The Clash of Civil Religions in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

Abstract

The 2013 counter-revolution that led to the removal of President Mohammad Morsi and the election of former military chief, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi, as president indicate that Egypt has chosen the unifying framework of Egyptian nationalism and rejected the Islamic one proposed by the Muslim Brothers. These dichotomous categories obscure more than they reveal, because Egyptian politics after the 2011 revolution is also polarized between different visions of the 'civil state'. The civil religion paradigm and the conception of the clash of civil religions as analytical models will be used to enhance our understanding of the relationships between the religious and the civil models and to identify certain characteristics of one of the most striking outcomes of this revolution: the clash between civil models and, more precisely, the clash of civil religions.