UC Berkeley

Āyāt al-Thawra: Discourses and Ideologies in Egypt 2011 examines how the 2011 Egyptian Revolution constituted itself as a site of competing ideological imaginaries—Islamist, liberal, and postcolonial—each re-inscribing the uprising within its own historical and literary genealogy. It argues that the Revolution was not only a political contest for power but also a semiotic struggle over the meanings of legitimacy, sovereignty, and identity in modern Egypt. By tracing the intertextual networks that animated these discourses, the study reveals how inherited discourses were reactivated and projected onto the revolutionary moment, displacing its transformative potential and fragmenting the imagined unity of the nation. The 2011 Egyptian Revolution represented a critical rupture in the postcolonial history of the modern Middle East. Rooted in long-standing grievances against authoritarian governance and socioeconomic inequality, it drew millions of Egyptians into unprecedented mass mobilization, articulating a popular demand for sovereignty that reverberated across the Arab world. Following the uprising, the struggle for power became a struggle over meaning, as liberal, Islamist, and postcolonial discourses sought to redefine “the people” as the foundational sign in which sovereignty resides. This contest reshaped political realities, diverting the revolution from its emancipatory promise. As Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Egypt’s foremost political prisoner, observed, “In 2013, we started to lose the battle for narrative… the very language of revolution was lost to us.” This loss of language, I argue, marked the Revolution’s undoing: the struggle over meaning proved central to the collapse of Egypt’s democratic experiment. While previous scholarship has examined the role of discourse in political polarization, this dissertation analyzes the mechanisms by which revolutionary texts produced meaning—how they constructed authority through intertextual reference and historical citation. It uncovers the semiotic strategies that underpinned liberal, Islamist, and postcolonial discourses and maps their genealogies from the late nineteenth century through 2011. In doing so, it reveals how long-lived ideological projects shaped the revolution’s trajectory and constrained the possibility of a unified political community. The dissertation engages a wide corpus of modern and contemporary Arabic texts that exemplify these ideological constellations. It reads the liberal discourse through Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and Ibrāhīm ʿĪsā, tracing how each reimagined Islam and the nation through the moral vocabulary of enlightenment and reform. The Islamist discourse is explored through Ḥasan al-Bannā, Sayyid Quṭb, and Muḥammad Badīʿ, whose writings articulated a vision of divine sovereignty as the basis of social and political order. Finally, the postcolonial discourse is examined through Tamim al-Barghouti, whose work articulates a vision of the umma as a historical community of resistance that derives its legitimacy not from the state but from its capacity to confront domination. Together, these authors form a dialogic archive through which the dissertation maps how Egypt’s political languages were constituted, contested, and continually rewritten. The project offers a new lens for understanding the ideological roots of political conflict and demonstrates that revolutions—far from breaking with the past—remain haunted by the very languages they seek to transcend.