This paper employs urban violence to map communal division and multiplied fluid identities based on localism, gender and class during speed urbanization and industrialization in Interwar Egypt. Thousands of landless peasants immigrated to the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra to work in the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company once it was established in 1927. This turned the town into a host of new social and economic tensions between the urban populations, who called themselves Mahallawiyya, or the people of al-Mahalla, and the peasant workers who were called Shirkawiyya, or people of the company. The company workers were also divided among themselves based on gender, geographical origins, their positions inside the factory, and their residential neighborhoods. Workers from the same villages clustered in shared rooms in the slums of al-Mahalla and turned into `usba, violently competing and fighting gangs. In this paper, I trace the communal divisions and the roles played by fighting bands of Mahallawiyya and workers, `usba, and their leaders, Futuwat to examine how such groups helped workers to adapt to urban industrial life while distracting them from “working class solidarity.” I show how and why these fighting groups sometimes cooperated with one another against the Company during strikes. More importantly, I look at how workers defined themselves vis-à-vis the nationalist Company, the Mahallawiyya, and even each other. The broad research question addressed here is to what extent modern industrialization changed local communal identities into a “modern class-gender identity” and what extent modern social types of organization replaced communal networks. I argue that both horizontal class and vertical communal relations co-existed and sometimes competed. In that fluidity, individuals and groups acted and interacted depending on socio-economic status, conjuncture, and a shared, often contested discourse. For instance, workers who were normally divided into hostile groups based on regional origins sometimes acted in class solidarity against the administration. Thus, it is not surprising to find that although the poor Mahallawiyya were hostile to the poor Shirkawiyya on a social and cultural level, they nonetheless supported the latter’s strikes. The paper draws intensively on a variety of archival sources, including Shari‘a, criminal and civil court documents in addition to the ‘Abdin Royal Court petition files, the archive of the Corporations Department, memoirs and oral history.