Religion

The 2011 revolution unleashed passionate public concern about how to create a “New Egypt.” Islamic channels were important sites of these debates as rival television preachers gave media form to their competing visions of what a virtuous life entails and what an ethical polity looks like. Based on fieldwork in Cairo with the “New Preachers” – so named because of their novel styles of Islamic media – this talk explores what these on and off-screen struggles reveal about Islam’s competing theologies and the distinctive media forms they take. It also considers what methodological attunements such contested religious mediations demand of their ethnographers.