Nermeen Mouftah THE SOUND AND MEANING OF GOD ’ S WORD: AFFIRMATION IN AN OLD CAIRO QUR ʾ AN LESSON Abstract For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God’s Word? To explore this question, a women’s Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive her- meneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and under- standing in relation to human interactions with divine speech. Keywords: hermeneutics; Islamic education; Islamic reform; Qurʾan; religious language Samiya and her neighbors attended Qurʾan lessons at their local community center in Batn al-Baqara, an informal neighborhood in the historical district of Old Cairo. They gathered on the plastic woven floor mat of the prayer room three times each week. It was September 2011 when I first joined them, a time when activists were spearheading new activities in the community center following the country’s 25 January uprising that ousted Husni Mubarak. The women rehearsed the shortest chapters of the final sec- tion of the Qurʾan ( juzʾʿamma), also known as the Seal of the Qurʾan (khatm al-qurʾa ̄ n). When Samiya and others explained to me “there is Qurʾan after the late afternoon prayer” ( fı ̄ qurʾa ̄ n baʿd al-ʿas ̣ r), they referred to the variety of activities that took place in their lesson: the recitation (tila ̄ wa) and memorization (h ̣ ifz ̣ ) of short chapters; training in proper pronunciation and elocution (tajwı ̄ d); and instruction in authoritative interpretations (tafsı ̄ r). 1 For three years, Samiya and her neighbors gathered in this way to rehearse the Word of God (kala ̄ m alla ̄ h). They called it, simply, Qurʾan. The women’s Qurʾan lessons in a slum of Old Cairo illustrate modern Muslim anxieties over how Muslims should encounter the Word of God. 2 The lessons combined compo- nents of Qurʾan education that did not typically align in Qurʾan education for laypeople, but that are increasingly prominent in Egypt’s late Islamic Revival. 3 In their lessons, the women blended a classical pedagogical style that emphasizes memorization and Nermeen Mouftah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, Butler University, Indianapolis, Ind.; e-mail: nmouftah@butler.edu Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 377–394 doi:10.1017/S0020743819000357 © Cambridge University Press 2019 0020-7438/19 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743819000357 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 47.227.73.132, on 15 Aug 2019 at 15:48:20, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available