In this article, I focus on the practice of listening to tape-recorded sermons among contemporary Muslims in Egypt as an exercise of ethical self-discipline. I analyze this practice in its relation to the formation of a sensorium: the visceral capacities enabling of the particular form of Muslim piety to which those who undertake the practice aspired. In focusing on both the homiletic techniques of preachers and the traditions of ethical audition that inform the contemporary practice of sermon listening, I explore how sermon listeners reconstruct their own knowledge, emotions, and sensibilities in accord with models of Islamic moral personhood. Normative models of moral personhood grounded in Islamic textual and practical traditions provide a point of reference for the task of ethical self-improvement, [embodiment, senses, disciplinary practice, reception, media, sermons, Islam] American Ethnologist 28(3):623-649.

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In this essay, I want to follow out one line of inquiry into secularism and the secular opened up—if in different ways—by the pioneering works of William Connolly and Talal Asad: namely, the extent to which the development of secularism has historically entailed—among its various dimensions—a unique configuration of the human sensorium. For both of these scholars secularism must be approached, not simply through the doctrine of separation of church and state, not through the sociology of social differentiation and religion decline, but, rather, in terms of the cultivation of the distinct sensibilities, affects, and embodied dispositions that undergird secular forms of appraisal and practice. In my discussion, I ask, what answers do we find in the work of these two scholars to the question, What is a secular body?, and what might these answers—or refusals to answer—tell us about the practical and conceptual contours of the secular and secularism? [secularism, body, sensorium, affect]

Since the rise of modernization theory in the 1960s up through present concerns with globalization, a growing body of anthropological and sociological scholarship has explored the impact of modern media technologies on religious practice. Scholars have frequently approached this topic in terms of a polarity between what are assumed to be two contradictory processes: the deliberative and the disciplinary. Analyses focusing on the deliberative aspect have emphasized the possibilities of argument, contestation, and dialogue that have been afforded by the advent of universal modern literacy, the diffusion of printed texts, and the operation of electronic mass media. 1 Following conventional histories of the Protestant revolution, this scholarship has given particular emphasis to the role of print and other media technologies in propelling a democratization of religious authority. The new object-like quality of religion and the universal accessibility of religious texts, it is argued, transform ritual speech into individual assertion, oral mnemonics into analytical memory. Equipped with these newly found sophistications and the autonomous reasoning that they facilitate, a growing number of individuals engage with and revise the religious traditions they have inherited.Scholars emphasizing the disciplinary functions of religious media, on the other hand, have stressed the ideological over the dialogic aspects of the phenomenon. 2 Media technologies, in this view, enable an extension of an authoritative religious discourse. The resultant public is less a sphere of discussion than one of subjection to authority, part of a project aimed at promoting and securing a uniform model of moral behavior. In short, the public arena constituted by the media practices of religious actors tends to be identified either as a deliberative space of argument and contestation between individuals or as a normative space for education in community-oriented virtue. The assumption is that the more truly deliberative a public is, the weaker its disciplinary function, and vice versa. This way of framing the inquiry reflects, in part, a tendency within liberal thought to view the individual as necessarily in conflict with the community and the forms of collective discipline that undergird it.Cultural AMhrvpology 16(l):3-34.In this article I want to rethink this polarity between deliberative and normative models through an interrogation of the practices of public sociability tied to the production and consumption of "cassette-sermons" in Egypt. In Cairo, where I conducted fieldwork for two years, cassette-recorded sermons of popular Islamic preachers, or khutaba 1 (sing, kha(lb), have become a ubiquitous part of the contemporary social landscape. The recorded voices of these orators can be heard to echo from within cafes, butcher shops, private homes, and most forms of public transportation throughout the city. Beyond its use as a form of pious entertainment, taped-sermon audition in Egypt has become a popular technique for the cultivation of Isla...

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