As an historian of Islamic law and material culture, I focus on theological responses to objects made by non-Muslims. Over the course of the twentieth century, an astonishing array of commodities and technological innovations crossed international boundaries to enter Middle Eastern markets. Muslim consumers regarded most foreign objects as irrelevant from a religious perspective. But a number of new products that Americans and Europeans perceived in a secular light provoked a religious response. In the early twentieth century, gramophones became controversial when Muslims began to play on them records of the Qur’an. Muslims knew that they needed to prostrate themselves to the ground at designated verses (sujud al-tilawa). But the idea of bowing humbly before a Talking Machine greatly disturbed them. They feared that a religious gesture that had traditionally signaled a believer’s submission to God would appear—with the machine in front—as an idolatrous act. As a result jurists faced a theological conundrum. They had to deliberate whether and if so how Muslims should use a “secular” instrument that interfered in some respects with Muslim rituals. A similar issue emerged in Saudi Arabia by the end of the twentieth century, in relation to mobile digital devices that could display the text of the Qur’an. Consumers wondered whether it was permissible to take these highly portable, pocket-sized machines to the restroom; they had scruples in particular about subjecting scripture, in this digitalized form, to ritual impurities. Their concerns gave rise to intriguing fatwas that challenge profoundly scholarly wisdom on Salafi thought. Although historians and political economists have paid significant attention to Muslim views of modernity and capitalism as abstract concepts, they have not analyzed in any depth pious responses to new material objects. And no scholar has systematically examined Salafi fatwas addressing Western objects and technological innovations. The result has been a scholarship far removed from the very material environment that gave concrete meaning to the concepts of capitalism and modernity. My research indicates a high degree of continuity in Salafi approaches to modern things over the course of the twentieth century. It shows that when they contemplated the use of new machines, Salafi legal thinkers worried greatly about ritual matters. My research also demonstrates that, instead of applying mechanically “fundamentalist” precedents to reject modern things, Salafis actually engaged in a highly creative enterprise to justify the adoption of most technological innovations while placing religious limits on proper usage.

In 1934, the Cairo textile merchants Hafiz and Muhammad Farnawani sponsored the mawlid of Husayn by organizing equestrian contests and Qur’anic recitations in `Ataba al-Khadra’ Square. Their new, modern department store on `Abd al-`Aziz Street had recently opened, with special visits by the Wafdist prime minister and other political officials. A local Egyptian journal, Ruz al-Yusuf, marveled at the way the Farnawani brothers, “Egyptians” in an occupational field dominated by foreigners and non-Muslims, set up “religious ceremonies next to nationalist ones,” thereby creating a font of “spiritual power” (the “unity of Egyptian souls”) that could support the “material power” (the “unity of their bodies”) needed in the struggle for full national sovereignty. Other modern department stores in interwar Egypt also prominently advertised an Islamic identity. The Egyptian Company for Local Products, for example, had shaykh Ma`mun al-Shinawi, rector of al-Azhar, cut its ceremonial ribbon on a new branch opening in 1948 on the chic Fu’ad Street. `Awf Department Store featured pilgrimage clothing in its elegant showrooms. Struggles over setting uniform weekly days of closure and ceremonies surrounding the annual tribute of the kiswa for the ka`ba took place alongside a more mundane integration of religious ceremony into Egypt’s cosmopolitan commercial spaces. Scholars of the modern period have documented the religiosity and Muslim identity of bazaar merchants as bulwarks of support for Islamic revolutions, must notably in the case of 1979 Iranian revolution (Keddie, Roots of Revolution; Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran), or examined Islamic religious practices in Middle Eastern suqs as “authentic” or non-modern spaces in society (Clifford Geertz, “Suq, the bazaar economy in Sefrou,” in Meaning and Order; Robert Fernea, “Suqs of the Middle East: Commercial Centers Past and Present,” in Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East). Other scholars have used legal and cultural texts to counter Weber’s claims that Islam is inimical to capitalism (Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism). Historians of Islamist movements have also briefly noted their commercial ventures (Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers). Little work has been done, however, on the religious participation of Europeanized merchants in capitalist societies such as mid-century Egypt. Using press advertisements and articles, state archives, and trade reports, this paper examines public religious practices and marketing strategies of Muslim merchants outside the suq to argue that sacred expression in interwar commercial space was more than an opportunistic marketing strategy and had an important influence on the practices of Islam.

The aim of my paper is to examine the reactions of Egyptian intellectuals around al-Azhar and the Muslim Brothers to the ideas of socialism and capitalism at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. While socialism, in the form it took under Nasser’s experiments, only emerged from 1954 onwards, capitalism and imperialism had already had a major influence on shaping the material environment in Egypt at the time. My approach is a combination of intellectual and cultural history. Besides the actual texts of authors like Muhammad al-Bahy, Muhammad al-Ghazali, al-Bahi al-Khuli or Khalid Muhammad Khalid, I am interested in the material and cultural conditions in which these texts were produced. I am particularly interested in the foundation and development of private publishing houses at the time, such as Maktaba Wahba in Cairo (founded in 1948), and beyond that in the personal relations between publishers and authors, as well as between publishers and other service providers, for example paper suppliers, printers, typographers and graphic designers. My questions to be addressed are threefold: Why did such publications only start to appear in the late 1940s? How is capitalism understood in the writings of these authors and what kind of capitalism was addressed–one that is local, translocal or international? And how did these writers react to the accusations levelled by communists and others in Egypt and elsewhere that they themselves were, in fact, defenders of the capitalist order? Scholars have researched the lives and ideas of most of these intellectuals and their institutions or associations. From the varying perspectives most of them have been portrayed as Islamists or actors within political Islam. For my part, though, I am interested in understanding them and their material conditions at a very specific moment in time–the beginning of the Cold War–and in exploring the question of what was possible for these writers and how their own perceptions of Islam were changed when confronted with ideologies and movements that at the time were vitally relevant and seemed indeed to be inescapable. Thus the writings of these intellectuals should be seen as part of a specific critique of capitalism and hence as part of a translocal history of ideas rather than only as a chapter of Islamism itself.

For observers of the oil-boom era nothing meets the eye more closely than the rapid spread of mass consumption together with manifold representations of religious devotion in public spheres and public discourses on religion. Why did the preoccupation with buying goods and services closely correspond to deepening religiosity as an idea, as part of everyday life, and as a politics? In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a search for new, local middle classness created multiple linkages between religious practice and consumption-as-social-distinction in an age of hectic cultural politics. Mass consumption facilitated Islamization through new mass media, market-inspired religious promotion, and commercialization of religious holidays, most notably Ramadan. Islamism and consumerism formed a confluence in new urban environments where construction of new shopping venues and mosques simultaneously took place. Devotion and respectability (an Egyptian male wearing white, Saudi-style jalabiyas, an Egyptian female adopting Saudi head covers) intertwined in public spheres. An Islamic revival facilitated the spread of local market-economies because it provided moral grounds and sanctioned practice for Egyptian and Saudi Arabian integration into the world economy. In Egypt, Islamic financial institutions bypassed state-owned banking system in channeling remittances and investment into the economy. In Saudi Arabia, a religious legitimizing mechanism (siyasa shar’iyya) greatly facilitated state modernization-cum-commercialization policies. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, fatwas (religious opinions), no less than commercial law, were crucial in guiding circulation of goods and services, and their use. Notably, fatwa giving institutions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were overhauled during this period. For both countries, the local press—daily newspapers and journals—constitutes an important source for contemporary debates on socio-economic transformations and Islam. I further consulted state legislation venues through which economic transitions were guided, and commodities regulated. I investigated religious opinions (fatwas) of leading religious officials as well as Islamic economics writing on consumption and consumers’ rights and duties.