Cosmopolitan Spirits: Islam and the Experimental Cosmologies of Egypt’s Spiritualist Movement, 1947–1960

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.