Civilizing Muslim youth: Egyptian state culture programmes and Islamic television preachers

Abstract

This article explores the similarities and differences between artist and Islamic preacher discourses on art, culture, and youth in Mubarak‐era Egypt in order to highlight the utility and limitations of current anthropological discussions of secularism and religious discursive traditions. By focusing on the shared civilizing and transformative associations of youth, art, and religion, it argues that there is an ingraining of Islamic civilizing traditions into modern governance and vice versa. Furthermore, explaining this phenomenon of ingraining requires that we give more attention to social class and geographical location, nationalism, global and national political‐economic shifts, and the complicated ways that globally circulating discourses become entangled.

Television is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

“…Echoing the criticism of Egyptian secularists—who also frame the New Preachers as “radical Islamists in sheep's clothing” (Winegar , 455)—some academic observers see this concern with aesthetics, class, and viewership as evidence of commodification. In this scholarship, New Preachers such as Amr Khaled are lambasted for promoting an “air‐conditioned Islam” or an “opium of the rich,” an ersatz “Islam‐lite” produced by a nefarious neoliberal logic (e.g., Bayat ; Haenni and Tammam ; Atia ).…”

“…By contrast, here I want to take seriously how these preachers and their affiliated producers see innovation in television da ‘ wa as a theological imperative oriented both toward this‐worldly flourishing and otherworldly salvation. To be sure, as Jessica Winegar () has argued, we need a thicker ethnographic contextualization of revivalists such as the New Preachers within changing political economies, class‐based distinctions, and urban–rural divisions if we want to rethink pious subject formation beyond the binaries of secularism and Islamism. At the same time, it is important to recall that while Islamic media is constituted, often self‐consciously and deliberately, through practices and discourses that transcend longstanding religious–secular dichotomies, pious media practitioners nevertheless take as axiomatic the possibility of creating media that is normatively Islamic, that is not itself indifferent to secular–religious distinctions.…”

“…In making this argument, I invite attention to the secular and the religious as unstable formations not only within our analytical accounts (Starrett ; Winegar ) but also within the piety movement itself. I suggest that one way to think about the “authorizing processes” (Asad , 37) through which sensibilities, practices, or beliefs, including those about media, come to be religious or secular—and what this means for how to live an Islamic life—involves recasting these as matters of continually evolving theological contention.…”

Islam and Culture: Dis/junctures in a Modern Conceptual Terrain

“…Finally, they connected it to authenticity, and, because art is generally perceived as expressing the inner nature of a community, they also had strong faith in the representative power of art for shaping a more positive image of Muslims in the larger British society. This kind of appreciation of the arts in contemporary pious Muslim life is not specific to my interlocutors but is also part of a growing trend within contemporary Islamic movements, which have begun to valorize art to various extents as conducive to strengthening Muslim subjectivities, communities, and nations (see Winegar 2014). 27…”

“…Following this understanding, self-expression for these artists is not meant to necessarily go against any structures or norms that hinder the sovereign self from expressing itself freely and spontaneously. The Islamic norms deemed authentic are incorporated into creative expression, not only because the artist feels committed to abide by them but also because culture and the arts are seen in terms of their pedagogical mission to contribute to the shaping of Muslim audiences ( da'wa ), thereby, again, enhancing and refining the pious self (see, for instance, Winegar 2014). However, my informants also believed that norms and structures could and should be critiqued through art if they contradicted the ethical norms of “authentic” Islamic tradition as they saw it, which they defined often in terms of justice and equality.…”