Religion serves as an essential framework through which individuals reconcile experiences of trauma, tragedy, and profound injustice with prior beliefs about the world and the divine logic through which it is structured. In this sense, religion offers a means of coping with adversity via a multiplicity of material practices, rituals, speech acts, and psychological processes. Talal Asad transformed scholarship on Islam through his notion of the discursive tradition, defined by its relation to a past upon which it makes claims to authenticity and to a future, for the sake of which knowledge of the correct, authentic form of a practice must be preserved. Islamic belief and practice are not monolithic, homogenous entities, but must be analyzed as historically-deep, contextualized phenomena. Rarely is religious doctrine neatly translated into everyday meaning-making and material practice. Over the last two decades, the positive psychology movement has inspired interdisciplinary inquiries into the nature of religious gratitude and its beneficial effects for both physical and mental health. However, the majority of this research has been conducted with Christian populations and informed by assumptions about the theological significance of gratitude that are grounded in Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Our study draws upon the results of a systematic literature review conducted by the authors and initial findings of pilot qualitative interviews on the lived experience of gratitude. The review employed systematic methods to identify 125 scholarly articles available in Arabic, English, Farsi, and Turkish related to the topic of religious gratitude in order to provide a comprehensive synthesis of the theological significance of gratitude to God within Islamic doctrine and everyday practices. Qualitative interviews were conducted with Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Turkey to explore gratitude as a lived experience and embodied practice. This study thus examines the connections between the lived experience of GTG as an affective, bodily practice and the significance of gratitude within historical and contemporary Islamic sources. Via archival and ethnographic work, we ask how religious ideals of gratitude shape everyday practices of gratitude and in what ways these practices contribute to the psychological process of coping—broadly defined—with hardship through multi-sited fieldwork, participant observation, and person-centered interviews with Syrian refugees.