The man is in his mid-forties or thereabouts. He is an MP and member of the second biggest Islamist party in the People's Assembly. He made headlines recently when he appeared on the media to claim he had been attacked, beaten in the face, and robbed of a large amount of money he had secured in his car.

Shortly thereafter, a call came from a surgeon working for a local hospital known to be too expensive for most Egyptians. The medical practitioner reported that he met this MP a few days before. But the meeting was not to mend injuries he sustained in an attack. Instead, it was to perform plastic surgery on the nose of the politician. The parliamentarian was immediately removed from parliament and ejected from his party. Moreover, he was made to apologise for disgracing the People's Assembly, violating democracy and transparency, and lying to the nation at large.

Apart from further pitying the evidently pitiful behavior of a supposedly respectable man, what can one make out of this story? What can one say about the tradition this man represents, and which is represented by the media as a host of high morals? Furthermore, what does this incident report about the overall society within which the man, his party, his parliament, and the historical tradition that has supposedly shaped his behavior live and operate? Are these elements independent of each other? Are they all independent of the overarching moral economy at work not only within political Islam but other ideological positions?

Can we draw any lines between the behavior of this public figure and the kinds of compelling, if not oppressive, forms of power tacitly practiced by the dominant economy of the media? Particularly, what kind of body politics is at work in contemporary globalised society? How was this man led to cut his nose and what does that say about contemporary politics as performance, or rather theatre?

These questions are too many and some are too big, no doubt. In this short article, however, some of them are worth reflecting on in the context of this small incident. They may suggest some directions to think along. At least three preliminary thoughts are worthwhile. One concerns a recent trend to present Islam as a homogenising political-moral force aimed at implementing a correct politics that will “cleanse” society, including all forms of corrupt governance. This tendency is part of a larger one intended to single out Muslims, or Islamists as they are normally called, to be the ones responsible for “cleansing” some politics of which they are integral parts.

Muslims are human beings with ordinary desires, habits and aspirations as the case of the MP obviously illustrates. To conflate Islam and Muslims may be underlined by an intention to consider or depict a tradition with diverse possibilities as equivalent to particular political groups emerging within a socio-political context characterised by long-lived and diverse forms of oppression and perceived economic and emotional deprivation. The MP and his party represent groups who suffered the most brutal of these forms.

In brief, to equate a long lasting and diverse tradition with localised if not even marginalised groups can be no less than misleading. The incident concerned illustrates that the representatives who won the parliament seats are no more than ordinary citizens.

Among those forces are those of an overwhelming media. The images circulated through this global machine of power must have contributed to the subjectivity formation of the millions of consumers, among whom must have been the man who wanted to reduce the size and change the shape of his nose. The question that interests me here is not the desire of the MP to look “better” or “different.” In fact, I have long been intrigued by this particular difference. What did the MP want his nose to look like?

A brief look at the celebrities who have obviously undergone similar operations shows that the resulting noses are not very different from each other, which suggests that their surgeons must have a limited number of shapes after which to “model” the noses of their customers. Most if not all the noses that have been altered are smaller and pointy. Some are little button noses too. They are noses most common in Northwest Europe and North America. This is where the former and current colonial powers come from. And they are the societies that own most of the media corporations. In other words, they own the machine that must have contributed to shaping the taste of the masses that are supposed to watch the MP on TV screens, not only as a politician but more as a performer.

The above incident may be small and will shortly be forgotten. Nevertheless, it can be used to report on the kind of society within which it occurs as well as the historical moment its population is undergoing. Furthermore, it can illustrate the kind of global power structures within which these populations have been and will be living for some time to come. The above story illustrates that Islam and Islamism are hardly if ever free of these structures.

The writer is professor of anthropology at the American Univeristy in Cairo.