Despite Elliot Colla's brilliant 2009 article that deconstructed of the mythology surrounding Muhammad Husayn Haykal's novel Zaynab (1913) and it's supposed status as the "first modern novel in Arabic," the novel is still seen as a major milestone in cultural modernism, both within Egypt and in Anglo-American Middle East Studies. This paper seeks to situate Haykal's novel within the Egyptian tradition of village literature (e.g. Yusuf al-Shirbini's Huzz al-Quhuf (17th century) and Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's 'Adhra' Dinshaway (1906)) as well as in the context of global modernist discourses like nationalism, anthropology, and agrarian capitalism. In the process, we will see how the "peasant" (fallah) came to represent the national essence of Egyptians in a durable structure of feeling that has persisted to this day, leaving Haykal's novel with an impenetrable mystique as Egypt’s "first modern novel.”