Page 50 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

When one hears these things, like that people in the U.S., or in Bosnia are taking
up Islam, one is stirred. You ask yourself, if they are turning to Islam there, how is
it that I as a Muslim am not even committed in my practice? What do they have
over me? We are all equals after all. So hearing this moves me toward committing
to Islam, and reforming my practice.

In this way, as numerous scholars have pointed out, mass media have trans-
formed the political and religious context wherein Islamic virtues are cultivated
and practiced, endowing it with a distinctly transnational focus for participants
of this movement, a point underscored in the coffee shop conversation I began
with. This tendency has been further enhanced, ¤rst, by the fact that many of
the khutaba# whose tapes are listened to in Egypt are from other Muslim coun-
tries, particularly Saudi Arabia, and, somewhat less so, Jordan and Lebanon;
and, second, insomuch as the leading contemporary khutaba# and other signi¤-
cant ¤gures of the da"wa movement have ongoing associations with mosques
and da"wa centers not only in other Arab countries but also in Europe, the U.S.,
and Canada.
Note also that this practice does not map onto the constitutionally demar-
cated separation of public and private but rather traverses this distinction in
a way that is often uncomfortable to those with secular-liberal sensibilities.
Da"wa is undertaken in the street, on public transportation, at the workplace,
or in the home. It may take place between friends or coworkers but also between
total strangers, as in the case of the taxi ride cited above. From a liberal perspec-
tive, da"wa is seen as encouraging an unwarranted intrusion into the privacy of
others, especially as it entails entering into what are considered to be personal
matters of religious faith. Du"at render public issues that the liberal state rele-
gates to the private sphere of individual choice—the modesty of one’s dress, the
precision of gesture in prayer, the danger of gossip, the proximity of unrelated
men and women in both the workplace and the home, as well as questions of
Quranic interpretation and religious authority. For liberals, these issues tend to
be viewed as either insigni¤cant (e.g., precision in prayer, gossip) and thus un-
worthy of public attention; or, alternatively, as matters of individual preference
(e.g., dress, gender relations), and, as such, protected by private law. Da"wa for
this reason constitutes an obstacle to the state’s attempt to secure a social do-
main where national citizens are free to make modern choices, as it re-politicizes
those choices, subjecting them to a public scrutiny oriented around the task of
establishing the conditions for the practice of Islamic virtues.

Politics and Ethics

The media and associational infrastructure put into place by the da"wa
movement has created the conditions for a kind of publicness, one grounded in
certain classical Islamic concepts but reformulated in response to a variety of
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contemporary conditions; that is, reformers like al-Banna and "Abd al-Hamid
Kishk revived a notion of da"wa as a civic duty the performance of which, con-

Cassette Ethics 39