This dissertation examines early Islamic understandings of godfearingness (taqwā), and how these understandings shape efforts to renew religious discourse in post-revolutionary Egyptian religious spaces. In centering taqwā, it explores a positive valence of fear, one that brings the believer closer to God through a series of practices such as fasting, charity, and upright speech. With a diachronic focus on expressions of taqwā in early Islamic and contemporary Egyptian preaching, I demonstrate how rhetorical beauty and virtuous practice are entwined towards didactic ends. The iterative recollection of early Islamic citations of taqwā in contemporary Egypt, particularly at the prominent center of Sunni Muslim learning al-Azhar, serves as a means of responding to state pressures to liberalize. These pressures must be understood in the context of a broader movement to renew religious discourse, promoted in distinct and sometimes contradictory forms by both the Egyptian state and religious leaders. In Egyptian religious spaces today, there is great concern that Egypt is at risk of losing its societal telos, in part through the rise of atheism. In this context, promoting taqwā comes to serve as a means of protecting against this loss.

The dissertation is divided into three parts. Part One is situated at the advent of Islam in the late antique period. It explores a late antique spirit of godfearingness through analysis of biblical and rabbinic terms for the fear of God. I then look at taqwā’s linguistic inheritances in pre-Islamic Arabian poetry. In the first hundred years of Islam, taqwā becomes an eschatologically oriented fear of God cultivated through specific practices and orientations. This early Islamic understanding is expressed to believers through oration and prophetic hadith that deploy corporeal journey imagery involving techniques of the external body and, significantly, techniques of the heart. Part Two asks how this early Islamic tradition is deployed in contemporary Egypt, particularly in spaces of preaching at al-Azhar. It traces citation as a virtuous practice of recollection through analysis of modern preacher training manuals and examines how citation is deployed by women preachers to resist state efforts to reform al-Azhar. Part Three focuses on the contemporary Egyptian movement to renew religious discourse. It examines the varying and contested understandings of renewal in Egypt that mirror power struggles between the state and al-Azhar. Against this backdrop, I complicate common understandings of extremism to apprehend how my interlocutors consider atheism a form of extremism that threatens Egypt’s societal telos, and how taqwā serves as the antidote.

Attention to taqwā as the pious fear of God emerging in early Islamic texts and reimagined in contemporary Egyptian religious spaces brings to light the affordances of a tradition that are obscured when fear is perceived as primarily negative or sacred texts are seen as a ruin of the past. At stake in this dissertation, then, is an effort to explore the unexpected possibilities and constrictions of ethical life exceeding liberal frameworks of thought and practice, frameworks that often uncritically reject eschatological orientations to modern life and the opportunities such orientations may enable.