For the good of the Nation: The New Horizon of Expectations in Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi’s Reading of the Islamic Political Tradition David H. Warren Abstract This article analyzes Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi’s (d. 1873) idea of Egypt- ian nationhood (al-ummah al-miṣriyyah) and key attendant con- cepts, such as civilization (tamaddun), progress (taqaddum), homeland (waṭan), and citizen (waṭanī). I revisit the intellectual origins of his thought to move our understanding of his intellectual production beyond simply the influence of the European Enlight- enment. Instead, I locate al-Tahtawi’s work as part of a conversa- tion internal to the debates of the Islamic tradition, which stretches across centuries and was never meant to finish. Consequently, I contextualize his conceptualization of nationhood as an attempt to re-imagine a role for the Muslim community in Islamic political life – from which it had long been excluded – and ground Muslim political theory and practice within a norma- tive Islamic framework. Furthermore, I contend that al-Tahtawi’s contributions to both the conversations of his immediate context and those of his tradition were underpinned by a shift in his gen- eration’s horizon of expectations, namely, the shared assumptions through which they received the conversations of their tradition. Underpinning this shift was the redefinition of time as progress, specifically the progress of the nation. If we conceptualize the Is- David H. Warren (david.warren@ed.ac.uk) is a postdoctoral research rellow at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh. He would like to thank Ovamir Anjum, Tazeen Mir Ali, and the anonymous AJISS reviewers and editors for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 30 lamic tradition as a framework for inquiry rather than as a set of doctrines, then we should recognize that al-Tahtawi and his peers’ new concern for the futurity of the nation represented a key addi- tion to this framework. Introduction In Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi’s (d. 1873) famous account of his studies in Paris, the Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī Talkhīṣ Bāris (The Extraction of Gold in the Distillation of Paris, 1834), we can observe that the Egyptian ʿālim’s observations of French society were underpinned by a temporal mode that was markedly different from the contemporary experience of time.1 In a particularly illu- minating passage we can see this different temporal mode at work, and time rising and falling like the tide: As time rises (fī al-ṣuʿūd) toward the past (taqādam), you will observe people regressing (taʾakhur al-nās) in human skills and civil sciences, and the more you go downward and observe the descent of time (fī al-hubūṭ), you mostly will see their elevation and progress [in skills and sciences].2 However, over the course of al-Tahtawi’s life a new temporal culture emerged in Egypt and across the Arab world. For example, in early colonial Algeria a “war for time” took place through which the French legitimized their 1830 invasion as a “civilizing mission.” That mission was to bring Al- geria into history, or rather to bring it into a particular understanding of his- tory as the forward march of progress led by Europe.3 In Egypt, by the time al-Tahtawi was writing his two major works on political theory, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah fī Mabāhij al-Ādāb al-ʿAṣriyyah (The Methods for Egyptian Hearts in the Pleasures of Modern Literatures, 1869) and Al-Murshid al-Amīn li al-Banāt wa al-Banīn (The Authoritative Guide for Girls and Boys, 1871), time no longer carried civilizations on a cycle, as it had in the earlier Takhlīṣ. Instead, civilization (tamaddun) had become a verb that de- scribed a process and signalled a faith in the forward drive of progress (taqaddum) over time toward an open horizon full of possibilities.4 As a re- sult, to be Egyptian and to love the homeland (ḥubb al-waṭan) meant sharing in the imagining of Egypt’s future civilization, in which the nation’s progress was an end in itself.5 This article analyzes al-Tahtawi’s conceptualization of Egyptian nation- hood (al-ummah al-miṣriyyah) and its key attendant concepts: civilization (tamaddun), progress (taqaddum), homeland (waṭan), and citizen (waṭanī). I aim to move beyond those assessments of his work that employ a yardstick Warren: For the Good of the Nation 31 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 31 that imagines the French Enlightenment as the pinnacle of contemporary intellectual achievement, and consequently attributes al-Tahtawi’s failure in that regard to his “difficulty in reconciling the workings of the secular po- litical system with his basic Islamic outlook” or to the constraints he faced as a result of living under autocratic rulers in Egypt.6 In so doing, I place this article within a growing body of literature that reconsiders the Nahḍa on its owns terms, rather than reduces it to a movement dominated by Arab reactions to European traditions.7 Although the realities of al-Tahtawi’s immediate context of living under Muhammad Ali (d. 1849) and his successors as well as his time in France are, of course, significant for understanding his thought, here I am interested in a greater appreciation of his participation in the overlapping conversations that make up the Islamic tradition. We can understand this tradition as a set of discourses extending through time or, more specifically here, as a set of overlapping conversations and authoritative arguments stretching across centuries that,8 as Mona Siddiqui reminds us, “were never meant to finish.”9 In this vein, Ellen McLarney grounds al-Tahtawi’s thought within the Islamic ethical tradition of adab that, to him, represented “a kind of virtuous comportment that governs self and soul and structures political relationships.”10 Al-Tahtawi worked through the adab tradition to make an important contribution to the pre-existing Islamic political imaginary of the good society as being like a body, with the king at its center.11 In this imaginary body, members of the realm (mamlakah) are like organs. If each organ knows its place in the hierarchy, the realm functions harmoniously. This image underpinned the Islamic tradition’s concept of statecraft (siyāsah). Within this schema, al-Tahtawi conceptualized a new political subject, the citizen (waṭanī). Significantly, he located the “public opinion” (al- raʾy al-ʿumūmī) of these citizens as a “vanquishing power” (ṣulṭān qāhir) within the very heart of the king as part of his corporeal political imagi- nary.12 Therefore, both the king and the public were equally subjects of the law.13 The discursive move that made al-Tahtawi’s contribution possible was his allowance for individual political subjects to have the potential for self- governance and the ability to cultivate an individual conscience, so long as they were properly educated.14 This allowance is markedly different from the position held by his predecessors among the classical ʿulamaʾ, such as Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), whose elitist view of the masses (al- ʿawāmm) made no such provision.15 32 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 32 In this article, I am interested in considering not also how, but also why al-Tahtawi makes his discursive moves. I argue that his conceptualization of a new political community, namely, the Egyptian nation, with the king at its head but with the citizenry at his heart, represented an attempt to ground the theory of the Muslim political community and its practice within a normative Islamic apparatus – itself an effort that originated in the early years of Islam. Grounding political theory and practice within deeper metaphysical and normative bases is integral to the vibrancy of any political commu- nity.16 Since the Prophet’s death, this conversation has continued through different theorizations of the caliphate, debates over Muslim kingship, and toward new controversies over Islamic nation-statehood. As part of these changes within the tradition, I also argue that a new temporal mode, ex- emplified by the understanding of time as progress, redefined al-Tahtawi and his peers’ horizon of expectations – a term from literary criticism that refers to a generation of readers’ shared assumptions that they bring to their interpretation of texts.17 Hans Robert Jauss originally used this concept to advocate for the study of the contemporaneous literature surrounding a text, in order to reconstruct the kinds of questions and assumptions a particular text was addressing for its original readership.18 I find this concept useful in referring to the change in how al-Tahtawi was reading the authoritative texts and arguments of his tradition through a new set of assumptions regarding civilization, progress, futurity, and so on.19 This point has wider implications for our conceptual- ization of the contemporary Islamic tradition. If, as Samira Haj and others suggest, we conceptualize tradition as a framework for inquiry rather than as a set of doctrines, we should recognize more fully that in the nineteenth century a concern for the nation and its future also became a key part of that framework. This redefinition of his horizon of expectations meant that al-Tahtawi’s own move to conceptualize the Egyptian nation was built upon a temporal mode of national progress and was an attempt to realign Muslim political theory and practice with the normative Islamic apparatus of society. He completed this move by re-imagining the Muslim community within the boundaries of the Egyptian homeland. This article is made up of three parts: (1) a brief introduction to al- Tahtawi’s life, (2) a critique of the elements of al-Tahtawi’s prevailing his- toriography, and (3) my own arguments about al-Tahtawi and the role of the community in Muslim political theory and temporality. Warren: For the Good of the Nation 33 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 33 Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi: The Father of Egyptian Nationalism Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi was born into an elite scholarly family in rural Upper Egypt that had recently been impoverished by Ali’s reform of the iltizām tax-farming system. In search of opportunities and due to his aptitude as a scholar, al-Tahtawi was enrolled in al-Azhar in 1817. By 1822, he had re- ceived a number of ijāzāt and become a teacher of Islamic sciences. Sig- nificantly, he was teaching at al-Azhar during a period of a resurgence of interest in classical Islamic literature. It was also in 1822 that Ali estab- lished Egypt’s first official printing press, the Bulaq Press, and it is no co- incidence that among the first works printed were al-Ghazali’s Ihyāʾ ʿ Ulūm al-Dīn (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqad- dimah.20 By 1824, al-Tahtawi had moved on to take up a post as a preacher in Ali’s new model army. Two years later, it was decided that he would accompany a contingent of Egyptian military officers to study in Paris. Al-Tahtawi spent five years studying there, learning French and immersing himself in reading the work of French Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mon- tesquieu. After his return to Egypt, al-Tahtawi published his Takhlīṣ, in which he extensively details his delegation’s journeys to Paris and back again, as well as their program of study (e.g., the subjects they were taught and the exams for which they sat). Al-Tahtawi also witnessed the 1830 July Revolution, in which Charles X was overthrown and replaced by his cousin Louis Philippe. Al-Tahtawi was impressed by this event, and in the Takhlīṣ provided a translation of and commentary on the 1830 French Na- tional Charter that established new constitutional limits on Louis Philippe’s power.21 The Takhlīṣ has been the subject of extensive academic study, particu- larly by linguists interested in al-Tahtawi’s ingenuity as he rendered into Arabic the new French concepts that he had come across.22 On his return to Egypt, al-Tahtawi became a prolific author and translator, and eventually became the director of the Dar al-Alsun, the translation school that he had founded in 1835.23 In 1863, Khedive Ismaʿil placed al-Tahtawi at the head of the forerunner to the Egyptian Ministry of Education. While in this post, he oversaw a massive expansion of compulsory state education across Egypt.24 Toward the end of his life, al-Tahtawi authored two major works in which he articulated his political theory, the Manāhij and Al-Murshid. Throughout 34 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 34 his career, then, al-Tahtawi not only played a key role in schooling the new technocratic class of Egyptian bureaucrats, but was also closely involved in the creation of a new Egyptian citizenry through mass education. As such, he straddled two new forms of discipline, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, which encompassed the creation of new concepts and then putting those concepts to work through education, forming a body of loyal Egyptian citi- zens who would recognize themselves as part of an Egyptian nation. The Historiography of al-Tahtawi’s Intellectual Production Much of the historiography of al-Tahtawi’s intellectual production can be characterized by an admiration for his ingenuity and productivity, coupled with a certain disappointment that he ultimately seemed unable (or unwill- ing) to faithfully replicate his reading of French Enlightenment authors to produce an Islamic political theory that would satisfy a contemporary reader rooted in the post-Enlightenment, liberal tradition. For example, it is not uncommon to see critiques of his writing “in a very traditional man- ner” because of his “late-Ottoman mindset” and his “difficulty in reconcil- ing the workings of the secular political system with his basic Islamic outlook.”25 It is, of course, legitimate (respectful, even) to be dissatisfied with a historical figure’s writings, rather than dismiss their work as historically determined by their context. The issue here is that such criticisms are rooted in a standpoint that views history as the progression from tradition to modernity, rather than understanding all traditions – be they liberal, Is- lamic, or otherwise – as equally contemporary and rooted in an ongoing effort to make a particular set of authoritative texts and arguments coherent in one’s own context. To quote Haj, the Islamic tradition can be viewed as comprising [C]ollective discourses, incorporating a variety of positions, roles, and tasks that form the corpus of Islamic knowledge from which a Muslim scholar argues for and refers to previous judgements of others, and from which an unlettered parent teaches a child. It is from within this tradition of reasoning that claims are made and evaluated and are either accepted or rejected as Islamic.26 As part of a more recent effort to reconsider the Nahḍa as more than just Arab responses to European traditions, scholars such as Roxanne Warren: For the Good of the Nation 35 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 35 Euben and McLarney emphasize that al-Tahtawi’s translations of the new French concepts he encountered into Arabic in the Takhlīṣ was far more than simply a transferral of terms from one conceptual universe to another.27 Translation is a highly creative process, and through his translations al- Tahtawi established a dialectic between the frameworks of the Islamic and French traditions.28 Consequently, he was able to embark upon a thorough critique of the French project of modernity that he was encountering, while also grounding his project in his tradition’s internal impulses of renewal and reform (tajdīd wa iṣlāḥ).29 As such, rather than emphasize al-Tahtawi’s indebtedness to French concepts such as patrie (homeland), McLarney foregrounds al-Tahtawi’s dialogue with the Islamic tradition’s corporeal imaginary of Muslim king- ship. Though the king was not constitutionally constrained by any formal institutions, public opinion was a restraining “power of the people” (al- quwwah al-maḥkūmah, al-quwwah al-ahliyyah) that was cultivated by the citizenry through adab and inculcated within them by both the ʿ ulamaʾ and mass state-education. This power of the people worked in conjunction with the king’s own ethical self-restraint, which he also cultivated through the virtues of adab.30 At the same time, the renewed interest in the work of al- Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun exemplifies the body of texts that al-Tahtawi was re-reading through his new horizon of expectations. Like them, he was deeply concerned with the legitimacy of Muslim political life and the social bonds that tie individuals together. It was through his conversations with them, just as much as with authors of the French Enlightenment, that al- Tahtawi made his discursive move to conceptualize the Egyptian nation. Conceptualizing the Egyptian Nation Al-Tahtawi located the power of public opinion within a broader concep- tualization of a new political community: the Egyptian nation. This nation was, in turn, bounded by the limits of the homeland (waṭan) and was made up of citizens (waṭanīs). As al-Tahtawi’s choice of the word waṭanī for his political subject suggests, these citizens gained membership in the Egyptian nation by virtue of their connection to the homeland, either by being born there or through migration.31 One particularly illuminating passage from Al-Murshid is worth quoting at some length. All the deductions that civilized nations (al-umam al-mutamaddinah) have reached by reason, and that they have made the foundations of their laws and civilization (tamaddunihim), rarely deviate from the prin- 36 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 36 ciples underpinning the branches of Islamic jurisprudence that concern human interaction (muʿāmalāt). What we call the principles of Islamic jurisprudence (ʿilm uṣūl al-fiqh) is similar to what they call natural rights or natural laws (al-ḥuqūq al-ṭabīʿiyyah aw al-nawāmīs al- fiṭriyyah), which means the rational principles, in relation to what to accept and what to reject, that underpin their civil laws. What we refer to as branches of jurisprudence they call civil rights or civil laws, and what we call justice and virtue (al-ʿadl wa al-iḥsān) they express with the terms freedom and equality (al-ḥurriyyah wa al-taswiyyah). What we call the love of religion and protecting it … they refer to as love of the homeland (maḥabbat al-waṭan). Loving the homeland in Islam is only one of the branches of the faith, while protecting religion is the main obligation. Every Islamic realm (mamlakah islāmiyyah) is a home- land for all of its Muslim inhabitants, and is therefore a combination of both religion and patriotism (fa hiya jāmiʿa li al-dīn wa al-waṭaniyyah). Therefore, protecting it [the homeland] is an obligation for its inhabi- tants in both respects ... However, it is also possible that [the love of] a particular homeland might lead to a zeal (ghayrah) purely on the basis of nationality (jinsiyyah) and residency (manziliyyah) as a Qaysi, a Ya- mani, an Egyptian, or a Syrian for example. This is despite the fact that the homeland establishes equality between different types of people within its bounds.32 In this passage, we can see that for al-Tahtawi nationhood is attended to by a number of interconnected concepts and conversations such as civ- ilization; the relationship among fiqh, reason, and siyāsah; justice and free- dom; kingship; and the relationship between love of religion and love of the homeland. I discuss these themes in turn below. A New Horizon of Expectations First of all, we should recall that language is not just a tool with which to make sense of reality. Rather, language and concepts actually constitute the reality one experiences. Moreover, different conceptual universes are underpinned by different temporal modes, meaning that the experience of time can change alongside changes in language. During the nineteenth cen- tury, a major temporal shift occurred in the Arabic language. This shift is best demonstrated by the new temporal mode conveyed by the root m-d-n and expressed by the concept of civilization (tamaddun), a shift that al- Tahtawi clearly signals in his concept of civilized nations (al-umam al-mu- tamaddinah) in the passage above.33 Warren: For the Good of the Nation 37 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 37 We can also observe this temporal change across al-Tahtawi’s oeuvre. The temporal mode underpinning the Takhlīṣ is that of time rising toward the past and then falling toward the present: “As time rises toward the past, you will observe people regressing … and the more you go downward and observe the descent of time, you mostly will see their elevation and progress.”34 A certain notion of progress is certainly evident in this passage, inasmuch as al-Tahtawi perceives progress in human skills and civil sci- ences, but time is not moving forward in a linear fashion.35 Prior to the nineteenth century, the temporal order that had underpinned the ʿulamaʾ’s conceptual universe had been that of a cyclical present underpinned by a just and loving God. In making this point I do not mean to establish an absolute dichotomy between the pre- and post-nineteenth century worlds, or repeat the Orien- talist trope that the pre-nineteenth century Islamicate world existed in a state of stagnancy or retardation. Rather, I mean that over the course of the nineteenth century, temporal culture changed in Egypt and across the Arab world more broadly, and that the emphasis on accessing truth through a re- flective tradition was replaced by a refashioning of the world with man at its center. This refashioning was part of an emerging worldview that prior- itized the future (or rather, the futurity) of the nation.36 Although al-Tahtawi did present a theory of history in the Takhlīṣ that he called civilization, comprising the three stages of savages (Black Africans), barbarians (bedouin), and civilized people (the Arab peoples of Egypt, the Levant, North Africa, Europe, and America), this is quite different from the theory of history that would take its place.37 By the time al-Tahtawi wrote the Manāhij and Al-Murshid, civilization and progress had become the watchwords of patriotic Egyptians, who shared in their imagining of Egypt’s future.38 This new temporality, an important part of the assumptions that made up al-Tahtawi and his peers’ horizon of expectations, had a marked impact upon their reception of the Islamic tradition. Nationhood and the Islamic Tradition: Fiqh, Siyāsah, and the Exclusion of the Community After al-Tahtawi’s reference to the deductions of civilized nations, we can observe that his concept of nationhood was sustained by a harmonious re- lationship between Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) on the one hand, and rea- son and politics (siyāsah) on the other. Al-Tahtawi divided politics into 38 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 38 five types (i.e., prophetic, monarchical, public, individual, and internal39) and emphasized that “people should be taught politics by the methods of the Sharia and not by pure reason (al-ʿaql al-mujarrad)” – although the fact that fiqh, as well as reason and siyāsah, are subordinate to the Sharia did not entail a rejection of the “positive” innovations that reason might produce.40 Al-Tahtawi anchored the exercise of reason and siyāsah within the bounds of the Sharia for a number of reasons, including legitimizing the natural sciences. He often stressed the Islamic roots of the natural sciences, which he also considered one of the key foundations of a nation’s strength because they would inculcate love of the homeland among the citizenry.41 Scientific advancement was also considered emblematic of European civ- ilizational advancement. However, al-Tahtawi’s emphasis on the appeal of nineteenth-century scientific method did not entail an embrace of nine- teenth-century European metaphysics. The fact that he did not extend his embrace of natural science and sci- entific method to a subsequent embrace of European metaphysics is often viewed as a deficiency.42 However, the prevailing view that the correct practice of natural science depends upon internalizing European meta- physics is only the result of the European historiography of science.43 The necessity of this internalization is not self-evident, and al-Tahtawi saw no need for it.44 Over the course of his life, the meaning of siyāsah changed from statecraft to politics, and al-Tahtawi saw fit to anchor it within the Sharia as well. Al-Tahtawi defined siyāsah as “everything that is related to the state (dawlah) in terms of its laws (aḥkām) and social re- lationships (ʿalāʾiqihā wa-rawābiṭihā).”45 In other words, siyāsah re- ferred to the public domain that had emerged along with the emergence of the nation-state.46 However, in placing fiqh, reason, and siyāsah under the Sharia, al- Tahtawi was also adopting a position within a conversation of the Islamic tradition, within which the relationship between the Sharia and siyāsah (as statecraft) was a significant controversy. During the classical period, that is, the period whose literature was enjoying a resurgence in al-Tahtawi’s time, the efficacy of the Sharia for the purposes of public order had been much debated. Some of the classical ʿ ulamaʾ appear to have considered the Sharia unsuitable for public law and a realm distinct from siyāsah, which was commonly equated with the ruler’s utilization of non-Sharia punish- ments and often justified solely on the basis of its utility in maintaining public order. The philosopher al-Farabi even considered siyāsah a realm Warren: For the Good of the Nation 39 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 39 beyond, and indeed above, the Sharia, while other ʿulamaʾ, such as al- Mawardi, considered it part of Islam’s normative field.47 Al-Tahtawi en- gaged in this discussion in Al-Murshid when he wrote, In the past, there were rulers (awāmir wulāt al-umūr) who were oppres- sive because they acted according to their whims, and did whatever they wanted. There were peoples who had no possibility of opposing their rulers, and did not have the protections of the legal ordinances of the Sharia (lā muḥāmāt la-hum ʿan aḥkām al-sharīʿah). They were not able to tell their kings anything that contravened their [the kings’] views, or write anything about politics or express their opinions about anything. They were like foreigners as far as governance was concerned.48 On the one hand, al-Tahtawi’s portrayal of extrajudicial (or siyāsī) pun- ishments as a failing of earlier of forms of rule can be read as a result of his appreciation for the public order he witnessed in France. At the begin- ning of his career he had included in the Takhlīṣ a translation and commen- tary on the French National Charter promulgated after the 1830 Revolution, a document that established the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe. In his commentary, al-Tahtawi remarked that one of the clearest signs of French “progress in civilized manners” (taqaddumuhum fī al-adāb al- ḥādirah) was that “All the French are equal before the law … the legal in- junction even applies to the king … 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.”49 On the other hand, and turning to the conversations of the Islamic tra- dition where the siyāsah–Sharia controversy often referred to the example of the ruler’s implementation of extra-Sharia punishment as though it were a key issue, these punishments were not the actual source of the classical ʿulamaʾ’s concern. In their opinion, extra-Sharia punishments happened anyway and would likely continue to do so. Instead what was at stake was the need to buttress the authority of Islam (and, we might add, the ʿ ulamaʾ) by articulating a position whereby it became Islamically normative, in terms of the ramifications of a believer’s actions in the afterlife (which is what really mattered), for subjects to obey and cooperate with the ruler and governing elite.50 At one level, al-Tahtawi’s context evidences a comparable concern inasmuch as he was witnessing the ʿulamaʾ’s marginalization from soci- ety as Ali created a new class of technocrats through state schools to staff the growing bureaucracy. The more important issue, however, concerns 40 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 40 authority. For the participants in the classical siyāsah–Sharia debate, the only authority for this kind of extra-textual argument (namely, that it was Islamically normative to obey and cooperate with administrative law and order) that had no explicit textual or revelational legitimacy could only have come from the community. More specifically, this authority could only come from the consensus of the community (ijmāʿ al-ummah), which the Prophet had legitimized as an authoritative source of law through the hadith “my community will never agree on an error.” How- ever, the classical ʿulamaʾ’s failure to adequately resolve the siyāsah– Sharia debate and promulgate a theory of political life that was thoroughly grounded in the Islamic normative apparatus meant that, by the time of al-Ghazali, the Muslim community had all but disappeared, or rather, had been excluded from even the most basic discussions of political legitimacy.51 This failure led to a foundational illegitimacy of political life in main- stream Sunni Islam, exemplified by al-Ghazali’s despairing image that engaging in political life was only legitimate inasmuch as eating carrion was legitimate to offset starvation.52 By contrast, in the early years of Islam the consensus of the community had played a central role in theo- rizing political life. The community selected the caliph through consen- sus, and the caliph acted as an agent (wakīl) on its behalf. In turn, this consensus guarded the caliph from error, thereby ensuring the theoretical legitimacy of Muslim political life. To the contemporary reader, the com- munity’s exclusion looks like absolutism. However, this appearance is the paradox that “modern scholars have observed in the ʿulamaʾ’s atti- tudes toward the legitimacy of government and the limits of its power. What looks like absolutism is the remnants of a Community-centered vi- sion, which the Community’s role to constrain the religiously bound [ruler] is expected.”53 I read al-Tahtawi as deeply invested in this conversation, and not just with a view to legitimizing cooperation with the emerging Egyptian na- tion-state and the absolutist rule of Ali and his successors. Instead, I con- sider al-Tahtawi’s introduction of public opinion as a vanquishing power to be his own attempt to re-animate the Muslim political community. He made this effort by introducing a new role for the community, and at- tempted to re-imagine its will and consensus within the territorial bounds of the homeland. This argument also has implications for understanding al-Tahtawi’s equivalence between freedom and equality, and justice and virtue, all of which could only exist under the law. Warren: For the Good of the Nation 41 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 41 The Perfection of the Monarchical System In the Manāhij, al-Tahtawi built his political thought on kingship upon a pre-modern imaginary articulated by ʿulamaʾ such as al-Ghazali, who drew comparisons between an adab of politics and an adab of the self in which “the relationship of the human spirit to his body is like the ruler to his city (madīnah) or kingdom.”54 Madīnah was the concept that had emerged in the Islamic tradition through a dialogue with the Hellenistic concept of polis, and had, along with Persianate theories of statecraft, filled the gap in Muslim political theory left by excluding the community’s consensus. At the same time, there were key differences between the worldviews that underpinned the Hellenistic polis and the Muslim com- munity, between, on the one hand, a territorially defined community that seeks the good life in this-worldly pursuits of material prosperity and intellectual enlight- enment and, on the other, an ideologically defined community … that seeks the ultimate good in the eternal afterlife and sees this life as only a means; between a community that sees itself and its god(s) all bound by the same brooding verdicts of fate, or laws of nature, and a community that believes in an omnipotent, personal God.55 Alongside a dialectic between polis and the Muslim community, al- Tahtawi also used madīnah as part of his own dialectic with the French concept cité. Within al-Tahtawi’s madīnah, just as the body’s organs work together harmoniously when each knows its place and function, so too does the citizenry work in harmony with the king, where public opinion was “a power conquering the hearts of kings and nobles.”56 While his political the- ory was grounded in the pre-modern imaginary of ʿ ulamaʾ such as al-Ghazali, he emphasized that the system of governance he was articulating was novel. So, although he wrote in the Manāhij that “the king is like the soul and [his] subjects are like the body. The body has no strength other than through its soul,” al-Tahtawi also acknowledged that “in the majority of countries” kings had formerly been chosen by the authoritative consensus of the com- munity (ijmāʿ al-ummah) and elected by the masses (intikhābiy-yan bi al- sawād al-ʿaẓam). By making these statements, al-Tahtawi is clearly positioning himself in relation to the issue at stake within the Islamic tradition, that is, how to resolve the Muslim community’s exclusion from any discussion of polit- ical legitimacy. He then adds that because elections were the cause of “cor- ruption, civil strife, war and disagreement,” monarchies have become 42 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 42 hereditary in order to ensure the “perfection of the monarchical system.”57 On the one hand, we can find some explanations for al-Tahtawi’s argument in his immediate context. He had been in France at a time when a nation- alistic cult had been developing around the memory of Napoleon Bona- parte, who had become revered as the “martyr and messiah” of the French Revolution and an “emblem of national unity.” Al-Tahtawi was influenced by this cult of veneration and constructed a similar “Napoleon-like myth” around the personage of Ali.58 On the other hand, it appears clear that he was engaging with interlocutors from his tradition and attempting to reimagine the community’s will within the new territorial bounds of the Egyptian homeland. For al-Tahtawi, the king was legitimate because he was God’s regent on Earth (khalīfat Allāh fī arḍihi). However, he was also legitimate by virtue of being “leader of the nation” (raʾīs al-ummah).59 The national political community was tied to the homeland, and “their personal inter- ests can be fulfilled only by fulfilling the public interest (al-maṣlaḥah al- ʿumūmiyyah), which is the interest of the government, which is the interest of the homeland.”60 The homeland has its own interests, then, and it is an entity that needs the love and protection of its inhabitants, who are bound to it by the same bonds that bind a child to a parent. Although the community – or “the great blackness” (al-sawād al-ʿaẓam, meaning the majority of Muslims), as al-Tahtawi put it in reference to those hadiths that represent the remnants of the community-centered vision of Muslim political theory61 – once chose the rulers, al-Tahtawi argued that this was no longer possible. However, the public opinion of the people can help ensure that the ruler was free from error by acting on the king’s heart. The community’s consensual will could now be imagined within the lim- its of the Egyptian homeland in a way that was not possible for al- Tahtawi’s interlocutors of the tradition, and could, theoretically straighten out the rulers if they deviated. The temporal mode underpinning the idea of civilization as progress forward through time is important to understanding al-Tahtawi’s engage- ment with Muslim ideas of kingship. He considered the good of the nation as a normative good on its own terms, rather than just for its echoes in the afterlife. In addition, he thought this good was best served by the monar- chical system. The term madīnah was closely linked to al-Tahtawi’s imag- inary of the progress of the civilized nations (al-umam al-mutamaddinah) that the Egyptian nation would join. The importance of this assumption is evidenced in the lines that follow the paragraph in which al-Tahtawi argued Warren: For the Good of the Nation 43 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 43 44 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 for the importance of public opinion. Here, al-Tahtawi emphasized the im- portance of a particular segment of the public, namely historians, “for it is the historian who recalls for the nation and the records of its kings and … disseminates both the good qualities of kings and their shortcomings.”62 The historian’s opinion was important for al-Tahtawi since a concern for the nation’s future, rather than the past, is a quintessential aspect of the modern nation-state project. Time is understood as progress, and na- tions are to be judged against one another by their progress.63 Al-Tahtawi expressed this idea through his concept of tamaddun, referring to the ma- terial and moral civilizing of the Egyptian nation that was to be carried out by all its citizens.64 He emphasized the importance of the ruler’s con- cern for history and the historian as a particular check on his power, since the ruler should also be concerned about how history and future historians will judge him in terms of how well he had served the nation and aided its progress.65 Events cannot be narrated in a conceptual vacuum, that is to say, the past cannot become history without first being undergirded by concepts that render past events conceivable as a part of history. Al-Tahtawi’s own work of history, Anwār Tawfīq al-Jalīl fī Akhbār Miṣr wa-Tawthīq Banī Ismāʿīl (The Illuminations of Tawfiq the Great on the History of Egypt and the Descendants of Ishmael, 1868), is instructive here. For al-Tahtawi, Egypt’s past becomes its history only through the concepts of civilization and progress. The memory and narrative of Egypt’s past glory is central to this process, as al-Tahtawi demonstrates in his introductory section to Anwār Tawfīq al-Jalīl, titled “The Pre-eminence of Egypt in Advancement and Civilization” (Aqdamiyyat Miṣr fī al-Taqaddum wa al-Tamaddun).66 He emphasizes that Egypt’s philosophers of Antiquity were so renowned that even the ancient Greeks traveled there to study.67 Al-Tahtawi’s state- ment: “For history is a guiding rudder of certain knowledge (ʿumūd al- yaqīn) … that preserves past truths and bygone eras, and brings into clear view that which was concealed”68 is an apt metaphor that illustrates what Reinhart Koselleck called the “horizontal qualities” of these kinds of con- cepts.69 For him, it is history that steers Egypt toward its future. Freedom and Justice under the law As an addition to his conceptualization of public opinion, al-Tahtawi wrote that this “power of the people is preserved by complete freedom (kumāl al-ḥurriyyah).”70 We know that freedom is not a transhistorical category, ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 44 but rather a concept that is always articulated against the backdrop of a par- ticular historical context and within the framework of a particular tradition. In his use of the term freedom, al-Tahtawi was referring to the rule of law, specifically the freedom to obey it. When he negatively recalled a time when people were denied the Sharia’s protections and were therefore like foreigners as far as the government was concerned, he appears to be draw- ing a connection between the Sharia and a desirable public participation in government. Al-Tahtawi famously declared that what “we call justice and virtue (al-ʿadl wa al-iḥsān), they express with the terms freedom and equality (al-ḥurriyyah wa al-taswiyyah),” a statement that has commonly been read for his appreciation of the French authors he had read in Paris; his subse- quent perceived failure to translate that reading into his own theory has been understood as a deficiency in his project. Meanwhile, his praise for Khedive Ismaʾil when he created the Council of Deputies (Majlis al- Nuwwāb) is tempered by the fact that al-Tahtawi did not consider that council to be an institutional check on the khedive’s power (which it in- deed was not), but rather a means by which the khedive could be certain of his “moral domination of the souls of his subjects.”71 These apparent contradictions, at least from a contemporary liberal standpoint, show that there is far more to be said about al-Tahtawi’s understanding of freedom. If we are to understand his praise for the council as part of the monarchical system’s perfection, rather than his failure to introduce an institutional check on the khedive’s power, then we can view the council as part of his attempt to re-imagine a role for the community in correcting a ruler who had deviated from the law. Al-Tahtawi considered public opinion to be a substantial constraint on the extra-judicial actions of the king. At the same time, he added that citizens (waṭanīs) had complete freedom (al-ḥurriyyah al-tāmmah) by virtue of their connection to the homeland. However, for al-Tahtawi freedom meant the free- dom to obey the law and the freedom from being forced to do that which the law forbade. It was not a right, but rather an individual’s “license” or “per- mission” from the ruler, although both the citizenry and the king were subjects of the law.72 Al-Tahtawi wrote that the citizens were “the children of the home- land.” Their role was to serve it and, in return, the homeland thanked them. As al-Tahtawi made this argument, he commonly cited the hadith “love of the waṭan is part of faith,” using this term in a new way.73 He subdivided freedom into five types: natural, behavioral, religious, civil, and political. Natural freedom included eating, drinking, and walk- Warren: For the Good of the Nation 45 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 45 ing, and restricting them would be unjust. Behavioral freedom was the freedom to display good behavior and act nobly. Similarly, freedom of re- ligion represented freedom of doctrine, opinion, and legal school, so long as the person did not go outside the fundamentals of the dīn. Political free- dom was the freedom to have different political opinions, but not to exer- cise power, and was the freedom of different kings to rule their countries in different ways.74 We can see that al-Tahtawi’s understanding of freedom and equality, and its conceptual counterparts justice and virtue, could not exist outside the law and could not be realized except through the obeying of it. Here, al-Tahtawi is drawing upon both the understanding of freedom that he found in his reading of François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télé- maque (The Adventures of Telemachus, 1699),75 but also the view of ʿulamaʾ such as al-Ghazali that freedom and justice could never be known outside the law.76 Moreover, while Wael Abu-Uksa remarks that al-Tahtawi was articulating his understanding of freedom against a contemporary backdrop whereby the state was understood as weak,77 I would add that he considered this state weakness not only in comparison to its contempo- rary European counterparts, but also to Egypt’s future state of strength, which could only be realized through the process of civilization. As such, al- Tahtawi put the adab tradition and obeying the law as ethical self-cultivation in the service of cultivating the civilization of Egypt. We can observe this emphasis in his move to connect obeying an unjust ruler with the new state practices of taxation, conscription, and the massive expansion of state education. Education The view in much of the historiography of al-Tahtawi is a disappointment that, despite his reading of French Enlightenment authors, he fell back upon the precedents of the Islamic legal tradition, which emphasized obe- dience to an unjust ruler. However, there is more to be said about his view on obedience and unjust rule, which Gilbert Delanoue characterizes as “very traditional.” While I certainly consider al-Tahtawi a thorough part of his tradition, Delanoue is an example of an author who uses the term tradition as an antonym to modernity, and subsequently views al- Tathawi’s position on obedience as being “traditional” because he reads him as repeating a fixed doctrine. When al-Tahtawi discussed rebellion against an unjust ruler, he wrote, “if he [the ruler] oppresses them, then 46 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 46 they [the people] are to persevere until God opens a door to guide him to- ward the good.”78 At first, it appears that only God’s mercy could “guide [the ruler’s] state toward justice.”79 However, for al-Tahtawi, the ruler’s power was checked not only by his own conscience and the certainty that he would be accountable to God for his actions, but also his accountability to future historians. I contend that the justice to which al-Tahtawi was referring in this pas- sage is the justice that came about by establishing and executing the law, that is to say, both fiqh and the correct practice of politics as taught by the Sharia. As a result, the oppressive or tyrannical ruler was not just a ruler who went beyond the Sharia’s stipulations when carrying out extrajudicial punishments, as it would have been in the view of some of al-Tahtawi’s classical interlocutors. Rather, injustice (ẓulm) was the absence of the law, and the oppressive ruler was one who did not (or could not) uphold the law and thereby engender a state of affairs in which both he and the citi- zenry could cultivate ethical and pious selves through their shared obser- vance of the law. One of the prevailing questions in al-Tahtawi’s historiography is whether he was an authoritarian or the catalyst for a form of Muslim re- publicanism. We can note that both of these positions judge him in relation to the liberal tradition’s benchmarks.80 However, Delanoue described al- Tahtawi’s understanding of obedience to the ruler as “very traditional,” be- cause he “closely links obedience to the prince with obedience to God and the Prophet. The subjects must therefore aid their prince if he is attacked, by supplying him with soldiers and money.”81 In my view, the second part of this sentence illustrates how al-Tahtawi was engaging with the conversations of his tradition from a standpoint that was underpinned by a new concern for the good of the nation. First of all, al-Tahtawi was not only concerned with protecting the personage of king from attack, which characterized pre-modern arguments. More importantly for al-Tahtawi, it was the Egyptian homeland that needed love and protec- tion. Moreover, al-Tahtawi’s specific examples of obedience to the ruler here were “supplying him with soldiers and money.”82 As such, his concern was that the citizenry should submit to new state practices of conscription and taxation. In Egypt, prior to the nineteenth century, defending a particular geo- graphically bounded territory had not been considered a collective obli- gation for the local population just because they resided within that territory. Instead, this obligation fell upon the ruler alone.83 Taxation and Warren: For the Good of the Nation 47 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 47 conscription as new techniques of governance had recently begun to be implemented by Ali, and at that time were being fiercely resisted by ordi- nary Egyptians. For al-Tahtawi, then, arguing for the legitimacy of con- scription and taxation by citing Q. 4:59 and the adab tradition of ethical cultivation through obeying the law was a key part of the process whereby subjects were fashioned into citizens of a nation-state of which they rec- ognized themselves as a part, to the extent of becoming willing to defend it with their wealth and lives. Al-Tahtawi considered the ʿulamaʾ’s role to be one of educating the public in the virtues of adab, rather than just educating the ruler as had been the case in the classical “mirror for princes” statecraft literature.84 His argument for the ʿulamaʾ’s inculcation of virtue among the public through adab occurred concurrently with a massive expansion of compulsory state education across Egypt under the direction of al-Tahtawi himself. McLar- ney emphasizes the centrality of the adab tradition to al-Tahtawi’s argu- ment and critiques what she views as Timothy Mitchell’s overemphasis on the novelty of mass education as a new form of power and discipline. My own point is to emphasize al-Tahtawi’s horizon of expectation. He considered the disciplinary power of education (inasmuch as the citi- zenry’s space, time, and activities could be regulated through it) important for the service of Egyptian civilization, that is, national progress. The pur- pose of education, as opposed to the undisciplined learning that occurred at al-Azhar and the village kuttāb, was to teach citizens the importance of health, duties toward the family, and, above all, ḥubb al-waṭan (love of the homeland). Al-Tahtawi had a hierarchical view of education, which he saw as something that was to be rationed according to one’s position in society. Primary education, which was mandatory for everyone, was not only sup- posed to teach children arithmetic and writing through studying the Qur’an, but, more importantly “swimming and horsemanship, and throwing and handling the javelin and sword and other implements of war, to train chil- dren in the methods of protecting and fighting for the nation.” Moreover, teachers were to instruct their students in “the reasons why the government obliges the population to serve their homeland personally in the army, and why they are obliged to pay a portion of their wealth in taxes.”85 As such, while on the one hand the citizens became free through obeying the law, and through adab cultivated an ethical self, the purpose of modern educa- tion was to make students understand the necessity of being obedient to the nation-state. 48 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 48 Mitchell emphasizes the importance that disciplinary power had for al- Tahtawi, since to him the word tarbiyah no longer meant cultivation, or causing something to grow, be it crops or the morals of children. Instead, to al-Tahtawi it meant “the tarbiyah of individual human beings, which means the tarbiyah of communities and nations.” As he put it in his trans- lation of Fénelon’s Télémarque, “We, the masters, should seize on our sub- jects in their early youth. We shall change the tastes and habits of the whole people. We shall build up again from the very foundations and teach the people to live a frugal, innocent, busy life.”86 For al-Tahtawi, the virtues of adab were of value for more than just ethical self-cultivation, since they could also serve national progress. Ibn Khaldun and the Problem of Social Cohesion Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in Egypt during the nineteenth century. Both he and al-Tahtawi were concerned with social cohesion,87 or, more specifically, with what kind of bond could bind people together to form a political community and would lead indi- viduals to subordinate their own interests to the good of the collective, ac- cept the authority of the ruler and the ruling elite, and internalize the aims of the collective as their own. In the final segment of the long passage quoted above, al-Tahtawi’s concern for the cohesion of the Egyptian nation is apparent: Every Islamic realm (mamlakah islāmiyyah) is a homeland for all of its Muslim inhabitants, and is therefore a combination of both religion and patriotism (fa-hiya jāmiʿa li al-dīn wa al-waṭaniyyah), and protecting it [the homeland] is an obligation for its inhabitants in both respects ... How- ever, it is also possible that [love of] a particular homeland might lead to a zeal (ghayrah) purely on the basis of nationality (jinsiyyah) and resi- dency (manziliyyah) as a Qaysi, a Yamani, an Egyptian, or a Syrian for example. This is despite the fact that the homeland establishes equality between different types of people within its bounds.88 Ibn Khaldun’s concept of social cohesion (ʿaṣabiyyah) underpinned his understanding of both civilization and history, and al-Tahtawi’s three-tiered view of civilization (savagery, barbarism, and civilization) in the Takhlīṣ is likely drawn from Ibn Khaldun, who supposed that, as human collectives progressed, this social cohesion would decline. Conversely, then, each civi- lization would grow weaker as it grew more advanced, because the bonds of Warren: For the Good of the Nation 49 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 49 ʿaṣabiyyah would decline as the society progressed from nomadic to urban. As a result, the ruling dynasty would fall and be replaced by another dynasty that came from the periphery, one that would initially be successful because while still in its early barbaric state it would enjoy strong ʿaṣabiyyah bonds. However, just like its predecessor, it would also rise and fall. “The past is like the future, water from water,” as Ibn Khaldun put it. The Takhlīṣ contains echoes of a shared temporal mode with Ibn Khal- dun. Al-Tahtawi was also concerned for social cohesion in part because he saw the potential for competing social bonds to disturb the public order, and that the new bonds of nationhood be strong, but not strong enough to subvert the bonds of Muslim solidarity. In the quoted passage, al-Tahtawi gave the example of Qaysi-Yamani tension. On the one hand, this referred to the historical rivalry between two northern and southern Arabian tribal collectives that turned into a well-known feud under Caliph Muʿawiyah. In al-Tahtawi’s own time, this conflict had re-emerged and led to a number of local conflicts, even pitched battles, between various Bedouin groups in the areas surrounding Mount Lebanon, Nablus, and Jerusalem, which did not dissipate until the mid-nineteenth century.89 For al-Tahtawi, the answer to this particular problem was to inculcate the bonds of solidarity within the bounds of the homeland via mass educa- tion. His concern with nation-state building in Egypt informed his conver- sation with the work of Ibn Khaldun, whose concerns he also shared. At the same time, while Ibn Khaldun understood time as a cyclical rise and fall, I understand al-Tahtawi’s orientation to the future to mean that he be- lieved he could mobilize the emerging nation-state’s disciplinary power to create new bonds that would stand the test of time. Conclusion In this article I have made two main points. My first point critiqued the pre- vailing view that measured al-Tahtawi’s work against a yardstick of the French Enlightenment and consequently understood his work as represen- tative of tradition, while the French thought he encountered represented modernity. By contrast, in this article I have demonstrated that while al- Tahtawi’s writings are on one level certainly in dialogue with his experiences in France, he was just as concerned, if not more so, with another set of in- terlocutors. This other conversation was internal to the unfolding Islamic tradition, which we can understand as both a framework for inquiry and as a set of conversations stretching across the centuries. 50 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 50 Among these conversations was the ongoing attempt to ground the the- ory of the Muslim political community and its practice within a normative Islamic apparatus. Al-Tahtawi engaged in this conversation on a number of levels: he conceptualized the public as a group with the capacity for self- governance and, in so doing, built upon the vivid imaginary of the good society as a body with the king at its center, by placing the public’s power at the king’s heart. I have added that al-Tahtawi did this due to his attempt to reconceptualize the will of the Muslim community within the territorial bounds of the homeland in order to legitimize Muslim political life. This effort was relevant and responsive to his immediate context (living under Egyptian autocratic rulers). However, he was also deeply invested in this conversation that had troubled his interlocutors ranging from al-Farabi to al-Mawardi and to al-Ghazali. Al-Tahtawi lived not only during a time of intense interest in translating European works into Arabic, but also during a resurgence of interest in clas- sical Islamic literature engendered in part by the introduction of industrial printing into Egypt. As such, the second point I have made in this article concerns his reception of the texts and arguments that comprised his tradi- tion. I have used the concept of horizon of expectations to refer to the shared set of assumptions through which al-Tahtawi’s generation received the texts of authors such as al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun. In particular, I have empha- sized the centrality of a temporal shift that underpinned al-Tahtawi’s writing. I have argued for the importance of a new temporal mode, exemplified by the understanding of time as civilizational progress. For al-Tahtawi, the na- tion’s progress, or civilization, became a good in itself. One of the nineteenth century’s most influential ʿulamaʾ, he instigated a chain of nationalist thought among the Egyptian ʿulamaʾ who succeeded him. The legacy of al- Tahtawi’s protonationalism is observable even today, as the likes of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and ʿAli Jumʿa contest the legitimacy of the 2011 revolution and the 2013 coup in the name of their competing visions of the good of the Egyptian nation.90 Endnotes 1. Wael Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2016), 71-72. 2. Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz fī Talkhīṣ Bārīz aw al-Dīwān al-Nafīs bi- Īwān Bārīs (Beirut: Dar al-Suwaydi li al-Nashr wa al-Tawziʿ, 2002), 6. Quoted in ibid., 72. I have followed his translation. Warren: For the Good of the Nation 51 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 51 52 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 3. William Gallois, “The War for Time in Colonial Algeria,” in Breaking Up Time: Negotiating the Borders between Present, Past and Future, ed. Chris Lorenz and Berber Bevernage (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 252-73; Gallois, “The Destruction of the Islamic State of Being, Its Replace- ment in the Being of the State: Algeria, 1830-1847,” Settler Colonial Studies (2017): 1-21. 4. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 50-83. 5. Ibid., 82. 6. Leon Zolondek, “Al-Ṭahṭāwī and Political Freedom,” The Muslim World 54, no. 2 (1964): 6. 7. See, for example, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: Toward an Intellectual History of the Nahda, ed. Jens Hanssen and Max Weiss (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2016). 8. Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Occasional Papers Series (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown Uni- versity, 1986); Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Ration- ality, and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 9. Mona Siddiqui, The Good Muslim: Reflections on Classical Islamic Law and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6. 10. Ellen A. McLarney, “Freedom, Justice, and the Power of Adab,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 1 (2016): 25. 11. McLarney, “Freedom,” 35-36. See also Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian, and Pagan Polities (London: I.B. Tauris, 1997). 12. McLarney, “Freedom,” 36. 13. Ibid., 29. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 161- 63. 16 Ibid., 37-92. 17. Hans Robert Jauss and Elizabeth Benzinger, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History 2 (1970): 7-37. 18. Ibid., 11-14. 19. This is how Reinhart Koselleck uses the term. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 20. McLarney, “Freedom,” 27. 21. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (London: Ox- ford University Press, 1962), 69-84. 22. For a translation of the Takhlīṣ and commentary, see Daniel L. Newman, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826- 1831) (London: Saqi, 2004). ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 52 23. McLarney, “Freedom,” 27. 24. Molefi K. Asante, Culture and Customs of Egypt (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 135. 25. Gilbert Delanoue, Moralistes et politiques musulmans dans l’Égypte du XIXe siècle (1798-1882) (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1982), 469-70; Juan Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s ‘Urabi Movement (Cairo: The Amer- ican University in Cairo Press, 1999), 42; Zolondek, “Al-Ṭahṭāwī and Polit- ical Freedom,” 6. 26. Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition, 5. 27. McLarney, “Freedom,” 28. 28. Roxanne Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 117-18. 29. McLarney, “Freedom,” 29. 30. Ibid., 36. 31. Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, Al-Murshid al-Amīn li al-Banāt wa al-Banīn (Cairo: Mak- tabat al-Adab, 2008), 94. 32. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Murshid, 124-25; Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 185. I have generally followed Abu-Uksa’s translation with some alterations and additions. 33. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 50-83. 34. Al-Tahtawi, Takhlīṣ al-Ibrīz, 6; Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 72. 35. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 72. 36. Gallois, “The Destruction of the Islamic State of Being,” 6-9. 37. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 72-73. 38. Ibid., 50-83. 39. Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah li Rifāʿa Rafiʿa al-Taḥṭāwī, ed. Muhammad ʿImara (Beirut: Al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li al-Dirasat wa al- Nashr, 1973), 1:511-12. 40. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 185. 41. Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah fi Mabāhij al-Ādāb al- ʿAṣriyyah (Cairo: al-Majlis al-Aʿla li al-Thaqafah, 2002), 15. 42. John W. Livingston, “Western Science and Educational Reform in the Thought of Shaykh Rifa’a Al-Tahtawi,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 543-64. 43. B. Harun Küçük, “Science Studies and Early Modern Ottoman Science,” In- ternational Journal of Middle East Studies 47, no. 3 (2015): 584-87. 44. Livingston, “Western Thought and Educational Reform,” 554-55. 45. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 1:517. 46. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 94-95. 47. Anjum, Politics, 102-04. 48. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 2:433. 49. Ibid., 1:102. Quoted in McLarney, “Freedom,” 29. Warren: For the Good of the Nation 53 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 53 50. Anjum, Politics, 107. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 127. 53. Ibid., 133. 54. McLarney, “Freedom,” 35-36. 55. Anjum, Politics, 14. 56. McLarney, “Freedom,” 36. 57. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 354-58. 58. Benjamin Geer, “The Priesthood of Nationalism in Egypt: Duty, Authority, Autonomy” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, 2011), 113. 59. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 353-57. 60. Ibid., 351. 61. Anjum, Politics, 85. 62. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah 1:521. 63. Samuli Schielke, “Hegemonic Encounters: Criticism of Saints-Day Festivals and the Formation of Modern Islam in Late 19th and Early 20th-Century Egypt,” Die Welt des Islams 47 (2007): 3; Talal Asad, Formations of the Sec- ular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13. 64. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Murshid al-Amīn, 90-95. 65. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 355-56. 66. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 3:32-34. 67. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 83. 68. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 3:28. 69. Koselleck, Futures, 112. 70. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 1:516. 71. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 323. 72. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 2:505. 73. For a discussion of the meaning of waṭan prior to the nineteenth century, see Geer, “The Priesthood of Nationalism in Egypt,” 39-89. 74. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Murshid al-Amīn, 127. 75. McLarney, “Freedom,” 31-34. 76. Anjum, Politics, 106. 77. Abu-Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World, 110-11. 78. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 369. 79. Ibid. 80. See for example Mohammad Fadel, “Modernist Islamic Political Thought and the Egyptian and Tunisian Revolutions of 2011,” Middle East Law and Governance 3, no. 1-2 (2011): 94-104. 81. Delanoue, Moralistes et politiques musulmans, 469-70. 82. Ibid. 83. Geer, “Priesthood,” 81-84. 84. McLarney, “Freedom,” 38. 54 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34:4 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 54 85. Al-Tahtawi, Manāhij al-Albāb al-Miṣriyyah, 350. 86. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 75. 87. McLarney, “Freedom,” 27. 88. Al-Tahtawi, Al-Murshid al-Amīn, 125. 89. Gabriel Baer and Miriam Hoexter, “Kays and Yaman in the Ottoman Period,” The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1965). 90. See David H. Warren, “Cleansing the Nation of the ‘Dogs of Hell’: ʿAli Jumʿa’s Nationalist Legal Reasoning in Support of the 2013 Egyptian Coup and Its Bloody Aftermath,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 3 (2017): 457-77; Warren, “The ʿUlamāʾ and the Arab Uprisings 2011- 13: Considering Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the ‘Global Mufti,’ between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Legal Tradition, and Qatari Foreign Policy,” New Middle Eastern Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 1-33. Warren: For the Good of the Nation 55 ajiss34-4-noconfrep_ajiss 11/3/2017 9:31 AM Page 55