Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Michael Feener, Asia Research Institute and Department of History, NUS

ABSTRACT

In contemporary Egypt, mass mediated religious performance occupies a significant sphere of Islamic discourse. This challenges standard modes of analysing “modern Islamic thought”; modes that seek to locate the authorship of ideas solely in verbal expressions. Through an urban ethnography of Egyptian middle classes, this study demonstrates the significance of approaching Islamic intellectual fields as markets for producing specific cultural commodities, which result from dynamic interactions between public intellectuals and the way their intended audiences understand good, sound scholarship. By examining the radio recordings of ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud’s lectures on prophetic hadiths (accounts of the Prophet Muhammad, the second source of Islamic law after the Qur’an), this paper addresses the significance of looking at the performative aspects of being an intellectual in contemporary Egyptian society. The Egyptian public remembers ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78) as a Grand Imam of al-Azhar mosque-university, French trained scholar of Sufism and the radio star of the 1970s. I place these recordings of Islamic programming in the larger context of mass mediated cultural production, rather than regarding religious content as an isolated field, and approach them as a type of “classical performing arts” in the sense that they should be understood as a genre of formalised expressive culture. I argue that mastering of the formal aestheticism of Islamic scholarship as indicated by a scholar’s ability to perform “proper and sound” interpretation on a specific subject is perceived as one of the most significant elements of being an intellectual in contemporary Egyptian society.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hatsuki Aishima is a social anthropologist specializing in Islam and public culture in the contemporary Middle East. She received her MA from Kyoto University (Area Studies, 2002) and her DPhil from St Antony’s College, Oxford (Oriental Studies, 2011). Before joining the University of Manchester in September 2012, she held research fellowships at the National Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU, Osaka) and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO, Berlin). Through an urban ethnography of Egyptian middle classes, her doctoral thesis explored the roles of mass media and modern education in shaping the public knowledge, scholarly culture, and the literary tradition of Islam. She is currently in the final stage of revising it for publication as a monograph, Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt: Media, Intellectuals and Society (under contract with IB Tauris).

REGISTRATION

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