1. Al-Ahram, 31 July 1993, p. 10.

2. Al-Akhbar, 31 August 1989, p. 1.

3. Al-Akhbar, 1 September 1989, p. 9.

4. Al-Akhbar, 1 September 1989, p. 9.

5. Al-Ahram, 31 August 1989, p. 10; al-Jumhuriyya, 31 August 1989, p. 3.

6. Al-Wafd, 2 September 1989, pp. 1–2.

7. Cassandra, “The Impending Crisis in Egypt,” Middle East Journal 49, 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 9–27.

8. Richard Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 4.

9. Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Occasional Paper Series, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, March 1986, p. 14; see also Lila Abu-Lughod, “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989), pp. 267–306.

10. Asad, “Anthropology of Islam,” p. 14.

11. L. Abu-Lughod, “Zones of Theory,” p. 297.

12. Asad, “Anthropology of Islam,” p. 15.

13. See, for example, John Bowen, “Elaborating Scriptures: Cain and Abel in Gayo Society,” Man, n.s., 27, 3 (1992), pp. 495–516; and his Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth-Century Notable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and his “Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies,” American Ethnologist 19, 4 (1992), pp. 643–55; Michael M. J. Fischer and Mehdi Abedi, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Patricia Horvatich, “Ways of Knowing Islam,” American Ethnologist 21, 4 (1994), pp. 811–26; Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

14. For a recent review of the literature, see Gregory Starrett, “The Anthropology of Islam,” in Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook of Method and Theory, ed. Stephen Glazier (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), pp. 279–303.

15. The notion of “objectification” is borrowed ultimately from Bernard Cohn, by way of Dale Eickelman, “Identité nationale et discours religieux en Oman,” in Intellectuels et militants de l'Islam contemporain, ed. Gilles Kepel and Yann Richard (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 121; see also his “Counting and Surveying an “Inner” Omani Community: Hamra al-‘Abriyin,” in Tribe and State: Essays in Honour of David Montgomery Hart, ed. E. G. H. Joffe and C. R. Pennell (Wisbech, England: MENAS Press, 1991), pp. 253–77. See William E. Shepard, “Islam as a “System” in the Later Writings of Sayyid Qutb,” Middle Eastern Studies 25 (1989), pp. 31–50.

16. Eickelman, “Mass Higher Education,” p. 650.

17. Al-Ahram, 17 February 1989, p. 13.

18. Messick, The Calligraphic State.

19. Dale Eickelman, “The Art of Memory: Islamic Education and Its Social Reproduction,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 20 (1978), p. 485.

20. Eickelman, “The Art of Memory,” p. 496. The work he is referring to is Durkheim's The Evolution of Educational Thought, trans. Peter Collins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

21. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Westmead, England: Saxon House, 1977), pp. 175–79.

22. Aside from efforts like Allan Peshkin's God's Choice: The Total World of a Fundamentalist Christian School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), and Melinda B. Wagner's God's Schools: Choice and Compromise in American Society (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), which are fine school ethnographies prompted by the political rise of the U.S. Christian Right in the 1980s, and the attendant expansion of Christian alternatives to the public schools. Unfortunately, both works are curiously distant from important theoretical debates in the educational literature.

23. This work will say little explicitly about gender, in part because of the substantial body of quality work already being done on gender and Islam. See, for example, Fadwa el-Guindi, “Veiling Infitah with Muslim Ethic: Egypt's Contemporary Islamic Movement,” Social Problems 28 (1981), pp. 465–85; Arlene Elowe Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women's Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); or any of the articles on women in Muslim societies in Valentine Moghadam, ed., Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). For a more complete list of references, see L. Abu-Lughod, “Zones of Theory,” and Starrett, “Anthropology of Islam.”

24. I am referring, of course, to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and more recent developments on the theme such as Don Handelman's Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

25. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour, pp. 173–74.

26. Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 171.

27. Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 175.

28. Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 104.

29. Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 172.

30. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 110.

31. This is the main theme of Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

32. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

33. Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 111.

34. Hisham Sharabi, “Islam and Modernization in the Arab World,” in Modernization of the Arab World, ed. Jack H. Thompson and Robert D. Reischauer (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1966), p. 26.

35. Sharabi, “Islam and Modernization,” p. 29.

36. Sharabi, “Islam and Modernization,” p. 31.

37. Durkheim's Moral Education stands, of course, as the best representative of this view.

38. Dale Eickelman's Knowledge and Power in Morocco; Roy Mottahedeh's The Mantle of the Prophet (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Michael M. J. Fischer's Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Fischer and Abedi's Debating Muslims.

39. For traditional education in Morocco, see Eickelman, “The Art of Memory,” pp. 485–516; Jennifer E. Spratt and Daniel A. Wagner, “The Making of a Fqih: The Transformation of Traditional Islamic Teachers in Modern Cultural Adaptation,” in The Cultural Transition: Human Experience and Social Transformation in the Third World and Japan, ed. Merry I. White and Susan Pollak (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 89–112; Daniel A. Wagner and Abdelhamid Lotfi, “Traditional Islamic Education in Morocco: Sociohistorical and Psychological Perspectives,” Comparative Education Review 24 (1980), pp. 238–51; and their “Learning to Read by “Rote,” ” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 42 (1983), pp. 111–21; Daniel A. Wagner and Jennifer E. Spratt, “Reading Acquisition in Morocco,” in Growth and Progress in Cross-Cultural Psychology, ed. C. Kagitcibasi (Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger B.V., 1987), pp. 346–55; and their “Cognitive Consequences of Contrasting Pedagogies: The Effects of Quranic Preschooling in Morocco,” Child Development 58 (1987), pp. 1207–19. For the longer treatment, see Daniel Wagner, Literacy, Culture, and Development: Becoming Literate in Morocco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Jarmo Houtsonen, “Traditional Qur’anic Education in a Southern Moroccan Village,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994), pp. 489–500. For Java, see Sidney Jones, “Arabic Instruction and Literacy in Javanese Muslim Schools,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 42 (1983), pp. 83–94; for Yemen, see Brinkley Messick, “Legal Documents and the Concept of “Restricted Literacy” in a Traditional Society,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 42 (1983), pp. 41–52; for Iran, see Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

40. Golnar Mehran, “Ideology and Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Compare 20 (1990), pp. 53–65; Bahram Mohsenpour, “Philosophy of Education in Postrevolutionary Iran,” Comparative Education Review 32 (1988), pp. 76–86; and M. Mobin Shorish, “The Islamic Revolution and Education in Iran,” Comparative Education Review 32 (1988), pp. 58–75.

41. Adeeb Khalid, “The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Tsarist Central Asia,” Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993.

42. Olivier Carré, Enseignement islamique et idéal socialiste (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq Editeurs, 1974).

43. Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: Customary Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

44. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill's The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 28, 36.

45. Dale Eickelman, Moroccan Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), p. 21.

46. Hasan al-Alfi, quoted in al-Ahram, 26 July 1993, p. 10.