This paper re-examines the theology of Egyptian alim Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) through the writing of Late Ottoman sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Sabri (1869-1954) and his radical critique of the Muslim reform (tajdid) movement. One of Mustafa Kemal’s most implacable foes, Sabri was alarmed to find Egyptian ulama and intellectuals advancing the positivist-materialist agenda he had challenged in Istanbul before fleeing in 1922. Debating the leading lights of the Egyptian modernist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri came to see its reform theology as a little more than a calque on Enlightenment notions of religion, but one that drew on the pioneering work of Abduh. The summa of Sabri’s years of polemical struggle in Egypt was Mawqif al-Aql wa-l-Ilm wa-l-Alam min Rabb al-Alamin wa-Rusulihi (The Position of Reason, Knowledge, and the World on God and His Messengers, 1949), a four-volume work – published with the support of Hasan al-Banna before his death – in which Sabri defended the Islamic epistemological system before the epochal challenge of European rationalist philosophy. In Mawqif al-Aql Sabri launched a comprehensive attack on Abduh for what he saw as: Abduh’s failure to defend Islam’s role in public life in his famous 1900 debate with newspaper editor Farah Antun; a scepticism towards unseen paranormal phenomena (al-khawariq) such as angels, the resurrection, and miracles; downgrading the prophets to the status of “great reformers” (al-uzama' al-muslihun) among men; rejection of one of the kalam proofs of God’s existence known as burhan al-tatbiq in favour of the infinite causal chain; and indulgence of European accusations of fatalism in the Ash'ari creedal system. Sabri argues for a firm link between Abduh’s ideas and the modernist innovations of Egypt’s liberal age that stripped Islam of non-empirical understandings of the created world and diminished divine intervention in man’s affairs in favour of human agency. Zahid al-Kawthari, Sabri’s deputy at the Ottoman Meshihat who also found refuge in Egypt, was only mildly less scathing about Abduh, apparently sensing in Abduh’s Risalat al-Tawhid a tendency towards Maturidi thinking on free will. Examining Sabri’s work in Istanbul and Cairo, Abduh’s early and later writing, and key texts of the islamiyyat literature discussed by Albert Hourani, Charles Adams, Israel Gershoni, and others, the paper will evaluate Sabri’s claims and ask whether the Ottoman exiles were the first to establish the discourse of rejection that came to dominate Muslim views of Abduh.