Nonetheless, simply demonstrating the vitality of Sufism in all its manifestations and the profound unity of popular Islam does not answer all the questions. Popular religion within Islam has a real autonomy, as it does within Christianity. It is probably better these days to talk of ‘popular religiosity’ in order to indicate that one is referring to a form of piety, not to another religion, and to practices, not to beliefs. Such caution is advisable, but the term ‘popular religion,’ imperfect as it may be, evokes more bluntly the difficulties of the subject and has the advantage of being better understood by nonspecialists. Within the tales of miracles and practices at the tomb one can see the undoubted face of a popular Islam, which is certainly not a different religion for the lowly folk, but neither is it “simply differentiated use of common materials.”4 The study of specific examples within Islam, as in Christianity, shows that in the matter of religious practices concerned with saints, there are real differences between town and country, but also between the districts of the same town, between the many brotherhoods, and between social categories (for example, the guilds in earlier times). In certain Ottoman hagiographies, as in oral traditions in general, the body of the saint, like the body of the devotees, is spotlighted in a rather bawdy, exhibitionist fashion designed to offend. The tone is obviously very different in the emasculated hagiographies that flourished in the twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that one is opposed to the other, or that the wild should be excluded by the more manageable. On the contrary, the conscious division of roles appears to me to be the rule, between saints who are masters of themselves and frenzied ecstatics, between sober brotherhoods and drunken brotherhoods, between mausoleums in the center of town and small domed tombs in remote rural regions. None of these apparent clefts have managed to break the fragile balance, even if there is always a tension between the extremes of expression within a shared Sufi culture.
In order to understand the issues of Egyptian popular Islam, one most look more generally at those of popular culture. The cult of saints is embedded within the wider world of Egyptian popular culture. Songs of marriage and mourning, rituals of birth and burial, folk tales and ballads and music, visits to shrines and mulids all form part of the same vision of the world. This folk culture is well known from the work of anthropologists, but the Orientalists have left it to the ethnologists and dialect specialists to scrutinize vernacular customs and tales. The majority of researchers studying this part of the world have accepted Islamic modernist discourse because they have been, consciously or otherwise, shaped by the post-Tridentine notion of the ‘excesses’ of popular piety and of superstitions. (The two influences are, in any case, not incompatible.) In both cases, popular religion is seen as an exuberant and irrational form of religion that it is best to supervise, censor, and perhaps suppress. The tendency to study Sufi Islam through the brotherhoods, and preferably the reformed brotherhoods, has given too many researchers a clerical and sanctimonious vision of Egyptian Sufism, whereas it is adamantly unruly. The words ‘excess,’ ‘abuse,’ ‘superstition,’ ‘magic,’ ‘deviance’ continually flow from the pens of excellent authors who are blocked by a normative vision of what Islam should be, and are more generally paralyzed by what they believe to be respect for religion. Many of them share, more or less, the condemnation of inappropriate innovation (bid‘a) and the quest for exemplary Sunni behavior. The absence of a firm vision of what is truly a society is added to these ideological assumptions: why could these pilgrims not eat, play, or sleep? Why do they have to be ascetic? Does piety imply seriousness?
In this striking disinterest in the religion of the humble, Boaz Shoshan’s book on popular culture in medieval Cairo is an exception.5 He covers several themes with great panache, echoing Barbara Langner’s wonderful analysis of Egyptian popular culture in the Mamluk period,6 but once again, the field is limited to Cairo and the countryside is ignored. As for Egyptian scholars, research into the cult of saints has been even more firmly smothered by the polemics arising from modernist Islam. The documents available for the historian of the contemporary period are pamphlets and apologies, indignant defenses and passionate attacks, but nary an academic study per se. Doctrinal Sufism or urban history would appear to be the only possible subjects for an Egyptian scholar of religious history.
Under the term ‘popular religion,’ and drawing inspiration from a framework proposed by André Vauchez for medieval Christianity,7 the Islamic specialist can address three categories of religious phenomena: the manifestations of a folk culture specific to rural societies with its rites of passage and its relationships between the living and the dead; the more or less spontaneous popular religious movements, such as the appearance of mahdis and those who rebel in the name of religion; and lastly the piety of Sufi brotherhoods and the pilgrimages that they organize. These categories, however, should not be seen as entirely discrete and they illustrate that no single theory can be applied to popular religion. Let us bear two things in mind: there is a folk culture distinct from, but still closely linked to, the Sufism of the brotherhoods, and Egyptian popular Islam is not a jumble of superstitions.
But what does ‘popular’ actually mean?8 Who are the people in question? The humble who live in town and countryside, or the rural as opposed to the urban, or even ‘lay’ Egyptians rather than the men of religion, the sheikhs and ulema? Does ‘popular’ mean created by the people, received by the people, or perhaps destined for the people? This question is particularly relevant as regards pilgrimages and local cults, and we shall see to what extent the Egyptian state, from Mamluk emirs to the current regime, has played a decisive role in the growth and organization of the mulid of Tanta. The cloak of civic religion that often covers festivals in Egypt illustrates the limited spontaneity of mulids.9 Expressing veneration for the saint has taken on different appearances depending on social environment, and even on cultural division, which is not exactly the same as the former. Medievalists’ notion of ‘civic religion’ helps us to reflect on what Copts and Muslims share about their mulids, and to understand the similarities and differences between Coptic pilgrimages and Muslim mulids.10
As for Tanta’s mulid, town versus countryside represents a fundamental split. For centuries it was very largely rural populations who made the pilgrimage to Tanta, although people of Cairo also attended. The mulid made Tanta one of the biggest towns in Egypt. It was a time of encounters and exchanges, of intersection between worlds that were intimately linked in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods but became quite distinct in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries: today the borders are more and more indistinct. The countryside of the Delta has become urbanized and the towns more working-class. The culture of the poorer districts of Tanta is not exactly that of villagers come to town for the pilgrimage, but it is definitely foreign to that of the town’s modern areas.
In Egypt, the adjective ‘popular’ (sha‘bi), in the sense of ‘of the people,’ took on a particular connotation in the Nasser era at a moment when interest was being shown in popular literature. Egyptian Arabic also has the term baladi, which signifies a certain authentic rusticity. However, for university-educated Egyptians shaped by Arab nationalism, the more one speaks of ‘the people,’ the more careful one is to distance oneself from them. The intellectuals of the interwar period and of the 1950s, themselves a product of rural environments, cultivated a mix of fascination for and rejection of the people of the countryside who flocked to the mulid of Tanta. In their eyes, the religion of the rural could only be uncouth, emotional, and loaded with superstition, a close cousin to the magic of ancient Egypt. In no way could it be a coherent system or a harmonious and structured interpretation of the world.
One must reject the all too current idea that has been repeatedly spread