This project examines the texts, practices and experiences of preaching taqwā in contemporary Cairo. Taqwā, a foundational concept in the Islamic ethical tradition, is often translated as piety or fear of God but exceeds both in its inclusion of embodied habits, feelings and thoughts. Yet, taqwā complicates a religious/secular distinction in its regular appearances in Egyptian humanitarian discourse.  In order to interrogate constructions of and debates around taqwā in the context of widespread ongoing commitments to humanitarian reason, I examine those sites where the ordinariness of taqwā is rendered extraordinary, namely in the textual and embodied practices of preaching.  Through the lenses of intertextual reading practices, intimacies of ethical life, and contested experiences of the suffering body, this project examines encounters between preachers and the preached to as a key site at which Egyptians negotiate taqwā and the pressures of humanitarian reason.   

Biography:

Erin Atwell is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She holds an MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School, an MA in International Political Economy and Development from Fordham University, and a BA in International Studies from Loyola University Chicago.  Erin has a background in the humanitarian aid industry in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Palestine.  Her research examines the affordances of the Islamic ethical tradition in its entanglements with humanitarian reason through a textual and ethnographic study of preaching in Cairo, Egypt.