Gregory Starrett’s Putting Islam to Work uses ethnographic and print material from the 1980s and British colonial records from 1870-1922 to argue that efforts by the Egyptian state school system to ‘put Islam to work’ backfired, as they created a demand for religion that state-controlled institutions could not fulfill. This story, however, is missing a crucial set of actors: the teachers who carried out this project and the ideas that they carried. This paper explores a central mechanism through which Islamic expertise was inserted into the Egyptian civil school system prior to 1952: the Dar al-‘Ulum teacher training school.  Founded in 1872 by Egyptian reformers to train top students from religious schools to teach in state-run civil schools and work in the Egyptian educational bureaucracy, Dar al–‘Ulum produced primary and secondary educators until its 1946 incorporation into Cairo University. Its graduates, in turn, had sufficient cultural capital to cross, straddle, and even shift the sociocultural boundaries separating civil and religious institutions and identities. This paper focuses on the ‘culture war’ that broke out during the constitutional period (1922-1952) between Europhile modernists who wanted to undermine the authority of Islamic expertise within Egypt and a range of Egyptians who opposed these efforts. While a Dar al-‘Ulum graduate by the name of Hasan al-Banna was a particular prominent symbol of this struggle, he was but one of hundreds of Dar al-‘Ulum graduates working as teachers, teacher trainers, textbook authors, school inspectors, and educational bureaucrats who sought to bolster the position of Islamic knowledge within the state-run educational system. The paper recreates their perspectives and formation by looking not only at the books and journals they published, but also the records of the institution that trained them. It is crucial to integrate the perspectives of Dar al-‘Ulum graduates into a historical narrative that has hitherto been dominated by figures such as Europhile-modernist Ministers of Education Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal. These lower and mid-level employees wielded as-yet unrecognized influence not as outside challengers but as inhabitants of state institutions that were central to the execution of the state-led project of modernity. Their opinions and actions are therefore essential to understanding the salience and complexity of the role religion plays within the Egyptian nation and its culture, as well as the ways in which Egypt’s state-led project of modernity was contested from within and without.