The end of the First World War in 1918 marked the collapse of the medieval Islamic order. The disintegration of the Ottoman empire that for many years gave Muslims a sense of identity and belonging launched the Arab world on a new era of social and political (dis)order. Intellectuals, political activists, and nationalists all faced a new political landscape rife with uncertainty and doubt. Few intellectuals have been able to capture this episode of the post-Ottoman order as vividly as Ahmad Amin, an Egypt polymath and a prodigious historian of Islamic civilization. Amin was not only a chronicle of his moment, but also a quintessential product of a time of accelerated change and transition. In his books and essays, Amin grappled with one question: how to live in a world marked by a collapse of the Islamic order? Focusing on Amin’s massive corpus, this conference paper examines the ways in which the post-Ottoman generation coped with the new realities the WWI created. The primary goal in this talk is not so much to interrogate the answers Amin had proposed, but to illuminate the themes, questions and concerns that preoccupied him and his generation in the wake of the War, the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, and the abolishment of the institute of Caliph. While Amin was not the only author whose life was informed by the experience of the collapse of the Islamic order, he nonetheless belonged to generation that formulated many of the cultural questions that gave shape to modern Arab thought for years to come. Without appreciating this historical moment and the social and cultural concerns it articulated, it would be hard to make sense of the intellectual and cultural debates in the Arab world. As this paper concludes, the collapse of the Ottoman empire created a problem of historical discontinuity in the Arab world. To acknowledge this problem is to begin to understand the tensions, distrust and disenchantment of Arab intellectuals in our present.