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

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 to the 1960s.It fo