ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s, Egyptians have repeatedly gravitated to Tahrir Square to stage political actions in what has evolved to become a quasi-consistent festival form. This chapter addresses questions of why sacrality is essential to Tahrir Square’s political festivals; how they deal with the city’s entrenched authoritarian milieu; what collective imaginary they conjure; and, more importantly, how Tahrir’s morphological and phenomenal qualities scaffold its festival form and festive imagination.
The chapter discerns the shades of sacrality that Tahrir actions inherit from the centuries-old local festivals of mulid (dedicated to saint-like awliya’) with their folk-religion associations, and how these acquired modernist overtones since the nineteenth century through the nationalist myth of the city vs. countryside (pharaoh vs. fellah). Arguments probe the ways this myth became manifest in Cairo’s urban fabric around Tahrir Square. Tracing the history of the square’s emergence as the main site for the people’s protests and symbolic actions in the twentieth century, the chapter posits that Tahrir evaded the sharp contradictions evoked by the nationalist myth and its political and economic implications. It speculates that the square registers in the people’s cognitive mapping of the city outside its authoritarian matrix.
