Politics and society in the Middle East
5 Capitalist Ethics?
Although people understand grand schemes as being located outside the ordinary world, they do have material form and shape. And most often in the early twenty-first century, that form is of a commodity.
Commodity and consumption have become a ubiquitous part of life in Egypt. Being a respectable person largely depends on one’s capacity to buy consumer goods. Love is transformed through the consumerist principle of gratification. Re ligious proselytization is a lucrative trade. This shared sense of existence is in the focus of this chapter. Capitalism is not only a configuration of relations of produc tion and consumption but also a sensibility of existence inherently accompanied by an ideology, promises, and ends of its own. And while Islam may appear to be the moral counterpart to capitalist economy, the Islamic revival has brought key anxieties to the forefront of people’s religious consciousness that resonate with capitalist modes of production and rationality in peculiar ways. Capitalism and religious revival share a sense of temporality that connects the two in complex and unpredictable ways. It is the temporality of a life in the future tense.
This may seem counterintuitive, given the tendency to see the economic realm as separate from the spiritual, romantic, or moral one. Such separation is fundamental to the capitalist exchange of goods that, unlike the exchange of gifts and favors, is not bound with moral reciprocity (Mauss [1924I 2007)—but it is a separation that is never complete. In real practice the exchange of goods comes with a morality of its own, and moral and spiritual ends are pursued through economic means and logics.
In cultural and social anthropology, this link has become the focus of a tre mendous amount of research around the keyword neoliberalism. I am somewhat undecided, however, as to whether to speak about capitalism or neoliberalism. To speak about neoliberalism is to highlight issues of governance and subjectiv ity, whereas to speak about capitalism is to emphasize issues of production and exchange. Academic debates on neoliberalism often address the ways in which is our lives, our governments, our loves, and our faiths become saturated (how ever unevenly, partially, and imperfectly) by a neoliberal logic of capitalism-as- government that governs people by making them the agents responsible for their own exploitation and policing (see, e.g., Elyachar 2005; Shever 2008; Shore 2008). And although much of what I address in this chapter could be well described in those terms as neoliberal, I prefer to speak about capitalism, in order to emphasize
305
106 I Egypt in the Future Tense
to earn that money and bX th„.“T>, T“^ile trying largely capitalist business of buying industollyro'd* ^d '’“d"
the markets are usually not free' thfmn ^ °f capitalism, though; terest, and much of Z hbof L omlZ d‘”-
stead, it is what I would describe “““''.‘‘“8 socialist principles. In- than a system) of relationshins anH t ^ capitalism: a process (rather creation of marked “ by the expansive
social relationships and obligations monetization of orientation created bv constant ^ important, a strong fUture surplus that is at once a structural n S^wth through the reinvestment of capLismisneithersys™^^^^^ not exist inapurefo:r““‘^>''"‘^
seminal study L ProtetZirtfc iTZ 5pir«
in analogy w^rthe
man 1998). Rather. I am cruLa]T; ma^nf feU prey to the anachronism of cross-hict ■ f '^bich in my view up Weber’s counter-Marxist question aboutTow^H^ ^ tions of production that Marx took to be irreducible around once more and look at the shared ■ f ^ question spiritual, and moral. In par^ular ity o dd K
from living under conditions in wh- h ■ complications that result
..a; b.„„z “aitiLx" «:"rrighteousness and existential trust Central m th ^ promise of moral less and often unpredictable ^ “u e^andT
try to make a living, to do the right thing’ and 'to lin T and uses should therefore also be the aralytLl fta t "■
Faces of Capitalism
Capitalist Ethics? \ 107
lone with strong pious overtones. Mass-produced and mass-mediated consumer I goods such as television sets, satellite dishes, and computers have become a main I aim of people’s aspirations, as well as a central medium of religious messages. In I the public sector, a planned socialist economy has become informally privatized, I as civil servants’ income derives mainly from privately selling public services t(also known as corruption). There have been major, successful efforts to create (niches of) Islamic markets and finances. And so also has the logic of markets,
I financing, production, profit, and consumption become a part of Muslims’ reli- I gious experience and beliefs. ' One feature of capitalism that has made it so successful and dynamic around • the world (aside from, of course, its exceptional capability to generate and rein vest surplus) is its peculiar dual face of a value-neutral, even amoral technology that can and must be “filled” with moral content, and of a moral order that privi leges innovation, initiative, self-responsibility, enjoyment, competition, success, and freedom as core characteristics of a good human being.* The first face makes capitalism and movements of religious revival natural allies, as proselytization can become a profitable way to make a living, consumption an ethical means to achieve a religious purpose, and a religiously inspired notion of morally re sponsible action the normative framework to guide the search for profit. At the same time, this alliance has a deeper layer of mutual resonance that is related to the second face of capitalism as an ideologically grounded practice that carries notions of morality and humanity of its own, paradigms of human action with a powerful dynamic to transform all social practices—including religious ones— according to a logic of investment, profit, and consumption.
Here, caution is needed, because one part of the power of the metaphors of capitalism is that “capitalism” appears to be something clear, solid, globally uni fied, whereas in reality it, too, is complex, dynamic, and embedded in idiosyn crasies and cultural specificities (Tsing 2000: 340; see also Ho 2005; Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008). So rather than looking at the abstract, systemic faces of capitalism as a technique and an ideology, it is more helpful to look at the more individual, human feces of capitalism in Egypt and the specific capitalist niches those faces represent.
A list of the most (in)famous individual feces of capitalism in Egypt in re cent years would include (but not be restricted to) the following: Ahmad Ezz was a steel monopolist and a leading figure of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party in the 2000s. He was sentenced to a long prison sentence in 2013 but has since been released and found not guilty of the corruption charges he faced. Na guib Sawiras is head of a Christian family clan with numerous enterprises in telecommunications, media, and import-export trade, and a prominent sponsor of liberal political movements. After 2011 he was a favorite figure for Islamists to hate, and in 2013 he was a main sponsor of the Tamarrud campaign against
io8 \ Egypt in the Future Tense
Morsi s presidency. He has proved a reliable ally of the El-Sisi regime since 2013 Khayrat al-Shater is owner of numerous supermarket and retail chains-or he was, because much of his property was confiscated in 2014. He serves as deputy supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. After 2011 he was the favorite fig ure to hate of the leftist and liberal opposition. During Morsi's presidency al- Shater was one of the most powerful men in Egypt; he was imprisoned in July 2013 along with the entire leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. Last but not least IS the Armed Forces, which owns and runs numerous businesses, including agricultural and industrial production, as well as health care and retail trade The Armed Forces has received the lion’s share of public infrastructures projects since 20« and was busy expanding its retail and consumer goods sectors significantly
These faces not only are involved in ongoing struggles with shifting fortunes that concern who controls Egypt’s economy but also stand for characteristic ways of doing capitalism that emerged during Egypt’s transition from Arab socialism to a new era of capitalism.
In the 1950s. Egypt’s growing sector of private industry and trade, largely owned by foreign nationals residing in Egypt, was mostly nationalized in the course of the Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist experiment. In the 1970s. his suc cessor, Anwar al-Sadat, initiated the infitah (open door) policy of gradual priva- tization and economic liberalization. In the 2000s, under the influence of Gamal Mubarak (Hosni Mubarak’s son and by that time his expected successor) this liberalization developed into a system of governance that united the neoliberal utopia of entrepreneurial spirit and wealth with a systematically nepotistic way ot producing and distributing that wealth. tb ™ of *e architects and primary profiteers of this era. but the Sawiras family Khayrat al-Shater. and the Armed Forces all got their share of the profits as well. Policies of trade liberalization created a situation in which industrial production stood m an increasingly disadvantaged position with re spect to European and Asian competition, and more and more profits could be made by import-export and retail trade. This shift bred a generation of successful entrepreneurial families who often made significant profits and turnovers while employing a relatively small workforce. Naguib Sawiras and Khayrat al-Shater may stand at different ends of the Muslim-Christian confessional split and the political spectrum, but they are sons of the same economic process, and together they represent one face of capitalism, oriented toward services, media, real ttate, and retail trade; organized through fiimily clans; and having a clear preference or import trade and services over industrial production. This tendency is not re- ncted to the big players. It also extends to small entrepreneurs who in previous ecades have largely shifted from artisanal and industrial production to import
and retail trade (Ismail 2013; Mitchell 2002). ^
\ Capitalist Ethics? S J09
V
In contrast, the Armed Forces—the main profiteers of which are established : officer families, who also control the recruitment of new professional officers, i most of whom come from officer families—built its economic power largely as a side effect of structural adjustment policies dictated by the International Mon etary Fund. In the 1980s and 1990s Egypt decreased its public sector not only by selling public-sector companies but also by turning civil bodies into military ones. The Armed Forces also had the unique advantage of free labor in the form of conscripts at its disposal. In contrast to Sawiras and Shater, however, the Armed Forces put much more emphasis on industrial production, infrastructure, and construction, such that “made by the army” has become a mark of quality for everything from foodstuffs to street repairs (Abul-Magd 2011).
These different faces continue to coexist, but their fortunes keep shifting. In 2012, many considered Khayrat al-Shater to be the real leader of Egypt; in any case he was one of the most powerful people in the country. The economic expe rience he and his fellow Muslim Brothers have gained also informed the econom ical policies they tried to pursue—oriented toward ongoing trade liberalization, reducing subsidies, and turning public services into public-private partnerships. This is an economic policy with real estate developments, malls, and hypermar- •kets as both a marker of success and a template for what a successful economy is about. It is a vision of economy that is flashy yet conservative, providing hedonis tic pleasure but selling no alcohol, distributing charity but fighting trade unions. At the time this books went to press, al-Shater was in prison and his businesses were being confiscated. It was a golden hour for the Armed Forces and for Naguib Sawiras, who was under much pressure during Morsi’s presidency. But just as Khayrat al-Shater compels one to think about revivalist ethics of piety and supermarket chains, so Naguib Sawiras makes one wonder about commercial media and real estate together with liberal politics and confessional tensions, and the Armed Forces inspires one to reflect about road construction and industrial production in relation to militarist nationalism.
Living Capitalism And yet these faces do not yet provide a satisfectory account of what capitalism is like in post-Nasserist Egypt. What is it like to niiilrr 1 livinn, tn wnrk.-^n- snmp. and to invest under the conditions described here? To make sense of the expeTiential side of living capitalism, I elaborate six crucial moments: socialist structures, debt, class, marriage, informal privatization, and last but not least a
sense of increasing pressure. First, a key feature of capitalism at the turn of millennial Egypt is t^e uneasy
coexistence of elements of Arab socialism with neoliberal structural adjustment Although state subsidies have been dramatically reduced and many state ownea
no I Egypt in the Future Tense
companies sold (often under questionable circumstances), rent income from oil, gas, the Suez Canal, and political alliances has allowed o mamta^e of its ^SdilSmFuctm^^bly a
ejpaMI?iUtorworic%ce^Despite poor salarii^iT'eople with lower in^es especially rely on public-sector jobs because of the security and social status they continue to be associated with, not to mention their social insurance and pen mUv-lThe f 7"" / of P"™'«”g-fo™ally and infor- nr^a I ^ an Arab socialist image of the public sector Tn knds “ f'" societal and economic issues of
Second, there is the incieasingprevalenceofdsbtasamodeoffinanre M„.i. d1 consumption since the 1990s have been made possible by.generous«editsJ« ftjn thejhape^^rmnii^niesJi^ in- vesri^on^oeaitVconsumers buying on installments, with the r^.lt ,i.ai bpthlggiaual^an^Hipinito-Base thehTpendinlnnJaree-ia^e^eht ajs PunTf “ff f, ''Ori^o economic policielT^he International Monetary
into n 7 80''=™”'"?? “d niicroloans to the poor, turning debt sltlW m ' T' power worldwide, both coercively and
btly (see Elyachar aoo^igh zoiJ In rural and popular milieus in Egypt however, people have also ^bneOrWbt without much input from internatfonal
crftS'nrten V consumption and to overcome cr. cal urgencies (such as sickness) has led to a proliferation of payment in in- MImaTvilkeeT'" f °f economic transactions rnrcheckT ”1! u ™ P=y”“ts, often guaranteed by
ank checks. Loans exchanged at weddings have grown from a way to flnanr. weddings to an expanding form of mutual credit. Going into debt has lost much ated withT ‘ "ssoci- ated with a certain prestige.*
celiai^ deb_Hsessatiaito the future-oriented and growth-driven
to investt“Ilj?g!fthan£;teTKiassity to-feaETtliat growth in order jcr^v b..i. oiriwesJOiis-commodifisaHo^the future" (A^Fid^mUg^’e-Ss).
mpl ed in the way investment atldSliSSpHon arrmade possible by credit and
capitalist economy. From a practical, everyday perspective this means that the p essure of debts and installment payments has become one of the most present ssues in people s lives as they accumulate consumer goods-apartments furni- ctothin^wTr’ telephones, computers, and fashionable Clothing—With money they yet have to earn. sellin^“cTnr' r'lf “ shopkeeper selling clothes to the poorest inhabitants of Nazlat al-Rayyis, rarely receives the
Capitalist Ethics? \ in
Figure 5.1. Collecting wedding loans, Nazlat al-Rayyis, November 2006.
price of his goods at once in cash. He sells even shirts and socks on installments. For his customers this means a constant pressure of debt, but for him the situ ation is hardly any better, because most of his capital is actually bound up in unpaid, interest-free installments, and if people are late with their payments, he cannot force them to pay.^ It is different when a person owes money to a bank or a traditional moneylender, of course. The point, though, is that although there is a strong historical relation betweeen monetary debt and violence (see Graeber 2011), debt is not a uniformly coercive form of power. It is. howej^LJJX^most uniforml^uture-oriented one, leaving iransacuons anJobligations ever incom- plpfpjjyt tfUiA fulfilled.
Third (following socialist structures and debt as the first two moments of living under actually existing capitalism), the future orientation is also visible in the way being middle class has become an ideal of social normality. People rang- ing from yesy poor tiivery wealthy have come to..see thgipgelygSas.jniddle class. “Themiddle classes” of Egypt consist of people yerY.£ai:^BArUnJgrms of income, educSiom livelihood, and Tial^ns. from executive employees in international companies who hold an English-medium university degree and live in privileged neighborhoods nf^irrmr-Alexandria, to civil servants who have almost no for mal income and a devalued, low-quality state education, living in informal ar eas of the cities, small towns, and villages. This expansionjifilhe-middlertasses
112 I Egypt in the Future Tense
the capitalist process, in whirl, stabhste£^ss Boundaries oT earlierTTmes arJ15^^55kwl,hil„ I,,., r::: ,
: ere, then, is the real middle in a soci^i^^^ii^fuUy stratified by descent ncome, education, and housing, and at the same time so united in the desire’
to helong o the middle class? Trying to pinpoint this is a futile task, Lcau
If the :1dd, 1 n "Oj^e but a direction. The '‘mM" fnd ^t awareness that there are others whose inclusion is more perfect nd marked by attempts to distinguish oneself from the poor and the ignorant Middle as a reality is forever elusive. But as a direction, an imagined she of good social normality (Fehervdry 2013; Yeh 2009), it is very powerful
the ™'r’’“^“'’“"°'’°^“°*™P‘’™’*a“”''nod‘fication of the future and 00 ife Inrf “ expectin'of a
g od life. In this sense, these things can be considered aspirational even utonian in some instances. The question, however, is to what degree people can pursue these expe^tions at will, and to what degree they experience them as pressing necessities
This leads us to the fourth (following socialist structures, debrand 2^' ”°“p" ”, ““‘“8 in Egypt: marriage. Marriaue for most Eptian,^e WHLSgSglHicinvestmemBrtEgFkn^tis a nodal
and rwS; childrSrgtoig^he same or higher Social class. One n?7he ::T:2-.r. -
a self-evident. destmy-Iike necessitv h.. , ^ is-conaidered difficult '-----------^------fapjer 4), it has becomemxre,a$ingly
The primary reason for that difficulty is the rising cost of marriage A stan dard marriage arrangement in the village involves not only a bride-prfce of gold cash, and presents but also an apartment, a bedroom set, the fumiturTeithero;
combined living room and salon (room where guests are received) or for two separate rooms if possible, linens, a television set, possibly TZler 2ih
ing table, a bathroom with toilet, shower, washtub and a boiler a kitchen with
uys what IS subject to a written agreement. The actual cost of marriage varies
Figure 5.2. A bride and a groom buying clothes for their marriage,
Alexandria 2003.
114 I Egypt in the Future Tense
marriage is caused by the increasing cost of housing, a result of real estate specu lation and shifting prices of globally traded goods like steel (needed for building houses) and gold (needed for the bride-price). But most of it is an effect of com petitive conspicuous consumption. As families try to negotiate the best possible terms to marry off their daughters, prospective grooms try to outbid one another in the cost of their contribution. Isma'il, whose shop also finances the purchase of brides contributions to the marital household (he provides the complete con ventional package and receives payments in installments), says that it is almost impossible to know how much marriages really cost, because all parties involved tend to exaggerate the price of the goods they buy:
A groom may buy furniture for 12,000 Egyptian pounds but tell the bride s father that it cost 18,000 in order to make himself look more generous and capable. The father’s neighbor will hear about it, and he will tell the young man who comes to ask for his daughter s hand that he should bring furniture worth of 20,000 pounds, because he doesn’t want his daughter to appear lesser than the neighbor’s.
A paradoxical dynamic of marriage-as-investment thus emeiees: because neonle consid^arriage a singularly important form of s^STbecom^gl and l£ause of theavallab^ ot mofe^ moTe tuiisuiiier goods, better housing conditions. andjhemcomemrjyor credit'to finance them, the cost of marriage is mnstantlv mqgnifiedaojhej^g^IEarpFnple.ran mi^ longer than previously was common to get married.
AMTand paradoxical moment of whath is like^to live under capitalism in Egypt (the first four being socialist structures, debt, class, and marriage) is that governruentpolifips, laws, -and internatinnal agreements highljgbt
rationality, but m practice almost nnfhingis what it seems. The actual work ings of educational, administrative, and economic institutions differ systemati cally from their official, legal form. These fields are governed by informal logics ^^^^!£HS^5£SiO-^^"atiiwtteat^se»-‘‘othorrQn3iderat^^ based on family relations and clientelist allegiances (wasta), bribes, and other informal transactions bypass formal qualifications and legal entitlements (see Rabo 2006). Also the socialist sectors of the economy have been transformed by an informal version of the privatization of public services. School diplomas with high grades are almost impossible to get without private tutoring, which in turn can be a very lucrative business for teachers who officially are very poorly paid. Govern ment jobs that include the possibility of significant income in bribes are either distributed on the basis of wasta or sold for high prices. The police can be hired to extract private debts. Largely because of these clientelist relations, in the early twenty-first century Egypt has emerged as a highly stratified class society in which paths to success are extremely dependent on family background and the ability to pay for private, high-quality (preferably English-medium) education
Capitalist Ethics? 1 115
Ia. de Koning 2009), and in which for every law there is an established way to
focumvent it (I return to this point in more detail in chapter 8). I Sixth and last (following socialist structures, debt, class, marriage, and in- Iformal privatization), the overall image of lived_capitalism in Egypt revealsji IfundajjifiUial contradiction between expectations and expenince^Egyptians
Even in a mrai location like Na^at al-Rayyis.~there UssomTwrk available, pe^le have enough to eat, and child mortality and illiter- ‘ acy rates have dropped while the standard of housing has dramat^ally risen and people have many more things than they did just few decades earlier. At the same time, pypryhodvcomplains abouLlhe unbearablejcononnc prices, consumer debts, housing. marrMe, education, priv^Tmtogiigl^so on. While th~e stan<Iari}iOmn&in^ ^^as risen somewhat, it is still dra-
ihan that of wealthier Epvptians Imng in tli&airbaft-^en^s a people are acutehLmor^ Expectations have grown much faster
than the resources to fulfill them. And while most Egyptians can now buy many more things than they could twenty or fifty years ago. buying those things is not something one can choose to do-in most cases, they are things one must buy. even if they may seem a dispensable luxury to an outsider. Dining tables, gl^^es, and coffee sets, which have little practical use in a rural Egyptian household, must be part of the apartment of a newlywed couple. Color television sets, mobile phones, and computers must be bought.’Egyptians often find it strange that I do not have a car even though I could afford one. If youc^fford a car, youb^.one.
Consumption is not a choice. It is a necessity.
Any Means Possible Given the pressure of consumption and the simultaneous scarcity of reliable le gal paths to success, immoral, illegal, or quasi-legal means to success appear as LLary and even acceptable in the face of the idea that anyone who has money must be a thief anyway, or the heir to a thief. Although people often stress the legality and legitimacy of income (especially in the religious sense of that income being halal), economic practices have not been influenced by the Islamic revival in the way in which, say, gender relations, dress, and drinking practices have been. More than that, the moral thrust of Egyptian Muslims trying to know their religion better for the sake of living a morally sound life is not primarily directed at economic practices (with the exception of Islamic banking). Womens dress and behavior; prayer and repentance; paradise and hell; abstinence from tobacco, alcohol, and drugs; fighting Israel-all these form the basic stock of religious admonitions that as stickers and graffiti have covered the walls of homes, shops, and public transportation in the 2000s. Only after the revolution in 2011 did such issues as taking and paying bribes emerge as a theme of stickers and gra 1 in public space. The wave of fashionable piety that went through the upper midd e
116 I Egypt in the Future Tense
p|pis§=The expectation that Muslims, by virtue of their faith i j u and responsible economir artorc ct he more moral nomic practice otn T
est or usury W thfriTs enir 'T ^'
(and probably because they have t, “™™unities for religious reasons instalLnt p^niXS^nX in"LTot
beco^ng increasingly popular especially among small entmp“’ critiq!: that oIn!emerfon“^^^^^^^ “ “ ^ ^ral
moral action that is closely connert h°” ^ interpersonal register of
=« g^eroqsly. Itopsct is *”'’''''1 'ii
::Sy“ rLi;‘r;r fail to meet the (rapidly growing) those who respect. At the same time, they routineTclmnf^'T* Performing empty virtue based entirely on money: ^ ^ ■'“pect has become an
The older one grows, the stronger the pressure'And ' 7'" °"k " 7'’'’ poverty, it is very important. ^ ^ ^hen one has lived in
SAMULi: What makes one respected in the village?
Is respect not measured by friendship, love, moral integrity, religiosity, and
invites everyone in thp raft or,,! i- i ntteen years, qualities. because of his persond
s: What if one’s wealth is based on bribes or drug trafficking?
Capitalist Ethics? 117
1 1: It has become irrelevant, it no longer matters where your money comes from B as long as you have it.
Lma*il presents a highly critical vision of a society in which moral values are Kere appearances and all that matters is money. At the same time, he works hard Kimself in order to become respected on these terms. He carefully manages the fmeager capital of his shop by participating in numerous saving associations and [wedding-loan exchanges, and he is very good at discovering niches to make a little bit more money in his trade as well as in his other job as a teacher. With the best of his efforts, his economic situation remains precarious, but he is helpful and generous to friends and family in need. He is a vocal critic of materialism, and yet he spends most of his time trying to make more money, reminding his customers to pay their installments, negotiating a better deal in buying a house, purchasing new goods, and mediating relatives’ marriage arrangements. His critique of materialism should thus be understood not so much as opposition to the promises and pressures entailed in consumption but rather as an expres sion of the ambivalence they create. The ability to spend money on conspicuous commodities is a virtue in itself, and even when people express their discontent about it being so, in their daily judgments about the qualities of other people as respectable or disrespectable, it counts. This is a real and serious pressure of at
once moral and economic kind. Isma’il sees himself as a socialist and is not very pious. He thinks that the
turn to revivalist piety under these conditions is insincere, and he points out that shops owned by Muslim Brothers in the village charge the highest inter ests rates on their installment plans. However, people can be quite sincere about wanting to live “according to the Qur’an and the Sunna ’ while reckoning with what they deem economic necessity. This was the case with two other small shop keepers from the village, the brothers Muntasir and Abdelnaser (see chapters 1 and 3). In 2007. they argued to me that they would want to live and do their business according to the law of God and the example of the Prophet, but they added that as materialistic as their society was, this was not possible. By 2009 they were forced to close their shop because of increased prices of foodstuffs, and they went to work as migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, where they faced highly exploitative conditions. By 2011, Abdelnaser was back in Egypt trying to find work there (unsuccessfully, it turned out), and when I asked him what kind of work he was searching for, he answered: "The kind of work doesn t matter. The
money matters."
■\
Profit and Reward There is widespread moral trouble with a life in which money matters so much. It is a problem, however, that also comes with a sense of direction.
ii8 I Egypt in the Future Tense
There has been much research on pious capitalism and spiritual economies. Most of that research has foregrounded the attempt of pious entrepreneurs to in still capitalism with religious-moral values (e.g., trading in halal products, giving money for charities), or to use capitalist means of training and distribution for pious ends, such as combining management training and da‘wa (“call” to Islam, that is, proselytization and preaching), developing Islamic entertainment, and clothing fashions (see, e.g., Osella and Osella 2009; Rudnyckyj 2009; Jones 2010). As the focus of those works is often mainly on the ethical aspect of the encounter between piety and business, there has emerged a lacuna regarding its unethical aspects (but see Ghannam 2002:179-181). Capitalist production, accumulation, and exchange often create moments of severe moral disturbance: the rising cost of marriage undermines gender ideals; the opacity of the process makes it diffi cult to distinguish right and wrong; the pressure to marry, to build a middle-class existence, and to pay back debts compels one to resort to any means necessary. Exploitative working conditions in the private sector and the destruction of wel fare guarantees in the public sector through structural adjustment generate a sense of grave injustice. In this situation the revivalist turn to religion as a grand promise of clarity has a curious double role. One the one hand, it appears as a site of moral certainty necessary to fill the moral vacuums of capitalism. On the other hand, it promotes an affective sense of being that strongly resonates with a sense of affective being that is central to the experience of capitalism. That is, revivalist Islam and actually existing capitalism share key moral anxieties as well as certainties that are taken for granted.
There are, of course, Islamist voices who raise fundamental questions about the logic of consumption, fashion, and the pursuit of worldly profit. But they are not the ones who gather mass followings. The higab may have been anti-fashion when it first became part of the dress of middle- and working-class women, but it could become the dominant form of Muslim women’s dress only as a consumable fashion item (MacLeod 1991; Hoofdar 1999:197; Moors 2009; Ahmed 2011). The power of Islamist movements relies heavily on their promotion of and reliance on retail trade and consumerist lifestyles. And no matter how ambivalent, demoral izing, and troubling the experience of living capitalism may be, even for people who hold to a socialist views of economy or who end up being at the losing end of the redistribution of wealth, capitalism is never merely a menace. It is also a key source of hope.
Wealth, which today is measured primarily by the ability to consume, equals a promise of good life and happiness, and it is the issue people I know spend the most energy and time on. As Isma'il pointed out, conditions of poverty make this promise of wealth only stronger. Wealth is a matter of having the resources to live a humane existence in command of dignity and respect. In other words, wealth is about existential comfort. As Sa'id pointed out at the opening of this
Capitalist Ethics? [ 119
book, wealth is a means to have existential power over one’s condition (see also Jackson 2011:156). This is not in any way new, of course. The pursuit of wealth predates capitalism by millennia at least. Capitalism is not the cause of people’s pursuit of wealth—it is better described as the processual outcome of an increas ingly systematic pursuit of wealth (Miller 2012). However, in the course of this process, the existential comfort of having a little more than one needs has trans formed into something more peculiar; an anxious combination of pressure and aspiration to realize a constantly better life by accumulating more wealth. Rapid economic growth has made it possible for many people to have more—even a lot more. And yet many among those people do not experience growth as a comfort able margin of surplus. Instead, they experience it as pressing scarcity, because the installments for the goods that were bought are yet to be paid, because others already have even more, because the children need to be educated to keep up with the competition.
Predictably, this causes anxiety, which is further amplified by the notorious precariousness of most Egyptian livelihoods. In such an unpredictable mixture of dramatic hardship, grand promises, increasing wealth, and shady deals, reli gion can appear to be precisely the kind of firm hold and straight path needed to make things a little clearer. But that is easier said than done. Revivalist Islam is neither an alternative to nor a corrective for capitalism. Rather, it is an especially compelling way to live capitalism, and vice versa.
In the course of the parallel processes of economic liberalization and re ligious revival, consumption has emerged as a key strategy of proselytization and an important means of living a religious life (women’s higab being a strong case in point). But consumption is never simply a neutral means for the ends of an ideological project, as Martin Stokes (2002: 331) reminds us: “Consumption- based strategies can never take everything into account. The commodity form is never simply amendable to ideological control. The commodity fetish, as Marx constantly reminds us, leads its own life—it ‘thinks us,’ no matter how much we like to believe we are capable of‘thinking it.’”
That is, when a religious movement makes use of the commodity form— which the Islamic revival has done in numerous ways, be it in Islamic fashion, mass-produced religious objects, or the linkage of supermarkets and Islamist proselytization—the commodity form also leaves its mark on the movement in unpredictable ways. However, this is not to assume the materialist causality of commodification. Even when businessmen become preachers, Islam has not be come business. In his work on consumption, Daniel Miller (1993, 2008) argues that consumption and commodities are not something external that take over our lives. Rather than being something done to us, consumption is something we do, and when we buy and use things, we de-alienate them; that is, we trans form them from commodities that are produced and sold under conditions of
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alienation into relational objects that may embody intimate emotional value. The intertwining between religiosity and capitalism is not simply about religi osity being shaped by capitalism. Instead, what is at hand is a resonance, a mu tual relationship between the process of commodity exchange and the work of de-alienation.
The resonance between monetary profit and reward in the afterworld is a case in point. While the religious discourse of the Islamic revival promotes the ideal of iltizam, or the commitment to a pious and moral discipline of willing and holistic obedience to God, this project is not one of selfless devotion. The ideal of commitment is linked with concerns over collecting rewards (thawab) for the afterworld, which can be obtained by praying, fasting, invoking God, do ing pious and good deeds, and the like. Preachers of the Islamic revival have very successfully mobilized the afterworld, especially people’s fear of hell and pun ishment of the grave as a key religious sentiment.^ Cultivating the daily worry about punishment and reward is a central part of pursuing the path of revivalist piety (Mahmood 2005; 140-145: Hirschkind 2006b). Booklets and sermons that detail the terrible tortures of punishment of the grave are among the most widely circulated. While the pursuit of reward is typicaUy aligned with the ideal of com mitment, the aim of commitment and the concern for reward do not always sit comfortably together. They present somewhat different emphases of religiosity: one based on a holistic discipline, and the other focused on maximizing divine reward for the sake of maximal pleasure in the afterworld.
The concern with reward and punishment, paradise and hell, positive and negative points {hasanat and sayyiat) in one’s account for Judgment Day. is as old as Islam itself. It is a recurring subject in the Qur’an, and it has a firm place in Islamic eschatology. However, concern for the fine details of maximizing reward has not been quite as central in other times as it is now. In my earlier fieldwork in the Sufi milieu (Sufi ways of devotion were hegemonic in Egypt until recently), I never encountered people discussing the issue of reward in such an explicit and elaborate manner. Reward in the afterworld for good and pious deeds committed in this world was taken up from time to time, but generally Sufi Muslims were more concerned with searching for assistance from the “friends of God” (i.e., Muslim saints) in this-worldly problems and with discussing the spiritual prog ress to higher states of religious experience.
The way a middle-class urban mother who had come to the muUd festival of as-Sayyid al-Badawi in Tanta in 2006 to take her children to see the rides and the fairgrounds interpreted the meaning of a Sufi gathering is telling of the shift. She argued that the Sufis who were engaged in an ecstatic dhikr (collective medita tion in tune of music) were misguided in their attempt to gain reward that way. I had actually never heard followers of mystical Islam claim that reward was the primary motivation for participating in a gathering, but unlike the Sufis, this
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mother articulated reward as the paradigmatic, if not the only, motivation of a religious ritual.
The privileging of reward is related to a more general vision of the human condition that also privileges profit as a paradigmatic motivation and outcome of action. Take, for example, the countless small prayers and invocations that cir culated on the Internet by the end of the 2000s, invariably carrying some varia tion of the promise that they would bring huge “mountains of hasanat" (reward points) to whoever would read, speak, and forward them. One such invocation that circulated on Facebook in 2008 declared:
Send this to 15 [others]—in an hour you will have gained [the reward equaling that of] 15 million blessings for the Prophet in your accounts, God willing. Don’t be arrogant towards God by saying you don’t have time. This is a million points of reward which you certainly need.’
Such hyperbolic promises of millions of points of reward and thousands of angels praying for a person are very common, and very telling of a rather utilitarian no tion of worship in which saying a prayer and forwarding it to friends is an easy, ac cessible way to balance one’s account: everybody certainly needs a million points. The issue of religious commitment is not absent; it is present through the very fear and anxiety that make people so eager to circulate such messages. But the hyper bolic promises of easy reward are motivated by a sensibility that does not require one to enter the path of committed personality. In the prayer posts on the Internet, reward (and punishment) is concrete and immediate. It does not require (though it may imply) elaborate work on the self. And that reward is just a click away.
Such messages, in handy posts and pictures, often written in an informal colloquial style similar to that of advertisements, are one of the many success ful means of a religious revival initiated but no longer controlled by groups of religious activists. By virtue of the life experience and the horizon of expectation of the people who write and read them, the rhetoric of persuasion they employ, and the sensibilities they appeal to, they also resonate with ideals and logics other than the one they were ostensibly designed to proliferate. They bring together concern for reward and punishment after death with concern for profit, success, and consumption in this world.
This was first pointed out to me by Layla, a Cairene woman in her midtwen ties who, in the spring of 2008, was working as a consultant for an international company—a very exclusive social milieu where the Islamic revival only became tangibly felt after 2000. She complained about one of her colleagues, a very re ligious person who prayed regularly. She said that she ended up doing much of his work because he. rather than praying in the office or at the mosque next door, would always walk to a mosque further away because every step he took to walk to a mosque for prayer would bring him more reward:
122 I Egypt in the Future Tense
“y j°>>, we work by theorel^^ T- ‘hat I have a very hLh fn that b T'™ n ""h “h “"s efficient^ I cfn “uch h“^Tdr“ J-‘hhe I count JioTk: havTi ,r j J ^ ™’' "'“'■hing time?” he thinks, "How much reward He thinf^T'^'t^T behind in points?”
ork. And religion for him is not about peace of mind, about the feelineL his the ^ V ' f r *^'*'"”8 point- All life shrinks m just n^aWnfproS fo
dothe, r b ‘““y *“«■- in bot weather under thdr cbthes, but they say "Ifs OK, I do it all for the afterlife.” They tWnk abom religion in a completely capitalist way.
midid f”‘’“‘!^ ^ P"*°n wbo finds collecting reward a mis guided form of religiosity. Layla probably underestimates the peace of mind and sen e of dtrectton that intense involvement in ritual practice may offer Fmther
ore, wht e her colleague may have had a capitalist approach toLrship he did not seem to have a capitalist approach to capitalism! at least not In W berian terms. Hts concern with prayer went at the cost of productivity and efficiencv and .least in Layla’s account, this did not seem to cause him much cofern
There IS a similarity, even an affinity, between the capitalist logic of profit and th T1 “ ■«« - one colonldnj its sW ofZr of capitalism, but capitalism also gete E^t d “ “** "“'■“oles. Importantly, the focus on wealth and profiUn Eg)Tt does not necessarily mean a Protestant work ethic (Weber ippal-on the dem^'t lT capitalism in a depen- tmeSbr often appear sudden, unpredic able, and even miraculous,* The resonance lies less on the side of ratio nal calculus and more on the side of the promise of miraculous abundance (see Mittermaier aoij). In fact, very much like the Internet posts that promise huge rewards (even more than those entailed in performing major religions obligattoL Ind !ud®dr'®" “‘®o of dramatic nd sudden wealth due to successful migration, lucky breaks, shady deals rags
to-riches careers, and dark alliances of politics and trade m^opjies cirX mong Eg^tians from less privileged milieus. Rather than bein! a transparent
ou come of rational economic actions, profit has much affinity with the logic of ««s,6. or unpredictable strikes of destiny. In the complex Arlbic vocabulary of destiny, nastb comes close to fortune. It is destiny as it hits one in decisive mo ments. m-mage, children, profits and losses, accidents, illness and healing One can make the best out of one’s nusib, but one cannot plan or choose it ® Web^Lo ! from that described by Weber (1992) in his Protestant Ethics, but it carries a similar dialectic Webe!
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famously argued that in a cosmology in which one’s fate is irreversibly prede termined by God, uncertainty about one’s share in the afterworld turned wealth from something one should spend to please God (and the church) into an indica tion of one’s belonging to those whose souls are saved. In combination with an austere approach to life that rejected feasting and other ways of expenditure, this cosmology laid the groundwork for an economic practice oriented toward in vestment and accumulation. Weber describes a world of unknown salvation and transparent wealth. In the current stage of capitalism, in contrast, the origins of wealth and the means to gain it are often highly opaque, not transparent. Despite the emphasis of neoliberal governmental discourses on transparency, the actual practice of accumulation under conditions of neoliberal government—especially so in dependent economies—relies on processes that are too complex for the un initiated to grasp and on ways of operating that are rejected by the ideology of good governance as “corruption” or “nepotism” but nevertheless instrumental for making anything happen, and therefore made invisible (see chapter 8; see also Shever 2008; Sanders 2009, Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). At the same time, salvation emerges as accessible, transparent, to some degree even calculable. This is notably the case with two of the most successful religious movements in this age, revivalist Islam and Evangelical Christianity, the first with its preoccupation with maximizing points of reward, the latter with its promise of a tangible and definitive guarantee of salvation by means of rebirth through Christ.^
This is not a matter of simple causality. For one thing, it is very difficult to determine which side of this dialectic relationship comes first, whether religious practices give contours to economic beliefs, or vice versa. In the final instance both Islam and capitalism are processes and outcomes of human action, and as such they cannot be ascribed causality in any direct way. Neither revivalist religion nor global capitalism exist as conclusive systemic wholes but rather as complex everyday practices and discourses that partly influence and partly con tradict each other—not to mention the multitude of other practices and pursuits that cannot be reduced to these two things. What we have at hand are affinities or resonances between diflrerent practices undertaken by people who “share a spiritual disposition to existence” (Connolly 2008:42). The notion of points of re ward and punishment has long tradition in Islam, as do trade and profit. But the particular contemporary capitalist shape of consumption and profit—especially sudden, abundant profits—resonates with notions of religiosity that highlight re ward, because they appeal to key sensibilities that have developed into master metaphors of subjectivity and social practice in the course of the reintroduction of capitalism in Egypt: the capability to consume as a key to happiness and social being (thus not really a choice, though it is commonly framed in terms of choice), measurable profit as the main aim and motivation of action, and the often sudden and miraculous appearance of profit and conspicuous consumption.
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Contentedness and Anxiety
Despite its well-known discontents, capitalism offers perhaps the most powerful social utopia of our time, grounded in its capacity to actually provide fulfillment in the shape of material goods and services. The evident inequality of the distri bution of that fulfillment does not make the promise any less attractive. On the contrary—poor people around the world have come to invest enormous hopes in the capitalist utopia of wealth and freedom. The trouble with this vision is not only its inequality but also its elusive temporality. The fulfillment offered by capitalism is ephemeral, and bound to debt, investment, and continuous expan sion (see, e.g., Appadurai 1996; Ziiek2006). Of course, consumption is not always ephemeral. Through the way people make things part of their life consumption also provides moments of lasting memory and emotional bond. Such “comfort of things,” as Daniel Miller (2008) has phrased it, is the ground of the emotional gratification capitalism offers. This power of durable comfort is paralleled and made problematic, however, by the power of the future, the pressure resulting from a dramatic gap between expectations and actual resources in a world where expectations are fulfilled and expanded at the same time. Under conditions of that pressure, there is no option for stability and satisfaction, even if the things themselves have the potential to provide them.
In this situation of elusive gratification, Islam offers a powerful site of emo tional stability, hope that is most pointedly expressed in the ideal of contented ness (rida, or qana a) with the will of God. Muslims often emphasize that, in the end, praise is to God in good and bad times alike because contentedness with the will of God at all times is one of the virtues of a believer, and the preachers of the Islamic revival have put a lot of effort into motivating people to cultivate this attitude. At the same time, expressions of contentedness with the will of God are often made in the middle of bitter complaints and agitated anxieties about one’s share in life. And the heavy emphasis of revivalist sermons on cultivating anxiety about one’s share in the afterlife does not make things easier. Rather than simply becoming content, Muslims who embrace the promises of the Islamic revival are called to cultivate the two contrary affects of contentedness with the present and anxiety about the future.
Mustafa had been bothered by this for a few days when we met in a cafe in downtown Alexandria in 2009. He had recently started his career as a salesman in an import-export company, and he was making good progress establishing business contacts, but he could still sense nothing but pressure to go ahead:
It’s a strange thought I have had in the last days. I think that contentedness [qana'a] is all a lie. Everybody talks about it, but nobody is really content. Sure, faith [iman] should be about contentedness with what our Lord gives us. I’m sure that in the age of the Prophet people were content. When you read the
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Qur’an it praises the grain, the dates—but it doesn’t talk about chicken or meat. In those days people could be content with the simple gift [ni‘ma] our Lord gave them. But I don’t see anybody today really having that, everybody is under pressure, never content, always looking for something better. You can never stop and be happy with what you have reached. If I make 700 pounds [at that time about USS140I, I am already worried about where I can get more. The only way you can stop and be content is to surrender like a beggar, stretch out your hand and let things happen to you.
This combined sense of religiosity and aspiration shares a key sense of temporal ity with capitalist production and consumption: both are based on a constant sense of shortcoming, of a perpetually underfulfilled aspiration. It is a sensibility of living in the future tense, which exerts continuous pressure and anxiety for the present moment, and posits fulfillment always in the future, almost but not yet within reach. The actual moments of satisfection they do provide—the sense of peace and certainty that religious practice often offers, the sense of satisfaction that the successful acquisition of goods often brings along—are characteristically transient. The moment after the prayer is one before the next prayer, and with life being full of small and large shortcomings, there is no certainty of one’s status of reward. After new goods have been bought, the installments are yet to be paid. And as soon as they are paid—or even before—newer, better goods have to be purchased.
This state of anxiety iqalaq) is not simply the raw opposite of well-cultivated contentedness. Anxiety, too, is often cultivated. The most powerful form of cul tivated anxiety is the religious virtue of fear (khuf) of God, the dialectic coun terpart of contentedness with God’s will. Saba Mahmood (2005:140-145) offers an insightful analysis of fear as a religious sentiment. For women in the piety movement, she argues, fear is not simply a motivation to follow commandments and prohibitions; it is most importantly an ethical faculty. Learning to be pious is learning to fear God, and cultivating this fear is a way to cultivate vigilance of oneself and become willing to make the commandments of religion a part of one’s life. Developing Mahmood’s idea further, I argue that the capacity to fear is more than an ethical capacity to distinguish right from wrong paths. It is an emotional state of constant shortcoming that is central to the historical nexus of capitalism, religious revival, and neoliberal rule. It is visible in the intense piety of Ramadan, in the troubled ambivalence of conflicting moral aims, in the millions of points of reward promised in Internet posts and in the need to buy more and better things. The key emotional basis of both capitalism and religious revival is the cultivation of constant anxiety. In a somewhat different mode, that anxiety is also what characterizes the shift in love from the emotional note of shagan (melancholy) to that of struggle for the'sake of fulfillment that I took up in the previous chapter.
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Conversely, the greatest counterweight to religious revival would be the sen timent that actually one is a good-enough Muslim, that following some basic moral rules will do just fine, and that “our Lord’s mercy is vast” (an Arabic prov erb), just like the greatest counterweight to the capitalist process of expansion would be a sense of accomplished satisfaction, a sense that one’s material needs are satisfied, and that any eventual surplus no longer needs to be invested for future maximization. Both counterweights seem unlikely to ever fully prevail given the apparently universal capacity of humans to imagine and to expect more than they need for survival (Jackson 2011:196-197). But the balance between the powers of satisfaction (or contentedness) and the powers of anxiety (or hope) is a shifting one, and it has clearly been in favor of the latter in the past decades.
No wonder, then, that Mustafa had come to see contentedness as a lie. It is a sensibility that under conditions of constant pressure, cumulative growth, and shortcoming becomes very attractive but very difficult to attain because the means to pursue contentedness are saturated by the cultivation of anxiety.
I do not, however, aim to argue that people would be victims of structural constraints under which both their religious and worldly aspirations offer little more than false comfort. Critically appropriating the approach of Michel de Cer- teau (1984; see also Mitchell 2007) on the tactics of the weak versus the strate gies of the powerful, I instead argue that the power of both capitalism and the Islamic revival is at once established and circumvented through everyday tactics as people try to make the best out of the powers, expectations, and pressures they face (see also Jackson 1998: 26-27; Schielke and Debevec 2012). Rather than as a duality of the powerful and the powerless, I suggest that we should under stand these tactics as the very condition under which people live their lives while at times trying to develop and enforce theoretical, ideological, and theological grand strategies. Just as tactics are not necessarily of the weak, strategies are not necessarily of the strong. The articulations of perfectionist religious ideology is a case in point of a grand strategy undertaken by people in marginal and precari ous situations. Tlie complex workings of economic desires, pressures, transac tions, tricks, and detours are a tactical business in which the elites are involved as much as the poor are. This is not to overlook that there are winners and losers, powerful and weak. But to understand what it means to act and live under given circumstances, it is important to avoid too much dualism and instead highlight the general, existential concerns that motivate people’s acts.
The race to build better homes on credit and the hope invested in a prayer that makes one’s afterlife “account” overflow with reward points are both practices that allow people to make their life bearable, manageable, and hope ful. The tragic catch of these attempts is that they also constitute the pressures and powers that people face when every potential groom tries to outbid others in standards of housing and every attempt to strive for reward reminds one of
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the punishments that await around every corner. This is a power that no grand strategy could ever accomplish. At the same time, this power is never absolute, always the outcome of particular actions that can be changed, oftentimes slightly, sometimes dramatically.
This power of capitalism and religious revivals as processes that are made by people who at the same time are subject to them raises two final questions, only one of which can be answered here. The second takes up the second half of this book.
The first question has to do with the ethicality of capitalism. I titled this chapter with an inversion ofWeber’s famous thesis on the role of Protestant eth ics in the genealogy of capitalism, with the intention of developing a nondichoto- raous view of living revivalist Islam and consumption-oriented capitalism—a view in which economy and religion belong to the same world, and in which economic processes and moral and spiritual pursuits share a resonance, a “dispo sition to existence” (Connolly 2008). But is ethics the right term? When we look at the pressure of the future and the increasing uncertainty and insufficiency of life trajectories people experience even though they have more things than before (things that ought to bring existential comfort), and how that experience compels people like Mustafa to wonder how one could possibly live by the Qur’anic atti tude toward God’s grace today, then the reflective moment of the ethical mode is certainly there. But it is often not there when people borrow more money to cover growing consumption and cost of weddings, or when people try to maximize their reward in the afterworld by sharing a link on social media, or when cer tain issues and problems of moral relevance are systematically not scrutinized. In short, the processes of capitalist consumption and expansion, and the reviv alist moral scrutiny of ritual, gender, confession, and the affective relationship with God, do create new and increasing uncertainties and thus also the need to reflect and wonder about what is right and wrong and what one should do about it. But they also create certainties, things that are taken for granted, necessities that defy reflective critique, affects that are cultivated not so consciously, as well as contradictions and wrongs that need to be evaded or silenced. Perhaps the better term, then, is ethos, the actually existing affective disposition to existence, self and relationality, which may or may not be part of an aspirational project of active self-making, and which may or may not be actively reflected upon.
This is as far as the engagement with grand schemes, their ambiguous coexis tence, and their yet-to-be-realized nature can take us. From here, we need to shift our focus to the second question raised in this chapter, a question about the actual paths people take and their consequences. If the pursuit of grand schemes is in separable from the pursuit of tactical advances, this means that we must turn our attention to specific trajectories of action that people actually realize under such conditions. It is to such paths and their winding trajectories that we now turn.