Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution by Walter Armbrust (review)

January 2021 marked the ten-year anniversary of the events at Tahrir Square in Cairo that, just eighteen days after their utopic beginning, ended the Mubarak regime. And yet when we take stock of Egypt ten years out from 25 January 2011, it is remarkable that the situation is worse: extrajudicial killings have increased, violence has become part of a "permanent crisis" of the state, and the rhetoric of the "War on Terror" is used to keep power consolidated in the state.

Walter Armbrust documents Egypt's path from the euphoric first days of the revolution to the state's retrenchment into the neoliberal policies of military rule in his Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution, using the concept of liminality as a framework for analyzing the revolution. In a liminal state of events, everything becomes a possibility, and no one outcome is assured. At first, there is a kind of euphoria, described by Victor Turner as "communitas." Everyone feels a deep connection to their neighbors, because they are all in this liminal state together. This communitas was notable to everyone in Cairo at the time. But the danger in the liminal state is what happens after the feeling of communitas dissipates without a resolution to the temporary conditions. The liminal state is accompanied by schismogenesis—the normalizing of what was previously unthinkable. Danger lurks here. Tahrir Square is the stage for the performance of the revolution, and Armbrust is concerned with two performance themes: martyrs and tricksters. These concepts weave together a way to think about and analyze the revolution and its aftermath in ways that are not explored in more historical accounts of the revolution.

Armbrust draws upon his deep experience in Egypt to explore details of the revolution at a granular level. Chapter 2, "The Material Frame," brings readers to the famous Tahrir Square. Synonymous with the revolution and the Arab Spring, romanticized and aestheticized by the events, Armbrust invites us to see the square as a heterotopic place, extending Foucault's concept to this space that served as transportation hub, martyrological space, and theater for political performance. Decades of neoliberal policies drained public expenditures and reshaped Cairo—including Tahrir Square—by creating disconnected, noncontiguous neighborhoods. Armbrust's description of the hierarchy of transportation through the transportation hub of the square illustrates the impact of policies that favor the private (e.g., private cars) at the expense of a great public.

In this material frame of Tahrir Square play out Armbrust's two performance themes of martyr and trickster. Martyrs are defined not by their deaths, but by the refusal of the living to let them pass. This not-dead/not-alive state of the martyr mirrors the protracted liminal state of the revolution. Chapters 3 through 6 examine the role of martyrs and their different significations in the revolution. Armbrust describes the contest over the images and narratives of the martyrs by the different factions (for/against) and camps (Islamists/non-Islamists) of the revolution as the sense of communitas faded into uncertainty. These images became so central in the struggle over who "owned" the revolution that the display of martyr images would become forbidden once the state consolidated enough power.

The struggle over the image of Sally Zahran, a young woman commemorated early on as a martyr, illustrates Armbrust's point about martyrdom as a performance theme used in the struggles over religious identity, gender, and politics. Zahran was featured as the only woman on a poster of martyrs early in the revolution, but soon the use of her image became caught up in controversy regarding the circumstances of her death and how she should be depicted (veiled or unveiled), all of which made the question of her "grievability" a subject of debate to be exploited by counterrevolutionaries. Armbrust shows how the transportation of Sally Zahran from her unknown, ordinary state into the iconic...