Egypt’s First Secular University: The Humanities, the State, and Forging the Modern Citizen, 1910–25

In 1910, Prince Fouad inaugurated Egypt’s first Faculty of Arts while emphasizing his high expectations that the new institution would create the nation’s thinking elite. “The light of this literary renaissance,” he boasted, “will radiate from the university to illuminate the entire Egyptian world.” Fifteen years later, however, the private university stumbled, and Fouad, declared King of a newly-independent Egypt in 1922, blessed the state acquisition of the university in 1925. The private initiative thus came to an end, and Egypt’s minister of education presides over the university to this day.

Drawing on primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives and the archives of Cairo University, my paper shows how the institutional study of the humanities became the cornerstone of a contested project seeking to confront modernity and the Western colonial project in early 20th century Egypt. I argue that the university founders internalized one of the central tenets of the nineteenth-century Arab reform movement, known as the Nahda, prescribing reform based on reviving the legacy and moral philosophy of the classical Arab-Islamic period while promoting a critical engagement with Europe’s modern accomplishments. I show how the university was organized along those lines to create scholars capable of undertaking such a task using modern teaching and research methods. Moreover, I argue that the university’s self-assigned objective of producing an elite responsible for designing Egypt’s national school curriculum and forging its new citizenry put the private university on a collision course with the state. While most historical accounts contend that the state saved the private university from its financial difficulties, I argue that by deliberately withholding recognition of the university diplomas, the state discouraged students from joining the new institution, especially as many of them were unfamiliar with such a new program of studies and skeptic about its career prospects.