In 1905, a Singaporean mufti issued a fatwa permitting the purchase of insurance (sikurtāh) for cargo transported by ship. This responsum was clearly a document of its time – an attempt to grapple with new financial instruments, themselves emerging as popular options as a result of new advances in technology, in particular the advent of steamships. It also reflected the immediate concerns of a shrinking world, increasingly linked together by the possibility of travel and communication. But the markers of this increasingly connected world could be found not only in the document itself, but indeed in its subsequent circulation and reception in the Middle East. It was quickly noticed by the famous reformist figure, Rashīd Riḍā, who published it in his journal al-Manār in order to make an argument of his own: that markedly liberal notions of consent and religion ought to govern the shariʿa’s approach to the economic realm. Not to be outdone, one of Riḍā’s strongest opponents in Egypt, Muḥammad Bakhīt al-Muṭīʿī, issued his own fatwa in response, drawing the same substantive conclusion but on more identifiably traditional grounds. The resulting polemic between the two figures lays bare the manner in which the contested terrain of Egyptian intellectual life – over questions as central to the fiqh tradition as the nature of legal authority (the right to ijtiḥād) and the basic methodological parameters of interpretation -- was constituted by both the rapid technological and social changes of the period, and a universe of discourse that was keenly attuned to happenings in other parts of the Muslim world. The engagement of reformists like Riḍā with the wider Muslim world is relatively well-known. My paper instead shifts attention towards their opponents, arguing that in confronting the arguments of the reformists, “traditionalists” too participated in wider networks of discussion which both enabled and constrained their engagement with modernity in particular ways. Specifically, I argue that they found ways to reconfigure the intellectual and social infrastructure of the old institution of the madhhab. At a moment when the madhhab’s role as an interpretive institution was being weakened, old-world scholarly and social protocols continued to provide a continuity with the past that enabled engagements with the present. The remnants of the madhhab paradigm, then, facilitated a remapping of networks of influence and identity that allowed “traditionalists” to both mark themselves off from reformists, and confront new problems in what they took to be authentic ways.