In his memoir, an Egyptian critic ‘Abbas Khidr narrated how his friend and the future Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb staged a fake honoring ceremony (haflat al-takrim) in the mid-1930s Cairo. Assuming the role of a host and with all due solemnity, Qutb ceremonially accorded the title of adib to a turbaned sheikh present (Khidr, 1983). To declare a sheikh to be a literati is to invert social reality of the Interwar Egypt, in which literature was associated with the sheikh’s nemesis, efendis. By staging a fictitious honoring ceremony, Qutb and his friends aimed to mock the institutional practice by appropriating it and turning it into the means of social criticism and fun. In contemporary Cairo, holding honoring ceremonies has become a common practice within the informal world of literature structured around numerous venues of literary socialization, such as literary clubs (andiya al-adab) and symposiums (nadawat). The distribution of certificates and trophies of honor acknowledging the literary merit of the receiver is a crucial part of closing ceremonies of literary sessions held in these places. Practiced profusely and with little selectivity, honoring ceremonies seek to create and maintain a belief that anyone can become writer. In so doing, the informal world of literature subverts the institutional practice to serve its own goal: the creation of a community of writers in the margins of formal institutions. This presentation suggests to think about the institution from the vantage point of its defining practice: takrim, or the honoring. Traditionally associated with the established institutions, such as the Opera House, universities, ministries or syndicates, takrim is a ritual practice aimed to distribute institutional recognition to its distinguished members. What happens to this practice when it slips out from institutional control and is appropriated by the anti-institution? Based on the long-term ethnographic fieldwork in literary clubs in contemporary Cairo, this presentation suggests to view literary clubs as the liminal space in which the categories produced by formal institutions are suspended, reworked, and subverted. By exploring the way the practice of takrim is reconfigured to fit the goals of literary informality, it shows how it paradoxically expresses the desire to become an institution itself.