The influence of fascism in Egyptian in the 1930s and 1940s has been the subject of a long and controversial debate. This paper moves beyond the scholarly fixation on influence by asking what it meant to use “fascist” as an invective in post-World War II Egypt. Specifically, I consider the deployment of “fascism” as a label to criticize religious politics by the Coptic intellectual Salama Musa from 1946 to 1948. Once an ardent secularist and even an admirer of fascism, in the 1940s Musa was part of a larger shift among Copts that advocated for the strengthening of communal institutions, both lay and religious, to act as representative channels in the face of the declining number of Copts in government and to counter illiberal politics. As a writer for the Coptic newspaper Misr, Musa frequently wrote on “religious fascism,” which he conceived of as a blending of religion and politics, rooted in majoritarian chauvinism, that would lead to illiberal governance and the oppression of minorities. While Musa primarily focused on Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood as the agents of “religious fascism,” he frequently presented these forces in alliance with both Egyptian authoritarianism, most notably exemplified in the second government of Ismail Sidqi (1946), and the manipulations of the British occupation. At the heart of Musa’s analysis was the diagnosis of a threat posed by these reactionary co-conspirators that would undermine the freedom and dignity of Egyptians in general and further the precarity and marginalization of Copts in particular. I argue that Musa’s invocations of religious fascism reflected a broader Coptic reaction to the limitations and contradictions of Egypt’s “liberal era” (1923-1952). Religious fascism served as a powerful vocabulary for Copts like Musa to express their anxieties over both the future of liberalism in Egypt and the grim lessons that European fascism offered on the vulnerability of minorities within nation states. In turn, expressing communal anxieties in comparison to fascism lent urgency to the arguments of Copts who advocated for their communal institutions to function on liberal-democratic grounds. By investigating Musa’s place in the Coptic discourse that warned of religious fascism while promoting the representative authority of communal institutions, I highlight a minority approach to navigating the limitations of inclusion in a liberal system. Understanding the struggle for communal rights as one between liberalism and fascism, Musa situated the community in a global moment of anxiety regarding liberalism’s future.