Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt provides the date by which historians of the Middle East designate that region's abrupt entry into the modern era. Napoleon's military forces were accompanied by members of the French Commission of Sciences and Arts. These civilian invaders were charged with implanting Enlightenment ideals of the new French Republic into Egypt as rationale for their colonial expansion into Ottoman territory. Thus, Egyptians felt the "shock of modernity" from the impact of intellectual as well as military invasion. French presence of three years was followed eventually by British occupation until 1922. Much of the political and cultural history of Egypt's colonial period involved complex interactions of resistance and attraction to European ideas and practices. Egyptian rulers introduced European-type military, political, and cultural reforms, while Egyptian and other Arab intellectuals debated the merits restoring a lost Arab heritage through carefully selected Western concepts and techniques. This discourse, centered in Egypt, came to be referred to as the modern Arab "renaissance," seen by later historians as primarily a literary and political movement. Musicological writings from this era indicate that music was also a significant feature of renaissance thought. In this paper I examine, from an ethnomusicological perspective, contributions of musical practice and theory to renaissance discourse of reform and redefinition. I demonstrate that my study of Arabic musicological texts from the later years of the renaissance period indicate that music was considered an important ideological component for the shaping of a modern Egyptian identity. For this study, I discuss accounts of official court patronage of music and musicians during the last decades of the 19th century. I focus on the court-supported singer Abduh al-Hamuli, described as "a reformer in the garb of a singer" who would lead Egyptians to "the right path for restoring the legacy of the East...." I describe the tensions expressed in writings on music, as their authors attempted to reconcile preservation of musical authenticity with attraction to innovation in musical styles and techniques based on European models. I conclude by analyzing the role of music within the broader discourse conducted by Egyptian intellectuals debating potential benefits of adopting Westernized modernity within an -Islamic context. I also discuss relevant issues of social theory related to understanding a non-Western society's conceptualization of processes of modernization. .