As Minister of Public Instruction between January 1950 and January 1952, the well-known Egyptian intellectual and educator Taha Hussein (1889-1973) tried to create Egyptian cultural institutes in French-controlled North Africa. Despite his insistence on the purely cultural motives of his project, Taha Hussein came to a head-on collision with the French authorities that opposed any official Egyptian presence in North Africa. After lengthy negotiations and broken French promises, Taha Hussein, in an unprecedented move against the traditional Franco-Egyptian friendship, retaliated by stopping the important French archaeological excavations in Egypt and imposing restrictions on cultural exchanges with France. On the surface, pitching his project as “only cultural” seems to agree with Taha Hussein’s published ideas about the “universality of culture” and the many debates that continue to surround these ideas. Egyptian Marxist writers in the fifties and sixties lamented how his literature was not “committed” to society and its needs (Al-ʻĀlim and Anīs 1955). Postcolonial thinkers have criticized Taha Hussein for his uncritical appreciation of European culture and more importantly for separating culture from the complex web of unequal power relations that shaped his time (Tageldin 2011). Moreover, many North African intellectuals, especially in Algeria, resented that he was not vocal enough against France during Algeria’s war of independence (Karrū 2001). Through a close examination of the details of his dispute with the French over North Africa, however, I will argue that a very political Taha Hussein emerges. Using primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq), the Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (AMAE) as well as Taha Hussein’s private papers, I will show in this short presentation that for Taha Hussein the promotion of the “cultural” over the “political” was a supremely political strategy. Such a strategy ensured that the French government studied and responded to his project in a very serious way. Furthermore, by putting forward such a project, Taha Hussein forced both the Egyptian and French governments to articulate their cultural policies in the region. The details of this dispute will allow me to tell the story of Egypt’s rising regional cultural influence before the 1952 revolution. By shifting the focus from what Taha Hussein wrote to what he and his bureaucrats did, an important continuity with Nasser’s pan-Arabism emerges. By making this argument I aim to question the presumed rupture between “liberal” and “socialist” Egypt.