In 2019 the Alexandria Library published a ten-volume biographical dictionary, titled Jamharat a‘lām al-Azhar al-Sharīf fī al-qarnayn al-rābi’ ‘ashar wa-l-khāmis ‘ashar al-hijrīyyīn [The Community of Luminaries from the Honorable al-Azhar in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries AH]. This dictionary, which was written by Usāma al-Azharī, a religious advisor to Egyptian president ‘Abd al-Fattāḥ al-Sīsī, details the lives and intellectual contributions of Muslim religious scholars (‘ulamā’) from al-Azhar from 1883 CE to the present. In doing so, it is the first of its kind; other biographies of ‘ulamā’ in the modern period only include those who served as Shaykh al-Azhar (e.g. al-‘Aẓīm, 1978). In this paper, I analyze the biographical dictionary to illuminate the anti-Islamist narrative that it constructs, and the related idealization and homogenization of the history of al-Azhar and the ‘ulamā’ in the modern period. Since the 2013 coup that ousted Muḥammad Mursī, Muslim religious scholars (‘ulamā’) like Usāma al-Azharī have collaborated with the Egyptian state to demonize the Muslim Brotherhood, while also promoting the Azhar methodology (manhaj) as the Islamist antipode. Most scholarship on al-Azhar in the modern and contemporary periods examines the ‘ulamā’ through the lens of their relationship to the state and political behaviors (Zeghal 1996, 1999; Bano, 2018). Much less attention has been given to the ‘ulamā’s production of knowledge, even when, as this biographical dictionary demonstrates, it can be deeply embedded in their politics. Through textual analysis of Jamharat a‘lām al-Azhar al-Sharīf, this paper argues that in al-Azharī’s construction of an anti-Islamist narrative, he is simultaneously redressing the legacy of “conservative” ‘ulamā’ in twentieth century historiography. In doing so, the paper demonstrates the intersections between the ‘ulamā’s efforts to counter Islamism and to reconstitute their reputation and place in modern Egyptian history.