Islamism and the Politics of Fun
In December 2002, on a plane from Aleppo, Syria, I happened to be sitting next to a twenty-year-old Syrian cleric on his way to Cairo to spend some time in Al-Azhar. He asked if he could borrow my Syrian newspaper, which he quickly skimmed through until he reached the sports pages. Only after the young cleric had thoroughly observed the entire section did I open a conversation with him. He said he loved soccer and prayed that his favorite teams, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, would win in their national tournaments. Music was his other interest, and not only that of Um Kulthoum and Fairouz but also of the Egyptian pop star Amr Diab. Young mullahs also need to have fun, it occurred to me. Observing this man of religion taking such pleasure in temporal diversions, I could not help wondering why puritan Islamists express such hostility toward fun and joy.
One of the ironies of “fundamentalist” Islamism is that it has tenaciously withstood waves of political challenges but has felt powerless before simple displays of spontaneity and joy and the pursuit of everyday pleasures. It seems as though every occasion of mundane festivity, private parties, and gatherings at bustling street corners, teahouses, shopping malls, and secular celebrations becomes a matter of profound doctrinal anxiety and delegitimation. It is as if these ordinary pursuits would enfeeble the Islamist moral paradigm just as the erotic taste of chocolate perturbed the tranquillité of the French village in Joanne Harris’s novel Chocolat.
Drawing mainly on the experience of Muslim states, notably postrevolution Iran, I explore why Islamists are so distinctly apprehensive of the expression of “fun” — a preoccupation most people in the world seem to take for granted. I take fun to refer to an array of ad hoc, nonroutine, and joyful conducts — ranging from playing games, joking, dancing, and social drinking, to involvement in playful art, music, sex, and sport, to particular ways of speaking, laughing, appearing, or carrying oneself — where individuals break free temporarily from the disciplined constraints of daily life, normative obligations, and organized power. Fun is a metaphor for the expression of individuality, spontaneity, and lightness, in which joy is the central element. While joy is neither an equivalent nor a definition of fun, it remains a key component of it. Not everything joyful is fun, such as routine ways of having meals, even though one can make food fun by injecting joyful creativity in preparing or consuming it. Thus fun often points to usually improvised, spontaneous, free-form, changeable, and thus unpredictable expressions and practices. There is a strong tendency in modern times to structure and institutionalize fun in the form of, for instance, participating in organized leisure activities; going to bars, discos, concerts; and the like. However, the inevitable drive for spontaneity and invention renders organized fun a tenuous entity.
Fun may be expressed by individuals or collectives, in private or public, and take traditional or commoditized forms. Fashion, for instance, represents a collective, commoditized, and systematic expression of fun, yet one that is constantly in flux because it deems to respond to the carefree and shifting spirit of fun. Fun appeals to almost all social groups (the rich and poor, old and young, modern and traditional, men and women), yet youths are the prime practitioners of fun and the main target of anti-fun politics, because youth habitus is characterized by a greater tendency for experimentation, adventurism, idealism, drive for autonomy, mobility, and change. Perhaps that is why fun is often conflated with and identified by “youth culture.” However, fun in fact constitutes only one, although significant, component of youth culture, in the same way that lower-class festivities, such as the activities celebrating the birthdays of saints (mulids) in Egypt, are but one aspect of folk culture and the creations of avant-garde artists one element of a counterculture. But the differential habitus of these social groups tends to orient them more or less to different fun practices and therefore subject them to different degrees of prohibitions and regulations that can be subsumed under the rhetoric of “anti-fun.” For instance, whereas the elderly poor can afford simple, traditional, and contained diversions, the globalized and affluent youth tend to embrace more spontaneous, erotically charged, and commodified pleasures. This might help explain why globalizing youngsters more than others cause fear and fury among Islamist anti-fun adversaries, especially when much of what these youths practice is informed by Western technologies of fun and is framed in terms of “Western cultural import.”
I suggest that the fear of fun is not restricted to Islamists and Islam but extends to most religions. It is not even a merely religious concern; secularists, whether revolutionary or conservative, have also expressed apprehension of and animosity toward fun. I argue that rather than simply a doctrinal question, anti-fun-damentalism is a historical matter, one that has to do significantly with the preservation of power. In other words, at stake is not necessarily the disruption of the moral order, as often claimed, but rather the undermining of the hegemony, the regime of power on which certain strands of moral and political authority rest. By “moralpolitical authority,” I refer not only to states or governmental power but also to the authority of individuals (for instance, sheikhs or cult leaders) and social-political movements — those whose legitimacy lies in deploying a particular doctrinal paradigm. The adversaries’ fear of fun, I conclude, revolves ultimately around the fear of exit from the paradigm that frames their mastery; it is about anxiety over loss of their “paradigm power.”
Islamism and the Struggle over Fun
The history of Islamism has been one of a battle against fun, playfulness, and diversion, with the hostility coming from both the Islamist movements and the Islamic states. In the late 1980s, Islamist students who dominated university campuses in the south and north of Egypt disrupted music concerts, plays, and amusements and harassed male and female students who were associating freely with one another or who were simply pursuing pleasures of everyday life. The Islamist student unions banned films, dancing, and popular and classical music, because they were deemed “alien to Islamic culture.”1 Later, the radical Islamist group al-Gama’a al-Islamiya imposed strict codes of conduct both on the young and on women in a Cairo neighborhood under its control; it forbade beauty salons and video shops and put an end to joyous music at weddings. Even the moderate Muslim Brothers held “exemplary Islamic weddings” that eliminated joyful music or allowed only the performance of inshad, featuring chanting and percussion. Many Islamists in Egypt wished to undo the country’s happy culture of Islam, in particular its highly festive Ramadan observance, denouncing the mulid festivals for their cheerful semblance.2 Morality among the young became a matter of serious concern not only for Islamists but also for the conservative media. The state-owned weekly Al-Ahram al-Arabi lamented that coffee shops and youth hangouts had become “dens of drug, booze, sexual movies and urfi [unofficial] marriage” and were frequented by “girls who smoke sheesha and wear clothes that are uncalled-for.” The paper called for surveillance to protect “our youth.”3 Advanced by opposition Islamists and conservative media, these measures were quite soft when compared with the puritan policies of self-declared Islamist states such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iran.
Saudi Arabia’s state control of leisure and diversion in the name of morality and piety has a longer history. The kingdom has banned dating, cinemas, concert halls, discos, clubs, and theaters. Even the innocent joy of flying kites is not tolerated. Yet nowhere was the dark side of puritanism probably more evident than in Taliban Afghanistan. During its draconian rule (1996 – 2001), the Taliban erased all signs of diversion, fun, secular aesthetics, the pursuit of individuality, and creativity. Music, television, painting, sculpture, not to mention dancing, acting, public jubilance, the expression of beauty, and attention to the self were harshly suppressed. Women were forced to wear the burkha and men to grow long beards. Thus when in November 2001 the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to Northern Alliance forces, many Afghans began their human expression of joy in public. They played music in shops and turned on television sets, while some women shed their burkhas and men shaved their beards.
But it was in Iran where the expression of fun turned into a site of the most dramatic social polarization, pitting masses of dissenting women and the young against the Islamic state. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conservative Islamists battled against those who desired to demonstrate public joy. Fun, playfulness, lightness, and laughter were seen as instances of immorality, laxity, and waste, while entertainment in general was cast as a “counter-value” (zedd-e arzesh). “The most dangerous thing that threatens humanity,” declared Muhamad Taqui Mesbah Yazdi, an Iranian conservative cleric, “is for men to forget devotion to God, to establish cultural centers instead of mosques and churches, and to be driven by film and art rather than prayer and supplication.”4 Unsolicited mixing of the sexes was perceived as one of the greatest diversions and was therefore “extremely dangerous.” It “represents the hell-hole of individuals,” an immoral practice that threatened the spiritual and physical health of society.5 Gender segregation, therefore, was to act as yet another instrument of social control and discipline. A reader of the Islamist weekly Hafte-name-ye Sobh echoed the profound anguish of the conservative establishment over the “dishonorable ways in which teenage girls walk in the streets. How will they respond to the blood of our martyrs? I am ashamed seeing girls wearing short jackets, of musical bands in Tehran who go as far as dancing . . . !”6
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Notes
I am grateful to Lila Abu-Lughod, Ted Swedenburg, Sana Makhlouf, Nadia al-Baghdadi, Ayse Caglar, Linda Herrera, and the reviewers of Public Culture, especially Dilip Gaonkar, for their critical comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay. Of course only I am responsible for all possible shortcomings. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
- Linda Herrera, “A Song for Humanistic Education: Pedagogy and Politics in the Middle East,” Teachers College Record (forthcoming).
- See Muhamed Abdul-Qoddous, “Mowajehe sakhina ma’a qiyadat al-television wa al-iza’a” (“Severe Confrontation with the Directors of Television and Radio”), Liwa al-Islami 43 (1988): 43 – 44. For a more detailed discussion of how saints’ festivals in Egypt are contested, see Samuli Schielke, “Habitus of the Authentic, Order of the Rational: Contesting Saints’ Festivals in Contemporary Egypt,” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 12 (2003): 155 – 72.
- Cited in Cairo Times, August 30 – September 5, 2001.
- Cited in Iran Emrooz, April 1, 2002.
- Discussed in the conservative Islamist monthly Partow-e Sokhan, cited in Nowrooz, 6 Aban AH 1380/October 28, 2001.
- Hafteh-nameh-ye Sobh, 22 Bahman AH 1379/February 10, 2001; my emphasis.