This paper looks at contributions to mid-20th century discussions over ‘the crisis of man’ by Egyptian scholars’ of mysticism (tasawwuf). Against the backdrop of the rise of the academic study of mysticism at Egypt’s institutions of higher learning and its diffraction in the journalistic sphere and beyond, scholars such as Abu al-‘Ila ‘Afifi, Muhammad Mustafa Hilmi, and ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi turned to mysticism in attempts to redeem ‘man’ (al-insan) in the shadow of world war, colonialism, and the dawn of the nuclear age. My focus is on scholars’ recourse to the idea of ‘the total man’ (al-insan al-kamil). A long-established notion in Islamic mysticism and philosophy, the ‘the total man’ for mid-century scholars and intellectuals denoted different things; at its very core, it denoted the unification of the worldly and the sacred in ‘man’ and the ability to ‘connect’ to a plain of spiritual reality beyond matter. In my paper, I highlight the complex genealogies of this idea—from Ibn Al-‘Arabi and Al-Jili over Weimar Germany to the institutional context of Egyptian academe—while highlighting the potentials that recourse to it opened up. These included, as I will show, an understanding of man that transcended tradition and race; a “religion after religion” beyond the law; and an aspirational ideal of being an authentic Muslim subject in an enchanted modernity. I do so by situating a close reading of selected texts in the institutional, cultural, and political history of mid-century Egypt.