Debating Mulids Having Fun. Serious Prodies, Bittersweet Fun and Egyptian Saints-Day Festivals

Nonetheless, ‘anti‐fun‐damentalism’ does not only operate through violent coercion. The Islamic revivalist and nationalist secularist movements in Egypt, as everywhere in the Middle East have been paralleled by corporate enterprises aimed at proposing a ‘clean’ and ‘pious’ style of entertainment, channelled primarily but not exclusively through state‐run or satellite television. This is the most distant type of entertainment from the objectifications of fun I have taken into account so far. Even though television, mulid fun, sufi culture and revivalist piety can all be a relevant part of people’s life and imagination, they nonetheless reflect radically distant discourses about piety and sociality.
At its roots, revivalist entertainment asserts that ‘everything must be part of a moral improvement. If not the habituation of a moral personhood, the purpose of these entertainment productions is that they propose fun in accordance with revivalist Islamic precepts as an alternative to global secularist and hedonistic tendencies. Comparing them with the various ways young Upper Egyptians try and ‘kill time’, Schielke (2008a) shows how these theorisers of boredom despise entertainment with moral purpose. Instead they strive for amoral fun practices inscribed ‘within morally acceptable limits’. The existential feeling, theorised under the rubric of boredom, does not appear in line with revivalist representations of fun.