MULTIPLE STRUGGLES

It is important not to confuse my discussion of religious identity with “fundamentalism,” “extremism,” or “militant Islam,” which has been the center of attention of many studies (Dessouki 1982; Ibrahim 1982; Kepel 1993). “Fundamentalism” especially has been the focus of studies that aim to examine the relationship between globalization and religion (see, for

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example, Turner 1994; Beyer 1994; Waters 1995; Watts 1996; Castells 1997). Such studies limit their discussion to the ideology of the leaders of some radical Islamic groups and tend to present these movements as “responses” or “reactions” to globalization. The role of ordinary people as active agents in negotiating religious and global discourses in their daily life and the formation of their local identities is largely neglected.

Central to the growing globalization of Cairo is the proliferation of discourses and images of modernity circulated mainly in the state-controlled media. Religious identity, I stress in this section, is closely linked to people's daily struggle to appropriate what they perceive as positive aspects of modernity and avoid what is considered negative. This entails a struggle on at least two fronts. First, people struggle against the state's attempts to copy Western modernity. Second, people also struggle against attempts by religious extremists who try to reject various aspects of modern objects and discourses and seek to live according to the time of the Prophet.