Nineteenth-century Egypt was a laboratory of social and legal change. One experiment in this laboratory was the police interrogation (the ‘sin wā jim’). It became a crucial part of the larger criminal investigation (taḥqīq) in which evidence was collected and presented against criminal defendants. By the 1840s, the interrogation had already become part of the khedival administrative state’s larger search for truth (al-wuquf ‘alā al-haqā’iq), deployed to order nineteenth-century Egypt. This paper challenges traditional historiography, which considers the interrogation to have only entered the Egyptian legal landscape at the behest of colonial powers through ‘secular’ legal codifications that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper also challenges a thesis that such colonial transplantations undid Ottoman Egypt’s traditional legal system that was predominantly governed by the sharīʻa’s adversarial scheme, a scheme in which the interrogation as a manifestation of an inquisitorial mode of adjudication did not play any significant part. The story presented in this paper, however, is not one that belabors an account of sudden, pointed disruption in which modern Egyptian criminal law was transformed at the end of the nineteenth century, and suddenly transmogrified through a colonial inquisitorial mode shaped under British Occupation and a New Criminal Procedural Code of 1883. Rather, the account that this paper gives is one that laboriously uncovers the siyasa (the state’s administrative policy) in nineteenth-century Egypt, and through it, traces the history of this one discrete aspect of Egypt’s modern criminal procedural law—the interrogation. To make this argument, this paper closely examines evidence from the historical records of various archives, including the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Watha’iq), Le Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes, and the British National Archives. Based on this evidence, this paper, aims to shed light on why and how a khedival administrative state adopted and adapted the interrogation within newly erected police stations beginning in the 1840s, decades before the seeming avalanche of legal, ‘secular’ codifications that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper, therefore, also challenges the existing postcolonial anthropological critique of disruption and rupture that came about through secularized, legal codification antecedent to the modernizing Egyptian state. Studying the interrogation in nineteenth-century Egypt also allows us to point to the birth of the individual not only in a new codified criminal law, but also as a scrutinized construct by an evolving modern administrative state.