Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Intellectual Leadership

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Education, Politics, and the Struggle for Intellectual Leadership Sonderdrucke aus der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg RAINER BRUNNER Education, politics, and the struggle for intellectual leadership Al-Azhar between 1927 and 1945 Originalbeitrag erschienen in: Meir Hatina (Hrsg.): Guardians of faith in modern times: ʿUlamaʾ in the Middle East. Leiden: Brill, 2009, S. [109]-140 CHAPTER FIVE EDUCATION, POLITICS, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP: ALAZHAR BETWEEN 1927 AND 1945∗ Rainer Brunner When the Egyptian historiographer ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d. 1825/ 26) began to compose his famous chronicle ʿAjaʾib al-athar at the end of the eighteenth century, the classical self-image of Muslim scholars was still intact. Following the well-known hadith, he called them the heirs of the Prophets and classifi ed them immediately aft er the latter, and before all mundane rulers and kings.1 It is not diffi cult to imagine that when writing these lines he had fi rst and foremost al-Azhar in mind, having originated from a family that already for nearly three centuries had been attached to this centre of Muslim scholarship, and having himself close ties to Hasan al-ʿAttar, who was to become Shaykh al-Azhar in 1830.2 Th e position of the ʿulamaʾ as the cultural elite of the country and the mediators between the rulers and the people had until that time largely remained uncontested, and during the French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801) al-Azhar formed the center of opposition to the foreign army. Th e strong moral authority of the scholars and their social infl uence were due not least to the fact that al-Azhar had always remained an autochthonous Egyptian institution, as no Turkish Otto- man ʿalim had ever held the offi ce of Shaykh al-Azhar since its creation ∗ My sincere thanks go to Simon Hopkins and Etan Kohlberg for valuable correc- tions and suggestions. 1 ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, ʿAjaʾib al-athar fi ’l-tarajim wa’l-akhbar, ed. Hasan Muhammad Jawhar et al., Cairo 1958, vol. 1, pp. 34f.; cf. the English translation: ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s History of Egypt, ed. by Th omas Philipp, Stuttgart 1994, vol. 1, pp. 10–15; regarding al-Jabarti (1754–1825/26) see Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Leiden 1954ff ., vol. 2, pp. 355–357 (David Ayalon); references to the hadith are given in A. J. Wensinck et al., Concordance et indices de la tradition musulmane, Leiden 1936–69, vol. 4, p. 321. 2 David Ayalon, “Th e Historian al-Jabarti and His Background,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23 (1960), pp. 217–249, esp. 243f. 110 rainer brunner in the late seventeenth century.3 Th e heyday of the scholars’ power was reached in 1805, when they helped Muhammad Ali (r. 1805–1848) to assume power. Th is “golden age,”4 however, proved to be only a short honeymoon. Th e new ruler himself eff ectively undermined the economic basis of the ʿulamaʾ by abolishing their tax concessions (iltizam) and confi scating the pious endowments (awqaf, sg. waqf ).5 What is more, he set out to undermine their social standing by sending delegations abroad to acquire the knowledge and skills deemed necessary to cope with the rapidly changing circumstances. Th is policy, which was continued by most of Muhammad Ali’s successors throughout the nineteenth century, amounted to an overthrow of the existing social structures, especially with regard to the traditional stratum of Muslim scholars. In the very nature of things, it was al-Azhar that was aff ected most by this development. Th e decline in the standing of the ʿulamaʾ was particularly sharp and painful in the two realms in which they had had a quasi-monopoly in the past: jurisdiction and education. In jurisdic- tion, the introduction of mixed courts in 1876 and of the national courts seven years later—both based on French law—and, especially, the founding of a state-run qadi school (madrasat al-qadaʾ al-sharʿi)6 in 1907 eff ectively curtailed the prospects of Azhar graduates ndingfi a suitable position aft er leaving university. Correspondingly, in the field of education the backward teaching methods of al-Azhar ensured that its graduates could for the most part no longer be used in the secular school system. Th is led to the founding of the teachers collegeDar al- ʿUlum in 1872, which was intended to train instructors for primary and 3 Daniel Crecelius, “Th e Emergence of the Shaykh al-Azhar as the Pre-eminent Religious Leader in Egypt,” in Colloque International sur l’Histoire du Caire, Gräfen- hainichen n.d., p. 111. For a list of al-Azhar rectors see A. Chris Eccel, Egypt, Islam and Social Change: al-Azhar in Confl ict and Accommodation, Berlin 1984, pp. 136–138. 4 Daniel Crecelius, “Nonideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Moderniza- tion,” in Nikki R. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints and Sufi s: Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East since 1500, Berkeley 1972, p. 173. 5 Ibid., 184. See also Pierre-Jean Luizard: “al-Azhar. Institution sunnite réformée,” in Alain Roussillon (ed.), Entre réforme sociale et mouvement national: Identité et moderni- sation en Egypte (1882–1962), Cairo 1995, pp. 519–548, esp. pp. 523–525; Wolf-Dieter Lemke, Mahmud Šaltut (1893–1963) und die Reform der Azhar. Untersuchungen zu Erneuerungsbestrebungen im ägyptisch-islamischen Erziehungssystem, Frankfurt/Main 1980, pp. 20–29. 6 On the brief history of this institution see Bernard Botiveau, “L’Ecole de la magis- trature sharʿi (1907–1930) et la production d’un droit islamique réformé,” in Roussillon (ed.), Entre réforme sociale et mouvement national, pp. 549–564. education, politics, and the struggle for leadership 111 secondary schools.7 Both institutions—to which must be added Cairo University, founded in 19088—not only proved to be a serious chal- lenge to Azhar graduates on the job market but put the time-honored university as a whole at risk of being marginalized in the long term. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, the debate was characterized primarily by two recurring top- ics: the need to reform the existing institutions on the one hand, and the emergence of new public media such as the press and new groups of social actors on the other. In the course of time, they successfully contested the traditional elite’s claim to speak on behalf of the people, whether in terms of the religious umma or in terms of a secularized nation. Notwithstanding the high social reputation it still enjoyed among the Egyptians, and notwithstanding also that the contrast between the “traditional” and the “modern” elites was not always as sharp as has oft en been claimed,9 al-Azhar could not close its mind to this develop- ment. Many a representative of the new class of intellectuals was himself a product of the new institutions (it will be recalled that the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, was a graduate of the Dar al-ʿUlum, as was Sayyid Qutb), without necessarily being inclined to give up a decidedly Islamic outlook on life. Islamic reform was not only—and increasingly less so—a matter to be left to theʿ ulamaʾ.10 A proliferation of religious authority, widely acknowledged as well as self-proclaimed, was the necessary consequence, a consequence that has left its distinct mark on all debates about Islamic reform and its participants until today. It does not therefore come as a surprise that the history of al-Azhar in the past 150 years is essentially a history of various attempts—mainly initiated from outside, only occasionally from within—to adjust one of the oldest universities in the world to the exigencies of modern 7 Lois A. Aroian, Th e Nationalization of Arabic and Islamic Education: Dar al-‘Ulum and al-Azhar, Cairo 1983, pp. 12–16. 8 Donald M. Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt, Cambridge 1990, pp. 11–33. 9 Malika Zeghal, “Les réformes de l’université d’al-Azhar en Egypte: une entreprise de sécularisation?” in Pierre-Jean Luizard (ed.), Le choc colonial et l’Islam: Les politiques religieuses des puissances coloniales en terre d’Islam, Paris 2006, pp. 538f. See also Crecelius: “Th e Emergence of the Shaykh al-Azhar,” passim. 10 On the rise of modern intellectuals in the Arab world see Jakob Skovgaard- Petersen, “Portrait of the Intellectual as a Young Man: Rashid Rida’s Muhawarat al-muslih wa’l-muqallid (1906),” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 12 (2001), pp. 93–104, esp. pp. 94f. 112 rainer brunner times.11 Th e very fi rst steps in this direction were undertaken as early as the 1860s; but approximately a century passed before, in the radi- cal reform of 1961, al-Azhar fi nally lost its mediaeval character and was transformed into a nationalized institution, designed to legitimize the nation-state. It has become a commonplace in research to assume that it was mainly the latter event (and Nasser’s takeover in 1952 in general) that fi nally politicized al-Azhar and “helped pave the way for the ʿulama’s increasing involvement in Egyptian politics in the 1980s.”12 Without questioning the signifi cance of the 1961 reform, I shall suggest in what follows that the perspective be broadened a little so as to include the fi rst half of the twentieth century. It was during this period—more precisely in the almost two decades spanning the rectorships of Muham- mad Mustafa al-Maraghi (1928–1929 and 1935–1945) and Muhammad al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri (1929–1935)—that al-Azhar not only became for the fi rst time involved in the political power struggle, but that the process of far-reaching politicization of the university began.
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