Religious Fetish Revisited
I decided to blog back to back with Kiki Jr. on the same exact post she wrote. I felt that somehow something remained to be said. While Kiki Jr’s shallow pragmatism and crude materialism have the transient allure, her seemingly astute observation of religion and its role in Egyptian society remains to be critically examined.
While the sweeping wave of religiosity that swept the middle class the past ten years, often called the Amr Khaled fever, is a sociological phenomenon worthy of critical assessment a few observations (not like the ones Kiki Jr. made) can be outlined.
This “lukewarm” religiosity should be regarded as an ingenious move devised by a class dispossessed of any right or capacity to engage in any way in the public sphere.
The absolute lack of a civic sphere where people are allowed to organize and coalesce to promote and verbalize their interests and concerns created an incredible social vacuum, that could not remain placid forever.
We should marvel at the endless creative ways in which humans adapt under the most dire of conditions. Our middle class is no exception.
Faced with a police state that regulates every single perceivable activity, from books to traffic, going through food, even trees and sanitary towels, there is little anyone can do without coming heads on in confrontation with this formidable security apparatus.
What is the middle class left to do?
Egypt has a relatively young population, with a significant percent of its demographics within the age group of (20-25). This segment of the population has tremendous potential for mobilization and a police state does not go well with such peculiar demographic condition.
There comes the role of Amr Khaled, a typical middle class individual, acutely aware of his own restrictions and weary of voicing any political dissent and on he goes to fill in this vacuum by reinventing an already religious discourse and appealing to an already existing religious tendency for the largely incapacitated middle class.
While Amr Khaled is not an intellectual (his writings are amateurish at best) or an ideologue, he managed to redress the problem of civic participation, public engagement. The very reason that Amr Khaled could not (and would not) sustain a movement is the complete absence of any form of institutional and intellectual support. His discourse is not supported by any official institution, and he is not theorizing about ways in which the middle class could mobilize and fulfill their civic potential.
He rather channeled this incredible potential into minor behavioral amendments and consistent acts of charity, a mechanism that only helps to compensate for a key failing state function, the distributive function that is. Something he knew quite well the government would not oppose or harass him for.
What happened was that the dragon Amr Khaled unleashed was triggered by a very shallow discourse, that was left unsanctioned by the Azhar (the defunct orthodox institution) and ultimately he himself was persecuted by the government when he was asked to leave the country eventually.
What Kiki Jr. failed to see was that the middle class had a sustained religious tendency and expressions of piety for the past 300 years or more. What Amr Khaled did was not introduce anything new. Certain ideas or practices might have been heavily influenced by the rise of Petro-Islam and the Wahabi, puritan revival (due to matters of funding and support) but the actual orientation and social aptitude was there all the while.
Amr Khaled’s fame and mania waned because he was able to understand the zeitgeist of the middle class but he was not genius enough to invent it.
Or rather reinvent it.
I completely agree with Kiki Jr (for very different reasons though) that petty middle class religiosity is more than annoying.
Its appalling actually.
It reduces complex phenomena and ideas that evolved over 1000 years to mere mechanistic rituals and formal, meaningless expressions.
The ideas and symbols that inspired people endlessly over a millennium are trivialized and mainstreamed.
And while I am enraged by such reduction, Kiki Jr seemed to be just pissed off at the inherent contradiction between religion and “modern life”.
Kiki Jr. belongs to a generation that prides itself of being post-religion. Something even the most mighty of Western philosophers would not dare bring himself to say. (I am thinking of Derrida when he said we can never escape the metaphysics of the text. But volia, what do you know, Kiki Jr did it! Hurray for Kiki Jr and her intellectual achievement)
I myself can not bring my self to admit that. Even if my own religiosity is at odds with everything I know, I adhere to religion for cultural and psychological reasons. Only fools undermine the power of belief.
While the sweeping wave of religiosity that swept the middle class the past ten years, often called the Amr Khaled fever, is a sociological phenomenon worthy of critical assessment a few observations (not like the ones Kiki Jr. made) can be outlined.
This “lukewarm” religiosity should be regarded as an ingenious move devised by a class dispossessed of any right or capacity to engage in any way in the public sphere.
The absolute lack of a civic sphere where people are allowed to organize and coalesce to promote and verbalize their interests and concerns created an incredible social vacuum, that could not remain placid forever.
We should marvel at the endless creative ways in which humans adapt under the most dire of conditions. Our middle class is no exception.
Faced with a police state that regulates every single perceivable activity, from books to traffic, going through food, even trees and sanitary towels, there is little anyone can do without coming heads on in confrontation with this formidable security apparatus.
What is the middle class left to do?
Egypt has a relatively young population, with a significant percent of its demographics within the age group of (20-25). This segment of the population has tremendous potential for mobilization and a police state does not go well with such peculiar demographic condition.
There comes the role of Amr Khaled, a typical middle class individual, acutely aware of his own restrictions and weary of voicing any political dissent and on he goes to fill in this vacuum by reinventing an already religious discourse and appealing to an already existing religious tendency for the largely incapacitated middle class.
While Amr Khaled is not an intellectual (his writings are amateurish at best) or an ideologue, he managed to redress the problem of civic participation, public engagement. The very reason that Amr Khaled could not (and would not) sustain a movement is the complete absence of any form of institutional and intellectual support. His discourse is not supported by any official institution, and he is not theorizing about ways in which the middle class could mobilize and fulfill their civic potential.
He rather channeled this incredible potential into minor behavioral amendments and consistent acts of charity, a mechanism that only helps to compensate for a key failing state function, the distributive function that is. Something he knew quite well the government would not oppose or harass him for.
What happened was that the dragon Amr Khaled unleashed was triggered by a very shallow discourse, that was left unsanctioned by the Azhar (the defunct orthodox institution) and ultimately he himself was persecuted by the government when he was asked to leave the country eventually.
What Kiki Jr. failed to see was that the middle class had a sustained religious tendency and expressions of piety for the past 300 years or more. What Amr Khaled did was not introduce anything new. Certain ideas or practices might have been heavily influenced by the rise of Petro-Islam and the Wahabi, puritan revival (due to matters of funding and support) but the actual orientation and social aptitude was there all the while.
Amr Khaled’s fame and mania waned because he was able to understand the zeitgeist of the middle class but he was not genius enough to invent it.
Or rather reinvent it.
I completely agree with Kiki Jr (for very different reasons though) that petty middle class religiosity is more than annoying.
Its appalling actually.
It reduces complex phenomena and ideas that evolved over 1000 years to mere mechanistic rituals and formal, meaningless expressions.
The ideas and symbols that inspired people endlessly over a millennium are trivialized and mainstreamed.
And while I am enraged by such reduction, Kiki Jr seemed to be just pissed off at the inherent contradiction between religion and “modern life”.
Kiki Jr. belongs to a generation that prides itself of being post-religion. Something even the most mighty of Western philosophers would not dare bring himself to say. (I am thinking of Derrida when he said we can never escape the metaphysics of the text. But volia, what do you know, Kiki Jr did it! Hurray for Kiki Jr and her intellectual achievement)
I myself can not bring my self to admit that. Even if my own religiosity is at odds with everything I know, I adhere to religion for cultural and psychological reasons. Only fools undermine the power of belief.
Comments
http://confessions-room.blogspot.com/2008/09/religious-fetish.html