The Mulid of al-Sayyid al-Badawi of Tanta. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen

degenerate popular religion that is a sad deformation of a once-pure and spotless Sufism, or of a mistaken popularization of a learned religion of the written word, or even the expression of an anti-Islamic paganism that bears no relation to true Islam. On the one hand, the cult of saints in Egypt, as elsewhere, has been deeply influenced by textual hagiology, and its models are also those of an Islam subjected to the law and those of the ulema, whose learning is just as esoteric as exoteric. We shall see Badawi venerated by the learned as well as by the ignorant, by Cairenes and by country people. This man who left no writings possessed a knowledge that—in his hagiographies of course—could confound the most erudite of scholars. And we shall also see personalities of great solemnity, whose characters, one might imagine, would have kept them at a great distance from our truculent saint, come to be interred in the shadow of his tomb. On the other hand, the systematic rejection of superstitions (khurafat) and inappropriate innovation (bid‘a) in the name of an intangible Islam implies value judgments that a historian should shy away from. If one hopes to understand the Sufism of the folk milieu (and it does indeed take on a different face from other milieus), one must blithely accept what is, without fulminating about what should be. There is no point in exaggerating the bubbling excitement of the Tanta mulid, as certain Orientalists and modernist Muslims have enjoyed doing, or in discarding the customs that were and are practiced there as un-Islamic or anti-Islamic.

      Therefore, we may speak of a popular Islam and also an Egyptian Islam, though this will likely raise eyebrows among those who claim to defend the universality of Islam by denying at all costs its historical and anthropological expression. However, one would have to be truly ignorant to deny all that is Egyptian in the cult of Sayyid al-Badawi and his pilgrimage. Of course, there are other great Muslim pilgrimages elsewhere with funfairs and markets attached, but their history would be different. In Egypt, the fundamental role of political authority and the power of the Land of the Nile have shaped a religious landscape without equivalent throughout the Near East. And the exuberant and public expression of a particularly joyous popular piety has remained to this day a characteristic of Egyptian Muslims in their own eyes as well as those of their Arab neighbors. The roots of this piety hark back to the Mamluk era (1250–1517), when the essence of the Egyptian religious landscape, profoundly and intimately shaped by Sufism, was constituted.

      The study of popular Egyptian Islam means diving into a polemical subject of controversies and denials, as Samuli Schielke has shown in his thesis.¹¹ It also requires methods adapted to a multifaceted subject that is difficult to grasp. In order to do justice to the subject, I have chosen the longue durée perspective. This, of course, was the common favorite of traditional studies of popular religion in Islam as conducted by the Orientalists of the nineteenth century and by folklorists, who were very interested in the mulid of Tanta. In general, they would end up affirming that nothing had changed or that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” This led to the development, as regards Tanta, of the mythical idea of a pharaonic pilgrimage in which the cult of Sayyid al-Badawi was simply a recent reincarnation with an Islamic veneer. Popular religion, springing from the rural and the humble, would thus belong to a continuum of agrarian religions in continuous existence and bereft of history. The lack of specific and plentiful sources on the subject gave space for these lazy explanations, which were taken up by the general public because of the attraction of Egyptology and an ignorance of Sufism. The characteristic features of a popular cult—carnival atmosphere, misbehavior, the sacred and the profane—were to be explained by looking back to antiquity, which was a way of emptying it of all meaning.

      Convinced that popular religion has a history, I have chosen to set myself up as both a historian and an anthropologist in order to examine the mulid of Tanta. Instead of considering this long time frame as an expression of something that does not change, I have endeavored to see within it signs of ruptures and evolution, while acknowledging any continuity. Above all, I have tried to approach the popular culture of Egyptian Islam not as a jumbled residue of medieval times but as a coherent culture that makes sense to its adherents. Instead of setting the mulid of Tanta as a marginal event in Egyptian history, I have given it its rightful place, in the center. An examination of Egyptian pilgrimages reveals that continuities and ruptures have occurred not only within the cultural and religious history of Egypt, but also within the political and economic history of the country. The mulid of Sayyid al-Badawi is far from being a single case study; instead, it turns out to be a marvelous observatory from which to view changes in Egypt since the Mamluk period. Better than any other phenomenon, it reveals the silent realities of the history of those about whom we know nothing.

      This book opens with an account of the Tanta mulid of October 2002. The aim is to bring alive the central act around which this book will turn. At one fell swoop we meet the saint, the Sufi brotherhoods and their ceremonies, the funfair, the relationship between the pilgrimage and the town itself—indeed, all the elements that we shall examine throughout the book. It is within the light of this anthropological perspective that the history presented thereafter will make sense.

      The saint, his legend—itself the subject of a long construction of hagiographic layers—and his importance in the history of Egyptian Sufism will follow in chapter two. Badawi is a type of popular saint, the ‘possessed,’ of which Egyptian hagiology is particularly fond. The fact that he has so readily fulfilled the idea of a rural Egyptian saint has made him a national figure to which a considerable load of folklore has been attached. Similarly, the Sufi brotherhood, the Ahmadiya (covered in chapter three), that Badawi is reputed to have founded is a typically Egyptian brotherhood which meets the needs of a very largely rural community. All the same, from the end of the Mamluk period the stigma attached to the Ahmadis as scandalous twirling dervishes gradually faded and the Ahmadiya spread throughout all Egyptian society and all Sufi tendencies. This success was closely linked to the triumphant popularity of the mulid, and it made the Ahmadiya the best known and most important Sufi brotherhood in Egypt until the present day.

      Once this foundation, which defines the very heart of the cult, has been laid, the next three chapters will present three different periods in the history of the mulid. Chapter four retraces the origins of the mulid, from the Mamluk to the Ottoman era, where political power played a decisive role at several moments in the growth of the cult of Badawi. The nineteenth century (chapter five) describes the historical height of the mulid, along with the commercial role played by the fair: the extension of the town of Tanta, initially due to the mulid, ends by damaging the mulid. In chapter six, the twentieth century witnesses the decline of the pilgrimage and its changing nature in the face of urbanization and modernization. The mulid of Tanta thus reflects the mutations of Egyptian Islam itself.

      Finally, chapter seven echoes, ten years after the mulid of 2002 described in the first chapter, the anthropological experience that nothing replaces. Egypt has changed a lot, the economic crisis has deteriorated even further, the revolution of 2011 has changed everything. Nevertheless the mulid of 2012, under the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood hostile to the cult of the saints, testifies to the impressive resilience of the mulid of Tanta.

      1. Map of the Nile Delta, Modern Egypt. Photograph courtesy of Aurélie Boissière.

      2. Map of Tanta’s situation. Photograph courtesy of Aurélie Boissière.

      3. Map of the center of Tanta. Photograph courtesy of Aurélie Boissière.

      1

      The Mulid of Tanta, October 2002

      It is October in the Nile Delta. Peasants in small groups of five or six are harvesting cotton. The men, wearing blue or soot-brown gallabiyas, and the women, with colorful headscarves, move slowly among the spiny branches of the shoulder-high cotton bushes. Great sacks, from which the occasional white ball attempts an escape, are piled up around the village ready for weighing. Elsewhere corn is being gathered in: the cobs are spread over the ground to dry while the stalks are stacked to form small huts