In one of Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi's last works, Manahij al-Albab fi Mabahij al-Adab al-ʿAsriyya (Methods for Hearts and Minds in the Pleasures of Modern Literatures, 1869), he likens the homeland to both a body and a tree. “There is no doubt,” he writes, “that the homeland [al-waṭan] is like a body, thriving by clipping the dry branch, so that the useful branches may survive.”Footnote 1 Al-Tahtawi draws on a classic analogy from the Islamic discursive tradition that compares the body politic to a body (and the realm, the mamlaka, to the body of the ruler, al-malik). In this classic image, adab dictates the proper execution of each limb's function, harmonizing the different parts of the whole. This adab is not just a kind of comportment, but also a body of literature with different branches that help structure the political relationships of the waṭan. “I harvested the ripe fruits of Arabic books,” he writes, “gathering with them useful French writings, ideas relevant to the issue . . . I reinforced these writings with verses from the Qurʾan, true hadith, and clear signs, and included abundant examples of models of the scholars, adab of the rhetoricians, and words of poets—all that refreshes minds (al-afhām), strips the intellect (al-dhihn) of delusions, helps in happiness, and makes mastery eternal.”Footnote 2 Analyses of al-Tahtawi's idea of waṭan, or homeland, tend to emphasize the purely French origins of his concept of la patrie.Footnote 3 Yet it is clear that this is not an imported political imaginary, nor does he envision a wholly new political subject, but he roots these ideas in Arabic and Islamic political concepts and especially in the ethics of adab.Footnote 4
In the course of Manahij al-Albab, al-Tahtawi builds on classical Arab Islamic understandings of the polis as a body, and specifically the body of the sovereign. He refashions this allegorical image by placing the people rather than the king at the center of this body politic. Al-Tahtawi developed an Islamic concept of popular sovereignty through and within the Islamic intellectual tradition. He did so by cultivating an emergent conception of the political power and authority of the people, whose conscience is a “vanquishing sultan” and a “court of law” in the heart of the body politic.Footnote 5 By reorienting politics in the hearts (albāb) of the people, rather than in the heart of the sovereign, he transforms classical conceptions of the sultan as the embodiment of the polity.Footnote 6 Al-Tahtawi situates his argument in the tradition of Islamic adab, a moral code of conduct incumbent on both ruler and subjects, anchoring his writings in the Islamic intellectual tradition in which he innovates. His own corpus of adab includes popular writings, pedagogical treatises, grammatical manuals, essays on statecraft, translations, journal articles, and poetry. Some of his writings are composed in the “mirror of the princes”Footnote 7 style, but his lessons are aimed not at the prince but at a new pedagogical subject—the common man, the people, the poor as well as the rich, and girls as well as boys.
I analyze al-Tahtawi's four principal works in tandem and close this analysis with his acolyte Husayn al-Marsafi, who wrote on the eve of the ʿUrabi revolution. That revolution, too, drew on a vocabulary of freedom, justice, and tyranny to call for an Egypt for the Egyptians. I examine al-Tahtawi's and al-Marsafi's understanding of the political power of adab, in its multiple senses—as literature, education, bodily discipline, and ethical comportment.Footnote 8 Incisive analyses of the transformations of the concept of adab have revolved around how adab became “literary”—or understood as “literature” per se—in the modern age.Footnote 9 Instead, I examine how adab continued to function at the intersection of power and knowledge, through the disciplinary formation of political subjects for a nascent Egyptian nation-state. Both al-Tahtawi and al-Marsafi understand adab (and taʾdīb) as a methodological and interpretive approach to knowledge, but also as practical means of shaping political subjectivities for an emergent nationalism and a concept of self-rule. They developed these ideas under a distinct set of political circumstances: in the wake of Muhammad ʿAli's rule, in the face of looming European imperialism, and on the eve of the ʿUrabi revolution. In his drive to modernize, Muhammad ʿAli helped reconfigure knowledge and literature. Adab became “reappropriated” within new constellations of political power—but in ways that were not necessarily alien or antithetical to its roots. Al-Tahtawi and al-Marsafi draw on the classical hierarchical relationship between the sultan and his subjects, but they make the sultan subject to the “court of law” of “public opinion.”
In Colonising Egypt, Timothy Mitchell characterizes al-Tahtawi's writings as helping to formulate a nascent discipline of political science in Arabic letters, though Mitchell identifies (along with other scholars) a literary quality that complicates easy disciplinary boundaries.Footnote 10 This science, Mitchell argues, introduced “new methods for working on the body” by envisioning education as both training the physical body and forming the mind and character.Footnote 11 This disciplining of the self and government of the body, siyāsat al-dhāt wa-l-badan, was not something entirely new, but was drawn from within the Islamic discursive tradition and the tradition of adab literature. These disciplinary regimes did not supplant Islamic models as Mitchell often seems to suggest (with reference to education and law, for example), but rather worked within these earlier models. Calls for indigenous modes of freedom and justice have been critical tools for claiming popular sovereignty, for demanding self-rule, for calling for the accountability of the ruler, and for asserting the rights (as well as duties) of citizenship, well into the 21st century. But the object of al-Tahtawi's politics moved from a centralized, hierarchical authority to the common man that populated the umma, to what Foucault calls the capillary forms of power.Footnote 12
Classical understandings of adab gave meaning, content, and substance to the intellectual project of modernity, yet challenging some of the most basic assumptions about modernity—about its European and implicitly secular nature and about the European and secular nature of modern techniques of power, modern disciplines, and modern literary forms. The new disciplinary institutions that accompanied colonial modernity did not necessarily supplant Islamic models, but rather worked within and through them. As Talal Asad observes in Formations of the Secular, “new discursive grammars” involve ruptures with tradition, as much as continuities. “New vocabularies (‘civilization,’ ‘progress,’ ‘history,’ ‘agency,’ ‘liberty,’ and so on) are acquired and linked to older ones. Would-be reformers, as well as those who oppose them, imagine and inhabit multiple temporalities.”Footnote 13 Al-Tahtawi transforms the “writing power” of a body of literature on Muslim kingship—and “political material that is composed of narratives of political behavior”—into a primer for a new generation of students that is being schooled in political knowledge.Footnote 14 Now the “son of the homeland” (ibn al-waṭan) has “complete freedom” (al-ḥurriyya al-tāmma) that is one of a citizen's “civil rights” (al-ḥuqūq al-madaniyya).Footnote 15 For al-Tahtawi, the ethical self becomes the very embodiment of freedom, in its capacity for self-government, cultivated through the discipline of education (tarbiya).Footnote 16
TRAVEL IS TRANSLATION
“Travel in search of knowledge is not only a practice of translation,” writes Roxanne Euben in her own analyses of al-Tahtawi, “but a term of translation, a conceptual bridge across traditions separated by culture or time.”Footnote 17 Al-Tahtawi's intellectual journey is well known: he was born in 1801 to a family of scholars and judges in Upper Egypt, studied at al-Azhar with Shaykh Hasan al-ʿAttar,Footnote 18 and at age twenty-five was appointed imam of a delegation of students destined for Paris. He remained in Paris for five years, singled out by French orientalist Edme-François Jomard (an editor of and contributor to Napoleon's Description de l’Egypte) for training in translation.Footnote 19 When al-Tahtawi returned from Paris, he would eventually become the director of Dar al-Alsun, the school of translation that he founded in 1835. There, he supervised over 2,000 translations that became the basis of the “translation movement” in Arabic letters. At this moment of infiltration of European writings—both technical and literary—there was simultaneously a resurgence of Arabic and Islamic literature (“neoclassicism”).Footnote 20 The first works to roll off the newly privatized Bulaq press were Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din (Revival of the Religious Sciences) and Ibn Khaldun's al-Muqaddima. Even as the study of foreign languages (French, Turkish, Italian, Persian) proliferated, the scholarly establishment of the ʿulamaʾ strove to strengthen the Arabic language, to adapt and accommodate neologisms through Arabic etymologies, to spread literacy in the linguistic sciences, and to facilitate knowledge of Arabic and Islamic adab.Footnote 21 Theories of cultural translation have tended to see this process unfolding along a hierarchy of languages, where the “third world” language “submits” to the dominance of European languages and regimes of knowledge.Footnote 22 Yet the seismic transformations in the Arabic language served to promote expanded literacy in Arabic and Islamic thought, as well as to aid in the dissemination and circulation of Arabic and Islamic literatures and educational materials.Footnote 23 Mass education, literacy, and print media helped revive consciousness—and scholarship—of the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition rather than supplant it. Moreover, this scholarly production formulated a new lexicon that helped in imagining, describing, and shaping new kinds of political subjectivities.
Al-Tahtawi was instrumental to this process. He was deeply connected to the group of intellectuals that founded Dar al-ʿUlum, the teachers’ training college envisioned as a “middle path” between the religious schools and the technical training schools first established under Muhammad ʿAli.Footnote 24 Al-Tahtawi played an important role in developing and founding these technical training schools over the course of his long career. The curriculum at Dar al-ʿUlum was aimed to produce a new cadre of teachers trained in geometry, physics, geography, history, and calligraphy, as well as Azhari disciplines such as Arabic language and literature, Qurʾan exegesis, hadith, and fiqh.Footnote 25 Dar al-ʿUlum initially recruited students from al-Azhar, many of whom went on to teach in the new government schools established under Khedive Ismaʿil. These schools created less a “division of spirits” between “two systems of education” and “two different educated classes in Egypt, each with a spirit of its own,” than a melding of traditional sciences, disciplines, and institutions to new ones.Footnote 26 In an article on this “dual system,” Hoda Yousef observes that this was not “a complete ideological separation between two sides of a bifurcated system of education, with government schools gaining ground and replacing indigenous ones and a ‘new’ elite displacing the ‘old.’ Rather, government schools relied heavily, both academically and structurally, upon indigenous education for manpower, input, and intellectual sustenance.”Footnote 27
Al-Tahtawi's impact on the field of education, on what became the “translation movement,” and on Egyptian public discourse was vast. He became known as “‘father of modern Arabic literature,’ pioneer of the Arab nahḍa (Renaissance), leader of the Egyptian ‘Enlightenment,’ and a ‘citizen of the world’ who helped initiate the ‘nineteenth century's growing Arab awareness of the West.’”Footnote 28 Moreover, his work has been of enduring scholarly interest: it has witnessed a revival in recent years, in both literary scholarship and in the writings associated with the Islamic awakening.Footnote 29Ṣaḥwa writers call him “the pioneer of enlightenment” and of “the new awakening” (al-yaqaẓa al-jadīda).Footnote 30 Al-Tahtawi's ground-breaking work Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Bariz (The Extraction of Gold in the Distillation of Paris, 1834) describes his delegation's travels to Paris (from Alexandria via Marseilles) and back; the sciences, skills, and crafts that they went to acquire; the exams they took (of which a translated transcript is provided); French geography, culture, politics, medicine, charity, economics, religion, education; the French revolution of 1830; and finally, the organization of knowledge in France. Several scholars have marveled at—and extensively analyzed—al-Tahtawi's inventiveness at the purely lexical level, especially his linguistic ingenuity in expressing concepts that had no direct equivalent in Arabic.Footnote 31 “Takhlis can be understood,” writes Roxanne Euben, “in part, as an elaborate linguistic mediation . . . al-Tahtawi did not have a language ready-made to represent the new world he encountered; he was compelled to coin Arabic neologisms, deploy classical Arabic terminology in unorthodox ways, or directly borrow from other languages simply to describe unfamiliar phenomena to his readers.”Footnote 32 What we see in al-Tahtawi's oeuvre, and indeed, in his career, is a translational negotiation of “indigenous” and “foreign” epistemes, different branches of the holistic tree that he mentions in Manahij al-Albab. He manages to navigate the shoals of renewal and reform within the Islamic literary tradition, establishing an effective dialectic between the past and the present, indigenous and foreign, and Arab-Islamic and European modes of knowledge. These are the tangled origins of an Arab-Islamic literary modernity, a rhizome-like genealogy growing out of the soil of the waṭan as a homeland.
In Takhlis al-Ibriz, al-Tahtawi translates liberté as ḥurriyya, a concept that had previously been used in contradistinction to “slavery,” but could also mean “nobility.”Footnote 33 In this translation, he began a process of reinterpreting Arabic and Islamic political concepts for the era of Muhammad ʿAli's emergent Egyptian state. This process of reinterpretation would go through several waves or instantiations, as al-Tahtawi himself traversed different political eras—from Muhammad ʿAli to a period of severe repression under ʿAbbas (1848–54) to the educational reforms instantiated under Saʿid (1854–63) and Ismaʿil (1863–79). Through these successive periods, al-Tahtawi would elaborate on the seed of his earlier ideas, first sketched out in Takhlis al-Ibriz. In his commentary on Article 1 of the French National Charter, he writes, “What they call al-ḥurriyya and what they desire in it, designates what we refer to as justice and equity [al-ʿadl wa-l-inṣāf]. The meaning of ‘to rule with al-ḥurriyya’ is to establish equity in injunctions and laws by which the ruler cannot oppress people.”Footnote 34 In his own translation of Article 1, “All French are equal before the law,” al-Tahtawi tactfully omits “quels que soient d’ailleurs leurs titres et leurs rangs” (whatever their title or their rank), perhaps in deference to the sovereign.Footnote 35 He later elaborates more fully on this part of Article 1:
All French are equal before the law, high and low, there is no difference in the application of the laws mentioned. The legal injunction even applies to the king, for it is enforced against him as it is against others . . . this is one of the clear signs of the application of justice among the French to a high degree, and their progress in civilized manners (taqaddumuhum fī al-adāb al-ḥādira). What they call freedom and what they desire from it designates what we call justice and equity. Thus the meaning of ‘ruling with freedom’ is the establishment of equality in injunctions and laws so that the ruler cannot oppress any human being.Footnote 36
“Justice and equity” here invokes the accountability of the ruler before the law, but is extended to the individual's right to freedom from oppression and tyrannical, arbitrary government. In this, al-Tahtawi draws on understandings in Islamic jurisprudence that the ruler is also accountable to the law and has “limits imposed on him by the existence of moral norms.”Footnote 37 Even if the caliph is the representative of God on earth, he is not above the law. By using the particular phrase, “to rule with al-ḥurriyya,” he interprets Article 1 as making the ruler subject to (Islamic) ethics of justice and fairness.Footnote 38
In this interpretation, the ruler is not necessarily the embodiment of the law, the dispenser of the law, the origins of justice, or ṣāḥib al-nufūdh (he who executes power and the law), but is subject to the law. Al-Tahtawi says that he translated the charter “so that you may see how their intellects judged justice and equity among the causes of the flourishing of kingdoms and of the wellbeing of their people [al-ʿibād] and how subjects and sovereigns submitted to that . . . Justice is the basis of civilization [ʿumrān].” Al-Tahtawi remarks on how sovereigns submit just like subjects; all of God's servants (kull ʿibād) are subject to God's law, including the king. This is also connected to al-Tahtawi's own experience witnessing Charles X being brought to justice during the French revolution of 1830.
In his analysis of al-Tahtawi's interpretation of liberté, Bernard Lewis evokes something of Talal Asad's “new discursive grammars” where new vocabularies (of “liberty” for example) are related to the old.Footnote 39
Shaykh Rifaʿa's equation of ḥurriyya with the classical Islamic concept of justice helped relate the new to the old concepts, and fit his own political writings into the long line of Muslim exhortation to the sovereign to rule wisely and justly, with due respect for the law and due care for the interest and welfare of the subjects. What is new and alien to traditional political ideas is the suggestion that the subject has a right to be treated justly, and that some apparatus should be set up to secure that right. With remarkable percipience, Shaykh Rifaʿa sees and explains the different roles of parliament, the courts and the press in protecting the subjects from tyranny—or rather, as he points out, in enabling the subjects to protect themselves.”Footnote 40
Lewis complains that al-Tahtawi did little to further this vision of political liberty when he was in positions of government power. But al-Tahtawi played a critical part in wresting control of new educational institutions from the military, expanding the literate public, extending education to women and men and to rich and poor, developing the power of the press, strengthening the Arabic language through lexical and pedagogical innovations, and rooting modern educational and political concepts in indigenous paradigms. Through such changes, he helped cultivate the public sphere as a space where educated citizens come together to judge the performance of the rulers.Footnote 41 By extending the literate public beyond the Azhar educated elite, he opened the public sphere to an ever-widening class of educated citizens, “widening the circle of civilization,” in his own words.Footnote 42
Analyses of the idea of “cultural translation” have tended to proceed from assumptions of hierarchy, of a weaker culture submitting to translation into the dominant language. In Talal Asad's earlier writings, he sees the transformations of the Arabic language in the 19th century—under the auspices of al-Tahtawi's translation movement—as a process of “forcible transformation” to which Arabic “submits . . . push[ing] it to approximate” European languages as a “mimetic gesture of power, an expression of desire for transformation.”Footnote 43 Yet what we see is not a weak and debilitated Arabic language and Islamic intellectual discourse submitting to a forcible transfer of ideas. Instead, the tradition shows itself to be malleable to regeneration—or “awakening” (nahḍa). As the tradition assimilates new ideas, it transforms them and reinterprets them in its own terms.Footnote 44 In Asad's later work, he would revise this earlier understanding of this relationship between colonial (and secular) modernity and the Islamic discursive tradition, seeing it as a process of rhizome-like hybridity and cross-fertilization. This is the way that al-Tahtawi himself saw the process, as a tree with different branches.Footnote 45
Toward the middle of the 19th century, there was a semantic shift in the word ḥurriyya as it began to connote ideas of political and personal freedom, sovereignty, and liberty.Footnote 46 Most analyses attribute this to the French revolution and developments in French thought.Footnote 47 Rather than a simple transference of French ideas into Islamic writings, however, these ideas were sanctioned with reference to the scriptural tradition, projected back into the early community (salāf), and framed within classical theological debates about ethical conduct (adab). This ethical conduct was defined through reference to justice and fairness (al-ʿadl wa-l-inṣāf), political consultation (shūrā), accountability before the law, knowledge and human reason, free will, and equality. Al-Tahtawi would further develop these concepts over the course of his long and prolific career under successive Egyptian governments. In Takhlis al-Ibriz, he moves away from the original sense of “justice and equity” as the prerogative of the ruler, reinterpreting this concept as a condition of freedom intrinsic to the subject, a condition to which the ruler is held accountable. Through this discursive move, al-Tahtawi shifts from the “absolutist imperative” of power enunciated by the ruler, articulated in a “corpus of universal wisdom,” to a modern ethics (an adāb ʿasriyya) that helps promote the (self-)mastery of the individual citizen-subject.Footnote 48
ERRANCY AND ADAB
After Muhammad ʿAli's death, al-Tahtawi fell out of favor with the new khedive. ʿAbbas I (1848–54) exiled al-Tahtawi to the Sudan under the pretense that he was needed to open a primary school for the children of Egyptian diplomats.Footnote 49 During his exile, al-Tahtawi translated the Archbishop of Cambray François Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque, originally published in 1699. Eve Troutt Powell describes the book as “an allegory which perfectly fitted his case and the injustice done to him.”Footnote 50Télémaque is a treatise on just rule, but also a critique of the absolute power of the sovereign and a dissertation on the accountability of the king. It is Fénelon's rendering of Homer's famous epic poem about Telemachus’ own educational voyage, guided by his Mentor Athena, goddess of wisdom. The didactic sermon, written in the “mirror of the princes” style, was a primer for Fénelon's student, King Louis XIV's eldest son, the Duke of Burgundy. Fénelon's vision of the public good is deeply connected to virtue, to notions of ethical conduct, and to Fénelon's own piety. But he also reconciles freedom with obedience to moral law, directly inspiring Rousseau's own idea of liberté as secured through submission to the law, the “chains that make us free.”Footnote 51Mawaqiʿ al-Aflak fi Waqaʾiʿ Tilimak (The Positions of the Planets in the Adventures of Telemachus) is, like Fénelon's text, a commentary on political tyranny, expressed via changing literary forms, new political concepts, and emergent pedagogies. Tilimak would not be published until 1867, much later in al-Tahtawi's career, during the more liberal reign of Ismaʿil.
Tilimak develops ideas about liberty that al-Tahtawi had begun exploring in Takhlis al-Ibriz and that he would further develop in his last works. In Tilimak, liberty is contingent on submission to the law, on the ruler's accountability to the law, and on the virtuous self-government of the citizen that enables popular sovereignty. The text meditates on the nature of just rule and the ideal society, realized through a system of rights and duties that provide a blueprint for such a society. This blueprint is the law; and the “custodians of the law” are the scholars and wise men who are its interpreters. In Tilimak, Minos is described as a great king “because of the justice, organization of rights, and morals that his laws preserve and protect.”Footnote 52 This vision of good government, where justice is tied to rights (equality under the law, individual freedom), echoes al-Tahtawi's interpretation of the French Charter, but includes the critical dimension of moral conduct—and adab—so central to his later writings on rights.
Télémaque elaborates a principle of sovereign accountability before the law, quels que soient d’ailleurs leurs titres et leurs rangs. Telemachus asks Mentor: In what does the king's authority consist? “The king, Mentor replies, is absolute over the people, but the laws are absolute over him. He has unlimited power to do good, but his hands are tied when he would do evil.”Footnote 53 Telemachus and Mentor are taken to a sacred grove, “sequestered from the sight of the profane,” where the ʿulamaʾ keep the laws. The text moves into an extended description of the ʿulamaʾ as free from “appetites” and hence able to purely use their reason. They are the embodiment of “enlightened and serene virtue.” “Those who are entrusted with the execution of the laws for the government of the people ought always to be governed by the laws themselves. It is the law, not the man, which ought to reign. Such was the discourse of these ʿulamaʾ.” The ʿulamaʾ are the keepers of the law not only through reason, but also through virtue and goodness. They pose a series of questions to test Telemachus (himself a prince in training), the first pertaining to freedom. “Who is the freest of all men?” A number of (erroneous) answers are proffered by the assembly. One of the erroneous answers is: “a king who had absolute dominion over his subjects.” Telemachus gives the best answer. Mentor had often told him that “the freest of all men is he who can be free even in slavery itself. In whatever country or condition a man may be, he is perfectly free, provided he fears God, and fears nothing but God. In a word, the truly free man is he who, void of all fears and all desires, is subject only to God and reason.”Footnote 54 This concept of freedom as submission to God alone would become extensively developed in modern Islamic thought by thinkers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh, Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn, ʿAbd al-Wahid Wafi, and Sayyid Qutb. They interpret submission to God (ʿibāda and ʿubūdiyya) as making God's servants (ʿibād) free from servitude to earthly powers (shirk). It is a concept that would make its way directly into ʿAbduh's Risalat al-Tawhid.Footnote 55
This vision of submission to God and the law as the source of liberty is reiterated throughout Tilimak. Two kinds of law are described, along with two utopian societies: Crete, ruled by the law of the books, and Andalusia, ruled by natural law. “The great riches of the Cretans are health, strength, courage, the peace and union of families, the liberty of all the citizens, a plenty of necessaries, a contempt of superfluities, a habit of labor, an abhorrence of idleness, an emulation of virtue, a submission to the laws, and a fear of righteous God.” Muslim Andalusia is also described as an ideal society, living by an innate goodness that brings happiness, wellbeing, and social and political concord. These images give expression to Fénelon's Quietist views that preach a direct relationship to God without worldly interference. In Andalusia, the people are described as nomadic, without a sense of fixed territory, keeping few possessions, and living simply. The key symbol in this passage is the tent—Quietists believed that the man of God was a man of the tent or of the altar.
Each family, wandering up and down in this beautiful country, moves its tents from one place to another . . . They love each other with a brotherly love that nothing interrupts. It is the contempt of vain riches and deceitful pleasures that preserves this peace, union, and liberty. They are all free, and all equal. There is no distinction among them, except recognition of the experience of the ancient sages, or the extraordinary wisdom of some young men, who are equal to the elders in consummate virtue.Footnote 56
This passage was reiterated almost verbatim in Muhammad ʿAbduh's Risalat al-Tawhid—that all men are naturally and originally free and equal and that there is no distinction among them, except in wisdom.Footnote 57 The passage has romantic intimations of an a priori golden age of simplicity lost among the ruins of modern existence. But it is also a political vision of sacred law (whose guardians are the elders in Crete) and of natural law existing without a formal political structure (Andalusia has no kings except fathers of families and chiefs of tribes). The twofold image of sacred and natural law, public and private government, kings and fathers, polis and family, structures al-Tahtawi's later book al-Murshid al-Amin li-l-Banat wa-l-Banin (The Authoritative Guide for Girls and Boys, 1871). Through Fénelon's idealistic, utopian, and romantic vision of a free, sacred, and ethical society, al-Tahtawi deploys his own utopian vision of the ideal Arabo-Islamic society and polity, not uncoincidentally through reference to an a priori idealistic Andalusia. These two models of good conduct and good government juxtapose a society governed by the law, books, and reason, with natural goodness that comes from living simply and through a direct relationship with God.
Both Fénelon and al-Tahtawi used new kinds of adab to meditate on the nature of good and just government precisely at a moment of intense political change. Fénelon's Télémaque moved away from epic poetry to a new kind of narrative prose written in a readily accessible vernacular style. In an introduction to a later edition, Fénelon's disciple Andrew Michael Ramsay described Les Aventures as conceived in the ethical framework of epic poetry, even as it ruptured with the form of epic poetry. Télémaque is a pivotal genre, mixing what is “old” in the epic—a metaphysical vision of the world—with what is new in the Enlightenment, an emphasis on freedom, equality, and justice and the role of reason. These virtues, long understood as emblematic of the move to secular government, did not have secular origins. Télémaque is informed by Fénelon's own spiritual trajectory—as priest, archbishop, and theologian. He adapts the travel narrative of the Greek (and pagan) prince to a Christian ethics, describing an epic unity of the world where all knowledge is from God.Footnote 58 Ramsay describes the aesthetic nature of this metaphysical unity:
The universe is only a picture, representing the divine perfections; the visible world is only an imperfect copy of the invisible; and consequently, that there is a hidden analogy between the original and these portraits, between spiritual and corporeal beings, between the properties of the one and those of the other . . . When we consult those among the Persians, the Phoenecians, the Greeks, and the Romans, who have left us some imperfect fragments of the ancient theology . . . they all tell us, that these hieroglyphic and symbolic characters denote the mysteries of the invisible world, the doctrines of the most profound theology.Footnote 59
Ramsay laments the loss of this “oriental theology” which, he argues, both Homer and Fénelon sought to revive—a theology which al-Tahtawi would similarly revive for the context of his exile under ʿAbbas.Footnote 60 The epic form traveled from a Greek fable to the history of a French prince to the story of an errant Egyptian scholar. All were trying to set politics and ethics along the right path. Through this romantic portrait of the “hieroglyphics” of “oriental theology,” an Andalusia imbued with natural rights, al-Tahtawi was able to “create in the book the picture of beloved Egypt which unlocked the reins of my pen.”Footnote 61 This errant political theology was able to flourish in multiple soils as a model—and as a primer—of good governance. It is an adab formulated and reformulated, for a Greek prince, for a French one, and for an Egyptian one, grounded in an ethics that was both practical and metaphysical.
The process of translation that we see in al-Tahtawi's work is not just itinerant, linguistic, and geographic, but also generic and disciplinary. Some literary critics argue that al-Tahtawi's translation of Télémaque represents a shift in Arabic narrative discourse toward “modern” genres such as the novel. Télémaque is not just literature; it is adab, an ethical document, an instrument of instruction, a vision of ethical citizenship, and a portrait of just rule. It is not just a cultural translation, but a generic one as well, as Homer's epic poem becomes a primer for the prince, the myth of Telemachus an Enlightenment treatise, Greek mythology Christian mysticism, Fénelon's critique of Louis XIV al-Tahtawi's commentary on the ethics of Egyptian monarchic rule and a preliminary vision of Islamic citizenship for the modern age.
Al-Tahtawi's generic mediations demonstrate a complex process of balancing not just linguistic and literary styles (the travel narrative, the epic, the primer, the mirror of the princes, the emergent novel), but also the pedagogies associated with them. His translation of Télémaque echoes Takhlis al-Ibriz, the educational mission, the travel narrative, the adab style now “translated” into an Arabized and Islamicized version of Telemachus's travels around the Mediterranean. Al-Tahtawi further translates the French to the Arabic, the Christian Quietist content to the Islamic, epic poetry to the adab of riḥla literature. As with his description of Paris in Takhlis al-Ibriz, he Egyptianizes the content to make the frame of reference familiar to his audiences, “dressing his work in an Egyptian garb with Egyptianized figures.” Literary scholars have tended to see Tilimak as a radical “departure from traditional and static literary models,” opening “a gate, however narrow, to future possibilities for the modernization of imaginative literature.”Footnote 62Tilimak was at the juncture of a proliferation of innovative literary styles, drawing on older, classical forms like the riḥla and contributing to the emergence of new genres.Footnote 63 As with other kinds of adab, its didactic, ethical, aesthetic, and political aims overlapped. Even as new literary forms and new narrative voices emerged for a new era, classical literary genres, styles, and forms still exerted their powerful force—not just in literature, but also in institutions such as new schools.
THE DISCIPLINE OF ADAB
After ʿAbbas was assassinated by his eunuchs, al-Tahtawi was liberated from his exile and returned to government favor under Saʿid (1854–63). During this time he worked on a project to open ten makātib ahliyya (“national” or “peoples” schools) intended to be a “middle path” between the technical and religious schools, a project that would not be actively implemented until the reign of Ismaʿil (1863–79). Though these schools have been widely understood as modeled on European educational institutions, they combined the traditional disciplines such as Arabic language and foundations of religion with arithmetic, geography, and geometry. Most historians have tended to assume that “a strict dichotomy existed between ‘new,’ modern, Western schools and ‘old,’ traditional, indigenous education” and that government education was “virtually synonymous with modernization, westernization, and secularization.” Moreover, historians have understood these schools as diametrically opposed to indigenous forms of (religious) education.Footnote 64 Yet the movement for educational reform—in both the religious and the national schools—was laid by Azharis such as al-Tahtawi, his junior colleague Husayn al-Marsafi, and later educational reformers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh and ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish.Footnote 65 This period in the late 1860s represented the pinnacle and culmination of al-Tahtawi's career. He was a member of the Educational Council at the newly formed Ministry of Education and editor of the pioneering journal Rawdat al-Madaris, and he published three of his most important books—each concerned in different ways with the subjects of education, pedagogy (tarbiya), and the “division of knowledge” (taqsīm al-ʿulūm). The first of these was a grammar book, a primer to teach students how to read and write; the second was Manahij al-Albab; and the third was al-Murshid al-Amin, a kind of “mirror of the princes” for a new, more plebian generation of students.
Manahij al-Albab begins by identifying the “two foundational means for perfecting civilization,” the first of which is rooted in adab, in “the training [tahdhīb] of morals and human virtues with the adab of religion.” The second is related to the cultivation of wealth through agriculture, trade, and industry. The book explores the “division of labor” between these two civilizational imperatives, as well as their imbrications, how one informs the other, is necessary to the other, is contingent on the other. These divisions in education, knowledge, and adab appear as divisions between body, spirit, and intellect within the pedagogical subject, conceptual divisions that also occur in the social body. Even as al-Tahtawi identifies different kinds of education and knowledge, he still relies on concepts of adab as structuring ethical relationships in the sphere of politics, as well as in the sphere of personal relations. In Manahij al-Albab, the adāb ʿasriyya of the title refers to “modern literatures” or “modern mores” as a curriculum for the formation of Egyptian hearts and minds.
In his long conclusion to Manahij al-Albab, al-Tahtawi compares the polis and the king to the body and soul (respectively), drawing on classical Islamic metaphors for the hierarchy of political relationships. The 11th- and 12th-century Islamic thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, for example, drew analogies between the adab of the self and the adab of politics: “The relationship of the human spirit to his body is like the ruler to his city or kingdom.”Footnote 66 In Ebrahim Moosa's analysis of this passage, he writes about al-Ghazali's image as a political one, but also as a kind of bodily discipline or adab connected to Islamic ethics of the self, a “hermeneutics of the self.” “The monarch represents the spirit, while the ministers represent the organs and limbs of the body. Just as each minister must fulfill his responsibilities in order for proper and just government to exist, similarly, each bodily limb and faculty must comply with its assigned task to prevent degradation in an individual's behavior and character.”Footnote 67 Al-Tahtawi elaborates on this traditional image from the Islamic discursive tradition, but puts the subject—rather than the ruler—at the heart and soul of politics. There is a perceptible shift to what Foucault calls the capillary forms of power, where “older forms of political authority, radiating outward from singular institutions or zones, or even bodies of sovereignty, are dissolved and dissipated by modern disciplinary practices into capillary forms of power.”Footnote 68
Manahij al-Albab concludes with three interlocking topics: on leadership and leaders (wulāt al-umūr), on the “art of politics,” and on “the rights of the citizens.” Al-Tahtawi returns to the connection between the adab of politics and the adab of body, self, and religion. He uses vivid imagery of a single organism, a human body, in which politics, soul, mind, and body must co-exist harmoniously. Extending the bodily imagery, he puts “public opinion” literally at the heart of politics and in the heart of the king. Public opinion becomes what he calls “a conquering power” or a “conquering sultan,” a sulṭān qāhir, “a power conquering hearts of kings and nobles.” Justice, he writes, is incumbent on rulers and “the power of the people is fortified by complete freedom.”Footnote 69
Al-Tahtawi's discussion blends the two kinds of adab mentioned at the beginning of Manahij al-Albab, the adab of the fulfillment of religious duty and the adab of politics. The king, he says, is the caliph of God on earth, he is accountable to God, but he does need advice from those who understand the revelation or politics. Here al-Tahtawi quotes a hadith: “Religion is advice.” But al-Tahtawi adds another dimension: religion is advice to the self. “The human being has in his spirit [fī nafsihi, also ‘in himself’] a court that applies laws to its owner, and this court is the conscience [al-dhimma] that is the spirit of censure or of reassurance [‘a censorious self or the reassuring self’], it is a judge that does not accept bribes.”Footnote 70 The king should act like others, in harmony with what is right for his own self and soul and for his umma. Echoing passages from Tilimak,Footnote 71 he argues that the king is like an ordinary man who must listen to his heart and the light of truth that shines there. This is the adab of justice, of acting in accordance with the heart, with righteous will, and with conscience. This adab is not just the adab of kings, it is the adab of the common people (al-ʿāmma) who act in accordance with the proper adab of religious duty, which is also the proper adab of politics. In this, the king, al-Tahtawi reiterates several times, “is like others.” He, “like others,” has a conscience that rules over his heart. Even as al-Tahtawi reiterates this classical image of “kingly influence,” the moral power of public opinion is “embodied in the heart of kings.”Footnote 72 By making public opinion the conscience at the heart of the king, he reverses the traditional model, making the people the soul of a righteous politics and putting justice in the hearts of the people.
Adab, al-Tahtawi says in the introduction to Manahij al-Albab, stems from justice. “The conscience is the rule of justice, instilling an aversion to oppression and injustice. It epitomizes fear of God on high, in its very existence it brings kings to justice.”Footnote 73 This adab is also an adab of rights and duties that structure the king's relationship to his subjects and vice versa. Discussing the king's accountability to the people, al-Tahtawi outlines rights that the king must not transgress, because he must not transgress “the limits of God.”Footnote 74 These rights—of equality in laws, freedoms, and protections of self and property—are the foundation of kingdoms.Footnote 75 Al-Tahtawi could not stress enough the importance of education and pedagogy to the inculcation of this adab. His own grammars (and al-Marsafi's after him) were developed to make the Arabic language more accessible to a wider reading public. It is a subject that he took up in his subsequent work al-Murshid al-Amin, the “righteous guide” for girls and boys. In this he becomes the “mentor” not to the king (as in Tilimak), but to a new generation of students constituted not by the elite, but ideally by the “public citizenry” to which he constantly refers, the boys and girls, the rich and poor.
THE ADAB OF RIGHTS
Al-Murshid al-Amin was published in the midst of Ismaʿil's initiatives to expand and reform public education. The book is a theoretical and methodological treatise on the nature of not just education (al-tarbiya wa-l-taʿlīm), but also education's role in shaping the social body (al-hayʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya) and the nation (al-waṭan). In al-Murshid al-Amin, al-Tahtawi lays out an interconnected vision of adab—the adab of home, family, and body; the adab of the sunna of religion; and the adab of public life. Parallel sections on education in the family and public education introduce parallel concepts of rights and duties that structure the adab of different spheres. Through the literary structure of his text, the “rights of kinship”—taken from Islamic law—are used to map the public rights of citizenship. In this way, al-Tahtawi maps—or translates—the adab of one sphere into the adab of another. He does this by eschewing the division of spheres into binaries (of private and public), instead showing how one informs the other. The section entitled “Fi Umum al-Qaraba wa-Huquq Baʿdahum ʿala Baʿd” (In Kinship Communities and the Rights of Some over Others) describes the reciprocal rights and duties of parents and children, comparing this relationship to the relationship between the ʿulamaʾ and the mutaʿallimin, teachers and learners. There are two main features of this relationship—the first one is of natural and instinctual feelings of love that come from the emotions (jumlat al-wijdāniyyāt).Footnote 76 The second feature—of justice and fairness (al-ʿadl wa-l-inṣāf)—is usually the language used to describe the moral duties incumbent on the ruler with respect to the ruled, but is now used to describe the relationship between parents and child. This system of adab balances the rights and duties between parents and child, teachers and students, the ruler and the ruled. In capillary form, al-Tahtawi reorients justice and fairness as a virtue cultivated not just among princes, but also in schools, in the home, and in the family. Through this allegorical model, he takes classical understandings of rights between husband and wife, parents and children, and turns it into a model of political governance. The adab of the family becomes the place for inculcating new kinds of political subjectivities.
In subsequent sections, al-Tahtawi outlines the specific rights of the children first and then the rights of the parents. His discussion of wilāya, or guardianship, is two things at once: a discussion of the parents’ wilāya of the family; and a discussion of the sovereign power of the ruler and of government. “Justice and fairness” mediates the relationship between parents and children, between teacher and student, and between the ruler and the ruled. Al-Tahtawi's discussion of wilāya is deftly argued, almost allegorical. Even as he separates out the “private” and “public” domains, family (qaraba) and homeland (waṭan), he conceptually connects them through a shared set of ethics, ethics connected in the revelation, the word of God, Qurʾan, Sunna, and related adāb.
Al-Murshid al-Amin returns to the topic of limits on the king's authority. Any act on the part of the ruler not in conformity with God's will (or in conformity with his own hidden desires for victory) is illegitimate. This rule is bound by God, by the foundations of religion, by law, by religious people (al-khalq al-maḥmūd) guided by revelation and intelligence, and love in the hearts of the people. Al-Tahtawi closes this section with a discussion of “brotherly love,” connecting the microcosm of family and home to the macrocosm of the polity. Parents must treat their children with equality, he says, whether male or female, rich or poor. While arguing for accountability on the part of the parent/ruler, he is also describing the rights of the children/ruled, their freedom, equality, and fraternity as governed by the divine law of “justice and fairness.” This is not just divine law, al-Tahtawi says, but law that is as natural and instinctual as a mother's love for her child, as the mercy and compassion with which she treats her own children.
When al-Tahtawi begins talking about the nation, he describes it in vividly familial terms, of nests, umbilical cords, birth, family, nurturing. The nation, he writes,
is the human's nest in which he grows up and from which he is produced, the point of connection with his family, his umbilical cord. It is the country that raises him and educates him; it is his nourishment and his air. Its breath raised him and its amulets adorned him. Abu ʿUmru bin al-ʿAlaʾ said: “Among the things that point to a man's freedom and the nobility of his instinct (gharīza) is his tenderness toward his homeland.”Footnote 77
Al-Tahtawi identifies the principal characteristics of the “son of the homeland” through a system of rights and duties, like the rights and duties that structure the family. The duties of the nation to its people are like that of the father to his son: the nation protects the citizen. The relationship between the citizen and the nation is like that between son and father: one defends the other. Each has his rights and each has his duties. One cannot ask for rights without performing duties. The meaning of a “son deep rooted in his nation,” al-Tahtawi says, is that “he enjoys the rights of his country, and the greatest of these rights is complete freedom incarnate in society.”Footnote 78 But this citizen is only free insomuch as he follows the law of the nation; this freedom is contingent on “obedience to the foundations of his country, requiring his nation to safeguard the enjoyment of civil rights [al-ḥuqūq al-madaniyya].”Footnote 79 Only then will he be considered a member of the social body, which evokes classical images of the relationship of the ruler to the ruled, the monarch to his kingdom, or the sovereign to his city imagined as the relationship between different parts of the body. When a citizen enjoys these rights and performs them, he feels he is a member of this body. In the past, some have been denied this function, have been unable to speak or act freely, unable to defend the dictates of shariʿa, unable to disagree with the monarch, unable to write on politics, and unable to freely express their opinions. But now, he says, things have changed.
In order for God's justice and fairness to be preserved, the ruler is not just subject to God, but also to the men of religion and knowledge who will hold him accountable for the legitimacy and justice of his actions. The ʿulamaʾ assume the position of ensuring the justice of rule, and hence the rights of the ruled. The relationship between the ʿulamaʾ and the mutaʿallimīn, the teachers and the students, is modeled on the relationship between parent and child, ruler and ruled. The ʿulamaʾ assume their own place as governors, as judges in the courts, as advisors, as interpreters of adab, and as instructors of hearts and minds. The ʿulamaʾ are the Mentors, al-murshid al-amīn, the authorized guide of the title. The mutaʿallimīn are no longer the princes in the “mirror of the princes” adab, but are now the public at large. These learners, these students, are no longer just the male elite, but are the poor as much as the rich, the girls as much as the boys.
Foucault observes how power operates simultaneously through different spheres, both private and public, in what he refers to as the “rule of double conditioning.” They are not “two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic),” nor are they completely the same “as if the one were only the enlarged projection or the miniaturization of the other . . . The father in the family is not the ‘representative’ of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. The family does not duplicate society, just as society does not imitate the family.”Footnote 80 Instead, they work through an overall strategy of “double conditioning” toward the transformation of society, functioning partly through the powerful, ancestral trope of kinship. A generation of writers imagining the cultivation of political subjectivities in the intimate domain would follow in al-Tahtawi's wake, drawing on the powerful trope of kinship as a means of inculcating self-government—and all that it implied of freedom, rights, duties, and disciplines. For al-Tahtawi, as for those who followed him, this freedom was brought about through the discipline of adab, a system of rights and duties intimately connected to a sense of Islamic justice, to an Islamic politics, and to a politics of the home.
In al-Tahtawi there is no strict division between private and public, between the realm of kinship relations and the realm of political relations. Even though these are identified separately in al-Murshid al-Amin, analogies and parallels integrally joined the two realms. The mediating factor, al-Tahtawi argues, is the conscience, heart, mind, and spirit cognizant of rights and duties, good and bad, laws and ethics, and performing adab in body and actions. Similarly, he sees no separation of mind, body, and soul. Instead these elements interact in concerted ways to produce the ethical subject that is the citizen of the good nation, thriving, healthy, righteous, efficient, worthy, and pious. The mind, al-Tahtawi repeatedly says, is in the heart. “The light of truth shines on the heart”; “the mind is in the heart and has rays that connect to the brain”; God “made the shining mind in the human heart a mirror of knowledge.”Footnote 81
In these writings, we see the recentering of politics onto the subject, the rooting of ethics in the individual conscience, and the impulse toward truth and knowledge in the instinct of every child born. Through this insistence on the mind, heart, and conscience of every individual, al-Tahtawi constructs an image of like individuals, bound equally under the law, and free insofar as they can govern themselves and adhere to mutually accepted law. Al-Tahtawi articulates these rights less within a French political framework than in the framework of Islamic adab. He draws on specifically Islamic concepts of rights and duties and of laws and leadership grounded in a body of Islamic literature, in the Arabic language, and in the linguistic sciences.
Mitchell argues that al-Tahtawi articulates a new art of political science, one that introduced “new methods of working upon the body,” “a process to be conceived according to the same processes as schooling, and was to work in the same way upon both body and mind.”Footnote 82 But al-Tahtawi's three types of tarbiya—the adab of home, the adab of the sunna, and the adab of public life—closely echo Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's understanding of the sovereign's relationship to his subjects in Mizan al-ʿAmal. These include “three interlocking aspects: the disciplining of the soul [tahdhīb al-nafs], the governance of the body [siyāsat al-badan], and administration of justice [riʿaya al-ʿadl].”Footnote 83 But now they are inculcated into the common man, as new conceptions of personal and political liberty reconfigured earlier conceptions of authority and governance. It is no coincidence that al-Ghazali's Revival of Religious Sciences was republished at the same time as al-Murshid al-Amin on the newly privatized printing press at Bulaq.
FREEDOM IS JUST ANOTHER WORD
The ʿUrabi uprising came in the wake of the intellectual mobilization partly set in motion by al-Tahtawi's writings, his educational reform initiatives, his work to spread literacy, his contribution to the nationalist press, and his pivotal role in disseminating print media at Bulaq. The intelligentsia and the press played a critical role in galvanizing public opinion against Tawfiq, who had replaced his more progressive brother, the modernizing reformer Ismaʿil.Footnote 84 Al-Tahtawi's junior colleagues Muhammad ʿAbduh and Husayn al-Marsafi were critical players in mobilizing public opinion.Footnote 85 Al-Marsafi published his al-Kalim al-Thaman (Eight Words) on the eve of the ʿUrabi revolution, defining a series of terms that were in current circulation: umma, waṭan, ḥukūma, ʿadl, ẓulm, siyāsa, ḥurriyya, and tarbiya (Islamic community, homeland, government, justice, oppression, politics, freedom, and education). He helped keep alive a set of themes first sketched out by al-Tahtawi about the nature of political community, just rule, freedom, rights, and education for an era of popular mobilization and colonial occupation.
The opening chapter on the umma echoes al-Tahtawi's images of the body politic as a body or a tree. “The umma is like a tree that planted itself in good soil,” al-Marsafi writes, “irrigated with what it needs to grow and flourish, so that it remains of blooming appearance, diverse species, verdant shade, abundant fruits. And when its time is over, it leaves behind others like it.”Footnote 86 Constructing a traditional analogy between the umma and the body, al-Marsafi compares the different parts of society (soldiers, scholars, men of religion, judges, etc.) to the limbs of a body. Adab coordinates the different parts of the body, with each part performing its particular task or function to the best of its abilities, according to the adab of its own discipline. This adab perfects the social body.Footnote 87 The shift from the mamlaka (the kingdom) to the waṭan is accompanied by a shift from the sovereign body of the king to the body of the common man. In defining the homeland, al-Marsafi writes that:
The people (al-ʿāmmī) of the waṭan are like a strip of land that populates the umma, while the elite (al-khāṣṣī) is like its house (maskan, abode, dwelling). The soul is a homeland (waṭan) because it is the house of consciousness; the body is a homeland because it is the house of the soul; clothes are a homeland because they are the house of the body; the house, street, city, region, land, and world all are homelands because they are houses. Each has rights (ḥaqq) that must be recognized, defended, perpetuated, and observed.Footnote 88
In this passage, the waṭan becomes embodied first and foremost in the soul of the common man—moving from his consciousness, body, home, house, and street to the city, land, and world. The elite helps form the “house” that is the waṭan, but they are duty bound to recognize the fundamental rights of its inhabitants. Al-Marsafi's analogy is grounded in traditional conceptions of political relationships, but now the scribes and scholars have a direct role in shaping the common man rather than the prince.
Al-Marsafi's first two keywords, umma and waṭan, have been understood as connoting different kinds of political community, one religious and Islamic and the other the secular nation-state. Waṭan has often been understood as the French idea of patrie, but al-Marsafi uses it in its more classical sense as a dwelling place, an abode, a house, or a refuge. The word connotes a kind of limit that protects, encloses, and joins a habitus of body and home. Al-Marsafi never opposes umma to waṭan, but elucidates them through an overlapping set of tropes. The khāṣṣa, the intellectual elite, builds the foundations of this house. They are the ʿulamaʾ, ʿuqalāʾ, ḥukamāʾ, and bulaghāʾ who interpret language, books, and religion. They help “build a house in the hearts of the public,” a house that will be their waṭan, their abode, their dwelling place.Footnote 89
The performance of adab regulates different parts of the waṭan, coordinating the relationship of one part to another. Al-Marsafi articulates the “right” (ḥaqq) of each part of the waṭan with respect to the other. He begins with the “right of the soul to protect against perceptions that are not beneficial . . . Beneficial perceptions are enough to build that abode of the soul.”Footnote 90 Using al-Tahtawi's language of murshid and albāb, al-Marsafi writes that the “minds of the ʿulamaʾ” are “your guide” (murshid) as the heart and mind (albāb) strive to build “beneficial perceptions that are the structure of the abode” that is the soul. A person must use his mind to become skilled in the art of this building, but also follow a guide. “The ideal ʿulamaʾ guide with virtue, use knowledge to discipline the spirit, adhere to religion and follow its rules, and mix adab and love of goodness in their characters. They command that the revelation be upheld and convey it to the people, until adab was common to all. In this, they epitomize righteous leadership.”Footnote 91
To be trained in adab one must understand language and grammar. Only through grammar will a person be able to properly understand the words of the prophet, the Qurʾan, and the speech of the aslāf (khuṭbat al-aslāf). Through this “picture, the public will arrive at an understanding of the performance of religion.”Footnote 92 The ʿulamaʾ show the way to the soul, which leads to the wellbeing of the life of the body (preserving life, strength, health, vitality, health). Preserving the “right” (ḥaqq) of one leads to the preservation of the “right” of the other, the right of the soul to the right of the body to the right of the house to the right of the world, ensuring the righteousness of these various homelands. But the ʿulamaʾ must teach a set of skills that help inculcate the “proper image of religion” in the bodies of the populace. Al-Marsafi writes about the role of the ʿulamaʾ in teaching “sacred arts” and the “ethics of social relations” (adab al-muʿashara) in the schools.Footnote 93 Similar to al-Tahtawi, the body of the common man, the public citizen, is the model for the waṭan, the plane on which the politics of the homeland plays out.
Al-Marsafi draws on the ʿulamaʾ's traditional role in advising the ruler, but now they advise the people, even as they act as spokesmen and representatives of the population. This ensures fairness and justice, but also preserves the rights (ḥuqūq) of the people. Al-Marsafi describes the ʿulamaʾ as
mediators between the shepherd and the sheep, ambassadors of goodness, preserving and regulating rights (ḥuqūq), the umma must approve them, and unleash their tongues in praise of them. The ʿulamaʾ must defend these rights completely and with integrity . . . They are the mediators of what is in the innermost thoughts and minds of the self, what is between the leader and the led.Footnote 94
The best way to ensure justice, al-Marsafi argues, is through education and “enlightening the understanding of the people” so that they can lead themselves.Footnote 95 In his short chapter on “Justice, Oppression, and Politics,” he turns to a politics of the self, authority over the self, and self-discipline. From there, he moves on to “freedom.”
Freedom for al-Marsafi “is knowledge, honor, obedience [inqiyād], and pride. A person is ignorant if they do not possess these things.”Footnote 96 To enforce this understanding of freedom, the “whip of discipline and correction” should be applied to the erroneous interpretations of the new generation. Inqiyād (obedience, submission, or subservience) seems antithetical to freedom, but it is precisely this kind of disciplinary training that makes the citizen free and cognizant of his rights, rights only secured through discipline and training (taʾdīb). Otherwise, appetites will take over the body and infringe on others’ rights and property. Knowledge is not specific to a certain class of learned people, but is open and available to everyone. Integral to self-government is a rigorous training in adab, in the proper ethics of self-government.
CONCLUSION
The first sentence of al-Tahtawi's last work, al-Murshid al-Amin, published just before his death, opens with adab: “Praise to those who made attaining adab the first habit of hearts and minds [albāb], and peace be upon our lord Muhammad who was given wisdom and the final word, and on his people, his parties, and those who were educated with his adab.”Footnote 97 This opening is an alliterative poetic play (jinās) that follows formalistic rhetorical conventions of rhyming prose: jaʿal kasab al-adab daʾb awwali al-albāb. Here al-Tahtawi connects albāb (hearts and minds) with adab, daʾb (habit), and taʾaddaba (to educate). His use of the word albāb is critical, a word that intimates heart and mind simultaneously, making one inextricable from the other, in stark contradistinction to a mind/body split. The heart becomes the seat of all knowledge, and adab the habit of body, mind, and soul simultaneously. As the “seat of knowledge,” it is with the heart (qulūb) that one “understands,” as in Qurʾan 7:179, 22:46.Footnote 98
Al-Tahtawi organizes al-Murshid al-Amin into sections that treat different kinds of adab: bodily discipline, ethical behavior, linguistic sciences, “scientific literatures,” “literary arts,” and creative “genius.” Only a few scholars—such as Kamran Rastegar and Tarek al-Ariss—have insisted on the primacy of the literary framework of Arabic adab (in how al-Tahtawi draws on the riḥla and the qaṣīda, for example).Footnote 99 In a recent essay, Peter Gran situates al-Tahtawi's writings in the “mirror of the princes” intellectual tradition in Islamic thought, arguing that al-Tahtawi's famous travel narrative about his stay in Paris is less travel literature than a vision of Islamic statecraft.Footnote 100 Yet adab and statecraft in al-Tahtawi are not antithetical. On the contrary, one elucidates the other through a poetics of Islamic politics. With the spread of printing and literacy during the 19th-century nahḍa, adab came to encompass new literary forms that dramatized new kinds of political communities, as much as new kinds of political subjectivities. New kinds of literatures were instrumental to the education and training (al-taʾdīb) of the modern citizen subject, so that s/he could participate in the world of letters and in the civilizational project of nation building. Adab was critical to al-Tahtawi's understanding of the conduct of the modern citizen subject, righteously schooled in the disciplines and ethics of modern political subjectivities, for which Islamic ethics—and Islamic literature—provided a blueprint. In writing about al-Marsafi's Risalat al-Kalim al-Thaman, Timothy Mitchell observes, “Texts too carried their own authority, an authority which mirrored that of politics . . . The proper preservation and interpretation of the authority of writing was in this sense an essential resource of political power.” The purpose of the study of adab “was more political than the term ‘literature’ might suggest . . . Words were not labels that simply named and represented political ideas or objects, but interpretation whose force was to be made real.” Footnote 101 The very preservation—and reinterpretation—of an Arabic and Islamic adab was, in itself, a political act.
Al-Tahtawi's reconceptualization of ḥurriyya (freedom) and al-ʿadl wa-l-inṣaf (justice and fairness) have had an enduring impact on political theologies in Egypt. His intellectual legacy can be traced to the present through thinkers such as Husayn al-Marsafi, Muhammad ʿAbduh, Muhammad al-Khidr Husayn, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Jawish, Sayyid Qutb, Anwar Jindi, Muhammad ʿImara, and Hasan al-Hanafi.Footnote 102 All of these thinkers elaborated Islamic ideas of freedom and justice for their own political battles over the course of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Al-Tahtawi's pioneering contribution forged the way for contemporary conceptions of the moral authority of popular sovereignty in Islam. Intellectuals connected to the ṣaḥwa, the Islamic awakening of the 20th century, have drawn extensively on nahḍa ideas of freedom and justice to legitimize their own political strugglesFootnote 103—concepts that remain salient to Egyptian politics today.
