During the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire—and later the newly founded Turkish Republic—was a "key referent" for Egypt’s elite intellectual culture. Egyptian feminists became active observers of the development of women’s rights reforms in Turkey, and they used Turkey as a role model—a potential roadmap—to articulate demands for change in specific areas for action, and to mobilize public and institutional support for their cause. As an Islamic country which ruled Egypt for almost four centuries, Turkey became a vessel, now distant yet still familiar, through which feminist ideas were communicated to Egyptian society. Turkey provided an extra layer of Islamic padding to cushion the effects of their feminist agenda, ideas that otherwise could have acquired edge more quickly, if associated with Westernization. Therefore, Turkey became a signifier of "how to become part of the modern world while remaining Muslim," and thus functioned as an alternative to, or a bulwark against, Western—read colonial—imperial and intellectual hegemony. Egyptian feminists thus justified their demands through the Turkish example in order to mobilize a sense of empathy from conservative voices, some of whom remained loyal to Egypt’s Ottoman past; indeed some had a continuing respect for the Ottomans as the defenders of Islam, coupled at times with a certain nostalgia for Muslim unity. Egyptian feminists’ preoccupation with Turkey also had its limits. Many of the feminists in Egypt did not fully embrace the Turkish model. Instead, Turkish feminism and its attendant discourses became open to a more diffuse process of "endless and relentless filtering, rendering, deconstructing, rethinking or contenting" before being used as a didactic tool for arguing the merits of a particular reform program in Egypt. Egyptian feminists, liberal and conservative alike, agreed that the Turkish model represented an inherent potential for women’s emancipation, not only in Egypt but also in the Middle East, but in their efforts to promote Turkey as a role model, they tried to maintain a delicate balance between the sympathetic observers and the worried detractors of the Kemalist reforms in Egypt and the larger Islamic world. Drawing on newspapers, periodicals, and public lectures in Egypt, this paper examines the ways in which gender politics in the newly founded Turkish Republic, once entitled to the authority of the Islamic Caliphate, shaped Egyptian feminism during the early twentieth century.