British Muslim writer and Qur’an translator Marmaduke Pickthall traveled to Cairo in November 1929 to revise his English translation of the Qur’an with the assitance of the Egyptian ulama. Expecting to receive a warm welcome, Pickthall was surprised to find much resistance to the idea of Qur’anic translation. Once news of his project spread in late December 1929, the former Vice Rector of al-Azhar, Muhammad Shakir, challenged the very permissibility of his project on the front pages of al-Ahram, igniting an exchange of views. What Pickthall did not fully appreciate upon his arrival was that his project intersected with a heated and on-going debate over the permissibility of translation of the Qur’an that had started a few years earlier and would continue throughout the 1930’s. Sparked by translations emerging from Turkey and India, the debate engaged many of the leading ulama living in Egypt at this time including the two-time Shaykh al-Azhar, Mustafa al-Maraghi, former Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa al-Sabri, and reformist Rashid Rida. Given Islam’s broad reach among non-Arab peoples from its earliest period, translation of the Qur’an was not, however, a new phenomenon in the early 20th century. Yet, no previous attempts at translation had evoked such spirited reaction among the ulama. This paper seeks to situate the debate in its socio-political context, while paying close attention to the arguments proffered on both sides, to understand how the various parties involved viewed the stakes of the debate and the factors that brought it to prominence at this particular moment. I begin by sketching the contours of the debate and the context in which this debate emerges. The fall of the caliphate in 1924 and the emergence of national ideologies that intertwine and bound the concepts of language and nation, I suggest, play a crucial role in heightening the stakes of the debate for participants with the symbols of the Qur’an and the Arabic language in marking Islamic identity taking center stage. I then examine conceptions of translation underlying the arguments of Mustafa Maraghi and Muhammad Shakir, leading figures of the pro and anti-translation positions, respectively. I argue that differing conceptions of what translation is – translation as replication versus translation as exegesis – serve as a key component generating the conflicting views on the permissibility of translation.