Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt (by Hilary Kalmbach)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt by Hilary Kalmbach Haggag Ali Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt Hilary Kalmbach Cambridge University Press, 2020, 288 pages. Hilary Kalmbach explores a marginalized, and misrepresented, chapter in the cultural history of modern Egypt; i.e., the role of Islamic knowledge and education in shaping Egyptian national consciousness and cultural identification.1 In a lucid and passionate style, Kalmbach critically approaches the role of education in promoting a permanent process of cultural hybridization. Drawing on social theory, she presents a complex, nonreductive, and nonpoliticized analysis of the role of Islamic knowledge in the making of modern Egypt, with particular emphasis on Egypt's first teacher training school, namely, Dar al-'Ulum (The House of Knowledge), founded in 1872 to prepare top graduates of al-Azhar and religious schools to teach Arabic and primary school subjects in Egyptian civil schools with alternative pedagogies and a combination of civil and religious subjects. The book attempts to reevaluate the role of this institution, using it as a window through which to view processes of sociocultural change in Egypt, particularly the role of Islamic knowledge in shaping state, society, and culture. It uncovers and criticizes implicit and explicit misunderstandings and misrepresentations caused by dominant narratives and their rhetoric of rigid divisions and boundaries. Kalmbach's book can be best read against Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and Ambivalence (1991).2 The latter underlines the fact that the core of the European project of modernity lies in its ambition to establish universal uniformity through launching a war against ambivalence, i.e., through enforcing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural homogeneity. This colonial ambition has led, in the final analysis, to a growing atmosphere of intolerance to difference. It is in this sense that Kalmbach's book is a defense of ambivalence as a positive aspect of being-in-the-world, particularly hybrid education and its ability to diverge deliberately from Western modes of knowledge production and transmission. It is precisely for this reason that Kalmbach attempts to underline the benefits and advantages of ambivalence (hybridity), arguing that European knowledge was not blindly and entirely copied by Egyptians, but "adapted to fit local needs through a process of localisation, translation, or indigenisation" (p. 22). [End Page 118] This selective process led to the creation of novel and influential hybrids, thanks to social actors that constructed, crossed, and changed sociocultural boundaries, even though they represented a largely unrecognized and marginalized group. In her attempts to counter colonial biases and their internalization by Europhile Egyptian modernists, Kalmbach uncovers the complex relationship between civil and religious systems of education in Egypt, criticizing the sharp distinction between orality and literacy, as well as the underestimation of aural, embodied, and person-to-person modes of knowledge transmission of Islamic pedagogy. This embodiment, as Kalmbach points out, is not a mere process of recitation, commentary, and memorization, but a virtuous act in and of itself, since it is expected to be transformed by both teachers and students into an embodied practice, into a form of life, into a mode of being-in-the-world, one that directs the sensibilities of the "ensouled body," as Talal Asad would describe it.3 Islamic education might have bestowed such functional benefits as employment, prestige, and social mobility, yet Islamic excellence and leadership must have required demonstration through embodiment and performance, or, to borrow Paul Ricoeur, a movement from text to action. It is in this way that the key authorities and repositories of Islamic knowledge are the people and not the written texts (p. 66). It is precisely for this reason that Islamic revivalism in Egypt from the late nineteenth century onward was not confined to the revival of Arabic literature, or the reform of Arabic language instruction, but included also the spreading of Islamic practice through grass-root associations (jam'iyyat). Due to her positive perception of Egyptian modernity as a plurality of complex and interrelated projects—as opposed to colonial western modernity and its monistic notion of progress—Kalmbach does not foreground the accompanying negative processes and consequences of modernity throughout the book: dehumanization, quantification, instrumentalization, bureaucratization, standardization, homogenization, institutionalization, functionalization, and reification...