Is God for Revolution? Affect, Youth and Islam in Post-2011 Egypt

Based on interviews with upper-middle-class Egyptian Muslims, Is God for Revolution? explores the ways in which political participation in the 2011 Egyptian revolution—and the emotions that came with it—changed the landscape of religious discourse and practice. In the wake of the uprising, Nareman Amin shows, revolutionary feelings—notably hope, disappointment, doubt, shock, and anger—transformed their understandings of what it means to identify as pious Muslims.

Is God for Revolution? is a story about post-revolutionary agency, the emotional toll that this democratic experiment had on those who believed in the revolution and its ideals, and the transformative power of this agency and emotion on young revolutionaries’ attitudes toward religious authorities and religious beliefs and practices.

Bio:

Nareman Amin is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Islam in the Religious Studies Department. Her research focuses on religious authority, affect, political participation, Islamic liberation theology, social media and Muslim youth culture. From 2021 to 2022, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy and Middle East Center Regional Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. She taught courses on social movements and revolutions, Islamic history, and youth culture and social media at the University of Pennsylvania, Fordham University and the American University in Cairo.

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