On April 29, 1911, key Egyptian government officials as well as political and Muslim religious figures convened in a Cairo suburb to discuss their visions of the Egyptian nation. The Egyptian Congress (which the conveners initially called the Islamic congress) is typically seen as a response to the Coptic congress, which was held in Asyut in the previous month. The Egyptian congress, after all, revoked all Coptic demands presented in the Asyut congress and advocated Islam as the official religion of the state. Lumped together, the two congresses are often glossed over in Egyptian and mainstream historiography as expressions of an internal strife—primarily based on the editorializing of contemporary papers—that was fueled by colonialism and that was eventually subsumed in the subsequent national unity resolutions. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that the Egyptian congress expresses a key moment in the development of the Egyptian national imagination, particularly among the Muslim intelligentsia. The Egyptian congress furthered the state consolidation process so as to transcend religious differences, thereby subjugating all Egyptians to the central authority of the state. In this vein, the congress constituted an attempt to revoke the Ottoman confessional heritage of the millet system and the ṭāʾifah-based demands characteristic of Coptic claims to self-governance as expressed in the Asyut congress, and to establish a modern Western-like nation-state upholding Islam as the official state religion. This study rests primarily on an examination of the 1911 published proceedings of the congress, as well as a wide array of contemporary Egyptian publications from the period of inquiry including newspapers and magazines (e.g. al-Manār, al-Waṭan, Firʿawn, etc.)