Those who follow politics in the Arab world are accustomed to encountering religion. Matters of faith seem closely connected with many political controversies; religion has also served as a rallying point for opposition groups and social movements. But focusing only on religion as personal faith and political opposition leads us to overlook the way that religion is woven into matters of governance in Arab states. Ministries of education write religious textbooks; ministries of religious affairs administer mosques; state muftis offer interpretations of religious law; courts of personal status guide husband and wife and parent and child in how to conduct their interactions the Islamic way. Yet if states structure religion in many diverse ways, official religious establishments have come under a two-sided challenge in recent years. From one side, existing regimes have sought to use the panoply of state religious institutions to cement their rule; they have also come under international pressure to “counter violent extremism” through the religious institutions they oversee. These pressures can weigh heavily on state religious establishments. But from the other side, a host of unofficial actors have shattered the monopoly over religious authority that religious officials grew accustomed to enjoy. The credibility of official religious actors depends in part on their ability to compete for influence among religious members of the public. In this environment, official religious establishments retain significant influence, but they are unlikely to be able to wield it in any coherent fashion either to serve their own agendas or those who would seek to use them. This paper will give special focus to Egypt and its religious institutions, but other cases in the Arab world will also receive sustained attention in a consideration of regional patterns. Based on surveys of legal and institutional arrangements and interviews with state officials concerned with religion, this paper will take a broad regional view on the relationship between various parts of Arab states concerned with Islam and existing regimes. It will show how leaders of religious institutions are anxious to augment their authority, protect their budgets, receive appropriate deference, protect timeless truths, guide the faithful, prevent perceived moral corruption, and jockey against each other. Regimes that wish to steer them to support short term policy goals or combat opposition have a panoply of tools but find that most efforts to use them in a concerned way are clumsy and uncertain.

Gregory Starrett’s Putting Islam to Work uses ethnographic and print material from the 1980s and British colonial records from 1870-1922 to argue that efforts by the Egyptian state school system to ‘put Islam to work’ backfired, as they created a demand for religion that state-controlled institutions could not fulfill. This story, however, is missing a crucial set of actors: the teachers who carried out this project and the ideas that they carried. This paper explores a central mechanism through which Islamic expertise was inserted into the Egyptian civil school system prior to 1952: the Dar al-‘Ulum teacher training school.  Founded in 1872 by Egyptian reformers to train top students from religious schools to teach in state-run civil schools and work in the Egyptian educational bureaucracy, Dar al–‘Ulum produced primary and secondary educators until its 1946 incorporation into Cairo University. Its graduates, in turn, had sufficient cultural capital to cross, straddle, and even shift the sociocultural boundaries separating civil and religious institutions and identities. This paper focuses on the ‘culture war’ that broke out during the constitutional period (1922-1952) between Europhile modernists who wanted to undermine the authority of Islamic expertise within Egypt and a range of Egyptians who opposed these efforts. While a Dar al-‘Ulum graduate by the name of Hasan al-Banna was a particular prominent symbol of this struggle, he was but one of hundreds of Dar al-‘Ulum graduates working as teachers, teacher trainers, textbook authors, school inspectors, and educational bureaucrats who sought to bolster the position of Islamic knowledge within the state-run educational system. The paper recreates their perspectives and formation by looking not only at the books and journals they published, but also the records of the institution that trained them. It is crucial to integrate the perspectives of Dar al-‘Ulum graduates into a historical narrative that has hitherto been dominated by figures such as Europhile-modernist Ministers of Education Taha Husayn and Muhammad Husayn Haykal. These lower and mid-level employees wielded as-yet unrecognized influence not as outside challengers but as inhabitants of state institutions that were central to the execution of the state-led project of modernity. Their opinions and actions are therefore essential to understanding the salience and complexity of the role religion plays within the Egyptian nation and its culture, as well as the ways in which Egypt’s state-led project of modernity was contested from within and without.

Between 1987 and 1993, the Press Bookstore (Maktabat al-Sihafa) released a sixteen-volume edition of the sermons of Egypt’s premier antiregime preacher, Shaykh 'Abd al-Hamid Kishk (d. 1996). Entitled al-Khutub al-Minbariyya li-l-Shaykh ‘Abd al-Hamid Kishk, this series, like other Islamic print products in Egypt, fell under the purview of government censors. Specifically, during the 1987–89 period, the Ministry of Culture’s Censorship Board (Jihaz al-Riqaba 'ala al-Musannafat al-Faniyya) reviewed volumes one through six, while between 1989 and 1993, the Islamic Research Academy’s Administration of Research, Composition, and Translation (Idarat al-Buhuth wa-Ta’lif wa-l-Tarjama) was responsible for volumes seven through sixteen. Whereas the Ministry of Culture (MOC) represented a leading secular-nationalist cultural bastion, the Islamic Research Academy (IRA) served as the state’s preferred tool to claim Islamic orthodoxy in the face of its Islamist challengers. How can we recover the logic of censorship and how can such a story cast light on the strategies by which state institutions produce Islam? While previous efforts to access censorship reports have been stymied by political sensitivities and intra-institutional competition within the Egyptian state, this paper circumvents these restrictions by comparing between the censored sixteen-volume printed edition of sermons and MP3s of original performances recorded initially by audiocassette. Drawing on nine sermons from this period, it examines the distinct approaches according to which state institutions under Husni Mubarak (r. 1980–2011) produced particular religious visions. Based on comparison of the inclusions and exclusions of these two governmental bodies, the paper argues that, while both institutions’ censors excised Kishk’s explicit attacks on Egypt’s post-1952 rulers and shaped his sermons to affirm the centrality of state institutions to national religious life, censorship also involved the adoption of many of the Islamist opposition’s central tenets. Far from a monolithic universe of state-sponsored religious discourse, the engagement of state institutions in the production of distinct renditions of Kishk’s legacy reveals not only the reach of state power, but also the influence of Islamist thought on state institutions.

In 1961, Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized al-Azhar, the Sunni world’s premier institution of Islamic learning, coopting and expanding the role of the thousand-year old mosque-madrasa to legitimize an interpretation of Islam that was compatible with various state projects (Zeghal 1996 and Skovgaard-Petersen 1997). In the wake of the 2013 coup, al-Azhar’s role in the Egyptian public sphere became even more pronounced as Sisi’s regime sought to purge civil society of all other voices that claimed to speak for Islam. In this climate of almost unprecedented state control of religious messaging in Egypt, the state has allowed al-Azhar to further expand its influence and disseminate a state-sanctioned brand of religious moderation (al-wasatiyya) that aims to counter alleged Islamic extremism within and outside Egypt. One of the primary sites where this currently takes place is the semi-formal network of classes (al-majalis al-‘ilmiyya) that occurs at and around al-Azhar mosque from the dawn to the evening prayer. While al-Azhar’s critics have dismissed the majalis as an opiate for the masses, teaching an apolitical, Sufi-infused brand of Islam that is grounded in traditional Islamic texts (al-turath), this paper argues that the majalis are in fact an essential site for understanding the negotiation of the boundaries between religious authority and political engagement. Based on ten months of participant observation in al-Azhar’s majalis and interviews with the ‘ulama and students who frequent them, this paper examines the content, dynamics, and context of the majalis ‘ilmiyya to shine a light on the relationship between religion and politics in Sisi’s Egypt. In addition to approaching the majalis as a site that teaches state-approved Islam, the paper contends that the majalis are a prime location in which rivalries between various ‘ulama play out. Furthermore, it situates the revival (ihya) of traditional learning at the majalis within a larger critique of official education at al-Azhar in the post-1961 period when the institution came more fully under the control of the Egyptian state. By exploring the key questions and issues that animate the majalis ‘ilmiyya, the paper foregrounds the ways in which education at the Azhar mosque is embroiled in broader battles over the nature of Islamic knowledge (‘ilm) and the proper role of the ‘ulama in contemporary Egypt.