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AbstractThis article analyzes in depth four main writings by the pioneeringnahḍaintellectual Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, who drew on classical kinds ofadabto articulate new kinds of political subjectivities. He especially draws on the image of the body politic as a body with the king at its heart. But he reconfigures this image, instead placing the public, or the people, at the heart of politics, a "vanquishing sultan" that governs through public opinion. For al-Tahtawi,adabis a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships. In this, he does not diverge from classical conceptions ofadabas righteous behavior organizing proper social and political relationships. But in his thought, disciplinary training inadabis crucial to the citizen-subject's capacity for self-rule, as he submits to the authority of his individual conscience, ensuring not only freedom, but also justice. These ideas have had lasting impact on Islamic thought, as they have been recycled for the political struggles of new generations.

AbstractRecently, there have been many compelling new theories of the emergence of an "Islamic public sphere." Few studies, however, have examined the role of literary writing in contributing to its emergence, even though such writing was critical to the intellectual elite's shift toward Islamic subjects in mid-20th century Egypt. In addition, little of this scholarship has examined the gendered nature of this public sphere in any depth, though gendered rights, roles, and responsibilities were among the most hotly contested debates in public discourses on religion. This article looks at how literary writing not only shaped particular interpretations of gendered relationships in Islam but also developed hermeneutical techniques for reinterpreting religious sources. It specifically examines the work of Egyptian literary scholar and Islamic thinker Bint al-Shatiʾ and how her writings helped define the nature of the family, gender relations, and the private sphere in Islamic public discourse.

In Hiba Ra'uf's Woman and Political Work, she argues that the family is the basic political unit of the Islamic community or nation (the umma). Her thesis is both feminist and Islamist, as she argues that the 'private is political'. By drawing analogies between family and umma, family and caliphate, the personal and the political, the private and public, Ra'uf seeks to dismantle the oppositions of secular society, to challenge the division of society into discrete spheres. This entails an implicit challenge to the secular state, but effected through the politics of the family. An Islamic family, she argues, is a powerful site for the transformation of socio-political institutions; a politics of the microcosmic with macrocosmic ramifications, effected through the very embodiment and practice of an Islamic ethos at a grassroots, capillary level. However, though Ra'uf contests liberal secularism's division of spheres with feminist and Islamist critical methods, she reproduces some of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the family: as the domain of religion, in opposition to the secular state; as rooting community, in opposition to the individualism of the citizen; as an ethics grounded in affect; and as an essentially feminine world. In making the family the sphere of Islamic politics, Ra'uf re-enacts secularism's division of spheres, sacralizing the affective bonds of intimate relations and making the family the domain of religion. Furthermore, by emphasizing the family as the domain of women's political work, she reinscribes the family as a feminine sphere, so that woman's vocation is familial, as is her ethical disposition.

In the months leading up to 9/11 and in its immediate aftermath, the media demonized the burqa as "Afghanistan's veil of terror," a tool of extremists and the epitome of political and sexual repression. Around the time of Afghanistan's presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2005, there were noticeable shift s in apprehensions of the burqa in the Western media. In Fall 2006, burqa images even appeared on the Paris runways and in Vogue fashion spreads. This article charts the burqa's evolution from "shock to chic" and the process of its commodification in the Western media. The article specifically analyzes Vogue magazine's appropriation of the burqa as haute couture.