When Nermin Elsherif announced her plan to devote her doctoral thesis to a study of “al-zaman al-gamil” (“the good old days”) in Egypt, many of those around her scoffed, including her mother. “Everyone thinks it’s nonsensical, irrelevant…a lot of scholars don’t take this seriously.” In this podcast, recorded on 28 July 2023, Nermin explains how she researched this nostalgic fantasy of a lost Egyptian idyll: a “monolithic notion of the good nation,” imagined and inhabited by middle-class Egyptian men. This patchwork was stitched together from grainy archival images and old newsreel footage shared in online communities: “orphan images”, in Sheila Yasanoff’s sense of the term, repurposed by white-collar workers whose heteronormative vision of a strong nation and strong family stood in stark contrast to the vision of those caught up in the 2011 Revolution. Here was one of the four utopias of 2011: the “Utopia of the Couch Party”, of those who “in the midst of a revolution…decided to sit on a couch and not participate”, to place alongside the utopias of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis and, of course, the utopia of Tahrir Square. The devotees of “al-zaman al-gamil” were a “chorus of people speaking to the present as much as to the past,” engaged in a monologue with an invented, anti-temporal and anti-spatial past.

AN “ORPHANED IMAGE”: UMM KULTHUM IN 1958

The “co-creators” of this Past That Never Was were, surprisingly, relatively unversed in the world of email, the internet and social media – and even claimed to be entirely “apolitical”. As Nermin explains, that presented a challenge to ethnographic research, in so far as her interlocutors denied themselves both an ideological stance as well as agency. Covid and tightening restrictions on academic freedom compounded these challenges. Nor did it help when fellow scholars pigeonholed her interlocutors as “digital fascists”, “Islamists” or members of a “silent majority”. Feeling herself torn between the demands of “here” (European academia) and “there” (her interlocutors in Egypt), in the end Nermin realized she had to blaze her own trail.

Episode 40 – The Utopia of the Couch Party

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

MAIN IMAGE: OM KALTHOUM CAFE, CAIRO.