Though Abd ar-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1855 –1902) is celebrated as part of the reform movement centered around Muhammad ‘Abduh and as a virulent critic of despotism (mainly through his book Taba’i‘ al-istibdad) and propagator of an Arab-centered Muslim Revival, his role in coining the term and concepts of Islamism ‘al-islamiyya’ is often unacknowledged. Upon a careful examination of his semi-autobiographical novel Ummu ‘l-Qurra: Proceedings of the first Conference on Islamic Awakening, one can find the foundation for the most basic creeds and strategies of what would become today’s Islamist ideology. This short political novel records the ‘fictional’ secret meetings of the organization of Ummu’l-Qurra in Mecca in 1898. In search for answers to al-Kawakibi’s life-long question of ‘what went wrong with Muslims?’ his 22 delegates express views that resonate with the rhetoric of contemporary Muslim activists; though few Islamists would like to admit such a possible parentage of their most cherished ideologies since they identify al-Kawakibi with the ‘secular’ reform movement. However, topoi developed in the novel like, al-islamiyya and second jahiliya (generally attributed to Sayyid Qutb), the need to revive the pure uncorrupted faith of the salaf as-salih preserved by the Arabs of the Peninsula (read Wahhabiyya), and the need to mobilize religion in order to lay the foundation for an Islamic revival etc., reveal a common ground for many of the arguments that modern Islamists have adopted for their causes. The question of ‘what went wrong’ central to the novel and kept alive throughout the twentieth century has also helped construct a common and uninterrupted space where Muslim activists could re-confirm their shared world-views, mission, goals, and common enemies. Published by Muhammad Rashid Rida in his al-Manar, the novel and its ideas gained a wide circle of readership amongst the early salafi movement. By the middle of the 20th century al-Kawakibi’s writings, also incorporated in school curricula, had become part of the making of a popular culture of political activists. More than a record of the ‘reform’ consciousness of the times, this widely popular novel helped shape an emerging sense of identity that has spread all across the Arab-speaking world: a legacy that helped shaped the identity of the Muslim public activists for more than a century. This paper attempts to examine the tenets of reform Islam as laid out in the novel in search for the ‘elders’ of Islamist ideology.