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 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, state-controlled military and civil educational institutions introduced non-religious, 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.Footnote 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 European-style 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 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 Edmé-François 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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,Footnote 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 Turko-Circassian. 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). Al-Tahtawi 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 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 al-ʿUlum (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.Footnote ⁸ Mubarak began government service as an efendi, but was one of the handful of native-born 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:

Lansing, a Presbyterian missionary from the United States, presents al-Azhar 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:

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.Footnote ¹¹ This sentiment appears again in travel writer G. W. Steevens’ 1898 condescending account, which presents al-Azhar as providing an ‘unchanging’ education that is ‘dead and deadening’ because of its ‘bondage to theology’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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 well-known 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁸

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.Footnote 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.

(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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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:

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 well-reflected 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.Footnote 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 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 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 in-between area remain only partially normalised into a grid, as shown by the persistence of winding lanes and dead-end cul-de-sacs.

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.

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, 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 twentieth-century 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 al-Jamamiz, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵⁸

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 al-Khalq, a gate in the walls of the old city of Cairo.Footnote ⁵⁹ One travel account notes that it was narrow and contained plenty of older architecture.Footnote ⁶⁰ The gates of the Darb al-Jamamiz Palace were approximately a half-mile 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 in 1903. Between 1893 and 1909, a street grid was extended across the area to turn it into a new suburb, named Hilmiyya.Footnote ⁶⁴

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.

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 development at the turn of the twentieth century, however, Egyptian urban reformers were engaging in more negotiation and consensus-building 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶⁶ The neighbourhood has since been mythologised in a five-part television serial drama Nights of Hilmiyya (Layali al-Hilmiyya) 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 working-class area that was seen later in the twentieth century as intrinsically authentic in contrast to the more sterile environments of the elite.Footnote 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 European-influenced 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 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 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 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.Footnote 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.

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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷¹ Regardless, the religious elementary schools that were fully or partially reformed as the result of this law spread European-influenced 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 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.Footnote 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 al-ʿUlum 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 al-Azhar. 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 al-Azhar 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 (1838–79), 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).Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷⁵ By focusing on how sociocultural 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 higher-level 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 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 self-consciously modern Egypt. It is to Dar al-ʿUlum and its hybridity that we turn next.