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Indira Falk Gesink is Associate Professor of History at
Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. She received her Ph.D.
in History from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in
2000 and lived in Egypt in 1995–96 and 1998.
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LIBRARY OF MODERN RELIGION
1. Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith
Jonathan Benthall
978 1 84511 718 4
2. Knowing the Unknowable: Science and Religions on God and the Universe
John Bowker [Ed]
978 1 84511 757 3
3. Sufism Today: Heritage and Tradition in the Global Community
Catharina Raudvere & Leif Stenberg [Eds.]
978 1 84511 762 7
4. Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi’ism
Abbas Amanat
978 1 84511 124 3
5. Global Pentecostalism: Encounters with Other Religious Traditions
David Westerlund
978 1 84511 877 8
6. Dying for Faith: Religiously Motivated Violence in the Contemporary World
Madawi Al-Rasheed & Marat Shterin [Eds.]
978 1 84511 686 6
7. The Hindu Erotic: Exploring Hinduism and Sexuality
David Smith
978 1 84511 361 2
8. The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies
Hugh B. Urban
978 1 84511 873 0
9. Jewish Identities in Iran:
Resistance and Conversion to Islam and the Baha’i Faith
Mehrdad Amanat
978 1 84511 891 4
10. Islamic Reform and Conservatism:
Al-Azhar and the Evolution of Modern Sunni Islam
Indira Falk Gesink
978 1 84511 936 2
11. Muslim Women’s Rituals: Authority and Gender in the Islamic World
Catharina Raudvere and Margaret Rausch
978 1 84511 643 9
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ISLAMIC REFORM
AND CONSERVATISM
Al-Azhar and the Evolution of
Modern Sunni Islam
INDIRA FALK GESINK
TAURIS ACADEMIC STUDIES
an imprint of
I.B. Tauris Publishers
LONDON • NEWYORK
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To
my parents,
Dr. Arthur E. Falk and Dr. Nancy Auer Falk,
For raising me to the academic life,
and
Dr. David Ede,
For teaching me to see the edges of my boxes
and think outside them.
Published in 2010 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2010 Indira Falk Gesink
The right of Indira Falk Gesink to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may
not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Modern Religion 10
ISBN: 978 1 84511 936 2
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress catalog card: available
Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press
from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Transliteration viii
1. Introduction 1
2. Religion and the State: Al-Azhar During Muhammad ‘Ali’s Rule 9
3. Order and Disorder: The Evolving Critique of Madrasa
Education (1834–1870) 37
4. Progress, Nationalism, and the Negative Construction of
al-Azhar ‘Ulama (1870–1882) 59
5. A Conservative Defense of Taqlid 89
6. Efficiency, Mission, and the Meaning of ‘Ilm (1882–1899) 111
7. The Syrian Riwaq Cholera Riot 143
8. Muhammad ‘Abduh and Ijtihad 165
9. Who Reformed al-Azhar? 197
10. Conclusions 231
Notes 237
Selected Bibliography 279
Index 293
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have completed this book without help. Grants from the
National Security Education Program (1995–1996) and the American
Research Center in Egypt (1998) supported my research in Egypt. Fellow-
ships from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and summer
grants as well as a Research and Publications Grant from Baldwin-Wallace
College in Berea, Ohio, funded the writing process. Many colleagues and
friends contributed ideas or read various chapters of the manuscript, includ-
ing Engin D. Akarli, Ana de Freitas Boe, Derek Hirst, Ahmet Karamustafa,
Victor LeVine, M. Nabil Nofal, Timothy Parsons, Mark Pegg, Christopher
L. Pepus, Mustafa Ramadan, Steven Siry, Laura Westhoff, and last but not
least, my parents, Arthur and Nancy Falk. I am particularly indebted to
Kenneth Cuno and David Commins, who read and commented on the
final manuscript, and to my husband, Greg, without whose patience and
support the book would not exist. All errors are my own.
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
I use a simplified transliteration system for Arabic and Turkish words, in
which qstands for qaf,ghfor ghayn,dhfor dhal,and so on. I leave out dia-
critical marks except for the ‘ for ‘ayn and ’ for initial hamza,and drop the
h for ta marbuta and the final hamza of frequently used terms, such as
‘ulama’.I retain Anglicized spellings and plurals for certain words (Cairo for
al-Qahira, fatwas for fatawa) and render names of Ottoman Egyptian
administrators in their common Arabicized forms. Colloquial Arabic
phrases are rendered phonetically to clearly distinguish them from phrases
in classical Arabic.
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1
INTRODUCTION
Picture this scene: Just across the street from the Khan al-Khalili, Cairo’s
medieval commercial district, overtopped by brick apartment buildings and
surrounded by the rush of human activity, a student leads a reading group
on a medieval theology text. He stands under a portico in al-Azhar mosque
and madrasa complex, one of the most august institutions of Sunni Islam-
ic education. The student presides as if he were a teacher, using written
commentaries by other authors to interpret and evaluate the text’s meaning.
It is not unusual for advanced students to teach, but the faculty considers
the ideas in this text controversial and has not taught them for several
decades. A high-ranking professor sees the student and challenges his
authority to teach such controversial subjects. The student replies that he
knows the material and is willing to be examined on the spot if necessary.
The student, Muhammad ‘Abduh, goes on to become a pioneering journal-
ist, a revolutionary, an educational reformer, and finally the most influen-
tial legal authority of his time. Years later, ‘Abduh remembers exchanges like
this with bitterness. He tells a journalist that the teaching methods used at
that school harmed his intellect and that he spent years sweeping his mind
clean of the school’s influences, without total success.1 He perceives his
society as struggling to free itself from intellectual fetters of the past, crip-
pled by its leading scholars’ unwillingness to accept new ideas or contem-
plate controversial ones, and as a result unable to effectively counter Euro-
pean imperial control. Using the newly flourishing Arabic journalism that
he and other reformers pioneered, he relentlessly pillories those whose
authority depends on upholding the status quo. His professor, Muhammad
‘Ilish, and other leaders of al-Azhar’s scholarly community respond that the
primary threat to Islamic society is internal division and that ‘Abduh’s pro-
posed solutions would further divide and weaken it.
Description:The famed reform debates at al-Azhar Madrasa in nineteenth-century Cairo -- one of the most influential centers of religious study in Sunni Islam -- were enormously influential for twentieth-century Islamic thought. In this book Indira Gesink argues that narratives of these debates overemphasize the
