This presentation looks at the mawālid as a subaltern form of resistance between space, control, and power negotiation. Expressions of vernacular Islam in Egypt, Sufism and the practice of ḏhikr are linked to marginalized social classes and traditional rural or suburban spaces (Mayeur-Jaouen 2019). Laments for one's condition of social oppression and invocation of madad (divine intervention) are some of the constant themes of ḏhikr, through which devotees seek trance as an instrument of detachment from the sensitive world and from existential suffering (Waugh 1989). Since 2011, political, security and public order issues have severely limited the spaces in which collective devotional practices such as ḏhikr can be performed. Recent actions of reinforced control over urban space by the authorities have drastically increased injustice and inequalities by banning most of the mawālid and putting obstacles to the organization of public ḏhikr in the traditional neighborhoods of Cairo. Additionally, forced residential mobility from informal neighborhoods to new urban developed areas had increased difficulties for the Sufi communities in finding a safe space for the ḏhikr practice. Through ethnographic accounts and observations of a ḏhikr of the munšid Ṣalāḥ al-'Askarī during the last Mūlid of Sīdī 'Alī al-Bayyūmī, at the alley adjacent to the saint's tomb in Cairo, I will investigate the relation between political and religious forces. I argue that ḏhikr musicians and ṭuruq ṣūfiyya react against public policies through a veiled resistance trying to keep control over mawālid spaces and sound in a subtle dynamic of power attrition.

This paper focuses on several different types of artificial reverberation and rhythmic elasticity to begin the project of a differential theory of sonic spaces in the Arab Islamic world. Each revolves around the actions and musicking of a particular mūlid through sound amplifiers. This artificial reverberation is cut with flows and rhythms, vibrations and echoes, all of which form a sonic discourse that is equally feverish, energetic, and participatory. However, the study of musical microtiming, the issue of non-isochronous beat subdivision, has instead gained considerable attention over the past decade (Polak 2010, Jankowsky 2013, 2021). In this paper, I examine the metric consequences of continuous tempo change, the "timbral saturations" (effects, mixers, digital devices), and the “global intensification” (Jankowsky 2021) through an analysis (Sonic Visualizer) of the sound waves in the Mūlid of Sīdī 'Alī al-Bayyūmī recorded on January 29, 2023. While the timbre remains constant, the intensification creates a sense of trajectory within the ritual and acts as an architectural structure of the sonic spiritual progression. Drawing from the concept of “sonic territories" (Labelle 2010), which trigger relationships with the associative dynamics of sound and healing, I argue that timbre, rhythmic modalities and intensification mediate as mental-emotional assistance between sound and spirituality.

In this paper, I seek to analyse the relationship between live performances of mahraganat music and the state of trance it induces in the street dancers in Egypt. Existing literature on mahraganat has attended to the genre’s political economy, its subversive nature, and the aesthetics of its lyrics (Abou Zeid 2019; Benchouia 2020; Ibraheem 2022, 2023; Kitzler 2020; Pratt 2020; Puig 2020; Sprengel 2020; Swedenburg 2012), with very little attention to street dancing and its relation to urban spaces. Based on extensive fieldwork, firstly, I trace the emergence of this underclass electro street dance genre in the weddings of the impoverished informal neighborhoods in Cairo. I then zoom in on the concept of street wedding as a total event that amalgamates rituality, music, dancing, mediated sound, and space making practices. Especially in male exclusive street weddings, their styles include dancing with fighting knives, dancing with ignited flares and a special form of squat dancing called ta’keeb. By analyzing those various dances, I argue that the aesthetics of mahraganat music contributes to converting the street wedding into a liminal space that allows neighborhood’s young men to get into a state of trance foregrounded by repetitions, heavy sampling and noise. Even though mahraganat trance could be considered as non-religious practice, it shares many similarities with religious trance, and it prompts consideration of the way that a street dance challenges and shapes notions of sound and spaces, religious and sacred, gender and belonging.