<div dir="ltr">Dear Colleagues,<div>Today on the blog, Yasmin Moll answers Sherine Hamdy's questions about her book, <i>The Revolution Within.</i></div><div><i><br></i></div><div><a href="http://www.campanthropology.org">www.campanthropology.org</a></div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Ilana</div><div><br></div><div>Press blurb: <span style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:11pt">The New Preachers of Egypt—so named because of their novel
preaching styles, which incorporate everything from melodrama to music to
self-help—came to prominence on the world's first Islamic television channel on
the cusp of the Arab Spring uprisings. They promoted an innovative and
inclusive Islamic piety that millions of young middle-class viewers found
radical and compelling—but were scorned as neoliberal by leftists, as stealth
Islamists by secularists, and as too Westernized by other Muslim preachers.</span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif">Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the New Preachers, their
producers, and followers in Cairo, Yasmin Moll shows how Islamic media and the
social life of theology mattered to contestations over the shape of a New
Egypt. These mass-mediated fractures within Islamic Revivalism were happening
at a time of both revolutionary possibility and authoritarian entrenchment. The
New Preachers' Islamic media inspired a "revolution within" that
transcended the country's divisions and anticipated the ethos of creativity,
solidarity, and coexistence that soon would mark Tahrir Square, the ethical
epicenter of the 2011 uprising. Vividly written and boldly theorized, The
Revolution Within challenges conventional accounts of the 2011 revolution
and its aftermath as a struggle between secular and religious forces,
reconsidering what makes a practice virtuous, a public Islamic, a way of life
Godly.</p>
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