Tahrir Square during the 18-day uprising that ousted Mubarak has become mythologized as the incarnation, however transient, of a “New Egypt.” For Egypt’s al-duah al-gudud (the new preachers) Tahrir was not just a site a political protest – it was a site of moral redemption, even godliness. Against the back-drop of continuing protests, these preachers and the media makers who produce their television programs aim to cultivate in viewers the “spirit of Tahrir” through a focus on the ethical dispositions and affective attachments generative of the “New Egypt.” Grounded in an ethnography of production practices at Iqraa, the world’s first Islamic satellite channel, this paper shows how “dreaming” is seen as both constitutive and reflective of the “New Egypt” by Islamic media producers and how the cultivation of the ability to dream (for Egypt) among viewers depends on a specific exploitation of the technological and pleasure-producing possibilities of television in a way seemingly ignored by Salafi preachers. Indeed, Iqraa media producers express deep dissatisfaction with the dominant media products of the Salafi dawa movement. In their view, Salafi media productions work to confirm, rather than subvert, secular stereotypes of Islamic media (and by extension of piety itself) as boring, depressing, constraining, unimaginative, and mediocre. In tandem, for many viewers watching Iqraa and eschewing Salafi television channels and preachers serves as a means of social distinction, marking them as more attuned to the task of “rebuilding Egypt” than other Muslims with different preferences. Such appraisals enfold new regimes of value about what religiosity is, and what forms of affect, sociality, and political participation its cultivation should call into being. This paper thus aims to show how practices of Islamic television production and consumption have become key sites for wider struggles over competing visions of citizenship and nation-ness.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s incitements to create Islamic Republics across the Muslim world followed his triumph in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and shortly thereafter, Hezbollah was created in both Iran and Lebanon. Since then, Iran’s close ties to the post-2003 Iraqi political elite have created the rise and threat of the so-called “Shi’i Crescent,” with much policy talk in Washington, D.C. about the direct and perceived threats to American. Missing from these alarmist accounts however, are grounded studies of how political Shi’i groups in Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain actually produce and circulate media, in their efforts to expand their reach through the creation of an “imagined community” despite differences in language. Through an ethnographic account of media producers in Iran’s Hezbollah, I focus on the creation and distribution of a new mini-series of Musa Sadr’s life aimed at both Iranian and Lebanese audiences. Produced by Hezbollah in Iran, with financial backing from Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia, I examine the social practices of media production in Iran directed at retaining support of a revolutionary regime at home, as well as across Shi’i communities in Arab countries. This research looks at how the popular figure of Musa Sadr is repurposed during the Arab Spring and how the notion of a Shi’i “Islamic Revolution” is restaged in a variety of cultural domains.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of calls for regulating ifta’ in the Muslim world. A specific diagnosis appears today to be almost universally shared: the multiplication of fatwas in the public sphere has led to a “chaos”, causing perplexity among believers and constituting one of the major quandaries facing the ummah. A wide range of solutions targeting the state, religious institutions, media practitioners, and the Muslim community have been proposed. The problem nevertheless seems so intractable that the question increasingly asked is not how to regulate the production of fatwas, but whether regulation is at all possible in today’s media-saturated world. Drawing on a variety of sources (from the proceedings of international fiqh conferences to religious talk shows), and reading them in light of anthropological scholarship on media, religion and politics, this paper makes two main arguments that seek to complicate the narrative of chaos. First, it argues that the narrative conflates a number of different phenomena, including the reflexive circulation of discourse within publics, shifting conceptions of knowledge and authority, the impact of new media technologies, the logics of the marketplace, the politicization of the fatwa, the regulation of deviant juvenile religiosities. These phenomena, however, are governed by incommensurable sets of assumptions regarding the performativity of ethical speech, the agency of Muslim subjects, and the proper relation between religion and politics. Second, the paper proposes to see the urgency underlying current calls for regulating ifta’ as the result of a distinctively modern understanding of the functions of the fatwa itself. I argue that the discourse of chaos presupposes the secular temporality of the modern nation-state, and suggest that efforts to regulate the production of fatwas must ultimately be placed in the context of a secular imperative of clarity – an imperative that continually problematizes the fatwa and its mode of inhabiting the interstitial spaces between the legal, the ethical, and the political. Despite these shortcomings, the narrative of chaos cannot be dismissed because it has become the basis of much public deliberation throughout the Arab world, shaping debates about the threat of international terrorism, the legitimacy of popular uprisings, or the reform of religious and educational institutions. In conclusion, I suggest how we might trace more precisely the performative effects of this discourse, the ambivalence of the media ecology upon which it depends, and the reconfiguration of pious subjectivity that it enables.

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.

In Post 9/11 Afghanistan, debates about women’s rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam are part of the fabric of local and international development efforts to “nation-build”. The medium at the heart of the most public and politically charged debates, instigating often violent cultural contestations and clashes between “Islamists”, “moderates”, and others, is television. Enabled mostly by the international donor community and transnational media corporations, Afghanistan is experiencing a surge in new media creation with dozens of new television and radio stations, hundreds of publications, a fledgling internet infrastructure, and mobile telephone companies. After nearly a decade of the Taliban’s strict ban on media except their own Sharia radio, a vibrant though fragile public sphere has emerged in Afghanistan to provide people with a platform to talk back to local conservative groups and the international community. Afghan television producers face a range of constraints, threats, violence, and regimes of censorship for providing this platform for debate. Like the people of Afghanistan, they are caught between warring ideologies and political economies that range from “Islamist” to commercial to “developmentalist.” In this paper through content analysis of television programming, reception, and production studies, I will explore the complex ways that religion and religious experience are understood and practiced in Afghanistan.