https://www.sup.org/books/revolution-within

Sherine Hamdy: Yasmin, I loved this book, and I want to start by saying how much I admire the amount of work and careful thought and writing that went into this. The topic is about televangelist-styled Islamic preachers’ use of satellite media in 21st century Egypt, when the state can no longer fully control or contain what its citizen-subjects have access to. 

But it’s really about much more than that: you are basically describing a society with deep divisions about what it means to be a pious Muslim in the contemporary world, and what it means to be a civically engaged Egyptian at a time of revolution . 

I’m so impressed with the breadth of ethnographic detail: You describe the behind-the-scenes aspects of producing the television shows and the political economy of religious satellite television throughout the Arab world. 

Most impactfully, you were really able to capture the emotional power and sense of intimate connection that the preachers hold with their fans. 

Yasmin Moll: Thanks Sherine for your close reading and engagement with my book! As a long time admirer of your own work on Islamic ethics in relation to bio-medicine in contemporary Egypt, I am delighted to be having this conversation with you. 

Sherine Hamdy: So my first question: Who did you imagine was the audience for this book?

Yasmin Moll: The book is intended for several readerships. The most obvious are readers interested in contemporary Islam in relation to the 2011 Arab Spring. While there are  many journalistic accounts and activist memoirs about these once-in-a-life-time popular uprisings, there is still a dearth of scholarly monographs based on first-hand ethnographic fieldwork.

More broadly, I hope the book will be read by anthropologists interested in religion and media as well as those in the still small field of the anthropology of revolutions. I bring these two foci into the same analytic frame. Hopefully this juxtaposition will be generative for conversations on mediation, theological ethics, and radical social transformation. 

Ultimately, I deliberately aimed to write a book that will be attractive to readers – and instructors looking for texts accessible for undergraduates – interested in a deep and nuanced dive into the lived stakes of Muslims’ internal debates over what makes something Islamic, be that a television program or a revolution.  

Sherine Hamdy: You get to the heart of a question that has for centuries riddled scholars of Islam – and Islamic theologians – but also people of faith more generally. And that is: Who can mediate the relationship between a believer and God? On what authority? And through what means? 

Were these the questions that led you to this research? Or did the research lead you to these questions?

Yasmin Moll:  I started thinking about Egypt’s New Preachers – specifically Amr Khaled – as an undergraduate writing an honors thesis back in 2003. More broadly, I was interested in Islamic televangelism, or styles of Islamic preaching (daʿwa) programs that resembled US Protestant television preaching in various ways. 

Khaled was at the time just starting to garner Western scholarly and media attention. But within the Arab world, there was already a social narrative about these preachers and their satellite television programs as a nefarious neoliberal commodification of Islam. It was becoming the analytical commonsense that these preachers, despite being dubbed new, weren’t actually offering anything new at all, whether within the piety movement, within the media industry, or within Egypt’s socio-political imaginaries. 

To write my undergraduate thesis, I watched dozens of episodes of popular Amr Khaled programs and analyzed lots of different newspaper articles about this emerging style of Islamic media. But then I became curious about the motivations of Islamic television producers themselves as well as how actual viewers made sense of these new preaching programs.  While there was a lot of opining about the consequences of Islamic televisual media, no one was talking to and spending time with the people to whom this media mattered most: the preachers, their producers, and their viewers. 

My interest in this question led me to NYU’s Anthropology department, one of the best places to train in media anthropology in the US. I ended up doing almost three years of fieldwork at the Cairo branch of Iqraa, the world’s first Islamic television channel and an important launching pad for Egypt’s New Preachers. From 2010 to 2013, I observed and participated in trainings, meetings, focus groups, brainstorming sessions, studio recordings, and on-location shoots. My fieldwork also included talking to dedicated viewers and spending time with them across different spaces, from cafes to Qur’anic recitation classes to malls. I hope the book exemplifies the power of ethnography to go beyond conventional – and ideologically convenient – narratives about new forms of Islamic media by centering the people involved in its theorization, production, evaluation, and circulation. 

Sherine Hamdy: Wow, so this began as an undergraduate thesis! It is such a comprehensive work, so it makes sense that it was the culmination of many years of thought and care.

Were there times that you found yourself personally or politically rooting for your interlocutors and their vision of a New Egypt ?

Yasmin Moll: My positionality in the social world I was researching is complex. On the one hand, I am an insider: I am Egyptian, I am Muslim, and I am middle-class. I could have easily met many of the people that I worked with at the channel at a family gathering or birthday party. On the other hand, I was an outsider in many ways. Compared to people in Islamic television production, I am a religious novice: I don’t have verses of the Qur’an memorized beyond the few that I need to pray, for example. I am also more Westernized — I attended  an American school in Cairo. 

Interestingly, one producer told me that my outsiderness to the social world of Islamic television made me more representative of their target audience. New Preaching producers were very invested in connecting across the screen with ordinary Egyptians like me to chart a pious middle path for us between liberal laxity and Salafi rigidity.  

Did I feel personally drawn to this particular path to piety? Sometimes. I mean, I was definitely not drawn to the Salafi path nor to Salafi political discourse after the fall of Mubarak! If I were ever forced to choose between having to watch New Preaching media or Salafi ones, I would choose the former.  

 But this isn’t an auto-ethnography. I try to keep my own beliefs and politics out of the book as much as possible. I am most interested in analyzing what the New Preachers and their followers find so wanting about Salafism, whether ritually, socially, ethically, or politically. 

While some of their evaluations of Salafism seemed polemical or caricatured to me, I felt it was important to understand how these evaluations played out as they created their own alternative forms of Islamic media. My book asks what implications might these theological appraisals of internal Muslim difference have for our own scholarly theorizations of religious mediation and its relation to both the ethical and the political.

Sherine Hamdy: The other thing that struck me is how different the Islamic televangelists are from their Christian counterparts, despite their recurrent comparisons, and despite the Muslim ones modeling themselves off televangelist programs. Specifically, the political economic structure is very different. Whether in the US, Africa or Latin America, Christian evangelical preachers often solicit money directly from their viewers or congregations. But this is not the case with the Muslim preachers, who are on the whole from the middle and upper-middle classes, and in some cases it’s even a step down for them to become television preachers socioeconomically and professionally. Can you tell us more about this religious media economy and why it matters? 

Yasmin Moll: Iqraa was founded in 1998 as the world’s first self-declared Islamic television channel by a Saudi media mogul and billionaire businessman. That fact alone provokes moral panic, whether by Egyptian intellectuals or regular folk, about how daʿwa has become commodified,  become for dollars. The anxieties speak to deeply held notions of the religious and the economic as domains of incommensurable value. But to understand how, why, and with what effect my interlocutors embraced dollars – that is, capital –  as crucial to revolutionizing Islamic media, we need to go beyond the familiar lament that the monetary corrupts the sacred, which prevails even in the academic literature. 

Rather than treat, as most do, Iqraa and its New Preachers as simply reducible to neoliberalism, I approach Islamic television’s political economy as a terrain of struggle for both material resources and ethical efficacy. Chafing against state strictures, many media producers welcomed legalizing privately owned channels on satellite television in the 1990s,.

At the same time, my interlocutors were not indifferent to the perils that dollars potentially pose to daʿwa. As they saw it, the conventional political economy of Arab satellite television is troublingly centered on capital accumulation and profit maximization without concern for the divine accountability awaiting in the Hereafter. However, this required not the condemnation of capital but rather its judicious calibration. While daʿwa should definitely not be for dollars, dollars should be for daʿwa. In many ways the struggles to define the Islamic are inextricable from the struggle over capital’s calibration.

Far from being the disembodied arrangements of predetermined structural logics, media economies are constituted by individualswith different levels of institutional access and power-making choices and different ideas about how to make change. So in other words, taking seriously Islamic television producers’ ethical calibration of capital yields more insights into the actual structures of media political economies than merely tracing who is funding which channel and why.  Again, this is where media ethnography really methodologically and theoretically shines! 

Sherine Hamdy: This brings me to another point of comparison evident in your book between the wider terrains of struggle over and within Islamic television in Egypt and that of struggles over media in other authoritarian Muslim majority countries like Iran.  

In her ethnography Iran Reframed, Narges Bajoghli argues that state-affiliated media-makers in Iran are trying to shore up the dwindling popularity of the 1979 revolution and the system of the Islamic Republic among the younger generation of Iranian citizens taken in by cosmopolitan global media and fed-up with government mismanagement and repressive policies. 

Your work analyzes the ways in which Egypt’s New Preachers and their media producers are also trying to compete with the lure of mainstream entertainment  by aspiring to dazzlement (ibhar) within Islamic media. You argue that this focus on changing the conventional aesthetics of Islamic media was theologically-grounded.  But as you show many Egyptians across the ideological spectrum dismissed the New Preachers and their programs out of hand – as too secular, as too neoliberal, or as too Islamist. So really there is so much you had to argue against as you were writing this ethnography. What was that process like for you?

Yasmin Moll: Incredibly generative, actually, although of course also daunting! 

There have been so many books written both about Islam in Egypt as well as the 2011 revolution by now.. Many of these books start from the premise that the most important fault-line in the country since the 1970s is the secular-religious one, with the state, intellectuals, artists, rights activists and so on all put in the former camp, and in the latter camp are grassroots Islamic preachers, Islamist politicians and lawyers, and ordinary Muslims attending mosque lessons or listening to cassette sermons and so on. After Tahrir Square and especially after the ouster in 2013 of the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi from the presidency, the this is a secular versus religious struggle framework became even more central to analyzing Egyptian politics and society. 

My book destabilizes this framing by focusing on how the internal divisions and power struggles of Egypt’s grassroots Islamic revival played out in relation to both Islamic media and revolutionary politics. My claim is that the on and off-screen contestations within Islamic television over the very forms of religious mediation are proxies for more fundamental disagreements about what makes a form of life Godly. The rivalry between New Preachers and Salafi preachers over the definition of the Islamic maps onto the most important theological faultline of Sunni Islam – that between Ashʿarism and Atharism. Far from being confined to musty medieval texts, the Ashʿari-Athari divide continues to preoccupy Muslims around the world as even a cursory Google search for onlineʿaqida [creedal] wars reveals. 

I show how a methodological attunement to these internal, doctrinally-elaborated, fractures allows us to better understand the theological instabilities of what counts as secular versus religious. So a key intervention of the book in terms of the anthropology of Islam is that we need to stop worrying so much about how we should analytically make sense of the Islamic tradition’s internal diversity, or of secular-religious formations, and pay more careful attention to how our Muslim interlocutors themselves theologically evaluate this diversity and these formations.  As I would find out, Islamic television preachers and their pious viewers spend much more time and effort debunking each other than they do secular liberal Egyptians. 

Again, taking these differences seriously ethnographically offers new insight into the social life of theology as a terrain of critical contestation in which the boundaries of the secular and the religious are subject to doctrinal elaboration, adjudication and rebuttal, even while being continually affirmed as important to God and crucial for believers to maintain.

And as I hope the book convinces readers, an ethnographic emphasis on the widespread internal contestation over the substantive definition of piety also allows for a more nuanced understanding of what was at stake for many ordinary Egyptians in that incredibly challenging and tumultuous revolutionary period between 2011 and 2013. 

Sherine Hamdy: It is so refreshing to see these Muslim revivalists discussing things that matter to them and their disagreements with each other being taken seriously on their own terms – not just as the foils for the assumptions of Western secular liberalism. 

I was stunned when I read your book that the Tahrir Square protests that captured the world’s attention, years later, were in many ways the enactment of these preachers’ message to the youth, whose hopes and dreams are often thwarted in repressive, corrupt, authoritarian, and jobless circumstances. The Islamic preachers that you study captivated youthful viewers – partly by encouraging them to build society and do something impactful to overcome a pervasive sense of nihilism, precisely the kinds of sentiments that were voiced around the time of the 2011 uprisings. 

When did you first realize that connection?

Yasmin Moll:  My interlocutors always saw themselves as revolutionary – even before the 2011 uprising. Their marshalling of novel aesthetic strategies and performative modes within their television programs was aimed at revolutionizing what daʿwa sounds and looks like for a new generation of youthful participants within Egypt’s Islamic Revival. This reconfiguration of Islamic media was itself predicated on revolutionizing revivalist expectations of what Islamic piety substantively and interactionally entailed, especially in relation to religious difference, whether between Muslims or between Muslims and non-Muslims. Simply put, my interlocutors were dismayed that Salafi doctrines, norms, and practices had become virtually synonymous with the grassroots piety movement and they wanted to subvert that association from within.  So this is the first sense of the revolution within that the book title references. 

The second sense is how this revolution within Islamic media and Islamic piety connected to the 2011 revolution for “bread, freedom, and social justice,” as the famous protest chant went. The Tahrir Square protests broke out six months into my fieldwork. While I participated in this mobilization from the very beginning, and made a short film about it, for a while I kept two different notebooks: one about my ongoing research at Iqraa and the other about the revolution. 

Looking back, I think I did so because I was trying to figure out if I was researching the revolution at a time of Islamic revivalism or researching Islamic revivalism at a time of revolution. The obvious answer is, of course, both! 

My research became about what new understanding of the 2011 uprising becomes possible if we trace its unfolding through Islamic television production. It also became about how a focus on revolution casts a new light on the piety movement. I was able to reflect, from this new vantage point, on topics that have long interested researchers of religious revivalism, from ethics to ritual to the political writ large. 

So to answer your question, I realized the connection between the new forms of Islamic media that I was already researching and the mass mobilizations that seemingly came out of nowhere when I started to understand why my interlocutors thought of their particular media practices in revolutionary terms. They had always insisted on a more capacious Islamic media – capacious aesthetically and substantively – connected to the emergent revolutionary vision of a New Egypt that fostered coexistence across various forms of difference. I was also able to follow how their television programs inspired off-screen initiatives connected to Tahrir’s ethic of social solidarity across various forms of inequality.

Nevertheless, for all their vocal support and active participation in the revolutionary timeline between 2011 and 2013, the New Preachers – and pious producers and viewers more broadly – are rarely counted among the revolutionaries. 

Sherine Hamdy: Exactly – that’s why I was so surprised by the connection in reading your book!

Yasmin Moll: This omission needs to itself be analyzed:  my interlocutors’ stances often mapped onto the same progressive definition of the revolutionaries. They were simultaneously opposed to both the remnants of the Mubarak regime and the electoral-oriented Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. For many progressive activists, however, the invocation of Islamic idioms, and the moral authority that such idioms carry, is antithetical to the radical promise of Tahrir.

I hope my book convincingly shows how such a dismissal misses the revolutionary salience of Islamic television. I also want to show that many Egyptians connected to the “spirit of the Square” through the Islamic Revival, not against it.