Pharaonism and Contemporary Egypt: A New ‘Civilizational State’ in Statu Nascendi

In April 2021, Egypt held an extraordinary event in Cairo, the ‘Golden Parade of the Pharaohs’, during which the government ceremoniously moved twenty-two ancient mummies from the Egyptian Museum to the recently established National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. The unprecedentedly spectacular event can be interpreted from the perspective of culture or tourism and can actually be perceived as a manifestation of the new Egyptian ideological discourse. At the centre of this is the structure of a civilizational state with its specific cultural, historical, and political traditions. The domestic political, economic, social, and cultural measures of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s[1] government, which came to power after the revolutionary period of 2011–2013, show that instead of following the example of a Western state based on liberal values, it is working on Egypt’s statehood by relying on its own religious and moral traditions. In doing so, it practically joins the recently emerging civilizational states around the world, which believe that their systems represent civilizations and must preserve faith, tradition, and heritage (Coker 2019). The article discusses some central cultural, social, and political initiatives, which in their final result sought to contribute to forming a highly centralized, hierarchically constructed and morally grounded – Egyptian – ‘civilizational state’.