While the Anglo-French contest and the transition to an Egyptian professoriate were unfolding, the Egyptian University was also struggling to define its student constituency. Admission of students without regard to religion had never been at issue; controversy centered instead on admitting women and — hidden behind the rhetoric of educational qualifications — how open admissions should be to various social classes.

The challenge of coeducation

The private university closed its women's section in 1912, and Egyptian women retreated to the harem and to charitable work. They remained in the background during World War I, when British repression made public activism impossible. But feminism was not dead. A leading journal of the day, whose contributors included Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal, called itself al-Sufur, “The Unveiling.” It provides a link between the pre-war al-Jarida and the later al-Siyasa. Women returned to the public eye in 1919 as part of the national protest against British rule, then turned to specifically women's issues.

Organized Western feminism emerged only decades, not centuries, ahead of its Egyptian and Ottoman counterparts. This should not be surprising, for modern feminism everywhere was bound up with the changing circumstances accompanying the rise of a capitalist-driven world economy.

Attention Please is a recent Egyptian movie about a university professor named Galal. Antar, a garbage collector with a donkey cart, mistakes Galal's sister for a servant girl and asks their father for her hand. Antar will inherit the concession for a large garbage district upon his father's death and have an income of £E600 a month; he is already becoming rich selling recycled garbage and making shady deals. The father refuses the marriage offer. Galal himself searches long and hard for a flat with his fiancée Aida, and they finally find one in a building owned by Antar. Antar has a flashy car, and he takes them to the villa where he lives with his wife and four children. Galal refuses Antar's demand of £E5,000 key money because it is illegal, then checks with the publisher of his five academic books and discovers they have brought him only £E200. He refuses the publisher's offer of a large commission for writing pornography instead.

Worn down, Galal bends his principles, and somehow he comes up with the key money for Antar, who takes him and Aida to a nightclub and throws away the entire sum on a belly dancer. Galal gets drunk and argues with Aida, who decides to marry Antar for his money.

Nasser tried to mobilize Cairo University, and the rest of the country's educational system, in two ways. First, he wanted the university to train the cadres needed for a modern technological society, second, he tried to push the university into articulating and propagating his Arab nationalist and socialist doctrines. His success was limited on both counts. Nasser only sporadically turned his attention to university affairs, his governing style limited the effectiveness of his lieutenants, and he ran into resistance from a diverse university community with a mind and interests of its own.

Technical or liberal education?

Nasser, Kamal al-Din Husayn, and the other Free Officers were practical military men, mostly from lower middle class homes. They saw liberal education as an upper-class luxury inappropriate to the new age. Progressive army officers and expert technicians, not civilian humanists or lawyer-politicians, would lead Egypt into the industrial promised land. Men as diverse as Muhammad Ali, Lord Cromer, Douglas Dunlop, Ismail Sidqi, and the Saadists of the 1940s had also pushed technical education. Now Soviet and American development experts competed to sell Nasser their versions of a technological utopia.

In the other camp, embattled humanists like Taha Husayn and Louis Awad defended liberal education and “knowledge for its own sake,” with which the Egyptian University had been born.

By the time Fuad I University celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1950, Egypt was in serious trouble. Nahhas, at seventy-one, was back with a Wafdist government for one last try, but the party no longer justified the lingering hopes placed in it. Eyebrows were raised when Nahhas kissed the hand of the obese king, whose nightlife had become a national embarrassment. Israel had defeated Egypt, and Britain still occupied the Suez Canal. A third of the agricultural land was owned by 0.4% of the owners, while 94% of the owners held only 36%, and many peasants had no land at all. The Wafd government did pass educational reforms, social insurance for some workers, and higher income and land taxes on the rich. But conservatives like Minister of Interior Fuad Siraj al-Din made sure his class was not seriously inconvenienced.

Left Wafdists, the Socialist Party (the erstwhile Young Egypt), the Muslim Brothers, small Marxist factions, and the clandestine Free Officers all wanted far-reaching change, though they differed on its extent and direction. University and secondary students, together with the growing working class, spearheaded the frequent street protests.

The days of the old regime were numbered, as were those of the British and French at the university and those of the liberal university itself as conceived by men like Lutfi al-Sayyid and Taha Husayn, Ali Mosharrafa and Ali Ibrahim.

The Renaissance prince and the Wafdist tribune

When Prince Fuad abandoned the Egyptian University to its fate in 1913, few would have believed it would survive or that its ex-rector would one day be king. But Fuad knew how to scheme and how to wait. Sultan Husayn Kamil died in 1917, his son declined the throne, and the British judged Fuad innocuous enough to reign. In 1925 — the year Muhammad Reza became shah, Mustafa Kemal [Atatürk] banned the fez and turban, and uprisings challenged France in Syria and the Moroccan Rif — King Fuad refounded the Egyptian University as a state institution.

To his regret, the king had to share the limelight, both at the university and in national politics. High Commissioner Viscount Edmund Allenby spoke for a weakened England which still dreamed imperial dreams. Unlike many Englishmen, the conqueror of Jerusalem was realist enough to see that England must loosen the reins and seek Egyptian allies in order to preserve her vital interests. Saad Zaghlul emerged as Egypt's tribune, reaching out beyond his own upper class to all his countrymen and boldly calling for immediate independence. Lutfi al-Sayyid, the first rector of the state university, spoke as one of the intellectuals and wealthy landowners who broke with Zaghlul to form the Liberal Constitutionalist Party.

The year 1908 was an eventful one for Egypt. Mustafa Kamil and Qasim Amin died, and Butrus Ghali, a Copt, became prime minister. The Watani and Umma parties found their feet, and Cromer's successor Sir Eldon Gorst pursued his rapprochement with the Khedive. In Istanbul the Young Turk Revolution seemed to revive the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt still nominally belonged. In London Asquith took over as prime minister for the Liberals, and Lord Cromer published his apologia, Modern Egypt. And finally, at the end of December, the Egyptian University came into being.

The palace takes over

By the fall of 1906 even Qasim Amin's patience with Cromer had worn thin; perhaps it was the radicalizing effect of Dinshaway. Succeeding Zaghlul as leader of the university committee, Amin decided that only Khedive Abbas could provide the powerful patronage needed. Disregarding the bad blood between his late mentor Abduh and Abbas, Amin requested an audience at the palace.

Abbas hated Cromer, who had humiliated him in a showdown early on, but he also remembered the fate of his deposed grandfather Ismail. So Abbas settled for outward submission and behind-the-scenes opposition through Mustafa Kamil and others. The 1904 Entente ended Abbas's hope of French support, so Abbas half-heartedly tried to improve relations with Cromer.

Egypt's partial independence after 1922 enabled King Fuad to revive the old game of playing France off against Britain. The French were more than willing to play. Fuad pressed for Frenchmen at the university, or failing that, Italians and Belgians. Britain, of course, fought back. A few German professors came in the 1930s, but neither they nor the Italians had much influence. Meanwhile Egyptians were slowly replacing the Europeans, but not fast enough to suit many nationalists. Everyone found internationalist academic ideals easier to extol than to practice.

Even as Egyptian professors were coming in, vexing questions about the language of instruction and publication remained. Nationalists pushed for Arabic, but the need to belong to a Western-dominated international community of scholars led many professors to retain English.

Lord Lloyd versus the “Latins”

When the decree founding the state university came out on March 11, 1925, High Commissioner Allenby's attention was elsewhere. The parliamentary elections the next day were his last chance to show that his Egyptian “moderates” could stabilize things and protect British interests. When the Wafd won the elections and Fuad prorogued the chamber, Allenby knew the game was up. As he prepared to leave, a memo from his Financial Adviser hardly rang alarm bells about the university:

In the decades since oil, Kuwait has experienced remarkable political stability. This stability has been achieved by a complex – and precarious – redistribution of power within the shaikhdom, a process which involved the eclipse of the merchants as a major political force and the ruler's replacement of his merchant allies with a strengthened ruling family and with supporters in the larger national population. These alliances, between the ruler and his family, and the ruler and his new popular base, were established in the 1950s and reshaped in the post-independence period to accommodate the political transformations which growing oil revenues, independence, and the policies of the 1950s themselves catalyzed. The strategies worked; continuity was maintained. In the process, however, Kuwait's rulers were forced to contend with new problems associated with the bureaucratic growth which accompanied the expansion of state services and with the growing interest of Britain in Kuwait which accompanied the development of Kuwait's oil industry.

The rise of the ruling family

Historically, Kuwait's ruling family was a weak political institution. The ruler relied on his family as little as possible, preferring court favorites and merchants. Early in the century, Lorimer (1908–15, vol. 2: 1074–5) observed Mubarak's rule to be “personal and absolute … The heads of his departments are mostly slaves; his near relations are excluded from his counsels; even his sons wield no executive powers … In the town the smallest disputes, whether civil or criminal, are settled by the Shaikh himself.”