Description
This paper examines how in Egypt a new and consolidating authoritarian regime has sought to extend direct state controls over private religious institutions, including mosques and the provision of preachers within them. In 2014, the newly elected president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, called for a “religious revolution” to “renew religious discourse” to combat what he called “Islamist extremism”. The Ministry of Religious Affairs was subsequently tasked with the nationalization of all private mosques, by placing them directly under the administration of the government. Despite these pronouncements, insufficient state capacity meant the implementation of this nationalization plan remained incomplete. In Egypt under Sisi, despite the implementation of controls over religious institutions being incomplete in practice, the government continues to project the attainment of these aims discursively through public pronouncements. This paper addresses this contradiction by developing the concept of ‘hollow statism’, showing how ‘performative acts’ attempt to account for this gap between discourse and praxis. Drawing on Egyptian government data and Arabic-language articles from Egyptian media, this paper shows how empirical practices intersect with the production of discourses to help reconstitute authoritarian rule. ‘Hollow statism’, however, demonstrates that despite the heightened level of repression towards private actors in Sisi’s Egypt, the foundations of the new regime’s attempts to control the religious sphere rest on a fragile pretence of these policies being fulfilled.
