A quick glance at Egyptian films of pre-1952 revolution can easily lead to conclusions that modernity in Egypt is as predominately secular domain. However, a closer look at supporting roles reveals that Islam served as a substratum of the everyday life practices of film characters. This paper examines metaphors representing Islam in the cinematic critique of modernity in post WWII Egypt. I draw on selected scenes from popular family dramas such as Talaq Su‘ad Hanim (The Divorce of Su’ad Hanim, dir. Anwar Wagdi, 1948), al-Zawja al-Sabi‘a (The Seventh Wife, dir. Muhammad ‘Imara, 1950) and al-Bayt al-Kabir (The Great Household, dir. Ahmad Kamil Mursi, 1949). These films are popular classics that continue to have a visible presence in Egyptian popular culture until today. They share a critique of the false ways in which modernity materializes and leads to the appropriation of Islamic legal tradition in order to sustain a class hierarchy that thrived on colonization and war. They present a rising trajectory showing the changing images of feminine agency in response to the appropriation of Islamic personal law of divorce amidst caricatures of modernity. In doing so, I argue, these films presented a fairly early recognition of how religion has not shrunken away under the pressures of modernization. They served as an exemplar of a secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between Islam as a faith and a body of legal knowledge that has the ‘vital semantic potentials’ to be translated into secular idioms and in a ‘universally accessible language.’ They underscored the importance of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions, which could be incorporated into a ‘postsecular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism. More importantly, they stressed that such a task falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens—both religious and secular—engaged in the public use of reason.