‘The piety of the gift’: Selfhood and sociality in the Egyptian Mosque Movement

Abstract

This article asks what is achieved in Muslim piety movements in Cairo by reciting, listening to and discussing the Quran, by sermonizing, and by mutual moral exhortation and admonishment. I argue that what is at stake for Egyptian pietists is not only self-formation (the Foucauldian perspective privileged by Mahmood 2005), but also the achievement of a non-secular sociality. For participants in the movement, virtue is constituted primarily through social exchange and interaction (mu‘aamalaat) rather than simply through worship (‘ibaadaat) or ritual practices that discipline the self. This suggests the need to go beyond Foucauldian conceptions of ethics as self-formation. In order to understand the sociality of the contemporary piety movements in Egypt analysed by Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006), I propose a metaphor borrowed from economic anthropology: the ‘gift economy’. I characterize contemporary Egyptian piety movements as gift economies by reference to the circulation of words rather than material goods. The advantages of the ‘words as gifts’ metaphor are threefold. First, it emphasizes the way in which virtue, for Egyptian pietists, is constituted through transaction and exchange rather than through individual worship. Second, it directs attention to the ideology of language in Egyptian piety movements, whereby ethical communities form around and through the efficacy of the Quran and language that recalls the example of Prophet Muhammad. Third, it reflects the way in which urban piety movements in Egypt constitute themselves in conscious opposition to a notion of secularism (‘almana) which is associated with a commodity economy of goods, words and images experienced as morally and socially corrosive.