Islamic prayers and experiences of religiosity, gender, ritual and language, public appearance and notions of modesty among Jews, Christians and Muslims, social history of moral values in Iran since early 20th century; language ideology, vernacularization and modernity. Egypt, Iran and the Middle East
 * The Private Performance of Salat Prayers: Repetition, Time, and Meaning. 2013. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (1): 5-34.
* Do we need the army's helping hand? Le Monde Diplomatique, English Edition. October 14, 2011. (Article on Egypt's "bloody Sunday" when the army used violence to disperse demonstrators).
http://mondediplo.com/blogs/do-we-need-the-army-s-helping-hand
* 2005 Clerical Chic. The Guardian. January 5.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1383312,00.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
Islamic Prayers
I just finished another round of fieldwork in Iran. This research was on the performance of the 5 daily prayers (namaz in Persian, salat in Arabic) by a group of middle class, educated women. I analyze the temporality of performing a ritual: Is praying at 18 the same as praying at 60? If not, what are the changes in form and content? I found that most of these women, having been praying for more than three decades, have found spaces of creativity in a supposedly “rigid” ritual. Some reach a level at times where they feel co-present with God—able to convey their anxieties, questions and gratitude.What happens to a ritual such as the salat when it is performed, not in public and with other people, but in private and at home, in the presence of God alone. I pursue the question of what aloneness does to a ritual through the ethnographic details of praying as performed by the group of women I worked with. My article based on this fieldwork can be found in this issue of Anthropological Quarterly:
http://aq.gwu.edu/current-issue.html
Translation, Education and the Production of Knowledge Tehran boasts a surprisingly large number of bookstores, old and dusty ones as well as quite sleek new ones. One is used to seeing translations of literary works, old and new, from many parts of the world. In the last few decades, self-help books that come out in the US are translated almost immediately. What attracted my attention this time is the sheer volume of translations in philosophy and the social sciences from French and English. Examining reading materials for graduate students in anthropology and sociology, one comes away with the impression that more than half of what they read are works in translation. How do translations contribute to the production of knowledge and to creativity within the local intellectual milieu? Which translations enter the curricula at universities and why? There is a category of books in Iran that are both translations and original works--they are called roughly "translated and composed" (tarjomeh va ta’lif). Often, university professors translate an author’s work and write an introduction to it themselves, adding commentary where necessary. I have begun interviewing translators of social scientific and literary works. I am also putting together a history of course materials in the last decade. Modesty and Public Appearance among Jews, Christians and Muslims
I have broadened this project and carried out interviews with rabbis, priests and Muslim clerics in London as well in Iran. I am now in the process of putting together the historical and contemporary materials that I have gathered. 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.
Comparative Education
I have written on education and literacy in the Arab world. I look forward to a short period of fieldwork this summer in Egypt to find out what the possibilities are for changes in public education. 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?
Arabic
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 pursue the question of what a modern language is and the relation between a “modern” language and modernity. 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. Language, Religion and Modernity in the Muslim World was a conference (2006) co-organized with Dr. Catherine Miller who is a researcher at Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arab et Musulman (IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence). We co-edited the papers from this conference for an issue of Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM). This issue has an introduction that includes a number of inquiries pursued in my book Sacred Language, Ordinary People, and also debates and historical studies undertaken by participants on countries such as Turkey, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, East Africa, Cameroon, among others.
* The Private Performance of Salat Prayers: Repetition, Time, and Meaning. 2013. Anthropological Quarterly 86 (1): 5-34.
http://aq.gwu.edu/current-issue.html
*Arabic Translation of Sacred Language, Ordinary People, with new preface for the Arabic translation. National Center for Translation in Egypt (il-Markaz il-Qowmi lil-Targima). 2011.
* 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.
PDF
http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item2326872/The%20Cambridge%20Handbook%20of%20Literacy/?site_locale=en_US
* 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 Cairo Gender, Class, and Education. 1996. London, New York: Kegan Paul International.
* 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.
* Do we need the army's helping hand? Le Monde Diplomatique, English Edition. October 14, 2011. (Article on Egypt's "bloody Sunday" when the army used violence to disperse demonstrators).
http://mondediplo.com/blogs/do-we-need-the-army-s-helping-hand
* 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]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,977260,00.html
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