In 1934, the Cairo textile merchants Hafiz and Muhammad Farnawani sponsored the mawlid of Husayn by organizing equestrian contests and Qur’anic recitations in `Ataba al-Khadra’ Square. Their new, modern department store on `Abd al-`Aziz Street had recently opened, with special visits by the Wafdist prime minister and other political officials. A local Egyptian journal, Ruz al-Yusuf, marveled at the way the Farnawani brothers, “Egyptians” in an occupational field dominated by foreigners and non-Muslims, set up “religious ceremonies next to nationalist ones,” thereby creating a font of “spiritual power” (the “unity of Egyptian souls”) that could support the “material power” (the “unity of their bodies”) needed in the struggle for full national sovereignty. Other modern department stores in interwar Egypt also prominently advertised an Islamic identity. The Egyptian Company for Local Products, for example, had shaykh Ma`mun al-Shinawi, rector of al-Azhar, cut its ceremonial ribbon on a new branch opening in 1948 on the chic Fu’ad Street. `Awf Department Store featured pilgrimage clothing in its elegant showrooms. Struggles over setting uniform weekly days of closure and ceremonies surrounding the annual tribute of the kiswa for the ka`ba took place alongside a more mundane integration of religious ceremony into Egypt’s cosmopolitan commercial spaces. Scholars of the modern period have documented the religiosity and Muslim identity of bazaar merchants as bulwarks of support for Islamic revolutions, must notably in the case of 1979 Iranian revolution (Keddie, Roots of Revolution; Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran), or examined Islamic religious practices in Middle Eastern suqs as “authentic” or non-modern spaces in society (Clifford Geertz, “Suq, the bazaar economy in Sefrou,” in Meaning and Order; Robert Fernea, “Suqs of the Middle East: Commercial Centers Past and Present,” in Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East). Other scholars have used legal and cultural texts to counter Weber’s claims that Islam is inimical to capitalism (Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism). Historians of Islamist movements have also briefly noted their commercial ventures (Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers). Little work has been done, however, on the religious participation of Europeanized merchants in capitalist societies such as mid-century Egypt. Using press advertisements and articles, state archives, and trade reports, this paper examines public religious practices and marketing strategies of Muslim merchants outside the suq to argue that sacred expression in interwar commercial space was more than an opportunistic marketing strategy and had an important influence on the practices of Islam.