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

Summary

This chapter 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, nationalism, and the nahda cultural renaissance, 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 increased the sociocultural value not only of the civil school capital that many elite nationalists possessed, but also the hybrid civil-religious capital of the darʿamiyya. Reform of al-Azhar was driven in part by the number of talented religious school students trying to leave for Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). Dar al-ʿUlum teachers and graduates contributed significantly to the revival of Arabic literature, the reform of Arabic language and how it was taught, and the rejuvenation of Islamic practice through grass-roots associations (jamʿiyat).