The Mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi of Tanta , livre ebook

This electronic edition published in 2019 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 200 Park Ave., Suite 1700 New York, NY 10166 www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2004 by Aubier, a department of Editions Flammarion, Paris First published in French in 2004 as Histoire d’un pélerinage légendaire en Islam: Le Mouled de Tantâ du XIIIe siècle à nos jours
English translation copyright © 2018 by Colin Clement

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 8925 eISBN 978 1 61797 952 1

Version 1
To James Martone and the People of Zeitun
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction: ‘Popular’ Islam in Egypt

1. The Mulid of Tanta, October 2002
2. The Lives of Sayyid al-Badawi: Between Oral and Written Tradition
3. From Saint to Mulid: The Ahmadiya Brotherhood
4. The Mulid of Tanta: From Its Origins until the French Expedition (Thirteenth–Eighteenth Centuries)
5. The Nineteenth-Century Tanta Fair: From Carnival to Reform
6. The Mulid of Tanta in the Twentieth Century: The Metamorphosis of the Pilgrimage
7. Return to Tanta, October 2012

Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
T his book owes its existence to my Egyptian friends. I wish to thank all those who will never be able to read it: ‘Abd al-Latif ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Isma‘il, Amal (the lady downstairs), Ehab, Hamada, Mahmud, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Gawad, Umm Ahmad (the lady upstairs), Ahmad, ‘Abduh, and Sawsan; to all the people of the balad , Kafr al-Hagg Dawud; to the family of Muhammad Shakuku and the cassette salesgirls; to Umm Ahmad of Tanta and to Lamia’s family, and so many Egyptian friends I’m not able to mention here. Finally, my loving and grateful memory goes to the people of Bagur and to the late Sheikh Sa‘d Ragab al-Rifa‘i.
Alain Jaouen knows just what the adventure of the Tanta mulid means to me: thanks for everything.
For the French edition (2004), I would like to thank: Delphine Pagès-Karoui for kindly allowing me to reproduce the map of Tanta taken from her thesis; the photographer Denis Dailleux of Agence VU, who accompanied me to the mulid in October 2002; Edwige Lambert for her French translation of The Seven Days of Man ; Maxime Catroux of Aubier-Flammarion for her editing work; Hélène Fiamma for her enthusiastic defense of the “petit livre alerte.”
For the English edition (2019), I would like to thank: The American University in Cairo Press and Nadia Naqib for her dynamic initiatives and wonderful work; the unknown reviewer for his/her energetic support; Aurélie Boissière for her maps; Samuli Schielke and Alain Jaouen for their photographs; Belal Darder for permission to use his wonderful photograph on the cover of this book; Colin Clement for his accurate translation; Lucy Hanna for her editing work; and the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) and Centre National du Livre (CNL) for having funded this translation. I have, for this edition, updated the notes and bibliography, and added a final new chapter on the mulid in October 2012.
Chronology General chronology Chronology of the Tanta mulid 969–1171: Fatimid dynasty 1171–1250: Ayyubid dynasty 12th–13th centuries: Beginning of Sufi brotherhood organizations in the Middle East 1236–37: Badawi arrives in Tanta 1250: Fifth Crusade in Egypt. Louis IX of France at Damietta. 1250–1517: Mamluk period 1276: Badawi dies at Tanta. Building of a zawiya over his grave. Presumed beginning of the pilgrimage. 1333: Death of ‘Abd al-‘Al, successor of Badawi and founder of the Sutuhiya Beginning of 15th century: First wave of hagiographic writings dedicated to Badawi 1468–97: Qaytbay rules Egypt 1447: Mulid of Tanta is banned 1495–96: Qaytbay builds the mausoleum of Badawi End of 15th century: The Sutuhiya becomes the Ahmadiya 1517: Ottoman conquest of Egypt 1526: Death of Muhammad al-Shinnawi 1565: Death of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha‘rani 1619–35: The two main hagiographies of Badawi are written 1757–73: ‘Ali Bey rules Egypt ‘Ali Bey’s waqf endowments for the mausoleum of Badawi and the mosque–university of Tanta Around 1780: Sheikh Mujahid dies and is interred in Badawi’s mausoleum 1798–1801: Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt 7 October 1798: Uprising in Tanta against the French 1805–48: Muhammad ‘Ali viceroy of Egypt 1834: Female dancers officially banned at the mulid 1836: Tanta becomes the capital of Gharbiya 1856: The railway runs through Tanta 1861–65: cotton boom 1863–79: Reign of Khedive Isma‘il 1869: Inauguration of the Suez Canal 1882: British occupation of Egypt 13 July 1882: Massacre of Christians and Jews in Tanta Slave trade banned; decline of the fair 1893: Local Commission set up in Tanta 1900: al-Sikka al-Gedida connects the train station with the mausoleum 1915: Mulid of Tanta is canceled Around 1918: Date of the Great Mulid is changed to the month of October 1919: Egyptian revolution 1922: Egypt is formally declared an independent country 1928: Founding of the Society of the Muslim Brothers 1936: Anglo–Egyptian Treaty 1948: Creation of the State of Israel; first Arab–Israeli war 1952: The Free Officers’ coup d’état 1954: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser takes power 1956: Suez crisis Around 1956: Departure of the Jews, Greeks, and Syrians from Tanta End of 1950s: Decline of the village delegations at the mulid 1966: Waguih Abaza governor of Gharbiya 1967: Six Day War 1973: October War 1978: Death of Sheikh Ahmad Hijab; interred in Badawi’s mausoleum 1991: Gulf War 1999: Ahmad al-Qasabi governor of Gharbiya. Extension work in the mausoleum 2011: Egyptian revolution 2012–13: Regime of the Muslim Brothers 2013: “Second revolution”; Marshal ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi elected president 2016: Terrorist attack at a church in Tanta
Introduction: ‘Popular’ Islam in Egypt
T he first time I visited Tanta, in the heart of the Nile Delta, I was twenty years old. It was winter. It was not love at first sight: the town was dusty, sad, and dull; the weather was cold and damp. I knew nothing then of the saint, Sayyid al-Badawi, who was venerated there, nor of the pilgrimage, the famous mulid and the Sufis of the Delta. 1 Since that time I have dedicated continuous research to all of these, and decades of inquiries have still not exhausted my curiosity or passion, or indeed, the very subject. The study of Badawi and the mulid of Tanta is not like writing a tidy monograph based upon accessible histories. It is more like casting off into a storm-tossed sea. There are hardly any sources, just some rare passages in old chronicles, some fevered hagiographies, ancient legends transcribed in the nineteenth century, stories passed down by oral tradition, and ranting diatribes. I had no real archives to go on, but I could and did visit the mulid continually over the years, as well as the surrounding countryside and its mausoleums. To have begun this field research at the threshold of my adult life contributed greatly to making me who I am. The promise made to friends, to whom this book is dedicated, and made to myself has to be kept: it is time to tell the tale of what was long the greatest pilgrimage in the Muslim world, a tale that belongs to the intimate heart of Egypt’s history.
An article on Tanta in the first edition of the French-language Encyclopédie de l’islam in 1934 presents the town as a hotbed of fanatics galvanized by the quasi-pagan cult of a saint of mythic proportions, the famous Sayyid al-Badawi (1200–76). The rather obscure life of this saint had, since the fifteenth century, led to the creation of the most remarkable legend of all Egyptian hagiographies. As for the mulid of Tanta, the majority of Western writers who had devoted a few lines to the subject simply saw it as the distant descendant of the ancient pilgrimage of Bubastis dedicated to the cat goddess Bastet, which was mentioned by Herodotus, and thus a scene of barely concealed paganism, mythology, and freakish phenomena. Over several centuries the mulid of Tanta, established in a rather modest little town, was recognized by the chroniclers themselves as the biggest in the Muslim world, bigger even than the Hajj to Mecca. It was also the most rowdy, scandalous funfair and a place of debauchery.
The first Orientalists who studied the mulid of Tanta were obsessed by this reputation and neglected to ask about the faith that had drawn and continued to draw so many Egyptians to the mausoleum of Badawi. What did the saint represent to them? What role did his brotherhood play in the cult? What exactly is this popular Egyptian Islam, of which even today the mulid of Tanta constitutes the most spectacular manifestation?
This Islam is not that of the Sufis, which is supposed to contrast with the scholarly Islam of the ulema, but rather that which constituted a shared culture for all up until the end of the nineteenth century and even into the interwar period. From the 1880s, the rupture caused by Islamic modernism and its success as the dominant discourse in the twentieth century have led many commentators and the Egyptians themselves to a mistaken reading of religious tradition, seen as a tissue of backward superstitions. Islamic modernism saw itself as an attempt to adapt Islam to the contemporary world, and it implied a rejection of tradition as lived, which was presented as sclerotic and burdened with useless dross, including the cult of saints. In reality, Egyptian ‘popular’ Islam (the Islam of ordinary people) is deeply and intimately shaped by Sufism, the quest for union with God, which since the thirteenth century—the very era of Badawi—had gradually formed itself into mystical brotherhoods, the turuq or paths. We are not contrasting here a sublime and pure ‘original’ Sufism with a degraded, bastardized version of the Sufi brotherhoods and coarse devo