Page 43 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

lamic practice of isti#dhan, wherein a member of the mosque assembly asks per-
mission to address the gathering on matters relevant to the Muslim community.
This practice, one that became increasingly widespread during subsequent de-
cades, had the effect of enhancing the dialogical structure of social discourse
within the mosque, thereby expanding its role as a key site of public discussion.
Mass media also became central to the Brotherhood’s effort. Books, short tracts,
pamphlets, and ®yers by Muslim reformers, as well as magazines covering na-
tional and international events considered relevant to Muslims, were widely cir-
culated and competed with the more secular-oriented publications of the na-
tionalist movement. For da"wa speech and print—and later audio—media, the
sermon provided a paradigmatic rhetorical form, a practice that stood in con-
trast to the European models of political oratory increasingly adopted by Egyp-
tian secular nationalists. Al-Banna’s sermons, in particular, became massively
popular in Egypt and other Arab countries and were widely distributed in book
and pamphlet form.
While the Brotherhood was eventually banned by the Egyptian state and
many of its members imprisoned or driven underground, da"wa itself did not
disappear. On the contrary, over the last half-century da"wa has increasingly be-
come a space for the articulation of a contestatory Islamic discourse on state
and society, a discourse embodied in a diversi¤ed array of institutional forms
including educational centers, preaching associations, thousands of private
mosques, and an expanding network of publishing houses and other media. As
a result of the activity of these publishing houses and various media, there now
exists a vast literature offering instruction in the practice of “individual da"wa,”
understood as an ethical form of speech and action aimed at improving the
moral conduct of one’s fellow community members. The concept has also be-
come a key point of reference for a wide variety of other activities in some way
oriented toward promoting and fortifying the ethical practices that constitute
Islamic modes of piety and community—from providing social services to the
poor, to tutoring children at mosques, to selling religious books or tapes. Da"wa,
in other words, has come to describe a particular way of linking public activism
with moral reform. Placed under the rubric of this notion, a wide range of com-
mercial, educational, and welfare activities essential to the reproduction and
maintenance of modern society were assigned moral signi¤cance, as contribu-
tions to the goal of building a community oriented around the practice of the
virtues.

Taxi Talk

The kind of discursive arena I am suggesting here can be illustrated
through a conversation I overheard during a taxi ride through downtown Cairo,
a scenario that is rather typical of the kind of public interactions for which
cassette sermons have played a constitutive role. Taxis in Cairo frequently pick
up more than one passenger. In this case I was sharing the ride with two other
people, a teenage boy and a young woman who wore the hijab (head scarf). The

32 Charles Hirschkind