Introduction
In November 1957, an American Spiritualist medium—or intermediary between the spirit and material worlds—named Keith Milton Rhinehart (d. 1999) visited Egypt’s two largest cities, Cairo and Alexandria, where he held séances with Egyptian audiences and performed a number of seemingly paranormal feats. Rhinehart was the founder of the Aquarian Foundation, a Spiritualist church based in Seattle, Washington.Footnote 1 An Egyptian Spiritualist movement, which had emerged during the preceding decade, hosted Rhinehart and facilitated his public events in Egypt. One of that movement’s leading organizers, a professor named ʿAli ʿAbd al-Jalil Radi, befriended Rhinehart and described this American medium’s visit to Egypt in the Arab world’s first and perhaps only Arabic periodical dedicated to Spiritualism, a monthly magazine called ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960).Footnote 2 Years later Radi recalled that Rhinehart’s visit was the “most marvelous spiritual gathering” (arwaʿ ijtimāʿ rūḥī) in Egypt’s history.Footnote 3 Since the coalescence of an organized Spiritualist movement in Egypt during the late 1940s, Egyptian proponents of this novel spiritual form sought to host an experienced European or North American medium in Egypt.Footnote 4 Rhinehart’s trip to Egypt was the culmination of a decade of Spiritualist publicizing and organizing in that country. Indeed, according to Radi, Egypt’s Spiritualist magazine entered its “golden age” during the late 1950s. Although the “Spiritualist movement” (al-ḥaraka al-rūḥiyya) in Egypt often “stumbled,” Radi nevertheless felt that by the close of the decade there was such a movement to speak of.Footnote 5 This article explores the history of this movement through an analysis of its magazine, ʿAlam al-Ruh.
Although controversial and sometimes treated with derision, Spiritualism caught the attention of many Egyptians during the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s it was common for Egypt’s newspapers, such as its leading paper, al-Ahram, to discuss paranormal phenomena and the activities of Spiritualists. In 1959, for example, al-Ahram commented that “there is, these days, much news spread by the newspapers about spirits, spirit mediums, and the summoning of spirits.”Footnote 6 These comments came in an interview the paper conducted with Ahmad Fahmi Abu al-Khayr (d. 1960)—Radi’s colleague, and the undisputed leader of Egypt’s Spiritualist movement—in which he answered questions for al-Ahram’s readers about the summoning of spirits.Footnote 7
Spiritualist claims and, in some cases, practices, strongly impacted Egypt’s Islamic scene. Key figures in its scholarly establishment, including Muhammad Hasanayn Makhluf (d. 1990), a leading mufti, and Muhammad Farid Wajdi (d. 1954), the editor of the journal of al-Azhar, a renowned institution of Islamic learning, articulated statements supportive of Spiritualist beliefs.Footnote 8 Tantawi Jawhari (d. 1940), a scholar of repute and author of a popular book on the Qur’an, was a Spiritualist practitioner.Footnote 9 The Sufi scholar and future Rector of al-Azhar, ʿAbd al-Halim Mahmud (d. 1978), opined on Spiritualism, albeit negatively.Footnote 10 In addition, luminaries in Egypt’s Islamic reformist milieu debated Spiritualism. Figures no less than Muhammad Rashid Rida (d. 1935), the editor of the Islamic journal, al-Manar, and Hasan al-Banna (d. 1949), the charismatic founder of the Muslim Brotherhood activist movement, both responded to Spiritualist claims. Whereas Rida evinced skepticism toward Spiritualism,Footnote 11 al-Banna voiced cautious support when he called on scholars of “Islamic nations” to compete with their Western counterparts “to do many precise experiments to know the truth of these matters themselves” (yukthiru min al-tajārib al-daqīqa li-maʿrifat ḥaqīqat hadhihī al-umūr bi-anfusihim).Footnote 12 Other influential Brotherhood figures, including the theologian, Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996), the legal scholar, al-Sayyid Sabiq (d. 2000), and the former Brotherhood leader, Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri (d. 1985), also engaged the ideas of Spiritualists and psychical researchers.Footnote 13
Evidently, Spiritualism garnered the attention of Egypt’s media and its leading Islamic intellectuals. Scholars, however, have only begun to explore ʿAlam al-Ruh, the mouthpiece of Egypt’s Spiritualist movement.Footnote 14 By analyzing its pages, this article charts an underexamined chapter in Spiritualism’s global history and explores how Egyptians have blended the Islamic tradition with novel ideas about science during the twentieth century.Footnote 15 It focuses on the central activity Abu al-Khayr and his associates promoted, what they called “spirit healing” (ʿilāj rūḥī). This practice derived from the work of the British medium and healer, Harry Edwards (d. 1976).Footnote 16 As it was deployed in Egypt, it involved a medium, such as Abu al-Khayr’s brother, Hamid Abu al-Khayr, summoning the spirits of the dead and requesting these disincarnate souls heal someone of their physical or psychological ailments, or expel from them, or their home, a malicious spirit. Spirit healing was thus a medical treatment and an exorcism. Importantly, to explain its mechanics, Abu al-Khayr and his associates utilized a Spiritualist cosmology, one that presumed that the dead could return to this world, perform services for the living, and thereby atone for past sins and achieve spiritual progress in the afterlife, or alternatively, attack, possess, and harm people. Such ideas were well outside of the scientific mainstream,Footnote 17 and, moreover, unorthodox within the Islamic tradition, as its central text, the Qur’an, depicts death as the end of a human’s ability to perform actions in the world.Footnote 18 Egyptian Spiritualists recognized their work’s unconventionality. Their goal, though, was not conventional. Rather, by promoting Spiritualism, they sought to advance Islam and science to new heights. Indeed, they argued, while the unenlightened may think that Spiritualism conflicted with the Islamic tradition and science, it, in fact, aligned with each in their truest forms.
This article examines Abu al-Khayr and his associates’ efforts to carve out space for spirit healing within Islam and science to shed light on a central dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. On the one hand, Egyptian Spiritualists saw this novel spirituality as promising a more scientific approach toward religion, one that would eradicate the superstitions of conventional religion and contribute to Egypt’s modernization. On the other hand, they saw in this novel spiritual form a salve for the souls of Egyptians who succumbed to an ill-informed scientific materialism that denied the agencies of spiritual powers. Abu al-Khayr and his associates thus framed their project as a two-fold enterprise: Spiritualism would render Islamic ideas and practices amenable to scientific inquiry and, at the same time, render modern scientific and medical practices open to the influence of otherworldly, metaphysical presences.Footnote 19 This double movement—between scientizing religion and spiritualizing science—is central, in many respects, to the history of scientific exploration within the Islamic world. Indeed, from Morocco to Egypt to Iran, spiritual seekers and reformers have not only drawn upon scientific discourses to make claims about “true” Islam, but have also utilized concepts drawn from the Islamic tradition to make claims about “true” science.Footnote 20
By situating the Egyptian Spiritualist project within this dynamic, this article moves away from understandings of the Islamic encounter with modern science that emphasize epistemological rupture,Footnote 21 and instead builds on scholarship foregrounding the Islamic tradition’s entanglements with modern scientific discourses.Footnote 22 This latter approach is useful for highlighting a distinct feature of Egyptian Spiritualism, what might be thought of as a type of cosmological experimentalism. To defend and explain spirit healing, Egyptian Spiritualists experimented with Spiritualist and Islamic cosmologies, combining elements of each together with a scientistic ideology. By cosmologies I mean accounts of the different classes of beings—spiritual and material—that inhabit this world, as well as understandings of the afterlife and its relationship to this world. For instance, when it came to spirit healing, Egyptian Spiritualists sometimes framed it as treatment for disturbances caused by jinn (sing. jinni), spirit-like beings found in the Islamic tradition who can be good or evil and can possess people.Footnote 23 More often, however, Egyptian Spiritualists, while accepting the reality of jinn, cast skepticism on claims about jinn disturbances. Instead, they framed their spirit healing in terms of a Spiritualist belief that it was the spirits of the human dead that caused the possessions and hauntings they investigated. This was especially the perspective of the leader of Egyptian Spiritualism, Abu al-Khayr, who favored Spiritualist accounts because he believed they were empirically verifiable and more advanced scientifically than traditional Islamic accounts. Nevertheless, ʿAlam al-Ruh hosted a diversity of views and its writers drew upon the Islamic tradition in their explanations of the paranormal phenomena they observed. Indeed, a mixing and blending of cosmologies and scientistic imaginaries was a central feature of ʿAlam al-Ruh’s discourse. Such an eclectic approach, believed Egyptian Spiritualists, offered the most enlightened method for understanding the world’s spiritual troubles.
This article has five sections. This first situates the Egyptian Spiritualist movement vis-à-vis global Spiritualism and considers reasons why it emerged in Egypt when it did. The second provides an overview of key actors and organizations within Egyptian Spiritualism. The third examines Abu al-Khayr and his colleagues’ spirit healing, exploring its relationship to local healing traditions and the ways Egyptian Spiritualists legitimated their practices by blending Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. The fourth explores how Abu al-Khayr and his associates positioned Spiritualism as a scientific tool with which they could study the Islamic tradition and advance new understandings of it, as well as their criticisms of scientific materialism. Finally, the fifth section examines the campaign of Egyptian Spiritualists against superstition in the name of science and social order, concentrating on their activities pertaining to possession (mass), jinn, and sorcery (siḥr).
Situating Spiritualism in Mid-Twentieth-Century Egypt
Spiritualism is a diverse phenomenon, but in its most basic sense, it is the attempt to communicate with the dead through a living medium during a séance.Footnote 24 Beginning in the United States in 1848 with the Fox sisters, it spread to Great Britain and France and across Europe. Beyond séances, Spiritualist practice included the usage of turning tables and planchettes, and phenomena such as table rapping, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and automatic writing. In France, Spiritualism developed into Spiritism.Footnote 25 From the United States and Europe, Spiritualism and Spiritism spread to Latin America, the Caribbean, and various Muslim societies.Footnote 26 Its presence in Egypt is part of a history of the global diffusion of Spiritualism that has only recently begun to be traced by scholars.Footnote 27
Several factors made possible the global diffusion of Spiritualism including novel forms of print media and new technologies.Footnote 28 Egyptian Spiritualists, as we will see below, were well versed in the literature of Euro-American Spiritualists and translated this literature into Arabic. With regard to technology, a common claim among ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers was that photography—or more specifically “spirit photography” as it was practiced by Euro-American Spiritualists—offered proof of the human spirit’s existence after death.Footnote 29 Additionally, discoveries related to electricity and radio provided Spiritualists in Egypt and elsewhere with analogies for how the spirit world functioned.Footnote 30
More importantly for the Egyptian case, Spiritualism offered its practitioners a means of reworking religious cosmologies in line with scientific imaginaries and of advancing critiques of materialistic science.Footnote 31 As we will see in the following sections, Spiritualism appealed to Egyptians who were concerned with contesting the perceived conflict between religion and science. It is no coincidence that Spiritualism gained a foothold in the Islamic world at a time when Muslim societies were under the control of European colonial powers. Intellectuals across these societies sought to demonstrate that their native traditions were not obstacles to science.Footnote 32 By improving the scientific standings of their societies, they believed they could surmount the challenge of imperialism. Ottoman, Turkish, and Iranian thinkers experimented with Spiritualism and Spiritism for this basic reason.
In the Islamic world, the earliest experimentation with these novel religious forms occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman heartland, where scholars translated the work of Euro-American Spiritualists, and, in some cases, held séances.Footnote 33 In 1920s Iran, a Spiritist society conducted research on the spirit world through communication with the souls of the dead.Footnote 34 Similarly, in 1940s Turkey, intellectuals researched the paranormal through séances and published original studies on Spiritualism.Footnote 35
Thus, by the time ʿAlam al-Ruh appeared in 1947, the Islamic world’s intellectual discourse was familiar with Spiritualism. A comprehensive history of Spiritualism’s diffusion to Egypt has yet to be written, but those interested in this history, including Egyptian Spiritualists and Western-trained academics, begin with two scholarly figures, Jawhari and Wajdi,Footnote 36 who both left supportive writings on the topic during the early twentieth century.Footnote 37 ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers referenced Wajdi’s writings to legitimatize their enterprise, but did not describe him as a Spiritualist. Rather, Wajdi’s significance was as an Arabic source for information about Spiritualism and as a translator of Spiritualist texts. Jawhari, on the other hand, was Spiritualist himself. In fact, according to Abu al-Khayr, together they established Egypt’s first Spiritualist circle, most likely during the 1930s.Footnote 38 Although this claim’s veracity is difficult to establish, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers and other Egyptian Spiritualists do not mention other circles in existence in Egypt or elsewhere in the Arab world prior to Abu al-Khayr and Jawhari’s circle. The scope of its activities was presumably not extensive, as they are neither reported on in ʿAlam al-Ruh nor described in secondary scholarship.
Although research on Spiritualism and Spiritism in Muslim societies is a burgeoning field, with the exception of Iran, scholars have yet to provide a detailed picture of the activities Spiritualists and Spiritists in these societies pursued. ʿAlam al-Ruh is thus a vital resource for filling this gap. The magazine also allows scholars to trace the emergence of a Spiritualist movement in Egypt. By “movement” I mean something more than the largely solitary activities and scholarship of Wajdi and Jawhari. Rather, I mean collective organizing activities involving a central mouthpiece (i.e., ʿAlam al-Ruh), and multiple propagandists, mediums, and séance circles, with a message that appealed to Egypt’s professional classes.Footnote 39 At first glance, its 1940s emergence seems late when compared to Spiritualism’s influence in the United States, where its appeal reached its height from the 1850s through the 1870s and thereafter witnessed periodic revivals into the early twentieth century.Footnote 40 However, this mid-twentieth-century emergence in Egypt is in line with trends in Turkey and Iran where Spiritists and Spiritualists became active during the twentieth century’s first half.
In Egypt, two factors explain why a Spiritualist movement emerged when it did. First, it was an outgrowth of the efendiyya movements of the early twentieth century. The efendiyya were a social grouping made up of urban, literate, and upwardly mobile Egyptian men, who formed politically prominent movements committed to anticolonial nation building and ideals of cultural authenticity during the 1930s and 1940s—a time of tremendous domestic and international upheaval.Footnote 41 They were products of an early twentieth-century rise in education and urbanization.Footnote 42 These movements included Islamic societies, such as the Brotherhood and the Young Men’s Muslim Association, who, alongside other efendiyya societies, like Young Egypt, popularized a turn toward the Islamic tradition for a model of modernity. These societies developed vibrant presses and outreach activities to spread their messages. The efendiyya movements, I argue, paved the path for Egyptian Spiritualists, providing models they could follow for organizing.
Second, Egyptian Spiritualists became most active during the mid-to-late 1950s, at the moment when Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government (r. 1954–1970) outlawed and repressed Egypt’s most influential Islamic society, the Brotherhood, and curtailed the activities of Egypt’s Salafi societies.Footnote 43 The Nasser government came to power through a 1952 anticolonial revolution and ushered in a politics of authoritarian secular Arab nationalism.Footnote 44 ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers shared the Nasserist state’s vision of modernization, social uplift, and science-based reform,Footnote 45 but did not explicitly address domestic politics. No doubt owing to their apolitical orientation and fealty to progressivism, the Nasser regime allowed them to function freely during the 1950s. It is known that Nasser allowed Egypt’s Sufis, who supported the regime’s ideology, to develop a press and pursue activism as a way of counteracting the Brotherhood’s influence.Footnote 46 Egyptian Spiritualists likely benefited from this strategy.
The ideological message of ʿAlam al-Ruh’s Spiritualists emerged in dialogue and competition with Egypt’s other 1950s Islamic trends, including Salafis, Muslim Brothers, and Sufis. Egypt’s Spiritualists shared with these groups the presupposition that the best way to reform society was to reform Islam. Unlike Egyptian Salafis, however, who sought to remove extraneous, foreign elements from the Islamic tradition,Footnote 47 ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers advocated an expansive and eclectic take on that tradition. Additionally, these writers shared with the Brotherhood a cosmopolitan perspective on Islam. Both Spiritualists and Brotherhood affiliates, for example, found common cause with Euro-American spiritual seekers.Footnote 48 Yet unlike Brotherhood activists, ʿAlam al-Ruh avoided engagement with politics. Finally, in their blending of science and spirituality, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers shared much with a key organization within Egypt’s reformist Sufi establishment, the ʿAshira Muhammadiyya.Footnote 49 Although Abu al-Khayr criticized alleged irrational excesses of Sufis, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s other writers posited connections between their practices and Sufi practices, especially those related to channeling the healing blessings of deceased Sufi saints, or Friends of God (awliyāʾ Allāh). In one article, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers favorably quoted a piece published by the ʿAshira’s magazine, al-Muslim, which described the postmortem healing works of a certain Friend of God.Footnote 50 For its part, al-Muslim articulated a supportive position on Spiritualism.Footnote 51
In sum, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s project did not simply derive from the diffusion of Spiritualist discourses to Egypt. Rather it was produced out of the intersection of global and local forces, which came together under the pressures of twentieth-century Egyptian political life. With this context in mind, we can consider the main Egyptian Spiritualist actors and their activities.
Egypt’s Spiritualists and Their Activities
Abu al-Khayr began his career as a Spiritualist publicist by translating a work by the British Spiritualist, J. Arthur Findlay (d. 1964) in 1936.Footnote 52 Translation was a crucial component of the Egyptian Spiritualist movement, as it was elsewhere in the Islamic world.Footnote 53 ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers reported extensively on Spiritualism in Western societies and related news from Western Spiritualist periodicals, such as Psychic News. Reports about ghost hauntings, exorcisms, and spirit sightings from Western societies filled ʿAlam al-Ruh’s pages. Edwards’s spirit healing loomed especially large in ʿAlam al-Ruh. Footnote 54
Through years of promotional activities, Abu al-Khayr became known as Egyptian Spiritualism’s leader.Footnote 55 According to Sabir Jabra, a Christian doctor, pharmacist, and member of Abu al-Khayr’s Spiritualist group, Abu al-Khayr “was the only man in the East who opened the door to the field of Spiritualist research.”Footnote 56 Radi asserted that no other person in history, with the exception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (d. 1930), did as much as Abu al-Khayr to promote Spiritualism.Footnote 57 When Abu al-Khayr established ʿAlam al-Ruh, he edited it and maintained it at his own expense.Footnote 58 The magazine held annual celebrations to commemorate its publishing activities, the work of Egyptian Spiritualists, and articulate their aspirations. At the first of these celebrations in January 1949, Abu al-Khayr called for the establishment of a society for Spiritualist research in Egypt, like those in Europe and the United States.Footnote 59 Two years later, ʿAlam al-Ruh celebrated the establishment of the Egyptian Society of Spiritualist Research (ESSR), which obtained government approval in September 1950. Abu al-Khayr served as its Secretary General.Footnote 60
Radi was also a leading member of Egypt’s Spiritualist movement.Footnote 61 He recalls that he first became interested in Spiritualism after the death of his brother. Although he would eventually become close colleagues with Abu al-Khayr, Radi’s relationship with the latter was not always smooth. Abu al-Khayr sharply criticized one of Radi’s earliest books on Spiritualism, a work published in 1951.Footnote 62 Thereafter Radi spent several years in London where he claimed to immerse himself in that city’s Spiritualist scene. Upon returning to Egypt in 1957, he became friends with Abu al-Khayr. By this time ʿAlam al-Ruh was experiencing financial difficulties and Abu al-Khayr asked Radi to take over the funding of its publication, which Radi did at his own expense.Footnote 63
Throughout the 1950s, the ESSR investigated paranormal phenomena across Egypt. During this decade, Egyptian newspapers called upon Abu al-Khayr and the ESSR to opine on events involving possessions, spirits, and hauntings, or what ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers called collectively “spirit disturbance” (shaghab rūḥī), more generally. To buttress the legitimacy of its endeavor, ʿAlam al-Ruh frequently reprinted excerpts from or entire articles by other media outlets that showcased Abu al-Khayr’s investigations.Footnote 64 An article from August 1954 that was printed in the newspaper al-Jumhuriyya, for instance, reported how Abu al-Khayr and colleagues put an end to the occupation by “demons” (ʿafārīt) of an apartment in the Shubra district of Cairo.Footnote 65 Another article first printed in the newspaper al-Akhbar interviewed Abu al-Khayr, describing him as a “spirit expert” or “scholar” (ʿālim rūḥī), and asked him to give his opinion on a story about disturbances caused by jinn in the Egyptian city of Kafr al-Shaykh.Footnote 66
Supporters and practitioners of Spiritualism in Egypt included lawyers, doctors, professors, actors, musicians, artists, engineers, and government employees. The participation of educated professionals in Egypt’s Spiritualist movement was a source of pride for ʿAlam al-Ruh and the magazine highlighted this, especially when such individuals partook in its yearly celebrations.Footnote 67 Additionally, the magazine’s articles often included the writers’ profession. The magazine had readers across the Arab world, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Kuwait. By 1960, the number of Spiritualist circles that ʿAlam al-Ruh reported on and advertised for increased from one during the early 1950s to four by the end of the decade, including one established by Radi, which was called the Pyramid Spiritualist Society.Footnote 68 However, there was a dearth of good mediums in Egypt, as Radi noted on multiple occasions.Footnote 69 When a British medium named Dorothy Adams visited Egypt—the second visit of a foreign medium to Egypt after Rhinehart’s—she too commented that Egyptian mediums needed more training.Footnote 70 Still, by the close of the decade, Radi penned an article in ʿAlam al-Ruh introducing no fewer than six Egyptian mediums.Footnote 71 Additionally, by the late 1950s, ʿAlam al-Ruh could report on a growing number of publications on or closely related to Spiritualism written by Egyptian authors, including a set of articles written by Muhammad Shahin Hamza, a writer whose work ʿAlam al-Ruh celebrated.Footnote 72 Hamza’s articles were later published as a book, the preface of which Radi wrote.Footnote 73 At least from the perspective of the writers in ʿAlam al-Ruh, the 1950s was a decade of growth for Egyptian Spiritualism. Indeed, there was enough growth in popular interest in Spiritualist practices that Abu al-Khayr and his brother, Hamid, both deemed it necessary to write articles warning Egyptians against what they believed were improper and dangerous methods of summoning the dead.Footnote 74
Despite the Egyptian Spiritualist movement’s growth during this decade, when Abu al-Khayr suddenly died in 1960, ʿAlam al-Ruh ceased publishing temporarily. Thereafter it continued to be published sporadically and under a different title.Footnote 75 Although it is difficult to trace the long-term legacy of the Spiritualist groups affiliated with Abu al-Khayr and ʿAlam al-Ruh, people like Radi, Hamza, and others continued to publish on Spiritualism throughout the 1960s.Footnote 76 Additionally, there is at least one group active in Egypt today, the Egyptian Society for Spiritual and Cultural Research, which was founded in 1980, that attributes to Abu al-Khayr an important role in its early historical formation and maintains fealty to Spiritualist ideas, if not practices.Footnote 77 Regardless of the legacy of Egypt’s Spiritualist movement, the latter’s importance, I argue, has less to do with its influence than with what its blending of cosmologies and scientific imaginaries says about the relationship between science and the Islamic tradition in modernity.
The Healing Spirit
The central practice ʿAlam al-Ruh’s Spiritualists pursued was spirit healing. It was rooted in Edwards’s ideas, which were ecumenical, though most explicitly tied to Christianity. The name “spirit healing” derived from Edwards’s work. As we will see below, Abu al-Khayr and his colleagues’ spirit healing also had parallels with local Islamic healing traditions. Nevertheless, it was neither a mere reflection of Edwards’s practice nor a traditional practice. It was rather an amalgam of different ideas, one that reflects a crucial dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. This dynamic relates to the fact that metaphysical inquiries have not existed on modernity’s margins, but have been central to projects of modernization in societies as diverse as those of the North Atlantic, and contemporary Iran and Morocco.Footnote 78 With regard to the Islamic world, two features stand out in this history. One is the attempt of researchers to grasp metaphysical phenomena through scientific practice and concepts, and banish superstition from such phenomena;Footnote 79 and the other is a commitment on the part of Muslim reformers to “ontological multiplicity,” or a willingness to accept mainstream scientific and medical suppositions, while at the same depicting materialist science and medicine as insufficient mechanisms for evaluating spiritual realities.Footnote 80 Thus, as I will show in this and the following sections, Egyptian Spiritualists framed their spirit healing as a corrective to the superstitions (khurāfāt) of local exorcism practices and as a challenge to materialism (māddiyya) in science.
I begin this section, however, describing what Abu al-Khayr and his associates’ spirit healing entailed. It involved the invocation of the aid of spirit worldly agents—benevolent souls of the dead (who had been doctors in their embodied lives)—who helped heal the living of their physical and psychological ailments.Footnote 81 Hamid Abu al-Khayr was the medium for Abu al-Khayr’s circle. Other Egyptians involved in this circle included clairvoyants who could “see” the healing spirits summoned by Hamid.Footnote 82 Spirit healing did not have to be performed in person; it could also be deployed remotely through a practice called “absent healing” (ʿilāj ghayābī) wherein the patient received treatment while at home.Footnote 83 Additionally, Abu al-Khayr and his circle’s spirit healing could be an exorcism, which also involved the assistance of the benevolent spirits of the dead, who, in this case, banished or pushed out malevolent spirits from a person’s body or residence.Footnote 84
Compared to local traditions of healing and exorcism, Egyptian Spiritualist healing practices were distinct. These local traditions include the paraliturgical usage of the Qur’an in the form of ruqya (incantation), amulets (tamāʾim), and supplicatory prayer (duʿāʾ).Footnote 85 Such usages are common across the Islamic world and they are believed to procure God’s aid to deal with moral, psychological, and physical ailments. Ruqya entails reciting certain Qur’anic verses or prayers attributed to the Prophet Muhammad combined with acts such as dry spitting or blowing over the outstretched palms and then rubbing the afflicted area of the body. In other contexts, however, ruqya refers to exorcism involving the reading of the Qur’an in the presence of someone possessed by jinn. Footnote 86 Another tradition practiced in parts of Egypt and Sudan is called zar. It is a type of jinn exorcism and appeasement, which involves music, dance, singing, and sacrificial offerings.Footnote 87 In addition, Muslims also employ healing practices attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. These practices, often called “prophetic medicine,” include the usage of foods, herbal remedies, simple drugs, and supplicatory prayers.Footnote 88 People in Muslim societies also attribute healing powers to Sufi shaykhs and Friends of God, whose tombs serve as centers of popular devotion.Footnote 89
Despite their diversity, a common feature within these traditions is the invocation of God, who is regarded as the ultimate source of healing.Footnote 90 In line with this orientation, Egyptian Spiritualists framed their spirit healing in God-centered terms. Nevertheless, as we will see, their conception of the mechanics of spirit healing derived crucial elements from a Spiritualist cosmology, one wherein the spirits of the dead are believed to play an active role in the lives of the living. By combining claims about the this-worldly agency of the souls of the dead and the healing presence of the Islamic tradition’s deity, Abu al-Khayr and his associates were experimenting with different cosmologies, attempting to craft out of them a plausible whole. This can be seen further, as this section will also show, in the way Egyptian Spiritualists posited analogies between Spiritualist accounts on good works performed by the spirits of the human dead and Islamic discourses about the activities of angels and deceased Sufi saints.
On the first front, consider how ʿAlam al-Ruh advertised Abu al-Khayr and his circle’s spirit healing: each issue included a one-page advertisement for their spirit healing entitled “To the Sick Ones Seeking Spirit Healing.” A typical advertisement tells readers dealing with intractable sicknesses to send their names and addresses to the magazine. After doing so, it instructs them to sit every Monday and Friday from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in a darkened room. Prospective patients can do this alone or with others, provided they do so in a quiet, calm manner. Most importantly, the patient must do it in a way that allows him to be “directing of his heart to God.” The patient should continue this practice weekly “until God bestows upon him healing.” The advertisement adds that the Cairo Spiritualism Circle (Abu al-Khayr’s circle) will provide treatment for free and will perform it at a distance. Prospective patients should not visit the circle for in-person healing. Concluding, it warns patients against seeking spirit healing from anyone who asks for payment in return, for in that case “God will not decree for him healing.”Footnote 91
Abu al-Khayr and his circle thus believed that God effected the healing they procured. As such, spirit healers, like Abu al-Khayr and Jabra, consistently emphasized that their work had its source in God’s agency.Footnote 92 In one article, after giving his readers their absent healing instructions, Abu al-Khayr tells prospective patients to follow instructions and they will “achieve healing when God wants for them healing.”Footnote 93 In this way, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned themselves as mediators of God’s power. One valuable feature of ʿAlam al-Ruh is that it printed hundreds of letters from Abu al-Khayr’s patients thanking him and God for healing. Although these letters were selected by the magazine for publication and are, therefore, only positive, they nevertheless provide a glimpse at how patients interpreted spirit healing. Patients too understood it in God-centered terms. Many of these letters, for instance, invoked God as the agent behind healing. One letter writer thanked Abu al-Khayr for helping him achieve health, noting, “I am one of those upon whom God has covered them with aid by way of spirit healing…. I had hardly participated in six sessions before my healing was completed by [the] grace of God.”Footnote 94 Although patients construed God as the primary agent, they acknowledged that Abu al-Khayr and his brother, Hamid, were mediators of God’s aid. As one letter writer put it, here addressing Abu al-Khayr directly, “God alone, o virtuous and honorable teacher, is able to bestow upon you…what is facilitated to people by your pure hands in terms of the grace of God and God’s blessing.”Footnote 95 A letter from a father whose daughter was healed by Abu al-Khayr’s circle thanked Hamid, “the spirit medium,” through whom “God bestowed upon her healing.”Footnote 96
Although local Islamic healing traditions and spirit healing share the invocation of God, the key difference between them is that spirit healing attributes a central role to the souls of the dead in effectuating healing. Except for popular beliefs about the spirits of deceased saints (an exception to which I will return),Footnote 97 the dead do not usually play a role within Islamic healing practices. The central role of the dead in spirit healing derives from a Spiritualist cosmology. Whereas the Qur’an depicts death as the end of a person’s ability to perform good deeds in this world for which he or she will be rewarded by God, Spiritualists believe that death marks the beginning of a journey of spiritual progress.Footnote 98
To justify ideas such as this one in Islamic terms, Egyptian Spiritualists deployed multiple strategies. One was to draw analogies between the nature and deeds of angels as reported by the Islamic tradition and the spirits of the dead according to Spiritualism. For instance, in a column called “The Spiritual Side [nāḥiyya rūḥiyya] of the Noble Qur’an,” a writer named Rabih Lutfi Jumʿa argues that the activities of angels are analogous to the good works of the dead. He describes the spiritual entities found in the Qur’an, including the human spirit (rūḥ), jinn, satans or demons (shayāṭīn), and angels (malāʾika) collectively as “spirits” (arwāḥ).Footnote 99 For him, “angels are no other than good, pure spirits who have reached a level of ascent that is great.”Footnote 100 By ascent here, note that Egyptian Spiritualists believed that existence in the barzakh—the intermediary realm where the spirit resides between death and resurrection—allows the dead to continue to perform good deeds and achieve spiritual ascension (irtiqāʾ rūḥī). In an article on “the deeds of the spirit in the other life,” Jumʿa asserts, “life in the barzakh is a rising high [sumūw] and an ascent [irtiqāʾ] and deed [ʿamal], not a life of restriction, stopping, idleness, and stagnation.”Footnote 101 On the good deeds of “spirits” (arwāḥ) with whom Spiritualists interact, Jumʿa further argues that they are done to expiate sins. He writes that “the deeds undertaken by these spirits are good deeds [aʿmāl ṣāliḥāt] with which the spirit expiates [tukaffir] its sins. Spirits, therefore, are always striving to help and do good. They help…those who live on earth and extend aid to them. There is no doubt that good spirits encircle their loved ones among the living and try to protect them from evil.” Importantly, for Jumʿa, the aid spirits of the dead provide the living is analogous to the help angels provide humans according to the Qur’an. He concludes quoting Qur’anic verses including 3:124, which reports how angels helped the Muslim community in battle against its enemies.Footnote 102 If spiritual entities like angels can help humans, he suggests, then highly evolved spirits of the dead may also do so.
Jumʿa’s claims were not unprecedented, as Jawhari also suggested analogies between the spirits of the dead and angels. Jawhari, however, based his assertions on a reading of the philosophy of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ) of tenth-century Iraq.Footnote 103 Although ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers did not often claim that the spirits they engaged were angels, the parallels between the nature of angels as reported by the Islamic tradition and the activities of the noble dead as conveyed by Spiritualists suggests that Egyptian Spiritualists took the former as a model for thinking about the latter. For one thing, within the Islamic tradition, angels are spiritual entities that take human form, interact and speak with humans.Footnote 104 Abu al-Khayr notes this and describes the archangel Gabriel’s deeds according to the Qur’an and hadith. For him, this shows that Islamic religion accepts the reality of “spirit materialization” (tajassud al-rūḥ) and legitimates the notion that the spirits of the dead can materialize and interact with the living.Footnote 105 Second, in the Islamic tradition, angels are inherently good and perform only God’s wishes.Footnote 106 Similarly, according to Egyptian Spiritualists, any healing spirit with whom they interact is unquestionably good and “does not communicate with…the living other than by [God] giving it permission.”Footnote 107 Lastly, angels in the Islamic tradition have abilities that surpass those of the jinn, with whom they were once at war.Footnote 108 Egyptian Spiritualists likewise describe the abilities of the spirits of the dead as surpassing those of jinn. As Abu al-Khayr put it, “one spirit is stronger than the entire kingdom of the jinn.”Footnote 109
Another Islamic analogue for the good works of the spirits of the dead came from the belief that deceased Sufi saints can aid the living. The Spiritualist idea that the dead continue to perform good deeds in the afterlife such that “God raises their rank,” as one writer put it,Footnote 110 parallels Sufi claims about Friends being able to help the living after their deaths because of their favored rank with God.Footnote 111 Indeed, around the same time Egyptian Spiritualists made such arguments, al-Muslim defended the idea that some of the barzakh’s inhabitants, namely God’s Friends, continue to enact good deeds on earth.Footnote 112 For their part, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers claimed that al-Sayyida Nafisa (d. 824), a well-known Friend with a tomb in Cairo, was actually a “healing spirit” (rūḥ muʿālija), who “participated in healing the sick in séance rooms and in the homes of the ill ones.”Footnote 113
ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers drew attention to Sufi claims about Friends in the afterlife continuing to interact with the living to suggest parallels with Spiritualist claims about the good deeds of the dead. On the most basic level, there is a belief among Muslims that the dead and the living can intercourse with one another in dreams.Footnote 114 This belief is particularly common among Egypt’s Sufi communities, who regard dreams as avenues of communication between deceased Friends and their devotees.Footnote 115 In their discussions of Sufism and Friends, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers highlight this to legitimate a basic Spiritualist postulate—that the dead and living communicate with one another.Footnote 116 More specifically, however, the magazine highlighted the postmortem deeds of Friends to make claims about the works of the dead. Thus, it published an article by the Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Bakhit al-Mutiʿa (d. 1935), affirming that deceased Friends wield marvels (karāmāt) for their devotees. There is no doubt, he writes, “that the spirits of Friends…after their bodily death are a cause through their prayer and attention to God…of the fulfilling of the needs of some visitors to [their tombs] seeking their intercession.”Footnote 117 Echoing Sufi arguments about the favored status of Friends with God, an ʿAlam al-Ruh writer asserted, “God honors their spirits, so they materialize after their death in the world of the barzakh and perform wonders [al-aʿājīb] with their devotees and disciples.”Footnote 118 Sufi narratives about deceased Friends’ marvels provided ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers with material within which to find parallels with Spiritualist claims. One author, after lamenting that Egyptians look askance at “modern Spiritualism,” noted that it confirms the plausibility of Friends enacting wonders like al-Sayyida Nafisa’s healings. Spiritualism, he writes, “reveals for people these secrets and presents to them evidence and proof for the continuance of life [after death], interpreting those doings of extraordinary phenomena [al-khawāriq] that this group [i.e., Sufis] used to call the marvels of Friends [karāmāt al-awliyāʾ].”Footnote 119
Despite the analogies Abu al-Khayr and his colleagues made between Spiritualism and Islamic traditions, the mechanics of spirit healing closely align with Spiritualism. Describing what happened during a spirit healing session, Hamid Abu al-Khayr, who was also clairvoyant, writes that he saw the spirits “encircling the patient. There were six doctors and two assistants…. Each was individually examining the patient and writing its report, delivering [the report] to the [spirit] leader.” During this examination, “the body of the patient healed…by means of the emission of rays [ashiʿʿa] brought to bear upon him from the ethereal apparatus [al-jihāz al-athīrī] that one of the assistants of the spirits placed on [the patient’s] head.”Footnote 120 That spirits utilized an “ethereal apparatus” to emit healing rays is a consistent claim in ʿAlam al-Ruh. “The spirits heal the patients,” writes another author, by “sending x-rays from ethereal apparatuses, which are reflected to the clairvoyant who concentrates the [x-rays],…directing them to the patient.”Footnote 121 The language of ether-based healing rays and apparatuses, and disembodied spirit doctors does not have precedents in the Islamic tradition, though similar claims can be found in Edwards’s writings,Footnote 122 which suggests their Spiritualist provenance.
As we have seen, the Egyptian Spiritualist effort to legitimize their practices took multiple forms—from exploring common ground with Islamic ideas about God’s curative powers to analogizing the good works of the dead to the deeds performed by angels and deceased Sufi saints. They thus combined elements from both Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies in their claims. In sum, what they produced was novel and unconventional, drawing from multiple traditions. This is important because although they saw their project as a friend to religion, Egyptian Spiritualists posited distinctions between Spiritualism and local understandings of the Islamic tradition, especially because Spiritualism, they claimed, was grounded in science. As I will show in the next section, they did not think of Spiritualism as a religion, but rather as a scientific tool with which to investigate religious discourses and advance new understandings of them.
Of Science and Spirits
For ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers, Spiritualism would undo the conflict between science and religion and produce a more advanced understanding of the world’s religions, including Islam. Just as importantly, it would also yield a more advanced understanding of science, one that would affirm the existence of spiritual agencies and refute scientific and medical materialisms. In this section, I consider how ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers framed Spiritualism as a scientific tool with which they could investigate spiritual phenomena and affirm their reality, on the one hand, and critique scientific materialism, on the other. In their commitments to scientizing religion and society, Egypt’s Spiritualists shared much with the Nasserist state’s progressive social vision.Footnote 123 Their emphasis on science was a reflection of the era’s scientistic ethos. Yet their critiques of scientific materialism and commitments to Spiritualist cosmology were at odds with this ethos, and Egyptian Spiritualists, as we will see, encountered criticisms.
For the magazine’s writers, Spiritualism was religion’s ally. According to Jumʿa, its emergence demonstrated that “the progress of the natural sciences has not ceased bringing together distance between the deniers of the spirit and its believers.”Footnote 124 Although an ally to religion, it was not a religion. Abu al-Khayr emphasized this and castigated those whom he believed conflated Spiritualism with religiosity (tadayyun) and Sufism.Footnote 125 He asserted that Spiritualism “is not a form of mysticism nor is it a plunging excessively into religiosity [imʿānan fī al-tadayyun] as ignorant ones of the religious folks do…. It is [rather] a practical and theoretical explanation of the truth of life after death and the possibility of communication between the living and the spirits of the dead.”Footnote 126 It was, in other words, a science. “The study of the spirit,” wrote Jabra, “has become science of firm establishment with its own principles, theories, laboratories, and scientists.”Footnote 127
Along these lines, Spiritualism, for these authors, provided the means for pushing understandings of religion out of the realm of legend and into the realm of empirical verification. Jumʿa, for example, describes the work of psychical researchers, such as J. B. Rhine (d. 1980), on manifestations of “extrasensory perception” (al-idrāk bi-ghayr al-ḥawāss), like telepathy (tilībāthī), and describes instances from the Islamic tradition when pious individuals exhibited telepathic powers including the Caliph Umar (d. 644) and some unnamed Sufis. Such ideas, he writes, were once “considered…under the authority of superstition [fī ḥukm al-khurāfa],” but adds that “when modern Spiritualist science came, it proved the validity [of telepathy] and the possibility of it occurring, and made it one of the phenomena testifying to the facets of the spirit [al-ẓawāhir al-dālla ʿalā wujūh al-rūḥ].”Footnote 128 Similarly, another author reflected on the Qur’an’s instructions that believers take refuge in God “from the evil of an envier when he envies” (113:5). Although people once considered such claims about envy mere “superstition,” he writes, “modern science has furnished scientific evidence of it.” “Modern Spiritualism,” he adds, has become “the first scientific authority to believe in the soundness of this theory.”Footnote 129 In this sense, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers believed that to understand the Islamic tradition through Spiritualism was to understand it through science. Thus, Abu al-Khayr described his Spiritualist project in this way: “I will don the clothing of the scientific preacher [al-wāʿiẓ al-ʿilmī], or the preacher who uses in sermons chemistry, physics, and biology. In this way I will be a preacher of the newest type [aḥdath ṭirāz].”Footnote 130
Evidently, Egyptian Spiritualists believed their approach toward religion was innovative; they conceived of their work as producing a more advanced understanding of the Islamic tradition. For this reason, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers argued that the extraordinary occurrences (khawāriq) and marvels recorded in hadith, Islamic healing traditions, and Sufi hagiographies had scientific explanations. As one writer put it, “modern Spiritualist science has removed the veil from some surprising truths [ḥaqāʾiq mudhisha], with which we can analyze many of the extraordinary occurrences that have appeared in Islamic history [al-tārīkh al-islāmī].”Footnote 131 This writer then describes instances of Prophetic healing as recorded by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), which, he claims, have explanations in Spiritualism. In another article, an author describes forms of “spirit healing in the Islamic heritage” including “the placing of the hands on the sick person…dry spitting [nafth] and blowing [nafkh]…prayer [ṣalāt], supplicatory prayer, supplication [ibtihāl], and ruqya.” These techniques, he argues, have their “scientific interpretation” (tafsīr ʿilmī) in that “the spirit healing medium encounters from the spirit world spiritual rays [ashiʿʿa rūḥiyya] which filter through his body and emit from the tips of his fingers so that they are directed to ethereal appendages [al-aʿḍāʾ al-athīriyya] that correspond to their ill counterparts in the [patient’s] material body.”Footnote 132
In making such claims, these writers were in effect asserting that Spiritualism could adjudicate the truth of Islamic traditions and advance understandings of Islam. Another example comes from Radi’s account of Rhinehart’s activities in Egypt. Rhinehart was known for materializing objects, such as gems from his body. Egyptian Spiritualists, Radi says, were impressed by his ability to materialize objects. Rhinehart’s deeds, he adds, proved that certain people can wield marvelous powers. What this “American medium undertook,” he writes, “proves without debate the truthfulness of the ‘extraordinary’ deeds [al-aʿmāl al-khāriqa] undertaken by…God’s Friends and the righteous worshippers over the course of the years.”Footnote 133
While such arguments depicted the Islamic tradition as amenable to science and highlighted Spiritualism’s scientific credentials, they also echoed critiques Euro-American spiritual seekers leveled against scientific materialism. Indeed, Abu al-Khayr was as sharp of a critic of the materialist presumptions of Egypt’s medical establishment as he was of the superstitions of religious folks. Egyptian Spiritualists, for example, highlighted the work of Western scientists-turned-spiritual seekers, including Rhine—a former botanist and pioneer of psychical research, who wrote The Reach of the Mind (1947)—and Alexis Carrel (d. 1944), a cardiovascular surgeon and author of the international bestseller Man the Unknown (1936).Footnote 134 Both were critics of materialist conceptions of science who believed that future research would affirm the existence of spiritual powers. Their works frequently featured in Egypt’s Islamic intellectual scene and were channeled by Brotherhood affiliates in their criticisms of materialism.Footnote 135
ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers acknowledged that their healing techniques were not accepted by most Egyptian medical professionals. The magazine reported on their efforts to gain recognition for the legitimacy of their healing practices and their debates with critics, whom they derided as “materialists” (māddiyyūn) who espouse “the philosophy of empty, idle speech.”Footnote 136 In one article, Abu al-Khayr lamented the “opposition” they faced from “men of religion and psychologists” (rijāl al-dīn wa-l-sīkūlugiyyūn). While discussing the “errors” these critics purvey about religion and science, Abu al-Khayr describes Rhine’s work on extrasensory perception and asserts that “psychology and psychologists will crumble in the face of modern spirit science.”Footnote 137 In another article, he mocked the comments of an Egyptian doctor, who rejected spirit healing, even though “modern spirit science,” claimed Abu al-Khayr, was an established discipline in Euro-American universities. He then called on this doctor to acquaint himself with “the renowned medical doctor, scientist, Dr. Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize winner, who wrote avowing spiritual phenomena [muʿtarifan bi al-ẓawāhir al-rūḥiyya] and spirit healing.”Footnote 138 Abu al-Khayr was particularly fond of referencing Carrel’s experience studying miraculous healings at Lourdes shrine in France and his views on prayer’s healing powers while responding to critics of spirit healing.Footnote 139
If Carrel and Rhine’s work provided Egyptian Spiritualists with resources with which they could criticize scientific materialism, the words of their patients provided another source of material. In their letters to ʿAlam al-Ruh, Abu al-Khayr’s patients related their experiences with failed medical treatments and complained of the inability of doctors to heal them.Footnote 140 Such letters provided Egyptian Spiritualists the opportunity to publicize the alleged wrongdoings of their rivals. For instance, in their introduction to one letter, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s editors noted that despite “spirit healing’s tremendous success in Egypt,” it still had many critics among psychologists. For his part, the letter writer describes seeking treatment from psychologists who, although they were unable to help him, took much of his money. They “deceived me for a long time and obtained from me a large sum without benefit,” he writes. The letter closes thanking Abu al-Khayr for quickly healing him at no expense.Footnote 141
As this section has shown, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers utilized Spiritualism to probe the Islamic tradition and recast it in scientific terms, while at the same time defend their beliefs and criticize scientific materialism. They thus worked to scientize religion and spiritualize science. In this sense, they were not unlike spiritual seekers and advocates of ontological fluidity elsewhere in the Islamic world.Footnote 142 In the next section, I consider another feature of the Egyptian Spiritualist project, one that resonates with modern occult exploration and metaphysical inquiries as they have existed across the globe. Like their fellow travelers in different contexts, Egyptian Spiritualists framed their enterprise as one of reforming and uplifting society by casting out superstition. However, one of the more unique features of their campaign against superstition, as we will see, relates to how Spiritualist spirit healing in Egypt was refracted through the prism of local exorcism practices and beliefs about the jinn.
Exorcising Superstition from Egyptian Society
Abu al-Khayr and his associates distinguished Spiritualist healing practices from what they saw as the superstitions of unenlightened local healing traditions. One of the most important of these distinctions relates to possession or “mass,” as it is called in Arabic. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, jinn are thought to be the cause of possession and local practices for dealing with jinn possession developed.Footnote 143 Although ʿAlam al-Ruh’s Spiritualists accepted the reality of jinn possession, they maintained that the possessions and hauntings they dealt with were caused by the spirits of the human dead. Indeed, they believed that if some spirits of the dead enacted good in the world, others inflicted harm upon individuals, or disrupted their physical environment by causing fires, overturning furniture, and breaking glass. As we will see, the subtext of the Egyptian Spiritualism effort to maintain a distinction between their project and local ideas about jinn related to their desire to distinguish the spirit healing of Spiritualists, with its alleged scientific grounding, from local exorcism traditions that they believed were based in superstition rather than fact.
In Abu al-Khayr’s articles on possession and what he called “spirit disturbance,” by which he meant hauntings, he described the activities of the dead who behave maliciously. “Spirit possession” (al-mass al-rūḥī) he writes, is “caused by unseen personalities [shakhṣiyyāt ghayr manẓūra] who attack…some of the living.” They are “the spirits of the dead who are not aware of their passing into the world of the spirit, so they cling to the world of matter and cause pains and illness among its inhabitants.”Footnote 144 He adds in another article, “an evil spirit” (rūḥ sharīr) may not only cause someone physical and psychological harm, but also might push a person toward the “crime of murder.”Footnote 145
ʿAlam al-Ruh is packed with reports about Abu al-Khayr’s efforts to treat possessions and stop hauntings. A consistent feature in these reports is Abu al-Khayr’s insistence that only “Spiritualist methods” (wasāʾil rūḥiyya), specifically spirit healing, can ameliorate disturbances caused by the dead. Thus, in one article about how he exorcised “disturbing spirits” bothering a Sudanese family, Abu al-Khayr tells his readers that, in these instances, “amulets [taʿāwīdh] and ruqya do not benefit…. No treatment is there in these cases other than Spiritualist methods, whether from proximity or distance. And I mean by Spiritualist methods the reliance upon pure, refined spirits in halting these troublemakers in their tracks.”Footnote 146 Abu al-Khayr told an Egyptian newspaper that there are some cases of disturbances, including some caused by jinn, wherein only “Spiritualist methods” will prevail. What is necessary in such cases, he says, is “our resorting to the refined spirits [arwāḥ rāqiyya].”Footnote 147 In one of his articles, Hamid Abu al-Khayr gives an idea of what, exactly, the good spirits do to aid the possessed. Describing a spirit healing session, he claims that the “healing spirit” used his “apparatus” to expel the “invading spirit” (al-rūḥ al-ghāzī) from the body of the patient and “compel it to the ground of the room in front of me.” Thereafter, the patient returned to normal. After healing the patient, the good spirits, says Hamid Abu al-Khayr, went on to pursue the “sorcerer” (sāḥir) who sent this being from the spirit world—in this case a jinni—to harm the patient. “Strong, good spirits were dispatched to [the sorcerer] to detain [taqbiḍ ʿalā] the evil spirits [al-arwāḥ al-sharīra] that this sorcerer used in his evils, and with that, this sorcerer became a sorcerer failing in each deed he undertook…. As such, they constrained his livelihood.”Footnote 148
Clearly Egyptian Spiritualists saw their exorcisms as in competition with an occult economy in Egypt for dealing with spirits. Abu al-Khayr and his associates framed their work as an effort to police this economy. Egyptians, they believed, were held back in their societal development by unscientific perspectives on the unseen and had therefore fallen prey to the manipulation of sorcerers, charlatans, and fraudsters, who claimed, but rarely possessed, knowledge of and influence over the spirit world.Footnote 149 By investigating spirit disturbances, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned themselves as servants of science and society. Along these lines, the writers of ʿAlam al-Ruh criticized zar as ill-informed. One article laments Egyptians’ ignorance of “Spiritualist sciences,” and their resort to zar to treat possession. “In truth,” the author writes, zar is “unscientific” and “ineffective.”Footnote 150 Abu al-Khayr likewise criticized zar, describing as superstitious (khurāfī) the practices associated with it, such as “the burning of incense, the playing of drums, and that annoying shout, and what follows it of ruqya, amulets [taʿāwīdh], and reprehensible songs…which, it is supposed, will expel [from the patient] the invading ‘devil’ [al-ʿafrīt al-ghāzī].”Footnote 151 More ominously, he noted in another article, zar practices actually “increase in terms of pain the states of possession for patients.” Unfortunately, he adds, “We are today passing a period in which cases of spirit possession have become frequent, and charlatans [dajājila] find in this fertile ground,” opportunities to promote such activities as zar. Footnote 152
Zar, however, was not the only practice Egyptian Spiritualists worried about. There was the general perception that Egyptians suffering from malevolent spirits were being duped—as one father put it in a thank you letter to Abu al-Khayr—by all sorts of “shaykhs…charlatan swindlers [al-dajājila al-mushaʿwidhūn],” and even “doctors,” who promised healing but only take “a lot of money without result.”Footnote 153 A problem closely related to that of charlatanry was sorcery (siḥr). The writers of ʿAlam al-Ruh accepted sorcery’s reality, though they sought to minimize the perception that it was reliable for dealing with the spirit world or related, in any way, to Spiritualism. There are different perspectives on sorcery in the Islamic tradition, but given that it is mentioned in the Qur’an, its existence was accepted by Muslim scholars, even if they also cast skepticism on reports of it occurring.Footnote 154
In their articles on the topic, ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers argued that the work of Spiritualists, like themselves, should not be conflated with that of sorcerers. According to one writer, “some erroneously imagine that Spiritualism is a type of sorcery or sleight of hand [al-shaʿwadha], although the difference between them is vast because sorcery employs [taskhīr] the jinn to achieve extraordinary deeds [al-aʿmāl al-khāriqa li al-ʿadāt].”Footnote 155 As these comments intimate, part of the cause of this conflation is that sorcerers, like Spiritualists, claim to communicate with unseen intelligences, in this case the jinn. Importantly, the jinn are believed to be shapeshifters, capable of taking human form. Thus, it was common for Egyptian Spiritualists to be accused of summoning—wittingly or unwittingly—the jinn rather than the spirits of the dead, a charge which they rejected.Footnote 156 Responding to one writer who made this claim, Abu al-Khayr asserted, “I challenge him to bring to us a sorcerer or mention to us a sorcerer that the dead, in his presence, can speak with direct voice and materialize.”Footnote 157 For Abu al-Khayr the proof that the beings he and his colleagues communicated with were the dead is that Spiritualists in the West have, apparently, taken the fingerprints of their spirit world interlocutors to confirm their identities. The jinn, according Abu al-Khayr, do not have such abilities. Abu al-Khayr thus challenged anyone claiming Spiritualism was akin to sorcery to summon a jinni who could replicate his fingerprints.Footnote 158
Rather than be confused for sorcerers, who manipulated the ignorant and self-servingly trafficked in jinn, Egyptian Spiritualists sought recognition as scientific investigators of the paranormal and as social servants. The distinction between science and superstition was therefore of utmost importance for ʿAlam al-Ruh’s writers. “Spiritualism,” as one writer asserted, “necessitates, for understanding some its facts, familiarity with the science of nature and chemistry which decisively shows that it is not a superstition [khurāfa].” If Spiritualism depends on “real facts based upon proven scientific principles,” “sorcery,” he claimed, “depends on jinn.” In line with how Egyptian Spiritualists positioned themselves as servants of society, he warns that sorcery “is among the most severe of crimes in terms of danger for society.” He adds, “Why does the government not fight these liars [affākīn]? Why do we not punish sorcerers [al-saḥara] and fraudsters who drain the money of people futilely and cause to them the worst of harms?”Footnote 159
As these comments indicate, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned themselves as both servants to society and as wardens of the boundaries between science and superstition. Spiritualist ideas and practices, they believed, provided more reasonable and more effective means for dealing with Egypt’s spiritual disturbances. By waging a scientific campaign against irrational and unenlightened beliefs about jinn, sorcery, and exorcism, Abu al-Khayr and his associates saw themselves as contributing to the much-needed uplift and modernization of Egyptian society.
Conclusion
The Egyptian Spiritualist project of ʿAlam al-Ruh offers a valuable window into the Islamic tradition’s twentieth-century entanglements with science. This is because, in Egypt and elsewhere across the globe, metaphysical and occult exploration has often been central to campaigns to advance human knowledge and modernize and uplift society. In Egypt, this manifested in Abu al-Khayr and his colleagues’ efforts to eradicate superstitions related to jinn, exorcism, and possession, as well as their desire to police sorcery and sorcerers. It further manifested in their attempts to utilize Spiritualism as a means of recasting the Islamic tradition in line with a scientistic imaginary, one that emphasized empirical verification over the narratives of tradition. By drawing upon Spiritualist science to explain and interpret paranormal occurrences from the Islamic past and present—including wondrous healings, the marvels of Sufism and God’s Friends, and human intercourse with different types of spirits—Egyptian Spiritualists sought to render the Islamic tradition scientific. Just as importantly, a key element of Egyptian Spiritualism was the claim that “true” science, or science in its most advanced form, recognized the agencies of spiritual powers in the natural world. In this respect, their endeavor was one of spiritualizing science as much as it was one of scientizing the Islamic tradition.
The blending of a scientistic ideology with Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies was one of the most distinctive features of Abu al-Khayr and his colleagues’ Spiritualist project. Indeed, at the heart of this project was a cosmological experimentalism, or a commitment to mix and match claims about empirical verification with diverse elements drawn from Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. The experimental cosmologies of Egypt’s Spiritualist movement included, as we have seen, the combination of Islamic beliefs about the presence and activities of God, angels, deceased Sufi saints, and jinn together with Spiritualist beliefs about the deeds and activities of the human dead, both the good and the evil, as well as the Spiritualist view on the porous nature of the boundary between the world of the living and that of the departed. Ultimately, this cosmology served as a mechanism for Egyptian Spiritualists to craft a plausible whole out of their rather eclectic beliefs, all the while voicing fealty to science, Islam, and Spiritualism.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their feedback and suggestions for revising and improving it. I would also like to thank Heather Hughes at the University of Pennsylvania Library for her assistance locating some of the difficult to find materials I used in it.
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