Allegedly defending a constitution that would guarantee equality of citizenship for Egypt’s non-Muslim, as well as its Muslim, populations, a Coptic lawyer wrote a twenty-five page letter to the British Consul General in 1911, preserved in the Foreign Office Archives in London. The author, Mikhail Fanous, claimed that the country’s British reformers had, over the past three decades, displaced Egypt’s Copts, ‘the actual rulers of country [sic.]’, and replaced them with the ‘most inefficient and disreputable’ sort of ‘Moslem rulers’. The British occupiers of Egypt had pushed ‘the Moslem native in the place left vacant by the overthrowing of the Turkish rulers,’ while the Christian Egyptian who had ‘a better claim both by ability & character to fill those positions in his own fatherland’ was barred from holding positions in government. The British, he argued, were fearful of altering ‘the religious colour of the governing element in order not to excite the religious feeling of the masses whom they were anxious to reconcile to the occupation.’ In Fanous’s argument the removal of the Copts—descendants ‘(by pure race) of the Upper Class ancient Egyptian’, with ‘superiority of inherited ability’—from their rightful position at the helm of the nation, had wrenched Egypt’s hitherto seamless socio-political fabric apart. Though his retelling of history is extensive, and his ideas about its rightful remedy exhaustive, Fanous’s voice has largely been ignored. Although fundamentally anti-imperial in both logic and tenor, Fanous has been evicted from the pantheon of modern Egyptian political thought. The author and his ideas were considered crude and unpalatable to the regime that emerged out of the 1919 revolution— a revolution that had allegedly banished sectarianism forever. His writings, deemed unsophisticated and anomalous, much like those of his Muslim nemesis Abd al-Aziz Jawish, have been sidelined by nationalist historians. But if, as this paper argues, we are to come to grips with the events of 1919, beyond the clichés of crescent embracing cross, we must turn to such ‘extremist’ thinkers as Fanous and Jawish. Representing a corpus of texts and ideas that fit neither in the genealogy of Islamic modernism, much studied as it is, nor in that of ‘secular’ liberal nationalism, they are worthy of attention, if we are to avoid the overbearing telos of nationalist historiography.