Najib Mahfuz’s al-Qahirah al-Jadidah (Cairo Modern), tells the story of a group of students at Cairo’s King Fuad University who serve as archetypes for various trends in 1930s Egypt. I approach this novel as a source for modernist critique through my investigation of Mahfuz’s presentation of the characters and their interrelationship as a critical reflection on the role of an entrenched (at least among intellectual historians) dichotomy of tradition vs. modernity in Egyptian society. The characters are stand-ins for Islamic reformers, socialist positivism, and the emergent system of worldwide capital. My theoretical approach offers an exploration of the effects of modernity on these characters that puts this novel into an ongoing conversation about ‘critical’ as opposed to ‘celebratory’ modernity as laid out by Jaafar Aksikas in Arab Modernities: Islamism, Nationalism, and Liberalism in the Post-Colonial Arab World. I believe that Mahfuz’s parodying of popular trends in 1930s Egyptian politics—trends that continue to define the Egyptian public sphere today—challenges assumptions taken as given in earlier scholarship on the role of modernity in Egyptian society. Previous scholarship, among Arabs and foreign orientalists alike, has generally come to the conclusion that the ultimate failure of the Arab nahdah (loosely translated as ‘renaissance’) can be blamed on the inability of Arab intellectuals, politicians, and others with cultural capital in the Arab world to overcome the dialectic of traditionalism and modernism and take on (Western) modernity. I begin my theoretical approach with Michel Foucault’s comments on the condition of modernity in his “What is Enlightenment?” I then turn to the concept of ‘quasi-objects’ (things that exist between the poles of subject and object, sometimes acting on us while we sometimes act on them) outlined in Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern and Michel Serres’ The Parasite. I find their theory particularly informative in regard to the role of money in modern society in general, and to money’s role in Cairo Modern in particular, where it is money, not man, which decides the actions of the characters. In addressing the relationship between modernity and literary modernism as found in Mahfuz’s text, I also refer to the work of Marxist critics such as Georg Lukács and Marshall Berman as well as that of Marx himself. By looking at the modern crises experienced by Mahfuz’s characters, I seek to trouble the absolute distinction between tradition and modernity found in earlier intellectual approaches to Egyptian society.