Lecture
Taking Theology Seriously: Islamic Media and the Revolutionary Struggle for a “New Egypt”
- Yasmin Moll
- Date
- Monday 15 December 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Academy Building
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden - Room
- 2
The 2011 revolution unleashed passionate contestation within the Islamic Revival over how to create a “New Egypt” that reflected incommensurable theologies of difference. Based on fieldwork in Cairo at the world's first self-declared Islamic television channel with the “New Preachers” – so named because of their novel styles of preaching – this talk explores how innovations in Islamic media production became entangled within the revolutionary promise of co-existence across difference. Such a methodological attunement to the social life of theology challenges conventional accounts of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath as a struggle between secular and religious forces. More broadly, refocusing the anthropological study of Islam from its preoccupation with analytically making sense of Muslim difference to how Muslims themselves theologically make sense of their differences invites more careful attention to questions of how and why and for whom a practice becomes virtuous, a public ethical, a way of life Godly. The talk concludes by reflecting on how anthropology's ethic of taking difference seriously, theological and otherwise, is shaped by its own secular epistemology.
About the speaker
Yasmin Moll is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on Islam, media, and politics as well as ethics in relation to questions of heritage activism and religious change in the Middle East. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among others. Her book, The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt, was published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. An award-winning filmmaker, Moll's new documentary Searching for Nubia will be released in early 2026.
Registration
Interested in joining? Please sign up via the registration form (available via the button below).
Register for this event