This paper focuses on a particular moment in Egyptian history in order to explore the shifting boundaries between religious and political authority. It zooms in on July 8th 2013 when the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb, announced on Egyptian television that he might go into seclusion (iʿtikāf) if the people of Egypt “didn’t take responsibility” and “stop the bloodshed”. This statement came in response to a massacre on the outskirts of Cairo that resulted in the killing of 51 people, most of whom were supporters of ousted-president Muhammad Morsi. Sheikh al-Tayeb’s threat to go into seclusion presented itself as a curious puzzle, both because it seemed like unusual behavior for the Sheikh of al-Azhar and because Sheikh al-Tayeb never actually went into seclusion (though the violence got worse). This paper seeks to make sense of this puzzle through a semiotic analysis of the rhetoric and content of Sheikh al-Tayeb’s July 8th statement and by relating his statement to the Sheikh of al-Azhar’s role in the political sphere before and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, as well as to the relationship between al-Azhar and the Egyptian state in the late 20th/early 21st centuries more generally. Through this discussion, the paper elucidates how Shaykh al-Tayeb seeks to discursively reconstruct his authority as Egypt’s religious guide and to interpellate an Egyptian moral public that is subject to this authority. Ultimately, the paper suggests that Shaykh al-Tayeb’s threat to retreat foregrounds the limits of the Shaykh of al-Azhar’s engagement in politics and the political sphere more generally. While scholars of al-Azhar and the ulama have focused on the institutional dynamics of al-Azhar (Nathan Brown 2011, 2013), as well as on the political reemergence of al-Azhar’s ulama in the late 20th century (Zeghal 1996, 1999, 2007), little attention has been given to the discursive modes that the Shaykh of al-Azhar uses to construct his authority. As such, this paper addresses this gap in the literature, exploring the relationship between discourse and authority, religion and politics, in the tumultuous context of post-revolution Egypt.