The nationalization and centralization efforts of the Egyptian Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) that overthrew the monarchy and took command of Egypt in July 1952 introduced sweeping changes to the socio-political and cultural landscape of the newly independent nation. Eager to portray themselves as different from their predecessors, the RCC attempted to forge a new modernity by fashioning their policies according to the new social science research findings and methods conducted by Western organizations. Unlike previous Egyptian engagements with social scientific research that simply discussed and suggested ways to improve standards of living, the RCC used research findings to formulate policies that were to be imposed on Egyptians, interfering in the most intimate and private aspects of their lives. Suggested policies that ranged from stricter governmental control over land distribution to dictating what Egyptians were allowed to wear in public animated the discussions of the ulama, public intellectuals, and ordinary Egyptians whose discussions over how these policies should be fashioned often turned into heated debates in the Egyptian press. One of these particularly heated discussions included whether the government should require Egyptian men to wear Western-style hats in public. Using several prominent Egyptian newspapers to highlight the differing perspectives on this matter, this paper will focus on the views of Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn (d. 1958), who was the rector of Al-Azhar at the time. His rejection of the requirement to wear Western-style hats from a religious perspective, as well as his criticism of the government’s social scientific rationale for imposing such a policy, elicited both respect and contempt from the myriad of public intellectuals of the time. By focusing on al-Khidr Husayn’s views and exchanges with intellectuals regarding this matter, the paper examines the rector’s arguments and discovers how he was influenced by, and himself influenced the public discourse, and the ultimate decision by the state to eschew the suggested law. Highlighting the public exchanges about the hat law also addresses the state’s larger aims of fashioning and defining what it meant to be “modern” yet authentically Egyptian. In addition, this paper will shed light on a largely understudied period of Egyptian social and intellectual history, as most studies focus on the Nasser years (1954-70) and overlook the first two pivotal years of Egypt after the end of the monarchy.