Abstract
This paper discusses the transnational reach of Dar al-‘Ulum, Egypt’s first teacher-training school. It trained top students from religious schools (such as al-Azhar) to be schoolteachers with strong Arabic skills from 1872 through 1946, when it joined Cairo University.
The school itself reflected a hybridization of foreign and Egyptian ideas about education, as it taught the Arabic and Islamic subjects of al-Azhar alongside non-religious, European-influenced subjects, while using the ocularcentric, concept-driven pedagogies of the Egyptian civil-school system. In the interwar period, a portion of its students – 30-60 out of several hundred – came from outside of Egypt, including individuals from the Middle East, North Africa, and Central, South, East, and Southeast Asia.
This bulk of this paper will focus on prominent graduates active in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It begins with a brief survey of graduates who worked outside of Egypt between 1890 and 1950, focusing especially on application of their Arabic, Islamic, and pedagogical expertise to new schools or programs.
The paper then explores the intricacies of transnational exchange and cultural translation through detailed accounts of several Dar al-'Ulum graduates. 1887 graduate Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl (d. 1904) was one of several early alumni to engage with Orientalist scholars in Europe and then return to apply this knowledge to educational pursuits. He taught Arabic in Germany and at Cambridge, was inducted into the Royal Asiatic Society in London in 1903, and published an innovative Arabic literature textbook. ‘Abd al-Aziz Jawish (d. 1929), an 1897 graduate who is most famous for his radical support of Mustafa Kamil’s Watani Party, also played a significant role in the field of Arabic and Islamic education. He studied in London, taught at Oxford, attended at least one Orientalist congress, and played a key role in the 1914 founding and subsequent development of the Salahiyya College of Jerusalem, which had a curriculum roughly comparable to Dar al-‘Ulum and aimed to graduate Islamic preachers.
These graduates provide insight into how high-level religious students, upon graduation from the hybrid Dar al-‘Ulum, had the skills and opportunities to participate in multi-directional transnational exchanges. They studied, taught, and presented scholarship in European orientalist circles, and then translated and applied this knowledge to Arabic and Islamic education in Egypt and other Muslim countries. The paper is an offshoot of a newly-written sociocultural history of the school based on archival and rare published sources.
Discipline
Geographic Area
Arab States
Egypt
Europe
Islamic World
Palestine
Southeast Asia
Sub Area
None