This paper challenges a scholarly consensus that locates the modern state project of managing religious difference in a colonial past. This consensus derives from the anthropological and postcolonial critique of secularism, based in a study of late nineteenth century Egyptian legal history. I cast doubt on this origin story of law and religion, in which the reshaping and alleged disfiguring of indigenous sociality is attributed primarily to foreigners. Events and innovations that date to just before and after World War II undermine the foundational claims of this story. Among the most significant of these events and innovations is the entire domain of administrative law, which championed self-determination and was propelled by a small group of local elites—not unlike other anticolonial movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Anticipating the end of British influence, including the ouster of the British-backed monarchy, Egyptian jurists endeavored to create a new and authentic law for all Egyptians. That law was not a new constitution, but a civil code; they undertook one of the most rigorous revisions of civil law in modern legal history. It was that code that established the Islamic identity of the new republic. Furthermore, the convergence of nation and religion forged after the Second World War was an outcome specific to Egyptian nationalist priorities. Contrary to prevailing scholarly narratives, social stratification on the basis of religion as reflected in the positivist law of the nation-state was not a foreign imposition but central to indigenous elites’ visions for the new republic. To advance the argument of this paper, I foreground legal and political developments, including the changing landscape of nationality laws and the laws on personal identification, that date from the late-1920s through the mid-1950s. Egyptians during these decades laid the administrative foundations of the new republic, including the requirement that Egyptians belong to a Muslim or Christian community by law. I consider the anticolonial motivations of a famed jurist, Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri, and military officer-turned-president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Though united in their commitment to sovereign legal and political institutions, Sanhuri and Nasser held different visions for how to re-order Egyptian society. Sanhuri’s revision of the Egyptian civil code subjected shari‘a to a comparative legal science, setting a new standard in comparative law. It was under Nasser’s tenure that religion and nation would become indelibly linked in the republic’s administrative order.