Page 47 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

to abide by Islamic moral standards—an activity they understood to be a duty
placed upon them as Muslims. Sermon tapes helped one pursue both these com-
mitments. Sermons are listened to as a disciplinary practice geared to ethical
self-improvement: a technique for the cultivation and training of certain forms
of will, desire, emotion, and reason, conceived of as intellectual and bodily ap-
titudes or virtues that enable Muslims to act correctly as Muslims in accord with
orthodox standards of Islamic piety. In addition, cassette sermons provide a
point of reference when discussing religious issues with acquaintances, or an in-
expensive and easily accessible media form through which others might be en-
couraged to attend to their religious duties. Tapes are frequently exchanged be-
tween friends or acquaintances, both informally and in the context of mosque
study groups, a type of association that many of the young men I worked with
had at some point been involved in. Indeed, it is the dif¤culty of controlling a
media form that can be so easily and inexpensively reproduced and circulated
that has enabled the cassette tape to evade, to an extent far greater than other
media, the regulatory purview of the state.
While the commercial aspect of the cassette sermon should not be ignored,
I would caution against overemphasizing it for the following reasons. First, the
majority of the khutaba# whose sermons are available on cassette have no formal
contractual relations with the tape companies and receive no remuneration
from the sales of their tapes. Indeed, many khutaba# encourage people to record,
reproduce, and disseminate their sermons, and even commercially produced
tapes usually include a written statement prompting the buyer to copy the tape
and make it available to others as part of doing da"wa work and as a means of
receiving bene¤cence from God. Moreover, the majority of tapes listened to in
Egypt circulate outside the structures of sale and marketing, through the prac-
tices of borrowing and exchange mentioned above. Many mosques in Egypt are
now equipped with tape libraries that regular attendees can borrow from with-
out charge.
In this way cassette sermons played an important role in the transformation
of da"wa in Egypt since the 1970s from being an organizing principle within
speci¤c institutions to becoming a popular form of public practice and partici-
pation. Owing largely to the mass popularity achieved through cassette circu-
lation, popular preachers—most notably Shaykh "Abd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1996)
—became rallying points and exemplary ¤gures within an emerging counter-
public of da"wa practitioners. A number of the young men I worked with ex-
plicitly identi¤ed cassette sermons as an alternative to the televisual and press
media promoted by the state. As one of the men told me, pointing to his cassette
recorder: “This is the only mass media [al-i"alam] I need. The [state-controlled]
television and the newspapers never discuss the important events and issues. We
would never ¤nd out about what is really going on even here in Egypt without
these tapes.”
Here, however, I want to draw attention to how da"wa, as developed ¤rst
within the Muslim Brotherhood and later in many other institutional locations,
became the conceptual site wherein the concerns, public duties, character, and

36 Charles Hirschkind