During the eighteen days of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, an uncountable number of citizens took part in public events. Two years later, an assessment of visibility, transparency, and governance in Nasser-era Egypt concluded with the note, “the number of Egyptian citizens who turned out to vote in the 19 March 2011 referendum on the constitutional amendments was unprecedented; following the victories (first) of members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘Freedom and Justice’ party to the legislature, and (later) of Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi to the office of president” (2013, p. 83). Since that date, the ocular nature of Egypt’s state has shifted, prompting a reassessment of the Gamal Abdul-Nasser-era advances regarding modernist government in the most populous of Arab nation-states. Yasmine Ramadan’s Space in Modern Egyptian Fiction emphasizes the jil al-sittinat of novelists, with their “representation of the various spaces of, and outside, the nation [reflecting] disappointment with the increasingly repressive regimes that followed independence (2020, p. 2). Ramadan quotes the four-page stroll through Cairo in Sonallah Ibrahim’s The Smell of It (1966), and the description of Kit-Kat Square’s denizens in Inrahim Aslan’s The Heron (1976) as metaphors for the narrativity of public experience, in which developments in the public sphere (such as citizens voting, assuming seats in a legislature, taking an oath of office), are recorded as street names or people collecting in a given space. Denied access to Egyptian state archives, I use conventional sources in unconventional ways (permitting me to identify individuals representing the former Ottoman imperial family’s transnational interests, with their privately-conveyed invitations for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to join the increasingly-unpopular Middle East Defense Organization; accountants with the Ministry of Finance’s Tax Authority auditing foreigners’ family members’ personal records; and transactions of “property of foreigners who are members of the Egyptian royal family and who attained or acquired Turkish nationality before the confiscation order” carried out within the walls of foreign embassies). Balancing transnational interests’ preference for privacy, this presentation from a forthcoming book analyzes the architecture circumstances of Mohamed Naguib’s house arrest. Fellow “Free Officers” ordered surrounding verditure stripped from his garden, draperies pulled from the windows, rendering the domicile’s every corner immediately visible by its guards. This created a Cairo panopticon, which informs both conversations about the jil al-sittinat and questions of present-day transparency.