"Over the last few decades, Sunni Islam has undergone a profound transformation as the result of the growing influence exerted over it by what is known as Salafism. This term, though often misunderstood, is claimed by a range of movements and individuals harboring diverse and sometimes opposing political positions, from the loyalist ulama who act as partners of the Saudi monarchy to the brutal jihadis of the Islamic State. Yet, despite their substantive differences, all these actors agree on a number of fundamentals. They claim to represent Sunni Islam in its strictest and most austere form; they openly reject the non-Sunni schools of Islam, starting with Shiism; and they promote social and religious practices deriving from an ultraconservative norm, which they describe as inherited from Islam's pious ancestors. This book explores the social and political history of Salafism in Egypt, from the days of its emergence in the reformist circles of Cairo in the 1910-1920s up to the present period. Relying on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival documents, Stéphane Lacroix illustrates the transformations of the Islamic norm in Egypt in the twentieth and early twenty-first century through examining the collective and individual actors who have played a role in those changes as well as the social and political contexts in which they operated. In so doing, he argues that Salafism, despite being a transnational phenomenon, takes on local characteristics that allow it to quickly take hold and have significant influence as an ideology. Twilight of the Saints offers an in-depth, authoritative understanding of the relationship between Salafism, politics, and authoritarianism in Egypt"--