2025/10/09 by Arthur Shiwa Zárate · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Islamic Studies and History #Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices #Religion and Society Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0010417525100248
openalex publication_date 2025/10/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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 ʿAlam 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.