Page 49 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Fig. 1.4. Muhammad Hassan’s
tape on the Day of Reckoning,
a common sermon topic.

Image right unavailable

sibility grounded in the idea and experience of national citizenship. As in other
modernizing states, in Egypt the process of recruiting citizens into the struc-
tures of national political life produced expectations, aspirations, and partici-
patory demands before the administrative, ideological, and security appara-
tuses that could accommodate these demands had been fully developed. In this
context, da"wa has become one of the critical sites for the expression of those
demands engendered by political modernization, especially among those ill-
versed in the literacy of newsprint. Resituated in this way, these demands have
given new impetus and direction to a project aimed at fortifying the bases of
the Islamic community. The elaboration of da"wa as a civic duty, in this sense,
has involved neither what has been termed “retraditionalization” nor, on the
other hand, simply the instrumentalization of a traditional category within a
modernizing or secularizing project.
As opposed to the national public sphere centered around the press and tele-
visual media, the da"wa public reveals a more marked supranational focus, evi-
dent, for example, in the considerable attention given within sermons to the
plight of Muslims worldwide as well as the interest shown by cassette-sermon
audiences in such issues. As one man told me after hearing a tape by an Egyptian
khatib on Muslims in the U.S.:

38 Charles Hirschkind