Anthropologists of Islam such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad have argued that late twentieth–century Islamist movements fundamentally challenge the divide erected by liberal modernity between the secular public sphere and the private moral sphere of religion. The insights of these scholars are extremely valuable to understanding the valence of these movements in the present day, but they tend to flatten the world preceding the nineteenth century, the time when secular-liberal modernity was supposedly introduced by European reformers. What was the role of public and private morality in Islamic societies before the nineteenth century? How did the category of religion take shape in the centuries before secularism, if at all? This paper explores the above questions through an examination of the concept of naṣīḥat in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. While nasihat literally meant admonition or advice, I argue that it in the early modern period it came to encompass a new and broader type of political exchange that was based on the imparting of moral advice to a variety of individual, collective, and public actors. Fathers gave advice to their sons, sultans to the crowds, shaykhs to their disciplines, authors to their readers, and the state to its subjects. Indeed, the extreme variety and number of texts from this period dubbed nasihatnames, or advice manuals, forces historians to rethink the traditional definition of the nasihatname as merely a mirror-for-princes text. The paper uses the immensely popular nasihatname of the poet Nabi from 1702 to examine the contours of moral advice-giving in the early modern Islamic world as a practice which tied together evolving notions of private and public morality and new ideas about the "private individual" and the "public good." In the text, Nabi turns his sage advice to his young son about how to be a man into a biting critique of the empire. Nabi’s text makes clear the implications of the practice of nasihat as a whole, suggesting how texts meant to inculcate a private moral sphere also introduced new notions of individual political subjectivity. Through nasihat, we see how early modern notions of what belonged to the individual and the collective, as well as to faith and to politics, took shape prior to the onset of secular modernity as described by Asad and Mahmood.

The question of what it meant to raise and educate a child became the subject of sustained debate among Arab intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their discussions revolved around the concept of tarbiya, an old Arabic term for raising livestock that began, in the nineteenth century, to refer to new structures of formal schooling, new pedagogies, and to the female labor of childrearing, moral cultivation, and subject formation in the home. Through debates about tarbiya, questions about the proper heat of a baby's bathwater or how to teach a child not to lie were linked to concerns about how to produce moral and pious individuals, educated communities who could exploit new markets for goods and employment, and an Arab world capable of “progress” and “development” in the face of European colonialism, economic penetration, and rapid technological change. Scholars like Tim Mitchell (1988) and Brinkley Messick (1992) have argued that educational thought and practice underwent an epistemic transformation in the nineteenth century, as new forms of standardization, order, and surveillance altered both how pedagogy was theorized and how children were trained. This paper traces the concept of tarbiya as pedagogical thought in Beirut and Cairo from 1850 to 1911 to rethink this period as one of educational "rupture." What exactly was transformed, and what remained? I examine works on or about tarbiya by American and Syrian Protestants in Beirut (Henry Harris Jessup and the Syrian Evangelical Church), Christian writers in the Arabic press (Labiba Hashim), and Muslim reformers (Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani and Mohammed Abduh) to question what was new about pedagogical thought in the late nineteenth century. I also explore the claims these thinkers made about the "newness" of their ideas. Ultimately, I argue that while tarbiya did take on new meanings in the nineteenth century, the practices, concerns, and forms of social life and individual development it authorized retained important connections to older traditions of moral cultivation, subject formation, and education among Christians and Muslims alike. What's more, I show that the idea that education in the Arab world underwent a fundamental transformation in the nineteenth century echoes a central claim made by theorists of tarbiya at the turn of the century, many of whom advocated for their proposed practices and pedagogies by depicting them as a fundamental break from an imagined, ignorant, "pre-modern" past.

This paper will examine the concept of ummiyya (illiteracy) and its changing meanings over the course of the long nineteenth century. While the idea of ummiyya has a long pedigree in Egyptian and larger Muslim discourses, by the early twentieth century, ummiyya became nearly synonymous with the idea of jahl, or ignorance. What is interesting about this conflation is that both concepts were central to social and religious notions of education and enlightenment well before this period. However, they were quite distinct in their implications for education: illiteracy was a type of tabula rasa upon which true knowledge could emerge, whereas jahl had an indelibly negative connotation as the very antithesis of knowledge itself. This distinction begins to disappear in the nineteenth century with the emergence of nationwide censuses and new criteria for formal education that frame the ability to read and write as central barometers of social advancement. As this paper will argue, once literacy became central to reformist agendas, thinkers began drawing on older concepts of jahl and recasting ummiyya as a type of dangerous ignorance – one that needed to be fought and eliminated. The seamless transition from ummiyya as a “natural state” to ummiyya as “dangerous deficiency” highlights the fact that older conceptions of social good were easily transposed onto new notions of what it meant to be an educated individual. The changing social structures of the late nineteenth century provided the ready ground for this transformation as schools and governments began privileging certain categories of knowledge over others. Ultimately, these structural changes helped expedite the emergence of a “new illiteracy”—as a site of necessary social reform. Yet, how “modern” was this development? The technological and educational changes of this era certainly played a central role in recasting illiteracy for the modern period. Yet, the fact remains that the new idea of ummiyya relied on remarkably established archetypes of what an educated or uneducated person represented. Even while the use of the word “illiterate” was changing, the underlying oppositions of the educated/uneducated, the enlightened/ignorant, and the moral/immoral provided the ready framework within which this new use could easily emerge. In other words, the concept itself – that the lack of a particular type of knowledge could be socially devastating –was much more stable over this period than the terms that came to designate it.

Debates and studies on the meaning, content, and history of philosophy became a prominent feature of Egyptian intellectual discourse during the late 1920s. While editorials on the national need for falsafah attempted to define the “queen of sciences” for the public, leading thinkers published volumes on the history of philosophy alongside annotated editions and translations of philosophical geniuses, ancient and modern, from Aristotle to Ibn ‘Arabi and Baqillani to Bergson. Contributors to this discourse presented competing notions and genealogies of falsafah that contested its conventional conception as a discipline of Greek provenance that the so-called philosophers of Islam (e.g. al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes) carried on. Public intellectuals and educators, famously Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq, Muhammad Ghallab, and Muhammad Lutfi Jum‘a, wrote ambitious works that identified non-Greek sources of philosophy, including ancient Eastern wisdom traditions, Islamic legal theory, and Sufism. As a result, new Arabic terms such as Eastern philosophy” (falsafah sharqiyah), “mystical philosophy” (falsafah sufiyah), “Islamic philosophy” (falsafah Islamiyyah), and “religious philosophy” (falsafah diniyah) were coined and conceptualized, raising hotly debated questions about the substance, politics, and standards of philosophical thinking. This paper examines the conceptual instability surrounding falsafah in late-interwar Egypt to think about the formation of the field of knowledge, canon, and mode of thought that the term came to signify during the decades of philosophy’s rise as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I examine varied texts that reflect the changing standards for what constitutes falsafah during this period, including histories of philosophy; encyclopedia entries; newspaper articles; curricula of philosophy departments in formation; and indexes for falsafah collections at newly-reorganized libraries. While certainly a response to European colonialism and the episteme it imposed, the era's re-formulation falsafah is not reducible to Western influence. In addition to critically synthesizing and responding to modern European philosophy, history of philosophy, and Orientalism, Egyptian intellectuals engaged with and drew on pre-nineteenth-century Arabic-Islamic epistemology, historiography, and philosophical-theological commentaries. Presenting their works as contributions within both European and Islamic literatures, the twentieth-century authors did not distinguish between the “modern” and “pre-modern” temporalities of these respective traditions as historians of twentieth-century Arabic thought have. By reconstructing the genealogy of falsafah’s conceptual transformation in late-interwar Egypt, this paper questions the assumed break with the Islamic past that informs dominant scholarly and popular portrayals of philosophy in twentieth-century Arabic culture as the product of an ex nihilo revival of a long-forgotten science.