Page 57 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

strumental role in relation to the activity of da"wa: as with other practices that
Muslims consider duties placed upon them in their status as Muslims—such as
prayer, fasting, or alms giving—da"wa has conditions of enactment that include
a particular set of virtues. In this sense it is both an activity that upholds the
possibility for the virtuous performance of other Muslim practices and a vir-
tuous act in itself.
As mentioned earlier, much of the Islamic print and audio media today con-
cerns the qualities the da"iya must possess in order to perform the civic duty of
da"wa. Such discourses fall within a long and continuing tradition of Islamic
ethical and pedagogical writings on the virtues that uphold individual piety.
Where they depart from this tradition is in addressing the virtues not simply
from an ethical point of view but also from a rhetorical one, as conditions for
the persuasiveness of speech and action within the public domain of da"wa
practice. Virtuous conduct, in other words, is seen by the movement both as an
end in itself and as a means internal to the dialogic process by which the reform
of society is secured.
The virtues of the da"iya as cultivated and practiced within daily life tend to
be understood behaviorally, as disciplined ways of being and acting, ways for
which the body’s performances and expressions constitute an integral part.
They are cultivated gradually through disciplinary practices, such as prayer,
Quranic recitation and memorization, hadith study, listening to sermons, as well
as by undertaking the practice of da"wa itself.
Some of the virtues speci¤c to the practice of da"wa are addressed within
da"wa literature under the term adab al-da"wa (loosely, etiquette of da"wa) and
include those qualities that ensure the orderliness and civility of public inter-
action. Much of da"wa print and cassette media focus on the task of developing
these qualities. A tape by the popular khatib Wagdi Ghunim entitled “The Mus-
lim as Da"iya” provides the listener with a list of thirteen requirements to which
every individual in his or her capacity as da"iya must adhere. Among these he
includes friendliness, gentleness of speech (al-rifq wa al-lin), temperateness, as
well as neatness and cleanliness. Throughout the tape Ghunim provides numer-
ous illustrations of how da"wa should be undertaken, as in the following:
Say we are sitting and speaking with a fellow who then gets upset. I’ll say to him,
O’ my brother, may God be generous with you; O’ my brother, may God open
your heart and mine [yashrah sadrak wa sadri]. Or say someone is sitting nearby
smoking a cigarette, and then comes and offers you one. Take advantage of the
opportunity. Don’t try to take the pack of cigarettes away from him. No. Da"wa
always entails politeness [adab]. Say to him: O’ Brother, may God restore you to
health. I ask God that you stop smoking. May God protect your chest [ sadrak]
from your act.
The prior cultivation of such virtues as friendliness, temperateness, and gentle-
ness of speech ensures that da"wa, as a public act, be conducted in a calm, re-
spectful manner, protected from the kind of passions that would vitiate the act
and the social bene¤t it seeks to realize. The adab of da"wa, in other words, en-

46 Charles Hirschkind