Everyone knew how the prime minister died but theories circulated about why he was assassinated. At one o’clock in the afternoon on February 20, 1910, pharmacology student Ibrahim Nassif al-Wardany shot Egypt’s first Christian Prime Minister Boutros Ghali as he mounted his carriage outside the Ministry of Justice. Five of the bullets only inflicted shallow wounds but the sixth punctured several critical organs as it lodged itself inside Ghali’s body. The prime minister died hours later at the hospital following a meticulous operation to save his life. Some said al-Wardany, freshly returned from Europe, had succumbed to degenerate western ideas that drove him to murder. Others swore he acted under the influence of insanity or fanaticism, citing his megalomania and anarchist reading habits. A zealous nationalist, Al-Wardany himself claimed that he killed for his country, accusing the prime minister of acquiescing to the British occupation for far too long. But whispers in the halls of power and among civil society revealed a much more glaring implication: sectarian motive. While Ghali’s assassination has traditionally been seen as an exclusively political event—one with implications for the British occupation in Egypt or for the nascent Egyptian nationalist movement—it has yet to receive equal attention for its role in generating public discourses about sectarianism and religious difference in Egypt. Sources from the period demonstrate a concerted effort from the British, the Khedivate, and members of the Egyptian nationalist movement to emphasize that Ghali’s assassination was a political, not religious, matter. Yet the death of the prime minister unleashed a national crisis not only over the specter of political violence but also on relations between the country’s Muslim majority and Christian minority during a time that grappled with the parameters of Egyptian nationality, identity, and belonging. This presentation examines sources from over two dozen archives to argue that Ghali’s death, the politics of his commemoration, and the ensuing inter-religious tensions form a crucial node in understanding the genealogy of sectarianism and religious difference in modern Egypt.