The Department of Philosophy at what is now Cairo University has long been known in and beyond Egypt as a consequential crucible of modern Arab thought. Recent scholarship offers in-depth studies of trends pioneered by famous faculty and graduates, such as ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi’s Arab existentialism, Yusuf Murad’s integrative psychology, and Hasan Hanafi’s heritage and renewal project. Yet little has been written about the department itself, whether in regards to its curricula and internal politics or the major figures, agendas, and debates that shaped how philosophy came to be understood and practiced within its walls. This lacuna reflects a broader discrepancy in existing scholarship on the modern Arabic humanities. Unlike its sister disciplines of literature and history, philosophy in modern Egypt and the Arab world more generally has been approached mainly through the work of iconoclastic individual philosophers with little attention paid to mainstream educational programs and research institutions devoted to the discipline, an historiographical oversight that inadvertently perpetuates the orientalist fallacy of philosophy as a fringe activity in Arab societies. Drawing on heretofore unexamined faculty files, textbooks, course lectures, and state archives, this presentation focuses on the Arab world’s first modern university philosophy department during its formative years. What is now the Cairo University Philosophy Department was established as a stand-alone faculty during the 1925 expansion of the initially private liberal arts college into a national university named for King Fu’ad I. While the presence of visiting European professors is generally credited with fueling the Fu’ad I Philosophy Department’s rapid growth and curricular development during this period, I identify other, local forces at play. Foremost among them was the concerted effort by Egyptian faculty to forge a philosophy curriculum rooted in the classical Arabo-Islamic tradition, which they accused al-Azhar’s ‘ulama’ of abandoning. Perhaps unexpectedly, this antischolastic position did not translate to a policy of hostile separation from the venerable al-Azhar. Rather, university archives indicate the opposite, with records of Fu’ad I philosophy faculty taking part-time teaching appointments at al-Azhar, advising theses by its most advanced students of theology, and designing philosophy courses for its new college of Religious Fundamentals. Their broad endeavor of institution building, I suggest, reveals the inseparability of the histories of Islamic reformism and modern philosophy in colonial-national Egypt while shedding light on the practical origins of the epistemological syncretism for which the Cairo University Philosophy Department became famous over the twentieth century.