When at the turn of the twentieth century a committee created to redesign fonts for the Egyptian governmental printing house al-Amiriya appointed Muḥammad Ja‘afar Bak to do this task, they could not have envisioned the complications that the hiring of a famous Quranic calligrapher would cause. Muḥammad Ja‘afar Bak insisted that the printed typeface imitate a hand-written script, something the printing house was unwilling and unable to do. My paper, using this event as a point of departure, explores the precarious relationship between religious practice and technology. Specifically, I look at the emergence of print in Egypt and its effects on the production and use of the mushaf, the material book that carries the Quranic text. I examine the ways in which typeset print unsettled some of the stable religious practices surrounding the material carrier of the message and compelled the religious scholars to reexamine the tradition – understood as a body of written and consensual knowledge - in relation to that technological change. One of the problems that surfaced as soon as typeset print became a tool used to disseminate the Quranic text was its incapability to adequately represent the Quranic orthography (al-rasm al-‘Uthmānī) until then skillfully reproduced by the calligraphers. The religious question of adherence to traditional spelling, and suggestions of modifications that accompanied print, had in its background broader, secular discussions. These included the debates of Egyptian linguists and scholars on reforming the Arabic language and creating more practical adaptations of the language to contemporary linguistic norms. At the same time, printing enabled the mechanical reproduction of the Quranic message in large quantities, precipitating a new relationship between the book and its public. The possibility that everyone might own a mushaf created for its users many new ways of deploying the text, which on the other hand required new pronouncements on the part of the ‘ulamā’. By examining these particular entanglements of printing and practice that have enveloped the Quranic text, I attempt to reverse the prevailing anthropological approach in which technology is seen merely as a tool for religious practice. Instead, I suggest considering the contrapuntal ways in which technology shapes and modifies religious processes and practice.