This paper examines how Muslim Egyptian preachers (duʾāh al-judud) harnessed the positive affective states of the youth who took part in what, in 2011, was a successful social movement to promote ethical self-cultivation. The duʾāh al-judud appeared on the scene in Egypt in the early 2000s. Young, charismatic men with no extensive religious training, the duʾāh appealed mostly to the young (teens and people in their twenties) and used emotion and storytelling to move the audience and guide viewers toward a virtuous life (Moll 2012a; 2012b). Through their shows, which aired on satellite television, radio and YouTube channels, the preachers offered alternative Islamic media and addressed topics that were relevant to the youth with the aim of edifying young Muslims spiritually and morally (Hirschkind 2012; Moll 2020). Essential to their teachings were three goals for every Muslim: Worshipping God, civilization-building and doing good for others, and purifying the self (ʿibādat Allāh, ʿimārat al-arḍ, tazkiyat al-nafs). In 2011, just a few short months after the Egyptian uprising toppled then president Ḥusnī Mubārak, one of the preachers, Moez Masoud, harnessed the hopeful affective energy generated by the revolutionary moment to call people to start a “revolution against the self (thawra ʿalā al-nafs)” in his show by the same name. Masoud himself was politically active and joined the protests in Taḥrīr Square, and his involvement gave him credibility as a revolutionary figure (at least, for the time being). This paper examines a moment when a positive moral mood, hope (Throop 2015), becomes a vehicle toward ethical self-fashioning (tazkiyat al-nafs) through content analysis of the first season of Masoud’s show. Masoud focuses on the Sufi theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s concept of the nafs, how “diseases of the heart” ail it, and how to “overthrow the corrupt, internal regime of the heart” as Egyptians overthrew the corrupt, external regime of Mubārak. The heart becomes a battleground where one constantly, deliberately fights against the evils and desires toward which one is naturally inclined toward the “virtuous formation of the soul” (Asad 2017). The duʾāh’s influence in Egypt today has waned, especially as the fervor and optimism of the social movement in 2011 have wavered (Amin 2021). But it was precisely the revolutionary moment and the hope that it engendered that made talk of drastic (internal and external) change warranted and viable.