Education, Social Mobility and Religious Movements: The Islamic Revival in Egypt

Abstract

Muslim societies have been reshaped in recent decades by an Islamic revival. We document a contemporaneous decline in social mobility among educated youth in Egypt, the epicentre of the movement in the Arab world. We then develop a model to show how an unexpected decline in social mobility combined with inequality can produce a religious revival led by the educated middle class. The principal idea is that religion helps individuals to cope with unfulfilled aspirations by adjusting their expectations-based reference point. By raising aspirations, economic development may make societies more prone to religious revivals. 2 Clemens et al. (2009) and Campante and Chor (2012), among others, have also documented that over recent decades increases in education have not been matched with increases in economic opportunities in Egypt and the Middle East more generally. Campante and Chor (2012) link political protest during the Arab spring to these factors. To our knowledge, none of these studies examined changes in social mobility among the educated. We also focus on a different time period, during which major changes took place both in the Egyptian labour market and in society at large.

The Institutional Foundations of Religious Politics: Evidence from Indonesia

“…8 Our paper also adds to a wider social science literature on the rise of Islamism (Berman, 2011;Blaydes and Linzer, 2011;Fourati et al, 2019;Pepinsky et al, 2012). Binzel and Carvalho (2017) argue that the Islamic revival in Egypt-and perhaps elsewhere in the Muslim world-is rooted in unmet aspirations that come with greater education but limited scope for upward mobility. Increased religiosity in this case helps individuals to cope and recalibrate expectations.…”

Excluded generation: the growing challenges of labor market insertion for Egyptian youth

“…In this increasingly pressurized environment family resources and connections play a decisive role in whether the aspirations of youth are achieved, evidenced here and elsewhere as a decline in social mobility (Binzel, 2011). This trend contributed to the sense of social injustice articulated in the Arab Spring and the involvement of middle class youth in protest movements (Joffé, 2011;Kandil, 2012;Kuhn, 2012;Pace & Cavatorta, 2012;Binzel & Carvalho, 2013;Malik & Awadallah, 2013;Richards, Waterbury, Cammett, & Diwan, 2014).…”

Educational mobility in developing countries

“…In Latin America, the mediating role of education appears to be strong, perhaps even stronger than in the advanced industrial world (Torche 2014). In contrast, Assaad and Saleh (2018) and Binzel and Carvalho (2017) show that growing educational mobility across cohorts in Jordan and Egypt respectively has not resulted in more income mobility, suggesting that the educational pathway plays a limited role in economic mobility, and offering a word of caution about the strategy of focusing on equalizing educational attainment to improve socio-economic mobility.…”