Page 59 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

sermon audition and the associated practices of da"wa with a preformed or un-
changing set of interests and goals. Rather, one comes to acquire an understand-
ing of the good and the virtues that enable its realization in the course of par-
ticipation in this domain. This learning is not simply a process of acculturation
nor of ideological indoctrination insomuch as both these notions fail to capture
the extent to which one’s participation within this arena necessarily involves
practices of argument, criticism, and debate. Although some shared orienta-
tions and languages are a prerequisite for this type of public engagement, and
one participates with the assumption that there is a proper and divinely sanc-
tioned form of life to which one aspires, this does not imply a uniformity of
thought and action. Rather, the aim is to uphold those practices understood to
be essential to an Islamic society, practices whose proper form, however, must
be continuously determined by public acts of guidance, argument, and discus-
sion by all members of the collective.
My argument is that we should not view da"wa as simply an Islamic rendition
of the normative structure of the public sphere, one enabled and produced
through an incorporation of Islamic symbols and culturally grounded frames
of reference. To focus solely on the process through which the concepts and
modular institutions of modern liberal-democracy have been in®ected by non-
Western traditions is to fail to explore the often parallel projects of renewal and
reform launched from within the conceptual and practical horizons of those
traditions. This is not to reinstate the binary of tradition and modernity but,
on the contrary, to point to processes that cannot be adequately analyzed via
this opposition. It is for this reason that I ¤nd unhelpful discussions of contem-
porary Islamic movements in terms of the notion of an “invented tradition,” a
modern institution in the guise of an ancient one. An approach adequate to the
historical form I have described here will necessarily understand tradition as a
set of discourses and practices that, while enabled by modern power, nonethe-
less articulate a politics and a set of sensibilities incommensurate with many of
the secular-liberal assumptions that attend that power. Of course, the Islamic
tradition is not the only framework within which the actions of the partici-
pants of the da"wa movement are meaningful, nor is it by any means the most
powerful.
Lastly, note that while debate and argumentation are ascribed a salient role
within the Islamic counterpublic examined here, this does not imply a move to-
ward liberalism. Indeed, many of the social norms which the practice of da"wa
has helped to strengthen in Egypt would not be acceptable for most liberals.
Da"wa is not geared toward securing the freedom of individuals to pursue their
own interests but rather their conformity with a divine model of moral conduct.
This model is not static, a labor of timeless repetition, but instead involves a
historical dynamism derived precisely from the sort of practices of reason-
ing and argument foregrounded by the da"wa movement, practices that depart
from the assumption of an authoritative corpus by which the status of current
practices may be assessed. Thus, while liberals may wish to take strong issue
with this tradition of public reasoning, those concerned with democracy and

48 Charles Hirschkind