Michael Gilsenan's Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt

Record summary

Michael Gilsenan's Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt examines religious specialists, saintly lineages, shrine-centered authority, and changing relations between popular devotion and Islamic reform. It offers a concrete route into accounts of dreams, blessing, healing, pilgrimage, and spiritual charisma in twentieth-century Egypt, while treating them as culturally organized religious claims rather than verified supernatural events. The book is valuable for comparing formal Sufi institutions with vernacular practices and for tracing how modernization and state policy affected esoteric authority. Researchers should verify which communities and periods each chapter actually covers.