This paper reads Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1992 novel Zaat as a critical and satirical engagement with Egyptian media both old and new. Focusing in particular on the role of contemporary news media and “transmission” (bathth), on the one hand, and echoes of the premodern “heroic biography” (sirah), on the other, I argue that Zaat interrogates the adequacy of these forms for narrating the nation in the post-Infitah era. I focus first on a curious scene of “seeking,” “questing” or “investigation” (bahth) from the middle of the novel, in which Zaat travels to the rural Nile Delta village of Zefta to pay her respects at the funeral of an eight-year-old girl who was electrocuted by a shoddy lamppost. In the hands of an earlier Egyptian novelist such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Fathi Ghanim, or Yusuf al-Qa‘id, I argue, the death of young Jihan might have served as the heart of a novel structured as a plea for justice from a corrupt and negligent Egyptian state. In Ibrahim’s work, by contrast, Jihan’s death is only one of many injustices with which Zaat collides in her quests through the halls of Mubarak-era Egyptian officialdom—including another, even longer “quest” for justice after purchasing a spoiled tin of olives. Through close readings these and other scenes of “seeking” or “questing” (bahth) in Ibrahim’s novel, I show how Zaat misreads and misrecognizes herself as the potential hero of a sirah like the one dedicated to her namesake, the legendary Arab princess Dhat al-Himmah, and as a result of this misrecognition, she ends up crushed under the wheels of a shockingly banal, everyday authoritarianism. Zaat thus mourns the demise of an Arab socialist dream in a mode of tragic irony (per Northrop Frye’s definition of this term), yet I also argue that the point of such tragedy is not merely to inspire teary pathos in the reader, but rather to refocus her attention on the supposed inescapability of injustice, revealing its historicity and thus also its potential reversibility. In this way, Ibrahim adapts the communal, ethical, and pedagogical function of the sirah for the age of military dictatorship, structural adjustment, and globalization.