ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century, Egypt’s infrastructure underwent modernization. The process was inevitably combined with social and conceptual changes which led to the later emergence of modern Egyptian nationalism. All these developments were reflected in the early history of higher education. Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (1805-48) conceived modernization mainly in terms of borrowing Western technology, so he established-with French aid and inspirationschools of engineering, medicine, chemistry, minerals and languages.1 Following his failure to secure an expanded Egypt in the face of Western opposition, his successors, notably Khedive Isma’il, sought to extend on this selective modernization. They added new dimensions to the process, introducing combinations of Western European economic, cultural and social values. Thus this era was marked by the opening of a law school and a teacher training college as well as of various learned societies, libraries and academies.2 (Even the ancient Islamic institution of learning, al-Azhar, in the face of such developments, particularly of the growing increase in the government-related professions, changed similarly, eventually opening the Dar al-‘Ulum teacher training college, as well as a school for qadis.)3
Until the 1920s, these schools retained their rather vocational, strictly professional character, and were controlled by the government, either through the Ministry of Education or the respective ministries. They did not, in any case, represent the Western idea of the university, namely that of an institution which integrates the advancement of the various branches of vocational and non-vocational scholarship, with the promotion of interrelations between them, as well as with the pursuance of knowledge as integrally combined with liberal values such as freedom of research and expression. The university as a comprehensive and free institution had indeed to wait for the emergence in Egypt of modern, European-modelled nationalism, for indeed the two ideas are essentially interwoven. While the authoritative pashas were behind the development of a
vocational, mainly technological or bureaucratic, higher education system,4 the pioneers of modern nationalism called for the establishment of a comprehensive university, primarily centred on humanistic studies.
