Every generation seems to yearn for a New Egypt. Since the late 19th century, as scholars such as Beth Baron, Walter Armbrust, Mona Russell, Lisa Pollard, Samah Selim, and others have shown, notions about “new” kinds of urban Egyptian men and women have populated the imaginations of intellectuals and reformers decade after decade. Each potentially revolutionary generation has adopted some innovation promising to propel the country into the future or align it with some already existing external “modernity.” Analysts have pointed variously to companionate marriage and education for women, articulation with global media and consumerist culture, participation in new genres of literary production, new manners of engagement with the Islamic tradition, embracing the collectivist imagination of a larger African/Arab post-colonialist identity, or privatizing both self and social life in the pursuit of neoliberal capitalist entrepreneurship as constituents or portents of the country’s latest transformation.

Moving into the 21st century, many of these traditional imaginaries of novelty combined to express themselves in acute form in the years surrounding the optimistic but ill-fated 25th of January revolution in 2011. In The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt, Yasmin Moll uses the hopeful spirit of the Tahrir uprising as a multidirectional map. She leads readers on a meticulous tour of one of the more recent tools for renewing Egypt: the development of satellite television channels centered on the “New Preachers.” The “newness” of these individuals lies in bringing specific kinds of educated middle-class sensibilities to religious outreach. Their approaches contrast with the media programs of both the official state religious establishment and Salafi movements, domestic and international. The larger goal of the committed and enthusiastic technical staff of these channels is the creation of morally responsible media that are “Islamic without being about Islam” (p. 98). Their production processes mediate between other groups who share the goal of nurturing a new generation: wealthy media entrepreneurs, the star preachers employed by them, and the “Class A and Class B+” aspirationally mobile middle-class Egyptians that form their intended audience. “The revolution” of the title is not just about Tahrir Square. It is an individual moral revolution, a technical revolution, and a revolution of mediation, changing the way that communications professionals calculate strategies of influence and discuss the agency of theological discourse.

Based on her long-term fieldwork with the media professionals and audiences of these Islamic satellite channels (beginning in 2008, from 2010–2013, and intermittently thereafter until 2018), Moll explores three major processes in the book’s first section. After a long introductory chapter that provides a wide-ranging and useful discussion of contemporary approaches to the anthropological study of Muslims, she presents chapters on calibration, innovation, and moderation. These are followed by chapters on the media’s impact and its contribution to coexistence in the second part of The Revolution Within. One of the book’s contributions is its illustration of the high degree of self-consciousness its professional subjects bring to issues of culture, including, but not limited to, the technical issues of television production. If, as Moll argues, Islam itself is fundamentally centered on issues of mediation—between humans and God, between values and practicality, between members of the community, and between Muslims and others—then the lines between theology, social scientific analysis, and practical political discourse are all blurred. The book’s structure begins with pragmatic issues faced by media producers and ramifies into larger political contestations and the structures of multiple revolutionary changes envisioned by its different social actors.

“Calibration,” or dabt in Arabic, refers to the careful negotiation of value necessitated by the contrast between the fluid capital accumulation that funds quality television production and the enduring values of Islam, which can work at cross-purposes. The seductive moral license of commercial television ends up subsidizing some small quarter of critique, commitment, moral guidance, and refuge. As one feature director explains, “Everyone on this [production] crew is happy for an opportunity to practice our profession without encouraging more sins. That’s rare in our industry” (p. 50). Originating in the late 1990s in the encounter between new Islamic finance practices and institutions in the Gulf along with the traditions of American-style self-help literature, Islamic satellite channels such as Iqraa and Resala capitalized on the desire of wealthy patrons and skilled professionals to counteract the potentially negative moral and social influences of the broader medium. They aimed for high production values in several formats, including feature programming, as well as alternatives to the sermons, lectures, and panels presented by pious talking heads characteristic of state and Salafi programs. The goal was to achieve a “dazzlement” (ibhar) that would attract viewers using the vivid imagery of television to forge a sense of intimate connection, engagement, and trust on the way to helping them develop spiritually.

The creators of these New Preaching channels emphasize innovation in form and content as ways to move beyond the scolding “God says and Muhammad says” presentation style characteristic of Salafi programming, and to offer Islamic wisdom, counsel, and inspiration from on-camera presenters who look and sound like their intended audience. Many of the creative and back-office staff of these channels are women with formal university training in media as well as experienced refugees from secular channels who prefer to produce morally edifying content despite the “underfunded, public-sector feel” of the facilities made available to them (p. 69). Creating an audience “means that we have to create in people… desire for the product [of religiosity] … and show them how to acquire it, how to become committed to it” by using the most current techniques, fronted by preachers who are “akin to a sympathetic friend, not a stern judge” (p. 86–87). The New Preachers, including Mustafa Hosny, Amr Khaled, and others, lead their audiences toward appropriate Muslim values and life choices by providing living examples and personal anecdotes of their own spiritual struggles and transformations rather than trying to frighten the audience with the specter of hellfire. “The ordinary person,” says Hosny, contrasting this new celebrity persona with the staid experts of al-Azhar, and implicitly with their mutual Salafi rivals, “can’t relate to the turban and the gown” (p. 97).

As competing mediators of Islamic values, the New Preachers, Salafis, and state religious establishment vie for funding, political influence (or a reputation of independence from politics), audience, and theological and practical legitimacy. Part of this competition involves accusing their rivals of complicity in spreading “extremism,” “secularism,” or “Westernization.” A repeated theme in Moll’s observations, for example, is the tendency of Salafis to accuse both al-Azhar’s scholars and the New Preachers of accommodating lax adherence to proper standards of ritual and comportment, thereby furthering secularization in the name of religion. The latter accuse the Salafis, in turn, “of contributing to secularization by making Islam repellent to ordinary people” and by making “secular lifestyles more attractive by promoting a piety that was unrealistic and unnatural” (p. 129, 138). Moderation, in the New Preacher’s theology, is both the central feature of an Islamic tradition that respectfully accepts multiple interpretive approaches and a proof and guarantee of its universalism. “Extremism” occupies the ends of a spectrum with secular denials of God at one end and Salafi insistence on ritual exactness at the expense of true ethics on the other. For their part, secularists perceive the New Preachers as barely distinguishable from the Muslim Brotherhood, allegedly furthering obscurantism in the guise of modernity and moderation. Such accusations might strike contemporary readers quite powerfully, underscoring the difficulty of maintaining what we think of as a “liberal consensus” in which different social factions seek to accommodate themselves to procedural democratic norms. The New Preachers and their followers, ostensibly seeking middle ground, are positioned by their ideological rivals on both sides as being identical with the enemy Other, recalling the dilemma outlined by Roxanne Euben in her classic book Enemy in the Mirror.

The Revolution Within is an ethnography of contention, particularly the multiple axes of dispute and disagreement between different strands of the Islamic revival. Moll’s thoughtful analysis of the increasingly complicated “social life of theology” (p. 19) in Egypt leads in several directions, exploring the affordances of specific media, debates over acceptable kinds of change and accommodation more generally, and the complicated logics of weighing the ends and means of piety. Her ethnographic material helps foster a deeper engagement with wider competitions over the meaning of being Muslim in a world of constantly elaborating difference, providing readers with something like the dazzlement that her Egyptian television producers extol.