During the 80s’, Egypt was amid a rising Islamic revival movement that shaped different aspects of daily life. An Islamic alternative was represented to an anticipating audience in a wide range of fields; banking, cinema, literature, politics, and eventually architecture. This paper focuses on how architecture in Egypt during the 1980s reflected such change. Architectural magazines such as ‘Alam al-Binaʾ, ‘The World of Construction,’ in press from 1980 to1999, claimed in its mission statement to revive the authentic values of Islamic architecture. Through its pages, the magazine promoted an understanding of Islamic architecture as an architecture produced in correspondence to legal texts. In other words, for a building to be Islamic, it has to follow strict “Islamic legal-based” interventions characterized by a literal interpretation of religious texts. This interpretation was better manifested in the work of the Center of Planning and Architectural Studies ‘CPAS’, led by Abdel Baki Ibrahim (1926-2001), the owner of ‘Alam al-Binaʾ magazine who tried through his work to materialize the ideas he promoted in his magazine. This paper tries to read “Islamic” architecture not only as part of a transforming social landscape towards piety but as an act of piety in and of itself that should be performed by pious architects. It also situates this understanding of the “Islamic” in architecture in relation to the Aga Khan Award for architecture, especially during the 1980s, which the magazine heavily criticized and tried to parallel by advocating an award that focuses on the “Islamic” essence that the Aga Khan, according to them, seemed to miss.