The Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim has variously been called a “rebel with a pen,” “a novelist of lost causes,” and “the Arab world’s preeminent bard of dashed hope and disillusionment.” But in addition to their biting political commentary, Ibrahim’s novels also revel in the scatological, the sexual, and the lewd, as farts, feces, urine, and masturbation all consistently make their way into his fiction. Ibrahim thus builds on the legacy of nineteenth-century printing maven, lexicographer, and author Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, whose famous al-Saq ‘Ala al-Saq begins with an exhaustive catalog of rare Arabic words for female and male genitalia, anuses, and copulation. In this sense, Ibrahim’s novels partake in what literary critic and author Radwa ‘Ashur has called a “possible modernity”—one in which heterogeneous languages of refinement, bawdiness, and everyday speech tumble over each other in a playful verbal romp. This paper reads Ibrahim’s Zaat (1992) together with the opening chapters of Shidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-Saq to illustrate in greater detail the parameters of this alternative, impolite, “revolting” modernity. I focus in particular on Ibrahim’s revival and reconfiguration of three key Shidyaqian forms: sexual punning, rhymed prose (saj‘), and the seemingly endless list. Where Shidyaq uses explicit sexual language to mock the polite prudishness of his presumed Christian critics, Ibrahim relies on innuendo to simultaneously escape and get the better of his own era’s Egyptian censors. And where Shidyaq lists endless obscure Arabic synonyms to preserve an Arabic language he felt was deteriorating under the pressures of modernization, Ibrahim uses lists to bombard the reader with the refuse and debris of late capitalism, its boundless heaps of cheap, imported products. I argue that, by challenging the borders that supposedly divide the Arabic literary canon into discrete historical periods, we can trace an alternative modernism in which political power is challenged through small, linguistic jabs at polite taste. We can trace a history of “revolt,” in other words, through works which reigning literary establishments deemed “revolting.”