Beginning an ethnography about hope and ambivalence with this sense of emptiness, boredom, even despair, helps us think about boredom as a condition in the lives of people who aim for a better life, a consequence as well as a grounding of aspiration. Moments of hope can be better accounted for if we first turn our attention to their flip side—despair, frustration, endless waiting, a sense of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. These negative sentiments come partly from dissatisfaction with unkept promises of improvement and progress, but also from expectation, which gives credibility to promises of purpose and hope. Boredom must therefore be taken seriously as an experience in its own right, because it points to a complex human condition that cannot be accounted for merely by reference to ideals, aims, and higher purposes. Instead, ideals are often discredited, aims frustrated, and life can seem to have no purpose.

Although this chapter deals with the sharply felt discrepancy between what might be and what is, politics is almost entirely absent from the discussion. This absence reflects the mood of the time.¹ As I started doing fieldwork in Nazlat al-Rayyis in 2006, people had a lot to say about boredom, as they did about religion, business, work, migration, marriage, love, and the difficulty of life. Politics, however, was tricky. People would speak about Iraq, the United States, and Israel. They would complain about the government and, in a less direct way, about the president. But even those who in the 1990s had been active in political movements of various kinds had abstained from political action for some time. There was little sense that collective action would be possible or meaningful. In the capital city, oppositional voices were growing louder already, and some years later, things looked very different in the village and the cities alike. In the final chapters of the book I turn to those later, highly politicized days of revolutionary hope and anxiety, but for now I focus on a different moment, one of dull emptiness, when hope, if it existed at all, was placed either in escape or in faith.

Developmentalist nationalism, on the one hand, and the ideal of purified and virtuous religiosity, on the other hand, are both very important to young people in the village. This, however, is only part of the story. Purpose, be it nationalist or religious, is not the primary way that young men in the village conceive of the entertainment they consume and partake in. In fact, the very idea of entertainment serving a purpose other than that of having a good time turns out to be far from obvious.

In Anwar’s café in the village of Nazlat al-Rayyis, the television is always on. In the past, the café had a satellite dish of its own, but by 2007 it was connected to the “central dish” (al-dish al-markazi) network, an illegal distributor of satellite television via cable. Run by two men with a rented room and a dozen satellite receivers, the central dish network of the village was part of a nationwide wave of countless small enterprises that brought satellite television into almost every home in Egypt in the early 2000s. The TV set in the café sometimes it shows music channels with video clips of different kinds, both Islamic ones and those featuring lots of naked skin and lyrics that tell about love, desire, trust, and betrayal. More often it shows movies, sometimes Egyptian ones but often also Hollywood films. Since 2011, it sometimes shows news. Before 2011 and again after 2013, by far the most popular thing on television has been soccer (the American name for the sport that Egyptians know as kurat al-qadam, or football, or simply il-kura, the ball).² For major matches between favorite teams, the café filled up with men—women never go to cafés in the village—watching the game in an atmosphere of intense concentration. If religious video clips have been successful on satellite television in the past few years, their success is minor in comparison to how the Champions League has swept Egypt since the establishment of central dish networks. Young men often wear jerseys of European teams, and everyone with the slightest interest in soccer has his or her favorite teams in both Egypt and abroad.

Soccer is not only big on television. Amateur soccer is a central part of the daily life of boys and young men, many of whom meet to play every afternoon in the school yards after they have emptied of pupils. In the month of Ramadan, an amateur tournament is held with approximately twenty teams from Nazlat al-Rayyis and neighboring villages and hamlets. I asked young fans and amateurs in autumn 2007 about what makes soccer so attractive, and their answers show a strikingly similar tone:

Soccer and hashish offer young men in the village a very different framework of entertainment from that of nationalist melodrama (see Abu-Lughod 2005) and religious video clips. Like other forms of entertainment, such as television, cafés, music, weddings, joking, taking walks, flirting, Internet chats, and pornography, they are essentially seen as ways to escape boredom, and they are not measured by their purposefulness.

Boredom, as was often pointed out to me, comes in different kinds. Young people suffer from it more than children and adults. It is different in the city and in the countryside, as well as in Egypt and in Europe. It comes in temporary and perpetual varieties. It is worst in the winter, when the nights are long, rain turns the alleys into mud, and power cut-offs are common. But even in the summer, even during holidays, even when one is having fun, boredom persists, as was argued by Faruq and Tawfiq, both in their early twenties at the time of this discussion and hanging out in the same clique (shilla) of friends:

The young men do not attribute boredom to saturation by media, consumption, and a search for spectacular experiences, as some analyses of boredom in Euro-American societies do (e.g., Klapp 1986: 117–129). Their boredom (which they explicitly articulate as a rural one) is primarily f...