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of da"wa as part of its attempt to purge this ¤eld of currents not supportive of its mod-
ernizing policies. Numerous governmental associations operate under the rubric of
da"wa, including a college at al-Azhar University (Kulliyat al-da"wa), which was set up
in 1977 to train khutaba#, as well as more than a dozen state-af¤liated institutes of da"wa
(ma"ahud al-da"wa) aimed at nonspecialists (i.e., people who are not khutaba# by profes-
sion but wish to study Islam in order to serve the community). These efforts, however,
have failed to dislodge the popular perception that the activity of da"wa is incompatible
with the directives and policies of the state. This judgment is evident in the contrasting
appellations popularly used to distinguish preachers who categorically support govern-
ment positions from those willing to question state policy: while the former are referred
to by the more neutral designations khatib or imam, the latter are generally granted the
more commendatory status of da"iya.
9. The most thorough and interesting anthropological work on Islamic sermons are
those of Patrick Gaffney (1994) and Richard Antoun (1989).
10. For an extensive discussion of the use of cassette sermons within practices of
ethical discipline, see Hirschkind 2001, 1999.

References

Antoun, Richard. 1989. Muslim Preacher in the Modern World: A Jordanian Case Study in
Contemporary Perspective. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
al-Banna, Hassan. 1978. Five Tracts of Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949). Translated by Charles
Wendell. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eickelman, Dale. 1999. Communication and Control in the Middle East: Publication and
its Discontents. In New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, ed.
Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson, 29–40. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indi-
ana University Press.
1. 1992. Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary
Arab Societies. American Ethnologist 19 (4): 643–655.
al-Faruqi, Isma’il. 1976. On the Nature of the Islamic Da#wah. International Review of
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Gaffney, Patrick. 1994. The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt.
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Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Con-
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1. 1999. Technologies of Islamic Piety: Cassette-Sermons and the Ethics of Listen-
ing. Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.
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Mendel, Miloš. 1995. The Concept of “ad-Da "wa al-Islamiyya”: Towards a Discussion of
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50 Charles Hirschkind