Patronage in reverse and the secular state in Egypt 1

Abstract

The secular state in Egypt cannot be studied without examining how it invents and manages the categories of the political and the religious in a mundane and systematic fashion. In this chapter, I interpret the state as a set of practices in a specific context of competing social actors. While the secular state has pursued the demarcation of religion within the nation-state, there appeared frequent challenges in the form of informal modes of politics. However, the secular state’s maintenance of a Muslim religious establishment is part of the struggle to define what is ‘good’ religion, as opposed to ‘bad’ religion.