On December 11, 2016, a terrorist attack on the church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Cairo’s Coptic Cathedral compound killed twenty-five Christian worshipers and wounded at least fifty-seven more. While ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks, mainstream Egyptian media attributed this attack to the teachings of what they referred to as the stagnant and back-warded Islamic heritage being taught at al-Azhar University. According to them, it is al-Azhar’s curriculum and its teachings that promote hatred and enmity towards Christians and Jews. Thus, they strongly advertised for the Egyptian president’s call for Islamic reformation. Despite the calls for such reformation, few of those calls paid attention to the earlier attempts adopted by prominent Islamic figures like Shaykh Hassan al-Attar, Shaykh Rifa’a al-Tahtawy, and most importantly Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abduh. Al-Azhar itself, Egypt’s official Islamic institution and the world’s largest Sunni Islamic institution, ignored the work and efforts of these exceptional scholars for the past four decades or so. In fact, on November 1, 2016, a professor of Islamic theology and philosophy at al-Azhar University was suspended and accused of atheism for adopting the thoughts of Muhammad ‘Abduh, who was once Egypt’s top Mufti (jurist) and is considered the father of Islamic reformation. Hailed as the Pioneer of modern thought in Egypt, this paper presents a detailed study of Muhammad ‘Abduh’s efforts in reforming education, specifically at al-Azhar. It aims to provide a detailed overview of his uneventful experience as a student at al-Azhar, by explaining the challenges and the excessive shortcomings that forced him to skip school as a student. It will then explain his later endeavors as a state official to improve and reform the institution’s educational process and its policies, which he once resented as a student. This includes his attempts to reform the entity’s curriculum, pedagogy, and administration. The paper will finally analyze the different forms of oppositions ‘Abduh faced from both the government and the conservatives at al-Azhar, which eventually put his reform efforts to rest.

Shortly after the beginning of World War I, the colonial state in Egypt implemented a series of economic policies to strengthen central state control over the country’s resources. This centralized wartime economy was characterized by price ceilings and export bans on essential foodstuffs, capital controls, such as regulating the price of gold and banning its exportation, and the monopolization of shipping routes for the purposes of war, which essentially halted foreign trade in the port city of Alexandria, Egypt. Using trade statistics, petitions, newspapers, and legal records, this paper will show that these colonial state policies weakened large businesses in Alexandria that were dependent on global trade and strengthened small, local businesses, particularly those in the informal economy. The growth of the informal economy was simultaneously accompanied by the informalization of labor and the spread of illicit markets. WWI thus marked a crisis of global capitalism, one that empowered local producers and traders in Alexandria and disempowered the colonial bourgeoisie. After the war, the colonial state in Egypt moved away from a centralized wartime economy by gradually removing price controls and trade restrictions. The reintegration of Alexandria into the world economy in the early interwar era resulted in a sudden influx of foreign goods and populations, a surge in the circulation and price of gold, and rapid inflation. This paper will argue that this trade and economic liberalization empowered large businesses and the colonial bourgeoisie, leading to the growth of the formal economy and harming local producers and traders in Alexandria. The deregulation of the formal economy after the war was further accompanied by state policies designed to regulate the informal economy, including frequent police raids on clandestine brothels, harsher penalties against merchants involved in illicit trade, and new tariffs on local fishermen. This paper will explore the ways in which the colonial state’s attempts to formalize the economy and reintegrate Alexandria into a capitalist world system resulted in the growing exploitation of workers in both the formal and informal economy, leading to large-scale working-class mobilizations against the colonial state after the war during a period of Egyptian nationalist organizing.

The coup d’état that brought a cadre of military officers to power in Egypt in July 1952 was the culmination of a long process of disillusionment with the liberal system that had emerged in the wake of the 1919 revolution. For decades, state officials and liberal landowning elites paid lip service to reform without ever seriously challenging the structural inequalities that warped social and political life in Egypt. Ostensibly to correct this imbalance, the first policy initiative announced by the new government in the summer of 1952 was a program of Land Reforms designed to confiscate all land held in plots over 200 feddans and to redistribute it to landless peasant families. But while this aim seemed simple enough, the devil is in the details. The question of how this land should be divided up and organized was still open to contentious debate, and the answers provided by the new government would come to change the relationship between the Egyptian state, the Cold War superpowers, and the millions of workers and peasants employed in Egyptian agriculture. This paper reconstructs the political economy of agricultural cooperatives in the twentieth century Egypt, tracking a shift in the basis of power from transnational networks of landowner/financiers to a set of nationally organized apparatuses constructed during the 1950s and 60s. I follow this shift from a number of perspectives. First, how did the agricultural cooperative movement participate in and reflect changes in geopolitics during the tumultuous twentieth century? Second, how did demographic shifts and considerations of national economy influence the formation of agricultural cooperatives? And finally, how did cooperatives function in rural society and the daily lives of peasant cultivators? Taking this three-pronged approach to studying agricultural cooperatives allows us to link macro-level institutions like the United Nations and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the forerunner to the World Bank) to the formation of the Egyptian state and the daily lives of rural Egyptians who remain a major demographic force in the region and throughout the world.

The nationalization of the private sector, beginning with the 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal, was one of the key components of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s reform package. Yet, there has been little discussion on what nationalization meant for individual companies. This paper uses unstudied Egyptian and Dutch archival records on the nationalization of the Egyptian beer industry in the period from 1961 to 1975 to fill this gap. Prior to nationalization in 1963, the Egyptian beer industry was led by the interconnected triumvirate of Crown Brewery, Pyramid Brewery, and Heineken Brewery. In the 1930s, Heineken had bought a controlling interest in the Cairo-based Pyramid and then orchestrated Pyramid’s purchase of significant stock in the Alexandria-based Crown. Despite the fact that the three remained ostensibly independent—and they had the internal feuds to show for it—the lucrative sale of the dominant beer brand in the Egyptian market, Stella Beer, held them together. This balancing act was thrown asunder when the Egyptian government started the nationalization process in 1961. On the brewery side, Dutch and Egyptian decision-makers fought against each other and the government to preserve their lucrative multinational venture. The Egyptian government, for their part, treated these companies with similar distrust, as it viewed them as prime examples of the foreign influence stifling the Egyptian economy. As a result, nationalization was a protracted struggle that took two years to resolve. Even then, the Egyptian government had to deal with the fallout from the nationalization well into the 1970s. Once Crown and Pyramid were incorporated into the government as the conglomerated Al-Ahram Beverage Company, part of the General Corporation of Food Industries, they faced new advantages and challenges. The most significant advantage was that they now had a monopoly on beer sales in the country. However, nationalization brought numerous issues including the flight of capital and expertise, the inability to use imports to fill production gaps, and most of all administrative and bureaucratic bloat. Nevertheless, if they adhered to certain provisions about monetary matters, imports, and employments, the company was free to make and sell the beer they wanted. Thus, this paper posits two arguments. First, that nationalization was not a violent rupture but a slow, messy process. And second, that Egyptian companies had a good deal of autonomy after nationalization, if they played by the rules of the government.