In 1951, the Egyptian state merged the elementary schools (al-madaris al-awwaliyah), formerly known as the katatib (s. kuttab) where children memorized the Qur’an, into its modern primary schooling system. The decision was the culmination of official and nationalist attempts, dating back to 1867, seeking to bring the expansive kuttab network under state control in order to supervise the instruction, instructors and health conditions in these schools. Adopting a unified modern curriculum to prepare all Egyptian students for secondary and higher education, from which kuttab graduates were excluded, had become a major national concern. Embracing the results of modern pedagogical studies, educational experts at the time also endorsed the state decision arguing that the kuttab, where students were made to memorize verses they did not understand, not only had become obsolete but that it also carried the stigma of what they described as poverty and “backwardness.” Drawing upon primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives and the archives of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, I seek to challenge dismissive readings of the kuttab and try to understand it on its own terms. Using these documents, I will reconstruct what the class experience in the kuttab was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and show the ways in which the kuttab prepared students for further studies at higher institutions of learning, such as al-Azhar, thus fulfilling an important function in an Islamic system of learning, which considered the mastery of Classical Arabic as a prerequisite for any kind of intellectual contribution. Furthermore, combining my historical analysis with recent anthropological and linguistic studies, such as those of Niloofar Haeri (2003) and Helen Boyle (2004), I will argue that the pedagogical tools used at the kuttab, like memorization at a young age, which were written off as rote learning, were crucial for handling “diglossia,” a problem that Egyptian state schools continue to struggle with to this day.