Page 41 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ferent from us; those over there don’t speak our language; those there, their
clothes are strange.’ No. If you say ‘There is no God but the one God,’ then you
are a Muslim. That’s in the Quran. The Serbs destroy houses of God, full of
people praying, and you say, ‘It’s not my business’ [m"lish da"wa]! Listen to the
Shaykh, Ahmed.” Attempting to bolster the shop owner’s argument, the third
man cites a well-known prophetic tradition [hadith] on the equality of Arab
and non-Arab Muslims: “No Arab is superior to an Ajami [non-Arab] except
by righteous conduct.” The exchange is interrupted as a boy from the store next
door calls out for the shop owner to bring over another round of tea. Ahmed
returns to his water pipe, while, echoing from the dusty electronics of the tape
recorder, the weeping of the supplicants rises up to engulf the preacher’s voice
as he continues to lead the collective prayer.
In Cairo, where I conducted ¤eldwork for two years, cassette-recorded ser-
mons of popular Islamic preachers, or khutaba# (sing. khatib), have become a
ubiquitous part of the contemporary social landscape. The recorded voices of
these orators can be heard echoing from within grocery stores, cafes, butcher
shops, private homes, and most forms of public transportation throughout the
city. Through the multiple practices of audition, exchange, and dialogue they
mediate, these tapes have contributed to the formation of what I will call an
Islamic counterpublic, one that often ¤nds expression in informal exchanges of
the sort described above and that are now a common element of daily experi-
ence for many Egyptians. Although shaped in various ways by the structures
and techniques of modern publicity, the counterpublic I discuss here exhibits
a conceptual architecture that cuts across the modern distinctions between state
and society, public and private, that are central to the public sphere as a norma-
tive institution of modern democratic polities. In contrast to a space for the
formation of political opinion through intersubjective reason, the discursive
arena wherein cassette sermons circulate is geared to the deployment of the dis-
ciplining power of ethical speech, a goal, however, that takes public deliberation
as one of its modalities. Within this context, public speech results not in policy
but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression
understood to facilitate the development and practice of Islamic virtues and
therefore of Islamic ethical comportment. This unique entwining of the delib-
erative and the disciplinary, as I describe, owes to the way Islamic notions of
moral duty and practices of ethical cultivation were mapped onto a national
civic arena by Muslim reformists over the course of the last century, in the con-
text of an engagement with the institutions, concepts, and technologies of mod-
ern political life. As mosques in Egypt became the site for new kinds of social
and political organization and expression, everyday practices of pious socia-
bility gradually came to inhabit a new political terrain, one shaped both by the
discourses of national citizenship and by emerging transnational forms of re-
ligious association. In the course of this shift, forms of practical reasoning tied
to the tradition of the virtues became oriented not simply toward a notion of
moral community but toward what we would recognize as a modern public as

30 Charles Hirschkind