“It is always dangerous to present intellectuals in the novel,” warns one of Gide’s characters in a 1925 novel. “They bore the reader to death.” Arabic novelists could not have heeded this warning any less. Egyptian novels, from Haykal’s Zaynab (1911) to al- Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2002) and beyond, teem with intellectuals, much like their contemporaries in other Arab countries, and often with excellent results. This paper is a study of Intellectuals as represented in a selection of Egyptian novels, an analysis of these ‘fictional intellectuals’ and how they figure into the discussion(s) of what/who is an intellectual in modern Arabic thought. The appellation “intellectual” and its Arabic equivalent “muthaqqaf” are relatively new to both Arab and Western writings, fictional and non-fictional alike. One of the paper’s goals is to trace the earliest incidence of the term in Arabic writings and its infiltration into the Arabic novel around the beginning of the twentieth century. Another goal is show the diversity of the representation of the “intellectual” in the Egyptian novel and to contextualize it within the differences in the author’s ideologies and/or generation as well as within the country’s socio-political conditions at the time of the novels’ authorship and publications. The paper draws on the discussions that Edward Said presents in his Representations of the Intellectual, and on the discussions of what constitutes “al-thaqafa” and “al-muthaqqaf,” in Arab society. Such discussions have actively engaged many of Egypt’s thinkers and writers from Taha Hussein and ‘Abbas al-‘Aqqad in the early twentieth century to Najib Mahfuz and Luwis ‘Awad a few decades later and have more recently engaged novelists of the younger generation of novelists, including Ibrahim ‘Abd el-Meguid ‘Alaa al-Aswany, and Hamdy Abu Golayyel. Outside of the novel, the paper draws on the non-fictional writings, published interviews and some interviews that I have personally conducted in 2010/2011. This paper is part of a larger work in progress.