Debates and studies on the meaning, content, and history of philosophy became a prominent feature of Egyptian intellectual discourse during the late 1920s. While editorials on the national need for falsafah attempted to define the “queen of sciences” for the public, leading thinkers published volumes on the history of philosophy alongside annotated editions and translations of philosophical geniuses, ancient and modern, from Aristotle to Ibn ‘Arabi and Baqillani to Bergson. Contributors to this discourse presented competing notions and genealogies of falsafah that contested its conventional conception as a discipline of Greek provenance that the so-called philosophers of Islam (e.g. al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes) carried on. Public intellectuals and educators, famously Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq, Muhammad Ghallab, and Muhammad Lutfi Jum‘a, wrote ambitious works that identified non-Greek sources of philosophy, including ancient Eastern wisdom traditions, Islamic legal theory, and Sufism. As a result, new Arabic terms such as Eastern philosophy” (falsafah sharqiyah), “mystical philosophy” (falsafah sufiyah), “Islamic philosophy” (falsafah Islamiyyah), and “religious philosophy” (falsafah diniyah) were coined and conceptualized, raising hotly debated questions about the substance, politics, and standards of philosophical thinking. This paper examines the conceptual instability surrounding falsafah in late-interwar Egypt to think about the formation of the field of knowledge, canon, and mode of thought that the term came to signify during the decades of philosophy’s rise as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I examine varied texts that reflect the changing standards for what constitutes falsafah during this period, including histories of philosophy; encyclopedia entries; newspaper articles; curricula of philosophy departments in formation; and indexes for falsafah collections at newly-reorganized libraries. While certainly a response to European colonialism and the episteme it imposed, the era's re-formulation falsafah is not reducible to Western influence. In addition to critically synthesizing and responding to modern European philosophy, history of philosophy, and Orientalism, Egyptian intellectuals engaged with and drew on pre-nineteenth-century Arabic-Islamic epistemology, historiography, and philosophical-theological commentaries. Presenting their works as contributions within both European and Islamic literatures, the twentieth-century authors did not distinguish between the “modern” and “pre-modern” temporalities of these respective traditions as historians of twentieth-century Arabic thought have. By reconstructing the genealogy of falsafah’s conceptual transformation in late-interwar Egypt, this paper questions the assumed break with the Islamic past that informs dominant scholarly and popular portrayals of philosophy in twentieth-century Arabic culture as the product of an ex nihilo revival of a long-forgotten science.