There will be Blood: Expectation and Ethics of Violence during Egypt’s Stormy Season
17.07.2017
Middle East Critique, 26, 3
S. 205–220
How did bloodshed emerge as a promising solution to the tensions and troubles of the
revolutionary period? And how did different people who were on a particular side of the events from
2011 to 2013 react to the bewildering violence of the victorious in summer and autumn 2013? With
these questions, I want to contribute to a conversation opened by engaged academics writing about
Egypt, in order to try to understand the wide-scale support for killing that emerged in Egypt in the
summer of 2013. My core argument is that, although the violence unleashed after June 30, 2013,
evidently was the result of intentional manipulation and escalation by the most powerful players
involved, many Egyptians’ actual support for that violence was thoroughly moral in character, a
consequence of an intensifying process of polarization where the need to defend right against wrong
was caught up in an ongoing sense of tension, confusion, and anxiety. In this mood of ‘broken fear’—not
the same as the overcoming of fear, the expectation that ‘there will be blood’ was a promise of reaching
clarity, purity and truth through a decisive battle. The incitement to bloodshed and the spiral of
violence can be described as a form of ethical cultivation where a sense of purity is established through
dramatic and radical confrontation. Paradoxically, during the bloody summer of 2013, moments
of irbak—confusion, bewilderment, loss of solid ground—sometimes were more likely to open up ways
out of the circle of hatred and confrontation than firm and clear principles. Wickedness and violence
are akin to righteousness and purity, and there are times when weakness and confusion can be the
better ethical stance. In this vein, I argue that if commentators failed to notice the inherent cultivation
of violence, it was not because it wasn’t there, but because we didn’t want to see it. It didn’t fit well
into the beautiful picture of revolutionary resistance. But we cannot separate beautiful resistance from
terrible bloodshed, just as we cannot isolate the flourishing of cultural life from the spread of violent
street crime in and after 2011, as they belong to one and the same process.