—than the July order could ever be.

35 Contrary to the story frequently told, “democratic transformation” was not sustainable in Egypt. In the year following the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, there was institutional and security mayhem. Brotherhood-supporting Islamists fought army-loving “honorable citizens” and honorable citizens fought “glue sniffers” (as “the revolutionaries” who had been hailed as history’s heroes only a few months before were now derisively called). The Muslim Brotherhood frantically sought to monopolize power, but much of the state bureaucracy found ways to undermine the Brotherhood. In the post-truth shitshow that ensued it was all that could be done to avert nationwide civil conflict and complete institutional collapse.

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36 Morsi’s ouster in 2013 was demanded by an indisputable majority and supported by practically all the January Revolution’s non-Islamist representatives, but in the West it was still decried as a coup. This, despite the fact that Mubarak had been ousted in a technically identical way and with far less popular backing in 2011. The former event was condemned while the latter was uncritically praised as an attempt at a “second republic” even though it never openly opposed the July order.

37 Less out of hatred for political Islam than because the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power had resulted in previously inconceivable division and dysfunction, everyone was grateful when the new commander of the army Abdel Fattah Al Sisi put his foot down—January Revolution partisans included.

38 Using sheer populist force, just like Nasser, by 2014 Sisi was in charge. And it wouldn’t take him long to restore the pharaonic status quo, ending Mubarak’s efforts at transitioning the country into civil governance and taking a monolithic, megaproject-fueled approach worthy of his socialist predecessor. Nothing at all had come of the January Revolution except three years of chaos and conspiracy, massive economic and human loss—both material and moral, including a massacre of Brotherhood supporters in August, which triggered a string of assassinations and jihadi attacks—and, together with the army’s return to politics, greater political repression. Cry the beloved modernity. The January Revolution bore more evidence than anything preceding it that even the idea of power peaceably changing hands had not gained a foothold in two centuries since Muhammad Ali.

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39 Nearly a decade later it hurts to remember how, with more delight than either fury or fear, I too joined the first mass protests ever to take place in my lifetime, and how ecstatic I was when—apparently through unaided people power—they managed to bring down a head of state who had seemed inviolate.

40 The place we converged on is in many ways modern Cairo’s dead center. It is the site of the Egyptian Museum, which has been located there since 1902. When it came into existence it was called Ismailia Square, after the khedive who conceived it. Tahrir (or “Liberation”) Square is what people started calling it during the 1919 Revolution, for obvious reasons, but it wasn’t officially so named until the July Revolution. All of which goes to show the sheer relevance of a film about postcolonial identity set in the Ismaili era, how inseparable The Mummy remains from the experience of being here now. That must be the reason I’m always eager to see it. Is it really such a good film?

41 When I first heard about The Mummy I was in my first year of university in the North of England—barra, studying Continental philosophy and English literature but already nostalgic for Egypt’s past glories—zaman. I saw it for the first time during my second summer break in 1996. I was bowled over. And I’ve never since doubted its quality. Yet here I am a quarter of a century later being forced to admit that sitting at home has nothing to do with my lack of excitement. It’s true that, as movies go, The Mummy—The Color of Pomegranates , too and, come to think of it, even Andrie Rublev—is unlike anything I can get excited about. Then again, it is so routinely and reflexively praised as art I feel I need to justify my enthusiasm for it anyway. That’s why I’m resolved to list its flaws.

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42 First, the dialogue. Written in standard Arabic rather than the Egyptian dialect used for all but the most classically oriented period dramas, it is meant to have a neutral register.17 This is necessary if the Cairo characters are to talk to their Luxor counterparts unaided, since each group’s spoken dialect of Arabic is wholly distinct, and the dialects are different enough to be mutually unintelligible. But standard Arabic ends up being unnatural, artificial-sounding in a way that jars with the film’s beautiful imagery. This is partly because it suffers from stilted delivery by theatrically inclined actors who sound like they are giving speeches, partly because formal rhetoric is what they unconsciously associate standard Arabic with. In many cases, what’s more, the performances themselves are flimsy. Shadi uses stylized choreography rather than verisimilar acting. But even so, with the notable exception of the lead role, Wanys (Ahmed Marie), the acting—including delivery of the standard Arabic dialogue—jars with the film’s other elements, often spoiling them.

43 The dialogue interests me more because it is the work of Alaa El Deeb (1939–2016), the Sixties Generation novelist and journalist who was my mentor and older friend, a kind of literary father figure, between the mid1990s and early 2000s. I never actually discussed 1967 with Ustaz Alaa, as I called him. He wrote The Mummy’s dialogue before that fateful summer. But I always knew that, until the age of 28 his career, his social life and his sense of value had all depended on a world where the nationalist experiment that began between 1952 and 1956 would remain meaningful. The Naksa ruined him.

17 In a 1970 French interview translated by Hala Essmat El Qadi as “Al Iqa’ al misri al bati’ ” (or “The Slow Egyptian Rhythm”) in Al Qahira, No. 159, 1 February 1996, Shadi says he used standard Arabic in order to eliminate the differences between two or more kinds of Egyptian person.

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44 It is the summer of 1967, nine years before I was born, and Ustaz Alaa has had the shock of his life. 30 years later he will have developed a melodramatic way of talking about the state of the nation. It is neither bitter nor cynical exactly but it is infinitely, disconsolately downcast. And I immediately recognize it in Shadi’s reference to not wanting to see his face in the mirror.18 Not being able to look in the mirror is exactly how he would’ve expressed the sense of impotence and shame associated with Naksa distress.

45 “The shops are closed,” Ustaz Alaa wrote of the evening the news of defeat descended on Cairo. “Women’s grief-stricken wails are the only audible sound. They sound as though they’re coming down from heaven. I’ve forgotten my name, who I am. The only reason I keep close to my friend is fear, necessity… In the middle of the street, I saw a madman wearing an old robe which he had rolled up to his waist, holding a bucket of water and a large cloth. He was splashing water around him, emitting unintelligible cries while he darted about, as if putting out a non-existent fire.”19

46 A subtler flaw of The Mummy’s is the friction between this funerary demonstrativeness and Shadi’s otherwise austere aesthetic. On the one hand a measured, muted stillness holds down the audiovisual experience. On the other hand, rather than appropriately controlled emotion, the characters’ grief comes across as rhetorical and theatrical. Pompous lines like “They had transgressed the respect due to this house” and “How

18 El Salamouni, “An Interview Not Published in Shadi’s Lifetime”, Cairo: Al Qahira, No. 159, 1 February 1996. My translation. 19 Alaa El Deeb, Waqfa qabl al munhadar: min awraq muthaqqaf misry 1952–1982 (A Stop before the Abyss: Out of an Egyptian Intellectual’s Papers, 1952–1982), Cairo: Dar El Sherouk, 2008. My translation.

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many bodies did my father’s hands violate to feed us?”20 are not the only thing that’s too melodramatic to fit comfortably with the subdued, almost abstract cinematic scheme.

47 From Wanys’s Hamlet-like wandering to illicit sex as a sign of moral degradation, and from the fatal stabbing of Wanys’s elder Brother (Ahmed Hegazi) to Wanys finally turning in his family, all kinds of Sixties Generation-style dramatics cut through the rarefied sense of mystery. In a film with so much temporal and visual space around what people do and say on screen, theatrical emotion feels not only strained but also muffled, as though a cinematic subtext is being deliberately suppressed. Sometimes this gives the impression that there are two incompatible audiovisual transmissions vying for the same portion of space-time.

48 If not for the grief that permeates both dramatics and photography, linking them, this would be even more distracting and unpleasant. Grief has an extra function for me: it reminds me of my father, whose death within weeks of my second viewing of The Mummy marked the first major threshold in my adult life (Fig. 4).

20 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press. This is the version of the script I am using for both quotes and character name spellings. No translator is credited, which suggests that the filmmaker wrote it in English.

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Fig. 4 Image of author at age six with his father on the beach in the summer resort of Agami, outside Alexandria. After trying out all kinds of avatars and visual self-representations to brand myself online, this is the image I settled on for both my site (therakha.net) and my Twitter avatar (@Sultans_Seal)

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49 The Mummy starts with the death of Wanys’s father Sheikh Selim, the tomb-raiding Hurabat clan’s powerful patriarch. This too is a threshold, it seems, but beyond the personal experience of the main character it is evidently a historical one. One relatively uncomplicated way to make sense of the film is to see it as an account of indigenous tradition breaking down in the face of colonial modernity. A premodern social-political order faces the wonders and weaponries of post-revolutionary France. A monarchy under occupation faces revolutionary republicanism, or—this last variation reflects the religious fervor with which Shadi views pharaonic heritage—a Muslim tribal belief system breaks down before the urban doctrine of enlightenment.

50 Following the beautiful Bedouin girl Zayna (a tiny, silent role played by the Golden Age icon Nadia Lotfy), Wanys ends up in a secret house operated by Murad (Mohamed Nabih), the groveling opportunist who hopes to replace Ayyub (Shafik Nour El Deen) as Luxor’s main antiquities smuggler. There Wanys finds young Hurabat clansmen having a good time. Murad is pimping out Zayna and another girl in return for artefacts. And, while he expects it of him, Wanys is utterly scandalized by his Cousins’ behavior. “Everything found in the mountain must be shared by all the tribe,” he berates them, outraged. Yet, now that the patriarch is dead and the effendis21 are here, the miscreants are sure of their ground: “Can you tell that to the Effendies? You are now our leader… Why should we share it with the Old Ones of the tribe? We lose half the profit. The mountain is no longer theirs alone.”22 In return for a gold 21 “EFFENDI (a Turkish word, corrupted from the Gr. αÙθšντης, a lord or master),” which Shadi’s own script spells the word both “Effendys” and “Effendies,” “a title of respect, equivalent to the English “sir,” in the Turkish empire and some other eastern countries. It follows the personal name, when that is used, and is generally given to members of the learned professions, and to government officials who have no higher rank, such as Bey, Pasha, &c. It may also indicate a definite office, as Hakim effendi, chief physician to the sultan. The possessive form effendim (my master) is used by servants and in formal intercourse.” Entry in Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911. 22 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press.

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Wedjat pendant—an Eye of Horus—that had been in Brother’s possession, Murad now offers him Zayna, whom he wouldn’t let Cousins have, and Wanys realizes to his horror the girl was purposely luring him here.

51 As Cairo encroaches on Hurabat territory, divisions within the clan mean the once sacred business of obtaining “enough gold to feed a hundred mouths” is being brazenly profaned. Like war profiteers, upstarts are trying to establish themselves. And the pillars of the existing order, whether Ayyub or the Old Ones, are no longer in control. Combined with the nobility and stateliness with which Shadi imbues the Hurabat, such decadence feels like the decline and fall of a whole way of life.

52 At the very start of the film, the black-robed figures of the Hurabat contrast with the white-jacketed horsemen from the city, prefiguring a new generation of clansmen who reject their ancestral heritage. This they do in the light that Cairo archaeologists arriving on a Nile “steamer” have shed on their lives. The patriarch has died and, apart from those archaeologists, no one can replace him. Grief is paramount.

53 The film ends, as it started, with the wailing of clanswomen. The image of them coming out to bid the steamer farewell, behaving as though the mummies were the bodies of their own dead being taken away, is extremely powerful.

54 “Then a strange thing happened, perhaps the strangest incident in the whole story. From Luxor down to Qift, on both banks of the Nile, the fellahin (peasants) fired guns as is customary at funerals. Fellah women with loosened hair followed the steamer, sending up the old wailing cry

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for the dead, which has probably come down from pharaonic times… This was their last instinctive act of homage.”23

55 But this is Naksa grief. It is death-of-the-father grief. But that’s what Naksa grief was at heart. It’s what Naksa grief overtly became three years later when Nasser, having offered to resign only to be re-legitimized by riots, fell dead. The encroachment of something new and uncertain on an established way of life—but it is also the harrowing confrontation with that way of life’s discontents, its lies. Grief remains the film’s saving grace. It is probably the reason I didn’t notice any flaws the first time round.

56 Here’s another tidbit. I hadn’t yet seen The Mummy when, on the 10th anniversary of Shadi’s death, Ustaz Alaa took part in a special issue of Al-Qahira magazine dedicated to the famed director. It came out in February 1996, while I was struggling with the wet, dark, strangely truncated days of my second winter in Yorkshire.

57 “He was a glorious madman who saw the scenes before realizing them and heard voices,” Ustaz Alaa wrote. “We’d keep looking for the [right] word till it matched what he imagined… Shadi Abdel Salam built his film word by word and image by image. He gave form to the shadows and the colors, with a formidable executive genius by his side: the dear late Abdel Aziz Fahmy, photographer and human being.”24

23 Leonard Cottrell, The Lost Pharaohs, London: Kegan Paul, 2005. 24 Alaa El Deeb, “He Was His Own Art School”, Cairo: Al Qahira, No. 159, 1

February 1996.

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58 So it goes. With almost every outdoor scene filmed in the magic hour—either dawn or dusk—and every camera angle considered and reconsidered for composition and color, the one indisputable virtue of The Mummy is its visual beauty. Each frame is a powerful still photograph. Groups of characters—the mountain dwellers, the valley dwellers, the policemen, etc.—are set apart by exquisitely designed costumes. Indoor lighting and sets have a balance and economy worthy of Rembrandt. And the props—lifelike replicas of actual relics—are stunning. Absorbing wind and wail, the Italian composer Mario Nascimbene’s unsettling soundtrack adds to the mystifying beauty of those strangely anthropomorphic white tombstones while the black-clad figures move among them—this time I am not letting any of it distract me from listing flaws.

59 Even worse than muffled melodrama, you see, in The Mummy the characters’ motives are seldom clear. Their behavior appears irrational even when the acting is solid. Consider the hero’s Mother (Zouzoo Hamdi El Hakim) at the start of the film.

60 Following the death of Wanys’s father, Wanys and Brother are led by their paternal Uncle (Abdel Moneim Abul Futouh) and an elderly Relative (Abdel Azim Abdel Haqq) on a clandestine journey into an uncharted cemetery where, deep in the mountain, they witness the violent extraction the Wedjat pendant from a pharaoh’s neck. That is their initiation into the secret their father decreed they should be trusted with, a “blood secret to guard with your lives… and, if need be, to pay for with your lives.” And it leaves Wanys dazed, in a trance. “What is this trust that makes me fear to look upon you, my father,” the question reverberates in his head.

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61 “As always, accounts vary: Horus is either completely blinded, or one eye is damaged; [that eye] is restored by Horus himself or, more usually, by Hathor, Isis or Thoth… Once restored, the eye of Horus became the wedjat eye: a potent symbol of completeness or wholeness which, initially used to bring Osiris back to life, also helped more humble mummies be reborn. Illustrations invariably show the eye as a mixture of human eye and eyebrow with falcon-like facial markings.”25

62 “Of all Egyptian mythological symbols,” nonetheless, “the most enduring is the eye. Actually there were two eyes in early myths—one associated with Ra and another with Horus. We have seen the myth in which Ra himself had two eyes, the sun and the moon. Since Horus was at times amalgamated with Ra, it is not surprising that Ra’s second eye became the Eye of Horus, This eye became the particular object of Seth’s aggression during the battle between Horus and his uncle; when the red god, using his magical powers of deception, had captured the eye, he threw it into the darkness beyond the edge of the world. Thoth, who had been watching the fight and who was the guardian of the moon, observed where it fell and went to fetch it. When he found it, it was in pieces, but he located them all and put them together to form a full moon and thereby restored the night light. This eye was called the wadjet and ancient Egyptians could take the eye apart into its pieces. In fact, the various pieces were used in early writing to represent fractions (the eyeball, for example, represented one quarter)”26 (Fig. 5).

25 Joyce Tyldesley, The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, Penguin, 2010. 26 Robert A. Armour, Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1986, 2001.

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Fig. 5 A late 21st-dynasty linen bandage wrapping the un-mummified body from Deir El Bahari bearing an eye of Horus as a protective emblem, 1000–945 BC. Tomb of Henettawy F (MMA 59), MMA excavations, 1923–1924, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Wikimedia Commons)

63 It is the summer of 2020 and I am thinking of eyes. I remember L’histoire de l’œil, the incredible 1928 novella by Georges Bataille (1897–1962) which I studied in my final year in England, writing my graduation minithesis on the renegade surrealist who denounced André Breton’s version of Marxism and, prioritizing desire, tried to come up, among other things, with “an erotics of the sacred.” “Even if it kills me,” the apotheosized mother tells her narrator son in the posthumously published My Mother (1966),27 “to yield to my desires, to every last one of them.” The eye in Bataille’s novella metamorphoses first into an egg, which also yields a

27 Georges Bataille (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2012.

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substance very like the “vile jelly”28 constituting the organ of sight—also, as Roland Barthes notes in his 1962 essay on the text,29 equated with milk, blood, urine and semen—and later into a bull’s testicle. In both forms—recalling a Hindu Shiva lingam, another oviform stand-in for the fascinum or divine phallus—the eye is used as a kind of dildo, but it also appears disembodied in the context of violence and death. The object is associated with the sun, too.30

64 A kind of philosophical meditation in the form of a pornographic narrative, the book turns the eye into an extra-anatomic entity that, in a postscript called “Coincidences,” Bataille relates to his childhood experience of being in his blind, paralytic father’s presence while the old man urinated into a chamber pot under a blanket in his armchair: “Since he could not see anything, his pupils very frequently pointed up into space, shifting under the lids… he had huge, ever-gaping eyes that flanked an eagle nose, and those huge eyes went almost entirely blank [with] a completely stupefying expression of abandon and aberration in a world that he alone could see… In any case, the image of those white eyes from that time was directly linked, for me, to the image of eggs….”31 Phallus, father, sun, sacred eye: coincidences seem to apply here too, with the sexual and free-association aspects of the famous “Contendings of Horus and Seth” coming through in new ways.

65 I’m thinking of the eye that watching The Mummy turns me into. It’s an eye that sees past aesthetics into history but, assimilating what historical insights it so gains, still seeks an aesthetic salvation in the end. It is a 28 “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” Cornwall famously cries as he gouges out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear (Act III, Scene 7). 29 Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye” (trans. J. A. Underwood), in Georges Bataille (trans. Joachim Neugroschal), Story of the Eye: By Lord Auch, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2013. 30 Georges Bataille (trans. Austryn Wainhouse), My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2012. 31 Ibid.

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desire-oriented, interdimensional eye, endlessly nostalgic for a zaman it has never known. And its pain comes from the fact that, even though it would like nothing more than being all and unequivocally baladi, it cannot help seeing things out of a head formed barra.

66 Later on Uncle and Relative come to Sheikh Selim’s house to offer their condolences, only to find that all-seeing eye still with Brother. He was supposed to take it to Ayyub, who arrives every so often on his Nile boat to collect the new objects on offer. Horrified at what his family does, Brother gets into an argument with the two Old Ones. Mother intervenes only when they question her son’s upbringing, which reflects on her and her late husband. She remains cool and collected after they are gone. She seems to respond tenderly when Brother objects to her not defending him further, asking after Wanys but saying little else as she paces away from him. At 28 min Mother abruptly turns and, for no clear reason, begins to swear at her firstborn.

67 “Curse you for disturbing what has ended—and now it shall never end,” the Lady of the House says in what sounds like a cryptic prophecy, unilaterally depriving Brother of his identity. She will never be seen again. “Curse you for disturbing the peaceful look between us. Drift alone, unfortunate. I cannot name you.”32

68 But the film’s greatest flaw is the assumption that the younger generation should have quite so much of a problem with the reality of the family business. Once they find out that it involves desecrating the tombs of “the Dead,” as the script calls them, they are all so morally revolted they instantly disown their heritage, give up their livelihood and risk their lives (Fig. 6). 32 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press.

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Fig. 6 Partly inspired by ancient sculpture, this statue, Nahdet Masr (Egypt’s Reawakening, 1920–1928), still occupies pride of place near Cairo University, where it was defaced by Islamist demonstrators in 2012. It is probably the best known work by the pioneer sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891–1934) (Photograph by Alex Dika Seggerman, from Wikipedia)

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69 The day Sheikh Selim dies, the Nile steamer arrives out of season, bearing the young Egyptian archaeologist Ahmed Effendi Kamal (Mohamed Khairi), who hopes to surprise the tomb robbers, as he tells his French superior Gaston Maspero (Gaby Karraz). “It is well known that the Archaeology Society doesn’t work in the summer, therefore it is the safest season to smuggle stolen objects. My unexpected arrival will cause a disturbance, and through the disturbance, new evidence is bound to leak.”33 As it turns out the disturbance is far greater than anything he can imagine.

70 Following Brother’s confrontation with the two Old Ones, they promptly have him killed. When you’re Sheikh Selim’s son and you’ve been let in on “Pharaoh’s cave,” it’s no longer an option to want out. This must be what Mother means by him disturbing “what has ended” and “the peaceful look between us.”

71 “To you it is an object of gold,” Brother tells the Old Ones. “To me it is an eye watching me… Better fear the day when your children will ask you: Is this our bread?” And, sure enough, when at the end of the film Uncle and Relative urge Cousins (Ahmed Khalil, Helmi Helal and Mohamed Abdel Rahman) to attack the official caravan taking the newly discovered mummies to Cairo, these young men too are inexplicably paralyzed as one of them asks, with melodramatic bitterness, “Is this our bread?”34

72 The quote in Paragraph No. 54 above is one of six epigraphs at the start of the script. But it is the missing part of it—the bit Shadi withholds—that is crucial: “Many of these people were robbers and had lived for years

33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.

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by despoiling the tombs of their ancestors. But they were also descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. The foreigners had found their kings and were taking them away.”35 The clansmen have been robbing their own fathers, in other words, as Shadi himself says: “a European man comes to [the clansman] and says, ‘Give me this piece of stone for [a phenomenal price],’ and he gives it to him not knowing that he’s trading in his own flesh.”36 (Fig. 7)

Fig. 7 The sister-in-law of English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) Amy buying antiquities at the site of the ancient city of Abydos near El Balayna, Sohag in Upper Egypt (From the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, London, in Wikipedia)

35 Leonard Cottrell, The Lost Pharaohs, London: Kegan Paul, 2005. 36 El Salamouni, “An Interview Not Published in Shadi’s Lifetime”, Cairo: Al Qahira,

No. 159, 1 February 1996. My translation.

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73 “In al-Mumiya,” Shadi says, sounding just as messianic as you expect him to, “I have essentially dealt with the problematics of national culture… I wanted to make it clear in the film that even though Wanys and the young Egyptologist [Ahmed Kamal] had never spoken to each other before their meeting, they are two brothers who represent two poles of Egyptian society. There will come a day in which all the Egyptian masses will share one culture, that is, the culture of customs that are particularly Egyptian, but modernized. This is the deeper meaning of al-Mumiya.”37

74 The truth is—whether such continuity is understood to be ethnic or cultural, the idea that the modern fellahin are the direct descendants of ancient Egyptians is as absurd as any historical race concept. Never mind Asian, notably Persian occupation at various points in over thirty centuries of pharaonic history. The twenty centuries between Ptolemy I Soter (367– 282 BC) and Muhammad Ali are sufficient to transform what it means to be Egyptian many times over. It’s true that the Nile Valley seems to have a homogenizing effect on those who settle in it. But, even before the Arab Muslim conquest of 639–42 AD, languages, belief systems and ways of life—let alone bloodlines—would’ve repeatedly reconstituted Egyptian identity. To think that there is such a thing as an Egyptian essence that accounts for Pharaonic glory and can still be accessed today seems sadly misguided. Yet Shadi is not the first intellectual to give into the thought.

37 Quoted in Colla, “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian Nation-State”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009.

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75 All through the first half of the twentieth century, it turns out, ancient Egypt is central to the nationalist renaissance being prophesied or planned. That particular zaman is the source, the proof that there is more to Egypt than its current sorry state. It was so popular at one point that even Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006)—the quintessential Arab novelist— started his career with a translation of Ancient Egypt (1912) by the Reverend James Baikie (1866–1931), a Scottish priest, armchair archaeologist and prolific writer of popular books on subjects such as astronomy and Atlantis. In his first three novels (written between 1939 and 1944), Mahfouz courted pharaonic revivalism before realizing it wasn’t catching on. And, even before he produced the celebrated Trilogy (1956–1957), it was with novels set in contemporary Cairo that he made his name.

76 Still, savants like the dramatist Tawfiq Al Hakim (1898–1987) consistently evoked the idea of ancient Egypt as a model for revival. As a young man Al Hakim was torn between respectable society—the legal profession of his father, which he naturally inherited—and love of street characters and popular performance. After failing to complete his Ph.D. in Paris, where he spent three years as a flaneur, too immersed in art and theater to sustain an interest, he came back to work as a public prosecutor and eventually a kind of public intellectual, writing frequently and prolifically in every genre until his death at 89. Al Hakim sought to reconcile his two conflicting loyalties by creating a serious or literary theater in Arabic, becoming the first Arab author to devote himself to drama and produce plays in the classical tongue. In a sense he too demonstrates the barrazaman requirement, drawing on a European education to revive and broaden the scope of an age-old literary tradition that had never included drama.38

38 In his 1947 short story “Averroës’s Search,” Jorge Luis Borges has the great Andalusian-Arab polymath Ibn Rushd (1126–1198) puzzling over the meaning of “tragedy” and “comedy” in the course of translating Aristotle’s Poetics, since he has absolutely no concept of dramatic work or stage play.

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77 Along with the majority of Egyptians, Al Hakim had been a supporter of the nationalist statesman Saad Zaghloul (1859–1927), a provincially— baladi—rooted lawyer and career politician who, initially by marrying the daughter of Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi (1840–1914), grew close to the British man in charge, Major Evelyn Baring—better known by the seat of his earldom as Lord Cromer (1814–1917)—rising in the ranks until his relations with the British came to a head following the end of the Great War. In 1919 he led a nationalist delegation—or wafd, hence the Wafd Party, the most popular and powerful national political force through the 1930s—to the Paris Peace Conference demanding independence from Britain. When he was exiled as a result, the whole country rose up against the British, forcing them to bring him back (Fig. 8).

78 So it goes. As a young man Al Hakim personally witnesses the anti-British demonstrations, and his first major work, the 1933 novel Return of the Spirit , is written in the optimistic spirit of the revolution. Stating that the Egyptian people lack only “an idol… that man from among them who embodies all their emotions and hopes… to work miracles,” Return of the Spirit personally inspires Nasser to become that very idol.39

79 The Arabic word I translate as “idol,” al ma b¯ ud, is literally “the worshipped one.” Though Al Hakim later recanted his support for Nasser, critiquing the Nasserist era in The Return of Consciousness (1972), throughout Nasser’s life he was a repeatedly decorated friend of the idol’s and the acknowledged Godfather of the Revolution.

39 Tawfiq Al Hakim, Awdat al Roh (Return of the Spirit), Cairo: Dar El Sherouk, . 2004. My translation.

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Fig. 8 An iconic photo of female demonstrators in traditional ladies’ dress raising the 1922–1953 Egyptian flag during the 1919 Revolution, captioned “Nationalists demonstrating” (From mideastimage.com, on the Arabic Wikipedia)

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80 “A nation that came up, at the dawn of humanity, with the miracle of the Pyramids,” Al Hakim has the French archaeologist Monsieur Fouquet tell the British irrigation inspector Mr. Black in Return of the Spirit , “will not fail to come up with another miracle or miracles. A nation they claim has been dead for centuries, not seeing its magnificent heart soar into the sky from amid the sands of Guiza… Those people whom we think of as ignorant know many things, but they know them with their heart, not their mind. The supreme wisdom is in their blood and they do not know it, the power in their spirit… which explains those moments in history when we see Egypt make an astounding leap in very little time, bringing about amazing achievements in the blink of an eye.”40

81 Return of the Spirit is made up of two volumes. At the start of each there is an epigraph from E. A. Wallis Budge’s Book of the Dead. The second is especially germane: “Arise, arise, Osiris. I am your son Horus. I have come to restore you to life. You will forever have your true heart, your past heart.”41

82 So, too, The Mummy: the epigraph preceding the opening credits is another quote from the Book of the Dead: “You who goes will come back/You who sleeps will rise/You who passes will live again/Glory be to you/To the sky and its haughtiness/To the earth and its breadth/To the seas and their depth.”42 Only having read this superimposed over the face of a gilded sarcophagus with one eye plucked out can the viewer ease into the opening scene. The Book of the Dead comes back at the very end of the film when, covering his face with his hands, Wanys watches the

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 My translation.

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mummies being taken away: “Arise… thou shalt not perish. Thou hast been resurrected.”43

83 “By the New Kingdom the nonroyal dead had abandoned their Coffin Texts in favor of the Chapters of Going Forth by Day, better known today as the Book of the Dead. The Book outlived the pharaohs, and was still in use during the Roman period. It was a personalized, practical guide to the afterlife written on a lengthy papyrus scroll (or, occasionally, on leather, linen, tomb furniture or tomb walls) and included either within the coffin or among the grave-goods. The scroll might be bespoke, or it could be purchased ready-written with gaps for the name of the deceased to be inserted….”44

84 It is the summer of 2020 and I am thinking about resurrection. One of the earliest poems I ever wrote was inspired by the Fayyum mummy portraits. They are remarkably lifelike images made using pigment and hot wax on wood panels that, from the first century BC to the third century AD—during the Imperial Roman period—replaced the sculpted face on the sarcophagus containing the mummified remains of a well-off person. Like coffin inscriptions, they were created during the lifetime of the deceased but used on their death. I’d gone to see a large selection of them beautifully mounted at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, within walking distance of my parents’ house. The wonder of 2000-year-old people looking so alive moved me to write about time-traveling faces. I am still in awe of them. Apart from clothes they are familiar enough to bump into on the street. If not in the religious—supernatural—sense then as art, they perform the function of mummification, keeping their subjects alive for all eternity. They are real (Fig. 9).

43 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press. 44 Tyldesley, The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, Penguin, 2010.

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Fig. 9 One of the more moving mummy portraits, encaustic on wood, Mummy portrait of bearded man, encaustic on wood, from the Royal Museum of Scotland. Excavated at Hawara by William Flinders Petrie in 1911 (Wikimedia Commons)

85 “I want you to understand me,” Shadi told one journalist, speaking of preparations for his second film The Tragedy of the Great House or Akhenaton, which he did not live to make, “the actors aren’t professionals… I met the person who will play the role of Akhenaton while walking in the streets of Cairo… I’ve met more than one woman who would work for the role of Nefertiti […] Most of those who act for me are inexperienced… I can influence them… They’re not tied to things that distance them from us… For this reason, when they decorate themselves with jewelry and wear wigs like the ancients – wigs made of wool – and Pharaonic robes made of Egyptian cotton or priestly garments made of cheetah skin… At that moment, the blood of our kings and queens and

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princes and soldiers and storytellers and writers will flow in their veins. It’s the blood of memory. They won’t be acting roles, they will be inheriting them.”45

86 “An analysis of old as well as current Egyptian folksongs reveals [that the] most expressive means of the people’s feelings is the well-known Arabic maww¯ al … The maww¯ al in Egypt as well as in all other Arab countries was, and still is, an indispensable part of daily life.”46

87 When in a mawwal from turn-of-the-century Minya the speaker implores a Boatman uncannily reminiscent of the god Re to take him to the west bank of the Nile where he can meet his dead loved ones,47 the sense of connection is palpable. This is especially true of the mortuary tradition in Upper Egypt.

88 “When investigating the historical foundations of lament cosmology and performance in Upper Egypt,” writes Elizabeth Wickett, “I found that many of the laments echoed the lamentations of their predecessors, inscribed, apparently verbatim, on ancient tomb walls from the Old Kingdom… The tropes of lament, their composition and performance style, as well as a substantive portion of lament themes invoke strong comparisons with the most ancient funerary liturgies extant, those incised on the pyramids of the kings of the Sixth Dynasty in Saqqara known as the Pyramid Texts . With these, I would include the ritual and non-personalized nature

45 Shadi Abdel Salam, Elliott Colla (translator), “Counting the Years: Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd alSal¯am’s Words”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), Wayne State University Press. 46 Sami A. Hanna, “The Maww¯ al in Egyptian Folklore”, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 80, No. 316, April–June 1967. 47 The folksong in question goes, Y¯ a rayyis el bah.r law tismah. ti add¯ın¯ı/ash¯ uf el h.ab¯ ayib bi ain¯ı/w arja  ti add¯ın¯ı: “Head Boatman, please take me across,/To see my loved ones with my own eyes/and come back, if you take me across.”

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of the laments and perceptions of the afterlife: visions of the tomb as a marshy or watery place, the idea of the deceased assuming the form of a migratory bird, and the phenomenology of the soul, its capacity to depart and return.”48

89 Soaked in the same funerary aura as the film, this connection between ancient and modern is an evocative aesthetic experience, maybe even a cultural insight. Can it really be an ethical-political guiding principle?

90 “Ever since I began to work,” Shadi says, “I’ve had a cause: histories that have been hidden or lost… The people you see on the street and in houses and in the fields and factories have a history. They have participated daily in forming life, in creating life; they have enriched humanity. How do we represent and remember their positive and powerful participation in life? First, they need to know who they are, what they were, and what they’ve contributed… We need to connect the person of today with the person of yesterday so we can present a person of tomorrow… That’s what motivates me.”49

48 Elizabeth Wickett, “Funerary Lament and the Expression of Grief in the Transforming Landscape of Luxor”, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 32, The Imaginary and the Documentary: Cultural Studies in Literature, History, and the Arts, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012. 49 Shadi Abdel Salam, “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian Nation-State”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009. Translated from Magdy Abdel Rahman’s compilation of interviews given by Abdel Salam published in Al Qahira magazine, No. 159, 1 February 1996.

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91 As a way to show human connections across class and time, it turns out, taboo invocation is not a very successful device. Considering that the mummies’ final resting place will not be their own graves but the Bulaq Museum, surely the archaeologists are just as guilty of disturbing the Dead. The assumption that everyone in Egypt instinctively observes a taboo on ancient tomb raiding is preposterous.

92 But that is not to support the offensive Elliott Colla mounts on the “statism” of Shadi’s approach to ancient Egypt. Using a Foucauldian account of “governmentality,” Colla seems to suggest that, since it was fellahin who did it, then the plunder of ancient sites must somehow have been an emancipatory act. He also conflates urban contempt for the fellahin with modern state control, applying Gramsci’s north–south binary to a geographically and culturally far more amorphous relation. The seventeenth-century satire Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded 50 shows how the educated class—many of whose members, versed not in ancient languages and scientific method but in religious law and Arabic rhetoric, themselves came from fellahin families—had taken the same “pedagogical,” “legal-moralist” and “disciplinary” stance on all kinds of fellahin practices long before the advent of Europeans, Egyptology or state structures as such.

93 The Mummy does not morally privilege the emerging state over its lawless antagonists, as Colla suggests even as he acknowledges Shadi’s ambivalence. It merely makes the assumption that collecting and preserving monuments is the standard (“normative”) course of behavior in a modern country, which is not itself a normative assumption to make. No need for

50 Y¯ usuf al-Shirb¯ın¯ı (trans. Humphrey Davies), Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab¯ u Sh¯ ad¯ uf Expounded, 2 Vols., New York University Press: Library of Arabic Literature, 2016.

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a post-Marxist analysis to see that this is by definition as painful as it is inevitable, as much a defeat as a triumph for Egyptianness.51

94 “Those you call ‘the Dead’ are but ashes or wood thousands of years old,” Relative tells Brother. “No one can recall their parents or their children.”52

95 “You mean leave [the Dead] to the Effendys,” he also says, and he is perfectly right. The only thing missing from his argument is that the effendis are defending the mummies on behalf of foreign conquerors. “What deal can you make with these arrogant Effendys from Cairo? They would put you in chains if they found [the Wedjat pendant] upon you. They grab what they want. They don’t pay us like Ayyub.”53

96 “The difficulty in controlling tomb robberies [in ancient Egypt] was simply that the wealth entombed with the deceased was so vast and the officials tasked with keeping them safe could so easily be bought.”54

97 Why would such young men have moral qualms about robbing tombs so old they can only contain, as Relative says, “ashes or wood”—and gold? Tomb robbing is as understandable in context as it was to the ancients themselves. If it was acceptable to officials at the height of 51 Colla, “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian NationState”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009. 52 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press. 53 Ibid. 54 J. J. Mark, “Tomb Robbing in Ancient Egypt”, Ancient History Encyclopedia, 2017.

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Egyptian civilization, why would it offend the moral sensibility of late nineteenth-century clansmen who definitely did not regard pharaonic mummies as dead people, let alone as their own (Muslim) dead, and whose family, materialistic and sectarian loyalties were stronger than any sense of propriety?

98 Had the film focused on the existential conflict of the individual at its center, Wanys, the idea of Egyptians coming back to themselves just might have worked. As it is Brother’s, and later Cousins’ position on desecrating the Dead turns an aesthetic trope into an ideological message—and not a very convincing one. Still, the individual father’s death is a powerful metaphor for the modern Egyptian’s historical orphaning—and it sets off the Naksa-inspired funerary atmosphere.

99 So it goes. I lost my own father in October 2000, but it wasn’t until September 2001 that I registered the full force of my grief for him. Another Sixties Generation intellectual, Baba had been a Nasser-hating Marxist-turned-liberal, born to a middle-class Nile Delta family in 1932. In the pre-1952 atmosphere of ideological multiplicity and political freedom, when he came to study law in Cairo, he must’ve envisioned a political career for himself. But by the time he graduated Nasser had come along and he abandoned all political hope. His life ruined not by the Naksa—which he might’ve prophesied 10 years before it happened— but by that pharaoh’s one-party police state, he suffered from the Black Dog, as the Australian poet Les Murry called depression,55 practically all his life. There must’ve been deeper reasons for Baba’s condition, but I’ve always felt it was the way Nasser’s revolution locked him out of history that made him a ghost of who he might’ve been.

55 Les Murry, Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

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100 Baba was always kind and loving when he had the presence of mind to show it, but most of the time he was either agitated to the point of panic or simply sleepy and silent. Past 65, with a myriad of morbid conditions and practically no will to deal with them, he became physically demanding to live with. By 2000 his health was failing so spectacularly that his death initially felt like a relief. For a few weeks, while the funerary rites were taken care of, I was emotional but embodied. I felt brave, facing the first major calamity of my life at 24 with my feet on the ground. I felt independent and grownup. And, as I went back to my daily life acting as if nothing had happened, it didn’t for moment occur to me that my world was irreparably damaged.

101 Baba had never exercised patriarchal authority even in the pedagogical sense. He had never taken on the mantle of the pharaoh, which was good for our relations because, by the age of 16 or 17, I already despised patriarchy. The trouble is—this gave me the illusion that fatherlessness could never be a problem. So when he died I did not suspect that something essential but invisible had been plucked from my life. In reality my sense of security, the feeling that the world would continue to hold together no matter how I behaved, had been seriously undermined. Slowly, insidiously, over the course of months, the terror and distress this generated built up inside me, so that—having held off the inevitable meltdown for nearly a year—by September 2001 the world came to pieces.

102 The world was really coming to pieces. The 9/11 attacks were reconfiguring Arab and Muslim identity in devastating new ways. Baba had been spared that horror, just as 10 years later he would be spared the abortive hope of the January Revolution. As a former communist he had watched with fascination while the Soviet empire collapsed and political Islam emerged as a global ideology with terrorist overtones. His conversion to liberalism had never affected his core principles. To the day he died he had no religious belief and no doubt about the economic driver

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of history. And, even though he did not fully appreciate its potential for violence, his rejection of political Islam remained firm. Now as 9/11 gave way to open-ended war across the region and unprecedented restrictions on and revulsion against Arabs and Muslims outside it, it felt as though Baba had really been holding it all together, his presence a bulwark against the Deluge. What would become of me without him?

103 This is another relatively uncomplicated way to see The Mummy, as the story of a young man’s psychological struggle to make sense of the world following the death of his father. Unlike his elder brother, Sheikh Selim’s direct heir, Wanys doesn’t have the moral wherewithal to decisively reject his patrilineal legacy. It’s the amoral fact of his father’s death that shakes the foundations of his world. And his sense of self is disrupted less by the objectionable nature of what his family does than by his own existential confusion. That is arguably why he ends up doing what he does.

104 “What is to be of me,” Wanys asks himself early on, just as I asked myself in 2001. After Brother’s altercation with Uncle and Relative, which upsets Mother, Wanys gently berates him, “Why did you have to hurt her?” But when Brother tries to have a conversation with him he refuses to engage: “You have shown me a dark fate. A desert in which I must move alone afraid to feel, afraid to remember… Why did you have to show me all this? Why did it have to be you, my brother?”

105 Only in this state of crisis can Wanys reconsider his relation not just to the pharaohs but to Egyptians outside the Hurabat as well. A pair of scenes brings this idea home. Early on Ahmed Effendi notices Wanys while moving from boat to carriage—their first encounter. While he walks—he “continues looking toward Wanys, thoughtfully”—an assistant “already in the carriage observes Wanys” and remarks, “What a curious look!” Ahmed Effendi’s response is, “One would think it is that of a stone image come to life.”

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106 Later Wanys befriends a Stranger from the valley (Mohamed Mourshid) and spends some time walking around with him. They separate when a headman comes searching for laborers to help the effendis with their excavations, and Wanys refuses to go with him. Stranger ends up badly beaten by Hurabat clansmen, who see him as the effendis’ spy. The next time they meet, he greets Wanys as Son of Selim, running away from him in terror. “Don’t fear me,” Wanys reassures the young man. “I am as wounded as you are.” Now while Stranger answers his questions about the effendis—“They say they seek people upon whose ruins we live today. They call them ancestors, and can read their writings and their names on the stone”—Wanys breaks down, banging his head against the temple wall and repeating Relative’s words: “No one can recall their parents or their children… Tell me no more,” Wanys wails. “You make the stone images seem alive to me.”

107 First an effendi identifies Wanys with pharaonic statues, then an innocent fellah makes him see the same statues as living people.

108 It is the summer of 2020 and I’m thinking about reverence for the pharaohs. I’m thinking what a quaint notion it has become. Only a post-January Revolution Facebook celebrity like Sameh Abu Arayes, a Mubarak loyalist and conspiracy theorist who regularly explains historical and current events by reference to the Illuminati and King Solomon’s djinn, has suggested that Egypt’s true religion is that of the ancients.

109 “Who said the Islamic or Christian religion are among the foundations of the Egyptian nation? I respect every person’s religion and opinion, but don’t say it’s among Egypt’s foundations. The Islamic religion is a religion that came from the Arabian peninsula which they forced on Egyptians after they occupied Egypt… and the Christian religion came from the Jews… If you want to return to a religion that is among the foundations

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of Egypt then that is the religion of Horus, Isis and Osiris, which was the religion of ancient Egyptian civilization… May Horus protect you!”56

110 It doesn’t take long to realize Abu Arayes knows practically nothing of ancient Egyptian religion, and what he does know he doesn’t feel strongly enough about to persuasively profess. While serving their purpose of maintaining a high level of online traction, announcements like “Off to the Guiza Pyramids to perform umrah,57 soak in the spiritual atmosphere and pray that Horus should protect us and protect Egypt”58 are not so much part of a sincere attempt at revival along the lines of Modern Paganism, say, as typical social-media douchebaggery. The interesting thing is—they sound like a premeditated parody of Shadi’s discourse.

111 In the way of nationalist rhetoric, much has been made of the struggle put up by early Egyptian Egyptologists to break into a traditional preserve of Europeans. People like the real Ahmed Pasha Kamal (1851–1923), the first Egyptian Egyptologist to make a name for himself and a teacher of the better known Selim Hassan (1886–1961)—author of the 16-volume Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, the definitive such work in Arabic—did initially suffer from bias and exclusion, it seems (Fig. 10).

56 Sameh Abu Arayes, Facebook post quoted in “Abu Arayes Calls on Egyptians to Return to the Religion of Horus”, Veto portal, 15 August 2014. My translation. 57 Umrah is an optional form of pilgrimage to Mecca that, unlike the Hajj (which is required of every adult Muslim able to undertake it at least once), can be undertaken at any time of the year. Even Abu Arayes’s ideas about worship are purely Islamic. 58 Sameh Abu Arayes, Facebook post displayed as a screengrab in “Abu Arayes Attacks Islam, Declaring His Conversion to Pharaoh’s Religion”, Rasd Portal, 18 August 2014. My translation.

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Fig. 10 “Dr Selim Bey Hassan’s excavations close to 4th pyramid in progress” (1934 negative from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, Library of Congress)

112 “This call [to contemplate the greatness of the past with a view to achieving national independence],” writes one biographer of Hassan, “sincerely expressed the ambitions of a whole generation of educated and intellectuals [entering the arena of Egyptology] which foreigners endeavored to close off in every way to Egyptians, perhaps because they realized the danger inherent in the children of a nation under occupation entering [it], sure as they were that the most powerful sparks of patriotic feeling are those that emerge from the veins of gold and the flash of brass within the land of ancient Egypt.”59

59 Mohamed Abdel Wahid, Ma s¯ ah .sana at maws¯ u ah: Sel¯ım Hassan (A Tragedy That Created an Encylopaedia), Cairo: Madbouli, 2018.

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113 And it may be that colonial policy did block Egyptians from highereducation disciplines in which it wasn’t thought their education would advance the cause of empire, but it is hard to see how Egyptology could be counted among such disciplines. Unfairness to native Egyptologists would’ve reflected racism or anti-Egyptian bigotry in Europeancontrolled institutions of learning, but that would have been no different in any other modern discipline of the arts or sciences.

114 The early Egyptian Egyptologists themselves never claimed the pharaohs as ancestors. They may have condoned a rhetoric of continuity but they did not take it literally. And there is no reason to think their careers had anything particularly to do with the fight for independence. In his Encyclopaedia 60 Hassan, whose language suggests he was a devout Muslim, never overtly identifies with the ancients or assumes privileged access to them on the basis of his patriotism or Egyptianness. He does not impose any sense of identity on what he sees as humanity’s past, not his people’s. And he treats knowledge of ancient Egypt rather as a doctor might treat medical knowhow.

115 Beyond being used as a rhetorical device, ancient Egypt doesn’t change substantially when it moves from Western into Egyptian hands. Egyptian interest in the pharaohs remains an aesthetic, ideational phenomenon, not a political or experiential one. For all his sophistication Shadi’s reverence for the pharaohs is not so essentially different from the Egyptomania informing The Mummy franchise. His aims are loftier, of course: art instead of entertainment and knowledge instead of profit. His perspective has ethical and emotive dimensions. And the object he offers is incomparably more interesting. But in historical terms his creative search for identity can only be understood as a metaphorical, symbolic one. He might as well be telling a story from The Thousand and One Nights (Fig. 11).

60 Maws¯ u at mis.r al qad¯ımah, 18 Vols., Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1994.

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Fig. 11 A 2012 image of Egypt’s best-known pharaonic-themed recreational site, Dr. Ragab’s Pharaonic Village, which shows scenes from ancient life reenacted often live through a boat ride as well as selling papyrus products. This is the mummification scene (Wikimedia Commons)

116 The one dead-serious aspect of Shadi’s interest in the pharaohs connects with the pervasive sense that Egypt is in decline—but before going back to Paragraph No. 32, let me try and say this differently. Shadi’s pharaonophilia brings up the modern Egyptian drive to latch onto some zaman in search of hope for revival or renaissance. That doesn’t have to be ancient Egypt.

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117 Shadi goes to Thebes the way I went to Constantinople. My first novel— maybe my most accomplished book—was finished in 2010 but published within a week of Mubarak stepping down in 2011. In it a Cairo journalist who might be psychotic, Mustafa Çorbacı, is contacted by the spirit of the last Ottoman sultan-caliph, Mehmed VI Vahideddin, who tells him he must find six lost pieces of parchment to complete a set of seven on which Vahideddin’s father Sultan Abdulmejid I, an expert calligrapher, had inscribed the Sura of Mary from the Quran. “You must know, Mustafa Efendi,” Vahideddin tells him, “that finding the lost sura of Mary and reassembling its scattered leaves is the first step toward frustrating the universal conspiracy that is being carried out against the Muslims.”61 It is 2007 in Cairo, and Mustafa feels lost and alienated because his marriage has failed. He makes drawings of his routes as he traverses the city, rediscovering it, and when he combines them he ends up with a map that looks exactly like a tugra: the calligraphic Ottoman sultan’s seal that symbolizes Muslim glory. Cairo has found its name in the pharaonic sense (Fig. 12).

118 When the January Revolution enabled Islamists to come to power, it felt as though by writing that novel I had summoned my own worst nightmare.

61 Youssef Rakha and Paul Starkey (translator), The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, Interlink, 2014.

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Fig. 12 One of the ways in which I envisioned central Cairo photographically. Taken through the windscreen in 2013, it nonetheless seeks out the older vision of the city implicit in the combination of an old car model, colonial architecture and palm trees

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119 “Of course, like other topics in my novel,” I wrote retrospectively, “the caliphate was fictional and utopian. As an idea, it was meant to glitter; and it drew on the brighter vistas of historical Istanbul to that end; it was seen as the multifarious and sublime ore that lay beneath the ugly sediment of Mubarak’s Egypt, of which ugly sediment (I had no qualms about stating) fundamentalism was the obvious aspect… So the kind of Islam I envisaged—as different in real life from Ottomania as it was from Islamism—had more to do with secularism and diversity than any essentialist formulation of identity. It presupposed a sort of protestant, empiricist revolution that had never actually happened in Islam. Reason, efficiency and freedom of thought on the one hand; and, on the other, mysticism, cultural multiplicity, geographic mobility, a relativist as opposed to a postcolonial reading of history. None of it was really true of the Ottomans at all but—and that might have been my point—all of it just might have been.”62

120 I chose a more recent and in some ways more plausible zaman to invoke than Shadi. But in the nostalgic search for identity that seems to inform all modern Egyptian art, I likewise ended up turning history into a Thousand and One Nights story. Was I too in the thrall of something essentially foreign?

121 Here’s a third tidbit about The Mummy. Shadi’s directorial career did not take off until Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977) saw the script. Shadi had been assisting the Italian filmmaker when he gave it to him, and Rossellini was so impressed he went straight to the Minister of Culture. “How is it that you let this screenplay sit? Why aren’t you producing

62 Youssef Rakha, “On Fiction and the Caliphate”, sultansseal.com, 2013.

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it immediately?” he said.63 Just as ancient Egypt cannot exist without European intervention, so Shadi’s career cannot kick off until an Italian approaches the Egyptian state.64

122 Likewise The Mummy’s destiny: following two private screenings, the film was quickly shelved on the premise that it was not accessible enough for general release.65 Happily it went on the festival circuit. If not for its success barra, it might never have been released at all; its commercial run in 1975 was very brief anyway. But the sad irony is that to this day Egyptian admiration for The Mummy is arguably based less on actual viewing experiences than on initially imported intellectual opinion. Few of those who praise The Mummy have ever allowed themselves to question its quality. I should know.

123 For reasons ultimately connected with modernity’s geographic origins, barra-first is a definite tendency in contemporary Arab culture. Mahfouz had admirers in Egypt for decades when he became the first (and so far the last) Arabic novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but he did not acquire grand, unimpeachable status—becoming both a household name and a target for jihadi violence—until he did.

63 Shadi Abdel Salam, Elliott Colla (translator), “Counting the Years: Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd alSal¯am’s Words”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), Wayne State University Press. 64 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press, ends with the words “Group Rossellini, Cairo, September, 1967”. 65 El Salamouni, “An Interview Not Published in Shadi’s Lifetime”, Cairo: Al Qahira, No. 159, 1 February 1996. My translation.

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124 How far can the barra-first rule be said to hold in politics as much as culture? The Arab Spring often feels insufficiently grassroots and compromised. Is its focus on ideas that are popular barra at the expense of local reality why it failed? With the benefit of hindsight you could say the Muslim Brotherhood sabotaged the January Revolution, but you could also say the revolution was itself a constructive-chaos ploy to give the kind of Obama-supported, Qatari-funded “moderate Islam” represented by the Muslim Brotherhood the democratic power American think tanks had been saying it deserved for years. In either case, things really were barra-oriented.

125 The January Revolution’s most widely respected figure—the closest thing to an Arab Spring ideologue in Egypt—was Mohamed ElBaradei, who acquired his credentials not in Egyptian politics or even while living in Egypt but by succeeding Hans Blix as the director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, a position he held three times between 1997 and 2009, and for which he and the agency were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Starting in 2009—notably through Twitter—ElBaradei began to champion “democratic transformation” in Egypt, visiting from his home in Vienna and working closely with the Muslim Brotherhood to coordinate what he was already calling a revolution. Never popular outside upper-class activist circles, ElBaradei’s brief stint as Interim Vice President following Morsi’s ouster ended abruptly with the August 2013 massacre of Muslim Brotherhood supporters at Rabaa Al Adaweya and Al Nahda squares. I personally lost all respect for him when, unilaterally resigning, he left the country within 24 hours without bothering to make a statement to the Egyptian people (Fig. 13).

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Fig. 13 “Port Said, entrée du Canal de Suez” (1890 image published by the Zürich-based Photoglob Company, Library of Congress)

126 By then ElBaradei looked less like the Egyptian face of a benign global modernity than the Western world’s disinterested, even unsympathetic emissary to Egypt. Over the years his intervention had lacked vision. Stressing “universal principles,” his discourse consistently failed to reflect power dynamics on the ground, let alone provide an accurate prognosis of a given development or policy, and he made absolutely no sacrifices to demonstrate his convictions. I for one was forced to the appalling conclusion that when, in 2009, he called for an end to “the military dictatorship” headed by Mubarak (actually the closest thing Egypt had ever had to a neoliberal system), ElBaradei had no idea what he was doing. Nearly four years into the experiment, without any real progress in terms of political freedom or institutional reform, Egypt was on the brink of civil

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war. But, prioritizing his personal safety and international reputation, all the Godfather of the Revolution could do was wash his hands of human rights abuses and leave the country.

127 While not living abroad, the most popular media face of the revolution, the physician-turned-satirist Bassem Youssef, was equally barra-oriented. His extremely popular show Al Bernameg (or “The Program”) was deliberately conceived as an Egyptianization of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. Instead of anything homegrown, baladi, or original, it applied a formulaic American paradigm to the local news, with hilarious montages of politicians and public figures, especially Islamists, making fools of themselves. But once the Muslim Brotherhood was no longer in power the attempt to exercise the perceived democratic right of mocking the famous and powerful was quickly seen as a threat to the very “deep state” forces that—out of hatred for the Islamists—had endorsed or tolerated it, and what started as a Baradeist YouTube show—B+, launched in March 2011—ended before it could put down real roots as a new televisual genre. By which time Bassem had alienated too many people too soon. Like other oppositional figures who did not support Sisi, he left the country indefinitely in 2014.

128 After three seasons screened on three different channels between 2011 and 2013, the end of Bassem Youssef’s barra-style show demonstrated that Egypt’s then volatile and always very baladi political scene had not been ready for the Saturday Night Live ethos it adopted. But there is a deeper dimension to the issue. Al Bernameg did introduce a new and arguably desirable sensibility into Egyptian television: Bassem’s consciously Westernized, upper class, nerdy perspective, mixing social-media humor with emotive moralizing. But, somewhat problematically for me, this perspective didn’t seem to have a problem with the hypocrisies and abuses of the global world order it was modeling even as its raison d’etre was to take moral issue with abuse and hypocrisy. It didn’t matter how good or moral Jon Stewart really was, or the arrangement of which he was part. This was the superior Western role model and Bassem

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could conceive of no greater achievement than being called “the Egyptian Jon Stewart.” In a sense this reflected the ultimately disastrous Arab Spring idea that democratic transformation could be achieved overnight simply by transplanting Western practices and discourses into the Arab world.

129 Movers and shakers behind the January Revolution who believed in this idea were by and large upper class, English-speaking blogger-activists with no political or community-service experience and, beyond the blandest notions of political correctness and social justice—the kind of abstract, platitudinous talk ElBaradei espoused—no real agenda. Even the Islamist leanings of someone like Wael Ghonim reflect the pro-“Islam” position of a Western liberal left defending an immigrant minority far more than any baladi ideas about religious rebirth or pious governance.66 Baiting not only the security apparatus but also, as it turned out, a large body of cynical Islamists determined to cash in on secularist sacrifices, the “revolutionaries” played into the hands of whoever stood to benefit from the discontent they expressed. Their own eyes were evidently not on local politics at all.

130 They had used social media to organize themselves, and now they latched onto the performative aspect of protest that tended to turn them into online and media celebrities. They wouldn’t have thought of it this way, obviously, but it was more to be called heroes abroad than to achieve anything tangible or coherent at home that they put themselves out. When it came down to it, the blogger-activists who used the web to effect political change had even less of an idea what they were doing than ElBaradei. And who’s to say the web didn’t use them to implement a global Islamist agenda? In either case, their edge was that, unlike the vast majority in Egypt, they had access to cutting-edge modernity.

66 See Wael Ghonim, Revolution 2.0: The Power of People Is Stronger Than the People in Power, London: 4th Estate, 2012.

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131 Since Muhammad Ali’s time at least there have been economic prerequisites for such access. If not for the relative financial ability of their authors’ families, for example, neither The Mummy nor this essay could exist. This feels important because it reflects the historical dynamic underlying The Mummy’s story.

132 It was the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone dating to 196 BC in Rashid during the French Campaign (1798–1801) that enabled archaeologists eventually to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs. The stone was inscribed in demotic Egyptian and ancient Greek as well as the hieratic language, and the process of deciphering the latter was ongoing in both France and Britain (where the stone was taken following the French defeat and the Capitulation of Alexandria) between 1801 and 1824.

133 That is why only Europeans and those they educated can decipher the writing on stones that feel so intimately familiar to Wanys. Thus the emergence of Egyptology turned Egyptianness into an object of European scrutiny as well as avarice, marginalizing (or indeed criminalizing) some Egyptians but at the same time presenting others with a hitherto nonexistent subject for a collective sense of self and the aspiration to revival.

134 Interesting that economics doesn’t figure at all in Shadi’s conception of history, central as History remains to his view of identity and renaissance. My late friend Samir Farid (1943–2017)—perhaps Egypt’s first truly dedicated film critic who did not miss a single round of the Cannes Film Festival from 1965 till the end of his life—was a friend of Shadi’s who accompanied him during The Mummy’s Venice Film Festival screening in 1970. According to him Shadi discounted socialist perspectives to the point of making fun of the term “class conflict.” “Shadi used to make fun of class conflict [al sira’ al tabaqi],” Farid writes, “saying that its

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only meaning is that one story (tabaqa) in a building should be fighting with another, and that as someone who studied under [the celebrated architect] Hassan Fathi [1900–1989] he had heard of no such conflict in architectural history.” Yet the story he resolves to tell is wholly rooted in the creditor–debtor relation that bound colonizer to colonized.67

135 So it goes. For three years, from 1876 to 1879, Britain and France exercise Dual Control over Egyptian finances. Then they have the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II depose Khedive Ismail. The once warring Great Powers have conspired with the Sick Man of Europe against the Egyptian upstarts for decades. They were still at each other’s throats when Muhammad Ali Pasha began to rival his suzerains in the 19-teens, but they were evidently both alarmed enough by the rise of a new regional power to want to get in on the economic action right away. Within fifty years they were in charge.

136 For decades Muhammad Ali’s successors have called themselves khedive (as opposed to mere veli), claiming effective independence from the Sublime Porte. But it is Ismail who officially obtains both privileges from Abdülhamid’s uncle Sultan Abdülaziz. He also has the sultan approve a change in the law of succession. Like the sultanate, the Khedivate has so far passed to the eldest male in the line. Now, to keep his uncle from power, Ismail restricts it to the reigning monarch’s offspring. He isn’t planning on leaving before he dies, and he doesn’t realize the new law stipulates primogeniture as such. His eldest son Muhammad Tewfik has no aptitude for politics. When he suddenly ends up on the throne, therefore, it comes as a surprise to both of them. Not a very pleasant one, either: it is said that on receiving the news Tewfik is so upset he boxes the messenger’s ears.

67 Samir Farid, “The Small Diwan: The Eloquent Peasant: Shadi Abdel Salam”, Cairo: Adab wa naqd, No. 92, 1 April 1993. My translation.

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137 Muhammad Ali’s most notable grandson, “Ismail the Magnificent” is the son of Ibrahim (1798–1848), the eldest of the Pasha’s 95 children and a military hero who ruled in his father’s stead when Muhammad Ali fell ill in the last year of his life. Ismail is neither as much of a politician as his grandfather nor as much of a warrior his father. But, in terms of his passion for modernizing, he is the bloodline’s worthiest heir (Fig. 14).

Fig. 14 Albumen print portrait of Khedive Ismail, circa 1860 (No. 135 in the Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Rome album, Library of Congress)

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138 Ismail does many things besides saddling his firstborn with the throne. As a step on the way to constitutionalism, he establishes an advisory assembly of delegates. He expands into Africa, annexing Darfur and going to war with Ethiopia. He raises the education budget tenfold, resuming his grandfather’s practice of sending Egyptians to be educated at Europe’s best centers of learning, which had stopped under Ismail’s pious, traditionalist cousin Abbas Helmi I (1813–1854) and not really taken off again under his Francophone uncle Muhammad Said (1822–1863).

139 Modeling it on Paris, Ismail builds Downtown (“Khedival”) Cairo: much of the modern city center as it stands today, in however dilapidated a state. He reforms the postal service and the railway network. He starts a sugar industry. He founds the National Library. He sees through the Suez Canal project, which has been ongoing since Said gave a French friend of his, the diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, a concession to dig and manage it for 99 years, a privilege France will end up sharing with Britain. Ismail commissions Guiseppe Verdi to compose Opera Aida for its 1869 grand opening, attended by, among other dignitaries, the French Empress Eugénie de Montijo (1826–1920) (Fig. 15).

140 Work on the Suez Canal began in 1859. Within months, prompted by a friend of de Lesseps’s, a school teacher-turned-Egyptologist named Auguste Mariette, Said sets up an Antiquities Service and archaeological museum in Bulaq which Ismail maintains. At one point, when after seeing them at the Paris World Fair in 1867 Eugénie wrote to Ismail requesting some ancient Egyptian jewels for her own use, the khedive wrote back saying that the decision on such a matter was in the hands of someone more powerful than himself when it came to ancient Egypt, citing the

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Fig. 15 Khedival Opera House, built for the opening of the Suez Canal (Photo dated 1869, from rom the Bibliotheca Alexandrina’s Memory of Modern Egypt Digital Archive, Wikimedia Commons)

director of the Bulaq museum, Mariette. Already making a name for himself, the Frenchman had the audacity to say no.68

68 Donal Reid, “Indigenous Egyptology: The Decolonization of a Profession”, Journal of the American Oriental Society (1985), pp. 105–102; and “Nationalizing the Pharaonic Past: Egyptology, Imperialism, and Egyptian Nationalism, 1922–1952”, in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, edited by James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni, New York: Colombia University Press, 1997. Cited in Colla, “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s alMumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian Nation-State”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009.

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141 Before the opening of the Bulaq Museum in 1858, there had been a smaller collection started in Azbakiyya in 1835 and later moved to the Citadel, but within 20 years it was all handed to Archduke Maximilian of Austria (who was made Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III), eventually to be moved to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The Bulaq collection was moved to a royal palace in Guiza in 1892 before finally finding a home in the current Tahrir space. A new, expanded Grand Egyptian Museum near the Pyramids is to be opened in 2021, to replace the Tahrir Museum.

142 But in the course of doing all that he does, the notoriously prodigal khedive incurs enough debt to ensure his downfall. By the mid-1870s he can hardly contain his resentment: of Lord Cromer forcing him to hand over his wealth and let a cabinet rule in his stead; of the sovereign, modern neo-Ottoman world power that his grandfather started turning back into a dispensable post-Ottoman province in foreign hands; of the fact that, though nominally headed by his long-time Armenian vizier Nubar Pasha (1825–1899) as prime minister, the cabinet is effectively controlled by a Briton and a Frenchman (Charles Rivers Wilson as finance and the Marquis de Blignières as public works minister) (Fig. 16).

143 That is why, even though it doesn’t really want to, The Mummy’s opening scene cannot help showing the political makeup of society. The central authority figure, the standing kingpin, is a Frenchman, while the quiet hero, the young man who is reading, is an educated Egyptian. Maspero puts forth on the meaning of the hieroglyphs being deciphered, and Ahmed Effendi defers to his authority. There is complete harmony between the two figures. Just as the effendi has adopted the European style of dress, so has the Frenchmen adopted Egyptian headgear. United in their love of the pharaohs, the archaeologists betray no sign of colonialism—the fact that one group has used moneylending and the concessions system to control the other through debt. There is no more

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Fig. 16 Undated portrait of Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer in oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) (Wikimedia Commons)

sign of the Europeans’ entitled attitude than of the Egyptian ruling class’s resentful complacency.

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144 “Concession was a European business practice widespread in Egypt; it was an institution inherited from a system of privileges for Europeans since the Middle Ages. It promised a way for Egypt to adopt modern infrastructures and receive needed European help [but] denied Egypt full benefit of [the results:] on the one hand, concessions were a necessity for modern infrastructure development in Egypt; on the other, they were a hindrance to further national economic development.”69

145 So it goes. In real life Maspero had a knighthood and an honorary degree and fellowship from Oxford. His successful “relations with British official life in Egypt” as head of the Antiquities Service, the Bulaq and later the Cairo (now Egyptian) museum in Tahrir Square made him popular with, among other colonial dignitaries, Lord Cromer, the very personification of the British Empire in Egypt.70

146 As antiquities head honcho (a position Maspero held twice under British rule, in 1881–1886 and again in 1899–1914), he was flexible and pragmatic, allowing Western collectors and museums to take artifacts out of the country so long as he knew about them. Setting up local museums and introducing tourist admission charges from which Egyptians were exempt, he did make efforts at “encouraging Egyptians to take pride in their heritage.” But there is no doubt that both he and Mariette were perfectly adjusted colonial figures who regarded the fellahin as entirely peripheral to the work of Civilization in which they were involved.71

69 C. Piquet, “The Suez Company’s Concession in Egypt, 1854–1956: Modern Infras-

tructure and Local Economic Development”, Enterprise & Society, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2004), pp. 107–127, Cambridge University Press. 70 “Obituary Notices: Sir Gaston Maspero, K.C.M.G.”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, January 1917, Cambridge University Press. 71 See Chapter 2 of Todd Hayen, Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy: Sacred Science and the Search for Soul, Routledge, 2017.

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147 Perhaps because he identified him with M. Fouquet in Return of the Spirit (quoted in Paragraph No. 80), Nasser seems to have been fond of Maspero. When, in the build-up to the first television broadcast in 1960, Nasser built the Radio and Television Union, he named the building after Maspero Street, the former site of the Bulaq Museum. In an ironic twist, the postcolonial socialist-cum-Arab nationalist regime’s propaganda mill thus came to be named after a colonial French aristocrat. Even today the YouTube channel dedicated to the national television archives is called “Maspero Zaman.”

148 That is also how Maspero became associated with the closest thing to a pogrom to come out of the January Revolution. In the protest mania that overtook the country in 2011, each group tended to station itself in a particular place. For Copts and pro-Coptic demonstrators this was the road overlooking the Nile in front of the Radio and Television Union. Another church had been torn down in Upper Egypt, and the relevant governor seemed to condone the act. This is a reminder that Upper Egypt is the site not only of pharaonic glory but also of rabid sectarianism, armed lawlessness and mafia-like codes of honor— facts that Shadi systematically ignores. While aiming to start a sit-in in protest, on October 10, 2011 protesters were attacked by army and honorable citizens as well as police. Armored vehicles crushed people’s heads. Abetted by at least one state television anchor, bands of vigilantes attacked and beat up Christians on the streets. Others raided the foreign media offices headquartered in the area demanding that they hand over any Christians who might be hiding there.72

72 See Zeinab El Gundy, “Outrage Over State TV’s Misinformation and Anti-Coptic Incitement”, Ahram Online, 10 October 2011; and “Egypt: Don’t Cover Up Military Killing of Copt Protesters”, Human Rights Watch, 25 October 2011.

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149 Maspero remains a more or less benign part of modern Egyptian history, but I don’t think he can be seen quite so unequivocally as a guardian of ancient heritage in the service of the nation. And this might be the last item on my list of flaws. In his dogged pursuit of an abstract idea of Egypt, Shadi ends up subverting identities. A criminal clan looks like a noble house. Maspero comes across as a patriotic nationalist.

150 Phew.

151 None of which is to say that my fourth viewing of The Mummy is in any sense a disappointment. Even as the young Hurabats’ behavior at the end of the film irritates me, I can only admire the way Nascimbene’s music, at once majestic and ominous, intensifies Shadi’s incredible photography. Once again, for 1:38:52 hours, I have been effortlessly immersed. And it leaves me as uplifted and fascinated as I’ve ever been by a work of art, abuzz with ideas about self and country. Even if it’s not a very good film, The Mummy always does this. How come?

152 Loosely abiding by the classical unities of Greek tragedy—a single event at one location within the space of a day and a night—The Mummy tells a real-life story. It is the story of the discovery of a hoard of nearly 50 mummies complete with their burial treasures: the Royal Cache (a.k.a. TT320). The mummies are in a cave in the mountains between the Valley of the Kings and the Hatshepsut Mortuary Temple in Deir El Bahari. Loyal priests hid them there to protect them from ancient tomb robbers. The hoard is located in the Theban necropolis, on the opposite—west— bank of the Nile from present-day Luxor, a very well-known site. But except for the tomb-raiding clan that controls the area, who discovered it by accident, no one has ever heard of that cave (Fig. 17).

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Fig. 17 Cliffs at Deir El Bahari by John Singer Sargent, oil on canvas, 1890– 1891 (From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wikimedia Commons)

153 The discovery leads to the mummies being transported from Luxor to the Bulaq Museum in Cairo. As well as the 21st-dynasty high priests Amun Pandjem I and Pandjem II, they include legendary pharaohs such as Ahmose I, Thutmose III (both from the 18th dynasty) and, most astoundingly, Ramses the Great, II (from the 19th).

154 “We the high priests of Amon,” the screenplay reads, citing an inscription in the relevant sarcophagus as it rings in the mind of the archaeologist who discovers it, “in the tenth year of the reign of Penndjem the great priest found the body of our lord the Great God Seti I, son of Ra, violated in its resting place in the great valley by the evil tomb-robbers. There we caused it to be carried to another place of safety and re-buried.”73 73 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, “The Night of Counting the Years (a.k.a. The Mummy)”, Discourse, Vol. 21, No. 1, Middle Eastern Films: Before Thy Gaze Returns to Thee (Winter 1999), pp. 89–126, Wayne State University Press. The real Ahmed Kamal was not actually involved in the Royal Cache discovery, though he was among

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155 “I hoped to find the trace of the 21st dynasty,” Ahmed Effendi tells the local police chief El Badawy Bey (a caricature of the stern keeper of law and order, played without an iota of irony by Ahmed Anan) while they are both crouched in the mummies’ ancient hiding place, the flickering warm light of handheld lamps dancing about them. “Instead I found the Pharaohs of five dynasties, from the 17th to the 21st dynasty… The inscriptions on the sarcophagi state they were transferred here 3000 years ago by the faithful priests at the fall of the empire. The mummies were placed in these humble sarcophagi after being stripped of their golden ones.”74

156 “The greatest find ever made by the Abd-el-Rasul gang,” a.k.a. the Hurabat, the film’s mountain dwellers, who lived in the nearby village of Gourna, “was the common tomb of Deir el-Bahri. [But] in 1875, [the head of the family, Ahmad] Abd-el-Rasul, by merest chance, had discovered a hidden opening in the cliffy massif between the Valley of the Kings and Deir el-Bahri. Getting up and into the opening with great difficulty, Abd-el-Rasul found himself in a roomy mortuary chamber containing a number of mummies. A preliminary examination revealed that here was a treasure that would yield him and his family an income as long as they lived—if the secret could be kept. None but the leading members of the Abd-el-Rasul family were let into the secret. They were solemnly sworn to leave the treasure where it had been found, that it might serve them all as a sort of mummified bank account on which to draw according to need.”75 (Fig. 18)

the brightest students of the Prussian Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827–1894), who headed the School of Egyptology in 1870. Brugsch’s brother Émile ended up being the first person from Cairo to enter the Royal Cache in 1881. 74 Sh¯ ad¯ı ‘Abd al-Sal¯am and Jalal Toufic, ibid. 75 C. W. Ceram, Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archæology, translated by E. B.

Garside, II.12, “Robbers in the Valley of the Kings”, Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. The date of the discovery is now believed to be closer to 1871 than 1875. A note on spelling: A more contemporary, common spelling of the name would be Abdel Rasoul. The “mudir” is the governor. Keneh refers to Qena, the governorate (or mudiriyah) of which Luxor was then

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Fig. 18 The Gourna Mosque, famously designed—along with the whole village—on the basis of local materials and culture by the great architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989), one of Shadi’s teachers (Photo by Marc Ryckaert, 2011, from the Arabic Wikipedia)

157 The Royal Cache discovery is actually a fascinating chain of events, worthy of several different movies besides The Mummy. In ways that Shadi only tangentially touches on, it sums up and complicates the most pressing and persistent conflicts surrounding Egyptian modernity: the family patriarchy vs. individual freedom; the countryside vs. the city; colonialism vs. nation building; Arab vs. pre-Islamic identity; community vs. government; convention vs. the law. But Shadi’s fervent piety toward the Dead takes away from the power of his version of the story.

part. Kurna is more commonly spelled Gourna (or Qurna), and Da’ud Pasha (also, after an Ottoman predecessor, the name of a celebrated meatball dish) Daoud Pasha.

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158 So it goes. Showing off a rare 21st-dynasty papyrus he has acquired illegally in Luxor, an American collector unwittingly tips off one Paris-based Egyptologist, who promptly writes to Cairo, sending a photographic image along with the information that such an object was found in Thebes. Royal objects unknown to the Bulaq Museum—from a range of eras—have been showing up elsewhere around the world and, intrigued by the news, the museum director, Auguste Mariette’s successor Gaston Maspero, sends an assistant of his to investigate. The archaeologist actually disguises himself as a European collector in order to gain the trust of the local community in Luxor.

159 “One day a dealer,” the story continues, “beckoned the young man to come over. Presently the assistant… was holding a statuette in his hand… a genuine piece three thousand years old, a mortuary gift from a tomb of the Twenty-first Dynasty… That same day he was introduced to a tall Arab in the prime of life, who called himself Abd-el-Rasul. This Abd-elRasul was the head of a large family. After the young assistant had dickered for several days… he had the Arab arrested. He was convinced that he had found the tomb-robber… Abd-el-Rasul and several of his family were brought before the Mudir of Keneh, Da’ud Pasha, who personally conducted the hearing…” It is reasonable to assume there was torture involved, but the Upper Egyptians stood firm. “All the inhabitants of the village where Abd-el-Rasul made his home swore to his innocence— indeed, to the innocence of the whole family, which was declared to be one of the oldest and most respectable.”76

160 A month later, out of the blue, a younger member of the clan turns up at Daoud Pasha’s residence to expose his family. The story Maspero himself tells in his 1889 report, Les momies royales de Deir El-Bahari, focuses on three characters. The two brothers Ahmad and Mohammad Abdel Rasoul, the models for Wanys and Brother, and the dragoman-like character who 76 Ibid.

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seems to be the model for Ayyub: the diplomatically immune local diplomatic consul of England, France and Belgium in Luxor, Mustafa Agha Ayyat. It was Ahmad, the younger brother, who bore the brunt of Daoud Pasha’s torture. By the time he was released Mohammad, who as the eldest brother controlled the business, had decided to abandon the antiquities trade altogether. When both Ahmad and Ayyat pressured him for money, he decided to give the game away.77

161 Many accounts of the discovery—the one in the Wikipedia entry on Maspero, for example—simply state that the Abdel Rasouls confessed under torture. Others stress the family feud that led to one brother breaking with another. As always the truth is more complex than any one account of it. As in Paragraph No. 105, a genuine change of heart resulting from an existential crisis like Wanys’s does seem to have occurred, albeit to the older brother. As in Paragraphs No. 49–51, there also seems to have been a breakdown in the clan’s tradition following the arrival of the archaeologists. But wait!

162 An Egyptian dispatched by the national museum to safeguard the country’s heritage from European incursion should himself have to pretend to be European to perform his task. How astonishing is that?

77 In addition to the original French (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148), the story is summarized in Elliott Colla, “Shadi Abd al-Salam’s al-Mumiya: Ambivalence and the Egyptian Nation-State”, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009. In addition to Ceram’s evocative version in Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archæology, translated by E. B. Garside, II.12, “Robbers in the Valley of the Kings”, Alfred A. Knopf, 1952, the story is also told in Leonard Cottrell, The Lost Pharaohs, London: Kegan Paul, 2005. The date of the discovery is now believed to be closer to 1871 than 1875.

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163 It is the summer of 1881 and Ahmed Effendi has just arrived in Luxor. Set in that quietly pivotal period, The Mummy brings up the tension between identity and modernity in all kinds of ways. That is one obvious reason it still does what it does to me—because, whatever else it means to be born in Cairo in 1976 and to live there more or less continuously to this day, it means you will feel that tension. To be a modern Egyptian is to be at the same time a repository of cultures irrevocably in decline (Arab-Islamic, or ancient Egyptian-Coptic) and a participant in cultures that, if not foreign to you, have for centuries regarded you as foreign.

164 Identity comes up right away. The Mummy opens with a reading from the Papyrus of Panedjem, a 21st-dynasty Egyptian Book of the Dead spell to help the deceased regain the name by which he is identified. (Remember Ustaz Alaa’s post-Naksa meltdown in Paragraph No. 45: “Women’s griefstricken wails are the only audible sound. They sound as though they’re coming down from heaven. I’ve forgotten my name, who I am.”) The reverberating sound is juxtaposed with the slow sweep of the actual papyrus on screen, until the scene shifts and it becomes the normal voice of a bespectacled young man. The man is reading to a group of seriouslooking, differently aged peers, only one of whom—the largest and most imposing—is standing. That one is the venerable Maspero.

165 “The Soul without a name was in a terrible plight,” Maspero explains to the others, eventually, “for the destruction of his name was equivalent to the destruction of his individuality.” He might as well be talking about Egyptian identity. A deceased people has lost the name it requires to live again in the hereafter of modernity. What does this imply for Mother saying to Brother before he is killed for breaking with tradition, “Drift alone, unfortunate. I cannot name you”?

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166 It is not as if you can choose to relinquish modernity however attached to tradition you might be. But it is not as if you can forget that, rather than growing out of it or being organically grafted onto it, modernity was suddenly imposed on your history, overtaking your sense of self in demeaning ways. In all kinds of political and economic contexts, what is more, modernity itself continues to remind you: that your place in it is tentative and suspect; that it is a gift from some superior other who can rescind it at any time; that in its scheme of things your heritage—what tradition might live inside you—is at best a set of museum exhibits; and that it has already rendered the identity you value irrelevant, dead—that you are civilization’s changeling.

167 “The torture of being the unseen object,” writes the American poet Amiri Baraka, “and the constantly observed subject.”78 Unseen object, observed subject.

168 That is what Paragraph No. 142 is saying. Khedive Ismail is so resentful of Europeans controlling him and his realm that, when an army colonel of grassroots fellahin stock named Ahmed Urabi leads a popular revolt against foreign influence, he does nothing to stop him. And when Urabi demands the dissolution of the cabinet, Ismail readily complies. By now Urabi is in control of the country anyway, but when Britain and France insist that their ministers should be reinstated, Ismail is happy to declare the matter out of his hands. Along with many high-profile Europeans, Maspero even has to leave the country temporarily in fear of his life (Fig. 19).

78 Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Afterword to The System of Dante’s Hell, Akashic, 2016.

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Fig. 19 1889 edition of Les Contes populaires Egypte ancienne by Gaston Maspero (From the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Wikimedia Commons)

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169 “At the beginning of 1881 he went out as its first director and, on Mariette’s death a few weeks later, he became head of the Bulaq Museum and director of excavations. In the following year his work was interrupted for a time, when with the other European residents he had to leave the country in consequence of Arabi’s revolt.”79

170 In 1882, as a result, Britain takes military control of Egypt, with the future Lord Cromer in the capacity of Consul-General ruling through Tewfik, who will die unexpectedly at the age of 39, to be succeeded by an 18-year-old Abbas Helmi II (1874–1944) in 1892. Shouldering the white man’s burden in Egypt and Sudan, Cromer and others—notably the Arabic-speaking Horatio Herbert, Earl Kitchener, a rather more hands-on war criminal, who became Cromer’s successor under Abbas Hilmi II—are to take charge. Thus the end of modern Egypt’s first spark of renaissance.

171 Meanwhile—till 1885, when Abdülhamid permits him to retire to his waterside palace at Emirgan, Istanbul—Ismail lives in exile in southern Italy. His extravagant tastes persist to the end of his life. At one point Abdülhamid has to ban female singing in public on religious grounds to stop the “bridge of boats stretching from Emirgan to the Asian side of the Bosporus” from forming outside Ismail’s palace when he has a chorus of 100 girls sing oriental music. “One of his slaves had a voice that carried from Emirgan to the other side where, striking the hills above, it produced double and triple echoes.”80 Think of that slave girl’s voice crossing the Bosporus while Egypt groans.

79 “Obituary Notices: Sir Gaston Maspero, K.C.M.G.”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, January 1917, Cambridge University Press. 80 Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, London: John Murry, 2006, Chapter 13.

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172 Meanwhile Urabi’s armed confrontation with the British, which actually brings about a full-on occupation that will last until 1956, marks the start of an ongoing tradition of military populism. Since Muhammad Ali’s time the army has been at the center of the power structure, but only as an expression of the rulers’ power. By setting out to defend the interests of the ruled now, it starts doing politics independently for the first time (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20 Modern human remains from the Battle of 1882 Tel El Kebir between the forces of Urabi and the British, in which the latter prevailed, 1915 (From the W. L. Crowther Library collection, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, Wikimedia Commons)

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173 Within 70 years, the association of the fellahin with the army will be consecrated by a rather more successful army colonel. Nasser! He not only deposes Ismail’s grandson Farouk but also transforms the July 1952 coup d’etat by which he does so into a widely supported revolution. Nasser oversees the British army’s long awaited withdrawal and, when Britain refuses to give him money to build the Aswan High Dam, proceeds unilaterally to nationalize the Suez Canal. As he centralizes the economy and stresses the republic’s nationalist orientation, Italian, Greek and Jewish communities disappear. So, under the one-party system he introduces, do what rudiments of democracy Britain introduced in the framework of a constitutional monarchy.

174 Go back to Paragraph No. 13 now. The Mummy is produced in 1969: 90 years after Ismail’s exile and two after Nasser’s defeat. Shadi was a good five years younger than I am now when he made it. His only feature-length piece of fiction, it is set in 1881: a time, as it turns out, very like the time of its making. This is what makes it remarkable: in terms of both its setting and its making, the film embodies a twilight zone in Egyptian modernity. The collapse, the course-changing obstacle to modernization is already in place, but the fundamental change it will cause hasn’t happened yet.

175 If Ismail’s attempt at modernity ended with his ouster followed by a British occupation, Nasser’s ended with his defeat to Israel followed by a new age of commercialism and religiosity: a geopolitical realignment that has been described—notably by the most interesting of the Sixties Generation novelists alive today, Sonallah Ibrahim (b. 1937)—as an American occupation. In a move often described as a step on the way to the January Revolution, when he was offered the Supreme Council of Culture Novel Prize in 2003, Ibrahim led ministry officials on, suggesting that he would accept the prize until he could reject it with a bang at the high-profile ceremony.

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176 “At the very moment we are gathered here,” Ibrahim astounded the audience by saying, once he was on the podium, “Israeli forces are storming what remains of the Palestinian territories, killing pregnant women and children [while] steps away from us the Israeli ambassador lives safely among us, and steps away in another direction the American ambassador occupies an entire neighborhood while his soldiers spread in every corner of a homeland that used to be Arab.”81

177 So it goes. Committed to the war against “reactionaries and imperialists,” Nasser establishes a police state on the pretext of “the sacred duty” of liberating Palestine—only to end up losing the June War. Within three years, “the mythic leader” has died. And an entirely new era of unbridled capitalism and oil-greased religiosity is dawning. After winning the October War of 1973, Sadat makes peace with Israel, allying himself with Washington and the Wahhabi Gulf while becoming the pariah of a still largely Non-Aligned Arab world. Already subject to corruption and control—here’s the rub—the bureaucracies established or co-opted under Nasser, including the Ministry of Culture, are to go on a downward spiral of deterioration from which they would never recover. In the arena of culture at least, modern Egypt’s second spark of renaissance thus goes irrevocably out.

178 In at least four distinct ways, you can see how the Royal Cache discovery summarizes the story of modern Egypt: as a resurrection spell, a lament for the patriarch, a national liberation slogan, and a sentence against taboo breakers. And as with those four interpretations, so with my four viewings: they are a set of canopic jars in which, when I rise from the dead, I can look for my viscera. That’s why it’s always worth watching The Mummy (Fig. 21).

81 Quoted in “Sonallah Ibrahim Rejects an Egyptian Literary Prize”, aljazeera.net, 23 October 2003. My translation.

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Fig. 21 1861 portrait of Auguste Marriette by the great French photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (From the Bibliothèque nationale de France collection, on the Arabic Wikipedia)

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179 “Here [in the Hermopolitan myth of creation], at the beginning of all things, there exist four inert couples; four being a good, well-balanced number signifying totality, which is reflected in the four cardinal points and, later, the four corners of the sarcophagus and the four canopic jars that will be used to house the viscera of the deceased.”82

180 The Mummy recounts the Royal Cache discovery in its own muted way, but it is as a crime thriller that the story seems most interesting. The sleuths are late Ottoman effendis: European and Europeanized archaeologists, policemen and other educated, state-employed people from Cairo. They are paragons of a khedival modernity eager to do right by Egypt’s pre-Arab past. The culprits are Upper Egyptian clansmen: provincial, uneducated tomb robbers who have reputedly operated uninterrupted since the thirteenth century. They are guardians of an “Arab” tradition that feels no connection with the pharaohs whatever. This is the fight for Egyptian identity. And it lends itself to far more complexity than Shadi’s pharaonophilia permits. But how was it being parsed on the ground in Shadi’s lifetime?

181 “Shadi was a Nasserist in that he saw Gamal Abdel Nasser as a pharaoh,” wrote Samir Farid, “and he was against Nasserism in its view of Egypt’s Arabness.”83

182 Shadi was a beneficiary of Nasserist state control who could not fund his second project under Sadat. But Farid points out that he was opposed to Arab nationalism, something that sets him clearly apart from Sonallah Ibrahim or Ustaz Alaa. Like T. S. Eliot, Farid says, “he was a classicist in 82 Tyldesley, The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, Penguin, 2010. 83 Samir Farid, “The Small Diwan: The Eloquent Peasant: Shadi Abdel Salam”, Cairo:

Adab wa naqd, No. 92, 1 April 1993. My translation.

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art, a royalist in politics,”84 and Sadat’s rhetoric of Egyptian patriotism— which Shadi expressed in the October War victory documentary Armies of the Sun (1973)—was far more akin to his political temperament.85

183 In many ways Shadi’s position is the standard liberal perspective that informed the Egyptian intelligentsia before the July Revolution. It can be traced to The Future of Culture in Egypt, an educational monograph by the acknowledged Dean of Arabic Literature Taha Hussein (1889– 1973). A blind fellah (also from Upper Egypt) who rebelled against the dogmatic traditionalism of Al Azhar to become a Sorbonne scholar and turn the study of Arabic literature on its head—and another supporter of Saad Zaghloul—Hussein himself embodies an early version of the barra-zaman requirement. He pioneered “Cartesian doubt” applied to the Arabic literary canon, notably pre-Islamic poetry, specializing in the blind Abbasid poet and philosopher Abul Alaa Al Maarri (973–1057).

184 Published before World War II, in 1938, the book was occasioned by the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 (which safeguarded Egypt’s independence) and the lesser known Montreux Convention of 1937 (which abolished extraterritorial law for Europeans), and it seems to take as its zaman a somewhat later stage of ancient civilization: Greco-Roman Egypt. Hussein argues for Egypt’s connection with the Greeks and the Islamic intellect’s with the European. He promotes a secular nationalism that absorbs and accommodates Arab, Islamic and Coptic elements.

84 The actual quote is “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”. It comes from the preface to the 1928 volume For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 85 Samir Farid, “The Small Diwan: The Eloquent Peasant: Shadi Abdel Salam”, Cairo: Adab wa naqd, No. 92, 1 April 1993. My translation.

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185 “And I don’t know that anything has worried me as much as independence worries me now that we have gained it, or freedom,” Hussein writes, and it’s as if he is describing precisely what will go wrong over the next 90 years, “[for] I fear that we will be negligent of ourselves and disregard our [state] facilities, or treat them without decisiveness or gravity, and so lag behind where we should advance… and I desire, as every educated Egyptian who loves his homeland and values his dignity and reputation among others must also desire that our modern life should reflect to our ancient glory, and that our modern actions should [live up to] the civilized nations’ [positive] opinion of us… that we should not on meeting a European feel that there is between ourselves and him a difference that justifies him feeling superior to us or belittling us, or that makes us despise ourselves or admit that he does us no wrong when he shows us such superiority and ascendancy.”86

186 So it goes. Shadi’s perspective was neither Arab nationalist nor tolerant of colonialism. It envisaged, rather, a modern version of the pharaonic structure that—like Al Hakim’s M. Fouquet—he believed to be integral to Egypt’s spirit, more capable than either Arab or Islamic identity of animating the people across classes, regions and subcultures. It seems he liked this aspect of Nasser’s rule. Instead of the caliphate, whichever way you conceive of it, Shadi’s zaman was ancient civilization at its height. Only the question of how Egyptians—currently split into effendis and clansmen—might reunite so as to integrate that identity preoccupies him.

187 This idea of a rift to be healed between two kinds of Egyptian has been called “false consciousness,” seen as more a side effect of power relations within the discourse than a real aspect of history.87 But it’s hard to see 86 Taha Hussein, Mustaqbal al-taq¯ afah f¯ı mis.r (1938), Cairo: Dar al Ma’arif, 1996. My ¯ translation. 87 Colla, published in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History Culture and Politics, edited by Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Palgrave, 2009.

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what true consciousness might sound like in an artist who made fun of Marxism. Shadi is not interested in power, and he definitely did not regard his film as a text to be scoured for arcane power dynamics semiotically hidden between the lines. Anyway he did include a third group of characters who seem to resemble the vast majority of Egypt’s population to a greater extent than either side of the supposed dialectic: the white-clad fellahin who play the role of innocent bystanders. They’re represented by Stranger, whose contact with Wanys spells pain. Then there are the smugglers, too: Sheikh Selim’s long-time associate Ayyub, by now an established tycoon; and his ambitious, back-biting subordinate Murad. This group also includes the two Bedouin girls Murad controls—apart from Mother, the only female presence in the film. Its members have no geographic or demographic loyalties.

188 The smugglers occupy a twilight zone between the two cultural and moral universes the film proposes to bring together: that of the effendis, and that of the clansmen. Now the more I think about it, the closer this zone seems to the space in which baladi and barra overlap, whether positively or negatively. An essentially pragmatic space, this: it is associated with the figure of the kherti, the young man who hustles Western tourists or “expats” on the street, befriends them, and offers illicit pleasures with a view to exploiting them. One of the more popular charges leveled by leftwing intellectuals against those perceived to defer to a Western agenda is that of practicing “kherti culture.” And one major kherti area of activity is male prostitution for the benefit of gay white men, not to mention upperclass Egyptians, which connects back to someone like Shadi by way of the gay Alexandrine-Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) writing about early twentieth-century Alexandria, say. Though only ever acknowledged in the context of police raids,88 male prostitution has been a cornerstone of downtown Cairo life for decades. On the other hand, defending those—like ElBaradei—who “who go and do great things abroad” (where

88 See Caroline Hawley, “Anger Over Egypt Gay Trial”, bbc.co.uk, 15 August 2001; and, about the same venue, Karim Alrawi, “No Queens on the Nile”, The Guardian, 27 July 1990. A more comprehensive study of the topic was undertaken by Nicola Pratt in “The Queen Boat Case in Egypt: Sexuality, National Security and State Sovereignty”, London: Review of International Studies, Vol. 33 (2007).

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great things can presumably be done) against populist honorable-citizen libel, Bassem Youssef too promoted that model. As a thought experiment, think of Bassem himself as a metaphorical kherti. Think of ElBaradei as a kherti. Think of me as a far more modest kind of kherti. Now think of Shadi as both a kherti and a beneficiary of kherti activity.

189 Wanys has been wandering around in a trance since coming out of “Pharaoh’s cave,” unable to confront his destiny enough even to reject it the way Brother did. When at 1:11 hours a badly beaten up, terrified Stranger explains to him that the effendis can decipher pharaonic inscriptions—Paragraph No. 106 again, that’s right—Wanys’s existential crisis comes to a head. While crouching at Sheikh Selim’s tombstone in an attitude of prayer in the dark, it is Murad who comes to inform him of Brother’s death. In the next scene, Murad can be heard attempting to stop Wanys as he walks toward the Nile steamer—news of his brother’s death having clinched the crisis: he will reveal the secret—desperately begging before he uses force. The determined young clansman has no difficulty brushing him off, leading to the climactic, epoch-making nocturnal encounter with Ahmed Effendi, which Shadi has spent the whole film building up to.

190 As Wanys walks up to the steamer where the Cairo effendis are staying, El Badawy Bey’s floodlights come on. The policeman is skeptical as he enjoins his soldiers not to fire, but Ahmed Effendi seems less perturbed by the prospect of meeting this “man in rags,” as one guard describes him. This is probably the most effective scene in the whole film. Before Ahmed Effendi finds out who Wanys is, their exchange sums up everything I’ve been thinking about in the summer of 2020.

191 “What makes you come to the mountain with all this might?” Wanys asks. “What you have [meaning the boat, the clothes, the weapons] is worth more than the gold of the dead.” And only after asking him what he knows about the Dead does Ahmed Effendi say, “Who are you?” Wanys

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replies, with a truly exquisite admixture of uncertainty and pride, “The heir of Old Selim.” While scolding Murad, he has accepted the death of Brother, so an extra layer of grief enfolds the statement as he goes on, “and his only heir.” There is a moment of silence. “Wanys looks fixedly at Ahmed Kamal,” the script reads, then he breaks the silence: “Am I not welcome in your house?”

192 We never know what Ahmed Effendi and Wanys say to each other. The next scene shows the archaeologist with El Badawy inside the cave, as Paragraph No. 155 recounts. When Wanys next appears he is covering his face with his hands. It is dawn. “The two Colossi of Memnon sit silently as the procession passes them,” the script reads: “a silent farewell. Some people come running and halt. The whole procession passes along an elevated country road. Women in black approach. El-Menshiya,” that is, the name of the real-life boat that carried the mummies to Cairo, “is lit up, with guards awaiting…” By the time El Menshiya has left it is daybreak. As Maspero explains in Paragraph No. 165, the pharaohs— hitherto stray souls—have retrieved their names.

193 Paragraph No. 162 makes an exclamatory remark about the fact that an Egyptian dispatched by the national museum to safeguard his country’s heritage should have to disguise himself as a European to achieve his aim. But that is not as crazy as it sounds. If not for “Mariette Pasha,” as Maspero calls him in the film, there would be no national museum. Outside the European discipline of Egyptology, Egyptians would never have thought of themselves as in any way connected with the weird and wonderful relics they sometimes stumbled on while they went about their lives. It is a Frenchman who is worried about national heritage, what’s more—keen on protecting it as much from Egyptian raiders and smugglers as Europeans. However much Shadi attempts to hide this, it remains the subtext of the film. The modern Egyptian character with a split personality isn’t really healed until European intervention brings together its two poles. According to Maspero, Mohammad Abdel Rasoul, the brother who tells the effendis about Pharaoh’s cave, goes on to find employment with the Antiquities Service.

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194 One of Baba’s favorite books was Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and it would be easy to refer to the legendary Martiniquan theorist’s “colonized mind”—how people who have been subjected to colonization will inevitably end up mimicking their oppressor—to explain the strange phenomenon of Ahmed Effendi’s real-life counterpart refraining from speaking Arabic,89 his native language, in the presence of the fellahin who share it. Except that, unlike the later dictatorial excesses of the three fathers of the republic, this cannot be seen as an instance of the “violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life.” It is not the irony of that same violence being “claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.”90 At least it is not just that.

195 An Egyptian pretending to be European to protect Egyptian heritage speaks to identity in flux. In Egyptology—as I suspect Shadi realized, more than he let on—the European worldview is so deeply embedded in national identity they might as well be the same thing. This is not false consciousness—it is trans-nationalism. And because barra is almost always bound up with zaman it is also doubly nostalgic: for the ancient past, and for the early colonial modernity that made that ancient past possible.

89 This is attested in both “Obituary Notices: Sir Gaston Maspero, K.C.M.G.”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, January 1917, Cambridge University Press and Cottrell, The Lost Pharaohs, London: Routledge, 2013, as well as Ceram, Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archæology, translated by E. B. Garside, II.12, “Robbers in the Valley of the Kings”, Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. 90 Frantz Fanon (trans. Constance Farrington), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968.

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196 Colonialism was unjust and humiliating but it also underwrote a certain degree of cosmopolitanism and, as in the somewhat tempered optimism of Taha Hussein in Paragraph No. 185, limitless hope for the future. This would seem to be the deeper wisdom in Shadi’s perspective, voided of patriotic piety.

197 An Egyptian pretending to be European to protect Egyptian heritage speaks to Egypt’s forever fraught modernity. It confirms the suspicion that the more you set out to decolonize or emancipate yourself the more colonized and enslaved you become. Whether by replicating the oppressor’s violence or making such a mess of things you end up worse off than you were when you started—viz. Urabi (Paragraph No. 172) or Nasser (Paragraph No. 177)—the more a victimized identity sets out to reassert itself in the face of a given power, the more it dissolves into that power.

198 That is not the story Shadi wants to tell, but because it is the story he was living—the story of the Nasserist experiment—it ends up coming through. And, whether you see it as a doubling down of the local despotism it set out to dismantle or an aspect of the global despotism in whose false rhetoric its champions believed, it is also the story of the Arab Spring. It is the story that tumbles out once my mouth has been ritually opened and I realize that, having survived for 20 years after my father’s death— an Egyptian, a 44-year-old Egyptian—I am a mummy reanimated. But what’s the alternative to revolution and patriotism? Maybe the way to resist is simply, in all our contradictory complexity, to be. Maybe it is to give up on delusions not of nationalism and authenticity but of equality, justice and the possibility of absolute emancipation—to confront, with bare-nerve bravery, our bondage to barra and zaman, who or what we are—so that we can think meaningfully about what we want to become.

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199 “A series of rituals was performed at the entrance to the tomb. The most important of these was the ‘Opening of the Mouth,’ a ceremony said to have been designed by the [divine] craftsman Ptah to animate the eyes, ears, nose and mouth and, in so doing, convert mummies, statues and images into latent beings with a potential for life. The mummy was propped upright as the sem-priest [or high priest of Ptah] touched it with a series of archaic sacred objects including the flint pesesh-kef knife (a knife similar to that used to cut the umbilical cord at birth), an adze and the leg of an ox. Meanwhile, the lector-priest recited the spells that would make the transformation complete.”91

200 It is the summer of 2020 and I’m about to watch a film. This is a very good film: despite some serious flaws I am not wrong to take that for granted, though it is also true that, cinematically speaking, the film won’t grip or provoke me. But seeing The Mummy for the fourth time is a kind of Opening of the Mouth. It will let my mummified person breathe, speaking in the afterlife that is my post-Arab Spring existence. It can do this because it permits me to confront the two conditions of my intellectual life, which are also its conditions: my sense of self, drawn inexorably to a past as elusive as it is tempting, is bound up with identities other than my own. Dumb though historical death has rendered me I am now articulate. And powerless to change history though I remain I can at least describe it. I might not be excited to see The Mummy again, but I really should be.

91 Tyldesley, The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt, Penguin, 2010.

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Index

A Abdel Rasoul. See Hurabat Abd-el-Rasul. See Hurabat Abdel Salam, Shadi, 12, 13, 20, 22–26, 31, 32, 35–37, 44–46, 52–56, 61, 63–65, 67, 68, 73, 74, 77, 81, 82, 85, 87, 93, 96–103 Africa, 14, 76 Alexandria, 22, 23, 73, 99 Al Hakim, Tawfiq, 47, 48, 50, 98 Arabic, 7, 18, 21, 26, 31, 47, 48, 53, 55, 61, 68, 91, 97, 102 Arab Spring, 6, 7, 14, 17, 69, 72, 103, 104 autotheory, 3

B Baba. See father baladi, 21, 42, 48, 71, 72, 99 barra, 6, 26, 30, 42, 47, 68, 69, 71, 97, 99, 102, 103

Bataille, Georges, 40, 41 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 10 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 10, 18, 20 Book of the Dead, 51 British, 10, 14, 17, 20–22, 48, 50, 80, 92, 93 Bulaq Museum, 55, 78, 81, 86, 91

C Cairo, 13, 21, 23, 25, 30–32, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 68, 74, 76, 80, 83, 84, 86, 88, 96–101 Chahine, Youssef, 13, 22, 23 Chapters of Going Forth by Day. See Book of the Dead Coffin Texts . See Book of the Dead Colla, Elliott, 13, 22, 25, 46, 53, 55, 56, 68, 77, 87, 98 colonialism, 10, 13, 46, 54, 56, 77, 87, 98, 103 concession, 80

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Y. Rakha, Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy, Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61354-9

109

110

INDEX

cosmopolitanism, 103 Cromer, Lord, 48, 78, 80, 91

E effendi, 44, 59, 78, 84, 88, 100–102 Egyptian Museum, 30, 78 ElBaradei, Mohamed, 69, 70, 72, 99, 100 European, 6, 22, 26, 45, 47, 63, 68, 73, 78, 80, 86, 87, 91, 96–98, 101–103 Evelyn Baring. See Cromer, Lord eye, 39–42, 44, 50

F Facebook, 4, 60, 61 Fanon, Frantz, 102 father, 25, 33, 35, 38, 41, 57 Fayyum mummy portraits, 51 Fellah. See fellahin fellahin, 26, 36, 46, 55, 80, 89, 93, 99, 102

G gay, 23, 99 grief, 32, 33, 37, 57, 88, 101

H Hurabat, 35, 36, 59, 60, 84 Hussein, Taha, 97, 98, 103

I Ibrahim, Sonallah, 14, 75, 93, 94, 96 identity, 6, 23, 26, 30, 42, 46, 58, 63, 67, 73, 85, 88, 89, 96, 98, 102, 103 image, 2, 4–7, 9, 36, 37, 41, 59, 86 Islamist. See political Islam

J Jahine, Salah, 16, 22 January Revolution, 27, 29, 58, 60, 65, 69, 72, 81, 93 Jarman, Derek, 13, 23 July Revolution, 22, 30, 97 June War. See Naksa K Khedive Ismail, 20, 21, 74–76, 89, 91, 93 M Mariette, Auguste, 76, 77, 80, 86, 91, 101 Maspero, Gaston, 44, 78, 80–82, 86–89, 91, 101, 102 mawwal , 53 Minya, 23, 53 modernity, 28, 29, 35, 68, 70, 72, 85, 88, 89, 93, 96, 102, 103 Morsi, Mohamed, 28, 29, 69 Mubarak, Gamal, 27 Mubarak, Hosni, 27–29, 60, 65, 67, 70 Muhammad Ali, 17, 18, 20, 29, 46, 73–75, 92 Muslim, 16, 23, 28, 29, 35, 46, 57, 58, 61, 63, 65, 69, 71 Muslim Brotherhood, 28, 29, 69, 71 N Naksa, 13, 14, 16, 17, 25, 26, 31, 32, 37, 57, 88 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon Nasser, Gamal Abdel El, 14, 16, 17, 22, 24, 27–29, 37, 48, 57, 81, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103 nationalism, 5, 6, 20, 96, 97, 102, 103 1919 (revolution), 30, 48

INDEX

1967. See Naksa

O Okasha, Tharwat, 24 Opening of the Mouth, 104 Ottoman, 6, 17, 18, 20, 65, 74, 78, 85, 96

P Palestinian, 14, 16, 94 Parajanov, Sergei, 12, 23 pharaoh, 4, 14, 17, 25, 27, 28, 38, 57, 58, 96 pharaonic, 8, 29, 35, 37, 46, 47, 57, 60, 65, 81, 98, 100 political Islam, 28, 29, 58 Pyramid Texts . See Book of the Dead

R Return of the Spirit , 48, 50, 81 Royal Cache, 82, 83, 85, 94, 96

S Sadat, Anwar, 16, 24, 27, 94, 96, 97 Shadi Abdel Salam, 2, 4, 10 Sixties Generation, 14, 31, 33, 57, 93

111

T The Color of Pomegranates . See Parajanov, Sergei The Mummy, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, 20, 24–26, 30–33, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 50, 51, 55, 56, 59, 63, 67, 68, 73, 78, 82, 83, 85, 88, 93, 94, 96, 104 The Night of Counting the Years . See The Mummy U Upper Egypt, 26, 81, 97 Urabi, Ahmed, 89, 92, 103 W Wanys, 31, 33, 35, 38, 42, 46, 50, 57, 59, 60, 73, 86, 87, 99–101 war, 13, 36, 59, 71, 76, 91, 94 Y Youssef, Bassem, 13, 21, 22, 71, 100 YouTube, 4, 13, 71, 81 Z zaman, 6, 26, 30, 42, 47, 64, 67, 97, 98, 102, 103