Page 53 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

ing for the development and expansion of after-school cultural activities—
music, literature, debating clubs, arts, and sports. As discussed within such
writing, Islam—as individual spiritual practice—should stand as a brief inter-
lude between the two primary modes of existence around which the times and
spaces of daily life are arranged, work and leisure. Indeed, it is precisely this
disjuncture between the kind of public subject fashioned within the da"wa
movement and one who will perform the role of national citizen inhabiting a
private domain of unconditional immunity that has made culture a site of
considerable struggle. For khutaba# and their audiences, the danger of Western
cultural forms and popular media entertainment lies in the fact that they en-
gender emotions and character attributes incompatible with those that, in their
view, enable one to live as a Muslim. As a khatib I worked with told me, echo-
ing a widely held opinion, “the enemies of Islam use fann, adab, thaqafa, and
muda [art, literature, culture, and fashion] to attack Islam,” a comment explic-
itly acknowledging the Western and secular genealogy of these categories of
discourse and practice. Much of the criticism found in cassette sermons is di-
rected at media entertainment, ¤lm stars, popular singers, and television serials.
Thus, Shaykh Kishk’s most well-known sermons are his critiques of the im-
mensely popular national icons, the singers Umm Kulthum and Muhammed
"Abd al-Wahab, while the khatib "Umar "Abd al-Ka¤ is best known for having
convinced a number of famous ¤lm actresses to give up their acting careers.
The state’s attempt to control da"wa has met with two serious obstacles.
One is grounded in the limited resources and capacities of the economically en-
feebled Egyptian state. The second, on the other hand, owes to the very hetero-
geneity of the state itself. Many of the state-administered religious organiza-
tions include sizable factions sympathetic to the same religious arguments that
their own institutions have been called on to of¤cially denounce and combat. It
is also notable that most of the well-known Egyptian khutaba# of recent years—
for example, Muhammed Mitwalli al-Sha "arawi, Muhammed al-Ghazali, "Abd
al-Sabbur Shahin, and "Abd al-Hamid Kishk—have all been af¤liated at some
point in their careers both with state institutions and with major opposition
movements, primarily the Muslim Brothers. Shayhk Kishk, one of the most un-
equivocally oppositional public voices in the last thirty years, was never entirely
outside the of¤cial structures he so powerfully criticized. While Kishk worked
for a brief period as an itinerant khatib within the system of mosques belonging
to the private da"wa association al-Jam"iyya al-Shar"iyya, for most of his life he
preached for the Ministry of Religious Affairs at the al-Malik mosque in the
al-Hada’iq al-Qubba quarter of Cairo. Notably he retained his position as khatib
at this mosque from 1964 until 1981, despite having become one of the most
virulent critics of the Egyptian government and having been subject to all
forms of state repression, including two periods of imprisonment.
In short, while the state has tried to harness the Islamic pedagogical, juridical,
and homiletic institutions to a variety of national goals (many now tied to issues
of state security), this has not led to the wholesale abandonment within these
institutions of practices and discourses that articulate with the ¤eld of da"wa. 8

42 Charles Hirschkind