The 1929 Egyptian personal status law has withstood the dramatic changes of the twentieth and the twenty first century with modest changes to its definitions of the roles and the individual rights that men and women have in the family. Secular critics suggest that its traditional (Islamic) definitions of these roles and rights explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Islamist supporters see it as part of the defense of the Islamic traditions that modernization threatened. I wish to contest these binary secular and Islamist definitions of Islamic legal and religious traditions through a contextualized discussion of the law as part of the institutional and social history of Egyptian modernity. I will discuss how the law was part of the modernization of the legal system, which narrowed the construction of Islamic religious traditions to one legal school instead of the multiple ones available in the nineteenth century which men and women drew upon to maximize their rights providing them with greater legal flexibility. The modern legal system also institutionalized a split between public and private laws giving Islamic religious/legal traditions a role to play only in the family/personal status. Secondly, I will review 2 societal debates, that took place in the 1920s and highlighted male anxiety about the effects that modernity had on women including their participation in the 1919 revolution coupled with the expansion of their access to education and public work, providing a context for the 1929 law. The first debate centered on the murder of Ali Fahmy, the wealthy nephew of Egypt’s leading feminist Hoda Sha’rawi, by his French wife and the very public trial that followed in London in 1923 triggering a national defense of old definitions of Islamic masculinity and femininity. The second debate was connected to the first through the discussion of a “marriage crisis” that press reports attributed to the reluctance of young men to marry educated women who imitated Western women’s quest for equality. The law’s emphasis on legal and religious concepts, like obedience and the economic dependence of women, reinvented tradition as part of the construction of gendered definitions of the individual that underlined the protection of women from the negative social effects of education and work and nationalized a form of male privilege and definitions of masculinity and femininity to give modernity its Islamic character.