The topic of personal hygiene and domestic cleanliness occupied Protestant missionaries working in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century. Remarks on hygiene can be found not only in writings published for the interested public but also in personal documents such as diaries. This article illustrates that, in missionary sources, descriptions of cleanliness appear mainly in the female sphere, implying a deficient domesticity. The causes of this shortcoming were seen in the crisis of the Egyptian - and in (...) particular the Islamic - family, in which, in the missionaries' perception, the husband ruled despotically over his wife and impeded a healthy family life. Missionaries tried to impart a new female role model - their ideal of a competent housewife and wise mother - and thereby aimed to empower women by teaching them habits of cleanliness. This paper examines the missionaries' methods and arguments for spreading ideas and practices related to hygiene and shows how cleanliness was closely linked to values such as orderliness, discipline and punctuality. It also explores the role of cleanliness in missionary accounts of Egyptian converts and examines how conceptions of personal hygiene and domestic cleanliness were linked to moral and religious purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

The question, ‘Are religious propositions meaningful?’, which dominated thought about religious language after the turn of the mid-twentieth century, was rapidly made redundant by the understanding of language promoted by thinkers associated with hermeneutical philosophy. Instead of arguing about whether or not religious language was meaningful, philosophers and theologians explored the various ways in which religious language is rendered meaningful by the creative interaction of readers and texts. After describing the origin of modern hermeneutics in the work of F.D.E. Schleiermacher (...) and outlining the most important developments within twentieth-century hermeneutical philosophy, this article explores how certain key Muslim theologians deployed the ideas developed within hermeneutical philosophy as they sought to provide new understandings of the Qur’an. After highlighting the link between this new approach to religious language and the innovative understandings of the nature of revelation that have emerged from it, the article considers how the recognition that the text of the Qur’an is consistent with a number of different interpretations has led to the view that there is a plurality of equally legitimate forms of Islam. Finally, the article reviews Mohammed Arkoun’s attempt to explain the unity behind this irreducible interpretive plurality by tracing its origin to what he calls the ‘Qur’ānic fact’. (shrink)