Al Fara'een does share many of the views of the Honourable Citizen as SCAF must imagine him, expressing—first and foremost—concern over the Stability of the State, the catchword of the Mubarak regime and all that it stands for: besides culturally articulated incompetence and corruption, in other words, not only stupidity and ignorance but also an astounding capacity to defecate from the mouth.
———Youssef Rakha (Reference Rakha2012)Kindly take the necessary steps toward having leaders at all levels instruct officers, junior officers and soldiers on the necessity of watching the Fara‘ayn Channel, as its programs can be described as impartial, objective, and as putting the interests of the nation above all other interests.
———Alleged leaked memo from Egyptian Air Force General Yunis al-Sayyid al-Masry (Abdelazim Reference Abdelazim2012)I hold the Muslim Brotherhood and the Military Council accountable.… Either they kill me—and the idea has been floated, to liquidate me physically—or else they'll write up a case and put me in prison.
———Taufiq ‘Ukasha speaking on the Fara‘ayn Channel the day after Muhammad Morsy's presidential election victory was announcedIn the wake of the Mubarak regime's collapse it seemed to most observers that the initiative for restructuring society and the political system lay with the young pro-democracy activists who started the revolution. It soon became apparent that while the regime had fallen, opposition to the Revolution was continuous. Opponents of the increasingly fragmented revolutionary forces were seen as variously the old regime, a “deep state,” opportunistic Islamist political parties, and the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF). Thus, for the most part, in early accounts of the Egyptian revolution activists protested, the reactionary forces of the state defended the status quo, and long-established and well-organized Islamist social movements dominated the field of formal political contestation.
But it was never a foregone conclusion that political initiative was the prerogative of either horizontally mobilized pro-democracy youth or well-established Islamist social movements, or indeed even that the anti-revolution forces consisted straightforwardly of the old regime or the military. Revolutions do not just pry open the field of political contention. They can instead be seen as moments of anti-structure in which new political agents can emerge, and in which all political agents are forced to act as bricoleurs, assembling new political formations from diverse cultural resources.
In this article I trace the rise of Taufiq ‘Ukasha, a talk-show host and minor parliamentarian in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) before the Revolution, recreated in the protracted state of anti-structure after the fall of the regime as a “media personality” and advocate for a cult of Egyptian militarism. He became a primary spokesman for the counter-revolution, and ultimately a political force in his own right. ‘Ukasha was often seen during his moment in the political limelight as an appendage of SCAF. But he can be more productively understood as a political trickster who rose to prominence in the context of a liminal crisis—not just a socially managed state of being “betwixt and between” (Turner Reference Turner1967: 93), but an uncloseable breach in everyday socio-political practice. ‘Ukasha may not achieve meaningful power; whether or not he does will not be known for certain by the time this article is finished. But he does exemplify potentialities of revolutionary liminality that are not well captured by debates over the conceptual preeminence of agency or structure, or by viewing a revolutionary situation as a theater in which contention occurs between established political actors.
I draw on Victor Turner's writing on liminality as a stage in what he called the ritual process,Footnote 1 which for him was a social means for containing uncontrollable forces unleashed in transformative contexts. Normally such transformations are elaborately managed precisely because conditions of liminality are unsettling and dangerous. A master of ceremonies, real or figurative, is crucial to the process. It takes no great leap of imagination to view revolutions as transformative events, but for a revolution to emerge as such, control of the process must be at least thrown into doubt, if not altogether absent. This is not to say that revolutions can occur without the conscious will of agents. The point is rather that revolutions intrinsically require at least a moment of doubt that a definable hand controls events, and the contours of this moment are extremely elastic. In the case of Egypt's January 25th Revolution the moment of doubt initiated by the fall of the Mubarak regime has thus far extended into its third year.
My interpretation of Taufiq ‘Ukasha also hinges on the concept of the Trickster.Footnote 2 Tricksters are beings at home in liminality, and natural adjuncts of anti-structure, the central quality of the ritual process. In narrative traditions ranging from Prometheus in Greek mythology to Wadjunkaga of the Native American Winnebago people, Trickster is the fulcrum of cautionary tales about the dangers of uncontained liminality. Such narrative traditions are performative envelopes for containing the dangers posed by a Trickster. The rise of Taufiq ‘Ukasha poses the question of what happens when a Trickster is placed in the context of uncontained liminality, in which there is no “narrative envelope” to contain the potential mischief committed by those who are betwixt and between.
I will elaborate below on liminality in revolutions, and briefly contrast it with conventional modes of understanding revolutions employed by disciplines most directly concerned with the phenomenon, political science and sociology. But first, let me introduce ‘Ukasha more fully.
TAUFIQ ‘UKASHA
Taufiq Yahya Ibrahim ‘Ukasha was a minor politician from Daqahliyya Province northeast of Cairo. Before the Revolution he was a television journalist. In the early 1990s he worked for state television, managing to become the presenter of a political program called ahzab wa barliman (Parties and parliament), which was broadcast in the wee hours of the morning “graveyard shift.” ‘Ukasha was a failed candidate in the 2005 parliamentary elections for an NDP seat in the Peoples’ Assembly. In 2008 he established his own satellite television station, al-Fara‘ayn (the Pharaohs), and began to recreate himself as an i‘lami (pl. i‘lamiyin)—nominally a media professional (in television working in front of or behind the camera), but most often used in the sense of a “media personality,” a quasi-celebrity located somewhere on a spectrum between news anchor and purveyor of “infotainment.” This worked well enough to get him elected in the 2010 parliamentary elections in his hometown of Nabaruh in Daqahliyya. These elections were blatantly rigged by the NDP, and contributed greatly to the outrage that fed the January 25th 2011 Revolution. Consequently ‘Ukasha's time “in government” was short. The parliament elected in November of 2010 was dissolved by SCAF on 13 February 2011, one day after Mubarak's abdication.
Before the Revolution ‘Ukasha's television station was a vanity project for furthering his frustrated political ambitions. After the Revolution he often claimed to have been at odds with the NDP. The substance of his conflicts with the luminaries of the ruling party is vague, but it is true that the NDP dominance was so great that political contention over control of resources and patronage took place within the party rather than between parties.
Arab television boasts a wide range of talk shows. The hosts of these programs, like the Americans CNN reporter Anderson Cooper or right-wing commentator Glen Beck, or the British newscaster John Snow, achieve a measure of celebrity. However, similarities between Egyptian media personalities and foreign counterparts belie a distinctive political economy. Egyptian private channels before the Revolution were owned by politically connected businessmen such as Ahmad Bahgat (the Dream channels) or Naguib Sawiris (OTV and OnTV), and hence “private” did not mean completely free of regime control.Footnote 3 Nonetheless, even before the Revolution, the possibility of media personalities (most often talk-show hosts) establishing a following made them commodities with transferable value. The existence of an increasing number of alternative platforms, even if they were not entirely independent of the regime, was important because it gave presenters themselves a degree of autonomy. Spectacle, controversy, and sometimes principled political criticism, even within the limits of Mubarak-era censorship, endowed media personalities with social capital convertible to both the fees they could command (a subject of intense gossip and gross exaggeration) and advertising fees that the stations could attract.
Mubarak-era restrictions on licensing news channels enabled Egyptian i‘lamiyin to become the public faces of political talk shows that skirted a ban on establishing straightforward news networks. On pre-Revolution satellite television Taufiq ‘Ukasha, host of a political talk show titled Misr al-Yaum (Egypt today), was a very small fish compared to such whales as Hala Sarhan, Mahmud Sa‘d, or ‘Amr Adib.
After the Revolution new channels proliferated as the ban on news reporting was relaxed, and political forces other than the regime and its cronies were able to establish a toehold in broadcast media. One might think that an expanded field of talk-show platforms might have made ‘Ukasha an even smaller fish in a larger pond. However, he thrived in the increasingly chaotic post-regime environment though a spectacular mix of virulent attacks on the Revolution, unswerving allegiance to the military, and a drumbeat of conspiracy theories “proving” that the Revolution was brought about by foreign agents who wanted to destroy Egypt. ‘Ukasha presented this bouquet of themes in a folksy idiom obviously designed to appeal to a rural and lower-middle-class audience. Many people I spoke to were convinced that the overall package was successful within this very substantial niche.Footnote 4 It was also widely believed that ‘Ukasha worked with the Military Intelligence Service and he was, moreover, a prime suspect in organizing the infamous Battle of the Camel, in which the Mubarak regime attacked protestors in Tahrir Square on 2 February with irregular “thugs” and security personnel. Such allegations cannot be proved, but no doubt ‘Ukasha's political activities went beyond his television program.
Ukasha's program's lavish praise for the military, police, and judiciary did not always extend to individuals. He forcefully supported Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, the leader of SCAF, until the moment on 24 June 2012 that Morsy was announced as the winner of the presidential election. Thereafter he denounced Tantawi as “the heir to Field Marshall ‘Abd al-Hakim ‘Amr” (the military commander when Egypt was devastated by Israel in the June War of 1967). There were accusations that ‘Ukasha incited lower-ranking officers to carry out a coup against the Military Council (Hasan Reference Hasan2012). Since the exact nature of ‘Ukasha's relation to both SCAF and the deposed Mubarak regime was exquisitely murky, viewers had scope to interpret ‘Ukasha's “falling out” with Tantawi as part of a devious strategy in which SCAF would depart in a fake coup that would bring younger officers to power, who would then forcibly remove the Muslim Brotherhood from power.
SPECTACLE
I first became aware of ‘Ukasha at a counter-revolution demonstration in ‘Abbasiyya Square on 23 December 2011. Counter-revolution demonstrations had been announced throughout the year, generally to little effect. However, by November 2011 sizeable anti-Tahrir protests had occurred. These events were labeled by their organizers, most prominently ‘Ukasha, as a “corrective revolution” (tashih al-thaura) rather than as a counter-revolution.Footnote 5 The ‘Abbasiyya demonstration I attended was the only occasion in the two years after the fall of the regime in which I felt unsure about my safety vis-à-vis demonstrators (as opposed to the security forces) as a foreign observer.Footnote 6 December 23rd was a day of “dueling demonstrations.” The ‘Abbasiyya happening was explicitly billed by ‘Ukasha as an alternative to the Gum‘at Radd al-Sharaf (the Friday of restoring honor)” in Tahrir Square, in response to the army's attack on a sit-in, in which soldiers had beaten and humiliated women in particular. Gum‘at Radd al-Sharaf was part of a campaign to reassert the relevance of the non-Islamist revolutionary forces in the wake of Muslim Brotherhood domination of parliamentary elections, and a series of pitched battles with the security forces involving young men allied to the non-Islamist revolutionary forces.Footnote 7 In response, ‘Ukasha labeled his event Gum‘at al-‘Ubur—the “Friday of the crossing”—to honor the armed forces by invoking their historic breaching of the Bar Lev Line in the October War of 1973.
‘Abbasiyya Square, a small and unpleasant place for a demonstration, was chosen for its proximity to the Ministry of Defence. With much of the square walled off to contain construction work on the Cairo Metro, it could host perhaps two thousand people, a bit more if the peripheral areas were packed. Traffic flyovers—raised highways carrying noisy traffic—dominated the square. Many of those attending ‘Ukasha's “corrective revolution” were members and families of the police and the military, both in plain clothes for this event. Speakers thundered against the United States, Israel, Europe, and Iran, all of whom were said to be in league with each other against Egypt. But local enemies were the focus of vilification. One speaker roared that the political essayist and novelist ‘Ala’ al-Aswany “announced the choice of Mohamed Elbara‘dei as president of a government of national salvation, [and] an after an hour Bara‘dei accepted the position, and another hour after that France is warning Egypt to surrender power to a civilian government right away … surrender to Bara‘dei.…” The crowd chanted batil, batil, batil (“invalid”—tantamount at a demonstration to yelling “bullshit”).
The protestors at ‘Ukasha's event featured few women, and little class or even age diversity; middle-aged men dominated, unlike the more youthful and often more gender- and class-mixed crowds in the heyday of the Tahrir demonstrations. Few of the ‘Abbasiyya crowd marked themselves Islamically, with a beard for men or a head or face covering for women.
The ‘Abbasiyya demonstration was made for television, and state television mobile broadcast vans were parked nearby. Banners hung from the traffic flyovers displayed four pro-revolution television presenters in nooses.Footnote 8 Text on the banners bellowed, “The people want death (i‘dam) for traitors and agents [of foreign interests].”Footnote 9 Neither pro-Revolution or foreign television stations were allowed to cover the ‘Abbasiyya demonstration. Later in the day news reached me that BBC reporters who tried to file a story from the scene were roughed up. The rude treatment of foreign journalists was ironic given that at one point the crowd had chanted “al-gazeera feeen, ish-sha‘b il-masry aho”—“where is al-Jazeera, here are the Egyptian people,” as if there were a plot by the foreign media to under-report the “corrective revolution” rather than a determined effort by the crowd to prevent coverage. I took some pictures from a traffic flyover, and while walking down the off-ramp on my way back to the Square, I paused by a knot of people crowded around an interview for the al-Hayat channel, considered by revolutionaries as a filul (regime remnant, or “dead ender”) mouthpiece. The interview was just ending. I heard a man standing beside me say to a friend, “al-nas dool illi fi midan al-tahrir mish bani admin” (those people in Tahrir Square aren't human beings).
The ‘Abbasiyya demonstration was hyper-coherent. Hand-written signs reiterated consistent themes, as if distributed by a committee; “The People and the Police and the Army are One Hand” was everywhere. On a banner suspended beside the images of television personalities in nooses one could see “the army, the police, and the judiciary.”Footnote 10 A group of tough-looking men standing near the entrance of the square sported additional venomous anti-Revolution signage:
There are still Egyptians who haven't gone into the [public] squares. Beware the return of the Egyptians. Egypt and the Egyptians are bigger than [foreign] agendas and funding.
We demand the emptying of Tahrir Square immediately.
Egypt above Tahrir. Corrective revolution.
Another man's sign read, “Friday of the Crossing (al-‘ubur). The people of ManufiyyaFootnote 11 support and pledge our loyalty to the armed forces, the police, and the judges. No to destruction, no to foreign directives. We die, and long live Egypt.” The appearance of coherence was no illusion—all the signs were straight out of ‘Ukasha's program.
Death to Revolution-friendly talk show hosts. Reem Magid and Mona Shazly (top left); Hala Sarhan and Yusry Foda (bottom right). Author's photo.
State and state-allied television channels never filmed the ‘Abbasiyya demonstration from the traffic flyovers in wide-angle shots. A video montage filmed from within the crowd, aired on ‘Ukasha's channel, gave an impression of a red-and-white sea boiling with frenzied flag-waving patriotism. One version of the video was put to the song Sura (picture) by Nasser-era icon ‘Abd al-Halim HafizFootnote 12:
Protestors in Tahrir had played the same song on loudspeakers. In ‘Abbasiyya it made for rather effective propaganda.Footnote 13
The “corrective revolution” demonstration in ‘Abbasiyya Square on 23 December 2011, from the traffic flyover above the Square. Author's photo.
LIMINAL CRISIS
Though the ‘Abbasiyya event was highly scripted, it was also a testament to ‘Ukasha, who was no longer obscure by the end of 2011. Having become aware of him, I mentioned his name to people of varying class backgrounds, and never once found myself answering the question, “Who is he?” By June 2012 I did not have to solicit opinions; ‘Ukasha's name was constantly mentioned without any prompting. Before the Revolution, ‘Ukasha barely registered even in the sphere of television talk shows. His subsequent rise to prominence was not due solely to SCAF's support. SCAF had repeatedly proved ham-handed in all public relations initiatives since the beginning of the Revolution, and there is no reason to think that ‘Ukasha was somehow their brainchild, though SCAF undoubtedly provided him logistical support. Whatever resources longstanding political forces may have given to him, to a considerable extent ‘Ukasha was self-made. How did this happen?
At this juncture I want to reintroduce and elaborate the notion of revolution as a liminal crisis. Prior to the Revolution, ‘Ukasha was for all practical purposes “a loser,” frustrated within the confines of the NDP's clientalist machine, wealthy or well-connected enough to establish a television station, but still lost in a shuffle of more prominent programs. In the space of the first year of the Revolution he moved from obscurity to near universal recognition. I believe that it was the anti-structural conditions of an uncloseable liminal crisis that enabled his rise. His cultural package resonated, but only in specific circumstances.
‘Ukasha's “corrective revolution” demonstration from within the crowd. The sign reads, “The army, the police, and the men of the judiciary are one hand.” Author's photo.
The notion of liminal crisis is one way of framing an anthropological approach to revolution. Anthropology is attentive to the causes of revolutions, particularly in extensive literature on social movements.Footnote 14 This is, however, not the same thing as an anthropological approach to revolution.Footnote 15 The disciplines most concerned with revolution per se, political science and sociology, distinguish structural approaches from process-oriented analyses, the latter allowing for contingent action by social agents, particularly in a “revolutionary situation,” which bears some resemblance to what I have called a liminal crisis.Footnote 16 Anthropological works, particularly on such matters as resistance and social movements, could potentially articulate with either of the social science tendencies, to the extent that these disciplines can accommodate culture in their analytical repertoire. However, the philosophical underpinnings of positivist social science do not easily facilitate combining them with anthropology.Footnote 17 In the social scientific vein, if the emergence of an ‘Ukasha in a revolutionary situation is unexpected, then it is because we lacked the data to predict him. Anthropologists, by contrast, draw more deeply from anti-positivism,Footnote 18 embrace contingency for its own sake as a social phenomenon (as opposed to contingency as a variable in political behavior), focus less narrowly on politics as a single abstracted sphere of social life, and usually with little or no emphasis on the scientific discovery of “true regularities” or “universal” laws. Prediction is beside the point; “anti-structure,” the quality of liminality in Victor Turner's writing, is unpredictable by nature. Normally such unpredictability is socially framed and thereby contained. In a revolution it is not, until a new way is found to close off open-ended liminality.
Turner's writing on liminality articulates with other works focusing on in-between states, such as Bakhtinian notions of carnival, border theory, queer theory, performance theory, and postcolonial approaches to hybridity, ambivalence, and difference. I draw on Turner for two reasons: his writing is directly concerned with events, and his insights are scalable. Turner helps one to frame both very small interactions as well as cataclysmic events.
Turner has, however, been largely outside the mainstream of anthropology since the 1980s,Footnote 19 though never entirely ignored (e.g., Ghannam Reference Ghannam2011). Anthropology's disciplinary genealogy downplays Turner's legacy on the grounds that he put too much emphasis on the maintenance of normative social structure “outside” the scope of events. The notion of culture as a neatly coherent system did not age well, though Turner's actual commitment to such a view over the long arc of his career is questionable. As one review of Turner's oeuvre put it, “Turner's model of social drama is transcendental, ultimately ahistorical and apolitical … unable to recognize the contested, charged political valences embedded in the phrase ‘proved values’ …” (Weber Reference Weber1995: 530). Ortner (Reference Ortner1984: 128–29) and Caton (Reference Caton1999: 7) also typecast Turner as a functionalist.
However, Turner's legacy has more recently been revisited. Surprisingly, given the damaging “functionalist” label he had acquired, Turner is now seen by some as a key figure precisely in political anthropology.Footnote 20 Thomassen and others argue that Turner's writing on liminality and the related concept of the Trickster have great potential for the study of revolutions.Footnote 21 The cornerstone of Thomassen's anthropology of revolutions is Turner's well-known adaptation of the three-part ritual process first outlined by Arnold van Gennep early in the twentieth century. All ritual, not just the rites of passage that van Gennep had focused on, involves stages of “separation, margin (or limen, signifying “threshold” in Latin), and aggregation” (Turner Reference Turner1969: 94). Van Gennep had been a minor figure in anthropology's theoretical genealogy until Turner (contrary to the conventional reading of his legacy) “liberated him” in the 1960s from a functionalist straightjacket (Thomassen Reference Thomassen2009: 14).Footnote 22 For the Turner revivalists, liminality possessed analytical utility far beyond the study of ritual. It could be seen as flexible in terms of its subject (from individual to “civilization”), temporality (moment to epoch) and space (parts of the body to nation-states) (ibid.: 16). In the context of Egypt's revolution, liminality emerges in the space and social-political condition between, on one hand, separation from the Mubarak era, and on the other, the aggregation of “revolutionary initiates” (theoretically the entirety of Egyptian society) in a new sociopolitical regime. For quite some time after the January 25th Revolution what Turner called the “aggregation stage” in the process—a reestablishing of social and political norms after a moment of revolutionary release—did not occur. This, as Thomassen and the other Turner revivalists saw it, should be viewed as a liminal crisis: anti-structure without familiar sociopolitical practices to contain it.
‘UKASHA THE TRICKSTER
What does it mean to say that ‘Ukasha was a trickster? “Trickster” designates both a character and a type of narrative found in various forms across all modern cultures and in antiquity. The potentials of liminality, both creative and destructive, are at the heart of the Trickster, who is exquisitely ambivalent: potentially powerful, ridiculous, and dangerous. In the introduction to his classic translation of a cycle of Winnebago Trickster tales Paul Radin states,
“Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being” (Reference Radin1956: ix).
The antinomian Trickster is part of the “margin of mess” (Babcock-Abrahams Reference Babcock-Abrahams1975: 152) that marks the boundaries of the order by which we live. The significance of the concept for politics is rarely discussed and, crucially, very little of scholarly writing presupposes a context of crisis, in which there is no immediately available or obvious means for closing the phase or condition of liminality.
Understanding ‘Ukasha as a Trickster requires taking a closer look at his primary stage, namely his television show. To call Egypt Today a “talk show” is misleading. Sometimes there were guests, but usually ‘Ukasha himself did the talking, for up to three straight hours, extolling the martial prowess of the Egyptian army, and fulminating against the forces that brought down the Mubarak regime—which he also nominally condemned—on grounds that they were agents of foreign powers, most prominently the United States and Israel, but allied with a grand conspiracy encompassing the European Union, Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, Southern Sudan, Qatar, communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Youth of April 6th Movement, the Kifaya Movement, Muhammad Bara‘dei's National Association for Change, Google, Facebook, the Masons, and the Jews. ‘Ukasha's exhortation to attend the ‘Abbasiyya demonstration was broadcast on Egypt Today two nights before the event:
Egypt is in danger that nobody could have imagined. Foreign agendas and unfortunately [he snickers bitterly] Arab agendas … Egypt: the oldest state in the world. The oldest state in the world! It has the oldest people in the world. The smartest people. The most powerful people. The “mustachioed elephant” (il-fil abu-shanab) wants to rule Egypt.Footnote 23 The mustachioed elephant thinks he can buy the people; he pays his money, but the Egyptian people can't be bought. I implore you in the name of Egypt to be present in ‘Abbasiyya Square on Friday after prayers. I've gotten lots of letters asking me to invite Shaykh Muhammad Hassan to come pray with us in ‘Abbasiyya.Footnote 24 So I'm inviting him, and to every person who loves Egypt, to be present in ‘Abbasiyya on a day that we're calling “The Friday of the Crossing” (gum‘at al-‘ubur).Footnote 25 THE CROSSING! EGYPT! THE GREAT … [his raised hand and his voice shake together] EGYPTIAN ARMY! … is being insulted. It's being insulted on satellite channels. First they say that the Military Council is one thing, and the army another. In the second stage, it's the whole Egyptian army. And they've pounded on the police forces, accusing them of vandalism (kharaba) and thuggery (baltaga) and lack of security spreading throughout the country. They say, “It's not enough; we have to finish off the army.” The main thing is the army, because then there won't be any protection. A state without an army and without police and without a judicial authority and institutions is no state. Those leftist and communist effendis who don't believe in the existence of the divine being (bi-wugud al-zaat al-ilahiyya) are telling you “we want to burn it.”
‘Ukasha's style is repetitious, circular, pitched to the oral rhythms of illiterate or semi-literate viewers:
Egypt calls for her sons’ help! Will her sons stand [with her]?! I am as certain as my belief in God that on Friday they will be there by the millions; not by the thousands, and not a phony “millioniyya” [like those in Tahrir]. Millions, millions by God's will (bi-izn-illah) will go out on the “day of crossing,” on the day of completing the corrective revolution, on the day that this nation (umma), with its sha‘b crosses to security (illa al-aman), to liberty, to building a civilization for the twenty-first century! An Egyptian civilization! That the Egyptian people will build! In the twenty-first century by God's will (bi-izn-illah).
For many, ‘Ukasha's ‘Abbasiyya address was simply absurd. This is not surprising. A Trickster is meant to be laughed at. As Paul Radin's classic study of the Trickster put it,
Laughter, humour and irony permeate everything Trickster does. The reaction of the audience in aboriginal societies to both him and his exploits is prevailingly one of laughter tempered by awe. There is no reason for believing this is secondary or a late development. Yet it is difficult to say whether the audience is laughing at him, at the tricks he plays on others, or at the implications his behaviour and activities have for them” (Radin Reference Radin1956: x).
Accordingly, ‘Ukasha has been the butt of much mockery. ‘Ukasha's fellow presenters on his Pharaohs channel consistently refer to him adoringly as “Dr. ‘Ukasha.” According to ‘Ukasha's bio on the website of a post-Revolution political party he co-founded with the late Tal‘at al-Sadat (Anwar al-Sadat's nephew),Footnote 26 he obtained a Ph.D. in “Media Institution Management” from Lakeford University in Bradenton, Florida (“Taufiq Yahya Ibrahim ‘Ukasha” 2012). Numerous self-appointed Internet investigators have pointed out that no such institution exists.Footnote 27 In the first post-revolution parliamentary election, ‘Ukasha's campaign for a seat in a district of the delta province of Daqahliyya, his detractors claimed that he received only nine votes.
Video clips of ‘Ukasha's most ridiculous statements are legion. In one he warns of a Masonic plot that will unfold on “13/13/13” (the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month of the year 2013). A technician speaks to ‘Ukasha through an earpiece, alerting him to his mistake. ‘Ukasha spends three minutes stumbling through a contorted explanation of how he meant “thirteen nights in the year 2013.” Another heavily circulated ‘Ukasha video asserts that Muhammad al-Bara‘dei, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and now a key figure in Egyptian politics, should not be allowed to be president unless he knows whether a peasant woman fattens the male duck for the market, and how she does it; he should also know the price of a male goose in the Tuesday and Thursday local markets, and the price of cow manure.
For the liberal urban intelligentsia, ‘Ukasha's manner of speech is ridiculous. His physicality also draws both attention and laughter. Tricksters are often grotesque figures. In Native American cultures Trickster “possesses intestines wrapped around his body, and an equally long penis, likewise wrapped around his body with his scrotum on top of it” (Radin Reference Radin1956: x). Television could never accommodate such fantastical imagery, but grotesquery appropriate to ‘Ukasha's medium comes across in his on-screen mannerisms. In one show he plays the mafia don, apologizing for coming late to a program because he had to deal with saboteurs from the Hizb al-Thaura Mustamirra (the “revolution continues,” a post-Revolution youth party), who stole his election campaign posters in the delta town of al-Mansura. Glowering at the camera, he speaks in a low threatening voice: “I want to say to them: you're like my children, and you're new to elections … don't do this thing again, because there are people who filmed you on their mobile phones, and we have the pictures, so if you do that again perhaps … someone will hang you by your legs on Kubri Talha. My words are clear.”
Often accused (and frequently sued) for incitement to violence, in the next instant ‘Ukasha will flash an impish grin, revealing his gapped front teeth and dimples. ‘Ukasha's antagonists have a field day with his cute-but-grotesque grin. His hands are in constant motion as he speaks. He is remarkably mobile for a television presenter. In one heavily parodied video he pauses in mid-sentence, pulls out a tissue, and loudly blows his nose on air,Footnote 28 typical of his exaggerated on-screen physicality. He and his co-host on Egypt Today, a voluptuous forty-something woman named Hayat al-Dardiri, often went through long interludes of faux emotional disclosure, expounding on the social difficulties caused by their uncompromising commitment to speaking truth, or the physical and financial toll taken by keeping the station operating in the face of the many plots against them.
A DANGEROUS MAN
I never attempted to interview ‘Ukasha simply because it may have been dangerous for me to do so.Footnote 29 Beginning in December, he had devoted prodigious energy to denouncing American-funded democracy and human rights NGOs. The campaign against the NGOs resulted in the issuance of warrants for the arrest of forty-three of their personnel, including twenty Americans.Footnote 30 ‘Ukasha's program had a field day with the NGO crisis, gleefully displaying document after document given to him by the military “proving” that American-funded NGOs were directing the Revolution from the start. Some of the documents may have been authentic. For example, on his 26 December program ‘Ukasha showed a document allegedly taken in the NGO raids, from the Human Rights Defenders Fund, an Israeli NGO that provides legal aid to Palestinians, and only operates in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Negev.Footnote 31 Following that, he presented a form purporting to show Ahmed Maher (one of the founders of the revolutionary April 6th Movement) applying for a grant from them. Then he moves on to show documents pertaining to organizations that certainly were operating in Egypt. These include the National Endowment for Democracy and the Middle East Partnership Initiative, which ‘Ukasha alleged were funded by the CIA. He pauses over an NGO-funded training program in Syracuse University. The documents stated that participants were supposed to be fluent in English. He sneers that the Egyptians on this program obviously lied about their English, and stumbles elaborately over a labored mispronunciation of “Syracuse” in order to establish his own credentials as a non-English speaker (a tactic he employed constantly to establish his nativist credentials, despite also claiming to have received a Ph.D. at an American university). Then he goes back to the original document by the Human Rights Defenders Fund, which is supposedly funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which he says “owns 75 percent of the one hundred largest companies in the United States.” Hence the NGOs raided by the military in December were neatly tied to the CIA, AIPAC, Israel, and the April 6th Movement. “Bil-mustanadat!” (with documentation), as ‘Ukasha often proclaimed triumphantly.
My own position in the research requires some elaboration. I make no pretense of writing a conventional ethnography on ‘Ukasha, by which I mean a long-term study based in a bounded field site.Footnote 32 Of course the notion of a field site coherently bounded in space and coterminous with objective social relations fell by the wayside long ago, replaced by more creative thinking about how people may be brought together over distance or by social relations that are not reducible to a literally spatialized “site” (Gupta and Ferguson Reference Gupta, Ferguson, Gupta and Ferguson1997). In 2012 one might have identified an “‘Ukasha site,” for example in delta towns, where he was presumed to be influential; or a counter-‘Ukasha society among Islamists, who loathe him; or a semi-clandestine ‘Ukasha-phile society among “filul”—“remnants” of the old regime (often used as a derogatory label for one's opponents rather than in a precisely sociological manner). However, ‘Ukasha's rise was extremely rapid. Unless one happened to be in the right place at the right time, ‘Ukasha's moment(s) were likely to have ended too quickly to organize a conventional field site.
But the constraints of my circumstances were not unusual, or necessarily crippling. Much anthropological writing is based on serendipitous experience, or simply happens well outside boundaries set by grant applications. A field site always “enables certain kinds of knowledge while blocking off others, authorizes some objects of study and methods of analysis while excluding others” (ibid., 4).Footnote 33 In my case, circumstances dictated that I could not have a field site in depth, particularly in the context of heated accusations about the role of American NGOs in training and funding activists.
But if my hands were tied in terms of having no field site in depth, my presence, in the context of ‘Ukasha's growing ubiquity, still gave me a site in breadth. ‘Abdin, where I lived, is adjacent to downtown and a ten-minute walk from Tahrir. Downtown is as close to a socially porous bohemian district as Cairo has, and yet despite the transience of many people who pass through, it is still in many ways a neighborhood like others, in which people recognize familiar faces, develop social networks with neighbors, and engage in everyday routines. In 2010–2012 we were not new to the area. Since 2009 we had kept a rented flat in ‘Abdin to store books and magazines acquired over the years. In 2008 we had purchased a flat just off Tahrir Square, but it was undergoing renovation throughout our 2010–2012 stay. Consequently, my regular social circle, heavy on non-Islamist intellectuals, was augmented by sustained contact with a wide variety of tradesmen, lawyers, estate agents, landlords, and neighbors not just in the building where we rented, but also in the buildings where we were owners.Footnote 34
I found that asking people directly about ‘Ukasha elicited indexical responses, rather like asking about Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, who is both a political icon and a social litmus test. “What do you think about ‘Ukasha?” indexed positions on the Revolution: for or against; Islamist or not Islamist. But “fieldwork of the specific kind that anthropologists do, whether staying in one place for a long time or going back repeatedly over years and decades, is necessary because the ‘buzz of implication’ which informs real life is otherwise unheard” (Dresch and James Reference Dresch, James, Dresch and James2000: 9). The buzz of implication about ‘Ukasha came through at varying volumes and social scales. The fact that I no longer had to solicit opinions on ‘Ukasha was an advantage of my position. The “buzz of implication” about ‘Ukasha was in many ways more valuable to me than “data” mined from an “‘Ukasha site” might have been.
The “buzz” about ‘Ukasha was accompanied by a growing realization that he could be dangerous. ‘Ukasha clearly had connections to military and security personnel, many of whom operated clandestinely. Foreign researchers (and this may apply to Egyptian researchers as well) cannot safely conduct research in a military or security forces milieu, with which an “‘Ukasha field site” might very well intersect. An ‘Ukasha fan I spoke to by happenstance (see below) turned out to be an ex-military man, who bragged that his best friends were policemen. I did not seek to maintain contact with him. Under the circumstances, his loudly proclaimed devotion to the police and military came across as a red flag.
Generally it was unwise to deliberately seek out contact with security personnel, and doubly so after the Revolution. This was underlined for me when a close friend (a foreigner) decided that he wanted to support the protestors directly. He went to sit-ins and started talking to people he did not know, striking up surprisingly easy friendships with a couple of “activists” who described themselves as hard-core revolutionaries. My friend's new acquaintances used him as a means to gain entry to a location known as a gathering place for anti-regime activists. Once they had joined the circle of conversation, the spies (instantly recognized as such by the activists) proceeded to loudly advocate using firearms against the military, trying unsuccessfully to draw others into supporting violence. Taking up arms against the military would have been suicidal, and was not something real activists ever espoused.
In ‘Ukasha's program, from late 2012 to the election of Muhammad Morsy in June 2012 (after which President Morsy swiftly took ‘Ukasha off the air for several months), conspiracy against Egypt by the United States was a major theme. American policy toward Egypt deserves criticism, but ‘Ukasha's rhetoric actually directed attention far away from important matters such as American pressure to enact economic liberalization agendas, or the securing of Israel's security through America's close relationship with the Egyptian military. That was the last thing ‘Ukasha wanted to draw attention to. The gist of his programs centered on vague allegations about the intentions of the United States, American-Israel plans to divide Egypt into warring cantons, or the notion that the entire January 25th Revolution was organized at the tactical level by American spies simply for the purpose of “destroying Egypt.”
It was not only ‘Ukasha who played the foreigner card. Early in the Revolution, long before ‘Ukasha became prominent, the regime ratcheted up foreign conspiracy rhetoric to a deafening volume. I witnessed foreigners being rounded up by the army on my street. Cars found to be carrying foreigners were searched for evidence that the passengers were journalists, and many were detained.Footnote 35 This lasted only a few days, after which it appears that new orders were issued and the detentions ceased.
‘Ukasha often made strenuous efforts to burnish his own credentials by aggressively calling for attention from prominent foreigners. On one occasion, when ‘Ukasha got wind that the American op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman was in Cairo, he lavished a large portion of his 15 January show on him, identifying him as the author of The Clash of Civilizations (presumably he meant The World is Flat, or maybe The Lexus and the Olive Tree). ‘Ukasha's monologue on Friedman is a good illustration of why one would not have wanted to draw his attention:
The electronic media corrupts peoples and nations (umam) because its goal is that there should be a rupture between people, and that there should not be groups or leaders or cadres—this isn't me talking, not me at all, it's Thomas L. Friedman, the American Jewish journalist who writes and participates in the forming of American political strategies, and who was trained by the Center for Strategic Studies of the Middle East, and he's in Egypt now. I say to him, to Thomas L. Friedman, who's in Egypt now, and I say to the Memri Center—the Center of Middle Eastern Media Studies—I say to them, I wish Ustaz Thomas L. Friedman would call me, as he's called some other people, I wish he'd call me, and I wish I could know his address and his phone number so that I could call him so that he might receive me in the U.S. and we could fulfill our obligations, as I hosted him here in Egypt ten or eleven years ago. I affirm again … and I say to al-akh al-fadil [“the distinguished brother”—sarcastically]—and he is, by the way, a serious man; as a media man I have to respect him, regardless of his ideas, but he has to be respected, he's a professional, and also a political professional, and he's among the political journalists who I … don't respect, but follow, and pay attention to how he uses media to fashion policy and to fashion a regional and global order, and how they use journalism to forge the political strategies of the most powerful state in the world. That's clear, it's true, we have to make it clear to people. That's Thomas L. Friedman, American, of the Jewish religion, and who also has a strong relationship with AIPAC, the American Zionist organization, indeed, is one of their most important thinkers. That is what he does. It's no shame. We also have people involved in similar activities, like the Revolutionary Socialists, or the anarchists, and those people, you know, we also have people like that. Does that mean we'll throw them [away]? No. In the end they're Egyptians. Either we open a dialogue with them so that we can rebuild their ideas and refashion their thoughts, and open up a scientific dialogue, an objective one tied to documents, and evidence and support, or we just renounce them. My personal opinion? No, we shouldn't let them be. We have to open a dialogue with them, we have to talk with them, A group of their audience has to participate in the political thought and philosophy—pay attention, I'm going to say it now—the Egyptian political and social philosophy, and not an Arabization….
I am, of course, not a public figure, and would not expect to get the same treatment. But any American academic might have been a tempting target. And one must not forget that attacks against the likes of Thomas Friedman, who does indeed support U.S. political and economic hegemony, and certainly is a supporter of Israel and Zionism (see Fernández Reference Fernández2011), come wrapped in elaborate packages of conspiracy, sometimes mixed with fact and sometimes outright fantasy. For example, ‘Ukasha said on the division of the Sudan into two countries in 2011, just before the outbreak of the Revolution in Egypt: “This is the birth pangs of the second stage of the Sykes-Picot agreement, and of course at the same time serves the Masonic idea to establish a world government next to the Egyptian pyramids” (from his 18 December episode). Or take a rambling accusation of a Jewish plot to engineer a decline in the population of Germany on his 9 February episode:
I'm saying this to the Jews. I'm saying, “brothers, don't lie to yourselves.” You've now played with the demography (al-geoghrafiyya al-sukkaaniyya) of Germany as much as you can. You've received an order to make the Germans hate marriage. So that there are no children. But what's happening today in Germany? Since exactly five years ago? They're marrying like crazy [al-zawaag zayy al-saruukh —“marriage like a rocket”]. And having tons of kids (wil-ingab sawariikh). In Germany. Today. You're following me? If they [the Jews] had succeeded … if they had made Germans hate marriage, the population of Germany would stay the same, like France.…
But taking such loopy passages out of context understates ‘Ukasha's effectiveness as a propagandist. His program was able to spin public opinion. For example, the country was rocked by images broadcast on 18 December (2011, just before the ‘Abbasiyya demonstration) of soldiers dragging a female protestor on the ground, and exposing her body as one of them stomped on her exposed stomach. It became known as the “dragged woman” case (al-fatat al-mashula) or sometimes in English as the case of the “blue bra” woman. The pro-Revolution newspaper al-Tahrir emblazoned the image on the paper's front page two days in a row. When I saw it on the second day I commented on it to the newspaper vendor on my street corner, and he replied sourly, “It's because they're really proud of it.” We chatted about the incident, and I was taken aback by his rejection of what seemed a clear affront on the citizenry by the military. He thought the whole thing was a fake. Perhaps not coincidentally, the moment the video of the woman being dragged and stomped went viral, ‘Ukasha's program had vigorously hammered against the credibility of the image, claiming that it had been staged by a taraf talit (hidden hand—literally “third party”) to discredit the military.Footnote 36
In the “dragged woman” case there was no direct link between my newspaper vendor and ‘Ukasha. In another case ‘Ukasha clearly put a fabricated narrative into circulation. This was a story in late April 2011 that the Islamist-dominated Peoples’ Assembly was debating a “law of intercourse” (qanun al-mudaja‘a) making it legal for a man to have sex with a deceased wife for six hours after her death. The story spread widely, and was picked up by the foreign press. Probably the origin of the story was a Fatwa by an incendiary Moroccan shaykh named ‘Abd al-Bari’ al-Zamzami (‘Asifat Ghadab 2012). The notion that the Peoples’ Assembly was debating adapting such a law was attributed to an editorial in al-Ahram published on 24 April (‘Abd al-Sami‘ 2012). But the source of the story was actually ‘Ukasha, from his 16 April program:
I'm really scared of this guy [Muhammad al-Katatni, the Muslim Brotherhood Speaker of the parliament] who's a member of the People's Assembly, who went to the parliament when the people elected him in order to tell you [about] “farewell intercourse” (mudaga‘at al-wida‘). Farewell intercourse. By God you're right. Can you imagine that I wasn't aware of that? I read about it in the foreign press, and I still didn't follow it. So I went back and checked, and found that it was true. I mean, [there is] someone who considers that it's part of the parliament's business to allow, by law—you see?—to permit by law, to make a law, called “The Law of Farewell Sex.” What does a “Law of Farewell Sex” mean? It means that when a wife dies it's the right of the husband to “be with her” as a husband for six hours after her soul has ascended to her creator. Oh my God! These are the problems of the Islamic nation (al-umma al-Islamiyya). These are the problems of Muslim men. [His voice rises; his face contorts.] The problem of Muslim men is “farewell sex”! God is greater (Allahu akbar)! I don't understand this.…
Although both Arab and foreign papers carried the story, the lie was recognized within a few days. Even the British tabloid the Daily Mail eventually published a recantation (Egypt's Plans 2012). But very few of the many articles and blog posts tracing the history of the story recognized that the liar was actually ‘Ukasha.Footnote 37
TAUFIQ ‘UKASHA, SERIOUSLY
As the previous examples show, there is more to ‘Ukasha (or to a Trickster) than laughter. A Trickster is productive, even if unintentionally. A Trickster provokes “laughter tempered by awe,” as Radin put it (Reference Radin1956: x). In a liminal crisis the tipping point between laughter and awe is precisely where the Trickster becomes dangerous: “the perfect scene for different sorts of self-proclaimed ceremony masters who claim to ‘have seen the future,’ but who in reality establish their own position by perpetuating liminality and by emptying the liminal moment from real creativity (Thomassen Reference Thomassen2012: xx).
It is easy to literally see the laughter because it leaves copious textual evidence on the Internet. The people who were listening but not laughing left far fewer traces. Outside virtual space, in the actual world, the prominence of ‘Ukasha became palpable. From at least December 2011, comments on ‘Ukasha were constantly in my peripheral hearing. Frustratingly so; I rarely caught the full content of strangers’ conversations in public spaces. It was always snatches of, “Did you hear what ‘Ukasha said,” or “‘Ukasha will go nuts when he hears about this,” said by passersby. Every time I mentioned to Egyptian friends (by and large secular and left-leaning) that I was interested in writing about ‘Ukasha they smiled, often assuring me in more serious tones that he was influential, specifically among the lower-middle-class and rural people that Egypt Today obviously targeted, and who ‘Ukasha himself repeatedly said were his “silent majority” supporters. I did meet a hard-core ‘Ukasha fan—a wildcat taxi driver in an unmarked 1970s vintage Fiat, who picked me up in Fagala, where I was buying a toilet for one of our apartments just before Morsy was elected. He claimed to be a former airforce plane mechanic, who subsequently worked in the civil aviation sector until he was laid off because they preferred hiring younger mechanics. The revolution, he said, had wrecked (kharrabit) the nation. That made me sit up and take notice, as takhrib—vandalism, wrecking—was one of ‘Ukasha's most commonly voiced accusations against revolutionary activists. My driver then let it slip that ‘Ukasha was indeed his favorite political commentator. “Why do you watch ‘Ukasha,” I asked? “Because he is the only man on television who tells the truth.” I questioned ‘Ukasha's veracity, suggesting that he was in politics for his own gain. “Why? He has no self-interest. Taufiq ‘Ukasha isn't trying to make money or get a political position. I am certain that he has very close relations to SCAF—people in the military have told me this. But he acts only out of love for Egypt.”
By the period leading up to the presidential elections (late spring 2012) ‘Ukasha simply became the face of an anti-revolution and anti-Muslim Brotherhood coalition—separate constituencies but of numerical significance. Doubtless for some ‘Ukasha was a strange bedfellow, but the degree to which he had stamped his name on a political position was nonetheless remarkable. In the tense days before the announcement of the winner of the presidential election hundreds of thousands of pro-Shafik protestors congregated in Madinat Nasr at the Minassa, the memorial where Sadat was killed by Islamists in 1981—obviously a highly significant location in an anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstration. The immense numbers, albeit bolstered by the bussing of supporters in from the provinces (as the Muslim Brotherhood also had to do to achieve a respectable-looking demonstration), were considered to be ‘Ukasha's achievement. At a rally in Tahrir Square the day before the announcement, I heard Muhammad Beltagi, secretary of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, whip up the crowd by telling them that “rumors have been put out by Shafkasha [an amalgam of Ahmad Shafiq and ‘Ukasha] that April 6th [i.e., activists of the mostly secular April 6th Movement who had openly supported Morsy's candidacy against Shafiq] has withdrawn from the Square. This is a lie! They are still here with us!”
For me the most telling sign of ‘Ukasha's prominence came a bit after the presidential race was settled. A group of three carpenters were working in one of my apartments. One mentioned that Omar Suleiman, the former chief of Egypt's General Intelligence Service and himself briefly a presidential candidate, had died. One of the others had not yet heard, and was shocked. The third replied, “Wi Mursy ta‘ban kaman” (“[Muhammad] Morsy is also sick”). The first carpenter laughed, and said, “Wi hatshuf—Taufiq ‘Ukasha bardu hayitla‘ ta‘ban” (“You'll see, Taufiq ‘Ukasha will also turn out to be sick”). It was not exactly a ringing endorsement for “Ukasha's politics; indeed, it was more an expression of skepticism toward politics generally. But it was incredible that ‘Ukasha, practically unknown a year ago, had gotten into a conversation about candidates for the Egyptian presidency. The Trickster had managed to put himself in rarified company indeed. Surely the tipping point between laughter and awe had been passed.
CONCLUSION
Observing the rise of Taufiq ‘Ukasha from the middle of 2011 to the middle of 2012 was a bit like watching the birth of Adolf Hitler: a Trickster seemingly coming from nowhere, suddenly no longer a laughing-stock, suddenly frighteningly real. Hopefully, ‘Ukasha's little Hitler will prove to have been stillborn. That was my assumption when I left Egypt in August 2012. I thought he had crested in June, at the time of the near-election of Ahmad Shafiq.
But when I returned to Cairo for a brief visit six months later, in February 2013, I was not so sure. I found myself in an Egyptian Weimar. The cities were seething with anger at the Muslim Brotherhood. Violent clashes were occurring every day between supporters and opponents of the government, and the security forces appeared to be paralyzed by division. Prices were shooting up, employment was plummeting, and everyone knew the country was on the precipice of far worse economic pain. I heard nostalgia for the Mubarak era expressed openly for the first time since the beginning of 2011. Many people were also calling openly for the army to return to power and oust the Muslim Brotherhood. In a week I spoke to as many people as I could. Moods were swinging from deep despair at ikhwanat al-daula (“Brotherhood-ization of the state) to giddy optimism that the “totalitarian project” of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a university professor described it to me, was in utter ruins and could never revive. The one thread that united every person I spoke to was rage against the United States for selling the country out to the Muslim Brotherhood. It sounded like an echo of German rage against the Versailles Treaty following World War I.
In a café I talked to some friends. One was a filmmaker working on a documentary about baltagiyya (“thugs”—hired muscle paid by political warlords).Footnote 38 Part of his task was to try to trace where the money came from, a frustrating endeavor because the trail always seemed to peter out just short of the real source(s). ‘Ukasha, as one of the potential sources for hiring baltagiyya, was a person of interest for him. When I explained my theory that ‘Ukasha had peaked in Shafiq's failed campaign for the presidency he strongly disagreed. “Watch what happens in the next two or three months,” he said, suggesting that ‘Ukasha would be officially “brought in” to a governing apparatus for whatever organization he was working with, probably military intelligence.
The limitation of a comparison between Weimar and the early months of the Morsy administration lies less in the contrast of economic conditions than in the ambiguous nature of charisma in political figures who emerge under such circumstances. Peter Worsley famously dismissed charisma as a Weberian “sponge word” (Reference Worsley1968: 272) evoking only a tautological relationship between the leader of a social movement and followers who see themselves in the qualities of the leader.Footnote 39 Charisma as a social relation demands a sociological explanation focusing, for example, on the attractiveness of ‘Ukasha's nationalist paranoia to lower middle-class men. But such a sociological approach to ‘Ukasha on its own would be as analytically shortsighted as the “spongy” concept of charisma, for over time the scope of ‘Ukasha's appeal transcended his presumed lower-middle-class following. ‘Ukasha was not just a reflection of lower-middle-class masculinity; he was an event. In this connection it is important to note that Weber, the most important touchstone for discussions of charisma, emphasized that “in its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in the process of originating” (Reference Weber, Henderson and Parsons1947: 364). Thereafter, charisma, understood as an emergent quality of separating from the everyday and a direct refusal of normal routines, enters a cycle of routinization into bureaucratic and traditional forms of authority (Andreas Reference Andreas2007: 437). A tendency to acknowledge the importance of charisma only insofar as it can be related to routinized authority (e.g., ibid.) inexorably pulls analysis away from the “process of originating” as Weber put it, and toward the strategic calculations of actors. Relating charisma to more highly valorized institutional forms distorts our view of it. To focus more squarely on charisma in its own terms, we might understand it as a “charismatic process” comparable to Turner's “ritual process.” A moment of separation from the ordinary is intrinsic to both, but Turner more productively conceptualizes in-between states as liminality, his signature concept rather than charisma seen as a minor partner in relation to institutional authority. Conditions enabling the rise of both a charismatic person and a Trickster are part of the liminal moment, and the line between them may be purely subjective. The charismatic is the one we like, the Trickster the one we loathe.
Comparisons with Weimar and the rise of Hitler aside, the rise of Taufiq ‘Ukasha enables a new perspective on revolutions both within anthropology and more generally in broader analyses of politics. My main goal, aside from presenting ‘Ukasha as a phenomenon of the January 25th Revolution, has been to show that anthropology possesses underappreciated conceptual resources for making sense of political contention. Specifically, the notion of a “liminal crisis” is valuable. To some extent a sudden collapse of familiar socio-political anchors resembles what political scientists and sociologists call a “revolutionary situation,” which “splits a regime into two or more blocs, each one controlling some significant segment of state power and/or territory, and receiving significant popular support” (Tilly Reference Tilly2006: 160). In this vein ‘Ukasha could be seen as an appendage of one player among “contenders or coalitions of contenders advancing exclusive competing claims to control of the state or some segment of it” (ibid.: 159). But was he? Such a view gives little scope for understanding him as an autonomous agent, and in the Weimar-like atmosphere of Egypt in early 2013, one could not help wondering whether SCAF may have needed ‘Ukasha more than he needed them.
As many scholars who conjure with in-between states have shown, liminality is culturally productive. Uncontained liminality is also dangerous. “In the liminal period we see naked, unaccommodated man, whose non-logical character issues in various modes of behavior: destructive, creative, farcical, ironic, energetic, suffering, lecherous, sub-missive, defiant, but always unpredictable” (Turner Reference Turner and Sills1968: 580). In a state of liminality so protracted that no end to it can be imposed or agreed upon, beings at home in liminality flourish. ‘Ukasha-as-Trickster is both a buffoon and a “culture hero”: a mythological being who “embodies all possibilities—the most positive and the most negative—and is paradox personified” (Babcock-Abrams Reference Babcock-Abrahams1975: 148). Obviously such a description applied to ‘Ukasha seems unspeakably grandiose, but the point is not so much his capacity to create or produce anything as it is the audacity of his self-presentation and his ability to move listeners, and possibly even turn them into followers. In 2011, I chuckled at ‘Ukasha's exhortations on his 21 December Egypt Today program to turn out for his ‘Abbasiyya demonstration: “Millions, millions by God's will, will go out on the ‘day of crossing,’ … this nation, with its people crosses to security, to liberty, to building a civilization for the twenty-first century! An Egyptian civilization! That the Egyptian people will build! In the twenty-first century by God's will!” In fact only a few thousand police and their families turned out. But then a little more than a year later, in a Skype conversation with a journalist friend in Egypt, I was told, “Ya duktur, people are listening to him. Not just farmers any more. All kinds of people in the cities. Millions of them. The things he predicted are coming true!”
This does not necessarily mean that ‘Ukasha has successfully willed himself into being as a permanent political force. He had backers and allies with prosaic political agendas carried out in a field of political contention (as Hitler did, one remembers). It may be that if they have reason to stop backing him ‘Ukasha's decline may be as swift as his rise. One may have doubts about his staying power outside the liminal void.Footnote 40 But he does instantiate a process that may be common in revolutions and other periods of extreme socio-political confusion, in which political Tricksters potentially gain real power. The concepts discussed here help us to bring them into focus. Otherwise, we tend to have an ocular problem with them—we simply cannot see them, analytically speaking. The rise of the political Trickster is by no means exclusive of other factors such as economic distress, political contention between formal organizations, ideology, or the organizational capacity of social movements. Neither do such factors, by themselves or in concert, explain the rise of an ‘Ukasha very well. He is a denizen of the revolutionary void, and a void pregnant with both destructive and creative potential is what a revolution is.
