Daughters of the Revolution: Negotiating Filial Piety in Post-2011 Egypt

Abstract

Abstract Based on interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with young middle-class Muslim Egyptians, this article demonstrates how a political event such as the Egyptian revolution of 2011 can cause a shift in family relations and notions of filial piety, especially for young women. I argue that the revolution gave my female interlocutors the ability to question aspects of the social and religious structures in which they grew up, including parental authority. I analyze in-depth the cases of three women who were disappointed in their parents’ use of the religious moral mandate of obedience to and respect for parents (birr al-wālidayn) to discourage their daughters from participating in what the women believed was a just, moral cause. This moral dissonance did not push the young women to resist their familial obligations or subvert relational hierarchies, but they have negotiated the parameters of their subordination to their parents, including how to be dutiful daughters.