Copyright by Benjamin William Koerber 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Benjamin William Koerber certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Aesthetics and Politics of Rumor: The Making of Egyptian Public Culture Committee: Tarek El-Ariss, Supervisor Kristen Brustad Samer Ali Mahmoud Al-Batal Moneera Al-Ghadeer The Aesthetics and Politics of Rumor: The Making of Egyptian Public Culture by Benjamin William Koerber, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2012 Acknowledgements In this dissertation, my investigation into strange voices, both real and imagined, has been assisted by many real voices in ways I could not previously have imagined. They have ensured that out of a primordial noise, I have been able to achieve a degree of sense and order that would have been inconceivable had I been left to my own voices. ismaʿū wa-ʿū I thank my supervisor, Tarek El-Ariss, for encouraging this project from the very beginning. He endured the subsequent stages of outbreak, remission, metastasis, resistance, and reaggregation with an indefatigable optimism, the sensibleness of which I have often questioned and can only now begin to appreciate. The result has proven to be a particularly virulent strain of discourse, whose potency owes much to his efforts, but for whose reeling diminutions and drolleries I am pleased to take full responsibility. My endless gratitude goes to Kristen Brustad, who I continue to look to as a model for what the Arabist, indeed the humanist, can and should be now and in the future. Her constantly renewed support for the success of my dissertation, and for my personal and intellectual growth, has proven critical and transformative, and attests not only to her capaciousness as a scholar but her most rare commitment to adab as knowledge and practice together. My thanks and gratitude also goes to Samer Ali for widening and deepening my sense of how adab works both within and beyond the academic setting. To him I owe a vital appreciation for the intersections between scholarship and citizenship, and an understanding of the importance of being worldly in as many senses as the world has to offer. I thank Mahmoud Al-Batal for taking me in hand over the slippery threshold of pedagogy, and showing me that my anā taʿlīmiyya is there to be drawn out and released to the world. His belief in my potential, and his belief in Arabic, iv have kept me in high spirits from my days at CASA through my time in Texas. Moneera Al-Ghadeer has helped me in ways she may not know, and to her I owe my utmost appreciation. Her reading and writing of Arabic literature has been not only inspiring in the ordinary sense of the word, but at a more fundamental level has given me the reassurance that the two can be linked in a productive and rigorous way, as scholars in the field search for new modes of knowledge production and new understandings of the literary form. I also thank Yoav Di-Capua for helpful hints along the way, and for extending to me the sirāj of clarity, both intellectual and existential, when it mattered most. He knows more about ishāʿāt in modern Egypt than anyone and I suspect that a superior version of this dissertation had been written in his head before I was able to get it out on paper. From my undergraduate years, special thanks are due to Suzanne Stetkevych and John Walbridge, who gave me a thorough grounding in the Arabic letters and sciences that has proven to be a more enduring element of my scholarly or personal identity than any I have acquired since. I owe an equal amount of gratitude to John Eisele who, long ago, was the first to make Arabic make sense for me. Anita Husen deserves more than the few words I can offer here, but there is space enough to confess that her insistence on my value as a contributing member of the game has been so angelic that I have often suspected demonic ulterior motives; I have found none but charity, self-sacrifice, and the nerves of an individual who is truly mutamakkina min kalámha. Merci ya khaltshi. I am especially grateful to Zeina Halabi, who has taught me oh so many tricks in the way of manners and things, and has furnished me with the vocabulary and props I need to elicit the consternation of Yusuf Wahbi in a scene of my own making; she has shown me there to be light at the end of the darkness. I owe many thanks to Melanie Magidow and Drew Paul for very helpful feedback and v comments on drafts of what eventually turned into “Part 3” of this dissertation. I thank Uri Horesh for assisting me in my quest for that objet petit a: The Official Minutes from the Session Records of the Revolutionary Tribunal (1953), especially Case No. 6, which seemed for some time to have foreknowledge of my requests at several libraries and to have exploited such knowledge to disappear before my arrival. My ultimate success is documented in Chapter 1. Many colleagues and teachers have aided and abetted my intellectual development in various contexts over the years, and among them I give very special thanks to Hilal Chouman, Laila Familiar, Angela Giordani, Rachel Green, Somy Kim, Alex Magidow, Jessica Martin, Sofian Merabet, Alyssa Miller, Ahmed Naje, Mohammad Rabie, Michal Raizen, Martha Schulte-Nafeh, and Johanna Sellman. taḥiyyātī lakum dayman. Last but not least, I am in eternal debt to my parents and grandparents for setting me loose into the world, and for their unconditional love and support. Though my projects remained obscure to them, and no doubt placed a considerable strain on their uncommon reservoirs of patience and hope, never did they show the slightest hint of dismay, nor ever did they invoke their due right to peace of mind. My parents and grandparents are responsible for what backbone of wisdom and reason I have. This dissertation finally emerged because of their graces and I dedicate it to them. vi The Aesthetics and Politics of Rumor: The Making of Egyptian Public Culture Benjamin William Koerber, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: Tarek El-Ariss Whether as a distinct cultural form, or as a problem exaggerated and imagined by a paranoid interpretive bent, “rumor” (al-ishāʿa) claims a place in the writings of many Egyptian intellectuals, littérateurs, journalists, and politicians in the twentieth century that has yet to be adequately addressed and theorized. At the intersection of cultural studies and Arabic literature, this dissertation investigates rumor as a fiercely contested mode of reading and writing public culture in Egypt since 1952. Eschewing the legislative trend in the modern social and clinical sciences that has positioned rumor as an object to be combatted, or reduced it to the mechanisms and motives of mass psychology, I examine some of the many ways in which it generates, animates, or interferes with scenes in the lives of social actors as they move between the centers and peripheries of power. Rumor possesses both affirmative and destructive powers, often inseparably, and in order to theorize its complex imbrications with character, community, and culture beyond the urge to evaluative critique, I develop a host of concepts – such as noise, play, paranoia, and parody – capable of bringing this oft-neglected ambivalence into view. Notoriously resistant to analysis, whether due to is conceptual vagueness or ephemeral phenomenological status, rumor and the scenes it makes require a rethinking of the modes of scholarly writing that dominate the humanities and social sciences. A vii degree of mobility and eclecticism, drawn from the object itself in its flight across history and culture, imbues the organization and style of this dissertation: rumor is the object, and inspires the mode, of my investigation. Each of the three Parts of the dissertation investigates a different field of public culture in post-1952 Egypt. Part 1 analyzes the rhetoric and interpretive practices deployed by state actors in their confrontation with what they call “rumors.” Three historical events are taken as significant: the rhetorical and dramatic performances of the Free Officers in the early revolutionary period (1952- 1954), the social scientific celebration of “planning” (takhṭīṭ) in 1964, and the Mubarak death rumors of 2007. While here rumor comes into view as the object of state discipline and paranoid interpretation, the remaining two Parts investigate its role in the performances of artists, littérateurs, and bloggers. Part 2 analyzes the literary texts of Gamal al-Ghitani, which are unique in their simultaneous recording and performing of rumors in Egyptian cultural politics at the turn of the millennium. Finally, Part 3 examines intersections between play, parody, and the paranoid style of interpretation in cyberspace, including an investigation into the blogging campaign “Mubarak Mat” (“Mubarak has Died,” 2008) and Ashraf Hamdi’s response to rumors spun by the counterrevolution (2011-2012). While rumor, across these many contexts, is deplored as a destructive force, it also, I contend, salvages possibility from necessity, explores alternatives to the status quo, and serves as an unexpected catalyst for innovative cultural and political forms. As noise, it creates disorder and generates a new order. It is at once in public culture, and making public culture. viii Table of Contents Note on Translation and Transliteration ..............................................................