In 1951, the Egyptian state merged the elementary schools (al-madaris al-awwaliyah), formerly known as the katatib (s. kuttab) where children memorized the Qur’an, into its modern primary schooling system. The decision was the culmination of official and nationalist attempts, dating back to 1867, seeking to bring the expansive kuttab network under state control in order to supervise the instruction, instructors and health conditions in these schools. Adopting a unified modern curriculum to prepare all Egyptian students for secondary and higher education, from which kuttab graduates were excluded, had become a major national concern. Embracing the results of modern pedagogical studies, educational experts at the time also endorsed the state decision arguing that the kuttab, where students were made to memorize verses they did not understand, not only had become obsolete but that it also carried the stigma of what they described as poverty and “backwardness.” Drawing upon primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives and the archives of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, I seek to challenge dismissive readings of the kuttab and try to understand it on its own terms. Using these documents, I will reconstruct what the class experience in the kuttab was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and show the ways in which the kuttab prepared students for further studies at higher institutions of learning, such as al-Azhar, thus fulfilling an important function in an Islamic system of learning, which considered the mastery of Classical Arabic as a prerequisite for any kind of intellectual contribution. Furthermore, combining my historical analysis with recent anthropological and linguistic studies, such as those of Niloofar Haeri (2003) and Helen Boyle (2004), I will argue that the pedagogical tools used at the kuttab, like memorization at a young age, which were written off as rote learning, were crucial for handling “diglossia,” a problem that Egyptian state schools continue to struggle with to this day.

Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) is an Egyptian philosopher, sociologist, and reformer and is ranked as one of the most remarkable ?gures in the contemporary Muslim world. On his death in 1323/1905 he left numerous disciples and many works of real interest and inestimable value. He was, and still is, commonly given the superb title “al-Ustadh al-Imam” (The Master and Guide); this title alone shows the in?uence that he had upon his contemporaries. Recently, a collection of manuscripts and rare books was found in London where a few items are attributed to Muhammad Abduh. One of the items in the collection is a letter that seems to be a hidden document was written with the help of a group of British politicians to be sent to Egyptians politicians and leaders of the broken National Party for them to comment and sign the document. Interestingly, the letter is written in the middle of a manuscript include translation of three chapters from Plato's The Republic. This paper aims to demonstrate the content of this letter where he listed the steps to restore an Egyptian democratic government. The letter brings more insights into Egyptian political life in this period. To this end, the article will look into the history of the political parties in Egypt in this period including the National Party that was first emerged in 1879 and vanished when British troops occupied Egypt in September 1882 to restore order. More importantly, the letter might throw more light on the role of Muhammad Abduh in the political movement after the end of Urabi’s revolution.

Corporate networks facilitate flow of knowledge, information, and capital between firms. Interlocking directorates is where hegemonic power is exercised by the elite of a society. The history literature on interlocking directorates has examined the economic and spatial interlocks between firms created by board members who were multiple directors. Historical research on interlocking directorates has been primarily conducted on the US and Western European structures. Recently, an emerging body of research has looked at the phenomenon in some Latin American countries. On the other hand, the literature on the economic activities of the corporate elites in Egypt, during the first half of the twentieth century, has mainly been concerned with the socioeconomic role played by local foreign minorities in modern Egypt. Empirical scholarship to systemically examine the shape of capitalism in modern Egyptian history, and the Middle East in general, with the systematic use of such methods as those associated with the social network analysis has been lacking. This paper aims to identify and describe, through using the interlocking directorates technique, the features of Egypt’s modern history capitalism. It leverages on social network analysis techniques applied to the interlocking directorates among the largest joint-stock companies in Egypt between 1923 and 1948. The paper documents the changing patterns of corporate interlocking for approximately 200 firms across three time periods. Social network analysis provides a framework to examine how elites in a society were networked through measures of network density, power, centralisation and connectedness. The characteristics of the Egyptian capitalist system are illustrated using various indicators derived from social network analysis. This includes identifying the control positions, group structures, the mechanisms that guaranteed the consolidation and defence of the control positions in the main business groups. The paper uses a complied dataset from various issues of the Stock Exchange Year-Book of Egypt.

The Delenda Affair, named after a disgruntled shareholder, is what Heineken, the Dutch brewing giant, labeled its twelve-year dispute with the Egyptian government. Lasting from 1963 until 1975, the battle would become an international issue involving ambassadors, foreign ministries, and even the International Monetary Fund. The point of contention was what the Egyptian government owed foreign investors after its expansive nationalization of the country’s private sector in the 1950s and 1960s. Although the two sides would eventually come to an agreement, the intense back and forth, preserved in Heineken’s company archives, sheds light on Egypt’s economy in a transitional period. This paper, using unstudied archival material from Heineken, the Egyptian government, and local breweries, argues that the Delenda Affair lays bare the roots of Egypt’s economic problems since the 1970s. The dispute was a natural outgrowth of a corporation dealing with a government caught between two minds. During the period from 1963 to 1975, the Egyptian government could not decide whether they wanted to be a market or command economy. The failure to plot a single course complicated their relations with foreign investors and created an economic situation that featured the problems of both types of economies. Specifically, the indecision forced Anwar Sadat’s government to provide excessively favorable conditions for foreign investment in order to combat the misgivings foreign companies, like Heineken, had about returning to a country that less than a decade prior had nationalized the majority of the private sector. It also meant that when Sadat tried to transition back to a market economy with his Infitah he did not initiate many of the necessary, and politically unpopular, measures to aid that transition. This indecision reshaped the Delenda Affair, which began as Heineken’s fight to recoup some of its losses after nationalization, into a decade-long referendum on the economic future of Egypt. For Egypt as a whole, the net result was a bloated public sector existing in parallel, and oftentimes in tandem, with an oligopolistic private sector, a reality which would hinder Egypt for decades going forward. The long lasting effects are obvious in the case of the Delenda Affair. The Egyptian government and Heineken would come to an agreement over recompense, aided in large part by the government’s desire to encourage Heineken to reinvest, but the whole experience would scare Heineken away from Egypt until 2003, after Egypt was forced to commit to a market economy.

With the arrival of railway technology, people’s life has become much more mobile, sophisticated and disciplined, which is always regarded as a progressive dimension of technological advance. However, the flip side of the railway progressiveness is far less mentioned. Railway, meanwhile, offered every advantage to robbers, pickpockets, and thieves, while minimizing potential risks of being caught. The proposed paper focuses on the outbreak of cases of robbery and thievery on Egyptian railways during the 1880s. Using first-hand sources collected from the Egyptian National Archives, I trace how railway robbers and thieves executed their plans. Through daily observance and bold practices, these criminals could detect the vulnerabilities of new railway technologies in its social infrastructure, and accordingly became adapted at designing the most suitable modi operandi to carry out their goals. The updated modi operandi made railway crimes engaged with modern technology and look “disciplined” and “modern.” And they became much more difficult to be identified and tackled by the law-enforcement authorities. The writing of railway crimes serves two interrelated theoretical purposes. First, by drawing attention to usurpers of modern technology, I hope to contribute to a bottom-up study of deviances in technological application. Technology in practice did not necessarily program a more efficient society. Usurpers—people who illegally used the technology for gaining personal interests—complicated the technology in use. Their engagement with railway, or more precisely intrusion, significantly reduced transportation efficiency and dramatically increase the risk of public safety. As a result, they undermined the very foundation of the promise of modern technology. Second, Railway crimes were not completely out of the picture of modernity. In fact, all outlaws had to follow what railway timetable and tracks had prescribed. Modern temporality and spatiality of railways still regulated patterns of their behaviors. From two perspectives, my paper argues that usurpers of railways lived in what modernity has created and reproduced new practical knowledge; yet they illegally undermined its progression towards technological utopia. A study of railway usurpers, therefore, reveals a contradiction in the modernist discourse and challenges the boundary between modern and its non-modern antithesis.