How do social activists use stories about religion and morality to envision change and encourage action, and how are these narratives exchanged across borders in the Middle East? To answer these questions, this study examines Egyptian and Algerian morality tales of the 1940s and 1950s, as printed in the pages of papers like al-Risalah, Afrique-Action, and El Moudjahid. For Egypt, the study explores stories written by Kamil Mahmud Habib, Sayyid Qutb, and 'Ali al-Tantawi, such as “Shaykh in a Dance Club” [Shaykh fi marqas] and “Goddess of the Beach” [Rabbat al-shati']. The presentation also examines Algerian morality tales like “The Mason-Wasp and the Toad” [La Mouche-maçonne et le crapaud], a fable adapted by Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, and the popular legend of Colonel Ben Daoud, cited by North African authors including Nadir Bouzar, Mustapha Bekkouche, and Allal El Fassi. These morality tales can be broadly classified into two types: the fable (which Yacine dubbed “lies, where not everything is false”) and historical myths (“truths, where not everything is true”). As the paper argues, morality tales were an important way for social activists to advocate both prescriptive norms (about what should be done) and proscriptive norms (about what should not be done). Moreover, individuals like Yacine, Bouzar, Qu?b, and ?ab?b used morality tales to provide scripts for action, make arguments about roles and responsibilities, communicate opinions about who was violating and who was upholding the social order, and contest social boundaries. For instance, “Shaykh in a Dance Club” encouraged transgressing established divisions of space, while the legend of Colonel Ben Daoud challenged social hierarchies and assimilationist doctrines in French Algeria. As compact arguments in a memorable and elastic form, these tales traveled well across borders and were flexibly adapted to fit local contexts. "The Mason-Wasp and the Toad," for instance, was a Sudanese fable that traveled to Algeria and was adapted into an anti-colonial tale. Similarly, the story of Ben Daoud was shared in Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. Thus, morality tales were a useful strategy for Egyptian and Algerian social activists of the 1940s and 1950s. Overall, this finding is important for the study of social movements in the Middle East, in that it should encourage scholars to decenter religion as a unit of analysis, and focus instead on the hybridity of the Arab moral imaginary and the ways norms were actively negotiated and contested between various sites of norm production.