The Expansion of Knowledge: Education and Translation in 19th-Century Egypt

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

This poster presentation will elucidate how Egyptians indigenized European knowledge and justified its inclusion in establishing a modern education system. Between the French and British occupations, Muhammad Ali Pasha (r. 1805-48) and his successors ruled Egypt as an autonomous Ottoman province. In order to establish and maintain that autonomy from both Ottoman and European imperial interests, Muhammad Ali sought European technical expertise to aid in the rapid modernization of the country - reorganizing the military, building new infrastructure, and reforming the civil service. Establishing a state-of-the-art education system was fundamental to this process, and yet it remains a neglected subject in contemporary historical scholarship on the modernization project initiated under Pasha’s rule.

This presentation will analyze transmission and translation of particular European knowledge as a part of the educational reforms initiated by Muhammad Ali and continued by his successors, through an examination of the translations produced by the Egyptian School of Languages, or Madrasat Al-Alsun. First operating from 1836 to 1851, Madrasat Al-Alsun trained Egyptian students in the art of translation. Under the directorship of educational reformer and translator Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), the school also operated as a translation bureau, through which European texts necessary for the newly reorganized system of technical schools were selected for their utility and translated into Arabic, a process through which this “useful” knowledge was indigenized and made both morally sound and legible for the local context. Using published archival sources and bureaucratic memos housed at the National Archives of Egypt, catalogs of Arabic published materials, and contemporary secondary source accounts, this presentation will catalog the translated texts by subject matter, in order to map what kinds of knowledge were deemed useful, how these definitions shifted as requirements of the government changed, and how the translation process legitimized this knowledge as permissible within the local context.

The poster will also analyze the impact of the proliferation of this “useful” knowledge on discourse about the importance of modern education through an examination of the first Egyptian educational journal Rawdat al-Madaris (The Garden of the Schools) from 1870 to 1877. This journal was edited by prominent alumni of the two organized educational missions sent to Paris during Muhammad Ali’s reign, championing an ambitious scope including any intellectual subject, but especially those were morally sound, classified in Arabic as “ ’ilm.” Focusing mostly on newly introduced European technical and humanist matters, the articles in Rawdat al-Madaris provide a unique lens on the legitimation methods used by reformers educated abroad to advocate for the inclusion of indigenized European knowledge and pedagogy when expanding the public education system. Through an engagement with the debates on education in this period, I will unpack how Egyptians used local forms of knowledge to rationalize the inclusion of indigenized European knowledge to construct a new understanding of permissible knowledge.

Understanding how and why particular European knowledge was chosen and “translated” – both literally and figuratively - for use in the larger technical educational system sheds light on what Egyptians defined as useful and modern in this period of rapid change. The introduction of this knowledge was not only essential to the localization of educational practice in Egypt, but it also made what Egyptians deemed useful available for consumption in the greater Middle East, laying the groundwork for larger literary, religious, philosophical and political trends.

Author

• Archana Gubbi Prakash, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign