There is gold here. Sheikh Rifaa Al-Tahtawi came to this conclusion when he
was in Paris. He had been appointed the chaplain of one of the first
educational missions (composed of a regiment of the Egyptian army) that Egypt’s
early 19th-century ruler Mohamed Ali Pasha had sent to learn about and transfer
knowledge and technologies from France to Egypt.
اضافة اعلان
Tahtawi did not have a curriculum to follow. He was
in France to guide the students in religious matters while they were studying
in this Western land with its strange, and for many, corrupting, traditions and
ways of life. Quickly, however, Al-Tahtawi became a student not of any one
discipline but of French culture and way of life in the early 19th century.
He did not need to be convinced that Egypt (and with
it the entire “East”) needed to learn from the West. That had already been a
given since Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt at the very end of the 18th century. Tahtawi’s
main insight was that the Egyptian, and the entire Eastern, worldview at the
time needed to be widened to include advancements that the West had developed
and which, in his view, were crucially needed back home.
He focused on his job, which was education. When he
returned to Egypt and was later given the responsibility to establish the
country’s first bureau of translation, he launched and directed one of the most
impressive waves of Arabization the region has ever seen. At least 2,000 books
ranging from literature to military studies were translated (largely from
French) into Arabic.
The objective was not merely quantity, but also
diversity. Tahtawi’s approach was almost to replicate his own Parisian
education and to present it to those who would benefit from the immense body of
knowledge that his bureau of translation was making available.
He had curated his own education in Paris in a
process that was not dissimilar to Al-Azhar’s classic form of learning in which
“the seeker of knowledge” was expected to acquaint himself with different
disciplines and schools of thought without a rigid curriculum imposed on him,
but through sailing into “the ocean of knowledge”, as Sheikh Hassan Al-Attar,
Tahtawi’s mentor at Al-Azhar, put it.
As a result, Tahtawi presented his audience with
19th-century French military thought and technical engineering work as well as
with the poetry of Racine and treatises on philosophy. He translated
commentaries on French law as well as Voltaire’s satires.
But his main focus was political philosophy. He was
taken by Montesquieu and Rousseau. From the former, Tahtawi emphasized,
primarily in commentaries in the newspaper that he came to edit, the idea of a
strong and secular state. This could not have been timelier, as Tahtawi was
working during the later period of Mohamed Ali Pasha’s reign in the 1830s and
1840s when the latter was cementing the new state he had begun building in
Egypt three decades earlier.
This state, though retaining Islam as an overarching
civilizational frame of reference, was edging toward secularism in its laws, in
equality between its citizens, and in minimizing the role of religion in public
affairs.
The Pasha was also a foreigner who had come to rule
Egypt without having any prior connection to the land or its people and with
only a nominal allegiance to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul whose armies
Mohamed Ali’s son Ibrahim had also crushed.
As a result, Mohamed Ali’s state needed its
legitimacy to be continually buttressed, and at the core of that legitimacy, as
Mohamed Ali himself saw it, was the modernization project he was leading.
Tahtawi was not just a functionary in this project.
He was a true believer. As a result, in translation after translation, and in
article after article, and using Montesquieu’s thought, he propagated the idea
that the state that Mohamed Ali was building entailed through the objective
behind it — of becoming strong, modern, and secular — the basis of its
legitimacy and why Egyptians must be loyal to it.
Through his translations and his writings, Tahtawi no doubt intentionally propagated the idea that the collective consciousness must be opened up to new horizons of thought.
Tahtawi was not a classic example of a scholar
subservient to a ruler, of which Arabic and Islamic history is full. He was
awed by Mohamed Ali and his project and by that of his son, Ibrahim Pasha, who
wanted to turn the nascent Egyptian state into an empire in the eastern
Mediterranean. He was convinced that Mohamed Ali’s modernization of the country
was the sole means to give rise in Egypt to the strength and advancement and
civilized ways of living he had known in Paris. He was also a strong believer
in a unique Egyptian identity that was vastly different from any pan-Arabic or
Islamic one. A side project he began but did not finish was a succinct history
of Egypt anchoring its identity in the pharaonic period.
Yet, Tahtawi was also a classic functionary for the
regime in prioritizing stability and the control of the masses over political
freedom. Despite his commentaries on Rousseau’s “social contract”, the contract
he believed in and promoted was one based on the ruler leading the country
toward progress, improved living conditions, and instilling a vague sense of
“glory”. In return, the people were expected to be docile, willing, and ready
to be mobilized in war, as well as to endure acute economic difficulties.
Tahtawi was certainly an early adopter of the idea
of Mohamed Ali Pasha as a “historic leader”, the “second great Macedonian” he
called him, in reference to the first, in other words Alexander the Great.
Tahtawi entrenched the idea of “great men” among the first generation of
Egyptians to be exposed to modern Western thought, with such great men being
selected by the Divine to save their country. In the case of Mohamed Ali, the
country was his by possession much more than by belonging.
Tahtawi’s adoption and promotion of the “great men”
idea and the system of governing that flows from it also flew in the face of
his fascination with liberal strands of French political philosophy,
particularly Voltaire’s rejection of absolute authority and rigid systems of
thought.
Given the reverence that Egyptian society and cultural
circles accorded to Tahtawi in the middle of the 19th century, he doubtless
contributed to entrenching in modern Egyptian culture the idea that the ruler
is above the will of the people. But he also made another contribution and one
that proved tremendously valuable to modern Egyptian culture. He saw and subtly
argued that the Egyptian, and for that matter also Eastern and Islamic,
consciousness would have to realize that its sense of self-sufficiency had led
to acute problems over the centuries.
Through his translations and his writings, Tahtawi
no doubt intentionally propagated the idea that the collective consciousness
must be opened up to new horizons of thought.
He sowed the notion that reference points dating
back centuries were no longer enough and that frames of reference needed to be
expanded to include what non-Egyptians and non-Muslims had achieved in
centuries in which Egypt and the entire East had lagged behind.
He educated his audience into understanding that
there was a wealth of knowledge that could be gained from learning, thinking
about, and assessing the West’s experiences and achievements and not only in
the natural and military sciences, but also and equally importantly in the
humanities and social sciences.
He put this beautifully in the title of his most
famous book “Extracting Gold from Summarizing Paris” (a title which rhymes in
Arabic). The gold was the knowledge, explicit and implicit, that Egyptians
needed to open their eyes to, learn, and internalize.
By pioneering the
extraction of that gold, Tahtawi earned his place in the history of Egypt’s
modern culture as a true teacher and as a leader of thought and action whose
work has had a lasting impact on society.
Tarek Osman is the author of Islamism: A History of
Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010). A version of this article
appeared in print in the October 13, 2022, edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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