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Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands-including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates. Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught between revolutionary activism and Islamic reformism in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite their many disagreements, religious reformers, revolutionaries, and state actors converged on literacy as the first step toward realizing aspirations of the revolution. They invoked the verse Muslims believe was the first to be revealed, "Read in the name of your Lord," to teach literacy as a religious duty and the foundation for the country's future. Nermeen Mouftah unravels how this religiously inspired push for universal literacy was born of twenty-first-century scripturalism and simultaneously went beyond the Quran, to make reading and writing virtuous acts of the liberal state. While revolutionary literacy campaigns soon vanished and adult literacy rates remained stubbornly low, their efforts revealed the importance of recognizing alternative modes of text processing and the personhood and knowledge of nonliterate people. Read in the Name of Your Lord demonstrates how the rise in modern scripturalism underpinned literacy activism, blurring the binary between secular and religious knowledge.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Acronyms
Prologue: Girl in a School Uniform
Part I: Faith in Reading
Introduction: God's First Command
1. Religious Reading in an Unlettered Nation
Part II: The Word of God for All
2. The Quran and Bible as Method
3. Scripturalism among Nonliterate Women
Part III: The Virtues of Basic Literacy
4. Making Mothers Read
5. Workers Writing Toward Dignity
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Nermeen Mouftah is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago.
