Simon Conrad studies the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East, with a focus on the history of 20th century Arabic scholarship and its dissemination across genres and media. His first book (in progress) examines the academic study of Sufism or Islamic mysticism (taṣawwuf) in Cairo and Alexandria and its afterlives across the Arabic public sphere between the interwar years and Nasser’s death. His current work focuses on the transnational history of this scholarship amid decolonisation and the Cold War. In future, Simon hopes to build on some of these themes while shifting his focus to Sudanese actors.

Simon is strongly committed to collaborative scholarship. Most recently, following two symposia, he edited a special issue of Philological Encounters that focuses on the role of the editor (muḥaqqiq) of pre-colonial Arabic literature in modern Middle East intellectual history. An upcoming collaborative project studies intellectual links between India and the Arab world.

Simon obtained his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, where he was a Harold W. Dodds fellow. He also holds a BA in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Islamic Studies from Free University in Berlin. From 2021-2023, he was Associate Researcher at the Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Research Project

Simon is currently developing his first monograph, Return of the Spirit: Towards a History of Mysticism in Modern Arabic Thought, based on his doctoral dissertation. The book offers the first sustained study of how Islamic mysticism (taṣawwuf) was reimagined in Egypt from the interwar period through the height of Nasserist pan-Arabism. Drawing on scholarly writings and their afterlives in journalism, politics, and popular culture, it highlights the work of overlooked intellectuals—such as Abū al-ʿIlā ʿAfīfī, Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Ḥilmī, and ʿUthmān Amīn—who fashioned a mystical counter-canon of Arabic and Islamic modernism. By transforming taṣawwuf from a tradition for the initiate into a cultural, literary, and intellectual resource for the wider public, these figures reshaped the modern intellectual landscape. The project foregrounds the largely neglected corpus of academic scholarship produced in the public universities of Cairo and Alexandria, situating it within Egyptian cultural and political history, and relating it to mid-century debates on decolonisation, revolution, and the making of a ‘new Arab man’.

During his fellowship at the Orient-Institut Beirut, Simon is extending these themes to a broader Arab and transnational context. His current research examines the role of mysticism in the thought of major leftist intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the Lebanese philosopher Ḥusayn Muruwwa and the Iraqi historian Hādī al-ʿAlawī. In addition to tracing their engagement with traditions of scholarship developed in Egypt, Simon explores the openings that taṣawwuf provided for their intellectual projects, and considers how a focus on mysticism can shed new light on the history of Arabic Marxism.