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( one ) Dreams, Spirituality, and the Piety Movement I n this chapter, I will present the life story of former actress Shams al-Barudi. Her story exemplifies a spiritual trajectory toward a pious lifestyle in which dreams and visions play a key role. The role of visions and dreams in the pietization of everyday life more generally will be dealt with in the second section. The final section provides background information on the development of the piety movement in Egypt in the early 1980s. the Spiritual biography of actreSS ShamS al-barudi Shams al-Barudi was the first famous performer to step down and veil in 1982.1 I tried to interview her and went to the Islamic film company of her husband, Hassan Yusif. Although I had an interesting chat with Hassan Yusif ’s brother, Shams al-Barudi and Hassan Yusif were not willing to grant me an interview (for a picture of her, see the book cover shown in Figure 6.2). Later I had an introduction by actress ʿAfaf Shoʿib and spoke to Shams alBarudi on the phone. She would consider my request, but when I phoned her again she refused to be interviewed. She extensively questioned me about the theory I was going to use. The answer that my research was not about theories but about life stories of retired actresses was apparently not convincing. Later an Egyptian journalist friend explained that she and her husband did not want to speak to non-Muslims because the latter usually misunderstood and misrepresented Islam. As we will see, Shams al-Barudi and her “repentant ” colleagues were regularly attacked in the secular press. She had accordingly become rather selective about whom to grant an interview. The religious magazine al-Nur was among those selected as friendly, and dreamS, Spirituality, and the piety movement ( 23 ) she gave a lengthy interview telling her story of “guidance and repentance.” This story was printed as a booklet entitled Rihlati min al-dhulamat ila alnur / My Journey from Darkness to the Light, with an introduction by the Islamic preacher Zeinab al-Ghazali. This story circulates with some minor changes in several books.2 Besides that, there are several other interviews in newspapers and magazines, most of which are collected in the book Awraq Shams al-Barudi / The Dossier of Shams al-Barudi, compiled by Siraj al-Din (1993). I will particularly use the parts that are traceable as views and opinions of Shams al-Barudi herself. Shams al-Barudi did not object to the word “repentance ”—while some of her retired colleagues felt offended by the term— therefore I will use the word repentance without quotation marks.3 Shams al-Barudi was born in 1945, in a small village to the south of Cairo, and moved to Helwan at the age of five (Siraj al-Din 1993, 11). She described her parents as religious with a “simple ordinary form of religiosity” (al-Nur, February 10, 1998). She went to the preparatory and secondary school in Helwan . During her school career she enjoyed singing and acting, and participated in school contests (Siraj al-Din 1993, 12). After finishing her secondary school, she preferred to go to the law faculty or the Institute for Fine Arts, but the grades of her final exam did not allow for that. She entered the academy of dramatic art instead. She did not finish, because she started working before her graduation. In an interview with al-Nur that she gave shortly after her repentance, she stressed that she never dreamt of a career as an actress. She felt she was pushed into the profession, although she was also drawn to fame and glory. She explained this attraction as a lack of religious education and blamed the educational system for not teaching religion as a central topic. Shams al-Barudi briefly worked for TV and soon after featured in several films. From the late 1960s onward, she worked in about thirty films. Most of her roles are characterized as seductive, and she is compared to Marilyn Monroe .4 In 1972, she married the actor and director Hassan Yusif and worked with him. They were divorced for a few months but remarried. In interviews Hassan Yusif explained that the marital problems were related to Shams alBarudi ’s work. He was not convinced that the genre she was specialized in was a form of art (Nasif and Khodayr n.d., 59). He preferred her to stay at home, particularly after the birth of...

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