Page 40 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

1 Cassette Ethics: Public Piety and

Popular Media in Egypt

Charles Hirschkind

A preacher’s voice reverberates through the rusted speakers of a tape player in
the Karim Coffee Shop in Bulaq-Dukrur, a lower-middle-class quarter of Cairo.
The owner of the shop wipes down the counters while listening to the preacher’s
passionate evocation of the current suffering of Bosnian Muslims at the hands
of Serbian aggressors. His three clients, all men from the neighborhood, accom-
modate to the languorous rhythm of their water pipes as the account of Serbian
atrocities and European indifference echoes around them. At a certain point the
preacher, his voice now straining with grief, halts his description to ask: “Where
are the Muslims?! Where are the Muslims, while Muslim girls are being raped,
mosques are being burned?! Where?!” “Enough, O’ Shaykh,” the man sitting
closest to the counter calls out, “they’re not Muslims; they’re Europeans!” Turn-
ing now to the owner of the shop, he continues, “Why all these tears for the
Bosnians; they dress like Europeans, they act like Europeans. There is nothing
Islamic about them.” “How can you say that?” the shop owner retorts as the
preacher continues behind him, “Didn’t you hear? They have mosques; they
pray; they stand in the same line [nafsi saf ] as we do. They worship . . . ” His
client cuts him short: “No, no, no. They may have been Muslims once, but they
became Westerners long ago [yatagharrabu min zaman]. Whatever little Islam
they had was extinguished by the Communists.” One of the other clients, an ac-
quaintance of the ¤rst and visibly irritated by his comment, weighs in: “Shame
on you, Ahmed [Haram alaik, ya Ahmed]. Muslims are Muslims, wherever they
are. The shaykh is right: the shame is on us that we sit by and do nothing while
our brothers [ikhwanina] are being slaughtered. The mosques collect a little
money, the prime minister says, ‘we support the rights of the Bosnians,’ and
nothing is done.” Ahmed again rejects the argument: “We Arabs have enough
problems. Palestinians are being murdered, and you want us to save the Bosni-
ans?! Maybe the Bosnians are our cousins, but our brothers, the Arabs—the
Iraqis, the Algerians, the Palestinians—they’re the ones we should be concerned
with.” As the preacher begins a collective prayer calling for an end of Bosnian
suffering, the shop owner returns again to the theme of Muslim solidarity: “So
we should only help Arabs. That’s exactly the reason why Muslims are so weak
today. That’s exactly what our enemies want us to do: ‘Those Muslims are dif-