Televised Tears

The practice of feigning weeping in devotional contexts, including in hortatory preaching, is closely associated in Egypt with Islamic Revivalism. It is an expression of pious humility through which worshippers pretend to cry in order to (ideally) develop the embodied capacity to shed tears in the future. Secular Egyptians tend to dismiss such weeping as insincere, but so, too, do many participants in the piety movement in a specific context: on-camera weeping. Drawing on fieldwork with Islamic television preachers and their followers in Cairo, this article explores how the mass-mediated artifice of preacherly weeping provokes expressions of religious ambivalence about an otherwise authoritative ritual practice. While televised tears facilitate the sense of intimacy that many viewers identify as key to their religious adherence, the preacher's lachrymose passion as dramaturgical enskillment coexists uneasily with the pious discipline of sincere self-cultivation. Understanding why this is so illuminates the changing criteria for ritual aptness in a mass media age.

Muslim narratives of desistance among Norwegian street criminals: Stories of reconciliation, purification and exclusion

Stories about sin, regret and forgiveness are fundamental in Islam and other world religions. Islamic revivalism mediates a redemption narrative tailored to street criminals who want to break with the cycle of stigmatization, imprisonment and violence. Drawing on so-called conversion narratives, this article examines the repertoire of such stories among male street criminals in Norway who turn, or ‘return’, to Islam. I have identified three narrative types: reconciliation, purification and exclusion. I explore the content of these stories and the work they do for tellers and their audiences. Arguably, these narrative types represent forms of desistance that open up and restrict particular paths into Islam and out of street crime.

THE POLITICS OF POPULAR ISLAM: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF ISLAMIC REVIVALISM IN PAKISTAN

In the post-9/11 scenario, the rise of the Taliban and their coalition with Al-Qaeda have engendered new discourses about Islam and Pakistan. In this paper, I present a multi-sited ethnography of Bari Imam, a popular Sufi shrine in Pakistan while re-evaluating certain suppositions, claims and theories about popular Islam in the country. Have militarization, Shariatisation, and resurgence movements such as the Taliban been overzealously discussed and presented as the representative imageries of Islam? I also explore the Sufi dynamics of living Islam, which I will suggest continue to shape the lives and practices of the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims. The study suggests that general unfamiliarity of people outside the subcontinent with the Sufi attributes of living Islam, together with their lack of knowledge of the varieties of identification, observance and experience of Islam among Pakistanis, limit not only their understanding of the land of Pakistan, but also their perception of its people and their faith (Islam).

Islamic Revivalism in Indonesia: The Caliphate, Sharia, NKRI, Democracy, and the Nation-State

This research examines Indonesian Islamic revivalist movements’ perspectives on the concepts of the nation-state and democracy. The Islamic revivalist movements studied in this research include Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI), Front Pembela Islam (FPI), Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI), and Forum Umat Islam (FUI). Following the fall of the authoritarian Suharto’s regime in 1998, Indonesia witnessed an escalation of Islamic activism whose goals revolve around the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law) and, to a certain extent, the reestablishment of a caliphate (transnational Islamic state). To this end, revivalist movements have been staging frequent mass protests, mainly addressing Indonesian government policies that are deemed un-Islamic. Some of the protests have ended violently, which implies that their Sharia and Islamic state goals have become a source of conflict in Indonesian society. This research suggests that this violent activism stems from different versions of the concept of the nation-state and democracy, which disagree with broadly accepted definitions. This research was conducted against this backdrop to analyze each movements’ perspectives on the concept of nation-state and democracy and argues that, despite each movement advocating the implementation of Sharia, their understandings of the concepts of the nation-state and democracy differ.