This panel examines the role played by the transnational exchange of knowledge in Middle Eastern education reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers transnational networks connecting educational institutions in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and looks specifically at:
- how patterns of transnational exchange that bring together students, staff, and knowledge from diverse places have shaped educational institutions, and
- how the educational ideas and practices espoused in certain places and institutions spread through the transnational movement of teachers and administrators.
The panel's relatively wide temporal and geographical focus highlights a range of roles played by transnational networks in education reform. As a result, the panel provides insight into how both national and transnational contexts influence the spread and adoption of ideas and practices related to education.
The panel’s papers look at the ways in which Islamic bodies of knowledge and educational practice came to coexist, compete, and intertwine with newly-embraced, often European-influenced, subjects and techniques. Paper one examines Muhammad Ali’s early nineteenth-century educational missions to Europe, which represent an early attempt to introduce European approaches to education into Egypt. It also traces the careers of notable graduates of these missions, including education reformers Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Ali Mubarak.
Papers two and three discuss institutions that were significantly influenced by these new ideas, yet also incorporated religious knowledge and expertise. Paper two discusses the transnational reach of Cairo's Dar al-'Ulum – an institution founded by Ali Mubarak to teach Islamic sciences in the framework of a modern, European-style school – through an account of prominent graduates who served as teachers and scholars of Arabic and Islam in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia between 1890 and 1950. Paper three looks at how Najdi, Ottoman, and Egyptian influences shaped the pedagogical development of the Mahad 'Ilmi Sa'udi in Mecca, a key early educational institution established by the third Saudi state in Mecca in 1926, intended in part to train teachers to staff its nascent modern education system.
Finally, paper four explores how religious educational institutions in Iraq – specifically the Shi‘a hawza in Najaf – responded to early-twentieth-century trends in education. It focuses on the debates surrounding the adoption of outside educational approaches to solve recognized problems within the religious school system and to meet the challenge presented by newly-established secular schools. Our discussant is an established scholar specializing in transnational connections in Islamic scholarship and education.
Education
History
Religious Studies/Theology
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Dr. Archana Prakash
Between the French and British occupations, Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-48) and his successors ruled Egypt as an autonomous Ottoman province. In order to establish and maintain that autonomy from Ottoman and European imperial interests, Muhammad Ali sought European expertise to aid in the rapid modernization of the country - reorganizing the military, reforming the civil service, and establishing a state-of-the-art vocational education system.
This paper focuses on a foundational component of the Pasha’s educational reforms – the Egyptian student missions to France – in order to assess the impact of this first attempt to incorporate Western modes of knowledge production. These reforms represent an early effort to establish a system of higher education that diverged from religious models in the Middle East. The program of sending Egyptian men to study in Europe explicitly aimed to create a cadre of indigenous experts in particular kinds of European knowledge deemed useful and necessary in their capacity to engender modernization. Beginning in 1826, 250 Ottoman-Egyptian men were sent in six official student missions to Paris to acquire expertise in subjects hand-picked by the Pasha’s administration like military science, weapons building, medicine, printing, engineering, textile-making, administration, agriculture, diplomacy, architecture, and translation.
This paper details the first and last student missions to Paris during Muhammad Ali’s reign while providing an overview of all of the missions. It argues that the day-to-day dealings of the students, instructors, and administrators of the missions showcase a contentious negotiation through which the idea of what was “useful” knowledge was continually reinvented. It will examine the careers of those students who worked in the educational system upon their return to Egypt, and explore how they mediated, justified, and indigenized what they learned in effecting modernizing reforms.
In revisiting this early iteration of a transnational educational program, this paper analyzes primary sources including personal accounts of students such as the celebrated educational reformers Rifa‘a Al-Tahtawi and Ali Mubarak Pasha, published archival collections, a variety of diplomatic and bureaucratic memos housed at the Dar al-Watha‘iq al-Qawmiyya, as well as Ottoman employment files located at the Dar al- Mahfuzat. It is a part of a larger project focusing on the foundational institutions of Muhammad Ali’s education system to trace the nature of negotiations between French and Egyptian scholars, and elucidate what Egyptians understood as “modern” in the nineteenth century.
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Dr. Hilary Kalmbach
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.
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Dr. Michael Farquhar
This paper uses the history of the Ma’had ‘Ilmi Sa’udi (Saudi Scholastic Institute), founded in Mecca in 1926, as a basis for exploring how and why educational discourses cross national borders. Run by staff from as far afield as Najd, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and India, including scholars whose names resonate in the history of twentieth-century Salafism, the Ma’had ‘Ilmi represented a key early Saudi experiment in educational reform. Trained in both religious studies and “modern sciences”, its all-male graduates would go on to teach in the gradually expanding Saudi schooling system, as well as achieving fame and high office in other spheres.
Engaging with the broadly Foucauldian line of enquiry into modern educational reforms associated with scholars like Timothy Mitchell, Brinkley Messick and Gregory Starrett, I suggest that this key institution represented the emergence of a hybrid mode of disciplinary schooling which drew on pedagogies embedded in Najdi Salafi religiosity, the post-Tanzimat Ottoman education system, and Egyptian and Levantine Islamic modernism. Moving beyond what was now seen as the outdated rote learning and brute violence of the kuttab, this new approach to schooling was instead calibrated to transmit knowledge and mould good character and sound reasoning through mechanisms of observation, correction, systematic evaluation and the promulgation of detailed syllabuses grounded in correct Salafi creed (‘aqida). Reflecting broader processes which played out in schools across the kingdom in the decades that followed, these divergent influences were to be appropriated in the name of supplying the new nation that was being forged by King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud with an industrious, disciplined, enlightened and pious male citizenry.
The history of the Ma’had ‘Ilmi, I argue, points to various factors which have helped to catalyse and sustain transnational flows of disciplinary educational practices in the modern period, including: imperial expansion; cultural affinities; the use of such new methods in the service of local or national political projects; and the inscription of these discourses on the bodies of migrants. It also points to the ways in which such thinking and practices are reworked as they travel and are taken up by different actors, in different contexts, with different goals. I draw on primary source materials including Ma’had ‘Ilmi syllabuses and promotional literature, contemporary media reports, biography collections, and memoirs written by former staff and students, as well as Arabic-language secondary works.
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Miss. Miriam Younes
Transnational connections within Shi’ite scholastic circles have been manifested by the century-old migration movements of Shi’ite ‘ulama, students and ideas that connected today’s regions of Iran, Lebanon, Bahrain and Iraq. The Shi’ite hawza of Najaf regarded for centuries as the center of Shi’ite scholarship forms one of the points of intersection into which these transnational movements flowed and were gradually transformed. The paper assumes a gradual shift in the transnational connections within the Shi'ite hawza in the early 20th century. This shift can be seen as a reaction to and expression of a general notion of crisis within the hawza that led to the rising emergence of ideas of reform and new forms of knowledge. The paper illustrates this shift by analyzing the emerging debate about a necessary reform of the hawza's educational system. The debate climaxed in the 1920s and 1930s and can be seen as one expression of the emergence of new transnational ideas and new forms of knowledge entering the hawza in this time.
The paper traces the debate by analyzing articles published in some of the newly established journals of the time (f.e. al-‘Irfan, al-Hatif). These articles show rising discussions among Najafi students and ‘ulama raising questions about the actual flaws of the educational system, the outlook of a possible reform and reactions to the rising rivalry of newly established secular education institutes. As will be shown the debate got gradually split between two dominant positions that can both be seen as different approaches to differing transnational frames: While one group increasingly argues for the maintenance of the traditional clerical and religious system, another group – mostly comprised of young students like Husayn Muruwah and Mohsen Sharara – urges the need for radical reform and the adaptation to modern ideas within the religious education system that also contain a gradual dissociation from the religious reference frame. The paper illustrates the main protagonists of the debate within the hawza and enquires the main emphases of these debates. It seeks to locate the debate in its emergence within the hawza as well as within its transnational momentum and connections. It thereby challenges the notion of decline usually associated with this period and instead traces the negotiation of new transnational connections that are apparent in the debates. The paper is part of a larger project focusing on modernist challenges and ideas emerging within the hawza in the early 20th century.
