This thesis explores how Egypt’s militant extremists used theological sources and the methodology of Islamic juridical-religious thought as instruments of legitimization for acts of political violence. Most studies dealing with the topic of Muslim extremism in Egypt are defined by a dominant interpretive paradigm, which treats Muslim extremists as political reactionaries, responding to a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural grievances. Although such grievances certainly played an important role in the development of extremism, the theological dimension of extremist ideologies has been drastically understudied. This thesis puts forth two correlative arguments. First, this thesis argues that the phenomenon of Muslim extremism in Egypt cannot be fully understood, without understanding its theological dimension. Secondly, this thesis argues that the historical trajectory of extremism and militant theological thought in Egypt from 1954-1997 unfolded in three distinct and heterogeneous phases, each with its own unique characteristics.

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This work analyzes the methods the Mamluk Sultanate (1250--1517) used to train and educate its military and religious elite. Three separate classes of people are examined: the Mamluks, the religious elite (' ulama') and finally the children of the Mamluks (awlad al-nas). It is demonstrated that in order for the Mamluk Sultanate to function properly, both military and religious scholarship were needed. During the Mamluk period, these methods of training and education were not applied in a uniform manner.

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Through the evidence of the court records (sijill s), this dissertation examines the interplay between Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), codified sultanic law (qanun ) and customary law in the shari`a courts of Ottoman-Cairo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The thesis forwarded suggests that custom was a declining source of law in these centuries as a result of two factors: the imposition of a codified qanun, and a redacted fiqh. / Conflict between Egyptian and Ottoman jurists, a well-documented feature of the sixteenth century, is often depicted as a by-product of the tension between qanun and fiqh. Questioning this framework of analysis, this study views the conflict between Egyptian jurists and their Ottoman counterparts as an exemplar of 'antagonistic shari`as.' The Ottoman shari`a, defined by 'universalism,' entailed a redacted fiqh in which Ḥanafism was privileged above the other schools of law, and a qanun in which sultanic customs were imposed in lieu of local custom. The 'Egyptian shari`a,' on the other hand, was defined by pluralism as it envisioned parity between the schools of law while upholding the role of local custom over and above the authority of the imported qanun¯. At the core of this antagonism, therefore, are two cross-cutting predispositions: one, a propensity for legal orthodoxy; and, two, a propensity (on the part of the Egyptian judiciary) to retain the traditional features of Islamic legal orthopraxy. / At the heart of the state's endeavour to construct a legal orthodoxy was a desire to promote a model of 'correct outward conduct' that would generate cultural parity between the empire's myriad ethnic communities. Such an undertaking fostered more than a growing social homogeneity, however. Positioned as the final arbiters of social justice and morality, the state and its courts were able to realign the social contract between the state and its subjects to strengthen the ties binding the individual to the state while weakening communal bonds. In the final analysis, the increasingly assimilative role of an Ottoman-defined shari`a over local custom, diminished the communities' roles in the arbitration of justice and led to the making of a proto-citizen in the Ottoman Empire.