Sebastian Elsässer is a lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern at Christian-Albrechts-Universität and the director of the research unit “Generations of Islamic Activism” (2023-2026). He received his M.A. degree in Islamic Studies, Political Science and Political Economy from Freie Universität Berlin in 2005 and his Ph.D. degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. He was a guest doctoral researcher at the CEDEJ, a French research center for the social sciences, in Cairo between 2008 and 2011, and has been teaching Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the universities of Kiel, Hamburg and Freiburg since 2011. His research interests include the ideological and sociocultural history of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Arab East, the family law and religious governance of Coptic Christians and other Middle Eastern minorities, as well as atheism and other forms of non-religion in the Arab world.

Research project

The DFG-funded research project “Generations of Islamic Activism” (2023-2026) investigates sociocultural and ideational change in the social milieu of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood from the 1970s until the present day. Since its establishment and rapid expansion between the 1930s and 1950s, the Muslim Brotherhood has been one of the most important religious and political movements in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where our field world is situated.
Although the Muslim Brotherhood has been researched intensively, research questions have been guided predominantly by the paradigms of political science and democracy theory. Our research project proposes a change of perspective inspired by the sociology of religion and cultural studies, examining the Muslim Brotherhood not primarily as a political movement, but as a sociocultural milieu in the process of generational change. 
Using an interview-based oral-history approach and a diverse research team, the project sets out into new methodological and practical directions: The three project staff members, including one woman, are conducting up to 60 in-depth interviews with current and former members (male and female) of the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and Europe. The research sample is to include members of different generations and all respondents will be asked about generational change in their own family and/or personal circle.
In this way, the project will be able to trace underlying processes of social change, for example in connection with increasing levels of education, migration patterns or the demographic transition, and will link them to vectors of cultural shift within the Muslim Brotherhood and in wider society. The resulting analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood as a religious-cultural milieu in transition situates ‘political Islam’ in its social context. Its aspiration is to open up multiple interdisciplinary perspectives for comparison with sociological and anthropological research on other socio-religious milieus in the region and worldwide.