First published in Egypt in 1925, Taha Husayn’s (d. 1973) Fi al-Shi’r al-Jahili, “On Pre-Islamic Poetry,” challenged the authenticity of Pre-Islamic poetry. Western scholarship on the resulting controversy has primarily focused on the court battles that ensued leading to his censure and firing from some of the positions he held, as well as highlighting how Husayn’s freedom of speech was trampled upon as a result of religious persecution. While the Islamic intellectuals and ulama who criticized the work are usually presented as irrational religious zealots whose simplified and dogmatic views led them to condemn an ‘enlightened’ intellectual who sought to elevate scholarly methods of research in the greatly evolving Egyptian milieu of the interwar period by incorporating Western historical methods of research in his work, this paper argues that the responses of the ulama were much more nuanced and level-headed than previously presented. Through discussing a book criticizing Husayn written by a Tunisian Islamic scholar who would later become the rector of Al-Azhar, Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn (d. 1958), I argue that the ‘reactionary’ responses revealed an attempt to reconcile Western methods of historical research with classical Islamic ones. Al-Khidr Husayn’s criticism stands apart from many of his peers, particularly because his work was seen as the official response of Al-Azhar to Fi al-Shi’r al-Jahili, but also because of his exceptional argumentative skills, his level tone, his demand for intellectuals to have the proper levels of knowledge when discussing a religious topic, and his demand for clarity in their discussions of religious matters that could be easily misunderstood. Although the issues that Taha Husayn argued in his book remain contested to this day, the arguments made by his interlocutor, al-Khidr Husayn, remain relevant to discussions of the appropriateness of using classical Islamic methods of research in modern settings, to what extent Western and Islamic methods overlap and/or diverge, and if a more ‘modern’ Islamic methodology could be developed in light of the changing scholarly standards of knowledge. The findings of this paper add detail to our knowledge of traditional Islamic scholars’ deliberations on issues raised by modernity.