Geographies of Union and Mobilization: The Azhar Strike of 1909

In January 1909, the students of the Azhar, the Islamic world’s oldest university, organized a union and went on strike. Protesting recent curricular and administrative changes that the Egyptian Khedive and his inner circle had imposed upon the university, they demanded increased material support and greater involvement in university governance. For several months, the Azhar Union Society staged regular demonstrations in the streets of Cairo, sometimes drawing thousands of supporters. Oddly, this moment of mass social mobilization has barely registered in studies of the colonial era. Labor historians have tended to eschew religious seminary students in favor of more conventional working groups. And what few works have mentioned the support that the striking Azharis received from Egypt’s various nationalist parties have reproduced the British colonial regime’s own analysis. Any endorsement the students received here serves as evidence for the nationalists’ cynical turn towards a lowest common denominator of religious identity politics.

            Drawing on articles from the Egyptian press as well as political intelligence reports from the Egyptian Ministry of Interior, this paper resituates the formation of the Azhar Union within a global moment of eventful political upheaval. In this context, the students who invoked the migratory category of “union” were engaged in multiple overlapping acts of comparison. Inspired by the tactics and organizational forms of militant labor, they understood their own predicament within the university as plausibly akin to that of other working groups across Egypt. At the same time, they hailed the constitutional revolution of the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress as a model for political reform both within the Azhar and in Egypt as a whole. It was this energetic engagement with the transformative possibilities of the moment, the paper argues, that accounts for the Azharis’ growing involvement in the movement to end colonial rule.