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Study of modesty and public appearance among followers of different faiths in Iran; the stakes of the public/private distinction; social history of moral values in Iran since early 20th century; role of language in the emergence and constitution of modernity; vernacularization; gender, language ideology. Egypt, Iran and the Middle East
This is the project I am most involved with at the moment and one whose fieldwork is not yet complete. I begin this research with the overarching question of the meanings of modesty and ask a number of questions: How do aesthetics and morality intersect for different groups of Iranians and what has changed in this respect since early 20th century? What roles have class and gender played in negotiating the relations between piety, modesty and dress? I have found the literature on the social history of moral regulation in the West and of sumptuary laws to be quite relevant to this project. There needs to be a revisiting of this period in Iranian history that pays close attention to the long term consequences of de-cloaking-- suits, skirts and hats, as opposed to robes, turbans and veils; takes into account the effects of the technologies of photography and film (both of which came to Iran only a few years after Europe); proliferation of shops and places of leisure; and steady increases in literacy rates. Most research on hijab excludes three very important groups, men and non-Muslims, and non-believers. There are ways in which what men wear also illuminate the question of modesty. And there is no principled reason why non-Muslim views of modesty should not be researched and analyzed. In Iran, Zoroastrianism predates Islam; and Jews and Christians have been living there for a long time, the latter since the time of Cyrus (550 B.C.). How could it be that their codes, views and practices would not be relevant to Iranians’ notions of modesty.
I am interested in a series of questions with regard to different educational systems: I focus first on textbooks and their authors. What kinds of knowledge are deemed worth passing on and why? Who is the pupil imagined to be? Is she expected to play a role in the future of her society and if so how? If not, why not? What kinds of affective relations does formal education create between the pupil and the language(s) of instruction? What are the consequences of these relations for reading and writing later in life?
My work in this area is at its beginning stages. One of the questions I pursued in my recent fieldwork in Iran was on the nature of repetition in prayer. How do believers view formulaic prayers whose structures are rather rigid and which involve many repeated verses? Is this communication with God even if one is not choosing the words? Is choosing one’s own words necessary or do believers have ways of negotiating this seeming limitation? The author whose work on voice I find most promising in relation to these kinds of questions is Michel de Certeau.
I have written a great deal on the social, cultural and political complexities of the language situation in Egypt. Some of my discussions on Egypt are also applicable to other parts of the Arab world. In my book Sacred Language, Ordinary people, I try to follow the reasons for the historical refusal of allowing vernacular forms of Arabic to become written languages of their own and the consequences of this “decision”; and the varied implications of using Classical Arabic instead—a language which a majority of Arab Muslims (as well as other Muslims) believe to be the word of God and in this sense “sacred.” There is often an emphatic denial of the importance of this fact, both on the part of many secular Arab intellectuals and on the part of non-Arab scholars who dismiss such ideas without any systematic study.
* Langue, Religion et Modernité dans l'Espace Musulman. 2008. Edited with Catherine Miller. Special issue of Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM).
http://remmm.revues.org/index5997.html
* Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt. 2003. Palgrave Macmillan. Reprinted 2007.
* Structuralist Studies in Arabic Linguistics: Papers Published by Charles Ferguson 1948 1992. 1997. Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill. Co-written and co-edited with K. Belnap.
* The Sociolinguistic Market of Cair Gender, Class, and Education. 1996. London, New York: Kegan Paul International.
* The elephant in the room: Language and literacy in the Arab world. 2009. Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Edited by David Olson and Nancy Torrance. Cambridge University Press.
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521680523
* The uses and abuses of Classical Arabic. In Transeuropeennes, Vol. 23, special issue on Religions in Politics. 2003. (French-English bilingual journal published in Paris).
http://transeuropeennes.gaya.fr/uk/revue/revue.html
* Form and ideology: Arabic sociolinguistics and beyond. 2000. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29:61-87.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1.61
* 1997 The Reproduction of symbolic capital: Language, state, and class in Egypt. 1997. Current Anthropology, 38 (5): 795-805, reply: 811-816.
* 2005 Clerical Chic. The Guardian. January 5.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1383312,00.html
* 2003 Getting Lost in Translation and Quotation. The Guardian, August 30.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/editor/story/0,,1032196,00.html
* 2003 Speaking up for a Plurality of Muslim Voices. The Guardian, July 26.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/editor/story/0,,1006209,00.html
* 2003 Arabs Need to Find their Tongue. The Guardian, June 14. [The title of this article was not chosen by me nor was I consulted about it]
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