From Glory to Shadow: Grieving and Memorial Practices Around the Martyrs of the Revolution in Counterrevolutionary Egypt.

In Egypt, the demands centered around the rights of the "martyrs of the January 25, 2011 revolution," civilians who fell during clashes with the police and the military, were at the heart of the revolutionary movement (Buckner and Khatib 2014, Mittermaier 2015, Armbrust 2019). In addition to the tributes organized by various revolutionary groups, these martyrs were also praised by the political authorities who held power between 2011 and 2013, whether it was the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces or the Muslim Brotherhood's President Mohamed Morsi. Some of these "martyrs of the revolution" were officially recognized, and their families were entitled to compensation. However, the military regime that seized power in the summer of 2013, putting an end to the pluralist revolutionary fervor, quickly worked to render the revolutionary symbolism invisible, erasing tributes to its dead from both public and media spaces. Momentarily celebrated as heroes who paid the ultimate price for the revolutionary cause, these dead are now excluded from official commemorations, in favor of police and army martyrs killed in the "war on terror" led by the Egyptian state. What happens to mourning when it no longer matters? How do the families of these dead, once celebrated as liberators from an authoritarian regime, survive in a politically hostile space where the revolution is “officially silenced” (Wilson 2023) and where the sacrifice of their children is no longer honored? How is the memory of these dead, now deemed undesirable by the authorities, perpetuated? This presentation, based on interviews with families of revolutionary martyrs and fieldwork carried out in Cairo between 2018 and 2024, aims to illustrate the inherent “ambiguity” (Verdery 1999) of dead bodies through analyzing how the transformation of political circumstances affects grieving, the memory of the dead, and the socio-cultural significance of the sacrifices made.