Scandal and Dialogical Network: What Does Morality Do to Politics? About the Islamic Headscarf within the Egyptian Parliament

Résumé 0

This chapter aims at analyzing the mechanisms specific to the birth, the swelling and the dying out of the particular public phenomenon of the scandal, as it can be observed within an Egyptian environment. In the ordinary world, other people are constantly the object of normative assessments. When brought to the public, these evaluations give them their reputation, when positive, or make them fear to be discredited, when negative. Generally, the media constitute the means through which judgements concerning reputation take the dimension of a scandal. Sometimes, the scandal is relayed in official settings like the Parliament. We recently examined how a particular dialogical site, e.g. the Egyptian People's Assembly, the lower chamber of the Egyptian Parliament, can be part of the broader dialogical network of the scandal ignited by the Minister's statement, what we called the “Fârûq Husnî case” (Klaus, Dupret, Ferrié 2008). It is now possible to analyse the sequential organization, the categorization devices, the protagonists and the audiences implicated in the enfolding of a news item of this type, which transformed into a scandal and even in a public cause. We proceed in three steps. First, we analyse the ordinary mechanisms of reputation and its breaches. We observe, in our material, how the structures of social and institutional life, like politeness, the protection of appearances, face preservation, but also their trial, like insults, humiliation and discredit, are achieved in action, through intertwined language games. Second, we describe how the mechanisms of ordinary reputation can be circumstantially mobilized to sustain, amplify and give credit to accusations, and therefore contribute to a generalization process giving to a singular blame the generic status of a scandal. Third, we scrutinize the functioning of a phenomenon which, although it does not exhaust the scope of all possible modes of the spreading out of scandals, constitutes a recurring and important figure: the moral over-investment of politics. We describe how questions related to moral relevance can be treated as such by members, but can also aim, without using explicit terms, at objectives belonging to the political repertoire.