This paper explores the social and legal history of defamation in nineteenth-century Ottoman Egypt. While defamation has usually been studied within the context of Khedival Egypt’s ruling dynasty and its complex personalities and their reputations muddled within the complexities of the Ottoman and British Empires, the reputations of everyday subjects and how they came to be understood, probed, and contested during the modern period have been underexplored. Nevertheless, how one came to stand and be valued and protected within her Ottoman province gradually changed during the nineteenth century. This gradual, yet critical transformation may be characterized by an increasingly secularizing society and protective state where social anxieties became fixated more on economic over moral harms. To explore this hypothesis, this paper focuses on and compares nineteenth-century defamation cases as they played out within local and foreign tribunals sitting in Cairo beginning in 1860s with the traditional Islamic law of qadhf—or false accusation of adultery or fornication. As similar, yet quite distinct analogues, nineteenth-century defamation and qhadf present the social historian with a new mode by which to study how Islamic law and society both changed and remained the same through the modern period. But their comparison also allows the legal historian a focal point to study how the law of negligence and the social concerns and policies underlying it emerged and evolved across this critical century from existing precedent. Relying on cases uncovered from the Egyptian National Archives, as well as British and French national archives, this paper follows the fates of individuals—locals, foreigners, rich, poor, men, women, Muslims and non-Muslims—and their communities as they unfolded in emblematic defamation cases in nineteenth-century Egypt. By doing so, this paper ultimately contributes to and fills a dearth of scholarship on the history of defamation and negligence in nineteenth-century Egypt. But more fundamentally, it serves as a social telescope by which to see how modern Egypt, its laws, and its people emerged and diverged from its past legal tradition.