Youssef Rakha considers revolution and Ramadan Revolution gives way to security breakdown. The people vote for the Sheikh. The Israeli Embassy is ringed with protesters, but so -- eventually -- is its Saudi counterpart. False prophets take over Tahrir Square. Thousands die; millions grow beards. Previously unseen gods of the sect bless the public sphere with fatal ministrations. The traffic is worse and worse. Petrol shortages give way to mortal combat, but not before a president is elected do arbitrary power cuts set in, apparently for the good of Islam. It turns out the General has been in league with the Brother all along. The Dissident preaches self-hatred. Then, electricity allowing, the people gather before the television to see how 18 months of turmoil may have affected the content and style of the sine qua non of their yearly month of devotion: the serial drama. Somehow, in spite of the economic slump, social uncertainty and political depravity, the makers of programmes have been busier than ever. "Revolutionaries" are still in jail, incarcerated murderers of the "Islamic" stripe are being set free by presidential decree -- but it is all about thugs and Israel. Nor does it have anything to do with the Arab Spring as such. One thing on which Islamists and seculars may agree is that Egypt's yearly festival of gluttony and comatose staring at screens would arguably look more like the holy month it was intended to be were it not for that unholiest of square monsters: the surface on which the ghosts of a given society tell that society what it is about. But it is interesting to observe how so-called drama has developed in the wake of so-called democracy. There is more swearing, more acknowledgement of unsavoury phenomena -- the drug taking, the bribe receiving, the ballot rigging, the torture using -- but none of these things is sufficiently thought through to feel remotely real. Shantytown thugs come across as downtown intellectuals, high-profile female lawyers as expensive prostitutes, activists as actors playing unemployed young men who are themselves playing at being activists. Upper Egyptians have still not mastered their own dialect; and, contrary to any evidence, sectarian tensions are still the rare exception to the rule of "national unity" between Muslims and Christians. Remarking on his failure to extract a confession using electricity, one State Security officer who looks and sounds like an employee of the Ministry of Endowments says, "I thought there might be something wrong with the wires." In one of at least two big-budget productions on the ever present fascination with "the Zionist entity" -- the copy of a copy of a copy of something that may once have been entertaining or funny -- comedy superstar Adel Imam transports the concept of Ocean's Eleven into the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict ("our brothers in Gaza" notwithstanding): he is an Egyptian diplomat who gathers and commands a band of high-wire artists in various disciplines to rob a bank in Israel. Forget plausibility and deeper implications (how on earth would such a feat benefit the Palestinian cause, for Nasser's sake?): the stink raised among "the Enemy" by Imam's absolute ignorance of Israeli society and the callousness with which he is treating Judaism is threatening to develop into a diplomatic crisis in its own right. So, having been mistaken for a hero of secularism earlier in the year, while the president denies writing to Peres and Peres shows the world the president's letter to him, counter-revolutionary Imam may yet be mistaken for a hero of nationalism. (see pp.16-17)
