From the mid-1930s until the outbreak of the war in Palestine in 1948, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt sponsored an Islamic Theater Troupe as part of its range of charitable, cultural, political, and religious activities. Active in both Cairo and the countryside, the troupe organized performances of Islamic dramas in youth programs and village squares in service of the practice of da’wa (recalling Muslims to the faith) and as a pedagogical technique for the transmission of historical and scriptural knowledge of the Islamic tradition and the strengthening of community ties within its membership. At the same time, the Troupe’s activities were not divorced from the wider theatrical and literary currents of the time, and Brotherhood figures such as ‘Abd al-Rahman Al-Banna (brother of the founder of the organization, Hasan Al-Banna) published their plays, staged them for cultural elites at venues such as the Cairo Opera House, and drew in audiences to their performances by casting stars of the cinema and theater of the day, including Fatma Rushdi and Hasan Al-Barudi. But the Troupe’s activities were not universally approved, and its critics and detractors came from the ranks of both secular intellectuals such as Salama Musa as well as Muslim scholars and preachers. Using the example of the Muslim Brotherhood’s theater troupe before the July 1952 Revolution, this paper explores the relationship between Islamic drama as an aesthetic form and as a religious and ethical practice in modern Egypt. Based on research in the Egyptian national library (Dar al-Kutub) and private archives, the sources for the paper include oral histories, memoirs, text versions of the plays, as well as advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of theater projects published in the organization’s periodicals and pamphlets. Through analysis of the controversies and debates surrounding the Troupe’s activities, the paper analyzes the place of aesthetics – understood as both sensory, bodily experience as well as appreciation of beauty and art – in mediating modern Muslim religious practice, the transmission of the Islamic tradition, and the cultivation of modern forms of ethics, piety, and subjectivity in Egypt. In addressing these issues the paper also seeks to re-think the relationship between modern aesthetic and literary movements in the Arab World and Islamic political activism – two spheres usually seen as distinct and almost always opposed, if not openly antagonistic, to one another.