The aim of my paper is to examine the reactions of Egyptian intellectuals around al-Azhar and the Muslim Brothers to the ideas of socialism and capitalism at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s. While socialism, in the form it took under Nasser’s experiments, only emerged from 1954 onwards, capitalism and imperialism had already had a major influence on shaping the material environment in Egypt at the time. My approach is a combination of intellectual and cultural history. Besides the actual texts of authors like Muhammad al-Bahy, Muhammad al-Ghazali, al-Bahi al-Khuli or Khalid Muhammad Khalid, I am interested in the material and cultural conditions in which these texts were produced. I am particularly interested in the foundation and development of private publishing houses at the time, such as Maktaba Wahba in Cairo (founded in 1948), and beyond that in the personal relations between publishers and authors, as well as between publishers and other service providers, for example paper suppliers, printers, typographers and graphic designers. My questions to be addressed are threefold: Why did such publications only start to appear in the late 1940s? How is capitalism understood in the writings of these authors and what kind of capitalism was addressed–one that is local, translocal or international? And how did these writers react to the accusations levelled by communists and others in Egypt and elsewhere that they themselves were, in fact, defenders of the capitalist order? Scholars have researched the lives and ideas of most of these intellectuals and their institutions or associations. From the varying perspectives most of them have been portrayed as Islamists or actors within political Islam. For my part, though, I am interested in understanding them and their material conditions at a very specific moment in time–the beginning of the Cold War–and in exploring the question of what was possible for these writers and how their own perceptions of Islam were changed when confronted with ideologies and movements that at the time were vitally relevant and seemed indeed to be inescapable. Thus the writings of these intellectuals should be seen as part of a specific critique of capitalism and hence as part of a translocal history of ideas rather than only as a chapter of Islamism itself.