I am Assistant Professor of Global Humanities at San José State University, where I teach in the Honors Humanities Program and the Comparative Religious concentration. My research explores the relationship between Islamic theological thinking and secularity in twentieth-century Egypt. I'm currently working a book manuscript, which among other things, will be the first comprehensive study dedicated to Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996).
My published work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society History and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. My research has been supported by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, as well as by Arabic language training from the Center for Arabic Studies Abroad in Cairo, Egypt.
Although theories of disenchantment have been both utilized and critiqued by scholars of Islam, t... more Although theories of disenchantment have been both utilized and critiqued by scholars of Islam, they have not received sufficient critical scrutiny within historical studies on Islamic reformism, a novel religiosity associated with modernity’s emergence in Muslim societies. Indeed, histories of Islamic reformism often portray this novel religiosity as an exclusive force of disenchantment, which is unhelpful for understanding the views of Muslims with reformist commitments and attachments to Sufi practices that invest supernatural powers into bodies and objects. Through an analysis of the Sufi Islamic reformist project of the ʿAshira Muhammadiyya organization in Egypt during the Nasser years (1954–1970), this article highlights how the history of Islamic reformism resonates with and diverges from disenchantment theories. Specifically, it foregrounds the way this Sufi reformism not only framed its objectives in terms of progress, science, and socialism but also presumed a reformist Sufi subject constituted through encounters with unseen supernatural agents.
This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How ... more This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.
Although theories of disenchantment have been both utilized and critiqued by scholars of Islam, t... more Although theories of disenchantment have been both utilized and critiqued by scholars of Islam, they have not received sufficient critical scrutiny within historical studies on Islamic reformism, a novel religiosity associated with modernity’s emergence in Muslim societies. Indeed, histories of Islamic reformism often portray this novel religiosity as an exclusive force of disenchantment, which is unhelpful for understanding the views of Muslims with reformist commitments and attachments to Sufi practices that invest supernatural powers into bodies and objects. Through an analysis of the Sufi Islamic reformist project of the ʿAshira Muhammadiyya organization in Egypt during the Nasser years (1954–1970), this article highlights how the history of Islamic reformism resonates with and diverges from disenchantment theories. Specifically, it foregrounds the way this Sufi reformism not only framed its objectives in terms of progress, science, and socialism but also presumed a reformist Sufi subject constituted through encounters with unseen supernatural agents.
This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How ... more This article examines an Arabic commentary on the American self-help pioneer Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, written by a one-time leading intellectual of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Muḥammad al-Ghazālī. Ghazālī’s 1956 commentary was perhaps the earliest manifestation of an influential genre of literature within the Islamic world today: “Islamic self-help.” Although scholars treat Islamic self-help as an effect of neoliberalism, this article reorients the study of Islamic self-help beyond neoliberalism by showing first, that Ghazālī’s early version of it emerged through a critical engagement with several ideological forms that relate in complex ways to neoliberalism's antecedent, liberalism; and second, that his Islamic self-help is best understood in terms of an Islamic encounter with American metaphysical religion made possible by Carnegie's text. It argues that Ghazālī’s Islamic self-help constituted a radical reconfiguration of Western self-help, one that replaced the ethics of self-reliance and autonomy with Islamic ethical sensibilities clustered around the notions of human insufficiency and dependence upon God. In doing so, it highlights how scholars of contemporary Islam might fruitfully pose the question of how novel intellectual trends and cultural forms, like self-help, become Islamic, instead of limiting their analysis to how Islam is reshaped by modern Euro-American thought, institutions, and practices.
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