May 2021
Edward Escalon Jr, Agnes Mondragon & Matthew Gordner
Interview with Dr. Yasmin Moll
Edward Escalon Jr: Starting off, we like to do this exercise with scholars because we live in the world wrought by social media: if you had to describe your work in 280 characters or less, what would you say?
Yasmin Moll: You know, although I am a media anthropologist, I am no longer active on social media and deliberately so. Imho [in my humble opinion], one of the dis-affordances of social media is the nuance necessary for scholarship. But I will play: My upcoming book examines what theological debates over new forms of Islamic media in Egypt reveal about the fraught intersections of ethics, politics, and aesthetics in an age at once authoritarian and revolutionary. That’s 185 characters if you are counting.
Agnes Mondragon: Staying with this topic, from your articles “Subtitling Islam” and “Television is Not Radio” we get a sense of the role media forms play in producing novel ways of thinking about, and partaking in, religious life. Can you tell us more about how these themes figure in the book you are writing?
Yasmin: Over the past decade we have seen protest movements fighting for democracy and social justice and against state violence galvanize ordinary people around the world. From the so-called Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, media technologies are central to these struggles. Similarly, activists across religious traditions see media as vital to their own efforts to create alternative futures. The aims of these movements may seem antithetical: emancipatory and creative on the one hand and constraining and conforming on the other. My book shows how this is not necessarily the case. Focusing on Islamic television preaching, The Revolution Within unpacks how religious media became a key site of advocacy for a revolutionary “New Egypt.” This democratic activism was shaped by a broader religiously-reasoned critique of actually existing Islamism and Salafism, the two dominant orientations of the Arab religious right, as well as of secular liberalism, the default orientation of middle-class progressivism in the region.
Ethnographically, the book is based on fieldwork at Iqraa, the world’s first self-declared Islamic television channel. Launched in 1998 in Saudi Arabia and Egypt by a prominent media mogul, Iqraa promotes a “centrist Islam” (Islam wasati) as a bulwark against both secular Westernization and religious dogmatism. Since Iqraa’s founding, the Islamic satellite-TV sector has increased dramatically with dozens of channels competing for viewers across the Arab world and within Egypt. These include channels run by prominent Salafi preachers renowned in the 1990s for their cassette sermons. But even as Salafi channels became more popular among Egyptians in the new millennium, so too did Iqraa’s “New Preachers,” so named because their styles of performance are unprecedented within the country’s 50-year Islamic Revival. The New Preachers appropriate genres from dramatic serials to music videos to American televangelism to create novel forms of religious media at once edifying and entertaining. Straddling distinct standards of moral probity, commercial success, and sensuous pleasure, their programs aim to expand what counts as “Islamic media” and why. In doing so, they imagine themselves as struggling against the grassroots dominance of Salafi norms within the piety movement.
These revivalist rivalries acquired new salience after the 2011 uprising as the New Preachers characterized the nation’s fraught transitional period as an ethical crisis exacerbated by Salafism. For the New Preachers and their followers, both the form and content of Salafi media preclude the “revolution within” so crucial to building the “New Egypt,” exemplified for them, as for secular activists, by Tahrir Square during the famed 18-days of the revolution. My pious interlocutors imagined their own Islamic media as enabling the cultivation of a democratic ethos in subversion of what they deemed the authoritarianism of the Salafi tradition. By doing so, they called into new question the sorts of sensibilities and practices that piety entails in a time of revolutionary possibility. So I chart in the book how these theological, ethical and political differences within the Islamic Revival play out, for example, in debates over translation strategies or over whether entertainment forms like music videos and dramatic serials could be vehicles for da’wa, for pious propagation. These religious contentions over mass mediation are proxies for wider debates over competing assumptions of human flourishing, divine obligation, and social difference.
Indeed, while the diverse currents of Egypt’s Islamic Revival, as with the Islamic tradition more broadly, have been influentially analyzed as part of a coherent project of ethical self-fashioning defined by its opposition to secular liberal publics and subjects, my book zooms in on the immanent and salvific stakes of internal religious critiques of religious difference. Methodologically this calls for both renewed attention to theology’s contentious social life and to how the public, mass-mediated forms theologies take are shaped by institutional structures, individual ambitions, capricious funding sources as well as the technical and regulatory aspects of media production under a repressive political dispensation. More broadly, then, the book rethinks the stakes of anthropological critique in the study of contemporary Islam and Muslims beyond a 9-11 politics of liberal repugnance — those awful fundamentalists! — or radical redemption – but we can learn (and transform) through them!
Matthew Gordner: In your article “The Idea of Islamic Media,” you argue that Islamic media theorists aimed at an “epistemic emancipation” in mass communication that provincializes Western communication studies. Has this given rise to significant cross-cultural debates and dialogues within communication studies that you know of? If so, does this give pause to those who deem media an essentially Islamic concept?
Yasmin: I wrote this article to offer a more multi-faceted account of Iqraa as the world’s first Islamic television channel beyond the usual petro-dollar story. I wanted to take seriously the role ideas played alongside changing economic and regulatory structures in the rise of privately-funded religious television in the Arab world. We need an account of how Islamic media as a concept – a concept in search of different kinds of capital including, but not only, financial – enabled at once new understandings of Islam and of media. Indeed, treating “Islamic media” as a self-evident and stable category results in a presentism that occludes its changing stakes across time. So I excavate the neglected intellectual history of this concept through focusing on three generations of Arab media scholars with wide regional influence from the 1960s to the new millennium. Similar to academics in other emergent disciplines of the Arab postcolony, theorists of Islamic media aimed to dismantle what they saw as a particularly insidious form of neocolonial power: the power to determine the very basis of knowing. I thus make the case for taking the decolonial sixties, rather than the usual neo-liberal nineties, as the point of departure in the history of Islamic television.
But did these media scholars’ intellectual efforts ignite widespread engagement and debate among decolonizing counterparts in media and communication studies? Not really. Islamic media theory was at worst a conversational non-starter, at best a niche curiosity. This is due to secular epistemological structures of the social sciences and humanities in the Western academy that preclude the premise of divine revelation as an apt theoretical terrain.
But, still, learning about the conceptual history of Islamic media as a decolonizing project allows us to see the current moment of reckoning with domination and inequality in our knowledge production in a comparative, more critical, frame. Because I am struck by how much decolonization appears to us as a transparent term of analysis with well-defined stakes. To decolonize is to undo the epistemic racism of Eurocentric universalism and move to what Achille Mbembe calls a “pluriversity” of mutually accepting and co-present different ways of knowing. In the decolonized secular academy, all marginalized knowledge traditions, oppressed communities, and local life-ways will be privileged equally, none more equal than other. But looking at how debates over sovereignty and epistemology played out within some corners of the Arab academy shows how decolonization there, while as dedicated to provincializing Europe as secular critical theory, did not necessarily negate the very possibility of an emancipatory universalism. This has important implications for current decolonizing calls across disciplines that we need to think more carefully about lest we ironically reinscribe yet another Eurocentrism in our quest to move away from the troubling history and political present of liberal universalism.
Matt: In “The Wretched Revolution,” you provide an account of your experience in the Raba’a sit-in just after the ouster of the democratically elected Islamist Morsi government in Egypt. Some of the religious people you meet dressed and acted in ways that for many outside observers would put them in the pro-Brotherhood camp, but in fact you show how many were either wholly against the Brotherhood or only conditionally for it. This reminded me of folks that I’ve met in Tunisia who voted for Ennahdha because they believed that no other party was organized or could fight corruption just after the uprisings, but who became disillusioned with Ennahdha once they started playing politics, like most parties do — all the more so because of their religious claims. Can you talk a little bit about your methodological approach to observing these discussions and interacting with these interlocutors?
Yasmin: This piece grew out of my frustration with dominant framings of the political struggle in Egypt as one between Islamism versus secularism, especially in the lead up to the 2013 coup and after. This framing was so dissonant with how the Islamic television producers I was working with were experiencing and making sense of our country’s deep divisions during this period. So I wanted to make the case that we should not take the “Islamism versus secularism” narrative as the starting point of our analysis, but rather as its very object. And I wanted to make that argument above all ethnographically, that is through providing a vivid depiction of a small slice of that terrible, wretched, summer, which was ethically, politically and affectively the inverse of the “New Egypt” as imagined by my fieldwork interlocutors.
Since writing that piece I have thought more about the methodological attunements that the anthropological ideal of thick description demands in a context that is so contested and polarized, where people can’t even agree about who did what to whom, never mind why and with what consequence. And what I suggest in a more recent essay is that contests over both the stakes of the uprisings and what forces, material and intangible, have enabled the popular authoritarianism of the present, call for “thick descriptions of thick concepts.” Moral philosophers define ethical concepts as thick when they are at once descriptive and evaluative. Examples are courageous or cruel: these moral concepts have a substantive heft that thin evaluations like right or wrong lack. They tell us something about the narrated action or attitude and how we should orient toward it. From an anthropological perspective, however, the sociological unevenness and cultural contingency of thick concepts make them unsuitable for scholarly abstraction aimed at second-order understanding. But it is precisely their prismatic nature, their straddling of the descriptive and the prescriptive, that makes them ideal for ethnographic investigation focused on the process of becoming. This process calls for fine-grained attention to the knotty entwinements of expression and evaluation that constitute charged moments of social life.
In other words, understanding how a given speech-act, production or event comes to be revolutionary for some Egyptians or contested as insufficiently so by others requires being methodologically attuned to categories like the revolutionary as made, not found. Scholars frequently approach the ‘revolutionary’ as a stable referent when it is in fact a shape-shifting constellation of sensibilities, actions, and expectations. The same goes for the Islamic. We need to cultivate a greater methodological sensitivity to how descriptive parameters already implicate evaluative criteria and to how these are definitionally dependent on a binarized other, the counterrevolutionary, the un-Islamic or non-Islamic, to have social traction. Again, such criteria, and more specifically their narrative elaboration (e.g. the struggle in Egypt is a secularist-Islamist one), should be the object of our analysis, not its starting point. This methodological attunement to conceptual thickness is all the more important during this moment in Egypt when lively public thickness is flattened in the name of stability and security.
Edward: You describe yourself as a visual ethnographer. What does it mean to decenter the text — I’m thinking field notes, written ethnographies — in an academic tradition that fetishizes those things?
Yasmin: The concept of the fetish — a concept borne out of a colonialist and violent European encounter with religious, racialized, difference — aims to capture the (mis)-ascription of divinity or sacredness to “mere” materiality. In the academy the tenure book is definitely fetish-adjacent! But I don’t think written works are actually as big of a fetish for individual anthropologists as the rhetoric around publish or perish suggests. The problem is rather structural: books and peer-reviewed journal articles are often the only output seriously recognized and rewarded by existing rubrics of review and institutionalized standards of achievement for tenure and promotion.
The irony is multi-modal research outputs, especially visual ethnography, have always had a lauded place in post-war American anthropology, especially what we call “public” or “engaged” anthropology. Anthropology historically has been much more creatively collaborative than we might imagine. For example, I was rummaging a few years ago through the sales bin of my town’s local library and found this amazing set of photographs about family life around the world published in 1965 by Margaret Mead with famed photographer Ken Heyman, who took one of Mead’s courses while an undergraduate at Columbia and had no professional photography background. A NYT review acclaimed it for making “anthropology palatable for many who might never be inclined to pick up a book on the subject.” While film and photographic collaborations like these have historically predominated in visual anthropology, we are seeing a wider variety of modes of late, such as the ethnographic illustrated novels being published by university presses like Toronto. It’s a really exciting time to be an anthropologist interesting in co-creative work with, and for, an audience beyond the academy. Tenure and promotion evaluative criteria need to catch up!
Agnes: Which brings us to the last question: What new projects do you have in mind for the future?
Yasmin: I have two new projects. My previous fieldwork on how television preachers imagine moderation as a paradigmatic Islamic virtue in need of their mass publicity informs a collaborative research project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation’s program on Religion and International Affairs on The Global Politics of Moderate Islam that I am leading with the anthropologist James Hoesterey (Emory University). The trope of “moderate Islam” is central to geostrategic Western aspirations to remake the Muslim world along secular-liberal lines. But moderation is more than an external imposed construct: it is equally a theologically defined and valued, if contested, practice of religious power and ethical cultivation. Working with an interdisciplinary team of other scholars, we are interested in unpacking the social life of moderation in Egypt, Indonesia, and Morocco in both state and grassroots religious spaces. As with everyone and everything, though, the pandemic has delayed us significantly.
My other new project is an ethnographic film on Nubian cultural activism in Egypt, which is in post-production. Nubians are an internally diverse ethnolinguistic community whose historical homeland straddles the border of Sudan and Egypt. In the 1960s, they were dispossessed yet again of their land by the building of the Aswan High Dam, becoming the largest displaced population in modern Egyptian history. Based on fieldwork with Nubian activist groups in Cairo and Aswan from 2015-2019, the film visualizes the internal debates within the community over what it means to be Nubian today, over how to collectively flourish as Nubians in the future as well as how these questions relate to the marginalization of Nubian (counter)narratives in Egypt.
The stakes of this project are at once intellectual and personal. Through the film, I hope to contribute to a growing if long over-due attention to anti-black racisms in the Middle East, while adding a South-South, Afro-Arab comparative lens to critical theorizations of race and racism that take North Atlantic subordinating structures as paradigmatic. In terms of the personal, my maternal family is from the Kenuz village of Kushtmna Sharq and I grew up in Cairo identifying with the city’s Nubian community as a biracial, Arab-passing, member. (My father is a Swiss German immigrant to Egypt.) It was important for me to create the film in collaboration with community members so that it could be not only a contribution to Nubian Studies as a field, but also to the Nubian activism that precedes and energizes this knowledge production. To that end, I am PI on a Michigan Humanities Collaboratory grant Narrating Nubia with archaeologist Geoff Emberling. An ethos of co-creation informs the project, whether with our Nubian stakeholders in Egypt, Sudan and the diaspora, or with each other as ethnographers and archaeologists, faculty and students, interested in the intersections of ancient material history, heritage politics, and revolutionary activism in a global context.