Social Text, 42: 53-67, 1995

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt

In Egypt, local westernized elites are singled out as sources of corruption Lila
and moral decadence by Islamic groups deploying a populist rhetoric. An Abu-Lughod
absence of faith is portrayed as the cause of this elite's immorality and
greed, while the embracing of Islam is offered as the solution to the coun-
try's considerable social and economic problems. Despite the efforts such
groups have made to provide social services, and especially medical clin-
ics, for the poor who are not well served by overtaxed state institutions
now under IMF and USAID pressure to privatize, they seem to have no
serious programs for wealth redistribution, while at the same time they
support capitalism and private property.' An important question that no
one seems to have explored is why a political discourse in which morality
displaces class as the central social problem is so appealing.
Instead of focusing on the social programs or philosophies of such
groups, I want to explore this question by way of a close analysis of a sen-
sationalized phenomenon: the decision by some female film and stage
stars to give up their careers and take on the higab, the new kind of head-
covering that is the most visible symbol of the growing popularity of a
self-consciously Muslim identity in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim
world. The complex reactions of rural and poor women toward these
stars, I will argue, illuminate the dynamics of the Islamist appeal. Leila
Ahmed has suggested, with some justification, that the dominance of the
new veiling and the affiliation with Islamism it represents mark "a broad
demographic change-a change that has democratized mainstream culture
and mores," whereby the emergent middle classes, rather than the for-
merly culturally dominant upper and middle classes, define the norms.2 I
will argue, however, that the case of the media stars shows how the dis-
course of morality associated with the new veil works to produce a false
sense of egalitarianism that distracts from the significant and ongoing
problems of class inequality in Egypt.

Born Again Stars

On display during the first months of 1993 in the bookstores and street
stalls of Cairo was a small but controversial book marking (and marketing)
what it claimed was a major social phenomenon. On the front cover was a
bold announcement that the book, published in 1991, was in its eighth
printing; on the back cover, a quote from the widely popular conservative
religious figure Sheikh Al-Sharawi, himself a media star because of his
weekly television program: "After more than 20 actresses and radio per-
sonalitieshad adopted the veil [higab]... war was declaredon them ... Those
carryingthe banner of this war are the 'sex stars' and 'merchantsof lust."'3
Entitled RepentantArtists and the Sex Stars, the book was coauthored
by man and a woman, 'Imad Nasif and Amal Khodayr. Yet only a photo
a
of the man can be found on the title page: he is youthful, wearing a loud
patterned shirt and sitting thoughtfully at a desk. One presumes that the
coauthor is veiled and does not want to appear. Below the photo is a quo-
tation, unattributed, suggesting the authors' admiration for what they rep-
resent as the courage of these embattled "born again" stars: "The most
honorable eagle is the one that flies against the wind and the powerful fish
is the one who swims against the current ... and truth is worth dying to
achieve." On the following pages are the assertion of copyright protection
(the book has no publisher and only lists the post office box and fax num-
ber of the authors) and a quote from the Koran about how God loves
those who repent.
Intended to promote the so-called repentant actresses, this little book
includes lengthy interviews with many of these famous actresses, belly
dancers, and singers, stars of film and stage, who have given up their
careers and have taken on the veil. The women tell their stories and pre-
sent "confessions." The book also contains some interviews with their
supportive husbands, an approving interview with Sheikh Al-Sha'rawi,
and a brief section at the end in which prominent actresses still in the
business tersely give their opinions on what their "repentant artist" sisters
have done (usually stressing individuals' freedom of choice) and defend
the value and religious correctness of acting and of "true art" (often in
distinction from the commercial productions of the last fifteen years).
As the pitiful confession of Hala Al-Safy, a famous belly dancer, illus-
trates, the discourse of these repentant stars demonizes the world of per-
forming and portrays their renunciation of it as a way of becoming closer
to God. The authors state that she wrote, in her own hand, the following
words for the book:

I confess and acknowledgethat I, SuhayrHasanAbdeenand famousas the

dancerHala Al-Safy ... left my life in the hands of the Devil to play with
and to do what he wantedwithoutmy feeling the sins of what I did, until
God willed and desiredto removeme from this swamp. . . and I acknowl-
edge and confess that the life that they call the life of art... is empty of art
and I acknowledgethatI livedthis life.... Justas I acknowledgeand confess
that I regret... regret ... regreteverymomentthat I lived far from God in
the world of night and art and parties. ... I entrust God to accept my
remorseand my repentance.(33)

LilaAbu-Lughod
 The dramatic story told by Shams Al-Barudy, a movie star whose
name, according to the authors, "was associated with seduction roles"
(49), repeats these themes. Some lengthy quotes give the full flavor of the
"born again" narratives. Al-Barudy recounts two experiences as transfor-
mative: reading a modern poem about veiling, and going to Mecca to
perform the lesser pilgrimage ('umra):

I was at home preparingsweetswhen my little daughterNarimancame in.

She was happycarryingher schoolbag.She kissedme and I huggedher lov-
ingly to my breast. She said, "Mom, Mom look at the presentmy teacher
gave me for gettinggood grades."She was talkingabout a book of poetry.I
kissed her and took the book from her. I skimmedthroughit and my eyes
stopped at one poem that began this way: "Let them talk about my veil, I
swearto God I don't care./ My religionhas protectedme with the veil and
deemed me lawful./ Shyness will alwaysbe my makeup and modesty my
capital."

And another verse in which the poet says:

"They cheatedher by sayingshe was beautiful,the beautifulare duped by

praise."When I readthese verses I had a strangefeeling.I sat down wearily
and found tearsfallingfrom my eyes. I repeatedwhatI'd just read.I said to
myself,modestyand bashfulnessdon't describeme so I don't have any cap-
ital. At this momentI realizedthe secretbehindthe continuousanxietythat
had spoiledthe happymomentsof my life. Those who told me that I was an
actressof great beautyhad cheatedme. Those who had put my pictureon
the coversof magazinesand in theirpageshad dupedme. It struckme in the
heart and afterthat my life changedcompletely.I startedhatingacting and
art. My pictures on the billboardsdisgusted me. I started thinkingabout
everything... myself,my husband,my children,death. (50-1)

She then recounts that her father suggested they go to Mecca to perform
the lesser pilgrimage. She was overwhelmed by the holy places and
remorseful about her life. Her discourse here turns on the Devil, prefaced
by the lament, "Oh, this damn Devil who steals the best years of our lives
and we only recognize him after it is too late" (51). Then comes the
description of the epiphany while in Mecca:

At night I felt a constrictingof my chest as if all the mountainsin the world

were on top of me. My fatherasked me why I couldn't sleep. I told him I
wantedto go the GrandMosque [Haram].He was surprisedbut pleasedthat
I had requestedthis. When we got to the sanctuaryand I greeted it and
began to circumambulate,my body began to tremble. I started sweating.
My heartseemedto be jumpingout of my chest and I felt at thatmomentas
if therewas a personinsidetryingto strangleme. Then he went out. Yes,the

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 55

 Devil went out and the pressure that was like all the mountains of the world
weighing on my breast lifted. The worries were gone. And I found my
tongue burst forth with prayers for my children and my husband and I
began crying so hard that it was as if a volcano had burst and no one could
stop it.
As I reached the shrine of the Prophet Ibrahim, I stood up to pray and
recited the opening verse of the Koran as if for the first time. I started rec-
ognizing its beauty and meaning as if God had graced me. I felt there was a
new world around me. Yes I was reborn. I felt I was a bride and that the
angels were walking in my wedding march. Everything around me brought
me happiness. I felt I was a pure white bird who wanted to fly in the sky,
singing and warbling, setting down on flowers and green branches. I felt the
world around me had been created for me. I would no longer feel fatigue,
anxiety, or misery. (52-3)

She then describes how her father came for her; when he took her by
the hand, she felt like a small child, totally innocent. She prayed the dawn
prayer among her Muslim sisters and from then on began wearing the veil
(higab). She concludes her interview with the following words, again
invoking the Devil:

I'll never go back to acting. I won't go back to the Devil who stole everything
from me. I've tasted the sweetness of faith and closeness to God . . . just as I
tasted the Devil's life. (58)

Immoral Lives

The first time I had heard about this new phenomenon was in the summer
of 1987. Two adolescent girls in the Bedouin community in Egypt's West-
ern Desert where I was doing research were entertaining themselves by
flipping through a clandestine movie magazine. One was literate, the other
had never been to school. The latter, who stared carefully at the grainy
black and white photographs, stopped when she got to one. This actress,
she pointed out approvingly, had given it all up and taken on the higab. By
way of explanation she added, somewhat harshly, "She got cancer and
they had to chop off her breasts." After a pause, to make sure I had
understood, she said, "God had punished her for exposing them."
In this girl's reaction is a key to the complex attitudes ordinary women
in Egypt have toward the world of media stars. She had conflated immoral
lifestyles with an absence of religion, as if only religion guided women to
live proper, respectable lives. God had punished the actress for her sins
and, as a result, she had come to recognize the importance of religious
faith. The girl could feel self-righteous and yet, there she was, poring

56 LilaAbu-Lughod
over a magazine filled with news of the others who were still part of that
fascinating world.
Although film and radio stars are among the most widely known and
popular public figures in Egypt, the "repentant artists"' demonization
and religious renunciation of the world they represent is not so surprising.
Nor is the widespread approval of these women's choices. But I think the
roots of this acceptance are complex, confounded by ordinary people's
continuing and simultaneous infatuation with media stars.
The born-again discourse of performance as the work of the Devil
carries weight, first, because it resonates with long-standing traditional
views in the Muslim world that performers are disreputable. Women per-
formers mixed with strange men and appeared in public when no other
women did; they were also linked, justifiably or not, to "the oldest profes-
sion." More important, in the contemporary period media stars are criti-
cized for their immoral life-styles and, in the lingo of the religious critics,
for their involvement in the world of animal instinct, sexual desire, and
temptation. My young Bedouin friend's interpretation of the film star's
breast cancer as due to the wrath of God is indicative of a widespread
recognition that media stars are the victims and perpetrators of what we
call "sexploitation."
Women stars today are perceived as problematic for a host of related
reasons, however. First, they are the most public of women and the most
visibly independent of family control, violating some basic assumptions
about gender in rural and many segments of urban Egypt. Many stars,
especially dancers, use stage names, as the confession of Hala Al-Safy
above illustrates, frequently with only a first name-Lucy, Shirihan, Yusra,
or Sabrin, for example. This is a striking sign of their difference, and
particularly their independence from family ties and genealogical defini-
tions in a country where the father's name is always one's second name,
and the grandfather's is often the surname.
Their denial of family responsibility, widely assumed to be part of a
woman's self-definition, is also problematic. A recurring theme in the nar-
ratives of the reformed actresses, bolstered by the interviews with their
husbands that accompany their stories, is how their careers had caused
them to neglect their husbands and children. As Shams Al-Barudy notes,
"I now live a happy life in the midst of my family, with my noble husband
who stood by me and encouraged me and congratulated me on each step
... and my three children"(56). Her husband, a former actor and movie
director, explains, "I had long wished that Shams would retire from acting
and live for her household" (60).
This husband is echoing a sentiment being widely disseminated in the
press and other media, especially in the last two decades of increasing
unemployment, that women's proper place is in the home with their fam-

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 57

 ilies. Actresses and other show business personalities epitomize the chal-
lenge to that domestic model and are targeted in part because they are the
Ultimately, the most extreme and visible case of a widespread phenomenon: working
women.
problem with That the problem is also class related-the working women being
stars is that they criticized are privileged-is apparent in a short article by Anis Mansour,
an establishment journalist, in the official government newspaper Al-
represent a Ahram in 1989. In alarmist language it lays out the links between careerist
mothers and unhappy children, stressing actresses' special culpability as
nouveau riche women who are wealthy enough to send their children to boarding
schools. It was translated in The Egyptian Gazette as follows:
westernized elite.
Obsessed with her career and the cut-throat competition with others to
Their sexual ascend the ladder of success, today's mother has not got enough time to
look after her childrenand get to grips with their problems.Thus in her
immorality is scramblefor business success, the motherleaves behind her poor children
for nanniesand servantsto bring up. Many film stars are characteristically
often associated interestedin sendingtheir childrenawayto be broughtup and receivetheir
education.There is no doubt that this lifestyletakes its toll on the mental
with Western life- and psychologicalgrowthof these childrenwho developa devastatingsense
of powerlessnessand even feel unwantedand isolated .... The whole issue
styles, but there boils down to the fact that unless the child gets enough parentalcare and
protectionhe is boundto fall into the abyssof brothels,drug dens and devi-
is also a general ation.4

impression that Ultimately, the problem with stars is that they represent a nouveau
riche westernized elite. Their sexual immorality is often associated with
they are different Western life-styles, but there is also a general impression that they are dif-
ferent from ordinary Egyptians. The women wear expensive, fashionable
from ordinary
clothes, plenty of make up, and dramatic hairdos, perceived by Egyptians
to be "Western."Moreover, many of the most famous actors and actresses
Egyptians. are known to travel to Europe for film festivals and holidays.
The statements of a Cairene domestic who was especially immersed
in and knowledgeable about the media world affirm this association of
actors with the immorality, and even illegality, of the wealthy. Comment-
ing on an actor in a rerun of a television serial, she said he had just died a
few months previously. He was at a seaside resort, having a good time. He
had an asthma attack but he probably died because he was snorting drugs
and had a fatal overdose. She added that all the "artists" do drugs; they
have lots of money and that is what they do with it. When I asked her how
she knew this, she said it was reported in the newspapers, on radio, and
on television. This particular actor had been arrested a few years earlier,
his apartment raided, and drugs seized. But he was acquitted. When I
expressed surprise that she said he had also been a prosecuting attorney,
she tried to convince me that "all these people" are rich and run the

58 LilaAbu-Lughod
country. By contrast, she concluded, it was only people like her (ordinary
poor people) who were suffering these days, barely managing to cope
with rising prices.

Entitlement and Distance

From these attitudes toward stars and the repentant stars' own denuncia-
tions of their former lives, one might expect that most women in Egypt are
wholly disapproving of actresses and other media stars. And yet, my
recent fieldwork in a village in Upper Egypt suggests that this is certainly
not the case. The Bedouin girl who so self-righteously condemned the
actress with cancer spoke with the confidence of someone who was part of
a community that had maintained enough independence from the urban
centers and from state institutions to retain a sense of pride about their
different social and moral standards. She was part of a wealthy family that
did not need to feel shame.5
In the Upper Egyptian village in which I have been working, however,
most people were relatively poor. Many men were forced to migrate to the
city or abroad to find work and people generally were aware of the disdain
with which they were regarded by urban and wealthier Egyptians. They
knew this from migrants but also because they were more involved in
state institutions and more connected to mass media than the Awlad 'Ali
Bedouin families I had known.6 The younger generation especially could
not manage the same pride, although most saw more dignity in their cus-
toms and community than other Egyptians granted.
The villagers spoke about media stars with a mix of entitlement and
distance. They seemed to feel as if the stars were "theirs," somehow
belonging to them as viewers as much as they belonged to anyone else in
Egypt. All except the old men and women knew the names of stars who
appeared on their television screens, volunteering their previous roles and
often some tidbits about their off-screen lives in answer to my questions
about television drama plots. Many offered opinions about the popularity
and success of various careers.
Yet no one would have considered the stars as like themselves. In this,
stars resembled the films and television serials in which they acted, which
villagers appreciated as having been broadcast for their pleasure but, as I
describe in more detail elsewhere, perceived as depicting the lives of oth-
ers who had different problems, followed different rules, and did not
belong to the local moral community.7
The black-and-white televisions on which most villagers watch these
stars sit in rooms of mud-brick houses whose walls are decorated with odd
bits of gift wrap and newspaper, small posters of Egyptian soccer teams,
and abstract hangings fashioned from the foil wrappers of a popular

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 59

candy bar advertised on television. These are different from the rooms
they see in the serials, where even village homes are depicted with decent
furniture and identified by primitivist wall hangings showing village
scenes, the kind of weavings popular only with tourists and affluent west-
ernized Egyptians.
The village might be considered atypical. School teachers from the
nearby town believed it was unusually liberal, the people kinder, more
hospitable, and less attached to their traditions and customs (implied neg-
ative) than in other communities in Upper Egypt. It was certainly extra-
ordinary in its enmeshment in the tourist industry. A Pharaonic temple
was set in its midst and many men made some kind of living through work
with the Antiquities Organization and foreign archaeological missions.
One heard octogenarians reminiscing about the Met, others praising New
YorkUniversity, and yet others mentioning the work they had done for the
Germans, the Poles, the Canadians, and the French. Even village women
had seen foreigners close up; several middle-aged tourists had married
young men in the village, buying them hotels or taxis. One American
expatriate had built himself a house in the village and a number of folk-
lorists had set up shop there, collecting funeral laments or simply using
the village as a base while studying epic poets further south. When I
arrived, a friend of these folklorists, I was asked their news and asked if I
didn't know other foreigners and urban Egyptians people knew-a mis-
cellany of filmmakers, journalists, architects, and others.
Despite their savvy about other worlds, some of it derived, as in other
villages across Egypt, from watching television, these villagers were typical
of other rural Egyptians in the problems they confronted. Trying to make
ends meet with low wages and unemployment, many children, and insuf-
ficient land to be farmed, were not the problems dramatized in television
serials or faced by movie stars. As in other agriculturalareas, land was dis-
tributed unevenly; the largest landowner worked hundreds of feddans
(approximately acres), while most of the families fortunate enough to
own land counted it in qirats (1/24 of a feddan). Some families were
embarrassed to admit, when I found them picking through the stubble of
a recently harvested wheat field, that they were grateful when kind
landowners permitted them to glean the grains of wheat left behind.
Women lived in a different world from the film stars. They worked
hard at household chores like baking bread and with the tasks associated
with raising animals as large as water buffalo and sheep and as small as
pigeons. When rented or owned fields were close by, the women cut the
barseem(clover) for the animals and carried it home in large bundles on
their heads or on donkeys their sons brought out to the fields. They wor-
ried about sons failing in school or getting daughters married. Some were
fortunate in their husbands; others put up with husbands who were

LilaAbu-Lughod
unhappy and cruel or who had migrated to Cairo only to take second
wives. Some had good in-laws, some did not. Some had brothers who
were generous with them; others found themselves in disputes over inher-
itance.
And they certainly did not perceive the stars as part of their moral The villagers
community. For village women, matters of reputation were crucial.
Although relations between men and women seemed more relaxed than in displayed a kind
the Bedouin community I had known, men and women greeting each
other more readily and people who had known each other for a long time of tolerance and
sitting and talking together, the men still sat perched on the benches while
the women sat on the floor. In large extended households where everyone suspension of
did watch television together, the women tended to be circumspect. All moral judgment
but the young generation of school-age women still wore heavy black
dresses and head coverings when they went on formal visits or to the toward the
nearby town. Even around the village they were careful to wrap shawls
around their heads and straighten out their black overdresses. Young media stars.
women were delighted when they got water piped into their houses
because they could avoid the public exposure of fetching water, since
people were so ready to judge each other and talk about how women and
girls behaved.
In contrast, the villagers displayed a kind of tolerance and suspension
of moral judgment toward the media stars. This was striking in its differ-
ence from their critical evaluations of neighbors and kin. The story I
heard from a mother of a married daughter shows the way discourses of
morality are crucial in discrediting others. As in many patrilineal societies
in which brothers are expected to share a household even after marriage,
in-marrying wives are prone to conflict, their interests being at odds,
especially regarding the division of the patrimony at the death of their
father-in-law. To explain why a high wall had been built between the
house of her daughter and her husband and his brother's family, this old
woman, the wife of a wealthy landowner in another hamlet of the village,
constructed it as a matter of moral difference between her daughter and
the sister-in-law. That woman, she began, was from a village in which all
the people are worthless. But the real difference could be seen in these
women's teenage daughters. Her grandchild, she explained proudly, was
like a cat. No one ever saw her. She would come out to say hello to you
and then disappear. She never went out and wouldn't let even the best
known and most harmless male family friends into the house if her
mother was not home. The other woman's daughter, she went on, had
gone across the river in a car to Luxor (the large town) alone with an old
European man who had bought her things. He had fallen in love with the
girl and moved into the house. She claimed that the young girl would go
up to his room.

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 61

 I happened to know this family she was disparaging and had been told
by her daughter's vibrant and friendly rival about the old Norwegian man
who had, she claimed, not been comfortable at his hotel and so they had
given him a room in their house. He had been generous with them, she
implied, because he pitied their circumstances. They ran a small restau-
rant in their front room that catered to budget tourists, the business they
had started after her lame husband had been fired from his job as the cook
for the German Archaeological Mission-because he drank, others told
me. She had showed me the Norwegian's room, still kept for him, but the
old man had never returned after the Gulf War.
Other women in the village, ones less directly involved, told the story
somewhat differently. One woman told me that an old European had
befriended the family and helped them out financially. She didn't know
why he had done this but thought he must have had no family of his own.
She explained that he had taken a liking to one of the girls, but she made
it seem more innocent. She did disapprove strongly of the fact that he
took the girl to Luxor to buy her things.
Whether they assumed the worst and loudly condemned the behavior,
in order to side with a daughter against her sister-in-law in a dispute over
their husbands' share of an inheritance as well as the disparities in stand-
ing (the other brother having taken over the disgraced brother's position
with the German archaeologists), or whether they withheld final judg-
ment, the moral standards were clear and the scrutiny of neighbors and
kin considered absolutely appropriate.
Knowing the standards by which the villagers judged one another, I
was always shocked by what people took for granted on television. For
instance, no one blanched at the fact that the highly anticipated annual
"quiz shows" (fawazir) of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, involved
sexy women wearing extravagant,often skin-tight costumes, dancing west-
ern-style and Arab numbers. In 1990, people were excited at the return of
Nelly to the small screen. She was blonde, petite, and quite agile; she was
reputed to be sixty years old. In 1993, her replacement Shirihan was
watched with more ambivalence, everyone impressed with her total recov-
ery from a serious back injury (treated abroad, they all stressed) suffered
in a car accident under scandalous circumstances. Despite the whispers
and the rumors about these circumstances, women and children in the vil-
lage watched every evening. They had no idea what the riddles meant and
even the references of her costumes (sometimes 1920s flappers, some-
times Caribbean, sometimes Arab) must have passed them by. Yet that
was one of the things Ramadan was about.
A favorite Ramadan program in 1993 was "Without Talk," a kind of
celebrity charades that pitted teams of stars against each other: men on
one side, women on the other. When they are being themselves, out of

LilaAbu-Lughod
costume and without lines, one can sense how fundamentally urban,
sophisticated, and westernized the media stars are. Again, though, what I
found surprising was how easily village children related to the program.
Those with whom I watched it were so excited that they eventually started
reproducing it in the field in front of their house, down to the competition
between girls and boys. And when I remarked on the stars' clothing, many
of the women in slacks or sporty culottes that were far from anything one
would see on local women, some adolescent girls explained knowledgeably
that this was the fashion. They knew, they said, because they'd seen city
women who came as tourists.
It was touching to see young adolescents even seeking ways to sym-
pathize with the plights of these stars. Some girls were anxious to tell me
that Yusra, one of the most westernized and sophisticated film stars, had
never married.8There was pathos in what they added: "She says she loves
children and has photos of children on her walls."
The television and film industries, of course, have a strong interest in
fostering viewers' attachment to the stars. They do so through television
programs in which actors and actresses are interviewed about productions
currently being filmed, compete in often silly games like relay races at the
Pyramids, and invite viewers into their homes. There are programs show-
ing highlights of new works, and magazines devoted to the world of cin-
ema and stage. Most recently, a new biweekly newspaper called "Stars"
began publication. Only the adolescents and young men in the villages
had access to the latter since they were literate and, for school or work,
went into a town where such reading matter was sold. But everyone was
exposed to the television promotions of these stars.
The pleasures village women and girls took in their access to the
world of the stars was undeniable. They could not only tolerate the dif-
ferences in these women's life-styles, so far removed from their own, but
were fascinated by them. I never sensed any envy of the stars, or fantasies
about joining them, although one evening when left on their own with no
interesting shows to watch, the children in one family had what they
described to me as a party. The eldest daughter had played the role of
broadcaster and each of her siblings took the name of a movie star. She
interviewed them about such things as how many films they had made and
about their marital lives. It was great fun, but make-believe. What one
sensed was that viewers enjoyed being entertained by the stars, in their
roles on- and off-screen, and in having a very different and glamorous
world to know about, to discuss, and to include in their gossip.
What happens when these stars change, taking on the veil and
renouncing that world, is that they are suddenly brought closer. They
seem to step out of their screen worlds and enter into the same world
these village women live in, a world where religion and morality are taken

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 63

 for granted as the foundation of social existence. This, I believe, provokes
a certain satisfaction while lending moral weight to the women's ambiva-
lence about the world of stars. For women who know they are peripheral
and disadvantaged compared to the urban and the wealthy, the confirma-
tion provided by these actresses enables them to more freely express, as
did my young Bedouin friend, their self-righteous disapproval of the
immorality of that world and to feel good about their own.

False Vindication

The "repentant" actresses have done what an increasing number of urban

Egyptian women have done: adopted the new modest Islamic dress as
part of what they conceive of as their religious awakening.9 Because they
are such well-known figures, their actions have been publicized and capi-
talized on by the Islamists to further legitimize the trend toward women's
veiling and to support their call for women's return to the home.
Secularists and progressives, many of whom see feminist ideals as
integral to their projects, are opposed to veiling as a sign of "backward-
ness." Whether they are westernized liberals of the cultural elite for whom
women's emancipation has been of long-standing interest, advocated first
by turn-of-the-century reformists and "modernizers"-like the well-
known figure, Qasim Amin, and upper-class women whose work we are
only now discovering-or leftists carrying the banner of Nasser's policies
of state feminism in the 1960s (stressing general employment and educa-
tion), they see in veiling the loss of women's rights.'0
Some feminist intellectuals and political activists, like television writer
Fathiyya al-Assal, who is also a leading member of the Egyptian leftist
party (hizb al-tagamml), suspiciously accuse these actresses of taking fat
salaries from the Islamic groups for hosting study groups at which con-
servative religious authorities or unqualified women proselytize. Others
concerned with women's issues, like the liberal writer Wafiyya Kheiry,
express resentment when censors interfere with their productions. Noting
that most of the censors for television are veiled women, Kheiry asks,
"How can I accept a veiled woman dictating to me what can and cannot
be said? If I am veiled, won't my thinking be veiled too?"
But such study groups have cropped up everywhere, and the decision
to adopt the higab-while initially, in the late 1970s, mostly a form of
political action by intelligent university women, usually the first in their
families to be educated-has now spread down to working women of the
lower middle classes and up to a few rebellious upper-class adolescents
and movie stars. In rural areas, educated girls declare their difference
from their uneducated kinswomen, without jeopardizing their respectabil-

64 LilaAbu-Lughod
ity, by means of this form of dress.1 Adopting the higabnow has an extra- The women
ordinary number of meanings and co-implications that need to be distin-
delude
guished.
And yet, just as the Western press treats the phenomenon monolithi-
themselves into
cally, as a simple sign of fundamentalism, so most women in Egypt
(except the urban middle-class secularists described above and Coptic
thinking that
Christians, most of whom share the Western view) read the new veiling
simply as a sign of piety and morality. When such women see prominent these stars are
women known to have operated under very different rules from them-
selves-performing, traveling abroad, wearing Western fashions, living now women like
independent of family constraints, seemingly unconcerned with reputation
and respectability-take on the veil, they interpret this as a renunciation of themselves,
such foreign values and an embracing of the same morality and religious
identity that they see as guiding their own lives. sharing their
The stars' choice to veil is taken as a vindication of the life patterns of
moral values and
these other women, who live in communities or come from classes that do
not offer the other choices to women-the choices of wearing make up or
thus other aspects
high heels on an everyday basis, of having careers, or of going to glam-
orous parties. The women delude themselves into thinking that these stars of their situations.
are now women like themselves, sharing their moral values and thus other
aspects of their situations. This is especially true for the younger women
who, if they attend school, begin to take on the same higab they see their
teachers wearing in communities that have become less lax about reli-
gious matters in the past decade.
When asked about how his wife had changed, the actress Shams Al-
Barudy's husband was quoted in RepentantArtists and the Sex Stars as say-
ing, "Shams has now become a wife who cares for her husband ... and a
mother who tends her children and lives her life like any otherwife ... she
is a mother with a calling [to raise her children in a Muslim way]" (61, my
emphasis).
Yet she is not like "any other wife"-especially a wife in rural Egypt.
The home she gives up her career for is comfortable, with fancy furniture,
shiny bathrooms, and plenty of servants. It is not mud-brick, with insuffi-
cient room for expansion when her sons marry, or requiring constant bat-
tle with flies because of the sheep and water buffalo housed within. Her
closets are stocked with clothes, the old fashionable ones now replaced
with "modest dress" that nevertheless is of high quality fabric and color
coordinated. She does not have to wait for the religious feasts to get a
piece of fabric to make a new dress. She probably has savings and a hus-
band with a decent income, not a migrant laborer who has left her with
five children to feed and fields to be worked, or an asthmatic husband who
makes $35 per month working for the Antiquities Organization. She never
walks back from the market carrying her purchases on her head, or is

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 65

 forced to squeeze into a crowded bus or climb into the back of a pickup
truck fitted with narrow benches; she drives, or, more likely, is driven
around in an imported car. It is this which allows her the leisure to tend to
her husband and to oversee the raising of her children, helping them with
their homework, taking them for lessons or to the club for swimming, or
delivering them to their friends' birthday parties.
Veiling and retiring from acting do not change her class position and
its privilege. Nor do they affect the bourgeois ideas about domesticity
informing her (not to mention her husband's) vision of herself as wife and
mother, ideas very different from the ones guiding women in this village
in Upper Egypt and elsewhere.12
To take on the higabis a very different thing from having always worn
some sort of head covering, having always thought of yourself as reli-
gious and moral, or having never left the bounds of family control. Yet, in
the new Islamic consiousness in Egypt, a discourse of morality serves to
erase the distinctions between these experiences and to mask the persis-
tent divisions of class and life-style. This gives poor and rural women the
comforting illusion of equality with their Muslim sisters everywhere,
something no other political discourse can offer.

Notes

This paper was written as the 1995 Sabbagh Lecture at the University of Ari-
zona. Research in Egypt was supported by fellowships from New York Univer-
sity, the Near and Middle East Committee of the Social Science Research Coun-
cil, and the American Research Center in Egypt. I am grateful for the research
assistance of Hala Abu-Khatwa, and expecially to Boutros Wadi'for first alerting
me to the phenomenon of the repentant artists and to my friends in the Upper
Egyptian village for their hospitality.
1. The literature on the Islamic groups in Egypt is considerable. Some
important sources are Ali E. Hillal Dessouki, ed., Islamic Resurgencein the Arab
World (New York: Praeger, 1982); Saad Eddin Ibrahim, "Anatomy of Egypt's
Militant Islamic Groups," InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980):
423-53; Gilles Kepel, The Prophetand Pharaoh:Muslim Extremismin Egypt
(London: El Saqi Books, 1985); Gudrun Kramer, "The Change of Paradigm:
Political Pluralism in Contemporary Egypt," Peuples mediterraneens 41-2
(1987-88): 283-302; Barbara Stowasser, ed., The Islamic Impulse (Washington
D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1987).
Two more recent special issues on political Islam make Middle East Report 179
(November-December 1992) and 183 (July-August 1993) especially useful.
2. Leila Ahmed, Womenand Genderin Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1992), 225.
3. Barbara Stowasser's "Religious Ideology, Women and the Family: The
Islamic Paradigm," in her The Islamic Impulse,op.cit., 262-96, gives a good sense
of the views of Sheikh Al-Shdrawi.

66 LilaAbu-Lughod
 4. Anis Mansour, "Victims," The Egyptian Gazette, 6 November 1989, 3.
5. I have written extensively about the pride of this community and its sense
of difference from the rest of Egypt. See, for example, Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled
Sentiments:Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1986) and Writing Women'sWorlds:Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993).
6. For a rich analysis of the place of Saidis (Upper Egyptians) in the imagi-
naries of urban Egyptians, see Martina Rieker, "Marginality and Modernity: Fig-
uring the Saidi Peasantry in the Egyptian Nation," (paper presented at the SSRC
conference on "Questions of Modernity," Cairo, Egypt, May 1993).
7. See my forthcoming article, "The Objects of Soap Opera," in Worlds
Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London:
Routledge, 1995).
8. The news of her marriage in 1993 was the cover story on numerous Ara-
bic magazines.
9. The phenomenon of "the new veiling" is extremely complex and interest-
ing. Among those who have written insightfully on it, showing clearly how the
religious motivation for it needs to be balanced by an understanding of how veil-
ing contributes to greater freedom of movement in public, easier work relations in
mixed sex settings, respectability in the eyes of neighbors and husbands, greater
economy, and social conformity, are Leila Ahmed, Womenand Gender in Islam
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Fadwa El Guindi, "Veiling
Infitah with Muslim Ethic," Social Problems28 (1981): 465-85; Mervat Hatem,
"Economic and Political Libera(liza)tion in Egypt and the Demise of State Fem-
inism," International Journal of Middle East Studies 24 (1992): 231-51; Valerie
Hoffman-Ladd, "Polemics on the Modesty and Segregation of Women in Con-
temporary Egypt," InternationalJournal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 23-50;
and Arlene MacLeod, AccommodatingProtest (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990). Elizabeth Fernea's documentary film, A VeiledRevolution, is espe-
cially good at revealing many meanings of the new modest dress.
10. I discuss these progressives and the issue of feminism in my unpub-
lished paper, "The Woman Question in Egypt: Notes on a Dynamic of Postcolo-
nial Cultural Politics." Good sources on feminism in Egypt include Leila Ahmed,
op. cit.; Beth Baron, The Women'sAwakening in Egypt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1994); and Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation
(Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). For a discussion of Nasser's
state feminism, see Mervat Hatem, op. cit.
11. See Abu-Lughod, Writing Women'sWorlds,op.cit., chap. 5.
12. For a discussion of the difference between urban and Islamist notions
about the roles of wives and mothers and those with which some rural women
work, see my unpublished paper, "The Woman Question in Egypt: Notes on a
Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics."

Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt 67