Sundry studies have been carried out on the intersection of religion and state in Egypt and the central role played in politics by the official religious establishment, Al-Azhar. Ever since its incorporation into the state apparatus in the 1960s, Al-Azhar has given the consecutive political authorities in Egypt a monopoly over the religious interpretation where it can find a religious justification and lend moral purpose and legitimacy to its actions. One of the major lacunas of the existing literature on Al-Azhar and its relationship to politics is that most studies are anchored in national methodological frameworks, overlooking the transnational phenomena and the contemporary rapid social changes that transcend the parochial nature of the nationally bounded perspective. None of the literature tackles either the role that al-Azhar has been playing in the global political domain in the last few decades or the impact of the accelerated and intensified global phenomenon on the religious institution itself. Thus, this paper takes an epistemological and methodological shift and seeks to explore the relationship between Al-Azhar and the dynamics of politics from a global perspective. It traces the evolution of al-Azhar’s global political role and explores the factors that have been conducive to the formation of the religious institution’s stature within the global political domain. The paper argues that subsuming al-Azhar’s role to domestic political functions is not quite apposite, as the religious institution has been increasingly interacting with global politics since 9/11. More specifically, the paper argues that there are two factors that have been conducive to the formulation of al-Azhar’s global political influence: 1) the global war on terrorism; and 2) the increasingly important role of religion in Egypt’s foreign policy.