Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt

Media, Intellectuals and Society

Hatsuki Aishima

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780857729644
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Anthropologie

What does it mean to be an intellectual in Egypt today? What is expected from an 'authentic scholar'? Hatsuki Aishima explores these questions byexamining educated, urban Egyptians and their perceptions of what it means to be 'cultured' and 'middle class' - something that, as a result of the neoliberal policies of Egyptian government, is widely thought to be a shrinking sector of society. Through an analysis of the media representations of 'Abd al-Halim Mahmud (1910-78), the French-trained Sufi scholar and the Grand Imam of al-Azhar under president Anwar al-Sadat, Aishima discusses the connection of Islam to these middle-class considerations and makes an original contribution to the debate on the commodification of religious teaching and knowledge. Public Culture and Islam in Modern Egypt is thereby aunique addition to the fields of anthropology, Middle East and media studies.

CHAPTER 1

AL-AZHAR REFORMS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ISLAMIC LEARNING

Before discussing the life and thought of ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud in detail, the present chapter analyses debates surrounding the educational and institutional reforms of al-Azhar Mosque-University in the period from 1872 to 1932, i.e. from the beginning of the reform era to the point at which ‘Abd al-Halim was initiated into a path of scholarly training. These reforms were geared towards gradually removing the role of the personal dimensions of knowledge transmission in traditional Islamic learning, paving the way to the transformation of Islamic knowledge into a commodity which could be individually acquired without the intermediation of specific authority figures. As learning and worship in Islam gradually came to be separated from each other, Islamic knowledge was transformed into a functional component of Egyptian nation building. It is useful here also to consider the intellectual order that prevailed at al-Azhar Mosque before these reforms were carried out, particularly in order to understand how the practice of dividing the world into categories of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ caused some Azharite scholars to sense the ‘necessity’ of reforming Islamic learning at their institution. Indeed, this sense was somewhat paradoxically shared, in a reverse way, by those leaders from al-Azhar who, like ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmud years later, intended to redirect the reform impetus into more ‘traditional’ channels.

Projecting Chaos

Founded in 970, al-Azhar Mosque has been one of the major focal points for those who pursue the path of knowledge in the Sunni Islamic world. The waqf (pious endowment) of al-Azhar provided its dwellers with a place to learn, work as well as to live for centuries. Those who received scholarly training at al-Azhar made their living in various public administration positions of all sorts, as well as in trade and commerce. As the only intellectual class, the ‘ulama ‘were ubiquitous, and fulfilled functions on all social levels and had an enterée into every nook and cranny of society’ (Marsot 1972: 157).

In conventional historiography this situation began to change after the rise to power of Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48), who was asked by the ‘ulama to take the place of the Ottoman governor-designate Kurshid Pasha in 1805 (Crecelius 1967: 96). The modernisation policies ‘Ali Pasha launched involved removing, dividing and redistributing the socio-economic roles that scholars had monopolised for centuries: ‘What was required was tanzim, a word often translated as “modernisation” for this period, though it means something more like “organisation” or “regulation”’ (Mitchell 1988: 67). A series of operations to concentrate economic and political power in Cairo necessitated a complete reorganisation of the social system and the national landscape.

As Muhammad ‘Ali advanced his modernisation policies, a social order modelled on European standards began to permeate various aspects of Egyptian public life. While he took initiatives to institutionalise Sufi orders, he did not attempt to interfere with the affairs of the scholarly communities affiliated to important mosques. What attracted him were simply the revenues from pious endowments, which ensured al-Azhar's autonomy. Hence in 1815 he confiscated the waqf properties of al-Azhar, while promising Azharites a lifetime pension scheme which was never fulfilled (Crecelius 1967: 124). Instead of depending on intellectuals trained at al-Azhar, he decided to cultivate future elites on his own by sending some students to Europe as early as 1810 and by establishing his own schools to train the type of men he needed. In Indira Falk Gesink's words, ‘Muhammad ‘Ali, by locating administrative education outside of religious schools, began a process of removing the training of government employees, educators, and legal personnel from the province of the independent religious schools into an environment of state control’ (Gesink 2000: 89). The first military school was founded in 1816 in the Citadel. When the British occupied Egypt in 1882, they decided that al-Azhar was ‘a nest of “Mohammedan fanaticism” best ignored’ (Reid 1977: 351). In this way, when the new social order started to establish a foothold in Cairo, al-Azhar became increasingly perceived as an enclave of Islamic tradition out of step with contemporary society. Eventually, al-Azhar – and some aspects of Islam itself in the eyes of modernist elites – started to stand out as an archaic entity.

After outlining European accounts of al-Azhar in travelogues of visitors to Egypt in the nineteenth century, Michael Reimer points out how little they were interested in this most important mosque of Islamic scholarship located in the heart of Cairo. Because the majority of tourists were more attracted to biblical sites and ancient Egyptian monuments, or perhaps to Islamic architecture that they thought had an artistic value,¹ al-Azhar completely slipped from their attention (Reimer 1998: 268–9).² Nevertheless, al-Azhar might have begun to stimulate a kind of voyeurism when an Orientalist painting of its inner courtyard was presented to European audiences for the first time in 1855 (Dodge 1974: 115). While recent photos of the al-Azhar Mosque sponsored by the Egyptian government focus on its architectural aspects,³ the illustrator here seems to have been fascinated with the picturesque lifeworld of Azharites studying in the inner courtyard. A photo of al-Azhar included in the catalogue of the world exhibition of 1889 in Paris captures a similar view (Mitchell 1988: 80).⁴ Such European views of al-Azhar – where the purportedly immanent chaos (or lack of an intrinsic ‘order’) is matched by a sense of warmth that strikes the eye – should be compared with the solemn image the Egyptian government now strives to construct of al-Azhar as ‘the citadel of Islamic knowledge’ or ‘the lighthouse of Islamic faith’. In Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, al-Azhar is introduced as ‘the principal university of the East’ (Lane 1890 [1842]: 191). However, representations of al-Azhar, including images transmitted through Orientalist paintings as well as the carnivalesque accounts of European travellers, appear quite unlike what we now understand as a university lecture hall or school classroom. ‘“What is astonishing at al-Azhar is the crowd that throngs in its halls”, we are told by the Inspector-General. “A thousand students of every age, of every colour… scattered into groups, the diversity of costumes”’ (qtd in Mitchell 1988: 80). Further, Valentine Chirol, an English journalist visiting Cairo in 1919,⁵ characterised the lessons at al-Azhar Mosque in the following manner:

In the great courtyard the students lie about on mats, some sleeping, some eating, some reciting aloud from their text-books in a rhythmical sort of chant to which their swaying bodies keep time. Water carriers and itinerant food sellers have hawkers of all kinds move freely amongst them, swelling the din of voices with their traditional street cries. (Chirol 1920: 235)

Most significant in how European visitors viewed al-Azhar was that they focused less on the architecture but on the view of people who are simply filling the space; this was part of a broader practice of representation that increasingly eliminated whatever was ‘unsightly’ according to the logic of European colonists and Egyptian modernists. As such, for the European colonial gaze al-Azhar was not just disorderly but rather a space that prepared observers to see in it the reflection of a social and, more specifically, educational order still trapped in ‘traditional’ settings. It was therefore a world that could only be made sense of in terms of deficits, deviations and delays, in contrast to a triumphant modern order that was inevitably the highly valorised preserve of Europe and its world hegemony. Not only at al-Azhar but also at other sites of mosque learning, foreign visitors to Egypt were disturbed when observing ‘children's occasional involvement in economic pursuits (e.g. plaiting straw mats for the teacher's use, or for sale) during lessons’, since, in their minds, education was supposed to take place in an autonomous space dedicated solely to that purpose (Starrett 1998: 35). They despised the noise, yet were equally amused by the view of children squatting on a mat around a shaykhly figure, rocking their bodies back and forth while reciting verses of the Qur'an. Such sites were photographed and presented in Europe as the exact reflection of a typically Islamic way of learning.

While the picturesque lifeworld of the al-Azhar courtyard could still appear pleasantly exotic to its European visitors, Egyptian elites who had travelled abroad learned to find it distasteful. In their eyes, the existing cultural conditions of al-Azhar Mosque manifested the backward state of their country and religion. A former Shaykh al-Azhar, Hasan al-‘Attar (1766–1834), was one of the high-ranking scholars of al-Azhar who became enchanted with the natural science subjects of the West that he learned through his interactions with the French during their occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). After exploring the academic environments of Syria and Istanbul, Shaykh al-‘Attar announced disparagingly that the problems of al-Azhar were rooted in the difficulties students had in accessing the original texts. He asserted that Azharite scholars ‘limited themselves to reading and teaching the accepted, traditional commentaries on the great works of Islamic law and have elevated these commentaries (as opposed to the original works) to a status they did not deserve’ (Gesink 2000: 97).

Al-‘Attar's disciple, Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801–73), who is known for his autobiography narrating his experiences in France, was also critical of the pedagogical style of mosque learning in Egypt. He was one of the three Azharites Muhammad ‘Ali sent to Paris on his student mission programme in 1826 (Eccel 1984: 35). Al-Tahtawi's autobiography is full of praise for France, which was intended to problematise the status quo in Egypt. For instance, he viewed language instruction in French elementary school education as the main reason for the success in bringing progress to their society. In contrast to Egyptian children who started learning Arabic by reciting verses of the Qur'an without understanding their meaning, French children acquired reading and writings skills through vocabularies that were familiar to them through their everyday environment. He despaired that the majority of Egyptian children left the kuttab (elementary Qur'anic school) before gaining basic literacy because the Arabic language was not taught to them in a clear manner (Gesink 2000: 117–20).

Al-Tahtawi's criticism resonates with that of Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), who aspired to bring modernity to al-Azhar. As he famously said, ‘if the Azhar were reformed, Islam would be reformed’ (Adams 1933: 70–1). ‘Abduh narrated in his autobiography that he ran away from the Ahmadi mosque in Tanta two weeks after he started learning Arabic grammar because he was not able to endure the suffering of listening to lectures without understanding their meaning. Although he eventually resumed his studies and obtained the ‘alimiya, the highest degree of Azharite scholarship, ‘Abduh often mentioned that he had continuously struggled to protect his intellect from the allegedly devastating impact of backward Azharite methods, but with mixed results (ibid. 31). Keeping such a background in mind, one can better understand why ‘Abduh's reform faced strong opposition among elite scholars of al-Azhar but gained a significant number of followers among young students (Gesink 2000: 328–466). By the time of ‘Abduh, publicly berating al-Azhar in one way or another had become almost a rite of passage for those seeking to display their modernist credentials. Criticisms of al-Azhar signified a conscious breaking with ‘tradition’ and commitment to a modernist reform ethos.

Another frequent discursive strategy for representing al-Azhar as backward was to erase its social role. For instance, the entry on al-Azhar in the encyclopaedia of Egypt by ‘Ali Mubarak Pasha (1823/4–93) is lengthy and rich in historical and architectural description (Reimer 1997). In contrast to the exoticism displayed in travelogues by European visitors, Mubarak does not mention the ‘chaos’ in the inner courtyard, but instead concentrates on the architectural aspects and historical development of the institution. As a technocrat who went through a civil education, Mubarak's appreciation of the role of al-Azhar was limited to its status as athar – a set of historical monuments which may evoke a sense of national pride in Egyptian history (ibid. 61). In other words, for self-consciously modern Egyptians at the end of the nineteenth century, al-Azhar had become a symbol of the glorious past of Islam but was something to be excluded from the future of Egypt.

The Intellectual Order of al-Azhar before the Reform

Throughout its long and dynamic history, the raison d'être of al-Azhar consisted in governing a cohort of learned men who were fulfilling a wide range of academic, social and political roles in society. Education was merely a process of self-reproduction of the ‘ulama as a heterogeneous social rank, and it was only of secondary importance to al-Azhar itself as an educational institution (Kosugi 1985: 963). It is important to note that the ‘education’ Al-Azhar provided was different from modern schooling, the aim of which consists in inculcating students with a type of knowledge abstracted from the actual context of its production and usage. On one hand, al-Azhar was a training hall for those pursuing a legal profession but on the other it was also, if not primarily, the place where law as a profession was actually practised. Those who wanted to enter the Azharite career path started by emulating the behaviour of their seniors, learning in the process to practise authority on their juniors. The intellectual order of the ‘ulama, or the traditional system of Islamic scholarship, was characterised by a relational system of authority in which the distinction between the learner and the learned functioned only on a relative scale, meaning that each individual was a master, senior or junior of the other. Both the ‘alim (scholar, sing. of ‘ulama) and the muta‘allim (apprentice, learner) lived upon bread distributed by the mosque. In this sense, al-Azhar was a community of men at different stages of learning and professional experience, starting with young boys who learned to read and write by memorising the Qur'an in the first instance, in kuttabs located throughout Egypt; continuing through novice scholars, both Egyptian and from elsewhere (e.g. those visiting Cairo on the way to hajj or came to al-Azhar to further Islamic learning begun in their own communities); and, finally, including erudite men with established careers.

Timothy Mitchell's notion of ‘the Order of Text’ is also helpful in discerning the outlines of the order prevailing in al-Azhar before its ‘reform’ in the late nineteenth century. In his analysis, this is a sequence of hermeneutic endeavours unfolding in a circular manner, as indicated in the layout of the classical scholarly texts of Islam:

The sequence of learning was also the sequence of scholarship. A scholar at al-Azhar, we are told, would prepare a legal opinion, a lesson, or a disputation, by placing all the books which discussed the question he wanted to elucidate on a low table in front of him, arranging them in sequences radiating from the middle: ‘at the centre is the original text (matn), then the commentary (sharh) on this text, then the gloss on the commentary (hashiya) and finally the explication of the gloss (takrir)’. (Qtd in Mitchell 1988: 83)

Scholars built their case by juxtaposing quotes from authoritative sources, the strongest of which were the Qur'an and hadiths, but also commentaries on them, in order to strengthen their arguments. ‘In this way,’ Skovgaard-Petersen writes, ‘there was the same proceeding at the macro and micro level, following a qualitative and cosmological scheme. The Order of Text was the order of the world, as experienced by the ‘alim’ (Skovgaard-Petersen 1997: 48).

Most importantly, this relational system of authority ‘relied upon the specific human links between intellectual generations’ (Messick 1993: 15). The lessons given by ‘ulama were largely based on lecture notes that students recited by dictation from their masters (ibid. 88). When the master recognised his disciple's mastery of a text, he granted him an ijaza, the permission to teach the text to the others.

This institutional process of transmission regenerated the value of knowledge by providing knowledge to the muta‘allim, while the ‘alim received an acknowledgement of his authority in return. The process supported the idea that knowledge is validated by a web of personal relationships, underscoring the complementary relation of knowledge and power. Legitimacy was bestowed upon embodied knowledge via a system of learning that excluded non-members of al-Azhar from having access to the body of Islamic knowledge. The authority of Azharite scholars to define Islam was thus given indefinite extension and legitimacy.

Self-conscious moderns often opposed themselves strongly to such practices. Taha Hussein (1890–1973), who studied at al-Azhar in the early twentieth century, recalls his days there in the following manner:

It was a life of unrelieved repetition, with never a new thing, from the time the study year began until it was over. After the dawn prayer came the study of tauhid, the doctrine of divine unity; then fiqh, or jurisprudence, after sunrise; then the study of Arabic grammar in the wake of the noon prayer. After this came a grudging bit of leisure and then, again, another snatch of wearisome food until, the evening prayer performed, I preceded to the logic class which some shaikh or other would conduct. (Hussein 1997 [1976]: 245)

This ‘stream of days’ (as the English translation glosses al-Ayyam, the title of his famous memoir) without any novel excitement, which Taha Hussein found painful, was based on ‘the Order of Text’, the model of the ‘ulama type of intellectual order which was starting to fall apart by the time of Hussein's youth.

Defining Teachers and Students

Modernisation policies based on European models could take effect only by invalidating or negating the existing social order. Al-Azhar became first the centre of religious sciences and then its role was specified as an educational institution in the course of further reorganisation. The aspects of al-Azhar which did not fit the definition of ‘educational institution’ in the view of modernists started to be classified as ‘backward’ elements to be eventually eliminated. The notion of orderliness served to legitimise the disruption of the existing social order even when there was not much correlation between the existing order and the new one.

Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79), who envisioned modernising al-Azhar based on an European model, initiated a number of reform projects in cooperation with high-ranking scholars of al-Azhar. Having studied at the Egyptian school in Paris, Isma‘il ‘dreamed of modernising the social and cultural life of his people, so as to make Egypt like “a corner of Europe”’ (Dodge 1974: 115). As I suggested earlier in this chapter, there was a growing crystallisation of opinion among some of the elite scholars of al-Azhar that if th...