Public institutions of religious education in Egypt and Tunisia: Contrasting the post-colonial reforms of Al-Azhar and the Zaytuna

Students of the modern Arab Middle East have previously examined regional systems of education in light of their transformation from informal and fluid arrangements that transmit religious contents into more institutionalized systems mainly teaching secular knowledge. They assumed that the postcolonial reforms of the educational systems would help realize full socioeconomic development. As a result, the majority of their studies has dealt mainly with secular education, often neglecting the domain of religious training within secular education systems or within the domain of the socalled “traditional” religious system in the hands of the religious scholars of Islam, or “ulama".1