The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (review)

Hirschkind studies cassette sermon listening in Cairo using an anthropological perspective, which attends to how the senses are prerequisites for ethical-political reasoning and its outcomes. The current Islamic Revival manifests this process. He argues that cassette media affect the emotions, moods, receptivity and awareness of their audience; they are not simply a means of disseminating ideas or implanting religious ideologies. Over the past 30 years, the circulation of cassette media and their nourishment of the sensory knowledge and propensities that accompany a renewed concern with Islam have created a phenomenon which pervades the neighborhoods of lower-middle and lower-class residents and are particularly attractive to young people. Cassette sermon listening has created an Islamic counter-public that debates and argues the complexities of devout, pious and ethical traditions as they confront increasingly secular perspectives in everyday life.

The book has multiple aims. It makes a case that scholars' grasp of the moral and religious cultivation of the self through sensory experience is important to understanding individuals' articulation with the public sphere in contemporary Egypt. In particular, it pays attention to hearing and critically assesses the cultural ascendancy of knowledge which is derived from sight over that derived from hearing, an ascendancy which occurred during the Enlightenment and has been described by the Frankfurt School's Walter Benjamin. The book critiques notions that Islamic cassette sermons are tools for fundamentalist and militant messages. Even though the cassettes have political content, such as critiquing a nationalism that lacks democracy and favors a ruling elite, they are not simplistic propaganda. Also, this monograph advances explanations that are linked to philosophical and social literature on the authority of tradition and the senses and to postmodernist emphases on the importance of mass media and of discourse. It applies concepts of collective existence from Hanna Arendt, of lifeworld and communicative action from Jurgen Habermas, and of the structures of knowledge that inform and shape political life from Foucault and French structuralists who, like Hirschkind, critique binary conceptualizations. Finally, it challenges Western dispositions toward Islam that are part of a long-standing traditional of both scholarly and popular exchanges that suggest that Muslim practices and doctrines are somehow lesser or substandard.

Hirschkind's methodology involved immersing himself in the study of the rhetorical styles of sermons, and the process was guided through his interaction with knowledgeable khatib, as well as other local people. Descriptions of their discussions revealed not only how they evaluated content but also how the quality of the speakers' attitudes and voices influenced listeners' responses. These descriptions are high points of the monograph. They appear at critical junctures throughout the manuscripts and serve to validate Hirschkind's interpretations as well as inform them.

Another strong contribution is the recounting of the growth over 30 years of the significance and pervasiveness of the cassette sermon. During portions of the 1960s and 1970s, taped sermons reproduced the traditional Friday sermons for popular consumption. The 1970s marked a growing independence of the taped sermons from the presentations in mosques and ushered in an oratorical style that was attuned to the preferences of modern listeners. The sermons became a force in the expansion of Islamic argumentation and deliberation among Egyptian Muslim citizens and created an "Islamic counterpublic."

Hirschkind decomposes sermons into their component rhetorical elements and aural renditions into the rudiments which constitute them, drawing on theories of rhetoric. In so doing, he illustrates that how the Islamic Revival is a contingent and shifting set of ideas and practices or arguments, debates and disagreements in which participants frequently engage. For example, Leading Islamic Revival figures are not constant nor are their positions consistent over their lifecourses. The question of relationships with Egypt's Coptic Christian minority is addressed in numerous ways by various Islamic political parties and ordinary citizen groups. Whereas once the da'wa movement was a quietist form of Islam distinct from political Islam as described by Oliver Roy and others, it has emerged as an ethical standpoint from which...