Past histories of Dar al-‘Ulum, Cairo’s first teacher-training institution, focus primarily on its role graduating teachers and Arabic experts. This paper recenters scholarly focus on Dar al-‘Ulum, presenting it as a provider of both civil and religious education. It argues that the school not only trained a new body of teaching professionals, but also provided graduates with sufficient capital to forge new, ostensibly more ‘authentic’ constructions of modernity. Dar al-‘Ulum was founded in 1872 to train shaykhs from al-Azhar to teach in government schools, a mission it carried out through 1946, when it became a faculty of Cairo University. The teacher-training side of its education initially focused on exposing shakyhs to ‘modern’ knowledge, but in the 1890s extensive theoretical and practical training in pedagogy was added. Its impact in this area was significant, and it graduated scores of teachers, headmasters, school inspectors and administrators. Yet its impact on Egyptian society stretches beyond this, as the challenge it presented to al-Azhar as a provider of a new type of Islamic education that was both ‘modern’ and religious was significant. Supporters of al-Azhar restricted its ability to move beyond teacher training into training judges and other religious officials, but despite this its graduates were not only active as teachers. They possessed a wider range of knowledge and cultural capital than graduates of non-hybridic religious or civil schools, including both the ‘modern’ subjects and discipline inculcated in civil schools and the ‘traditional’ Islamic and Arabic sciences that were at the heart of the religious school system. This knowledge and experience gave them the ability to strike new balances between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. Understanding the school in this light reveals that it was not a coincidence that Dar al-‘Ulum also graduated individuals who made significant contributions to the modernization of Arabic and Islam. Therefore, Dar al-‘Ulum is not only an example of how government reformers incorporated local elements into the western-inspired civil school system – in the process, radically changing conceptions of religious education – but also how graduates with significant background in both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ subjects could forge new combinations of the two and incorporate more local elements into Egyptian modernity. This paper is based on analysis of an extensive range of institutional records, rare published sources and interviews, amassed as part of a detailed and lengthy reassessment of Dar al-‘Ulum’s history.