Secular Concepts, Law, and Religion in Colonial Egypt
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, and Religion in Colonial Egypt Jeffrey Culang The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2335 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] LIBERAL TRANSLATIONS: SECULAR CONCEPTS, LAW, AND RELIGION IN COLONIAL EGYPT by Jeffrey Culang A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 JEFFREY CULANG All Rights Reserved ii LIBERAL TRANSLATIONS: SECULAR CONCEPTS, LAW, AND RELIGION IN COLONIAL EGYPT by Jeffrey Culang This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Beth Baron ______________________ ______________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Helena Rosenblatt ______________________ ______________________________ Date Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Samira Haj Emily Greble Eric Weitz Mandana Limbert THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Liberal Translations: Secular Concepts, Law, and Religion in Colonial Egypt by Jeffrey Culang Advisor: Beth Baron This dissertation is a conceptual history of Egypt’s national formation between the 1880s and the 1930s. This period involved the convergence of nationalism, colonial rule, missionary activity, and new modes of governance at the national and international levels. Drawing on state and missionary archival material, periodicals, legal compendia, laws, and parliamentary transcripts, and adapting methods developed by Reinhart Koselleck, I trace shifts within Egypt’s socio-political lexicon through processes of translation and demonstrate their effects upon social experience and political aspiration. I focus on a set of liberal-secular concepts critical to national politics—religious freedom, public interest, nationality, and the minority—as they appeared in Egypt and were adapted by jurists, colonial officers, parliamentarians, and “ordinary” Egyptians in ways that advanced their respective interests. Following the fluid, contextual, and contingent process through which these concepts accumulated meanings, I show that each had a distinct genealogy linked to its conditions of translation and reinterpretation. This finding challenges understandings of the nation-state as a fixed form that, originating in Europe, was replicated across the globe. iv As Egyptian legislators gradually entered the concepts under study into Egypt’s expanding modern legal system—top-down, rigid, and disciplinary—they fixed their meanings in text in ways that enhanced the regulatory capacities of the state. The Egyptian state’s articulation of religious freedom and public interest enabled it to wield increasing power over religion and to gradually dismantle Egypt’s Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, whose more flexible legal structures had sustained the common good through bottom-up cultivation of morality. Meanwhile, its definition and ascription of nationality and minority status linked religious groups to emergent national categories along a grid of loyalty and disloyalty to the Egyptian nation. Rather than opening space wherein religious divisions could be overcome through the convergence of equal citizens, these liberal-secular transitions established new forms of difference based on flattened notions of identity. Against automatic associations of secularism with tolerance and boundless possibility, I argue that the unfolding of liberal-secular law in Egypt introduced unprecedented discord and delimited the country’s religious and political horizons. As Egypt enhanced its sovereignty in the 1920s and 1930s, law proved an essential tool of the state to produce a homogenous and governable population. Muslims and Copts emerged as the two essential elements of the Egyptian nation, while other non-Muslim groups, including Armenians and Jews, were subjected to the gaze of suspicion and novel forms of exclusion. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is at least eight years in the making. In this time I have accrued many debts. I am grateful to the American Research Center in Egypt, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Center for Jewish History for supporting my research and writing. During my research trips in Egypt, the staff at the Egyptian National Library graciously and patiently facilitated my effort to access a long list of periodicals. The Khallaf family helped with logistics, kept me well fed, and generously put me up for stretches of time. I wish to thank Muhammad Afifi, Anny Bakalian, Ofer Dynes, Omnia El Shakry, Amer Essam, Kyle Francis, Jane Gerber, Will Hanley, Shady Helal, Daniel Hernandez, Dagmar Herzog, Paulo Hudson, Aleksandra Majstorac Kobiljski, Claire Panetta, Danielle Prager, Casey Primel, Sara Pursley, Aaron Rock-Singer, David Sclar, John Sigmund, David Sorkin, Volker Strähle, Christopher Stone, Gabriel Tuffs, and Secil Yilmaz for their advice, support, and, in some cases, comments on individual chapters. As members of my dissertation committee, Emily Greble, Mandana Limbert, and Eric Weitz provided critical input and encouragement. I could not have asked for mentors more brilliant, dedicated, and generous than Beth Baron and Samira Haj. With meticulous care, they guided my intellectual development toward different but complimentary ends. I hope this dissertation does justice to all they have invested in me, for which I will always be grateful. My family has been a pillar of love and support throughout my life. I thank my sister and brother for being my best friends, my parents for raising me to have an open mind, trusting me in the paths I chose, and so much more, and my grandmother for her unwavering belief in me, even as she wondered when I’d have a “real job.” At home, Cocoa and Looza made me laugh and provided purring affection when I needed it most, and even when I didn’t. My wife and partner in life Alzahraa K. Ahmed accompanied vi me on each leg of my doctoral journey. Her intellectual curiosity, open spirit, and deep sensitivity to the textures of Egyptian history enriched every page of this dissertation. I am inspired by her strength, emboldened by her faith in me, and appreciative of her love. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Concepts and Historical Formations………………………………………………1–18 Chapter 2: “The Shari‘a Must Go”: Seduction, Moral Injury, and Religious Freedom in Egypt’s Liberal Age ……………………………………………………………………. 19–63 Chapter 3: Whose Public Interest? Translations of Libel and the Elders of Zion…............. 64–105 Chapter 4: Ordering the “Land of Paradox”: The Fashioning of Nationality, Religion, and Political Loyalty……………………………………………………………………… 106–147 Chapter 5: Elusive Minorities: “Between the Devil and the Deep Sea”………………….148–186 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….187–193 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………194–207 viii Chapter 1 Concepts and Historical Formations This dissertation is a conceptual history of the secularization of Egyptian law and society during the colonial period (1882–1936). It focuses on four legal-political concepts that were critical to this process: religious freedom (hurriyyat al-‘itiqad), public interest (al-maslaha al-‘amma), nationality (al-jinsiyya), and the minority (al-aqalliyya). I trace these concepts from their translation into Arabic and Egypt, to their adaption by subjects in Egypt’s streets, courtrooms, parliamentary halls, and colonial offices, to their codification and activation within modern law as part of a regulatory secular state apparatus. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck, one of the main contributors to theorizing conceptual history, defined concepts through their differentiation from words. For Koselleck, concepts are a series of expressions that make up the sociopolitical terminology within a given historical context. Though they are associated with words, not all words are sociopolitical concepts, and whereas words can be unambiguous in meaning, concepts are characterized by their ambiguity, bundling together a range of meanings that often extend beyond the words that contain them.1 The concepts in which Koselleck was especially interested—so-called “basic concepts”—were those that are indispensable to a historical moment. They are concepts that subjects must work within and through, claim and articulate, as they act in the world. In line with the broader linguistic turn in which he fit uneasily, Koselleck presumed a relationship between basic concepts and “reality,” seeing them as “joints linking language and the extralinguistic world,” or as the conditions of possibility for social and political experience.2 As such, they can be seen as depositories of human experience 1 Reinhart Koselleck, Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated and with an introduction by Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 [1979]), 84–86. 2 Reinhart Koselleck, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtiche Grundbegriffe,” in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte,” ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin