“To liberate global history from the Eurocentric master narrative remains a complex epistemological and methodological challenge,” Sebastian Conrad writes in his 2016 primer on the important and widely-debated subfield.[1] This panel offers one response to that challenge within the subfield of global intellectual history, and with regard to Islamic thought in particular. Existing scholarship has tended to present colonialism as the necessary backdrop for Islamic intellectual history in the 19^th and 20^th histories. Applied to contexts as varied as the Dutch East Indies and the French empire in Africa, the narrative of Europe’s inescapability has developed particular traction for the question of Islamic reform (Ar. iṣlāḥ), which conventional accounts present as the attempt “to reconcile Islamic faith and modern [i.e. European] values.”[2]

Our panel offers a shift from such narratives by foregrounding Egypt’s role in Islamic intellectual history in the modern period. The task is not to discount Europe’s near-omnipresent influence, but rather to develop the underappreciated case that Egypt remained a hub for new ideas in Islamic thought, ideas that spread around the world. Cairo, in particular, constituted a publishing powerhouse and base of the most important center of higher education in Sunni Islam, the Azhar Mosque, its purview radiating out to contexts as varied as France and South Africa. In this way, Cairo underpinned key dimensions of global intellectual history. It was Umm al-Dunya, “the Mother of the World,” to cite the Egyptian colloquial self-description.

Our panel moves chronologically through the modern period. The first presenter works in the subfield of book history to examine the classic devotional work, Dalaʾil al-Khayrat (Waymarks of Good Things), in the transition from manuscript to print during the 19^th century. In print form, the book escaped the parameters of the Arab region and defied prevailing low literacy rates to influence readers and publishers in locations such as Istanbul and Calcutta. Moving into the 20^th century, the second panelist uses Egypt to de-center narratives that conceive of Tunisia as an exception with regard to women’s rights in Islamic law. Muslim scholars in Tunisia and Egypt invoked the identical neologism—“Islamic legislation”—to uphold existing shariʿa provisions in the interwar period. The presentation emphasizes the primacy of “south-south” connections over the French empire framework typical of Maghribi historiography. Finally, our third panelist describes the reconstitution of Islamic philosophy in interwar Cairo. Islamic philosophy’s status today as a global genre appearing on the curricula of universities throughout the world owes much to Cairo’s pivotal role during this period at the center of multi-confessional scholarly networks extending from Paris to Kerachi.

In sum, this panel makes the case for Egypt’s productive role within and beyond the Arab Middle East region where historians tend to locate it. Our work will be of interest to scholars of empire, global history, intellectual history, and modern Islam.

[1] Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 170.

[2] Charles Kurzman, introduction to Modernist Islam, 1840-1940: A Sourcebook, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.