Are We All Amr Khaled? Islam and the Facebook Generation of Egypt

Anthropological inquiries into mass media and Islam, particularly with regard to da‘wa practices, have demonstrated the significance of “staging” strategies of public religious personalities (Salvatore 1998), as well as the diverse ways in which mass-mediated Islam facilitates the sustenance of lay audiences’ moral disposition (Hirschkind 2006). I build on these studies and shed light on the youthful aspirations and challenges of educated Egyptian Muslims engaging in da‘wa activities. I illustrate how Amr Khaled’s televised preaching facilitates the production of other Islamic religious commodities such as the exclusive da‘wa workshops in Cairo organized by Fadel Soliman (b. 1966) of Bridges Foundation. Taking into account the nexus of new media, the education industry, and the global political economy, I thus analyze how a strategic segment of young Egyptians were called upon to communicate with non-Muslims of the West about ways of being Muslim in the post-9/11 era.