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.
