Men in Time

Productivity

In her recent book, Navigating Austerity (2015), an ethnographic study of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, and day laborers along the Hooghly River, India, anthropologist Laura Bear spotlights an intriguing notion of masculinity. Throughout her monograph, Bear identifies links between “popular ethics of productivity” and what it means to be a proper hardworking man. In an era marked by governmental defunding, privatization, and failing infrastructures, writes Bear, men on all levels of the social hierarchy have come to consider the ability to (re-)produce material and social value as an essential male virtue. In order to be a good man—or, perhaps more accurately, good at being a man—Bear’s (2015) interlocutors need to master specific “conducts of productivity” and classed ideals of “workmanship” (p. 18). Often, such productive conduct manifests in practices of “speculation,” that is, “forms of social action that seek to anticipate the future and creatively bring it into being” (Bear 2015, 19). To be flexible enough to seize fluid opportunities and shape desirable futures is imperative in the social setting that Bear considers. In twenty-first-century India, a man has to be highly adaptable and always ready to act and react. Only then can he “regenerate” public or private goods from the “ruins of austerity capitalism” (Bear 2015, 53).

Bear’s linking of masculinity with productivity does not emerge in a vacuum. For a few decades now, anthropologists have analyzed entanglements between ethics, productivity, and labor in various sociocultural settings. United by a concern for how what counts as “value” is generated, this literature has expanded the notion of production so to also encompass the fashioning of persons, kin, social relations, and private and public institutional arrangements (e.g., Graeber 2001, 2005, 2013; Guyer 1993; Yanagisako 2002; Bear et al. 2015). Notions of manhood are inexorably linked to such productive activities. As students of masculinities around the world tell us, an ability to produce and reproduce (for) one’s family is typically at the core of what it takes to be a proper man (e.g., Cornwall, Karioris, and Lindisfarne 2016; Gaibazzi 2013; Inhorn 2012; Osella and Osella 2006).

The added value of Bear’s work, then, lies not primarily in her theorization and conceptualization of masculinity, but in minute ethnographic illustrations of how ethical codes of productivity and value translate into lived experience: how her male interlocutors attempt to combine but end up compromising, personal rewards and public goods; how men struggle to make their work and efforts really work under uncertain, often unfavorable, and constantly shifting material and institutional conditions; and how futures recurrently emerge as a key variable to account for, as something men desire, envision and actively work on. To put it briefly, Bear’s depictions of laboring men and masculinity are dynamic yet constrained, forward-looking yet historically contextual. As such, she provides an optic that avoids stereotyping men either as trapped in static patriarchal structures or as living through seemingly perpetual “crisis,” two problematic tendencies in previous studies on men and masculinities in the Middle East (e.g., De Sondy 2014; Horrocks 1994; see also Amar 2011a). What is more, Bear’s stressing of speculative “future making” resonates particularly well with the experiences of men in Cairo in the tumultuous years that followed January 2011. After all, this was not only a period when well-entrenched masculine ideals of productivity, nurturing care, and acting for the public good were intensified and accentuated (Ghannam 2013; Naguib 2015). It was also a moment in time when the Egyptians, more than ever before, found themselves negotiating multiple, sometimes conflicting, “grand schemes” and living “in the future tense” (Schielke 2015).

As a place where state bureaucrats, sports coaches, young players, and local entrepreneurs converge, Cairo’s marakiz al-shabab are full of men striving to productively generate futures and values. Here, professionals work to support their families, investors intervene with the aim to combine monetary rewards with social status, and boys work out to shape skills and bodies, so as to possibly fulfill lofty dreams in the glitzy football industry. Most importantly, though, the marakiz is literally dedicated to mold al-shabab (the youth). As I came to realize during my fieldwork, this mission gives the centers a political weight by default. The country’s young population constitutes a never-ceasing well of inspiration for debate, debates that recurrently spill over into discussions about the national future. Especially, the male subsection of al-shabab ² —a social category that in contemporary Egypt comprises unmarried boys and men from their late teens well into their thirties—has in recent decades emerged as a contested discursive-political battleground: from the Mubarak era, when the youth generally were portrayed as troublesome thugs or lazy good-for-nothings, over the revolutionary years, when young revolutionaries suddenly became widely valorized, into the post-coup period, when male and youthful energies ambivalently have been framed as both a promise and a problem (cf. Amar 2011b; Armbrust 2005; Sika 2012; Swedenburg 2007). This sense of urgency was clearly discernible among state employees and coaches working on fostering young boys, as football players, men, and national subjects. All men I met considered sports an unmatched avenue for steering the youth away from all sorts of troubles, be it violence, drugs, obesity, and the nebulous realm called “politics” (cf. Swedenburg 2007; Menoret 2014, 182–85). In their daily work, therefore, my interlocutors did not only generate material, social, and interpersonal value for themselves and for their families. They also saw themselves act, more or less productively, on what by definition constituted the nation’s future. This mission was at the core of their profession and, if we follow Laura Bear, of their constituting themselves as proper men.

***

Let us take a closer look at what such a conduct of productivity could look like. In Fall 2012 and Winter 2013, I spent several evenings each week at the youth center in the working-class neighborhood of Bab el-Hut ³ in central Cairo, watching young boys playing football and talking to employees, coaches, players, and parents. Two men who I learned to know well were the center’s manager, Mahmoud, and his deputy, Hossam. Mahmoud and Hossam were state employees (muwazzafin), employed by the Ministry of Youth. ⁴ Now in their late forties, they had both worked in Bab el-Hut for more than a decade. Although none of them lived in the area—well-educated men like them rarely do—they had acquired a certain social position and reputation in the neighborhood. Like many Egyptian bureaucrats, however, their relatively meager governmental salaries did not suffice to sustain the middle-class lifestyle that their social capital reflected and that their families aspired to. In order to balance their budgets, both Hossam and Mahmoud thus had second part-time jobs in the more lucrative private sector.

In informal chats and more formal interviews, Mahmoud and Hossam told me about the aims and ambitions of the center in Bab el-Hut. Frequently, they talked about the center’s dual mission to provide a space for Egyptian kids to play sport and to foster them as moral and responsible citizens. To achieve this, the center did not only organize courses in a variety of sports (football, weight lifting, table tennis, karate, and pool) but also music classes (violin and song), cultural activities, religious education and “citizenship courses” (durus muwatna). This multifaceted repertoire of activities constituted a sense of pride. As Mahmoud liked to remind me, no other markiz of comparable size in central Cairo ran a greater variety of courses. “It is important to have many different things, for different children,” he told me once.

Not all children like football. How can we reach out to them if everything happens at the football pitch? And by the way, sports alone aren’t enough to shape a complete human being (insan kamil). You need culture (thaqafa) as well. And religion (din), and morals (akhla’).

***

One of the coaches that Hossam had previously paid to run the football academy at his center was Omar, a man in his early thirties who I learned to know through a common friend in the area. Omar was born in Bab el-Hut in the mid-1970s as the youngest of four siblings. His now deceased father had been a state employee at the Ministry of Supplies; his mother was a housewife. From early on, Omar’s life had orbited around football. As often as he could, he played with friends in the streets or at the youth center, and when his talent was spotted by a talent scout at a school tournament, he ended up in the youth team of the small Cairo club, Nadi el-Nil. As one of the very best in his cohort, Omar was immediately included in a team of one-year older boys; before long he was attracting attention from Cairo’s most famous club, al-Ahly.

Between the age of ten and eighteen, Omar played regularly for al-Ahly’s academy teams. He was considered a promising talent, at least as good as his teammate, the future national team midfielder, Muhammad Barakat. However, due to a combination of untimely injuries and military service, Omar’s career had stalled in his late teens. Instead, he went on to study commerce at Cairo University, before spending ten years working in Egypt’s booming tourism industry. Just after turning thirty, though, he received a phone call from an old friend from al-Ahly asking him whether he wanted to coach one of the club’s youth teams. Although this meant a significantly lowered salary, Omar accepted the offer right away. As he told me, justifying his choice: “Football is the passion of my life,” “I have always loved children,” and “This was a chance to make a difference, to pay back and teach kids; football is something I really know.” After three years as a youth coach in al-Ahly’s academy, he signed a deal with Mahmoud to run the academy at the youth center in Bab el-Hut. For reasons that I will return to below, his spell at the markiz ended in disappointment. He left bitterly in early 2009, and he has not entered the compound ever since. At the time I came to know him, in late 2012, Omar was finishing his third year as a full-time coach at the private club Wadi Degla’s “Arsenal Academy” in the posh 6th of October suburb. ⁶ Since getting married and having children a few years ago, he was living in the informal suburb Bulaq al-Dakrur in Giza. Yet he still spent most of his spare time in Bab el-Hut, the neighborhood where he had grown up, where he had all of his friends, and which he still called home.

Like Mahmoud and Hossam, Omar had noted that his occupation had become more appreciated in recent years. “Finally,” he told me, people in Egypt had begun to understand the value of the work that he and his colleagues were carrying out day in and day out. As he once expressed it, “It’s not just about sports. We’re working with the future every day. What could be more important? It’s a big responsibility.” Another time, immediately after a session with the kids he trained at the Wadi Degla compound, his enthusiasm was tangible: “This is a great job: playing football with young boys and seeing how they get better. Sure it is hard work, but I really enjoy it. After so many years, it still makes me happy (yifarrahni).”

But the happiness he felt there and then, with the children at the training pitch, would only last so long. As anthropologist Samuli Schielke (2015) has noted, also in reference to contemporary Egypt, “capitalism offers perhaps the most powerful social utopia of our time” (p. 124). As far as Omar’s dreams and aspirations were concerned, this was no doubt the case. Having spent the last three years working among the posh villas and—by Cairo standards—clean air in the 6th of October suburb, he nurtured a dream to take his own children out of the congested city center into the middle-class life that the desert developments afforded. At the time I came to know him, however, this dream looked more than distant. Despite working full time with boys from the moneyed upper-middle classes six days a week, Omar’s salary did not exceed 1,500 EGP ($231) per month. Given that he paid more than 300 EGP ($46) in monthly rent, 150 EGP ($23) for transportation, and several hundred pounds in school fees for his two sons, the space for savings was minimal. Instead, like so many other Egyptian men, Omar had to rely on small additional sources of income to make ends meet. In the last five years, he had sometimes driven a friend’s taxi on weekends. Recently, he had begun selling pirate copies of al-Ahly track suits that another friend was producing in a small workshop in Cairo’s outskirts. Regardless of when and where I saw him, he always carried around a large bag with pants and jackets, constantly ready to do business. “It is tough,” he explained:

Everything has become more expensive after the revolution, but salaries are still the same. No one has money. Of course, buying new sports gear is nobody’s priority now. But it’s the same for everyone. One has to try to get some extra [money] wherever one can, but it’s never really enough.

Corruption

When Egyptians talk about the many problems that mark the current era—within Egyptian football, in their personal lives, or in society in general—the topic of corruption (fisad) almost always comes up. While nobody considers himself part of the problem, people will readily label institutions, authorities, people in power, or professional and social competitors as “corrupt” (fasid). Depending on one’s politics, profession, and social position, the others accused of corruption vary. Yet almost everyone agrees that corruption comprises a deep and extremely serious problem in Egypt, which somehow needs to be tackled.

At the markiz in Bab el-Hut, these discussions were commonplace. In 2012 and 2013, Egypt’s youth centers experienced a period of uncertainty and multiple attacks from all sorts of directions. With the national government facing an acute financial crisis, funding to nonprioritized activities within the Ministry of Youth was cut. As a result, Mahmoud and Hossam found it increasingly difficult to keep the activities at the center running. However, as they often complained, residents in the neighborhood did not properly grasp the real reasons behind the crisis. Instead of holding the “corrupt” (fasda) and “failing” (fashla) Mursi government responsible, people put the blame on bureaucrats, such as them, who did their best to keep the place afloat. It is here important to bear in mind that the Egyptian Revolution to a great extent was a revolution against the perceived ills of the state. For many Egyptians, low-level governmental institutions, like marakiz al-shabab, epitomized the corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency that the people had rose up to reform. Consequently, Mahmoud and Hossam’s problem was not only that they lacked funding, that parents told their children to stay home at night when clashes raged on nearby Tahrir Square, or that the unrest made it difficult for employees to get to work. Many residents in Bab el-Hut turned against the state employees, accusing them of being filul (remnants of the old regime), or more commonly, fasidin (corrupt). For Mahmoud, this was deeply unfair. Once he told me:

I suppose they think we take money and put it into our own pockets: that we use our positions to enrich ourselves. But look at my salary; I have to work extra to support my family. I’m sure we can do things better and more efficiently; everyone can; of course there is corruption in Egypt. But the corruption exists up there (al-fisad huwa mawgud fu’), among politicians, people with real power. No one can say I’m doing this for money. I tell you what: people don’t really know what they mean when they speak about corruption (al-sha’b mish ‘arif al-fisad da eih bezzabt).

And yet, regardless of the concept’s catchall properties, within the context of Egyptian youth football, discussions about fisad habitually harkened back on a more limited set of tropes. To pinpoint this articulation, it is useful to consider in some detail how Omar, the youth coach, spoke about development and scouting of Egyptian football talents in the past as well as in the present. Whenever I met Omar, our discussions tended to gravitate toward how corruption hindered the country’s best talents from “making it.” One cold Tuesday evening, as we drank a cup of sweet tea in the empty Wadi Degla coffee shop after one of Omar’s training session, he told me:

Remember I told you about how different everything was in Bab el-Hut in my childhood in the 1980s? We were all poor, but still there was a real chance for everyone, just look at me. There were spaces to play football everywhere: in the streets, on parking lots and at al-markiz. Sure, the pitches were all balat (stone tiles) and the balls were bad, but there were kashifin (talent scouts) in every neighborhood, so if someone was really good, a club would pick him up. That’s what happened to me, remember? In the end, the boys who had talents and passion to train made it. Everyone had a chance.

Cleanliness

It is important to stress that Egypt’s revolutionary period was not merely an historical juncture when the country’s endemic corruption was endlessly discussed and problematized. The years that followed the uprisings were likewise a point in time when institutions, activists, politicians, and individuals articulated initiatives for how to tackle the problem. To cleanse the clogged system, reintroduce a lost meritocracy, and somehow allow men to be productive, develop, and flourish were at the heart of the revolutionary project. This tendency was also very much visible at the markiz in Bab el-Hut. Mahmoud and Hossam might not have admitted that their institution had had a problem with corruption, but they were acknowledging that the center had to adapt to a new reality in the post-2011 nation. At the very least, the pressured state employees realized that they needed to revamp their image so to somewhat preempt the accusations that the general public directed at them.

As part of this rethinking, the markiz saw a couple of novelties being introduced in late 2012 and early 2013. As state funding was drying up, the center came to host two externally funded football tournaments. The first of these, Copa Coca-Cola, was a nationwide five-a-side tournament for fifteen-year old boys played for the first time at Egypt’s marakiz al-shabab between December 2012 and March 2013. ⁸ The competition in Cairo began with qualification matches at each markiz, where the winning team qualified to the city final. After subsequent regional and national finals, the winner would represent Egypt in a global tournament in London the following summer. The cup was organized in cooperation between Coca-Cola and the Ministry of Youth. Whereas the ministry provided spaces to play—the pitches at the country’s marakiz al-shabab—Coca-Cola covered all other organizational costs: referees, balls, match shirts, and, most spectacularly, an enormous advertisement campaign.

For anyone following Egyptian sports media or just moving around Cairo in October and November 2012, Copa Coca-Cola must have come across as a very prominent football tournament. Commercials for the tournament, promising to “take the Egyptian youth all the way to London,” were run daily on television, and huge billboards were placed along motorways all over the capital. On the morning of the qualifications in Bab el-Hut, the promotion company Field Action—contracted by Coca-Cola to organize and run the event—spent hours dressing the youth center in Coca-Cola’s red and white colors, and the soft drink company’s FIFA World Cup 2010 hymn, “Wavin’ Flag,” was playing on repeat from oversized loudspeakers. ⁹ For me, it all seemed like a giant marketing campaign for Coca-Cola, parachuted onto the governmental infrastructure that the marakiz provided. At the same time, the tournament was run faultlessly. The kids I spoke to seemed delighted that something out of the ordinary was happening at the center, and they ensured me that they were having a great time.

A good month later, in February 2013, I visited the tournament’s Cairo finals at another youth center in Nasser City, Eastern Cairo. At this later stage of the cup, the saturation of brands and commercials had been intensified yet another notch. In addition to the already extensive setup that I had witnessed in Bab el-Hut, the kids playing were now dressed up in brand new match shirts, shorts, and socks with Coca-Cola’s logotypes, and every player was given a can of Coke after each match. Furthermore, the entire event was recorded by a professional film team that did not hesitate to stop the matches at any time, so that they could enter the pitch and get the best close-ups or angles of the action. Frequently, the crew also instructed groups of youth who had gathered to watch the matches either to cheer loudly or to behave more properly, all to make the event look suitable in what was to become a promotion video.

When the day’s activities were over, I got the chance to talk to the representative for Coca-Cola in Egypt, who was sent out to supervise the event. Clearly, the company’s envoy was satisfied with how it had all developed:

I think we’re doing a great job. Everything is really clean and professional. It’s a nice project for everyone. For us [at Coca-Cola], it’s great promotion, but it’s especially nice for the kids. You have to remember that most of them come from very poor areas. They’ve only played football in the streets and on marakiz al-shabab before. To play in real shirts with brand names and to be filmed by a professional team is a great chance. You can see that they love it. It’s premium.

***

If Mahmoud was mildly hesitant to the intentions behind Copa Coca-Cola, this was nothing in comparison with his colleague Hossam’s opinion of the second new tournament hosted at the center that winter. One day in January 2013, I noted a small sign on the wall outside the markiz, announcing that the Muslim Brotherhood’s political branch, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), would organize a Festival of Youth and Sports (mahragan shabab wi riyada) there the flowing week. As I read on the sign, the festival was a Cairo-wide football tournament for adult male teams, comprising qualification rounds on each markiz, followed by a district final and, eventually, a big all-Cairo final.

At this point in time, the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated President Muhammad Mursi’s government was in rapid decline. After a brief period of calm following the presidential elections in Summer 2012, a bitter and in part violent rift had opened up between secularists and Islamists; less than six months later, in Summer 2013, these tensions would escalate in massive anti-Mursi demonstrations, a military coup led by Field Marshal Abdel Fatah el-Sisi and a bloody clampdown against the Brotherhood. In the current climate, Hossam and Mahmoud—both stern secularists—were unwilling to even speak about the upcoming event. “We do not know much about that thing,” Hossam told me:

Some ikhwani [Muslim Brotherhood member] came by one day and booked the football pitch for five consecutive nights. You cannot be sure what they really want. Why would they pay for such a thing? But in the end of the day, they rule the country now. If they want to do something here and pay for it, fine for us. It is good that things are happening and that they try. But I’m not sure how many people will show up. It’s difficult to know. In any case, I don’t care what they do.

Mismatch

These vignettes from two externally organized football tournaments at a youth center in Cairo suggest that the Egyptian revolution was not merely manifest in demonstrations or at the ballot box. While both cups are possibly best understood as elaborate marketing events, it is also unquestionable that they stepped in to fill a function that employees at the markiz could not any longer carry out due to lack of money, personnel, will, or energy. The tournaments gave the center the opportunity to draw on financial and cultural capital of the powers that be in Egypt at the time. Reaching out to external actors within the private sector and country’s ruling political party, it allowed Mahmoud and Hossam, however reluctantly, to continue fulfilling their zeal and mission among Bab el-Hut’s youth. Moreover, while it is clear that men from Coca-Cola, FJP and the youth center itself sought to extract different types of value from the tournaments, my material also points to a shared ethics of masculine productivity tied to an idealization of transparency and cleanliness. No matter whom I talked to, the future envisioned and desired was one where the endemic troubles of corruption would be overcome. The tournaments promised to cleanse the clogged system that the youth centers embodied, a system which for too long had impeded men’s and boy’s efforts to be productive, work out, and flourish.

Omar, the youth coach, was well aware of these postrevolutionary developments at the youth center in the neighborhood, he still called home. One day in February 2013, we met in a coffee shop just outside the markiz’s walls. When I asked him what he thought of the initiatives that were underway, he depicted them as a promising first step:

These are the type of things the revolution should change. The guys in there [pointing at the wall] have already lost a lot of power. They do not get much support from the government (al-hukuma) any longer. That’s why they need to look for new money, from the private sector (al-qata’ al-khas) and even from al-ikhwan (The Muslim Brotherhood). This is a normal development and it is good. It will make it all cleaner, more professional. Hopefully, it’ll benefit the boys in Bab el-Hut. They need it.

Partly due to these priorities, working at Wadi Degla had never lived up to Omar’s expectations. Surely, the facilities were great, and he knew that he was privileged to work intensively with small groups of players. But something was lacking. Once I asked him if he believed that the huge discrepancy in facilities was likely to tilt the class composition of Egypt’s professional football players—who traditionally stem from poorer social strata—toward higher classes in years to come. Somewhat surprisingly, his reply was a vehement “no.” “It is never going to happen,” he explained:

It doesn’t matter how good pitches and well-educated coaches we have out here: these boys will never play for the national team. They’ll become engineers and doctors. The boys who really care about football, all the great talents, come from poor areas in Cairo or from the provinces. That’s where football is really important, where players take the time and have the passion to train hard, to do what’s necessary. Sometimes, that’s why I feel that what I’m doing here is useless. It’s all nice and shiny, but it’s not the real thing (mish ha’i’i). To be honest with you, this is child care, not talent development.

The way Omar drew a distinction between “child care” – being useless – and “talent development” – the “real thing” – does not only highlight what types of (masculine) productivity he considered valuable and worthy to engage in. His complaints also spoke to a particular kind of class inequality that he found deeply troubling. Later that same evening, in the microbus on our way home to the city, Omar elaborated further on the mismatch between talents and facilities. Addressing the compromise that working at the Arsenal Academy entailed, he touched on a privatized and geographically concentrated cleanliness that did not reach the areas where it would matter the most.

This is why I got so disappointed when I had to quit my job at the markiz [in Bab el-Hut]. I told you, that was my dream job. There were much more talent there than here in Degla. 100 times more! They would beat the rich kids I coach now easily, 8-0. You cannot compare. But it didn’t work out because of the corruption. They laughed at me and they took all the money. It was not possible for me to make any money there where I really wanted to be, and where I could make a difference. This is what makes me sad.

Conclusion—Revolutionary Promises

When I last visited Bab el-Hut in October 2016, the revolutionary years felt very distant, indeed. At the youth center, it was almost as if the turmoil in 2012 and 2013 had never happened. While critical of some of the President el-Sisi’s latest statements, Mahmoud ¹⁰ was overall content with the policies of the new government. He assured me that things were now getting “back to normal” at the center as well as in the country. Whereas Copa Coca-Cola was still an annual event, the Festival of Youth and Sports had been a one-off thing. The fact that that the center had co-organized a tournament with the now terror-labeled Muslim Brotherhood just a few years earlier was not an issue Mahmoud felt like talking about. Although the center was full of noisy kids, a new sense of calm was noticeable. The urge to restructure activities and bring in external money and actors seemingly belonged to the past.

During the same visit to Cairo, I also met Omar. For him, the last few years had been tough. The Spanish NGO’s plans for a new type of football academy had not come through. When I asked him about it, he first did not understand what I was talking about. When he finally did recall the project, he mumbled something about a person that had never called back. In fact, Omar had stopped coaching altogether over the past two years. Instead, he had invested some hard-earned savings in a small shop selling sports clothes in an alleyway in Bab el-Hut. As we met, his business was struggling badly, in particular as a result of the drastic devaluation of the EGP, which made imports very expensive. He had several plans for getting back into coaching. Yet, as he also acknowledged, he had opened the shop to get more stability needed to support his family. To once again rush into new and uncertain projects was not an option for the time being.

And yet, the fact that Mahmoud’s youth center is back to normal and Omar’s bold dreams from 2012 and 2013 are unlikely to materialize does not make their stories irrelevant to ponder. In contrast, I would say that this makes the ethnographic material contained in this article all the more revealing. For, what my material about youth football at and around the markiz in Bab el-Hut illustrates well is how the revolutionary years instigated and made visible a multiplicity of novel projects and ideals for how to be a productive, future making Egyptian man. Whether in Hossam and Mahmoud’s struggle to cast off criticism of corruption and keep the activities running in the tournaments organized by Coca-Cola and the FJP or in Omar trying to create spaces to work and flourish, what we see are attempts to generate private and public value, regulated by overlapping (and sometimes contradictory) conducts of productivity. Very often, these projects were explicitly designed to anticipate, act on, and mold desirable futures. To work with and on Egypt’s shabab, after all, is by definition a speculative enterprise aimed at “bringing futures in to being” (Bear 2015, 19). At other times and in other contexts, though, the various initiatives that the men I met engaged in were more than anything a matter of survival. To creatively generate productivity and value was here a requirement for merely staying afloat in a world and in an era that were highly uncertain and constantly on the move.

Without a doubt, the time period between 2012 and 2013 that this article considers was an exceptionally ephemeral one for a great many Egyptian men. As scholars such as David Scott (2014) and Hannah Arendt (1963) have famously argued, revolutions are the epitome of contingency and dislocation, moments in time when possibilities seem endless and when bold human actors—most often male—can intervene in history and potentially change worlds. ¹¹ But it is never only a matter of grabbing power and doing politics. As the ethnography in this article has suggested, revolutions can also be historical junctures, at which more mundane possibilities for being an agile and productive man expand. To get a better sense of how such a proliferation of masculinized possibilities could be experienced, let us once again turn to Omar and his life and dreams in those heady years. As we have seen, Omar often mobilized youth football—the world he knew the best—as a metonym, both for the ills of the old regime and for revolution’s promises: how a previously broadly meritocratic system in the last decades had been “corrupted” by greedy state employees and strained urban space; how the private sector, with its unmatched yet unequally distributed resources, provided cleanliness and professionalism merely for a negligible and largely untalented elite; but also, how the last year of turmoil had come to break down the state’s monopoly, as external financial resources and actors were knocking on the door.

Regardless of its many uncertainties, therefore, the revolution was for Omar largely a force for good. New private initiatives, such as the ones currently underway at Cairo’s youth centers, promised more transparency, a more appropriate distribution of material facilities, and a plethora of cleaner pathways toward brighter and more promising futures. Even as late as the Winter 2013—more than two years after the beginning of the uprisings on Tahrir Square—the political transformations lumped together as al-thawra (the revolution) looked set to reinstate a long lost meritocracy, which the last decade of corruption efficiently had crushed: it would introduce a fairer playing field for all, on which Bab el-Hut’s wealth of talent would be allowed to develop, grow, and flourish. ¹² What is more, on a more personal level, Omar also entertained an anticipation that the revolutionary process would allow him to combine productive generation of value in his own life—money to realize the dreams he had for his family—with the development of football talent (and not just child care) that he felt so very passionately about. In contrast to in the corrupt past, when he had always found himself working on these futures somewhat out of sync—forced to choose between personal prosperity and professional zeal—evolutionary Egypt would be a place where his diverging ambitions and projects finally linked up in some sort of harmony.

Finally, then, what becomes legible from the theoretical ponderings and ethnographic vignettes presented in this article is a notion of masculinity as a temporal enigma: as a set of ambiguities between discordant futures that leave material needs, familial care, and development of the neighborhood’s talents difficult to reconcile. In addition, what we see surfacing is a particular vision of the idealized object conjured up among my interlocutors as the “revolution.” For, while it is certainly true that the experience of Egypt’s revolutionary years was disorienting and fractured one—squeezed between political promises, personal anxieties, and numbing economic uncertainties (Schielke 2015; Ahlberg 2017)—ideals for what the revolution ought to be rather alluded to a recaptured synchronicity between social and individual futures. At the very least, this was at the core of what Omar envisioned regarding what the revolutionary transformation would grant him and the youth playing football in Bab el-Hut. In short, Omar hoped that he would become a truly productive man: a man whose work would finally be allowed to work on all those futures deemed morally and materially valuable.