In December of 1980, the Egyptian judge and public intellectual Tariq al-Bishri (b. 1933) used his slot as a featured speaker at the Center for Arab Unity Studies’ annual conference in Beirut to come out, so to speak, as a neo-Islamist. Having been regarded for over a decade as a pillar of Egypt’s nationalist Left as well as a leader of its new generation of scientific-socialist historians, al-Bishri argued in Beirut that the Arab nationalist project must negate its secular character and incorporate Islam as a central element in order to survive in Egypt. He insisted that achieving independence required the re-structuring of the modern Arab knowledge hierarchy to replace its foreign wafid (imported) elements—-its secular principles, especially—-with native mawruth (inherited) epistemic and moral structures, the most important of which, al-Bishri significantly asserted, is the shari’a. Delivered at a historical moment when the question of basing Egyptian legislation on shari’a law formed the battlefront between the then-waning Arab nationalist current and burgeoning political Islamist movement, al-Bishri’s emergence in favor of shari’a marked his defection from the Egyptian Left and the beginning of his life as a so-called Islamist thinker. In contrast to the description common to both Arab and Western scholarship of his metamorphosis as a naqla (shift) or hijra (emigration) to a reformist strand of wasati (mainstream) Islamism that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, my paper argues that the Islamist direction taken by al-Bishri and many thinkers of his generation in the late 1970s constituted an evolution of Arab nationalism itself, rather than a bona fide defection to another intellectual tradition. Beginning with al-Bishri’s socialist writings in the mid-1960s, I delineate a nationalist trajectory that reached Islamist conclusions on its own by the late 1970s, well before the rise of the wasati Brothers. Indeed, al-Bishri and his contemporaries were driven by a purpose all their own: the revision and revival of the post-colonial nationalist project that they had spent their careers building and defending until its shocking 1967 defeat against Israel and subsequent collapse over the Sadat era. As my interview with al-Bishri and analysis of his work reveal, his generation’s concerns with the religious-cultural heritage (turath), authenticity (asala), and civilizational independence, which together comprise the basis of their neo-Islamist positions, were not new but, in his own words, “had an interior basis” in the nationalist project that they were bequeathed as young men.