Abstract
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 unfulfilled aspirations for a better and more exciting life. Boredom and attempts to escape it form an experience and a discourse of life that stand in a strong albeit often unstated contrast to the ideology of Islamic revival. With the stated purposeless and pointlessness of the discourse on boredom, not only the forms of entertainment, but also the very position of entertainment towards the grand projects of religious revival and nationalist progress appears in a different light that fits in neither the secularist tradition of arts and entertainment nor their revivalist contestation and reinterpretation.
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Notes
For a historical parallel from 19th century Great Britain, see Lecky (1903: vol. 1, p. 319).
In early 2008, Tawfiq got a job in Bahrain where he currently works—his long-term plan, however, remains to migrate to Europe or the US.
This is not simply because they would be afraid to be caught. The shame young men feel about doing certain things in view of older men is related to a notion that the young should abstain from acts that would be disrespectful towards older men, such as smoking cigarettes in front of one’s father. Smoking in view of one’s father or other older male relatives would mean disrespecting them by treating them as one’s equal.
Colloquial expression for a Salafi. Depending on the context, calling a Salafi a ‘sheikh’ can be both respectful and ironical.
Another important form of meaningful action could be politics. Almost everybody I know has a more or less well-defined political point of view, and some, albeit few, are or have been active politically, the most likely candidates being the Muslim Brotherhood and socialist groups. However, during my fieldwork I have abstained from conducting research about people’s political activism because it could have drawn unwelcome attention to them by State Security.
Narrating a personal history of deviance and disorientation appears to be common to male members of Islamic piety movements (notably Salafiya and Tablighi Jama’at) around the world. For example, Sindre Bangstad (Personal communication, 9 January 2008) has noted the presence of men with a history of addiction, imprisonment and personal crises in Tablighi Jama’at in South Africa.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the people of Nazlat al-Rayyis who do not appear with their original names in this article, as well as Daniela Swarowsky, Jennifer Peterson, Kevin Eisenstadt, Ayman Muhammad Ahmad, Sindre Bangstad, Karin Nieuwkerk, the anonymous reviewers of CI and the participants of the panel ‘Creating an Islamic Cultural Space: Contested Notions of Art, Leisure and Entertainment’ at the MESA annual meeting in Montreal, 18 November 2007 where an earlier version of this article was presented. The research for this article was made possible by the generous support of the collaborative research centre ‘Cultural and Linguistic Contacts’ and the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Mainz.
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Schielke, S. Boredom and despair in rural Egypt. Cont Islam 2, 251–270 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-008-0065-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-008-0065-8