This thesis challenges the conventional view of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s reform ideas in broad and binary terms as bridging a gap between ‘Islam and Europe’ or ‘tradition and modernity’. I offer instead an analysis of ʿAbduh’s reformist thought in his own words and local practical context in 19th century Egypt, based on a close-reading of his newspaper articles. I argue that ʿAbduh’s reform project, in terms of what was at stake in his job as Director of Publications for the Egyptian state from 1880-1882, is best understood as a bureaucratic publishing project or politics of adab that bridged journalism and the modern state, the Arabic Nahḍa and the Ottoman modernizing reforms known as the tanẓīmāt. He was pioneering journalism as a form of moral education (adab) to mobilize the souls of the reading public in what he conceptualized as a new biopolitical phase of state reform – reform and accountability to law that would operate bottom up from the people. His journalistic pedagogy worked by addressing readers with a polemic about a superficial nationhood and empty modernity that lacked both substance in the people’s souls and visible proof in ‘society’. Locating this project in Egypt’s emerging capitalist economy, I argue that his journalism particularly targeted Egypt’s cotton-enriched landed elite for failing to uphold rule of law and to distribute the benefits of modernization. ʿAbduh’s reform thus becomes a window into a wider dynamic of power taking shape between journalism, bureaucracy and law – itself crucial to understanding a pivotal moment in Egypt’s modern history, known for being the time of the so-called ʿUrābī Revolution.