Page 60 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

its cultural conditions and possibilities in the contemporary world will want to
pay close attention to religious movements of this kind.

Notes

This essay is based on ¤eldwork carried out in Egypt between 1994 and 1996 with the
support of dissertation grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research and the Social Science Research Council. An earlier version of the article ap-
peared in Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 1 (2001): 3–34.

1. On the history of the concept and practice of da"wa and its classical origins, see
al-Faruqi 1976; Mendel 1995; and Waardenburg 1995.
2. The most comprehensive discussion of the history of the Muslim Brotherhood
remains that of Mitchell 1993 [1969].
3. Al-Banna understood the nation-state as a legitimate object of political loyalty
and identity but one secondary to and subsumed within a broader community based on
adherence to Islamic practice: “The bone of contention between us [the Muslim Brother-
hood] and them [Egyptian nationalists] is that we de¤ne patriotism according to the
standard of credal belief, while they de¤ne it according to territorial borders and geo-
graphical boundaries” (al-Banna 1978, 50).
4. The sunna refers to the prophet’s exemplary behavior as witnessed by a contempo-
rary of the prophet and passed down by means of an authoritative chain of transmitters.
5. I am not suggesting here, of course, that the da"wa movement is founded upon
a notion of gender equality. On the contrary, participants in the movement and the
khutaba# who are its most prominent exponents generally emphasize a certain patriarchal
order as essential for the organization of social and individual conduct in a Muslim so-
ciety. That said, the actual practice of da"wa has been one area where women’s subordi-
nate status has been relatively attenuated, and where many of the arguments commonly
used to disqualify women from domains of political and religious authority are seen not
to apply. As Saba Mahmood (2005) has noted in her rich study of pious women in Egypt,
one of the apparent contradictions of the da"wa movement lies in the fact that while its
participants generally insist on the subordinate status of women within social life, the
movement itself has been more open to women’s participation than have other currents
of the broader Islamic revival.
6. My own discussion of the Islamic public sphere overlaps with Armando Salva-
tore’s (1998) at numerous points, especially in his exploration of the interlinkages be-
tween the ethical and deliberative aspects of this sphere. Where our analyses differ lies
in Salvatore’s greater emphasis on the techniques and practices of mass publicity, and
particularly styles of media commoditization and consumption, as enabling conditions
for the emergence of this sphere. Also, for an insightful analysis of the market in Islamic
commodities in Cairo, see Starrett 1995.
7. A comparison can be drawn here to the Turkish government’s decision to forbid
the reading of the Quran in schools: the worry is that such training will orient school-
children favorably to projects that would challenge the secular basis of the state and its
goals of Europeanization.
8. The Egyptian state, it should be mentioned, has established its own institutions

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