A Week of Laughter and Forgetting: Day Seven

A year after its outbreak, Youssef Rakha lists seven of the more revealing flights of humour that have punctuated the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath

Of all the different “political players” who have emerged in the aftermath of the revolution, the self-proclaimed Sharifs or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad are indeed the most fascinating. As represented by Sheikha Magda, according to her own testimony a “Quranic healer” who was always present outside the court during hearings of the Mubarak trial, campaigning against the former president being tried, unlike either the God-fearing hence good Islamists or the Westernised and bad liblalals (in the populist pronunciation of the word), Sharifs are pro-Saudi and (like the inexplicable Sons of Mubarak organisation) pro-Mubarak, but they are not only anti-Iran and anti-Hamas (we have already mentioned Iran and Hamas’s own enemies, who have apparently nonetheless joined forces simply to bring down Egypt: Masons, Zionists and Americans); they are anti many things besides: reason, fact, common sense and of course meaning itself.

The Sharifs are like the liblalals in that they reject political Islam (which they see as part of the Conspiracy), but they are like the Islamists in that they appeal to a higher power to explain and justify them: President Mubareek, Sheikha Magda is known to have revealed, pronouncing the name Mubareek, is himself a Sharif, “from the progeny of the Prophet Muhammad”, as she put it, and therefore quite obviously a good man. Those who killed the protesters — she saw them with her own eyes, emerging out of boats on their way to Tahrir Square — were neither police nor unidentified militias; they were “Iranians, Shias from Iraq and Palestinians”. How did Sheikha Magda know? They told her. But why would they tell her? Well, she explained, some of them were Sharifs too; and when they found out she was a Sharifa they warmed up to her. Even the Sharifs themselves were capable of evil deeds then… Ah, well!

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Sharifs and the Okashas — there have been speculations that they might actually be two species of alien life — are by and large outside the picture. The Islamists have the parliament.

One simply wonders what will become of the liblalals.