The Civil State vs. the Secular State in Arab Discourse: Egypt as a Case Study

This article is the result of collaboration between the authors, one a researcher from Bar Ilan University who deals with state-religion relations in Egypt, and the second an Egyptian sociologist, a lecturer at Ain Shams University, and one of the founders of a new movement calling for secularism in Egypt. The article proposes a contextual analysis of the principle ideas of this secularization movement, as presented by Shalaby at the annual conference of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Tel Aviv University in May 2020. The article analyzes the emergence of the secularization movement in contemporary Egypt, its demands for change, and its weight in public discourse, and considers the difference between the call for secularism and the more common calls in the Arab world since the Arab Spring for the establishment of civil states.