New Ideas, Institutions and Adaptations: The Politics of Education Reform after the Nahda in Syria, Egypt and Algeria
Panel 053, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Friday, December 2 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Historians focus on education reform so as to better understand a major mechanism underlying change, whether social, cultural, political or economic. Narratives focusing on the hegemonic ‘top-down’ reforms of colonial or ‘semi-colonial’ governments have been further complicated by histories looking at how western ideas, practices and technologies were translated – and combined with longstanding, often religious, knowledge and practices – to fit local contexts and needs. The agency of ‘bottom-up’ non-governmental forces in these processes of adaptation is clear.
The schools profiled by the papers in this panel contribute to this complication of narratives on education by showing how ‘bottom-up’ contextualization worked in practice, and how interactions between government, school and society contributed to wider change in nineteenth and twentieth-century Syria, Egypt and Algeria. Collectively, they reveal how Ottoman, Egyptian and colonial leaders trained cadres of new professionals through ‘useful’ ‘modern’ education, as well as the factors behind individual attendance, such as improved socioeconomic status.
The first paper, /Situating Maktab Anbar/, investigates how imperial Tanzimat educational policies were contextualized to fit Damascus and the demands of its notables through a discussion of Maktab ‘Anbar, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Sultaniyya civil school. It reveals that, while the school was meant to remove education from a religious context, the Islamic sciences took up a considerable portion of the curriculum.
/Being ‘Modern’ and Religious/ continues the discussion of local adaptation by presenting Cairo’s Dar al-‘Ulum teacher-training school as a hybrid of nineteenth and twentieth-century civil and religious education trends. The institution not only trained top students from al-Azhar to teach in government schools, but provided many graduates with sufficient capital to establish themselves as efendi professionals who were ‘modern’ and ‘authentic’.
/Missionary Islam/ shows how new institutions of religious instruction attempted to update the role played by Islamic education and knowledge in Egyptian and Ottoman contexts. It presents Rashid Rida’s early twentieth-century Madrasat al-Dawa wa-l-Irshad as an anti-Azhar, and explains how its curriculum abbreviated study of the Islamic sciences (and included modern subjects) in order to train preachers to counteract the influence of Christian missionaries, popular Sufis and ultra-conservative Azharites.
/‘Practical Education’/ places examples of state-sponsored vocational education in interwar Algeria in the context of both civil and religious professional-education provision between 1850 and 1950. It brings discussion of our themes into the colonial era, and highlights the clash between local ideas, practices and desires, and the supposedly ‘enlightening’ agenda of colonial administrators.
As a direct response to local and imperial initiatives, the Ottoman sultaniyya (secondary) Maktab ‘Anbar was established in Damascus in the mid 1880s at the end of the Tanzimat period. As with other educational establishments in the Tanzimat public civil school system, the creation of Maktab ‘Anbar and its infrastructure are the consequence of pluralistic influences, each one exerting, in different ways, its educational and ideological agenda on the Tanzimat educational program.
On the most visible level, Maktab ‘Anbar is a result of the Tanizmat educational policy to create an Empire-wide network (urban and rural) of civil schools aimed at educating “Ottoman youth” (both genders), “regardless of religion”, in subjects deemed important by Istanbul for the future of the Empire (instruction in European languages, administrative and bureaucratic sciences, arithmetic, etc.). This is indeed part of the official policy of the Ottoman Tanzimat schools along with creating a consciousness of belonging to the Ottoman world.
But over and beyond these straightforward political objectives on the part of Istanbul and on the part of the Damascene religious-commercial-political elite regarding modern educational needs organized by the state (the elite correctly seeing Maktab ‘Anbar as a vehicle for upwards social mobility for its children), a look at this school’s study curriculum shows a complex interweaving of other influences. While the Tanzimat civil school infrastructure intentionally removed education (with the approval of some ‘ulama) outside of a religious framework (which nonetheless continued to exist in parallel structures along with missionary schools, millet schools, etc.) towards one controlled by the state, Maktab ‘Anbar’s study program reveals nevertheless a strong religious component. The curriculum shows in fact that the Islamic sciences were taught in the school by the Hanafi mufti of Damascus as well as other ‘ulama to the tune of some twelve hours per week.
A combination of primary sources such as the Ottoman yearly almanacs (salnamas), local Damascene 19th chronicles (Qasatli), biographies on students who went through Maktab ‘Anbar (S. al-Qasimi) as well as publications on Maktab ‘Anbar (Z. al-Qasimi) will be utilized for this presentation. While the aim is ostensibly a case study, the underlying objective is to use this example to reflect upon Tanzimat educational policy “on the ground”, i.e. how it was concretized within a specific context but also how it was inscribed within the overall objectives and intersection of Tanzimat and Nahda on the local and imperial scale.
Past histories of Dar al-‘Ulum, Cairo’s first teacher-training institution, focus primarily on its role graduating teachers and Arabic experts. This paper recenters scholarly focus on Dar al-‘Ulum, presenting it as a provider of both civil and religious education. It argues that the school not only trained a new body of teaching professionals, but also provided graduates with sufficient capital to forge new, ostensibly more ‘authentic’ constructions of modernity.
Dar al-‘Ulum was founded in 1872 to train shaykhs from al-Azhar to teach in government schools, a mission it carried out through 1946, when it became a faculty of Cairo University. The teacher-training side of its education initially focused on exposing shakyhs to ‘modern’ knowledge, but in the 1890s extensive theoretical and practical training in pedagogy was added. Its impact in this area was significant, and it graduated scores of teachers, headmasters, school inspectors and administrators.
Yet its impact on Egyptian society stretches beyond this, as the challenge it presented to al-Azhar as a provider of a new type of Islamic education that was both ‘modern’ and religious was significant. Supporters of al-Azhar restricted its ability to move beyond teacher training into training judges and other religious officials, but despite this its graduates were not only active as teachers. They possessed a wider range of knowledge and cultural capital than graduates of non-hybridic religious or civil schools, including both the ‘modern’ subjects and discipline inculcated in civil schools and the ‘traditional’ Islamic and Arabic sciences that were at the heart of the religious school system. This knowledge and experience gave them the ability to strike new balances between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’. Understanding the school in this light reveals that it was not a coincidence that Dar al-‘Ulum also graduated individuals who made significant contributions to the modernization of Arabic and Islam.
Therefore, Dar al-‘Ulum is not only an example of how government reformers incorporated local elements into the western-inspired civil school system – in the process, radically changing conceptions of religious education – but also how graduates with significant background in both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ subjects could forge new combinations of the two and incorporate more local elements into Egyptian modernity.
This paper is based on analysis of an extensive range of institutional records, rare published sources and interviews, amassed as part of a detailed and lengthy reassessment of Dar al-‘Ulum’s history.
The systematic neglect of education for Algerians has long been recognised as one of the hallmarks of French colonial rule in the Maghrib, with profound implications for the social and political history of the country into the late twentieth century. Its effects were among the principal grievances of nationalist politics and its attenuation became one of the first priorities of the independent Algerian state. Influenced by later nationalist depictions of deliberate ‘depersonalisation’ and the sometimes exaggerated role claimed for the free schools of the reformist ?ulam?, scholarship has sometimes suggested that the social as well as the political history of colonial education is merely one of deprivation and ‘deculturation’. At the same time, however, most Algerians who were literate at independence, including of course the leaders of the revolution, were literate primarily in French, and increasingly towards the end of the colonial period, the provision and reform of education was a frequent concern of the colonial government. This paper seeks to illustrate the less well-known dimensions of the issue of state colonial schooling in Algeria, from c.1850 to c.1950, with a sidelong comparative glance towards the end of the period at developments in Tunisia and Morocco. Drawing on the colonial archives, the paper will show how discourses of reform, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, sought to grapple with the conflicting imperatives of colonial government through the conception and management of institutions of ‘practical education’, from high-level judicial training for ‘official’, salaried functionaries in the Islamic branch of the civil courts to vocational education for rural boys destined to become low-wage workers in the colonial economy. Repeated programs to ‘reform’ the system, in 1908, the 1930s, the mid-1940s, and during the war of independence, illustrate the intractable bind into which colonial administrators worked themselves and their ostensibly humanitarian purposes, and the confinement into which, more by force of circumstance than by design, they pushed generations of young Algerians. The private papers of the distinguished historian and university professor (and founding member of MESA), Roger Le Tourneaux (1907-71), who taught in Fez and Algiers and was consulted by the colonial state in the 1940s and 1950s, demonstrate vividly how, at the very end of the colonial system, it remained possible for high-minded educationalists to review the catastrophic past century as one of success for a French oeuvre de scolarisation in the Maghrib.
