REVOLUTIONARY RELIGION: YOUTH AND ISLAM IN POST-2011 EGYPT

Abstract

This dissertation examines how political participation in a revolution changed the landscape of religious discourse and practice. In particular, I explore how Muslim youth partaking in the 2011 Egyptian uprising affectively responded to the promise and ultimate demise of a revolution. Based on an in-depth analysis of 60 interviews with young middle-class Muslim Egyptians in 2018 and 2019 and of traditional and social media, my project shows that, for many youth, revolutionary affects and emotions, notably hope, disappointment, disillusionment, shock and anger, shifted their understanding of what it means to be a pious Muslim. This resulted in a fluidity with regards to how one reaches moral and religious perfection. Before the revolution, most of my interlocutors found themselves in structures of culturally agreed-upon forms of religiosity. They were raised during what scholars call the “Islamic Awakening” of the late twentieth century, i.e. laypeople in the Middle East became pious both internally and visibly. In the wake of the 2011 uprising and its failure, however, my interlocutors broke free of many of these structural conceptions of Islam. They no longer trusted the religious authorities whom they believed violated the religious teachings they had preached for years prior to the uprising. Likewise, the Islamic politicians, who for the first time in modern Egyptian history were allowed to participate freely in politics, betrayed the country and failed to live up to the moral standards many of the youth associated with their political project. These youth now believe that there are many paths to gaining God’s favor. Some of them have turned to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, while others have stopped believing in Islam or God altogether. These shifts in religious understanding are what I call “revolutionary religion,” an epistemological mode in which Egyptian youth independently questioned the Islamic tradition they grew up learning, as a result of the affects and emotions they experienced in the wake of a defeated revolution.