Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011

By Samuli Schielke

Against the backdrop of the revolutionary uprisings of 2011–2013, Samuli Schielke asks how ordinary Egyptians confront the great promises and grand schemes of religious commitment, middle class respectability, romantic love, and political ideologies in their daily lives, and how they make sense of the existential anxieties and stalled expectations that inevitably accompany such hopes. Drawing on many years of study in Egypt and the life stories of rural, lower-middle-class men before and after the revolution, Schielke views recent events in ways that are both historically deep and personal. Schielke challenges prevailing views of Muslim piety, showing that religious lives are part of a much more complex lived experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9780253015891

Samuli Schielke

Samuli Schielke is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. His research interests include Islam, festive culture, subjectivity and morality, and migration and aspiration in Egypt.

Reviews for Egypt in the Future Tense

[dono421846 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Engaging mix of the personal and the theoretical to understand how Egyptians viewed their situation leading up to the revolution of January 2011 and beyond. Schielke folds in in-depth accounts of his informants (who were uniformly strikingly articulate about their lives and thoughts) with background historical details. The account woven is subtle and complex. Readers who prefer strong dichotomies and few ambiguities will be disappointed. But the author's intent is not to construct a polemic but to describe real lives as actually lived. And that, of course, is fluid across boundaries and categories, and it is all brilliantly captured.This is not the place to go for a blow-by-blow description of the revolution, but the reader gets enough of the facts to understand the situation. Very well done.