Long before Habermas admitted the persistence of religion in the public sphere and the possibility of a ‘post-secular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning, pioneer Egyptian filmmakers used the screen to construct a secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between religion as a faith and a body of legal knowledge that has the “vital semantic potentials” to be translated into secular idioms and in a “universally accessible language.” This paper examines metaphors representing Islam in Egyptian postwar (1945-1952) films that engaged with discourses of Islam and modernity in the context of colonization and war. By using tools of screenwriting, this paper analyzes three patterns of depicting metaphors representing Islam: marginalization, ridicule, and appropriation. I trace these patterns in everyday life practices of film characters succumbing to competing for colonialist, nationalist or Islamist projects of modernity. In doing so, these early films, I argue that, did not only present a fairly early recognition of how religion has not shrunken away under the pressures of modernization. Rather, they stand out as an exemplar of Islamic popular culture in which the public use of reason continued, despite shrinking physical public sphere caused by the harsh realities of colonization and war. More importantly, these film show how their filmmakers stressed that the task of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions, which could be incorporated into a ‘post-secular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism, falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens—both religious and secular—engaged in the public use of reason.