The paper attempts to disentangle the plurality of conceptual threads and material trajectories that underlie the contemporary uses and understandings of the notions of zahir and batin within a transnational Egyptian-Sudanese brotherhood (the tariqa Burhaniyya Disuqiyya Shadhiliyya), which stands in a twice- subaltern position with respect to both official and Reformist Egyptian Islam. After a long-lasting campaign against its doctrines and practices the Burhani Shaykh (leader) decided to leave Egypt in order to concentrate his efforts on proselytizing for converts in Europe, starting from a group of German Gestalt psychotherapists. Informally reaccepted by the Egyptian Sufi Council 2004 under the name of another Shaykh, the Burhani disciples have rearticulated their cosmology in ‘modern’ terms, embedding Sufi notions with ‘modern’ western psychological notions, in order to respond to the enduring suspicions towards their beliefs and practices. Structured around the dichotomy “ma‘anaui (spiritual)/maddi (material)”, this cosmology relies on a vocabulary, which puts into dialogue notions belonging to the Sufi mystical tradition -such as zahir (manifest reality) and batin (hidden reality)-, with liberal and modern conceptions of private and public dimensions of the Self, as well as with psychological notions of embodiment, linked to Gestalt psychology. Through this complex cosmology, the Burhanis vindicate a particular relation between emotions, senses, body and religious meaning, which blurs the boundaries between representations of ‘Modern’ and ‘Traditional’ Islam dominant in the contemporary Egyptian public sphere. However, the genealogy of this cosmology is one that cannot be explored only on the level of explicit theorizations, just as the uses of its vocabulary are not confined to the level of public discourses. Rather, the process of exchange and of encounter between the different traditions of knowledge described above, happens primarily on the level of the life-worlds of the Burhani disciples, and the notions of zahir and batin infuse the ways in which the disciples make their moral choices and express their existential stakes. The paper thus describes how such Burhani vocabulary of moderness, beyond its discursive level, also reflects a common Burhani grammar of action and experience.