Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt

Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Gregory Starrett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 324 pp.

By showing how Islam and national politics are elaborately fused in Egyptian public culture, Gregory Starrett has cleared new analytical ground on which unorthodox and critically disorienting approaches to Islam can be developed. Putting Islam to Work breaks with the standard diagnosis of Islamic fundamentalism (which Starrett prefers calls "the Islamic Trend") by attributing it less to socioeconomic frustrations of the moment and more to the pervasive, long-term effects of mass education, mass literacy, and the Egyptian government's persistent use of religious instruction as a means of social control. In essence, Starret argues that the Islamic Trend is a product of modern institutions (the nation-state and its pedagogical apparatus of social control) and of modern technologies (print, radio, television, VCRs, and tape cassette recordings). Islamic activists in Egypt do not reject these innovations; rather, they enlist them in the cause of Islamic reform.

The idea that Islamist political agendas are modern in their origins and inclinations is not new. Putting (slam to Work is unusual, however, in the extent to which it moves discussion beyond political movements per se and attends instead to Egyptian public culture, the arena in which Islamic discourses circulate and are variously politicized. Public culture is mass culture, and Starrett traces the emergence of the modern Egyptian public to nineteenth-century British colonial policies, which were themselves rooted in the idea that Egypt was an object, a social formation to be understood, controlled,...