The Easternist orientation of the 1930s overlapped with a more profound cultural reorientation developing in Egypt at the same time – the return of Islam to a primary position in Egyptian intellectual discourse and public life. Even in the heyday of Western influence and Egyptian territorial nationalism in the 1920s, Islam was still the central factor in the daily life of most Egyptians. It was only in terms of the customs and ideas of the heavily Westernized elite of Egypt, and in its public life which was then in the process of organization along Western-inspired lines, that Islam can be said to have been shunted to the periphery. The new conditions of the 1930s and 1940s created a suitable environment for the return of Islamic sentiments and concepts to the center of Egyptian thought.

The return of Islam occurred on many levels. One was organizational; the emergence and rapid growth of societies with an explicitly Islamic agenda. The growth of a more Islamically oriented body of opinion within Egyptian society was paralleled by the greater political salience of Islam as manifested in the growing power of the Egyptian Palace and forces allied with it in the 1930s. Underpinning both of the above was the intellectual resurgence of Islam, the emergence of a body of new intellectual production concerned with the history, civilization, and values of Islam.