Religion, Media, and Politics

Abstract

The first explosion to rock Egypt’s political scene was not the popular mass protests of 25 January 2011, but rather literally, a church bombing in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve 2010. This provided an opportunity for modest protests as a dress rehearsal for things to come. The issue of sectarian unity and strife has been a constant thread in much of the political developments since then. Sectarianism may be defined as the elevation of one’s religious identity to the status of primary political identity. As such, and to escape this trap, the status of the “Copts” has been a leitmotif in the heated political posturing undergirding the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafi Nour party, parliamentary elections, presidential elections, and constitutional writing amongst leftists, liberals, and Islamists of various stripes. In the midst of this eventful and heated political calendar, in the first Ramadan television season following the revolution, a series aired that took the issue of Egypt’s Christian–Muslim relationship as its central narrative core. Approved during the Mubarak regime, and airing after the revolution, the series provides a unique snapshot of this debate. In the final analysis, however, the series and its outlook were quickly overtaken by the changing political landscape. This article looks at this snapshot, and snapshots of various other media forms afterwards, to see how the issue of sectarianism was constructed in the first popular phase of the revolution, and how the consolidation of Islamist political power since then has injected a new problematic as it comes to the issues of difference, tolerance, power, and art.