Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt 9781108423472, 9781108526142

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Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt

This historical study transforms our understanding of modern Egyptian national culture by applying social theory to the history of Egypt’s first teacher training school. It focuses on Dar al-ʿUlum, which trained students from religious schools to teach in Egypt’s new civil schools from 1872. During the first four decades of British occupation (1882–1922), Egyptian nationalists strove to emulate Europe yet insisted that Arabic and Islamic knowledge be reformed and integrated into Egyptian national culture despite opposition from British officials. This reinforced the authority of the alumni of the Dar al-ʿUlum, the darʿamiyya, as arbiters of how to be modern and authentic, a position that graduates Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood would use to resist westernisation and create new modes of Islamic leadership in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Establishing a 130-year history of tensions over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modernised public spaces, tensions which became central to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Hilary Kalmbach demonstrates the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge to notions of authority, belonging, and authenticity within a modernising Muslimmajority community. hilary kalmbach is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex, where she specialises in the culture, religion, and art of the MENA region. She has been awarded Fulbright and Clarendon Fellowships, the Cox Junior Fellowship (New College, Oxford), and the BRISMES Graduate Article Prize.

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt hilary kalmbach University of Sussex

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423472 DOI: 10.1017/9781108526142 © Hilary Kalmbach 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-42347-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt

This historical study transforms our understanding of modern Egyptian national culture by applying social theory to the history of Egypt’s first teacher training school. It focuses on Dar al-ʿUlum, which trained students from religious schools to teach in Egypt’s new civil schools from 1872. During the first four decades of British occupation (1882–1922), Egyptian nationalists strove to emulate Europe yet insisted that Arabic and Islamic knowledge be reformed and integrated into Egyptian national culture despite opposition from British officials. This reinforced the authority of the alumni of the Dar al-ʿUlum, the darʿamiyya, as arbiters of how to be modern and authentic, a position that graduates Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood would use to resist westernisation and create new modes of Islamic leadership in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Establishing a 130-year history of tensions over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modernised public spaces, tensions which became central to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Hilary Kalmbach demonstrates the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge to notions of authority, belonging, and authenticity within a modernising Muslimmajority community. hilary kalmbach is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex, where she specialises in the culture, religion, and art of the MENA region. She has been awarded Fulbright and Clarendon Fellowships, the Cox Junior Fellowship (New College, Oxford), and the BRISMES Graduate Article Prize.

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt hilary kalmbach University of Sussex

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423472 DOI: 10.1017/9781108526142 © Hilary Kalmbach 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-42347-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt

This historical study transforms our understanding of modern Egyptian national culture by applying social theory to the history of Egypt’s first teacher training school. It focuses on Dar al-ʿUlum, which trained students from religious schools to teach in Egypt’s new civil schools from 1872. During the first four decades of British occupation (1882–1922), Egyptian nationalists strove to emulate Europe yet insisted that Arabic and Islamic knowledge be reformed and integrated into Egyptian national culture despite opposition from British officials. This reinforced the authority of the alumni of the Dar al-ʿUlum, the darʿamiyya, as arbiters of how to be modern and authentic, a position that graduates Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood would use to resist westernisation and create new modes of Islamic leadership in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Establishing a 130-year history of tensions over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modernised public spaces, tensions which became central to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Hilary Kalmbach demonstrates the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge to notions of authority, belonging, and authenticity within a modernising Muslimmajority community. hilary kalmbach is Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex, where she specialises in the culture, religion, and art of the MENA region. She has been awarded Fulbright and Clarendon Fellowships, the Cox Junior Fellowship (New College, Oxford), and the BRISMES Graduate Article Prize.

Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt hilary kalmbach University of Sussex

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108423472 DOI: 10.1017/9781108526142 © Hilary Kalmbach 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-42347-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For my father John

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements

page ix x

Preface

xiii

Notes on Transliteration and Use of Arabic

xvi

Introduction: Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and ‘Being Modern’ in Egypt Modernisation and Its Supporters Using Bourdieu, Barth, and Bakhtin to Explain Sociocultural Change Hybridity and Sociocultural Change in Modern Egypt Conclusion and Outline of Chapters

1 Reform, Education, and Sociocultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century Egypt Education and Egyptian Projects of Modernity, 1811–1871: A History in Five Reformers (Mis)representing Egyptian Education (Mis)representing Egyptian Landscapes Colonising Minds Before Bodies? 1867–1876 as a Turning Point Conclusion: Egyptian Education and Shifting Sociocultural Landscapes

2 Dar al-ʿUlum: Hybridity, Education, and Sociocultural Change, 1871–1900 Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian Teacher Training Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian Hybridity Hybridity, Authenticity, and Sociocultural Change Conclusion: Dar al-ʿUlum and Egypt’s Projects of Modernity

3 Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and the Formation of Egyptian National Culture, 1882–1922 Dar al-ʿUlum and Sociocultural Change

1 7 16 26 43 49 53 57 71 81 87 89 91 100 120 124 127 132 vii

viii

Contents Darʿamiyya and the Authentification of Nation and Nahda Conclusion: Authority, Culture, and Anticolonial Resistance

4 Fighting over the Future of Egyptian National Culture, 1923–1952 Islam and a Modern Egyptian Nation Arabic and a Modern Egyptian Nation Conclusion: A ‘Culture War’ over the Future of Egypt

Conclusion: Authority, Authenticity, and Revolution The Secret to Being Modern and Authentic Being Efendi in Shifting Sociocultural Landscapes Conclusion: Authority, Authenticity, and Revolution

149 161 164 168 184 203 206 213 216 218

Appendix I: Summary of Dar al-ʿUlum Curriculum Sources

223

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

225

Appendix III: Glossary with Full Transliteration of Arabic Used in the Text

230

Bibliography

242

Index

261

Figures

0.1 Dar al-ʿUlum faculty in 1895 or 1896 page 40 0.2 Dar al-ʿUlum faculty in 1902 41 1.1 Map of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, showing the borderlands surrounding Darb al-Jamamiz 75 1.2 Map of Cairo in 1825 showing Birkat al-Fil 79 2.1 Map of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, showing locations of Dar al-ʿUlum 117 2.2 North wing of Dar al-ʿUlum’s new buildings with student body, around 1901 119 2.3 Dar al-ʿUlum’s buildings in 1942 120 3.1 Cover of the first alumni association publication, Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum 156 3.2 First edition of the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac published by ʿAbd al-Jawad (pictured) as a student in 1913–1914 157 4.1 Part of the Dar al-ʿUlum student body in 1899 190 4.2 Part of Dar al-ʿUlum’s student body, 1928 191 4.3 Part of Dar al-ʿUlum’s student body, 1950 192

ix

Acknowledgements

My largest debt is to my doctoral supervisor Walter Armbrust. His insightful and detailed comments on my written work – drawing on his considerable expertise on patriarchy and popular culture – as well as numerous discussions over tea at Oxford’s Middle East Centre have contributed significantly to my efforts to reconstruct the sociocultural position of Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya. I really appreciate his wholehearted support for the many applications and projects I submitted over the years, without which I would not be in the position I am in today. His creative approach to studying the society and culture of interwar Egypt is visible in all of his students’ work, so I am in no doubt that it is also evident here. I am also deeply indebted to colleagues in Egypt at numerous institutions, including Dar al-Wathaʾiq, Dar al-Kutub, Dar al-ʿUlum, and Cairo University. I had hoped that I would be able to thank them individually here, now that the project has made it into book form, but unfortunately the politics surrounding this topic have become more, not less, restrictive. I want to make it clear that I did not discuss the Islamic activities of Dar al-ʿUlum’s graduates with any of my contacts in Egypt at any point in time, as it became evident during my fieldwork that this was an extremely controversial aspect of the institution’s legacy. All responsibility for work on it rests on my shoulders alone. I am especially grateful to Donald Malcolm Reid for his advice and assistance with respect to the history of Egyptian education – including very useful contacts – at several points along the way. This project would not have made it into its present form without Lois Aroian’s pioneering 1978 dissertation on Dar al-ʿUlum. When developing the final formulation of my social theory framework, I benefited significantly from reading suggestions from Benjamin Geer (on Bourdieu’s capital and habitus) and Gudrun Krämer (Barth on boundaries and Bourdieu on habitus). While I have not met Pnina Werbner, I really appreciated reading the work of someone who x

Acknowledgements

xi

shared my discomfort with the narrow ways in which hybridity is defined within cultural studies and whose reading of Bakhtin presents such an elegant solution. I place great value on the generous support and mentorship I have received over the years from Eugene Rogan, Francis Robinson, Michael Willis, and Philip Robins. I sincerely appreciate the comradery and support of fellow Middle East Centre alumni Hatsuki Aishima, Samer el-Karanshawy, Leonard Wood, Hussein Omar, and Nadia Bou Ali. I would also like to thank the staff at numerous libraries and archives in North America and the United Kingdom for their assistance finding materials, including James Weinberger at Princeton University and Paul Thomas and Carol Leadenham at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. I greatly appreciate the comments provided by examiners James McDougall and Gudrun Krämer on the text of the dissertation, as well as comments provided by Claire Langhammer, Aaron RockSinger, and the two anonymous reviewers on the entire book manuscript. Michael Cook and Karen Bauer provided very helpful comments on an early draft of the sections on religious and civil education in Egypt. Marilyn Booth provided detailed and generous comments on a stand-alone chapter I presented at a workshop she cohosted while based at Edinburgh University. Mick O’Malley provided sage advice on book proposal and rewriting strategies while my school’s Director of Research. Needless to say, responsibility for any errors or omissions in the final manuscript lies with me alone. This project at a whole benefited significantly from the feedback and opportunity to present my work provided by conveners of the following workshops: Oxford’s Arabic Work-in-Progress Seminar (Geert Jan van Gelder and Christopher Melchert), Oxford’s Religious History Seminar (Jane Garnett, Jane Shaw, and Alana Harris), the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Near and Middle East History Seminar (Benjamin Fortna, Konrad Hirschler, and Teresa Bernheimer), the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies’ Seminar (Kevin Fogg and Mohammad Talib), the University of Manchester’s special seminar series on education reform (Oliver Bast), and the University of Birmingham’s Islamic Studies Research Seminar (Haifaa Jawad). I sincerely appreciate feedback from colleagues in the School of History, Art History, and Philosophy who have attended the presentations I have made at Sussex. I also want to thank the

xii

Acknowledgements

discussants who generously provided feedback on presentations given at the Middle East Studies Association annual meetings over the years: Gregory Starrett, Sarah Shields, Andrew Arsan, Michael Laffan, Benjamin Fortna, David Commins, and Yoav Di-Capua, as well as the organisers of two of those panels, Aaron Rock-Singer and Ahmet Serdar Akturk. I completed the fieldwork on which this book is based while a postgraduate student whose studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, were supported by a Clarendon Fellowship. St Antony’s College, the Oriental Institute, the Colin Matthew Fund, and the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies provided travel and research grants at various points during my time in Oxford. I wrote up this material into a dissertation while employed as an assistant dean at St Anne’s College, Oxford and the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College, Oxford. I completely rewrote this material into a book manuscript while employed as a lecturer (assistant professor) at University of Sussex. I sincerely appreciate the positive and supportive climate that the senior women of Sussex’s History Department and their supporters have worked to create since my arrival. The Kalmbach family – John, Cecilia, Whitney, Eliot, and Betty – have been a source of much-needed support over the years, especially when the going has been tough. Without the love and encouragement of my ‘wing man’, aka husband Peter Augar, this book would never have made it to press. Kittens Astraeus and Artemis did their best to ‘help’ with the final revisions of the manuscript, as did Gail’s Bakery, unknowingly, through its production of reverse chocolate chunk cookies and pecan brownies. And, yes, Dad, the book based my doctorate is really and truly finished!

Preface

This book is a history of people and institutions who do not fit neatly into boxes or categories – either those drawn by their contemporaries or by subsequent scholarship – that explains how they contribute to social and cultural change. It uses the Dar al-ʿUlum teacher training school and its graduates as a prism through which to view sociocultural change in Egypt between 1890 and 1952. It demonstrates that inbetween positions are important to sociocultural change, but also that the opportunities they can offer are often accompanied by difficulties and challenges. In this case, these difficulties and challenges extended to obtaining sources that would enable me to write a history of Dar al-ʿUlum in the first place. As it turns out, that there had been little work on the school since the early 1980s was no accident. It took five months, a decent amount of work, and a measure of good fortune to receive permission to access the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaʾiq) for this project. Once in the archives I found that the primary series of files on the teacher training schools were sparse at best, and that many of the other seemingly relevant series contained sufficiently little on the school that I could not justify the large amount of time it would take to sift through them. My search for official records in other places turned up very little, especially as the library and archives at the Ministry of Education was closed for renovations shortly after my arrival, and regular follow-ups as they compiled an electronic catalogue did not reveal sources relevant to Dar al-ʿUlum. Neither Dar al-ʿUlum’s library nor Cairo University’s central archives contained institutional records addressing the period 1872–1946. Dar al-ʿUlum did, however, very generously offer me a copy of their two-volume reprint of Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum (the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac) that includes the 1952 original and its 1991 continuation, which many see as the definitive set of historical documentation related to the school. Personal papers and autobiographies were also hard to locate in sufficient quantity in venues such as the Azbakiyya book market and

xiii

xiv

Preface

the wide range of downtown bookstores. This makes sense when one considers that the graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum are a very small proportion of the wider body of civil school graduates who were active authors in this period – finding the little that was out there was like searching for a needle in a haystack. My focus on the period from 1872 to 1946 exacerbated this problem, as few individuals who graduated before 1946 were still alive to interview or ask about papers, and their families or heirs are apparently no longer in touch with the school or the alumni association. As a result, this book relies primarily on a rich and plentiful cache of published sources related to the school, which have been underutilised or overlooked by most historians. The 900-page Taqwim Dar alʿUlum, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad’s 1952 yearbook-cuminstitutional history of the school is a significant resource that I read critically, in part as a compendium of basic facts about the institution, and in part as a historiography revealing the perspectives of the late 1940s, a time of significant sociocultural and institutional change. The records available in the archives provided a crucial starting point for finding additional published sources, including printed school regulations and ministry decisions, as well as interesting secondary collections housed within the Egyptian National Library (Dar alKutub). I purchased hundreds of books related to Dar al-ʿUlum as well as Egyptian education, teacher training, and sociocultural developments in the first half of the twentieth century. I also gathered tens of thousands of photographs and photocopies of periodicals, books, pamphlets, and government regulations that could not be bought due to age or scarcity from libraries, archives, and private collections in Egypt, North America, and the United Kingdom. To give a sense of scale, a full set of the second run (1934–48) of Sahifat Dar al-ʿUlum provided me with between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of articles, poetry, and opinion pieces addressing the interests and concerns of Dar alʿUlum’s graduates.

***** In the end, it made sense – in terms of both the themes I wanted to discuss and the sources that were available – to focus the second half of the book on the activities of the school’s graduates. I was able to make this decision confidently at a relatively early stage thanks to Lois

Preface

xv

Aroian’s 1978 dissertation on Dar al-ʿUlum. We each found the same number – though a slightly different distribution – of school regulation documents. Furthermore, neither she nor I, using the Ministry of Education archives and the Egyptian National Archives, respectively, were able to find the sorts of sources – rosters of teachers, lists of entrants, copies of examinations, administrative records – that would have made it possible to write a book focused entirely on the school itself. At some point in the future – perhaps as a result of changes in the political climate, or the conclusion of renovation, reorganisation, and recataloguing projects – further details may come to light about Dar alʿUlum’s history that will enable historians to fill in the gaps left by accounts of the school’s history to date, or even to write a different sort of institutional history of the school. In the meantime, I present this work as a re-evaluation of the school that places it in a wider context of education, religion, and culture, and uses it as a window through which to view processes of sociocultural change. As a result, this book not only transforms our understanding of a pivotal but misunderstood institution, but also presents a new perspective on the cultural history of Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century.

Notes on Transliteration and Use of Arabic

With the goal of making the book accessible to a wider audience of historians, I have removed almost all of the Arabic terminology from the text of this book, as well as all diacritics except hamza and ʿayn from the Arabic words that remain in the text. Arabic speakers who are curious to see the original terminology transliterated in IJMES format can peruse the glossary at the end of the book where many of the terms from the original manuscript are presented in full transliteration alongside the English translations used in the text. Several Arabic terms are too important to remove. First and foremost is Dar al-ʿUlum (known as Madrasat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m 1872–1946, and Kulliyyat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m from 1946), the Egyptian higher school or grande école founded to train Arabic and primary school teachers. It is central to the narrative; plus, as its name translates to the nondescript ‘House of Knowledge’, it is usually kept untranslated in non-Arabic texts. The remaining exceptions are three sets of terms referring to people and corresponding social groups. I use the singular efendi and plural efendiyya (afandı¯, pl. afandiyya; also transliterated effendi and effendiyya) to refer to the emerging middle-strata group centred around graduates of the civil school system. I use the singular shaykh and the Anglicised plural shaykhs to refer to graduates of religious schools. Here I eschew the Arabic broken plural (shuyu¯kh) because of the confusion it is likely to cause English speakers already familiar with the term via its alternative spelling sheikh. Finally, I use the singular darʿami and plural darʿamiyya (darʿamı¯, pl. darʿamiyya) to refer to graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum, whose status – formally and in practice – overlapped with the categories shaykh and efendi in different ways over the ninety years discussed in this book. While the phrase ‘sons of Dar al-ʿUlum’ (abna¯ʾ Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m) is used more frequently in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac, darʿami is used by the president of the alumni association to describe graduates of the school

xvi

Notes on Transliteration and Use of Arabic

xvii

in a piece at the start of the Almanac.1 ‘Sons of Dar al-ʿUlum’ is comparable to ‘the sons of the schools’, a term used to refer to civil school graduates more generally,2 while the term al-darʿama, defined as ‘belonging to Dar al-ʿUlum’, was presented at the Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) as an example of a compound derivation.3 Numerous names are used for the government department responsible for education in Egypt during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, some of which appear in the bibliography. While some of the shifts in terminology reflect changes in status, such as its independence from other ministries, it is common practice for historians to translate the name of this department into English in ways that do not match the original terminology. As this work looks at Egyptian education over such a long period of time, and the shifts in its status are not of primary importance to the themes under discussion, I will use the term ‘Ministry of Education’ throughout. Similarly, I will refer to the person in control of this department as the ‘minister of education’, even though his title and rank varied during the period under study. Finally, the Egyptian University that was founded in 1908 as a private institution and in 1925 as a public university has gone through several name changes in the period discussed here. It was renamed Fuʾa¯d I University in honour of the first rector of the private university, Prince – later King – Fuʾa¯d, after his death in 1936, and then Cairo University after the 1952 Free Officer Revolution. To avoid confusion, I refer to it as the ‘Egyptian University’ or simply ‘the University’ throughout. 1 3

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. u, n–q. 2 Hussein, The Days, p. 196. Stetkevych, Modern Arabic Literary Language, p. 48.

Introduction: Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and ‘Being Modern’ in Egypt

In the 1970s, an Islamic revival emerged in Egypt and many other Muslim-majority countries. At the time, the strength and success of this revival surprised observers who had assumed, first, that the secular emphasis of Arab socialism and nationalism after 1952 under Gamal Abd al-Nasser would remain dominant and, second, that the move to a secular public sphere was a natural part of the modernisation processes that had swept the globe over the preceding centuries. Forty years later, it is clear that neither of these assumptions was sound. The electoral success of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia after the Arab Uprisings of 2011 are among the most visible demonstrations of the importance of Islamic thought and practice in Middle Eastern politics, culture, and society, and the prominent role that many want it to play in ordering both public and private lives. Furthermore, the resurgence of Islamic revivalism in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond since the 1970s demonstrates the central role of religion in many societies, cultures, and nations around the world, regardless of the advancement of secularism within the Christian communities of Europe. Explanations of Islamic revivalism that begin with the 1970s misunderstand the who, what, when, and why underlying the emergence of these movements, as well as wider histories of sociocultural and religious change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. It is incorrect to assume that early Islamic revivalists were iconoclasts whose activities took place outside of institutions controlled by a secular state; that Islamic revivalism was a regressive, backward movement motivated solely by pursuit of political power or socio-economic justice; that its origins lie in the 1970s or even between the first and second world wars; or that the goal of revivalism was to rid Egypt of all European influences. Viewing the political Islamists of 2011 in this light is an oversimplification that ignores the motivations of the founders of 1

2

Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and ‘Being Modern’

organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, as well as 140 years of negotiation over the role that Islamic knowledge should play in the state and society of a rapidly changing Egypt. Tensions surrounding religion and religious knowledge first erupted into conflict not in the 1970s but during Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–52). This is widely recognised as a time of socio-economic frustration and nationalist failure. It is often referred to as a ‘liberal age’ or a period of ‘liberal constitutionalism’, a description that focuses on the role played by a nationalist elite and how their aspirations for full self-rule were thwarted by the monarch and the British.1 The role of mass movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in criticising the ruling elite for their failure to achieve real independence and refusal to further socio-economic justice is noted from the 1930s onwards, but discussed separately given the marginalisation of these groups from government and the apparent lack of originality of their thought. A closer look at these mass movements and the sociocultural groups that supported them, however, reveals that they were not all the outsiders that this narrative suggests. The unrest that erupted periodically in Egypt from the 1930s to 1952 not only stemmed from political and economic discontent, but was also the result of a ‘culture war’ between more and less Europhile social groups, several of whom laid claim to the mantle of eminent Islamic scholar, education reformer, and nationalist Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905). Prominent intellectuals advocated strongly for continued westernisation of culture, society, and education, while groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood argued for the revival of Islam among the self-consciously modern sections of society. Each of these groups had significant ties to the institutions of the Egyptian state, especially the civil education system that Egyptian rulers created in the early nineteenth century as a complement to long-standing religious educational institutions in the form of the elementary-level kuttab and higher-level madrasa. Therefore, if we are to understand this culture war – as well as the emergence of transnational Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, and the spread of a new form of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual – we must understand the history of the Egyptian education system, and

1

Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.

Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and ‘Being Modern’

3

specifically the unusual role played by Islamic expertise within Egypt’s civil schools from the late nineteenth century onwards. The half-century surrounding the turn of the twentieth century – a period stretching from approximately 1871 to 1922 – was crucial for the emergence and development of a self-consciously modern Egyptian national culture, yet in histories and historical memory it has been almost entirely overshadowed by the tumult of 1881–2 and 1919–22,2 as well as the flourishing of intellectual, political, and cultural expression between 1923 and 1952, during the largely interwar constitutional period. This extended fin-de-siècle period witnessed sweeping changes not only in the political, economic, and social institutions that structured the daily lives of Egyptians but also in the cultural and intellectual frameworks they used to understand themselves and their place in the world. Detailed examination of the interaction between Egyptian education, religion, and culture around the turn of the century is what enables this book to rewrite the dominant historical narrative of the constitutional period and, in so doing, to place tensions surrounding the place of religion during the early twenty-first century in historical context. Therefore, to explain the contentious role of Islam in modern Egypt, we must recognise the active engagement of early Islamic revivalists alongside their Europhile opponents in the advancement of reform and modernisation, as well as the commonalities between them. We must consider sociocultural as well as socio-economic and sociopolitical dynamics, and changes in what and who was considered authoritative. We must begin our story in 1871–2, a century before the Islamic revivalism of the 1970s, fifty years before Egyptians were able to elect their own leaders, and ten years before Egypt came under British control. Finally, we must eschew the simplistic and reductive explanations for Islamic revivalism advanced in the politicised rhetoric of its modernist opponents.

***** In 1872, following the success of a lecture series the year before, reformers employed by the Egyptian state integrated Islamic knowledge into the state-run European-style civil education system by founding Egypt’s first teacher training school. This school, Dar 2

As argued for the 1890s here: Booth and Gorman, ‘Introduction’, pp. 2–3.

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Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and ‘Being Modern’

al-ʿUlum, taught the Arabic and Islamic disciplines found in religious schools within the framework of a civil school to students from top religious schools. It did this to improve the quality of Arabic and primary school instruction that would be provided by these students – who held the title shaykh on graduation – within Egyptian civil schools. Dar al-ʿUlum was Egypt’s most influential teacher training school, and operated for seventy-four years as a higher – that is, post-secondary – school until its integration into Egypt’s main university in 1946. In 1907, it was joined by another hybrid school teaching shaykhs, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi), which taught Islamic legal subjects within the structure of a civil school until the 1920s, after which it was folded into Egypt’s top religious institution, al-Azhar. Dar al-ʿUlum’s foundation formalised the pathway for becoming a reform-minded shaykh, that is an individual with religious education who was interested in the European-influenced reform programmes that transformed Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum, known collectively as the ‘Sons of Dar al-ʿUlum’ (abnaʾ Dar al-ʿUlum) or the less formal darʿamiyya, had mixed civil-religious expertise that enabled fin-de-siècle nationalists to create a national culture that was modern and authentically Egyptian by including courses on Arabic, Islam, and Egyptian history in the school curriculum. The mixed background of the darʿamiyya presented challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, it meant that many of them found it difficult to progress into the higher ranks of either civil or religious bureaucracies in Egypt. Instead, they played important roles within the lower and middle levels of the education system, serving as primary school teachers, authors of textbooks, teacher trainers, and school inspectors. This apparent disadvantage is behind their omission from mainstream historical narratives, which have allowed the content of reams of school policies and regulations as well as intellectual treatises issued by politicians, high-level officials, and prolific scholars to eclipse how and by whom ideas from the top were put into practice. For much of the twentieth century, the darʿamiyya dominated the bureaucratic strata where high-level education policies were put into more concrete forms and, as a result, exercised significant collective influence over state-led efforts to change Egyptian society and culture at the grassroots level.

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On the other hand, a mixed background presented the potential for darʿamiyya to exercise authority beyond that normally associated with state employment. Prominent darʿamiyya were able to influence the cultural and religious beliefs and practices of Egyptians who felt alienated by the emphasis that intellectual and political elites placed on foreign bodies of knowledge. Many of these Egyptians preferred to rely on leaders who could claim mastery of both religious and civil knowledge or who, in other words, could present themselves as both modern and religious. Prominent darʿamiyya such as Hasan al-Banna (1906– 49) and Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1909–77) of Hizb al-Tahrir backed their calls for the revival of Islamic practice among self-consciously modern Muslims with this combination of bureaucratic power and cultural authority. As a result, it was the hybrid civil-religious background provided by Dar al-ʿUlum that was behind the emergence and consolidation of a new type of religious leader, the new religious intellectual. The impact of the darʿamiyya as a whole on the development of an Egypt that was modern and authentic is significant enough that their claim to the mantle of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh needs to be taken seriously. Their mixed background not only enabled this impact, however, but also explains why this claim has been obscured. Histories of Egypt to date have not only focused primarily on ideas and discourses, but also tend to take the discourse of Egypt’s political and intellectual elite at face value, instead of viewing it as one side of a highly politicised culture war.

***** This investigation into the role of Islamic knowledge in the formation of a modern Egyptian nation state, and the connection between each to the emergence of new types of Islamic organisation and leadership, is possible because of a new approach to modernisation, nation-building, and sociocultural change. This approach uses the social theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), Fredrik Barth (1928–2016), and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to do two things: first, to connect institutions with individuals, social groups, and conceptions of the nation; and, second, to locate all of these entities in physical and sociocultural landscapes. Using this approach to explore the activities of a largely unrecognised group, the darʿamiyya, provides significant insight into how and why ideas, practices, and individuals become influential and

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authoritative at particular places and times. This book demonstrates the importance of hybridity and mixing in sociocultural change, as well as how global flows of ideas, practices, and technologies are reshaped to fit local needs, including a desire for cultural authenticity. As a result, it demonstrates the salience of localised paths to modernity and nationhood in non-western contexts. This framework is introduced here and applied to a case study of the darʿamiyya, while the subsequent four chapters apply it to a study of Egyptian hybrid schooling and its impact between 1872 and 1952. The book as a whole is based on an examination of Egyptian and British records related to civil schools and education, publications by Egyptian education experts, and memoirs and travelogues providing first-hand accounts of religious, hybrid, and civil schools. Journals consulted include The Garden of Egyptian Schools (Rawdat al-madaris alMisriyya), a publication run by Ministry of Education officials in the 1870s; Journal of the Dar al-ʿUlum Club (Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum) and Journal of Dar al-ʿUlum (Sahifat Dar al-ʿUlum), published by the association of Dar al-ʿUlum alumni before the First World War and from 1934 to 1948, respectively; and The Journal of Teachers (Sahifat al-Muʿallimin), published by the association for graduates of higher schools in the mid-1920s. An especially important source is the 900-page Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac (Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum), a yearbook-cum-institutional history of Dar al-ʿUlum compiled by alumnus Muhammad ʿAbd alJawad and published in 1952. It has long been treated as the definitive set of historical documentation related to the school and is seen by many associated with the school as making up for the paucity of archival records held by Egyptian National Archives and Dar alʿUlum itself. I have chosen to read it critically, in part as a compendium of basic facts about the institution and its graduates, and in part as a work of history whose content and arguments reveal much about cultural and political dynamics of the time in which it was written, the latter half of the constitutional period. These sources enable us to ask when, how, and why the current fight about the place of religion in Egypt began. The remainder of the introduction provides, first, an overview of my approach to the study of modernity that introduces the most important groups involved in advancing modernisation in Egypt between 1811 and 1952. This section provides a brief chronology of relevant events

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and individuals for the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the recent history of Egypt. The second section of the chapter applies the social theories of Bourdieu, Barth, and Bakhtin to understand the role played by hybridity in sociocultural change, and then presents a case study of the darʿamiyya to demonstrate their relevance.

Modernisation and Its Supporters The challenge represented by the spread of European influence in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was significant, ranging from tangible threats such as military occupation, economic dominance, or political interference via religious minorities to the more abstract threat of ostensibly superior European ideas and practices to society, culture, and state. These threats led many local leaders – including those in Tunis, Istanbul, Cairo, and Tokyo – to launch European-inspired reform programmes while independent of colonial rule.3 In this context, the ideas, practices, and technologies of a rapidly modernising Europe were both the largest threat to and the best hope for maintaining independent local rule. In nineteenth-century Egypt, Muhammad ʿAli (r. 1805–48) and his successors initiated European-influenced programmes of military, administrative, and agricultural reform that enabled them to rule Egypt as an increasingly independent province of the Ottoman Empire. The Tunisian Regency, under reformer Ahmad Bey (r. 1837–55), reorganised the Tunisian military along European lines and developed new institutions to train and supply it. Military defeat and inter-religious conflict led Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) to begin a reform process that evolved into the Tanzimat programme pursued by his sons Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61) and Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76). Tanzimat reforms included introducing European-style military units and declaring Muslims and non-Muslims equal, which further destabilised communal relations that had been strained by European interference. In Japan, the threat of European interference and invasion, along with internal factors, led notables to seize power in the 1868 Meiji Revolution; centralise control of the country; and introduce a social,

3

Rogan, The Arabs, pp. 85–108, esp. 89–90, 98–103; Sims, Japanese Political History, pp. 1–2, 6–12.

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economic, political, and educational reform programme showing significant European influence. At the close of the First World War, only Japan had escaped colonial rule. In Egypt, imminent bankruptcy had led European powers to seize control of Egyptian finances in 1876 and then to replace Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad ʿAli’s grandson Ismaʿil (r. 1863–79), with his son Muhammad Tawfiq (r. 1879–92). The ʿUrabi rebellion of 1881, in which a range of Egyptian-born notables protested against European interference and the rule of the new khedive, provided Britain with a reason to invade in 1882. France obtained the approval of other world powers for the colonisation of Tunisia at the 1878 Congress of Berlin, but lacked a pretext to invade until 1881, after a few hundred mountain tribesmen retreated into Tunisia after a raid on the French territory of Algeria. The Ottoman Empire remained independent of European control longer, but defeat in the First World War led to the creation of what were effectively colonies in most of its territory. However, in all three polities the projects of modernity initiated by local governments during the nineteenth century marked the start of a radical reshaping of state, society, economy, and culture that incorporated both European and local bodies of knowledge and continues through to the present day. These projects of modernity were advanced not only by modernising rulers, but also by a diverse range of actors with varying degrees of independence from these increasingly centralised states.

Projects of Modernity The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Middle East have often been referred to as an age of ‘modernity’, and individuals, ideas, and practices emerging in this period are described as ‘modern’. The concept of modernity is especially salient when viewed as an array of context-specific projects initiated by state and non-state actors in particular times and places. Along these lines, Talal Asad emphasises examination of ‘why modernity has become hegemonic as a political goal’ alongside the supporting structures behind this development and its result.4

4

Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 12–13.

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Taken collectively, these projects of modernity span the globe, having become dominant and omnipresent. They are at the root of radical shifts in sociocultural, political, and economic structures around the world, leading to a faster-paced life dominated by cities, increased mobility, and industrial and social reorganisation. New ways of thinking about the world and its inhabitants spread on a global level, including Enlightenment-influenced ‘scientific’ perspectives and a perception of a distinct rupture with the past.5 Change was not only accepted but expected, with the concept of progress over time shifting how people saw not only their present and future, but also their past.6 Yet, at the same time, the parameters and end points of these often interconnected projects varied widely across space and time.7 Therefore, the sociocultural changes commonly glossed as modernisation are best conceptualised as a complex, multidirectional process of challenge and contestation involving a wide range of actors, including local governments, foreign powers, non-governmental associations, and individual citizens. The agency exercised by these actors means that local projects of modernity diverged from the European model by design and not by accident, incorporating aspects of local culture such as Islam. Finally, ‘modernity’ and its supposed opposite ‘tradition’ are not absolute terms that remain unchanged across space and time, but instead are context-specific discursive constructions that reveal not continuity but change. I use these terms cautiously, in recognition of their inherent flaws as well as the impossibility of writing them completely out of the narrative. ‘Modern’ and ‘modernity’ appear in the text as markers referring to the period in time in which modernity-as-a-project emerged and expanded in the Middle East. As much as possible, the book eschews these labels and instead focuses on describing the often changing orientations of a wide variety of institutions and individuals towards reform proposals, revealing divergence between state and non-state actors, as well as the wide range of Egyptians working within the umbrella of state institutions. This approach to modernity as a plurality of complex and interrelated projects enables this book to 5 6 7

On scientific and social-scientific thought in Egypt, see: El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory; Elshakry, ‘Darwin’s Legacy’. On historicism in Egypt, see: Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past, pp. 3–11. Asad, Formations of the Secular, pp. 12–14; Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 17–18.

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provide significant new evidence of the importance of local elements – including religion – and non-state actors within non-western nationalisms and projects of modernity. This conceptualisation of the relationship between separate projects of modernity, and especially the connection between Europe – the first area of the world to modernise – and projects of modernity elsewhere in the globe, falls under the umbrella of Eisenstadt’s ‘multiple modernities’ approach,8 and presents a sharp contrast with prominent postcolonial approaches to Egyptian modernity. Postcolonial scholarship transformed colonial history by demonstrating that colonial dominance was not only physical but intellectual, and that the colonial subjects advancing non-western projects of modernity were colonised not only in body but also in mind.9 This colonisation of minds could precede direct European rule when local rulers internalised European claims of superiority, creating a semicolonial context.10 This history of Egypt, along with many others, owes a major debt to these pioneering observations about the intellectual and cultural power of Europe. That said, my approach to modernity diverges significantly from the largely homogenous and stable category presented by the most prominent postcolonial historian of Egypt, Timothy Mitchell. Mitchell’s conviction that modernity is an essentially unified and, by implication, European phenomenon and his assertion that divergence from European models of modernity occurred only by accident, instead of by design, are particularly damaging.11 This is because conceptions of modernity that focus so heavily on European and elite hegemony mask the agency exercised by the people acted upon by these projects of modernity – inside and outside of Europe – as well as the importance of local ideas and practices in many non-western projects of modernity. By design or accident, projects of modernity involve creating selfconsciously modern subjects and subjectivities which, once created, take on lives of their own. Ignoring the ways in which non-western actors created projects of modernity that diverged deliberately from European models oversimplifies processes of modernisation in nonwestern contexts. 8 9 10 11

See the special issue of Daedalus dedicated to ‘Multiple Modernities’. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 95. El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, pp. 2–3. Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xiv; Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, pp. 23–4.

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The Egyptian state was the principal agent behind the large-scale projects of reform and modernisation that transformed Egypt between 1811 and 1876, and then again after the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution. In between 1876 and 1952, however, the situation was more complicated. Over time, the number of groups competing for control over high-level policymaking increased, while expansion of the state bureaucracy allowed middle managers as employees to exercise varying degrees of influence over how policies were executed. Nonstate institutions were even more varied, ranging from foreign missionary organisations active in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to grass-roots organisations promoting Islamic revival and reform in the early twentieth century, to mass sociocultural and political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1930s onwards. Egypt’s first sustained exposure to European projects of modernity was between 1798 and 1801, when French forces under Napoleon invaded Egypt and temporarily displaced Egypt’s Ottoman governor as well as its Mamluks, a military caste of Turko-Circassian slaves that ruled Egypt before the Ottoman conquest of 1517 and who continued to wield power and influence in Ottoman Egypt. During this occupation, a cadre of scholars who accompanied the French forces set out not only to document their new holdings but also to expose Egypt’s political and intellectual classes to the cutting edge of French knowledge. The most significant impact of the French occupation of Egypt, and of the joint Ottoman-British action that brought it to an end in 1801, was its demonstration of European military might. By 1811, through a string of savvy political manoeuvres, Ottoman-Albanian military officer Muhammad ʿAli had forced the Ottoman Sultan to recognise his rule over Egypt and eliminated all other claimants to the governorship, most notably many of the Mamluk factions who had fought each other for influence within Ottoman Egypt before the French invasion.

Egypt’s Khedives Muhammad ʿAli and his descendants – often referred to as the khedives, a title formally granted in 1867, though used earlier – ruled absolutely within the bounds of Egypt from 1811 until 1876 and continued to provide Egyptian heads of state until 1952. The khedivial

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state was the main force behind Egyptian projects of modernity for most of the nineteenth century. Muhammad ʿAli and his successors introduced many of the technologies and practices associated with modern European states into Egypt, such as a centrally run military and a bureaucracy supported through direct taxation. These projects not only increased the power held by the khedivial state but were essential to maintaining Egyptian political and economic sovereignty. As khedivial control of Egypt meant fewer officials dispatched from Istanbul, it presented significant opportunities to members of the Ottoman Turko-Circassian governing elite (dhawat) and European professionals based in or willing to relocate to Egypt, as well as nativeborn Egyptians. Egyptians trained in religious schools, known by the title shaykh (pl. shuyukh, here shaykhs), could now hold judicial appointments instead of being limited to mosque leadership and instruction, recitation of the Qurʾan, and issuing non-binding legal interpretations as a mufti. Even more opportunities were available to native-born Egyptians – primarily those from the families of rural notables (ʿayan), but potentially also especially gifted members of the peasantry (fallahin) – who gained a place at one of the khedive’s civil or military schools. Upon graduation, they held the Ottoman title afandi (here efendi, pl. efendiyya) and became eligible for employment in the state bureaucracy. The upper echelons of the military and bureaucracy were dominated by the landed, aristocratic Turko-Circassian dhawat, yet a handful of native-born Egyptian efendiyya were also granted higher-ranking titles such as pasha and bey. Bey, roughly translated as ‘lord’ or ‘commander’, was used extensively by Egyptian Mamluks, and was the highest title available to a non-Muslim under the khedives. Pasha was the highest-ranking title in the Ottoman Empire. Its use was formalised during the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, when it was granted to the top four of the nine levels of civil servants, military officers, and notables. Muhammad ʿAli’s reforms began to lapse in 1840, after Britain, France, and Russia forced the Egyptian army to withdraw from lands it had conquered in Greater Syria, cease its assault on the Ottoman Sultan, and drastically decrease in size. The unfolding of his programmes accelerated further under Muhammad ʿAli’s immediate successors ʿAbbas (r. 1848–54) and Saʿid (r. 1854–63). However, from 1863, Muhammad ʿAli’s grandson Ismaʿil vigorously pursued European-style projects of modernity. Ismaʿil’s approach was semicolonial, as he wanted

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more than the ability to remain independent of Europe; he wanted Egypt to be respected as an equal of Europe on the world stage. However, these ambitions led him to borrow heavily, such that by 1876 he could no longer keep up with interest payments. The spectre of Egyptian bankruptcy led to the involvement of two further groups in Egyptian governance: European powers interested in Egyptian financial stability and a nationalist movement that emerged from among the social groups who had facilitated and been empowered by the khedivial reforms.

European Powers European interference was initially limited to financial control, exercised by a ‘public debt commission’ (la Caisse de la Dette Publique) made up of representatives of France, Italy, and Austria-Hungary from 1876 and Britain from 1877, then dual British and French control over the income and expenditure of the Egyptian state going forward. That said, European powers were also party to the replacement of Ismaʿil with his son Muhammad Tawfiq by the Ottoman Sultan in 1879. Chaos related to an 1881 rebellion against Tawfiq and his dependence on Europeans gave Britain the excuse to invade in 1882. Britain exercised effective control over Egyptian governance between 1882 and 1952, even though it did not formally declare Egypt a protectorate until 1914, when the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War to fight against Britain and its allies. British financial control continued until 1922, while throughout this period officials posted at the highest levels of Egyptian ministries ensured the Egyptian state acted in accordance with British wishes, and were overseen by the highest-ranking British official in Egypt – a consul-general until 1914, a high commissioner between 1914 and 1936, and an ambassador thereafter. Evelyn Baring, later known as Lord Cromer, was the longest serving of these officials. He held the post of controller-general of Egyptian finances in 1878–9 and then consulgeneral between 1883 and 1907. His immediate successors, Eldon Gorst and Herbert Kitchener, were in office for four and three years, respectively, and their successors as high commissioners for even shorter periods. Miles Lampson, who served as high commissioner and then ambassador for the twelve-year period between 1934 and 1946 is the closest anyone came to Cromer’s twenty-four years as the top-ranking British official during the seventy years Britain occupied Egypt.

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Egyptian Nationalists Frustration about the dominance of the Turko-Circassians over Egyptian governance grew during Khedive Ismaʿil’s reign, especially once he had overspent to such an extent that Europeans felt compelled to take control of Egyptian financial affairs to protect their own interests. In 1881, these tensions erupted into a revolt led by Egyptian-born colonel Ahmed ʿUrabi (1841–1911) supported by rural notables, other officers, and reform-minded Egyptians from the ranks of the efendiyya and the shaykhs, calling for removal of European control and limits on the power of the khedive. Unrest and the prospect that this movement would depose Khedive Muhammad Tawfiq led to the British invasion of 1882. While ʿUrabi’s revolt was unsuccessful, it had a lasting impact in so far as it articulated an agenda – ending European interference and checking the power of the khedive – that was supported by a diverse range of Egyptians over the next forty years (1882–1922). During this period, Egyptians rallying behind these demands coalesced into a loosely connected nationalist movement which was supported by a new khedive, ʿAbbas Hilmi II (r. 1892–1914) during his early years in power. While it did not manage to expel the British, the movement spread its ideas through print media and had a number of small victories, including the ‘Egyptianisation’ of the school curriculum in 1907. These nationalists also actively participated in a programme of intellectual, sociocultural, and religious reform often referred to as the nahda, or renaissance. In 1919, after British officials refused to allow Egyptian nationalists to attend the Paris Peace Conference, they organised massive demonstrations in support of Egyptian independence. Negotiations between the nationalists and British officials resulted only in further demonstrations, however. Britain issued a unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence in 1922 that retained British control over military affairs, foreign policy, the Suez Canal, and Sudan. While it was not full independence, this allowed the nationalists to draft a constitution and elect a parliament that gave them a say in Egyptian governance alongside the king – as the khedives were now called – and the British. During the constitutional period (1923–52), the unity of purpose that bound together nationalists between 1882 and 1922 fractured, with factions vying for political and sociocultural influence. Many

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histories of this period focus on the changing balance of power between three groups: the king, British officials, and nationalists active in parliament.12 This leaves out a significant part of the picture, however. This is because the parties active in parliament during this period were led by members of the new intellectual and political elite, made up largely of efendiyya who came of age in the 1890s and 1900s. This group had significant socio-economic resources, as many of these efendiyya came from notable (ʿayan) families and some intermarried with the Turko-Circassian elite. Furthermore, most of the parties led by this new ruling elite were centred around a single personality and unable to command broad levels of popular support. The exception to this was the Wafd (lit. ‘delegation’), a political party formed from the group of nationalists who attempted to attend the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in order to negotiate for Egyptian independence. Though it was tightly controlled by nationalist Saʿd Zaghlul (1858–1927) and his successor Mustafa al-Nahhas (1879–1965), it won every free election in this period. Most of the histories that take cultural or intellectual approaches to interwar Egyptian nationalism replicate this focus on the socioeconomically elite nationalists associated with parliamentary politics, and treat a fourth group separately if at all: the ideological mass movements such as Young Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose protests and activism disrupted social and political affairs from the 1930s onwards. Such works not only discuss the Wafd, but also members of an offshoot of the Wafd, the Liberal Constitutional Party. This was a loosely bound group of modernist intellectuals, bureaucrats, and landowners who thought that rule of Egypt should be granted on the basis of intellectual attainment, which contrasted with the Wafd’s focus on winning popular support. Notable members included Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid (1872–1963), Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956), Taha Husayn (1889–1973), and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq (1888–1966). They focused not on their appeal to the masses, but instead on advancing intellectual arguments for emulating Europe, especially with respect to establishing an explicitly civil state and society.13 Despite relatively poor showings in elections, the Europhile 12 13

Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt and Cromer, p. 207; Warburg, ‘The “Three-Legged Stool”’. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 28–31, 53–5, 61–71.

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modernists of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party dominated cultural circles and numerous members served as minister of education. From a cultural perspective, however, it makes sense to consider the darʿamiyya alongside the populists of the Wafd and the Europhile nationalists of the Liberal Constitutional Party, not least because this approach connects the policies pursued by the nationalists of the fin-desiècle period with the emergence of Young Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. These groups have been marginalised in histories of the constitutional period due to their lack of influence within parliament, but situating them in longer sociocultural histories demonstrates that their importance goes beyond the organisation of demonstrations, even those that facilitated the 1952 Free Officer Revolution.

Using Bourdieu, Barth, and Bakhtin to Explain Sociocultural Change To understand how these actors – the khedives, the British, and Egyptian nationalists of all varieties – created sociocultural change, we must find a way to connect them and their visions for an Egyptian nation with the institutions through which these visions were transmitted, plus the sociocultural and physical landscapes which shaped and were shaped by these visions. In short, these actors used the capital at their disposal to create hybrids with varying degrees of sociocultural visibility that, in turn, enabled them to police, cross, straddle, or even shift sociocultural boundaries.

Capital and Habitus The resources used by Egyptian actors to advance their preferred project(s) of modernity, and the links between these resources and education, are best analysed using Bourdieu’s construction of capital.14 Bourdieu’s approach moves beyond a narrow focus on economic forms of capital, and instead distinguishes between the social, cultural, and economic aspects of capital. Cultural capital is institutionalised in educational certificates, objectified in cultural objects (books, tools, images), and embodied in habits and skills acquired over time. Social capital is the sum of assets or other forms of support resulting 14

Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, pp. 282–7.

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from belonging to a network or group, the maintenance of which requires constant attention and often involves actions that shape or reshape the group. Symbolic capital is seen by others not as capital but as authority or ‘legitimate competence’. Applying Bourdieu’s ideas to Egypt between 1872 and 1952 enables us to draw meaningful connections between a school and the activities of its graduates, as well as to understand the role of education in establishing new social groups. While it is widely recognised that new forms of state-sponsored education played a crucial role in locally driven projects of modernity in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire, few studies adequately conceptualise the link between the knowledge inculcated by education and larger processes of sociocultural change. Most works on sociocultural change state that it is connected to education without examining how or why,15 while others equate the impact of a school to the activities of its most famous graduates.16 Furthermore, most scholarship on Middle Eastern education focuses only on civil or religious schooling,17 which makes it difficult to provide a deep sociocultural context for the divergent paths taken by educated Egyptians. Connecting education with particular social groups is neither as simple as equating civil schooling with the efendiyya and attendance of Dar al-ʿUlum or another hybrid school with status as a darʿamiyya or reform-minded shaykh, nor noting that civil school attendance is the key factor differentiating both of these groups from the majority of shakyhs. For instance, in some cases, individuals who had not attended a civil school were able to establish themselves socially as one of the efendiyya, and prominent darʿamiyya were able to establish new forms of religious organisation and leadership despite only having a civil school certificate. In the case of Dar al-ʿUlum, a history focused on the most famous educationalists to study or teach at it leads us to 15 16

17

Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 11–12, 16–17. Previous historians of Dar al-ʿUlum have provided detailed biographies for the most prominent graduates and instructors, yet with little attention to how these individuals were selected and the implication of this for any overall conclusions drawn about the group and its impact. ʿAbd al-Jawad’s assumption, in particular, seems to be that famous, powerful, or influential graduates contribute significantly to an institution’s legacy. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 92. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity; Bein, Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic; Gesink, Islamic Reform.

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underestimate its impact, as famous figures were few in number and often excluded from the highest levels of political and intellectual life, similar to the rest of the darʿamiyya. Instead, we must also consider the collective impact of ordinary graduates with successful but unremarkable careers, as well as the activities of famous graduates whose activities diverged significantly from the path educational reformers intended. Three of Bourdieu’s applications of capital are particularly helpful in analysing the connections between education, social groups, and sociocultural change. First, the role of schools and other social institutions in shaping the sociocultural perspectives of their members is captured by his concept of habitus. By habitus, Bourdieu means the set of practices that are so established in a community that they are socioculturally invisible to its members. A European-influenced education not only provided an Egyptian efendi or darʿami with mastery of the body of knowledge needed to become a salaried employee of the state but also left him with a set of shared skills, habits, and values with which to build a personal and professional life outside of religious circles. It also enabled him to participate fully in the discovery and promotion of new solutions to the challenges faced by the region, whether through working for the state or contributing to the cultural renaissance of the nahda. In Egypt, the necessity for the majority of Egyptians to travel to a larger town or city to pursue secondary and higher education meant that lessons learned inside and outside of the classroom were incorporated into the habitus of students at civil, religious, or hybrid schools. Schools and their instructors were at the centre of constituting what was and was not included in the habitus associated with a particular school or form of schooling, as it was here that students were exposed to the subjects, pedagogies, and disciplines associated with their particular type of school, which enabled them to connect so easily with students enrolled in similar schools. Time in the classroom was only part of the collective experience of attending a secondary or higher school, however, especially for students living far from home. As a result, experiences such as living in an all-male household away from parental oversight, enjoying urban spaces and lifestyles with school friends, and connecting with peers encountering similar educational experiences while at home during summer vacations18 are an 18

Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 171–2, 216–18.

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important part of the formation provided by enrolling in a secondary or higher school, as well as an important part of what distinguishes the sociocultural formation and habitus of civil school students from those of peers left behind in the village. Bourdieu’s discussion of habitus, and especially its application to education in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture and The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, appears to focus primarily on how education leads to the continuation of the structures and habits of the past.19 However, it is straightforward to see how new systems of schooling could provide their graduates with radically new forms of habitus and thereby contribute to sociocultural change. For instance, in Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu describes habitus as the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, [which] produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.20

Of course, change is not completely absent here; small changes are built into the process of reproduction, while The State Elite mentions shifts in power related to the emergence of government education alongside that offered by the church. The overarching emphasis of the theory is on continuity, however, not significant change. While certain aspects of Egyptian education favoured alreadyestablished groups in society, the introduction of new, Europeaninfluenced norms and practices threatened to significantly change socio-economic, sociocultural, and sociopolitical structures. The association of civil schools with new types of social mobility highlights what seems to be underemphasised in Bourdieu’s work on habitus and schooling: that education, through its provision of cultural capital, can contribute significantly not only to continuity but also to change in social structures.

19

20

Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 78; Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture; Bourdieu, State Nobility, esp. pp. 79, 83–4. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 78.

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Second, Bourdieu’s conception of the ways in which cultural capital can be embodied sheds significant light on how and when individuals without the usual educational qualification could establish themselves socially as an efendi or a shaykh. In addition to being located in objects and the structures of institutions, capital can be performed or embodied. While the capital of cultural objects – that is, objectified cultural capital – can be bought or sold and instantly passed to another, embodied cultural capital in the form of knowledge or expertise takes time and effort to acquire. Bourdieu’s discussion in The Forms of Capital focuses primarily on embodied cultural capital acquired through growing up in a family with strong cultural capital, which differs significantly from the situation in Egypt: while many families had longstanding ties to the religious schools that produced the shaykhs, the families of most first-generation efendiyya would not have possessed the types of cultural capital needed to join the emerging middle stratum of Egyptian society.21 In early twentieth-century Egypt, civil schooling was therefore an important source of cultural capital, as was the ability to demonstrate this capital in front of other efendiyya. Third, Bourdieu’s concept of certified cultural capital makes it clear why Egyptians with particular educational backgrounds formed the core of the efendiyya, the darʿamiyya, and the shaykhs, even if autodidacts or individuals with some of the relevant educational experience were able to obtain enough capital to perform membership of the group. Bourdieu notes that the cultural skills of an individual with quantifiable, recognisable educational training – that is cultural capital embedded in and certified by an institution – were much more certain: [It is this quantification that] makes the difference between the capital of the autodidact, which may be called into question at any time, or even the cultural capital of the courtier, which can yield only ill-defined profits, of fluctuating value, in the market of high-society exchanges, and the cultural capital academically sanctioned by legally guaranteed qualifications, formally independent of the person of the bearer. With the academic qualification, a certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to culture, social alchemy produces a form of cultural capital which has a relative

21

Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, pp. 282–7. This is the source used for the next three paragraphs unless noted otherwise.

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autonomy vis-à-vis its bearer and even vis-à-vis the cultural capital he effectively possesses at a given moment in time.22

Therefore, while a motivated individual could acquire and perform sufficient embodied capital to gain acceptance as an efendi or shaykh, the status of an individual with a certificate from a civil or religious school was harder to question. When applying all of this to social groups, context is crucial: the type of cultural and symbolic capital necessary to join a group – and obtain its social capital – will vary between places, times, and groups. Once accepted into the group, an individual shares responsibility for maintaining its boundaries, a dynamic that might seem to promote continuity, but also opens the door for change.23 In Egypt, by the start of the constitutional period if not earlier, upwardly mobile, middle-strata efendiyya had much in common with each other, as well as much that distinguished them from shaykhs. They dressed in European suits with an Ottoman tarboush and worked in one of the many new professions: civil servant, military officer, doctor, lawyer, teacher, or journalist. They avidly engaged with new forms of media by reading or writing for newspapers, journals, and magazines, and listening to radio broadcasts. They spent their leisure time participating in civil groups, intellectual salons, or other social activities, and frequented the new European-style quarters of Cairo even if their salaries did not stretch to living in them. These venues gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the skills, habits, and values inculcated by the civil education system and, in so doing, their membership of the group. This combination of dress, habitus, and spatial mobility also contrasts sharply with the turban and gown, religious professions, and spaces most commonly associated with shaykhs.24 However, purchasing the cultural objects necessary to look like an efendi or a shaykh, or spending time in the places and spaces they frequented, was not enough to establish an individual as a member of the group. To be accepted into the group, a would-be member would need to demonstrate mastery of the habitus and embodied cultural capital that was shared by group members and required to work as 22 23 24

Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, p. 285. Kalmbach, ‘Islamic Authority’, pp. 7, 11–12. Kalmbach, ‘Blurring Boundaries’, p. 164.

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a bureaucrat or religious leader, a process that would be less gruelling for graduates with relevant cultural capital certified by a school certificate. Regardless, only after his performance was accepted would he possess the social capital of an efendi or shaykh.

Hybridity and Boundaries The narrative so far has made it clear that knowledge – that is ideas, practices, and technology – imported from Europe and embedded in the civil education system was essential to the advancement of Egypt’s projects of modernity. The transmission of knowledge from Europe to Egypt is only part of the story, however. European knowledge was not copied wholesale, but instead adapted to fit local needs through a process of localisation, translation, or indigenisation. Cultural historians such as Peter Burke model this process of adaptation as one of cultural translation.25 Translation in this sense is not limited to the rendering of words and concepts from one language to another, but also refers to the shifts that occur naturally when ideas, practices, and technologies are adopted in a new context. Educational literature models this dynamic as a multistep process of ‘indigenisation’ or ‘policy borrowing’.26 These processes of transmission and translation combined bodies of knowledge to create novel and influential hybrids, where hybridity is conceived more broadly than in most academic literature. The dominant approach to hybridity draws on the work of trailblazers such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy. Their discussion of race and ethnicity emphasises the discomfort and difficulty that is often associated with hybrid social positions, that is how people in such positions are often excluded, attacked, or otherwise pressured to conform. While this dynamic is important, hybridity is a much broader phenomenon. Almost all people, objects, and practices can be seen as constantly changing mixtures of different elements, the majority of which are not perceived as an unnatural or dangerous threat to the status quo but instead largely ignored. 25 26

See Burke and Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe. Schriewer, Discourse Formation, pp. 25–7; Phillips and Ochs, ‘Processes of Educational Borrowing’, pp. 9–10/ See also Ochs and Phillips, Towards a Structural Typology.

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The theories of Barth and Bakhtin can help us distinguish between different types of hybridity and the roles they play in sociocultural change. First, Pnina Werbner’s reading of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic principle makes a useful distinction between two types of hybridity. The first is an ‘unconscious’ hybridity, which is part of unquestioned, socially invisible processes of change, while the second is a jarringly visible ‘intentional’ hybridity of the sort described by Bhabha, Hall, and Gilroy. The former provides the baseline against which the latter stands out as shocking: Organic, unconscious hybridity is a feature of the historical evolution of all languages. Applying it to culture and society more generally, we may say that despite the illusion of boundedness, cultures evolve historically through unreflective borrowings, mimetic appropriations, exchanges and inventions. There is no culture in and of itself.27

Distinguishing between visible and invisible forms of hybridity is an essential prerequisite to understanding the role that hybridity plays in sociocultural change. The vast majority of sociocultural change in Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth century occurred as the result of hybrids that were socioculturally invisible to influential stakeholders. Second, Barth’s observations about sociocultural boundaries are useful for modelling hybridity as a process instead of a largely static category. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Barth notes that sociocultural boundaries persist despite the flow of people and ideas across them, and that contact across boundaries is not a hindrance to, but instead a crucial part of, the underlying structure of society.28 Once a boundary is widely recognised, it serves to divide a particular group from the rest of society, yet can also be interestingly and productively crossed. The primary importance of boundaries, therefore, lies not in how they divide, but in how they are used to reinforce, subtly change, or blatantly undermine sociocultural constructions. Examining how sociocultural boundaries are constructed, crossed, and changed by social actors provides significant insight into the mechanics of social change in this period, allowing us to preserve complexity and to avoid 27 28

Werbner, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–5. Barth, ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’; Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries.

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historically inaccurate use of categorisations. Movement across boundaries shows the complexity of sociocultural groupings, which often contrast with simplified rhetoric stressing complete division, and provides key insight into sociocultural change. Four types of action involving boundaries are useful when considering the impact of hybridity on sociocultural change: policing, crossing, straddling, and shifting. All four of these actions involve performing or embodying cultural, social, or symbolic capital. Boundary policing is key to the formation of social groups. Social groups emerge through the regulation of cultural codes, that is, sets of embodied cultural capital that group members equate with an ‘us’ that is different from a ‘them’. While the divisions between groups that generate sociocultural boundaries can be grounded in physical attributes, much more important to the maintenance of the boundary is the perception of contrast, or the ‘subjective experience of difference’.29 The insides of groups are inevitably hybrid, yet this hybridity is ignored and rendered socioculturally invisible in order to maintain the sociocultural boundary surrounding the group. This is done either by ‘naming clear outsides’30 or clearly picturing the centre of the group, which is why nationalisms stressing distinct cultural and ethnic identities often arise in places where geographical and cultural differences are collapsing.31 Boundary crossing is where individuals with sufficient cultural capital to perform more than one cultural code perform different codes at different times. It works in a manner similar to performative code switching, where individuals identify themselves as a member of more than one social group by performing different cultural codes at different times, just as they might switch between different registers of language depending on context.32 As in other dynamics discussed so far, what matters is not that the two cultural codes are different in an objective sense, but that the two are seen by the audience as different. The hybridity inherent in boundary crossing is almost always socioculturally invisible because at any given moment the individual in question conforms to the code of a single group. Therefore, the 29 31 32

Sahlins, Boundaries, esp. pp. 70–1, 212–58. 30 Clifford, Routes, p. 65. Gupta and Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”’, p. 39. Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism, pp. 28–34, 230; Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, sections 1, 2.1.

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challenge that boundary crossing represents to the status quo is subtle and only apparent when viewed across space and time. Boundary straddling is more contentious, as it involves individuals who do not – or cannot – separate their performance of different cultural codes and therefore are not seen by their peers as fully belonging to a single category. They are hybrids who have a foothold on both sides of a boundary, embodying characteristics of more than one sociocultural group at the same time. Boundary straddling can result in hybridity that is socioculturally visible or invisible, though once again the focus to date has been almost entirely on the former, even when one looks beyond literature using the term ‘hybrid’. For instance, Victor Turner’s discussion of liminality describes an unclean state that can be jarringly visible because of its location outside of social structures.33 Mary Douglas’ work emphasises how unstable and difficult to maintain in-between positions can be. She explains how individuals who do not belong fully to a category present a danger to the status quo and may be ignored, pressured to conform, or even actively excluded – all of which would reinforce the status quo. If these efforts fail, their differences could, eventually and with difficulty, bring about a rearrangement of the system being challenged.34 It is these rearrangements that shift sociocultural boundaries and lead to sociocultural change. Boundaries shift dramatically when flows across them represent a challenge to the status quo and this challenge is not neutralised but instead changes who and what is perceived as belonging within different sociocultural groups. Cultural and anthropological approaches to hybridity, boundaries, and space recognise the importance of connection to sociocultural change. For instance, Gupta argues that recognising the intrinsically hierarchical connections drawn between spaces is crucial for understanding social and cultural change: if one begins with the premise that spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected, instead of naturally disconnected, then cultural and social change becomes not a matter of cultural contact and articulation but one of rethinking difference through connection.35

33 34 35

Turner, Forest of Symbols, pp. 93–111. Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 36–40. Gupta and Ferguson, ‘Beyond “Culture”’.

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The approach used here goes one step further to assert that the challenge represented to the status quo by boundary straddling and crossing is what leads to changes in what does and does not belong in a given group. That is, hybridity that leads to movement across boundaries is an engine driving sociocultural change. It is important to recognise that both invisible and visible forms of hybridity, boundary crossing, and boundary straddling can result in the shifting of a boundary and sociocultural change. In certain circumstances, invisible forms of hybridity will have more potential for change as the actors involved will not have to deal with the same degree of exclusion and marginalisation as those whose hybridity is perceived as a challenge to the status quo, and as a result may be able to engage directly with those involved in defining the centre of the group.36 This combination of the theories of Bourdieu, Barth, and Bakhtin – with Werbner’s mediation – helps explain the wide range of activities undertaken by the darʿamiyya as a whole, including outliers. It also helps us understand the culture war many were involved in during the constitutional period, as well as the challenges and opportunities they faced throughout the twentieth century.

Hybridity and Sociocultural Change in Modern Egypt The importance of recognising hybridity and movement across boundaries in the Egyptian education system is shown by a major misunderstanding of Egyptian sociocultural dynamics in Robert Tignor’s 1966 book Modernisation and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914. This is one of the few English-language monographs that places education at the centre of a discussion of Egyptian society and culture during the British veiled protectorate. Tignor argues that Cromer’s policy of limiting Egyptian education to avoid creating a nationalist elite backfired completely, as it instead created ‘an intelligentsia cut off from the rest of the population by education’ who saw themselves as born to lead and who turned anti-British when faced with narrow scope to realise their leadership ambitions.37 Tignor’s account recognises the importance of education to socio-economic mobility and the emergence of divisions within the educated elite between those with and without 36 37

Kalmbach, ‘Social and Religious Change’, pp. 47–52. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, p. 348.

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access to government employment. However, he misunderstands the nature of the Egyptian education system when he states that by 1914 the gap between the two school systems [religious and civil] was quite distinct. Nowhere did one system lead into the other. The Westernised schools trained young men in Western knowledge and prepared them for service in the modernizing administration. The Islamic schools, although they were influenced by modernity, trained young men basically in religious subjects and prepared them for the traditional semi-religious and religious roles of shaykh, imam, mufti, and school teacher. Only a few men had the ability, energy, vision, or opportunity, to move from one system to the other, since regular channels of access did not exist.38

Tignor then goes on the argue that this division between ‘two elites – the traditional and the modern’ who ‘existed separated in their own spheres’ is what created the frustration that led to the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood to further the goals of ‘the more traditionally educated’. This could not be further from the truth. Not only was it possible for Egyptians to pass from religious to civil education via the Dar al-ʿUlum from 1872 and the School of Shariʿa Judges between 1907 and 1930, but it was the hybrid background provided by these schools that enabled the founding of the Brotherhood by darʿami Hasan al-Banna, as well as its adaptation of Islamic thought and practice to meet the needs of the efendiyya instead of the needs of ‘the more traditionally educated’. Furthermore, once founded, the Brotherhood established institutions that enabled new religious intellectuals, individuals without a religious education, to exercise religious authority, an action that further undermined the sociocultural position of those with a religious education. Before we explore the hybrid sociocultural position of the darʿamiyya, however, we need to introduce the sociocultural landscape of Egypt more generally.

***** The terms efendi and shaykh have their origins in the title system of the late Ottoman Empire and were used within Egypt’s khedivial state to refer to individuals with a civil and religious education, respectively. As a result, they are not only titles but education-focused descriptions of a sociocultural position. Exactly when and how Egyptians started using these titles in a third way – to denote members of distinct sociocultural 38

Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, p. 348.

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groups, the efendiyya and the shaykhs (in Arabic the broken plural shuyukh) – is a matter for debate and further study. This is because the ‘Misri Effendi’ caricatures and prose referenced in Gershoni and Jankowski’s description of the ‘new efendiyya’,39 as well as the rich collection of autobiographies, fiction, and films Ryzova uses to write a detailed ‘thick description’ of the self-narratives of ‘new’ and ‘old’ efendiyya appear to have been produced almost entirely after 1922.40 These accounts provide ample documentation for a division that emerges during the constitutional period (1923–52) between two groups of efendiyya: a smaller, older group who came of age in the 1890s and 1900s and became the intellectual, political, and social elite of Egypt during the constitutional period, and a larger, younger group who came of age in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and were more conservative, less educated, and provided support en masse to the political parties led by the older group. As a result, it remains unclear whether holders of the title efendi perceived themselves as a social group during the veiled protectorate, though there is evidence that Egyptian shaykhs and efendiyya were conscious of a difference between their respective sociocultural positions as early as the turn of the twentieth century or even, in the case of ʿAli Mubarak, as early as 1871.41 As a sociocultural position, and especially as a sociocultural group, the title efendi denoted an individual who was self-consciously modern and actively involved in new professions and lifestyles, as well as spreading European-influenced ideas, practices, and technologies. Within the Ottoman Empire as a whole, this group was not bound together by social class, but instead by connections to new, European-inspired forms of civil education and involvement with new forms of political expression, regardless of social class or social position.42 The emergence of the Egyptian efendiyya is linked not only to the spread of modernisation projects but also the wider rise of social groups centred around the ‘social 39 40

41

42

Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, p. 92; Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 7–22. Ryzova’s films date from between 1933 and 1957, and the majority of her memoirs and fiction, as well as her photo albums, appear to be from this period also. Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 69–70, 78–82, 207–9. See the section ‘Becoming a Reform-Minded Shaykh’ in Chapter 3 for the former and the section ‘Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian Hybridity’ in Chapter 2 for the latter. Eppel, ‘Note about the Term Effendiyya’, p. 535.

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middle’ in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle East.43 Becoming an efendi by attending a civil school represented a significant opportunity for Egyptian-born subjects of the khedive, as it provided access to a pool of salaried government positions involved in the advancement of projects of modernity and, in the case of a select few, made it possible to rise to the highest levels of the state bureaucracy. The efendiyya were central to Egyptian projects of modernity, but it is a mistake to fold all modernising actors in Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century into this group. Reform-minded shaykhs, beys, and pashas played important roles in khedivial projects of modernity from the outset, plus the most successful reform-minded shaykhs and efendiyya who came of age between the 1870 and 1900 held the title bey or pasha by 1922. While the self-narratives of the efendiyya argued that they were the only Egyptians able to legitimately combine modernity and authenticity,44 that does not mean their claim stood alone or unchallenged, or that they really exercised a monopoly over contributing in substantial ways to projects of modernity. In fact, that this theme comes through so clearly when their self-narratives are read collectively is a strong indication that this status was contested. By the constitutional period, many aspects of efendi subjectivity had spread widely. From a sociocultural perspective, the ranks of Egyptians able to convincingly perform efendi habitus went beyond civil school graduates and also included autodidacts who had acquired the necessary capital through self-study. Ryzova’s book extends the efendiyya as a social group further to include not only autodidacts but also any literate individual who had spent time in a civil school or could convincingly wear a suit and tarboush:45 all Islamic reformers including Islamic modernists Jamal al-Din Afghani, Muhammad ʿAbduh, and Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi, modernist Salafi Muhammad Rashid Rida, the Islamist revivalists of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizb al-Tahrir, and politically active shaykhs who joined in the radical politics of the constitutional period.46 Not only does Ryzova rebrand these diverse expressions 43

44 45 46

Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East, pp. 7–22; Ryzova, ‘Efendification’; Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity’, pp. 124–5. See also Schayegh, Who Is Knowledgeable Is Strong; Jacob, Working Out Egypt; Gasper, Power of Representation; Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians. Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, esp. pp. 24, 72. Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 45, 59–60. Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 77–8, 172, 218–19.

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‘efendi Islam’ but she also reclassifies the nahda, ‘modern Egyptian national culture’, and the ‘liberal project’ of the constitutional period as efendi projects.47 Ascribing such breadth to the efendiyya is problematic because it elides the complex ways in which individuals saw and presented themselves, masks significant differences in education and capital between efendiyya and shaykhs as well as within each category, and flattens important distinctions between the goals of Islamic modernists, Islamist revivalists, and other religious-trained actors. It also hides the unique contributions made by modernising groups outside of the efendiyya to projects of modernity, liberal or otherwise. Without this detail, it is difficult to explain which projects succeeded and why. If the goal is explaining not only what happened, but also attempting to explain why and how historical events took place, we must draw finer distinctions between modernising actors, for instance by paying attention to differences in background, goals, and projects. The main difference between modernising Egyptians who did and did not hold the title efendi is that only a subset of the individuals holding titles other than efendi were associated with reform projects, necessitating the prefix ‘reform-minded’ to separate active supporters of modernisation from the remainder of title-holders. The ranks of Egyptian beys and pashas, reform-minded or otherwise, were small, yet diverse, which begs the question whether they can be considered a single sociocultural position or group at any point in time. The strongest case for a title signalling a collective group consciousness in addition to a sociocultural position throughout the entire eighty years discussed here (1872–1952) is that for the title shaykh signifying a member of a sociocultural group centred around the religious scholars (ʿulamaʾ, sing. ʿalim) based at al-Azhar, Egypt’s most prestigious mosque. The centre of this group was further defined by the reform law of 1872, which introduced a centralised exam to determine who deserved the title ʿalim, and by subsequent reforms that increased the control exercised by leaders of al-Azhar over other religious institutions. This book presents reform-minded shaykhs – a social position that came to be dominated by the darʿamiyya – as a third entity that must be considered alongside the efendiyya and the shaykhs in order to 47

Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 21, 33, 36, 251.

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understand the sociocultural dynamics of Egypt between 1872 and 1952. Reform-minded shaykhs were important enough to state-led projects of modernity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for the state to found Dar al-ʿUlum to begin to train them in 1872. The group as a whole – and especially those whose religious studies ceased before they reached ʿalim status – overlapped with and remained suspended in between the bulk of the efendiyya and the shaykhs throughout the fin-de-siècle period. There is a notable difference between this third entity and the other two that is summed up by the contrast between the signals sent by the school certificates held by the individuals at the centre of each between 1872 and 1927. While a civil school certificate marked the bearer as possessing efendi title, capital, and habitus, and a pass on al-Azhar’s ʿalimiyya examination certified that an individual shaykh held the capital and habitus expected of a religious scholar, the signals sent by a certificate from Dar al-ʿUlum or the School of Shariʿa Judges were much less clear. Graduates of these schools received civil school certificates but were titled shaykh and were officially supposed to wear a gown and turban instead of a suit and tarboush up to the 1920s. Uncertainty about their sociocultural status was thus built into the core of the group, instead of being a feature of the fringe. As a result, this third designation was a less secure sociocultural position than either efendi or shaykh, at least during the eighty years under discussion here (1872–1952). Following in the footsteps of my dissertation,48 Ryzova’s book adds consideration of liminality and in between states (that is, boundary straddling) to the discussions of performative code switching (that is, boundary crossing) that featured so prominently in her dissertation, and uses these new terms in interesting ways.49 That said, it is important to recognise that there are significant differences between the contingency and uncertainty associated with the liminality of an efendi graduate of a civil school and a reform-minded shaykh trained at Dar al-ʿUlum, at least once the ‘social middle’ documented in meticulous detail by Ryzova was wellestablished.50 The positions of Egyptians with a school certificate would always be less contingent than autodidacts whose relevant 48 49 50

Kalmbach, ‘From Turban to Tarboush’, pp. 28–31. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, sections 1.1, 2.1; Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 34–6, 194, 210 n. 108, 233, 246. On the ‘social middle’: Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 10–18.

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cultural capital was not certified, and the opportunities available to younger efendiyya were fewer and less lucrative than what was offered to those who came before. But these factors do not mean that efendi or shaykh status was inherently liminal, as was the case for the darʿamiyya. The remainder of this chapter introduces the hybrid sociocultural position of the darʿamiyya and the events behind their reclassification from shaykh to efendi in 1927.

The Darʿamiyya as Modern and Religious The hybrid civil-religious capital provided by Dar al-ʿUlum – and acquired in ad hoc ways by earlier generations of reform-minded shaykhs – presented the possibility of both socio-economic and sociocultural mobility. The self-narratives of reform-minded Egyptian shaykhs contained in autobiographies and a film made during and shortly after the constitutional period describe protagonists attempting to become ‘modern’ through the acquisition of knowledge, similar to the self-narratives of the efendiyya.51 These accounts focus on tracing a path from rural to urban, from shaykh to darʿami or efendi, and from what-was-seen-as-traditional to what-was-seen-as-modern. They help their protagonist establish sociocultural belonging by showing him crossing back and forth over geographical boundaries inside and outside Egypt, yet making a sociocultural transition that is unidirectional, final, and in the past. The memoir of literary scholar Taha Husayn, The Days (al-Ayyam), published in three volumes in 1929, 1932, and 1967, is the defining work of the genre.52 These volumes follow the author as he crosses physical boundaries – from the countryside to Cairo’s al-Azhar, to the Egyptian University, and finally to Paris – and makes one of the largest sociocultural transitions of his generation – from childhood as a blind rural shaykh to adulthood as a Europhile cosmopolitan with a French wife. Crossing the boundary between religious and civil schooling, and then between Egyptian and French schooling was especially difficult for Husayn because of his blindness, a disability that was much less of 51 52

Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 33, 145–6, 174–5. Hussein, The Days. Note that this is the same Husayn mentioned in the main text; the publisher transliterated the author’s name following a different system from that used in this book, which I necessarily follow for citations.

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a hindrance within the religious schools in Egypt than in the civil schools of Egypt or Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. He had to fight for accommodations that enabled him to attend classes in non-religious institutions, take part in an educational mission to France, and become an instructor at the university.53 As Fedwa MaltiDouglas’ analysis makes clear, Husayn’s autobiography portrays his acts of boundary crossing as unidirectional shifts that collectively make up a trajectory ending with his place in society as a Europeanised member of the intellectual elite. Despite the extra difficulties faced by Husayn, the sociocultural journey he describes so saliently in his autobiography is comparable to the path followed by most of the students leaving high-level religious educational institutions. Moving from village or town to a major city such as Cairo, leaving religious education for a civil school, and working as a civil servant instead of as a religious functionary involved crossing physical, social, and cultural boundaries. Those who, like Husayn, were fortunate enough to obtain a place on a government mission to Europe would cross an even larger set of sociocultural and physical boundaries separating Egypt from Europe. Numerous autobiographies and biographies of darʿamiyya include a rural-to-urban narrative, detailing their birth and childhood in the countryside before moving to the big city in pursuit of knowledge. Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad and Sayyid Qutb published autobiographies focusing entirely on their childhood in rural villages, similar to Husayn’s first volume, while other darʿamiyya open their memoirs with sections discussing childhood and early studies in villages. Hamid Tahir, a 1967 graduate of Dar al-ʿUlum, takes this further, beginning his autobiographical account with his family’s move from the countryside to Cairo in the late 1930s even though he was born there in 1943.54 Many of these narratives leave implicit the connection between a move to the city and a transition from traditional to modern lifestyles, but this link would have been legible to Egyptian readers of the time, as virtually all Egyptian novels and films from the first half of the twentieth century focus on moving steadily towards modernity, 53 54

Malti-Douglas, Blindness and Autobiography, pp. 43–7, 60–5. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Fı¯ kutta¯b al-qarya; Qutb et al., A Child from the Village; Ahmad, ˙ ¯n Ahmad bı¯ qalamihi, pp. 5–12; Shalabı¯, Rihla haya¯, pp. 27–36; Ta¯hir, Dı¯wa ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ Ha¯mid Ta¯hir, pp. 5–6. ˙ ˙

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often through leaving behind a residential quarter of a medieval city (hara) or a rural village.55 Many of the graduates who were successful enough to publish an autobiography had had the opportunity to study abroad and described this as a significant step in their pursuit of knowledge. Muhammad Khalaf Allah Ahmad, a 1928 graduate, describes his travels and studies in England, where he earned a BA in philosophy at University College London before returning to his ‘beloved’ homeland.56 The travels of Ahmad Shalabi, who graduated in 1944, took him in a wider variety of directions: first England, but then later Indonesia and Sudan.57 Hamid Tahir’s memoir focuses instead on Cairo, by describing in detail the different spaces in which he spent his childhood – the Khalifa neighbourhood near the citadel, then the (at that time) much cleaner and quieter Darrasa neighbourhood to the north, Fayyum to the south of Cairo, and Darb al-Ahmar back near the citadel. At one point, he compares his family’s dress, socio-economic status, and preference for religious education and with their smartly dressed and more sophisticated middle-class neighbours in Darrasa.58 The unidirectional rural-to-urban and religious-to-civil transition present in memoirs written during the first half of the twentieth century has remained a dominant feature in the historical and fictional narratives about the darʿamiyya produced since then. One such account is the 1956 movie A Woman’s Youth (Shabab Imraʾa), directed by Salah Abu Sayf (1915–96).59 It opens with the protagonist Imam Beltaji Hasanayn, played by Shukri Sarhan (1925–97), leaving his rural village to enrol as a student at Dar al-ʿUlum. The spatial and sociocultural aspects of Imam’s transition from rural to urban environment are captured beautifully in the initial scenes. The film opens with his widowed mother selling her beloved cow to fund his studies, an action that was artfully shot without dialogue using close-ups of her hands and those of the cow’s buyer to explain what was happening. She then returns home, where a chaotic and loud crowd is packing up Imam’s things for the move to Cairo.

55 56 57 58

Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism; Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985, p. 5. Ahmad, Ahmad bı¯ qalamihi, pp. 86–95. ˙ ˙ la haya¯, pp. 53–201, esp. 53–8, 126–7. Shalabı ¯, Rih ˙¯n H ˙ a¯mid Ta¯hir, pp. 5–27, esp. p. 12. 59 Sayf, Shaba¯b Imraʾa. Ta¯hir, Dı¯wa ˙ ˙ ˙

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Imam’s arrival in Cairo is shown by a brief shot of a train pulling into a large, spacious station and Imam emerging from the station to load his things into a horse-drawn cart. He asks to be taken to a neighbourhood (khitta) where he could live, and the driver chooses one of the old quarters of the city near the citadel. The route from the station to the old city takes them through several of the main squares of the newer quarters of the city (Ramses, Opera), whose tall apartment buildings and neatly shuttered ground-floor shops elicit looks of amazement from Imam. This clean, peaceful, and orderly image of the European-influenced quarters of the city is reinforced by subsequent scenes showing them as empty and quiet, with no moving traffic, and only children – neatly dressed in shorts – playing in the streets. These street shots are complemented by frequent scenes inside the home of a friend of Imam’s late father located in the newer quarter of ʿAbbasiyya. This friend is shown with many of the achievements to which a Dar al-ʿUlum student might aspire: a government job, a flat in a cosmopolitan building, and European-influenced dress and lifestyle. The old neighbourhood near the citadel in which Imam rents a room is portrayed in a very different fashion. Its narrow streets are barely large enough for the cart, and its soundscape includes a bustling mix of the call to prayer, the cries of animals, and the calls of door-to-door salesmen advertising their wares. The house in which Imam rents a room is large, yet dirty and filled with motion: animals walk freely around its central courtyard, which is dominated by a donkey-powered grain mill and a workshop. His widowed landlady is vulgar and loud, getting into fights, chewing gum, and smoking cigarettes and a shisha. On his first day of school, Imam’s rural habits clash sharply with those of the city, as he is one of the few in his new neighbourhood – and the only one in his household – who sets a very loud alarm clock for the dawn prayer and uses a noisy gas burner to make tea, before doing his ablutions and putting on a gown and cap to go to the mosque to pray. Upon his return, he loudly recites the rhymed verses of a religious-style textbook in a sing-song voice, by which time his landlady has had enough and comes to tell him off for making so much noise so early in the morning. Imam crosses between the old and new areas of the city daily to go to classes at Dar al-ʿUlum and to tutor the mischievous son of his father’s

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friend, possibly via buses or trams from ʿAtaba, as both the school and the ʿAbbasiyya area would have been a long walk from his lodgings. In one instance, his landlady, an older widow played by Tahaya Kariuka, picks him up in a horse-drawn carriage. In Imam’s case, the transition from a sheltered rural life to a sophisticated urban one goes further than intended, as this landlady seduces him and tries to get him to forget about his duties to his schooling, his family, and his friends. He eventually escapes her grasp and seeks instead the polite attention of Salwa, the European-attired daughter of his father’s friend. Despite his early difficulties transitioning from rural to urban life, and the difficulties he faces living in his lodgings near the citadel, he remains confident in his own abilities and position in society as a young, educated man aspiring to a more affluent lifestyle. This rural-to-urban transition also appears in the portrayal of the darʿamiyya in a 2009 documentary shown on Al Jazeera. This documentary accurately captures Egyptian historical memory of the darʿamiyya and is considered among Egyptian academics to be an excellent source of information on Dar al-ʿUlum. The programme includes interviews with Kamal Bishr, whose biography begins with his birth in a village and the beginning of ‘his journey in search of knowledge’ in its religious elementary school.60 These films show a compressed and stylised version of the religiousto-civil and rural-to-urban transition that early Dar al-ʿUlum students would have undergone. By the time students sat Dar al-ʿUlum’s entrance exam, many would have already made the move to a city to study at the madrasa associated with a major mosque. This was often al-Azhar, but could also have been the Ahmadi Mosque in Cairo, the Ibrahim Mosque in Alexandria, or the Ahmadi Mosque in Tanta.61 In the constitutional period there were further changes that enabled students to enter Dar al-ʿUlum after studying at one of the schools training teachers for kuttab elementary schools or one of the regional religious institutes overseen by al-Azhar.

***** These narratives, often composed years or even decades after the events which they describe, perform several functions. Autobiographies from this period can be read as part of a performance through which an 60 61

al-Qa¯dı¯, Kama¯l Bishr, pp. 13–16. ˙ ‘Education, Language and Culture’, pp. 2–3, 13–14, 93–4, 241, 300. Aroian,

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individual uses his life story to establish himself as an educated and modern Egyptian. Self-narratives of all types also perform a second function: creating, spreading, reinforcing, and even subtly altering the collective identity of the group as a whole. Finally, they can be used to address the challenges faced by an individual author or the group at the time of writing.62 The frequency with which darʿamiyya from the 1960s or later presented the narrative summarised above as the path followed by students at the school demonstrates the degree to which self-representations written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s have shaped the collective memory of the group as a whole. These functions, however, mean that Egyptian self-narratives written in the constitutional period or later need to be read critically and in combination with other sources. Elements of the past that undermine one or more of these functions or that are no longer consistent with the author’s world view or view of himself, are likely to be underemphasised or written out of the narrative in ways that flatten or simplify the view they provide of the past. As a result, if we want to use selfnarratives to reveal more than how the groups want to see themselves and be seen by others, it is crucial to consider the ways in which genre and tropes are deployed, the position of the author at the time of writing, the wider sociocultural context, and the extent to which the narrative is complemented by sources contemporary to the events described, such as periodicals, diaries, or records.

***** Ample support for the socio-economic and geographic mobility described in the self-narratives of reform-minded shaykhs is provided by Lois Aroian’s detailed study of darʿamiyya who graduated between 1872 and 1923. Her findings reinforce the idea that Dar al-ʿUlum provided a path from rural poverty to urban prosperity for lowerand middle-class Egyptians. They reveal that a typical student during this period was from a small village or town. Almost three-quarters of the graduates for whom she found information were born in rural 62

For instance, Brnyar Lia’s careful reading of Hasan al-Banna’s memoir demonstrates how a memoir can not only legitimate authority but also respond to problems the author faces at the time of writing. Walter Armbrust’s analysis of Egyptian films demonstrates how they can propose solutions to collective cultural problems. Lia, ‘Autobiography or Fiction?’, pp. 200–1; Armbrust, ‘Long Live Patriarchy’,

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areas, instead of district towns, provincial capitals, or the large cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Most students were from relatively poor families. These families must have been able to forgo the contribution their son would make if working, but presumably were without the funds, access, or inclination to send him to a civil school. Aroian also confirms that the vast majority of darʿamiyya who graduated before 1924 held a government position related to education at some point. Teaching and working as a school inspector were particularly common, with 954 and 313 graduates respectively out of the 1,041 for whom Aroian was able to find employment data. Serving as a school director was also common. Darʿamiyya were a significant presence in the schools that trained instructors for government-run kuttab elementary schools. The majority of graduates held initial postings as teachers or school inspectors outside of Cairo, though they would have been in towns large enough to have a government school. However, slightly over half finished their careers in Cairo, a move that would cement a rise from humble, rural roots to a life as an educated urban professional in a rapidly changing city.63 It is important to recognise, however, that while darʿamiyya had preferential access to salaried government jobs related to the teaching of Arabic, reformminded shaykhs without a certificate from Dar al-ʿUlum would have found it more difficult to achieve this level of socio-economic success. On a sociocultural level, the situation is more complex. These selfnarratives reveal much about the sociocultural goals and aspirations of reform-minded shaykhs, but they obscure the difficulties inherent in these transitions as well as the frequency with which darʿamiyya and other reform-minded shaykhs crossed and straddled sociocultural boundaries. There are notable examples of individuals among both the darʿamiyya and the efendiyya whose transitions were complex and multidirectional, either by design or due to failure to realise their goals. Naguib Mahfouz’s novels occasionally discuss the failures of self-consciously modern Egyptians to realise their dreams, providing a view of the sacrifices and frictions inherent in these transitions that contrasts with the ‘triumph over adversity’ trope emphasised in the majority of autobiographies. For instance, his novel Respected Sir (Hadrat al-muhtaram), published in 1975 but seemingly about the constitutional period, describes the ultimate failure of efendi clerk 63

Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture’, pp. 10, 12–13, 20–1, 303–4.

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ʿUthman Bayyumi to rise to the top of the ministry in which he worked despite devoting almost all of his energy, personally and professionally, over years of his life to this goal. Furthermore, during the fin-de-siècle period it was common for darʿamiyya to engage in performative code switching,64 that is crossing sociocultural boundaries by performing different cultural codes at different times and places. The path followed by Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl involved repeatedly crossing geographical and sociocultural boundaries. After graduating from Dar al-ʿUlum in 1887, al-ʿAdl had a distinguished career abroad that included teaching Arabic and studying alongside Orientalists in Berlin, teaching Arabic at Cambridge, and being inducted into London’s Royal Asiatic Society. The fluid manner in which he deployed various aspects of his cultural capital is most visible in his switching between different styles of dress and title. For instance, he was listed as a shaykh in the notice announcing his induction into the Royal Asiatic Society in London and wore the dress of a religious scholar when meeting the German Kaiser, yet he used the title efendi and appeared in a suit and tarboush in the 1895 picture of Dar al-ʿUlum’s faculty.65 Al-ʿAdl used dress as a socially legible marker with which to perform belonging to different social groups at different points in time, crossing the sociocultural boundaries in between performances. Ahmad Miftah, an 1885 graduate, also changed dress frequently. Immediately after graduation, he worked for the Egyptian newspaper The News (al-Akhbar) and taught while wearing the dress of the efendi, but later returned to the dress of the shaykh when teaching Arabic composition at Dar al-ʿUlum.66 Other members of the Dar al-ʿUlum faculty engaged in boundary crossing involving dress, as the faculty pictures from 1895 and 1914 show a mixture of turban- and tarboush-wearers, while the picture from 1902 shows the faculty wearing suits, tarboushes, and dapper handlebar moustaches, despite the fact that it shows many of the same individuals (see Figures 0.1 and 0.2 on the following pages).67 These fin-de-siècle examples of boundary crossing were made possible by the collective suspension of the darʿamiyya in between the 64 65 66 67

Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism, pp. 28–34, 230; Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 32, 68, 85–7. ‘Notes of the Quarter’, pp. 175–80; ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 8–84 (esp. 41), 172. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 176–7. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 5, 90, 172.

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Figure 0.1 Dar al-ʿUlum faculty in 1895 or 1896. In the late 1890s, Dar al-ʿUlum’s faculty wore a mix of turban and tarboush, even those faculty members who are Dar al-ʿUlum graduates. Front row, left to right: Shaykh Ahmad Miftah, 1885 graduate and teacher of Arabic composition; Ismaʿil Raji Bey, officer of the school; Shaykh Hasan Tawil, teacher of hadith and tafsir; Amin Sami Bey, director of the school; Shaykh Sultan al-ʿAbd, high-ranking religious scholar; Muhammad Idris Bey, mathematics teacher who worked at the school for over thirty years; Shaykh Muhammad ʿAli al-Nawamisi, 1893 graduate who taught law and morals. Back row, left to right: Ahmad Qadri Efendi, teacher of English; Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl Efendi, 1887 graduate and teacher of Arabic language and literature; Mr Mardin, teacher of map drawing, English, and pedagogy; Ismaʿil Raʾfat Bey, geography teacher; Sultan Muhammad Bey, teacher of Arabic. Source: Faculty names listed alongside reproduction in Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 172; repeat of p. 24.

classifications of shaykh and efendi, a situation that did not last long into the constitutional period. In the years following the First World War, state officials attempted to crack down on darʿamiyya using the title and dress of the efendi. That is, the largely efendi intellectual and political elite that came to power during the constitutional period set out to police the sociocultural boundary between efendi and shaykh by insisting that darʿamiyya remain entirely on the side occupied by shaykhs.

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Figure 0.2 Dar al-ʿUlum faculty in 1902. A picture from 1902 where all faculty members pictured wear the tarboush, including Dar al-ʿUlum graduate ‘Hasan Tawfiq Efendi’, that is Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl (second row, third from the left, number 9). Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 42; repeated p. 185.

Opposition to this shift came to a head in February 1926, when government troops were called to Dar al-ʿUlum to enforce a ban on students entering the school wearing the suit and tarboush of the efendi instead of the qabaʾ (a gown with full-length sleeves), the jubba (open-front gown with wide sleeves), and ʿamama (turban) of the shaykh that had been the official dress of the school for its first fifty years. Several weeks earlier, many of Dar al-ʿUlum’s students had agreed to attend school after the mid-year break wearing suits instead of robes as part of an effort to force the government to officially change the status of the darʿamiyya from shaykh to efendi, an agreement that received a significant amount of publicity in the national media. When they arrived on the appointed day, however, they found troops at the school gates who only allowed students in traditional dress to enter. A group of students fooled the soldiers by wearing robes to enter the school and, once inside, removing them to reveal suits underneath, after which they staged a sit-in.68

68

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 551.

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Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad’s florid account of the incident, ‘Battle over changing dress at the Dar’ (Maʿrakat taghayir al-ziyy bil-dar), explains that the number of Dar al-ʿUlum graduates discarding the title and dress of the shaykh and instead dressing and using the title of efendi had significantly increased in the years running up to this crisis. ʿAbd alJawad explains that shaykhs had sufficiently low status that many were disrespected by ordinary people while they went about their business in the streets, shops, government offices, and social institutions. He argues that it was only through wearing the dress of the efendi – a privilege granted in other civil schools – that Dar al-ʿUlum’s students and graduates could ‘claim the affluence of respect and the freedom to walk’, go about their business with dignity and respect, and stay on an equal footing with students and graduates of other civil schools.69 The government claimed that this led to confusion about the identities of individuals who were recorded as shaykhs in certain places and efendiyya in others. The government’s attempt to solve this problem – forbidding men with a civil school certificate but the official status of shaykh from using the title efendi unless they had received written permission to do so – was the spark that set off the student strike.70 The student strike generated debate in multiple national newspapers before and after the 6 February sit-in. Their accounts link dress and title to larger issues of dignity, respect, lifestyle, and jobs, as well as relative status within Egyptian society. Ittihad was one of many newspapers that supported the students’ cause, publishing multiple articles in support and their own explanations of events two days before the sit-in.71 In an article published three days before the sit-in and one day before the students released their manifesto, the writers at Ittihad pointed out that the students considered looking like other people instead of standing out to be explicitly connected to their potential for accomplishment in wider society, and argued that the Ministry of Education (with the support of al-Azhar) had no right to dictate their dress.72 Multiple papers used the sit-in and its aftermath as a reason to raise wider questions about dress in Egypt, with writers at Wadi al-Nil discussing ‘the problem of the turban and tarboush’ as a ‘new Egyptian problem’ and Kawkab al-Sharq arguing that the debate was relevant not only to 69 71 72

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 552. 70 ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 551–2. According to a 7 February response from Shaykh Muhammad Sha¯kir (also in ˙ Ittiha¯d), it was published on 4 February. See˙ ‘Hawa¯dith wa Akhba¯r: 1. Ziyy Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m’, 2 February 1926.

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the graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum but also to the wider question of ‘Egyptian dress’.73 This strike was one of the most visible manifestations of the difficulties faced by students with significant religious capital as they tried to move into the professional and social circles of civil school graduates. The Egyptian government’s attempts to police the boundary separating shaykhs from efendiyya by barring darʿamiyya from using the title efendi ultimately failed. By occupying their school grounds while wearing the dress of the efendi, students visibly asserted the right to cross this boundary. Their defiance continued, as the number of students attending lessons wearing the suit and tarboush gradually increased until graduation at the end of the 1926–7 academic year, by which time almost all of the student body had made the switch.74 The issue was not formally resolved until December 1927, almost two years after the initial demonstrations, when a government decree officially changed the dress of the school.75 The success of the strike in changing the official categorisation of darʿamiyya from shaykh to efendi is an example of how deliberate transgressions of boundaries can lead to a shift in the boundary itself, with the efendiyya officially expanded to include the darʿamiyya. Being granted the title and dress of the efendiyya in 1927 was an important step for darʿamiyya who wanted to establish themselves in social circles dominated by civil school graduates, but was not sufficient in itself to guarantee the social and professional positions of graduates in the 1930s and beyond, a dilemma we return to in the conclusion.

Conclusion and Outline of Chapters This chapter has provided historical background and introduced the novel combination of social theory that underpins this book’s approach to modernisation and change in Egypt. This approach presents Egyptian modernisation as a constellation of projects advanced by Egypt’s ruling khedives, Europeans, and a diverse group of Egyptian 73

74

¯ ima: mushkila al-ʿama¯ma’, Wa¯dı¯ al-Nı¯l, 9 February 1926, and ‘Azya¯ʾ See ‘al-ʿ As ˙ hawla haa¯dith Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m’, Kawkab al-Sharq, 9 February 1926. al-Misriyya: ˙ ¯ ma wa al-tarbu¯sh’, al-Siya¯sa, 9 February 1926, and ‘Ma¯ See also ‘Dajja al-ʿama ˙ wa masʾala al-khila¯fa’, Ittiha¯d, ˙ hiya al-ʿala¯qa bayna ziyy al-talaba ˙ ˙ 18 February 1926. 75 al-Banna¯, Mudhakkira¯t, pp. 51–2. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 554.

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nationalists, including mid- and lower-level civil servants. The approach also uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Barth, and Bakhtin to explore the role of institutions and social groups in advancing sociocultural change. Bourdieu’s capital and habitus enable us to connect educational experiences with sociocultural outcomes in meaningful ways. They also highlight the importance of education in societies undergoing reform in response to European colonial expansion, as new systems of schooling enabled a large number of people to obtain certified cultural, social, and symbolic capital that was radically different from what they would have received from their families and the communities in which they were raised, that was crucial for state-led projects of modernity, and that could be embodied to realise large jumps in sociocultural standing. Knowledge imported into Egypt from Europe was translated and applied in ways that addressed Egyptian concerns and created dynamic hybrids. Pnina Werbner’s reading of Bakhtin’s dialogic principle enables us to distinguish between hybrids that are socioculturally visible or invisible, with the former seen as a rupture that overtly challenges a sociocultural order and the latter representing change from within that is subtle enough to go unnoticed. Finally, Frederik Barth’s work on sociocultural boundaries demonstrates that they are not only policed but also crossed in productive ways. I expand upon these ideas to describe four ways in which capital and habitus can be used to shape the boundary surrounding a sociocultural group: to police, or reinforce, the boundary; to cross the boundary through performing different cultural codes at different times, an action that can reinforce or undermine the boundary; to straddle the boundary in ways that create hybrids, an action that subtly changes or blatantly undermines the boundary depending on whether the hybrid is socioculturally invisible or visible; and to shift the boundary, which occurs when the forces challenging the boundary prevail over those reinforcing it. The application of this combination of social theory to the history of Egyptian teacher training schools demonstrates that a major engine driving sociocultural change in Egypt was the agency exercised by individuals who crossed boundaries and consciously hybridised cultural codes to create modernities and nationalisms that were uniquely Egyptian.

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This introduction finishes by exploring the sociocultural position of the darʿamiyya, and especially the ways in which they were suspended in between the modernising graduates of civil schools (efendiyya) and the traditionally trained alumni of religious schools (shaykhs) between 1872 and 1927. It presents the titles efendi and shaykh as designating a sociocultural position that can, in certain periods, be linked to social groups – the efendiyya and the shaykhs – centred around the alumni of civil and religious schools, respectively. It also argues that it is a mistake to equate only the efendi with modernisation, as reform-minded individuals from other groups made important contributions to Egyptian projects of modernity. Reform-minded shaykhs – a social designation that came to be dominated by the darʿamiyya – are a third entity that must be considered alongside the efendiyya and the shaykhs in order to understand the sociocultural dynamics of Egypt between 1872 and 1952. The self-narratives of the darʿamiyya composed during and shortly after the constitutional period describe a unidirectional transition from rural to urban, from shaykh to darʿami or efendi, and from modern to traditional, a simplification of their lives that dominates historical memories of the group through to the present day. The socio-economic side of these narratives is supported by other sources, but the sociocultural situation is more complicated. In practice, darʿamiyya status was less certain, and as a result many used their hybrid background to repeatedly cross the boundary separating shaykh from efendi and to perform the capital and habitus of efendi or shaykh in front of different audiences. Several years into the constitutional period, the Egyptian state attempted to end this challenge to the boundary by forbidding darʿamiyya from presenting themselves as efendiyya. A student ‘dress strike’ at Dar alʿUlum in 1926 thwarted this attempt and led to the redesignation of the darʿamiyya as efendiyya in 1927. That is, the crossing of individual darʿamiyya over the shaykh-efendi boundary that they collectively straddled from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, combined with mass protest of Dar al-ʿUlum students over efendi efforts to police it, shifted the sociocultural boundary surrounding the efendiyya such that it included the darʿamiyya from the 1927.

***** Chapter 1 introduces the educational systems and cultural politics of Egypt between 1811 and 1900. It demonstrates how Egyptian reformers advanced projects of modernity by importing, translating, and

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applying European knowledge within Egypt, including through founding a new system of civil schools to run in parallel with long-standing religious schools, both kuttab elementary schools and higher-level madrasa schools. It explains how these school systems were misrepresented by European discourses that divided Egypt into two halves – a modern-foreign and a traditional-local. It uses the terms ocularcentric (focused on visual reading) and audiocentric (focused on listening) to deconstruct this dichotomy as applied to Egyptian education. It shows how the exercise of Egyptian agency, especially via the civil school system, created projects of modernity that deliberately diverged from European models. Next, the chapter deconstructs the application of this dichotomy to the geographical and sociocultural landscapes through which Egyptians moved and claimed social status. This section focuses on the hybrid borderlands that developed around the schools and institutions associated with state-led projects of modernity. The chapter concludes by presenting 1867–76 as the key cultural turning point of late nineteenth-century Egypt, one that facilitated not only the cultural renaissance of the nahda, but also the colonisation of Egyptian minds before the political transformations of 1876–82 finished the colonisation of their bodies. Chapter 2 discusses Dar al-ʿUlum, a hybrid school founded in 1872 to train students from top religious schools such as al-Azhar to teach primary school subjects and Arabic within state-run civil schools. It begins by locating Dar al-ʿUlum within the history of Egyptian teacher training. It explains how Dar al-ʿUlum formalised and expanded the path followed by reform-minded shaykhs from the early nineteenth century by providing a crash course in the subjects and habitus of the civil school system, alongside advanced training in how to apply specialist knowledge of Arabic and Islam to teaching in a civil school. It then presents Dar al-ʿUlum as a hybrid institution whose mission was to bring religious knowledge into the civil system. As a result, Dar al-ʿUlum was structured as a civil school, but its curriculum and faculty combined civil and religious elements and expertise. The chapter demonstrates that Dar al-ʿUlum was founded not only because of efforts to control and put Islamic knowledge to work, but also because of the value placed by many Egyptians on the authentic connection to Egypt’s past provided by Islamic knowledge. That is, the objectification and functionalisation of Islamic knowledge by the Egyptian state

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between 1872 and 1922 was far less cynical than the post-1952 contexts upon which Gregory Starrett focuses. Chapter 3 reveals how graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum contributed significantly to the creation of an authentic national culture for Egypt during the first forty years of British occupation (1882–1922). It demonstrates that projects of modernity and nationalism, and the cultural renaissance that supported them, were not only advanced by Egypt’s political and intellectual elite but also by educational experts working within lower and middle levels of state institutions and within grass-roots movements. The resistance of elite nationalists to cultural change under British occupation was selective: they fought education cutbacks and Anglocentric policies but accepted European critiques of Islamic knowledge and pedagogies. This not only enhanced the sociocultural value of the civil school capital that many elite nationalists possessed, but also that of the hybrid civil-religious capital of the darʿamiyya. Reform of al-Azhar was driven in part by the number of talented and ambitious religious school students trying to leave for Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges. Dar al-ʿUlum’s teachers and graduates contributed significantly to the revival of Arabic literature, the reform of Arabic language instruction, and the rejuvenation of Islamic practice through grass-roots associations (jamʿiyyat). Chapter 4 rewrites the history of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–52) by examining a ‘culture war’ that broke out between graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum and Europhile modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq. From 1930, Europhile modernist calls for further westernisation fell on deaf ears due in large part to the darʿamiyya. Darʿamiyya continued to exercise significant influence over the teaching and reform of Arabic, including as members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya al-Malaki) from 1932. Furthermore, the darʿamiyya Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir advanced explicitly Islamic alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. Their example established a new mode of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, that was accessible to individuals without significant religious education. Europhile modernists responded differently to this loss of sociocultural authority. Haykal’s switch to writing about Islamic topics can be seen as an attempt to co-opt darʿamiyya influence

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over popular views of religion. Husayn’s call for Dar al-ʿUlum to be subsumed into the Egyptian University’s College of Literature was a direct attack on the darʿamiyya’s sociocultural and professional authority. The Conclusion ties together the arguments of the book by returning to several moments of the constitutional period. First, it uses quotes praising Dar al-ʿUlum from the letters and reports of prominent Egyptians between 1904 and 1939 that were included in the 1952 Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac as evidence of the quality of the school to discuss two things: first, the long shadow cast by Taha Husayn’s critique of the school, even after it was incorporated into Cairo University as an independent faculty in 1946; and, second, that the darʿamiyya should be considered, alongside Europhile modernists and Islamic revivalists, as claimants to the legacy of Muhammad ʿAbduh, an Islamic modernist reformer and Egyptian nationalist who died in 1905. After summarising the main points of the book, the Conclusion closes by returning to the 1926 dress strike. It uses the strike to explore the consequences of the massive expansion of the efendiyya during the constitutional period, such that it included all of the graduates of a rapidly expanding, multilevel civil school system as well as the darʿamiyya. As a result, from the constitutional period onwards it is far more important to focus on the differences in cultural, social, and symbolic capital that divided the efendiyya than the capital and habitus that they all shared. The anger of the younger efendiyya at a system dominated by their older counterparts was due in good part to the fact that efendi status and roots in the Egyptian countryside was no longer enough to facilitate a rise to the top of Egyptian state and society. The groups who overthrew the efendi political and intellectual elite of the constitutional period with the 1952 revolution were those who could bring additional capital to the table through, for instance, access to the social networks surrounding radical youth politics, the ability to express religious knowledge convincingly using a civil school habitus, or the ability to mobilise military units. Several of these additional sources of capital have remained influential within Egypt in the longer term, including in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution.

1

Reform, Education, and Sociocultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

I have often taken transient sojourners in Egypt to visit two institutions in Cairo which are only about fifteen minutes walk [sic] apart, and which are typical of the two great systems which, like Jacob and Esau, have been struggling in the womb of the Egypt that is to be. The first is the Government College in the Derb-el-Gamamiz. There, as the visitor passed from room to room, he would see classes of young Egyptians, amounting in all to about 400 youths reciting their lessons in algebra, geometry, astronomy, drawing, natural sciences – indeed, all that constitutes a liberal education in the curriculum of a college in Europe or America. The other is the great university connected with the Azhar Mosque, founded some nine hundred years ago, and to-day the greatest centre of Mohammedan learning in the world.1 Dr Gulian Lansing (1826–92), American Presbyterian missionary, writing in 1882

The transmission of knowledge is at the heart of all forms of education, though ideas about the best way to do it have varied significantly between times and places. In the minds of people educated in the schools and universities of Europe, the topic of knowledge is likely to conjure up images of books and visual processing of information such as old tomes on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a grand wood-panelled library, a dimly lit bookstore filled to the brim with the smell of old books, or a library full of people reading silently from a book or computer screen, possibly while making written notes. Yet, with further thought, alternative ways to communicate may also come to mind, as written texts are far from the only way to pass on ideas, practices, and technologies – that is, knowledge – even in the most formal of scholarly circles. One might picture an intelligentlooking person speaking at a podium or writing on a board in front 1

Wylie, Egypt and Its Future, pp. 111–14.

49

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of a class. Those familiar with stereotypes of English education may visualise a distinguished-looking Oxbridge don sitting in a historic set of rooms and engaging in debate with a small group of students. Visual information may still play a role here in the form of the instructors’ notes or lecture script, student notes, and lecture slides or information on the blackboard, but these forms of knowledge transmission also include significant oral (spoken) and aural (heard) components. Indeed, the dominant mode of tutorial teaching in Oxford until the 1960s, at least, involved students reading the essays they had written on the week’s topic aloud to their tutors, who would deliver oral feedback on the work as they heard the text read.2 The gap that had opened up between Europe and Egypt by the start of the nineteenth century was not only one involving military might or administrative techniques. It also involved vastly different perspectives on the types of knowledge that were useful and how this knowledge should be transmitted. While texts played an important role within the learned communities of both Europe and Egypt in the nineteenth century, European approaches to literacy and knowledge transmission had become largely ocularcentric, or focused on using the eyes to read and write, a development aided significantly by the spread of Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing system within Europe from 1450. In contrast, Egypt was home to a rich tradition of audiocentric approaches, in which written texts were used alongside oral transmission and aural reception of knowledge, and it was possible to become a scholar of the highest calibre without being able to write, or even read, a text. This difference in approach led European observers to condemn the forms of knowledge transmission and education commonly used in Egypt, whether in the madrasa – a school providing secondary and higher education that is usually attached to a large urban mosque, such as Cairo’s al-Azhar – or the kuttab, an elementary school teaching basic literacy to the Muslim or Coptic children of a particular village or neighbourhood. It was not only the content of the knowledge passed on in these schools that was inferior, in western eyes, but also the audiocentrism of the system as a whole. Much more to their liking were the subjects and pedagogies used in the civil schools centred around Darb al-Jamamiz (Lansing’s Derb-el-Gamamiz) in the late nineteenth century, which were part of a system founded earlier in the 2

Palfreyman, ‘The Oxford Tutorial’, pp. 7–8.

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century to train officers and officials for Egypt’s European-influenced military and bureaucracy. Accounts like the one by Dr Lansing quoted at the start of the chapter are problematic for two reasons. First, they dismiss Egyptian knowledge practices as inferior without making the effort to understand them on their own terms. Any divergence from European ideals is seen as evidence of the backward nature of Islamic knowledge and the societies built upon it, even though large segments of European society also failed to live up to these ideals. Second, they reduce Egyptian education into two supposedly fixed categories instead of recognising the fluidity and dynamism of on-the-ground educational practices. This categorisation assumes that Egyptian civil and military education is a direct transplant of European practices and therefore representative of order, progress, and modernity, while religious education is seen as its unchanging, disorderly, and inevitably inferior opposite. Such descriptions are a gross misrepresentation of Egyptian practices, not least because ideas, practices, and technologies used in religious and civil systems of education were connected and changing. Despite their inaccuracy, however, these views have had a significant and lasting impact on the development of Egyptian national culture. The reform programmes launched by Egypt’s rulers in the early nineteenth century attempted to use European knowledge as a tool to maintain Egypt’s independence. Egyptian elites witnessed the power of Europe first-hand during the French invasion of 1798 and the BritishOttoman invasion that ended French occupation in 1801. The initial aim was to augment, not replace, local bodies of knowledge – that is the ideas, practices, and technologies dominant in Egypt up to 1811 and perceived as traditional – and to leave largely intact the patterns of dress, behaviour, and socialisation prevalent in Egypt at the time. However, the idea that civil education was superior to religious education, present at the start of the nineteenth century, gained significant traction towards its end. Civil education not only increased the ranks of Egyptians receptive to European approaches to history, social science, and the natural and physical sciences,3 but also encouraged the internalisation of European norms related to knowledge and education. That is, it spread ideas about what knowledge should be studied and 3

Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past; El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory; Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic.

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why, which pedagogies should be used to transmit it, and how it should be put to use after graduation. By the end of the century, at least some of the educated Egyptians entering civil schools did so not only because of the salaried government job that awaited them upon graduation but also because they wanted the cultural and social cachet associated with the knowledge and pedagogies used in these schools. The primary focus of this chapter and the next is to trace the relationship between civil and religious systems of education in Egypt between 1811 and 1900, and to explain the place of civil-religious hybridity in each. In exploring the cultural context in which these systems of education are situated, however, these chapters also reveal the increasing power and authority of European-influenced ocularcentrism, and cultural objects related to it, in Egypt. They show how, over the course of the nineteenth century, initiatives putting European ideas to use within the Egyptian state ended up transforming how increasing numbers of educated Egyptian saw themselves, their knowledge traditions, and the spaces surrounding them. Or, in the language of postcolonial scholarship, by accepting European knowledge and forms of knowledge expression as holding equal or greater authority than their own, many educated Egyptians were colonised in mind before the British invasion of 1882 finished the colonisation of their bodies. Orientalist knowledge not only provided a rationale for colonisation and shaped the perspectives of colonial officials but also transformed how the colonised viewed their own cultural traditions. These attitudes created sociocultural boundaries that had an impact on what Egyptians with ocularcentric or audiocentric capital were able to do within Egyptian state and society. That said, this shift in the types of knowledge and knowledge expression that were seen to be authoritative was not universally accepted, nor were the sociocultural boundaries created by this shift as rigid as postcolonial accounts would lead one to believe. The average shaykh or efendi – graduates of religious and civil schools, respectively – likely considered each other’s cultural discourses and practices controversial enough to be avoided or resisted, overtly or covertly. Therefore, while colonial power imbalances meant that European ideas, practices, and technologies represented a significant threat to political and cultural sovereignty within Egypt, they did not represent the final word. Instead this imbalance was the backdrop against which Egyptians advanced contrasting visions for an authentically Egyptian national culture,

Education and Projects of Modernity, 1811–1871

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visions that often involved not only the policing, but also the crossing, straddling, and shifting, of sociocultural and physical boundaries. This chapter introduces the sociocultural and physical landscapes created by colonial cultural politics, while chapters two, three, and four explore the many ways in which reform-minded shaykhs navigated these landscapes. It begins with a brief history of the projects of modernity led by the Egyptian state during the nineteenth century, a history that uses five key reformers to highlight the ways in which European knowledge was imported, translated, and put to work to serve local goals. It then explains how nineteenth-century European discourse simplified Egypt’s physical and sociocultural landscapes to the point of misrepresentation. The discussion of education in this section explores the roles of aural and visual knowledge practices in the religious and civil schools of Egypt during the first sixty years of khedivial reform (1811–71). Dualities drawing unnecessarily sharp divisions between religious and civil schooling helped police a sociocultural boundary that separated foreign and local, and established Europeans as superior to Egyptians. The discussion of urban space explains how Egyptian educationalists transcended these dualities from their Darb al-Jamamiz campus, located in a hybrid ‘borderlands’ in between sections of Cairo labelled by many as Islamic or European. The chapter concludes by introducing the early 1870s as a turning point in the evolution of Egyptian culture that marks the start of tension between the hybridity present in everyday Egyptian life and the European hierarchies of knowledge that were laid on top of them.

Education and Egyptian Projects of Modernity, 1811–1871: A History in Five Reformers An exploration of the projects of modernity initiated by Egyptian rulers Muhammad ʿAli (r. 1805–48) and Ismaʿil (r. 1863–75), and the contributions to these projects made by Ottoman Armenian Joseph Hekekyan (1807–75), Egyptian shaykh Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–73), and Egyptian efendi ʿAli Mubarak (1824–93), highlights the main contours of the first sixty years of European-inspired reform to Egyptian state and society. By 1811, Ottoman military officer Muhammad ʿAli had established Egypt as a quasi-independent entity within the Ottoman Empire and eliminated the last threats to his control. He then set about establishing

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a European-style military, as well as the systems of administration, taxation, and education necessary to support it. Over the course of the following sixty-five years, Muhammad ʿAli and his descendants, a dynasty that came to be known as the khedives of Egypt, established early versions of institutions that continue to play important roles today: a centrally run army, a cabinet overseeing bureaucratic institutions, and proto-parliaments in the form of consultative assemblies created to increase buy-in from important constituencies such as urban merchants or rural notables. Long-standing religious institutions, such as Cairo’s al-Azhar university, were gradually brought under khedivial control through reforms that limited their financial independence and undermined their authority, while new, statecontrolled military and civil educational institutions introduced nonreligious, ocularcentric forms of literacy. Modernisation projects slowed after European powers forced Muhammad ʿAli to withdraw from Syria and reduce the size of the Egyptian army in 1840, and remained stalled under Muhammad ʿAli’s first two successors, ʿAbbas (r. 1848–54) and Saʿid (r. 1854–63). They were decisively relaunched by Muhammad ʿAli’s grandson Khedive Ismaʿil (r. 1863–75). Ismaʿil’s rule brought about a significant expansion in the scope of these projects: the goal was no longer merely remaining independent of Europe, but being seen on the world stage as a political and cultural equal of European countries. As a result, many of the projects of modernity advanced by Ismaʿil were culturally semicolonial; that is, they were the result of the acceptance of foreign cultural norms within Egypt.4 The most visible of these projects was his attempt to turn Cairo into ‘Paris on the Nile’ by laying out a major new quarter between the existing city and Nile and introducing Europeanstyle public utilities (in the new quarter at least). Khedivial reform programmes depended on the importation of European knowledge, that is ideas, practices, and technologies developed in Europe that were often perceived as foreign within Egypt. Their successful execution depended on individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, but who had all had some degree of exposure to European bodies of knowledge. European advisors and instructors with professional expertise relevant to the reform projects provided significant assistance, especially at the outset. Advisors involved with 4

El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, pp. 2–3.

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education during the reign of Muhammad ʿAli included Bernadino Drovetti (1776–1852), an Italian serving as French Consul-General in Egypt, and Frenchmen Captain Joseph Sève (1788–1860), known as Sulayman Pasha after his conversion to Islam, educationalist EdméFrançois Jomard (1777–1862), and medical expert Bartholomew Antoine Clot Bey (1793–1868). Influential foreigners employed by Ismaʿil included French lawyer Victor Vidal (d. 1889/90) and Swiss Inspector General of Schools Édouard Dor Bey.5 European ideas about education also arrived in Egypt via the English and American missionary groups active within the Egyptian Coptic Christian community, the former from the 1830s to the 1850s and the latter from the 1860s.6 Initially, Muhammad ʿAli found it challenging to find locally based personnel with the skills necessary to advance reforms. The education system in Egypt and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire consisted of religious institutions that focused primarily on teaching Arabic and Islamic law instead of the mathematical and scientific disciplines required by the new institutions of the khedivial state. Furthermore, many Egyptian shaykhs were suspicious of Muhmmad ʿAli’s reforms and opposed his use of charitable endowment (waqf, pl. awqaf) income normally reserved for religious institutions’ funding. To overcome this challenge, Muhammad ʿAli introduced a second track of civil education that ran in parallel with religious schools and specifically focused on training the officers and bureaucrats needed by the khedivial state. A smaller number of Egyptian subjects received advanced training in European ideas, practices, and technologies through state-funded study in Europe, including two large educational missions based in Paris, l’École Franco-égyptienne (1826–36) and l’École Militaire (1844–9). Educational programmes contracted along with the rest of the state military and bureaucratic apparatus under ʿAbbas and Saʿid, but were reinstated and expanded by Ismaʿil. In 1863, Ismaʿil ordered the restoration of the Ministry of Education, which had lapsed under Saʿid. This institution oversaw the reopening of many of the closed schools and a vast expansion of primary and secondary education from 1867. These educational opportunities enabled a wider range of people to contribute to khedivial reforms. These people included Turkish-speaking 5 6

See Prakash, ‘Negotiating Modernity’, esp. ch. 1. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 52–62, 129–40.

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members of the Turko-Circassian Mamluk and Ottoman governing elite (dhawat), the latter bolstered by the British-Ottoman invasion of 1801 and the former significantly reduced in 1811 as Muhammad ʿAli consolidated his power. They also included Ottoman citizens from elsewhere in the empire: Arabs as well as Greeks, Armenians, and other minorities, many of whom spoke European languages in addition to Arabic or Turkish, and some of whom had studied previously in Europe. A notable example is Ottoman Armenian Joseph Hekekyan (1807–75), whose education in England was sponsored by Muhammad ʿAli after his father died in the Pasha’s service. Hekekyan subsequently returned to Egypt to work as a translator and educational reformer under Muhammad ʿAli,7 and ended his government service with the title bey, the highest imperial title available to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects. Over time, native-born, Arabic-speaking Egyptians educated in religious or civil schools joined the cadre of reformers, though the upper ranks of both the military and bureaucracy remained TurkoCircassian. The most famous of the reform-minded shaykhs who were willing to put their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic disciplines to work for the khedivial state is Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi (1801–73). AlTahtawi joined the first mission to France between 1826 and 1831 as its religious leader (imam), on the recommendation of his mentor, the reform-minded shaykh Hasan al-ʿAttar. Unlike many of his congregation, he was a keen student and observer while in France. Upon returning to Egypt, he published an account of his life in France in Arabic and was an active supporter of khedivial reforms. Al-Tahtawi was the only native-born Egyptian on the Schools Administration Council for many years and also served as the head of Egypt’s School of Languages (Madrasat al-Alsun), which translated European works into Arabic. A particularly influential Egyptian-born civil school graduate is ʿAli Mubarak (1824–93). At a young age, he met a former slave working as a civil servant and was inspired to seek out civil schooling as a result. He attended schools in Qasr al-ʿAyni and Abu Zaʿbal, as well as the Bulaq Polytechnic, before studying in France with the second large mission group (1844–9). He filled technical roles within various government departments upon his return, gaining positions of significant influence in public works and education during the rule of Ismaʿil and Ismaʿil’s son Tawfiq (r. 1879–92). Mubarak was the first native-born 7

Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 64–80, 90–2.

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Egyptian to serve as minister of education, his final term in this office being 1888–91. He was the driving force behind the founding of Dar alʿUlum (the House of Knowledge) as well as the education journal Rawdat al-Madaris (The Garden of Schools) and what would become the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub). While his education was primarily in civil schools, his major publications – the geographical and historical encyclopaedia New Guide to the Districts Ruled by Tawfiq (al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida li-misr al-qahira), published 1886–9, and the 1882 novel ʿAlam al-Din (named after the main male character) – bridged new and old genres of literature.8 Mubarak began government service as an efendi, but was one of the handful of nativeborn Egyptians promoted to pasha, the highest-rank in the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, while reform-oriented khedives Muhammad ʿAli and Ismaʿil were the driving forces behind the first sixty years of Egyptian projects of modernity, the success of their projects depended on Egyptian subjects of Turko-Circassian, non-Egyptian Ottoman, and Egyptian origin. Individuals such as Efendi-cum-Bey Hekekyan, Shaykh al-Tahtawi, and Efendi-cum-Pasha Mubarak were able to make substantive contributions to these projects due to their training in schools and mission programmes established with the help of Ottoman and European advisors, many of which continued to develop under their leadership.

(Mis)representing Egyptian Education Europeans writing about religious education in nineteenth-century Egypt regularly comment on the importance of memorisation, recitation, and embodiment; the relative lack of written texts and discipline; and the centrality of the Qurʾan and religious subjects. The subjects studied, methods used to teach, and the overall school environment were all judged by European standards, without attempting to understand what was (and was not) important in the eyes of Egyptians. Dr Lansing’s account, quoted at the start of this chapter, continues by equating the schools of Darb al-Jamamiz to those of Europe and describing al-Azhar as follows:

8

Muba¯rak, ʿAlam al-Dı¯n; Muba¯rak, al-Khitat. ˙ ˙

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On entering the great court of the Mosque, after divesting ourselves of our boots (for the place is holy), we beheld hundreds of boys sitting upon the pavement of this court and the surrounding porches, committing to memory the Koran, verbatim et literatim, so that they can recite the whole book without a slip in a single accent or vowel point. This is the foundation upon which the education is to be built. After entering the portals of the mosque, the spectacle which presents itself is a very unique one – an immense room, the roof of which is supported by about twenty marble pillars . . . each pillar being said to have its professor. Scores of these may be seen at any time of the day, each sitting with his back to his pillar, upon a sheepskin, or, if his class be large, upon a small raised stool. In a circle before him sit his pupils upon the thickly matted floor, perhaps a dozen or twenty, perhaps eighty or a hundred; sometimes with their textbooks in their hands, sometimes writing from his lips, as he lectures. And the hum is increased by hundreds of others who are sitting in the vacant places between the classes, committing to memory, while their bodies are moving to and fro, or copying their textbooks . . . And naturally the curriculum of study in the Azhar . . . is all founded upon the Koran, the text of which they had memorised under the porches of the outer court, or in the primary schools of their native villages, and it has not a single point of contact with the circle of our modern science and literature. Nay, it is not only independent, but intensely antagonistic. The professors know too well, for instance, that should they teach modern astronomy, one peep through a telescope would for ever dissipate Mohammed’s cosmogony, with its seven heavens and seven flat layers of earth beneath them.9

Lansing, a Presbyterian missionary from the United States, presents alAzhar as an overcrowded ‘spectacle’, devoid of furniture but stuffed with students listening and transcribing lectures, or rocking back and forth while reciting a memorised text. He dismisses out of hand the potential for connections or synergies between the subjects studied in Europe and the ‘intensely antagonistic’ material covered at al-Azhar. This sense of disorder and chaos is echoed by Sir George Newnes’ description of al-Azhar, as quoted in a guidebook published in 1898: What strikes one is the utter slovenliness in dress. Although many of the students belong to rich families, there was a complete absence of any attempt to adorn themselves even neatly, and fine raiment was not to be seen. They all looked as if on getting up in the morning they simply threw around their

9

Wylie, Egypt and Its Future, pp. 111–14.

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bodies some folds of white, blue, or black drapery, put on a turban, slided [sic] into slippers, and sallied forth.10

Lansing’s dismissal of the knowledge taught in religious schools is echoed by Stanley Lane-Poole’s 1892 account, which describes this knowledge as ‘terribly mistaken’, ‘obsolete’, ‘of little practical use’, and leading ‘inevitably towards fanaticism’ and violence against Christians.11 This sentiment appears again in travel writer G. W. Steevens’ 1898 condescending account, which presents alAzhar as providing an ‘unchanging’ education that is ‘dead and deadening’ because of its ‘bondage to theology’.12 These accounts show no understanding of the range of subjects studied in the upper levels of these schools, and instead respond to the perceived threat from lack of discipline and European-style morality among the masses.13 While Europe had its own ostensibly immoral and disorderly lower classes, the application of this critique abroad, in the presence of significant power imbalances, often led to the conclusion among foreigners that local societies and people were ‘backwards’ or otherwise inferior to those of Europe.14 More damaging than dismissing the subjects and environment of religious schools, however, was the narrow, Eurocentric manner in which European critics defined literacy. English Orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole’s description of the education provided by religious elementary schools in Egypt concludes with a withering description of the qualifications of the school’s instructor: This [the alphabet, memorisation and recitation of the Qurʾan] is all that the boy generally learns at school. Indeed, the schoolmaster could not teach him much more. The worthy man knows his Korân, and can instil it, with the help of a stout cane, into his pupils’ skulls; but he is thoroughly illiterate, and sometimes cannot even read, and has to get a pupil-teacher to write the alphabets and copies, on the pretence of having weak eyes. Writing is not always taught at a school, and the lower classes do not feel any urgent necessity for this accomplishment.15

10 12 13 14 15

Khemeid, Cairo and Egypt, pp. 13–14. 11 Lane-Poole, Cairo, p. 188. Steevens, Egypt in 1898, pp. 52–6. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, p. 11; Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education, p. 19. For instance, see Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, p. 82. Lane-Poole, Cairo, p. 184.

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In this description Lane-Poole makes explicit what Lansing’s stress on memorisation, recitation, and embodiment at al-Azhar implies: the only way to be a literate, educated member of society is to be able to read and write written texts. This approach ignores the importance of audition and person-to-person contact in the transmission of Islamic knowledge, and overlooks the synergies between mastery of the Qurʾan and the largely audiocentric set of skills necessary to rise to the top of Islamic scholarly circles. Lane-Poole (1854–1931) was not only a wellknown historian and numismatist, he was also from a renowned family of Orientalists. He was the son of Arabic scholar Edward Stanley Poole (1830–67), was raised by his grandmother, travel writer Sophia Lane Poole (1804–91), and great-uncle, Arabic scholar and Egypt expert Edward William Lane (1801–76), and mentored by uncle Reginald Stuart Poole (1832–95), the keeper of coins and medals at the British Museum. Therefore, his assessment of Egyptian education would have carried significant weight amongst European readers of English. This point of criticism appears earlier in the nineteenth century in descriptions of religious education written by European missionaries observing Coptic Christian kuttabs. In the 1820s, John Lieder of England’s Church Missionary Society (CMS) reacted strongly against learning practices centred on listening and recitation, assuming that students learned by ear because of the blindness of their teachers as well as a lack of access to physical texts, and not because such teaching methods had intrinsic value. In 1849, missionaries visiting Egypt from Malta’s Protestant College criticised Coptic schools for employing ‘ignorant teachers’ who focus only on the Scriptures, and stress memorisation instead of understanding.16 Similarly Eurocentric views of teaching and learning have continued within the academy in studies that draw a distinction between orality and literacy, in which orality is primarily used to describe societies without written texts and is often seen as inferior to text-based literacy.17 In the Middle East, whether in the Orientalist texts of the nineteenth century or the scholarship of the twentieth, this approach ignores the importance of aural or audited transmission of texts which may or may not have been published in print form.18 16 17 18

Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 1–2. Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, pp. 1–44; Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 2–15. Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam, pp. 2–9.

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Therefore, in Muslim and Middle Eastern contexts, it is especially important to look at the ways in which aurality and orality are combined with highly sophisticated textual practices. The transmission of Islamic texts up through the early twentieth century can be seen as a largely audiocentric process, where written versions of texts existed, and sometimes even played important roles, but did not diminish the importance of aural, embodied, and person-to-person modes of knowledge transmission. This contrasts sharply with the ocularcentric textual practices that were dominant in nineteenth-century Europe, in which visual renditions of texts took precedence over oral ones.19 Embodied transmission of knowledge – and the accompanying processes of recitation, commentary, and memorisation – continued to form the core of Islamic pedagogy and was reflected in how knowledge was passed to students in all levels of religious schooling in late nineteenth-century Egypt.

Audiocentrism in Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Religious Institutions In nineteenth-century Egypt, Islamic institutions were home to traditions of education that differed significantly from European practices. Many Egyptian children began their studies in elementary kuttabs associated with the local mosque, where they sat on the floor and learned to recite the Qurʾan. They would listen to their teacher recite a verse, record it on a small slate, repeat it themselves until they had memorised it, and then have their recitation checked by the teacher.20 Coptic Christian kuttabs taught in Arabic using similar approaches to pedagogy and knowledge, though of course the text studied would have been the Bible instead of the Qurʾan. Both Muslim and Coptic Christian kuttabs emphasised the memorisation and recitation of core texts because internalisation of these was the bedrock on which subsequent study would be based, as well as being a virtuous act in and of itself.21

19 20 21

I am grateful to Walter Armbrust for suggesting the terminology ‘audiocentric’ and ‘ocularcentric’. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 21–2; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 82–7. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 1–4, 107–9.

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Talented students might continue their studies at a big-city madrasa, where lessons took place in the halqa or discussion circle. Here they would listen to an Islamic scholar recite and comment on a text, asking questions related to the points he raised along the way. Students would learn key points of grammar, rhetoric, or law by hearing, commenting on, and memorising individual texts discussing these subjects. When a student felt he was ready, as an individual, he could approach his instructor to obtain a certificate (ijaza) stating his ability to transmit a text or perform a type of task, such as teaching or issuing interpretations of texts.22 This system of education was based on master-disciple relationships which were hierarchical, yet allowed for disputation and argumentation between master and student through which the student would demonstrate his skill and knowledge and build a reputation as a scholar. The end result was a chain of master-disciple links (silsala) stretching back through time, conveying specific texts and techniques from their original authors to their nineteenth-century masters. Islamic education could bestow functional benefits including employment. Those who had memorised the Qurʾan could make a living through recitations delivered at important events such as weddings and funerals. Individuals with basic mastery of the core texts could work as the prayer leader (imam) or instructor (muʿallim) in a small kuttab or village mosque. More talented students could teach in a madrasa as a scholar (ʿalim, pl. ʿulamaʾ), issue legal interpretations (fatwas) as a scholar qualified to rule on questions of religious law and practice (mufti), or serve as a judge (qadi). Such positions would be obtained through informal networks built as the individual in question demonstrated their mastery of core Islamic texts and disciplines. While a position as prayer leader or judge would bestow some degree of institutional power on an individual, most Islamic religious leadership positions rest primarily on authority. To exercise authority, one’s claims to hold special knowledge about Islam must be recognised as legitimate by audiences such as village elders, established urban scholars, or the congregation of a particular mosque. A would-be leader would have to meet the expectations that such audiences had of religious leaders in terms of knowledge, behaviour, and aesthetics. Only once recognised as an authority would he be able to subtly reshape these expectations. Islamic leadership is therefore performative and 22

Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges, pp. 147–52.

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relational, and can be mapped by identifying the knowledge an individual claims, how it was obtained, and how it is demonstrated through embodiment and performance.23 It is important to note, however, that Islamic education held significant social and religious value independent of any such functional benefits, and many pursued it as a virtue in itself, often with family encouragement and support. For instance, students who attended a Moroccan madrasa prior to the reforms of the 1930s reported that their primary reason for pursuing this education was to obtain Islamic knowledge, even if they worked in non-religious professions after graduation.24 A man with at least some religious learning in nineteenth-century Egypt was often referred to as a shaykh. The subjects studied at al-Azhar differed significantly from what was studied in Europe, though it is challenging to ascertain exactly what was studied by the majority of students at the madrasa level in the nineteenth century. Students at al-Azhar, Egypt’s top religious institution, and other madrasa schools remained free to choose their path through the institution until well into the twentieth century. Given the range of personal and professional goals and outcomes associated with religious education, there was no single course of study. There would have been an informal consensus in a given community or institution about what was expected of any given religious post. Students aspiring to such a position would seek out information about these expectations from peers and mentors, and note the paths followed by former students whose efforts had resulted in success. While programmes of study for the most successful students are occasionally available, sources shedding light on the larger collective experience are scarce. We do know what subjects were considered important enough within an Azhar education to include on the first formal examination for those who wanted to teach there, which was instituted from 1872.25 Islamic subjects listed were interpretation of the Qurʾan (tafsir), the sayings of the Prophet (hadith), legal interpretation (fiqh), sources of law (usul al-fiqh), the unity of God (tawhid), and logic (mantiq). Arabic subjects were often studied first as students would need strong language skills to understand their lessons. These subjects included syntax 23 24 25

Kalmbach, ‘Blurring Boundaries’, pp. 162–5; Kalmbach, ‘Islamic Authority’, pp. 3–15. Eickelman, ‘The Art of Memory’, p. 507. Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 60, 150.

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(nahw), morphology (sarf), and rhetoric (balagha), which included study of meaning (maʿani), figures of speech (badiʿ), and clarity of expression (bayan). Clarity of expression could include the study of metrics or prosody (ʿarud) and rhyme (qafiyya). James Heyworth-Dunne, relying on the early nineteenth-century chronicler al-Jabarti and others, provides a list of books taught at alAzhar that also includes works on arithmetic, algebra, inheritance law (faraʾid), mysticism (tasawwuf), calculating religious calendars and prayer times (miqat), astronomy (haiʾa), and philosophy (hikma).26 While this indicates that various shaykhs were teaching these subjects early in the nineteenth century, it does not tell us how often they were taught or how many students attended the lectures. What is certain is that by 1872 these subjects were not deemed central enough to a religious education to be included on the teacher examination. The most significant difference between educational practices in Europe and at al-Azhar relates to the modes of knowledge transmission that were seen as authoritative. Historical and ethnographic accounts of Arab-Islamic education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that normative practice was for knowledge to be transmitted aurally in both Islamic and Coptic contexts. The core text, the ‘authoritative original’ that presented an unattainable model for all subsequent texts, was the Qurʾan or, among Copts, the Bible. This and other important texts would be passed along in aural form, with transmitters often reciting from memory and then providing commentary. Whether or not the recipient memorised the text varied between regions, but normative practice in most places involved having his or her recitation and understanding checked by the transmitter.27 Historically, Islamic knowledge was not exclusively aural or oral, as texts in written form played an important role in the preservation and transmission of knowledge. Gregor Schoeler’s study of ninth-century Islamic literature argues for the coexistence, and increasing importance, of texts and even text-based transmission alongside orality, aurality, and audition, from the ninth century.28 Konrad Hirschler’s study of reading practices in Syria and Egypt between 900 and 1600 reveals large shifts in knowledge culture enabled by the spread of 26 27 28

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 41–65. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 16, 22; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 150–3; Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco, pp. 58–9. Schoeler, The Genesis of Literature in Islam, pp. esp. 9, 122–5.

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written texts and a wider range of people able to read them. Hirschler argues that the increasing number of texts, including encyclopaedic and summary works aimed at non-specialists, signals the acceptance of the written word as a form of knowledge transmission alongside older oral and aural practices.29 The work of Schoeler and Hirschler highlights the wide range of ways in which Islamic knowledge was transmitted in the pre-modern period. A text could be received by an individual or a group visually, aurally, or through a combination of the two, as when one or more people listening to the recitation of a text follow along in their own written copy. The transmitter could be reading from a written text, reciting from memory, or using a written text or notes to ensure the accuracy of material delivered from memory. While it was not seen as best practice, independent reading of a written text undertaken silently or out loud could form the basis for obtaining an ijaza on the work in question. That oral and aural forms of transmission and recitation from memory were respected – even prestigious – ways to transmit and receive knowledge, despite the spread of written texts, is shown by the presence of scholars who could read but not write, and who could not read written texts at all, as in the case of the blind, at the highest levels of scholarship.30 Publicly performed and embodied versions of texts were important among Islamic scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For instance, among Moroccan scholars of this period only the oral transmission of knowledge was regarded as culturally legitimate in the Moroccan context; knowledge acquired exclusively from the study of books . . . was considered unreliable. Interruption of student readings was a way of signaling important points, and verbal emphases could be used to communicate more than a written text could convey. Significantly, the introduction of printed texts after 1865 . . . had minimal impact upon the form of the lesson circles. No questions were asked during these sessions, and students rarely took notes or made annotations in the printed copies of the texts that a few possessed.31

29 30 31

Hirschler, Written Word, pp. 18–19, 197; Endress and Filali-Ansary, Organizing Knowledge, pp. 1–101, esp. 1–19, 24–75. Hirschler, Written Word, pp. 16–17. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco, p. 95.

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Outside of higher levels of learning, the emphasis on aurality made acts of speech valuable in and of themselves, with members of the general population seen to benefit from hearing recitation of texts in religious services even if they could not understand their meaning. This dynamic ensured a steady stream of work for professional reciters of the Qurʾan. It is also shown particularly in Coptic communities where it was not – before the nineteenth century – seen as a problem that most of the Arabic-speaking population did not understand the Coptic phrases and formulas that they recited or heard recited during church services.32 These practices can be compared to the ritual uses of books, such as being buried with a Qurʾan or another text.33 Furthermore, the meaning of the language through which the Islamic knowledge inherent in memorised texts was transmitted was seen as unchanging and constant. Medieval scholars saw texts as having fixed meanings that could be transmitted and understood regardless of their age, and this approach to texts is reflected in the view of some religious scholars (ʿulamaʾ) that older texts are better than modern ones at explaining what the Arabic means.34 As a result, an essential part of the transmission process of a text was receiving an – often unmemorised – commentary that would elaborate the meaning of the text in contestable, context-specific ways.35 The importance of recitation and explanation alongside written texts, as well as the need for personto-person certification of knowledge regardless of source made people – and not written texts – the key authoritative repositories of knowledge.

Ocularcentrism and Muhammad ʿAli’s New Schools The Egyptian state-funded school system founded by Muhammad ʿAli in the early nineteenth century and expanded by Ismaʿil between 1867 and 1876 was heavily influenced by European educational ideas and practices, and contrasted sharply with religious schooling. The goal of these schools was functional; they were to produce the military officers, administrators, and professionals needed to run new state institutions. As a result, they needed to provide graduates with sufficient mathematical and scientific literacy for the advanced study of military and 32 33 35

Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 105–9. Hirschler, Written Word, p. 20. 34 Zaman, ‘Tradition and Authority’, p. 64. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 15–16, 30–6.

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administrative topics. These schools included a military academy (1821) as well as higher schools for administration (1829), medicine (1829), surveying (1816), midwifery (1832), technical training (1834), and language and translation (1835). They were supported by a secondary school from 1825 and several primary schools from 1833 that provided preliminary training for individuals who wanted to enter these schools. Many of these schools lapsed or were amalgamated under Muhammad ʿAli’s successors, ʿAbbas and Saʿid, but were reopened by his grandson Khedive Ismaʿil. Under Ismaʿil, the focus of Egyptian education remained functional and focused primarily on training state employees, though some capacity for general education was introduced from 1867. Upon assuming the throne in 1863, Ismaʿil reinstated the Ministry of Education, opened primary and preparatory schools in Alexandria and Cairo, and began reorganising the system of military schools and academies. From 1868, the civil schools training bureaucrats were separated from their military counterparts. ʿAli Mubarak, recently returned from a research trip to Paris, created a central campus at Darb al-Jamamiz for the ministries of education, religious endowments, and public works – all of which were under his directorship at the time – and many of the civil schools. He moved Cairo’s Preparatory School and the School of Engineering to this campus in 1868, and opened new higher education institutions such as the School of Administration and Languages (later renamed the School of Law), a school of drawing, a school of surveying and accountancy, and a school of Egyptology alongside these older institutions.36 This central location enabled the schools to share instructors and Mubarak and other administrators to monitor educational standards. As the school system increased in size and scope, standardisation and central control increased in importance. An 1867 law introduced standardised curriculum, examination, administration, and dress so that individual schools would function together as a coherent whole.37 Schools of different classes were distributed throughout the provinces in a purportedly uniform manner, by size and importance of settlement.38 Progress of students was regularly assessed through examination. The overall goal was to produce graduates with uniform, measurable skills who could – where permitted – graduate and move 36 37

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 352–4. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 76–7. 38 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 76.

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seamlessly onto the next level as a group. Inculcating discipline and good hygiene was of the utmost importance. Starting as early as the 1840s, Egyptian schools were structured to inculcate in its students a new habitus, that is set of habits, abilities, and perspectives that shape the bearer’s view of their surroundings. Daily attendance, punctuality, and cleanliness were all required, and students’ adherence to these standards was monitored in school and wider society.39 This contrasted sharply with practice in Egyptian religious schools, which only began regulating the passage of students through the institution in 1896 and did not aspire to a comparable degree of control or standardisation for much of the twentieth century. The methods by which these bodies of knowledge were transmitted to students were radically different than those used in Egypt previously, as they eschewed the memorisation and embodiment of audiocentric approaches in favour of disembodied and ocularcentric written texts. Reading written texts was central to the education process, and students who were blind or had poor eyesight were excluded. Those with physical disabilities were also excluded, seemingly due to the system’s roots in training officers and administrators to support military operations as well as European influence. In contrast, the ocularcentric pedagogies of religious schooling made (and still make) it possible for students with visual or physical impairments to earn a living and contribute to their communities through reciting the Qurʾan or becoming an Islamic scholar. Finally, the curriculum of Egyptian civil schools was predominantly made up of subjects most often studied in Europe, such as mathematics, science, history, and geography. While Arabic was studied, students spent far less time on it than in religious schools. Of course subjects such as mathematics, science, morality, and philosophy had been taught by religious schools in the past. The subject classifications of Islamic scholars such as al-Farabi (d. 950) and al-Ghazali (1058–1111) differentiate between religious and non-religious or philosophical subjects, with the latter including metaphysics, mathematics, political science, and natural science.40 However, these subjects do not seem to have been a core part of education in al-Azhar for much of the nineteenth century, as they were not included in the 1872 examinations 39 40

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 45–6, 69–74. Bakar, Classification of Knowledge in Islam, pp. 264–6.

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for the ʿalimiyya teaching degree, and the 1896 reform law added only arithmetic as an optional, non-examination subject.41 These aspects of the civil education system – functional goals, standardisation and discipline, ocularcentric pedagogies, and new subjects – have little in common with educational practice in Egyptian religious schools in the nineteenth century. They are instead similar to approaches to knowledge and education prevalent in much of Europe at the time. In Germany and France during the nineteenth century, lower and mid-level education was often defined in functional terms, as an activity that should contribute to society and progress, through activities such as training professionals or improving morality of the lowest classes. Ocularcentric pedagogies were also used to transmit knowledge held in largely disembodied texts. In England, providing disciplinary education to control the immoral and disorderly masses was seen as especially important by utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and James Mill (1773–1836). One British educational trend that was especially influential at home and overseas was the discipline-focused monitorial education system championed by Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) as an efficient and cost-effective way of spreading literacy and discipline. The highly centralised, standardised structure of the monitorial schools, combined with the ocularcentric approach to knowledge dominant in Europe, was supposed to enable schooling to be scaled and reproduced with a higher degree of central control over the end result. This aim suited not only European governments but also the ideological aims of foreign missionaries and the reform agendas of the Egyptian state.42 With respect to what was taught, disciplinary schools focused not on religious texts and the language necessary to understand them, or on less-utilitarian subjects such as Greek, Latin, or the fine arts, but on training in subjects such as mathematics, geography, and the natural, physical, and chemical sciences that would be useful when pursuing further professional training.43 Monitorial schools aimed to discipline both body and mind by creating an environment where all student actions were observable through specifically designed school 41 42 43

Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 74, 150. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 79–80. Itzkin, ‘Bentham’s Chrestomathia’, pp. 306–7; Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 56–8.

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environments and the employment of a hierarchy of student monitors who would inspect and drill students. The many parts of the system were supposed to function in a coordinated, orderly, and impersonal manner similar to a machine and, though the school was structured to prevent infractions, discipline was strict when they were committed.44 Pedagogy was ocularcentric and aimed at training students how to think, live, and ‘be’ in radically new ways. As in Europe more generally, knowledge was transmitted through disembodied texts whose meaning-as-read was taken to be constant across space and time, and understandable to any literate individual without special instruction. Monitorial schools, unlike the audiocentric kuttabs, did not stress memorisation; their students were supposed to be regularly drilled, but in a way that tested their understanding of texts and ability to interact with the concepts they had been taught. In fact, Lancaster explicitly opposed the memorisation of long passages of the Bible, arguing that memorisation should be limited to short passages that connect directly with an idea or practice under study at that time.45 The monitorial system was extremely influential in the early nineteenth century and much educational innovation in this period owes a significant debt to it. Lancaster’s techniques were spread within England and around the world, including to Egypt, by evangelical groups such as the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) and the Church Missionary Society.46 Another example is its transfer from Spain to Colombia, where it dominated primary education from 1821 to 1844.47 Disciplinary trends also influenced teacher training. From the midnineteenth century onwards, French teachers were not only expected to teach students to read, write, and do arithmetic, but also to imbue in them new behaviour and practices. This emphasis was present as early as 1795, but played a major role after 1851, when new school regulations put greater emphasis on memorisation, repetition, and disciplinary structures that fostered a sense of group identity among the trainee teachers.48 Furthermore, teachers completed coursework related to the 44 45 46 47 48

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 73–4. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 27–8. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, p. 15; Sedra, ‘Exposure to the Eyes of God’. Itzkin, ‘Bentham’s Chrestomathia’, pp. 16, 309; Caruso, ‘The Persistence of Educational Semantics’. Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education, pp. 1, 6, 31, 50.

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values they were supposed to transmit, for instance in hygiene and morality. In England, schools using disciplinary models such as monitorial schooling – taught in England’s first teacher training school founded in 1809 – emphasised order, structure, and discipline of both body and mind, techniques that potential teachers and monitors would have to master before being able to transmit them on to students; these ideas and techniques were first introduced to Egypt in the 1820s. It is important to note that scholarship has cast doubt on whether the schools in the Egyptian civil system lived up to the strict criteria and high goals set out by central education planners. They faced numerous difficulties, including a lack of qualified teachers, prepared students, and appropriate textbooks.49 It also seems likely that the transition to European pedagogical approaches in the nineteenth century was gradual, as memorisation of texts, including the core grammar text at alAzhar, the Alfiyya of Ibn Malik, was still a major part of government preparatory school curricula after the 1873 reforms.50 That said, the number of European visitors to Egyptian civil schools in the 1880s and 1890s who equated the educational experience in the schools of Darb al-Jamamiz with European practice indicates that many European practices were successfully transferred.

(Mis)representing Egyptian Landscapes The second problematic aspect of colonial representations is their simplification of the physical and sociocultural landscapes of Egypt to the point of misrepresentation. Colonial-era discourse stressed an absolute division between European and local ideas, practices, and spaces. Criticism of local practices served to police a sociocultural boundary that separated foreign and local, and established the colonisers as superior to the colonised. Reform and change in religious schooling were by and large ignored, as demonstrated by the texts already quoted. Civil schools were either equated entirely with European practices, as in the Lansing quotation at the start of the chapter, or assumed to be imperfect, and therefore inferior, copies. In the rare instances where Egyptian agency could not be ignored, it was 49 50

Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 12, 52, 134, 175; Starret, Putting Islam to Work, pp. 23–61; Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization, pp. 103–5. Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 380–1.

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denigrated. For instance, Stanley Lane-Poole’s 1892 account not only harshly criticises al-Azhar and its scholars – whom he describes as bigots and extremists – but also argues that only education reform instituted by the British will save Egypt. In the process, he completely dismisses khedivial and Egyptian input into the civil school system before and after 1882.51 European accounts often embed their descriptions of Egyptian education and culture in a geographic landscape that was divided sharply in two between a romanticised old and an essentially European new. For instance, the small streets of old Cairo are romanticised as inextricably ‘eastern’, assigning to them both negative attributes – ‘confusion, idleness and squalor’ – and a timeless mystery – ‘narrow lanes’ that ‘wind away’ into the ‘labryinthic distance’ and recall the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.52 Another author divides Cairo into a section ‘almost entirely occupied by Europeans’ and an ever-the-same ‘purely native town’, lamenting both the destruction of Cairo’s cultural heritage and the spread of western forms of dress among Egyptians.53 Accounts from 1892 and 1909 go so far as to identify the canal that became Bur Saʿid Street as a dividing line between the two, with the latter describing it as ‘the severest boundary line between Cairo former and present’.54 The irony of classing Islamic Cairo as ‘local’ and the European-style city laid out during Ismaʿil’s reign as ‘colonial’ was lost on these authors. While some saw Ismaʿil’s Cairo as entirely European, ignoring the role played by Ismaʿil and his administrators in the development of this ‘Paris on the Nile’, others derided the contributions of Ismaʿil and his administrators as inauthentic yet also not modern enough: Carrying the eye towards the north, a shining line is seen roughly dividing the old city from the new. This is the Khalig or Canal, which divides Cairo longitudinally from north-east to south-west into two strongly contrasted portions. West of the canal and next to the Nile [that is, Ismaʿil’s new quarter], the deforming touch of the Khedivial bricklayer has ruined everything mediaeval. East of the canal the old Muslim city of the Fatimis [sic] still retains its picturesque character, and as we enter it we may almost forget for

51 52 54

Lane-Poole, Cairo, pp. 24, 84–8, 119–20, 288–9. Wylie, Egypt and Its Future, pp. 104–5. 53 Kelly, Egypt, pp. 6–7, 11, 23. Lane-Poole, Cairo, p. 24; Lamplough and Francis, Cairo and Its Environs, p. 124.

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the moment that there ever was such a person as Ismaʿil, the ex-Khedive, or such civilising agents as railways and frockcoats and the opera bouffe.55

In the discourse of the colonised, therefore, Egyptians were often damned regardless: local Egyptian practices were so backward that only European actors could exert effective reform, yet Egyptians who crossed sociocultural boundaries to attempt to change these practices through exercise of agency were inauthentic and unnatural because they refused to stay within the confines of traditional spaces, professions, lifestyles, and modes of dress. This narrative of a Cairo divided neatly into new and old is wellreflected in the landmark urban histories of Cairo written by geographer Janet Abu Lughod and historian Andre Raymond. Abu Lughod argues that Ismaʿil’s city expansion created a dual city: a fresh, ‘modern’ city for Europeans that contrasted with the old, decaying ‘traditional’ city for Egyptians. She represents the separation between the two as not just one of ‘physical duality’ but also ‘cultural cleavage’ with significant differences between the two areas socially and technologically. Abu Lughod describes this city as ‘self-contained’ and distinct, aspects that only increased as the twentieth century progressed. While Raymond’s discussion initially focuses only on the physical structure of the two parts of the city in the colonial period, he also describes the two halves of the ‘double’ city as ‘two worlds that differed in every respect’, one for ‘natives’ and the other for the colonisers.56 When Raymond notes that well-off Cairenes left older quarters for residences in new neighbourhoods, he observes that this decision had a larger cultural significance: those who left accepted colonial dominance and embraced ‘assimilation into a way of life brought to them from outside, symbolised by the increasing dominance of Western-style buildings, whose spread coincided with the new forms of urban development’. These descriptions echo the Eurocentrism and duality of colonial-era descriptions.

Translation and Transition in Cairo’s Borderlands Missing from this discourse and much of the scholarship that draws upon it is recognition that the hegemony of European knowledge in late nineteenth-century Egypt was significant but not absolute. This lack of recognition has resulted in descriptions of Egypt that diverge 55

Lane-Poole, Cairo, p. 24.

56

Raymond and Wood, Cairo, pp. 17–18, 309.

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significantly from what was happening on the ground. First, local ideas, practices, and institutions were not backward and unchanging, but instead operated according to a locally focused logic and were affected in positive and negative ways by reform and change. Second, significant agency was exercised by Egyptians in bringing about such changes. Civil schooling and missionary programmes may have spread colonial norms, but graduates such as Tahtawi, Hekekyan, and Mubarak used what they learned to play an active role in shaping Egypt’s path within a world that was increasingly dominated by Europe. Finally, this agency led to deliberate divergence between European models and Egyptian practices, for instance via the emphasis many placed on cultural renaissance (nahda) or religion. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, local actors translated European ideas, practices, and technologies to meet local needs. This process created a rich, uniquely Egyptian sociocultural landscape in which Egyptians from different social backgrounds claimed sociocultural positions. The history of change and reform under the khedives up to 1876 demonstrates significant local agency, as the ruler and his associates chose which practices to borrow and used them to maintain political sovereignty. The tension between a colonial rhetoric of division and inferiority, on the one hand, and an Egyptian project of modernity involving change, agency, and deliberate divergence via the hybridisation of foreign and local, on the other, was played out not only in the abstract, in the sociocultural landscape surrounding educational institutions and government ministries, but also in the urban landscape in which these offices and schools were located. Representations of a colonial city inextricably divided in two in an abrupt and unchanging manner through reference to cultural differences, city walls, or topographical barriers such as the Bur Saʿid canal do not hold up to scrutiny. The Darb al-Jamamiz area, which Lansing contrasts with al-Azhar and describes as essentially European, is, first, part of marginal yet in-between borderlands in which new buildings and activities were integrated into older urban structures, and, second, an example of how these borderlands changed over time, alongside the growth and development of the city. Re-examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century travel maps show a marginal ‘borderlands’ in between the relatively straight, orderly streets of Ismaʿil’s city in the west and the narrow, winding lanes and cul-de-sacs of Islamic Cairo in the east. As Figure 1.1

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Figure 1.1 Map of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, showing the borderlands surrounding Darb al-Jamamiz. The older fabric of the city is not limited to Islamic Cairo (in dark grey on the right of the canal), but also extends towards the regimented street grids of the newer quarters of the city in a borderlands (in light grey). This borderlands also encompasses newer, European-influenced fabric that was inserted into the older city on the right of the canal. This includes Darb al-Jamamiz Palace, which was built on land reclaimed from the Birkat al-Fil pond, remnants of which appear in white just south of the palace. Note that the popular quarters (haras) of the borderlands almost surround Ismaʿil’s European-style ʿAbdin Palace, including haras hidden behind large, European-style boulevards. Source: based on ‘Le Caire (Masr El-Kaira)’ in Baedeker’s Egypt: Handbook for Travellers; Plan général de la ville du Caire et des environs.

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shows, these borderlands ran from pockets on the eastern side of the Bur Saʿid canal towards the landmarks of the new, self-consciously modern city in the west, such as the Egyptian Museum, Garden City, and the Azbakiyya Gardens. It stretched from the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque in the south to the extension of the walls of the Islamic city in the north. Only gradually did the street grids of Ismaʿil’s ostensibly modern city move east to fill in the areas running up to and alongside the canal. This process was not uniform for either old or new neighbourhoods, with street grids expanding east in some areas, leaving areas further west riddled with small alleys and cul-de-sacs. Both sides of the canal saw new development in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with major institutions of the modernising state, such as the municipal headquarters and police station, and the indigenous courts built – similar to Darb al-Jamamiz – on the older, eastern side of the canal, while the building constructed for the khedivial library is only just on the western side. Even today, the streets of this inbetween area remain only partially normalised into a grid, as shown by the persistence of winding lanes and dead-end cul-de-sacs. These borderlands stretch further to the west than a casual visitor might realise. While many of the areas immediately west of them had main boulevards lined with impressive European-style buildings, behind these façades, were side streets with popular quarters that had much in common with the quarter-based (hara) neighbourhoods of the old city. These areas were populated by a mix of working- and lower middle-class people, whose neighbourhoods backed onto upper-class, European-style residences on the main streets, where wealthy Egyptians lived in relatively close proximity to neighbours from the Mediterranean or elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, including Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, and Italians. An example of this sort of mixing is shown in the 1956 film Shabab Imraʾa by Salah Abu Sayf. The first glimpse we see of these borderlands comes at the start of the film, as its darʿami hero, just arrived in Cairo, commissions a cart and driver to take him and his luggage to a place where he could rent rooms. This trip begins by showing the impressive and spacious newer quarters and ends in the older areas around the city, shown as dirty and chaotic. The borderlands appear in one shot, immediately after a shot of Opera Square, which is near ʿAtaba, an area in which the major thoroughfares of Islamic Cairo and Ismaʿil’s Cairo converge. It appears as an area with reasonably wide streets lined with buildings in a mix of styles,

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including two- and three-storey European-style buildings, yet debris from shops in their lower storeys spills out onto the pavement, the streets are filled with people and a bus, and minarets of the older quarters can be seen in the background. The film gives us a different view of the borderlands later on, in its portrayal of early twentiethcentury ʿAbbasiyya as a clean, spacious, quiet neighbourhood with multistorey European-style apartment buildings occupied a range of people, including Arabic- and Greek-speaking families. The relationship between the expensive buildings and the popular quarters was in many ways symbiotic, with people from the latter providing services to the former. Darb al-Jamamiz’s location in these borderlands is further reinforced by its proximity to old and new. The Ministry of Education at Darb alJamamiz, similar to other ministry properties, was located in a palace complex built in the nineteenth century near Ismaʿil’s European-style ʿAbdin Palace. The area around ʿAbdin was laid out in a spacious manner, with wide, tree-lined boulevards, villas, and apartment buildings built in European styles, and amenities like gas lamps, street cars, and water and electricity lines.57 Darb al-Jamamiz itself, however, was located on a street more similar to the twisting lanes characteristic of old Cairo. The word darb is defined by Edward William Lane as a minor thoroughfare from six to eight feet in width, with a gate at each end, often running transversely from the great streets, and generally consisting of private houses two or three storeys high, with occasionally a few shops or a market. The walls of the ground-floor of the private houses are faced within and without with stone; and the upper storeys, which generally project two or three feet, are of brick, and in most cases plastered and whitewashed . . . The houses being thus constructed and the streets so narrow, many of the projecting windows would quite meet, face to face, were it not that few of them are placed so as to be exactly opposite one another. These streets have, of course, a dull appearance, the more so as the principal windows of the larger houses look into an inner court; but they afford a delightful shade . . . [and some provide] comparative solitude, to the bustle witnessed in the greater thoroughfares.58

57 58

McCoan, Egypt As It Is, pp. 56–7. On the contrast between the two, see Wylie, Egypt and Its Future, pp. 108–9. Lane and Lane-Poole, Cairo Fifty Years Ago, pp. 57–9.

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Accordingly, Darb al-Jamamiz appears on maps as a short street running roughly parallel to the Bur Saʿid canal, loosely connected to similar lanes at each end. It appears as a walking route in Badaeker’s Egypt as early as 1898, described as ‘a series of tortuous streets’ leading from the square in front of the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque to Bab alKhalq, a gate in the walls of the old city of Cairo.59 One travel account notes that it was narrow and contained plenty of older architecture.60 The gates of the Darb al-Jamamiz Palace were approximately a halfmile north of Sayyida Zaynab, across from a tree-lined opening looking onto the canal and immediately south of the ‘Tekkîyeh Habanîyeh’, an eighteenth-century Sufi Lodge used in the late nineteenth century by foreign students studying at al-Azhar.61 The Darb al-Jamamiz area is also a significant and early example of change, agency, and deliberate divergence through successive rounds of redevelopment within the fabric of old Cairo. The Darb al-Jamamiz Palace, running along the east side of the street, was part of a larger complex of palaces and gardens built in the nineteenth century on land reclaimed by filling in a long, snaking drainage lake, the Birkat al-Fil. (See Figure 1.2 for a representation of this lake in 1825.) This genealogy meant that buildings constructed on reclaimed land at various times in the first half of the nineteenth century were inserted into the fabric of a much older section of the city.62 The Darb al-Jamamiz Palace occupied the north-west section of the lake, while Prince ʿAbbas Hilmi built a palace in its eastern section. Both palaces appear on the map in the Baedeker guide of 1885, with empty space appearing between their gardens. To at least 1914, the Baedeker maps mark off the area that was the south-west tail of the lake in either white or green, with the label ‘Birket el-Fil’, seemingly indicating that the lake had not been entirely built over.63 The insertion of new urban material into the fabric of the old city continued in the late 1890s when the gardens of ʿAbbas Hilmi’s palace were declared public in 1893, and the palace demolished 59 60 61 62 63

Baedeker, Egypt 1908, p. 56; Baedeker, Egypt 1902, p. 56; Baedeker, Egypt 1898, p. 56. Lamplough and Francis, Cairo and Its Environs, pp. 115–23. Baedeker, Egypt 1898, p. 58; Baedeker, Egypt 1902, p. 58; Baedeker, Egypt 1908, p. 69. Asfour, ‘The Villa’, pp. 11–12. Baedeker, ‘Le Caire’ (1885); Baedeker, ‘Le Caire’ (1908); Baedeker, ‘Le Caire’ (1898); Baedeker, ‘Le Caire’ (1914).

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Figure 1.2 Map of Cairo in 1825 showing Birkat al-Fil. Areas of Cairo settled in 1825 shown in white, with roads, canals, and the Birkat al-Fil pond in black. Source: based on the map in Grabar, ‘The Meaning of History in Cairo’, p. 4, which itself is based on Coste, L’architecture arabe.

in 1903. Between 1893 and 1909, a street grid was extended across the area to turn it into a new suburb, named Hilmiyya.64 The structure of Hilmiyya reflected the translation of European ideas about urban planning and house design into an Egyptian context, a process that was significantly influenced by ʿAli Mubarak. The rigid, orderly street grid of Hilmiyya highlighted the difference between old and new more sharply than the previous palace. By the time of its 64

Asfour, ‘The Villa’, p. 118; Asfour, ‘The Domestication of Knowledge’, p. 125.

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development at the turn of the twentieth century, however, Egyptian urban reformers were engaging in more negotiation and consensusbuilding with residents than they had done earlier. A major artery adjoining Hilmiyya, Muhammad ʿAli Street, had been cut through the fabric of Islamic Cairo early in the nineteenth century in a much less consensual manner, involving the destruction of scores of homes and the relocation of a fourteenth-century mosque.65 The development of Hilmiyya reveals the influence of French urban planning in nineteenth-century Egypt, as the underlying goals were improvement of hygiene, transportation, and state control within Islamic Cairo. Khaled Asfour argues that the architecture of the large villas that initially filled the suburb was a physical realisation of debates amongst the sociocultural elite about how foreign ideas should be translated into the Egyptian context.66 The neighbourhood has since been mythologised in a five-part television serial drama Nights of Hilmiyya (Layali alHilmiyya) broadcast in the 1980s and early 1990s. Director Usama Anwar Okasha (1941–2010) used the neighbourhood as a frame to explore the tumult of Egypt’s twentieth-century history. While Hilmiyya was originally dominated by the villas of the rich, the series – whose action begins in the 1940s – showed it as the type of workingclass area that was seen later in the twentieth century as intrinsically authentic in contrast to the more sterile environments of the elite.67 This brief exploration of Cairo’s urban development further demonstrates how colonial-era discourse emphasising the division of space and policing of sociocultural boundaries misrepresents Egyptian sociocultural and physical landscapes. Darb al-Jamamiz and the borderlands surrounding it was a site of innovation and change between Islamic Cairo and the Ismaʿil’s semicolonial city. The physical fabric of these borderlands was initially a mix of Islamic- and Europeaninfluenced building styles and street layouts, with the latter increasing slowly over time as dominant uses of the area shifted from palaces to government ministries and schools, to neighbourhoods occupied first by the elite and then the working class. Even more important to narratives of sociocultural change was the diverse range of people who moved through and occupied these borderlands. It was a place 65 66 67

Asfour, ‘The Villa’, pp. 115–16; Asfour, ‘The Domestication of Knowledge’, pp. 125–8. Asfour, ‘The Villa’, esp. pp. 11–12, 69–113. Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, p. 218.

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where important progress in education reform was made by local rulers before the protectorate, and where teachers and students with religious and civil expertise convened to integrate Islamic knowledge into the Egyptian project of modernity for decades thereafter.

Colonising Minds Before Bodies? 1867–1876 as a Turning Point The nine years between 1867 and 1876, and especially the years 1871 and 1872, represent a significant turning point in the cultural history of Egypt. Five years into Ismaʿil’s rule, programmes to reform and renew Cairo’s urban fabric and educational institutions were beginning to bear fruit. His vision of transforming Cairo and the Egyptian state so that they would be perceived by Europeans as a ‘Paris on the Nile’ represented a significant shift in the goals underlying state-led projects of modernity in Egypt. Buoyed by the high price of cotton and driven by his quest for the respect of European rulers, Ismaʿil presided over a series of reforms that made the days when Egyptians abroad were excoriated by Muhammad ʿAli for wearing European dress a distant memory. Timothy Mitchell points to the 1890s as a period by which semicolonial and colonial systems had not only asserted control over Egyptian bodies but also transformed how Egyptians saw the world around them by colonising their minds. By the 1890s, a decade into the British occupation and seven decades into extensive engagement with European misrepresentations of the Orient, the absolute opposition between the order of the modern West and the backwardness and disorder of the East was not only found in Europe, but began to repeat itself in Egyptian scholarship and popular literature, just as it was replicated in colonial cities. Through its textbooks, school teachers, universities, newspapers, novels and magazines, the colonial order was able to penetrate and colonise local discourse . . . It was able at the most local level to reproduce theatres of its order and truth.68

The travel accounts quoted above illustrate the first step, whereby Egyptians – both their bodies and their ‘character’ or ‘culture’ – were conceived as concrete objects that were distinct from and inferior to 68

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 171.

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European bodies and minds. Once this was established, semicolonial and colonial institutions worked to transform these Egyptians, body and mind, by establishing disciplinary institutions such as the military and schools that would produce Egyptians who accepted and reproduced this dichotomy in their teaching and writing.69 Mitchell’s focus on the 1890s appears to reinforce the importance of the major political turning point of late nineteenth-century Egypt: the 1882 British invasion following the 1881 ʿUrabi revolt, which was sparked by events following the seizure of control of Egyptian finances by European creditors in 1876. These events are crucial to shifts in Egyptian political sovereignty, as they mark the point from which khedivial control over Egyptian domestic affairs began to be limited by European powers and a nationalist movement that emerged out of the social groups who had facilitated khedivial reforms. These dynamics generated a rebellion under the leadership of Egyptian-born colonel Ahmed ʿUrabi (1841–1911) in 1881, whose success triggered the British invasion the following year. However, we must not let the political significance of events between 1876 and 1882 eclipse the impact of Ismaʿil’s reign on sociocultural dynamics in Egypt. The invasion of 1882 finished the colonisation of Egyptian bodies, but the key turning point in the colonisation of Egyptian minds came earlier, between 1867 and 1876, as Ismaʿil’s reforms began to take effect. A string of events during this period started to shift the types of knowledge, education, and cultural capital seen as authoritative, which would eventually establish European-style ocularcentrism and approaches to space as paramount. With respect to space, Ismaʿil’s efforts to remake Cairo in the image of Paris launched in earnest after Egypt’s participation in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, an exhibition that redefined how a city should be laid out. These efforts, spearheaded by ʿAli Mubarak in his role as head of public works, culminated in the November 1869 celebrations surrounding the opening of the Suez Canal. They included building a new palace on a large island in the Nile to house visiting European dignitaries as well as the khedivial Opera House, for whose opening Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was commissioned to write the opera Aida.

69

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 95–105.

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Less visible, but even more important to the emergence of Egyptian national culture, were reforms related to civil and religious education. One of the biggest initiatives was the attempt, described in a law passed in November 1867, to improve and even out experiences in entry-level schools across Egypt. The goal was not only to run flagship civil schools at the primary and secondary levels to train government employees, but also to oversee the religious elementary kuttab schools that educated the population as a whole. All kuttabs with sufficient charitable (waqf) funding to run themselves were be taken over by the Ministry of Education, under whose supervision they would teach a much wider range of subjects: ‘writing, arithmetic, commercial knowledge, grammar, ancient history, geography, a modern language, and the principles of politeness’. The remaining elementary schools were to raise sufficient funds to provide students with buildings and furniture in good repair, and use textbooks to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.70 These regulations asked for significant changes in kuttabs in which instruction had been entirely audiocentric or whose facilities were in poor condition. Instructors not only needed to be morally upstanding and know their Qurʾan, but also needed to be able to write by hand and teach arithmetic. New instructors would need state certification, while existing instructors could keep their posts by providing documentation as to their suitability and, if blind, engaging an assistant who could read and write. The impact of this initiative was limited by the relatively few schools (apparently only thirty-three) that had enough funding to qualify for full state supervision, as well as by the inability of many of the existing instructors to learn new techniques, especially how to teach arithmetic.71 Regardless, the religious elementary schools that were fully or partially reformed as the result of this law spread Europeaninfluenced educational norms beyond the ranks of Egyptians entering government service. Yet this expansion and increasing regulation of Egyptian schooling also hardened the boundaries between civil and religious education systems, making it more difficult for talented students from religious schools to pass into the higher levels of the civil system. It also introduced a division within the schools overseen by the 70 71

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 352–74. Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 362–74

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Ministry of Education, as only some of these – the primary schools of provincial towns as well as Alexandria and Cairo – taught all of the subjects and skills necessary for progression to preparatory or higher civil schools, the only schools that provided access to government employment at this time. Even the three-tier scheme proposed by an 1880 report on Egyptian education, which would have introduced the ability to progress from waqf-funded elementary schools into civil preparatory schools, only suggested adding the full range of primary school subjects to the highest tier of schools, to be established only in towns with at least 100,000 inhabitants.72 The Darb al-Jamamiz educational campus continued to develop into the early 1870s. In March 1870, Ismaʿil tasked Mubarak with building a library similar to the depository institutions common in European capitals on the Darb al-Jamamiz campus, an institution that would eventually grow into the Egyptian national library, Dar al-Kutub (the House of Books). The first issue of Rawdat al-Madaris, a pioneering education journal edited by Mubarak, also appeared in 1870, shortly after the opening of the library. In July 1871, Mubarak launched a lecture series in an amphitheatre on the campus named Dar alʿUlum that aimed to expose top students from al-Azhar to the subjects taught in Egyptian civil schools, with the goal of improving the quality of teaching in Egyptian primary schools. In autumn 1872, this initiative was expanded into the Dar al-ʿUlum school, which trained shaykhs to teach in civil schools and kuttabs, helping to fill the demand created by the 1867 expansion of European-influenced schooling. Its impact went beyond this, however, as it expanded the ranks of reform-minded shaykhs who spread, instead of condemned, European subjects and pedagogies. Finally, the early 1870s were also a time of change in and around alAzhar. In 1872, the first law reforming education at al-Azhar was passed. This introduced an exam of eleven subjects leading to a diploma called the ʿalimiyya that enabled its holders to teach at alAzhar and similar institutions. It quickly narrowed the subjects most students were interested in studying down to these eleven and formalised the bodies of knowledge one had to master to be considered an ʿalim. Even more important for the spread of reformist ideas was the arrival in Cairo in 1871 of intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838– 72

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 429–31.

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79), seen by many as the father of Islamic modernism. He taught a group of young reform-minded students from al-Azhar in private. This group included a number of future Egyptian leaders, including Saʿd Zaghlul (1857–1927), founder of the Wafd, the premier Egyptian nationalist political party of the twentieth century. Afghani’s lectures inspired a generation of thinkers, known now as Islamic modernists though they referred to themselves as reformers (muslihun) or modernisers (muhaddithun).73 These thinkers cast aside interpretive traditions stretching back centuries to rejuvenate Islamic thought and practice through new readings of the Qurʾan and the traditions of the early Muslim community. They aimed to make Islamic thought and practice relevant in the new sociocultural and intellectual environments emerging in Egypt. Chief among them was Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), who held a range of illustrious positions including high court judge and lead legal interpreter (mufti) of Egypt, despite having been exiled between 1882 and 1888 for political activities. Printed journals were key to the spread of Islamic modernist thought around the Middle East and North Africa, especially al-Urwa al-Wuthqa (The Firmest Bond), which was published by Afghani and ʿAbduh in Paris in 1884, and al-Manar (The Lighthouse), which ʿAbduh’s student Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) edited from 1898 until his death. This expansion of European-influenced education within Egypt, combined with an expansion of reform-minded thinking within religious circles, laid the groundwork for the emergence and development of a broader set of modernisation projects: those associated with the cultural and intellectual renaissance known as the nahda. This movement’s call for renewal simultaneously internalised and rejected colonial norms. It accepted European diagnoses of Egyptian religion and culture as stagnant and backward, but focused on placing revived and renewed forms of Arabic and Islam at the heart of renewed religious, cultural, and literary forms. The civil schooling and missions abroad that trained military officers and bureaucrats also swelled the ranks of Egyptian subjects who were able and eager to contribute significantly to the nahda, many of whom had the language and intercultural skills necessary to engage with and translate European publications. The printing press technology used to produce the Egyptian government’s gazette from 1813 was used from the mid-nineteenth century to print 73

Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 5–6.

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the journals, newspapers, and books that spread the ideas of the nahda renaissance beyond the intellectual salons of Cairo to modernising social groups across the region. The way in which the nahda combined acceptance and rejection of colonial norms hints at a much larger phenomenon in fin-de-siècle Egypt. While developments in the 1870s accelerated internalisation of European approaches to knowledge, education, and culture, the hegemony of these approaches was far from absolute. The Egyptian projects of modernity that developed out of cross-cultural exchange with Europe did not match European models or replicate colonial conceptions of division and inferiority. Instead, through locally initiated reform, Egyptians created modes of practice that deliberately diverged from European ideas, practices, and techniques and developed in ways that met the needs of Egyptians. As a result, the histories of Egyptian education, and Egypt more generally, do not make sense in a context that shows education creating an unassailable division between civil and religious knowledge, or what was seen as modern and unmodern. The possibility for colonial subjects to cross and straddle boundaries in meaningful and productive ways is underemphasised in much of the Foucault-inspired postcolonial literature on modernisation in the Middle East and North Africa. Timothy Mitchell’s work on Egyptian modernisation, while prescient in its discussion of the colonisation of minds as well as bodies, focuses almost exclusively on boundaries as entities that are created and assiduously policed by the disciplinary power of the colonial state, instead of divisions that, once recognised by some sort of social consensus, can be productively crossed. He quotes Frantz Fanon’s depiction of colonial society as ‘a world divided into compartments . . . a world cut in two’, where the two halves are grossly unequal and the inferior half is seen only in terms of what it lacks.74 Mitchell’s later work notes that reality can be more complex, but the overarching emphasis of his discussion of modernity remains on value-laden dualisms that dominate ‘representations’ of this reality and – in his assessment – play an essential role in the hegemony of colonial power. This later work dismisses the possibility of local agency in so far as it describes Middle Eastern modernity as a copy that diverges only accidentally from the European original.75 By focusing on how sociocultural 74 75

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 6, 14, 71, 82, 163–4. Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, pp. viii, xi, xii–xiv; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, pp. 5, 11, 52–3; Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, pp. 6–7, 18, 23–4.

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boundaries can be crossed as well as policed, this book demonstrates how modernisation – not to mention change more broadly – can occur without rupture between modern and unmodern, or past and present.

Conclusion: Egyptian Education and Shifting Sociocultural Landscapes This chapter is the first of two tracing the relationship between civil and religious systems of education in Egypt between 1811 and 1900. It introduces the cultural politics surrounding knowledge and its transmission during the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on educational reform during the first sixty years of the khedivial projects of modernity (1811–71). These projects depended on selective processes of cross-cultural borrowing in which knowledge was imported, translated, and applied in ways that created Egyptian modernities that deliberately diverged from European models. These efforts led to the founding of a new system of civil schools to run in parallel with Egypt’s religious schools, which consisted of primary-level kuttabs and higherlevel madrasas. The pedagogical differences between these school systems in the nineteenth century is best explained by contrasting the listening-focused literacy, or audiocentrism, of the older religious schools with the reading-focused literacy, or ocularcentrism, of the new civil schools. Colonial accounts misunderstood and misrepresented Egyptian education, in part because of their strong preference for ocularcentrism, but also due to their tendency to divide Egyptian society, culture, and space into two halves: a modern foreign and a traditional local. This dichotomy is behind not only misrepresentations of education but also the flattening of descriptions of the geographical and sociocultural spaces through which Egyptians moved and claimed social status. These misrepresentations obscure the hybrid borderlands that surrounded the schools and institutions associated with state-led projects of modernity, including ʿAli Mubarak’s Darb al-Jamamiz campus. Despite their biases, however, these accounts became influential enough to transform how Egyptians saw themselves, their knowledge traditions, and the spaces surrounding them. The turning point behind this colonisation of Egyptian minds was not the 1882 British invasion that concluded the colonisation of Egyptian bodies, but instead the intellectual and institutional shifts between 1867 and 1876. This

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period also laid the groundwork for resistance to and subversion of European cultural forms by Egyptian nationalists decades later. The hegemony of European misrepresentations – alongside attempts to resist and subvert them – reshaped the physical and sociocultural landscapes in which Egyptian national culture was formed. The increasing power and authority of European-influenced ocularcentrism and related cultural objects in the late nineteenth century led to significant shifts in the educational choices of Egyptians, as it raised the sociocultural standing of the efendiyya and increased bias against the shaykhs graduating from religious schools. The capital held by the efendiyya as a result of their education, especially their ability to function in ocularcentric environments, meant that they not only had greater access to employment opportunities but also were privileged among Egyptians as they navigated physical and sociocultural landscapes shaped by colonial politics. This climate encouraged top students at religious schools who wanted to contribute to the making of Egypt’s future to seek out the hybrid education offered by Dar al-ʿUlum, and to use the capital they gained from it to cross, straddle, and shift the sociocultural boundaries that placed them at a disadvantage. Their histories demonstrate that Egypt’s new education system could help establish and break down the sociocultural barriers present in colonial-era discourse, giving graduates the capital to act authoritatively in a wide range of situations and to play an active role in shaping the national culture of a selfconsciously modern Egypt. It is to Dar al-ʿUlum and its hybridity that we turn next.

2

Dar al-ʿUlum: Hybridity, Education, and Sociocultural Change, 1871–1900

In the spring and summer of 1871, education professionals and students gathered at the Darb al-Jamamiz Palace in Cairo to hear experts lecture on a variety of subjects. The topics included history, architecture, machines, the physical sciences, plant science, railroads, and Arabic literature, as well as Islamic subjects such as Quranic interpretation (tafsir), the sayings of the Prophet (hadith), and jurisprudence (fiqh). Foreign experts lectured in French, which was translated into Arabic. Victor Vidal, the director of the School of Administration and Languages, spoke about railroads, while Eloi Guigon, director of the School of Arts and Crafts, explained mechanics, Heinrich Brugsch, Director of the School of Egyptology, gave an overview of general history, and two other colleagues spoke about physics and architecture. Egyptians delivered lectures in Arabic as well. Shaykh Husayn alMarsafi, a teacher at the School for the Blind, covered literature, while Shaykh ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Bahrawi, a legal expert (mufti) employed by the Ministry of Justice, discussed Hanafi fiqh. Shaykh Ahmad al-Marsafi, a religious scholar recommended by the Shaykh alAzhar, covered Quranic interpretation and the hadith. Ismaʿil Falaki, the director of the School of Engineering, lectured on astronomy, Mansur Ahmad on natural sciences, and Ahmad Nada on botany.1 These lectures, described by educational historian Amin Sami as general lessons (durus ʿumumiyya), were intended to broaden the perspectives of Ministry of Education and other government employees, as well as students at the higher government schools, most of whom were based at Darb al-Jamamiz.2

1 2

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 6–7; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 36–7. Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, p. 23. ˙

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These lectures were the brainchild of ʿAli Mubarak, then minister of education, who asked al-Azhar to nominate ten of its students to be paid a stipend to attend. Those who regularly attended the lectures on Islamic subjects would then be eligible to teach in government schools, an opportunity Mubarak thought they would appreciate.3 In August of 1872, Mubarak asked the khedive to expand this initiative into a school to train top students from al-Azhar to teach Arabic and primary school subjects in the government’s civil schools. This school was named Dar al-ʿUlum – ‘House of Knowledge’ or ‘House of Science’ – after the amphitheatre in which the lecture series took place. The initial proposal included a Turkish section, but this part of the project never got off the ground, ostensibly due to a lack of qualified applicants.4 Dar al-ʿUlum was Egypt’s first – and longest-lasting – teacher training school, producing teachers specialising in Arabic from 1874 until it became a faculty of Egypt’s most prestigious Arabiclanguage university in 1946. Its integration into this university, founded in 1908 as the Egyptian University, renamed Fuʾad I in the 1930s, and known as Cairo University since 1952, secured a future for the study of traditional Arabic and Islamic sciences within the changing landscape of Egyptian higher education. While teacher training ceased to be part of its curriculum, many darʿamiyya continued their studies after graduation to obtain a teaching certificate. As Dar al-ʿUlum taught the Arabic and Islamic disciplines that had long been part of religious schools within the framework of a government civil school for seventy-four years, it is also Egypt’s most significant example of hybrid schooling. Of all the events discussed in Chapter 1 that make the early 1870s a key turning point in Egyptian cultural history, this lecture series and the subsequent founding of Dar al-ʿUlum are among the most important but least visible. On the surface, Dar al-ʿUlum was founded to solve a simple problem: a shortage of teachers with strong Arabic skills who were also familiar with the subjects and pedagogies of the staterun civil school system. Scratch deeper into its history, however, and it becomes clear that its civil-religious hybridity holds much greater significance, especially with respect to the formation of Egyptian national 3 4

Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 36–8; ʿAbd alJawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 6–7. Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 44–5.

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culture. The founding of Dar al-ʿUlum marked the start of a longlasting government initiative to educate top students from religious schools, with the goal of incorporating them into the modernising institutions of the khedivial state. From this point onwards, Islamic knowledge was no longer purely the domain of religious institutions, but also played a key role in the Egyptian school system as well as the state-led projects of modernity and nation-building that it supported. This chapter begins to tell this story by introducing Dar al-ʿUlum as a teacher training school and as a hybrid institution, focusing on the period between 1871 and 1900.

Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian Teacher Training Establishing Dar al-ʿUlum as a teacher training school focused on Arabic was a crucial step in the development of Egyptian education. Prior to 1872, civil school teachers were a motley group of European consultants, civil school and mission graduates, and governmentemployed shaykhs. At first glance, it might seem strange to provide training for only the last of those three categories, yet Dar al-ʿUlum was set up to do just that. It admitted students on the basis of a competitive examination focusing on Islam and Arabic grammar, and trained them in linguistic and religious sciences as well as civil school subjects so that they could teach Arabic and primary school subjects proficiently in civil schools.5 Compounding this is the fact that Dar al-ʿUlum did not have classes in how to teach for at least the first eight years it was open (up to 1880), and possibly not for another seven years after that (until 1887), despite its teacher training mission.6 These apparent conundrums makes more sense after examining, first, approaches to teacher training in the nineteenth century and, second, the challenges facing Egyptian education in the early 1870s. Extensive theoretical training in how to teach was not fully established as standard practice in Europe at the time of Dar al-ʿUlum’s founding, and remained a point of contention among policymakers into the twentieth century. Isolated teacher training institutions opened as early as 1795 in France and 1809 in England and increased in 5 6

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 12–17. Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education), Qara¯r min niza¯ra al˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), pp. 3, Art. ˙1, and maʿa Qa¯nu¯n Madrasat Qism al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ (1895), p. 3, Art. 1.

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number gradually throughout the nineteenth century.7 These early institutions emphasised subject matter expertise instead of formal training in how these subjects should be taught. While a decree required French schools to provide training in how to teach alongside subject training as early as 1808, the time devoted to these classes was limited until the 1870s, following on from an 1866 change in official requirements.8 The assumption seems to have been that students would intuitively understand how to teach based on observation of how they had been taught as students, an assumption that remained prevalent in Anglo-American universities into the twenty-first century. Egyptian educationalists appear to have made a similar assumption – that teachers of all backgrounds would understand how to teach in civil schools due to their experience of attending civil schools in Europe or Egypt. The number of reform-minded shaykhs employed by the Ministry of Education as teachers before Ismaʿil’s rule was apparently small enough – and the shaykhs sufficiently motivated – for most to assimilate these norms despite a lack of direct experience. However, the expansion of primary and secondary schooling called for by the November 1867 law faced many barriers to execution, the most important being a lack of teachers with the necessary qualifications. Kuttab elementary schools had traditionally been staffed with shaykhs trained at al-Azhar or another higher-level religious school (madrasa), as these schools provided a strong grounding in Arabic language and grammar as well as mastery of the Qurʾan, the main subject of study in these schools before 1867. However, religious schools did not teach arithmetic or writing, subjects that, as of 1867, all new kuttab teachers were required to know and all old kuttab teachers were supposed to learn within a year. They were also unfamiliar with the further subjects – ‘commercial knowledge, grammar, ancient history, geography, a modern language, and the principles of politeness’ – that these reforms aimed to introduce in the elementary schools that were taken over by the government.9 By 1871, four years into the attempt to expand and improve primary education, it was clear that a lack of suitable instructors was a major obstacle. Not only were many of the existing instructors in regular 7 8 9

Berry, Teacher Training Institutions, pp. 14–17; Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education, p. 23. Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education, pp. 3, 7, 31, 80, 99, 101. Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 362–74.

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kuttabs unable or unwilling to learn arithmetic, efforts to employ more shaykhs than could be easily assimilated into the larger schools had led to a significant gap in understanding and trust between teachers trained in religious schools and teachers who had attended civil schools or studied in Europe. Dar al-ʿUlum was set up to solve these problems by better preparing shaykhs to teach in the civil school system. Historian and Dar al-ʿUlum graduate Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad writes about a ‘secret’ behind the selection of students: The late ʿAli Mubarak Pasha became aware of the deep abyss and wide chasm between the two sides [shaykh and efendi] and he wanted to overcome this problem by bridging the gaps between them. So he dedicated himself to establishing Dar al-ʿUlum in which students [would] encounter natural sciences whose study did not take place at the noble Azhar to the point where [these subjects] were not strange for them, their belief in the blasphemy of [teachers specialising] in them would disappear, and their knowledge would increase so that the other side [civil school instructors] would drop their belief in [the shaykhs’] ignorance.10

Exposing shaykhs to civil school subjects, norms, and teaching methods was thus Dar al-ʿUlum’s raison d’être, and as a result the school played an increasingly important role in integrating shaykhs into Egyptian projects of modernity from the late nineteenth century onwards. Dar al-ʿUlum represented a formalisation and significant expansion of the pathways that previous generations of reform-minded shaykhs had followed to gain government employment and to contribute to Egypt’s state-led projects of modernity. Prior to its founding, reform-minded shaykhs interested in engaging with European ideas and state-led projects of modernity had to find their own path towards hybridity and government employment. The reform-minded shaykh Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi had the opportunity to study in Paris because the L’École Franco-égyptienne (1826–36) needed a prayer leader and his mentor had influence over who was considered for the post. Shaykhs such as Husayn al-Marsafi, Hassuna al-Nawawi, and Muhammad ʿAbduh found ways to study new topics outside of their main focus of work or study. Unlike these previous generations, however, the shaykhs who entered Dar al-ʿUlum in the nineteenth century would leave with 10

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 17–18.

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certified cultural capital, an asset that was previously only available to the handful of shaykhs who were lucky enough to join a statesponsored mission to study in Europe. The cultural capital of a reformminded shaykh who became familiar with European ideas, practices, and technologies through self-study was that of the autodidact. As a result, it could be questioned in ways that the capital of a holder of a certificate from a state-run civil school would not be. They also would not have to completely leave behind what they had learned in religious schools. For instance, students at Dar al-ʿUlum were spared the culture shock that Tahtawi would have experienced upon arrival in France earlier in the century, as study at Dar al-ʿUlum did not require anywhere near the same degree of linguistic, cultural, and intellectual immersion. Their expertise in Arabic was highly valued, plus Mubarak did not intend Dar al-ʿUlum’s graduates, the darʿamiyya, to assimilate completely into the civil system. ʿAbd al-Jawad’s account makes it clear that Mubarak not only wanted to improve the teaching ability of shaykhs but also to reduce the mutual suspicion between shaykhs and efendiyya teaching in civil schools, something that would only happen if the shaykhs trained at the school remained shaykhs. As a result, the darʿamiyya retained the title and dress of the shaykhs, unlike the graduates of other civil schools, and were to be seen by their colleagues as enlightened representatives of the religious education system. Therefore, while Dar al-ʿUlum represented a significant incursion by the khedivial state into the religious sphere,11 control over religious institutions was not the most important aspect of its foundation. Instead, it was supposed to enable a larger number of religious experts to make significant and well-informed contributions to the civil schooling and the state-led projects of modernity that these schools supported. As a result, the key part of Dar al-ʿUlum’s fulfilment of its teacher training mission, both before and after the introduction of pedagogy classes, was its provision of a civil school education that covered the knowledge and habits graduates would need to teach, and that were necessary to be perceived as an educated individual in a modernising Egypt.

11

Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 330; Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, p. 60.

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Dar al-ʿUlum remained Egypt’s only teacher training institution until 1880. In this year, a commission headed by ʿAli Pasha Ibrahim described standards in Egyptian schools as generally poor, especially at the lowest levels.12 This commission issued a report calling for the creation of another teacher school alongside Dar al-ʿUlum to train graduates of civil schools. This school, known initially as the Khedivial School of Teachers (Madrasat al-Muʿallimin alKhidiwiyya), was founded in September 1880. It focused on training teachers of foreign languages, history, geography, mathematics, and the sciences. It had a primary and secondary school physically attached to it to provide its students with teaching experience, seemingly inspired by developments in French teacher training during the 1860s and 1870s.13 Changes were made at Dar al-ʿUlum as well: the faculty expanded from five to twelve and formal diplomas were issued from 1887, with the caveat that graduates could only teach independently after two years of observation.14 Formal pedagogy classes were supposedly added to the curricula of Dar al-ʿUlum and the new teachers’ schools in 1880, but time for this was not blocked out in Dar al-ʿUlum’s curriculum until one hour a week on ‘scientific pedagogy’ (tarbiyya ʿilmiyya) was added to the final year of study in 1887.15 The founding of the School of Teachers also led to the first of many changes in institutional status and name for Dar al-ʿUlum, shifts that some have used to impugn the school’s significance. In 1882, Dar alʿUlum was downgraded to a department of the School of Teachers. It recovered the name Dar al-ʿUlum in 1883–4 and had the School of Languages attached to it briefly from 1885. Then it lost its name again in 1895, when it became the Division of Arabic Teachers (muʿallimin) of the primary-level Mubtadiyan School (Madrasat al-Mubtadiyan), which was later renamed the Nasriyya School (Madrasat an-Nasriyya) after the neighbourhood in which it was located.16 This school dated 12 13 14

15 16

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 39–40, 427; Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr. ˙ Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, p. 439. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 6–7; Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry ˙ of Education), Qara¯r tartı¯b Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), p. 8, Arts. 30–1; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 84–5. Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, Appendix 3, p. 45; ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 25. This neighbourhood ˙of Cairo may be named after Mamluk ruler al-Na¯sir Muhammad Ibn Qala¯wu¯n (r. 1293–4, 1299–1309, 1310–41) who dug a˙ lake in ˙ the area in pursuit of building material, or after Sittı¯ Nasra, a female saint. ˙

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back to the to the very beginning of Khedive Ismaʿil’s reign and was initially run by ʿAli Mubarak. Shortly after this merger, in the 1896–7 academic year, Dar al-ʿUlum moved to adjacent premises.17 The integration of Dar al-ʿUlum into the Mubtadiyan School ushered in an era of expansion and stability for Dar al-ʿUlum in which it solidified its standing within Egyptian teacher training. ʿAmin Sami, the director of the Mubtadiyan School, was appointed director of Dar al-ʿUlum and deserves much of the credit for this. Sami was a respected teacher, educational administrator, and the author of the Almanac of the Nile (Taqwim al-Nil) and Education in Egypt (al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr), as ˙ well as being Dar al-ʿUlum’s longest-serving director. Between 1895 and 1911, he presided over the expansion of the student body and faculty, a major revision of its curriculum,18 and the construction of new buildings, buildings that it would use for eighty years starting from 1901. However, despite the number and magnitude of changes between 1895 and 1911, Dar al-ʿUlum retained enough of an institutional identity to be officially renamed Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum in 1920. ʿAbd al-Jawad, who graduated the year before the name was restored, claims that the name Dar al-ʿUlum never went out of use and there had been a movement to restore it.19 Regardless, that Egypt’s school for Arabic teachers was renamed Dar al-ʿUlum twenty-five years after it was folded into Mubtadiyan School and forty years after the founding of more comprehensive teacher training schools demonstrates that the darʿamiyya retained a distinct sense of identity as the experts on Arabic and Islam within the civil school system, and that this identity was a significant source of pride for them. While the 1880 reforms marked the start of significant changes for Dar al-ʿUlum, execution of many of the other reforms proposed by the 1880s commission were limited by Egypt’s financial difficulties. After 1882, a further limiting factor was British concerns that mass education and higher education could create an educated elite who would

17 18 19

Regardless, the name is pronounced in Egyptian Arabic with the a¯ shortened and omitting the short i after the s: Nasriyya instead of Na¯siriyya. Davies and ˙ 159. ˙ Lababidi, A Field Guide, pp.˙62, 126, ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 102; Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of ˙ Education), Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1903), p. 7. Kalmbach, ‘Training Teachers How to Teach’, esp. pp. 101–2. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 35.

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oppose their control of Egypt. Lord Cromer (1841–1917), who served as the British financial controller in 1878–9 and then consul-general from 1883, significantly restricted spending on education.20 Cromer’s approach to education was motivated by a desire to minimise cost, as well as two beliefs about education itself: first, that education was only valued when it was paid for and, second, that the rise of nationalism in India was linked to the existence of more school graduates than there were openings for government jobs. In his view, some mass education was essential to maintain social order, as it would teach the masses to ‘act rationally’, but too much would upset the class balance and contribute to nationalism and anticolonial resistance.21 As a result, he increased fees, eliminated scholarships, and cut places at all levels of the civil system, which was reorganised into two levels.22 The upper tier contained a small number of places in primary, secondary, and higher schools with the goal of teaching the skills and languages that Egyptians would need to serve in the government bureaucracy, while the lower tier consisted of a large number of places in religious elementary schools aimed at providing basic literacy and functional skills. Egypt’s financial situation – the root cause of British involvement in Egypt – had stabilised enough by the 1890s to increase spending on education. British reports claim that the number of schools run by the government almost quadrupled between 1887 and 1890, and that education spending in 1890 was 24 per cent greater than the year before, though it is important to note that spending increased more in other departments.23 Despite increased funds, education remained far less of a priority than many Egyptian educational experts wanted it to be, with access to education restricted in number as well as location. Furthermore, British official Douglas Dunlop exercised significant influence over educational policies on behalf of Lord Cromer. Dunlop, a former missionary, had arrived in Egypt in the late 1880s to teach English. He was a strict disciplinarian who believed that education should be a rigid, standardised experience. He is 20 21 22 23

Cromer, Modern Egypt, pp. 527–8. Williamson, Education and Social Change, pp. 79–82; Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 314–15. Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization, pp. 122–3; Reid, Cairo University, pp. 18–19. Parliamentary Papers, Egypt. No. 2 (1891), p. 18; Parliamentary Papers, Egypt. No. 3 (1891), pp. 25–6.

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remembered in Egypt for his unbending approach to the execution of pro-British policies, as well as his disdain for Egyptian language and culture.24 Especially controversial were the language policies that he put into place. He was not interested in interacting with local language and culture, nor was he happy about the long-standing cultural and political influence of the French in Egypt. Policies enacted under his watch increased the number of school subjects taught in English, instead of Arabic or French, as well as the number of young Englishmen with little Arabic competency employed as teachers.25 This meant that the cadre of British officials active in Egyptian institutions was no longer limited to advisers at the highest level in each ministry, but also included a substantive number of British employees at lower levels. In this climate, it is not surprising that links between Egypt and England’s monitorial education institutions grew stronger during the 1890s.26 An 1889 agreement – apparently brokered by ʿAli Mubarak – enabled Egyptians to study at the Borough Road Training College, as Joseph Lancaster’s Central School was then known.27 The main focus of this programme was putting small groups of Egyptian teachers through the school’s two-year teacher training programme. Influential alumni of this scheme included educator ʿAtif Barakat and Egyptian nationalist ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish (1872–1929, also known as ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Shawish). Upon returning to Egypt, Barakat worked as a school inspector, wrote a report on elementary education in religious schools (kuttabs), and served as the first director of the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). The school also attracted Egyptian educators as professional visitors. For instance, Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl, a darʿami education official and literary scholar, spent two months in 1892 at the school while completing a study of European publicly funded education. The shift towards English-language instruction was reinforced further by the 1889 opening of the English-language Khedivial 24

25 26 27

Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3; Long, British Pro-Consuls, p. 248; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, p. 291; Szyliowicz, Education and Modernization, pp. 125–6; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 227–31. Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3; Long, British Pro-Consuls, p. 248; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, p. 291. Kalmbach, ‘Training Teachers How to Teach’, pp. 98–100. Report of the British and Foreign School Society (1891), p. 33.

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Teachers’ School as a sister institution to the existing French-language Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School, which appears to be a continuation of the teachers’ school founded in 1880. Yet, despite these developments, Egyptian educational officials maintained the breadth of crosscultural influences through to the end of the nineteenth century, as is shown by the radical overhaul of Dar al-ʿUlum’s pedagogical instruction in 1895, in which the latest in French and continental practice was introduced despite its relative lack of use in England.28 While such diversity was not to last long into the twentieth century, the preservation of such breadth in cross-cultural borrowing until the 1890s ensured that a wide range of cultural influences were present in Egypt at the start of the twentieth century.

***** While Dar al-ʿUlum was consistently Egypt’s most successful teacher training institution, it was fairly small until the turn of the twentieth century. In its first thirty years, up to the 1901–2 academic year, its student body was under (and often much less than) eighty, and its core faculty numbered three or four in the 1870s, and between eight and twelve in the 1880s and 1890s. The total number of graduates in this period was 235. In the early twentieth century, however, its student body increased significantly, passing 100 in 1903–4, 200 in 1905–6, and 300 in 1908–9. The total number of graduates in the twenty years from 1903 to 1922 was 749, meaning the average graduation rate was almost five times greater than the first thirty years of the school.29 Therefore, while the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum ensured that the darʿamiyya placed an increasingly important role within the ranks of government-employed shaykhs in the late nineteenth century, it was not until the early twentieth that their numbers became more significant. While the darʿamiyya may not have represented the majority of instructors in schools with ties to the state – especially with the institution of state-subsidised elementary education in kuttab schools under the British – they held more influential positions than peers who had attended only al-Azhar, dominating the ranks of teacher trainers, textbook authors, and school inspectors. Their growth solidified a shift within the top level of the government-employed, reform-minded shaykhs from the informal, highly personalised cultural capital of 28 29

Kalmbach, ‘Training Teachers How to Teach’, pp. 100–5. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 6–7.

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boundary-straddling religious scholars such as Tahtawi and ʿAbduh to the institutionalised cultural capital of a darʿami shaykh.

Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian Hybridity Dar al-ʿUlum’s hybridisation of Egyptian religious and civil education was an essential part of its mission to bridge the gap that was seen to have opened up between efendi and shaykh instructors within the civil school system. For the school to produce shaykhs who were perceived by the efendiyya as modern, it would need to expose students to the knowledge and habits inculcated by the civil schools, elements they would be expected to embody in front of their students, and that were necessary to be perceived as educated and forward-looking within a modernising Egypt. While Dar al-ʿUlum is the most significant and longest lasting example of civil-religious hybridity in Egyptian education, it was preceded by several smaller examples. First off, there was some hybridisation present within Egypt’s civil schools’ student bodies from the outset. Religious schools were a major source of students for the civil schools at the outset given the focus of the state on opening many more higher schools than primary and secondary schools. While opportunities for reform-minded shaykhs to join a civil school or study in Europe fluctuated throughout the nineteenth century, it is important to remember that students from religious schools were a part of the civil school system long before Dar al-ʿUlum institutionalised a path from religious to civil schooling. A second hybrid element predating the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum is the School of Languages (Madrasat al-Alsun) that was directed by Tahtawi from 1837. The main focus of this school was training the translators who were essential to khedivial efforts to import knowledge from Europe. It was noteworthy in so far as it enabled Egyptians to gain familiarity with European languages and subjects without having to undergo the extreme cultural changes inherent in attending one of the military or military-style schools run by the khedivial state.30 Around 1842, a School of Accounting and a School of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence were also put under Tahtawi’s direction, and all three schools may have merged into one institution 30

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 262, 8.

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based in the Azbakiyya area of Cairo.31 Certainly, the number of students under Tahtawi’s supervision increased notably, from 137 in 1839 to 320 in 1849.32 Initially, the School of Languages had focused on teaching three languages – Arabic, Turkish, and French – alongside mathematics, history, and geography. After the apparent merger, it added courses in both French and Islamic law, the latter taught by religious scholars. That a stand-alone school or a section of the School of Languages taught Hanafi jurisprudence, the type of law used in Egyptian courts, makes it possible that one of its aims was the training of Islamic legal professionals within the framework of a government civil school. If this was in fact the case, it is the first interruption of the monopoly held by religious institutions over the teaching of religious subjects. It would also mean that the educational institutions under Tahtawi’s supervision were intended to play a mediating role not only with respect to language and translation, but also between the religious and civil school systems. That said, this experiment with civil-religious hybridity was relatively short-lived and its impact on the Islamic legal profession seems to have been small. The School of Languages closed in 1851, during the reign of ʿAbbas. After Ismaʿil’s ascension in 1863, it reopened as a school of translation under Tahtawi’s direction and was briefly incorporated into Dar al-ʿUlum in 1885.

Mission By the start of the 1871 Dar al-ʿUlum lecture series, increased demand for teachers made it all the more important to bring religious knowledge into civil schools or increase state control over religious institutions. Dar al-ʿUlum’s mission was to do the former by substituting a focused training to teach primary school subjects and Arabic for the wide – but relatively shallow and unstandardised – expertise across many, largely religious topics provided by al-Azhar. This shift made it easier to produce teachers and educational officials who understood the European-influenced norms and structures that were increasingly important in government institutions as the nineteenth century progressed. Yet Dar al-ʿUlum was not uniformly hybrid across the board. 31 32

Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 264–71. Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, pp. 10, 15. ˙

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The remainder of this section demonstrates that its curriculum and faculty mixed civil and religious, but its structure was decidedly civil. This meant that the experience of attending it would have been roughly comparable to attending one of the other non-military civil higher schools. The importance of hybridity to Dar al-ʿUlum’s mission, and to the trajectories of state-led projects of modernity, is further demonstrated by attempts to expand its mandate to train teachers for religious elementary schools in 1887 and professionals for Islamic courts in 1888, upon the return of ʿAli Mubarak as minister of education. While the first initiative involved only a minor change to the wording of the school’s mission statement,33 the second led to significant changes in the Dar al-ʿUlum entrance exam and curriculum, and may have been behind the hiring of two new shaykhs from al-Azhar.34 This represented a major encroachment upon al-Azhar, as it meant that Dar al-ʿUlum would be training personnel not only for the government bureaucracy but also for positions in religious courts. The initiative failed because the religious scholars in charge of judicial appointments refused to appoint graduates of this new section because they did not want the darʿamiyya, a group of people who already had preferential access to a huge pool of teaching positions, to encroach further upon the jobs available to students trained at higher-level religious schools.35 Dar al-ʿUlum made another attempt to expand into the training of religious elementary school teachers in 1891, when it opened a second section specifically for these teachers with a two-year curriculum that omitted higher-level Arabic and Islamic disciplines. Sami links its closure in 1895 to the doubling in size of Dar al-ʿUlum from fifty to one hundred students a year, a change that implies the intention was still to expand Dar al-ʿUlum’s remit as a teacher training institution.36

33

34

35 36

Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education), Qara¯r min niza¯rat ˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), pp. 3, 7, Arts. ˙ al-maʿa 1, 20. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 5, 7, 8, 22–3; Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, p. 165; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 38. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 5–8, 22; Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, p. 165. Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, Appendix 3, p. 24; ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 27. ˙

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Sources related to Dar al-ʿUlum do not indicate why these expansions were such a priority for Mubarak and other reformers, but inferences can be drawn by looking at the wider context. The year 1888 was several decades into attempts by the Egyptian state to reform and control religious institutions and religious education. Despite the significant logistical challenges facing al-Azhar in the nineteenth century, including declining financial resources and increasing student numbers, reforms introducing civil school-style discipline and organisation were slow to materialise. Between 1863 and 1896, repeated initiatives either failed or fell short of what was needed due to the intervention of sceptical religious scholars, with the exception of two isolated successes.37 First, in 1872, the ʿalimiyya degree was set up, representing one possible way to exit al-Azhar. This degree was granted after twelve years of study and an oral examination on a set list of subjects, and qualified its bearer to teach in religious institutions as a religious scholar (ʿalim, pl. ʿulamaʾ). It represented a significant shift away from the decentralised process of granting certificates (ijaza) and was lamented for narrowing the subjects studied by ambitious students. Second, basic entrance requirements were laid out in an 1885 regulation. These laws were noteworthy because they delineated basic entrance and exit requirements, as well as the skills expected of high-level instructors. However, they did not significantly change the structure or pedagogies used in religious education, nor did they alter how al-Azhar itself functioned.38 That is, neither of these reforms turned al-Azhar into an institution that could reliably produce professionals who would fit seamlessly into the bureaucracies being built by the Egyptian state. This failure not only helps explain the importance of Dar al-ʿUlum to reformers such as Mubarak, but also begins to explain these attempts to expand the scope of the school still further. That said, al-Azhar’s passage of the 1872 and 1885 reform laws provides an important reminder that religious institutions were changing alongside civil ones throughout the nineteenth century, as the result of reforms pioneered by religious scholars, reform-minded shaykhs, and the khedives, and often in response to shifts in the balance of power between these groups. Efforts to standardise and centralise 37 38

Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 2, 11–17, 41–7, 228–9. Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 139–42.

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the administration of religious institutions increased the control of alAzhar and its scholars over many aspects of Egyptian religious affairs, but they also facilitated khedivial intervention in religious affairs. For instance, an 1880 law laying out how shariʿa courts were to be run introduced the position of state mufti, which then led to the appointment of a reform-minded shaykh as Egypt’s first Grand Mufti in 1895. The legal interpretations (fatwas) issued by the state and the Grand Mufti were imbued not only with the scholarly authority of the issuing person, as is the case with all fatwas, but also the authority and power of the state of Egypt.39

Structure As an institution, Dar al-ʿUlum was structurally and administratively similar to other higher schools in the civil system during the late nineteenth century. These schools were organised and run with an emphasis on efficiency, discipline, and standardisation. The early organisational laws for Dar al-ʿUlum reveal the gradual refinement of school procedures for selection and entrance, teaching and evaluation, and final examination and exit of students. Throughout this period, the procedural hoops that applicants, students, instructors, and administrators were supposed to jump through in the discharge of their duties increased significantly. Admissions were handled in a centralised and standardised manner, involving identity verification followed by rigorous intellectual and physical examinations. The former consisted of oral and written exams on a varying array of topics, while the latter was a common feature of the early Egyptian higher school system given its military origins. Age and health requirements were increasingly specified in the first fifty years of the school, excluding students with poor or no visual ability,40 in sharp contrast to the religious school system. The academic progress of the students was structured and standardised. After 1887 (and possibly as early as 1875), they followed a set syllabus that prescribed a progression of courses for each year of study, 39 40

Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, p. 104. Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education): Qara¯r min niza¯rat ˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), p. 5, Art.˙ 14; al-maʿa Qa¯nu¯n Madrasat Qism al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ (1895), p. 3; Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1901), p. 9, Art. 1; Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1903), pp. 9–10, Arts. 3, 4.

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as well as the hours allocated for their study, the weight of the final exam, and the topics to be studied in each course.41 Their progress at each discrete level of study was assessed through periodic examinations, with their end-of-year exams administered by an outside panel appointed by the Ministry of Education.42 The end result was a degree that – regardless of the identity of its holder – signified mastery of a predefined and quantifiable body of knowledge. Finally, the work of teachers was supposed to be regulated and checked by the school director, who was himself monitored by ministry officials. The greatest degree of oversight appears in the 1887 school regulations, which instructed teachers to record whether each class period was actively taught or reading review, and to send a report to the director containing student grades and copies of graded work every six weeks. The director was then supposed to send a list of grades and an account of the moral conduct of students to the ministry every three months.43 On the whole, the increasing specificity of Dar al-ʿUlum’s structure and organisation echoes developments in Egyptian school administration as a whole, with standardisation and bureaucratisation increasing over time. The scarcity of eyewitness descriptions of Dar al-ʿUlum in its early years makes it impossible to know the extent to which these school regulations were carried out in practice. However, the increasing provision for the monitoring of director and teachers seems likely to have increased compliance. By the 1890s, the Egyptian educationalists running the civil school system were certainly more experienced than they were in the 1840s, when discipline at the higher school they ran in Paris fell far short of what was specified in the school regulations.44 41

42

43 44

Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, Appendix 3, p. 45; ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 18–20; ˙ al-taʿlı¯m, p. 587; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and ʿAbd al-Karı¯m, Ta¯rı¯kh Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 48. Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education): Qara¯r min niza¯rat ˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), pp. 7–8, ˙Arts. al-maʿa 26–30; Qa¯nu¯n Madrasat Qism al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ (1895), pp. 5–6, Arts. 11–20; Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1901), pp. 14–17, Arts. 13–21; Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1903), pp. 12–15, Arts. 14–22. See also Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 203–8. Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education), Qara¯r min niza¯rat ˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), p. 7, Art.˙ 21–5. al-maʿa Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 71–4; Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 80–2.

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Curriculum Dar al-ʿUlum’s curriculum was a mix of civil and religious subjects in order to hone students’ already advanced skills in Arabic and Islamic subjects, and to introduce them to basic civil school subjects. The curricular information that is available reveals the hybrid nature of what educational administrators wanted prospective teachers to know upon exiting Dar al-ʿUlum. The subjects studied at Dar al-ʿUlum were a combination of what was studied in religious schools at the time of the school’s founding with subjects that were introduced (or reintroduced) into Egypt in the nineteenth century via European-influenced civil schools. Up to 1890, students spent approximately 40 per cent of their time studying subjects related to Arabic and Islam, and 60 per cent of their time studying subjects taught primarily in the civil school system.45 Dar al-ʿUlum’s curriculum documents reveal a training in Arabic and Islamic sciences focused on subjects almost identical to those at the core of high-level religious education in nineteenth-century Egypt: Arabic grammar and language, tafsir, and fiqh. Dar al-ʿUlum’s curriculum added literature, calligraphy, composition, and, at times, dictation. Calligraphy, composition, and dictation were presumably less important within religious schools due to their emphasis on audiocentric approaches to knowledge. Literature had fallen out of fashion in religious circles by the nineteenth century, but was included in the 1871 lecture series as well as the Dar al-ʿUlum curriculum. Dar al-ʿUlum was behind many of the efforts to reintroduce it. Study of Arabic subjects would enhance the ability of graduates to teach Arabic within the civil system. Whether or not Qurʾan interpretation and Islamic jurisprudence were also included due to their importance to Arabic training remains unclear. The only religious subject included on the civil school curriculum in 1900 was a class in basic theology and worship (al-ʿaqida wa alʿibadat al-islamiyya) at the primary level, yet tafsir and fiqh were a constant feature on the curriculum Dar al-ʿUlum used to train teachers for these schools. 45

See Appendix I for an overview of the curricular information available for Dar al- ʿUlum. See also Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr; Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya ˙ al-maʿa ˙ (Ministry of Education): Qara¯r min niza¯rat ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b ˙ Madrasat Qism al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), Qa¯nu¯n (1895), Bru¯gra¯m qism al-muʿalimı¯n al-ʿarabı¯ (1895).

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The non-religious subjects taught at Dar al-ʿUlum matched almost exactly what was taught in civil schools at the primary and secondary levels. These subjects included mathematics – usually arithmetic, geometry, and algebra – geography, history, drawing, chemistry, physics, astronomy, and the natural or physical sciences, all of which were taught at both levels (except for the sciences, which were secondary only).46 These subjects were not only part of what Dar al-ʿUlum graduates would teach in primary schools, but also what they would have studied and experienced had they themselves attended a civil school instead of a kuttab and madrasa. European languages were a significant omission from the Dar al-ʿUlum curriculum. English and French were taught there only sporadically despite being a significant part of training at the other higher civil schools, as well as at the top tier of primary and secondary schools.47 Training Dar al-ʿUlum students in foreign languages would have been challenging given, first, lack of exposure to European languages among entrants and, second, the large quantity of other material that the school needed to cover, often from scratch or a basic level. Given that the darʿamiyya needed to be sufficiently proficient to teach Arabic and the primary school subjects listed above upon graduation, but would not be called upon to teach foreign languages, it was expedient to leave English and French off the curriculum. However, this left the darʿamiyya at a disadvantage with respect to participating in educational delegations to Europe, as well as working in the higher levels of the educational administration. Also, darʿamiyya who were not proficient in foreign languages could not access European knowledge themselves, as graduates of other higher schools could, but instead were dependent on translators and translations.

Pedagogy and Teaching To fully execute its teacher training mission, Dar al-ʿUlum needed do more than teach shaykhs civil school subjects. It needed to enable them 46

47

See Dar al-ʿUlum curricula cited above and Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya ˙ (Ministry of Education), Bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m al-ibtida ¯ʾı¯ wa bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m altha¯nawı¯ (1900); Heyworth-Dunne, Introduction to the History of Education, pp. 368–9, 430. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 74–5; Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education), Qa¯nu¯n Madrasat Qism˙al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ (1895), p. 4, Art. 8.

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to embody and demonstrate the ocularcentric learning practices and disciplinary habits that they would need to embody and demonstrate for their students, and that were increasingly necessary to be seen as an educated individual in a modernising Egypt. That is, it needed to instil the habitus associated with civil schooling in its students. Therefore, the Dar al-ʿUlum curriculum included subjects linked to instilling order and discipline similar to those taught at primary schools in the civil system. They included, at various points in time, coursework in hygiene, morality, general knowledge (ashyaʿ, lit. ‘things’), refinement (al-tarbiyya wa al-tahdhib), physical education, and military drill.48 Such coursework had no precedent in Egyptian religious schools, at least in the forms taught within civil schools, and instead was linked to the introduction of disciplinary education into Egypt. It would therefore make up a notable part of the embodied knowledge that all teachers, including darʿamiyya, would be expected to demonstrate and pass on as teachers. Exposure to disciplinary norms came not only through coursework in hygiene, morality, general knowledge and order, physical education, and military drill, but also through increasingly structured school procedures which subjected the shaykhs to the practices of order and discipline that they, as teachers in the civil system, would presumably be expected to transmit to their students through embodiment and demonstration, alongside instruction. Upon admission, the lives of the students were monitored and regulated by the school to the extent possible in a non-residential institution. Students were expected to attend regularly and to follow reasonably strict rules and the instructions of teachers, the school director, and the Ministry of Education. It seems discipline was strict, with procedures for handling rule violations increasing over time, throughout the early years of the school.49 Europe is the obvious source of inspiration for this approach to education and teacher training, whether the monitorial schooling advocated by British subjects Lancaster and Bell or the military48 49

Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education), Bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m ˙ al-ibtida ¯ʾi wa bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m al-tha¯nawı¯ (1900). Niza¯rat al-Maʿa¯rif al-ʿUmu¯miyya (Ministry of Education): Qara¯r min niza¯rat ˙ ¯rif al-ʿumu¯miyya tartı¯b Madrasat Dar al-ʿUlum (1887), p. 4 Arts.˙ 7–9; al-maʿa Qa¯nu¯n Madrasat Qism al-Muʿalimı¯n al-ʿArabı¯ (1895), p. 8, Arts. 23–6; Qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m (1903), pp. 11–12, Arts. 20–3; Mashru¯ʿ qa¯nu¯n wa bru¯gra¯m Madrasat al-Muʿalimı¯n al-Na¯sriyya (1911), pp. 11–12, Arts. 20–3. ˙

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influenced schooling advocated by French experts. That said, the overall impact of monitorial schools on Egypt’s civil school system in the nineteenth century has been the subject of much debate among scholars. Timothy Mitchell’s wide-ranging study of colonial power in nineteenth-century Egypt argues for the influence of the monitorial school system, but he has been criticised by Gregory Starrett for providing ‘scant evidence’ for the overall influence of disciplinary education in practice, beyond the initial few establishments.50 Paul Sedra’s claims that monitorial schooling was influential in Egypt in this period are more substantiated, in part due to his focus on a slightly wider term, ‘disciplinary education’, and also due to the evidence he brings to the table about the spread of monitorial education through missionary activities. Sedra’s work documents the impact of monitorial schools run by the English Church Mission Society in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and American Presbyterian missionaries from the 1860s, on reformers within the Coptic community as well as Muhammad ʿAli’s administration.51 While his main body of sources does not address conditions in Egyptian civil schools, Sedra documents the extent of the missionary presence on the ground, their connections with Muhammad ʿAli’s family, their confidence in their ability to influence Muhammad ʿAli, and the adoption in Egyptian schools of texts first published by their press in Malta.52 The influence of British traditions of disciplinary education was reinforced further by the visit of twenty Egyptians to Joseph Lancaster’s Central School in London in the 1820s. Two Egyptians who had studied in England set up a school in 1843 to model Lancaster’s methods, and an 1847 law indicated the government’s intent to set up eight more Lancaster-model schools in Cairo.53 These schools closed in 1849, when ʿAbbas shut down much of the civil school system. French approaches to disciplinary education were also represented on the ground in Cairo, with government-employed advisors from France or elsewhere in Europe who were advocates of French methodologies. These advisors included Bernadino Drovetti and EdméFrançois Jomard during the reign of Muhammad ʿAli and Édouard Dor during the reign of Ismaʿil. As a group, they ensured significant 50 51 52 53

Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, pp. 58–60. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 4–80, esp. 7. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 52, 87–8. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 69, 73–4, 89.

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French influence over where Egyptians studied in Europe. The involvement of military officers and institutions in the two schools for Egyptians in Paris during the reign of Muhammad ʿAli, l’École Franco-égyptienne (1826–36) and l’École Militaire (1844–9),54 ensured the transmission of norms related to French-style disciplinary education. France also hosted over half of the students on official, government-funded missions during the reign of Ismaʿil. A much smaller number of students travelled to England, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.55 The likely inspiration for the return of disciplinary-style education under Saʿid’s rule from 1854, in the form of a programme for army recruits,56 was France, as the school’s supervisor, ʿAli Mubarak, had attended the military school in Paris. One of the most important elements that distinguished a civil school education from its religious counterpart was its intensive focus on ocularcentric pedagogies as well as its use of teaching texts that explained material in accessible language whose meaning-as-read was easy to understand. Direct evidence of ocularcentric teaching methods at Dar al-ʿUlum in its early years is scarce, but the activities of early faculty members make it likely that the school used these new, textfocused approaches to teaching. The full-time faculty of the school initially consisted of three shaykhs – presumably responsible for Arabic, tafsir, and fiqh – who were joined in 1874–5 by two efendiyya teaching mathematics, geography, and calligraphy. The involvement of shaykhs trained at al-Azhar might, by itself, lead to the conclusion that this material was taught using the same approaches and pedagogies used at al-Azhar. This is not necessarily the case, however, as these early shaykhs also had significant connections to reform of thought, education, and language, and included individuals who pioneered clearer and more accessible ways to explain long-standing disciplines. While audiocentric training undoubtedly continued to influence certain aspects of their teaching practice, the explanatory and ocularcentric innovations of these pioneers represent a significant pedagogical shift towards ocularcentrism. Shaykh Husayn al-Marsafi, a leader in the rejuvenation of the study of Arabic literature, served as ‘general teacher’ from Dar al-ʿUlum’s 54 55 56

Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 69, 71–4. Jumayʿi, al-Baʿtha¯t al-ʿilmiyya, p. 94. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 69, 73–4, 89.

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founding in 1872 through to 1888. He had participated in the 1871 lecture series, speaking twice a week on literature.57 From the town of Marsafa and blind since the age of three, al-Marsafi followed in the footsteps of his father and many townsmen to study at al-Azhar, finishing in 1840–5 and going on to teach. He taught for the government first within the School for the Blind and then at Dar al-ʿUlum. He was the highest-paid teacher at Dar al-ʿUlum until 1881 at least.58 Al-Marsafi is widely recognised for his efforts to revive the study of Arabic literature and the art of writing, as well as his clear, lucid explanation of Arabic’s grammatical sciences. His lectures on rhetoric and literature at Dar al-ʿUlum were serialised in the journal The Garden of Schools (Rawdat al-Madaris) and then were published as The Literary Means to the Arabic Sciences (al-Wasila al-adabiyya ila alʿulum al-ʿarabiyya) in two volumes in 1872 and 1875 by the Ministry of Education press at Darb al-Jamamiz.59 Over 900 pages, the volumes discuss a wide range of topics. They reference the linguistic disciplines used at al-Azhar, such as syntax (nahw), clarity of expression (bayan), figures of speech (badiʿ), and rhyme (qafiyya), yet the text is organised by topic instead of commentator. It is also written in explanatory prose interspersed with quotes from literary texts, instead of the metrical verse or word-by-word commentary formats used more commonly in texts taught at al-Azhar. Its focus on literature, especially classical poetry and prose, was unusual, as this topic was not a core part of the curriculum at al-Azhar during the nineteenth century. Husayn alMarsafi’s lectures at Dar al-ʿUlum are widely credited with bringing pre-Islamic and classical forms of literature back into core Arabic curriculum after a long absence at al-Azhar. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were taught on the margins of al-Azhar by another scholar presumably also from Marsafa, Sayyid al-Marsafi. Husayn al-Marsafi’s contribution to the revival and study of Arabic literature is such that that he is described as a notable figure within the nahda renaissance.60 At Dar al-ʿUlum he taught Hifni Nasif, who delivered lectures for the first Egyptian University, and Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl, who taught at Dar al-ʿUlum and Cambridge University. The publication of The Literary Means spread al-Marsafi’s ideas and 57 59 60

Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, p. 24. 58 ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 11, 170. al-Marsafı¯, al-Wası¯la˙ al-Adabiyya. ˙ ʿAbd al-Jawa ¯ d, al-Shaykh al-Husayn ibn Ahmad al-Marsafı¯, pp. 100–1. ˙ ˙ ˙

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approaches beyond Dar al-ʿUlum. Egyptian neoclassical poets such as pro-ʿUrabi stateman Mahmud Sami al-Barudi (1839–1904), Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932), and Muhammad Hafiz Ibrahim (1869/72–1932) used it to familiarise themselves with the classical poetry on which they based their work. The Literary Means also played a wider role in raising consciousness of classical literature, as ʿAbd al-Rahman Shukri (1886–1958) – one of the early twentieth-century authors from the Diwan school, which normally drew inspiration from foreign literature – was apparently swayed by it.61 A wider circle of Dar alʿUlum instructors and graduates contributed further to the development of neoclassical expression and early literary criticism via the journal Garden of Schools. This publication, founded by ʿAli Mubarak and edited by Tahtawi, was influential in the shift away from classical models towards neoclassicism.62 That al-Marsafi was a pioneer in important shifts – organising lectures by theme, delivering them in relatively accessible prose, and distributing them in print form thereafter – is all the more interesting given his blindness and the difficulties he would have faced engaging with conventional written or printed texts. In fact, his support for ocularcentric approaches to texts had its limits. He is best known among historians for his Essay on Eight Words (Risalat al-kalim althaman), which was written in the wake of the 1881 ʿUrabi revolt.63 While al-Marsafi supported the cause of the revolt’s leaders, he did not approve of the way in which Egyptian leaders were using the eight words referenced in his title in the run-up to the revolt: umma (nation, community), watan (fatherland), hukuma (government), ʿadl (justice), zulm (injustice), siyasa (politics), hurriyya (liberty), and tarbiyya (education). This shows that his support for the ocularcentric spread of information had limits: while printed materials were not problematic in and of themselves, he mistrusted the ungoverned proliferation of printed materials and the confusion it created over the meanings of words. Another shaykh from the village of Marsafa who taught at Dar alʿUlum after participating in the initial lecture series was Shaykh Ahmad Sharaf al-Din al-Marsafi. His lectures were on tafsir and hadith, and he 61 62 63

Brugman, Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 26, 326. Brugman, Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 322–3. al-Marsafı¯, Ha¯dhihi Risa¯lat al-kalim al-thama¯n; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 132.˙

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taught tafsir from 1872 to at least 1881, if not later. Before teaching at Dar al-ʿUlum, he had lectured at al-Azhar, where he was said to have taught the premier nationalist of twentieth-century Egypt, Saʿd Zaghlul. He is thought to have died in 1888. Little is known about his teaching style. His two major published works seem to fit within traditional Azhar genres, but they date from before his tenure at Dar alʿUlum,64 and a traditional title does not necessarily signal traditional content. The first two shaykhs who taught Hanafi fiqh at Dar al-ʿUlum, Shaykh ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jizawi and Shaykh Salim ʿAmr alQalʿawi, lasted only one year each.65 They were succeeded by Shaykh Hassuna al-Nawawi, who taught at the school from 1874 until sometime between 1881 and 1895. He also taught jurisprudence at the School of Administration (Madrasat al-Idara), which later became the School of Law (Madrasat al-Huquq), the higher school attended by many of the intellectual and political elite of the constitutional period. He was the highest-ranking religious scholar to teach for a significant amount of time at Dar al-ʿUlum in its first few decades, as he would later serve as the first Grand Mufti of Egypt from 1895 to 1899 and hold the office of Shaykh al-Azhar twice, between 1896 and 1899 as well as 1907 and 1909.66 His appointment as Shaykh al-Azhar and mufti of Egypt can be seen as leading on from this experience teaching in government civil schools, as his actions in post provided significant support for government-led reform of the religious sector.67 Al-Nawawi’s use of new explanatory techniques and ocularcentric teaching materials is shown by the relatively accessible introduction he wrote to Hanafi jurisprudence for the students at the School of Administration, The Staircase for the Seekers of Right Guidance (Kitab sullam al-mustarshidin).68 Leonard Wood’s detailed study of Egyptian legal education notes that the approach used in this book as a whole is not that different from the summary-commentary approaches to law used at al-Azhar.69 The fact that this book wrote 64 65 66 67 68 69

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, al-Shaykh al-Husayn ibn Ahmad al-Marsafı¯, pp. 127–8. ˙ ˙ ˙ ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 11. Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, pp. 3, 5, 111. Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, p. 115. al-Nawa¯wı¯, Kita¯b sullam al-mustarshidı¯n li-ihka¯m al-sharı¯ʿa wa-al-dı¯n. Wood, ‘Reception of European Law, Origins˙ of Islamic Legal Revivalism, and Foundations of Transformations in Islamic Legal Thought in Egypt’, p. 359 n. 20.

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these approaches down in detail in textbook format and included an clear, content-driven introduction, however, represents a significant shift towards new methods of instruction. Al-Nawawi’s commitment to new modes of knowledge transmission, preservation, and access is shown further by his actions as Shaykh al-Azhar and Grand Mufti. He strove to limit the exposure of Azhar students – especially those in their first four years – to the more complex types of commentaries.70 He founded a central library at alAzhar to bring together the myriad collections based in the lodgings (arwiqa, sing. riwaq) for students from particular regions of Egypt and other countries, which facilitated care of and control over the books and manuscripts available to scholars and students. He also founded an institution called Dar al-Iftaʾ (the House of the Mufti) to store a written record of every fatwa issued by the Grand Mufti of Egypt.71 The association between Dar al-ʿUlum and Egyptian reformer Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) is limited but significant, despite common assumptions. ʿAbduh was an Islamic modernist, that is a religious scholar who aimed to make Islam relevant to the new sociocultural and intellectual environments emerging in Egypt. While he was educated at al-Azhar and lectured there before his death, his primary employment while in Egypt was in government institutions. Rumours of his centrality to the development of Dar al-ʿUlum are grossly exaggerated, however. The relationship between ʿAbduh and Dar al-ʿUlum is less one of direct contribution, and more about a shared philosophy of reform involving hybridity, ocularcentrism, and European knowledge. This affinity is demonstrated most significantly by his desire to teach at Dar al-ʿUlum upon his return to Egypt in 1888, after his political activities had led him to be exiled from first Cairo and then Egypt, a request that was denied and led instead to his serving as a judge and eventual appointment as Grand Mufti of Egypt. ʿAbduh was not involved in the founding or early development of Dar al-ʿUlum. He had only just begun attending the study group of mentor and fellow Islamic modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani at al-Azhar in 1872, the year Dar al-ʿUlum was founded, and he did not finish his studies at al-Azhar until 1877. He is not listed as one of the principal teachers 70 71

Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, pp. 118–19. Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, pp. 117–19.

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in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac,72 though it seems that in 1878 he lectured on the philosophy of history using Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, a book not taught at al-Azhar at the time. These lectures are likely to have been the basis for a book that was lost when ʿAbduh went into exile entitled The Philosophy of Society and History (Falsafat al-Ijtimaʿ wa al-Taʾrikh). Even his teaching activities at al-Azhar in this period appear to have been unconventional. For instance, he not only taught books such as Miskawayh’s Treatise on Ethics (Tahdib alAkhlaq) but also the 1877 Arabic translation of Francois Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe and in France, a book that connects political change to developments in thought and society.73 ʿAbduh’s calls for al-Azhar’s curriculum and organisation to be updated, for Islamic sources to be reread and reinterpreted to fit with new circumstances, and for Islamic scholars to actively engage with European ideas, alongside use of printed periodicals to spread ideas beyond those able to attend his lesson circle, not only make him the reformminded shaykh and Islamic modernist par excellence, but also demonstrate his affinity for the sorts of ocularcentric and hybrid approaches that were common at Dar al-ʿUlum. While administrative and pedagogical techniques at Dar al-ʿUlum evolved over time, the influential shaykhs on the faculty in the school’s initial years were actively committed to ocularcentric and accessible forms of explanation in their teaching, in so far as we can judge from the printed versions of their teaching materials. As a group, they were located at the forefront of reform of religious knowledge, education, and institutions. Their involvement with Dar al-ʿUlum establish it firmly as part of the reformist currents that had a significant impact on civil and religious institutions in the final three decades of the nineteenth century, currents that facilitated the development of the nahda renaissance. As individuals, they transmitted religious knowledge from within a civil school framework. In doing so, they modelled ways to live and work with a hybrid background, as highly educated shaykhs who did not necessarily fit entirely into either category, shaykh or efendi, yet could still be significant contributors to the Egyptian project of modernity.

72 73

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 1–232, esp. 11, 24, 30, 172. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp. 8–12, 16–17, 72.

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Location The locations occupied by Dar al-ʿUlum between 1872 and 1981 are another way in which the school provided a hybrid experience to its students. The school was located in Darb al-Jamamiz until 1896–7, initially in the Dar al-ʿUlum lecture theatre and then in other locations as of autumn 1874, except for a brief period starting in 1882 when, as part of its incorporation into the new School of Teachers, it occupied the palace in ʿAtaba that later held the National Courts (Mahkama alAhliyya).74 For the 1896–7 academic year, Dar al-ʿUlum moved to premises adjacent to the Mubtadiyan School in Nasriyya that included chemistry laboratories and space for scientific tools and library books. In October 1901, the school moved to new buildings that it would occupy for the rest of its tenure as an independent school and its first four decades (1946–81) as a department of the university, with only a short break during the First World War, when it was used by the British Army. These buildings initially housed a canteen, library, facilities for science classes, and a place for prayer. The premises were expanded over the years, most notably with the addition of a second floor containing a drawing room, an auditorium, and further instructional space, and the construction of space for the Preparatory School after 1920.75 At first glance, Darb al-Jamamiz appears to be located within the older, mostly walled section of the city to the east of the Bur Saʿid canal, while ʿAtaba and Munira are among the new Europeaninfluenced neighbourhoods built to the west of the canal starting in the reign of Khedive Ismaʿil. However, all of these locations were in fact located in or near the hybrid borderlands in between these older and newer sections of the city.76 The Darb al-Jamamiz palace complex was an eighteenth-century development inserted into the fabric of Islamic Cairo as the Birkat al-Fil pond was infilled. Dar al-ʿUlum’s temporary location in ʿAtaba near the Azbakiyya Gardens might appear entirely European, as this area had wide, tree-lined streets filled with new European-style residential and commercial buildings. European travellers described it as an environment ‘worthy of any second-class European town’, and ‘the most elegant public place in Cairo, perhaps in Egypt’.77 Unseen or unnoticed, however, were the 74 76 77

Abd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 101–2. 75 Abd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 102–3. See the section ‘Translation and Transition in Cairo’s Borderlands’ of Chapter 1. McCoan, Egypt As It Is, pp. 51–2; Wylie, Egypt and Its Future.

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Figure 2.1 Map of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, showing locations of Dar al-ʿUlum. Dar al-ʿUlum’s first, second, third, and fourth locations (1871–1901) were in the borderlands between old and new, with the second and fourth on the supposedly new side of the canal. In 1901, it moved into buildings built specifically for it that were only a few blocks west of the borderlands. By this point, the canal had been mostly covered over to create a street with a tram running down it. This new, fifth site was approximately halfway between al-Azhar, the religious school where many of its students studied previously, and the campus built for the Egyptian University in the 1920s in Giza, where it relocated in 1981. Source: based on ‘Le Caire (Masr El-Kaira)’ in Baedeker’s Egypt: Handbook for Travellers; Plan général de la ville du Caire et des environs.

nearby popular neighbourhoods existing in social symbiosis with the European-style buildings that in many cases concealed or obscured them.

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In the late 1890s, Dar al-ʿUlum moved to a building next to the Mubtadiyan School in Nasriyya, to the west of the former locations of both the Birkat al-Fil pond and the Bur Saʿid canal. Yet even this area was not newly built in the nineteenth century. From 1868, the Mubtadiyan School was located in one of several large houses built by the Mamluks in the late eighteenth century that were requisitioned under the French to house expedition officers and the Institut d’Egypte, and later turned into Egypt’s first civil primary school during the rule of Muhammad ʿAli. Since the construction of the canal in 1324, wealthy residents of Cairo suffering from the summer heat escaped to houses with gardens and orchards adjoining the canal. The house occupied by the Mubtadiyan School was built in the late eighteenth century by Ibrahim Katkhuda al-Sinnari – complete with gardens, rooms arranged around a courtyard, and windows covered with wooden mashrabiyya screens.78 The purpose-built premises that Dar al-ʿUlum occupied in Munira between 1901 and 1981 was just outside of the borderlands. It lay halfway between al-Azhar and the Giza location where a campus would be built for the Egyptian University in the 1920s. Though it was only a few blocks away from the al-Sinnari house, this new area was dominated by a regular, orderly street grid of wide, tree-lined boulevards, villas, and apartment buildings built in European styles, and had amenities like gas lamps, street cars, and water and electricity lines.79 The two schools were given large plots on which they could construct buildings immediately adjoined not by other buildings, but by school yards. Dar al-ʿUlum’s westward movement, from the Darb al-Jamamiz palace complex to ʿAtaba and then Nasriyya within Cairo’s borderlands, and then to its own buildings in Munira in the early twentieth century just outside of these borderlands, parallels the gradual way in which its graduates integrated religious knowledge into Europeaninfluenced civil spaces.80 It was only in 1981, when Dar al-ʿUlum moved to a two-storey concrete building surrounding two tree-planted 78 79 80

Maury, ‘Conserving and Restoring the Harawi and Al-Sinnari Houses in Cairo’, pp. 29–31. McCoan, Egypt As It Is, pp. 56–7. On the contrast between the two, see Wylie, Egypt and Its Future, pp. 108–9. A similar point is made by Aroian in ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 52–5.

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Figure 2.2 North wing of Dar al-ʿUlum’s new buildings with student body, around 1901. This image, taken around the time Dar al-ʿUlum’s new buildings were opened, shows the students dressed as shaykhs. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 37.

courtyards on the university’s premises in Giza, that it put down roots in an unequivocally modern part of Cairo. So, to sum up, the locations Dar al-ʿUlum occupied as a higher school – similar to its curricula – mixed elements of old and new, even if many of these neighbourhoods appeared at first glance to be entirely European in architecture and lifestyle. In terms of what it taught and where it was located, Dar al-ʿUlum maintained solid connections to Egypt’s older traditions, yet it slowly and subtly moved west – in terms of physical location and intellectual orientation – throughout its seventy-four-year history as a higher school. As a result, Dar al-ʿUlum’s students and faculty would have been among the Egyptians who crossed the boundaries between new and old quarters of the city – living, studying, working, or spending their leisure time in these borderlands that were neither entirely Egyptian nor European. In the eyes of many Europeans, the Egyptians crossing these boundaries were inauthentic and unnatural because they refused to stay within the confines of the traditional spaces, professions, lifestyles, and modes of dress that European discourses condemned as inferior, yet romanticised. Within this group, Dar al-ʿUlum’s students and

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Figure 2.3 Dar al-ʿUlum’s buildings in 1942. This image shows Dar al-ʿUlum’s yards and balconies packed with people watching sports in 1942, after a second storey was added to the buildings shown in Figure 2.2. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 104.

graduates would presumably have been even more aberrant, as they brought a much larger share of the traditional into their version of Egyptian modernity. Yet it is precisely the boundary crossing and straddling of these Egyptians, and the ways in which they mixed old and new, that enabled them to contribute significantly to the development of an explicitly Egyptian modernity.

Hybridity, Authenticity, and Sociocultural Change By 1900, religious-civil hybridity was well embedded within the Egyptian education system. Dar al-ʿUlum was the oldest of a group of teacher training institutions and had established a unique identity at the nexus of two evolving traditions of education. The degree to which it institutionalised hybridity was unusual within the wider context of European-influenced education reform in the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt was the first Middle Eastern state to introduce Europeaninfluenced civil schooling. Following in the footsteps of its vassal Egypt,

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the Ottoman central government opened new military and civil schools such as Mekteb-i Ulum-i Harbiyye (School of Military Sciences, 1834) and Mekteb-i Sultani (or Galatasaray Lycée, 1868) in Istanbul, and a Sultani Lycée each in Beirut (1883) and Damascus (1885). At the end of the century, the Ottomans opened the A¸siret Mekteb-i Hümayun (Imperial School for Tribes, 1892) in Istanbul and Maktab ʿAnbar (1893) in Damascus.81 Outside of the Ottoman Empire, new European-influenced schools included Iran’s Dar al-Funun (the House of Arts, 1851) and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College founded in Aligarh, India, by Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1877).82 Many of these institutions included some degree of hybridity – for instance, some level of instruction in Arabic or Islam, along with instructors qualified in these subjects – but none integrated religious subjects and expertise into the educational system to the same degree as Dar al-ʿUlum. The closest institution to Dar al-ʿUlum is Tunis’ Sadiqi College, which was founded by reformer Khayr al-Din prior to colonial rule in 1875. Sadiqi College was also created as part of efforts to reform religious educational institutions – in this case, Tunis’ Zaytuna Mosque – and it taught a mixture of Islamic and European subjects within a Europeaninfluenced school structure.83 However, it did not provide higher education or teacher training, but instead a general secondary education. While Dar al-ʿUlum produced teachers and lower-level administrators, Sadiqi College’s alumni include many prominent twentieth-century Tunisian nationalist leaders. The school is therefore more comparable to another of Egypt’s higher schools, the School of Law. By training teachers and lower-level administrators for the civil school system, Dar al-ʿUlum’s influence on the construction of Egyptian national culture was less prominent, but more significant in the long term. The connection between Dar al-ʿUlum and the advancement of the projects of modernity preferred by the khedivial state has been the subject of much debate. Creating an institution whose aim was the production of reform-minded shaykhs gave the khedivial state much more influence over the intellectual and corporal formation of this group of people – that is, over their habitus. From this point onwards, Islamic knowledge was no longer purely the domain of the 81 82 83

Provence, ‘Ottoman Modernity, Colonialism, and Insurgency’; Rogan, ‘Abdulhamid II’s School for Tribes’. Ekhtiar, ‘The Da¯r al-Funu¯n’. Green, The Tunisian Ulama; Sraïeb, Le Collège Sadiki de Tunis.

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religious institutions, but also played a key role in the Egyptian school system and the state-led projects of modernity and nation-building which it supported. Historian Lois Aroian argues that Dar al-ʿUlum’s primary importance to Egyptian education efforts lies in its role as a modernising transitional institution that played an important role in the nationalisation – or bringing under state control – of the study of Arabic and Islamic subjects.84 Gregory Starrett’s work on religion, education, and state in Egypt highlights the potential perils of this strategy. His Putting Islam to Work combines ethnographic data from the 1980s and 1990s with historical material from 1882 onwards to describe how the Egyptian state attempted to use Islam as a tool. Two processes were key: objectification, or simplifying Islam into a ‘coherent set of practices and beliefs’ that must be understood and justified; and functionalisation, defined as processes of translation in which intellectual objects from one discourse come to serve the strategic or utilitarian ends of another discourse. This translation not only places intellectual objects in new fields of significance, but radically shifts the meaning of their initial context. In the Egyptian case, a whole series of existing religious discourses have been reified, systematized in novel fashion, and set to work fulfilling the strategic and utilitarian ends of the modern and secular discourses of public policy. Traditions, customs, beliefs, institutions, and values that originally possessed their own evaluative criteria and their own rules of operation and mobilisation became consciously subsumed by modern-educated elites to the evaluative criteria of social and political utility.85

The basic idea is that the Egyptian state created a pared-down version of Islam and then ‘put it to work’ to advance its strategic goals. Dar al-ʿUlum’s history provides further evidence of the relevance of these concepts to state-led reform of religious education in semicolonial and colonial Egypt. This book reveals that it was teachers trained at Dar al-ʿUlum who facilitated the objectification and functionalisation of Islam before 1952 through their efforts to present the core tenets of Islam within the framework of Egyptian civil schooling. That is, it was the darʿamiyya, acting on the instructions of elite nationalist 84 85

Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 330; Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, p. 60. Starrett, Putting Islam to Work, pp. 9–10.

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politicians, who set the stage for the Islamic revivalism of the 1930s and since the 1970s. Yet the significance of Dar al-ʿUlum and its hybridity goes far beyond the practical and the political. Documents discussing the school’s foundation demonstrate that the mixing of elements from the two systems was not an accidental by-product of its position within Egyptian education, but instead was a conscious choice on the part of its founders to give shaykhs a civil school-style education. The goal behind exposing shaykhs to civil school subjects and approaches was not necessarily to turn them into efendiyya, but to produce shaykhs who understood and embraced both the putatively modern and unmodern aspects of Egyptian education. That said, Dar al-ʿUlum was not a unidirectional route to a modern social status – plain and simple – but something much more complex: a place that equipped students to ‘be modern’ like the efendiyya, while furthering and celebrating Egypt’s linguistic and religious heritage. In other words, the objectification and functionalisation of Islam by the Egyptian state before 1952 was more complex and less cynical than Starrett posits. This is not only due to the wide range of actors trying to influence the Egyptian state during the constitutional period, but also because the use of Islam in the education system before 1952 was not motivated primarily by functional concerns but by a sense that Islamic knowledge was important in and of itself. In a period of sweeping change, Islamic knowledge and expertise provided Egyptians with an authentic connection to their past, as well as a means to push back against colonial discourses that asserted the inferiority of Islamic religion and Egyptian culture. It was this earlier, less cynical integration of Islamic knowledge and expertise into state institutions that created the conditions that facilitated the narrower, post-1952 functionalisation of Islam described by Starrett. The history of Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates discussed in the remainder of this book demonstrates that educational institutions in colonial and postcolonial contexts can be seen not only as avenues for top-down social control or as the creators of demand for religious knowledge better fulfilled by organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as demonstrated by Starrett, but also as sites of resistance themselves. Graduates of hybrid schools not only played a central role in advancing and authenticating projects of modernity championed by high-level state administrators or foreign organisations, but also were

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at the forefront of presenting alternatives to state visions for national culture. The integration of Islamic knowledge into education in the late nineteenth century not only created space for Islamic thought and practice in social and political discourse, but also meant that state institutions and employees could facilitate the emergence and spread of such alternative visions. Visions for Egyptian modernity and nationalism that included a significant role for Islamic thought and practice were not merely a reaction to state-led reform but also a product of it.

Conclusion: Dar al-ʿUlum and Egypt’s Projects of Modernity This chapter focuses on the deliberate introduction of civil-religious hybridity into the civil school system via the foundation of Dar alʿUlum in 1872. Dar al-ʿUlum’s practical function is obvious: to produce better-qualified Arabic and primary school teachers for an expanding civil school system. Less obvious, but just as important, was its mission to bridge the gap in understanding that had emerged between teachers trained in civil versus religious schools in the late nineteenth century. That is, it was supposed to increase mutual understanding among the shaykhs and efendiyya working within the civil school system. Dar al-ʿUlum fulfilled these goals by providing top students from religious schools with a crash course in the subjects and habitus of the civil school system, alongside advanced training in how to apply their specialist knowledge in Arabic and Islamic subjects to teaching in a civil school. The faculty was mixed, with experts in religious and civil subjects, but the school was run using the disciplinary structures and ocularcentric pedagogies of a civil school. This institutionalisation of hybridity within the Egyptian civil school system – and more broadly within Egypt’s projects of modernity – had an impact that went far beyond education. Dar al-ʿUlum’s integration of Islamic knowledge into state-run projects of modernity was instituted not merely to ‘put Islam to work’ for the khedivial state but also because of the valued placed on the authentic connection to Egypt’s past provided by Islamic knowledge in a time and place where European hegemony was radically reshaping state, society, and culture. An unintended consequence of Dar al-ʿUlum’s hybridity was the socio-economic and sociocultural opportunities it offered to its students. As a school, it formalised and institutionalised the process for becoming a reform-minded, government-employed shaykh. Not only

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did this provide a route to salaried work independent of al-Azhar, but also gave students from religious schools a claim to the cultural capital and habitus of the civil school system that was backed by a school certificate. The growing acceptance of colonial critiques of Islam and Islamic education towards the end of the nineteenth century lowered the sociocultural value of the cultural capital obtained from a religious education at the same time that expansion and increased regulation of civil schools was making it harder to move back and forth between the two systems. This development presented shaykhs who aspired to government employment, to contributing to projects of modernity, or simply to ‘being modern’ with a dilemma that could best be solved by attending a hybrid school such as Dar al-ʿUlum.

***** The remainder of this book explores the impact of Dar al-ʿUlum on Egyptian state, society, and culture. Dar al-ʿUlum cannot match the record of other higher schools or Tunis’ Sadiqi College with respect to producing high-ranking government officials. However, its graduates would become deeply embedded in the lower and mid-level ranks of the education system, working as teachers, school directors, school inspectors, and teacher trainers. As a result, they were well placed to use the cultural and social capital from their education to integrate hybridity into the Egyptian project of modernity in ways that were subtle but influential and lasting. The following chapters focus on the many ways in which darʿmiyya used the hybrid cultural capital provided by their education to shape Egyptian national culture. The techniques of discipline and order practised at Dar al-ʿUlum introduced students to new ideas and practices, highlighted the boundary between the embodied knowledge of civil and religious systems, and contributed to the embedding of sociocultural categories such as shaykh and efendi. However, instead of reinforcing this boundary and making it more difficult to cross – as much of the civil school system did – Dar al-ʿUlum provided students with hybrid cultural capital that enabled them to cross or straddle it in ways that were socially and politically meaningful. At a time of increasing self-segregation between these two groups of educated Egyptians, Dar al-ʿUlum not only bridged but also merged civil and religious educational paths in interesting and productive ways. It therefore contributed not to the reinforcing and policing of boundaries but instead to

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the transcendence of sociocultural divisions drawn between graduates of the civil and religious schools. Darʿamiyya made significant contributions to state-led projects of modernity as teachers, educational administrators, and school inspectors. Individuals such as Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl (1862–1904), Hifni Nasif (1856–1919), and ʿAli al-Jarim (1881–1949) actively contributed to the revival of Arabic literature and the reform of the Arabic language in ways that retain a strong connection with past practices, including as early members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya al-Malaki) and through their alumni association (Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum) and its journal, Sahifat Dar al-ʿUlum. Other notable darʿami activists include spiritualist Tantawi Jawhari (1862–1940), caliphate activist Muhammad Madi Abu al-ʿAzaʾim (1869–1937), and nationalist ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish. Other darʿamiyya used their cultural capital to establish more explicitly religious alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. These include Hasan al-Banna (1906–49), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun), and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani (1909–77), founder of The Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb al-Tahrir alIslami), two organisations that still have transnational reach today, as well as Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), an intellectual and school official who joined the Brotherhood out of a concern for social justice and was radicalised in prison after the 1952 Free Officer Revolution. These leaders used their hybrid educational backgrounds to establish themselves as social and religious leaders. Their example, institutionalised within their organisations, established a new form of religious leadership, the new religious or lay intellectual, that was accessible to individuals without significant religious education.86 The ideas and initiatives of many of these graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum outlasted and outreached those of prominent graduates of more prestigious civil schools, such as Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal. It was the civil-religious hybridity introduced by the Egyptian state into its projects of modernity in the late nineteenth century that enabled such alternative projects of modernity to rival in influence those advocated by the state. 86

Kalmbach, ‘Blurring Boundaries’.

3

Hybridity, Islamic Knowledge, and the Formation of Egyptian National Culture, 1882–1922

I will seize the opportunity to state the standing of this school in my own opinion, and what I consider to be its place in the Egyptian country and the Arabic language. Truly the people still remember the Arabic language, and the neglect of its citizens in its reform, and they charge the government with failing to protect its mandate. I have never heard them be just to this school, nor do they remember it as being one of the positive contributions of the government. If a meticulous researcher wanted to know where the Arabic language is dead and where it lives, he would find her dead in all places but living in this place. The highest service in presenting the Arabic language, in facilitating paths to receive it, and writing some of the books that are used by teachers in primary schools has been done by its graduates, who are the teachers of the primary and secondary schools. A rational person does not doubt that the students of these schools write and express themselves better than their teachers wrote and expressed themselves previously. This school is worthy of the protection of your excellencies. The cap on its student numbers should be raised, and [the school should be able] to choose for itself how to take [its students] to the limit of what is demanded of teachers in this captive Egyptian country, especially with respect to the Arabic language and the religious arts.1 Praise of Dar al-ʿUlum from a report written by Muhammad ʿAbduh in 1904 in his role as chair of examiners, as quoted in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac in 1952

That the Islamic modernist and educational reformer Muhammad ʿAbduh heralded Dar al-ʿUlum instead of al-Azhar as the home of Arabic in Egypt is remarkable. By 1904, when ʿAbduh is said to have written the passage above, Dar al-ʿUlum had been present in various 1

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 543–4; emphasis added.

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forms for thirty-two years and was under pressure to increase the size of its graduating class. Yet in size and international reputation, it was no match for al-Azhar. Understanding why ʿAbduh heralded Dar alʿUlum instead of al-Azhar as essential to the future of Arabic, and why Arabic was so important to a modernist reformer such as ʿAbduh is crucial to explaining how religious expertise – and a wide range of religious experts – came to occupy such a central place within a self-consciously modern Egyptian nation.

***** The four decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century (1882– 1922) are primarily known as a period of British occupation and the era in which Egyptian nationalism came into its own. While the highest British official in Egypt, Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer from 1892), only held the title of British consul-general for most of this period, he and his successors exercised effective control over Egypt from 1882. While Egypt’s khedive and government officials remained in place and the British Advisor in each ministry was supposed to function only as guide and mentor, the Granville Doctrine shifted the balance of power away from the Egyptian ministers and their staff early in the occupation. This doctrine enabled the removal of any Egyptian minister who did not enact British policy, and facilitated the transfer of administrative habits developed in India, where British officials made binding decisions instead of giving advice.2 In the latter years of Cromer’s rule, the role of British officials expanded further, with administrative positions increasingly given to British instead of Egyptian candidates and English supplanting Arabic as the language of power within Egyptian ministries. The situation was further exacerbated by Cromer turning increasingly to Europeans and Turko-Circassians, instead of Egyptianborn Muslims, as collaborators.3 During this period, two strands of nationalism emerged out of the milieu of notables and intellectuals from which a consultative assembly was drawn, starting in 1883. Nationalist hopes increased in the 1890s with the accession of a new khedive, ʿAbbas Hilmi II (r. 1892–1914) and were spread by Egypt’s newspapers. The ideas of the National Party of Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) were expressed in al-Liwa from 1900. As Kamil’s rhetoric grew increasingly strident, nationalists who 2 3

Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt and Cromer, pp. 56–8, 80. Hunter, Power and Passion in Egypt, pp. 169–71.

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wanted to take a more moderate approach broke off to found the Umma Party, whose perspectives were printed in al-Jarida from 1907. Education policies were a key issue around which dissatisfaction coalesced, especially from the 1890s. While the restriction on school places introduced in the 1880s due to financial and political concerns were relaxed slightly, especially at the lowest levels of schooling, the anglophone policies of a key British official working within the Ministry of Education, Douglas Dunlop, angered nationalists. Dunlop not only increased the number of school subjects taught in English, instead of Arabic or French, but also employed large numbers of young Englishmen with little competency in Arabic as teachers.4 From 1885, a national regime of weekly and termly examinations was established to increase centralised control over schooling. Given the shift from Arabic to English, the 1888 school inspection was done by British officials who were controlled (in practice) by Cromer.5 These policies made it difficult for nationalists to put the project of modernity built by Egypt’s khedives and their experts over the previous seventy years at the service of a second project, the spread of Egyptian national consciousness. Furthermore, British officials made it clear that they would not facilitate Egyptian independence until they perceived significant capacity to rule among locally born Egyptians. The TurkoCircassian dhawat who had ruled Egypt for centuries were considered inappropriate rulers of an independent Egypt because they had shown authoritarian tendencies and were likely to be pro-French. Yet it was especially difficult for locally born Egyptians to develop and demonstrate competence as rulers because Cromer considered Egyptian Muslims of all classes to be dishonourable and would only appoint Turko-Circassians to high-level positions. Cromer singled out nationalist activists for particular scorn. He obscured the growth of nationalism in the 1890s in his reports and considered nationalist leaders to be obtuse and immature zealots who were incapable of governing and without popular support. In Cromer’s assessment, the only way for Egypt to retain its independence was through acceptance of Christian norms and values after decades of tutelage and education.6 Cromer’s insistence on the inculcation of 4 5 6

Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, pp. 291–2; Long, British Pro-Consuls, p. 248. Shanu¯da, Saʿd Zaghlu¯l, na¯zir al-maʿa¯rif. Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt and˙Cromer, pp. 31–3, 58–66, 164–6.

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foreign ideas and practices with little adaptation, translation, or hybridisation, combined with the restriction of school places, hiring British instead of European officials, and promotion of the use of English over Arabic and French in the education system, made it difficult for Egyptians to obtain the education and experience colonial officials touted as necessary for independence and self-determination. Egyptian nationalists were not able to expel the British or establish robust checks on khedivial power before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but they realised a number of small victories. In 1902, Cromer was forced by nationalist pressure to put his educational policies in Egypt down in writing.7 The nationalist cause grew further after the Dinshawaʾi incident in 1906, a conflict that began with British officers shooting pigeons raised by the villagers of Dinshawaʾi and then firing upon the crowd that gathered to protest. The villagers were punished as if they were rebelling instead of defending themselves and their interests, which increased hostility towards the British within Egypt. In the aftermath of the conflict, the khedive attempted to Egyptianise the cabinet, including by appointing nationalist Saʿd Zaghlul (1858–1927) as minister of education in October 1906. To the end of his tenure in February 1910, Zaghlul clashed with Douglas Dunlop over free access to civil schools, increasing instruction in Arabic, improving the status of Egyptian educationalists, and limiting abuse of power by English instructors serving as managers.8 His ability to achieve these goals appears to have increased slightly with the change of British consul-general in April 1907. The new consul, Eldon Gorst, continued many practices instituted by Cromer, including the advisor system, but was more in favour of expanding education and involving native-born Egyptians in governance. One of Gorst’s first actions as consul was to sit down to mediate between Zaghlul and Dunlop in May 1907. As a result, the number of classes taught in Arabic increased significantly at all levels of civil schooling, while students in primary schools spent more time studying religion. This bargain also introduced a new class called ‘national education’ that allowed Egyptians to provide historical narratives that contrasted with the imperial-influenced accounts taught in history and geography classes. 7 8

Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 314. Shanu¯da, Saʿd Zaghlu¯l, Na¯zir al-Maʿa¯rif, p. 84. ˙

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Another nationalist success was the founding of the Egyptian University in 1908. It was run as a private institution, with support from subscriptions. It demonstrated its independence by establishing a faculty made up almost entirely of non-British Europeans and Egyptians. The latter included darʿamiyya such as Hifni Nasif, Muhammad al-Mahdi, Muhammad al-Khudara, Sultan Muhammad, and Tantawi Jawhari teaching subjects such as Arabic literature, Islamic history, and Arabic philosophy and morality.9 These changes enabled nationalists working for the khedivial state to place the educational institutions advancing state-led projects of modernity to work spreading nationalism. This chapter reveals that the importance of the first forty years of the British occupation of Egypt goes far beyond the emergence of nationalism. More important in the long term has been the ways in which Islamic knowledge was embedded into Egyptian projects of modernity as a result of nationalists’ determination to create a state, society, and culture that met European standards yet was uniquely Egyptian. The importance that nationalists such as Saʿd Zaghlul placed on reinforcing Arabic and Islam within the Egyptian education system cemented the status of the darʿamiyya as authoritative arbiters of how to combine local and foreign, civil and religious, and rural and urban early in the twentieth century. The importance of hybrid civil-religious capital to projects of modernity and nation-building encouraged religious schools’ students to seek a place at Dar al-ʿUlum or, from 1907, its short-lived sister institution the School for Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat alQadaʾ al-Sharʿi). This in turn added crucial weight to efforts to reform al-Azhar and the upper levels of Egyptian religious schooling. In this light, it is less surprising that ʿAbduh placed Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates at the forefront of Arabic knowledge and practice. During the protectorate, when Egyptians were largely united in their opposition to the Anglophile cultural policies of British colonialism, the contributions made by darʿamiyya to the renewal and reform of Arabic, Islamic knowledge, and education were welcomed and lauded by the emerging nationalist elite. In other words, it was the darʿamiyya and a handful of other reform-minded shaykhs who provided the hybrid linguistic and cultural resources necessary to articulate a national culture for Egypt. 9

Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, pp. 54–5. ˙

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Dar al-ʿUlum and Sociocultural Change British colonial policies, and the nationalist response to them, injected new impetus into the hybridisation of local and foreign bodies of knowledge. The active interference of British officials accelerated acceptance of an idea sown during Ismaʾil’s rule: that Egyptian religion, culture, and religious education were inferior to those of Europe. This occurred at the same time as nationalists wanted to use Arabic and Islamic knowledge to resist British domination and create a national culture for Egypt that was modern and authentic. The juxtaposition of these two factors led to a bifurcation in Egypt’s projects of modernity and created a dilemma for ambitious students studying in religious schools such as al-Azhar. For most of the nineteenth century, Egypt’s khedives and their officials engaged in cross-cultural exchange with the goal of enabling Egypt to compete on a global stage. The synthesis of local and foreign ideas, practices, and technologies was seen by many within government – and especially the shaykhs employed to do the hybridisation – as a natural way to achieve this goal. ʿAli Mubarak’s goal of using Dar alʿUlum to increase understanding between efendiyya and shaykhs teaching in civil schools demonstrates that both were highly valued within state-led projects of modernity. By the 1890s, colonial representations of local religion, culture, and knowledge practices had been internalised such that Egyptian reformers used cross-cultural exchange to pursue two distinct sets of goals. First, the adoption of European ideas, practices, and technologies related to discipline, order, and ocularcentrism increased in importance in order to address the supposed disorder of Egyptian state and society. However, this did not result in an Egypt that looked identical to Europe. Colonial critiques also galvanised Egyptian reformers, who worked to reform and renew Egyptian religion and culture, and then fought to consolidate and expand their place within a self-consciously modern Egyptian nation. The end goal remained the creation of a future for Egypt that deliberately diverged from – but was as modern as – the European model. The intellectual and cultural movements at the heart of the second initiative – the reform and renewal of Egyptian religion and culture – included Islamic modernism and the flourishing of literary and cultural production that is known as the nahda, or renaissance. Many of the Egyptians involved in the nahda were also avid nationalists, but this renaissance was not the

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only tool at their disposal. Nationalists also fought the khedive and British officials to place the institutions associated with state-sponsored projects of modernity at the service of spreading various projects of nationalism. The role of state institutions and employees in the emergence of the nahda has been overlooked by scholars who have, first, focused on the flourishing of intellectual discourse among the efendiyya who came of age around the turn of the twentieth century and, second, assumed that Britain’s control over high-level decision-making meant that state resources were not used to spread nationalism. However, attention to the history of the darʿamiyya reveals that, throughout this period, the middle and lower levels of the state bureaucracy – and especially educational institutions – made significant contributions to the reform and renewal of Egyptian culture and, by extension, projects of nation-building. The renewal of Arabic language and literature was not effected only at the hands of Egypt’s rising intellectual elite, but also through the actions of darʿami educationalists deriving new ways for Arabic to be taught, studied, and constituted as a language. Similarly, the renewal of Islam occurred not only through the discourse of the Islamic modernists but also through the actions of grass-roots associations, or jamʿiyyat (sing. jamʿiyya), that promoted a range of religious practices, including spiritualism. Spiritualism, a religious movement that emerged in the 1840s in the United States and later spread elsewhere, involves a belief in spirits and efforts to talk to them through a medium, during either religious services or associational meetings. Many of these activities could only be undertaken with support from individuals with strong ties to religious schooling, an understanding of projects of modernity, and access to employment outside of longstanding religious institutions – that is, individuals with sufficient capital to cross and straddle the boundaries between local and foreign, religious and civil, and rural and urban. In Egypt, this combination of capital was held only by reform-minded shaykhs in government employment, a group in which the darʿamiyya held an important and central position by the turn of the twentieth century.

Becoming a Reform-Minded Shaykh These dynamics played out on the individual as well as the collective level. The rise of the efendi as the new ideal learned person, and the

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darʿami as the ideal synthesiser of the civil and the religious, left ambitious students enrolled in religious schools with few options and difficult choices. Before the creation of the civil school system, Egyptians who spent decades studying in religious institutions would leave with sufficient cultural capital to establish themselves as respected authorities mediating the knowledge they had mastered to wider state and society, whether as a high-ranking scholar (ʿalim), legal interpreter (mufti), judge (qadi), or a lower-ranking prayer leader (imam), preacher (daʿi), elementary school (kuttab) teacher, or reciter of the Qurʾan.10 However, the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum in 1872 cut into the jobs available to shaykhs, while the internalisation of European norms towards the end of the nineteenth century undercut their sociocultural standing, all around the same time that it became more difficult to move between religious and civil school systems. Many of the students in the religious system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century may not have had the option of pursuing an education in the civil system. The hardening of the boundaries between civil and religious education that started during Ismaʿil’s rule made access to the highest level of civil education uneven and unequal, especially when compared to the religious system. Furthermore, only the top tier of civil schooling taught the subjects necessary to enter the highest levels of the civil education system. Even when they lived in the vicinity of a suitable civil school, families may not have been able to pay the fees or buy the uniforms often required by these schools, especially given that they were already losing income by keeping one of their children out of the workforce. The sequential nature of the expanded system meant that a family would have to be able to pay consistently for their children to progress to the highest levels. These access-related problems were further exacerbated by the financial austerity and limits on education imposed by British administrators between 1876 and 1907. Alternatively, the families of these students may have had longstanding ties to religious education, leading to uncertainty about how to educate their brightest children. For instance, the father of literary scholar Ahmed Amin was torn about where to send him to study, as it was clear from an early age that he had great intellectual potential.11 After consulting friends, he initially sent Amin to a civil school, but 10

Kalmbach, ‘Blurring Boundaries’, pp. 163–5.

11

Amin, My Life, pp. 38, 83.

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eventually pulled him out to attend al-Azhar. Students who were blind, poorly sighted, or had other disabilities were also barred from civil schools. As the civil school system grew in importance, families with long-standing ties to major centres of religious education, as well as those of reduced means or living outside of regional centres, were presented with increasingly difficult decisions about the education of their children.

***** In the meantime, by the early twentieth century, Eurocentric critiques of Islamic knowledge and education had spread to some of al-Azhar’s most talented students. Among the most prominent critics of the organisation, content, and audiocentricity of fin-de-siècle religious education were Husayn and Amin, literary scholars and authors of influential autobiographies The Days (al-Ayyam) and My Life (Hayati), respectively. Both works describe the teaching style of al-Azhar as unintuitive and frustrating. In The Days, Husayn repeatedly notes his annoyance with the audiocentric and confusing recitation-commentary style in which most teachers taught: while he generally understood the underlying texts and traditions, he was annoyed by the lengthy recounting of sources and transmitters and the ‘tedious’ explanations and analysis of the material by the shaykhs.12 When Amin’s father decided to pull him out of his government primary school and send him to al-Azhar at the age of fourteen, the young Amin was also frustrated by the teaching style. He found it difficult to follow the lessons at al-Azhar, perhaps because of his time out of religious education spent studying at the civil school.13 Husayn and Amin also complain about the unregimented nature of admissions and study at al-Azhar. Husayn was disgusted at the limited and unchallenging nature of the entrance exam to become a registered Azhar student.14 Amin complained about the lack of a definitive path through the myriad lectures offered at al-Azhar, even though his father (an Azhar graduate) set a programme of study for him.15 Husayn’s internalisation of colonial-era norms goes beyond a simple critique of religious education, as it describes the crossing of spatial and sociocultural boundaries in ways that draw a sharp division between religious and civil spaces. For instance, the second volume of his 12 14

Hussein, The Days, pp. 25, 55, 118. 13 Amin, My Life, pp. 5–6, 41. Hussein, The Days, p. 173. 15 Amin, My Life, p. 43.

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autobiography conceptualises the milieu of the shaykhs and the efendiyya as spatially separated worlds, and explains how difficult it was ‘keeping a foot in both camps’: He16 had to go on living this double life, between two worlds that pulled him different ways: the old world of the Azhar, down in the age-worn streets between the Batinîya and Kafr El-Tamâʿîn, and the new world of the University amidst all the modern elegance of Sharia Koubry Kasr El-Nil.17

Closely linked to this spatial conceptualisation of difference were differences in dress. Husayn speaks of wanting to join the ‘lay world of the tarboush’ because he was ‘sick to death of the turban and all that it implied’ and he found himself preferring the company of people from tarboush-wearing circles. In the third volume of his autobiography, changes in dress coincide with Husayn’s definitive crossing of the boundary between the ‘worlds’ of the turban and tarboush. For instance, when he was called to meet the khedive before his departure to Europe, his friend took him to buy new clothes, in this case a long coat (kakula), in which he says he felt like a ‘different person’ who had ‘emerged from one style of life to enter a new one’. Similarly, he describes changing from his turban and robe (qaftan) to European dress as soon as his ship departed from Egypt. Despite the separation emphasised by Husayn’s descriptions of worlds and dress, though, his reference to ‘tarboush-wearing shaykhs’ – and subsequent discussion of friends fitting this description – hints at the ability to transcend these barriers and the ambiguity that movement across the boundary could create.18 These critiques, refracted through the prism of memory and part of a genre heavily influenced by tropes, may say more about attitudes towards al-Azhar and religious education at the times in which they were written. While Husayn and Amin left al-Azhar in 1910 and 1908, respectively, their memoirs were published during the constitutional period – 1929 and 1932 for volumes 1 and 2 of The Days and 1950 for My Life – when tensions surrounding the place of religion in Egyptian state and society reached their zenith. However, Husayn’s and Amin’s critiques are similar to accounts of Azhar education published by former students 16

17 18

Writing about himself in the third person (‘he’ or ‘the boy’) is an unusual feature of Husayn’s autobiography. The practice was adopted by Egyptians writing after him. Hussein, The Days, p. 232. Hussein, The Days, pp. 19, 25, 27, 52, 301–2, 205.

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in journals in the early 1880s. For instance, one student complained that al-Azhar aimed only to transmit the knowledge of the past instead of including coursework in the new subjects about which he was curious. Another expressed sympathy for the difficult conditions – especially lack of funding – with which instructors at al-Azhar had to deal, but criticised its faculty for tolerating individuals with very little expertise – for instance, little more than memorisation of the Qurʾan – among their ranks.19 What is undisputable is the fact that Husayn and Amin – along with many of their contemporaries – chose to leave al-Azhar and attend schools with other structures, goals, and knowledge. By the first decade of the twentieth century, both Amin and Husayn desperately wanted to attend a civil school. Attending a hybrid school would not only give them access to the bodies of knowledge and practice associated with civil schooling but also would provide certification of their skills. This certified cultural capital was not available to previous generations of autodidact reform-minded shaykhs and was all the more important given the increasing bias against religious education. Dar al-ʿUlum was especially attractive to Amin because it was ‘an orderly school with clear bounds and intelligible goals at which an enrolled student spent four years learning from the best teachers and graduated to be a teacher in the government schools’. Unfortunately, Amin’s sight was not good enough to sit the Dar alʿUlum entrance exam.20 In 1907, after teaching in state schools in Alexandria and Cairo, he was admitted into the first class of another hybrid school, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ alSharʿi) despite failing the sight test. This short-lived sister school to Dar al-ʿUlum was willing to bend the requirements because it had only just opened and needed excellent students such as Amin, who ranked third in the entrance exam. Husayn despaired when his close companions at al-Azhar left him for modern schools: his cousin to Dar al-ʿUlum and his brother to the first section of the School of Shariʿa Judges, like Amin. He felt that the knowledge al-Azhar had to offer him was pointless, but his blindness barred him from civil schools and a relatively smooth transition into what he perceived as the ‘lay world of the tarboush’.21 He eventually succeeded in crossing this boundary, despite the odds, via the 19 21

Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 84–6. 20 Amin, My Life, pp. 53–4. Hussein, The Days, pp. 7, 25, 29–31, 203.

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Egyptian University, which was open to all in the years immediately following its 1908 inauguration, and which gave him the knowledge and contacts necessary to gain a position on a government mission to France. Hybrid schools such as Dar al-ʿUlum represented a significant opportunity for students in religious schools at the turn of the twentieth century to improve their socio-economic and sociocultural standing in a society dominated by a rhetoric of division and inferiority. Husayn and Amin were able to establish themselves solidly in an institution dominated by efendiyya, the Egyptian University, where both held professorships and Husayn became the first Egyptian dean of the Faculty of Arts. But the integration of the vast majority of students with significant religious credentials into the professional and social circles of civil school graduates was less certain. Graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum were officially classed as shaykhs until the 1920s, even though they held a civil school diploma. Not having finished their studies at al-Azhar, they did not hold ʿalimiyya degrees and therefore did not fit into the highest ranks of the religiously educated yet were not always recognised as efendiyya either. Despite – or perhaps because of – this awkwardness, individuals who had significant experience in both the religious and civil educational tracks entered social and professional circles with a wider range of certified cultural capital than their peers. Being able to cross sociocultural boundaries did not necessarily result in sociocultural or socio-economic mobility, but by providing the tools for the former, Dar al-ʿUlum made the latter a possibility. Finally, hybrid schooling provided reform-minded shaykhs with the ability to make a living independent of al-Azhar and other major religious institutions. The importance of majority opinion and consensus at al-Azhar appears to have discouraged intellectual innovation. The centralisation of religious institutions under the supervision of al-Azhar during the nineteenth and early twentieth century increased the authority and influence of prominent leaders and majority opinion over many issues related to affairs in the mosque, including professional appointments and salaries, as well as the less tangible status of an individual as an authoritative leader within the scholarly community. The dynamics inherent in authority and group belonging enabled institutions such as al-Azhar – via their leaders or various factions – to place limitations on what their

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members could do.22 Exactly how these dynamics worked to limit ideas and practices that were perceived as innovations vary according to place and time, but transgression of these limits could lead to cessation of employment or denial of other privileges. Taha Husayn’s The Days provides an example of this dynamic from the first decade of the twentieth century. Sayyid al-Marsafi, Husayn’s favourite teacher at al-Azhar, was blamed for Husayn’s ostensibly heretical argument that a historical figure’s ridicule of the holiest building in Islam, the black cube (kaʿba) in Mecca towards which all Muslims pray, did not constitute heresy. As a result, al-Marsafi’s Arabic literature lectures were moved to a less prestigious location and he was forced to substitute a less controversial text for the one he had chosen to teach. Husayn’s account implies that al-Marsafi had no choice but to comply, or lose his livelihood. Earlier in the text Husayn had revealed that al-Marsafi supported himself and his family – including the education of his children – on a meagre three and a half pounds per month, one and a half of which were due to his high degree result, and the other two were from teaching literature.23 Given the talent and skill Husayn credits him with, it is likely that al-Marsafi could have held much more remunerative positions if he had been willing to teach approved topics using conventional linguistic approaches and to check his criticism of fellow religious scholars. In short, the ability of religious scholars and other shaykhs to work as teachers in government civil schools provided opportunities to teach new subjects and experiment with alternative pedagogies outside of the constraints of al-Azhar, and from 1872 onwards Dar al-ʿUlum was the major path from a religious school to government employment.

Dar al-ʿUlum as a Catalyst for Reform of al-Azhar The success of Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates was a significant catalyst for the reform of religious institutions such as al-Azhar from the late nineteenth century onwards. In 1896, the logistical challenges facing al-Azhar came to a head in the form of student riots. Years of declining financial resources and increasing student numbers had created 22

23

Kalmbach, ‘Social and Religious Change’, pp. 47–53; Kalmbach, ‘Islamic Authority’, p. 23; Bano and Kalmbach, Women, Leadership, and Mosques, pp. 187–361. Hussein, The Days, pp. 220–4.

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overcrowded, unhygienic conditions and conflict among the students, yet the sort of administrative reform that would enable the mosque’s leaders to address these problems continued to encounter stiff resistance. In the summer of 1896, a cholera epidemic that had been spreading around Egypt hit the area of al-Azhar that served as a dormitory for Syrian students, the Syrian riwaq. A riot broke out among the students after government representatives attempted to enforce a quarantine and remove a sick student for treatment. Two students who had been taken to the state hospital previously had died there, which led the remaining students to argue that their sick colleague should be taken to a private house instead. Resistance to removing the student led to an armed confrontation between the students and government soldiers and officials, as well as forcible and violent entry to the mosque.24 These riots, and the significant outside intervention necessary to resolve them, consolidated support among religious scholars, reformist and conservative, for the introduction of civil school-style discipline and administration at al-Azhar via a new reform law, passed in 1896. This law gave the Shaykh al-Azhar and the administrative council that had been founded two years earlier control over all activities at alAzhar and several other large madrasa schools. It mandated centralised admissions procedures, required the teaching of arithmetic, and stipulated a formal progression of study according to subject difficulty, all for the first time. Finally, it introduced the eight-year ahliyya degree as an alternative to the twelve-year ʿalimiyya qualification. The ahliyya degree was also awarded by examination and would qualify an individual to be a mosque leader (imam), a daʿi, or a kuttab teacher.25 The riots were not the only factor behind this shift in policy at alAzhar, however. Government pressure on the religious system had been building since Ismaʿil’s ascension in 1863. First and foremost, the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum in 1872 demonstrated the government’s readiness to bypass al-Azhar if the religious system did not meet its needs and expectations. From day one, Dar al-ʿUlum threatened the control of religious institutions over how religious knowledge was transmitted and used. Unlike the hybrid elements of the mid24 25

Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 143–7. Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 7, 54–64, 97, 143–4, 228–30; Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 170–6.

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nineteenth-century School of Languages (Madrasat al-Alsun), Dar alʿUlum persisted in the long term. It managed to maintain a distinct identity and mission despite its incorporation into a succession of teaching schools. That al-Azhar set up the ʿalimiyya degree and examination for would-be teachers in the same year as Dar al-ʿUlum was founded, and the year after the lecture series out of which it grew, raises the possibility that Dar al-ʿUlum was also a factor in the consolidation of support for the 1872 law. The institutional relationship between Dar al-ʿUlum and al-Azhar after 1872 reveals the importance of two things to the leaders of alAzhar: first, preventing the widening of Dar al-ʿUlum’s mandate beyond the training of Arabic and primary school teachers and, second, maintaining their status as Dar al-ʿUlum’s primary supplier of students. Should reform at al-Azhar fail to meet government expectations, the government could encroach further on al-Azhar’s mandate through lateral expansion into other professional roles requiring religious knowledge or vertical expansion by taking students out of the religious system at a younger age. The first of these two possibilities – lateral expansion – was realised in an 1888 attempt to use Dar al-ʿUlum to train judges as well as teachers that came to an end in the 1890s. To carry out this mission, Dar al-ʿUlum’s curriculum was overhauled and religious content increased, with 60 per cent devoted to religious subjects and 40 per cent to civil, instead of the other way around as was the norm during its seventy-four years as a higher school. Concerns raised about the legal qualifications of the first cohort of students to use this curriculum led to the introduction, in 1893–4, of a fifth year to provide specialised training to work as qadi or mufti. The initiative came to an end after traditionally trained religious scholars refused to appoint the first graduates of the five-year programme as judges. These scholars argued that it was not fair for darʿamiyya to take some of the few jobs that were still open to graduates of al-Azhar when they already had preferential access to the much larger pool of teaching positions.26 Similarly short-lived was a second department of Dar al-ʿUlum, added in February 1891, to provide two years of training for teachers in religious elementary schools. While administrators expressed an interest in training kuttab teachers at Dar al-ʿUlum in 1887, they had 26

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 26–7.

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largely been trained within the religious system, despite the fact that their schools formed the backbone of introductory education under British occupation. The section also had a curriculum that reversed the 40–60 split between religious and civil subjects, with 62 per cent of coursework addressing basics related to Arabic and Islam that presumably formed the core of kuttab education. Courses including grammar (nahw and sarf), reading (mutalaʿa), ‘easy’ composition, and ‘laws of Islam and its worship’ (qawaʿid al-Islam wa ʿaqida).27 At least thirtythree students graduated from this section in the summer of 1895, after which the department was closed, and the size of the regular section of Dar al-ʿUlum doubled from 50 to 100.28 While Dar al-ʿUlum’s records do not indicate why this section was closed, it would not be surprising to learn that pressure from al-Azhar was involved, as this initiative would also have cut into al-Azhar’s ability to place graduates in jobs and exercise influence in the realm of teacher training. Government pressure to reform was not only external via Dar alʿUlum, but also came from within al-Azhar itself. Khedive ʿAbbas appointed Hassuna al-Nawawi as the deputy Shaykh al-Azhar in 1894, and then Shaykh al-Azhar and Grand Mufti in 1895. alNawawi’s appointment as Shaykh al-Azhar and Mufti of Egypt appears to have been based not on him being seen as a top scholar, but instead on his openness to reform. He had taught Hanafi jurisprudence (fiqh) in government schools including Dar al-ʿUlum, and may have had links to Islamic modernism.29 From 1894, al-Nawawi also chaired a new administrative council made up of top scholars from alAzhar as well as reformist shaykhs Muhammad ʿAbduh and ʿAbd alKarim Salman, both of whom were employed in the government bureaucracy. This council drafted the first formal laws regulating salaries at al-Azhar in 1895 as well as the reform law passed after the riots in 1896.30 The 1896 reform law gave al-Nawawi significant licence to use his experience teaching in hybrid and civil schools to change the patterns of instruction and administration at al-Azhar and other large madrasa schools. He oversaw the application of this law through 1899, issuing orders centralising control of students via their riwaq, regulating the school year and student attendance, and setting up committees 27 28 29 30

Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, Appendix 3, p. 24. ˙ ¯m, p. 27; Sa¯mı¯, al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, Appendix 3, p. 24. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı ˙ Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, pp. 6, 112. Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 169–70.

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to deal with admissions and the curriculum. Al-Nawawi’s role in enacting these reforms, as well as his closeness to the government, contributed significantly to his unpopularity among the bulk of religious scholars. By the time of the 1896 riots, therefore, al-Azhar was facing significant pressure from inside and outside, in the form of reformminded shaykhs and the hybrid Dar al-ʿUlum. While the reforms of 1872, 1885, and 1896 had a significant impact on how al-Azhar and other higher religious schools (madrasas) were organised and administered, they did not introduce major changes in modes of knowledge transmission. For instance, while an 1897 regulation touched on some issues related to teaching methods, it did not represent a significant change to audiocentric approaches, as its stipulations were limited to telling religious instructors to plan one-to-two-hour lessons in advance, to provide short revision of material after vacations, and to stay away from complex language and rambling side notes.31 The breadth of subjects studied at al-Azhar changed in the early twentieth century, motivated by the threat of vertical expansion of Dar al-ʿUlum. Throughout its first fifty years, the latter was under significant pressure to produce more graduates, while maintaining their quality. As instructional time at Dar al-ʿUlum could only be increased up to a point, the background of students entering the school came under increasing scrutiny. Changes began to emerge after Dar al-ʿUlum’s 1895 merger with the Madrasat alMubtadiyan. The additional preparatory (tahdiriyya) year added to Dar al-ʿUlum in 1897 would not have presented a serious threat to al-Azhar, but the large increases in the amount of civil school knowledge required to pass the entrance exam between 1896 and 1911 was a different matter. While some of these subjects were introduced as options at al-Azhar by the 1896 reforms, the Dar alʿUlum exam required more from its entrants than was covered by these additions. This meant that the Dar al-ʿUlum exam diverged increasingly from what students studied at al-Azhar, so students from al-Azhar would have to learn more material through selfstudy to pass the entrance exam for Dar al-ʿUlum. This divergence narrowed after 1911. In 1911, al-Azhar passed a new reform law which broadened the subjects studied, while Dar al-ʿUlum reduced 31

Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 158–9.

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the amount of civil school knowledge required to pass the entrance examination between 1911 and 1920.32 It is in this gap between curriculum changes at Dar al-ʿUlum and alAzhar that the influence of government reformers can be seen. Lois Aroian concludes her detailed analysis of the curricula of Dar al-ʿUlum and al-Azhar up to 1923 with the following statement: al-Azhar in only fifty years was forced, due partly to the Dar al-ʿUlum challenge, to restructure religious education in Egypt so that at least in form and to a lesser degree in content that education resembled much more closely than that of the 1870’s the education offered in the government secular school system . . . [these reforms] greatly broadened the scope of education at al-Azhar, at least in theory.33

In short, curriculum and entrance exam changes at Dar al-ʿUlum and al-Azhar between 1896 and 1922 demonstrate how the dissatisfaction of government officials with al-Azhar led to changes made Dar alʿUlum, which in turn provoked a reaction from al-Azhar, and finally resulted in compromise and change at both al-Azhar and Dar al-ʿUlum. By the end of the protectorate, the education provided by al-Azhar was comparable to that of Dar al-ʿUlum in many ways.

A Civil School to Train Shariʿa Judges The School of Shariʿa Judges, a short-lived sister school to Dar alʿUlum, opened in 1907 and added further to the pressure on al-Azhar in the latter half of the protectorate. The School of Shariʿa Judges was the only Egyptian higher school other than Dar al-ʿUlum that admitted students with a strong grounding in religious subjects and gave them a hybridised professional education in the civil school system, in this case licensing them to work as judges in the shariʿa court system. The strong negative response of al-Azhar’s leaders to the 1888–95 attempt to expand Dar al-ʿUlum’s mandate to train personnel for the shariʿa courts provides us with a sense of the political obstacles that must have been overcome to establish the School of Shariʿa Judges in 1907. These efforts benefited immensely from the support of Saʿd Zaghlul in his role as minister of education (1906–10) as well the 32 33

Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 170–2. Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 170–2.

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British advisor to the Ministry of Justice, John Scott.34 The 1907 regulations that ostensibly founded the school raise further questions. The text of this law departs from dominant understandings of the school by stating that it was initially opened after the passing of the 1896 Azhar reform law as an initiative run by religious scholars within al-Azhar. Given the complicated politics surrounding reform, government intervention, and the position of Shaykh al-Azhar between 1896 and 1907, it seems likely that this initiative represented much less of an intervention than this text implies. The execution of many of the details of the reforms agreed in 1896 required a supportive Shaykh al-Azhar. Al-Nawawi was dismissed from his positions as Grand Mufti and Shaykh al-Azhar in 1899 after he refused to follow khedivial instructions to appoint two civil court appeal judges to the highest Islamic law court.35 Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh replaced al-Nawawi as Mufti of Egypt, but the situation at al-Azhar was more complicated. The post of Shaykh alAzhar was occupied between 1899 and 1907 by four scholars in quick succession – ʿAbd al-Rahman Qutb al-Nawawi, Salim al-Bishri, ʿAli alBiblawi, and ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Shirbini. Al-Nawawi then served a second term in office from 1907 to 1909, and was followed by Salim al-Bishri, who served until 1917. Al-Bishri, his effective successor, blocked execution of many of the initiatives established by alNawawi in support of the 1896 reforms.36 Even if a predecessor to the School of Shariʿa Judges was established in some form within al-Azhar after the 1896 reforms, the year 1907 represents a significant turning point for both the school and al-Azhar. The founding documents from 1907 lay out an institution that was, first, civil in how it was administered and, second, hybrid in terms of its curriculum, similar to Dar al-ʿUlum.37 That said, its position was far more complex and precarious than that of Dar al-ʿUlum. The experiment at Dar al-ʿUlum a decade earlier had made it clear that the Ministry of Education would need the cooperation of al-Azhar and the Ministry of Justice, the two institutions in control of appointments to judicial positions, to make a success of this school. At the outset, the 34 35 36 37

Wood, Islamic Legal Revival, pp. 183–4. Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam, p. 115; Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, p. 137. Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 178–83. Madrasat al-Qada¯ʾ al-Sharʿı¯, esp. Art. 3. ˙

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Ministry of Education controlled a board with representatives from all three institutions, though the school provided its graduates with a degree from al-Azhar instead of the Ministry of Education.38 The first director of the School of Shariʿa Judges was Zaghlul’s nephew, ambitious Dar al-ʿUlum graduate ʿAtif Barakat. It replaced alAzhar as the higher education institution responsible for training judges and clerks for the shariʿa court, and its preparatory school made it less dependent than Dar al-ʿUlum on students from al-Azhar. This made the School of Shariʿa Judges less of a provider of higher education to advanced students from al-Azhar, similar to Dar alʿUlum, and more of a parallel track bypassing the secondary and higher levels of the religious education system. Finally, the education that its students received was supposedly more focused on preparing students to work in shariʿa courts as legal professionals than the more theoretical study of law at al-Azhar.39 This improvement in preparation may have been relative, however. After graduating with the first cohort to finish the course of study, complete with practical examples and experience, Ahmad Amin still faced a steep learning curve upon his first posting to a rural court after graduation.40 The relationship between Dar al-ʿUlum and the School of Shariʿa Judges would logically have been a close one despite the involvement of al-Azhar in oversight and administration at the latter. This is because their students were pursuing a similar goal – leaving religious schools to pursue a civil school education and a government job – and the faculty at the School of Shariʿa Judges included many darʿamiyya. Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad’s description of the school and one of its directors in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac is surprisingly critical, however. It implies that there was a rivalry between the schools due to the favourable political connections of the leaders of the School of Shariʿa Judges. It also says that the school’s director was sufficiently confident of his position that he wanted to incorporate Dar al-ʿUlum into the school as a department.41 Despite this, the School of Shariʿa Judges did not manage to maintain its independence in the longer term. Responsibility for it was transferred to al-Azhar in 1911, and then to the Ministry of Justice in 1916. It was incorporated into al-Azhar in or 38 39 40

Wood, Islamic Legal Revival, pp. 184–5. Wood, Islamic Legal Revival, pp. 186, 189–90. Amin, My Life, pp. 94–5. 41 ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 270–1.

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before 1925, then refounded as an independent school under Ministry of Education control in 1927, before being definitively incorporated into al-Azhar as a higher faculty for legal studies in 1930.42 The affinity between the School of Shariʿa Judges and Dar al-ʿUlum at the student level was such that a large number of students from the preparatory and higher divisions of the former elected to enter the latter instead of alAzhar when the school closed, even when it meant repeating years of study.43

Al-Azhar in Politicised Landscapes The establishment of an independent school for shariʿa judges in 1907 as the culmination of fifteen years of attempts to reform the training of judges raises a larger question: why was it preferable for shariʿa court judges to have an education in a school with European-influenced structure and pedagogy instead of al-Azhar? In the case of Dar alʿUlum, the utility of European-influenced knowledge is clear: its graduates would understand and be sympathetic towards civil school structures and pedagogies as well as the non-religious subjects taught either by themselves (in the case of smaller schools) or by colleagues who had graduated from civil schools. Furthermore, attending Dar al-ʿUlum should improve their ability to teach in the style preferred in civil schools, initially because they had been taught in this style and, after 1895, because they were explicitly taught how to teach in this way. The goal behind incorporating training for shariʿa court judges into the civil system through Dar al-ʿUlum and the School of Shariʿa Judges is less apparent, given the separation between religious and civil legal systems. It could have been driven by a desire to increase the government’s control of education or the religious sector,44 frustration at resistance to reform at al-Azhar, or even the thought that focused professional training was superior to the broad academic training provided at alAzhar. That said, the role played by sociocultural factors in ʿAli Mubarak’s account of the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum – as well as the role played by Mubarak in the 1888 effort to expand Dar al-ʿUlum’s 42

43 44

Eccel, Egypt, Islam, and Social Change, pp. 183–9; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 165; Wood, Islamic Legal Revival, pp. 184–5. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 53. Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, pp. 2, 60.

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mandate beyond teaching to law – raises the possibility of a sociocultural motivation. That is, it may have been seen as beneficial to have shariʿa court officials who were sympathetic to the subjects, approaches, and habits inculcated by civil schools. Developing a cadre of judges that would actively support projects of modernism and nationalism similar to the darʿamiyya appears to have been the motivation behind the support of the British advisor as well as Saʿd Zaghlul,45 who stated that he hoped shariʿa court judges would join school inspectors in discouraging superstition and resisting British rule.46 Reform at al-Azhar during the British veiled protectorate was significant. It resulted in the centralisation of control over al-Azhar and religious education across Egypt under the Shaykh al-Azhar and the restructuring of its religious education along civil school lines with entrance requirements, levels of study, examinations, and degrees. Change was driven not only by catastrophes that convinced conservatives of the need for reform, but also by pressure from government officials exerted via hybrid schools Dar al-ʿUlum and the School of Shariʿa Judges. While al-Azhar successfully fought off both lateral and vertical expansion by state-run hybrid schools, this came at the cost of significant changes to religious education. By 1896, it had strengthened the structure and discipline of its student experience. By the end of the veiled protectorate in 1922, it had significantly broadened the subjects studied by its students, leaving pedagogy as the sole significant difference between al-Azhar and the hybrid schools. Yet, despite these changes, al-Azhar and its graduates continued to be associated with ineffectual and old-fashioned methods of organisation and education. The sociocultural domain – and particularly its politics – holds the key to understanding why. The perception of alAzhar as significantly different from the civil system at the turn of the twentieth century is grounded less in al-Azhar itself as an institution, and more in the politics of the period, which viewed religious knowledge and audiocentric pedagogies negatively. Nineteenth-century reforms did not substantively change the subject matter taught in religious institutions – in fact, the introduction of examinations in 1872 reinforced a focus on legal and linguistic topics. It was only towards the end of the veiled protectorate that al-Azhar’s core 45 46

Wood, Islamic Legal Reform, pp. 183–4. Shanu¯da, Saʿd Zaghlu¯l, na¯zir al-Maʿa¯rif. ˙

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curriculum was broadened to include many of the subjects studied at civil schools. The introduction of the knowledge and pedagogies valued within Egypt’s projects of modernity and nation-building into al-Azhar appears to have been a case of ‘too little, too late’, which in turn affected popular perceptions. Taking a long view, connections can be drawn between the dissatisfaction of government officials with the preparation of Arabic teachers and shariʿa court officials, the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum and the School of Shariʿa Judges, pressure from al-Azhar for their reform or even closure, and compromises that created an al-Azhar that resembled Dar al-ʿUlum and the School of Shariʿa Judges in many ways. Yet, despite this, as these reforms were taking hold in the early twentieth century, negative stereotypes of al-Azhar’s shaykhs were increasingly influential socioculturally. This combination of factors indicates that religious knowledge was best assimilated into Egyptian state, society, and culture at the turn of the twentieth century when it was expressed using ocularcentric and disciplinary pedagogies. This, in turn, empowered a new class of interpreters centred around the darʿamiyya. Indeed, the histories of Egypt’s projects of modernity and nation-building during the veiled protectorate show that this knowledge, once hybridised, was desirable enough for nationalists to fight to protect it.

Darʿamiyya and the Authentification of Nation and Nahda Widening our view of Egyptian cultural reform and renewal around the turn of the twentieth century to include schools, associations, and the darʿamiyya reveals that efforts to reform Arabic and Islam went far beyond the intellectual discourse of elite nationalist graduates of the schools of law, medicine, and engineering. Darʿamiyya played a leading role in the adaptation of Arabic and Islamic knowledge for civil institutions and projects of modernity and nationalism during the British protectorate. Prominent darʿamiyya used their expertise in the Arabic disciplines long taught at al-Azhar to contribute uniquely and significantly to changing approaches to the study, reform, and teaching of Arabic language and literature from the 1880s onwards. Their contributions demonstrate how they were able to apply both their expertise in Arabic and their familiarity with the European-influenced pedagogy and structure of the civil school system, often while employed at lower and middle levels of the civil education system.

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Darʿamiyya also were active in the jamʿiyyat that sought sociocultural and religious change at the grass-roots level from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, including the Egyptian spiritualist association Jamʿiyyat al-Ahram al-Ruhiyya.

Reforming Arabic Reforming Arabic and improving Arabic proficiency was a central part of renewal agendas from the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, Arabic was seen as an essential part of Egyptian culture, and a core part of the Egyptian nation. On the other hand, one of the justifications given by British officials for their Anglophile policies was the supposed unsuitability of Arabic for education. First, Arabic was seen as neither accurate enough nor possessing the right lexicon for scientific and technical instruction;47 second, it was considered too complex and difficult to incorporate into mass education. These critiques are further examples of the misrepresentation of Egyptian culture by Europeans, as they ignore the magnitude of the challenge facing Arabic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Furthermore, new technologies, practices, ideas, and ways of thinking that developed in Egypt while it was borrowing from Europe left speakers of Arabic scrambling to develop new vocabulary.48 New media outlets and technologies required a language that could not only describe these novel topics, but also be written quickly. This required new, more concise forms of expression, many of which were borrowed from European texts, especially those of press agencies.49 The format of civil education also created challenges for the Arabic language. Teachers and textbook authors needed to figure out how to present large volumes of foreign material in a form of Arabic that was simple enough for a diverse student body to understand, in far less time than had been allocated for Arabic instruction in Egyptian religious schools. For all of these reasons, how to best reform Arabic as a language was a topic of significant debate around the turn of the twentieth century, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. 47 48 49

Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, p. 326. Stetkevych, Modern Arabic Literary Language, pp. 116–21. Brugman, Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature, p. 14.

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Writers of poetry and prose – especially neoclassical authors, or those who were inspired by classical genres and texts – are often credited with driving the reform and renewal of the Arabic language via the nineteenth- and twentieth-century renaissance known as the nahda. These writers used ocularcentric media and experimented with new genres of writing imported from Europe and are responsible for major changes in Arabic language and literature. They form only part of the picture, however. The main contribution of the darʿamiyya to the literary production of the nahda lies in its revival of the study and teaching of Arabic literature, stemming from the pioneering work of early Dar al-ʿUlum instructor Husayn al-Marsafi (1815–90). Al-Marsafi may have been the first colonial-era Egyptian scholar to advance the idea of periodisation in Arabic literature. He revived a periodisation similar to that used by classical scholars, dividing literature into periods before and after the advent of Islam (jahiliyun and islamiyun), and additional categories for nonMuslim poets who died after the advent of Islam (mukhadramun) and for the modernist poets of the ninth and tenth centuries (muhdathun).50 Orientalist scholarship, on the other hand, attributes the spread of new periodisation of Arabic literature to Carl Brockelman’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur, which one of al-Marsafi’s students, Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl, appears to have encountered while in Germany. Al-ʿAdl’s History of the Literature of the Arabic Language (Taʾrikh adab allugha al-ʿarabiyya), published posthumously in 1906, uses political periods to divide Arabic literature into five eras: pre-Islamic, Umayyad, ʿAbbasid, Andalusian, and a subsequent period. This approach was developed further in Jurji Zaydan’s acclaimed four-volume work also entitled History of the Literature of the Arabic Language (1911–14) and Mustafa Sadiq al-Rafiʿi’s 1911 History of the Literature of the Arabs (Taʾrikh adab al-ʿArab).51 Another one of al-Marsafi’s students, Hifni Nasif, also contributed significantly to the teaching of Arabic literature. He graduated from Dar al-ʿUlum in 1882 and had a distinguished career as a prosecutor, judge, school inspector, and teacher at the School of Law (Madrasat al-Huquq). Most relevant here, though, is his participation in the founding of the Egyptian University and the lectures he delivered there on Arabic literature. 50 51

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, al-Shaykh al-Husayn ibn Ahmad al-Marsafı¯. ˙ Brugman, Introduction to the˙History of Modern Arabic˙ Literature, pp. 327–9.

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A notable exception to the pattern of darʿamiyya as scholars and instructors instead of producers of literature is neoclassical poet Muhammad ʿAbd al-Muttalib (1871–1931). He graduated from Dar al-ʿUlum in 1896, after the end of al-Marsafi’s tenure at the school. He supported his literary endeavours by teaching, first in a primary school, then at the School of Shariʿa Judges followed by a secondary school, and finally at Dar al-ʿUlum. Orientalist scholar Jan Brugman identifies him as the poet who ‘among the many lesser neoclassicists . . . is generally considered to have most consistently pursued the neoclassicist ideal’. He explicitly stuck to conventional models and favoured preIslamic and Umayyad poets over the ʿAbbasids favoured by other neoclassicists. He also played an active role in politics through writing poetry that was ‘intransigently nationalistic’.52 Dar al-ʿUlum’s teachers and graduates also dominated early efforts to reform the Arabic language and how it was taught. All of the members of a special commission set up in 1888 to examine Arabic education were associated with Dar al-ʿUlum in some way. This commission argued that schools needed to make Arabic more relevant to their students so that they would see it as a valuable subject of study. School inspectors, many of whom were darʿamiyya, were repeatedly told that they needed to ensure that Arabic teachers were not teaching via memorisation, but instead through demonstration and explanation, supported by the teacher speaking properly and correcting students’ mistakes.53 The hybrid expertise of the darʿamiyya is evident in the Arabic textbooks they wrote for Egyptian schools starting in the 1880s. These textbooks used the ocularcentric pedagogies preferred in Egyptian civil schools to explain the grammatical disciplines that had long formed the basis of Arabic training in religious schools.54 Their authors included darʿamiyya Hifni Nasif (graduated 1882), Muhammad Diyab (gr. 1876), Mustafa Tammum (gr. 1883), and Muhammad Salih (gr. 1880), as well as influential Dar al-ʿUlum instructor Sultan Muhammad. Only the fourth author of secondary school texts, Mahmud ʿAmr, does not appear to have been associated with Dar alʿUlum. As far as is indicated, the authors worked for the Ministry of 52 53 54

Brugman, Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 51–2. Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 323. For a full listing of the texts, see Appendix II or Na¯sif et al., Kitab qawa¯ʿid and ˙ ¯ s al-nahwiyya. the bibliography entries listed under Na¯sif et al., Duru ˙ ˙

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Education as teachers or school inspectors. Interestingly, only Tammum was listed as a shaykh, while Nasif, Diyab, Salih, and Muhammad all used the title efendi and eventually bey, the rank between efendi and pasha. These textbooks show that Egyptian civil schools taught grammar using the conceptual framework and terminology of the grammatical disciplines used in religious schools but approaches to knowledge and education that were significantly different from those used in al-Azhar at the time. So, on the one hand, these books introduce the student to the relatively complex network of terms for different parts of speech and types of sentence in Arabic, as well as the discipline of iʿrab, which concerns the endings added to words that signify their role in a sentence; but, on the other hand, they present these subjects using a relatively straightforward, concept-focused approach. For instance, the second volume of the primary school version of The Book of Syntax Lessons for Students of Primary Schools (Kitab al-durus al-nahwiyya li-talamidh al-madaris al-ibtidaʾiyya) begins with a lesson defining a complete sentence (al-jumla al-mufida) that starts with example sentences written with short vowels and case endings, then defines the parts of speech that make up these examples – noun, verb, and words that are neither nouns nor verbs (harf) – and finally provides seven brief sentences for students to divide into these three categories.55 This approach contrasts significantly with that of the Alfiyya of Ibn Malik, the fundamental grammatical text at al-Azhar. The Alfiyya significantly condensed grammatical terminology in verse form – for instance, the contents of the complete sentence lesson referred to above are summarised in one line (line number 8) instead of multiple pages of explanation, review, and exercises – so that it would be easier to memorise in an audiocentric context.56 However, this meant that students would need to study this topic with a teacher and possibly with one or more commentaries – the text of the Alfiyya by itself was not enough to understand the lesson. Also, if the lecturer spent the lesson digressing into complex scholarly debates instead of giving a beginner’s introduction, it would be difficult to understand the concepts conveyed in the text. The ocularcentric approach used in the school textbooks could be improved by explanations from a teacher, 55 56

Na¯sif et al., Duru¯s al-nahwiyya (1911), pp. 10–11. Ibn˙ Ma¯lik, Matn Alfı¯yya˙ Ibn Ma¯lik, p. 1.

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but the text itself had to be able to stand on its own to a much greater degree. These grammar texts were taught alongside other Arabic skills, though grammar appeared to dominate Arabic instruction in schools, especially in higher years. The primary school curriculum published in 1900 also mandates instruction on the alphabet, vocabulary, dictation, reading, memorisation of set texts, handwriting, and composition. Time spent on long-standing grammatical disciplines – such as syntax (nahw), morphology (sarf), meaning (maʿani), clarity of expression (bayan), rhetorical beautification (badiʿ) – increased significantly in secondary school and was taught alongside further subjects including composition and readings in literature.57 Graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum were also involved in early efforts to reform the Arabic language via their alumni club (Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum). The Dar al-ʿUlum Club opened in a swanky set of rooms in a building on ʿAbdin Square in 1907, two years after the founding of the Higher School Club (Nadi al-Madaris al-ʿUlya), a club for all graduates of Egyptian higher schools and whose teachers’ section included prominent darʿamiyya ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish and ʿAtif Barakat.58 The Dar alʿUlum Club held lectures, debates, and parties for alumni until it was forced to close during the First World War, along with other private organisations.59 Its presidents included Hifni Nasif, ʿAtif Barakat, and ʿAbd al-Rahim Ahmad. Club rules indicate that it was to focus on social issues of concern to its members, especially those related to the teaching of the Arabic language, its arts, and its literature.60 The monthly journal published by the club, Sahifat Nadi Dar alʿUlum, documents the active approach of darʿamiyya to the issue of language reform. In February 1908, the club launched a project to research the Arabisation (al-taʿrib) of foreign words, the results of which would be presented to members for approval and published in the journal.61 The continuing involvement of members in this area is shown by the inclusion of a section on language reform at the end of all twelve issues of Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum in the publication year 1910–11. The first issue of the second year includes an article 57 58 59 61

Bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m al-ibtida¯ʾı¯ wa bru¯gra¯m al-taʿlı¯m al-tha¯nawı¯ (1900), pp. 14–21, 79–82. Qa¯nu¯n Na¯dı¯ al-Mada¯ris al-ʿUlya¯, pp. 13–36. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 507. 60 Qa¯nu¯n Na¯dı¯ Dar al-ʿUlu¯m, p. 1, Art. 2. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 9, 507.

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presenting an initial list of substitutions for foreign words such as mudarraj instead of ‘amphitheatre’, which had entered Arabic as the awkward anfitiatru.62 The next article is the first of a multipart series entitled ‘The Future of the Arabic Language’ and includes investigation into Arabic roots.63 All subsequent issues in year two include either a list of words or a more extensive article contributing to the Future of the Arabic Language series.

Reforming Islam In the late nineteenth century, reforming Islamic thought and practice was a priority for many involved in the governance of Egypt. Colonial critiques blamed Islam for the weakness of Muslim countries in the face of European challenges, seeing it through Western eyes as simply a religion rather than a fundamental part of culture pervading every aspect of state and society. Cromer’s history-cum-memoir of Egypt presents a reductive and essentialised categorisation of the residents of Egypt that places Muslim Egyptians at the bottom due to their religion. To him, Islam was outdated and inherently prejudiced against other religions. That this section of the book was singled out for praise in a review in the London paper The Spectator demonstrates that these views were not held by Cromer alone. Furthermore, Cromer considered it impossible to reform Islam without transforming it into something else, yet he was openly condescending towards Europeanised Muslims, whom he considered to have lost their religion.64 This is another example of European commentators misrepresenting Islam and its ability to reform and change. The nineteenth century saw religious institutions and experts face significant challenges. The capacity of religious institutions to deal with these challenges – or at times even to physically accommodate their students and staff – was limited by charitable endowment (waqf, pl. awqaf) reforms that restricted funding at the same time as the rise of conscription and forced labour increased student numbers.65 That said, the importance of consensus within al-Azhar and the caution with which many of its staff approached change hindered the emergence of radical reinterpretations of thought or practice from its 62 63 64 65

Sahı¯fat Na¯dı¯ Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m, 2.1 (April 2010), pp. 25–9, esp. p. 26. ˙Sah ˙ ı¯fat Na¯dı¯ Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m, 2.1 (April 2010), pp. 30–2. ˙Mansfield, ˙ The British in Egypt, p. 141; Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 355–9.

Gesink, ‘Islamic Educational Reform in Nineteenth-Century Egypt’, pp. 17–18.

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Figure 3.1 Cover of the first alumni association publication, Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum.

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Figure 3.2 First edition of the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac published by ʿAbd alJawad (pictured) as a student in 1913–1914. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 528.

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ranks. As a result, turn-of-the-twentieth-century efforts to adapt Islam to address the new sociocultural and urban landscapes of Cairo came from outside of the walls of al-Azhar, from reform-minded shaykhs employed by the government, such as the darʿamiyya. Academic discussion of Islamic reform at the turn of the twentieth century focuses almost entirely on describing the ideas of the reformist thinkers often referred to as Islamic modernists. These thinkers included Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), who lectured in Egypt in the 1870s; Egyptian Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), who was among Afghani’s most gifted students; and Syrian Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who travelled to Egypt after Afghani’s death to study with ʿAbduh. They set out to make Islam relevant to the new sociocultural and intellectual environments emerging in Egypt, and often benefited at least in somewhat from government employment. Their efforts had a long-lasting impact on structures of Islamic knowledge and leadership, even though the extent to which their ideas reached the population of Egypt as a whole is questionable. First, they used ocularcentric media to argue that new interpretations of Islam should be at the centre of efforts to reform state and society. They spread their ideas beyond local discussion circles and lessons through printed journals such as The Firm Bond (al-ʿUrwat alWuthqa), edited by al-Afghani and ʿAbduh in Paris in 1884, and The Lighthouse (al-Manar), edited by Rida from 1898 until his death in 1935, after which the journal was run by the Muslim Brotherhood until 1940. Second, the spread of the techniques they called on to further their reinterpretations of Islam were highly dependent on the expansion of civil schooling. This is because they not only advocated the use of independent interpretation of religious sources (ijtihad) and Quranic commentary (tafsir) to renew Islam, but also because they argued for the end of the monopoly of religious scholars on the interpretation of religious texts. While it is debatable whether independent interpretation had actually stopped between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries,66 characterising Islamic law as unresponsive and unchanging enabled Islamic modernists to radically redefine the interpretive process by opening it up to all fluent readers of Arabic.67 ʿAbduh’s The 66 67

Hallaq, ‘Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?’ Gesink, Islamic Reform, pp. 6–7.

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Theology of Unity (Risalat al-tawhid) argues that Muslims should take more responsibility for Islamic thought and practice, both individually and communally, by not only memorising the Qurʾan but also trying to understand it in rational terms.68 This argument was echoed in the Quranic commentary serialised by Rida The Lighthouse. It is not clear that Rida or other modernists meant their calls for increased individual and collective responsibility to result in the interpretations of lay people to be given equal or near-equal status as those issued by religious scholars (ʿulamaʾ),69 as has since come to pass. Regardless, their arguments called for major shifts in patterns of authority. The increased individual responsibility they called for was only possible given the spread of literacy and social scientific ways of thinking within Egypt from around the turn of the twentieth century via the civil school system. In this context, Taha Husayn’s observation that the only people who seemed truly moved by the death of ʿAbduh were the efendiyya graduates of civil schools begins to make sense.70 That said, the intellectual discourse of Islamic modernists is only part of the picture. Among the many small associations pioneered by lowerlevel bureaucrats and teachers were religious-oriented groups that aimed to structure not only the religious practice of members, but also their engagement with wider state and society. In Egypt, many of these organisations aimed to combat western sociocultural influence, especially the spread of foreign morality and social practices, yet their interpretation of correct morality often showed the influence of semicolonial and colonial conceptions of discipline and order. For instance, missionary groups had a significant impact on the organisational structure of charitable and benevolent associations run by Egyptian Copts in the nineteenth century,71 plus many of these associations published journals which their members could read because they had been exposed to ocularcentric and discipline-focused norms in the civil school system. An alternative approach to reform of Islam came from an 1893 graduate of Dar al-ʿUlum, Tantawi Jawhari (1862–1940). Jawhari became Egypt’s most prominent spiritualist, whose quest for harmony and world peace made him the Egyptian nominee for the Nobel Prize at 68 69 70 71

Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, p. 5. Ivanyi, ‘Who’s in Charge?’, pp. 188–9, 192–3. Hussein, The Days, pp. 162–3. Sedra, ‘Monitorial Schools’, pp. 52–71, 107–28.

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the time of his death in 1940. While his work was respected by prominent Orientalists such as Joseph Schacht, H. A. R. Gibb, and David Santillana, his belief in spiritualism and his involvement with an Egyptian spiritualist association, Jamʿiyyat al-Ahram al-Ruhiyya, led him to be shunned by scholars at al-Azhar. Spiritualism, a religious movement that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, involves trying to speak with spirits through a medium and can represent an effort to harmonise science and religion. In Christian circles, adherents attempted to use its methods to empirically verify religious tenets such as life after death. Spiritualism can also be linked to universalism, that is efforts to harmonise and smooth out the differences between religions. While further research into the Egyptian version of this movement is required, it appears to have been a modern, explicitly scientific incarnation of mysticism. Much of Jawhari’s scholarly work focuses on demonstrating how Islam and its core texts do not conflict with either human nature or science, a concern he shared with prominent Islamic modernists.72 Also evident in much of his work is a belief in spirits and his ability to connect with them. His Dreams in Politics and How to Realise World Peace (Ahlam fi al-siyasa wa-kayfa yatahaqqaq al-salam al-ʿamm) demonstrates both of these trends. The book as a whole is structured around six visions delivered by spirits that present an ideal ordering for human life. Science is clearly also a priority, as he argues at the outset that it should be the basis for the international political order, just as it is the basis for mathematics and physics. He also refers periodically throughout the book to various European scientific works. He mailed a copy to the Bodleian Library in Oxford with a note to the librarian reminding him of his duty to further the study of world peace.73 Jawhari supported himself through his retirement in 1922 by teaching in governmentfunded or private institutions, primarily in civil schools but also for six years at Dar al-ʿUlum and the Egyptian University (1908–14). He is therefore one of the many reform-minded shaykhs who benefited from the ability to obtain employment outside of al-Azhar.

**** Looking broadly at Egyptian cultural reform and renewal at the turn of the twentieth century reveals the diversity of ideas that educated 72 73

See Daneshgar, Tantawi Jawhari and the Qurʾan. Jawharı¯, Ahla¯m fı¯ al-siya¯sa, pp. d–dh, j; Jawharı¯, Kita¯b al-Ta¯j al-murassaʿ. ˙˙ ˙

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Egyptians had about how Arabic and Islam should be hybridised with European ideas, practices, and technologies. It shows the important contributions of government-employed shaykhs, including darʿamiyya, to renewal and reform, contributions that facilitated many of the initiatives and activities associated with the nahda and nationalism. It also demonstrates the involvement of state institutions in these movements, despite British oversight within Egyptian ministries. The growth of state educational institutions provided shaykhs with employment outside of the religious sector, which in turn gave them the freedom to use their hybrid civil-religious cultural capital to innovate. These schools then spread the ocularcentrism, analytical techniques, and knowledge that enabled Egyptians outside of the intellectual elite to participate in the creation of a national culture that was modern and distinctly Egyptian.

Conclusion: Authority, Culture, and Anticolonial Resistance Graduates of hybrid schools contributed significantly to projects of modernity and nation-building, as well as to the cultural renaissance of the nahda, in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century (1882–1922). The Anglophile cultural policies of British advisors in the latter years of Cromer’s rule helped unify disparate groups of reform-minded Egyptians under the banner of nationalism. Conforming to colonial norms, especially with respect to organisational and knowledge practices, was essential to address the justifications British officials provided for their continued rule. However, Egyptian reformers not only wanted self-rule, but also a future that was distinctly and authentically Egyptian. As a result, Egypt’s reformers not only furthered the spread of the ocularcentric and disciplinary practices that were central to colonial ways of thinking, but also set out to reform and renew Arabic and Islam so that they would fit the new modes of living and governing that were emerging at the turn of the century. This combination of goals increased the sociocultural value of the civil school cultural capital of the efendiyya and the hybrid civilreligious cultural capital of the darʿamiyya. This in turn led an increasing number of religious school students to seek a place at Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges. The success of these schools spurred reform at al-Azhar and led to the

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integration of new subjects and European-influenced modes of teaching into Egypt’s top religious schools. The twofold nature of the nationalist project – pursuit of modernity and authenticity – also ensured that the darʿamiyya were essential to the development of Egyptian national culture. Anticolonial resistance and nationalism within the education system were not limited to the soon-to-be elite graduates of Cairo’s School of Law, the Egyptian instructors resisting British interference in the schools of law, engineering, and medicine, or the privately financed print culture in which they exchanged ideas.74 It was also carried out much more subtly by the hybrid schools that employed and trained the experts needed to adapt Arabic and Islam to the new realities facing Egypt. Reform programmes of the fin-de-siècle period were facilitated by the largely behind-the-scenes efforts of reform-minded shaykhs to change the Arabic language and how it was taught, to promote the study of Arabic literature, and to revive as well as reform Islamic thought and practice. Via their work in schools and the lower levels of the education bureaucracy, as well as the associations they ran in their spare time, they provided substantial support to the cultural renaissance known as the nahda. They made it possible to teach Arabic using the ocularcentric and disciplinary pedagogies that were at the core of turn-of-the century literary activities, introduced their contemporaries to classical Arabic literature, and contributed to the reform of the Arabic language. These activities cemented their status as the go-to authorities on the integration of Arabic and Islamic knowledge into Egyptian projects of modernity and nation-building. Recognising the importance of government-employed shaykhs – and especially the darʿamiyya – to nationalist mobilisation also demonstrates the coexistence, from the outset, of a broad and diverse range of views on the form that a self-consciously modern, yet explicitly Egyptian, nation should take. The potential for disagreement within this broad and disparate array of nationalists would not emerge until after the First World War, during the twenty-nine-year constitutional period (1923–52). Britain ruled Egypt under martial law during that conflict, while it served as a staging ground for British troops, but nationalist activities resumed with increased vigour as soon as the war was over. Demonstrations 74

Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, pp. 331–5.

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shook Egypt in March and April of 1919 after a delegation of Egyptian nationalists was blocked from attending the Paris Peace Conference, which they hoped would enable them to negotiate for independence similar to many of the other Arab provinces of the former Ottoman empire. Late in 1919, the Milner Commission recommended that the British open negotiations with the nationalists over the status of Egypt. Talks began in June 1921, but only resulted in further demonstrations. In 1922, Britain issued a unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence limited by four reserved points that maintained Britain control over the Suez Canal, military affairs, foreign policy, and the Sudan. This was not the outcome the nationalists had hoped for, as they would have to wait until 1936 to sign a bilateral independence treaty and until the 1952 Free Officer Revolution for full independence. However, this nominal independence enabled them to enact a constitution in 1923 and establish a parliament. These institutions enabled nationalist notables and intellectuals to have a say in governing Egypt, alongside the descendants of the khedives, who now used the title ‘king’, and British officials.

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Unlike al-Azhar, [Dar al-ʿUlum] virtually neglects the Islamic sciences; unlike the secular schools, it treats the modern disciplines very superficially. Thus, its alumni stand uncomfortably suspended, as it were, between the old knowledge and the new, ill-prepared to teach either.1 Taha Husayn, Mustaqbal al-thaqafa fi Misr, 1938 When Dar al-ʿUlum was founded, its mission was tough . . . for the purpose of Dar al-ʿUlum was to revive the lifelessness of the language and to resurrect this treasure that was about to disappear under the heap. Dar al-ʿUlum was able with the efforts of its men to restore this dying light to the Arabic language in its grammar, literature, and rhetoric, and to revive its past glory that the Umayyads and Abbasids boasted about; Dar al-ʿUlum was able to resurrect strength and action in [Arabic]. If we – we writers of today – are in debt to someone, we are in debt to the sons of Dar al-ʿUlum.2 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, speaking at Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum on 11 July 1939 after presenting prizes in honour of the late Abu al-Fath al-Fiqi

These quotations highlight two contrasting perspectives on Dar alʿUlum held by Europhile modernist members of the elite who dominated intellectual and political circles during the constitutional period. These statements were made just over halfway through the twenty-nine-year constitutional period (1923–52), at a time when popular discontent with Egypt’s political leaders was increasingly expressed and the authority of Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya was under attack. On the surface, arguments about Arabic and the schools teaching it seem disconnected from the emergence of a new mode of religious leadership and the disruption of political affairs by popular protests calling for independence and social justice. In fact, 1 2

Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 107–8. ‘Ihtifa¯l Jama¯ʿat Dar al-ʿUlum’, pp. 3–8. ˙

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the words and actions of the Europhile modernist elite in the latter half of the constitutional period make it clear that criticism of Dar alʿUlum was about much more than the legacy of a school and the status of its graduates, who were officially granted the title efendi in 1927.3 Instead, it was about the future of Egyptian national culture and who held the authority to shape it. The number of actors involved in advancing projects of modernity and nationalism increased significantly during the constitutional period, as the nationalist movement splintered into factions vying for political and social influence. Most histories of this period focus on the changing balance of power between the political parties active in parliament, British officials, and the king, as the Khedive was now known. All of the political parties active in parliament during this period were led by members of the socio-economic and sociocultural elite, with the majority centred around a single personality and unable to command broad levels of popular support. The dominant force within the Egyptian parliament was the Wafd Party, the only political party able to mobilise large numbers of Egyptians on election day. The Wafd was a tightly disciplined group under the leadership of Saʿd Zaghlul (1858–1927). It grew out of the delegation (wafd) that demanded that Egypt be represented at the Peace Conference in Paris. It based its claim to authority on the support of the masses and won every fair election during the constitutional period. Its success is why it is common to describe constitutional-era politics as a ‘three-legged stool’, where power shifted between the British high commissioner, the king, and the Wafd.4 Despite this high level of popular support, however, the Wafd was similar to the rest of the parties active in the parliament in one important respect: its leaders were from a largely Europhile elite, and they had no interest in advancing policies that would further socio-economic or sociocultural change. Members of a second political party, the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, made significant contributions to projects of modernisation and nationalism during this period. This party was formed in 1922 when ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Fahmi, Muhammad Mahmud, and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid 3 4

For more on this, see the section of the Introduction, ‘The Darʿamiyya as Modern and Religious’. Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt and Cromer, p. 207; Warburg, ‘The “Three-Legged Stool”’.

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(1872–1963), all of whom had taken part in the delegation demanding representation in Paris, split with Zaghlul and the Wafd. They were a loosely bound group of modernist intellectuals, bureaucrats, and landowners who thought that rule of Egypt should be bestowed on the basis of intellectual attainment, a view that contrasted sharply with the Wafd’s focus on winning popular support. Many had strong networks in rural areas, yet they had limited success courting the urban lower classes that were crucial to election victory because they saw themselves as superior to the masses. Members such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq, and Ibrahim ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Mazini had been active contributors to the periodical al-Jarida in the early decades of the twentieth century. These modernists not only remained aloof from the bulk of Egyptians but also had a vision for Egypt that was decidedly Europhile in approach. Viewing themselves as ʿAbduh’s secular heirs, they focused not on their appeal to the masses, but instead on advancing intellectual arguments for an explicitly civil state and society based on the European model.5 Despite relatively poor showings in elections, the Europhile modernists of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party dominated cultural circles and had numerous members serve as minister of education. Their intellectual leadership did not go unquestioned, however. As the 1920s progressed, the party and its members were accused of atheism by religious scholars multiple times. One example of this was in the aftermath of the publication of Shaykh ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq’s Islam and the Principles of Government (al-Islam wa usul al-hukm) in 1925, which appeared after the newly formed Turkish Republic abolished the caliphate in 1924. This book aimed, in part, to undermine the legitimacy of the monarchy and to argue against the claim of Egyptian King Fuʾad (r. 1917–36) to the caliphate. Its larger goal was even more controversial: arguing against the necessity of a caliphate and, in so doing, legitimising constitutional democracy without reference to Islamic principles or the monarchy. As a result of its publication, ʿAbd al-Raziq was thrown out of al-Azhar and removed from his judgeship. Also, due to his family’s association with the Liberal Party and the support given to him by the party’s newspaper al-Siyasa, the Liberal Party was removed from government. The following year, accusations of atheism were again raised against a Liberal, this time 5

Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 28–31, 53–5, 61–71.

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Taha Husayn, as a result of the publication of his On Pre-Islamic Poetry (Fi al-Shʿir al-Jahili). This book was controversial because it claimed that most of what was considered pre-Islamic poetry had been written after the foundation of Islam. This work, combined with other publications written by Husayn, was seen by its critics as undercutting the authority of the Qurʾan by reading it not as a religious text but as a source of historical evidence to be critically examined. In so doing, Husayn hoped to free the study of Arabic literature from the constraints of religion. In both instances, politicised charges of atheism issued by scholars associated with al-Azhar were amplified by the Liberals’ political rivals, marking the start of a notable increase in the use of Islam to score points in Egyptian politics. This further alienated the Egyptian population from the Liberals and spurred calls for the defence of Islam against attack.6 The authority of all elite political parties, including the Liberals, was further challenged by the emergence of a fourth leg for the stool: populist mass movements with leaders from outside the elite who capitalised on the anger generated by British occupation and elite indifference to social inequality among Egyptians. These movements included the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan alMuslimun), an association founded in 1928 that promoted Islamic revival and anticolonial resistance, and Young Egypt (Misr al-Fatah), a radical nationalist party founded in 1933 whose members injected militant violence into public protests until it was disbanded in 1938. While their members were largely excluded from high-level government positions, many had strong ties to the middle or lower levels of state institutions, especially civil schools in which many were enrolled as students or, in some cases, even worked as teachers. This context of increasingly populist and religiously polarised politics demonstrates that the late 1930s debate about Dar al-ʿUlum’s legacy was about much more than who would teach Arabic and how. It was not only about the reputation of Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates, nor was it simply a case of institutional rivalry, state encroachment, or concern over job opportunities.7 Instead, it was a reaction to the 6 7

Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 77–9, 92–4. As argued by Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, p. 62.

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actions of prominent darʿamiyya who used their authority as hybridisers of religious and civil capital and habitus to thwart Europhile modernist efforts to free Egypt from its religious heritage. That is, it was a reaction to educationalists trained at Dar al-ʿUlum who argued for significant continuity between past, present, and future in the revival, reform, and teaching of Arabic language and literature, as well as a reaction to darʿami schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna, who took advantage of claims that Islam was under attack to found the Muslim Brotherhood in order to revive it. These activities threatened elite leadership of Egyptian projects of modernity and nation-building and led to the outbreak of a culture war between darʿamiyya and Europhile modernists. The epigraphs at the start of this chapter highlight two of the approaches taken by Europhile modernists during this war. Taha Husayn responded to darʿami dominance over Arabic by going on the attack and attempting to delegitimise Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates as not modern enough. Muhammad Husayn Haykal responded to the increasing use of Islam in Egyptian politics and the rise of the darʿamiyya-led Muslim Brotherhood by writing wildly popular books that presented Islam in ways that were compatible with Europhile visions for Egypt’s future. At stake was the direction of Egyptian projects of modernity and nation-building, and the place of Islam within them.

Islam and a Modern Egyptian Nation Prominent darʿamiyya were at the forefront of integrating Islam into Egyptian national culture in ways that threatened the continuing westernisation of Egyptian state and society advocated by many Europhile modernists. As the role of references to Islam in Egyptian politics grew, so did the range of actors claiming to speak on its behalf. Up until the 1920s, the ability to speak publicly on behalf of Islam was claimed primarily by religious scholars (ʿulamaʾ). This is shown particularly by the debates following the Turkish Republic’s abolition of the caliphate in 1924, a year after it abolished the Ottoman sultanate. Arguments for re-establishing a caliphate – and arguments for or against the many opportunist monarchs who attempted to claim it – were largely made by prominent religious scholars. Even prominent reform-minded shaykhs, such as ʿAbduh’s Islamic modernist disciple Rashid Rida, joined in expressing support for re-establishment. When ʿAli ʿAbd al-

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Raziq argued that the caliphate was not a necessary institution in 1925 and Taha Husayn attempted to undercut the authority of the Qurʾan by reading it critically as a historical document instead of a religious text in 1926, each of them was denounced as an atheist even though they – similar to other major commentators – had significant religious training. However, Europhile modernists’ texts were far from the only threat to the near-monopoly held by the religious scholars over Islamic thought, practice, and leadership during the constitutional period.

The Muslim Brotherhood and New Forms of Islamic Expression Out of the hundreds of associations (jamʿiyyat, sing. jamʿiyya) active in the religious sphere since the start of the century came a movement that demanded a more prominent role for Islamic thought and practice within the parallel projects of modernity and nation-building: the Muslim Brotherhood, a jamʿiyya that quickly expanded into a mass movement, in part by subsuming smaller groups. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by darʿami Hasan al-Banna in the town of Ismaʿiliyya in the Suez Canal zone, where al-Banna taught in a civil school. It moved to Cairo in 1932 and had branches across Egypt by the time alBanna was assassinated in 1949. The Brotherhood’s call for the revival and renewal of religious practice within a modernising Egypt was not new. It was an expansion and extension of the jamʿiyyat had that emerged in Egypt starting in the late nineteenth century and brought people together to pursue common sociocultural or religious goals. Many religious-oriented associations aimed to structure not only the religious practice of members, but also their engagement with wider state and society. Furthermore, many of these organisations aimed to combat western sociocultural influence, especially the spread of foreign morality and social practices, yet their interpretation of correct morality often showed the influence of semicolonial and colonial conceptions of discipline and order. This seemingly paradoxical combination is likely to be the result of two elements present in Egypt from the mid-nineteenth century: civil schooling and foreign missionary groups. Paul Sedra demonstrates the influence of missionary groups on the organisational practices of Egyptian Copts in the late nineteenth century, while Beth Baron argues

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that the Muslim Brotherhood emerged when it did due to the expansion of missionary activities from the 1920s onwards and especially because of a 1933 crisis surrounding the mistreatment of a Muslim orphan by missionaries.8 The parallels between the Brotherhood and missionary activities in Egypt outlined by Baron are striking and appear to demonstrate that missionary activity during the constitutional period was a motivation for Islamic activism as well as a significant influence over the early development of the Brotherhood. However, to argue that these foreign organisations were the motivation ignores the impact of two traditions of practice that were already deeply embedded within Egyptian sociocultural landscapes: first, a tradition of civil education dating back to the 1820s, and, second, a tradition of grass-roots sociocultural organisations dating back to the 1880s, if not earlier. While the former certainly had European roots, and the latter are very likely to have European roots – their evolution in Egypt was locally focused and involved significant Egyptian agency. Giving foreign missionaries the starring role in inspiring the Brotherhood also ignores the importance of the state-led Egyptian projects of modernity, and especially civil schools, to the spread of European-influenced, ocularcentric capital and habitus. Only after these forms of knowledge, knowledge transmission, and organisation were normalised within Egypt did civil associations and printed journals become an obvious and accessible way for missionaries and the Brotherhood alike to spread ideas and practices. While the sensitivities around printed missionary material raised by the orphan crisis may have influenced when the Brotherhood launched their periodical, just as the expansion of missionary schools influenced where the Brotherhood set up schools,9 the use of ocularcentric media and nonreligious spaces to reach followers was an established practice well before 1933, even among grass-roots associations. For instance, the magazine of one association seeking to imbue its brand of ‘Islamic’ morality in Alexandria, The Magazine of the Abbasiyya Refuge and Islamic Moral Character (Majallat al-Malajiʾ al-ʿAbbasiyya wa Makarim al-Akhlaq al-Islamiyya), reached its twenty-first volume in 1920. Regular features in this magazine included 8 9

Sedra, ‘Exposure to the Eyes of God’, pp. 52–71; Baron, Orphan Scandal, pp. 127–8, 133–4, 150. Baron, Orphan Scandal, pp. 123–5.

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poetry, articles interpreting of verses of the Qurʾan, essays discussing the role that religion should play in society, and literary pieces addressing intercultural issues. One such piece discussed the influence of Arabs on Europe from an etymological perspective. Another association, the Association for the Protection of Islamic Morality (Jamʿiyyat Makarim al-Akhlaq al-Islamiyya), was active in Cairo from 1924 to 1938, at least. Its magazine contained regular features on Arabic prose, poetry, and literature as well as interpretation of the Qurʾan and the sayings of the Prophet (hadith) and sermon-like pieces admonishing the reader to maintain moral standards. The numbers of such associations were such that, even towards the end of the constitutional period when the Brotherhood was the dominant Islamist association in Egypt, James Heyworth-Dunne documented 135 associations related to Islam whose activities he categorised as religious, politico-religious, social, cooperative, vocational, and charitable.10 Another jamʿiyyat that attempted to influence politics on a national level joined ʿAbd al-Raziq in opposing King Fuʾad’s bid for the caliphate. The Association of the Islamic Caliphate in the Nile Valley (Jamaʿat al-Khilafa al-Islamiyya bi-Wadi al-Nil) was formed on 20 March 1924 to counterbalance the support which the bulk of religious scholars provided to King Fuʾad. The group was banned by the Wafd in May 1924 due to the anti-British activities of its founder Muhammad Madi Abu al-ʿAzaʾim (1869–1937), yet was influential in blocking Fuʾad’s appointment at the international congress held in Cairo in May 1926.11 Abu al-ʿAzaʾim graduated from Dar al-ʿUlum in 1890 or 1891 and taught in government schools in Egypt and Sudan, where he spread his own reformist version of the Shadhiliyya Sufi order, the Azaʾimiyya Shadhiliyya.12 He taught Islamic Law at Gordon College in Sudan between 1905 and 1915, after which he was banished to the Minya governate because of opposition to British rule. While Abu al-ʿAzaʾim’s status as a darʿami and government employee enabled him to oppose powerful religious scholars without suffering the consequences faced by ʿAbd al-Raziq, he was not immune to pressure from the British. 10 11 12

Heyworth-Dunne, Religious and Political Trends, pp. 30, 90–1 n. 30. De Jong, ‘Abu ‘l-ʿAza¯ʾim’; Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, pp. 55–74. His name does not appear in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac under either of these years, however.

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While the Brotherhood built upon the rich texture of associations that emerged within Egypt in the early years of the twentieth century, it is the first example of a different type of organisation: the mass Islamic movement. This is because the Brotherhood set out to transform Islam from a set of social and religious practices into an allencompassing ideology that could be mobilised in support of social, cultural, political, and economic change.13 While it pursued many of the same goals as religious associations – for instance, resistance to westernisation and missionary activities, plus provision of charitable assistance – the Brotherhood advanced a comprehensive programme of reform of religion, politics, society, and culture that went far beyond the socioreligious focus of the typical grass-roots association. The difference between the Brotherhood and other associations involved in politics during the 1930s is highlighted by a comparison with a group that also emerged in the late 1920s, the Association of Muslim Youth (Jamʿiyat al-Shubban al-Muslimin), also known as the Young Men’s Muslim Association. Like the Brotherhood, it was active in politics but its monthly magazine, launched in 1930/1, presents a sharp contrast to the Brotherhood’s publications. While the magazines and pamphlets put out by the Brotherhood were dominated by articles that aimed to spread particular habits and attitudes, the Young Men’s Muslim Association’s magazine focuses on discussing current affairs relating to the Muslim world. For instance, the July 1938 issue (vol. 9, no. 10) contains a series of articles profiling Muhammad Iqbal, the Pakistani (then Indian) leader, and a review of a book discussing Palestine.14 The breadth of the Brotherhood’s vision for Egypt made it much more than a political party using Islam to bolster its appeal. Instead, the Brotherhood presented Egyptians with an alternative to the state-led projects of modernity and nation-building, an alternative in which Islamic knowledge played a much more explicit role, especially with respect to legitimation of authority. Its appeal was linked not only to its use of Islam, but also its focus on reaching out to the efendiyya. The Brotherhood has been described repeatedly as ‘Islam of the efendiyya’, with scholars noting that it was a movement comprised primarily of the 13 14

Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 326–8; Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 4–5. See Majallat al-shubba¯n al-Muslimı¯n, 9.10 (July 1938).

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efendiyya.15 The link between the efendiyya and the Brotherhood goes far deeper than this, however. The Brotherhood presented a reinterpretation of Islamic thought and practice that was specifically tailored to the efendiyya, who were the main targets of its revivalist activities. This is because its formulation of Islam, first, fit perfectly with knowledge and forms of knowledge transmission used in the civil school system and, second, was presented in the social and professional spaces occupied by the efendiyya at times that fit in with their nonreligious obligations. Similar to Dar al-ʿUlum, Brotherhood leaders used ocularcentric pedagogies by presenting information about Islam in plainly worded texts whose meaning would be clear with little or no intervention from an instructor. These texts were focused on transmitting basic ideas and practices instead of the linguistic analysis or scholarly commentary that was the focus of audiocentric lessons at al-Azhar. At their most basic, these texts used Islamic scripture and teachings to instruct readers how to live as a proper Muslim within a context of European-influenced sociocultural change. In other words, the Brotherhood did not present Islamic knowledge using the highly technical approaches used by specialists in mosque-based schools, but instead adopted a manner that would be familiar and understandable to civil school graduates. The Brotherhood brought this approach to knowledge out of the mosque and into the lives of the efendiyya. Its leaders reached out to the efendiyya by sending preachers into the non-religious spaces – such as coffee houses – that they frequented.16 While its leaders were also active in mosques, meetings in non-religious spaces rented by the branches remained central to the movement throughout the constitutional period.17 Educational efforts were a major priority,18 and its branches enabled Egyptians to learn about Islam on a part-time basis alongside non-religious professional and educational pursuits. These two aspects – delivering information about Islam using civil school ocularcentrism and providing religious instruction in convenient times and places – made Brotherhood ideas and practices especially 15

16 17 18

Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 5–6, 280; Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, p. 216; Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, section 2.1; Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 77–8. Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 31–3, 107. Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers, p. 13. Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 6–7, 102–3.

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accessible to the efendiyya. In some respects, the Brotherhood’s actions in these areas mirrored those of earlier associations catering to modernising segments of the population, as many of the small-scale associations of the constitutional period met in secular spaces, were led primarily by lay people, connected members through regular newsletters and magazines, and organised action related to charitable and political causes. Yet the Brotherhood’s efforts in these areas were on an entirely different scale and were directed specifically at the goal of mass sociocultural and political change inspired by their interpretations of Islam. A crucial part of its efforts to transform Islam into a modern socio-political ideology was the seamless integration of its ideas and practices with the habitus of the efendiyya.

Darʿamiyya and the Emergence of New Religious Intellectuals The Brotherhood was successful as a mass movement because of its ability to cross and straddle the sociocultural and socio-economic boundaries separating civil schools and institutions overseen by a largely Europhile political elite from schools and institutions run by religious scholars. While religious scholars had held a monopoly on the public exercise of text-based, or scholarly, forms of religious authority for centuries, they had neither the sociocultural capital nor – in many cases – the inclination to adapt Islam to fit into the new landscapes and lifestyles that were emerging within Egypt. This fell to a new type of religious leader, individuals academics call ‘new religious intellectuals’ or ‘lay intellectuals’.19 These leaders were able to gain legitimacy as religious leaders despite spending the majority of their education studying in non-religious institutions and lacking mastery of the modes used by the religious scholars to transmit, interpret, apply, and dispute religious texts. Their emergence is generally tied to shifts around the turn of the century, such as Islamic modernists arguing for the interpretations of the Qurʾan independent of centuries of past scholarship, civil schools increasing the body of people who were literate enough to do this, and new forms of media creating spaces in which would-be interpreters could spread their ideas, engage with others, and build a reputation 19

Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics, p. 165; Zaman, ‘Consensus and Authority’, p. 155.

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outside of mosques. Mass movements such as the Brotherhood, with their educational programmes and hierarchies of leadership, are credited with turning new religious intellectuals into a major phenomenon. Exactly how they were able to do this, however, is largely misunderstood. The spread of literacy, the democratisation of religious interpretation, and the emergence of new types of organisation do not fully explain why new religious intellectuals were seen as authoritative leaders. The educational background of early new religious intellectuals such as Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb, a Brotherhood ideologue, is key to understanding the emergence of this type of Islamic leader.20 It is crucial to recognise that al-Banna and Qutb had significant formal training in religious subjects, as their highest degree was from Dar al-ʿUlum instead of a purely civil institution. Assumptions that they did not have significant religious training appear to stem from several factors. Al-Banna and Qutb had largely been educated in civil schools before entering Dar al-ʿUlum, a background that was unusual at Dar al-ʿUlum until its first preparatory school class entered in 1924. They also graduated from the school in 1928 and 1933, respectively, shortly after the dress strike officially reclassified the darʿamiyya as efendiyya instead of shaykhs. This meant that they were free to use the dress and title of the efendiyya while working in civil schools as a teacher, in the case of al-Banna, and a school inspector, in the case of Qutb. While it was easy for al-Banna and Qutb to appear as modern as any other member of the efendiyya, their association with Dar al-ʿUlum meant that they also had significant religious credentials on which to draw. First, their education at Dar al-ʿUlum contained significant training in the Arabic and Islamic disciplines forming the centrepiece of a religious education. Entrance examinations tracked what was studied at al-Azhar fairly closely, meaning that al-Banna and Qutb, entering in 1923 and 1929, would have been expected to be able to recite and explain the syntax, grammar, and rhetoric used in the Qurʾan and the Alfiyya of Ibn Malik to gain entry to the school. As a child, Qutb memorised the Qurʾan and sought out lessons from students of al-Azhar who travelled the countryside to lecture in their vacations.21 Al-Banna, however, resisted memorising the Qurʾan as 20

Kalmbach, ‘Blurring Boundaries’.

21

Qutb, A Child from the Village, p. 23.

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a child and chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps by attending the Religious Institute in Alexandria and then al-Azhar.22 Instead he attended the Primary Teachers’ Training School in Damanhur, a secondary-level school that trained graduates of primary schools to return and teach. It is unsurprising, therefore, that while al-Banna had spent time studying the Alfiyya, he was insecure about his mastery of formal grammatical disciplines when he sat the entrance exam.23 Once at Dar al-ʿUlum, this basic understanding of religious and linguistic subjects was enhanced further by a curriculum that mixed coursework in Arabic, Islam, pedagogy, and the subjects taught in civil schools. Second, as darʿamiyya, both men were able to draw on the reputation of the school, its association with religious knowledge, and its track record in producing go-to experts on how to combine religious and civil knowledge, regardless of their individual level and skill. Al-Banna and Qutb (and subsequent new religious intellectuals) established themselves as religious authorities via the same mechanism used by religious scholars for centuries: they embodied knowledge mastered through study in ways that matched what a given audience expected of a religious leader.24 Because of their education at Dar alʿUlum, however, they had a much wider range of cultural capital on which to draw and their access to employment was not dependent on currying favour with influential religious scholars. They had sufficient religious knowledge to speak authoritatively about key subjects and to use the language, habits, bearing, and dress of a religious scholar, yet – like all Dar al-ʿUlum graduates after 1927 – they lived and worked as efendiyya and understood the very real social and economic challenges faced by this group in the 1930s and 1940s, especially their struggle to live new, ‘modern’ lifestyles without completely abandoning the ideas and heritage of the past. Their ability to assert authority in a wider range of situations that most of their educated peers – specifically on both sides of the sociocultural boundary separating the social milieus of efendi and shaykh – enabled them to respond to the concerns of the age and their generation, and to forge ways of being modern and religious. Al-Banna is best seen as an activist leader with a strong interest in Islamic education and revival, much of which was targeted at the 22 23 24

Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, p. 25. al-Banna¯, Mudhakkira¯t, pp. 32–5, 42; Qutb, A Child from the Village, pp. 9–30. Kalmbach, ‘Islamic Authority’, pp. 7–13.

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urban efendiyya. His authority rested on his hybrid education at Dar alʿUlum and factors such as previous experience in government schools, family ties to religion via his father, a mosque instructor and scholar, and his continuing connections with Sufi and Islamic welfare groups. His speaking style was charismatic, and he was comfortable preaching in a wide range of venues, which aided his efforts to reach out to new audiences in coffee shops and other non-religious public places. He was an inveterate networker, crossing boundaries to reach out to religious scholars and community leaders, in both rural and urban settings, and actively participating in other Islamic groups.25 His memoir claims that he was one of two students at Dar al-ʿUlum who did not adopt the suit and tarboush in the year following the dress strike, but that he later did so during trips to teach in schools at the request of a respected teacher. After graduation, he continued to cross boundaries with respect to dress, switching between the suit and tarboush of the government employee and the turban and gown of the religious scholar, sometimes modified slightly, with hajj-style sandals and a cloak to reference the practices of the Prophet. That his writing makes specific references to his dress seems to indicate that he was aware of the signals it could send to audiences.26 Yet the most significant of al-Banna’s activities as a leader fall into the realm of boundary straddling, by which I mean the combining of elements from different religious and civil sociocultural codes. He combined the work and lifestyle – and often the dress – of a government-employed efendi with specific (arguably reinvented) religious ideas and practices. Gudrun Krämer sums up a visual example of this – al-Banna’s combination of efendi dress with a tidy religiously inspired beard – as an attempt to cultivate some sort of ‘Islamic modern’ look.27 The long-term entrenchment of the ideas and practices that al-Banna taught, embodied, and institutionalised in the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood led to the shifting of the boundary between shaykh and efendi. This shift furthered the incorporation of religious elements – often reinterpreted – into the intellectual, professional, and private lives of efendiyya and their middle-class successors in the second half of the twentieth century. 25 26 27

Lia, Society of the Muslim Brothers, pp. 188, 132–6. Krämer, Hasan al-Banna, pp. 88–90, al-Banna¯, Mudhakkira¯t, pp. 52–3. Krämer, Hasan al-Banna, p. 90.

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As an authority, Sayyid Qutb was more of a public intellectual than a grass-roots activist, as shown by the form of his early forays into the religious realm – a series of journal articles in 1948, followed by his book Social Justice in Islam.28 Prior to establishing himself as a Muslim public intellectual, he had built a reputation as a secular literary critic, author, and intellectual, and it is likely that his efforts to enter the Islamic sphere were aided by his prior reputation and his long-standing links with publishers and editors. While he joined the Brotherhood in the early 1950s and was in charge of their outreach literature, his lasting legacy is found in his many books on Islam, the most famous of which he wrote in the late 1950s and 1960s. Discussions of Qutb often divide his life into ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ compartments, arguing that his circulation post-graduation in the same literary salons as pro-European intellectuals such as ʿAbbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad should be seen separately from his subsequent Islamist activities. These accounts are encouraged by the way in which Qutb’s writings draw and reinforce a boundary between religious and nonreligious segments of his life, for instance, by describing his trip to the United States as a major turning point, and by labelling his life before his turn to Islamism as a period of jahiliyya, a reference to the ‘age of ignorance’ before the coming of Islam. However, the emphasis put on this division is misplaced. His description of his childhood and his entrance to Dar al-ʿUlum demonstrate that religion, religious texts, and religious knowledge were important to Qutb for much of his early life, and publications from the late 1930s demonstrate his discomfort with unabashedly pro-European approaches. Furthermore, the stages of the ostensibly ‘religious’ section of his life are not uniform but reveal a range of views starting with moderate calls for political and social reform and only later arguing for extreme action.29 With respect to religious authority, al-Banna and Qutb were able to apply significant religious training and familiarity with the civil spaces and professions of rapidly modernising Egyptian society to their leadership activities. The social and cultural capital held by al-Banna and Qutb as darʿamiyya enabled them – and by extension the Brotherhood – to better address the needs and concerns of a rapidly modernising Egypt. Social justice and reform – crucial issues for both 28 29

See Qutb, al-ʿAda¯la al-ijtima¯ʿiyya fı¯ al-Isla¯m. Zollner,˙ The Muslim Brotherhood, pp. 41, 50–4.

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the middle strata and the poor – were key themes throughout. Implicit in many of their arguments and activities was an opposition to western influence, first, politically (in the form of occupation and imperialism), second, religiously (in the form of missionary activities), and, finally, culturally (for instance, with respect to the changing prominence and roles of women). Their examples, as founder-leader and public intellectual, set a precedent that paved the way for the emergence of religious leaders whose religious credentials fell far short of those held by a religious scholar. Furthermore, the ideas of Sayyid Qutb have been seized upon by extremist groups such as that led by Muhammad ʿAbd al-Salam Faraj (1954–82), which was implicated in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat (1918–81), and been applied to the ‘far enemy’ – that is, non-Muslim societies – by transnational extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS who engage in violence on a global, instead of domestic, scale. Along with Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi, Qutb contributed significantly to the emergence of violent Sunni extremist groups in the twentieth century by applying the concept of jahiliyya to modern Egyptian society, and the concept of takfir (excommunication) to mean not only Muslims who consciously reject one or more core tenets of Islam, but also the political leaders of societies in a state of jahiliyya.30 The examples set by the Brotherhood as a mass Islamic movement and a pioneer of a new form of religious leadership have been replicated in communities around the world, often by groups who see themselves as affiliated in some way to the original Egyptian group, including in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. A comparable group with ties to Dar alʿUlum is the Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami, also transliterated as Hizb-ut-Tahrir). It was founded by Taqi al-Din alNabhani, a darʿami originally from Palestine, as a Jordanian political party in 1953. It has since expanded into a transnational religious movement encouraging revival of particular forms of Islamic practice and calling for the unification of Muslims worldwide under a caliphate. As a mass movement with worldwide reach, including activities in 30

For instance, see Nettler and Qutb, Past Trials and Present Tribulations; Musallam, From Secularism to Jihad; Khatab, The Political Thought of Sayyid Qutb; Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism.

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Central, South, and South-East Asia, Australia, and Britain, there are many parallels between the Islamic Liberation Party and the Brotherhood. It is important to stress that Dar al-ʿUlum was not a hotbed of radicalism. It is not possible to link unique aspects of the student experience at Dar al-ʿUlum directly to the emergence of these groups. Similarly, it is not possible to predict that a hybrid background obtained or enhanced by attending Dar al-ʿUlum would lead to the emergence of al-Banna and Qutb and subsequently the ‘new religious intellectuals’. This is because capital does not determine which of many possible paths an individual will follow, but only delineates a range of possible paths. It sets the parameters within which an individual negotiates personal and professional spaces, parameters that can only be altered by investing the time and effort to obtain more or different forms of cultural capital. That the background of such important early leaders included significant training in long-standing religious disciplines alongside a civil school education, however, demonstrates clearly the utility of boundary straddling and crossing, as well as the possession of a wide range of cultural capital, in the construction of new forms of Islamic authority. These leaders’ ability to reach beyond peers with a narrower range of cultural capital enabled them to meet the expectations and needs of their audience, the efendiyya. It made it possible for them to adapt not only Islamic thought – as Islamic modernists had been doing since the late nineteenth century – but also Islamic practice to meet the demands of new circumstances and lifestyles. Because they could wield authority within modernising circles, they were able to spread new ideas, practices, and politics, and to build new institutions. Therefore, the hybrid civil-religious cultural capital that both al-Banna and Qutb gained upon graduation – which was a significant, if not strictly unique, characteristic of the darʿamiyya – was a major factor behind their ability to have such transformative impacts.

Challenging the Authority of the Darʿamiyya The founding and expansion of the Brotherhood, alongside the emergence of new religious intellectuals, fit into a larger process of Islamisation of public discourse in Egypt during the constitutional period. As free elections and the spread of literacy widened the body

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of Egyptians active in politics, the ability to reference Islamic knowledge became an increasingly powerful source of legitimacy within Egyptian state and society. By the late 1920s, Europhile modernists arguing for further westernisation faced a dilemma: if they continued to express their visions for Egyptian national culture in terms of European or Pharaonic heritage, they had very little chance of turning their visions into reality, as popular sentiment lay instead with drawing on the Arabic and Islamic heritage that connected Egypt with its neighbours in North Africa and the Middle East. As a result, during the constitutional period, prominent Europhile modernists significantly increased their engagement with Islam politically and intellectually. Claims that Islam and Muslims were under attack featured regularly in Egyptian parliamentary and sociocultural politics in Egypt from the late 1920s. In 1929, the Liberal Constitutionalists attempted to gain the upper hand against those accusing them of atheism in reaction to the work of Husayn and ʿAbd al-Raziq by claiming to defend Egyptian Muslims against a Coptic conspiracy within the Wafd Party. They asserted that their split with the Wafd in 1921 enabled ‘Coptic zealots’ to enter the party and gain influence, an argument that was supported by Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, a reform-minded former Shaykh alAzhar. Popular perception that Islam and Muslims in Egypt were under threat were stoked further by a string of reports relating to missionaries overstepping their authority: for instance, reports that staff at the American University of Cairo kidnapped a Muslim in January 1932 and that missionaries running an orphanage beat a Muslim girl to force her to convert in May 1933.31 The former provided an opportunity for Liberals to attack Prime Minister Ismaʿil Sidqi, Shaykh al-Azhar Muhammad al-Zawahiri, and their support for suspending the 1923 constitution between 1930 and 1935. The May 1933 scandal united a broad coalition of Egyptians under the banner of the League for the Defence of Islam, including the Liberals associated with al-Siyasa, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Young Men’s Muslim Association, and Shaykh al-Maraghi, who also happened to be Zawahiri’s nemesis. After the constitution was restored, Liberals and Maraghi teamed up with other opposition parties to continue to use Islam to delegitimise the Wafd. They presented King Faruq as a defender of Islam at his 31

Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, p. 112; Baron, The Orphan Scandal, pp. 1–5.

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coronation in 1937 and used anti-Copt propaganda to keep the Wafd out of power, efforts that resulted in a Liberal government between January 1938 and August 1939. In the 1930s, reference to Islam was a feature not only of Egyptian politics, but also of many of the books and articles written by Europhile modernists in this period, creating a body of literature that Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski call ‘Islamiyyat’. Their survey of this literature includes Islam-focused periodicals al-Fath (1926–), the periodicals of two associations, Majallat al-Hidaya al-Islam (1928–) and Majallat al-Shubban al-Muslimin (1929–), four publications associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, two associated with al-Azhar, Ahmad Husayn al-Zayyat’s al-Risala (1933–), Ahmad Amin’s al-Thaqafa (1939–), and assorted articles from older publications such as al-Hilal and al-Siyasa, as well as authors ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Najjar, ʿAbd alWahhab Azzam, Taha Husayn, Muhammad Efendi Rida, Taufiq alHakim, ʿAbd al-Rahman ʿAzzam, ʿAbbas Mahmoud al-ʿAqqad, Mahmud Taymur, Ibrahim ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhiy al-Din Rida, and Ahmad Husayn.32 The most significant author of Islamiyyat is Muhammad Husayn Haykal, whose 1934 book, Life of Muhammad (Hayat Muhammad), presented the Prophet as an exemplar for contemporary Egyptians in a way that refuted Orientalist criticisms, yet also undermined religious scholars in so far as it advanced a rational, scientific, European-inspired vision for Egyptian state and society. Then, in 1937, Haykal’s account of the pilgrimage to Mecca, In the House of Inspiration (Fi Manzil al-Wahy), argued that European science and technology should be combined with early Islam’s lack of religious officials as intermediaries.33 This body of material as a whole takes a progressive, modern approach to Islamic history and presents early Islamic leaders, especially the Prophet Muhammad, as heroes whose examples are relevant to the present day.34 The shift in focus among Europhile modernist authors to writing about Egypt’s Arabic and Islamic heritage was perceived by many readers as a genuine change of heart, yet this is only one of several possible explanations. Gershoni and Jankowski list three goals 32 33 34

Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 54–78. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 113–25. Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 55–6.

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commonly held by Islamiyyat authors – defending Islam from external attack and internal conservatism, revival and reform of Arabic and Islamic culture, and reaching out to the burgeoning literate population – that were best furthered by combining old and new, modern and traditional, past and present. Their works presented Islam as ‘liberal’ and ‘modern’ and emphasised ‘the humanity, the greatness, and the rationalism’ of the Prophet Muhammad and other early Islamic leaders.35 Gershoni and Jankowski’s broad survey of this literature does not explain what is different about it, however. Almost all reformist groups active in Egypt during this period justified their agenda by presenting it as a middle way that would create a state and society that was modern and authentic. Even if we discard groups drawing on non-Islamic sources of authenticity, such as Egypt’s countryside, Pharaonic heritage, or historic connections to Graeco-Roman civilisation, actors using this strategy include Islamic modernists such as Afghani and ʿAbduh, modernist Salafis such as Rashid Rida, and Islamic revivalists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to Europhile modernists such as Ahmad Amin and Muhammad Husayn Haykal. As a result, Charles Smith’s detailed study of Haykal provides more insight into how Islamiyyat factored into sociocultural politics during the constitutional period. Smith argues that Haykal’s writing about Islam was ‘a direct product of an existential situation to which he and colleagues such as Taha Husayn responded, not an internal crisis of orientation’. That is, it was a response to popular unrest that threatened the social position and political influence of Egypt’s elite. In other words, the authors of Islamiyyat were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to maintain social order and advance a European-influenced vision for Egyptian state and society during a period in which demand for Islamic knowledge was high. In Smith’s assessment, Haykal’s Europhile vision remained constant over several decades, though the manner in which it was expressed changed over time.36 Regardless of whether or not the interest in Islam exhibited by Haykal and other authors of Islamiyyat was the product of a spiritual change of heart, the act of writing about Islam from a Europhile modernist perspective 35 36

Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, pp. 55–7, 63–4, 66–9, 71–5. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 2–7, 45, 83–4, 132–8, 181 (quotation p. 2).

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served to place Islamic knowledge at the service of Europhile modernist goals and to supplant religious scholars as a source of knowledge about Islam. Adding darʿamiyya to the frame makes it clear that these efforts were about co-opting the authority of not only religious scholars but also the darʿamiyya. In fact, the ability of Hasan al-Banna and other darʿami new religious intellectuals to exercise sociocultural as well as religious authority makes it all the more likely that they were a strategic target for Haykal and other Europhile modernists. Europhile modernist attempts to persuade Egyptians to accept a Europhile vision of Islam’s role in state and society failed not only because the Europhile principles underlying their writings were unpalatable to the majority of Egyptians, but also because most of them did not have sufficient relevant cultural capital to convincingly legitimise their interpretations. The success of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar organisations indicates that many Egyptians found the version of modernity espoused by an efendi from Dar al-ʿUlum, linked strongly to Egypt’s Arabic and Islamic heritage, more compelling than the European-focused vision of a foreign-educated graduate of the University.37

Arabic and a Modern Egyptian Nation Arabic was the second major flashpoint in the culture war between Europhile modernists and the darʿamiyya, though the key Europhile modernist interlocutor in this case was Taha Husayn rather than Muhammad Husayn Haykal. The question at the centre of this debate – how and where Arabic teachers should be trained, at Dar al-ʿUlum, alAzhar, or the University – emerged at a time when the Shaykh al-Azhar was under pressure to increase the jobs available to its graduates. Also important was the 1925 refounding of the University as a public institution, into which many of the Ministry of Education’s higher schools were incorporated as faculties. The shrinking number of higher schools in the civil school system, combined with the fact that the refounded University already had a college of literature (Kulliyyat al-Adab) and 37

The Egyptian University was renamed Fuʾa¯d I University in honour of its first rector, King Fuʾa¯d, after his death in 1936, and then Cairo University after the 1952 Free Officer Revolution. To avoid confusion, I refer to it as the Egyptian University or simply ‘the University’ throughout. See Reid, Cairo University, pp. 1, 18, 71, 115.

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this institution took a European-influenced approach to Arabic that was very different from Dar al-ʿUlum’s focus on long-standing grammatical disciplines, made Dar al-ʿUlum’s position – as an independent higher school straddling the boundary between civil and religious educational tracks and belonging fully to neither – less tenable. These struggles over Arabic were about more than institutional rivalries, however. Increasing Arabic proficiency among Egyptian schoolchildren was particularly important because of the central role Arabic played within the Egyptian project of nation-building. In 1938, Taha Husayn summed up nationalist sentiment by arguing that the Arabic language is an essential part of Egyptian national consciousness: Arabic is our national language and as such constitutes an integral part of the Egyptian personality. It is the medium for transmitting to the younger generation the legacy of the past and serves as the natural tool by which we help one another realize our personal and societal needs.38

Since the early twentieth-century fight to increase the classroom time spent on Arabic, Islam, and local interpretations of history and geography, reforming the Arabic language and how it was taught had been a crucial part of the projects of modernity and nation-building. The idea that Egyptian schoolchildren were not excelling at Arabic featured prominently in debates in the constitutional period, though it is unclear whether student proficiency was actually lower than it had been in the past or only falling short of what nationalists wanted it to be. A range of factors could have been contributing to low standards of Arabic among graduates – the skill of the teachers, the general approach to Arabic, the content of specific textbooks, the large amount of time devoted by the curriculum to other subjects including foreign languages, or the difficulty of the language itself. Therefore, the problem could have been more about perception or even a rhetorical position used to support a call for change. For our purposes, all that matters is that key voices within Egypt perceived that there was a problem, and blamed it on Arabic teachers, the approaches they used, and the institutions that trained them. While the most prominent of these attacks, Husayn’s 1938 The Future of Culture in Egypt, took an unequivocally pro-western stance that was at odds with the shift towards Islam pioneered by Haykal, it served the same goal: 38

Hussein, Future of Culture, p. 83.

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undermining the authority of the darʿamiyya and religious scholars in order to shape Egyptian national culture and the role played by Islamic knowledge and expertise within it.

Darʿamiyya and the Reform of Arabic In the constitutional period, the darʿamiyya continued to exert a significant influence over Arabic as a language and a body of knowledge, especially through language reform and teaching. Arabic language reform, pioneered on an ad hoc basis at the turn of the century by associations such as the Dar al-ʿUlum alumni club, was taken to the next level with the foundation of the Arab Scientific Academy (Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmi al-ʿArabi) in Damascus in 1921 and the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya al-Malaki) in Cairo in 1932. The Egyptian Majmaʿ was set up by the king with twenty members and an official mandate to investigate and issue decisions related to the Arabic language.39 The autocratic rule of Sidqi and Fuʿad between 1930 and 1935 meant that Europhile modernists affiliated with other political parties, such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, ʿAbbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, and Taha Husayn, were excluded from the founding cohort of the Majmaʿ, even though they were included on a list of individuals suggested for membership drawn up and published by the Egyptian intelligentsia.40 However, three darʿamiyya were selected to join the founding cohort: ʿAli al-Jarim (1881–1949), Ahmad ʿAli al-Iskandari (1875–1938), and Ahmad al-ʿAwamri (1876–1954). Al-Jarim graduated from Dar al-ʿUlum in 1908, studied in England for four years, and then returned to Egypt to teach and inspect schools before serving as deputy director at Dar al-ʿUlum from 1940 until his retirement in 1942.41 Al-Jarim and Iskandari were two of only three people on the intelligentsia’s list of suggestions who were actually selected by the 39 40 41

Stetkevych, Modern Arabic Literary Language, p. 13; Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, p. 142. The list was apparently published in al-Ahra¯m on 16 November 1932. See Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 134. After al-Ja¯rim’s death, his son arranged for the publication of seven volumes containing his complete works and the commentaries of others on his writing and activities, and two books discussing his influence: al-Ja¯rim, al-Ja¯rim fı¯ damı¯r al-ta¯rı¯kh; al-Ja¯rim, Ja¯rimı¯ya¯t; al-Ja¯rim, ʿAlı¯ al-Ja¯rim: na¯thiran; al-Bayu¯mı¯˙, ʿAlı¯ al-Ja¯rim: Sha¯ʿir al-ʿuru¯ba.

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state. These darʿamiyya served alongside European Arabic experts on the Majmaʿ, where they advocated a careful balance between continuity and change on the issue of language reform. Darʿamiyya working for the Ministry of Education struck a similar balance when they ensured that the grammatical disciplines that had long formed the basis of Arabic training in religious schools remained influential – in ocularcentric form – in Egyptian schools through the 1960s. In the late 1930s, the Arabic grammar books in use in government primary schools since the late 1880s or early 1890s were replaced by new books, also written largely by darʿamiyya. One was the Grammar Book of the Arabic Language for Primary School Students (Kitab qawaʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya li-talamidh al-madaris alibtidaʾiyya), whose volumes were used in primary schools for almost a decade (1936–44), if not longer.42 Three out of its five authors – Ibrahim Mustafa, Muhammad ʿAtiyya al-Ibrashi, Mahmud al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Latif – were darʿamiyya. Another new book was The Clear Syntax in the Grammar of the Arabic Language for Primary Schools (al-Nahw al-wadih fi qawaʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya lil-madaris alibtidaʾiyya), written by darʿamiyya al-Jarim and Mustafa Amin, a 1907 graduate. This book appears to have been published in primary and secondary school versions in Egypt from 1933 to 1965.43 Fifty years later, it was still being used in translation by European Muslims who wanted a grammar-focused approach to Arabic without having to go back to classical texts.44 Finally, the Ministry of Education review panel for the first of these two books, at least, was made up of four darʿamiyya – Ahmad al-Iskandari, Muhammad Mahdi ʿAllam, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Wahid Wafi, and Muhammad Ahmad Jad al-Mawla – plus Taha Husayn and Ahmad Amin. These books continued to present Arabic grammar through a relatively complex network of terms for different parts of speech and types of sentence. While Arabic grammar was taught alongside a range of other subjects, such as literature and composition, these new books ensured that the conceptual framework and terminology of the grammatical disciplines used at al-Azhar would remain in use, as per 42 43 44

Mustafa¯ et al., Kita¯b qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya (1936, 1937, 1941). ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 162–3, 205–7; al-Ja¯rim and Amı¯n, al-Nahw al˙ wa¯dih. See also Appendix II. ˙ See˙http://unity1.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/al-nahw-al-wadih-primary-partone.pdf.

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the practice at Dar al-ʿUlum. This approach contrasted sharply with practice at the University’s College of Literature, which used a European-influenced literature-based approach.

Dar al-ʿUlum and the Darʿamiyya Under Attack The debate about who should train Arabic teachers that culminated in the late 1930s with the publication of The Future of Culture in Egypt had begun over a decade earlier, with Egypt’s hybrid schools – the School of Shariʿa Judges and Dar al-ʿUlum – as its focal point. In 1920, pressure from al-Azhar led to the closure of the lower preparatory section of the School of Shariʿa Judges and the decision to fold the higher section of this school into al-Azhar between 1920–1 and 1924–5. A temporary section with its own four-year curriculum was opened within Dar al-ʿUlum in order to allow graduates of the lower section to continue their studies in a civil school, while students from the lower section who had not yet finished their studies were transferred to al-Azhar. Despite the cloud hanging over the School of Shariʿa Judges, however, Dar al-ʿUlum not only managed to remain effectively independent but even expanded vertically with the opening of the four-year preparatory school of Dar al-ʿUlum (Madrasat al-Tajhiziyya Dar alʿUlum) in 1920. This school took students out of the religious system at a younger age so that they could be introduced to civil school subjects and pedagogies at an earlier point in their education. This change was made because the quality of Dar al-ʿUlum was seen to have deteriorated, a shift that was attributed to a lack of qualified entrants coming from religious schools. Many of the students who had been transferred to al-Azhar from the preparatory school attached to the School of Shariʿa Judges chose to sit the end-of-year examination taken by first year students in Dar al-ʿUlum’s new preparatory school, even when it meant repeating years of study.45 Al-Azhar went on the offensive again in 1924, the year in which the first cohort of students graduated from Dar al-ʿUlum’s preparatory school and a new four-year course of study was created for them at Dar al-ʿUlum. Apparently almost all of the students who were accepted into the first year of Dar al-ʿUlum for the 1924–5 academic year came 45

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 51, 57–9.

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from the preparatory school rather than al-Azhar. Ministry of Education administrators made this shift permanent in 1925 by deciding to abolish the five-year curriculum followed by the admission of students directly from al-Azhar in 1927–8, the year that the cohort who entered in 1923–4 would graduate. (See Figure 4.2 for a picture of these students.) This shift appears to be behind al-Azhar’s demand, in 1924, that the preparatory school and Dar al-ʿUlum be closed. Subsequent negotiations resulted in a compromise: secondary-level departments would be established at al-Azhar and its religious institutes, using the preparatory school as a model, successful graduates of these departments would be eligible for entry to Dar al-ʿUlum, and the preparatory school was to be closed starting in the year 1925–6. However, these measures do not appear to have had a significant impact on the skills of al-Azhar students, in the 1920s at least. Ten students with secondary certificates from al-Azhar were selected to sit the end-of-year exam taken by first year students at Dar al-ʿUlum in 1925. Two of the ten showed up for the examination and only one passed. He was allowed to enter Dar al-ʿUlum in 1925–6, but starting from scratch in the first year instead of the second alongside those with whom he was examined. Potentially as a result, the cancellation of the preparatory school was reversed in 1927 and in 1928 the decision was made to reduce enrollment gradually between the 1929–30 and 1934–5 academic years as students graduated.46 The sociocultural advantages of a degree from Dar al-ʿUlum versus alAzhar in the 1920s are shown by the repeated preference for Dar alʿUlum among students from the School of Shariʿa Judges. The School of Shariʿa Judges appears to have been entirely swallowed up by al-Azhar in 1925, then was reopened under Ministry of Education control in 1927, before being permanently incorporated into al-Azhar in 1930.47 Students who hung on in the higher section of the School of Shariʿa Judges after 1920 in the hopes that it would not be integrated into al-Azhar asked to enter Dar al-ʿUlum in 1924–5 and were allowed credit for their studies to date as long as they could pass the non-shariʿa sections of the end-of-year examinations their peers had sat. A similar request was granted to the cohort of students who entered the newly reopened school in 1927–8 (and potentially two further cohorts) once it was clear that the school 46 47

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 53, 55, 57–9, 694. Wood, Islamic Legal Revival, pp. 184–5.

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Figure 4.1 Part of the Dar al-ʿUlum student body in 1899. This photograph also includes graduates from the classes of 1900 and 1901, as well as several faculty members. The students are dressed as shaykhs. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 575.

would be phased out for good from 1930. Finally, in 1925, the year that the School of Shariʿa Judges was supposed to have been definitively incorporated into al-Azhar, its graduates petitioned for and gained the right to complete the non-shariʿa components of a Dar al-ʿUlum degree in return for a teaching certificate.48 That these students would choose to complete a second higher education degree from scratch casts significant doubts on the sociocultural and socio-economic value of the certificates issued by the School of Shariʿa Judges in the mid-1920s. Between the start of al-Azhar’s attack on the Egyptian state’s two hybrid schools in 1920 and the definitive closure of both preparatory schools and the School of Shariʿa Judges in 1930, reform of teaching and learning at al-Azhar had significantly reduced the gap between al-Azhar and Dar al-ʿUlum. In 1927, the parliament passed a law giving the prime 48

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 57–9. The uncertainty regarding the number of cohorts who transferred from the School of Shariʿa Judges to Dar al-ʿUlum is due to the fact that the temporary curriculum taught to students transferring from this school remained in use until 1932–3, two years after the students given permission to transfer in for their second year in 1928–9 would have graduated.

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Figure 4.2 Part of Dar al-ʿUlum’s student body, 1928. This photograph shows the first cohort to graduate from the section of Dar alʿUlum created to teach graduates of its preparatory school. As these students graduated in 1928, they are dressed as efendiyya, while the ten faculty members in the front row include men dressed as shaykhs and efendiyya. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 55.

minister, instead of the king, the right to appoint the Shaykh al-Azhar and in 1928 Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, a reformist disciple of ʿAbduh, was given the post. A year earlier, he had served on a committee which called for the regulation of al-Azhar and its religious institutes by the Ministry of Education. Around the same time, another reformist religious scholar, Shaykh Mahmud Shaltut, wrote articles in favour of giving the Egyptian parliament oversight of religious appointments as well. As Shaykh al-Azhar, al-Maraghi increased the role of ocularcentric modes of knowledge transmission by opening a department of preaching which started publishing the first Azhar journal, Light of Islam (Nur al-Islam) in 1930. Similar to the Islamic modernist periodical The Lighthouse (alManar), this journal had a column offering religious advice.49 The use of an ocularcentric, one-to-many form of media to disseminate religious opinions represented a major change to the largely individualised, person-to-person transmission of fatwa opinions that had been common 49

Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State, pp. 150–2.

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Figure 4.3 Part of Dar al-ʿUlum’s student body, 1950. This photograph shows students from Dar al-ʿUlum’s legal (shariʿa) section alongside several teachers. This image was taken six years after Dar al-ʿUlum was integrated into the Egyptian University as its own faculty. Its students wear suits without tarboushes, while the faculty members are split between turbans and tarboushes. Source: Taqwim Dar al-ʿUlum, p. 575.

practice until the turn of the twentieth century.50 Al-Maraghi also presented a law to reform al-Azhar’s curriculum that called for revision of teaching methods and the introduction of classes in foreign philosophy and religion, though stiff opposition prevented the law from passing and led to the appointment of his rival Muhammad al-Zawahiri as Shaykh al-Azhar in 1929. The appointment of Ismaʿil Sidqi as prime minister in 1930 led not only to the suspension of the 1923 constitution between 1930 and 1935, but also the return of the power to appoint the Shaykh al-Azhar to the palace. In 1930, Zawahiri and Sidqi secured the passage of a reform law that was less comprehensive than the one advocated by al-Maraghi, yet introduced faculties of higher study for Arabic, law (shariʿa) and theology (usul al-din). These faculties made it possible to focus one’s 50

Messick, ‘Media Muftis’, pp. 311–14.

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studies at al-Azhar on professional preparation to become a judge, teacher, or preacher instead of an all-around expert on religious matters, and to have this focus recognised by a diploma, for the first time. A significant portion of the instructors hired for the Arabic faculty, which appears to have used the same textbooks as Dar al-ʿUlum, were darʿamiyya.51 That these changes were made after political and religious power had been firmly returned to the hands of conservatives further demonstrates the impact of Dar al-ʿUlum on the educational practices of religious institutions. The status of Dar al-ʿUlum as the premier trainer of Arabic teachers for Egyptian civil schools was questioned again in 1938. That year, al-Azhar Magazine (Majallat al-Azhar), the successor to Light of Islam, published a series of articles written by Sadiq ʿArjun that argued for folding the Arabic programmes at both Dar al-ʿUlum and the university’s College of Literature into al-Azhar.52 Reformer al-Maraghi had been appointed Shaykh al-Azhar again in 1935, after the fall of the Sidqi government and the restoration of the 1923 constitution, and was instrumental in bringing and keeping a Liberal Constitutionalist government in power between January 1938 and August 1939. Tempers were running high at al-Azhar in part because the Ministry of Education had been refusing to appoint Azhar-trained candidates to teach in civil schools alongside darʿamiyya, despite the fact that the 1930 reform law permitted graduates of al-Azhar’s Faculty of Arabic to hold these jobs. Al-Maraghi asked Muhammad Husayn Haykal, then serving as minister of education, to appoint graduates of al-Azhar to teaching positions in the ministry’s civil schools in the short term and to integrate Dar al-ʿUlum into al-Azhar in the longer term.53 What really sparked public debate about Arabic instruction and Dar al-ʿUlum, however, was the release of Husayn’s The Future of Culture. Husayn published this book in the autumn of 1938, after politically motivated protests led him to resign his position as dean of the College of Literature at Fuʿad I University. In it, Husayn expands upon his earlier critiques of religious education to argue that Dar al-ʿUlum’s time has passed. He claims that its overall impact on education and Arabic had been minimal, that its approach was betwixt and between 51 52 53

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 53, 55, 57, 694; Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, pp. 62–3. Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, pp. 62–3. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 49–51, 110–13.

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as well as insufficient, and that it should be folded into the university, where it would presumably draw some or all of its students from the civil school system. Husayn reveals that several years earlier, in 1935, he had written to the then minister of education, Najib al-Hilali, asking that Dar al-ʿUlum be incorporated into the university. This proposal apparently suggested that Dar al-ʿUlum keep its name and independence, serving a purpose similar to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) within the University of London, but it was submitted to the minister alongside a suggestion from the university that Dar alʿUlum instead be folded into the College of Literature. Husayn argued that joining the University was Dar al-ʿUlum’s only real option, because it could not reform while under the control of the Ministry of Education, and it would not want to join al-Azhar. The Future of Culture reveals that the idea of unification was rejected by the ministry in 1936, which instead floated a plan whereby students from, first, all three institutions and then only Dar al-ʿUlum and the University would compete upon graduation for entry into the Institute of Education, whose programme they would need to complete in order to teach.54 The reprint of Husayn’s proposal in The Future of Culture argues that, while Arabic was crucial for the development of the Egyptian nation, students were put off studying it by outmoded approaches and under-qualified teachers. Ignoring the sociocultural and socioeconomic benefits of speaking a foreign language in a colonial context, Husayn argues that school students did not learn to love Arabic in the way that they appeared to love foreign languages because of, first, outdated grammar-focused teaching methods that have ‘not changed in over a thousand years, despite such innovations as the use of secular schools instead of mosques and the replacement of straw mats with benches’, and, second, a complete lack of qualified teachers. He held Dar al-ʿUlum responsible for both of these problems. He claimed that Dar al-ʿUlum taught Arabic grammar and expression ‘in the medieval fashion’, using many of the same texts used at al-Azhar, and that it ‘has had only a minimal amount of success in reforming and adapting Arabic to modern conditions’. In his view, the school’s structure did not ‘meet the requirements of modern education’ and reforming it was 54

Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 10–14, 107–8. Despite repeated requests from multiple directions and the very kind help of many individuals at Cairo University, I was not able to gain access to university documents – should any still exist – related to these debates on Arabic instruction.

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futile because it would not be possible to bring students from predominantly religious backgrounds up to high levels in Arabic and another Semitic language, and to proficiency in a foreign language, pedagogy, and ‘the basic elements of higher culture’, even if the course were lengthened.55 Therefore, for Husayn, it was not enough to change the pedagogical approaches used to teach Arabic, as had been done with the opening of Dar al-ʿUlum. Instead, it was necessary to completely overhaul the underlying bodies of knowledge that had been used to teach and study Arabic for centuries, and to sever the tie between religious institutions and Dar al-ʿUlum. Husayn advocated replacing the study of grammatical disciplines with a focus on Arabic literature taught in relation to European and other Semitic languages. He argued that ‘Literature is perhaps the most important element of general education because it disciplines the mind, stirs the heart, and refines the taste, whereas other subjects only affect the mind’.56 In his view, studying literature instead of complicated grammatical sciences was the key to interesting students in the study of Arabic, especially if the literature in question addressed modern topics to which students could relate. Husayn was not content to limit his discussion to methods used to teach Arabic, however. He used The Future of Culture to launch an allout attack on Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya. He describes the education provided by the school as backward and the achievements of darʿamiyya as a whole as insignificant. He argues that, with the exception of a handful of great educators, it ‘has made an utterly insignificant and disappointing contribution to the modern renaissance of our Arabic language and literature either in form or content’. He dismisses the school’s connection with instructor Husayn al-Marsafi by pointing out that none of the great neoclassical poets went to Dar alʿUlum, and that ‘not many’ of the influential writers, intellectuals, and reformers of the twentieth century had anything to do with the school. He says that the graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum were not even in the same league as the top graduates of the civil school system and al-Azhar, the two places he sees as producing individuals of note in the world of Arabic literature. He tops off this condemnation by claiming that the darʿamiyya ‘are incapable of imbuing their pupils with a genuine love 55 56

Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 106–16. Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 92, 110–11.

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and appreciation of Arabic or equipping them, as they should, to produce literary works of value’. Husayn’s critique focuses almost entirely on Dar al-ʿUlum, though this does not mean that he approved of the Arabic education provided at al-Azhar. In passages before and after his discussion of Dar al-ʿUlum, he argues that the Azhar of the 1930s, despite its reorganisation into specialist higher colleges, is qualified neither to produce teachers of Arabic for civil schools nor to take study of the language into the future, which could only be done by newer, European-influenced approaches to the language. Husayn ascribes Dar al-ʿUlum’s failures to its in-between location and composition, which he sees as ‘unnatural and illogical’. This assessment is in keeping with his overall view of Dar al-ʿUlum as a compromise that enabled the reform of Arabic training in an era when this subject was seen as the sole preserve of al-Azhar but was not able to meet the challenges of interwar Egypt.57

The Darʿamiyya in Politicised Landscapes The secret to understanding Husayn’s focus on attacking Dar al-ʿUlum while leaving al-Azhar relatively unscathed, and why this attack matters more generally, lies in the cultural politics of the late constitutional period. The Future of Culture was not Husayn’s first critique of grammar-focused education generally or of Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates specifically. His scathing condemnation of Dar al-ʿUlum merely escalated the critique of religious knowledge and education in his memoir, published almost a decade earlier. In the memoir, he objected to the way in which textual analysis at al-Azhar emphasised linguistic structure, commentary, and esoteric scholarly debates instead of the underlying ideas of the primary texts.58 The overarching goal was the preservation, discussion, and transmission of existing texts and commentaries, on the assumption that all the important topics had already been addressed. He preferred instead the more direct teaching methods used by Muhammad ʿAbduh and Sayyid al-Marsafı¯ at al-Azhar, as well as by many of the teachers at the Egyptian University. While Husayn never attended ʿAbduh’s lectures, in a 1934 journal article, he praised ʿAbduh for basing his teachings on classic, primary-source texts, but 57 58

Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 15, 84–5, 106–8. Hussein, The Days, pp. 26, 93–202, esp. 118.

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teaching them in a new way that ignored linguistic considerations and focused instead on ideas, posing questions, leading discussion, and facilitating student engagement.59 This alone does not explain Husayn’s objections to Dar al-ʿUlum, however, because it used ocularcentric pedagogies instead of the textcommentary approach used at al-Azhar. In fact, in his years at the Egyptian University, between 1907 and 1914, Husayn had been taught by notable darʿamiyya, and several were among his favourite instructors. Husayn criticises Ismaʿil Raʾfat, the geography instructor at both institutions, for viewing students ‘as heads or vessels into which knowledge had to be poured’ but indicates that he learned as much from these lessons as he would later learn at the hands of French experts. He describes the darʿami Hifni Nasif, teacher of ‘ancient’ Arabic literature as happy, unpretentious, and devoted to his students. He enjoyed the classes that Muhammad al-Kadri taught on Islamic poetry and early Islamic history but found his teaching of European history unoriginal. He says that there were two more darʿamiyya he liked, but whose habits he ridiculed mercilessly: Muhammad al-Mahdi, a teacher of Arabic literature whose habit of speaking in formal Arabic Husayn found ‘affected’, and the spiritualist Tantawi Jawhari, a teacher of Islamic philosophy whom he describes as talking voluminously with little meaning, emphasising especially the majesty of the surrounding world.60 It also seems likely that Husayn’s favourite instructor at alAzhar, Sayyid al-Marsafi, taught in a manner comparable to Husayn al-Marsafi at Dar al-ʿUlum, as he replaced complex grammatical commentary with a content analysis grounded in historical context, author biography, and rhetorical style, with the goal of cultivating in his students a critical eye and good taste. Instead, the key to understanding Husayn’s contention that Arabic should be studied through its literature instead of its grammar lies in understanding the influence of European ideas over his approach to Arabic literature, an influence that dates back to his time at the University. European scholars lecturing at the Egyptian University – including Carlo Nallino (1872–1938), David Santillana (1855–1931), and Louis Massignon (1883–1962) – gave Husayn his first significant exposure to European approaches to academic inquiry. These early 59 60

Mahmoudi, Ta¯ha¯ Husain’s Education, pp. 28–9. Hussein, The˙ Days,˙ pp. 283–7.

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experiences, combined with Husayn’s studies in France at Montpellier University and the Sorbonne, set him on an intellectual and cultural path that was unapologetically focused on Europe.61 With respect to literature, Nallino advocated a history-focused approach to literature that involved seeing it as part of the society in which it was produced, grouping works by subject or contextual factors, and drawing comparisons with other world literatures. More generally, he emphasised the connection between history and progress – that is, the importance of critically approaching the past to efforts to renew and move forward, which he linked to the practice of independent interpretation (ijtihad). He argued that literature can be read as a historical text revealing past concerns and attitudes and supported an approach to history that sought to discover causal relationships between events. Two specific arguments that seem to have been particularly influential on Taha Husayn were Nallino’s criticism of the inaccuracies inherent in splitting history into periods and his argument that at least some pre-Islamic poetry was written in the Islamic period.62 Early in the twentieth century, Husayn had begun criticising approaches to literature that were common among darʿamiyya. In a 1911 article, he blamed the slowing of attempts to renew Arabic on the Egyptians teaching literature and literary history, a group that was dominated by the darʿamiyya. A 1914 piece criticises a current he labels the ‘Literary Study School’ whose main proponents were Jurji Zaydan and darʿami Hasan Tawfiq al-ʿAdl, but whose adherents supposedly included most of those teaching Arabic literature to schoolchildren (that is, the darʿamiyya). He portrays their approach as shallow and criticises their use of periodisation based on political trends only, and their failure to connect literature to wider contexts and developments. In the Preface to his first doctoral dissertation, ‘Tajdid dhikra Abi alʿAlaʾ’ (‘Renewing the Memory of Abu al-ʿAlaʾ [al-Maʾarri]’), Husayn again critiques this ‘Literary Study School’. First, he argues that the ideal approach combined Sayyid al-Marsafi’s neoclassical consideration of text with the analysis of historical context advocated by European instructors at the University. He then claims that the ‘Literary Study School’ did not conform to either classical or ‘modern’ 61 62

Mahmoudi, Ta¯ha¯ Husain’s Education, pp. 6, 31–3, 62. ˙ a¯ha¯ H ˙ usain’s Education, pp. 3–4, 6–7, 52–3. Mahmoudi, T ˙ ˙

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approaches to texts and describes it as ‘distorted and confused’. He concludes that the in-between – that is, hybrid – position of the ‘Literary Study School’ rendered it useless, as it developed an understanding of neither literature nor ‘modern’ approaches to studying the world,63 an argument that anticipates the statements he would make about Dar al-ʿUlum twenty-four years later in The Future of Culture. Husayn’s affinity for Europe also explains his insistence that Egyptian school students and their teachers master European languages. He justifies this by pointing to his experiences in France, where he had to return to the secondary level in most subjects in order to understand and progress at the Sorbonne, despite the fact that he already had a doctorate from the Egyptian University.64 As long as Dar al-ʿUlum focused on recruiting students from religious schools who had excellent Arabic but limited exposure to civil school subjects and foreign languages, it would find it nigh on impossible to imbue in its students an understanding of both the civil school subjects they would have to teach and one or more European languages. Seemingly recognising these constraints, Husayn argued that Dar alʿUlum needed to take its students from secondary schools, presumably so that its graduates would reach a higher level in these subjects. On the whole, in Husayn’s view, it was not enough to use ocularcentric and disciplinary pedagogies, or to teach literature using the approach pioneered by Husayn al-Marsafi. To teach Arabic well, Egyptian educators had to shift the subjects studied by students to better match what was studied in Europe. Therefore, at the roots of Husayn’s explicit and high-profile critique of Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya in The Future of Culture is a subjective, European-focused judgement of what was valuable with respect to reform of Arabic language and literature, a judgement that was not necessarily shared by fellow Egyptians and may not have improved standards of Arabic in Egypt. It ignores or dismisses the contributions to the teaching or reform of Arabic made by prominent darʿamiyya such as Husayn al-Marsafi, Hifni Nasif, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish, ʿAli al-Jarim, Ahmad al-Iskandari, and Sayyid Qutb. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, minister of education from the late 1930s into the early 1940s, was a Europhile modernist whose publicly 63 64

Mahmoudi, Ta¯ha¯ Husain’s Education, pp. 84–99, 111 nn. 4–5. ˙ of˙Culture, pp. 92–3. Hussein, Future

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expressed views on Dar al-ʿUlum diverged from those of Husayn. On 11 July 1939 Haykal attended a gathering of the Dar al-ʿUlum alumni association commemorating Abu al-Fath al-Fiqi, a 1907 graduate and long-time teacher and inspector, where he presented a prize in al-Fiqi’s memory to two recent graduates. After making the presentation in front of an audience packed with influential and eminent alumni, he delivered the remarks that included the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, in which he praised Dar al-ʿUlum and emphasised its major contributions to the revival of the Arabic language. Yet his praise did not end with the past, but also stressed Dar al-ʿUlum’s continuing importance – stating specifically that he was ‘certain that the name Dar al-ʿUlum would always remain an authority in the renaissance [nahda] of the Arabic language’ as processes of revival and reform continued.65 Furthermore, whether Husayn’s ideas would have improved the teaching of Arabic in schools remains unclear. In the 1930s, civil school students – who presumably had studied less, rather than more, grammar – seemed to be graduating with lower levels of Arabic than their counterparts in the religious system. A comparison of textbooks used in the College of Literature and the religious system reveals that first year university students used a grammar book that the religious school system used in the fourth year of elementary school, which sheds further doubt on whether students from secondary-level civil schools would pass the Arabic sections of the Dar al-ʿUlum entrance examination.66 If Husayn’s calls for literature-focused language education with only limited instruction in a very simplified grammar are to be taken seriously, the question remains whether children following this programme would be able to reach university level in a language as complex as Arabic. In terms of language reform, Husayn advocated simplifying Classical Arabic grammar and instituting a new system of writing that incorporated short vowels and other important markers affecting meaning.67 Given that these changes were not implemented, we are left unable to assess the extent to which this would have made a literature-focused approach more possible.

65 66 67

‘Ihtifa¯l Jama¯ʿat Dar al-ʿUlum’, pp. 3–8. ˙ Aroian, ‘The Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education’, p. 63. Hussein, Future of Culture, pp. 89–90.

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One thing that Husayn would not have been willing to compromise on was language standards for his autobiography presents him as a fierce critic of anyone – including religious scholars at al-Azhar and professors at the University – who made mistakes in their Arabic. His critique refuses to acknowledge that he owed much of his mastery of language and argumentation to his years at al-Azhar, as his excellent memory, acerbic wit, and ability to argue logically are attributes that he shared with the best graduates of al-Azhar.68 It is implausible that an average civil school student would be able to master Arabic – even, say, a simplified Arabic – without a decent amount of instruction in the underlying structures of the language.

***** Despite these flaws, Husayn’s critique of Dar al-ʿUlum carried weight. At the time it was written, Husayn had just stepped down as dean of the College of Literature at the University and as advisor to the Ministry of Education. Then, in the early 1950s, he served as minister of education. These posts were higher-ranking than any previously held by a darʿami, and they gave the critique significant weight. Husayn’s legacy as a scholar continues to win his critique credence among many historians and literature specialists and contributes to significant misunderstanding of Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya in academic scholarship. Within a few months of the publication of The Future of Culture, refutations of Husayn’s characterisations and plans appeared in the literary magazine published by the school’s alumni association (Sahifat Dar al-ʿUlum).69 The introduction to the January 1939 issue focuses on the issue of Arabic teaching, and is followed by articles on teachers, national literature, poetry, pre-Islamic history, and excerpts of poems and prose from famous alumni such as Hifni Nasif and ʿAli al-Jarim. Most of the April 1939 issue is devoted to a review by Sayyid Qutb of Husayn’s The Future of Culture, while the introduction to the issue discusses Arabic and the Ministry of Education. Finally, the July and October 1939 issues include articles on primary schools, literature, language reform, criticism, and the teaching of Arabic. The October 1939 issue also contains a piece written by Muhammad Husayn Haykal arguing that, for the sake of Arabic instruction, the 68 69

Mahmoudi, Ta¯ha¯ Husain’s Education, p. 19. ˙ al-ʿUlum, ˙ See Sahı¯fat Dar 5.3 (January 1939), 5.4 (April 1939), 6.1 (July 1939), ˙ ˙ 6.2 (October 1939).

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religious institutes administered by al-Azhar must come under control of the Ministry of Education, similar to Dar al-ʿUlum.70 Placing Husayn’s remarks in the wider context of institutional and sociocultural politics is the key to understanding why debates about Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya matter more generally. The struggles over how Arabic should be taught and which institution should train Arabic instructors in the latter half of the constitutional period were not only about institutional politics and jobs for students. Husayn’s critique was also about neutralising the threat that the darʿamiyya represented to the sociocultural authority of not only al-Azhar but also the Europhile modernists, and thereby reclaiming lost ground with respect to the ability to shape Egyptian national culture. That the issue at stake was the direction of Egypt’s projects of modernity and nation-building is shown further by portrayals of the three darʿamiyya selected to join the founding cohort of the Majmaʿ in 1932, at a time when Europhile modernists were excluded. The resistance of many darʿamiyya to the incorporation of foreign words into Arabic (taʿrib) placed them in Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid’s categorisation of ‘linguistic traditionalists’, whom he describes as opposed to efforts to reform the language.71 Yet many of these same darʿamiyya presumably thought that they were doing exactly what Lutfi al-Sayyid said needed to be done, that is, striking a balance between tradition and modernity. For instance, Ahmad al-Iskandari had a reputation for being a staunch defender of Arabic against foreign influences because he opposed the formation of new compound words (naht) as well as taʿrib. In fact, he was mocked after a name he suggested for the telephone, irziz, failed to gain acceptance. Yet al-Iskandari’s resistance to linguistic change was not absolute. For instance, he and a colleague presented a report to the Majmaʿ with examples from Classical Arabic that could have led to the resumption of the ancient practice of word derivation from nouns instead of verbal roots, as was and is customary practice, a possibility that the Majmaʿ rejected. Furthermore, ʿAli al-Jarim, who served on seven committees and was held in sufficiently high esteem that the side he took in debates was often the one that won, was against the Latinisation of the Arabic script, but supported alphabet reform and 70 71

‘Masʾala tadrı¯s al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya’, pp. 9–20. Suleiman, The Arabic Language and National Identity, pp. 172–3.

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proposed a new alphabet that included short vowels, an idea comparable to that advanced by Husayn.72 The positions of the darʿamiyya on the Majmaʿ appear to have been the result of careful and serious deliberation instead of a knee-jerk reaction against change. Dismissing them as conservative, regressive, or anti-change through reference to the perspectives and opinions of their critics ignores the highly politicised culture war in which much criticism of darʿamiyya took place and obscures their contributions to the complex and multifaceted language reform debates of this period.

Conclusion: A ‘Culture War’ over the Future of Egypt The clashes during the constitutional period between Europhile modernists, the darʿamiyya, and the religious scholars of al-Azhar were not just about access to jobs or even the scoring of points in a highly politicised political landscape dominated by elite nationalist politicians, the king, and British administrators. They were about who had the authority to determine the direction of Egyptian projects of modernity and nationbuilding. Attempts made in the 1920s by Europhile modernists such as Taha Husayn, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal to move the projects of modernity and nation-building decisively towards Europe by questioning or jettisoning elements of Egypt’s heritage drew strong resistance from the religious scholars of al-Azhar and the Europhile modernists’ political opponents, leading to claims that Islam was under attack. The founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 by the darʿami Hasan al-Banna and the continuing dominance of darʿamiyya over Arabic instruction and language reform, including their inclusion in the founding cohort of the Royal Arabic Language Academy in 1932, further reinforced the authority of the darʿamiyya with respect to the modernisation of Arabic and Islam, authority that had been boosted by their reclassification as efendiyya in 1927. With respect to Islam, prominent Europhile modernists led by Muhammad Husayn Haykal attempted unsuccessfully to co-opt the authority of religious scholars and the darʿamiyya by writing sympathetically and supportively about Islam. These attempts did not increase popular support for moving the Egyptian project of modernity 72

Stetkevych, Modern Arabic Literary Language, pp. 10, 32, 49, 57, 134; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 339, 520–2.

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in a decidedly European-influenced and liberal direction, with social and political authority derived primarily from non-religious sources. Instead, they increased suspicion of Europhile modernists and boosted support for the Muslim Brotherhood.73 The authority and influence of the approaches used at Dar al-ʿUlum are also demonstrated by significant reform at al-Azhar in the 1920s and 1930s. The closure of Dar alʿUlum’s preparatory school in the early 1930s may have been celebrated as a victory, as it improved the job prospects of students at alAzhar, but it also represents the culmination of sixty years of reform of al-Azhar spurred on by hybrid schools such as Dar al-ʿUlum. The end result was an Azhar that was similar to Dar al-ʿUlum in structure, pedagogy, and subjects of study. During the constitutional period, the Brotherhood grew in influence by presenting a version of Islam specifically tailored to the knowledge practices and lifestyles of the efendiyya. Their efforts provided Egyptians with an alternative to the projects of modernity and nation-building presented by the Europhile modernists. With respect to Arabic, the Europhile modernist Taha Husayn took a different approach, directly attacking Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya in order to undermine their sociocultural authority. Dar alʿUlum survived this attack in so far as it joined the University in 1946 as its own faculty, the College of Dar al-ʿUlum (Kulliyyat Dar alʿUlum), instead of being folded into al-Azhar or the University’s College of Literature. While this development ended Dar al-ʿUlum’s straddling of the boundary between civil and religious education systems, it also resulted in a subtle shifting of this boundary. The integration of an institution with such strong ties to religious knowledge represented a significant integration of religious knowledge into the highest level of the civil education system. Students studying Arabic at university level would be able to choose between two contrasting approaches to the language, one that retained significant ties to longstanding religious disciplines and another that was proud of its links with European-influenced approaches. Husayn’s description of the darʿamiyya as awkwardly in-between and – as a result – unfit for purpose places them within the bounds of Bakhtin’s jarringly visible hybridity, that is, they were a problem that needed to be solved. While Haykal attempted to further the goals of the 73

Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, p. 184.

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Europhile modernists by cultivating his own civil-religious hybrids – hybrids he presumably intended to be socioculturally invisible – for Husayn, progress was only possible through a dramatic rupture with the past. Subsequent scholarship on Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century has also placed a premium on rupture, with the positions of the darʿamiyya represented – at best – as insufficiently innovative and – at worst – as anti-change.74 Yet the success of the darʿamiyya in advancing their approaches to Arabic and Islam demonstrate that they were (and are) perceived differently outside the circles of intellectuals and scholars. For much of the Egyptian population, Husayn’s focus on moving forward free of the constraints of religious knowledge and authority was the perspective that was unnatural and problematic, while the hybridity of the darʿamiyya, which seemed natural and almost invisible, was the path they chose to follow into the future. 74

Brugman, Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 25–8, 51–2, 321–2.

Conclusion: Authority, Authenticity, and Revolution

If a thorough researcher wanted to investigate where the Arabic language was dead and where it was alive, he would find it dead in every place and alive in Dar al-ʿUlum. Muhammad ʿAbduh, writing in 1904 as chair of examiners at Dar alʿUlum, as quoted at the start of the April 1935 issue of Sahifat Dar al-ʿUlum Oh you sons [of Dar al-ʿUlum]! . . . There is no one among us who does not feel your influence on his tongue or his pen . . . as well as this productive literary culture that is learned in the schools from the shaykhs of Dar alʿUlum. And what is mentioned when praising your school is that its men have known traditions, and these are in addition to their fulfilment of knowledge and language. They are well mannered with nobility of character and good conduct and commendable qualities and they [are] always a good model and a correct example for their students.1 Excerpt from a 1932 speech delivered by Muhammad Hilmi Aisa Pasha, minister of education, to the students of Dar al-ʿUlum, as quoted in 1952 in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac We arrived with the peace of God after praying Friday prayers . . . Each and every family member destroyed [this] most delightful peace having confronted us with a multitude of the greeting ‘Welcome Hasan Efendi’. We understood from them the reality and realised, by God, the betrayal of the dogs of Dar al-ʿUlum who lowered its reputation thus.2 Excerpt from a letter dated 30 January 1926 from Hasan al-Banna to his father, as quoted in Gamal al-Banna’s 1990 compilation Letters of Hasan al-Banna, the Youth to his Father

These quotations remind us why a history of Dar al-ʿUlum reveals so much about Egyptian sociocultural politics, and especially tension over the place of Islam in Egyptian state and society. The first has been 1

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, p. 545.

206

2

al-Banna¯, Khita¯ba¯t Hasan al-Banna¯, p. 97. ˙ ˙

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printed at the start of every issue of the journal published by the Dar alʿUlum alumni association from April 1935 onwards. The second was printed in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac as part of an essay proclaiming the merits of the school, alongside a longer version of the first quotation (reproduced in part at the start of Chapter 3), a quotation from the examiner report written by director of religious endowments Ahmad Shafiq Pasha in 1910, and from the letters or speeches of fellow ministers of education Ali Shamsi Pasha and Muhammad Husayn Haykal in 1927 and 1939, respectively.3 The inclusion of these quotations in the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac, a yearbook-cum-institutional history published in 1952, demonstrates the long shadow cast by Taha Husayn’s politically motivated attack on Dar al-ʿUlum in The Future of Culture. By 1952, much about the school had changed, though not along the lines proposed by Husayn. In 1946, Dar al-ʿUlum joined the Egyptian University as its own independent faculty, though it was not until 1981 that it moved from its buildings in Munira to the main campus of the university in Giza. In anticipation of this shift, the teaching of pedagogical subjects was removed to Cairo’s Institute of Education starting in the 1945–6 academic year, a shift that was made easier by their earlier consolidation into a final period of study – one year from 1938, lengthened to two years in 1940 – focused entirely on teacher training.4 On the one hand, Dar al-ʿUlum’s in-between position – as seen through its curriculum and institutional structure – was seemingly resolved when it joined the university. That said, while this development ended Dar al-ʿUlum’s straddling of the boundary between civil and religious education, it also resulted in a subtle shifting of this boundary. The assimilation of an institution with such strong ties to religious knowledge represented a significant integration of the religious into the pinnacle of the Egyptian civil education system. Because it was not incorporated into the College of Literature or made into an advanced studies institute, as Husayn had proposed, undergraduate students wanting to study Arabic were able to choose between two contrasting approaches to the language, one that retained significant ties to long-standing religious disciplines, and another that was proud of its links with European-influenced approaches. 3 4

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 543–6. Qara¯r wiza¯rı¯ raqm 4917 (1938); ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 60–1, 68–71, 77, 79.

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Despite the resounding success of the darʿamiyya and their supporters in thwarting Husayn’s plans for Dar al-ʿUlum, the sting left by his critique clearly remained. In addition to the quotations above, the front matter of the 1952 edition of the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac diverges from the customary pattern of pictures of important people – king, minister, director – alongside short pieces singing their praises. Here, instead, is a picture of Taha Husayn, who had been named minister of education in 1950 in part due to the plans he outlined in The Future of Culture, accompanied by a curious piece written by Saʿd al-Laban, president of the Dar al-ʿUlum alumni association. This essay asserted a deep connection between the so-called ‘Dean of Arabic Literature’ Husayn and the school by noting that he had a similar educational background to the darʿamiyya and that darʿamiyya helped him develop his approach to literature. It concludes by arguing that the newly formed College of Dar al-ʿUlum – and not Husayn’s preferred College of Literature – was the closest realisation of the programme of reforms in The Future of Culture.5 Furthermore, the piece on Taha Husayn comes after a picture and a laudatory text for ʿAbd al-Khaliq Hassuna Pasha, who served as minister of education and minister of foreign affairs in the cabinets of ʿAli Mahir and Ahmad Najib al-Hilali early in 1952 before being elected the second secretary-general of the Arab League in September 1952. ʿAbd al-Khaliq Hassuna was the grandson of Dar al-ʿUlum teacher and Shaykh al-Azhar Hassuna al-Nawawi, held a master’s degree from Cambridge, and appears to have been an individual greatly admired by the compliers of the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac. That the text identifies Taha Husayn as minister of education in a piece that is unusually assertive but then heaps praise on his successor demonstrates two things: first, that the Almanac – or at least this edition of it – had elements added to it after the bulk of the text was finalised, and that the change of minister was important enough to darʿamiyya to mark even as the book went to press. It also further reinforces the implicit message of the Laban text on Taha Husayn: his attacks on the school had not been forgotten. Slightly further into the Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac, author ʿAbd alJawad presents a history of Dar al-ʿUlum that goes out of its way to emphasise the prestige of the school throughout its history. Instead of 5

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 4–7.

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beginning his history of the school with the 1871 lecture series, as most writers have done, ʿAbd al-Jawad starts with a section entitled ‘The Twins’ in which he links the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum to the founding of Egypt’s national library, the Khedivial Library, which later became the national library, Dar al-Kutub. He even presents the lecture series in the Dar al-ʿUlum auditorium as part and parcel of the Khedive’s efforts to complete his library.6 By emphasising this link, ʿAbd al-Jawad locates the founding of Dar al-ʿUlum within the programme of independent reform projects sponsored by Khedive Ismaʿil and executed by ʿAli Mubarak, projects that used European ideas but preceded direct European financial and political control. Connections to such a vaunted era – when Egyptian rulers and reformers took the initiative to build Egypt into a world power intellectually and politically, unfettered by colonial interference – could not be taken for granted. While a handful of university faculties could claim an even longer and richer heritage, the College of Literature and dozens of other institutions founded subsequently could not. Having established this link, ʿAbd al-Jawad connects Dar al-ʿUlum with the high-level intellectual projects that introduced European knowledge and practices into Egypt. He portrays the Darb alJamamiz Palace that the Khedivial Library and Dar al-ʿUlum initially shared as a place focused on the pursuit of knowledge, implicitly linking both to projects such as an archive and history-writing programme that were crucial to the projects of modernity and nationbuilding.7 ʿAbd al-Jawad describes the Dar al-ʿUlum lecture series as ‘more like a scholarly institution than a university college’ and an example of academic ‘high culture’. His description of the pursuit of knowledge is flamboyant: royal visits to the lecture hall supposedly served ‘to awaken the student’s interest in knowledge and to energise the teachers’, and that seeing the lecture theatre ‘empty of the light of knowledge’ was distressing to Egypt’s reformers. He even uses hyperbole, stating that the lectures were open to people of all races, ethnicities, genders, and classes, despite the fact that this was very unlikely, as the education of women and the masses was then in its infancy. Finally, ʿAbd al-Jawad situates Dar al-ʿUlum in longer histories by referencing the House of Wisdom (Dar al-Hikma) set up in Cairo 6 7

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 4–7. These projects are discussed further in Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past.

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during the rule of the sixth Fatimid caliph Hakim (r. 996–1021), an institution that played an important role in the spread of Greek (and Ismaʿili Shiʿi) knowledge.8 In short, ʿAbd al-Jawad’s framing of Dar al-ʿUlum’s founding in the Almanac not only links the school to the high-level intellectual projects that translated European knowledge and practices into Egypt, but also places it solidly within pre-occupation reform projects. Given that the university was focused on the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, it seems likely that ʿAbd al-Jawad’s account was influenced by the integration of Dar al-ʿUlum into the university several years previously, as well as by Husayn’s critique in The Future of Culture over a decade before. A desire to establish the prestige and importance of Dar al-ʿUlum is also evident in ʿAbd al-Jawad’s wider body of work. For instance, in 1952, he published a biography of Husayn al-Marsafi, which he said he was motivated to write because of al-Marsafi’s immense academic importance to the ‘contemporary scientific [ʿilmiyya] renaissance [nahda]’, a statement that implies this had been overlooked.9 The work sets out to establish the eminence of al-Marsafi and the role he played in the rejuvenation of Egyptian culture and literature, a role that was denigrated by The Future of Culture and dismissed as insufficiently progressive by subsequent scholars.10 That darʿamiyya continued to feel the sting of Husayn’s critique for decades is shown by the 1976 doctoral dissertation of darʿami Muhammad al-Kashif. Al-Kashif stated that he was motivated to write on the influence of Dar al-ʿUlum on Egyptian literary life because of the harsh criticism levelled at the institution and its graduates, and because of their omission from many literary histories.11 Over 1,200 pages he presents the work of hundreds of graduates writing prose, poetry, plays, articles for newspapers and magazines, and scholarly works, and argues that their often highly original work has been unfairly ignored in discussions of Arabic literary history. He argues that it is inaccurate to portray famous darʿamiyya such as ʿAli al-Jarim and ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish as followers of others rather than literary figures in their own right, and that darʿamiyya should be seen as 8 9 10 11

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 4, 6, 7. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, al-Shaykh al-Husayn ibn Ahmad al-Marsafı¯, pp. 8–9. ˙ Brugman, Introduction to the˙ History of Modern Arabic˙ Literature, p. 326. al-Ka¯shif, ‘Ta¯ʾthı¯r Da¯r ʿUlu¯m’, p. 1185

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a single literary school whose hallmark is a blend of old and new, as well as the accurate use of Arabic. By using Arabic accurately, he seems to mean mastery of Classical Arabic, as he refers to preservation of the language.12 While the question remains whether 104 years of literary production can be lumped together into a single style of expression, his conclusion that the literary production of the darʿamiyya combines mastery of the classical cannon with sensitivity to contemporary needs is an accurate summary of the orientation of the darʿamiyya as a group, and an effective way of pushing back those who would condemn the school as reactionary.

***** The long shadow cast by Husayn’s attack on Dar al-ʿUlum is what makes a question linked to the first epigraph above all the more important – who are the heirs of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh? As a supporter of the ʿUrabi revolt whose political activities landed him in exile for much of the 1880s, a close collaborator of pioneering reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and a reform-minded shaykh who facilitated the modernisation of Egyptian cultural heritage via the nahda renaissance and institutional reforms, ʿAbduh’s standing within Egyptian projects of modernity and nation-building was significant. Yet his death in 1905 made it impossible to know who and what he would have supported in the cultural wars of the 1930s and 1940s. Therefore, it is not surprising to find many of the parties involved in the culture war attempting to claim ʿAbduh’s legacy. Whoever could stake a convincing claim to it would find their cultural authority significantly enhanced. The Europhile modernists of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party considered themselves to be the ‘secular heirs’ of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh,13 though their advocacy of further westernisation in the 1920s and 1930s placed them at odds with the man most often identified as ʿAbduh’s heir, Rashid Rida. Rida travelled from Syria to Egypt after Afghani’s death in order to work with Afghani’s protégé ʿAbduh. As a result, intellectual historians trace a genealogy from Afghani to ʿAbduh and then ʿAbduh to Rida, in part by pointing to the fact that much of ʿAbduh’s writing was published in The Lighthouse (al-Manar), which was compiled and edited by Rida. 12 13

al-Ka¯shif, ‘Ta¯ʾthı¯r Da¯r ʿUlu¯m’, pp. 11–12, 97–8, 1185. Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order, pp. 28–31, 53–5, 61–71.

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However, between ʿAbduh’s death in 1905 and his own in 1935, Rida took ʿAbduh’s ideas in new directions. He became convinced that Islam needed not only to be renewed, but also revived and better integrated into Egypt’s new political and social institutions. This call for revival fell on receptive ears in the early twentieth century, with hundreds of revivalist associations seeking to encourage morality and expressions of piety within communities impacted by modernisation. It was turned into a major political movement when darʿami Hasan alBanna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Rida’s more conservative, eastern-focused approach is also shown by his support for the renewal of the caliphate and for the followers of Muhammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab and the new Saʿudi state that was taking shape in Arabia in the 1920s and 1930s. Interwar Egypt was home to a third group of ʿAbduh’s heirs, however, whose approaches fell in between those advocated by these other claimants: the darʿamiyya. Their claim to ʿAbduh’s legacy has been overlooked by recent histories, especially those discussing ideas and discourses rather than institutions and practices. As the core of the corpus of government-employed shaykhs, the darʿamiyya fulfilled many of ʿAbduh’s goals in terms of institutional and educational reform. Their ranks stretch beyond Islamic revivalists such as alBanna to include the Arabic experts who dominated the Egyptian cohort of the Royal Arabic Academy at its founding in 1932, as well as the thousands of teachers, school inspectors, and other officials employed at the lower and middle levels of the Egyptian Ministry of Education. The approach of the darʿamiyya clashed with that of the Europhile modernists in so far as they wanted long-standing approaches to Arabic and Islamic disciplines to remain influential within Egyptian state, society, and culture, but the majority seem not to have gone as far as Rida with respect to supporting Wahhabism. While the politicised discourse of the constitutional period made it impossible for the darʿamiyya to stake a claim to any sort of modernism, their advocacy of moving forward without losing touch with the knowledge of the past gives them a strong claim to the fulfilment of ʿAbduh’s legacy.

***** This brings us to the third epigraph, which is the only one not associated in some way with the darʿamiyya as a whole. It is an excerpt

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from a letter written by Hasan al-Banna to his father dated 30 January 1926, reproduced in a book compiled decades later by his younger brother Jamal al-Banna.14 It reveals a perspective on the 1926 student strike over dress at Dar al-ʿUlum that differs significantly from the majority of his fellow students. During this period, Hasan al-Banna travelled frequently between villages carrying out business on his father’s behalf. The letter discusses al-Banna’s arrival in Mahmudiyya, his father’s home village, from Damanhur on Friday 29 January. The instigators of the strike had met over a week before this, during the week ending 22 January, and wrote to the parents of the school’s students asking that they support the strike.15 News of these plans appear to have spread to al-Banna’s family in Mahmudiyya, as they greeted him with ‘Welcome Hasan Efendi’ rather than ‘Welcome Shaykh Hasan’. Either these remarks were made pejoratively or were interpreted as such, as al-Banna describes them as shattering the peace he had carried with him after completing Friday prayers in Damanhur. In al-Banna’s opinion, the organisers of the strike were not valiantly defending the reputation of the school and its graduates by claiming a social status equal to that of other civil school graduates, as per Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawad’s description in the Almanac, but lowering its standing instead. The account of the dress strike in his memoir reinforces this with its claim that he was one of two students who did not switch to wearing the suit and tarboush in the year following the strike.16 This apparent difference in opinion over the merits of being classified as a shaykh in the 1920s foreshadows the rift over the role of Islamic knowledge within Egyptian state and society that would emerge not only among darʿamiyya but also more broadly in the years to come. Despite al-Banna’s divergence from many of his schoolmates, the long-term success of the Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most significant outcomes of the hybridisation of religious and civil knowledge at Dar al-ʿUlum.

The Secret to Being Modern and Authentic Creating a national culture for Egypt that was modern and authentic was a cultural imperative throughout the twentieth century, though 14 15

al-Banna¯, Khita¯ba¯t Hasan al-Banna¯, p. 97. ˙ Taqwı ˙ ¯m, pp. 551–4 16 al-Banna¯, Mudhakkira¯t, pp. 52–3. ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d,

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exactly how this authenticity should be constructed was hotly contested. The education reforms won by nationalists in 1907 defined authenticity in terms of coursework relating to the Arabic language, religion, and non-imperial histories, a definition that contrasts with the preference of many nationalists for Greek or Pharaonic heritage a decade or two later. Ryzova’s thick description of the selfnarratives of the efendiyya from the constitutional period onwards and Samah Selim’s work on Egyptian novels between 1880 and 1980 highlight the importance of ties to the Egyptian countryside, while Walter Armbrust’s study of popular culture from the 1970s onwards underscores the tension between classical and colloquial or folk sources of authenticity.17 The collective histories of the darʿamiyya, however, emphasise the importance of another source of authenticity: that of Islamic knowledge – that is, the Arabic and Islamic subjects long taught in religious schools – especially when expressed using the capital and habitus associated with Egyptian civil schools.

***** Islamic knowledge was central to Egypt’s parallel projects of modernity and nation-building from the late nineteenth century onwards, if not earlier. By the turn of the twentieth century, colonial misrepresentations of religious knowledge and the audiocentric ways in which it was transmitted were powerful enough to delegitimise religious institutions and traditionally trained scholars, at least within reformist circles. However, the acceptance of ocularcentric and disciplinary pedagogies by the educated classes of Egypt led not to the rejection of Egypt’s language and religion, but instead to efforts to reform and incorporate them into the state, society, and culture of modern Egypt. An incomplete rupture between old and new, foreign and local, rural and urban enabled Egyptians to be as modern as Europeans while retaining a connection with local culture that was perceived as authentic. Repackaging the knowledge taught in religious schools using European pedagogies enabled Egyptians to assert their self-worth in the face of semicolonial and colonial domination. The pursuit of modernity and authenticity led Egyptian reformers to mandate that teachers – and, for a short period of time, shariʿa judges – 17

Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt, esp. pp. 7–8, 22–3, 59–60; Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary, p. 5; Ryzova, Age of the Efendiyya, pp. 81, 150–1.

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receive their advanced training outside of al-Azhar in a higher school run within the civil school system, either Dar al-ʿUlum or the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). These were hybrid schools suspended between the religious and civil school systems because they presented Arabic and Islamic subjects using ocularcentric and disciplinary pedagogies. This combination was used to train professionals who facilitated the integration of religious knowledge into state-led projects of modernity. Over sixty years, the success of these institutions, combined with attempts to expand their mandate, put significant pressure on al-Azhar and other religious institutions, leading them to reform until they had changed not only their structure and curricula, but also the pedagogies they used. At the turn of the twentieth century, the pursuit of a distinct national identity for Egypt in the face of enforced Anglicisation led nationalists to fight for education reforms that reinforced the role of the darʿamiyya within Egyptian schools. The importance that nationalists placed on expanding the role played by Arabic and Islamic knowledge in the civil school system helped establish the darʿamiyya as the go-to experts on integrating Islamic knowledge into projects of modernity and nationbuilding. During the first forty years of British occupation (1882–1922), darʿamiyya worked alongside other Egyptian intellectuals to support and advance the renewal of Egyptian culture, language, and religion, making noteworthy contributions with respect to education reform, spiritualism, and the nahda cultural renaissance. This unity of purpose fractured during the constitutional period (1923–52). The authority ceded several decades earlier to governmentemployed shaykhs – a group that was by this point dominated by darʿamiyya – led to the emergence of a culture war in which darʿamiyya and religious scholars challenged attempts by Europhile modernists to undermine the authority of religious experts and expertise. The darʿamiyya were particularly threatening to the plans of Europhile modernists because of their ability to perform modernity and authenticity in especially persuasive ways. Their authority as arbiters between old and new within society at large led to the continuation of their influence over how Arabic was taught and reformed. It also facilitated the launching of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic revivalist movement par excellence. The Brotherhood transformed Islam into an ideology supporting social and political change. It also spawned a new form of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, that enabled

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Egyptians without significant religious education to teach and preach about Islam. The ability of darʿamiyya to hybridise civil and religious, and to present alternatives to the state-led projects of modernity and nation-building, led Europhile modernists to try to undercut their authority. Muhammad Husayn Haykal attempted to co-opt their authority by using his writing to forge civil-religious hybrids that furthered essentially Europhile goals, while Taha Husayn directly attacked their qualifications, history, and competence.

Being Efendi in Shifting Sociocultural Landscapes Dar al-ʿUlum’s 1926 dress strike demonstrates two things about Egypt in the first decade of the constitutional period: efendi status was preferred over shaykh status by the majority of reform-minded individuals, and being formally granted efendi status was not enough to guarantee the sociocultural and socio-economic position of the darʿamiyya. This was not only because of their hybrid status. It was also the result of the expansion of the efendiyya far beyond the numbers the state could employ. Younger darʿamiyya would have been less impacted by the socio-economic difficulties related to this expansion, as the number of teaching positions requiring excellent Arabic outstripped the number of graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum, but they would have encountered the same sociocultural challenges as other young efendiyya. It was near-impossible for efendiyya who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s to achieve the same degree of sociocultural and political influence as the efendiyya who came of age in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s relying solely on their Egyptian origins and civil school habitus. First, this older group of efendiyya did not achieve their standing based on their education alone. They were, on the whole, wealthier and more connected than the generations that followed, as many came from notable Egyptian families (ʿayan) and some married into the TurkoCircassian elite (dhawat).18 Second, the older effendiyya came of age in a moment of major sociocultural and political change during which it was possible to argue, in Egypt and Europe, that Egypt needed to be governed democratically by Egyptians. Their civil school training, combined with their connection to the Egyptian countryside, enabled 18

Omar, ‘And I Saw No Reason to Chronicle My Life’, pp. 302–5.

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them to present themselves as modern and authentic, to spearhead programmes of nation-building and the cultural renaissance of the nahda, and to argue that they were more legitimate rulers than the Turko-Circassians or Europeans. By the constitutional period, the number of civil school graduates formally holding the title efendi – as well as Egyptians with enough capital to convincingly present themselves as efendiyya – had increased to the point that efendi status and a connection to the Egyptian countryside by themselves were not enough to secure a place at the forefront of shaping Egypt’s future. The older generation of efendiyya that had displaced the shaykhs as the ideal learned person at the turn of the twentieth century and the TurkoCircassian dhawat as the ruling elite by World War I were not willing to cede power to younger efendiyya during the constitutional period. Therefore, the anger and radicalisation of the younger efendiyya in the years running up to the 1952 revolution were due less to a failure to gain efendi status, and more to the fact that efendi status on its own was no longer sufficient to reach the top without staging a revolution. While this conflict may have been perceived and expressed in efendi self-narratives in terms of rivalry between sons and their fathers or between ‘old’ and ‘new’ generations, the root cause of this particular rivalry was the frustration of playing a game whose rules had changed unexpectedly halfway through. The up-and-coming efendiyya who were best able to resist the sociocultural dominance of the ruling elite of the constitutional period had access to sources of authenticity that went beyond civil school capital and ties to rural Egypt. They engaged in radical forms of politics and protest, as was the case for politically active efendi youth, especially those in the Communist and Young Egypt parties; they possessed convincing connections to religious knowledge, as was the case for those involved in the founding and development of the Muslim Brotherhood; or they were able to stage a military coup, as in the case of the increasing number of Egyptian officers active in the military after 1936. Crucially, these groups used their additional sources of authority not only to delegitimise the older efendiyya active in parliament, but also to mobilise urban Egyptians to participate in mass demonstrations. The Free Officer Revolution of 1952 that removed these older efendiyya from power alongside the king was possible due to the support of

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groups with access to sources of authority in addition to the efendi capital and habitus they shared with the elite they displaced. Efendi actors in the years surrounding 1952 included groups as disparate as the constitutional-era political and intellectual elite, the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical political activists of Young Egypt and the Communist Party, and the post-1936 army, Understanding the differences in goals, capital, and subjectivities between these groups is essential for understanding the 1952 revolution and its aftermath. In other words, the key to understanding the conflicts between groups of participants in the revolution of 1952 – not to mention 2011 – is what differentiated them from one another rather than what they had in common.

Conclusion: Authority, Authenticity, and Revolution On the surface, this book presents a 130-year history of the role of Islamic knowledge and Islamic expertise in the development of a modern Egyptian nation. It places the tensions surrounding the place of religion in a self-consciously modern Egyptian nation in historical context, linking the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood with choices made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the importance of local knowledge to Egyptian projects of modernity and nation-building. It demonstrates that a range of views about the role of religion in Egyptian national culture existed from the outset of nationalist mobilisation, and that changes to school curricula won by nationalist intellectuals in the early twentieth century helped establish the darʿamiyya as more authoritative than Europhile modernists in the eyes of many Egyptians during the 1930s and 1940s. That said, the ability of the darʿamiyya to move from the social and professional circles of religious scholars to those of the self-consciously modern efendiyya was uncertain and contested, generating pressure that came to a head in the 1926 student strikes in support of formally granting the title and dress of the efendiyya to Dar al-ʿUlum’s students and graduates. All of this reinforces the ambiguous status of Arabic and Islamic knowledge among Egypt’s modernisers at the turn of the twentieth century. On the one hand, unless this knowledge was mediated using the capital and habitus of a civil school, it was condemned as inferior, alongside other traditional aspects of Egypt, such as the lifestyles of the village or the older neighbourhoods of Cairo. Yet without

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it, these same groups were left completely alienated from their past and unable to assert the worth of their culture in the face of semicolonial and colonial discourses. This book is also a history of education that demonstrates how school records can be used to study sociocultural change in meaningful, non-reductive ways. Instead of equating the impact of a school to the activities of its most famous or most representative graduates, it uses Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus to connect students’ experiences between matriculation and graduation, inside and outside of school, with the sociocultural resources they are able to put to work after graduation. Applying these ideas to a context of significant sociocultural change demonstrates how schools generate sociocultural and socio-economic mobility, in addition to reproducing the status quo. Egypt’s civil school system was responsible for the emergence of new sociocultural positions and – through its provision and facilitation of distinctive shared experiences – new sociocultural groups. This book also demonstrates the power of ocularcentrism: once established within Egypt’s state-led projects of modernity, its superiority over audiocentric modes of knowledge transmission was not questioned, even after Egypt obtained full independence in 1952. On a deeper level, this book is a history of individuals, institutions, and social movements stuck in between that demonstrates their importance to sociocultural change. It explains why it is impossible to understand how change works without considering those stuck in between, even though they tend to be either unseen and unrecognised or jarringly visible and condemned. It reveals how non-western modernity does not make sense in a context that is absolutely divided in two, that boundaries in sociocultural and physical landscapes are not only policed but also crossed and straddled in productive ways, and that movement across boundaries by those stuck in between is a major driver of sociocultural change. Finally, it shows that innovative ideas and wellreasoned arguments – often privileged by academics and intellectuals – do not necessarily generate lasting change in a democratic context, that embedding ideas in institutions such as schools is one way to spread them outside the intellectual elite, and that hybridity that is perceived as invisible and organic enables change that is more easily accepted as authoritative and authentic. The debates over the impact of Dar al-ʿUlum and the darʿamiyya with which we started this concluding chapter are part of a larger battle

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over who had the authority to shape the future of Egyptian state, society, and culture. The culture war that emerged between darʿamiyya and Europhile modernists during the constitutional period is evidence of a tension that emerged among educated Egyptians in the early twentieth century and continues to play a role in Egyptian politics over a century later. The focal point for this tension is disagreement over the role that local forms of knowledge and authority – particularly religious ones – should play within Egypt’s projects of modernity and nation-building. The flashpoint of this tension has shifted over time, focusing on Islam in the 1920s, Arabic in the 1930s and 1940s, and returning to Islam from the 1970s. In the constitutional period, Europhile modernists attempted to undermine the authority of local knowledge and those qualified to transmit it, while the darʿamiyya were at the forefront of efforts to preserve it.

***** All of this emphasises that the influence of Islamic actors in the early twenty-first-century Arab Uprisings did not appear from nowhere, nor does their history begin in the 1970s. Tensions over the place of Islam within Muslim modernities first erupted in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s and have their roots in institutional changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 as a response to attempts to marginalise Islamic expertise within the modern Egyptian nation has had a long-lasting and wide-reaching impact. Since the 1930s, Islamist groups calling for the revival of Islam in state and society have emerged around the world. Groups in Syria and Palestine affiliated formally with the Brotherhood, while others have followed the Brotherhood’s model as a mass movement mobilising Islam as an ideology to support change. One such group, Hizb al-Tahrir, was founded in Jordan by the darʿami Taqi alDin al-Nabhani. The war over the future of Egyptian national culture that dominated cultural politics in the latter half of the constitutional period did not end with a decisive victory for either side, but instead increasing chaos and the 1952 Free Officer Revolution. The policies followed by the new revolutionary regime might appear to have been a victory for Europhile modernists, as they mandated further secularisation and westernisation of Egyptian culture as well as the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet if they were a victory, it was short-lived. The military

Conclusion

221

regime of post-1952 Egypt was no more successful than the Europhile modernists at persuading the majority of Egyptians of the merits of a secularising approach. In retrospect, the secularism of post-1952 Egypt appears as a veneer maintained by a state willing to use coercive force, rather than the result of deep and lasting cultural change. The key ingredient in the Brotherhood’s ability to shape the direction of national culture has been their focus on establishing cultural authority before seeking political power. In colonial and postcolonial Egypt, similar to much of the Middle East and North Africa, political and intellectual elites have not focused enough on establishing political and cultural legitimacy in order to persuade their populations to follow their examples by choice. The vicious suppression of the Brotherhood in Egypt during the rule of Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser has had one lasting impact: it facilitated the emergence of violent Islamic extremism. While in prison, the darʿami Sayyid Qutb came to the conclusion that social outreach and reeducation of the Egyptian population was not enough to foster religious revival as long as Egypt was ruled by dictators whose authoritarianism furthered the spread of materialism, secularism, and other western cultural practices, rulers, he argued, were infidels. Instead, a small vanguard would have to separate themselves from society to re-establish correct Islamic practice, which could be spread further at a later date, presumably once the dictator was overthrown. Qutb’s ideas, along with those of South Asian intellectual Abu al-Aʿla Mawdudi, had a significant influence on the emergence of extremist groups engaging in violence, including the group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. In the meantime, Nasser’s suppression of the Brotherhood led many members to settle in Saudi Arabia, where their ideas had a significant impact on the emergence of religious opposition to the Saudi state as well as the first global jihadi group, al-Qaeda. The conflict between progressive and revivalist groups during and after the Arab Uprisings of 2011 demonstrates that the ‘culture war’ that first erupted in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s has not been adequately resolved.19 In Egypt, events after the overthrow of Mubarak mirrored 19

Recent work by scholars such as Hatsuki Aishima and Aaron Rock-Singer discusses comparable themes from the 1960s onwards. Their work, in combination with that of Gregory Starrett, helps fill in the gap between the 1930s and 2011. Aishima, Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt; RockSinger, Practicing Islam in Egypt; Starrett, Putting Islam to Work.

222

Conclusion: Authority, Authenticity, and Revolution

those earlier in the century all too closely. A progressive Europhile elite failed to persuade the majority of Egyptians to support them instead of the Brotherhood and Saudi-influenced Salafist groups, and then threw their weight behind military-enforced secularism, in this case the 2013 coup led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. This re-established authoritarian rule and led to even further alienation among the many supporters of a more explicitly religious path for Egypt. The increased polarisation of Egyptian cultural politics exacerbated still further the negative stigma of association with a progressive secularism that is portrayed as foreign. This makes the legitimation of claims to authenticity all the more important, yet more difficult given the entrenchment of a rhetoric of division and the proliferation of claims to have a monopoly on the truth, on the past, and on ties to Egyptian heritage.

Appendix I: Summary of Dar al-ʿUlum Curriculum Sources

The following is a summary of curriculum information relevant to Dar al-ʿUlum, listed by year and annotated by source, using the following abbreviations: DK DW TM TDU AR

National Library National Archives Amı¯n Sa¯mı¯’s al-Taʿlim fı¯ Mı¯sr, 1917 ˙ Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d’s Taqwı¯m Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m, 1952 ˙ Lois Aroian’s publications on Dar al-ʿUlum, 1978 and 1983

1875 Secondary sources: TM 45, TDU 19 1887 DK: Ministerial Decision to [Re]organise the Dar al-ʿUlum School 1890 Secondary sources: TM 45, TDU 25 1895 DK: Regulations and Curriculum of the Department of Arabic Attached to the Mubtadiyan School (2 documents, includes examination subjects); also TDU 31 1896 Secondary source: TDU 33 1897 Secondary sources: TDU 32, 33, 35 1898 Secondary sources: TDU 34, 35 1899 Secondary sources: TDU 34, 35 1901 DW: Regulations and Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School (includes examination subjects); also TDU 39 1903 DK: Regulations and Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School (includes examination subjects) 1904 Secondary sources: TDU 43 (references a letter written by Amin Sami) 223

224

1906 DW: 1911 DK:

1913 DK: 1920 DK:

1921 DK:

1923 DK:

1924 Secondary sources: 1929 Secondary sources: 1938 DK: 1940 Secondary sources: 1945 Secondary sources: 1950 Secondary sources:

Appendix I: Dar al-ʿUlum Curriculum Sources

Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School; also TDU 44 Regulations and Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School (includes examination subjects) Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School; also TDU 46 Ministerial Decisions number 2214, 2215, and 2216, addressing main and alternative tracks of study at Dar al-ʿUlum plus its preparatory school; main track referenced in 1923 curriculum; all three tracks summarised in TDU 48, 49, 50 Temporary Curricula of the Nasriyya Teachers’ School; Temporary Curriculum of Study for the Preparatory School Annexed to Dar al-ʿUlum Temporary Curriculum of Study at the Dar al-ʿUlum School for Students of the Old Regime TDU 54 TDU 52 (preparatory school only) Ministerial Decisions number 4917 and 4918 (25 July 1938); also TDU 61, 62 TDU 69 TDU 78 TDU 110–11

Other Relevant School Documents 1895 DW: Draft Laws for the Tawfiqiyya and Khidiwiyya Teachers’ Schools 1900 DK: Curriculums for Primary and Secondary Schools (staterun civil schools) 1907 DK: Foundation Regulations and Curriculum for the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi) 1918 DW: Memo Addressing the Revision of the Organizational Law and Programme of the Sultaniyya Teachers School, 18 September 1918

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

Duru¯s al-nahwiyya li-tala¯midh al-mada¯ris al-ibtida¯ʾiyya ˙ (Syntax Lessons for Primary School Students) written by H ifnı¯ ˙ Na¯sif, Muhammad Diya¯b, Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m, and Muhammad ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙ Sa¯lih ˙ ˙ Books found

My collection

WorldCat listing

Book 1 (for year 3)

1894/5 (1312 Hijri): 1st ed. 1909: 10th ed. 1911: 12th ed. 1930: 24th ed. (one undated edition)

1916: 15th ed.

Book 2 (for year 3) Book 3 (for year 4)

1916: 14th ed. 1916: 17th ed. 1924: 21st ed.

– Approved for use by primary school students from 1887; revised in 1911 and seems to have been used until 1930, at least. – The book was re-examined in 1911 by a committee made up of Sulta¯n Muhammad, ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d ʿAbd al-Mutaʿa¯l, Mustafa¯ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ Tammu¯m, and Sayyid Muhammad under the supervision of ˙ ˙ H amza Fath Alla¯h, who also corrected the printing. ˙ ˙ – Unusually, this book also underwent certification (tasdı¯q) by ˙ the Shaykh al-Azhar, Shaykh al-Inba¯bı¯, which could indicate that it was used in religious schools as well. Kita¯b qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya li-tala¯mı¯dh al-mada¯ris al-tha¯nawiyya (Grammar Book of the Arabic Language for Secondary School Students) written by H ifnı¯ Na¯sif, Muhammad ˙ ˙ ˙ Diya¯b, Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m, Mahmu¯d ʿAmr, and Sulta¯n ˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙ Muhammad ˙

225

226

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

Books found

My collection

WorldCat listing

1905–30 (as one book)

1929: 12th ed. (one undated edition) –

1909, 1916, 1924 1930: 13th ed. 1971: 1st ed. 1976: 2nd ed. 2007: 1st ed

1970s (with Muhammad ʿAlī Ta¯ha¯ ˙ ˙ Durra) 2000s (with Muhammad Anīs ˙ Mahra¯t)

–

– Approved for use in secondary schools from 1892 to 1930; reprinted with revisions in 1971 and 2007 – Between 1892 and 1905, published as two separate volumes, Duru¯s al-nahwiyya li-tala¯midh al-mada¯ris al-tha¯nawiyya (Syntax Lessons ˙ for Secondary School Students) by Hifnı¯ Na¯sif, Muhammad Diya¯b, ˙ ˙ ˙ Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m, and Mahmu¯d ʿAmr and Kita¯b duru¯s al-bala¯gha ˙ ˙˙ ˙ li-tala¯midh al-mada¯ris al-tha¯nawiyya (Lessons of Rhetoric Book for Secondary School Students) by Hifnı¯ Na¯sif, Muhammad Diya¯b, ˙ ˙ ˙ Sulta¯n Muhammad, and Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m. The front matter of ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ the new 1905 single volume notes that they were combined because of curricular changes that added a fourth year of secondary education. – It underwent tasdı¯q by an academic committee at the ministry and ˙ approval (iʿtima¯d) by the Shaykh al-Azhar, Shaykh al-Inba¯bı¯. Three darʿamiyya were involved with all of these books: Hifnı¯ Na¯sif, ˙ ˙ always listed first, Muhammad Diya¯b, and Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m. Hifnı¯ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ Na¯sif graduated in 1882, after studying at al-Azhar, had ˙ a distinguished career as a prosecutor, judge, teacher (at the School of Law, Madrasat al-Huqu¯q), and school inspector in Arabic. He ˙ participated in the founding of the Egyptian University and was one of its initial instructors. Muhammad Diya¯b graduated in 1876 and ˙ taught in a number of schools, including briefly at Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m in 1892. Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m graduated in 1883.1 Muhammad Sa¯lih was ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙ the fourth author of the primary school text, while Sulta¯n ˙ Muhammad was involved with the secondary school texts, as well ˙ 1

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 241–3; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 21–3, 101–2, 314–15.

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

227

as with the 1911 revision of the primary school text. Muhammad ˙ Sa¯lih graduated in 1880. Sulta¯n Muhammad taught most notably at ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ the Egyptian University and Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m, and was identified as the most influential teacher of his era by the graduate interviewed by Aroian.2 Only one author – the fourth of a secondary school text, Mahmu¯d ʿAmr – does not appear to have been associated with Da¯r al˙ ʿUlu¯m. ***** Kita¯b qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya li-tala¯mı¯dh al-mada¯ris alibtida¯ʾiyya (Grammar Book of the Arabic Language for Primary School Students) written by Ibra¯hı¯m Mustafa¯, Muhammad ʿAtiyya al˙˙ ˙ ˙ Ibra¯shı¯, Mahmu¯d al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Latı¯f, ʿAbd al-Majı¯d al-Sha¯fiʿı¯, and ˙ Muhammad Ahmad Bara¯niq ˙ ˙ Books found Year 1, part 1 Year 3, part 2

Year 4, part 3

My collection

WorldCat listing 1944: 15th ed.

1936: 1st ed. 1937: 2nd ed. 1941: 3rd ed. 1939: 2nd ed.

– Used for almost a decade (1936–44), if not longer. – The ministry review panel for this book was almost entirely made up of darʿamiyya (Ahmad al-Iskandarı¯, Muhammad ˙ ˙ Mahdı¯ ʿAlla¯m, ʿAlı¯ ʿAbd al-Wa¯hid Wa¯fı¯, and Muhammad ˙ ˙ Ahmad Ja¯d al-Mawla). The graduates of other schools on the ˙ panel – Ta¯ha¯ Husayn and Ahmad Amı¯n – also had a hybrid ˙ ˙ ˙ educational background. – The edition information above raises the possibility that the first part of the book was published before 1936. The first three of five authors, Ibra¯hı¯m Mustafa¯, Muhammad ʿAtiyya ˙˙ ˙ ˙ al-Ibra¯shı¯, and Mahmu¯d al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Latı¯f, were darʿamiyya. ˙ Ibra¯hı¯m Mustafa¯ graduated in 1910 and was appointed Dean of ˙˙ 2

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 175–6; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 21, 101–2.

228

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

Kulliyyat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m in 1948 and a member of the Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya in 1949. Muhammad ʿAtiyya al-Ibra¯shı¯ graduated in ˙ ˙ 1921, while Mahmu¯d al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Latı¯f graduated in 1910.3 ˙ ***** al-Nahw al-wa¯dih fı¯ qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya lil-mada¯ris al˙ ˙ ˙ ibtida¯ʾiyya (The Clear Syntax in the Grammar of the Arabic Language for Primary Schools), written by ʿAlı¯ al-Ja¯rim and Mustafa Amı¯n

Books found

My collection

Primary book 2 (handwritten inscription indicates it was used in year 3) Secondary book 1

1935: 10th ed.

Secondary book 2

Secondary book 3

3

WorldCat

[1938]: 6th ed. 1946: 7th ed. [1949]: 10th ed. 1950: 11th ed. 1959: 16th ed. 1960: 17th ed. 1964–5: 22nd ed. 1933–8: 4th ed. 1946: 7th ed. 1950: 11th ed. 1959: 16th ed. 1960: 17th ed. 1964–5: 22nd ed. [1933]: 3rd ed. 1946: 7th ed. [1948]: 9th ed. 1950: 11th ed. 1959: 16th ed. 1960: 17th ed. 1964–5: 22nd ed.

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 156, 299; Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, pp. 72, 271, 334.

Appendix II: Arabic Grammar Textbooks up to the 1960s

229

– Appears in regular editions with the secondary books in print from 1933 to 1965, at least. Mustafa Amı¯n graduated in 1907.4 ʿAlı¯ al-Ja¯rim, a 1908 graduate, travelled to England to study for four years, after which he returned to Egypt to teach (including at Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m), work as an school inspector specialising in Arabic from 1918, and serve as the deputy director at Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m from 1940 until his retirement in 1942. He was one of three darʿamiyya in the founding cohort of the Majmaʿ alLugha al-ʿArabiyya, where he was very influential and served on no less than seven committees.5 This book appears to be in use today among European Muslims wanting to learn Arabic. Its merits relative to other Arabic textbooks are discussed on numerous websites, often with links to the original Arabic or this translation into English (rather confusingly without the original Arabic text, a copy of which presumably would have to be read alongside it or otherwise provided in lessons), which was prepared for use in courses at a London-based mosque: http://unity1.files.wordpress.com/ 2009/06/al-nahw-al-wadih-primary-part-one.pdf. This may indicate that mosque-based Arabic instruction among English-speaking Muslims focuses on the Arabic grammatical disciplines instead of the text-based approaches of either Orientalist grammars or the newer textbooks used more often in Anglo-American universities. The decision to use textbooks such as this one instead of the Alfiyya is an interesting one. 4 5

ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d, Taqwı¯m, pp. 162–3, 205–7. Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt’, p. 339; Ha¯fiz, ˙ ˙ ʿAlla¯m, and ʿAbd al-ʿAzı¯z, eds. al-Majmaʿı¯u¯n, pp. 520–2.

Appendix III: Glossary with Full Transliteration of Arabic Used in the Text

Khedives of Egypt, 1805–1952 Muhammad ʿAlı¯ (r. 1805–49, officially as wa¯lı¯, or governor, though ˙ he claimed the title khedive) ʿAbba¯s (r. 1849–54) Saʿı¯d (r. 1854–63) Isma¯ʿı¯l (r. 1863–79, claim to title khedive recognised by Ottoman Sultan in 1867) Muhammad Tawfı¯q (r. 1879–92) ˙ ʿAbba¯s II (ʿAbba¯s Hilmı¯) (r. 1892–1914) ˙ Husayn Ka¯mil (r. 1914–17 as sultan) ˙ Fuʾa¯d I (r. 1917–22 as sultan, 1922–36 as king) Fa¯ru¯q (r. 1936–52 as king)

Egyptians (or Based in Egypt) ʿAbba¯s Mahmu¯d al-ʿAqqa¯d (1889–1964) ˙ ʿAbd al-ʿAzı¯z Fahmı¯ (1870–1951) ʿAbd al-ʿAzı¯z Ja¯wı¯sh or Sha¯wı¯sh (1872–1929) ʿAbd al-Karı¯m Salma¯n (1849–1918) ʿAbd al-Kha¯liq Hassu¯na al-Nawa¯wı¯ (1898–1992) ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahı¯m Ahmad ˙ ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n al-Bahra¯wı¯ ˙ ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n al-Jabartı¯ (1753–1825) ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n al-Jı¯za¯wı¯ ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n Qutb al-Nawa¯wı¯ (d. 1909) ˙ ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n al-Shirbı¯nı¯ (d. 1908) ˙ ʿAbd al-Rahma¯n Shukrı¯ (1886–1958) ˙ Abu¯ al-Fath al-Fiqı¯ (d. 1936–9) ˙ Ahmad ʿAlı¯ al-Iskandarı¯ (1875–1938) ˙ 230

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

Ahmad Amı¯n (1886–1954) ˙ Ahmad al-ʿAwa¯mrı¯ (1876–1954) ˙ Ahmad Lutfı¯ al-Sayyid (1872–1963) ˙ ˙ Ahmad al-Marsafı¯ ˙ ˙ Ahmad Mifta¯h ˙ ˙ Ahmad Nada ˙ Ahmad Najı¯b al-Hila¯lı¯ (1891–1958) ˙ Ahmad Shalabı¯ ˙ Ahmad Sharaf al-Dı¯n al-Marsafı¯ ˙ ˙ Ahmad Shawqı¯ (1868–1932) ˙ Ahmad ʿUra¯bı¯ (1841–1911) ˙ ʿAlı¯ ʿAbd al-Ra¯ziq (1888–1966) ʿAlı¯ ʿAbd al-Wa¯hid Wa¯fı¯ ˙ ʿAlı¯ al-Bibla¯wı¯ ʿAlı¯ al-Ja¯rim (1881–1949) ʿAlı¯ Ma¯hir (1882–1960) ʿAlı¯ Muba¯rak (1824–1893) ʿAlı¯ Pa¯sha¯ Ibra¯hı¯m ʿAlı¯ Shaʿra¯wı¯ Amı¯n Sa¯mı¯ Anwar al-Sa¯da¯t (1918–81) ¯ if Baraka¯t ʿAt ˙ Ha¯mid Ta¯hir ˙ ˙ Hamza Fath Alla¯h ˙ ˙ Hasan al-ʿAtta¯r (1766–1835) ˙˙ ˙ Hasan al-Banna¯ (1906–49) ˙ Hasan al-Tawı¯l ˙ ˙ Hasan Tawfı¯q al-ʿAdl (1862–1904) ˙ Hassu¯na al-Nawa¯wı¯ (1838–1925) ˙ Hifnı¯ Na¯sif (1856–1919) ˙ ˙ Husayn al-Marsafı¯ (1815–90) ˙ ˙ Ibra¯hı¯m ʿAbd al-Qa¯dir al-Ma¯zinı¯ Ibra¯hı¯m Mustafa¯ ˙˙ Isma¯ʿı¯l Falakı¯ (1825–1901) Isma¯ʿı¯l Raʾfat Isma¯ʿı¯l Sidqı¯ (1875–1950) ˙ Jama¯l al-Dı¯n al-Afgha¯nı¯ (1838–97) Joseph Hekekyan (1807–75) Ju¯rjı¯ Zayda¯n (1861–1914)

231

232

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

Kama¯l Bishr Mahmu¯d ʿAmr ˙ Mahmu¯d Sa¯mı¯ al-Ba¯ru¯dı¯ (1839–1904) ˙ Mahmu¯d al-Sayyid ʿAbd al-Latı¯f ˙ Mahmu¯d Shaltu¯t (1893–1963) ˙ Mansu¯r Ahmad ˙ ˙ Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawa¯d ˙ Muhammad ʿAbd al-Muttalib (1871–1931) ˙˙ ˙ Muhammad ʿAbd al-Sala¯m Faraj (1954–82) ˙ Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) ˙ Muhammad Ahmad Ja¯d al-Mawla¯ ˙ ˙ Muhammad ʿAtiyya al-Ibra¯shı¯ ˙ ˙ Muhammad Diya¯b (graduated 1876) ˙ Muhammad Ha¯fiz Ibra¯hı¯m (1869/72–1932) ˙ ˙ Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956) ˙ ˙ Muhammad al-Kadrı¯ ˙ ˙ Muhammad al-Ka¯shif ˙ Muhammad Khalaf Alla¯h Ahmad ˙ ˙ Muhammad al-Khudarı¯ ˙ ˙ Muhammad Ma¯dı¯ Abu¯ al-ʿAza¯ʾim (1869–1937) ˙ ˙ Muhammad al-Mahdı¯ ˙ Muhammad Mahdı¯ ʿAlla¯m ˙ Muhammad Mahmu¯d (1877–1941) ˙ ˙ Muhammad Rashı¯d Rida¯ (1865–1935) ˙ ˙ Muhammad Sa¯lih (graduated 1880) ˙ ˙ ˙ Muhammad al-Za¯wahirı¯ (1878–1944) ˙ Mustafa¯ Amı¯n (1914–97) ˙˙ Mustafa¯ Ka¯mil (1874–1908) ˙˙ Mustafa¯ al-Mara¯ghı¯ (1881–1945) ˙˙ Mustafa¯ al-Nahha¯s (1879–1965) ˙˙ ˙˙ Mustafa¯ Sa¯diq al-Ra¯fiʿı¯ (1880–1937) ˙˙ ˙ Mustafa¯ Tammu¯m (graduated 1883) ˙ ˙˙ Rifa¯ʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahta¯wı¯ (1801–73) ˙ ˙ Saʿd al-Laba¯n Saʿd Zaghlu¯l (1858–1927) Sa¯diq ʿArju¯n ˙ Sala¯h Abu¯ Sayf (1915–96) ˙ ˙ Salı¯m ʿAmr al-Qalʿa¯wı¯ Salı¯m al-Bishrı¯ (1832–1917)

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

233

Sayyid al-Marsafı¯ ˙ Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) ˙ Shukrı¯ Sarha¯n (1925–97) ˙ Sulta¯n Muhammad ˙ ˙ Ta¯ha¯ Husayn (1889–1973) ˙ ˙ Tahaya Ka¯rı¯u¯ka¯ (1915–99) ˙ Tanta¯wı¯ Jawharı¯ (1862–1940) ˙ ˙ Usa¯ma Anwar Oka¯sha (1941–2010)

Fictional Egyptians Hamı¯da (heroine of Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqa¯q al-Midaq) ˙ Ibra¯hı¯m Faraj (villain of Naguib Mahfouz’s Zuqa¯q al-Midaq) Ima¯m Belta¯jı¯ Hasanayn (hero of Sala¯h Abu¯ Sayf’s film Shaba¯b ˙ ˙ ˙ Imraʾa) ʿUthma¯n Bayyumı¯ (tragic hero of Naguib Mahfouz’s Hadrat al˙ ˙ muhtaram) ˙

Other Rulers Mentioned in the Text Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76, as Sultan of Ottoman Empire) Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61, as Sultan of Ottoman Empire) Abu¯ Bakr (r. 632–4, as caliph of early Muslim community) Ahmad Bey (r. 1837–55, as regent of Tunisia) ˙ Ha¯kim (r. 996–1021, as sixth Fatimid caliph) Mahmu¯d II (r. 1808–39, as Sultan of Ottoman Empire) ˙ ʿUmar (r. 634–44, as caliph of early Muslim community) ʿUthma¯n (r. 644–55, as caliph of early Muslim community)

Other Arabic or Urdu Names Mentioned in the Text ¯ Abu¯ al-Aʿla Mawdu¯dı¯ (1903–79) al-Fa¯ra¯bı¯ (872–950) al-Ghaza¯lı¯ (1058–1111) Ibn Ma¯lik (c. 1204–74) Muhammad Iqba¯l (1877–1938) ˙ Taqı¯ al-Dı¯n al-Nabha¯nı¯ (1909–77)

234

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

Europeans Mentioned in the Text Bernadino Drovetti (1776–1852) Carlo Nallino (1872–1938) David Santillana (1855–1931) Douglas Dunlop Edmé-François Jomard (1777–1862) [Victor] Édouard Dor Lord Cromer (1841–1917), known as Evelyn Baring until 1892 Louis Massignon (1883–1962)

Places ʿAbba¯siyya ¯ ¯n ʿAbdı Abu¯ Zaʿbal ʿAtaba Azbakiyya Ba¯b al-Khalq Birkat al-Fı¯l Bu¯la¯q Bu¯r Saʿı¯d Darb al-Ahmar ˙ Darb al-Jama¯mı¯z Damanhu¯r Darra¯sa Dinshawa¯ʾı¯ Fayyu¯m Hilmiyya ˙ Isma¯ʿı¯liyya Khalı¯fa Mahmu¯diyya ˙ Marsafa¯ ˙ Minya¯ Munı¯ra Mu¯skı¯ Na¯siriyya ˙ Qasr al-ʿAynı¯ ˙ Sayyida Zaynab

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

235

Schools, Libraries, Archives Egyptian Da¯r al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) ˙ Da¯r al-Ifta¯ʾ (House of the Mufti, repository of fatwas issued by the Grand Mufti of Egypt) Da¯r al-Kutub (Egyptian National Library) Da¯r al-Watha¯ʾiq (Egyptian National Archives) L’École Franco-égyptienne (Egyptian School, Paris, 1826–36) L’École Militaire (Military School for Egyptians, Paris, 1844–9) Ja¯miʿ al-Ahmadı¯ (Ahmadi Mosque, Cairo’s second most important ˙ mosque and religious school; also the name of Tanta¯’s most ˙ ˙ important mosque and religious school), Ja¯miʿ al-Azhar (al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo’s most important mosque and religious school) Ja¯miʿ al-Ibra¯hı¯m (Ibrahim Mosque, Alexandria’s most important mosque and religious school) Ja¯miʿat al-Qa¯hira (Cairo University, founded 1908 as Egyptian University, made public in 1925, renamed Fuʿad I University in the 1930s, renamed Cairo University in the 1950s; often ‘the University’ in the text) ¯ ¯ b (College of Literature within the University) Kulliyyat al-Ada Kulliyyat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m (College of Dar al-ʿUlum, as it was known after its integration into the University) Madrasat al-Alsun (School of Languages) Madrasat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m (subject of this monograph, the School of Dar al-ʿUlum) Madrasat al-Huqu¯q (School of Law) ˙ Madrasat al-Ida¯ra (the School of Administration) Madrasat al-Ida¯ra wal-Alsun (School of Administration and Languages) Madrasat al-Mubtadiya¯n (the Mubtadiyan School, a primary school founded early in Ismaʿil’s reign) Madrasat al-Muʿallimı¯n al-Khidı¯wiyya (the Khedivial School of Teachers) Madrasat al-Muʿallimı¯n al-Mubtadiya¯n (alternative name for Dar al-ʿUlum, while it was attached to the Mubtadiyan School)

236

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

Madrasat al-Muʿallimı¯n Nasriyya (alternative name for Da¯r al˙ ʿUlu¯m, while it was attached to Madrasat al-Nasriyya) ˙ Madrasat al-Muʿallimı¯n al-Tawfı¯qiyya (the Tawfiqiyya School of Teachers) Madrasat Nasriyya (the Nasriyya School, as Madrasat al˙ Mubtadiya¯n was known once it was renamed after its location) Madrasat al-Qada¯ʾ al-Sharʿı¯ (School of Shariʿa Judges) ˙ Madrasat al-Tajhı¯ziyya Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m (Dar al-ʿUlum’s Preparatory School) Muhandishkha¯na (School of Engineering)

Elsewhere A¸siret Mekteb-i Hümayun (Imperial School for Tribes, Istanbul, 1892) Da¯r al-Funu¯n (Tehran, 1851) Ja¯miʿ al-Zaytu¯na (Zaytuna Mosque, Tunis’ most important mosque and religious school) Maktab ʿAnbar (an elite secondary school, Damascus, 1893) Mekteb-i Sultani (or Galatasaray Lycée, Istanbul, 1868) Mekteb-i Sultani (or Sultani Lycée, in Beirut (1883) and Damascus (1885)) Mekteb-i Ulum-i Harbiye (Ottoman School of Military Sciences, Istanbul, 1834) Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (Aligarh, India 1877) Sa¯diqı¯ College (Tunis, 1875) ˙

Associations al-ʿAzamiyya al-Sha¯dhiliyya (a Sha¯dhiliyya Su¯fı¯ order) ˙ Hizb al-Tahrı¯r al-Isla¯mı¯ (the Islamic Liberation Party) ˙ ˙ Hizb al-Umma (National Party) ˙ Hizb al-Wafd (Wafd Party) ˙ al-Ikhwa¯n al-Muslimı¯n (Muslim Brotherhood) Jamʿiyyat al-Ahra¯m al-Ru¯hiyya (Spiritualist Association of the ˙ Pyramids) Jama¯ʿat al-Khila¯fa al-Isla¯miyya bi-Wa¯dı¯ al-Nı¯l (Group of the Islamic Caliphate in the Nile Valley)

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

237

Jamʿiyyat Maka¯rim al-Akhla¯q al-Islamiyya (Association of Islamic Character) Jamʿiyyat al-Shubba¯n al-Muslimı¯n (the Association of Muslim Youth, also known as the Young Men’s Muslim Association, YMMA). Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmı¯ al-ʿArabı¯ (Arab Scientific Academy) Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya (Arabic Language Academy) Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya al-Malakı¯ (the Royal Arabic Language Academy) Misr al-Fata¯h (Young Egypt) ˙ Na¯dı¯ Dar al-ʿUlum (Dar al-ʿUlum alumni club) Na¯dı¯ al-Mada¯ris al-ʿUlya¯ (alumni club for graduates of Egyptian higher schools)

Journals and Newspapers al-Akhba¯r al-Jarı¯da al-Liwa Majallat al-Azhar (Magazine of al-Azhar) al-Mana¯r (The Lighthouse) Nu¯r al-Isla¯m (Light of Islam, al-Azhar’s first periodical) Rawdat al-mada¯ris al-Misriyya (The Garden of Egyptian ˙ ˙ Schools) Sahı¯fat Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m (Journal of Dar al-ʿUlum, published by the Dar ˙ ˙ al-ʿUlum Club) Sahı¯fat al-Muʿallimı¯n (Journal of Teachers) ˙ ˙ Sahı¯fat Na¯dı¯ Dar al-ʿUlum (Journal of the Dar al-ʿUlum Club, the ˙ ˙ alumni association of Dar al-ʿUlum) al-Siya¯sa (Politics) al-ʿUrwat al-Wuthqa¯ (The Firm Bond)

Books Ahla¯m fı¯ al-siya¯sa wa-kayfa yatahaqqaq al-sala¯m al-ʿa¯mm (Dreams ˙ ˙ in Politics and How to Achieve World Peace) ʿAlam al-Dı¯n (1882)

238

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

al-Alfiyya, or Khula¯sa fi al-nahw (The Thousand, or Summary of ˙ Syntax in 1,000 rhyming verses) Falsafat al-ijtima¯ʿ wa al-taʾrı¯kh (The Philosophy of Society and History) Fı¯ manzil al-wahy (In the House of Inspiration) ˙ Fı¯ al-shʿir al-ja¯hilı¯ (On Pre-Islamic Poetry) Hadrat al-muhtaram (Respected Sir) ˙ ˙ ˙ Hayat Muhammad (Life of Muhammad) ˙ al-Isla¯m wa usu¯l al-hukm (Islam and the Principles of Government) ˙ ˙ al-Khitat al-Tawfı¯qiyya al-jadı¯da li-Misr al-Qa¯hira (New Guide to ˙ ˙ ˙ the Districts Ruled by Tawfiq) Kita¯b al-duru¯s al-nahwiyya li-tala¯midh al-mada¯ris al˙ ibtida¯ʾiyya (Book of Syntax Lessons for Students of Primary Schools) Kita¯b qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya li-tala¯mı¯dh al-mada¯ris alibtida¯ʾiyya (Grammar Book of the Arabic Language for Students of Primary Schools) Kita¯b sullam al-mustarshidı¯n (The Staircase for the Seekers of Right Guidance) Muqaddima (Ibn Khaldu¯n’s Introduction) Mustaqbal al-thaqa¯fa fı¯ Misr (The Future of Culture in Egypt) ˙ al-Nahw al-wa¯dih fı¯ qawa¯ʿid al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya lil-mada¯ris al˙ ˙ ˙ ibtida¯ʾiyya (The Clear Syntax in the Grammar of the Arabic Language for Primary Schools) Risa¯lat al-kalim al-thama¯n (The Essay on Eight Words) Risa¯lat al-tawhı¯d (The Theology of Unity) ˙ Tahdı¯b al-akhla¯q (Treatise on Ethics) Tajdı¯d dhikra¯ Abı¯ al-ʿAla¯ʾ (Renewing the Memory of Abu al-ʿAlaʾ [al-Maʾarri]) al-Taʿlı¯m fı¯ Misr (Education in Egypt) ˙ Taqwı¯m Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m (Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m Almanac) Taqwı¯m al-Nı¯l (Almanac of the Nile) Taʾrı¯kh a¯da¯b al-ʿArab (History of Arabic Literature) Taʾrı¯kh a¯da¯b al-lugha al-ʿarabiyya (History of the Literature of the Arabic Language) al-Wası¯la al-adabiyya ila¯ al-ʿulu¯m al-ʿarabiyya (The Literary Means to the Arabic Sciences) Zuqa¯q al-Midaq (Midaq Alley)

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

239

Film and Television Laya¯lı¯ al-Hilmiyya (Nights of Hilmiyya) broadcast in the 1980s and ˙ early 1990s Shaba¯b Imraʾa (A Woman’s Youth)

Terms ʿadl (justice) ʾafandi, pl. ʾafandiyya (efendi, person possessing civil school knowledge) ahliyya (second degree established at al-Azhar; qualification to work as ima¯m, kutta¯b instructor, or reciter of the Qurʾa¯n) ʿa¯lim, pl. ʿulama¯ʾ (religious scholar) ʿa¯limiyya (highest degree from al-Azhar; qualification to teach as a religious scholar) ʿama¯ma (turban, headgear associated with shaykhs) al-ʿaqı¯da wa al-ʿiba¯da¯t al-isla¯miyya (Islamic creed and worship) ʿaru¯d (metrics, prosody) ˙ ashya¯ʿ (general education, lit. ‘things’) ʿayan (notable rural families) badı¯ʿ (figures of speech, rhetorical beautification) bala¯gha (rhetoric, eloquence) baya¯n (clarity of expression) bey (title associated with rank above efendi and below pasha) da¯ʿı¯ (male preacher) darʿamiyya (graduate of Da¯r al-ʿUlu¯m) darb (small lane) dhawa¯t (landed, aristocratic elite of Egypt; largely Turko-Circassian) duru¯s ʿumu¯miyya (public or general lessons) falla¯h (Egyptian peasant) ˙ fara¯ʾid (inheritance law) fatwa (legal interpretation) fiqh (jurisprudence) hadı¯th (sayings of the Prophet) ˙ haiʾa (astronomy) hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) ˙ halaqa (mosque lesson circle) ˙

240

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

Hanafı¯ (school of law that was the official school of law in the ˙ Ottoman Empire) ha¯ra (local quarter in an urban area with a medieval-era street plan) ˙ harf (a word that is neither noun nor verb) ˙ hikma (philosophy) ˙ huku¯ma (government) ˙ hurriyya (liberty) ˙ ijaza (certificate) ijtiha¯d (independent interpretation of religious sources) ʿilmiyya (scientific) ima¯m (prayer leader) iʿra¯b (grammatical method for studying Arabic) ja¯hiliyya (a reference to the ‘age of ignorance’ before the foundation of Islam) jamʿiyya¯t (sing. jamʿiyya, or, in ida¯fa form, jamʿiyyat) ˙ jubba (open-front gown with wide sleeves) al-jumla al-mufı¯da (a complete sentence) kaʿba (the holiest building in Islam, a black cube in Mecca towards which Muslims pray) ka¯ku¯la¯ (long coat) khitta (neighbourhood) ˙˙ kutta¯b (religious school at the elementary level) maʿa¯nı¯ (meaning) madrasa (religious school at the secondary or higher level) mantiq (logic) ˙ mı¯qa¯t (calculations governing calendar, times of prayer) muʿallim (teacher, including in a kutta¯b) muʿallimı¯n (teachers) mudarraj (amphitheatre, alternative to anfitı¯a¯tru¯) muftı¯ (a scholar qualified to rule on questions of religious law and practice) muhaddithu¯n (modernisers) ˙ muhdathu¯n (modernists, specifically a group of poets in the ninth ˙ and tenth centuries) mukhadramu¯n (senior) ˙ muslihu¯n (reformers) ˙ ˙ muta¯laʿa (reading) ˙ nahda (cultural renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth ˙ centuries)

Appendix III: Glossary of Arabic Used in the Text

241

naht (method for creating new compound words in Arabic) ˙ nahw (syntax) ˙ pa¯sha¯ (title associated with the highest ranks in the Ottoman Empire) qabaʾ (a gown with full-length sleeves) qa¯dı¯ (judge) qa¯fiyya (rhyme) qafta¯n (robe) ˙ qawa¯ʿid al-Isla¯m wa ʿaqı¯da (laws of Islam and worship/theology) Qurʾa¯n (Muslim holy scripture) riwa¯q, pl. arwiqa (residence hall/lodgings) Salafı¯ (follower of the practices of the Salaf, the companions of the Prophet Muhammad) sarf (morphology) ˙ Sharı¯ʿa (Islamic law) shaykh, pl. shuyu¯kh (person possessing knowledge transmitted by religious schools) silsala (chain of transmission) siya¯sa (politics) tafsı¯r (interpretation of the Qurʾan) tahdı¯riyya (preparatory) ˙˙ takfir (excommunication, declaring a Muslim an unbeliever) tarbiyya (education) tarbiyya ʿilmiyya (scientific pedagogy) al-tarbiyya wa al-tahdhı¯b (education and refinement) tarbu¯sh (fez or tarboush, the headgear associated with the efendiyya) ˙ taʿrı¯b (method for the incorporation of foreign words into Arabic) tasawwuf (mysticism) ˙ tawhı¯d (unity of God) ˙ umma (nation, community) usu¯l al-fiqh (sources of law) ˙ wafd (delegation) waqf, pl. awqa¯f (charitable endowment) watan (fatherland) ˙ zulm (injustice) ˙

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics denote maps or illustrations. ʿAbbas Hilmi II, Khedive, 14, 128 ʿAbbas, Khedive, 12, 54, 142 ʿAbd al-Jawad, Muhammad biography of Husayn al-Marsafi, 210 Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac, 6, 156–7 Dar al-ʿUlum student, 93, 96, 156–7 history of Dar al-ʿUlum, 208–10 rural childhood, 33 on School of Shariʿa Judges, 146 on school strike over dress, 42 Abd al-Khaliq Hassuna, 208 ʿAbd al-Latif, Mahmud al-Sayyid, 187 ʿAbd al-Muttalib, Muhammad, 152 ʿAbd al-Raziq, ʿAli, 15–16, 166 Islam and the Principles of Government, 166 ʿAbduh, Muhammad, 93 claimants to his legacy, 211–12 education reformer and nationalist, 2, 29 Islamic modernist, 85, 158 limited involvement with Dar alʿUlum, 114–15 praise of Dar al-ʿUlum, 127, 206–7 The Theology of Unity, 158–9 Abdülaziz, 7 Abdülmecid, 7 Abu al-ʿAzaʾim, Muhammad Madi, 126, 171 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 73 al-ʿAdl, Hasan Tawfiq, 39, 98, 111, 126, 151, 198 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din, 29, 84–5, 114, 158 Ahmad Bey, 7 Ahmad, Mansur, 89 Ahmad, Muhammad Khalaf Allah, 34

al-Azhar ahliyya degree, 140 ʿalimiyya degree, 103, 141 certificates, 31–2 curriculum, 63–4, 143–4, 175, 192 Dar al-ʿUlum as catalyst for reform, 140–2 dissatisfaction with reforms, 148–9 Husayn’s condemnation, 196 Koranic learning, 57–8 library, 114 Light of Islam (Nur al-Islam), 191–2 and Muhammad ʿAbduh, 114–15 prestigious mosque, 30 reforms, 84–5, 103–4, 139–40, 142–4, 190–3, 204 and School of Shariʿa Judges, 144–6, 189–90 student frustrations, 135–7, 138–9 student riots, 139–40 Alfiyya grammar text, 71, 153–4, 175–6 ʿAllam, Muhammad Mahdi, 187 Amin, Ahmed, 134–5, 187 My Life, 135, 136–8 Amin, Mustafa, 187 al-Aqqad, ʿAbbas Mahmud, 178, 186 Arab Scientific Academy, 186 Arabic language al-Azhar curriculum, 63–4 Alfiyya grammar text, 71, 153–4, 175–6 grammar, 153–4, 187–8 Husayn’s critique of teaching methods, 194–5, 199 The Literary Means to the Arabic Sciences (al-Marsafi), 111–12

261

262 Arabic language (cont.) and nation-building, 184–5 notable darʿamiyya, 126 reform, 150–5, 186–8 Royal Arabic Language Academy, 186–7, 202–3 textbooks, 150, 152–4, 187–8 Arabic literature of the darʿamiyya, 210–11 darʿamiyya as scholars and instructors, 151–2 Islamiyat, 182–3 key to study of Arabic, 195 modernist journals, 85, 158 nahda literature, 85–6 Arjun, Sadiq, 193 Armbrust, Walter, 214 Aroian, Lois, 37–8, 122, 144 Association of the Islamic Caliphate in the Nile Valley, 171 Association of Muslim Youth, 172 Association for the Protection of Islamic Morality, 171 associations (jamʿiyat), 133, 159, 167, 169–70 atheism, accusations, 166–7 audiocentric pedagogy, 46, 50–1, 61–2, 68, 87, 110 authenticity, 213–14, 217 authority Islamic leadership, 62–3, 176–7, 178–9 and symbolic capital, 17 autobiographies, 32–4, 36–7 al-ʿAwamri, Ahmad, 186–7 al-Bahrawi, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 5, 23, 44 al-Banna, Hasan founder of Muslim Brotherhood, 27, 126, 169 hybrid civil-religious capital, 5, 176–7 opposition to western influence, 178–9 religious credentials, 175–6 return home after dress strike, 206, 212–13 Barakat, ʿAtif, 98, 146 Baron, Beth, 169–70

Index Barth, Fredrik, 5, 23 Bell, Andrew, 69 Bhabha, Homi, 22, 23 al-Biblawi, ʿAli, 145 Birkat al-Fil lake, 78, 79 Bishr, Kamal, 36 al-Bishri, Salim, 145 Borough Road Training College, 98 boundary crossing al-Banna’s dress, 177 and sociocultural change, 219 concept, 24–5 conscious agency, 44 dress as boundary marker, 39, 136, 177 Egyptian modernisation, 86–7, 132–3 invisibility, 24–5 new religious intellectuals, 180 religious-civil, 32–3 rural-urban, 32–6, 37–8 boundary policing, 24, 39–41 boundary straddling, 25–6, 39–43, 177, 180 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 16–22, 44, 219 British occupation, 128–31 concerns over effects of mass education, 97 control of Egyptian bodies and minds, 81–2 education policy, 96–9, 129 English as language of power, 128, 129 officials, 13 see also Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord; Europeans Brockelman, Carl, 151 Brugsch, Heinrich, 89 Cairo Birkat al-Fil lake, 79, 78 European-Egyptian divide, 71–3 film representation, 35–6 Hilmiyya suburb, 79–80 Islamic/European-influenced borderlands, 73–81, 75, 79, 116–17 Ismʿail’s ‘Paris on the Nile’ reforms, 54, 72, 82 maps, 117 see also Darb al-Jamamiz

Index Cairo University see Egyptian University caliphate, 166, 168–9, 171 capital Bourdieu’s concepts, 16–17, 219 certified cultural capital, 20–1 cultural capital, 16–17, 20–1 habitus and education, 18–19 hybrid civil-religious, 131 social capital, 16–17 civil schools access difficulties, 134–5 Arabic teaching, 200 centrality of written texts, 68 considered superior to religious education, 51–2 Cromer reforms, 97 curriculum, 68–9, 107 elementary school reform, 83–4 European influence, 69–71 founded by Muhammad ʿAli, 55, 66–7 hybridity, 214–15 and Islamic reform, 158–9 standardisation and central control, 67–8 students from religious schools, 100 training state employees, 66–7 Clot, Bartholomew Antoine, 54–5 code-switching, 24–5, 31, 39 College of Literature, 188, 200 constitutional era (1923–52) culture wars, 2–3, 47–8, 167–8, 203, 215–16, 220 political and economic discontent, 2, 14–15 see also nationalism Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Lord, 13, 26, 97, 128, 129–30, 155 cultural authenticity, 213–14, 217 cultural capital and boundary crossing, 24–5 civil schooling as source, 20 concept, 16–17 darʿamiyya, 93–4, 124–6 efendiyya and shaykhs, 21–2 embodied cultural capital, 20, 21–2 cultural renaissance (nahda), 29–30, 74, 85–6, 132–3, 149–50

263 cultural translation, 22 culture wars, 2–3, 47–8, 167–8, 203, 215–16, 220 curriculum al-Azhar, 63–4, 143–4, 175, 192 civil schools, 68–9, 107 Dar al-ʿUlum, 106–7, 141–2 Egyptianisation, 14 kuttabs, 83, 92 monitorial schools, 69–70 religious schools, 92 Dar al-ʿUlum, 190, 191, 192 academic progress, 104–5 Al Jazeera documentary, 36 buildings, 119, 120 changes in institutional status, 95–6 critiques, 164, 193–6, 199 curriculum, 106–7 curriculum changes, 141–2 disciplinary education, 108–10 faculty members, 40, 41, 110–15 foundation lectures, 89–90, 209 history, 3–4, 90, 208–10 hybridity, 27, 90–1, 100, 101–3 kuttab teacher training, 141–2 location, 116–20, 117 mission hybridity, 46–7, 101–3, 124–5 monitoring of director and teachers, 105 objectification and functionalisation of Islam, 122–3 origin and purpose, 84, 90, 208–10 practical teaching classes, 95 praise for, 127, 137, 164, 199–200, 206–7 Preparatory School, 188–9 and School of Shariʿa Judges, 146–7 selection of students, 91, 104, 143–4 sociocultural status uncertainty, 31–2 student numbers, 99, 102 student strike over dress, 41–3, 212–13 teacher training, 91, 207 as University faculty, 90, 204, 207 Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac, 6, 146, 156–7, 206–7, 208–10

264 Dar al-ʿUlum Club, 154–5 Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum, 154–5, 156, 201–2 darʿamiyya (graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum) ʿAbduh’s heirs, 212 Arabic language reform, 186–8 aspirations, 35 autobiographies, 32–4, 36–7 civil-religious hybridity, 4–5, 47, 152–3, 176–7, 204–5 contribution to renewal and reform, 131, 160–2 cultural capital, 93–4, 124–6 culture wars with Europhile modernists, 167–8, 203, 215–16, 220 embodied knowledge, 108 granted title of efendi, 43, 175 hired for al-Azhar faculty, 192–3 Husayn’s condemnation, 195–6 influence in education world, 4, 38, 99–100, 215 language deficiencies, 107 literary canon, 210–11 modernity projects, 149–50, 202–3 notable graduates, 5, 126 retention of title and dress of shaykhs, 94 rural backgrounds, 33–4, 37–8 sociocultural uncertainty, 31–2, 45, 218–19 socio-economic possibilities, 138 study abroad, 32–3, 34, 55, 56 Darb al-Jamamiz borderland area, 77–9 central campus, 67 civil schools, 49, 50–1 Ismʿail’s reforms, 84 lecture sessions (1871), 89–90, 209 disabled children, educational opportunities, 68, 135, 137–8 Diyab, Muhammad, 152–3 Dor, Édouard, 54–5, 109 Douglas, Mary, 25 dress as boundary marker, 39, 136, 177 Dar al-ʿUlum students, 190, 191, 192 student strike, 41–3, 212–13 Drovetti, Bernadino, 54–5, 109 Dunlop, Douglas, 97–8, 129, 130

Index education civil-religious boundary crossing, 32–3 darʿamiyya significant contribution, 4, 38, 99–100, 215 European misrepresentation, 46, 49–51, 57–61 and social and professional progress, 18–19 and sociocultural change, 17–18 study abroad, 32–3, 34, 55, 56 see also pedagogy education policy khedival reforms, 51–2, 54–7, 66–71, 83–6 reforms, 214–15 under British rule, 26, 96–9 Zaghlul’s successes, 130 efendiyya (civil school graduates) boundary straddling, 177 career opportunities, 12 cultural capital, 20, 88 habitus and embodied cultural capital, 21–2 inclusion of darʿamiyya, 43 and Muslim Brotherhood, 172–4 origin of term, 27–8 sociocultural group identities, 28–30 socio-economic difficulties, 216–18 socio-economic resources, 15 Egyptian army, 54 Egyptian independence, 14, 162–3 Egyptian University advantages, 138 College of Literature, 188, 200 foundation, 131, 151 and future of Dar al-ʿUlum, 194 Husayn’s experience, 197–8 integration of Dar al-ʿUlum, 90, 204, 207 refoundation, 184–5 Egyptian uprising (2011), 221–2 England Borough Road Training College, 98 monitorial schools, 69–70, 98, 108–9 Europeans colonisation of Egyptian minds, 52, 81–2, 87–8 financial control, 13

Index misrepresentation of Egyptian culture, 87–8, 150 misrepresentation of Egyptian education, 46, 49–51, 57–61 misrepresentation of Islam, 155 pedagogic influences, 69–71 see also British occupation; England; France Europhile modernists, 47–8, 164–5, 166, 167–8, 182–4, 203–4, 211, 215–16, 220 extremist groups, 179, 220, 221 Fahmi, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, 165–6 Falaki, Ismaʿil, 89 Faraj, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Salam, 179 Faruq, King, 181–2 films A Woman’s Youth (Shabab Imraʾa), 34–6, 76–7 Al Jazeera documentary, 36 al-Fiqi, Abu al-Fath, 164, 199–200 The Firmest Bond (al-Urwa al-Wuthqa), 85 First World War, 162–3 France education influences, 109–10 Egyptian occupation, 11 l’École Franco-égyptienne, 55, 109 l’École Militaire, 55, 109 Tunisian invasion, 8 Free Officer Revolution (1952), 217–18, 220 Fuʿad, King, 166, 171, 186 The Future of Culture (Husayn), 193–6 Garden of Schools (Rawdat al-Madaris), 57, 84, 111, 112 Gershoni, Israel, 28, 182–3 Gilroy, Paul, 22, 23 Gorst, Eldon, 13, 130 grass-roots associations (jamʿiyat), 133, 159, 167, 169–70 Guigon, Eloi, 89 Gupta, Akhil, 25 habitus Bourdieu’s concepts, 219 civil schools, 68 concept, 18, 19

265 Dar al-ʿUlum, 108 education and sociocultural change, 18–19, 44 Hafiz Ibrahim, Muhammad, 112 Hall, Stuart, 22, 23 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn Europhile modernist, 15–16, 166, 168, 182, 183–4, 186 praise for Dar al-ʿUlum, 164, 199–200 Hekekyan, Joseph, 53, 56 Heyworth-Dunne, James, 64, 171 Hilmiyya suburb, 79–80 Hirschler, Konrad, 64–5 Hizb al-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), 126, 179–80, 220 House of Wisdom, 209–10 Husayn, Taha on Arabic language, 185 critique of Dar al-ʿUlum, 164, 168, 196 critique of religious education, 196–7 Dar al-ʿUlum Almanac essay, 208 The Days (al-Ayyam), 32–3, 135–9 Egyptian University experience, 197–8 European influences, 197–8, 199 Europhile modernist, 15–16, 166, 186 The Future of Culture, 193–6 high-ranking education posts, 201 language standards, 201 ‘Literary Study School’ critique, 198–9 On Pre-Islamic Poetry, 167 hybridity civil schools, 214–15 Dar al-ʿUlum, 27, 46–7, 90–1, 100, 101–3, 124–5 Dar al-ʿUlum’s location, 116–20 darʿamiyya, 4–5, 47, 152–3, 176–7, 204–5 and founding of Muslim Brotherhood, 27 School of Shariʿa Judges, 4, 27, 137 and sociocultural change, 22–6 visible vs invisible, 23 al-Ibrashi, Muhammad ʿAtiya, 187 al-Iskandari, Ahmad ʿAli, 186–7, 202

266 Islam European misrepresentation, 155 reform, 155–61 see also reform-minded shaykhs Islam and the Principles of Government (ʿAbd al-Raziq), 166 Islamic knowledge ambiguity, 218–19 authentic connection to Egypt’s past, 123–4 employment possibilities, 62–3 minimal impact of written texts, 64–5 objectification and functionalisation, 122–3 oral transmission, 57–8, 61–2 public recitations, 65–6 social and religious value, 63 Islamic law see shariʿa law Islamic leadership, 62–3 Islamic Liberation Party (Hizb alTahrir), 126, 179–80, 220 Islamic modernists, 85, 158 Islamic revival, 1–2 Islamiyat, 182–3 Ismaʿil, Khedive, 8 education reforms, 55, 67 financial problems, 12–13, 14 reforms, 53, 54, 81, 82, 209 Ittihad (newspaper), 42 Jad al-Mawla, Muhammad Ahmad, 187 Jankowski, James P., 28, 182–3 al-Jarim, ʿAli, 126, 186–7, 202–3 Jawhari, Tantawi, 126, 131, 159–60, 197 Jawish, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, 98, 126 Jomard, Edmé-François, 54–5, 109 al-Kadri, Muhammad, 197 Kamil, Mustafa, 128 al-Kashif, Muhammad, 210–11 al-Khudara, Muhammad, 131 Kitchener, Herbert, 13 kuttab elementary schools curriculum, 83, 92 Islamic learning, 61 reform, 83–4 teacher-training by Dar al-ʿUlum, 141–2 western dismissal, 50

Index al-Laban, Saʿd, 208 Lampson, Miles, 13 Lancaster, Joseph, 69, 70, 109 Lane, Edward William, 60 Lane-Poole, Stanley, 59–60 languages darʿamiyya deficiencies, 107 English as language of power, 128, 129 European languages, 199 see also Arabic language; Arabic literature Lansing, Dr Gulian, 49, 51, 57–8 League for the Defence of Islam, 181 legal education fatwa (legal interpretations), 114 Guide to Hanafi jurisprudence, 113–14 short-lived Dar al-ʿUlum department, 141 Liberal Constitutionalist Party, 15–16, 165–7, 181–2, 193 Lieder, John, 60 Light of Islam (Nur al-Islam), 191–2 The Lighthouse (al-Manar), 80, 211 literacy, 59–61 ‘Literary Study School’, 198–9 The Literary Means to the Arabic Sciences (al-Marsafi), 111–12 Lutfi al-Sayyid, Ahmad, 15–16, 165–6, 186, 202 madrasas, 36, 50, 62 The Magazine of the Abbasiyya Refuge and Islamic Moral Character, 170–1 al-Mahdi, Muhammad, 131, 197 Mahfouz, Naguib, 38–9 Mahmud II, 7 Mahmud, Muhammad, 165–6 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, 33 Mamluks, 11, 12 al-Maraghi, Mustafa, 181–2, 191–2, 193 al-Marsafi, Ahmad, 89, 112–13 al-Marsafi, Husayn ʿAbd al-Jawad biography, 210 Arabic literature tuition, 151

Index Dar al-ʿUlum teacher, 93, 110–12 Darb al-Jamamiz Palace lecturer, 89 Essay on Eight Words, 112 The Literary Means to the Arabic Sciences, 111–12 al-Marsafi, Sayyid, 139, 197 Massignon, Louis, 197 al-Mazini, ʿAbd al-Qadir, 166 Miftah, Ahmad, 39 Ministry of Education and Arabic grammar, 187–8 and Dar al-ʿUlum, 194 Ismaʿil’s reforms, 55, 67 location, 77 and School of Shariʿa Judges, 145–6 missionaries, 55, 60, 109, 159, 169–70, 181 Mitchell, Timothy, 10, 81–2, 86, 109 modernisation actors, 29–30, 55–7 by independent local rulers, 7–8 cultural renaissance (nahda), 29–30, 74, 85–6, 132–3, 149–50 in Egypt, 11, 86–7, 132–3 khedival reforms, 53–7 modernity culture wars, 2–3, 47–8, 167–8, 203, 215–16, 220 Europhile modernists, 47–8, 164–5, 166, 182–4 projects, 8–11, 12–13 terminology, 9–10 monitorial schools, 69–70, 98, 108–9 Mubarak, ʿAli Cairo public works, 82 Darb al-Jamamiz lectures (1871), 89–90 education reforms, 84, 98 founding of Dar al-ʿUlum, 147–8 influential reformer, 53, 56–7, 209 publications, 57 sociocultural status, 28 study in France, 110 Mubtadiyan School, 95–6, 118 Muhammad ʿAli, Khedive Egyptian governor, 11 missionary influence, 109 reforms, 7, 11–12, 53–4, 55 state-funded schools, 66–7 Muhammad, Sultan, 131

267 Muslim Brotherhood cultural authority, 221 electoral successes, 1 emergence, 15, 16, 27, 169–70 Islamic vision for Egypt, 172–3 links with efendiyya, 172–4 mass movement, 167, 169 Nasser’s suppression, 221 opposition to western influence, 178–9 transnational reach, 126, 179–80, 220 Mustafa al-Nahhas, 15 Mustafa, Ibrahim, 187 al-Nabhani, Taqi al-Din, 5, 126, 179 Nada, Ahmad, 89 nahda (renaissance), 29–30, 74, 85–6, 132–3, 149–50 Nallino, Carlo, 197–8 Nasif, Hifni, 111, 126, 131, 151, 152–3, 197 Nasriyya School, 95–6 al-Nasser, Gamal Abd, 1 nationalism and Arab language, 184–5 Cromer’s derision, 129–30 early nationalists, 14–16 early successes, 130–1 hybrid civil-religious capital, 131 modernity and authenticity, 161–2 post-war activities, 162–3 two strands, 128–9 al-Nawawi, Hassuna, 93, 113–14, 142–3, 145 new religious intellectuals, 174–5, 178–9, 180, 184 Newnes, Sir George, 58–9 Nights of Hilmiyya (Layali al-Hilmiyya), 80 ocularcentric pedagogy, 46, 50–1, 61, 68, 70, 110, 173 Okasha, Usama Anwar, 80 Ottoman caliphate, 166, 168–9, 171 Ottoman Empire military and civil schools, 120–1 reformers, 55–6 Tanzimat reforms, 7, 12

268 pedagogy Dar al-ʿUlum’s ocularcentric methods, 107–8, 110 monitorial schools, 69–70, 98, 108–9 ocularcentric vs audiocentric methods, 46, 50–1, 61, 68, 70, 87, 107–8, 110 practical teaching classes, 95 subject matter expertise, 91–2 performance efendi habitus, 29 Egyptian self-narratives, 36–7 embodied cultural capital, 20, 21–2 Islamic leadership, 62–3 performative code-switching, 24–5, 31, 39 see also boundary crossing; boundary straddling; dress Poole, Edward Stanley, 60 Poole, Reginald Stuart, 60 Poole, Sophia Lane, 60 Qurʾan, 63, 64, 65–6 Qutb, Sayyid and extremist groups, 179, 221 hybrid civil-religious background, 5, 126 opposition to western influence, 178–9 religious credentials, 175–6 rural childhood, 33 writings, 178, 201 Raʾfat, Ismaʿil, 197 al-Rafʿi, Mustafa Sadiq, 151 Rashid Rida, Muhammad, 29, 85, 158, 159, 211–12 Rawdat al-Madaris (Garden of Schools), 57, 84, 111, 112 Raymond, André, 73 reform-minded shaykhs Dar al-ʿUlum education, 4, 30–1 first Grand Mufti, 104 importance to state modernity projects, 30–1, 45, 93, 160–2 uncertain sociocultural status, 31–2 religious schools, 36 curriculum, 92 madrasas, 36, 50, 62

Index for those with visual or physical disabilities, 68 see also al-Azhar; Islamic knowledge; shaykhs (religious school graduates) research sources, 6 Royal Arabic Language Academy, 186–7, 202–3 rural-urban boundary crossing, 32–6, 37–8 Ryzova, Lucie, 28, 29, 31, 214 Saʿd Zaghlul, 15 al-Sadat, Anwar, 179, 221 Sadiqi College (Tunis), 121 Sahifat Nadi Dar al-ʿUlum (journal), 156, 154–5, 201–2 Saʿid, Khedive, 12, 54 Salih, Muhammad, 152–3 Sami al-Barudi, Mahmud, 112 Sami, ʿAmin, 89, 96 Santillana, David, 160, 197 Sarhan, Shukri, 34 Sayf, Salah Abu, 34 Schoeler, Gregor, 64 School of Administration, 67, 113 School of Languages (Madrasat alAlsun), 56, 100–1 School of Law (Madrasat al-Huquq), 113, 121, 162 School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat alQadaʾ al-Sharʿi) Barakat as first director, 98 and Dar al-ʿUlum, 146–7 establishment, 144–5 hybrid background, 4, 27, 137 integration into al-Azhar, 189–90 pressure from al-Azhar, 188 relations with Ministry of Education and al-Azhar, 145–6 Scott, John, 145 Sedra, Paul, 109, 169 Selim, Samah, 214 Sève, Joseph, 54–5 Shabab Imraʾa (A Woman’s Youth) (film), 34–6, 76–7 Shalabi, Ahmad, 34 Shaltut, Mahmud, 191 shariʿa law

269

Index career possibilities, 62–3 courts, 104 Shawish, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, 98, 126 Shawqi, Ahmad, 112 shaykhs (religious school graduates) career opportunities, 133–4 habitus and embodied cultural capital, 21–2 integration into modern civil school system, 92–4 judicial opportunities, 12 origin of term, 27–8 see also reform-minded shaykhs al-Shirbini, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 145 Shukri, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 112 Sidqi, Ismaʿil, 181, 186, 192–3 al-Sinnari, Ibrahim Kathuda, 118 Smith, Charles D., 183–4 sociocultural change, 17–19, 22–6, 219 spiritualism, 133, 150, 159–60 Starrett, Gregory, 109, 122 Steevens, G. W., 59 Sultan, Muhammad, 152–3 Tahir, Hamid, 33, 34 al-Tahtawi, Rifaʾa Rafiʾ, 29, 53, 56, 93, 100–1 Tammum, Mustafa, 152–3 Tanzimat reforms, 7, 12 Tawfiq, Muhammad, 8, 13 teacher training Borough Road Training College, 98 European influence, 70–1

Khedivial School of Teachers, 95, 98–9 Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School, 98–9 see also Dar al-ʿUlum television, Nights of Hilmiyya (Layali al-Hilmiyya), 80 textbooks, 150, 152–4, 187–8 Tignor, Robert, Modernisation and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 26–7 Tunisia, Sadiqi College, 121 Turko-Circassian elite (dhawat), 12, 55–6, 128, 129 the University see Egyptian University ʿUrabi, Ahmed, 82 ʿUrabi revolt, 14, 82, 112 Vidal, Victor, 54–5, 89 Wafd Party, 15, 165, 181–2 Wafi, ʿAli ʿAbd al-Wahid, 187 Wahhabism, 212 Werbner, Pnina, 23, 44 Young Egypt, 15, 16, 167 Young Men’s Muslim Association, 172 Zaghlul, Saʿd, 85, 113, 130, 144, 148, 165 al-Zawahiri, Muhammad, 181, 192–3 Zaydan, Jurji, 151, 198