This chapter introduces Dar al-ʿUlum, a hybrid school founded in 1872 to train students from top religious schools such as al-Azhar to teach primary school subjects and Arabic within state-run civil schools. First, it locates Dar al-ʿUlum within the history of Egyptian teacher training. It explains how Dar al-ʿUlum formalised and expanded the path followed by reform-minded shaykhs since the early nineteenth century by providing a crash course in the subjects and habitus of the Egyptian civil school system, alongside advanced training in how to apply their specialist knowledge of Arabic and Islamic disciplines to teaching in a civil school. It then presents Dar al-ʿUlum as a hybrid institution whose mission was to bring religious knowledge into the civil system. As a result, it was structured as a civil school, but its curriculum and faculty combined civil and religious elements and expertise. The chapter demonstrates that Dar al-ʿUlum was founded not only because of state efforts to control and put Islamic knowledge to work, but also because of the value many Egyptians placed in the authentic connection to Egypt’s past provided by Islamic knowledge.

This chapter considers Egyptian sociocultural politics in the run-up to the revolution of 1952 and beyond. Dar al-ʿUlum’s victory in the culture war was cemented in 1946 when it became a fully fledged faculty of the University. Furthermore, the immense impact of the darʿamiyya on fields related to Arabic, Islam, and education gives them a stronger claim than Europhile modernists to the legacy of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh. Their histories demonstrate that schools can be the key to understanding social and cultural histories, that hybridity is a major engine driving sociocultural change, and that Islamic knowledge was most authoritative in colonial and postcolonial contexts when expressed in explicitly modern, ocularcentric ways. However, efforts by alumni to defend the school and its legacy in the decades since demonstrate the lasting sting of Husayn’s critique. As early as the 1926 dress strike, Hasan al-Banna decided to take his ability to be modern and religious in a different direction. Yet, considering him alongside the bulk of the darʿamiyya makes it clear that the role of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Revolution needs to be viewed within the 130-year history of engagement between Islamic knowledge and Egyptian modernities.