In June 1950, the Minister of Education Taha Hussein created the Supreme Council for the Universities (SCU). With the growing number of universities in Egypt, he argued the council was necessary to coordinate between these institutions, and oversee their policies and procedures. Facing resistance from the universities, which refused to report to the SCU, however, Hussein abandoned his project. Nevertheless, following the purge of the universities whereby faculty considered a threat to the regime were fired, the SCU was re-created in October 1954. Hussein’s initiative was criticized for rendering the universities vulnerable to the politics of the Ministry of Education. It came as a surprise: as a professor in 1932, he suffered the ministry’s unilateral decision to transfer him to the department of elementary education. My paper will argue, however, that this initiative was consistent with Hussein’s larger project for culture and education in Egypt. His goal was to build strong educational institutions requiring substantial support from the state. This paper will show how the secular university was at the heart of Hussein’s project. In his view, the university, with its “modern” research and teaching methods, was the only institution capable of training the nation’s “intellectual leaders” to formulate its problems and create an educational system corresponding to its needs. Without such an education, he believed no democracy or full independence could be achieved. Furthermore, I will argue that despite Hussein’s dissatisfaction with Egypt’s multiparty system, he predicated the proper functioning of these institutions on the existence of a democratic system whose checks and balances kept the government accountable. To overcome partisan politics focusing on short-term political gains, he proposed supreme councils focused on long-term policymaking and run by expert technocrats sheltered from the rapid turnover of political power. Using archival material from Dar al-Wathaiq, Cairo University, and Hussein’s private records, this paper draws on Hussein’s life as a civil servant to investigate the ways in which he negotiated the implementation of his ideas on education. His decisions and debates reflect not only the flaws of Egypt’s volatile pre-1952 political system, but also serious attempts to engage the public in policymaking using a relatively free press and a commitment to a certain level of transparency on the part of government officials. Moreover, by telling the story of the SCU, now a symbol of state control of the universities, I aim to question the presumed rupture between “liberal” and “Nasserite” Egypt.

In June 1950, the Minister of Education Taha Hussein created the Supreme Council for the Universities (SCU). With the growing number of universities in Egypt, he argued the council was necessary to coordinate between these institutions, and oversee their policies and procedures. Facing resistance from the universities, which refused to report to the SCU, however, Hussein abandoned his project. Nevertheless, following the purge of the universities whereby faculty considered a threat to the regime were fired, the SCU was re-created in October 1954. Hussein’s initiative was criticized for rendering the universities vulnerable to the politics of the Ministry of Education. It came as a surprise: as a professor in 1932, he suffered the ministry’s unilateral decision to transfer him to the department of elementary education. My paper will argue, however, that this initiative was consistent with Hussein’s larger project for culture and education in Egypt. His goal was to build strong educational institutions requiring substantial support from the state. This paper will show how the secular university was at the heart of Hussein’s project. In his view, the university, with its “modern” research and teaching methods, was the only institution capable of training the nation’s “intellectual leaders” to formulate its problems and create an educational system corresponding to its needs. Without such an education, he believed no democracy or full independence could be achieved. Furthermore, I will argue that despite Hussein’s dissatisfaction with Egypt’s multiparty system, he predicated the proper functioning of these institutions on the existence of a democratic system whose checks and balances kept the government accountable. To overcome partisan politics focusing on short-term political gains, he proposed supreme councils focused on long-term policymaking and run by expert technocrats sheltered from the rapid turnover of political power. Using archival material from Dar al-Wathaiq, Cairo University, and Hussein’s private records, this paper draws on Hussein’s life as a civil servant to investigate the ways in which he negotiated the implementation of his ideas on education. His decisions and debates reflect not only the flaws of Egypt’s volatile pre-1952 political system, but also serious attempts to engage the public in policymaking using a relatively free press and a commitment to a certain level of transparency on the part of government officials. Moreover, by telling the story of the SCU, now a symbol of state control of the universities, I aim to question the presumed rupture between “liberal” and “Nasserite” Egypt.

Having just completed a manuscript on the history of nineteenth-century medicine in Egypt, I consulted a large number of medical books that had been translated from French into Arabic. These books covered such diverse subjects as morbid anatomy, pathology, gynecology, pediatrics, pharmacology, public hygiene, osteology, ophthalmology, physics, chemistry and veterinary science. One name kept on popping up in consulting these book, that of Muhammad ‘Umar al-Tunisi (1789-1857). A graduate of Al-Azhar who had grown up in Sudan, joined Mehmed Ali’s army as an imam of one of the regiments dispatched to Greece, upon returning to Egypt in 1827, al-Tunisi was appointed as chief editor of translated books in the newly founded Qasr al-‘Aini Medical School. This paper charts al-Tunisi’s biography as a way to revisit the manner in which the story of translation in nineteenth-century Egypt is often told. In addition to editing the Arabic translation of the numerous French medical books that the Bulaq Press published under his supervision, al-Tunisi also wrote lengthy introductions to these books. More significantly, and shortly before his death al-Tunisi supervised a mammoth task of translating Fabre’s eight-volume medical encyclopedia Dictionnaire des Dictionnaires de Médicine that had been published in Paris in 1840. The result was a hefty 600-page titled Al-Shūdhūr al-Dhahabiyya fī’l-Muṣṭalaḥāt al-Ṭibbiyya. A deeply pious man who gave weekly sermons in one of Cairo’s chief mosques until his death in 1857, Al-Tunisi’s biography offers an interesting example of an Azhari shaykh who was deeply involved in translating modern science. By having a close look at his magnum opus, Al-Shūdhūr al-Dhahabiyya, as well as the introductions to the numerous books he edited, this paper sheds light on a little known character whose biography sheds new light on the story of translation in modern Egypt.

The limits of social biography: a case study Having recently completed a social biography of the Arab military officer Fawzi al-Qawuqji (1894-1976), I have been forced to grapple with the fact that an individual’s life-story can illuminate the past but also obscure it. Taking my narrative of Qawuqji’s experience of the 1948 War in Palestine as a case study, the paper will describe how adopting the vantage point of an individual Arab military commander produces new historical narratives about 1948, including nuanced accounts of: the difficult choices that individual Arab politicians and military officers made in the run-up to the war; the way that, in the middle of battle, old lines of loyalty between officers trumped new hierarchies of modern army structure; and the role of non-human elements, like weather, money, and wireless codes. These new narratives are woven into Qawuqji’s particular lived experience of the 1948 War. At the same time, adopting his vantage point leaves other important narratives in the shadows, for example, the lived experiences of foot soldiers (as opposed to officers), of women, and of the Palestinian leadership. In addition, the paper will focus on Qawuqji and 1948 to discuss the messy causal relations between the biographer’s craft and the sources, which include post-facto texts such as memoirs and archival jottings, in addition to contemporaneous documents such as letters, telegrams, memoranda and reports. Historians interested in writing biographies inevitably face many challenges when using multiple sources as a basis on which to craft a new narrative of the subject’s life and context. We have to make choices about which sources to use and which to leave out. Our sources present themselves in a variety of languages, moments, and genres, but we flatten these differences in order to make our new narrative coherent and compelling. Reflecting on this from the vantage point of a recently completed project, the paper will suggest some ways that the biographer can allude to the contingency of these choices concerning sources, without interrupting the flow of the historical story opened up by the biographical method.

If historical scholarship is marked by a certain set of tenets – namely work that follows basic norms of methodology in making an analytic argument about the past – crafting that argument into an accessible story has not always been part of the creed. The linguistic turn brought much needed critical focus to the asymmetry of power in the historiography of the modern Middle East, and discourse analysis came with a healthy dose of skepticism about the ways in which historians narrate the past. In recent years, historians of the modern Middle East have returned to descriptive histories, placing narrative in the foreground of their scholarship to a degree unprecedented in the previous few decades. Biographies or microhistories more broadly, attuned to critiques of institutional power, or the colonial archive, can add to this growing collection. They also offer the opportunity, in some circumstances, of reaching a broad readership accustomed to iterations of the T. E. Lawrence story, or other variations on colonial narratives. This paper first addresses the place of biography (and “social biography” in particular) in the historiography of the modern Middle East. I suggest that the biographical turn can open up new space within the discipline to compliment (or push back against) discourse analysis on the one hand, and challenge quasi-scholarly or essentialist popular narratives on the other. I then address some of the methodological concerns inherent in writing this sort of history by taking the life of ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam as an example. Al-Qassam, who has been written about frequently but about whom little is typically said, left few sources on which a conventional biography can draw. How can a historian write what Peter Burke called the “thick narratives” required in microhistories with what some see as thin sources? Here, little material is available that provides the researcher with insight into al-Qassam’s life in a phenomenological sense. We are left to reconstruct his biography with disparate sources, finding traces of his life in Ottoman salnames; colonial commissions; memoirs of Palestinian nationalist politicians; oral interviews with guerilla fighters; the personal papers of prominent lawyers; contemporaneous newspapers; Jewish intelligence documents; British police files; the observations of a Swedish ethnographer. Shaping these voices into an accessible chorus can make a strong contribution to our understanding of the period.