Textual Traces of Tradition: Taqwā in the Early Islamic Moment and its Reimagination in Contemporary Egyptian Preaching

This dissertation argues that across disparate times and spaces, expressions of the Islamic concept of taqwā (piety, godfearingness, consciousness of God) come to index ruptures, shifts, and unexpected continuities in societal orientations towards God. Through textual and ethnographic research that tacks between two distinct temporal moments, the advent of Islam and contemporary Egypt, I examine the bricolage of inherited texts, traditions, sayings, and embodied practices that collectively signify expressions of taqwā. In the first Hijri century, biblical understandings of godfearingness together with taqwā’s pre-Islamic poetic linguistic inheritances coalesced into the internally and externally embodied concept that permeates the earliest Islamic sources. Navigating anxieties that Egyptian society is heading towards two equally threatening types of extremism, atheism and religious-based violence, in contemporary Egypt this early tradition of taqwā is reimagined and redeployed by religious leaders and their constituencies alongside uniquely modern strategies like cinema clubs, YouTube preaching, and psychological counseling.