In the late 1910s the entertainment press was rising fast in Cairo. First, newspapers started featuring reports about plays, actors and singers. Then, by the mid 1920s, a series of magazines exploded into life including gossip, photos and long interviews with the stars of the day. This was the beginning of modern celebrity culture in Egypt and a huge number of performers became national and international stars – Youssef Wahby, Fatima Rushdi, Badia Masabni, Naguib al-Rihani, and many more. Many of the models for these new celebrities were Europeans or American. The figure of Sarah Bernhardt, probably the world’s first modern celebrity, loomed large over Egyptian actresses and many of them (including Fatima Rushdy and Rose al-Youssef) were called “The Sarah Bernhardt of the East”. The stars of Hollywood, such as Pearl White, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and others, also became pinups in Cairo. There were many similarities between the celebrity cultures of Egypt, Europe and America. However, stars in Cairo were constantly shaping their image in response to the local culture. This paper focuses on two rivals and probably the most famous singers in the 1920s Cairo, Oum Kalthoum and Mounira al-Mahdiyya, who both used their own conceptions of Egyptian-ness to form their public personae. Oum Kalthoum, worked hard to paint herself as a conservative girl from the countryside, shocked by the excesses of Cairo’s nightlife scene. Mounira, on the other hand, reveled in her unconformity. Stories appeared about her late-night poker parties, her Zar ceremonies, superstitions, and the wild antics that happened on her Nile house-boat. They two women were polar opposites. I argue that the clash between these two huge celebrities was, more than anything, a clash between different ways that women were constructing a female Egyptian national identity in the aftermath of the 1919 revolution. Mounira was urban, unabashed, and upfront; Oum Kalthoum was rural, modest, and reserved. The concept of a modern celebrity, that many want to trace back to the West, was being used to ask questions about a newly independent Egypt.