Browse

Building a House in Heaven uses Islamic charity as a lens through which to understand the relations between the economy, state and religion in Mubarak era Egypt. My approach links questions of governance, authority, economy and polity with questions of identity, subjectivity and ways of knowing. The first geographical account of its kind, it considers how Islamic associations enact Islamic economic practices and how these practices changed relations between the state, voluntary and private sectors. I explore the practices of Islamic charities and their associated sites, neighborhoods, ideology, sources of funding, projects, and broad social networks. Throughout the book, I map the landscape of charity and development in Egypt, moving back and forth between ethnographic stories of specific organizations and reflections on patterns across the sector. I chart numerous factors that changed the nature of Egyptian charitable practices including: the state’s intervention in social care and religion, an Islamic revival, political economic trends that intensified economic pressures on the poor, and the emergence of the private sector as a key development actor.

This book represents the first scholarly engagement with shababiyya, the genre of popular music that dominates consumption in the Arab world in general and Egypt in particular. This genre is hugely popular among the contemporary youth generation of Egypt, yet scorned and ignored by their elders and scholars alike. The book analyzes the changing trends in musical tastes in Egypt over the last fifty years, and reveals a shift in the underlying aesthetic criteria of music reception that influences, among other things, the kind of political rhetoric to which these youth are receptive. The book is the most thickly ethnographic study to date of the relationship between mass-mediated popular music, modernity, and nationalism in the Arab world. The book is the first of its kind to be based upon sustained ethnographic research among a large number of youthful music listeners in the Arab world. It is also one of the earliest anthropological monographs to be published based on ethnographic research conducted amid the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The book is targeted primarily at cultural anthropologists, but also to other social scientists who study the Middle East and the Arab world.