Negotiating Modernity and Islam in pre-1952 Egyptian Cinema

Abstract

A quick glance at Egyptian films before the 1952 revolution can easily lead to conclusions that modernity in Egypt emerged as a predominately secular domain that is anti-religion. But a closer look at screenwriting tools reveals that Islam served as a substratum of everyday life practices of film characters. This essay sheds light on metaphors representing Islam in the cinematic critique of modernity by drawing on selected scenes from the popular classics Talaq Su'ad Hanim/The Divorce of Lady Su'ad, directed by Anwar Wajdi [Wagdi], 1948, and al-Zawja al-Sabi'a/The Seventh Wife, directed by Muhammad 'Imara, 1950. The two films enjoy a visible presence in Egyptian popular culture until today. Both critique how the materialization of modernity among the Cairene bourgeoisie leads to the appropriation of metaphors representing Islam, such as Islamic legal tradition, to sustain a class hierarchy thriving on colonization and war. The two films present an expanding trajectory and direction of female agency in response to the appropriation of Islamic personal law for divorce amid film characters who are depicted as caricatures of modernity. In so doing, these early films recognize how religion did not shrink or diminish under the pressures of modernization; they are examples of how cinema serves as a supplemental secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between Islam as a faith, Islam as an ideology and Islam as a body of legal knowledge that has the vital semantic potentials to be translated into secular idioms, and in a "universally accessible language." More notably, the films underscore the importance of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions which could be incorporated into a "post-secular" stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism. And above all, the films show that such a task falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens engaged in the public use of reason.