The Religious Dimension of State Educational Reform in Nineteenth-Century Khedival Egypt: Muḥammad ʿAbduh on teaching school children by animating their souls

Abstract

Scholarship has tended to treat state modernisation of education in the Middle East as a process of displacing an indigenous system of religious learning with a secular European-modelled system of general education. Considering newspaper articles written and published by Muḥammad ʿAbduh on state education and knowledge in the Egyptian state newspaper from 1880 to 1881, this paper complicates this picture. It shows how ʿAbduh, acting in his state role as chief publisher, articulated a public governmental discourse that treats religion as basic to education in general. For ʿAbduh, religion produces real consequential knowledge by cultivating (tarbiyya) moral subjects who are empowered to make choices for themselves. Knowledge provides the foundation for independent will and religion is the crucial link between them. The paper situates ʿAbduh’s conception of the role of religion in education in a bureaucratic context of the supervision and inspection of school systems and the journalistic context of seeking to persuade the reading public of particular notions of reform.