Dreams of alternative modernities on the Nile This paper studies how Egyptian filmmakers operating during 1919-1952 were able to carve a space for their art and profession under overt and covert censorship regimes. Under overt censorship, I draw on archival material to study the positions of the British colonial authority and the Egyptian colonized state on film as a "modern" medium of cultural expression. Under covert censorship, I study societal and religious discourses that proscribed film as an art and profession, thereby deeming the new medium of expression incompatible with the “standards"(thaw?bit) of a majority Muslim society. I draw on a collection of Islamic legal opinions (fatwas) to deconstruct the narrative of prohibitions of film as a reprehensible form of figurative representation (ta?w?r), a reprehensible entertainment (lahw), and reprehensible innovation (bid’a). In addition, I show the limitations of Islamic legal opinions that tolerate film by relying on the Islamic legal concept of public welfare (ma?la?a). I argue that Egyptian filmmakers, who witnessed the 1919 revolution with its limited success in installing a functional constitutional democracy in Egypt, found in cinema a powerful new communication medium that could be used to break the tight circles of covert and overt censorship. Filmmakers used the screen to construct a public sphere, where they imagined an alternative modernity characterized by a secularizing society— but not anti-religious-society--in which people enjoyed surprising levels of social liberties and social justice for the time period. I am not suggesting here that film was a substitute for a physical public sphere such as public houses. Rather, I aim to show how cinema was an amplifier for the unheard vernacular voices of the marginalized within that wider public sphere fostered by print-capitalism that included newspapers dominated by modern standard Arabic. In my research I have found that the two major characteristics of that cinematic counter-discourse were, first, to lampoon the Cairene bourgeois reductionist understanding of modernity, which reduced “being-modern” in Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s to “appearing-modern” without “acting-modern.” The second characteristic was to position individuals from marginalized social groups such as working class Egyptians (awl?d il-balad), the peasants (fall???n), women and performing artists at the center—not on the margins- of that public sphere, in which Islam was depicted as a substratum of the everyday life practices of film characters, who adapted Islam to their common good.