The New Preachers of Egypt
In this book, Moll focuses on the so-called New Preachers of Egypt: a group of media-savvy religious voices who gained worldwide fame via the first Islamic television channel on the eve of the Arab Spring.
Their new way of preaching – a combination of melodrama, music and self-help – found favour with millions of young followers, but also evoked divisions: dismissed by the left as neoliberal, by secularists as creeping Islamists and by traditional clerics as too westernised.
The inner revolution
Yasmin Moll did years of fieldwork in Cairo with the “new preachers”, their producers and their followers. Her book The Revolution Within therefore offers a different perspective on the 2011 revolution.
It shows how Islamic media and forms of public piety enabled not only a religious but also a social and political revolution from within.
The so-called ‘inner revolution’ she describes, transcends the classic opposition between secular and religious and invites a reappraisal of what public virtue, solidarity and coexistence can mean.
Yasmin Moll
Yasmin Moll is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Dr Moll is a socio-cultural anthropologist and her research focuses on the intersection of religion, media and politics, as well as racial issues, indigenisation and heritage activism in the Middle East and North Africa.
This year, she joins the UCSIA Summer School faculty team for the first time.
About UCSIA Summer School
This book launch is the public event of the UCSIA Summer School. For over 20 years, the UCSIA Summer School has explored the complex intertwining of religion, culture and society.
In this edition, we focus on religion and politics, inspired by contemporary geopolitical developments and critical insights from decolonial, feminist and ecological studies, among others.
The summer school provides an interdisciplinary forum for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers interested in religion, and encourages reflection on how religion can connect, divide or complement politics.
