but must sit and pause briefly in between them.
He should initiate both sermons with liturgical
formulae of praise to God, the Muslim profession
of faith, and invocations of blessings upon the
Prophet. The first sermon should contain admo-
nitions and counsel relevant to the occasion,
while the second “qualifying” sermon features
prayers on behalf of the Prophet, the ruler, and
the community. The khutba is often delivered in
rhymed prose, believed to enhance its affective
and persuasive power. Today, in most Islamic
countries, the state determines the content of the
“official” Friday and festival khutbas.
Exhortatory preaching assemblies (majlis or
maqamat al-waaz) varied in performance styles
and ritual environments and were not subject to
the same liturgical conditions as the canonical
sermon. Exhortatory preachers crafted their ser-
mons from scriptural recitation, hadith sayings,
Sufi ceremonial litanies praising God, personal
admonitions, and preexisting homiletic litera-
ture. Morality, the remembrance of death, and
JUdgment day were the most common themes.
Preachers delivered exhortatory sermons during
Sufi ceremonies, as erudite homilies in madrasas,
as part of feast day celebrations and funerals, and
as regular public moral instruction. Itinerant and
“free” preachers coexisted uneasily with those
appointed by the authorities to preach.
Religious storytelling (qasas) developed from
quranic tales of the prophets and the People of
Israel and from the so-called stories of the prophets
genre of exegetical narratives embellishing the scrip-
tural stories. Liturgical and exhortatory preachers
sometimes incorporated them into their sermons.
Independent storytellers preached on roadsides
and in cemeteries and held storytelling assemblies
in mosques, where they read stories to the public.
Socially, storytelling served to edify and exhort the
faithful to imitate the prophets’ moral examples.
The religious authorities sometimes censured the
storytellers as a public nuisance for narrating fraud-
ulent hadith to an unsuspecting audience.
See also cemetery; dhikr; prophets and prophecy.
Linda G. Jones
Further reading: Jonathan Berkey, Popular Preaching
and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press,
2001); Patrick D. Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic
Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994). Ibn al-Jawzi, Kitab al-qussas
w’al-mudhakkirin (The Book of Storytellers and Popular
Preachers). Edited and translated by Merlin L. Swartz
(Beirut: Dar al-Machreq, 1986); Linda G. Jones, “The
Boundaries of Sin and Communal Identity: Muslim and
Christian Preaching and the Transmission of Cultural
Identity in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb (12th to
15th Centuries).” Ph.D. dissertation (unpublished),
University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004.Seveners See ismaili shiism.
Shaarawi, Huda (1879–1947) pioneering
Egyptian feminist leader
Born into an elite family in upper egypt, Shaarawi
was raised in cairo. Although her father, a promi-
nent government official died when she was four,
she continued to lead a privileged childhood. She
was instructed along with her only brother in all
subjects but Arabic, which was deemed inappro-
priate for a young girl. As a result Shaarawi became
fluent in Turkish and French and had memorized
the qUran by the age of nine. However, she also
became conscious from an early age of differences
in gender norms. She was married at the age of 13
to her paternal cousin, Ali Shaarawi, but months
later a dispute led to a seven-year separation. This
period served as a crucial developmental time,
allowing her to continue her studies with foreign
tutors. She also met Eugénie Le Brun, a French
woman who became her mentor and began attend-
ing her weekly salon, where Islamic modernist
ideas concerning Women were discussed. Shaarawi
was exposed to new ideas about veiling, seclu-
sion, edUcation for girls, and Egyptian family law,
known as the personal status codes.
In 1900 she was reconciled to her husband and
resumed married life. After the birth of two chil-
dren she dedicated the next several years to raisingShaarawi, Huda 613 J