Debating Mulids Having Fun. Serious Prodies, Bittersweet Fun and Egyptian Saints-Day Festivals

This paper focuses on Egyptian Muslim saints days festivals as intricate sites where opposing discourses about piety are played out in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Through the pursuit of fun, mulid‐goers formulate complex recontextualisations of sufi aesthetic experiences that comment on the highly debated nature of the ritual and on their own precarious existences. Through the application of bakhtinanderived theories of parody, the paper makes sense of the complex interaction between revivalist, Islamising pressures and people’s quest for morally legitimate practices of fun, consonant with their personal taste and thereby complicates our understanding of contemporary Muslim life in Egypt. In fact, mulids offer spaces for the instantiation of ambiguous moral dispositions that defy modernist approaches to piety and resist the pressure of an increasingly Islamising public sphere. The nondiscursive nature of mulid fun embodies radically dichotomising debated notions of religion, bearing witness to how the oppositional nature of discursively constructed representations is overcome into ritual performances and complex kinaesthetic experiences. The 2009 mulid ban and recent state authorities’ breakdowns on shrines, as well as further research on the social life of saints‐cults and sufi turuq, must be thought of under the light of thes findings.