Performing Piety

Abstract

Anthropologist Karin van Nieuwkerk’s latest book-length study addresses thephenomenon, widely discussed in Egyptian media since the 1990s, of celebratedsingers, actors, and dancers who withdraw from their professions to liveaccording to what they believe are Islamically sound principles. The author of“A Trade Like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1995), van Nieuwkerk draws on experience andcontacts from over two decades of research. But this project, as well as its subjectsand issues, presents new challenges for the ethnographer.Each of the three main sections describes the trends of a particular decade.The first wave of famous women to retire began in the late 1980s, and thusthe first section focuses on the shared rhetorics, ideologies, and activities of“repentant” artists. From the beginning, artists cannot be read as simply adoptingwholesale Salafist ideologies, since their personal turning points bore asmuch influence from “popular” or “Sufi” religiosity as from the “rationalist”tendencies of Islamists (p. 30). In the early 1990s, as retirements peaked,Egyptian media became central to both celebrities’ and fans’ understandingof this new trend. In this section, the author focuses on debates over secular(ist)aesthetics and changing discourses on women’s participation in public life.Two generations of preachers offer different rationales for women’s retirementsor re-entry into art, reflecting the sea change incited by a generation ofMuslim Brotherhood-allied “lay preachers” such as Amr Khalid during the1990s.The 2000s are depicted as a time of experimentation. Some veiled womenchoose to return to entertainment on their own terms; their productions caterto a growing market for entertainment that reflects elite consumption habitsand piety, overcoming a longstanding association of overt piety with impoverishedCairenes and villagers. Noting other authors’ commentaries and terminology,van Nieuwkerk follows Asef Bayat in calling this market“post-Islamist” – explicitly pious but unconnected to an Islamist dream of remakingthe state (p. 203). I particularly appreciated how her insights into thesimultaneous influence of American and Gulf consumer culture dislodge easyreadings of globalization as synonymous with Americanization (pp. 227-28).The full sweep of all three sections provides a cultural history of the Islamic ...