The dominant portrayal of Egypt’s troubled transitional period since the 2011 revolution as a struggle between secularism and Islamism fails to capture what is actually at stake for many Egyptians who do not endorse a secularized conception of religiosity, yet refuse its conflation with the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood. The paper aims at elucidating how the institutional configuration and discursive forms of religious interaction impede transformation of power relations between state and democratic social forces. Why do the revolutionary and secular forces fail to constitute themselves as new brokers to usher in an inclusively democratic political regime? How is the arbitrary division between religion and politics misleadingly conceived? How can civil society organization surpass the binary choice between the conservative religiosity and national sentiments? The paper firstly investigates how the political class has long accentuated a schism between Islamists and secular forces to monopolize the ideological production of “Islam” at critical historical moments, and therefore to maintain hegemonic position over society. Secondly the paper draws a parallel between the position of the radical left in Latin America during the 1960s that polarized societies and led to the establishment of highly repressive “Bureaucratic Authoritarian” regimes on the one hand, and the role of Islamists in Egypt on the other. It will show how the production of ideological “socialist renovation” that offered a new ideational underpinning for the leftist ideology led to the re-emergence of a new version of moderate left since 2006 in Latin America, which, in turn, ushered in a new pluralistic and equitable socio-political order. This analogy would help unpack the role of subjectivity in a polarized context, exposing the importance of emergence of new “post-Islamist” forces to surpass existing political predicament of transition and constitute an inclusive democratic regime. Far from being a self-evident, my fieldwork conducted in Egypt in the period between May 2012-September 2015, including observer participation in some of the protest activities, such as marches, demonstrations and political rallies, as well as in-depth interviews, shows how diverse political forces are deeply interpellated in the perpetual zero-sum game between the nation-state and the Islamic groups. Understanding how the meanings and practices associated with such divisive categorical identities shifted over time would help to contemporaneously position the religious production of the state within wider debates in Egypt about the nature of the modern state and the links between religion and politics that animate modern governance.