While the prominent Muslim preacher Amr Khaled is widely known for his television programs that teach Islam to Egyptian and global audiences, he has recently turned to books as the ideal medium for his reformist project. His latest literacy and literary initiatives stress reading and books as vectors for personal and national improvement. His latest move to draw on, create, and emphasize the role of the written word is thus consonant with Egypt’s Islamic Revival that gave rise to modes of self-learning, often through newly accessible and low-cost books. In order to understand Khaled’s turn to reading as pivotal to Islamic reform, this paper telescopes from Khaled’s call to properly “live with” the Quran through reflective reading practices, to his broader appeal for cultural renewal through the habit of reading. Khaled develops a reading strategy that disciplines traditional Quranic practices that he dismisses as mere ritual in order to explicate Quranic reading regimens as a method to structure one’s life and generate productivity. He applies new meanings to old rituals by giving Quran reading regimens worldly justification. At the same time, the paper demonstrates how he turns to reading as an act of worship in itself, not only when one reads the Quran or other Islamic texts, but more broadly as an activity with potential to transform the reader into a cultured, responsible, and self-knowing subject. At the intersection of reading as a textual and embodied practice is what I call Khaled’s hermeneutic of success: autonomous reading as a technique that is not only necessary to understand a text’s true meaning, but that is essential to forming a particular kind of believing (and reading) subject. For Khaled autonomous reading is not only a way to reform Muslim encounters with the Quran, but to shape the life of a modern Muslim. This paper therefore inquires into how his efforts to reformulate “religious reading” may not only seek to rationalize but also secularize traditional Quranic reading regimes. How does the self-learning enabled by autonomous reading transform relationships to and conceptions of authority? How do appeals to reason redefine ideal Muslim engagements with God’s Word? In tending to these questions this paper goes beyond the program of a single preacher in order to investigate the pivotal practice of reading in Islamic reform.