Tahrir Square during the 18-day uprising of 2011 has become mythologized as the incarnation, however transient, of a “New Egypt.” For the country’s al-du’ah al-gudud (the New Preachers) Tahrir was not just a site a political protest – it was a site of moral redemption, even godliness. These television preachers and their affiliated media producers aim, through their programs, to instill in viewers the feeling of seemingly endless possibility – and its attendant sense of hope – that marked Tahrir during this time. The revolutionary mantra “despair is betrayal” (al-ya’s khiyana) inspires their efforts. To ward off despair, producers draw on religiously-grounded notions of individual responsibility in effecting collective change as well as on the practical skills for cultivating optimism offered by American self-help literature. Situating its claims in an ethnography of the production practices surrounding these Islamic television programs, this paper pushes against dominant accounts of self-help as technologies of neo-liberal governmentality to think about how their articulation with Islamic moral frames may be key in realizing what Ann Cvetkovich in a different context has called “the affective foundation of hope that is necessary for political action.” I argue that for Islamic media producers to sustain hope (especially, but not only) in times of pervasive polarization is to sustain the political. Hopefulness is generative of ways of acting in common to achieve the felt conditions of collective aspiration – of a certain striving togetherness – that made the “New Egypt” a dream one could just imagine was possible to make true. At the same time, this sense of collective aspiration is rendered precarious by the vagaries of the individual life-trajectories within which dreams must unfold. I therefore end with a consideration of how viewers of Islamic television often remain indifferent to hopeful optimism and its promise of a new polity.