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Western Science and Educational Reform in the Thought of Shaykh Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

John W. Livingston
John W. Livingston
Affiliation:
Associate Professor at William Paterson College, Wayne, N.J. 07470, USA.
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Extract

At the cultural heart of the intellectual awakening, or al-Nahḍa, that arose with Egypt's modernization movement in the 19th century was the endeavor to legitimize the innovations which came in the train of military, scientific, technical, and educational imports from the West. The vanguard of this movement, unlike that of the one taking place at the same time in Istanbul, came from leading religious shaykhs in the government's employ. It may seem remarkable that graduates and teachers of such a conservative religious institution as al-Azhar took the lead as spokesmen for change, particularly when models of this change came from the Christian West, the traditional antagonist of Islamdom for more than a millennium. It becomes less remarkable when we realize that there was no other possible source of intellectual leadership in Egypt. Egypt had no imperial state service with its own traditions of education as did the Ottomans. Thus, conservatively reared shaykhs and Azhar graduates were obliged to play the role that was filled in the Ottoman Empire by reforming grand viziers and their ambassadors to European capitals, who were often assisted by converts from the West seeking employment in the sultan's service—“secular” Muslims who were identified with the state and not the educated ulema. In Egypt, the reasoned voice advocating change came from the very custodians of conservative tradition. Accordingly, that voice would speak throughout the century with great caution, often tentatively and sometimes in contradictory ways.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , November 1996 , pp. 543 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

NOTES

1 It was ʿAttar who as chief editor of Muhammad ʿAli's government gazette, al-Waqāʾi ʿal-Miṣriyya, recommended that young Tahtawi accompany the 1826 student mission to Paris as imām, launching his career as a writer and reformer. A decade later, at the end of ʿAttar's career, he recommended that Tahtawi succeed him as chief editor of the government gazette. For an extensive and imaginative account of ʿAttar's career, see Gran, Peter, The Roots of Islamic Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin Tex., 1979)Google Scholar.

2 Jabarti expresses tepid enthusiasm over the scientific instruments and demonstrations he witnessed at the institute and concludes his description by remarking that such knowledge is “beyond minds the likes of ours” (ʿAjāʾib al-āthār fiʾl tarājim waʾl-akhbār) [Cairo (Bulaq), 1879], iii, 2Google Scholar. Shaykh Khalil al-Bakri, a leading shaykh who worked closely with the French during the three-year occupation, also dismissed the science and technology he saw at the institute with contempt: Heyworth-Dunne, J. J., An Introduction to The History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1938; repr. London: Cass, 1968), 97Google Scholar, citing Bourrienne, , Private Memoires of Napoleon Bonaparte (London, 1830), i, 279Google Scholar.

3 al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rifāʿa, Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fi talkhīṣ al-Barīz, ed. Badawī, Aḥmad (Cairo, 1958), 319Google Scholar. There is another edition of this work, edited by Ḥijāzī, Muḥammad Fahmī in his Uṣūl al-fikr al-ʿarabi alḥadīth ʿind al-Ṭahḍāwī (Cairo, 1974)Google Scholar. Unless otherwise stated, references to Tahtawi's book on Paris are to the Badawi edition. For Tahtawi in Paris, see also Silvera, Alain, “The First Egyptian Student Mission to France under Muḥammad ʿAli”, in Modern Egypt, ed. Kedourie, Elie and Haim, Sylvia (London, 1982), 1–22;Google ScholarHeyworth-Dunne, , Education in Modern Egypt, 159–70Google Scholar. In his book on ʿAttar, Peter Gran makes the startling assertion that Tahtawi was minimally influenced by his education in Paris, that Tahtawi had already learned natural science from Shaykh ʿAttar before setting off for France in 1826, and that Egyptian intellectual history up to 1840 can be understood and interpreted without reference to the West. This conforms to Gran's intention to write the history of Egypt from 1760 to 1840 as though the West did not exist and Bonaparte never came. His object is to avoid the plague of “Orientalism”, in which the Egyptian is the subject of the orientalist's “other.” The result is as historically perverse as Orientalism itself: Gran, , Roots of Capitalism, 197–208Google Scholar.

4 Muhammad ʿAli thought enough of the book to have a Turkish translation published under the title of Siyāḥat Nāme, copies of which were sent to all of his officials and the sultan in Istanbul. The book had a wider circulation in Turkish than in Arabic, which is perhaps not surprising given the Egyptian ulema's hostility to Tahtawi because of his interests outside al-Azhar and his position in the government. See Heyworth-Dunne, , Education in Modem Egypt, 166–67, 265–66, 297Google Scholar. ʿAli Mubarak also thought little of Tahtawi's book, again a prejudice born of resentment of a rival's good fortune in attracting Muhammad ʿAli's favor. See al-Qadi, Wadad, “East and West in ʿAlī Mubārak's Alamuddin”, ed. Buheiry, Marwan (Beirut: AUB Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

5 Hourani, Albert, Arabic Thought in The Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 82Google Scholar.

6 Toledano, Ehud, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15Google Scholar, which has Tahtawi and another of ʿAttar's students, ʿAli Mubarak, “engaged in a major synthesis of traditional and Western knowledge”. Also al-Shayyal, Gamal al-Din, A History of Egyptian Historiography in the Nineteenth Century (Alexandria University Press, 1962), 23–46Google Scholar.

6 Malek, Anouar Abdel, Idéologie et Renaissance Nationale: L'Égypte Moderne (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), 184:Google Scholar “D'ailleurs, il ne s'agit seulement des connaissances scientifiques et techniques … mais également de l'introduction d'ideés et de théories nouvelles. Ce sera la le point de départ de cette fioraison d'oeuvres littéraires, scientifiques et de sciences humaines qui se deploie …. D'un bout à l'autre de cette percé'e, Rifaʿah al-Tahtawi pave la voie”. For a similar view, see ʿAwad, Louis, Taʾrikh alfikr al-Miṣrī al-ḥadīth (Cairo: Kitāb Hilāl, 1969), ii, 90–91Google Scholar.

8 Choueiri, Youssef, Arab History and The Nation State (London: Routledge, 1989), 15Google Scholar.

9 The fullest account of Tahtawi's political thought in English is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Altman, Israel: “The Political Thought of Rifāʿah Rafīʿ al-Tahtawi, A Nineteenth Century Egyptian Reformer” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1976)Google Scholar. A brief and more recent published account is Cole's, JuanColonialism and Revolution in The Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 38–52Google Scholar. In both works Tahtawi is seen as having rejected the ultimate underlying assumptions of the Enlightenment's political philosophy. This would parallel the pattern of his thinking when arguing for the legitimacy of Western science in Islamic education. He may have perhaps gone slightly further in his arguments reconciling Enlightenment philosophy and Islamic political tradition. In the tradition of any good philosopher or political theorist, he interprets his subject in accordance with his purpose. For example, to be in keeping with the absolutist tradition of Islamic government, he turns Montesquieu upside down when arguing that a limited absolutism is the true form of Islamic government, and claims that the three powers of government—legislative, judicial, and executive—emanate from the central power of the ruler: Cole, , Colonialism and Revolution, 39Google Scholar. The venerable standby for Tahtawi's political thought and its place in Egyptian reformism remains Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Also informative on this subject is Zolondek's, Leon “Al-Tahtawi and Political Freedom”, The Muslim World 54 (1964): 90–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 ṬahṬāwī, , al-Murshid al-amīn liʾl-banāt waʾl-banīn (Cairo, 1873), 124;Google ScholarAltman, , 172–73Google Scholar.

11 The astronomy treatise that he composed in Paris seems to have been the little book he published a few years after his Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz, namely, al-Kanz al-mukhtār fī kashf al-arāḍī waʾl-biḥār (Cairo: Maktab al-Tubjiyya 1835)Google Scholar. The book briefly describes heliocentricity, Cartesian vortices, and Newtonian gravity directly, forthrightly, and in a nonreligious tone.

12 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 172, 211, 302–3, 307Google Scholar.

13 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 124Google Scholar. Chapter 3 of Altman's dissertation provides a lengthy explication of Tahtawi's ideal of liberalism as it was woven into the actual of absolutism.

14 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij al-albāb al-miṣriyya fī mabāhij al-ādāb al-ʿaṣriyya (Cairo, 1912), 19–21Google Scholar; idem, Murshid, 80, 125;Google Scholar see also Ḥijāzī, , Uṣūl al-fikr, 113–18Google Scholar.

15 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 211, 328–29Google Scholar.

16 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 23Google Scholar.

17 Ṭahṭāwī, , Murshid, 80, 125Google Scholar; Ḥijāzī, , Uṣūl al-fikr, 117–18Google Scholar.

18 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 334Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., 206–7.

20 Ibid., 328–29.

21 Ṭahṭāwī, , Anwār tawfiq al-jalīl (Cairo: Bulaq, 1869), 117–18Google Scholar.

22 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 15–19, 185–97Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 246.

24 Ibid., 201–5.

25 Ibid., 248–49.

26 Ibid., 205, 248–49; Ḥijāzī, , Uṣūl al-fikr, 126–27Google Scholar. This idea was first broadcast in Egypt by Bonaparte and enjoyed popularity among the French Orientalists Tahtawi studied under in Paris.

27 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 306;Google Scholaridem, Manāhij, 118, 247Google Scholar.

28 The most thorough histories of Egyptian educational reform and the role that the shaykhs played in it are: al-Karīm, Aḥmad ʿIzzat ʿAbd, Tarīkh taʿlīm fī ʿaṣr Muḥammad ʿAlī (Cairo, 1938)Google Scholar, and Hamont, P. N., L'Égypte sous Mehemet Ali, 2 vols. (Paris, 1845)Google Scholar (vol. II for the military organization and discipline of the schools and important and vital role of the shaykhs). Also Heyworth-Dunne's Education in Modern Egypt.

29 Heyworth-Dunne, , Education in Modern Egypt, 297;Google ScholarGran, , Islamic Roots of Capitalism, 163Google Scholar. For more substantial accounts of this animosity see al-Najjār, Ḥusayn Fawzī, Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī (Cairo: Dār al-Miṣriyya, 1966), 93Google Scholar; and Badawi, Aḥmad, Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (Cairo: Bayān al ʿArabi, 1959), 140Google Scholar.

30 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 247–48Google Scholar. Altman's dissertation analyzes Tahtawi's position between the Azhar shaykhs and the political rulers (p. 33ff.).

31 Ṭahṭawī, , Manāhij, 15Google Scholar.

32 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 124Google Scholar; idem, Manāhij, 19–24, 34Google Scholar.

33 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 209–11;Google Scholaridem, Murshid, 63; Ḥijāzī, , Uṣūl al-fikr, 113Google Scholar.

34 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 306Google Scholar; idem, Manāhij, 118.

35 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 248–49;Google ScholarḤijāzi, , Uṣūl al-fikr, 126–27Google Scholar.

36 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 7–18, 201–5Google Scholar.

37 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 246Google Scholar. He compares Muhammad ʿAli to Peter the Great in praising the Egyptian ruler for building his own ships and not buying them ready-made from Europe. Muhammad ʿAli, however, did in fact buy ships from France.

38 Ṭahṭāwī, , Manāhij, 10Google Scholar.

39 Ibid., 20–21.

40 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 339Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., 124.

42 Ibid., 97–98, 250. ProfessorGran, writes in Roots of Islamic Capitalism (p. 63)Google Scholar that Tahtawi's break with Ptolemaic astronomy is first evident in his Kanz al-Mukhtār (see n. 11, earlier). This book indeed makes it clear Tahtawi had come around to Copernicus and Newton, especially on pp. 129–43. What Gran fails to mention is that Tahtawi rejects the modern view for the ancient toward the latter part of his life, as is evident in his Anwār tawfīq al-jalīl.

43 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 112Google Scholar.

44 The decay of the high tradition of the ʿulūm al-awāʾil in Islamic society during the 17th century—and far earlier in the Arabic-speaking region—parallels the earlier decline of natural philosophy in the cities of Latin-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire when the dying embers of Hellenistic science gave way to what has been called the Dark Ages. These provincial Roman cities in the European wing of the empire, however, could never, even in the best of times, be compared intellectually to Baghdad, Bukhara, Cairo, or Andalusian cities. In Islam, the last bastions of high scientific study—the observatory at Samarqand, where in the 15th-century Ghiyath al-Din al-Kashi was employed, followed by the observatory in Istanbul, where original work continued into the 16th century—had succumbed to such religious hostility that attempts to revive the study of science in Istanbul in the 18th century were bloodily aborted, first with the uprising of ulema, Janissaries, and Bektashi chiefs that ended the Lâle Devri (Tulip Period) decade of reform (1718–30; during this period, a printing press was publishing works that included contemporary European science—or, rather, near-contemporary) and then, three generations later, with the same coalition of conservative forces that as bloodily ended Sultan Selim Ill's Nizam i-Cedid, (1789–1807). An indication of the extent to which Islamic society had lost its scientific tradition is that as late as 1830, the higher council of the ulema in Istanbul was debating the disturbing claim that the Earth was a sphere. Around the same time in Istanbul, General Helmuth von Moltke wrote that educated Ottoman officers whom he was training accepted only out of politeness his opinion that the Earth was round: Davison, Roderick, Essays in Ottoman Turkish History (Austin: University of Texas, 1990), 166Google Scholar. See also Adivar, Adnan, Osmanli Türklerinde Ilim (Istanbul, 1943), 153–83;Google ScholarLewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 44–59Google Scholar, and idem, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 237 ff.;Google ScholarBerkes, Niyazi, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 46–116;Google ScholarShaw, Stanford, History of The Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), i, 234–74Google Scholar. As late as 1966, the leading religious scholar in Saudi Arabia, Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Bāz, condemned Copernicanism as heresy, asserting that the true Muslim believes that the sun orbits the motionless Earth: See Mortimer, Edward, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam (New York: Random House, 1982), 182Google Scholar.

45 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ, 392, n. 29Google Scholar.

46 Ibid., 36ff.

47 Ibid., 206.

48 Ṭahṭāwī, Kanz al-mukhtār.

49 Ṭahṭāwī, , Takhlīṣ 319Google Scholar.

50 Ṭahṭāwī, , Kanz al-mukhtār, 129–30Google Scholar

51 Ṭahṭāwī, , Anwar tawfīq al-jalīl, 225 ffGoogle Scholar.

52 Ibid., 231. See also Choueiri, , Arab History, 15–16Google Scholar.

53 The letter was from Gabriel Jabbara, a Beiruti who was Archimandrite of Antakya, and was published in the newly founded scientific monthly al-Muqtaṭaf, vol. 1, pt. 9 (04 1876): 171–74Google Scholar. The answering article appeared in Rawḍat al-madāris, vol. 7, pt. 5 (Rabīʿ al-Awwal, 1293/1876): 2–23Google Scholar.