This paper explores an important debate on the drafting of the divorce law in Egypt in the early 20th century. This debate was between the shari'a judge Ahmad Muhammad Shakir (d. 1958) and the adjunct to the last Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire, Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (d. 1952). This debate epitomizes the struggles of the traditional legal class ('ulama') in face of introducing new judicial and legal systems. The debate between Shakir and al-Kawthari about the divorce system in Egypt does not only record the changing intellectual and political milieu in Egypt but also it identifies the challenges of social realities that posed immense pressures on the traditional legal class and their diminishing influence in the emergent Egyptian state. Shakir’s ultimate goal is to break the monopoly of Islamic legal school (madhahib) on the process of law making and legal reasoning by directly engaging the Qur'an and the Sunna. This methodology triggered fervent criticism of the new divorce system by Al-Kawthari. Interestingly, this disapproval was not directed at the divorce code per se but at the sheer disregard for the madhhab tradition. I argue that this debate is not only indicative of the gradual processes of the anti-madhhab discourse in Egyptian legal history, but also reveals the crisis of the legitimacy of a new authority structure. The opinions of both Shakir and al-Kawthari were articulated against the premise of the need to preserve sharīʿa courts from dissolution, yet both have very different ways to address this problem.