Between 1987 and 1993, the Press Bookstore (Maktabat al-Sihafa) released a sixteen-volume edition of the sermons of Egypt's premier antiregime preacher, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1996).Footnote 1 The story of the Press Bookstore appears unexceptional: like many publishers of Islamist media, it distributed a narrow array of products on an intermittent basis and al-Khutub al-Minbariyya li-l-Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk (The Pulpit Sermons of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Hahmid Kishk) appears to have been its most prominent product.Footnote 2 Yet, prior to publication, Islamic print media had to pass through government censors and, in Kishk, the censors faced a particular challenge. Legendary for his raspy voice, which was then amplified by his microphone (known by his followers and opponents alike as the “Kishkophone”Footnote 3 ) and transmitted by audiocassette, Kishk was and remains a central symbol of Islamist challenge in 20th- and 21st-century Egypt. Yet, following his removal of the details of Kishk's indictment—whether the names of government officials or particular incidents of moral corruption aided and abetted by state institutions—from the print version of Kishk's sermons, a reader during the reign of Husni Mubarak (1981–2011) would have wondered as to the basis of his fame and infamy alike.
How can we recover this story of censorship and how can such a story cast light on the logic by which state censors not only laid claim to this Islamist icon, but actively created an alternative understanding of his message? The challenge to such analysis is that the Ministry of Culture and al-Azhar have obstructed previous efforts by researchers to obtain censors’ reports.Footnote 4 Neither is it possible to contact the publishing house. Although multiple phone numbers can be found online, it appears that the Press Bookstore, like many other Islamic publishers, has closed due to state-sponsored repression of religious publishers under President ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi (r. 2014–present).Footnote 5
In addition to this methodological problem, there is a conceptual one. Many previous studies of censorship in the Middle East assume a binary model by which particular ideas are either banned or allowed.Footnote 6 Instead, censorship is an active process by which censors create particular ideas.Footnote 7 Kishk's popularity as an orator—evidenced by the decision to publish printed editions of his sermons as well as the survival of audio versions of many of these performancesFootnote 8 —enables us to move beyond a dichotomy between state-sponsored and Islamist religious claims to explore the logic by which state censors permitted and forbade particular ideas and references.
The central story of censorship of these sermons, however, is not one of the al-Sadat period but that of his successor, Husni Mubarak, and the differing ideological agendas of government censors. Censorship of Kishk's sermons was carried out, in succession, by two key governmental bodies: between 1987 and 1989, the Ministry of Culture's (MOC) Censorship Board (Jihaz al-Riqaba ʿala al-Musannafat al-Faniyya) reviewed volumes one through six; and between 1989 and 1993, the Islamic Research Academy's Administration of Research, Composition, and Translation (Idarat al-Buhuth wa-Taʾlif wa-l-TarjamaFootnote 9 ), based within al-Azhar, was responsible for volumes seven through sixteen.Footnote 10 While the MOC represented a leading secular-nationalist cultural bastion, the Islamic Research Academy (IRA) served as the state's preferred tool to claim Islamic orthodoxy in the face of its Islamist challengers and was the leading socially conservative voice within al-Azhar.Footnote 11
These volumes, which provide the beginning and end points of the censorship process, do not allow us to trace the deliberations or motivations of the censors. Nor do they reveal the reception of the altered products. What they do show is how two government bodies sought to appropriate and shape, rather than merely repress, the ideas of a prominent Islamist critic in a manner that fit both broad regime priorities and particular institutional interests.Footnote 12 This article draws on eight sermons published between 1987 and 1993, each roughly ninety minutes in length prior to transcription. Four of the eight sermons that it analyzes were published during the MOC's reign as censor, while the other four appeared during that of the IRA. Specifically, it focuses on sermons from the al-Sadat period due to the significance of the Islamic Revival during this period and as a means of partially sidestepping the political sensitivities of direct criticism of Husni Mubarak.Footnote 13
This article uses the censorship of Kishk's sermons to analyze the logic by which Egyptian state institutions under Mubarak articulated a particular religious vision for the state and the society over which it presided. Previous studies of the state's interventions into religion in Egypt have highlighted primary and secondary religious education in public schools,Footnote 14 the politicization of al-Azhar,Footnote 15 the activities of Dar al-Ifta,Footnote 16 and how the IRA has used censorship to claim religious orthodoxy in the battle over “Cultural Islamism.”Footnote 17 These studies valuably elucidate the diversity of religious visions within the Egyptian state, the red lines that structure state-sponsored religious positions, and, in the case of the Ministry of Education and the IRA, the role of state institutions in producing alternative understandings of Islam. Yet, even as they underscore the diversity of the state's religious activities, they tell us little about the logic that undergirded them.Footnote 18
This study of religious censorship in Egypt also casts light on the ways in which leaders of Muslim-majority countries have drawn on the unprecedented reach of modern state institutions not only to regulate, but also to produce new understandings of religion.Footnote 19 Most notably, studies by Mona Hassan, Samuel Helfont, Nabil Mouline, Vali Nasr, and Donald Porter trace how governments from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea have used Islam as a means of extending the control of state institutions further into society.Footnote 20 Broadly speaking, these studies argue that ruling elites use religion to obtain ideological legitimacy vis-à-vis the population and, at times, to enhance authority over this population. In this context, states turn to religion both as a proactive measure to build up their legitimacy and extend the reach of their rule, and as a response to political pressure by an Islamist opposition.Footnote 21
This article examines how states use religion to assert their interests, with particular attention to an undertheorized distinction within both bodies of scholarship between claiming and producing Islam. Specifically, as states turn to Islam, do they do so primarily by claiming previously existing public religious symbols and practices (such as in the case of al-Sadat appearing on television engrossed in prayer),Footnote 22 or by producing new understandings of religion itself?Footnote 23 While studies subscribing to the former approach are increasingly in the minority, even scholarship that adopts the latter approach give little consideration to the logic by which previous ideas and practices are reformulated to serve the cause of state authority.Footnote 24 Specifically, the article argues that state claims to Islam could involve intimate engagement with key ideas of their Islamist competitors yet remain distinct from them.
This analysis of the censorship of ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk's sermons also reveals how state power and Islamist critique intersect through the production of religion. As leading state institutions under Mubarak responded to the challenges of radical and moderate Islamists alike, they reformulated the ideas of a leading antiregime preacher, thus challenging the implicit claim in both bodies of scholarship that state efforts to produce religion occur in intellectual isolation from their Islamist competitors. The similarities and differences in the censorship logic of the MOC and IRA underscore not only the diversity among Egyptian state institutions, but also the shared assumption that the state must stand as a guardian of public morality.
This article begins by contextualizing the competition to censor Kishk's sermons within this firebrand preacher's own biography, the legacies of Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir (r. 1952–70) and Anwar al-Sadat (r. 1970–81) with which he engaged, and the specific dynamics of religious contestation in 1980s Egypt. Analyzing the texts themselves, it highlights the strategies employed by MOC censors to reshape Kishk's trenchant indictment of Egypt's social and political order, with particular attention to the ways in which such efforts protected state claims to guard national religious life even as they preserved politically ambiguous indictments of economic liberalization and moral decline. Turning next to the 1989–93 period, the article situates the shift of censorial power within a broader effort by the Mubarak regime to combat radical Islamists, analyzing how and why the IRA's censors sought to respond to this challenge. Far from a narrative of either capitulation or co-optation, diverse censors actively molded the legacy of Shaykh Kishk and were molded by engagement with his ideas. How did a blind preacher from the Delta come to shape two of Egypt's cultural guardians?
CULTURAL CONTESTATION AND POLITICAL CENSORSHIP IN POST-1952 EGYPT
Born in 1933, ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk was a son of the village of Shubrakhit in the Delta governorate of Beheira. While he lost sight in one eye at the age of six and the second eye by the age of twelve, he nonetheless pursued a traditional Azhari education, studying at this seminary's primary and secondary institutes in Cairo and Alexandria before completing his Azhari training as a BA student in the Faculty of Theology (Usul al-Din) in Cairo. Following his university education, he began his career as a preacher within the Ministry of Endowments in 1962 at Masjid al-Tib in the Cairene neighborhood of Sayyida Zaynab, before moving in 1964 within Egypt's capital to ʿAyn al-Hayat mosque in Hadaʾiq al-Qibba. While Kishk never formally joined the Muslim Brotherhood, he spoke glowingly of its founder, Hasan al-Banna, and the organization's ambitions. It is thus little surprise that he was caught up in ʿAbd al-Nasir's 1965 crackdown on Islamists, spending two years in prison.Footnote 25
Although prison would be a formative experience for many Egyptian Islamists, it was from atop the pulpit of ʿAyn al-Hayat mosque that Kishk would find his voice. Exhorting Egypt's leaders to follow Islam and Egyptian citizens to recognize the political and cultural impiety in their midst, Kishk melded religious thought, political protest, and cultural critique. This blind preacher's significance lay not merely in the broad sweep of his ideas, but in his success in bridging separate spheres of Islamic thought and preaching. Speaking as much to leading religious intellectuals such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926) and Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996) as to leading mosque preachers (khaṭīb, pl. khuṭabāʾ) such as Ismaʿil Sadiq al-ʿAdawi (d. 1998),Footnote 26 Kishk delivered a trenchant indictment of the perceived impiety of the ʿAbd al-Nasir period while mocking the claims to Islamic legitimacy made by his successor. At a time when media was heavily censored, Kishk used the pulpit to directly challenge corruption within state institutions and secular cultural elites such as Umm Kulthum and ʿAbd al-Halim Hafez, while defending the Muslim Brotherhood and even Sayyid Qutb.Footnote 27 In contradistinction to radical Islamist claimants to Qutb's legacy, however, Kishk never declared society to be in a state of jāhiliyya or justified killing an outwardly Muslim ruler who did not rule by the precepts of Islam.Footnote 28
Kishk's sermons attracted thousands to Friday prayer, with worshippers who wished to find a place in or around the mosque arriving by seven or eight in the morning.Footnote 29 Just as importantly, Kishk was a media sensation. As Charles Hirschkind notes, “by the mid-1970s, Sheikh Kishk's taped sermons had become a ubiquitous part of the Cairene soundscape, his sharp criticisms of the Sadat regime echoing from stores, taxis, buses, and private balconies and living rooms throughout the popular quarters.”Footnote 30 Recorded at the mosque, Kishk's sermons reached beyond the worshippers of ʿAyn al-Hayat to circulate among Egyptian men and women who gathered around cassette players in homes and coffee shops to listen to him. Over the course of his career, supporters and cassette companies recorded at least 384 of his sermons,Footnote 31 and publishers distributed over one hundred of his books, including a ten-volume commentary on the Qurʾan.Footnote 32
Amid this popularity, Kishk continued to work as a preacher and inspector within the Ministry of Endowments. Although he did not formally join the Muslim Brotherhood, Kishk maintained ideological ties to the organization as his sermons continually trumpeted the necessity of a close tie between religion and politics and echoed the Brotherhood's harshest critiques of the ruling regime.Footnote 33 Despite these criticisms, ʿAyn al-Hayat mosque benefited from the largesse of the ministry, which expanded the mosque grounds to accommodate the tens of thousands of Egyptians who would flock to Friday prayers to hear Kishk's sermons.Footnote 34 While a paradox on the surface—how could such a trenchant critic of al-Sadat work within and benefit from the state religious bureaucracy?—Kishk's position reflected al-Sadat's efforts to divide radical and moderate Islamist groups by allowing the latter to mobilize publicly.Footnote 35
The effectiveness of censorship as a surveillance tool depended on the medium to which it was applied. In the specific case of audiocassettes, the ability of government censors to control sermons was limited to those produced commercially, rather than the significant quantity recorded privately, including many of Kishk's sermons.Footnote 36 The al-Sadat regime exercised far more control over print media. Most notably, the 1975 creation of the High Council for Journalism (al-Majlis al-Aʿla li-l-Sihafa) followed ʿAbd al-Nasir's model of using syndicates to control politically conscious professionals.Footnote 37 The importance of this control over print products had only grown over the course of the 20th century as the number of literate Egyptians increased by 24 percent, from 8.4 million to 10.41 million, between 1947 and 1976.Footnote 38 In line with al-Sadat's commitment to channeling oppositional voices, the need for censorship that could persuasively alter, rather than merely ban, texts grew.
The 1970s also saw the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Daʿwa) and its Salafi peers, Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhamadiyya (Proponents of the Prophetic Model, al-Tawhid) and al-Jamʿiyya al-Sharʿiyya li-l-ʿAmilin bi-l-Kitab wa-l-Sunna (The Lawful Society for Those Who Work According to the Qurʾan and Sunna, al-Iʿtisam),Footnote 39 invest further in publishing Islamic periodicals, thus raising the stakes of censorship of printed religious material. In this context, al-Sadat passed Law 250 of 1975, which granted the IRA authority to “review and research studies published on Islam and the turath [heritage], at home and abroad, [to determine] whether it contains a sound opinion or not, and if not, to reply to it and rectify it.” The Administration of Research and Publication, in turn, was to examine “Islamic publications or such works which deal with Islam, give an opinion on them and publish, circulate, or exhibit them.”Footnote 40 Yet, the IRA was not yet the last word: it was to advise the MOC's Censorship Board on which materials should be censored and how.
The political and religious context of Kishk's rise to fame during the late 1960s and 1970s must be understood alongside the religiopolitical tumult of the 1980s and early 1990s that motivated two separate government bodies to censor his sermons in accordance with broad state priorities and their specific institutional concerns. The first body, the Ministry of Culture, had once been an epicenter of modernist cultural transformation and an essential engine of social change in support of a secular-nationalist artistic and literary project under the rule of ʿAbd al-Nasir. By contrast, al-Sadat's embrace of both Islamic piety and a retrenchment of state institutions led to a dramatic downsizing of this key state organ. Following al-Sadat's assassination in October 1981, however, Husni Mubarak came to power and revitalized the MOC. Under Mubarak, the ministry was tasked with advocating a vision of “cultural democracy” which sought to immunize youth against the ideological threat of Islamism.Footnote 41
Just as importantly, though, the 1980s saw the rise of a threat, physical and ideological, of radical Islamist organizations inspired by Sayyid Qutb, most notably the Islamic Group (al-Jamaʿa al-Islamiyya) and Islamic Jihad (Tanzim al-Jihad). The Mubarak regime, which lacked a clear ideological project or claim to religious legitimacy, struggled to effectively confront this ideological challenge, and al-Azhar's attempts to persuade the followers of these groups to abandon armed resistance to the state suffered under the perception that it was a mere regime puppet.Footnote 42 As the regime sought to more effectively confront the ideological challenge posed by radical Islamists, it dislodged the MOC by granting the IRA primary authority to censor religious materials.
Moves to shape religious debate between 1987 and 1993 emerged out of a longer history of efforts to extend state control into society. Since the rise of ʿAbd al-Nasir, the question of how to shape Islamic thought and practice while co-opting oppositional voices had preoccupied leaders and bureaucrats alike.Footnote 43 The early period of Mubarak's rule saw a shift away from a sole focus on demonizing radical Islamist critiques as had been the case under ʿAbd al-Nasir and to a lesser degree al-Sadat,Footnote 44 and towards active engagement with the categories on which they drew. The decisions made by censors within the MOC and IRA would reveal that such efforts involved not only the production of depoliticized ideological visions, but also an attempt to transform the ideas of a leading Islamist preacher.
THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE VERSUS THE MASTER OF ORATORY
When the censor pressed play on his cassette player, he would have heard Kishk's 10 June 1977 sermon valorizing poverty and piety over material temptations. As Kishk instructed his listeners that day, “it is better to brave the hunger of this world than the torment of fire of the Day of Judgment” (ʿadhāb al-nār yawm al-qiyāma).Footnote 45 Yet, this exhortation to divinely inspired, delayed gratification was not an instruction to political quietism, but an extended indictment of the contrasting, but equally flawed, economic policies pursued by Egypt's varied post-1952 regimes.
Kishk reached his verbal peak as he mocked consumerism in 1970s Egypt:
There was a time when a wife did not ask her husband to come home with a washing machine, refrigerator, corruptavision [i.e., television, Ar. mufsidiyūn], or heater. . . . Whether by means of theft of public money or taking bribes or embezzlement . . . [all] in the name of that celebrated socialism or in the name of false freedom . . . Instead, the wife would say to her husband: fear God and do not eat what is forbidden . . . [as] we can endure in the face of hunger in this world but we cannot endure God's torture on the Day of Judgment. Why do women of this day and age tire their husbands with such demands?Footnote 46
The censor confronted challenges to both ʿAbd al-Nasir's socialism and al-Sadat's open-door economic policies. Accordingly, he replaced “corruptavision” with “television” (tilīfiziyyūn) and struck Kishk's sarcastic invocation of “celebrated socialism” and “false freedom,” which referred to the economic policies of Egypt's first two postcolonial rulers. This editorial intervention served to redirect Kishk's indictment towards an amorphous commercialism independent of the ruling regime.
As Kishk spoke to the worshippers of ʿAyn al-Hayat, he sought to elucidate the contrast between a social order structured by consumerism and one defined by faith. Al-Sadat's open-door economic program, known as infitāḥ (opening), had in just a few short years vastly widened the existing disjuncture between the self-understanding of teachers, civil servants, and lawyers as part of Egypt's socioeconomically mobile middle class and their capacity to purchase symbols of a middle-class lifestyle, most notably an apartment.Footnote 47 Equally important, members of this segment of society increasingly came to identify socioeconomic disappointment with moral decline.Footnote 48 It is thus little surprise that Islamist thinkers sought to respond to these challenges. In January 1978, a writer in the Muslim Brotherhood's al-Daʿwa magazine stressed the need for an “Islamic system” (niẓām islāmī) that could achieve “social progress” (al-taqaddum al-ijtimāʿī) without leveling class differences.Footnote 49 For Kishk, the pressure to purchase increasingly available household appliances emerged from this cultural turn and the attendant perception of moral degeneration.
Over a decade after Kishk first delivered this sermon, the censor sought to disarm his critique of state economic policy as a prime driver of public immorality. By removing references to both ʿAbd al-Nasir's and al-Sadat's economic policy—“celebrated Socialism” and “false freedom,” respectively—Kishk's indictment of successive regimes was reformulated to attack the irreligious desires of the Egyptian people. If only men and women alike lived in accordance with God's will rather than their material desires, moral decline would be reversed.
By excising key portions of the sermon, the MOC transformed Kishk's indictment of ʿAbd al-Nasir's statist policies and al-Sadat's infitāḥ—and, by extension, Mubarak's continuation of the latter's policies—into a model of individual pious responsibility consistent with the move away from a welfare state and towards trade liberalization spearheaded by al-Sadat. At the same time, the censor retained Kishk's warning to his listeners to “fear God.” This command, while a means of rhetorical flourish, also emerged out of a longstanding Islamic ethical tradition that emphasizes one's fate on the Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyāma) as a means of inspiring religious obedience. The censor, working within a broader religious context in which invocations to heed the coming of the Day of Judgment had increasingly come to serve as a motor of social reform,Footnote 50 sought to incorporate fear of the divine into a project of individualistic piety.
The censor also actively worked to offer an alternative to the Islamist critique that political misrule had led to moral decline.Footnote 51 In a 6 May 1977 sermon, printed in the third volume, Kishk had narrated the story of the Queen of Sheba and her dealings with Solomon in Surat al-Naml (the Ant). The topic of this sermon was the Queen of Sheba's promotion of worship of those other than God (ṭāghūṭ) and her subjects’ related lack of religiosity. Kishk was particularly troubled by the notion that the Queen of Sheba owned and ruled the people (tamlik wa-taḥkum), as it was only God who could make such claims over mankind.Footnote 52 Indeed, as Kishk noted, Islam is committed to eliminating all such false worship (ṭāghūt) as it leads to acts of disbelief (kufr).Footnote 53 In this instance, the censor removed reference to the claim that God “owns and rules” (yamlik wa-yaḥkum), yet allowed Kishk's claim that the Queen of Sheba engaged in exactly this practice to stand uncensored.
The issue at hand, however, was not merely the implication that ʿAbd al-Nasir's policies constituted taghūṭ and led his citizens to engage in kufr. Raising one manifestation of disbelief in al-Sadat's Egypt, Kishk described a plague of immorality sweeping college campuses:
It has reached the point of moral destruction [al-inḥilāl al-akhlāqī] that a female student, a student at Cairo University, stood up in the university courtyard and denied God's existence . . . how can such a place permit such disbelief as well as the worst forms of gender mixing [al-ikhtilāṭ ʿalā ashaddihi]?Footnote 54
The censor of this sermon removed all the specific details of immorality at Cairo University, yet preserved the image of the woman engaged in disbelief and gender mixing.Footnote 55 Further, the censor excised a full five minutes of the sermon that excoriated the imprisonment of Muslim Brothers during the ʿAbd al-Nasir period.Footnote 56 Although the language of ṭaghūṭ had emerged as a staple of radical Islamist thought thanks to the influence of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), Kishk's critique departed significantly from Qutbists of the 1970s. Most crucially, the Qutbists’ claim to the existence of such un-Islamic worship was accompanied by a commitment to jihad and a willingness to declare one's political opponents to be non-Muslims (takfīr). Kishk's accusation of ṭaghūṭ, while implicating the ruling regime, refused to countenance tyrannicide and spared Egyptian society.
Since Kishk had given this sermon, the challenge to the ruling regime had grown. Claims to the reign of ṭaghūṭ—and associated understandings of divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyyat allāh), the just ruler (al-imām al-ʿādil), and injustice (ẓulm)—had persisted in radical intellectual circles, including in ʿAbd al-Salam Faraj's 1980 al-Jihad: al-Farida al-Ghaʾiba (Jihad: The Hidden Duty), and the blind shaykh ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Rahman's 1984 Kalimat al-Haqq (The Word of Truth).Footnote 57 With the Mubarak regime facing a homegrown radical movement that considered both state and society to be un-Islamic, the MOC under the direction of Mubarak sought to reshape a key Islamist voice, and the categories of political legitimacy on which he drew, in order to disarm this ideological movement.
The attempt to define the bounds of ṭaghūṭ meant wading into dangerous waters. MOC efforts to delineate the nature of legitimate political rule implicitly suggested that legitimate and illegitimate political orders could and should be determined based on religious principles. This challenge only grew when the censor tackled the local manifestations of such ṭaghūṭ, particularly gender mixing, which, by the early 1980s, had become a central cause for leading Salafi organizations.Footnote 58 Indeed, by this point even state-produced religious textbooks taught that co-ed social spaces increased the risk of immoral behavior.Footnote 59 This censor's efforts to navigate questions of consumerism, morality, and gender relations thus touched on tensions that lay at the core of state claims to religion. On the one hand, the Egyptian state was not responsible for consumerism or public immorality because these were the results of individual choice. On the other hand, the censor permitted an extended discussion of ṭaghūṭ invoking a religious basis for the regime's political legitimacy and a responsibility to control the spread of gender mixing.
The vulnerabilities produced by the censor's simultaneous efforts to shield the state from responsibility for social immorality and to claim a religious imprimatur for it also involved an attempt to neuter the political implications of Kishk's glorification of fidelity to religious principle. A later sermon in this volume, entitled “Ahmad ibn Hanbal,” centered on the steadfast commitment to theology exhibited by the eponym of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence and icon of purist Salafism. On 25 March 1977, Kishk had sought to mobilize his audience:
Oh Protectors of Islam: we now face days in which people have forgotten the message of God in favor of dirhams and dinars. For this reason, I present one of the greatest scholars to you . . . a model for Muslim scholars in the 20th century. . . . Our guest today is Ahmad ibn Hanbal. . . . He is the Imam of Jihad, of the word of Truth, no matter its price . . . the Imam Ahmad could not betray the truth [that the Qurʾan was not created] though the price was heavyFootnote 60 . . . [his punishment] is an example of injustice [ẓulm] that does not distinguish between the scholars [ʿulamāʾ] and the ignorant [juhalāʾ].Footnote 61
Once again, Kishk had set up a clear binary by which principled commitment to God trumped worldly pressures or desires. The censor did not seem to object: Kishk's nearly fifteen-minute discussion of the eponym of the Hanbali school and his travails under Abbasid rule was reproduced in its entirety.
The claims to principle, however, could not extend to recent Egyptian history. As soon as Kishk began to discuss those who had paid the price for their steadfastness (ṣumūd) in Egypt—namely, members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had entered prison in 1965 due to the reign of injustice and manifestations of disbelief (al-ẓulm wa-l-ṭughyān)—the discussion abruptly ended.Footnote 62 The text then picked up as Kishk pivoted back to Ibn Hanbal and criticized Egyptians’ lack of religiosity: “[while] Ahmad ibn Hanbal would always respond to the call to prayer, even when faced with mortal danger. . . . there are those among us today who sit on the corners of coffee shops and on the open roads . . . but we do not respond.”Footnote 63 The censor cut this critique short, however, excising Kishk's claim that “we have fallen asleep and let atheism [al-ilḥād] torture our countries. . . . how we have gone astray!”Footnote 64
The censor thus worked to protect the Mubarak regime's legitimacy by upholding the centrality of religious principle. Ibn Hanbal was, in many respects, an ideal model: his insistence to the Abbasid caliph al-Maʾmun (r. 813–33) that the Qurʾan is uncreated, while a rejection of his neo-Muʿtazilite competitors and of the Caliph's religious authority, reflected a traditionalist Sunni view of the obligations of obedience to the ruler, whether sinful or just.Footnote 65 This censored sermon, in turn, now suggested that religious principle, far from representing the basis of Islamist opposition to the ruling regime, should drive the kind of individual pious action that was necessary to repair public morality.
It was in this context that the censor laid claim to a regulatory role for the Egyptian state. Listening to a 27 February 1981 sermon, he would have heard Kishk speak about preparation for the Day of Judgment and illustrate the stakes of this day through stories of Islam's prophets. Some forty minutes into the sermon, Kishk turned from prophetic stories to contemporary challenges, narrating the tale of a woman whose husband refused to pray because he rejected the divinity of the Qurʾan, thus apostatizing.Footnote 66 For Kishk, the culprits were clear, as “our rulers have distracted us from God” (ḥukkāmunā shaghalūnā ʿan allāh). The censor sought to redirect this critique, removing the phrase “our rulers” in order to render the source of deviation an unnamed third party.Footnote 67
The task at hand was not merely to obfuscate the factors that had led this man to apostatize—echoing previous efforts to obscure government policies that had stimulated Egyptian consumerism and attendant immorality—but also to position the government as the legitimate arbiter of disputes between the Muslim Brotherhood and its Salafi competitors. Accordingly, even as the MOC censor had previously removed references to the Muslim Brotherhood, he allowed the following passage:
There has been conflict in Alexandria among Muslim youth at the Faculty of Medicine . . . which centers on secondary issues . . . some call themselves [Muslim] Brothers [jamāʿat al-ikhwān] while others call themselves Salafis [jamāʿat al-salafiyyīn] . . . the Brothers call the Salafis backward looking [jamāʿat al-khalfiyyīn] and the Salafis call the Brothers Sufis [jamāʿat ṣūfiyyīn].Footnote 68
For Kishk, these divisions were not the product of true conflicts between Islamic movements, but rather of a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Egypt. The question, however, remained: how had Jews gained access to Egypt? As Kishk explained, “Egypt has an Israeli embassy . . . and the Jews are the Jews . . . and always cause strife [fitna].”Footnote 69 For his part, the censor had different priorities: while he allowed the passage blaming the Jews for this division to remain, he removed all mention of the Israeli embassy and, implicitly, al-Sadat's role in the 1978 Camp David agreement which had paved the way for an Israeli diplomatic presence.
The strategy of removing local references, particularly to the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty, mirrored previous excisions of local immorality and political policies. What is striking about this particular text, however, is how it moves beyond previous implicit claims that the government is not responsible for religious life to suggest that the government can and should regulate feuding Islamist groups. This claim to regulate, while less ambitious than Islamist visions of the state as the primary shaper of religious life,Footnote 70 offered a roadmap for regime intervention in local battles.
Censors also had to contend with Kishk's criticism of al-Azhar. On 14 September 1979, Kishk took Egypt's flagship seminary to task for Egypt's moral decline:
What are the factors that push people to engage in forbidden behavior? . . . [such as sex outside of marriage and women marrying without paternal permission] . . . Last Wednesday I was at the inspection of a mosque and was asked: “Are you the one who asked the [State] Mufti: ‘Are you asleep [nāʾim]?’” I responded: “Yes, I suggested that he was asleep and indeed, he may not only be asleep but sleeping in such a way that he will never wake up [nāʾiman lā yastayqaẓ]. The Mufti is dead [al-muftī māʾit]. There would be no crisis of fornication [zinā] if there were muftis [muftiyyūn] and scholars [ʿulamāʾ].Footnote 71
In this sermon, Kishk melded a condemnation of immorality with an indictment of state-sponsored religious functionaries, particularly the state mufti, whose role was established in 1895 as part of an early state effort to extend the reach of its religious bureaucracy.Footnote 72 This was not an uncommon criticism: graduates of al-Azhar, particularly those based outside Egypt, frequently accused the seminary more broadly of abdicating its role as guardian of political justice and public morality.Footnote 73 The censor removed Kishk's incendiary suggestion that the state mufti existed somewhere in between a state of sleep and death, and replaced the final reference to the absence of muftis with a broader category of religious specialists, jurists (fuqahāʾ). Even with this revision, however, the censor's logic reveals the ways in which censorial choices could also reflect intrastate negotiations as the MOC sought to tar another state institution, al-Azhar, with responsibility for the widespread perception of moral decline.
What does the censor's logic in altering these four sermons reveal about the opportunities and challenges in transforming Islamist critique into a source of support for the ruling regime? The censor handcuffed indictments of regime responsibility for moral decline by removing reference to the accused institutions and rulers. Instead, the MOC's censors depicted a preacher who exhorts his followers to a quietist vision of individual piety and religious principle. This state production of Kishk's religious vision thus sought to distinguish key Islamist themes of political justice and public morality from contemporary Egyptian politics.
Yet these censored texts also reveal the ways in which a leftist state institution asserted the necessity of Islamic credentials for political rule and positioned the government as the premier arbiter of religious conflict in Egypt. While the MOC sought to defang Kishk's critique, it did not depoliticize it completely. Instead, it sought to use this critique to extend state control into society. Although this logic confirms the claims of previous studies that state-sponsored religious visions serve to extend state power and increase ideological legitimacy, it also shows how such efforts can shift the political goalposts by affirming the centrality of religion to both state and society.
The MOC's censorship logic is only part of the story of state claims to religion under Mubarak. As the IRA took the reigns of censorship in 1989, it would preserve the broad vision articulated by MOC censors, while revisiting the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and the causes of moral decline in Egypt as it responded to the increasing threat of radical Islamist violence in Egypt.
THE RISE OF THE ISLAMIC RESEARCH ACADEMY
In 1989, the battle was not merely over the state's claim to shape public morality, but also among state institutions as to which was authorized to define the religious boundaries of opposition claims to politics. The IRA was hardly a stranger to this question: ʿAbd al-Nasir's 1961 reorganization of al-Azhar had tasked this institution with serving as the “highest body for Islamic research. . . . striving for the renewal of Islamic culture.”Footnote 74 Despite the lofty pretensions of its mission, the IRA remained silent in the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars, and, under ʿAbd al-Nasir, was often forced to adopt socialist interpretations of Islam that affirmed the regime's view.Footnote 75
The political tremors of the 1980s, however, produced new challenges for the Mubarak regime that necessitated an empowered, rather than weakened, IRA. While the efforts of radical Islamists to overthrow the state had failed, so too had al-Azhar's previous attempts to engage in unidirectional religious “dialogue” with the radicals in order to protect the regime's legitimacy. The issue was not merely the substance of this exchange, but the mockery aimed at al-Azhar's scholars as political lackeys (ʿulamāʾ al-sulṭa).Footnote 76
The urgency of the project of re-educating radical Islamists had increased further in the face of violent attacks against nightclubs, liquor stores, former government ministers, and journalists. Most notably, in the mid-1980s, the Upper Egyptian cities of Asyut, Sohag, Minya, and Beni Suef saw harassment of Coptic Christians by radical Islamist students, with the occasional effort to hold other students hostage. Both student activists and their older counterparts had been inspired by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Salam Faraj's al-Jihad: al-Farida al-Ghaʾiba, which exhorted Muslims to engage in religiously framed armed conflict both at home and abroad.Footnote 77 Efforts to counteract this critique and its associated violence had failed and, as the government worked to devise a more effective defense against its radical challengers, it turned to al-Azhar to furnish a theological response.Footnote 78
Yet, for such a response to be credible, this leading institution of Sunni Islam had to appear independent. It was in this context that the IRA took the reigns as censor of religious materials in Egypt.Footnote 79 As the IRA assumed this role, volumes seven through sixteen of al-Khutub al-Minbariyya appeared. The censorship practices of the IRA were far more permissive than those of its predecessor, though discussion of the Egyptian government's inability to liberate Jerusalem and the related peace treaty with Israel remained red lines.Footnote 80 Within these restrictions, the decision to engage in limited censorship of sermons relating to political legitimacy, piety, and the Muslim Brotherhood reveal an attempt by the IRA to undercut radical challengers and to empower itself as the premier authority on Islam. From its location in the suburbs of Cairo, the IRA sought to incorporate politically moderate factions of Egypt's religious landscape and to explicitly acknowledge the Egyptian state's prior religious failures.
In contrast to the MOC, which had long barred any positive mention of the Muslim Brotherhood, the IRA reintegrated Egypt's leading Islamist organization into Egyptian history. In a 28 March 1980 sermon, Kishk had narrated the travails of God's friends (awliyāʾ allāh) through the allegory of a man named Ibrahim, who was targeted by bandits (muḥarribīn). Upon threat of death from the bandits, Ibrahim asked that he be allowed to pray and recite the declaration of faith. In good time, an angel arrived to kill the bandits and rescue this pious man.Footnote 81 Like Ibrahim, leading Muslim Brothers such as Hasan al-Banna, ʿAbd al-Qadir ʿAwda, Muhammad Farghali, and Sayyid Qutb had died carrying the declaration of faith. Yet, in Egypt, this was the work not of bandits but of the state security court (maḥkamat amn al-dawla).Footnote 82
How are we to make sense of this apparent legitimation of the Muslim Brotherhood's martyrs? This decision proceeded from a premise that the IRA shared with its predecessor: the primacy of religious principle, here seen in the allegorical model of Ibrahim in the face of bandits. Yet, in a departure from the MOC's logic, the censor depicted the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate claimant to such principle, glorifying those who had died for their devotion to Islam. The enemies of religious principle were not the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather the state security courts that had failed to uphold law and order, thus becoming no better than the bandits who sought to destroy internal security by blocking public roads (qaṭaʿ al-ṭarīq) or robbing innocent travelers.Footnote 83 Far from justifying the procedures of the Egyptian judiciary, the censor's rendition of Kishk suggested that such bodies should themselves be sanctioned.
Although mention of the Muslim Brotherhood's martyrs constituted a rupture between the reigns of the MOC and the IRA, such references were hardly unprecedented beyond these two bodies. Since the mid-1970s, the Brotherhood had worked to memorialize its founding generation, whose members had braved ʿAbd al-Nasir's prisons, through regular features in al-Daʿwa magazineFootnote 84 and through the distribution of videotaped “testimonials” of these individuals.Footnote 85 Neither was this censorship choice primarily the result of the increasing presence of Islamist scholars at al-Azhar, though such a process may well have been at work.Footnote 86 Instead, this move revealed efforts by the IRA to seize the thunder from its radical challengers by positioning the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate participant in the national conversation regarding Islam. The Brotherhood's attractiveness in this context lay in its status as a contested symbol and in the fact that this stance explicitly communicated the IRA's independence vis-à-vis the regime.
The challenge at hand was not only to reincorporate the Muslim Brotherhood, but also to neutralize a particular vision of divine obedience first popularized in Egypt in the 1960s by Sayyid Qutb and accepted, albeit with certain limitations, by the MOC. In a 22 February 1980 sermon, Kishk had dealt at length with the characteristics of a Just Ruler (al-imām al-ʿādil), setting a seemingly low bar of someone responsible for ten or more people who treats them well.Footnote 87 For Kishk, ʿAbd al-Nasir did not qualify due to his torture of the proponents of God's oneness (al-muwaḥḥidīn). Instead, the leader who fits this description is one who “acts on the matters that concern Muslims.”Footnote 88 While the MOC's censor had removed critical references to ʿAbd al-Nasir, the IRA censor showed little concern as to the religious standing of Egypt's former leader.
Why would the IRA actively promote a religious judgment so easily applicable to Egypt's ruling elite, past and present? This was certainly a strategy to distance the IRA from the regime by allowing an attack on ʿAbd al-Nasir in the name of religious legitimacy, but it also utilized a similar logic to that employed by the MOC when amending the 6 May 1977 sermon on the Queen of Sheba and the reign of ṭaghūṭ. Specifically, by embracing Kishk's middle ground between political quietism and the excommunication of other Muslims (takfīr), the IRA censor sought to challenge radical Islamist justifications of armed resistance against the state and society, while echoing Mubarak's own emphasis on limited critique that produced a veneer of democratic practice.Footnote 89 The censor thus suggested that the use of violence against either state or society was religiously unacceptable, even as he acknowledged that the Mubarak regime could be a target of Islamic critique and moral opprobrium.
If the MOC had suggested that religious principle reigned supreme when devoid of political overtones, the IRA provided space for Muslims to claim prayer not merely as a marker of religiosity but also as a means of political resistance. In a 24 May 1980 sermon, Kishk had criticized Muslims who worship irregularly in mosques, suggesting that their energies were directed instead towards the consumption of alcohol and even amusement parks.Footnote 90 The issue was not merely grave sin (maʿṣiyya) but also the previous punishment of the pious. Kishk asked rhetorically:
How many people were imprisoned by the revolution for praying? How many were tortured for growing beards? How many were hanged for reciting the Qurʾan? And how many people were buried in the desert . . . because they raised their voices [declaring that] there is no God but God? What an unjust ruler! What an unjust ruler [ayyuhā al-ẓālim]!Footnote 91
As he lobbed one rhetorical question after another towards his audience, Kishk questioned the disjuncture between political change and piety in ʿAbd al-Nasir's Egypt.
That the censor affirmed Kishk's reincorporation of Islamist piety as a model—and of the Muslim Brotherhood into the Egyptian national community—does not reveal Islamist co-optation of the IRA. Instead, this decision highlights how the IRA's censors sought to respond to radical Islamist claims to piety by adopting the historical narrative of Egypt's leading Islamist organization. Just as importantly, the IRA censors, as religious scholars who worked within an institution that defined its leadership through a claim to religious expertise, used Kishk's sermons to affirm their own role as arbiters of issues of national importance.Footnote 92
The censors sought not only to disarm the IRA's radical competitors, but also to articulate an alternative case for the decline of social morality. In a 13 October 1978 sermon, Kishk had taken aim at the alleged relationship between an increase in masturbation (al-ʿāda al-siriyya) among Egyptian men and the spread of indolence, tuberculosis, and drug addiction.Footnote 93 For Kishk, the short-term solution for this epidemic was intensive walking and avoidance of public transportation, while the long-term solution involved a reversal of the current balance between hypocrisy (al-nifāq) and falsehood (al-bāṭil) on the one hand, and religious truth (al-ḥaqq) on the other hand.Footnote 94 Of particular concern to Kishk was a fatwa by an unnamed Azhari scholar, formerly a chaired professor (ustādh kursī) at al-Azhar's Faculty of Shariʿa, that permitted viewing scenes of “love and passion” (al-ʿishq wa-l-gharām) at the cinema.Footnote 95 Yet, while the censor allowed Kishk's criticism of this individual scholar to stand, he removed Kishk's mocking description of the scholar as a “chair-less professor” (ustādh bi-lā kursī).Footnote 96
Kishk sought to diagnose the sexual ills of Egyptian society, offering a model of personal restraint while criticizing al-Azhar's inaction. This critique was hardly unprecedented: during the same period, Islamist writers wrestled with the challenges of sexually based impiety, particularly among the male college students who formed a key component of their social base, while challenging Sunni Islam's premier seminary to spread piety in society.Footnote 97 A decade later, as the most socially conservative faction within an institution that was united by a commitment to scholarly authority, the IRA had much to gain from pressuring the grand shaykh's office to foreground sexual morality as a key site of scholarly activism, while co-opting a popular plank embraced by both moderate and radical Islamists.
As the IRA transmitted Kishk's words through print, the contrast with its predecessor, the MOC, appear stark, owing to their dueling institutional priorities and the increased need for al-Azhar to independently challenge radical Islamist organizations in Egypt during the late 1980s. Yet, the censorship logics of these two institutions share a great deal: each used their power as censor to stress that both political rule and individual lives must proceed according to religious principles, while emphasizing the authority of the state to actively intervene in Egypt's religious landscape. If the initial goal of religious censorship had been to tame this firebrand preacher's far-reaching religious critiques of state and society, the end result was far more ambiguous.
CONCLUSION
In 1994, the State Council (Majlis al-Dawla) clarified a previously informal decision, officially transferring authority to censor print, audiovisual, and audio religious materials to the IRA. The State Council decision, while a high profile one, did not emerge in a vacuum; it responded to a request by the Shaykh al-Azhar Jadd al-Haqq (r. 1982–96) to “define the areas of jurisdiction of both the Honourable Azhar and the Ministry of Culture with respect to audio or audio-visual products that deal with Islamic issues or that contradict Islam.”Footnote 98 This decision followed some two decades of ambiguity and nearly a decade of contestation between these two bodies over which of them should determine the boundaries and logic of religious censorship.
Since the mid-1990s, the State Council has sought to preserve a de facto separation between the IRA's authority over “religious issues” and the MOC's control over “security issues.”Footnote 99 Both bodies proceeded based on this arrangement, in cooperation with the dictates of Central Security (al-Amn al-Markazi), through at least 2005.Footnote 100 Since Muhammad Mursi's fall in June 2013, a new (albeit informal) arrangement has emerged in which these two bodies have lost any semblance of independence vis-à-vis state security forces.Footnote 101 Yet, whatever the ultimate rearrangement of powers between state institutions and the regime of al-Sisi, or among these institutions themselves, Egyptian state institutions will continue not only to lay claim to but also to produce Islam.
This article has demonstrated how and why the intersection of state power and religion in late 1980s Egypt involved the production of a distinct understanding of ʿAbd al-Hamid Kishk's thought. Moving beyond state religious visions which center on red lines and ideological goals, it has analyzed the logic employed by two state institutions as they adopted and amended the categories and critiques of a leading Islamist preacher. The censored versions of Shaykh Kishk's sermons suggest, in line with previous studies on Islam and state power, that Muslim-majority states produce particular religious visions in order to assert ideological purity and to extend the reach of government institutions further into society.
In contradistinction to this scholarship, this study has shown how the logics employed by the MOC and IRA neither unequivocally claim Islamist thought nor entirely reject it. Instead, notwithstanding the distinct emphases within the censorship logics of these two government bodies and the concrete ideological goals of these approaches, both adopted many of the Islamist opposition's central tenets. Far from a monolithic universe of state-sponsored religious discourse, the engagement of state institutions in the production of a distinct interpretation of Kishk's thought reveals that, just as Islamists incorporate key assumptions of the state modernization project, so too do state functionaries and scholars draw on the central themes and concerns of the Islamist opposition.
State engagement in the production of these religious visions came with its costs, pushing the state into a continued process of “upwards bidding” by which the price of religious authenticity continually rises beyond the initial demands of either the state or its Islamist opposition.Footnote 102 Books, in turn, represent but one front in a broader culture war to define the role of Islam in Egyptian society, and the spread of the Internet and satellite television over the past twenty years has multiplied the participants in and raised the stakes of this battle. Yet, the similarities among adversaries remain: in 2016 as in 1989, state institutions and Islamist organizations are both political opponents and ideological cousins.
