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NS: I know you have been following the events in Egypt and have even been back a couple of times since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. How would you describe the situation?

SM: I think this is an incredibly interesting time in Egypt. The country is involved in a historic and heady process of political transformation. The stakes are very high, and it is unclear whether the kind of changes—political, social, and economic—that the January 25 Revolution envisioned will, in fact, be possible. Like any other revolution in modern history, this one faces immense challenges from both within and without.

NS: What exactly are those challenges, in your view?

SM: Well, after the overthrow of the Mubarak regime, as one would expect, the movement became divided over what the collective future of the country should be. Old differences that had been set aside to topple the Mubarak regime have come to the fore again—differences of class, ideology, and religion, all of which affect the vision of what a just society should be. Second, there is the issue of transforming the political system from within to create a democratic structure—which entails, not only promulgating new electoral laws and procedures, but also forging laws that address the demands of a democratic society. Then there is the challenge of how to dismantle the much-despised state security apparatus, with its bloated and corrupt bureaucracy of surveillance and vengeance, and the Emergency Law—in place for over twenty years—that has facilitated its operations. In recent months, protestors have taken to the streets again to demand an end to the military trials that have continued since the overthrow of Mubarak. (Some report that more than 10,000 people have been tried in military courts since the revolution.) These military trials are a symbol of the old system that is still intact, and which the protestors of the January 25 Revolution had sought to dismantle. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there are economic issues that are systemic, and that are not simply Egypt’s but belong to the international system of finance and capital. Egypt, like any other Third World country, is hostage right now to the global economic crisis and the immense pressure put upon those countries by international institutions (like the World Bank and IMF) and geopolitical powers (the US and Western Europe) to resist the demand for socially progressive economic reforms. The Egyptian military is part of this system and has benefitted from it immensely. I cannot see how the military, as the primary institution in charge of this “transition,” is going to set aside its economic interests to yield to the popular demand for economic justice. This is in part why Egyptians from various walks of life continue to stage sit-ins and protests across the country.

NS: How do you think these challenges might be overcome?

SM: Well, I have faith in the Egyptian people and their thirst and desire to transform the status quo. None of us expected or predicted what the Egyptians were able to achieve on February 11, 2011, with their determination and political will. The unimaginable became imaginable. The same powers are in play right now, and I suspect we all will have a lot to learn from the developments that unfold in Egypt in the coming years.

NS: Without a doubt. But let’s back up a bit now. I first read your essay on “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” when I was a freshman in college, and it had a big influence on how I came to think about the practice of religion. I still look back to it. In that vein, I wonder if you, too, had an experience early on that reoriented your own thinking.

SM: One thing that had a decisive impact on me was Talal Asad’s “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I was working on issues of religion at a moment when there was little interest in the subject within the discipline of anthropology. This was pre-9/11, and people didn’t think that religion was of great importance. I was reading a lot on my own, and this essay came up in footnotes. Our library didn’t even have a copy of it, so I had to request it through interlibrary loan. I sat down, and I distinctly remember reading and then rereading it several times. I was really challenged by the questions that the article forced the reader to ask, not just of Islam but of religion in general. It’s a very well-circulated paper now, and most students of religion and Islam tend to read it, but at the time, it was a buried treasure.

NS: Tell me about what brought you to anthropology in the first place. You were an architect before that?

SM: Yes, I practiced architecture for four years. At the time I was also involved in activism against U.S. foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. When the first Gulf War broke out, I realized that there were many pressing questions, which the war had brought to the fore, that I hadn’t really resolved for myself. These were questions that had to do with the transformed political and social landscape of the Muslim world, the ascendance of Islamic politics and the challenge this posed to those of us who grew up believing in the promise of secular nationalism to forge a different future. Following the Iranian Revolution, in 1979, Islamic movements had become the primary expression of political dissent in a variety of Muslim countries. In order to think about the transformations this ascendance had caused in the social and political landscape of Muslim societies, I resolved that I would go back to graduate school. At the time, I did not really know much about anthropology; so I enrolled in a political science graduate program, which I found to be very Eurocentric. I realized that this discipline would not help me explore the kinds of questions that I was interested in. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to anthropology at the time, and it has been my disciplinary home since.

NS: Have you found anthropology to be a discipline in which questions that concerned you as an activist can be addressed?

SM: My activism would probably have been accommodated in any discipline. But what anthropology has allowed me to do in a serious way is pursue the question of difference. The traditional aim of socio-cultural anthropology was to study the primitive other in order to reflect upon the peculiarity—and often superiority—of Western cultural and social norms. In the late 1980s, anthropologists and others launched a robust critique of the essentialized and ahistorical notion of cultural difference that had served the discipline for so long. One important result of this critique was that the discipline moved to think critically about the question of difference—not just cultural difference but how different histories, traditions, and arrangements of power force people to live and experience life in heterogeneous ways. In general I find anthropology’s commitment to thinking critically about difference unique in the human sciences and worthy of engagement and exploration. So, in answer to your question, it is not so much that anthropology is especially open to activism, but rather its insistence that we engage with difference, while being attentive to relations of power that hierarchicalize and essentialize differences, that has enabled me to work productively in the discipline.

NS: On your website, you also say that your experience in architecture influenced your work as an anthropologist. Can you say something about how?

SM: That’s probably overstated! But when I was practicing architecture, I realized I wasn’t very happy with the elitist and technological bent of the profession. I started working instead with the homeless, designing, financing, and constructing housing for people who couldn’t afford to pay rent or mortgage. The work I did was mostly in dense, urban communities, both in the U.S. and, briefly, in Pakistan. This experience left me with an appreciation for the grit of urban life, the challenges it throws up to people, and how they manage them. In a sense, this is what Politics of Piety is about, too—people trying to make sense of a world that has completely undone the possibility of a wholesome life, but in which people still try to recreate that possibility through suturing various kinds of disparate practices and habits.

NS: Why did you choose Cairo as the site of your fieldwork?

SM: At first I went to Algiers, but it was in the throes of a civil war, which made fieldwork impossible. I also went to Fes and Casablanca but found that political debate was very guarded and muffled, making it difficult to pursue the kinds of questions I was interested in. In Cairo, however, I found a place that was very vibrant and alive with debates about the importance of secularism, Islamism, and what it means to live as a Muslim in the contemporary world. The city streets pulsated with these debates, and Egyptians generally did not feel restrained in expressing their religious and political views. I found the public culture of the city very conducive to the project I wanted to pursue, and so I stayed.

NS: What brought you to the theoretical tools that would help you interpret that experience in Politics of Piety?

SM: By the time I went to do fieldwork in Cairo, I was already very critical of how the existing literature analyzed Islamist movements, largely in functionalist and reductive terms. It seemed to subscribe to a hydraulic conception of politics: you squish something down in one place and it bubbles up in another. Islamic politics, in other words, was a displacement of something more fundamental—economic frustration, lack of democracy, and so on. But I was far less prepared to think about the range of embodied religious practices I encountered and how these inform or undergird politics. It was really a challenge for me to think about people’s preoccupation with the minutiae of bodily practices and not to read them as misguided or misplaced religiosity. Like countless other scholars, I initially tended to view them as inconsequential both to politics and to the substance of religion. It was really only after doing the fieldwork, when I came back and started writing, that I began to think more deeply about these issues and my own inadequate response to what I had observed in the field. This process of reflection and writing brought me to rethink the distinction drawn between ethics and politics in liberal political theory, as well as the centrality of affect and embodied praxis to political imaginaries and projects.

NS: In the preface to Politics of Piety, you speak very eloquently about the relationship between that project and your experience of coming of age in Pakistan. Does Pakistan continue to inform the questions that you pose and the ways in which you think about them? The country has certainly come to play a different role on the world stage in recent years. . . .

SM: The developments in Pakistan have been quite tragic. The Pakistani military has mortgaged the future of the country to fight a series of proxy wars for the U.S.—wars that have methodically destroyed its infrastructure, not to mention social and political life in the country. Politics of Piety is an analysis of a different kind of Islamic movement, in Egypt, that is transformative of social and political life but not destructive of its very possibility. In Pakistan, Islamist movements have largely played a very destructive role, especially with the ascendance of jihadi movements that have made a Faustian bargain with the Pakistani military, on the one hand, and U.S. strategic interests, on the other. It’s quite different in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest Islamist political organization in the country—has eschewed militancy at least since the 1950s, and the network of da’wa groups that I analyze in my book are reformist in nature, focused largely on proselytization and social welfare activities. The career of Islamic militants in Egypt was short-lived, and they do not command the kind of power that they do in Pakistan. As a result, the social and political profile of Islamism in Egypt is radically different from its counterpart in Pakistan. In my current project, I have begun to take up the question of how geopolitics transforms the ways religious coexistence is managed, produced, and transformed. But, while geopolitics has certainly transformed Pakistani life, in my current work I’m not thinking about it particularly in the Pakistani context.

NS: Can you tell me more about the project you’re involved in now?

SM: Well, I am engaged in a couple of related projects. My personal project focuses on how Christian-Muslim relations have been historically transformed through the introduction of the concepts of minority rights and religious liberty in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egypt. Aside from this, I am also working on a three-year collective project with three other colleagues (Elizabeth Hurd, Peter Danchin, and Winnifred Sullivan), funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It focuses on how religious freedom is being transformed through legal and political contestations in a variety of countries in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and South Asia. It’s called “Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Norms and Local Practices.” Most of the scholarly work to date tends to treat religious freedom as a singular and stable principle, enshrined in international and national legal documents. Others tend to focus on how different religious traditions are either amenable or resistant to the incorporation of liberal conceptions of religious liberty. Our project is distinct in that it asks whether religious liberty can indeed be treated as a singular or stable principle aimed at achieving shared goals and objectives, given the diversity of historical and political contexts. We will track the variety of claims made in the name of religious liberty, with the aim of mapping out modular disagreements that occur in a variety of national and international political contexts. We are interested in this because we believe that, in order to reach any sort of agreement in the human rights community, it is important first to understand what is really at stake in battles over religious freedom. It is also important to ask whether religious freedom, given its manifold deployments and limitations, is the best way to achieve co-existence for the variety of actors involved.

NS: A thread that seems to connect the earlier work with what you’ve been doing more recently is the issue of freedom—from freedom as personal autonomy, in Politics of Piety, to religious freedom in international law, now. Has the one informed how you think about the other?

SM: That is an interesting question. I agree that liberty and freedom are at the center of both of my projects. The right to religious liberty is often conceived in individualist terms—whether in the First Amendment, the European Convention on Human Rights, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the right to religious liberty has also been imagined in collective terms as the right of a group to practice its traditions freely, without undue intervention or control. This latter conception has been very important to religious minorities in claiming a place of autonomy and freedom from majoritarian norms and state interventions. In my current work, I am trying to think through how these alternative conceptions of religious liberty stand in tension with each other and the sorts of impasses it produces.

NS: What kinds of methods are you using? Are you doing fieldwork again?

SM: Fieldwork is an important part, but the project has historical, geopolitical, and legal dimensions as well, since I’m interested in tracking how notions of religious liberty travel across time and history, and also across the divide between Western and non-Western. So, I’m looking at the UN charter, the UDHR, international laws and treaties, as well as particular legal precedents in Europe that have traveled to the Middle East and have gained particular traction there.

NS: Tell me more about what the fieldwork is like. After all, I imagine that the usual way of studying international law is primarily textual. How does fieldwork inform these kinds of questions?

SM: I’m interested in the social life of the law, especially since many court cases about the right to religious freedom in the Middle East are fought, not just in courts, but through public campaigns launched on the cultural-political terrain. People’s sense of what constitutes religious liberty is shaped by how human, civil, and minority rights organizations end up contesting and arguing over it. Part of my fieldwork in Egypt entailed working with human rights practitioners, particularly those who are using international human rights protocols in their legal strategies and public campaigns.

NS: Can you say a bit, in turn, about how Is Critique Secular? came about and the kinds of problems that framed it?

SM: It emerged out of an event organized at UC Berkeley to announce the establishment of a new teaching and research unit on critical theory. This inaugural symposium generated a lot of interesting debate and discussion—not only on the Berkeley campus but here on the Immanent Frame as well. The Townsend Center for the Humanities, where the event was held, approached me and other participants about putting some of the papers together in book form. As we could not pull together all the papers from the symposium, we focused on the ones about the Danish cartoon controversy. Wendy Brown, Talal Asad, Judith Butler, and I decided that we would try to organize the book around this question while also retaining some of the original impetus for the symposium.

NS: More recently, the cartoon controversy seems to have repeated itself all over again with the Park51 complex in Lower Manhattan, or the so-called “Ground Zero mosque.” And long before that, there was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses.

SM: Well, I think there are substantial differences among the issues involved in each of these controversies. I think the latter is quite straightforwardly about the right of a much-maligned minority to build a place of worship near a site invested with patriotic-national fervor, while the former controversies centered upon Muslim objections to how the prophet Muhammad was portrayed.

NS: What is wrapped up for people in these portrayals of the prophet?

SM: It’s not an accident that with both the Satantic Verses and the Danish cartoon controversies, what was at stake was the particular kind of affective and religious connection pious Muslims (but certainly not all Muslims) feel to the figure of Muhammad—to his iconicity and his exemplariness. This relationhip forces us to think about religiosity in more complicated ways than as privatized belief, or as a system of rules, regulations, and taboos. Both Muslims and non-Muslims must think critically about whether the sense of injury that derives from this sort of religiosity is translatable into a language of rights, and whether understanding this sense of injury is something worthy for the ethical and political life of a religiously diverse society. I think that there is an increasing tendency within the U.S. and Europe—on the part of the majority and minorities alike—to resort to the law and the state to settle ethical and moral issues. At the time of the Danish cartoon controversy, both sides wanted to defer to the law to settle their claims. But I think that such a turn to the law, or legislation, freezes positions and allows the state to intervene in domains toward which it claims to be neutral. My contribution to Is Critique Secular? lays these issues out in more detail than I can do justice to here. In sum, what I am suggesting is that struggles over religious difference cannot simply be settled by the heavy hand of the law. Insomuch as these struggles entail competing religious sensibilities as well as deep prejudices and intolerances, they must be engaged on other—cultural, ethical, visceral—grounds. This may not yield immediate or definitive results, but it is a necessary and important step in the creation of a multi-religious polity.

NS: So how do you think this plays out in the case of Park51?

SM: There, of course, even though the personage of Muhammad was not involved, the language of injury and offense dominated the debate. If you recall, in the Danish cartoon controversy, the claim was that the right to freedom of expression is also a right to offend anybody and anyone—and that this is a characteristic of an open, pluralistic, and democratic society. Some even argued that the cartoons served as an instrument to create offense, so as to engender a critical dialogue among Muslims about Islam. In contrast, in the Park51 controversy, it was argued that the complex should not be built because, even though Muslims have a right to do so by virtue of the First Amendment, building one so close to the World Trade Center would offend American sensibilities. The claim to offense and injury in each instance was being marshaled for very different purposes.

NS: And the players’ roles have been reversed, haven’t they?

SM: Right. I do think, however, that what is at stake in all these debates is the status of a religious minority within self-avowedly liberal societies, which claim to have in place the most robust mechanisms possible for accommodating the concerns of majority and minority alike. And yet, what we find is that the rights of minorities are actually framed by the norms of the larger community; it’s against those norms that minoritarian claims are judged and contested, and that is where the idea of religious liberty and freedom of expression as an individual right remains inadequate to grasping the situation. We have to start thinking in terms of how groups are weighted both demographically and politically, and how this conditions the context in which certain claims are made or heard. It’s not enough to refer to a right that exists in constitutions—such as the right to free speech or to religious liberty—and to track when it is applied or not. Far tougher questions are at play. One has to think about how the ethical, cultural, and social norms of the majority structure the possibility of the exercise of individual and group liberties differently for minorities. I should make clear that this structural problem characterizes all nation-states (premised as they are on the demographic calculus of minority and majority populations), and is not simply particular to Euro-American societies.

NS: When you approach these issues today, are you still coming to them as an activist as well as a scholar?

SM: No, I would say that I come to them more as a scholar than as an activist. My intellectual work has often led me to challenge and complicate my political stances—to complicate the very ground on which politics can be imagined and conducted. Politics, in my opinion, demands a certain closure of thinking, in order to judge and to act. Intellectual work requires a different kind of labor. In one sense, of course, all arguments are political when you’re thinking about such controversies, but I don’t start with a political position and then see how the argument unfolds. For example, during the Danish cartoon controversy, I was puzzled by the fact that the kind of injury expressed by ordinary pious Muslims did not find any voice in the polemical debates in either the Islamic or the European press. I tried to make sense of this silence, and it led me to suggest that the kind of religiosity expressed by most Muslims in response to the Danish cartoons was incommensurable with the language of rights, litigation, and boycotts that came to dominate the debate. And it was precisely because this religiosity could not be contained within the language of identity politics that it found no expression in the public debate. Needless to say, this argument did not win me friends in either one of the two camps.

NS: Is there something in particular that you think the West needs to know about the Muslim world, or about Islam, or about Muslim minorities? Is there some message that, above all, you think needs to be definitively stated—or is the questioning enough?

SM: I don’t think questioning is enough. But I do think that there is a desperate need to challenge the current way of framing things, as a civilizational stand-off between Islam and the West. This way of thinking is not only dangerous but also unsustainable in the long run. Those of us interested in stepping out of this overheated polemic have a responsibility to make people realize why this framing is inadequate and problematic, even dangerous. Despite important differences among political ideologies and religious traditions, I believe that we have the historical language and analytical skills to think differently, to imagine a future in which Islam and the West are not locked in some zero-sum game. To take a simple example, when I speak of the kind of relationship that many pious Muslims feel toward Muhammad, which was partly at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy, surely it is recognizable to scholars of Christianity (with its long and rich tradition of the Eucharist and Corpus Christi), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and late Antiquity? Surely we can think together about different conceptions of religiosity and what space they have in, and what effects they may have on, our political present without descending into the abyss of civilizational incomprehension and incommensurability?

NS: What about the concerns of Western feminists in particular? There sometimes seems to be especially little hope for common ground on women’s issues.

SM: Once again, feminism has a rich and varied tradition of thought and praxis. The current tilt toward painting an essentialized picture of feminism and Islam—as quintessential opposites—is inadequate to the complexity of both traditions. There are no doubt historical reasons for the great suspicion with which some Islamic symbols are treated in Euro-American societies, but I would hope that thoughtful people would be able to think through this history critically. Take the example of the current obsession with the veil in Europe: colonial discourse had long cast the veil as the essential symbol of the civilizational inferiority of the East, and of Islam in particular. It is not a surprise, therefore, that anti-colonial movements took up this symbol precisely to reverse the colonial judgment while embracing the practice—in the process, reifying the importance of the veil to Muslim identity. The current discourse is, in a sense, a re-enactment of this history. What is new, however, is the way in which the European and Turkish bans on the veil have been held up in the name of secularism, wherein secularism is equated with the principle of gender equality. For example, the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that uphold the headscarf ban in Turkey and France rest on two interrelated claims: one, that the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression; and two, that insomuch as secularism is for gender equality France and Turkey, as secular states, cannot condone this practice. But, historically, secularism has hardly been on the side of women’s rights—otherwise French women would have been granted the vote long before 1945, and the separation of church and state would have yielded gender equality in the nineteenth century, when European states adopted this principle. Secularism and women’s rights have always had a troubled relationship, which is important to think about from within the history of feminism. This does not mean, of course, that one has to denounce secularism and embrace religion or vice versa. One has to be able to see the mutual imbrication of religion and secularism to even diagnose the problem correctly. Otherwise, I think we run the risk of dulling the critical edge of feminist thought.

NS: I found your essay about the mobilization of feminists behind the invasion of Afghanistan very powerful. I remember being so struck at that time by how American women were identifying with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, which made some eager to support our military adventures over there. But is there a better way to ally ourselves with women in the Muslim world?

SM: The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.  We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Clearly, Oprah’s product endorsements have had a huge impact on sales, which is no doubt galling for us critics of neoliberal capitalism, who are often ashamed to admit how much we ourselves buy and consume in the privacy of our own lives. Most of us are not strangers to the act of buying to help us feel good, but members of the intellectual elite disavow their commodified selves as a mark of class status and taste.  Watching Oprah, we enact this disavowal, and Lofton herself performs it when she writes: “We’re happy for the woman and glad for her good tidings, but we are left with the itching uncertainty that we don’t feel very good at all about all this commodity fetishism.” Criticizing Oprah’s blatant embrace of shopping performs a deeply entrenched scholarly identity that has its roots in Marxist intellectualism. It thus reproduces old political ideologies and dichotomies, such as the (often implicit) idea that political action to create a better world requires personal austerity and social upheaval.

Oprah makes people feel good. Scholarly critics fear that Oprah is anaesthetizing the masses. Lofton asks us to be surprised at how Oprah blends spirituality with the real world of commodities, but she does not as readily examine or challenge the common assumption that spirituality-cum-commodified self-improvement is antithetical to social/political action. In fact, the criticism of Oprah’s political effects seems oddly misplaced. There are at least three arenas that Lofton discusses in which Oprah’s acts have had significant social and political effects that go well beyond passive self-improvement: the election of Obama; transformation of the reading practices of the wide public that participates in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club; and the refashioning of gender. Within these three arenas, Oprah has arguably contributed significantly to the fashioning of a new middle-class subject and made it a performative possibility for millions of viewers. Oprah’s iconic performances have had important political and social effects that most liberal academics would be expected to applaud, including the encouragement of reading and the promotion of religious, racial, cultural, and sexual tolerance, by downplaying difference. Yet Lofton presents these Oprah effects in prose that often oscillates between a balanced review of scholarly and historical sources and conclusions tinged with disparagement. It is this tone, which belies her analytic neutrality, that might lead Oprah’s audience members to wonder what Lofton is doing to “their Oprah.”

Lofton’s epilogue focuses on the “‘Oprahfication’ of Obama,” by which she means the way that Oprah put Obama into the mold of a “familiar sort of savior,” a commodified product of neoliberalism.  She and some of her more socially progressive readers are disturbed by this commodification—including Deidre English, who calls such Oprahfication “chilling.” Yet the effect of Oprah’s decision,to come out and take an explicit political stance—not only aligning herself with a Democratic political candidate, but also actively promoting his presidency—was enormous. Oprah’s decision to openly endorse one candidate was quite a contrast from her usual practice of even-handed inclusiveness. One effect, of course, was to alienate some of her most conservative viewers, producing a small drop in Nielson ratings. But another effect was to create a huge base of support for Obama among people, especially women, who otherwise might not have imagined voting for a black presidential candidate. Some have argued that she may have influenced the very outcome of the election.

Oprah has this power to shape middle-class American discourse precisely because she does not take an overtly radical political stance focused on upending the current economic and social order from the outside, which would alienate people who are worried about rapid social transformation. She instead operates from within, performing and promoting a middle-class subjectivity grounded in a form of spirituality that has deep roots in American religious practice. She made it conceivable to identify Obama with the mainstream middle class—an effect that goes well beyond shallow, commodified “Oprahfication.”

The concept of depth is another one of those Oprah inkblots that exposes academics’ anxieties about the contradiction between their elitism and their egalitarianism. Lofton herself is uneasy and noncommittal about the concept of depth, presenting arguments that are critical of Oprah’s lack of depth, while aware that the criticism of spirituality as “thin” raises the question of what “thick” or “deep” might be. What is needed is a more systematic analysis of the politics of “depth,” beginning with its deployment by academics.

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. Lofton is one of several scholars who have engaged in the classic highbrow-lowbrow debate and either bemoaned the loss of “depth” in an Oprah reading or celebrated how Oprah’s approach is a new style of reading that has encouraged the middle class to engage with both new authors and classic tomes that otherwise may have been inaccessible to most readers. Cecelia Farr, for example, compares the book club to an introductory English class: the first step is to reach students. One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids.  Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world. Furthermore, Oprah’s book recommendations brought many female and minority authors the kind of visibility and respect that otherwise might have eluded them, effectively forcing a widening of the literary “canon.”  Surely, a “deep” reading is not precluded by a form of reading that first grabs people emotionally and gets them to buy and open the book. But Oprah stimulates our class anxieties surrounding taste and the discernment of quality as manifest in our ability to interpret a novel “deeply.”

I turn finally to the question of gender and to scholarly anxieties about Oprah as an icon of womanhood. Why would Lofton say that “women and femininity in Oprah’s empire are . . . served up to be sacrificed”?  What are the effects of Oprah’s use of gender?  Are women being sacrificed or rendered powerless by Oprah’s embrace of feminine style?  Feminists may well be concerned that this sort of emphasis on the feminine deprives women of their political voice and plays into the hands of an arch-conservative like Glenn Beck, the only talk show host who rivals Oprah’s popularity. Beck is the antithesis of Oprah in so many ways—a white male whose commentary plays a central role in shaping conservative political discourse as it is articulated by many middle-class Americans. Yet he himself has stated on his show that his wife watches Oprah. Though he denigrates Oprah, his comments imply the following peculiar analogy: Oprah is to women what he, Beck, is to conservatives. In this analogy, the domestic doings of women can be safely ignored. Beck asserts a form of divisive but beleaguered masculine culture that must be protected from the incursions of foreigners, government, elite liberals, and uppity women. If Oprah is painted as merely promoting feminine distractions, then she too can be safely mocked and ignored.

Lofton’s reading of Oprah unwittingly participates in a similar class- and politics-based denigration of the feminine that involves a problematic conceptual slippage. Many feminists of a certain age, who recall their bra-burning resistance to gender inequities in the workplace and the home, have been critical of an upcoming generation of women who seem to have forgotten these hard-won social gains as they subject themselves to a feminine style and impossible shoes. But a large proportion of this younger generation doesn’t necessarily recognize the bra or the shoe as a symbol of male domination as they dress for their successful careers. Furthermore, their concern with style needn’t mark them as politically apathetic or conservative, as both Beck and Lofton appear to assume. Beck uses a specific form of masculinity as the emotional juice for his political conservatism and tries to paint women’s world as apolitical and powerless. Assuming that he is correct reproduces this assumption.

Denigration of feminine political action has a long past. The temperance movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was mocked as a bourgeois woman’s concern before it moved into mainstream politics and became the powerful force that resulted in Prohibition. Discussing how Oprah was directly influenced by the multiple strands of spiritualism that developed in the nineteenth century, scholar Trysh Travis has suggested that these forms of spiritualism were marginalized both by the general public and by the academy because they were judged to be “pathologically bourgeois and feminized.” They were criticized as being vague and superficial—a concern that Lofton herself expresses about Oprah’s approach to Obama, to books, and to spirituality. Historically (and, from an anatomical point of view, rather paradoxically), the feminine has been seen as lacking depth. Lofton’s criticism of the way Oprah encompasses both style and personal autonomy in her vision of self-improvement rests on a similar unease with feminine style and bodily practice, which is shared by many scholars. Yet, in our time, neither femininity nor masculinity can be detached from commodified bodily practices. Oprah’s entanglement of spiritualism and feminine commodities, which Lofton so powerfully demonstrates, can instead be viewed as an ethical discipline that not only embraces forms of embodied feminine pleasure but links these pleasures to forms of power that have the potential to recast the political process by reshaping the middle-class subject into one who is tolerant of the racially, culturally, religiously, and sexually other.

Focusing on the ways in which Oprah’s performances make scholars uneasy exposes the silent ambivalences and contradictions that shape our own discourse. These contradictions emerge from tensions between our egalitarian ideologies and our entrenched intellectual elitism. Oprah preaches a more egalitarian and tolerant social order, just as do many liberal scholars and other members of the intellectual elite, but she goes about it very differently. She disrupts intellectual elitism by making aspects of elite culture—ranging from lifestyle to literature—visible and accessible to everyone.  Unfortunately, efforts of the intellectual elite to promote a better world often backfire, foundering on the political polarization of liberals and conservatives. Conservatives attack liberals, especially those at elite research universities, for being out of touch with mainstream America. In some respects, they are right. Our uneasiness with Oprah arises precisely at those moments when we draw the line and pass judgment on her appeals to the lowbrow middle-American consumer. And yet Oprah has figured out how to transmit her message of tolerance even into the home of Glenn Beck.

“I made a video asking people not to be scared, asking how long will we live in fear, that we should go to the streets and that there are plenty of men in Egypt, and we can protect ourselves from Mubarak’s thugs. Now I’m getting many threatening calls from Mubarak’s people ordering me not to leave my home, and saying that if I do I will be killed along with my family.”
——Asma Mahfouz, to BBC Arabic Television

A young Egyptian woman willing to put her life on the line used Facebook to issue this clarion call to her compatriots. On February 25, they went out by the thousands. During the following days, their numbers swelled into the millions. The Revolution of 2011 had started. On February 11, the eighteenth day of the Revolution, President Mubarak was ousted and the stage of building a new Egypt began.

The youth-driven Revolution of 2011, with its call for freedom and justice, is inscribing a new feminism, with a fresh lexicon and syntax. The new feminism—which does not go by the name “feminism,” but by its spirit—redefines the words freedom, liberation, justice, dignity, democracy, equality, and rights. It creates its own syntax, which, the dictionary reminds us, is the “arrangement of words to show their connection and relation.” It announces itself from deep within the Revolution, which aims to resurrect the fundamental principles and rights of citizens and human beings that were wantonly trampled down by the Mubarak government. The new feminism might be called, simply, “freedom, equality and justice for all.” It asserts itself in actions, straight-forwardness, and courage.

Over the course of eighteen days, Midan Tahrir, or Liberation Square, the geographical center of Cairo and the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, became a swirling kaleidoscope of images of freedom, equality, and justice in the making, with the whole world looking on. Saturday, February 12, the first day Egypt woke up without its harsh dictator of thirty years at the helm of a repressive regime, was the first day in the in the new life of this ancient country. Young women and men who had gone out to sweep away the tyrannies, inequalities, and injustices could be seen on this day with brooms in hand, now literally sweeping the streets clean. With bottles of detergent and brushes in hand, they wiped the walls around the square. They even scoured the pedestals of the lion statues at the Kasr al-Nil Bridge, where the “Battle of the Bridge” erupted on the first Friday of the Revolution, and where the police hurled tear gas at the peaceful demonstrators making their way to Midan Tahrir to practice democracy their own way, feet—not boots—on the ground, when all other avenues were blocked.

Embedded feminism

In the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the youth were joined by citizens of all ages—workers, students, professionals, women and men, Muslims and Christians. It was a populist movement mobilized in cyberspace and through local networks, and acted out on national soil. The new feminism is a feminism embedded in revolution. It is so fused with the revolution that to use the term “feminism” seems redundant or superfluous, even anachronistic, and we have just observed that the revolutionary actors themselves do not use it. Yet feminism possesses conceptual and explanatory power, and so we employ it analytically. At the core of feminism is a call for the practice of equality and justice for women, who as a group have suffered historically from systemic inequality and injustice. Women in different parts of the world—Egypt among them—have on many occasions organized to take for themselves the rights that have been withheld from them. They have done so both in their own feminist movements and within broader social and political movements and configurations. Early in the last century, for instance, Egyptian women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, to fight for their rights as women while they worked simultaneously within the national liberation movement. In so doing, they set a precedent for multi-level activism. Egyptian feminists understood from the beginning that the equality and justice that they sought for women was of a piece with equality and justice for all.

Over the years, activists in Egypt seeking human rights, inclusive of women’s rights and social justice, pushed strenuously for reform. They tried to use classical methods—the vote, the press, television and radio, and public demonstrations—but elections were rigged, the media controlled, and public demonstrations met with violence, which for women often included sexual harassment, molestation, and rape. Reform movements typically involve campaigns focused on particular causes, including causes specific to women. In Egypt, as attempts to reform the existing political system were repeatedly thwarted—that is, brutally rendered impossible—by the state, revolution became the only way, and revolution demands a major overhaul of the political and social order, indeed, that the old system be swept away altogether.

In the twenty-first century, the tools of revolution have drastically changed, while the methods of state repression, as we have seen recently and vividly in Egypt, remain archaic and crude. The regime’s methods stemmed from the arrogant belief that an autocratic regime, with its vast power and violent means of repression, is unassailable. Autocrats take for granted that constitutions can be rewritten at will from on high to extend state power and impose their own rules for succession; that sham elections can produce compliant parliaments; and that the military, policy, intelligence, and security apparatuses possess limitless authority to muzzle citizens.

It is Egypt’s youth who have mastered the tools of the twenty-first century—information and communications technologies—and who are at home in cyberspace, a “country” in which they are free even while they remain shackled in their homeland. It is the youth who possess a belief in ideals, a vision, and a healthy impatience. Navigating the Internet, and with careful coordination on the ground, undaunted they mounted a peaceful assault upon the unmitigated, suffocating power of tyranny and oppression that had left no segment of society untouched.

Cairo’s Midan Tahrir has been called the epicenter of the 2011 Revolution, whose topography extends to Alexandria, Suez, and cities and towns throughout the country, including even the oasis city of Kharga, deep in the Western Desert of Upper Egypt. The choreography of shouting, gesticulating, dancing young men and women, joined by Egyptians of all ages, was caught on live feeds and transmitted instantaneously across the globe. It was captured on film and videos and recorded on cell phones and digital cameras by demonstrators and reporters. This rich visual and oral album displays a gender pastiche of women and men side by side—clusters upon clusters of women amid seas of men, women and men shoulder to shoulder, and families with small children. The demonstrators and their supporters all craved the same thing: an end to the tyranny of the dictator and his corrupt regime, and the emergence of a free society with equal opportunity for all. They called for an end to the inequities of gender, class, and connection that formed the tight and insidious web of patriarchal hierarchy.

The downfall of authoritarianism and the building of a new egalitarian and just order

With the dismantling of the three-decade-old autocracy of Mubarak—itself a continuation of the previous autocracy—and the hierarchies that spawned spirals of injustice as people’s basic rights were hijacked, the people of Egypt, led by its youth, grabbed for themselves the chance to rebuild.

The builders of the new Egypt want nothing less than full equality in law and practice, justice, and dignity for all. As we speak, a special committee is drafting a new constitution (to supplant the previous one that was arbitrarily altered by Mubarak). Laws that undermine the equality, justice, and dignity of the citizens of Egypt must either go or be drastically overhauled. The Muslim Personal Status Code (also referred to as family law) structures a model of the family based on a patriarchal understanding of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This law, by formalizing male authority and power, shores up a system of gender inequality. The husband is cast as the head of family, with the attendant privileges and prerogatives, along with obligations of protection and support, while the wife, as subordinate, owes obedience to her husband and must render services in return for his support and protection, whether she wants it or not.

Feminists, as well as other reformers, have tried since the early twentieth century to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code. Over the years, they obtained only minor adjustments in the law, which did not disturb the patriarchal family model. A common excuse for this failure to reform the Muslim Personal Status Code is that it is religious law, part of the shar ‘iah, and therefore sacred and immutable. The confusion of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, which is man-made, with the shar ‘iah, which is the path to a virtuous life, ascertained from the Qur’an, has been a potent deterrent of change. However, it is possible to enact an egalitarian family law based in Islamic jurisprudence, as Morocco did in 2004, with the overhaul of the Mudawanna that recast husband and wife as equal heads of the family. It is also theoretically possible, if politically difficult, to enact into law a secular egalitarian model of the family that would reflect the spirit of religion and its ideals of equality, justice, and dignity, the ulemah, or religious scholars, in Turkey say their country’s secular family law does.

With the overthrow of the authoritarian state in Egypt and the dismantling of the buttresses of its power, and with legal reform already underway with the creation of the committee tasked with drafting a new constitution, equality and justice in law and practice now have a renewed chance at realization. The harsh inequities that authoritarianism enforces were there for all to see, in their starkest, most extreme form, in the practices of the regime that the youth eventually took down. Will the youth now be willing to accept patriarchal authoritarianism sustained by the old family law, a law so out of sync with contemporary social realities—with their own realities? It is very hard to see by what logic they could do so. Freedom, equality, and justice cannot be reserved for some only. For the youth, female and male, who raised this revolution, freedom, equality, and justice are surely non-negotiable, and dignity, the order of the day. This is the essence of the new feminism, call it what you will.