Mediating God Muhammad al-Ghazali and the Politics of Divine Presence in Twentieth-Century Egypt

by Zárate, Arthur Shiwa

• ISBN13: 9780197827062
• ISBN10: 0197827063
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197827086
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2026-01-23
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• More Book Details

Summary

This intellectual biography of the Egyptian Muslim theologian, scholar, and activist, Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996), provides the most comprehensive study to date of one of the most influential Sunni Muslim writers of the twentieth century. Al-Ghazali shaped the views of multiple generations of Muslim activists and was a one-time leading intellectual of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Mediating God charts his rise as a leading theologian in the Brotherhood during the 1940s, his subsequent clash and expulsion from the group in 1953, and his extensive post-Brotherhood career during the Nasser years.

To tell this story, it excavates a massive collection of writings by Brotherhood members and their affiliates, many of which have never before been utilized in secondary scholarship. Through an analysis of this collection, Mediating God provides the first in-depth view at the richly cosmopolitan and eclectic intellectual milieu of the Brotherhood and its affiliates from the 1930s through the 1960s. It focuses particular attention on the underexamined, though voluminous, writings al-Ghazali and his colleagues dedicated to charting God as real and meaningful presence in all arenas of human life, from the mundane realms of daily life to political struggles and scientific enterprises. Ultimately, by highlighting the centrality of God as an inscrutable and incalculable-yet intimately known and felt-presence in al-Ghazali and his colleagues' project of spiritual and social uplift, Mediating God provides a way of understanding modern Islamic politics beyond the scholarly framework of Islamism and attendant claims about the functionalization, objectification, and systemization of Islam in modernity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Mediating God1. Material Theologies: Egypt's Economic Conditions and the Material Foundations of Islamic Belief2. Mediating God's Message: Embodiment, Affect, and Knowledge Transmission in the Muslim Brotherhood's Call (Da?wa)3. Ethics and the Elsewhere: God in History and Society4. American Sufis: Self-Help, Sufism, and Metaphysical Religion in Postcolonial Egypt5. Secularity and the State: The Secular Social Imaginary in Nasser's Egypt6. Sufism and the Spirit of Activism: God and Spirituality in the Brotherhood's Call7. God's Signs: Sufism, Cosmology, and the Critique of Human Empowerment in Nasser's Egypt8. Gazing at God's Book: Islamic Natural Theology and the Believing Scientist9. Encounters with the Paranormal: Science and the Unwieldy Powers of GodConclusion