Celebrating Emergent Modernity ( Asala )

This chapter analyses diverse depictions of emergent modernity (asala), i.e., how filmmakers depict their characters attempting to make a seemingly impossible condition possible and how these attempts are depicted as suppressed, tolerated, or emergent. Films show multiple constructions of asala. Sometimes, by underscoring the female protagonist’s awareness of how patriarchy commodifies the female body (as a source either of income or class superiority), hence forcing patriarchy to reconsider its injustices. The Islamic notion of tawakkul appears as the driving force behind the empowerment of the marginalized. Asala appears through rebellion against effendiness and resists the inferiority gaze at the peasant by positioning the uneducated peasant woman at the center of Egypt’s modern renaissance. For asala to be a collective emergent culture, the collective agency of working-class Egyptians is depicted breaking the myth of shame constructed around “the origin” without reactionary stances that idolize it. Asala interrogates 1940s public discussions on civil liberties for women in relation to sexual harassment and retribution-based versus rehabilitation-based justice. Asala is depicted questioning orthodox interpretations of Islamic law about the question of polygamy and kufr, which is reinterpreted as “ingratitude,” as opposed to the popular understanding of the concept as “infidelity.”