The new Eastern and Islamic orientations of the post-1930 era set the general mood underlying the more focused supra-Egyptian ideologies of the period. The first of these to emerge with clarity was Egyptian Islamic nationalism. Egyptian Islamic nationalism was an attempt to build a religiously based alternative to supplant the territorial nationalism which had gained ascendancy in Egypt in the 1920s. It is important to emphasize that its formulators were both Muslims and nationalists. By this we mean that they were the first Egyptian Muslims to undertake the task of developing a systematic nationalist doctrine whose reference point was firmly anchored in Islam.

The Islamic orthodox establishment of Egypt was not the primary force responsible for the formulation of Egyptian Islamic nationalism. This was in part because of the diversity of that establishment; Egypt's ‘ulama’ spanned a wide range of opinion and spoke in tones ranging from relatively liberal to quite conservative. Even in the 1930s, when Nur al-Islam provided the ‘ulama’ with their own outlet for cultural expression, their role in developing a specifically Islamic variant of nationalism was less important than that played by spokesmen for the new Islamic societies of the period. Azharite-trained shaykhs such as ‘Abd Allah ‘Afifi, Muhammad Sulayman, and Mustafa al-Rifa'i al-Lubban occasionally contributed to Islamic nationalist publications; ‘alim and effendi both participated in the task of reformulating nationalism in more Islamic terms.

But on the whole Egypt's ‘ulama’ followed rather than led in the discourse which articulated Egyptian Islamic nationalism.