Egypt in the Future Tense: Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence before and after 2011 (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa) by Samuli Schielke

Author:Samuli Schielke [Schielke, Samuli]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780253015891
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2015-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Solving a Crisis

When I first met Mustafa in early 2006 in his native village of Nazlat al-Rayyis, he had just gone through very difficult times. His father, with whom he had been very close, had died three years earlier. This left him seriously disoriented, and to make things worse, he had become the senior male in his family, loaded with responsibilities but lacking the experience to handle them. In this situation he fell into what he describes as bad company and started smoking hashish on a regular basis and getting into various kinds of trouble. His habit of smoking hashish ended up costing him a sizable part of the inheritance his father had left him, until his mother and uncle intervened. The unhappy end of his love relationship (see chapter 4) also took place in this period. After a while he gave up his consumption of hashish and started to look for a principle to tell right from wrong, a principle that he found in Salafi piety. He started praying in a Salafi mosque, grew his beard long, shortened the hems of his trousers in the Salafi manner, and tried to stop smoking cigarettes (Salafis hold that smoking is haram). He demanded that his mother (who until then had dressed in the colorful combination of long gown and headscarf common in the countryside) to wear the full face veil called niqab, which she refused, and they settled for a single-color khimar, which is plainer than standard dress but does not cover the face. He removed all pictures from his home, except for the photograph of his late father, which he did not have the heart to remove. Months of intensive piety and worship followed, a period that he describes as a very happy time in his life. But bit by bit, practical problems came up: he was compelled to shave his beard when he was about to be conscripted, he felt the drive of piety slowing down, he started smoking cigarettes again, and he became less dedicated in his observance of ritual obligations. Still holding to Salafi ideas of piety but not finding the energy to enact them, he began to suffer from feelings of guilt and failure.

This was the state he was in when I met him again in the autumn of 2006. In a matter of few months he had gained the reputation of being an enthusiastic Salafi proselytizer, and although he no longer sported a Salafi beard and dress code, young men continued to ask him for Salafi literature, which he got from his sheikh. And yet he was deeply shattered. He was troubled by his quite inexplicable inability to maintain the rigorous ritual schedule of Salafism, which in addition to the obligatory five daily prayers, contains an extensive program of voluntary prayers and lectures. He felt that he had found the correct, true Islam but had failed to live it out. He had been happy, but now he was troubled.

His friend Tawfiq, who had not gone

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.