MESA Abstract 2022 “Updates and Revisions in the Study of the Egyptian Reformer Shaykh Hasan Al-`Attar, d. 1835” This paper surveys some of the contributions to scholarship over the past 30 years which have added to an understanding of the life of Shaykh Hasan Al-`Attar and the period in which he lived. Arguably, the most important of these contributions involved an Albanian perspective on Al-`Attar. In addition, there were Turkish and German contributions amplifying earlier ideas about Al-`Attar’s views on medicine. Finally, there was an article or two from Nahdawi literary scholarship. While the paper is thus somewhat empirical it also raises a more theoretical question and provides one possible answer to it. The question raised is how do we explain the lack of concern with this figure, who played a recognized role in the Muhammad `Ali reform program given a context in which scholars are deeply concerned with many other such figures? To answer the question, I begin with a review of some of the new work, the most interesting of which I take to be that of Muhammad al-Arna’ut, a Jordanian professor familiar with the Albanian language sources for the study of the city of Scutari, in northern Albania. From this work, we learn not only something about the years which Al-`Attar spent there but something about the success of the local dynasty there over the preceding 20-30 years in modernizing the society, learning as well that Muhmmad `Ali Pasha and seemingly also Hasan Al-`Attar were both influenced by the achievements of the Bushati dynasty there. We also learn that, Egypt and Albania had long been in contact, that in fact a good deal of the ruling class of Egypt from the 18th into the 20th centuries derived from Albania. After discussing some other new scholarship on Al-`Attar and modern medicine in the Muhammad `Ali reform period, the paper returns to the question of why Al-`Attar has been ignored and or kept out of Nahda studies. The stock answer is one putting aside his achievements by simply noting he did not know French. The paper concludes that a more satisfactory answer would be one considering other factors as well among which would be how we identify the constituent elements of early modernity. Does cultural modernity exist without a connection to what went before? As regards Egypt, many make that claim so logically Al-`Attar would be marginal!