Performing Piety
Singers and Actors in Egypt's Islamic Revival
In the 1980s, Egypt witnessed a growing revival of religiosity among large sectors of the population, including artists. Many pious stars retired from art, “repented” from “sinful” activities, and dedicated themselves to worship, preaching, and charity. Their public conversions were influential in spreading piety to the Egyptian upper class during the 1990s, which in turn enabled the development of pious markets for leisure and art, thus facilitating the return of artists as veiled actresses or religiously committed performers.
Revisiting the story she began in “A Trade like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt, Karin van Nieuwkerk draws on extensive fieldwork among performers to offer a unique history of the religious revival in Egypt through the lens of the performing arts. She highlights the narratives of celebrities who retired in the 1980s and early 1990s, including their spiritual journeys and their influence on the “pietization” of their fans, among whom are the wealthy, relatively secular, strata of Egyptian society. Van Nieuwkerk then turns to the emergence of a polemic public sphere in which secularists and Islamists debated Islam, art, and gender in the 1990s. Finally, she analyzes the Islamist project of “art with a mission” and the development of Islamic aesthetics, questioning whether the outcome has been to Islamize popular art or rather to popularize Islam. The result is an intimate thirty-year history of two spheres that have tremendous importance for Egypt—art production and piety.
…an invaluable contribution to the anthropology of performing piety, in general, and the study of Islamic revival and Muslim piety movement in Egypt, in particular.
This ambitious study by Dutch anthropology professor Karin van Nieuwkerk is a vital contribution to the anthropology of Islam.
Van Nieuwkerk provides a finely detailed contribution to the study of elite public cultures in the Middle Eastern and North African region. . . An inventive analysis of the circulation of taste in a fractured media environment.
Karin van Nieuwkerk is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She coordinates the research program “Islam and the Performing arts in Europe and the Middle East.” Her main publications include “A Trade like Any Other”: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt, Women Embracing Islam, Gender and Conversion in The West (ed.) and Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One. The 1980s: Celebrating Piety
- Chapter 1. Dreams, Spirituality, and the Piety Movement
- Chapter 2. Repentance, Da`wah, and Religious Education
- Chapter 3. Veiling and Charity
- Part Two. The 1990s: Debating Religion, Gender, and the Performing Arts in the Public Sphere
- Chapter 4. The Islamist (Counter)public
- Chapter 5. The Secular Cultural Field
- Chapter 6. Changing Discourses on Art and Gender
- Part Three. The New Millennium: Performing Piety
- Chapter 7. Art with a Mission and Post-Islamism
- Chapter 8. Halal Weddings and Religious Markets
- Chapter 9. Ramadan Soaps and Islamic Aesthetics
- Afterword
- Notes
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Pyramids and Nightclubs
A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers
By L. L. Wynn
Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater
Artistic Developments in the Muslim World
Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk
