This chapter introduces Dar al-ʿUlum, a hybrid school founded in 1872 to train students from top religious schools such as al-Azhar to teach primary school subjects and Arabic within state-run civil schools. First, it locates Dar al-ʿUlum within the history of Egyptian teacher training. It explains how Dar al-ʿUlum formalised and expanded the path followed by reform-minded shaykhs since the early nineteenth century by providing a crash course in the subjects and habitus of the Egyptian civil school system, alongside advanced training in how to apply their specialist knowledge of Arabic and Islamic disciplines to teaching in a civil school. It then presents Dar al-ʿUlum as a hybrid institution whose mission was to bring religious knowledge into the civil system. As a result, it was structured as a civil school, but its curriculum and faculty combined civil and religious elements and expertise. The chapter demonstrates that Dar al-ʿUlum was founded not only because of state efforts to control and put Islamic knowledge to work, but also because of the value many Egyptians placed in the authentic connection to Egypt’s past provided by Islamic knowledge.

This chapter considers Egyptian sociocultural politics in the run-up to the revolution of 1952 and beyond. Dar al-ʿUlum’s victory in the culture war was cemented in 1946 when it became a fully fledged faculty of the University. Furthermore, the immense impact of the darʿamiyya on fields related to Arabic, Islam, and education gives them a stronger claim than Europhile modernists to the legacy of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh. Their histories demonstrate that schools can be the key to understanding social and cultural histories, that hybridity is a major engine driving sociocultural change, and that Islamic knowledge was most authoritative in colonial and postcolonial contexts when expressed in explicitly modern, ocularcentric ways. However, efforts by alumni to defend the school and its legacy in the decades since demonstrate the lasting sting of Husayn’s critique. As early as the 1926 dress strike, Hasan al-Banna decided to take his ability to be modern and religious in a different direction. Yet, considering him alongside the bulk of the darʿamiyya makes it clear that the role of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Revolution needs to be viewed within the 130-year history of engagement between Islamic knowledge and Egyptian modernities.

This chapter reveals how graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum contributed significantly to the creation of an authentic national culture for Egypt during the first forty years of British occupation (1882–1922). It demonstrates that projects of modernity, nationalism, and the nahda cultural renaissance, were not only advanced by Egypt’s political and intellectual elite, but also by educational experts working within lower and middle levels of state institutions and within grass-roots movements. The resistance of elite nationalists to cultural change under British occupation was selective: they fought education cutbacks and Anglocentric policies, but accepted European critiques of Islamic knowledge and pedagogies. This increased the sociocultural value not only of the civil school capital that many elite nationalists possessed, but also the hybrid civil-religious capital of the darʿamiyya. Reform of al-Azhar was driven in part by the number of talented religious school students trying to leave for Dar al-ʿUlum and its short-lived sister school, the School of Shariʿa Judges (Madrasat al-Qadaʾ al-Sharʿi). Dar al-ʿUlum teachers and graduates contributed significantly to the revival of Arabic literature, the reform of Arabic language and how it was taught, and the rejuvenation of Islamic practice through grass-roots associations (jamʿiyat).

This chapter introduces the main tenet of the book: that tensions over public expressions of Islam in Egypt have a 130-year history, as they stem from decisions made in the half-century surrounding the turn of the twentieth century (1871–1922), and they first erupted into conflict during a ‘culture war’ that shaped the intellectual discourse of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–52). Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates, the darʿamiyya, are crucial to understanding this culture war. After providing historical background, this chapter explains a new approach to modernisation, nation-building, and sociocultural change. It presents modernity as a constellation of projects advanced by Egypt’s ruling Khedives, Europeans, and a range of Egyptian-based social groups. It uses the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, Frederik Barth, and Mikhail Bakhtin to connect educational experiences with sociocultural outcomes using capital and habitus, to explore how sociocultural boundaries are crossed in productive ways, and to widen definitions of hybridity beyond combinations that are shockingly jarring. It uses these ideas to explore the sociocultural position of the darʿamiyya, a group that was suspended in between the modernising alumni of civil schools (efendiyya) and the traditionally trained alumni of religious schools (shaykhs) until a 1926 student strike.