149 © The Author(s) 2017 M. Menshawy, State, Memory, and Egypt’s Victory in the 1973 War, Middle East Today, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-50121-5_4 CHAPTER 4 Socio-Political Practices Under Sadat To demonstrate that the Al-ahram’s coverage—as detailed in the previous two chapters—refected a systematic discursive strategy on the part of the Egyptian state requires a careful, detailed exploration not simply of discourse but of internal dynamics both within the state and the newspaper themselves. This chapter unpacks the various socio-political practices that fed into the carefully woven formal and semi-formal narrative of the 1973 War as repre- sented in the pages of Al-ahram. Based on critical discourse analysis (CDA) as an overarching analytical framework, these practices include Sadat’s ‘authoritarianism’ as identifed in the frst section. The media system is the focus of the second section. The relation between the state and the media system including Al-ahram is also investigated. This critical investigation does not merely unravel the powers through which the state dominated the media system, but also exposes how the media system itself acts in a similarly authoritarian manner by subduing opposition emanating from, in Gramsci’s words, ‘subaltern thought’ or counter-hegemonic forces. 1 Focusing on the media system in the second section, this chapter explains how these differing voices were muffed all for the sake of marshalling only the three macro- themes of the war. Within this context-rich scale, the third section of the chapter takes a wider view of another phenomenon standing behind the predominant hegemonic discourse on 1973—the so-called Islamic revival of the 1970s. This ‘islamisation’ was related to Sadat’s distancing from Nasser 1 See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume II, trans. and ed. Joseph Buttigieg (New York, Columbia University Press: 1996).