"Practicing Islam in Egypt" and "Salafism": Podcast with Aaron Rock-Singer

Aaron Rock-Singer is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He has published two fantastic books, “Practicing Islam: Egypt’s Islamic Revival” and “In the Shade of the Sunna: Salafi Piety in the Twentieth-Century Middle East”.

Aaron is truly brilliant, connecting both the macro and the micro. By examining structural shifts in education and urbanisation as well as Islamic print media, he shows how modernisation triggered counter-mobilisation.

We discuss:

• How was religosity affected by colonialism?

• Why were post-independence leaders relatively secular?

• What caused Egypt’s Islamic revival?

• Why was the Islamic revival especially popular on university campuses?

• Why was there a global religious revival in the 1970s?

• Why was there so much focus on women?

• Would Egypt’s Islamic revival have occurred in the absence of Saudi funding and migration?

You can listen on Spotify and iTunes, or watch YouTube.

An automated transcript is provided below.

Apologies for any errors, blame AI. ;-)