What Can a Spiritualist Periodical Tell Us about Islam? Archive, Historical Method, and the Unseen in Modern Egypt

Historian Arthur S. Zárate explores ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit), a little-studied Egyptian periodical that reveals how Islam intersected with mid-twentieth-century debates over spirits, jinn, miraculous healing, science, and the unseen. Drawing on this remarkable source held at the Penn Libraries, Zárate considers how encounters with the unseen—and the ways people determined their authenticity—changed over time.

Featured Image: Cover of ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960), Cairo, March 1958. Owner and responsible editor: Ahmad Fahmi Abu al-Khayr. From the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries; photograph by Arthur S. Zárate.