Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Development in Revolutionary Egypt (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)

Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Development in Revolutionary Egypt (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)

Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands―including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates. Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught between revolutionary activism and Islamic reformism in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite their many disagreements, religious reformers, revolutionaries, and state actors converged on literacy as the first step toward realizing aspirations of the revolution. They invoked the verse Muslims believe was the first to be revealed, "Read in the name of your Lord," to teach literacy as a religious duty and the foundation for the country's future. Nermeen Mouftah unravels how this religiously inspired push for universal literacy was born of twenty-first-century scripturalism and simultaneously went beyond the Quran, to make reading and writing virtuous acts of the liberal state. While revolutionary literacy campaigns soon vanished and adult literacy rates remained stubbornly low, their efforts revealed the importance of recognizing alternative modes of text processing and the personhood and knowledge of nonliterate people. Read in the Name of Your Lord demonstrates how the rise in modern scripturalism underpinned literacy activism, blurring the binary between secular and religious knowledge. "Mouftah's careful ethnographic examination of adult literacy programs in Egypt acts as an intersection from which the reader can turn one way or another to explore everything from debates about Qur'anic hermeneutics and contemporary theories of development, to gender and language ideologies, the false promises of neoliberalism, and the cruel optimism of revolutionary hope."―Gregory Starrett, author of Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt "In addition to tracing the social life of literacy campaign in Egypt, this book provocatively questions the privileging of literacy in the first place. Mouftah gives spaces to ways of knowing that rely on other modes of experiencing text. This pivot animates the very subjects who are objects of reform campaigns and in this Mouftah reverses the gaze and calls into question the readers' underlying assumptions."―Shenila Khoja-Moolji, author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia "In Read in the Name of Your Lord, Mouftah's reflexive approach as an ethnographer, carefully considering her own positionality and the power dynamics at play between herself and her interlocutors, and between the educated literacy teachers and their adult students or learners, adds an invaluable layer of depth to the book's analysis."―Kimberly Wortmann, Religious Studies Review Nermeen Mouftah is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago.