Referring to Islam as a Practice: Audiences, relevancies and language games within the Egyptian parliament
Résumé
In this chapter, we address the question of the reference to Islam as a social practice, not in abstract terms, from an overhanging viewpoint, but as it is embedded in members' routine activities. Hence, the interest for ethnography in our undertaking, for referring-to-Islam is a situated accomplishment that must be described in context and in action. What it contextually means and "does" to refer to Islam can only be elucidated through a close description of people's orientation to, and reification of, categories as they emerge from their actual encounter with social matters. The context we are dealing with is the Egyptian Parliament in the course of a session that was part of the broader polemic that ensued the publication of declarations allegedly held by the Minister of Culture Fārūq Husnī, in which he considered the Islamic headscarf as a mark of backwardness. This session constitutes a "perspicuous setting" i for the study of referring-to-Islam as a situated practice, since references to Islam proved numerous as it unfolded. Our data consist in the official verbatim transcription produced by the parliament's secretary, and submitted to the approbation of the deputies, for all parliamentary practical and bureaucratic purposes ii. The secretariat's concern for accuracy is obvious in these documents, through the following of endogenously developed rules, but also in the respect of a procedure which accounts for a genuine editorial work (the formulation used to refer to the participants, the description of specific actions, or the elision of
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