In the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crisis, economists and financial experts have turned to Islamic banking and finance as an untapped continent with the potential to renew and recapitalize globalizing regimes of finance. This revalorized homo islamicus, previously a signification of difference to be overcome in the process of modernization, now stands as an alternative network of financial practice, the instruments of which, once purified into the legal formalisms of global financial markets, will place a check on the speculative and, ultimately, destabilizing tendencies of homo economicus. Recent scholarship has sought to deconstruct this simple opposition between the profit-maximizing figure of neoclassical economic theory and its more circumspect Islamic cousin. Scholars have demonstrated how the distinction is constructed in practice, a process of differentiation through which Islamic finance assembles and designates new boundaries to market calculation vis-a-vis an Islamic moral economy. As they have shown, the purification of Islamic financial instruments - the derivation of their value from the transactional forms of "conventional" finance with which they are always already entangled - has been concurrent with their historicization, the projection of homo islamicus into an Islamic past. This paper explores the engagement of Islamic reformers in colonial Egypt with questions of financial calculation and economic organization. The most well-known example is Muhammad ‘Abduh's 1904 pronouncement on the permissibility of interest-bearing savings certificates. Contemporary scholars of Islamic finance and economics have claimed ‘Abduh's statement to be the first attempt to circumscribe the novel financial instruments of a modern capitalist society within the moral dictates of the Islamic discursive tradition. Rather than reading this moment as an engagement between the economic and the ethical, the paper explores their imbrication as part of the broader articulation of Islam and economic liberalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century projects of legal reform. I argue that reformers such as ‘Abduh sought to assemble alternative networks of financial practice and, thus, reconfigure the linkage between the self-interested individual and possible forms of collectivity, whether national or Islamic. This is traced through the work of ‘Umar Lutfi, a contemporary of ‘Abduh most famously known as the father of the cooperative movement in Egypt, but also a proponent of Islamic reform. The paper examines how the nascent cooperative movement drew on the conceptual grammar of Islamic legal reform to refashion liberal notions of public utility and the calculative arrangements of the joint-stock corporation.