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Stranger Visions: Ghuraba’ and Egypt’s Ideological Crisis
My paper examines a moment of ideological crisis in modern Egyptian history, refracted through the film Ghuraba’(strangers, directed by Sa‘d ‘Arafa and written by ‘Arafa and Ra’fat al-Mihi). The film was screened in 1973, at a postcolonial inflection point in which Marxism, existentialism and an extreme formulation of Islamism were all depicted as exhausted and inadequate. Ghuraba’ gropes toward, but stops short of fully articulating, an Islamic moral engagement with secular society and ideology. That still-inchoate post-ideological future offers a glimpse of roads not taken, but perhaps also insight to dormant ideological, philosophical or religious paths out of the sterile alliance of religious extremism and free-market fundamentalism that dominates our present.
Date:
27 November 2025, 17:00
Venue:
St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details:
Investcorp Lecture Theatre
Speaker:
Professor Walter Armbrust (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Middle East Centre
Organiser:
Middle East Centre Administrator (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
mec@sant.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor Eugene Rogan (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
Part of:
Thursday Seminars (formerly Friday Seminars)
Booking required?:
Not required
Cost:
FREE
Audience:
Public
Editors:
Caroline Davis,
Jennie Williams
