At the center of the paper is the puzzle of why Egypt appears to have contributed little to the global corpus of political thought. Although the country witnessed two large-scale revolutions in 1882 and 1919, there are no historical accounts of the ideas that they generated or the thought that fuelled them. Colonial observers frequently suggested that Egyptians were ‘political ciphers’ and pointed to the absence of abstract political theories as evidence for that assertion—a claim that has since been accepted by many scholars. Against those persistent claims, then, the paper asserts that what appeared as a national deficit of ideas was instead the product of some foundational assumptions on the part of the intellectual historian. These include: a dependence on a Eurocentric concept of ‘politics’, which itself emerged in the nineteenth-century; a reliance on colonial distinctions between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’; and more crucially, between political thought and political practice, with the attendant presumption that the former precedes the latter. Indeed the very dichotomy between ‘thought’ and ‘action’ upon which much intellectual history of the region has relied—and the notion that the former must be prior to the latter—is not merely a simplification or a misrepresentation of a complex social reality. Instead as I show, it itself played a critical role in justifying imperial domination and plays now an active role in obscuring the significance and contribution of anticolonial political actors. I show that in Egypt, political ideas were to be predominantly found not in the abstract speculation of political theorists, but in the everyday praxis of politicians: op-eds, speeches, court testimonials, and quotidian reflections in diaries. Drawing on these overlooked sources, the paper provides prompts for writing the history of political ideas for a place that, it is said, failed to produce any.