In 1930, following his doctorate on the great Muslim mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi at Cambridge, Abu al-‘Ila ‘Afifi joined the Egyptian University’s young department of philosophy. He was greeted by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, ‘the teacher of a generation’ and a stern embodiment of Egypt’s liberal elite who advocated the study of Ancient Greek classics and European enlightenment philosophy. Informed by ‘Afifi that he intended to offer courses on mysticism (tasawwuf), Lutfi al-Sayyid reacted with paternalistic surprise: “What do mean mysticism? Dervishes at the university, Abu al-Ila?” ‘Afifi was ordered to teach logic instead and was free to teach mysticism only years later. My paper discusses the life and thought of Abu al-‘Ila ‘Afifi who—despite opposition—pioneered the academic study of mysticism in the Egypt of the 1930s and 40s. Trained at Cairo’s Dar al-‘Ulum and the University of Cambridge, ‘Afifi returned to Cairo at a time of great political and cultural turbulence: following the cataclysm of the First World War, disillusionment with the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, and widespread doubt in liberal progress towards ‘civilisation’ along European lines, Egyptian intellectuals turned to the Arabo-Islamic heritage—the turath—for inspiration, direction, and as a source of ‘authentic’ knowledge and being. In this context, ‘Afifi was at a forefront of a whole range of actors—philosophers and mystics, ʿulamaʾ and Catholic scholars, Orientalists, philologists, and esoterics—who endeavoured to bring to the fore the vast body of Islamic mystical literature as an intellectual resource. He did so in the context of Egypt’s young public universities, both in Cairo and Alexandria: as professor of philosophy, ‘Afifi made tasawwuf a fixture on Egypt’s humanities curriculum and pioneered its study as philosophy; as an academic mentor, he trained a generation of Egyptian scholars whose influence would range from philophy to psychoanalysis; and as a public philosopher, he argued for the intellectual value of ‘mystical’ concepts—from intuition (dhawq) to existence (wujud)—reading mystical treatises alongside contempory philosophy. By providing a close reading of ‘Afifi’s scholarship and journalism—the first dedicated study of this seminal figure in a European language—I account for the transformative effect ‘Afifi had on tasawwauf as concept and canon. In so doing, my paper suggests that ‘Afifi and others involved in the academic study of religion—mysticism in particular—constitute a vital ‘missing link’ in recent efforts in the history of Arabic thought to recover the multi-layered archive of intellectual decolonisation in Egypt and beyond.