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Al-Tahtawi’s Trip to Paris in Light of Recent Historical Analysis

Travel Literature or a Mirror for Princes?

PETER GRAN

RIFA‘AH RAFI‘ AL-TAHTAWI’S Takhlis (al-Tahtawi 1834) is traditionally studied as travel literature not so much because of its contribution to that genre but because of its content.¹ Its importance rests on the fact or, more precisely, on the scholarly assumption of its being an early if not the first example of the Arab discovery of modern Europe. This assumption affects how the book has long been read. The present chapter, basing itself on recent developments in Egyptian studies, proposes that the Takhlis might be better understood as an example of Mirror for Princes literature or advice literature with the travel dimension being a subordinate feature.

Modern historical analysis of al-Tahtawi’s period in Egyptian history (1801–73) suggests that Egyptians and Europeans were acquainted with each other and that therefore al-Tahtawi would not have been traveling into the unknown as has long been claimed. Rather he would have been making a trip (1826–31) to a fairly familiar destination on behalf of a ruler whom he, of course, supported but about whose policies he nonetheless had some criticisms. This is why the “mirror for princes” characterization of the Takhlis is more useful than the rihlah (trip or book of travels) one. It allows us to understand why certain aspects of France were of interest to him and not others, why, for example, Paris and not other cities, why the parliamentary tradition and not the Bourbon Restoration. It was all related to his perception of Muhammad Ali’s policies in Egypt.

To pursue this line of interpretation, one needs to make a number of claims about Egyptian history, claims about what kind of system was emerging in Egypt at this time as well as claims about what al-Tahtawi’s position was in it and therefore what sort of advice he would have been likely to give and why. This chapter spells these out. Egypt, it is suggested, is not an example of an Oriental Despotism as has generally been assumed, but rather an example of an “Italian Road” regime, a description that makes use of a model of political analysis developed by the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci. Al-Tahtawi’s place in this regime was that of a “Southern Intellectual,” the Takhlis becoming a Sa‘idi (Upper Egyptian) Mirror for Princes, one that was written for Muhammad Ali Pasha.

To pursue this line of interpretation, this chapter is divided into sections. Following an opening section introducing the subject of hegemony analysis as it would relate to Egypt, the second section turns to the economic and political dynamics of Egypt in the period of al-Tahtawi’s life. The third section then proceeds to consider Egyptian cultural history and al-Tahtawi’s place in it within this set of dynamics. The next sections examine the wider implications of adopting an Italian Road model for the study of Egyptian history by addressing the period after 1860 and the institution of the Southern Intellectual as a part of that wider history. Once this “groundwork” has been laid, al-Tahtawi’s Takhlis will best be understood, I propose, as a mirror for princes of the sort just mentioned. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the existing historiography on al-Tahtawi. What I establish is that, over the past century, there has been a rise and then more recently a decline of the traditional rihlah (book of travels) paradigm. This article can be understood as a part of the latter trend.

Hegemony Analysis with Reference to Egypt

Hegemony analysis is an approach to analyzing political dynamics that brings together insights from politics, sociology, and history. Hegemony analysis differs from the traditional study of government in fields such as political science not only by including the dialectic of ruler and ruled but including the strategies employed by both. Writers who have worked with the concept of hegemony have produced a considerable body of writing (Bocock 1986). Traditionally, the subject has had a liberal center of gravity owing much to the work of Max Weber and a Marxist one owing much to the work of Gramsci. With the rise of globalist and transnationalist analysis in recent years, writers have attempted to fuse these approaches, doing so, for example, in fields such as neo-Gramscian international relations.² My work follows this tack in a general way, but it is centered in the discipline of history and political economy and not international relations. Despite the existence of transnational linkages as a part of the world system, it is assumed that the nation-state remains the political backbone of capitalism. Therefore, one needs to inquire into the particular form of the nation-state at hand. Al-Tahtawi’s trip to France, one might understand, does not have the same significance as those of his Moroccan and Lebanese contemporaries, individuals who also wrote about Paris, in part at least because the form of hegemony of Egypt was different from those of Morocco and Lebanon.

I spell all this out because the study of hegemony in the subfield of Middle Eastern history remains a fairly new endeavor. Until now, the study of hegemony is more commonly found in the study of Europe and in parts of the Third World other than in the Middle East. In the study of Egypt, scholars have generally assumed that hegemony simply meant Oriental Despotism. Overwhelmingly, scholarly writing on modern Egypt follows the Oriental Despotism model. Following the Oriental Despotism model, the later eighteenth century in Egypt becomes a period of chaos and decline followed by a partial awakening with the coming of Napoleon in 1798. This in turn is followed by the reconstruction of a modernized version of the Oriental Despot system. The study of hegemony in the sense intended here, which is termed “Italian Road” hegemony, calls this tradition into question.

Following an Italian Road approach, the study of Egypt (1760–1860) witnessed a deepening contradiction between the North and the South in Egypt, one that would play an even larger role in the years that were to follow. It is this point that leads to the characterization of Egypt as Italian Road. In other words, in this period, the strategy of maintaining order by playing class against region had come into being. Eventually it would become a fully developed system based on playing the Northern worker off against the Southern peasant. This is the main feature of the Italian Road form of hegemony. By 1860 the outlines of a system of this sort were apparent with the coming of Khedive Isma‘il.

Economic and Political Dynamics in Egypt in the Period of al-Tahtawi’s Life

Al-Tahtawi was born in 1801 in the midst of considerable changes in Egypt. The state that had existed in the last years of the eighteenth century based on the indigenous mercantile capitalist sector had suffered a blow as the world market forced its way into the country and redefined its economics and politics. As this took place, there was a protracted social crisis; many individuals were driven into poverty. As this crisis grew, it gradually reached threatening proportions, and the existing political system lost its legitimacy. As a result, Muhammad Ali, an Albanian adventurer, was able to rise to power. Growing up when he did, al-Tahtawi had no real choice but to work for Muhammad Ali.

As late as the middle of the eighteenth century, this dramatic series of events could hardly have been anticipated. Up to that point, artisanal production, a strategic location on trade and pilgrimage routes, renowned institutions of learning, and the potentiality of producing products sought in Europe and elsewhere had supported what might have been a transformation from mercantilism to modern capitalism of a very different sort—had circumstances allowed.

The leading sector of the economy, scholarship shows, was that rooted in the artisanal guilds and merchant groupings, the two often linked together through their overlapping memberships in Sufi turuq (mystical confraternities or orders). These were dynamic institutions; they were continuously adjusting to market conditions, continuously in motion. Some stayed in a single location; others spread through Egypt and beyond. In modern scholarship, religionists lead the way in analyzing these developments. In their scholarship, the spread of the Sufi orders has been observed as an “Islamic Enlightenment.”³ Certainly for historians, the spread of the orders over vast distances, such as the Khalwati order, draws one’s attention. For example, at one point in the eighteenth century, the Khalwatis expanded all the way from Cairo to Upper Egypt. Upper Egypt was opening up; there were new opportunities. Ali Bey al-Kabir (1728–73), the ruler in Cairo, had recently defeated the leader of Upper Egypt, the Hawwara chief Shaikh al-Arab Hammam (1709–69). The region as a whole could therefore potentially be exploited by the North of Egypt (Ahmad 1987). Sufis, local merchants, and others all began to arrive.

As this North-South dynamic was progressing, a deepening struggle among groups seeking to dominate the Egyptian market in the North (Haridi 2004) was also occurring. The outcome of that struggle, as earlier noted, was one that would bring in world market forces and new political actors. In effect, as the indigenous capitalist sector fought it out and lost and the Mamluks went into crisis, commercial minorities allied to European powers became the indispensable middlemen benefiting from the fact that Europe opposed the formation of Muslim merchant establishments not only in Europe but even in Egypt. As a result, the Greek, Jewish, Armenian, and Syrian Christian communities in Egypt grew in importance. From this period of the later eighteenth century onward, it might also be noted that rulers in Egypt chose to play or were forced to play a facilitating role in these developments as well. They allowed the indigenous production and trade to wither away; they allowed artisanal workshops to collapse, leaving many workers unemployed. Foreign goods were allowed to flood the markets.

A question that the scholarly literature has never adequately addressed is that of “why?” Moving beyond older explanations of decline on cultural grounds, it seems that what took place can be better understood in material terms. In this period in history, rulers were becoming a part of the worldwide phenomenon of the “Rise of the Rich.” With the new options created by the world market at this point, rulers stood to gain handsomely by collaborating with other rulers worldwide against even their own people. Through this system of mutual cooperation, each ruler could finally introduce a system of capitalist relations and, in doing so, derive far more wealth and power than they could from the older mercantilist system of tribute and taxes prevailing up to that point in time. To effect this transformation, rulers made available to each other sophisticated weapons and technology, loans, and credit, not to mention luxury goods useful as bribes. Progressively from this period, rulers worldwide appear to grow richer and more powerful in relation to their own people, a trend continuing until our own day. This was the case in Egypt. If the Ottoman Walis of the sixteenth century lived in barracks in the Citadel in Cairo, the leading eighteenth-century Mamluks built lavish private homes. Later, the nineteenth-century rulers built palaces; twentieth-century rulers added to the palaces a variety of villas, chalets, and foreign residences.

Capitalist development has always been by its nature uneven. In the case of Egypt, political and economic factors favored the development of the Delta (North Egypt) over that of the Sa‘id (the South of Egypt, also called Upper Egypt). In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Delta exported rice and wheat to France; France in turn sold Egypt finished cloth and luxuries. The balance of trade favored the Egyptians to an extreme degree, and this imbalance led to crises when the French could not pay. Partly as a result of these crises, France invaded Egypt in 1798 under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte. Upon their arrival, the French set out to gain access to the rice fields of the Egyptian Delta. To this end, Napoleon had one of his generals convert to Islam and marry the daughter of an influential local farmer from that region. While the invasion itself only lasted a short period of time, the French managed to establish enduring links to the local power structure. Through an agent, Bernardino Drovetti (1776–1852), France was able to influence the course of events that followed (Ridley 1998). For example, France helped Muhammad Ali come to power in 1805. France helped Muhammad Ali defeat all his potential rivals, even Muhammad Alfi Bey, the Mamluk known for his ties to Britain and to Upper Egypt. This was obviously to the detriment of the Upper Egyptian region from which al-Tahtawi hailed.

And while France played a role, the dynamics in Egypt itself were decisive. Thus what actually lay behind Muhammad Ali’s rise to power was the social crisis in the Delta, the one that had begun back in the 1780s. In other words, there was a lot more than simply the growth of poverty that we had mentioned before. Peasants were protesting the breakdown of village life as the Delta region was integrated into the market. As a result, the interests of dominant groups, both regional and national ones, were threatened. Landlords dreaded peasant protests. Ulama rushed to the area from Cairo to intercede. The conflict, however, would not go away; soon it spread to Cairo itself, attracting artisans whose world was also threatened by the rise of the open market. As this occurred, a local political “Jacobinism” arose. In the 1790s, it was spearheaded in Cairo by the followers of Shaikh Ali al-Bayyumi, the late shaikh of the guild of the water-carriers, along with various other workers and artisans. Later, this political radicalism carried over into the resistance to the French occupation (1798–1801) and into the movement in support of Umar Makram (1755–1822) in the early nineteenth century. Umar Makram, it appears, would have been the popular choice for ruler of Egypt over any Ottoman nominee and even over Muhammad Ali himself. It was not to be; Jacobinism in Egypt as elsewhere went down to defeat. Muhammad Ali was politically more adroit than was Umar Makram. He was able to build relations with Drovetti and to play the fears of the Egyptian landlords against their sympathy for their peasants, splitting any potential alliance in the making that might have emerged to unify these groups against him. Thereafter, Muhammad Ali was able to overwhelm the remaining Mamluks and to capture the entire country. Umar Makram ended up in forced retirement in the Delta far from his native Asyut; most of the Mamluks wound up dead.

Muhammad Ali was a notable figure in modern world history (Batou 1991; 1993) in the view of contemporary scholars. Not only did he seek to wipe out the tradition of Egyptian radical protest just referred to, he set out to have Egypt escape from the periphery of the world market, which was the fate of all late joiners. To this end he worked closely with the French to build up his army and industry. In return, he supplied the market with long staple cotton, which was quickly becoming the principal export crop of Egypt. As was noted before, Muhammad Ali rose to power by benefiting from the unrest in Egypt. Once in power, however, he quickly set out to try to bring an end to this unrest, first by drafting large numbers of landless peasants and poor artisans into his army and shipping them abroad in wars of expansion from which many never returned, and then by using direct repression. Thus, for example, he crushed a number of peasant uprisings, and he brutally punished draft resisters and tax evaders. The upshot for our purposes is that Muhammad Ali wound up dealing with or papering over the existing political problems. He did so chiefly by concentrating Egyptian industry in the Delta and leaving Upper Egypt to stagnate, in other words, deepening the already-existing divisions of North and South.

Muhammad Ali attracts the attention of most scholars today largely because he progressed so far toward his goal. Few of the dozen or more other attempts on the part of rulers from the periphery met with the same success as did his. It is thus not surprising that his regime had an almost magnetic appeal for various highly skilled European technicians who were frustrated by the policies of their own countries and who as a result were willing to go abroad and to serve foreign governments such as that of Muhammad Ali’s for the sake of promoting technical development. Chief among these skilled technical people who came to Egypt were the Saint-Simonians. A number of Saint-Simonians worked in Egypt at least for a short period of time. Had the Saint-Simonians stayed in Egypt for a longer period of time, history today might have been different. But they could not. All this is duly noted in the scholarship on Muhammad Ali and is generally explained as follows. The problem for Muhammad Ali, it is frequently claimed, was ultimately a problem with England. England saw no need to weaken the Ottomans who were holding Russia at bay, nor to allow the development of a power that blocked the way to India, nor to develop a rival for its own textile industry. For all these reasons in the later 1830s, England turned against Egyptian development. It had become a potential threat.

At this point (1838–40), however, one comes perhaps to a clearer understanding of the Pasha’s true motivations. Egyptian development was for him a means to an end. When he could not reach that end by pursuing Egyptian development, he pursued it in other ways. At that point, Muhammad Ali’s behavior represented what one could term an example of the “Rise of the Rich.” With an undefeated army in the field, one that had crushed the Ottomans in battle, he ordered a retreat and a policy of deindustrialization and demilitarization, doing so in return for a promise from the Ottomans and the English to recognize himself and his family as the legitimate rulers of Egypt in perpetuity. Personal power and, to a lesser extent, class interests trumped dreams of national development.

As some have noted, with this shift in strategy came the end of his support for industry and education. And as other have noted, Egypt at this point had taken another step toward a free market economy. Left unexplained in the critical literature, however, is how this dissolution and shrinkage of the army, factory system, and educational system were achieved without major incident. One possible explanation might lie in Muhammad Ali’s success in inducing a number of Egyptians and Europeans to join with him prospecting for mineral wealth in the Sudan. This undertaking required a certain military presence, and it occupied many Egyptians through the nineteenth century, imperialism coming to serve as a substitute for national development. Many Egyptians served in the lower echelons of the armies of exploration and occupation. Some of them even came from the tribal levies of the South.

What is also noticeable is that, from this point onward, Egyptian rulers tried to deepen market relations in the country. Whether or not this resulted in development became a secondary issue. What the market brought was increased profit for those who could benefit from it. It also brought social unrest. To the extent possible, the rulers in this period in Egypt as elsewhere tried to ignore this unrest and even tried to speed up the full and complete introduction of private property in land. And this sometimes succeeded at least part of the time up through the 1850s. In the 1850s, however, much of the Sa‘id arose in a movement led by Ahmad al-Tayyib, a leading figure of the Hawwara Confederation. This movement could not be ignored. The Hawwara were the dominant group around Minya and Asyut. The government had to attack them, and this it did. Crushed militarily in a battle in 1865, Al-Tayyib was forced to flee for a time to Libya. More unrest, however, followed; political order would take a long time to reestablish. Ultimately, it required concessions to the southern ruling class. Ahmad al-Tayyib eventually returned in triumph. As this took place, the regime in Cairo seemed to solidify itself, taking its particular hegemonic form with the rise to power of the Khedive Isma‘il (1863–79). This one could term an example of “Passive Revolution.”

Egyptian Cultural History: Al-Tahtawi’s Place within It

In this section, I discuss al-Tahtawi’s place in Egyptian cultural history and argue that the old interpretation is clearly inadequate and that a new one is required. The old interpretation was one that pictured Egypt as a static Oriental Despotism, that is, a country with little or no cultural activity. The only hope for change would depend on the arrival of the West. According to this old interpretation, al-Tahtawi was among the first Egyptians to appreciate the significance of the West and to avail himself of the new opportunities it afforded. The newer interpretation of al-Tahtawi is one premised on the assumption of a continuing vitality of the existing cultural dynamic. Al-Tahtawi found himself a Southern Intellectual, by virtue of his background in the intellectual class of Upper Egypt and by virtue of his success at finding his way into and then out of al-Azhar and then into government service. This success meant that he gained an opportunity to be quite influential in Egyptian affairs, but at a certain price. He would have to defend the regime and not directly acknowledge that it was oppressing the people of his home region. In return, he would be honored for his services. Al-Tahtawi accepted the offer but did so conditionally.

Scholars have long wondered why al-Tahtawi emerged as such a dominant figure. His background reveals the answer. Al-Tahtawi had grown up in a well-known family spread between Tahta and other towns of Upper Egypt. Following the early death of his father, he was raised by relatives and given a good education by them in the years before he and his mother moved to Cairo in his late teens. This is an important point because conventional wisdom would scarcely lead one to think of Upper Egypt as a center of culture. Yet, in Ottoman times, it was. During al-Tahtawi’s youth, its center was the city of Girga. Girga was the southern capital of Egypt and, at that time, had become a cosmopolitan city with links to the Hidjaz and to the Sudan and Cairo. While Girga has not been well studied, we know some things about it from the books of a local historian, Muhammad al-Jirjawi, one of which was edited and published in 1998 (al-Jirjawi 1998). From this book, it is obvious that the city produced many writers, including poets and theologians; we can also infer that al-Tahtawi was exposed to such works during this formative period. When al-Tahtawi moved to Cairo and began as a student in al-Azhar, he was thus not surprisingly considered a very advanced student. We know, for example, that al-Tahtawi tutored students who were ahead of him in age to earn money.

It should also be noted that al-Tahtawi’s al-Azhar education, along with what may have occurred before it, often gets ignored in the studies of al-Tahtawi because he is so often associated in scholarship with secular culture, and many scholars seem to doubt—and I believe without good reason—that al-Azhar offered secular culture. The Fahrasah then in use clearly included a number of examples of such subjects (Shalash 1981).

The traditional view is not entirely wrong because at the particular time that Al-Tahtawi arrived it is true that secular culture was less in evidence than it had been in the late eighteenth century. For the late eighteenth century, the picture we have of the al-Azhar is one of a precocious, frustrated, and ultimately defeated group of intellectuals who were promoting a pragmatic modernizing approach to culture. During this late eighteenth-century period, significant works in lexicography, grammar, literature, and history appeared. These works underlay the new journalism and the translation movement, which were to arrive during the Muhammad Ali period. They may have some features of religious learning in them but they are essentially secular. By the early nineteenth century, al-Azhar’s repertoire, however, seems more limited.

Scholars are thus correct in their observation that much of the cultural production in the eighteenth century was largely derivative of what had come earlier. Dozens of works of the era, for example the glosses or the textbooks, were simply copies of what went before, leaving us with the question of how one should characterize the more scholarly works that were produced. Until the 1990s, there was no easy way to answer that question. In Islamic Roots of Capitalism, I had experimented with the use of the term “neo-classical revival” as a kind of “low-level” descriptor (Gran 1979).

In the 1990s, students of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in different countries began to point out that the Enlightenment had many varieties and patterns and that, for example, the well-known instance of the French Enlightenment was simply one among them. Thus while Enlightenment remains a fusion of middle-class and elite production of culture in contrast to the fusion of middle-class and popular culture found in the seventeenth century, what the recent developments in scholarship demonstrated were that there existed a number of different versions.

Because of this recent scholarship, one can provisionally characterize Egyptian cultural history as a part of the Italian Road. The Egyptians’ concern was not in playing off secularism against clericalism (as occurred among the French) so much as a recognition of a scholastic modernism (as seen among the Italians). Put in other terms, it was not a question of rejecting what France could offer but of how to integrate it. It was how the new knowledge of the Muhammad Ali period was to be integrated that was so controversial with the Azharites, less so the knowledge itself. To summarize, it appears that Egypt went through a long period of enlightenment of this integrative sort first under the later Mamluks and then under Muhammad Ali.

In analyzing Egyptian culture of the nineteenth century, the Italian model is influential for yet another reason, namely, that of regionalism and regional culture. Regionalism, it appears, played a distinctive role in Egyptian culture as it did in politics. Again, as with Italy, the cosmopolitan belletrists and linguists of Egypt seem to come mainly from the South. Thus, for example, in the new institutions of the 1820s and 1830s, such as the Egyptian Gazette, the Bulaq Press, and the Language School, one encounters several Upper Egyptian belletrists working as writers and linguists. The technical cadre, however, which would serve the army and the factories, appears to have come from elsewhere, either from the Ottoman Diaspora or from the Delta.

A few years earlier during the late eighteenth century, regionalism was not that pronounced, and the language question had not become that political. From the earlier period, one encounters the last main attempt in Egypt at a dictionary of classical Arabic as a living language; it was the Taj al-arus of Muhammad Murtada al-Zabidi (1732–1791). What stands out concerning this work compared to others that appeared even earlier was the author’s concentration on actual word usages instead of possible or potential word usage, that is, a preference for useful, empirically based knowledge of a living language over speculative usages or over classicism. To acquire this knowledge, al-Zabidi traveled around Egypt sampling actual usages. As some have noted, he tended to resist the colloquial he encountered although some of that is registered as well. The main point is that such data collection was something that was still possible to do; the boundaries between city and town, town and village, and Upper and Lower Egypt were still not that rigid. As one finds with a number of other eighteenth-century reference books worldwide, Italy included, the Taj was not just a dictionary; it was an encyclopedia as well. For our purposes here, al-Tahtawi was quite familiar with the Taj, as was his contemporary Edward Lane, who was working on his own classically oriented dictionary.

The late eighteenth century also saw the production of a great history book, one also rooted in much empirical knowledge. This work was Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s Aja’ib al-athar (1754–1822?). Still read with admiration as the greatest work on modern Egyptian history, it represents a high point of the Enlightenment, one of the relatively few works in the history of history-writing on Egypt in which the author succeeds in discussing both the power of the state and, at the same time, the power of civil society (see al-Jabarti 1880). In his later years, the author al-Jabarti, the historian just referred to, became alienated by the policies of Muhammad Ali, especially by the latter’s confiscation of the wealth of the ulama. And, while his life is not known in great detail,⁴ it is believed that he may have met with Wahhabi sympathizers at a time when Muhammad Ali was at war with the Wahhabis. Later, al-Jabarti was murdered by unknown persons, and no one investigated this crime. Some have speculated that Muhammad Ali may have had him killed. In any case, there is no doubt that his history of Egypt was another influence on the Takhlis, and no doubt that al-Tahtawi took cognizance of what befell al-Jabarti in the crafting of his own work. Al-Tahtawi would be less direct in his criticisms than was al-Jabarti.

A major figure in grammar and literature from the late eighteenth-century period was Hasan al-Attar (1766–1835). Al-Attar achieved many things in his career in the area of language and grammar. Historians have not given him his due. Al-Attar has often been identified simply in terms of his influence on al-Tahtawi. This, however, is less than accurate. As was noted before, al-Tahtawi’s major formative influence was his own extended family. According to his own words, his relationship to al-Attar was, first, that he read a number of books with al-Attar in the latter’s home (they were not taught at al-Azhar at that time), and second, al-Attar supported his career, recommending that Muhammad Ali appoint him as the imam-translator for the Paris Translation Mission. It might also be noted that al-Tahtawi did not study the subjects that al-Attar generally taught, such as Arabic language and grammar. Those subjects he already knew. Exactly how one would characterize the relation of al-Attar to al-Tahtawi is, therefore, a bit more ambiguous. “Junior colleague” might be a better characterization than “major formative influence,” the phrase most commonly invoked.

As I have suggested in this chapter, the century of 1760 to 1860 was one of transition for Egypt into an Italian Road–type regime. It contained two overlapping phases of enlightenment. The Muhammad Ali period represents the second phase of the Enlightenment, the one that was more directly inspired by contact with Europe than was the first. During it, Muhammad Ali sent student missions to Paris to learn science and to translate European language texts into Arabic. These works Muhammad Ali then published in the new government printing press at Bulaq. The most famous individual associated with the missions and with the translations was al-Tahtawi. From 1835 onward following his return from Paris, he ran the school for translators in Cairo.

Al-Tahtawi, one needs to make clear, was a supporter of Muhammad Ali. His first position after al-Azhar was that of an army imam, a government appointment. The nature of this appointment needs to be underscored because in al-Tahtawi’s time al-Azhar was a major center of opposition to the government. Not all shaikhs were against the government, but most of the leading ones were. And this reaction was not surprising because Muhammad Ali, as mentioned earlier, had confiscated most of al-Azhar’s wealth. As a result, al-Azhar opposed many of the government’s initiatives, which denied them the ordinary rewards they would have otherwise received. Given al-Tahtawi’s desire for a career in government, it is obvious why he did not seriously consider at the same time a career as an al-Azhar shaikh.

From what is known, although al-Tahtawi appears to have always planned to make his career in the service of Muhammad Ali, he also had hoped that the reformist party in the government would remain influential. This, however, was not destined to be the case, and, as a result, in the period extending from the 1840s until the 1860s, al-Tahtawi’s career suffered. He could neither work for the government nor for al-Azhar.

The Italian Road Form of Hegemony in Egypt from al-Tahtawi’s Time Onward (An Aside)

The argument for Egypt as an example of the Italian Road form of hegemony is one based primarily on a consideration of the country’s history during the period 1860 to the present. To do the argument of this chapter justice, therefore, it is necessary to consider at least parts of that wider history. This section attempts to do that. I begin with some general points applicable to many countries in modern times and then progress to some specific features of Egypt that support this hypothesis.

While it is true al-Tahtawi happened to live into the early part of this later period, that is, into the 1860s and beyond for some years, the purpose for including this section, I repeat, is more to show how the Italian Road approach would work than to show the course of al-Tahtawi’s later years, as my focus in this chapter is on the Takhlis, which was written earlier in al-Tahtawi’s life.

For historians today, Egypt 1860 to the present is the account of Egypt as a modern capitalist nation-state. Some of its dynamics were those of most other states of the period, and some were not. On the economic level, Egypt passed through the same three economic phases that most other countries in the world did and in the same sequence: classical liberalism lasted from 1860 to 1952, corporatism from 1952 to 1970, and neoliberalism from 1970 onward. Like most other countries, Egypt has had to depend on one main crop, cotton.

Cotton in the Egyptian case produced immense wealth, but its production brought many problems. Cotton was a product that required an immense infrastructure as well as an immense labor force, and it also required a specialized system of finance. It is this latter system that attracts one’s attention in particular. Up to the 1952 Revolution, bankers and moneylenders were a conspicuous part of the structure. Farmers could not farm without credit; they needed this credit because of the vagaries of the growing season and of the actual market itself. Even the state had its debts. As a result, bankers and moneylenders occupied center stage when it came to economic power and to policy-making in Egypt, and this position was scarcely in Egypt’s national interest. Under such conditions, it was difficult to escape from debt, much less to forge a national economic policy. It was difficult as well for the country to adjust to the declining position of cotton in the world market, which occurred after the rise of synthetics, a situation making it all the more difficult to justify the continuing investments needed for the infrastructure. But to change the economy from agriculture to industry, which was one solution, would have required extraordinary political change. The middle classes and the workers would have had to play a role in politics. Would this have been possible given the obligation to pay off the debts? The answer is probably in the negative. Italy faced some of the same problems during this period and resolved them through fascism.

Under classical liberalism, which was what prevailed during the nineteenth century in both countries, the approach to politics was that of the minimal state, the state as a “night watchman.” In this type of arrangement, there was little room for middle strata to develop. There was in effect no need for it. Thus, on the one hand, one finds a small ruling class, on the other, a large peasantry. Typically, however, periods of classical liberalism led fairly rapidly to social crises. For governments to cope with these crises, they needed to be able to smooth over the rough edges left by the market, and this typically led to their bringing elements of the middle strata and upper working class into the political system at least for awhile. The entrance of these classes and strata into the dominant bloc strengthened it politically and brought it the skills it needed for its survival. The entrance of these classes and strata also allowed for new directions in politics and economics. Scholars use the term populist or corporatist or simply cross-class to characterize this shift in strategy. A large body of scholarship drawn from the study of Latin Europe examines these phenomena in considerable detail. As for countries that were colonized, such as Egypt, the development of populism and cross-class alliances were also important. They simply reached this phase in political economy more slowly than did the others. In the wake of the 1919 Revolution, there was little question that Egypt was ready for populism, but populism actually only fully arrived some thirty-three years later in the 1952 Revolution. The probable reason for the delay was colonialism.

Egypt was a colony for much of its modern history. Even in al-Tahtawi’s time there was already a semicolonial dimension affecting Egypt’s development. It is this factor among others that adds to the complexity of interpreting the Takhlis. How does one read the political writing of semicolonialism? Did M. Jomard, the Savant,⁵ and the other French with whom al-Tahtawi associated kibitz in the writing of this book, and if so, to what end? This cannot be known without pursuing the career of these individuals through state papers and private papers and without considerably more theorizing. All this has yet to be done.

Colonialism, it was observed, bolstered the existing structure, making the classical liberal age last longer in Egypt than it did in most of the countries that were not colonized. Rather than relying on the local middle classes, which was what commonly took place, rulers in colonies such as Egypt often relied on Europeans who made their careers serving the local bureaucracy. Europeans became a surrogate middle-strata service structure. As a result, what was insidious about colonialism was not that a country like Egypt would be left undeveloped but that Egyptians would not be involved in that development. In the particular case of Egypt, this trend was exacerbated by the sheer size of the European communities resident in Egypt, communities fully possessing the skills needed to manage the country’s business and professional life. While, in some cases, these communities had actually been a part of Egypt for centuries, the conjunction of circumstances that came with the modern nation-state and with colonialism encouraged their growth and made them suitable allies of the British, and thus by extension made them appear as antinational to most other Egyptians. This alliance was beginning to become noticeable much earlier, even when al-Tahtawi wrote the Takhlis.

As I noted, crises in classical liberal regimes were common. It was a very unstable type of system. This instability was certainly the case for Egypt and one might add for Italy among many other countries as well. In the case of Egypt, the introduction of classical liberalism led to the rise of a nationalist movement. This movement in turn triggered fears on the part of the European bondholders for their investments. This fear gave the Egyptian ruling class and the European residents in Egypt (the so-called “Men on the Spot”) a certain leverage to bring about a colonial regime. And this leverage they used. Egyptian nationalism was a threat to the bondholders, they claimed; the Great Powers must send an army. Such statements no doubt contributed to the decision of the English prime minister, Gladstone, to take action. From sending a few senior advisors to the Egyptian government over the years, suddenly the English government progressed to sending an army to occupy Egypt, and occupy the country it did. Soon a second “threat” developed, this one apparently contrived by various interested parties as well, perhaps out of a fear of a British withdrawal from Egypt. The Mahdi of the Sudan, it was declared, had now become a threat to the Nile Valley. It would be necessary for the British and the Egyptians to invade the Sudan and to overthrow him. And this too came to pass, with verbal threats leading to actual policy decisions and these in turn leading eventually to the creation of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Here one sees the completion of a process that had been going on through much of al-Tahtawi’s life. In the course of a century, the Sudan had gone from being a major trading partner with Girga, to being a hinterland, and then to being a colony of the Egyptians and the English. This transition had been facilitated by people such as al-Tahtawi, who threw in his lot with the government in Cairo. When by chance he was exiled for a period to the Sudan, he was miserable, feeling out of place.

Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, as the name suggests, serves as one example of what were a number of unequal partnerships among ruling classes in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It required of Egypt, the weaker partner, an immense contribution in manpower and service to the British, and this was rendered. Not much was given in return. Britain in fact took much of the Middle East for herself more or less as she took the Sudan. This extreme exploitation of Egypt not surprisingly produced a reaction. Even segments of the ruling class could not abide by what was happening. The Wafd Party led by Sa‘d Zaghlul Pasha (1859–1927) created the 1919 Revolution. This time, England was left in a weak position. Except for the royal family, British colonialism in Egypt at that point had few defenders compared to the situation from 1879 to 1880. To hold onto their overall position, the British were thus finally obliged to acknowledge the rights of Egyptians to sovereignty and to an eventual timetable of decolonization. Once again the regional factor stands out. The bulk of the nationalist movement was in the Delta. Perhaps, as a result, it was not altogether accidental that the king, who supported the British, seemed to relish his honorific title Amir al-Sa‘id (ruler of Upper Egypt). In the 1930s, he made a famous tour of that region. In the Italian case, colonialism was not taken away from them by a stronger power but rather they were left to shoulder the responsibilities themselves, and this they did. In both cases, one could tell the monarchy was on its way out.

When one arrives at the twentieth century, the conventional historiography of most countries, Egypt and Italy included, emphasizes change and progress. This change is the case even where one finds historians making use of the Oriental Despotism model. In the case of Egypt, however, a deeper look suggests that the country had reached the age of Isma‘il in the 1860s with a severe regional imbalance between North and South. As we come to the twentieth century it became clear, at least to Upper Egyptians, that the maintenance of regional inequality was a part of the strategy of the hegemony. One could go from ruler to ruler and from colonialism to independence as political historians do with whatever change that might entail, but still there was a system based on region. What seems likely is that the ruling class found it useful to exploit the regional inequality to split the mass population of the country, making it difficult for opposition movements to arise. What seems likely as well is that for a long time, the maintenance of regional inequality assured the dominant region a supply of migrant labor (tarahil) for harvest seasons. Still, as more recent history bears witness, with or without this cheap labor, the system I term Italian Road would live on. Until today, one finds its presence on all levels, not just in economics but in politics, in law, and even in the humor of daily life. The proverbial jokes about the Sa‘idi’s stupidity and his accent remain until today as a part of the culture of regional oppression, a culture contributing to keeping the system in place. For details about the Italian case, the reader need only turn to the life and writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci.

Exploitation requires desensitization. It demands a desensitizing of the general population of the North in regard to the well-being of the Upper Egyptians, and there is evidence to show this desensitizing had happened. As far back as the 1870s, for example, starvation appeared in Upper Egypt. For a period of several years, this starvation was left to progress around Asyut with no help coming from the central government or from the Delta. This neglect suggests a fairly considerable desensitization. Was it surprising that the British and Egyptian ruling classes could fear a possible pro-Mahdist orientation concentrated in that region a few years later? Nor was this neglect an isolated occurrence. When a cholera epidemic broke out in Upper Egypt in the 1940s—no doubt also related to the widespread malnutrition—the American Rockefeller Foundation became involved, as did even the Egyptian royal family, but not the rank-and-file Egyptian nationalists of Cairo. Egyptian nationalists of the period were busy beating the drum for Egyptian independence from the British.

In 1952 independence came and with it land reform and the nationalization of industry, but still Upper Egypt continued to suffer as most of the reforms were carried out in the Delta. Later in the 1960s, Nasir placed the High Dam in Aswan, disrupting the lives of thousands of Nubians there. In the 1967 War, many Upper Egyptians served in the infantry of an army whose officer corps was trained in the Delta. Mortality, it might be added, was very high in that war on the level of the infantry.

Still later with neoliberalism in the ascendancy, Upper Egypt became a place for foreign chemical waste sites. At least once, a chemical waste dump created a poisonous flood emergency around the city of Suhaj in Upper Egypt. In recent times, the struggle of the Sa‘idis has taken the form of mass out-migration from the South to such cities as Cairo and Alexandria. The population of these cities has mushroomed as a result. In recent times, radical Islamism emanating from Upper Egypt suggests yet another level of struggle.

The Southern Intellectual as an Institution of the Modern Egyptian Political Economy

This section—a continuation of the preceding one—shows that while al-Tahtawi may be considered to have been the first of what I term the Southern Intellectuals, there were quite a few other Upper Egyptian intellectuals who followed him, all of whom served the regime in similar capacities. Why has this fairly obvious point been ignored? The biographical details of the famous figures are widely known.

This question brings us back to interpretation. Many of the great analysts of Egypt in modern times have been Marxists. And, although Marxists are very interested in the role of the intellectual in history, in general their interpretation is drawn from Lenin, not Gramsci. From a Leninist perspective, intellectuals are an elite; they are the bearers of the high culture, which gradually trickles down to the lower level of the rural mass. Here, by way of contrast, the spotlight is shone on the issue of region. Intellectuals are assumed to be tied to power blocs, some of which are regionally based.

Identifying a few examples of these prominent intellectuals in terms of their regional background will make this contrast clear. Following al-Tahtawi, in the twentieth century, came the legal reformer Ali Abd al-Raziq, the literary critic Mahmud Abbas al-Aqqad (1889–1964), and the educator and litterateur Taha Hussein (1889–1973). These talented individuals, all of Upper Egyptian background, were given a seemingly virtual free hand in their areas of specialization, apparently in return for their political stance on the question of region. As a result, it was they who influenced the development of the secular education system, for example the law and the shape of modern Arabic culture in Egypt more generally. The point here is that the country had many other talented individuals, but it is these men whose lives and writings we study, hence the idea of the Southern Intellectual. Lenin did not use this term, presumably because it was not compatible with his approach.⁶ He preferred terms such as “internal colonialism” and “comprador.”

In the 1920s, Gramsci characterized the philosopher Benedetto Croce and his role in Italian society (both as an individual and as a set of institutions that supported him) as that of a Southern Intellectual. At the time, Gramsci was trying to explain why Croce, who was a liberal, was given an opportunity to deflect the radical critics of fascism, especially those of the South, by turning their criticism toward liberalism. What Gramsci wanted to understand was why Croce’s liberal values were praised by politicians who did not share them, for example, Mussolini. The answer lay, he decided, in the Italian Road system. As an aside, but a fairly important one, Gramsci’s theory even in the Italian left was not widely accepted. The Italian left, like the Egyptian left, on the whole preferred Leninism.

There is a possible second reason for why the term “Southern Intellectual” is so little used, be it for al-Tahtawi or more generally, one more technical than philosophical. In Gramsci’s own writings, the Southern Intellectual as a subject is treated as a part of the study of many fields, fields such as philology, folklore, the philosophy of education, and others. This mixture makes it difficult to reduce it to one thing or another, which would be needed were it to have a wide circulation. This chapter picks up one small piece of the subject, that is, the use the Southern Intellectual makes of the ideology of secular culture (for example, cosmopolitanism) as a foil against the narrow nationalism and business orientation of the dominant northern region. And while this is only one piece, it is a significant one and not just for al-Tahtawi or the others who have been referred to. For, if one were to pursue the matter of the social origins of Egyptian professional communities, one could show that many diplomats, translators, media personalities, and multilingual cosmopolitan people arose in the South or came from Southern families resident in the North and then gained national prominence. What one understands from this is that the Italian Road type of power structure predictably creates a certain niche for Southerners in these areas while on the whole retaining a monopoly of the political and economic decision-making in the hands of Northerners. In this regard, what Gramsci wrote about Croce thus serves to allow us to return to the subject of al-Tahtawi, an Upper Egyptian, one who emerged as the leading Egyptian intellectual of his time, as a major translator, writer on subjects French, and cultural emissary of Egypt to France in the period when the relationship between Egypt and France was most important. Al-Tahtawi was thus a cosmopolitan in Gramsci’s sense, as were others who came later.

As many others were as well, al-Tahtawi was a belletrist. He translated a number of works including literary ones into Arabic from French. And there were others too, for example, Taha Hussein. Taha Hussein wrote that Egypt was a part of the Mediterranean, this at a time when many especially in the North of the country looked at Egypt as Arab Islamic. He was perhaps the quintessential example of a cosmopolitan belletrist in modern Egyptian history.

Al-Tahtawi’s Takhlis al-Ibriz as an Upper Egyptian Mirror for Princes

In taking the Takhlis as a Mirror for Princes,⁷ this article overlaps partly with the received interpretation, but it goes beyond it. It overlaps with it—to give credit where credit is due—inasmuch as most modern commentators note some element of advice with regard to educational reform. There was more behind the Takhlis, however, than educational reform; there was a regionalist agenda, even one including a veiled threat.

Al-Tahtawi was a political reformer. From the Takhlis it is clear that al-Tahtawi stood for republicanism, for the educated citizen, and for modern liberal education for boys and girls. The Takhlis was among the first works to take up these subjects in Arabic. As a result, it is not surprising that it has been closely read by scholars for a long time. It is also not surprising, given the influence of the Oriental Despotism model, that a great deal of the scholarly commentary on this book has dwelt on what was understood to be France’s role in his education. The problem with this—repeating earlier points—is not about this emphasis per se but about the assumption accompanying it—that al-Tahtawi was being modernized by going to France. More likely what was happening was al-Tahtawi’s use of his visit to France to point to certain empirical details about France in a discussion that was actually about Egyptian policies. He was not simply learning new things and reporting on them.

Given the conventional reading, several important points as a result have drawn little if any attention. This omission is unfortunate as these points appear to bear directly on what al-Tahtawi actually intended to convey. The first of these points is inserted in his description of his arrival in Marseille on his way to Paris. Here, near the very beginning of the book, he tells us that he unexpectedly met some Egyptians, among them a member of his own extended family from Upper Egypt, a man who claimed to have become adjusted to life in France. The most plausible reason for why one would find this point placed at the beginning of the book is to eliminate the expectation that this was going to be a book about the unknown. The fact that al-Tahtawi encountered a relative from Upper Egypt who had adjusted to life in France seems like a deliberate way to make this clear. A second point, again one that has generally been ignored in the commentary literature, is of a similar sort. I refer to one particular comment about democracy and republicanism. In dealing with the subject of democratic and republican forms of government found in France, one might have expected al-Tahtawi to categorize them as something new or foreign. Most writers who were not French or English tended to do so. Al-Tahtawi’s approach was a bit more cosmopolitan. He began by making reference to the experiment of Shaikh al-Hammam, understanding it to be an Upper Egyptian example from the 1700s of a republican and democratic sort (al-Tahtawi 1973, 2:201).⁸ To the Egyptian reader who had heard about the Tahtawi family, this would bring to mind a time and place when that family was prominent. While these references leave much unresolved, it is clear and unambiguous that when al-Tahtawi used terms like jumhuriyah (republic), he was thinking in Upper Egyptian as well as in global terms. Here was Egyptian cosmopolitanism.

Al-Tahtawi was no doubt hoping to bring about actual reforms in Egypt. The Takhlis was in this sense a reformist tract. Education, he more or less said, would bring change, political and otherwise. Moreover, al-Tahtawi makes clear he was thinking here of the education of both men and women. What is certain is that when al-Tahtawi came back to Cairo, he championed the idea of founding a university, but as is also well known, the Madrasah al-Alsun (his translation school), which was to serve as a basis for the proposed university, did not become one for another century when Ayn Shams University absorbed it. In fact, there was no serious contemplation of the idea of any university in Egypt for many years to come. Had a university been founded in this period, many Upper Egyptians might have found positions in it. This is the regionalist implication in what he wrote. Another implication, a historiographical one, is that, despite the considerable amount of scholarship on the subject of education in the Muhammad Ali period, it is still not exactly clear what Muhammad Ali’s concerns about education were. One wonders as well if al-Tahtawi had a strategy in place for when Muhammad Ali might resist the further development of education. The answer to this question is uncertain.

One other point stands out in this book, that of the advice or threat dimension. Many authors have given advice and even warnings to rulers if they had the standing to do so. Few books written by a relative outsider and addressed to a ruler, however, contain threats. If the people want something, al-Tahtawi wrote, they could overthrow a ruler who denied it to them. This belief can be found in his comments on the Revolution of 1830 in France and the French invasion of Algeria of the same year. The Algerian ruler, he observed, left with his personal wealth while King Louis XVIII (Louis the Last) did not.⁹ Here al-Tahtawi was taking chances. He was not an adviser of the ruler, nor was he a social intimate. Furthermore, he knew what had befallen al-Jabarti.

The Rise and Decline of the Traditional View of Rifa`ah al-Tahtawi in Scholarship

The traditional approach to al-Tahtawi as the author of a rihlah outlined above appears in recent years to be slowly breaking down. A review of the scholarship from the past century suggests this. Although the process has been a gradual one, the groundwork has clearly been laid for the development of a more complex view of this remarkable figure.

Apart from reference works, nineteenth-century writing about al-Tahtawi was confined to a single, somewhat hagiographic work written by a former student, al-Sayyid Salih al-Majdi (1827–1881), in his Hilyah al-zaman bi manaqib khadim al-watan; sirah Rifa‘ah Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1958). Between the 1940s and the 1980s, al-Tahtawi was incorporated into the scholarship of the Nahda (or Arab Renaissance), and he became an icon of the rising corporatist culture. In this period, what has been termed the dominant paradigm solidified itself. It seems clear that al-Tahtawi’s work in education, language, translation, and modernization clearly resonated with the concerns of many of the important scholars. One could mention as examples the work by the late Alexandria professor Jamal al-Din al-Shayyal (1945) and the work of Cairo University professor Mahmud Fahmi Hijazi (1974). Still later, the well-known Nahdah writer Hussein Fawzi al-Najjar (b. 1918) issued his Rifa‘ah al-Tahtawi, ra’id fikr wa al-imam nahdah (1987). With the coming of neoliberalism in the 1970s, one finds subtle shifts in the scholarship reflecting changes at that point. For example, more specialized works appeared, works on his poetry and then even on his contribution to language development, for example, al-Badrawi Zahran (1983). The idea of the Nahdah was by this time in disarray, and al-Tahtawi’s putative relationship to it was starting to be downplayed.

Before pursuing these more recent developments in the historiography, one needs to make mention of the work of one major Tahtawi scholar in particular, that of Muhammad Imara. In the 1970s, Muhammad Imara tried in a five-volume collection of texts to bring together the main works of al-Tahtawi. He may not have entirely succeeded because Al-Tahtawi wrote a good number of books, which could not be located easily, but what Imara did achieve was to make the general reader aware that al-Tahtawi had a profound interest in religion and religious history and not simply in Europe and in secularism. Imara’s work represented a turning point in the historiography. The conventional approach to reading al-Tahtawi in terms of his two most European-oriented and secular books would not suffice. Thus it is not surprising to find that in 1990 came an edited edition with comments on al-Tahtawi’s work on the Islamic state (al-Tahtawi 1990). This edition was followed two years later by Sulayman Khatib’s Al-Din wa al-hadarah fi fikr al-Tahtawi: qira’ah Islamiyah (1992). The most important recent publication on al-Tahtawi is the three-volume manuscript catalog of his private library in Tahta (now in Suhaj) prepared by Yusuf Zaydan (1996). As one can see from a perusal of this work, the library is made up entirely of Islamic heritage books. If one pursues the books listed by Zaydan, a more complex picture of al-Tahtawi should emerge. As for the currently dominant tanwir paradigm, it goes back to Rifa‘ah al-Tahtawi: ra’id al-tanwir (Imara 1984).

To sum up, I have set out in this chapter to offer a somewhat revisionist reading of al-Tahtawi’s famous travel work the Takhlis with the suggestion that it might be looked at profitably not simply as rihlah literature but also as an example of Mirror for Princes literature, a genre that was still being composed at the time when the modern national hegemony of Egypt was coming into being. This chapter then examined what advice was being conveyed and concluded that there was a dimension of regionalism involved. I argued that this detail was probably one of the real keys to the text because, as I postulated, Egypt was an Italian Road regime and not, as is commonly supposed, an Oriental Despotism. To pursue this line of thought, the chapter went on to consider in some greater detail whether Egyptian history could be treated as Italian Road and found that it could. On this basis, I conclude that the Takhlis is best understood as a Mirror for Princes written by a Southern Intellectual and not in the more conventional way as a voyage to the unknown by a young author from a backward country.

Postscript: Two recent publications of interest are Tageldin 2011 and Coller 2011. The former sheds further light on the life and work of Joseph Agoub, who influenced al-Tahtawi’s translation theory during his stay in Paris. The latter discusses the Marseille Arabs of that period.

1. This chapter is based on several previous pieces of work and on some ongoing research (Gran 1979; 1996). Articles I drew on here were Gran 1999 and Gran 2001, which present a map of specific hegemonies, the countries they illustrate, and why. “Tahtawi in Paris,” Ahram Weekly, no. 568, Jan. 10, 2002, 14, presents a revisionist reading of al-Tahtawi. Articles on state formation include Gran 2002 and Gran 2004. For articles of a more general and comparative nature, see Gran 2006 and Gran 2005. For a sketch of an outline of world history going beyond Hegel, see Gran 2007.

2. For neo-Gramscian international relations, see, for example, Bieler and Morton 2001 and Morton 2007.

3. Concerning the main reaction to the hypothesis of an Islamic Enlightenment as propounded by Reinhard Schulze (1996), see the special issue of Die Welt des Islams 36, no. 3 (Nov. 1996).

4. The main biography of al-Jabarti is still Shaybub 1948.

5. On M. Edme-François Jomard, see Laissus 2004.

6. On the Southern Intellectual, see Gramsci 1978.

7. On the Mirror for Princes genre, see Ferster 1996 among others.

8. This sentence is missing from the edition published by the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance in 1958, edited by Anwar Luqa, Mahdi Allam, and Ahmad Badawi. In Imara’s 1984 biography of al-Tahtawi, there is still a bit of his socialism (299ff.).

9. On the dignity of the Algerian ruler leaving with his personal wealth versus the French ruler leaving without his, see al-Tahtawi 1973, 219.