For 130 years, tensions have raged over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modern Egypt. This history focuses on a pivotal yet understudied school, Dar al-Ulum, whose alumni became authoritative arbiters of how to be modern and authentic within a Muslim-majority community, including by founding the Muslim Brotherhood.

What does it mean to be an intellectual in Egypt today? What is expected from an 'authentic scholar'? Hatsuki Aishima explores these questions byexamining educated, urban Egyptians and their perceptions of what it means to be 'cultured' and 'middle class' - something that, as a result of the neoliberal policies of Egyptian government, is widely thought to be a shrinking sector of society. Through an analysis of the media representations of 'Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78), the French-trained Sufi scholar and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar under president Anwar al-Sadat, Aishima discusses the connection of Islam to these middle-class considerations and makes an original contribution to the debate on the commodification of religious teaching and knowledge. Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt is thereby aunique addition to the fields of anthropology, Middle East and media studies.

Boasting an in-depth analyses of individual texts over half a century, this intriguing history of the dynamics of Islam and culture in modern Egypt presents the conflict between tradition and secular values in a challenging new light. Including literature and film as crucial sources, this book is accessible to general readers and scholars alike.

The emergence and evolution of Egyptian feminism is an integral, but previously untold, part of the history of modern Egypt. Drawing upon a wide range of women's sources - memoirs, letters, essays, journalistic articles, fiction, treatises, and extensive oral histories - Feminists, Islam, and Nation tells this story. Margot Badran shows how Egyptian women assumed agency and in so doing subverted and refigured the conventional patriarchal order. Unsettling a common claim that "feminism is Western" and dismantling the alleged opposition between feminism and Islam, the book demonstrates how the Egyptian feminist movement in the first half of this century both advanced the nationalist cause and worked within the parameters of Islam. Badran offers an innovative reinterpretation of modern Egyptian history by demonstrating the gendered nature of nationalist, Islamic, and imperialist discourses. The book shows how Egyptian women, attentive to the implications of gender, played vital roles, both as movement activists and everyday pioneers, in the construction of citizenship and the institutions of a modern state and civil society. Badran argues further that, of all the forces that shaped and reshaped modern Egypt, feminism constituted the most sustained critique - from within - of state and society. Feminists, Islam, and Nation not only expands our understanding of modern Egypt and our historical knowledge of feminist movements, but also contributes toward theorizing and further defining feminism.

The Power of Representation traces the emergence of modern Egyptian national identity from the mid-1870s through the 1910s. During this period, a new class of Egyptian urban intellectuals—teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists—came into prominence. Adapting modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and universal citizenship, this group reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and created a national sense of "Egyptian-ness" drawn from ideas about Egypt's large peasant population. The book breaks new ground by calling into question the notion, common in historiography of the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that in the nineteenth century "secular" aptitudes and areas of competency were somehow separate from "religious" ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions Michael Gasper shows how religion became integral to modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.

An accessible and wide-ranging survey of modern Arab culture covering political, intellectual and social aspects.

Preaching Islamic Renewal examines the life and work of Muhammad Mitwalli Sha‘rawi, one of Egypt's most beloved and successful Islamic preachers. His wildly popular TV program aired every Friday for years until his death in 1998. At the height of his career, it was estimated that up to 30 million people tuned in to his show each week. Yet despite his pervasive and continued influence in Egypt and the wider Muslim world, Sha‘rawi was for a long time neglected by academics. While much of the academic literature that focuses on Islam in modern Egypt repeats the claim that traditionally trained Muslim scholars suffered the loss of religious authority, Sha‘rawi is instead an example of a well-trained Sunni scholar who became a national media sensation. As an advisor to the rulers of Egypt as well as the first Arab television preacher, he was one of the most important and controversial religious figures in late-twentieth-century Egypt. Thanks to the repurposing of his videos on television and on the Internet, Sha‘rawi’s performances are still regularly viewed. Jacquelene Brinton uses Sha‘rawi and his work as a lens to explore how traditional Muslim authorities have used various media to put forth a unique vision of how Islam can be renewed and revived in the contemporary world. Through his weekly television appearances he popularized long held theological and ethical beliefs and became a scholar-celebrity who impacted social and political life in Egypt.