Great Projects

This chapter moves from low- and mid-ranking bureaucrats to higher-ranking officials and their ‘great projects’ ( al-masharī‘ al-kubra ) – the revolution’s signal achievements in governmental media. The chapter describes how this type of achievement was considered extraordinary, given the struggle to coordinate across fragmented and conflicting state institutions. Moreover, the chapter analyses one of the Ministry of Culture’s greatest and longest-lasting projects: to build a new Egyptian human being ( binā’ al-insān al-miṣri ). I argue that the need to cultivate the Egyptian masses was not purely born from a desire to civilise, but by a political imperative to build a new people to be governed by the revolutionary command. In contrast with Younis’s pejorative description of the people envisaged by the Revolution as a ‘mass’ ( gumū ‘) or a ‘herd’ ( qatī ‘), this chapter presents the meliorative side of the same project: the yet-to-exist People as a collection of ‘righteous citizens’ ( muwaṭinīn ṣāliḥīn ).