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Taswir: Vision and Imagination in Islamic Print Media
Abstract
Before the publication of Sayyid Qutb’s al-Taswir al-Fanni fi al-Qur’an al-Karim (1945), taswir simply meant “to photograph” or “to film”—in its technical sense of recording an image. Aesthetic Representation developed a sense of taswir as an Islamic mode of representation, an aesthetics creating a sensory imagination (al-takhayyil al-hissi) and an affective logic (mantiq wijdani) that function as embodiments (tajsim) of the Qur’an (Qutb 1945, 62, 183). But taswir also came to denote a kind of Islamic weltanschauung, an Islamic way of seeing cultivated through Islamic modes of representation. New senses of taswir have proliferated with the expanding Islamic publishing industry (see Muhriz 1962; Sidqi 1968; Sharaf 1969; `Ukasha 1977; Muhammad 1980; Abu Musa 1980; Raouf Ezzat 1995; Raouf Ezzat 2007). Pamphlets, personal testimonies, new Qur’an exegeses, newspapers, religious tracts, theses, and other kinds of print da‘wa did battle with the presumed secularism of popular media (Baker 1995; Abu-Lughod 2004; Hirschkind and Larkin 2008; Aishima and Salvatore 2010). A critical arm of Islamic social and political movements (Gonzalez-Quijano 1998; Wickham 2002, 134–43), this industry developed new kinds of semiotic ideologies (Keane 2007, 17) promoting a specific “vision” of Islamic practices and Islamic selves. The flourishing of Islamic cultural production also signaled a kind of retreat from (or rerouting of) politics as the sphere proper for the cultivation of Islamic selves (Bayat 2007). Personal narratives about the “return to Islam” describe “visions” (taswir, ru’ya, basar) that are physical and spiritual means of embodying a “passion” (‘ishq) for “a living Islam and an articulated Qur’an” (Mara`i 2004, 57,59; Mittermaier 2012). Through a textual anthropology of these testimonies, I examine the stimulation (and “awakening”) of the sensory and emotional dimensions of faith, through the aesthetic construction of conviction in the age of neoliberal expansion. These testimonies function as a kind of da‘wa in which their authors “broadcast Islam” (Hamza 1981, 34) and further circulate an Islamic taswir at the intersection of print and visual media.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Media