4 Dissertationen und Habilita- tionen / Dissertations and Habilitations

VORTRÄGE 18. DAVO-KONGRESS PAPERS DAVO CONGRESS 2011
which various actors strive to adopt their skills and
ideas to the material and technical conditions of the
existing milieu. The inquiries of the panellists into the
notion of popular encouraged the authors to overcome
the boundaries between the studies on consumer culture,
mass media, as well as intellectual and social
history of the Arab world.
Bettina Gräf (Berlin): Fatwas in the Making. Reflections
on Islam, Social Media, and Popular Culture
This paper takes on the interest of the panel in exploring
the production background and social context during
the making of cultural products. It deals with various
media fatwas in Arabic and English connected to
the name of the popular Azhari scholar Yusuf al-
Qaradawi (born 1926). The interest of the author is to
show how the addressed people are imagined, who
does it in which ways, and how certain people after all
adopt and reproduce media fatwas. Fatwa editors in
the press and online as well as production manager in
TV play a major role in setting their own agendas in
terms of the selection of topics to be discussed, the
content and methods to be applied, and the categories
to be used.
The paper therefore explores media fatwas not only
as part of politics or in their legal capacity for regulating
social affairs but as an example of the intertwining
fields of media, identity politics, and popular culture.
The explored fatwas are regarded as cultural commodities
in the first place. They are not produced to
give legal advice but to educate, to touch, and to entertain
people. In addition the paper highlights that editorial
processes are structured by translocal media
events and topics hotly debated in different national
and international media. Thus media fatwas become a
marker of Islamic identity in multi-religious and multi-lingual
mediascapes.
Hatsuki Aishima (Osaka): Marketing Sufism for
the Educated Public in Contemporary Egypt
This paper questions the category of Sufism as ‘popular
Islam’ by looking at Sufi writings of ‘Abd al-
Halim Mahmud (1910-78) who is an iconic figure of
the 1970s Egypt with honorary titles such as “the
Ghazali of the twentieth century” or “the Father of
modern Sufism”. The author aims to situate the rise of
‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud as a public personality before
and after his death in wider context of explanation.
This study pays particular attention to ‘Abd al-
Halim’s attempt to make Sufi tradition relevant to the
lives of the educated middle classes outside of scholarly
communities by developing the style of expression
(uslub) suitable for his intended audiences.
The author approaches ‘Abd al-Halim’s ideas and
the images attached to him not strictly as ‘thought’,
but also as a commodity which is produced for a market
that was emerging throughout ‘Abd al-Halim’s
lifetime – but particularly in the 1960s and 1970s –
and continued to expand posthumously for ‘consumers’
of Islamic knowledge. Contemporary anti-Sufi
sentiments are generally expressed in the form of un-
18
ease at following a shaykh. ‘Abd al-Halim was able to
provide a public anchoring to mass-mediated Sufism
as an authority that dispenses educated Muslims who
are suspicious of institutionalised Sufism from personal
dependence to a shaykh. He became such a public
personality not only through his teaching, but even
more by developing a communicative style suitable to
the task.
Dominic Coldwell (Oxford): Situating the ‘Popular’
in Egyptian Oppositional Culture of the 1970s
This paper explores the reception of poetry by the
Egyptian dissident Ahmad Fu’ād Nigm and his singer
Shaīkh Imām in the 1970s, which is often thought to
have appealed to a popular ‘folk’ audience. The author
argues that the duo’s popularity among the lower
classes, however, was difficult to determine in the
1970s. On the other hand, their songs won sanction
from gatekeepers of the cultural establishment and
helped mobilize the urban, middle-class student
movement. To understand their popularity requires
examining how the poetry operated in different milieus
and interacted with media. State-controlled audio-visual
and print media played a brief part in promoting
the duo.
De-centralized media controlled by consumers, like
hand-written copies of the poems and audiorecordings
of their songs, circulated Nigm and
Imām’s output once they lost access to the mass media.
The author suggests that a notion of ‘folklore’ enters
into this discussion only insofar as the middleclass
student movement and the intelligentsia interpreted
Nigm’s poetry in line with a nationalist imaginary
that required romanticized representations of an
‘authentic folk culture’. Thus, it matters not as a description
of some ‘objective reality’ but because of its
function in discourse. The author concludes that the
trajectory of Nigm’s career, therefore, requires investigating
the ways in which his poetry compensated for
the state’s perceived loss of national credentials after
1967.
Vit Sisler (Prague): Digital Heroes: Popular Culture
in Arab Video Games
Video games are popular mainstream media for a substantial
part of the Arab youth. This emerging ‘gaming
culture’ is not characterized only through playing
the games, but through the systems of exchange and
discussion that surround them. Until recently, the Arab
video game industry has been dominated by political
games, such as games produced by the Lebanese
Hezbollah movement, immersing players into recreations
of real-world battles with Israel, or by religious
games, aiming to teach children the basic tenets of Islam.
Recently, a new generation of games emerged on
the Arab market, which appropriate Arab popular culture,
such as television series and movies, and strive
to present unique Arab heroes to their audiences. These
games, such as Abu Hadid or Bab al-Hara, are produced
mostly by independent Arab developers and
utilize frameworks established by successful Western