Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Author Samuli Schielke sees the January 25 uprising as a part of the "pressing and often frustrating expectation of something more and better to come." In his upcoming book Egypt in the Future Tense, Schielke asks how ordinary Egyptians confront the great promises and grand schemes of religious commitment, middle class respectability, romantic love, and political ideologies in their daily lives, and how they make sense of the existential anxieties and stalled expectations that inevitably accompany such hopes. Drawing on many years of study in Egypt and the life stories of rural, lower-middle-class men before and after the revolution, Schielke views recent events in ways that are both historically deep and personal. Schielke challenges prevailing views of Muslim piety, showing that religious lives are part of a much more complex lived experience.
Egypt in the Future Tense will be available this March. Learn more about the book in this excerpt: