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xi Preface This book presents the fruits of nearly fifteen years of research in and about the festive culture of mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim “friends of God”—or saints, a cruder translation. These years began in 1997, when I was spending half a year as a student in Cairo to learn colloquial Arabic, and friends took me to see the festival of al-Sayyida Zaynab, a granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad believed to be buried in a Cairo quarter named after her. The crowds, the atmosphere, the colors, and, perhaps most of all, the music of the festival immediately drew my attention, but what I found most striking was the degree to which many Egyptians were seriously annoyed and troubled by something that I found simply striking and beautiful. This sense of annoyance, expressed in the press and other media, eventually became the topic of my magister thesis in Islamic studies, an undertaking that made me aware of the limitations of the inquiry I had undertaken: I could say a great deal about strategies of argumentation in a public debate, but I still knew near to nothing about mulids and their place in Egyptian society. This sense that there was much more to know was the starting point of years of ethnographic and literary research. They started at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden in 2001. In the course of four years of research and fieldwork, I came to see almost everything about the topic differently, and I switched disciplines from Islamic studies to anthropology. By 2005, I submitted a PhD thesis that looked at the contestation of different forms of power, with the festive order of mulids as their crystallization point. This proudly Foucauldian approach focused on the intersections of discourse, governmentality , and power. xii  Preface Six years later, as I am finishing the work on the manuscript for this book, I have to admit a dilemma. Fifteen years are a long time, especially if they are the years of one’s academic formation. I have changed my mind about key theoretical issues more than once, including the use of a Foucauldian approach that takes discursive, relational power as the key to understanding social reality. Today, I grant more importance to the experiential side of festivity and the phenomenology of festive time and space; and I think that there is need to look more closely at the lives of the people involved to balance the focus on power and discourse that marked the earlier stages of my fieldwork. The outcome is a layered book that approaches its theme and argues about it from different perspectives, looking at the shifting discourses on religion and society, at the margins and “others” of modern power and urban planning, and at the experience and consequences of festive time as a part of a complete life. The reader will find a Foucauldian approach on the discursive construction of the social world through a century-long contestation side by side with a phenomenological approach on the festival as something that by virtue of its material and sensual shape does something to the world and our ways of being in it. Such ambiguity, I think, is not only inevitable: it is in fact necessary. Festive culture, I argue in this book, is inherently ambivalent, resisting to be reduced to any single purpose, meaning or explanation—and a successful theory of festive culture should not be too straightforward either. ...

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