3. ‘I Quenched the Thirst of Seventy Million’

This chapter explores the story of Sumayya ʿAfīfī, an Egyptian translator who translated the concise Qur’an commentary al-Muntakhab into Russian. It traces the trajectory of ʿAfīfī’s life against the backdrop of the Cold War era Egyptian-Soviet collaboration and the subsequent Islamic revival in Egypt. ʿAfīfī’s journey serves as a demonstrative case of a professional woman with a career spanning Nasserist socialism and Hosni Mubarak’s alliance with Islamic institutions. During the first period, ʿAfīfī was among the first cohort of Egyptian students who traveled to study in the USSR, seeking educational opportunities to aid Egypt’s post-colonial development. Her educational mobility here provides a lived example of the vision of Nasserist progress in which women balanced career and home life became manifestations of the state’s progress towards modernization. During the second period, she gained public recognition as a prominent and celebrated Qur’an translator. The secular mobility of her past became key to enabling and legitimizing her activities in religious translation and da’wa activism—spreading Egyptian Islam to the lands of post-Soviet Russia through the dissemination of her translations of the tafsīr al-Muntakhab. The chapter contextualizes ʿAfīfī’s life within these diverse political and cultural landscapes, charting her evolution from ‘Nasser’s translator’ to a dāʿiya during Egypt’s Islamic revival. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates the dynamics of female engagement in conservative Egyptian religious initiatives and the implications of such inclusion.