of Orientalism, has been widely perceived as colonial knowledge at its worst. Rather than deconstructing Orientalism yet again, I suggest moving from a postcolonial perspective with its heavy emphasis on colonial knowledge to a decolonial perspective, one that first, focuses on the interplay of local and "foreign" agents and their respective repertories and agendas; second, systematically considers local knowledge antedating the colonial era of which postcolonial theory tends to be oblivious; and third, thinks in the categories of encounters and entanglements rather than of hierachical binary relationships pitting the European colonizer v. the non-European colonized. The multifocal approach is particularly suited to understanding the quest for Ottoman modernity in the nineteenth century and Islamic modernity in the twentieth. A case study taken from interwar Egypt - the "Islamic" project to form Muslim man - serves to illustrate the dynamics at play.