Filming Modernity and Islam in Colonial Egypt

Explores over 30 feature films from the formative years of Egyptian cinema (1919 52) to contest the contradiction between Islam and innovation.

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Explores the formative years of Egyptian cinema (1919 52) to contest the contradiction between Islam and innovation

Discusses over 30 feature films, drawing on English and Arabic archival material including records of the British Foreign Office, the Egyptian National Archive, diaries of filmmakers and film censors, magazines and newspapers, and Islamic legal opinions on theatre and cinema
Sets out a dialogic and innovative approach to studying modernity and Islam as interdependent lived experiences
Steps outside the Orientalist formalist approach, which subjects subaltern cinema to the Hollywood standards of film language
Writes a compelling account of Egyptian cinema as creative imagination and an Islamic popular culture shaped by Muslims and Non-Muslims

This book studies the rise of cinema in colonial Egypt as a supplemental secular public sphere that is not anti-religion. To this end, it investigates the reception of film by three centres of powers: the colonial authorities, the Muslim clergy and the Cairene bourgeoisie. It inquires about the representations of modernity in films produced during the time and the place filmmakers assigned to Islam in these representations. The result is a story of survival and coexistence told through the lens of cinema as modern art and popular culture negotiating its overt and covert censorship in the public sphere, despite colonisation and war.