The historical writing of an amateur historian – Dar al-‘Ulum instructor Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jawad – gives scholars a window through which to examine how effendis viewed the past and ‘modern’ attempts to record it. ‘Abd al-Jawad’s most prominent work is the 900 page Taqwim Dar al-‘Ulum, which is part history, part yearbook. His historical works also include a biography of Shaykh al-Husayn Ibn Ahmad al-Marsafi and two memoirs of his childhood, one focusing on the village in which he was born and the other on life as a teenager in Cairo. However, ‘Abd al-Jawad was professionally trained as a teacher, not a historian. He may not have been exposed to the ‘modern’ discipline of history until his first year at Dar al-‘Ulum, the higher school that trained shaykhs to be teachers. He spent the majority of his working life teaching in various government schools. In scattered essays in the Taqwim and other publications, ‘Abd al-Jawad discusses his approaches to writing history, especially the importance he placed on recording the recent past. His (extremely rare) memoir Fi Kuttab al-Quriya contains an astoundingly detailed record – in words and pictures – of the rhythms and patterns of life in a small Egyptian village in the early twentieth century. His often quirky historical pieces discuss topics of personal interest: events and practices he witnessed, institutions he attended, individuals he met. While he could not have met Shaykh Marsafi, who died in 1890, the shaykh was an early faculty member of his beloved alma mater, Dar al-‘Ulum. ‘Abd al-Jawad’s pieces contrast with those written by professionally-trained Egyptian historians of his generation, yet he clearly aspires to take part in these ‘modern’ attempts to record the past. While the growing professionalization of history writing in early twentieth-century Egypt makes it tempting to focus only on the works of prominent professionals, a detailed examination of the historical output of a dedicated amateur such as ‘Abd al-Jawad gives scholars a window into alternative ideas about history, historiography and the past. What ‘Abd al-Jawad recorded in his histories, why he thought history writing was important and the methods he used to assemble his snapshots of the past all tell us more about what it meant to be a historian in interwar Egypt.