Historian François Furet speaks here of the French Revolution, although his words may also serve as an apt description of national political discourse in Egypt since 25 January 2011. Like France in the late eighteenth-century, Egypt in recent years has, by many accounts, witnessed a veritable explosion of conspiracy theorising by both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary voices, as well as those who belong to neither of these two currents. Although this is not the place for an extended comparison, we may note, as an aside, some of the eerie textual correspondences between the two revolutions: rumours of brigands and balṭagiyya, of kidnapped children and abducted Muslim girls, of the death of the king and the death of the president, of foreign invasion and neocolonial plots. As in the French case, too, ‘conspiracy’ in Egypt has meant many different things to different people, and provoked a range of emotional, indeed artistic reactions and counter-reactions that has been neither monolithic, nor entirely predictable.

A beautiful synthesis of some of these conflicting perspectives on conspiracy theory is offered in the two-part autobiography of novelist Radwa Ashour (Raḍwā ʿĀshūr) (1946–2014). Athqal min Raḍwā (Heavier than Radwa) (2013) and al-Ṣarkha (The Scream) (2015), Ashour's final published books, interweave vivid reflections on the advances and setbacks of the Revolution with sober descriptions of her battle with cancer. Conspiracy theory is not the primary focus of these two books, but operates as one especially charged node of emotive, literary, and political meanings. Her first remarks on the topic are defensive.