Publication Date
10-9-2025
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Comparative Studies in Society and History
DOI
10.1017/S0010417525100248
Abstract
This article considers the history of Egypt’s mid-twentieth-century Spiritualist movement through an examination of its periodical, a monthly Arabic magazine called Alam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960). As it shows, Egyptian Spiritualists defended and promoted their project by crafting an experimental cosmology, one that blended claims about empirical verification with elements of Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. It further shows how this combination of scientism and cosmology reflects a core dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. Like spiritual seekers and occult practitioners in Muslim societies elsewhere, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned their project as one of eradicating superstition from religion, modernizing the nation, and advancing science. By attending to the Egyptian Spiritualist effort to scientize religion and spiritualize science, this article foregrounds the Islamic tradition’s entanglements with scientific discourses and navigates beyond claims about epistemological rupture that often characterize the study of Islam’s relationship to modern science.
Keywords
Ahmad Fahmi Abu al-Khayr, Alam al-Ruh (1947–1960), Egypt, Islam, spirit healing, spiritualism
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Department
Humanities
Recommended Citation
Arthur Shiwa Zárate. "Cosmopolitan Spirits: Islam and the Experimental Cosmologies of Egypt's Spiritualist Movement, 1947–1960" Comparative Studies in Society and History (2025). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417525100248
