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Ninety-Nine

A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of Allah

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Book

Pages: 272

Illustrations: 12 illustrations

Release Date: October 06, 2026

According to Islamic tradition, God has at least ninety-nine names. In Ninety-Nine, Amira Mittermaier presents ninety-nine short chapters based on her fieldwork and interviews with over one hundred Egyptians about who God is to them. In Egypt’s turbulent twenty-first century—the Egyptian uprising, a military coup, a pandemic, a climate crisis, wars across the region—God is talked about endlessly yet remains elusive. Ninety-Nine follows Allah into different spaces and conversations without ever claiming to get the full picture. We meet a Cairo beggar, an enigmatic dervish, a queer agnostic, and a Salafi housewife. We meet a depressed God, a cute God, a God who has stopped caring, a loving God, and a God who is a bully. We learn about divine interventions, big and small, and about daily struggles, even fights, with God. An intimate mosaic of Allah, Ninety-Nine celebrates the multiplicity inherent to the Islamic tradition and offers insight into how present-day Muslims grapple with big theological questions amidst their busy lives.

Praise

“This is a moving, poetic, elegant and beautifully written book about how people experience God in Egypt. It is a reflection on how God is felt and heard and seen, and thus, about how God is held in the awareness of God’s followers in richly varied ways. Sometimes secular observers think that the main anthropological question about religion is belief. This book show us how flat-footed that perspective can be.” - T.M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

“Both ethnography and personal testimony, Ninety-Nine opens a window onto the many ways Egyptian Muslims reflect on, relate to, and encounter God across their daily lives. Through this intimate account, one comes to see that the divine is not an answer to the question of existence but itself a question, one that invites as many responses as there are lives from which to ask it.” - Charles K. Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley

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Author/Editor Bios

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Amira Mittermaier is Professor of Religion and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times and Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination.

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3906-8 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3410-0 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6268-4 /