This paper provides a historical analysis of violence and riots that broke out in the Egyptian town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra in 1925 and how the riots were represented in the nationalist narratives. What became known as the al-Mahalla Intifada, al-Mahalla Revolt, started with a protest against the wide scale fraud of the parliamentary election. The protest grew violent and caused destruction to the commercial and the upper scale residential neighborhoods where candidates lived and where the commercial interests of the rising Egyptian bourgeoisie and foreign businesses were located. A group of men, including the Wafd candidate and his middle-class and working-class futuwwat supporters were jailed. For two years, people of al-Mahalla and nationalist activists in Cairo worked tirelessly until the Wafd afandiyya were released, leaving behind in jail many working-class rebellious and futuwwat. The Cairo-based contemporary press misleadingly considered the Revolt peasantry riots, while the local nationalist narrative focused on the role of male educated afandiyya in the Revolt. Tracing the social and geographical origin of those who were involved in the riots, I provide a gendered and classed construction of the revolt. Rather than treating that incident of urban violence as a spontaneous reaction to the election battle between two elite candidates, I argue that the Revolt was a protest of the townspeople against the enforced integration of the town into the global economy which led to the decline of its traditional handloom industry, the deterioration of the traditional quarter, the exclusiveness of the emerging Europeanized commercial and residential area. Examining the Revolt of al-Mahalla in both local and national contexts problematizes the political instability that Egypt experienced for the three decades between the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1922 and the Free Officers’ Revolution in 1952. Contending the existing literature that discusses the dynamics of instability and protests from the Cairo-based politics as struggles between elite political parties and the Royal Palace, I show that the political troubles and riot in the Egyptian locality were the ultimate culmination of tension between the inhabitants of the traditional quarters and the emerging Egyptian capitalists that allied themselves with the global economic forces. The paper benefits from a wide range of sources including court records, ‘Abdin Royal Palace archive, and contemporary memoirs and periodicals.