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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters On the frontiers of the academy
By Amina ElbendaryCairo's cultural and social calendar is packed with events attracting a growing, and increasingly diversified, audience. Conferences, seminars, workshops and round tables are no longer the exclusive realm of academics, so that while many sophisticated intellectuals lament the "decline" of contemporary Arab thought, interesting developments in other spheres are actually taking place. The debate over whether the decline of learning and culture goes hand in hand with their popularisation is one that has preoccupied analysts of the modern scene as well as interpretations of the history of Arab and Muslim culture.
This debate was revived once more last week when the American University in Cairo's Department of Arabic Studies (DAS) held its fourth annual seminar. This year's theme was Control, Mobility and Self-fulfilment: Learning and Culture in the Muslim World since the Middle Ages.
The DAS seminar has developed a reputation as a forum for young scholars and graduate students to present their work and interact on equal footing with their senior colleagues. As such, it performs a function that few other academic venues in Egypt do. The one notable exception is the weekly Ottoman studies seminar held by Cairo University's History Department. It was at the DAS seminar that I gave my first public talk as a graduate student, and I remember the astonishment I experienced when "the audience" actually took me seriously and discussed my arguments. A number of this year's speakers were PhD candidates, such as Ghada El-Gueme'i, Magdi Girgis, Amna Higazi Abdu, Mohamed Rifaat El-Imam, Mohamed Hakim, Imad Hilal, Nermine Abdel-Moneim and Dana Al-Sajdi, among others.
The seminar was also an opportunity for scholars -- mostly historians -- from different universities, national and otherwise, to interact. Thus there were participants from AUC, Cairo, Ain Shams, Helwan, and Damanhour universities. There were also participants from non-Egyptian universities and research centres, such as Rachida Chih from the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO), Randi Deguilhem from the Institut de Recherche et d'Etudes du Monde Arabe et Musulman and Touati Houari and Kim Sitzler from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales (EHESS). The seminar bridged some of the gaps between institutions that often remain intellectual islands.
Egyptian academia is decidedly Egypto-centric, so it was a welcome change that this year's seminar included papers on regions outside Egypt as well. AUC professor Shahab Ahmad's paper on mapping the intellectual world of a religious scholar from Bukhara was particularly interesting. Ahmad analysed the bibliography that Al-Faryabi (d.1211) provided for his book Kitab Khalisat Al-Haqa'iq. Placing the authors cited in the bibliography, their travels and their texts on a geographical map, Ahmad argued for the existence of a book-based regional scholarly tradition in mediaeval Iran. Similarly interesting was the panel on Ulama and Culture, which included several papers on Cairo and Damascus in the Ottoman period. Randi Deguilhem studied the career of the Damascene scholar Al-Qasimi. Originally a barber not born into a family of scholars, Al-Qasimi was moved by his own personal desire to undertake religious studies at the relatively advanced age of 19, and studied under the Egyptian scholar El-Dessouqi. Deguilhem traced the relations of Al-Qasimi and his descendants with Egyptian scholarship which continued from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
Kim Sitzler discussed the particularities of Egyptian scholars teaching in Damascus in the late 17th and 18th centuries. He concentrated on the career of one Azharite scholar, Younes El-Mahalli (d.1709), who moved to Damascus and taught there from 1660 on. For various reasons -- perhaps a lack of teaching jobs available in Egypt -- there were more Egyptian scholars moving to Damascus to teach than vice versa. However, since most of these were teachers of language and Hadith (the study of Prophetic sayings), they did not usually reach such prominent positions as scholars of jurisprudence and law, for example. On the other hand, they did introduce different techniques of teaching to Damascus.
The papers of both Deguilhem and Dana Al-Sajdi (from Columbia University) discussed the strategies ulama employed to rise through the ranks of academia. Al-Qasimi, who eventually rose to prominence in Damascus, married the daughter of his Egyptian teacher El-Dessouqi. Al-Sajdi's case study -- Ibn Kannan -- had a more difficult time escalating the professional ladder. Ibn Kannan's Hanbali heritage was a liability in the job market. This prompted him to convert to the Hanafi madhhab or school. Ibn Kannan was not born into a family of scholars; nor did he marry into one like Al-Qasimi. Deprived of such beneficial connections, he spent 17 years trying to get and keep a teaching job in Damascus. It was only after a petition to the Hanafi mufti, who was also the supervisor of the madrasa where he taught, that Ibn Kannan managed to get a tenured position.
These papers seemed to indicate that Ottoman academia in the Arab world was a very limited meritocracy, yet they did not fail to nuance their conclusions. Positions were not simply hereditary, but connections within the establishment were essential for ulama to rise through the ranks.
While the dominant stereotype associated with learning in the Muslim world is that science and knowledge are exclusively of a religious nature -- the learned class as ulama -- Mohamed Hakim (of Cairo University's Department of Sociology) presented an alternative view, emphasising secular knowledge of a very specific sort. He outlined and analysed the career of a man influential in the bureaucracy of Mohamed Ali, Ghali Sergius (d. 1822), who rose to a top position in the financial administration. Indigenous Egyptian administrative knowledge constitutes an important cultural tradition that ought not to be ignored, argued Hakim. This knowledge, and the techniques elaborated to implement it, were highly sophisticated, as evidenced by the elaborate financial registers that survive from the Ottoman period. Registers prepared by Ghali Sergius during the early reign of Mohamed Ali Pasha are testimony to the flexibility of this tradition and its ability to adapt to new circumstances and political needs. Sergius was executed by Mohamed Ali in 1822 after opposing the Pasha's imposition of an additional land tax, which provoked the strongest revolts in Upper Egypt.
Only two papers dealt with women's contribution to learning and culture. The first was by Imad Hilal (Zaqaziq University), on the maternity hospital under Mohamed Ali. In a disappointingly straightforward narrative, Hilal traced the official history of the hospital, which began by recruiting female slaves as students and eventually produced a new class of female medical professionals.
The second was the interesting presentation by Madiha Doss (Department of French Literature, Cairo University) on the somewhat marginalised bilingual Franco-Egyptian culture of the early 20th century. Doss presented and discussed three letters a teen-age Egyptian, Zeinab Fouad, wrote in 1909 while on a vacation in Istanbul to her piano teacher in Cairo, Madame Balta. The queer thing about the letters is that they are written in semi-colloquial Egyptian Arabic but in Latin script. They also show that the writer was to a good degree fluent in French since she uses some French words and expressions, and thus point to the existence of a bilingual culture in early 20th-century Egypt that was perhaps more widespread that is more commonly assumed by the dominant culture.
Indeed, the seminar paid attention to non-dominant forms of expression and learning in the form of a whole panel on Informal Culture. Nermine Abdel-Moneim (Department of History, Cairo University) discussed the early 20th-century controversy over men's head-dress -- specifically, the respective merits of the turban, the tarboush and the hat. Each choice was laden with cultural and political symbolism. While Abdel-Moneim presented the arguments of the supporters of the various camps, however, it would have been interesting had she developed the deep implications involved at greater length.
On the same panel, Sayed Ashmawi (Cairo University) discussed popular political slogans used in Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries. He analysed the common features of these slogans, including exaggeration, slander and insults. These slogans point to a volatile and subversive street-culture that existed simultaneously with a conservative official political culture.
Despite the fact that the seminar had a clearly identified theme, some participants offered general overviews of "learning and culture" in such and such a period which failed to analyse or problematise their subject. One example of such contributions was Salah Haridi's presentation of education in 18th-century Egypt. Haridi (of Alexandria University's Damanhour branch) presented the now orthodox theory of the decline of learning and education throughout the Ottoman period -- a theory heartily opposed by the majority of young scholars specialised in the study of Ottoman Egypt. He dealt with this decline as a given, and therefore did not even mention its causes or manifestations. His presentation prompted severe criticism from one of the younger and more outspoken graduate students, who voiced revisionist ideas emphasising the importance of realms outside high or formal culture. She argued that even if high culture was in decline -- which is arguable -- other aspects of traditional and popular culture merit serious consideration.
In a sense, the seminar's greatest strength was also its weakest link. These historians from diverse intellectual and cultural backgrounds met to discuss the history of learning and culture. Yet at times, it seemed as if each was on a different wave length. One main problem in the communication process was that of language. Egyptian scholars obviously are more fluent in their native tongue, Arabic. It is the language they need most for reading manuscripts and archival material. Most do not master a second language, not to mention a third. The result is that, although they have access to their source material, they are not necessarily in touch with developments in fields of inquiry outside the Arab world. Non-Arab scholars, on the other hand, are required to learn at least Arabic as a Middle Eastern language. Their knowledge of the language, however, is in large part dead and bookish. They are not comfortable expressing their ideas in Arabic. They do not "think" in Arabic. Consequently, many in the audience could not really comprehend what the visitors were saying, even when they were technically speaking the same language.
This might seem like a logistic hurdle at first. Having been involved in the organisation of this seminar, I know that it can seem as if bilingual abstracts of all the papers would solve the problem. Other research centres in Cairo prefer to resort to simultaneous translation. It is not that simple, however. The language is not the problem; the discourse is.
It is encouraging that the DAS seminar and other activities -- like the Egyptian Historical Society's conferences -- are becoming regular annual events on the cultural scene in Cairo. They are contributing to the formation of a young generation of Egyptian scholars, but also attracting an ever wider audience of enthusiasts, specialists and amateurs alike.
