Egypt as Tunisia's Metropole: “Islamic Legislation” and Connected Histories of Family Law Reform at the Interwar Azhar and Zaytuna

This paper uses a transnational intellectual history to challenge two tropes of existing historiography. The first trope is the notion of French colonialism as the definitive force in the history of modern North Africa. The second trope is the idea of “Tunisian Islam,” defined as an exceptional tradition of Islamic reformist thought that laid the groundwork for landmark changes to the shariʿa personal status laws after Tunisia’s independence from the French protectorate (1881-1956). Breaking with these tropes, I examine the importance of Egypt’s Muslim scholars (Ar. ʿulamaʾ) to their counterparts in Tunisia in the interwar period. The analysis focuses on the two countries’ major institutions of Islamic higher education, Egypt’s Azhar Mosque and Tunisia’s Zaytuna Mosque. Using Arabic-language writings by Zaytuna figures who identify the Azhar as their “model,” I explore the extent to which Cairo, rather than Paris, was Tunisia’s metropole.

In particular, a 20^th-century neologism originating in Egypt—“Islamic legislation” (al-tashrīʿ al-Islāmī)—provided the reformist Zaytuna scholar Muhammad al-ʿAziz Jaʿit with a keyword for analyzing personal status law in a 1937 magazine article. Rather than using this concept to call for the shariʿa’s modification, however, Jaʿit invoked “Islamic legislation” to defend the shariʿa’s existing provisions. He did so in similar terms to the Azhari scholar and lawyer ʿAbbas Taha. The overlaps between their writings point not only to the limitations of the French empire geography as an analytical frame, but also to the constructed quality and instrumental logic of “Tunisian Islam.” My paper therefore illustrates the revisionist potential of global intellectual history for the study of modern Islam.