This article examines how travelers, colonial officials, and educators have treated prayer and other body rituals in Egyptian popular schools. Once the object of colonial[...]

Studies of writing in developing societies generally focus on book, newspaper and commercial literacy, and do not address the cultural significance of writing on craft an[...]

In this essay I hope to add an anthropological voice to the conversation about political Islam, one which seeks its context not in relation to some underdefined “non-poli[...]

Contemporary Muslim criticisms of the commodification of religion are similar in some ways to the sociology of culture formulated by members of the Frankfurt School of th[...]

Anthropology’s rediscovery of material culture has emphasized the centrality of objects and their production in constituting human experience. In Egypt, the design, mass [...]

The North American public sphere is suffused with claims and counterclaims about the relationship between Islam and violence. Schools and publishers have responded with t[...]

The topic of irreligiosity and secularism among Muslim immigrants is an understudied subject. Academic studies of Muslim immigrants, in particular, tend to focus on relig[...]