Mathias Ghyoot

Position
3rd-year Ph.D. student
Office
Jones Hall
Bio/Description

Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He studies the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia with a particular interest in the history of Islamism.

Mathias is the author of the forthcoming book Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2025). Based on more than two hundred prison memoirs written by both Muslim Brothers and Sisters, the book tells the harrowing, yet fascinating story of the Muslim Brotherhood’s imprisonment from 1948 to 1975, and takes the reader on a rare journey behind the prison walls to show how radicals and moderates, ministers and intelligence officers, clerics and jailors, were embroiled in an epic battle to define Islam in modern Egypt. Mathias is, moreover, working on the edition and translation – from Arabic into English – of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), a prominent literary critic of Egypt and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who visited the United States in the 1940s. This book is tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making.

Mathias obtained a M.A. in Islamic Studies with distinction from the University of Copenhagen in 2021 and received the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies (NSMES) Award for Best M.A. Thesis in 2022. Mathias also holds a B.A. in Arabic and Religious Studies from the University of Copenhagen, and in 2018 completed the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) Program at the American University of Beirut.

Mathias has conducted fieldwork and archival research across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, and is proficient in Arabic (MSA and Egyptian/Levantine Colloquial) and Urdu.

Selected Publications

Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2025) 

“Paradise on Earth: How the Muslim Brotherhood Built a ‘Virtuous City’ (al-madina al-fadila) in ʿAbd al-Nasir’s Prisons”, in Simon Wolfgang Fuchs and Thomas Pierret (eds.), Utopias in the Middle East and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024) (forthcoming)

“Ahlam al-Nasr and the Islamic State’s Justification for Execution by Burning”, in Omar Anchassi and Robert Gleave (eds.), Islamic Law in Context: A Primary Source Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)

“Breaking the Fourth Wall: Abū al-Faḍl (d. 1960) on the Prohibition on Theater in Twentieth Century Egypt,” in Sune Haugbolle et al. (eds.), Suzanna in the Bath: Festschrift in Honor of Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen’s 60th Birthday (Copenhagen: Forlaget Vandkunsten, 2023)

“Supporters and Opponents: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Second Prison Ordeal, 1954-1964,” Middle Eastern Studies (2023), 59(3):478-501

“‘Nay, We Obeyed God When We Burned Him’: Debating Immolation (Tahriq) Between the Islamic State and al-Qaʿida”, in Mustafa Baig and Robert Gleave (eds.), Violence in Islamic Thought from European Imperialism to the Post-Colonial Era (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)

“Signs of the Merciful: ʿAbdullah ʿAzzam (d. 1989) and the Miraculous Chronicles of the Afghan Jihad, 1982-1992,” Journal of Religion and Violence (2019), 7(2):92-127