Performing Piety: Singers and Actors in Egypt’s Islamic Revival by Karin Van Nieuwkerk (review)

While much scholarly and popular attention in recent years has focused on the Islamic resurgence in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, very little has focused on the role of the performing arts in the fashioning of new public spheres. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among artists and performers in Cairo since the 1980s, Karin Van Nieuwkerk, an anthropologist and professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands, offers critical insights into the Egyptian piety movement through the lens of the performing arts, with a special focus on women performers who developed forms of an Islamically informed "art with a mission" (al-fann al-hadif). The result is an engaging and critically important study of the aesthetics and politics of the performing arts in contemporary Egypt.

Van Nieuwkerk arranges the text into three main parts corresponding roughly to her three fieldwork projects from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Part I, "The 1980s: Celebrating Piety," explores the phenomenon of celebrity artists who retired in the 1980s and 1990s at the outset of the Islamic piety movement, with its emphasis on individual repentance and personal spiritual development. Van Nieuwkerk weaves a fascinating tapestry of stories of female performers in Cairo, from the traditional dancers of her earliest fieldwork ¹ to movie stars who renounced their art and donned the veil to devote themselves to the Islamic project of a pious self. These performers were at the vanguard of what would in the following years become a series of retirements among star performers, generating a rich corpus of repentance literature, dream interpretation, and visionary experiences at the heart of the piety movement in Egypt. The author explores the important, if often unacknowledged role of women artists in the creation of an Islamic public sphere through discourses of repentance (tawba), Islamic education and propaganda (da‘wa), and charity and religious service.

Part II, "The 1990s: Debating Religion, Gender, and the Performing Arts in the Public Sphere," explores the consequences of the piety movement both for the emerging Islamic public sphere and for artistic practice. In the context of changes in Egyptian society in the 1990s, including such challenges as religious extremism, the growth in the number of repentant, veiled, and activist women in the public sphere challenged religious and political authorities as well as undermined secularist understandings of the role of the arts in society. Through analysis of mass media coverage of veiled celebrity artists the author advances a nuanced reading of the contradictions of religion, gender, artistic practice, and nation in the Egyptian public sphere. Her arguments complement and extend those of Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind. ²

Part III, "The new Millennium: Performing Piety," bring us to the contemporary period, a time when many repentant and veiled female performers have made comebacks to the public stage through their performance and production of pious arts. The author analyzes the contradictions of pious artists advance new forms of Islamic aesthetics that draw on the religious authority of the piety movement. Whether through the performance of religious wedding songs or Islam-themed television programming ("halal" soaps), Van Nieurwkerk reveals not only how Islam has influenced the arts, but more provocatively how pious artistic practices known as "art with a mission" have influenced Islam itself, creating what some scholars call an "Islam-lite" fit for easy consumption. Far from the grounds of traditional religious authority we see in the mass mediated public sphere of engaged pious art the tensions of an ethically informed artistic practice and an aesthetically reformulated religiosity.

An afterword explores the relevance of this study for understanding ongoing political crisis in Egypt, which postdates her field research. Van Nieuwkerk examines the fragmentation of political as well as religious and artistic authority in the context of revolutionary change, asking about the role — and limits — of pious art projects in refashioning taste in contemporary Egypt. It is a provocative and perhaps prescient statement about the continuing role of religion and performance...