Abstract: Most academic accounts of the Arab Spring (ca. 2011–2013) politics of the 'ulamā' (Muslim religious scholars) explain their political stances in terms of the political ideals purportedly held by individual scholars. This article challenges this scholarly consensus through a detailed examination of the Arab Spring politics of three influential Egyptian 'ulamā' . Specifically, it demonstrates that Yusuf al-Qaraḍāwī (1926–2022), Aḥmad al-Ṭayyib (b. 1946), and 'Alī Gomaa's (b. 1952) political stances do not consistently follow any single political ideal attributed to them. Contrary to the literature, I show that al-Qaraḍāwī and al-Ṭayyib, despite their disagreements on the political situation in Egypt, took similar stances on all uprisings after the Egyptian uprising, including support for the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni uprisings, and their opposition to similar developments in Bahrain. I argue that their divergence regarding Egypt and their supposed inconsistency on Bahrain is primarily a result of their assessments of contemporaneous political situations and their contingent moral dilemmas. These two cases highlight an important aspect of the Islamic legal tradition that is influential in political moral deliberation: the legal maxims on balancing harms and benefits. To apply these legal maxims in concrete situations, contemporary 'ulamā' often rely on the concept of fiqh al-wāqiʿ (Islamic jurisprudence of reality), according to which contextual sociopolitical knowledge is considered as important as textual religious knowledge. Fiqh al-wāqiʿ however remains critically underdetermined, and, as this article argues, offers meager methodological tools for empirical understanding.