In the nineteenth-century, the government of Mehmet Ali utilized the normative system of religion to produce the modern, Egyptian individual. Mehmet Ali appointed the Bakri family as heads of all Sufi orders in Cairo and offered them authority over most Sufi shrines, rituals, and personnel. The modern state began to circumscribe the boundaries of proper Islam, through the Bakris' management of the right to proselytize in public (qadam) and their official certification of religious knowledge (ijaza). Yet, as Sufi shaykhs and bureaucratic intermediaries, the Bakris assured a place for Sufi Islam in Mehmet Ali's vision for Egyptian society on the path to modernity. Sufism - defined as a tradition of Islamic knowledge, practices, and persons – provided the means of political jostling and social maneuvering between the Bakris, other Sufi heads of orders, and the modern state, in the contested and discursive battle to define modern religion. In the historiography, Frederick de Jong’s work on Sufism has drawn attention to the Bakris’ legal-rational authority as heads of orders, but this study goes beyond his pioneering work in a substantial way. We seek to uncover the multilogue of voices inherent in the sources, by which Mehmet Ali cast bureaucratic change as the logical extension of religious precedence and traditional legitimacy, or how state functionaries shifted Sufi concepts onto modern epistemes. In large part, these Imperial decrees infused Sufi terms, titles, and functions with the state's definition of religious propriety: quietist, bloodless, and secular. By taking inspiration from Selim Deringil’s evaluation of Islamicization as secularization, in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth-century, this paper seeks to compare Abdulhamid II and Mehmet Ali’s efforts in enforcing proper Islam in Istanbul and Cairo, respectively. This study approaches Imperial decrees as sites of political contestation between the state, the Bakris, and rival religious claimants. The nineteenth-century negotiations over material largesse and social prestige demonstrate the logic of power inherent in the modern, Egyptian state’s unprecedented subordination of Sufi orders. As the primary intermediaries between Mehmet Ali and Sufi heads of orders, the Bakris navigated the twin processes of Egyptian bureaucratization and Sufi institutionalization, thereby influencing the political and poetic contours of modern religion in Egypt.