Cairo Contested , livre ebook

GOVERNANCE, URBAN SPACE, AND GLOBAL MODERNITY
 
 
 
 
Edited by
Diane Singerman
The American University in Cairo Press Cairo   New York
First published in 2009 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York 10018
www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2009 by Diane Singerman

An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in: Samia Mehrez, Egypt s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (London: Routledge, 2008), 144–68. Reproduced by permission.

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.

Dar el Kutub No. 4093/09
ISBN 978 977 416 288 6

Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Singerman, Diane
Cairo Contested: Governance, Urban Space, and Global Modernity Cairo / Cairo Contested.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009
p. cm.
ISBN 978 977 416 288 6
1. Marketing 2. Markets I. Singerman, Diane (ed.)
381

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 14 13 12 11 10 09

Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi
To the courageous, creative ‘city-makers’ of Cairo who continue to govern, design, and construct their city while fighting for more space, inclusion, voice, meaning, equality, and citizenship within it.
And to the memory of Marsha Pripstein Posusney (1953–2008), an ardent supporter of Cairo’s citizens and labor movement activists.
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
       The Contested City Diane Singerman
 
Contested Space, Authority, Security, and Meaning
1 Making or Shaking the State: Urban Boundaries of State Control and Popular Appropriation in Sayyida Zaynab Model Park Khaled Adham
2 Cairo as Capital of Islamic Institutions? Al-Azhar Islamic University, the State, and the City Malika Zeghal
3 Policing Mulids and Their Meaning Samuli Schielke
4 The Siege of Imbaba, Egypt’s Internal ‘Other,’ and the Criminalization of Politics Diane Singerman
5 From the Hara to the ‘Imara: Emerging Urban Metaphors in the Literary Production of Contemporary Cairo Samia Mehrez
 
Cairo’s Governance: Ambiguity, Legalities, Informality, and Mobilization
6 Cairo’s City Government: The Crisis of Local Administration and the Refusal of Urban Citizenship Sarah Ben Néfissa
7 The Dictatorship of the Straight Line and the Myth of Social Disorder: Revisiting Informality in Cairo Agnès Deboulet
8 Extract from a Diary: Marginal Notes on the Soft Dialectics of Historic Cairo Kareem Ibrahim
9 Of Demolitions and Donors: The Problematics of State Intervention in Informal Cairo W.J. Dorman
10 Banished by the Quake: Urban Cairenes Displaced from the Historic Center to the Desert Periphery Bénédicte Florin
11 Cousins, Neighbors, and Citizens in Imbaba: The Genesis and Self-neutralization of a Rebel Political Territory Patrick Haenni
12 Economic Liberalization and Union Struggles in Cairo Agnieszka Paczynska
13 Land Disputes, the Informal City, and Environmental Discourse in Cairo Jennifer Bell
 
Markets, Marketing, and Globalized Identities
14 Market Spaces: Merchants Battle the Economic Narratives of Development Experts Jörg Gertel
15 Political Consumerism and the Boycott of American Goods in Egypt Taline Djerdjerian
16 Amr Khaled and Young Muslim Elites: Islamism and the Consolidation of Mainstream Muslim Piety in Egypt Hania Sobhy
17 African Refugees and Diasporic Struggles in Cairo Mulki Al-Sharmani and Katarzyna Grabska
 
 
 
Contributors
Khaled Adham is an architect, assistant professor at the United Arab Emirates University, and an associate professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Suez Canal University. His publications and current research activities are focused on contemporary architectural and urban transformations of Cairo, Doha, and Dubai.
 
Jennifer Bell is an independent scholar in New York City. Her 2006 PhD dissertation at New York University, “Power, Politics and Pollution: The Political Economy of Environmentalism in Egypt” focuses on environmental activism and urban politics in Cairo.
 
Agnès Deboulet is professor of sociology at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-la Villette. She has carried out research on popular urbanization in Cairo, and more recently, Beirut, and currently works on urban renewal processes and migrations. She is the author and editor of Les Compétences des Citadins dans le Monde Arabe (with I. Berry-Chikhaoui, 2001); Dynamiques de la Pauvreté en Afrique du Nord et au Moyen-Orient (with B. Destremau and F. Ireton, 2004); and Villes Internationales: Entre Tensions et Réactions des Habitants (I. Berry-Chikhaoui and L. Roulleau Berger, 2007).
 
Taline Djerdjerian is a sociocultural anthropologist and has taught for several years at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests focus on poverty, female-headed households, and women’s changing roles in Armenian society since gaining independence from the former Soviet Union.
 
W.J. Dorman lectures on Middle East politics at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. His research interests include state-society relations and the impact of authoritarianism on state capacity in Egypt and Iraq highlighted by his work “Informal Cairo: Between Islamist Insurgency and the Neglectful State?” published in Security Dialogue (2009).
 
Bénédicte Florin is a professor of geography at Tours University and a researcher at Equipe Monde Arabe et Méditerranéen. Her publications focus upon residential mobility, spatial and social practices of Cairene housing projects, new cities, and gated communities as well as the effects of privatization on the garbage collection system on the Zabbalin community.
 
Jörg Gertel is a geographer and professor at Leipzig University. His publications include Globalisierte Nahrungskrisen–Bruchzone Kairo (2009) and Krisenherd Khartoum (1993). He is the editor of The Metropolitan Food System of Cairo (1995), and co-editor of Pastoral Morocco: Globalizing Scapes of Mobility and Insecurity (2007).
 
Katarzyna Grabska was research coordinator and researcher at the FMRS program at the American University in Cairo. Between 2002 and 2006, she conducted research on the economic conditions of Sudanese refugees in Egypt and policies toward forced migrants. She is currently completing a doctorate at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, with a focus on changes in gender relations resulting from displacement among southern Sudanese refugees returning to Sudan.
 
Patrick Haenni is a researcher at the Religioscope Foundation ( www.religion.info ), co-president of the Polarités Foundation, and a scientific adviser at the Humanitarian Dialogue Institute. Previously, he has been a researcher at the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ) in Cairo and an analyst for the International Crisis Group in Lebanon. His publications on Islamization and Islamism in the Muslim world and the west include L’islam de Marché, l’autre Révolution Conservatrice (2005).
 
Kareem Ibrahim graduated from Cairo University’s Faculty of Architectural Engineering in 1995. He is a founding member and former president of the Egyptian Earth Construction Association, and has designed environmentally and culturally appropriate architecture throughout Egypt. Before joining Aga Khan Cultural Services—Egypt in 1997, he worked on the United Nations Development Programme’s Historic Cairo Rehabilitation Project. He is currently the technical coordinator of the Darb al-Ahmar Revitalization Project, overseeing the rehabilitation of houses, the construction of public buildings, and the development of the district’s planning activities.
 
Samia Mehrez is professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo. She is author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (1994, 2005), Egypt’s Culture Wars (2008), and The Literary Atlas of Cairo and The Literary Life of Cairo (forthcoming), which will be published simultaneously in English and Arabic. She has also published on postcolonial literatures, translation theory, gender studies, and cultural studies.
 
Sarah Ben Néfissa is a political science researcher at l’Institut de Recherche pour le Développement. Her major publications include Vote et Démocratie dans l’Égypte Contemporaine (2005), NGOs and Governance in the Arab World (2005), and Associations et Pouvoirs dans le Monde Arabe (2002).
 
Agnieszka Paczynska is associate professor at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. She has written on economic reforms, political transitions, security, and globalization. She is the author of State, Labor and the Transition to a Market Economy: Egypt, Poland, Mexico and the Czech Republic (2009).
 
Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has conducted ethnographic research about the contestation of mulid s, the ambivalent outcomes of the Islamic revival, and the aspiration and frustrations of provincial Egypt. He co-edited Dimensions of Locality: Muslim Saints, Their Place and Space (with George Stauth, 2008) and co-directed the documentary film “Messages from Paradise #1” (with Daniela Swarowsky, 2009).
 
Mulki Al-Sharmani is an assistant research professor of anthropology at the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo. She also teaches at the Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies and the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. She has written on forced migration and transnationalism in the Middle East and North Africa regions, child protection policies in Egypt, and Egyptian family law and gender justice.
 
Diane Singerman is an associate professor of political science in the Departme