The scholarship on Ottoman Egypt generally supports a narrative that depicts Egypt emerging as an autonomous political entity in the mid-19th century and steadily marching towards becoming a sovereign nation-state in the first decades of the 20th century, with the process being led by the Egyptian ruling family. There has been little focus, however, on the role that the Ottoman cultural consciousness played in shaping the way the Egyptian ruling elite identified themselves under various historical contexts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper focuses on the philanthropic activities which the members of the Egyptian family undertook during the Ottoman-Greek War of 1897 and the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 in their efforts to help the Ottoman Empire. It pays special attention to the female members of the Egyptian ruling family, who played a major role in the organization of donation collection campaigns for the Ottoman military as well as providing relief to the Ottoman refugees. The paper argues that self-identification in late Ottoman Egypt was fluid and situational and that the members of the Egyptian ruling elite, who are usually depicted in the scholarship as Egyptian nationalists, continued to identify themselves as Ottomans until World War I. The paper goes beyond the dichotomy that pits national identities and imperial commitments against each other and contributes to the debates on the emergence of national identities in late Ottoman Empire.

In 1945, Dr. ‘Abdel Azīz al Qūṣī published his seminal work ’Usus Aṣ-ṣiḥḥah an-nafsiyyah (Foundations of Mental Hygiene). Earlier In 1938, his master, Ismā‘īl al Qabbānī published Qiyās al dhakā’ fil madāris al ’ibtidā’iyyah bil Qāhirah (Measurement of Intelligence in Cairo Primary Schools), first of its scope and methodology in Egypt and the Arab World. The significance of the work of both Qabbānī and Qūṣī is due to their introduction and representation of the “mental hygiene” movement, a hybrid of pedagogy and psychology. “Mental hygiene” centred around “the development of personality,” with the assumption that personality maladjustments were the cause of individual mental disorder and social problems of all sorts (shudhūdh). Because childhood was the locus of development of personality, any deviance would render children vulnerable to personality disorders. As such, according to both Qabbānī and Qūṣī, the school was the strategic agency to prevent, detect and "adjust" problems in children's personality development. Due to the work of al Qūṣī, we see for the first time in Egypt the publication and distribution of government sponsored booklets addressed to children giving “proper” and scientific sex education. This shift from a moral discourse on sex to one more entrenched in medicine and science signaled a nuanced case of biopower aiming at the “normalization” of childhood sexuality, and managing the body and mind of the child as a member of the population. Simultaneously, the work of al Qabbānī signaled the medicalization of education by introducing IQ testing and “experimental schools” to “quantify” the intelligence of children and consequently pathologize those who did not conform to the “normal.” The work of Qabbānī and Qūṣī represent yet another episode of “childhood gaze” by “child experts” which started at the fin-de-siecle Egypt, reaching a peak in the 1940s. Policies and laws were drawn to rescue, protect and reform the child, who was perceived as the capital and future of the nation. Scientific discourses on child health, juvenile delinquency and pedagogy helped tectonically move the child from the private domain of the family to the public sphere of state control. Attempts to create a single “ideal childhood” resulted in the construction of multiple childhoods, manifesting themselves in criminal, legal, pathological, psychological and pedagogical categories. It is through this prism of rogue childhoods, and the dynamic process of “constructing” and “othering,” “normalizing” and “abnormalizing” that the work of al Qabbānī and al Qūṣī is situated and read accordingly.

In 1930, following his doctorate on the great Muslim mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi at Cambridge, Abu al-‘Ila ‘Afifi joined the Egyptian University’s young department of philosophy. He was greeted by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, ‘the teacher of a generation’ and a stern embodiment of Egypt’s liberal elite who advocated the study of Ancient Greek classics and European enlightenment philosophy. Informed by ‘Afifi that he intended to offer courses on mysticism (tasawwuf), Lutfi al-Sayyid reacted with paternalistic surprise: “What do mean mysticism? Dervishes at the university, Abu al-Ila?” ‘Afifi was ordered to teach logic instead and was free to teach mysticism only years later. My paper discusses the life and thought of Abu al-‘Ila ‘Afifi who—despite opposition—pioneered the academic study of mysticism in the Egypt of the 1930s and 40s. Trained at Cairo’s Dar al-‘Ulum and the University of Cambridge, ‘Afifi returned to Cairo at a time of great political and cultural turbulence: following the cataclysm of the First World War, disillusionment with the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, and widespread doubt in liberal progress towards ‘civilisation’ along European lines, Egyptian intellectuals turned to the Arabo-Islamic heritage—the turath—for inspiration, direction, and as a source of ‘authentic’ knowledge and being. In this context, ‘Afifi was at a forefront of a whole range of actors—philosophers and mystics, ʿulamaʾ and Catholic scholars, Orientalists, philologists, and esoterics—who endeavoured to bring to the fore the vast body of Islamic mystical literature as an intellectual resource. He did so in the context of Egypt’s young public universities, both in Cairo and Alexandria: as professor of philosophy, ‘Afifi made tasawwuf a fixture on Egypt’s humanities curriculum and pioneered its study as philosophy; as an academic mentor, he trained a generation of Egyptian scholars whose influence would range from philophy to psychoanalysis; and as a public philosopher, he argued for the intellectual value of ‘mystical’ concepts—from intuition (dhawq) to existence (wujud)—reading mystical treatises alongside contempory philosophy. By providing a close reading of ‘Afifi’s scholarship and journalism—the first dedicated study of this seminal figure in a European language—I account for the transformative effect ‘Afifi had on tasawwauf as concept and canon. In so doing, my paper suggests that ‘Afifi and others involved in the academic study of religion—mysticism in particular—constitute a vital ‘missing link’ in recent efforts in the history of Arabic thought to recover the multi-layered archive of intellectual decolonisation in Egypt and beyond.