Samuli Schielke

• Researcher at Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren Berlin

A peculiar aura of uncertainty and difficulty of knowing surrounds class, and especially its transmission from one generation to another. In this programmatic text we trace silences around the reproduction of class through our ethnographic research in Kenya, Egypt, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, and Palestine, and among migrant diasporas that link those countri...

How does existential mobility—the sense of being able to move forward in one’s life—relate to the experience of borders and limitations? Tawfiq is an Egyptian man who once longed to migrate to Europe or the United States, but has since then worked on and off as migrant worker in the Arab Gulf states. He has reflected on this question by using the m...

This afterword takes a closer look at relationships of power involved in destiny, taking inspiration from questions and answers offered in this special section on anthropologies of destiny. Destiny offers a theory of human action according to which humans can have power over their condition only in accordance and alliance with very powerful or omni...

How did bloodshed emerge as a promising solution to the tensions and troubles of the revolutionary period? And how did different people who were on a particular side of the events from 2011 to 2013 react to the bewildering violence of the victorious in summer and autumn 2013? With these questions, I want to contribute to a conversation opened by en...

Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar . Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi + 184 pages, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth US$85.00 ISBN 978-0-8047-8123-7. - Volume 51 Issue 2 - Samuli Schielke

Meditation on Fadil, Nadia and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: Notes on an anthropological divide." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 59–88.

Der Aufstand vom 25. Januar 2011 in Ägypten ist wiederholt und mit Nachdruck als eine Revolution der Jugend zelebriert worden, und zwar sowohl in Ägypten als auch im Ausland. Vor allem in westlichen Medien wird die arabische Jugend schon seit Jahren als eine progressive Kraft gefeiert, die aus dem engen konservativen Rahmen der religiösen und natio...

This volume envisions social practices surrounding mosques, shrines and public spaces in urban contexts as a window on the diverse ways in which Muslims in different regional and historical settings imagine, experience, and inhabit places and spaces as »sacred«. Unlike most studies on Muslim communities, this volume focuses on cultural, material an...

The international hype around the spectacular graffiti of Muhammad Mahmoud Street in Cairo, and erroneous claims that the revolution brought graffiti to Egypt, have overshadowed the everyday presence of multiple forms of written messages. Egyptians have a long tradition of writing on the walls. They also stake claims to parts of cities for particul...

Looking at the trajectories of people of Muslim origin in Egypt who express religious doubts, I argue in this article that doubt and nonreligiosity are not necessarily a child of a Christian genealogy of the secular and definitely not alien to Muslims. Instead, we have to understand them as an intimate moral discontent with the contemporary age of...

One of the most ambiguous outcomes of globalization has been the emergence of a large class of people who subscribe to global trends in religion, consumerism, nationalism, sports and popular culture, without having access to the mobility nor the symbolic capital that are associated with cosmopolitanism. This sense of aspiration is far from ephemera...

Mulids, festivals in honor of Muslim "friends of God," have been part of Muslim religious and cultural life for close to a thousand years. While many Egyptians see mulids as an expression of joy and love for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, many others see them as opposed to Islam, an expression of a backward mentality, a piece of folklore at b...

Everyday practice of religion is complex in its nature, ambivalent and at times contradictory. The task of an anthropology of religious practice is therefore precisely to see how people navigate and make sense of that complexity, and what the significance of religious beliefs and practices in a given setting can be. Rather than putting everyday pra...

Although contemporary migration in and from Africa can be understood as a continuation of earlier forms of interregional and international migration, current processes of migration seem to have taken on a new quality. This volume argues that one of the main reasons for this is the fact that local worlds are increasingly measured against a set of po...

Rezensiertes Werk: Hanafi El Siofi, Mona: Der Westen : ein Sodom und Gomorrah? Westliche Frauen und Männer im Fokus ägyptischer Musliminnen. - Sulzbach/Taunus : Helmer, 2009. - 212 S. ISBN: 978-3-89741-281-1

So much has been written in recent years on Muslims who consciously and consistently aim to be pious, moral, and disciplined that the vast majority of Muslims who – like most of humankind – are sometimes but not always pious, at times immoral, and often undisciplined have remained in the shadow of an image of Islam as a perfectionist project of sel...

In contrast to a line of studies that inquire how Muslims try to solve the problem of living piously in a society dominated by materialist tendencies and secular rationality, in this article I turn the question around and problematize the will to live piously and the focus on self-discipline. In everyday lives of young men from the Nile Delta regio...

Boredom is a key experience in the lives of many young people in contemporary rural Egypt. With its calm, predictable rhythm of life offering little excitement and surprises, village life is intrinsically monotonic. But monotony as such does not necessarily bore people. It is turned into intense boredom and despair by the presence of strong but unf...

In this article, I explore how the festive culture of mulids, Egyptian Muslim saints-day festivals, troubles notions of habitus, public space, and religious and civic discipline that have become hegemonic in Egypt in the past century and how state actors attempt to “civilize” mulids by subjecting them to a spectacular, representative order of spati...

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus b...

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus b...

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus b...

As a world religion Islam is based on a highly abstract and absolute notion of the transcendent, which its followers establish and celebrate - in a seemingly contradictory fashion - at very specific sites: Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, and the vast and complex landscapes of mosques and Muslim saints' shrines around the world. Sacred locality has thus b...

Sufi rituals have historically been more open to women than other Islamic religious practices such as prayer in the mosques, legal scholarship, and preaching. While the past decades have seen some, albeit modest, opening of the latter fields for female participation, even leadership, in the Sufi milieu, the participation of women has been subjected...

In late 19th century, Islamic saints-day festivals (mawlids) became the subject of strong criticism. A festive tradition that until then had been central to the religious and communal life of Egypt was now increasingly criticised for being backward and un-Islamic. Mawlids, popular festivals that combine the atmosphere of a fair with the ecstatic sp...

Egyptian mawlid festivals are regularly subject to criticism which describes them as an uncivilised and un-Islamic bid‘a. In response to this, attempts to reform mawlids have emerged in the recent years. State institutions attempt to reorganise mawlids to give them a more “civilised” and “ordered” appearance, while some Sûfî orders reshape their fe...

Saints, their places, the rituals of their veneration - the heroes and martyrs they represent or to whom they are often connected with - and the beliefs in their powers have often been described as being counter-thematic to the constructive issues of modern society in our times. However, in the Middle East - and certainly this is true for many othe...