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

Abstract

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…Some of the work on how people debate, contest, and control the meaning of intragroup identity and relationships focused on religion. Moll () and Kazi () worked with Islamic television shows in Cairo, Egypt, and Karachi, Pakistan, respectively, showing the complexity of Muslim engagement with Islam and the media both from the perspective of preachers and people's practices of watching TV. Their work built explicitly on the legacy of the late Saba Mahmood's transformative work on tensions between the secular and the religious as categories.…”

“…Through examination of moments of “moral failure” when certain nuns were unable to fully engage in care of disabled or elderly orphans or residents, Scherz argued that the nuns understand the “ethical subjectivity and transformation as partially dependent upon forces outside a person's control” (104), a mixture of inborn qualities and active yet mysterious and unpredictable involvement from God. Scherz thus used the unruly divine (and ideas of distributed agency more widely) as a way to “take seriously local claims” about divine agents (104; see also Moll ). In a related focus on the excesses of religiosity and ritual, Shohet (, 60) showed how the affective force of text‐artifacts used in ritual performances at funerals in Vietnam “exceeds the bounded subjunctive world fostered by ritual,” shaping possibilities for moral personhood.…”

Hearing Allah’s Call: Preaching and Performance in Indonesian Islam, by Julian Millie

“…Privileging substance would, moreover, "involve an assumption that all media forms-print media, radio, oratory, theater genres, and so on-perform an essentially similar function of conveying messages about things outside the context of the communication itself" (p. 5). Indeed, Millie convincingly shows that oratory styles are reflective of religious debates (a comparable argument has been made with regard to visual styles; see Moll 2018). However, the critique that Millie anticipates might have been be formulated in less austere and binary ways.…”

Islam

“…Islamic schools that combine traditions of religious learning with contemporary national curricula promise a spiritual moral education and knowledge towards social advancement (Hefner & Qasim Zaman 2007). Religious movements of various colourings have proven very media-savvy -some by appropriating commercial formats, others by creating parallel 'counterpublics' (Meyer & Moors 2006;Hirschkind 2006;Moll 2018). Southeast Asia is a forerunner region in the Islamization of neoliberal capitalism -and neoliberalization of Islam (Hefner 2012).…”

“…Islam as a critical engagement has inspired many anthropologists to think against the grain of secular, religious, and other assumptions. Anthropological theories about Islam have always carried acknowledged or unacknowledged theological and political sympathies and antipathies, and anthropological debates may echo theological ones (Moll 2018). But there is more space for dialogue today than there was in the past.…”