In the 1980s, the towns of the Greater Cairo peri-urban fringe experienced the rise of what can be described as a daʾwa movement. Mosques, whose numbers grew exponentially, embraced a new generation of Islamists who for the first time since the mid-1950s enjoyed a space of political tolerance as a result of the authoritarian upgrading arrangements of the late Sadat–early Mubarak era. Mosques, therefore, became platforms where political, social and cultural policies of the government were publicly condemned, and there was a proliferation of consumerism and western lifestyle practices that stemmed from Sadat's infitah social and economic policies. Thousands of Egyptians from the region attended religious lessons that were offered by renowned sheikhs from different Islamic currents, discussing a wide range of social and political topics. It was a ‘daʾwa revolution’ according to Khaled Sa‘d, one of the adherents of Ali Qinawi; a Salafi scholar from Kerdasa.

The previous chapter examined the authoritarian approaches to upgrading the Egyptian system of local governance, which involved strategies of informal centralisation and decentralisation that aimed, among other things, to dominate local politics and to manage the regime's power networks at the subnational level. Yet the subordinated institutional frames, which were intended to contain the regime's networks, suffered from a structural dilemma: an inherent weakness in their mobilisation functions. Nevertheless, this did not mean that local communities were averse to politics, but rather it led to the emergence of alternative local politics. This chapter is devoted to examining the rise of the daʾwa movement in the towns of the Cairo peri-urban fringe as an expression of this phenomenon. It will try to provide an explanation for the weakness of the authoritarian mode of political mobilisation compared with the Islamic one. In one sentence, it is true that the former was backed by the authoritarian regime and attached to the state public-service machine, but compared with the latter, it lacked the capability of extending general trust beyond the immediate circles of the clientelist lines.

Different dynamics resulted in the lack of ‘general trust’ between the state and local communities. Of those dynamics, the chief causes were the dysfunctional government institutions and the neglectful rule that marked Egyptian local governance due to the acceleration of neo-liberal policies.