Programming Note: Off next week, back on August 15.
Country: Egypt
Director: Tarik Saleh
Time: 2 hours
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($4.99 to rent); GooglePlay ($4.99 to rent)
To filch from that old feudal scorecard: those who rule will often attempt to co-opt those who pray. Within societies featuring high levels of religiosity, repressive regimes have long undermined dissent emanating from religious bodies by devolving very particular decision-making powers onto religious luminaries and institutions—think social and personal conduct questions—in exchange for political quiescence or support. Instead of limiting religion to the private sphere, the aim remains to incorporate religious institutions into public-facing projections of power. If the narrowing of theologians’ prerogatives remains an old story comprising many variations on a theme—Henry VIII and the Act of Supremacy; Francis I and the right to appoint French bishops; the Ottoman incorporation of the ulema into the state bureaucracy and the government appointment of the shaykh al-Islam—then each of these confrontations’ specific contours reveal much about the nature of political power within particular contexts. More to our purposes, it’s also fertile ground for politically engaged filmmaking.
Tarik Saleh's latest film, Cairo Conspiracy, is an espionage thriller interested in exploring the Egyptian state’s infiltration of Al-Azhar University—probably the most celebrated site of religious learning in the Islamic world—whose elected leader is known as the Grand Imam. (Though fictional, the film’s plot captures the current Egyptian government’s subversion of Al-Azhar’s independence.)
The work centers on Adam, a fisherman’s son from the small town of Manzala in northeastern Egypt, who receives a state scholarship to study at Al-Azhar in Cairo. Adam begins the film as a wide-eyed, devout, and devoted student, paying rapt attention to various lectures within Al-Azhar’s hallowed campus, while generally being kind to others. In a word, he is naive—unworldly in his eagerness to conflate religion and morality. Shortly after his arrival in Cairo, the institution’s Grand Imam dies. (A brief introductory text at the beginning of the film posits the Grand Imam as the most powerful voice in Sunni Islam, which definitely remains contestable, though he is without question a deeply influential figure. That same introductory remark also notes that the Egyptian state has long tried to influence Al-Azhar without success, which ignores various ways in which past Egyptian leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser constrained the institution throughout the 1950s and 1960s.1 But I have digressed too far.) In the wake of the Grand Imam’s death, the university’s various imams will convene to vote on his successor. Enter the state.
Naturally, Egypt’s National Security Agency has a preferred candidate, but it lacks a nuanced understanding of the university’s internal political dynamics. It needs eyes and ears. Under mysterious circumstances, a previous informant has been murdered. As a result, Colonel Ibrahim, a beleaguered senior intelligence officer within the Egyptian NSA, contacts Adam, effectively blackmailing him into informing on various happenings within the university. In many ways, Colonel Ibrahim remains the movie’s central figure. A lifelong intelligence agent who has been passed over for promotion, he is at once cynical and sympathetic: if possible, Adam should be used without being harmed. (For John Le Carré aficionados, Ibrahim shares certain affinities with George Smiley.) Less a believer in any political project than a seasoned bureaucrat, Ibrahim’s code of ethics encompasses ruthlessness in the name of cementing political power and eliminating perceived state enemies (in particular the Muslim Brotherhood, a contingent of whom Adam has been tasked with infiltrating, and with whom one popular candidate for the position of Grand Imam is close). Nonetheless, he respects certain boundaries: violence should be employed for narrowly instrumental, instead of expressly exemplary, purposes.
By contrast, Ibrahim’s boss (and foil) remains younger and much more comfortable with brutality. A member of the new guard—the implication is that his promotion has been fast-tracked following Egypt’s 2013 coup—he unquestioningly accedes to any demand made by his superiors: the brutal, bureaucratic yes-man par excellence. Though an intelligence officer, he evokes an old Roberto Bolaño line about writers as “a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment—nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.” In turn, his boss is a General implied to be within Egyptian President Sisi’s inner circle. (The current Egyptian President makes no appearance in the film except through ubiquitous photographs.)
In order to facilitate the election of the Egyptian government’s preferred candidate, Adam gets drawn further into the competition between various members of Al-Azhar and the state security apparatus, while learning just how expendable Egyptian informants can become. As one might expect, it’s a deeply disillusioning alternate education. At the same time as his understanding of the complete collapse between institutionalized religion and politics grows, a series of friendships with other Al-Azhar students, in particular a Syrian named Zizo, offer glimpses into more flexible forms of Islamic practice that contrast with the strident strictures on offer within the classroom. Suffice it to say, the plot thickens and—without giving any of the particular twists and turns away—the state comes out on top. In this case, art follows life.
Film noir, the espionage thriller, and contemporary Egyptian politics are all fertile ground for cynics. In his prior film, The Nile Hilton Hotel Incident (2017), Saleh transcended the noir’s genre confines by enveloping viewers within different (and competing) layers of the Egyptian state security apparatus (thus broadening the work’s central scope beyond unsympathetic and hard men towards an exploration of competing institutions), while simultaneously drawing attention to institutional corruption’s ramifications by setting the film in the weeks prior to January 25, 2011, when the country erupted in protests that would soon oust the Mubarak government (1981-2011). In an unintentional ode to that film’s incisiveness, the Sisi government (2013-present) banned its director from filming in the country—The Nile Hilton Hotel Incident was shot in Casablanca—and blocked its release in domestic theaters. In their wisdom, the Egyptian government also expelled Saleh from the country in 2015. He remains persona non grata. As a result, Cairo Conspiracy was shot primarily in Istanbul using a largely non-Egyptian cast. (For Arabic speakers, the different accents across different characters can occasionally inject a discordant note into the film.)
In some ways, Cairo Conspiracy remains a less hopeful film than The Nile Hilton Hotel Incident, though it’s equally propulsive. Following Egypt’s 2011 revolution, democratic parliamentary and presidential elections brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. A 2013 coup led by the country’s then-Minister of Defense (and supported by both the armed forces and internal security services) put an end to democracy within the country and re-established a military dictatorship headed by Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who has dramatically ramped up repression in comparison to the erstwhile Mubarak regime. Most infamously, the regime murdered at least 1,150 demonstrators in Cairo’s Rab’a Square in 2013. Perhaps the most famous incarcerated dissident alive after Russia’s Alexei Navalny, Alaa Abd-El Fattah, still languishes in an Egyptian prison under horrific conditions, where he is one of an estimated 60,000 political prisoners.2
On a political level, the film assumes the Egyptian state to be ethically bankrupt, even if individual bureaucrats themselves occasionally emerge as sympathetic characters, largely because they too underestimate the state’s capacity for brutality. Indeed, the work remains less interested in the Egyptian state—an admittedly easy target—and more interested in offering a strong critique of Egypt’s most prominent religious institution. (The National Security Agency’s preferred candidate for Grand Imam in the film shares his name with the interim prime minister who assumed power following Egypt’s 2013 coup: puppets both.)
Indeed, Cairo Conspiracy remains less the story of how political institutions limit the prerogative of religious bodies, than a story of how religious institutions make their peace with political overlords. If the state refuses to hide the brutality undergirding its power, it remains the religious elite’s hypocrisy that generates most of Saleh’s scorn. On the film’s terms, the imams of Al-Azhar are hypocritical, power-hungry, and (even at their most sympathetic) willing to cede power to the state in order to preserve their own position vis-à-vis various competitors (in particular, various Islamists who criticize both the Egyptian state and Al-Azhar’s comfortable relationship to that state). This trade nets everyone something: the imams maintain their status; the government gets its preferred messages broadcast throughout the country during Friday prayers. Within these confines, faith emerges a propagandistic spectacle. First principles collapse when confronted by well-trained purveyors of the hermeneutic art. Each party gets to go home happy.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Tarik Saleh — The Nile Hilton Hotel Incident (2017)
One could actually go much further back in time. Alas, this is a film Substack.
Alaa Abd-El Fattah’s recently translated collection of essays on the Egyptian revolution, 2013 coup, and current regime, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, remains an excellent entry point into the Sisi regime’s practices.