The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt (By Yasmin Moll)

Abstract

In the last two decades, debates within the anthropology of Islam have
been invigorated by ethnographies set in Egypt – from Saba Mahmood’s
Politics of Piety and Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape, to
Amira Mittermaier’s Dreams that Matter and Samuli Schielke’s Egypt
in the Future Tense. In conversation with these influential texts, anthropologists
studying Muslims have delved into issues like the relationship
between interiority, exteriority, and ritual; the normative and analytical
distinctions made between piety and impiety; the political valences of
public religiosity; and the entanglements of the religious and the secular.
Yasmin Moll’s The Revolution Within explores all these questions and
more through an investigation of how Sunni Egyptian Muslims embody
diverse orientations towards piety and politics in their struggles to build
a New Egypt.