Treatments of new media, and particularly of the Internet, in the Middle East frequently stall around a restricted view of communication as message-passing, variable reception by individuals, and averaging them as ‘audience’ or, in political terms, as ‘public’ opinion that inconclusively support interpretations as technologies both of freedom and of futility. But individual data (and models of actors) capture little of how communication is more than message and impact – how it is situated, strategic, its linguistic pragmatics – and so how new media form in and as specifically public spheres, their social settings and dynamics. This paper draws on the example of Dale Eickelman’s seminal study of how modern education linked new ‘intellectual technologies’ to networks spread by mass education to take another look at the spread of new media and the publics they form. It aligns their settings in communities of practice, the strength of weak ties that extend them and the emergence of ‘textual authority’ that are cast either as informal or do not enter at all in common comparisons to mass media and likewise the freedom in new media; it briefly traces how these features of settings, networks linking them and entextualization create literally public spheres, drawing on data about Internet use (and users) surrounding the Kefaya and Arab Spring movements in Egypt that featured in the Internet’s latest iteration as social media.

Under extreme conditions, the acts of writing, witnessing, and speaking are carried on as a last resort -- not as a way to communicate among disparate audiences, but rather these are desperate gestures into the void. As innovative origins for the public sphere, this presentation considers the ways in which acts of last resort that emerge from open cemetery graves and closed prison cells resituate emerging Moroccan public spheres and plural democratic vistas. Thus, I extend anthropologists Dale Eickelman and Jon Anderson’s descriptions of “an emerging Muslim public sphere … situated outside formal state control … at the intersections of religious, political and social life.” Accordingly, the public sphere expands exponentially towards a metaphorical, imaginary, visual or even a moral space as well as an actual bounded place. I consider examples in which Moroccan political prisoners breached the confined spaces of the state-controlled cell and the cemetery through discursive, performative, and participative modalities. Focusing on the post-Hassan II historical turning point, I return to 1999-2000 when I conducted numerous interviews with Moroccan political prisoners. These encounters occurred in public spaces newly opened to overlapping communities of political prisoner associations and human rights organizations. Generations formed in prison were armed with knowledgeable analyses and organizational abilities that did indeed reach wider publics. The events of the year 1999-2000 cause me to ask: where do Moroccan claims to the public sphere about prisoner and political rights begin -- is it from inside the prison or at the cemetery, and how to document these intimate and emergent processes ethnographically? Despite regimes that criminalize all manner of cultural activities, censored literary production, and controlled sociability of cafés, Internet networks, national demonstrations, and local meetings, I discuss political prisoners’ avenues for getting the word out.

This paper discusses Dale Eickelman’s scholarly themes and approaches that have had an immense impact on the anthropology of Islam. Although studies that deal with Islamic political thought and movements in Muslim countries are extensive, Eickelman’s contribution has provided insights from ethnographic, historical and cross-cultural perspectives, facilitating comprehensive views of this critical inquiry. Eickelman’s major contribution has been to highlight the power of knowledge to better understand human societies. Eickelman has addressed the relation between knowledge and power in the sense that knowledge leads to power and power may facilitate knowledge. As his early published scholarship attests, Eickelman considers knowledge and power as central to understanding core drivers that bring about, over time, changes in religious and political authorities, ideologies, and social hierarchies in Muslim societies. Knowledge practices represented in mass education, mass communication, new technology, travel, labor immigration and globalization have great impact on the transformation of religious and political identities and authorities in the Muslim world. However, Eickelman has refuted modernization theories that propose that the process of social and economic modernization impacts religion and politics in such a way that secularism becomes dominant over religion, rendering it to a marginal status in the modern world. He has argued that religion has not lost its role, but rather has succeeded in gaining more religious commitment as education has generated political and religious awareness. This is to say that religion can change or transform without failing to be religion. What is significant here is that Eickelman has described religious activism in the political sphere as a distinctively modern phenomenon. The power of knowledge or education and Islamic reform movements have, within the historical context of the Muslim world, put pressures on the cults of saints, which are in relative decline. Educated people, independent of state authority, have been engaged in both religious and political activities. While it is true that the fragmentation of religious authority has enabled those who have generally been excluded from politics to act and to have their voices heard, the situation in the Middle East still requires greater participation of people in political life.

Interpretive Anthropology and Islam in Morocco Geertz and Eikelman compared. Abstract: The anthropological works on Moroccan society carried out by Clifford Geertz, Hildred Geertz, Lawrence Rosen, Paul Rabinow and Dale Eickelman, represent all an interpretive approach which tried to understand the nature of the Moroccan social system, and to pinpoint the mechanisms of change starting from the concepts of individuals and the cultural representations of their world view and social relationships. Geertz and Eikelman have focused more than the others on studying religious beliefs and practices as a key to understand the Moroccan social system. The purpose of our paper is to show up the main ideas and conclusions of the interpretive approach on Islam in Morocco, through comparison between the books of Geertz and Eickelman, especially Islam Observed and Moroccan Islam. Even if Eickelman rejects the idea of possible existence of an "interpretative school", of which he is a part with the others, we believe that the careful reading of their books clearly shows that what binds these two great anthropologists is much stronger than what separates them. They share a number of methods and analysis. It is true that each of these two great anthropologists of Islam, has his own style in writing and analysis, but they still share the same methods and the same ideas about Islam in Morocco, and that's exactly what we want to demonstrate in detail in this chapter.