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Yasmin Moll

University of Michigan, Anthropology, Faculty Member

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University of Michigan

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California State University Long Beach

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Papers by Yasmin Moll

Televised Tears: Artifice and Ambivalence in Islamic Preaching

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2021

The practice of feigning weeping in devotional contexts, including in hortatory preaching, is clo... more 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 criterial for ritual aptness in a mass media age.

The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2020

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Sau... more The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world's first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of "Islamic media" (al-i'lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

TELEVISION IS NOT RADIO: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

Cultural Anthropology, 2018

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers i... more What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

Subtitling Islam: Translation, Mediation, Critique

Public Culture, 2017

Egyptian translators working at Iqraa—the world’s first Islamic television channel—use a variety ... more Egyptian translators working at Iqraa—the world’s first Islamic television channel—use a variety of strategies in subtitling Arabic-language preaching programs into English. These translators see their task as twofold: to act as “cultural mediators” responsible for countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims, on the one hand, and, on the other, to transmit as “preachers by proxy” correct and relevant religious knowledge to viewers when, at times, the Arab preachers they subtitle fail to do so. Translators feel authorized to contest through subtitles both external representations of Islam and internal interpretations of divine intent. Far from being just exercises in interlingual equivalence, subtitling is a form of moral critique motivated by both postcolonial and theological imperatives. These acts of translation, and their internal debate at Iqraa, exceed the familiar Euro-American antimony of fidelity and betrayal.

The Moral Economy of Islamic Television: Panic and its Perils

POMEPS Studies 23

Divine cosmopolitanism: a reply

Media, Culture and Society

Special issue on media and religion for Media, Culture & Society: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content... more

Islamic Feminism Between Interpretive Freedom and Legal Codification: The Case of Sisters in Islam in Malaysia

This article explores the epistemological assumptions of Islamic feminist discourses. Using the M... more This article explores the epistemological assumptions of Islamic feminist discourses. Using the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam (SIS) as a case study, I argue that the hermeneutical strategies and activist methodologies of SIS partake in the same objectifying rationalities of the Malaysian state when it comes to Islamic jurisprudence. While the political labor performed by SIS in contesting patriarchal norms from within a religious frame is important, this labor is made possible by the changing relations of knowledge and power that enable Qur'anic interpretation to be conceptualized as a matter of individual rights. At the same time, such feminist claims and strategies take for granted the interpretive closure introduced by the codification of Islamic law in the modern period. Islamic feminism, far from "reclaiming" an "uncorrupted" Islamic tradition, redefines the very epistemological basis of this tradition through advocating new ways of reading and relating to the Qur'anic text.

The Wretched Revolution

Middle East Report

“We live in a country where liberals renege on democracy, Islamists harm Islam and human rights a... more

Islamism beyond the Muslim Brotherhood

Immanent Frame , 2014

The “secularism versus Islamism” narrative is a political one—it performs important legitimizing... more The “secularism versus Islamism” narrative is a political one—it performs important legitimizing labor for a plethora of social actors in Egypt, from the Brotherhood to deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak’s allies and both liberal and leftist activists alike. It is, however, of very limited analytical utility in making critical sense of what is actually at stake in the current impasse for the many Egyptians who do not subscribe to a secularized conception of government, yet whose religiosity cannot be conflated with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Islamic Televangelism: Religion, Media and Visuality In Contemporary Egypt

arabmediasociety.com

“Beyond Beards, Scarves and Halal Meat”: Mediated Constructions of British Muslim Identity

http://www.utpjournals.com/Journal-of-Religion-and-Popular-Culture.html

There is an emerging identity discourse among young British Muslims in the twenty-first century t... more There is an emerging identity discourse among young British Muslims in the twenty-first century that strives to create a space for itself in the public sphere beyond both assimilation and isolation. Its articulators seek to affirm their Islamic identity within its Western context and through interaction with it, re(defining) and (re)constructing in the process what it means to be British as well as to be Muslim. An important way in which such redefinitions take place is through British Muslim particularistic media. Through a critical analysis of the content of two British Muslim magazines, this article examines the way in which these media construct an identity open to the possibility of multiple ways of simultaneously being Western and being Muslim.

"We Are All Egyptian"

What Does Democracy Look Like: Religion and Secularism in the Pew Poll Results on Egypt

Cairo Review of Global Affairs

What Egyptians want, above all, is an Egyptian democracy. For many of them, this means a democrac... more

Televised Tears: Artifice and Ambivalence in Islamic Preaching

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2021

The practice of feigning weeping in devotional contexts, including in hortatory preaching, is clo... more 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 criterial for ritual aptness in a mass media age.

The Idea of Islamic Media: The Qur'an and the Decolonization of Mass Communication

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2020

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Sau... more The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world's first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of "Islamic media" (al-i'lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

TELEVISION IS NOT RADIO: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival

Cultural Anthropology, 2018

What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers i... more What makes media “Islamic”? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Islamic television producers in Cairo, this article looks at the passionate contention within Egypt’s piety movement over the development of new forms of religious media. I suggest that at stake in these mass-mediated debates over da‘wa (Islamic outreach) are conflicting theologies of mediation that configure the boundaries of the religious and the secular differently. This God-talk matters greatly to Islamic revivalists, who spend more time debunking each other than they do secularists. Attention to these internal critiques foregrounds the competing moral conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate Egypt’s Islamic Revival. Indeed, focusing on the piety movement’s internal fractures as God-talk allows for an ethnographic engagement with how Muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power. This focus, in turn, complicates the stakes of anthropological judgment.

Subtitling Islam: Translation, Mediation, Critique

Public Culture, 2017

Egyptian translators working at Iqraa—the world’s first Islamic television channel—use a variety ... more Egyptian translators working at Iqraa—the world’s first Islamic television channel—use a variety of strategies in subtitling Arabic-language preaching programs into English. These translators see their task as twofold: to act as “cultural mediators” responsible for countering perceived Western stereotypes about Muslims, on the one hand, and, on the other, to transmit as “preachers by proxy” correct and relevant religious knowledge to viewers when, at times, the Arab preachers they subtitle fail to do so. Translators feel authorized to contest through subtitles both external representations of Islam and internal interpretations of divine intent. Far from being just exercises in interlingual equivalence, subtitling is a form of moral critique motivated by both postcolonial and theological imperatives. These acts of translation, and their internal debate at Iqraa, exceed the familiar Euro-American antimony of fidelity and betrayal.

The Moral Economy of Islamic Television: Panic and its Perils

POMEPS Studies 23

Divine cosmopolitanism: a reply

Media, Culture and Society

Special issue on media and religion for Media, Culture & Society: http://mcs.sagepub.com/content... more

Islamic Feminism Between Interpretive Freedom and Legal Codification: The Case of Sisters in Islam in Malaysia

This article explores the epistemological assumptions of Islamic feminist discourses. Using the M... more This article explores the epistemological assumptions of Islamic feminist discourses. Using the Malaysian group Sisters in Islam (SIS) as a case study, I argue that the hermeneutical strategies and activist methodologies of SIS partake in the same objectifying rationalities of the Malaysian state when it comes to Islamic jurisprudence. While the political labor performed by SIS in contesting patriarchal norms from within a religious frame is important, this labor is made possible by the changing relations of knowledge and power that enable Qur'anic interpretation to be conceptualized as a matter of individual rights. At the same time, such feminist claims and strategies take for granted the interpretive closure introduced by the codification of Islamic law in the modern period. Islamic feminism, far from "reclaiming" an "uncorrupted" Islamic tradition, redefines the very epistemological basis of this tradition through advocating new ways of reading and relating to the Qur'anic text.

The Wretched Revolution

Middle East Report

“We live in a country where liberals renege on democracy, Islamists harm Islam and human rights a... more

Islamism beyond the Muslim Brotherhood

Immanent Frame , 2014

The “secularism versus Islamism” narrative is a political one—it performs important legitimizing... more The “secularism versus Islamism” narrative is a political one—it performs important legitimizing labor for a plethora of social actors in Egypt, from the Brotherhood to deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak’s allies and both liberal and leftist activists alike. It is, however, of very limited analytical utility in making critical sense of what is actually at stake in the current impasse for the many Egyptians who do not subscribe to a secularized conception of government, yet whose religiosity cannot be conflated with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Islamic Televangelism: Religion, Media and Visuality In Contemporary Egypt

arabmediasociety.com

“Beyond Beards, Scarves and Halal Meat”: Mediated Constructions of British Muslim Identity

http://www.utpjournals.com/Journal-of-Religion-and-Popular-Culture.html

There is an emerging identity discourse among young British Muslims in the twenty-first century t... more There is an emerging identity discourse among young British Muslims in the twenty-first century that strives to create a space for itself in the public sphere beyond both assimilation and isolation. Its articulators seek to affirm their Islamic identity within its Western context and through interaction with it, re(defining) and (re)constructing in the process what it means to be British as well as to be Muslim. An important way in which such redefinitions take place is through British Muslim particularistic media. Through a critical analysis of the content of two British Muslim magazines, this article examines the way in which these media construct an identity open to the possibility of multiple ways of simultaneously being Western and being Muslim.

"We Are All Egyptian"

What Does Democracy Look Like: Religion and Secularism in the Pew Poll Results on Egypt

Cairo Review of Global Affairs

What Egyptians want, above all, is an Egyptian democracy. For many of them, this means a democrac... more