Langohr State Educational Systems Strengthening Nationalist Movements Egypt India Indonesia

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Religious Nationalism 101: How the Growth of State
Educational Systems Strengthened Religious Nationalist
Movements in Colonial-Era Egypt, North India, and Indonesia
Vickie Anne Langohr
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2000
UMI Number 9956372
Copyright 2000 by
Langohr, Vickie Anne
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Vickie Anne Langohr

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ABSTRACT
Religious Nationalism 101: How the Growth of State Educational

Systems Strengthened Religious Nationalist Movements in
Colonial-Era Egypt, North India, and Indonesia
Vickie Anne Langohr
Standard explanations for the strength of contemporary religious nationalist movements
presume that it is state weakness - as measured primarily by the state’s withdrawal from
the provision of social services - that creates the conditions under which religious
nationalist movements can thrive. I use the cases of three religious nationalist movements
active in the colonial period - the Arya Samaj in north India, the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt, and Muhammadiya in Indonesia - to demonstrate the opposite. It was precisely
those colonies in which the colonial state was the most heavily involved in one particular
aspect of social service provision - the creation of centralized Westem-style educational
systems - that religious nationalist movements were most likely not only to flourish
during the colonial period but also to outlive the colonial context in which they were
created to play an important role in post-independence politics. When the creation of
Westem-style education systems was accompanied by a pronounced role for missionaries
in the educational arena, religious nationalist movements availed themselves of state
educational subsidies to found their own alternative networks of schools. These schools
contributed to the longevity of the movements by providing them with a platform from
which to espouse their religiously-imagined conceptions of the nation and by funneling
substantial human, financial, and organizational resources into the movement as a whole.
When the foundation of Westem-style educational systems was not accompanied by a
strong missionary presence in education, religious nationalist movements did not found
their own networks of schools, but they nonetheless benefitted from the incorporation of
an unprecedentedly large proportion o f the population into state-run schools by working
as teachers within those schools. The dependence of religious nationalist movements on
state institutions and resources to succeed raises fundamental questions, in turn, about
the validity o f analytical frameworks which presuppose the existence of the state as a
category entirely separate from “society” and organized movements within it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One: Setting the Stage, and Shaping the State 1-44
The Question of Definitions 11

The Cases 21
The Question of Religion, Education, and the State 25
The Question of Comparability 36
Chapter Two: Nationalism, Religious and Otherwise: An 45-88

Interrogation (and Extension) of the Literature
What Is Nationalism? 53
The Definition of Religious Nationalism 64
Pharaohs vs. Pakistanis: The Print Battle over the Boundaries of the 71
Egyptian Imagined Community
Chapter Three: The Creation of Centralized Education 89-150

Systems in North India, Indonesia, and Egypt
Some General Statements About Pre-Colonial Education 91

Pre-Colonial Education in North India, Indonesia, and Egypt 93
The Construction of A Centralized Education System in India 104
The Particulars of Punjab 113
Centralized Education Systems, Dutch-Style: The Case of Indonesia 119
From Mohammed Ali to the Modem State: The Creation of A
Centralized Education System in Egypt 131
How Centralized Systems Changed Religious Education in Egypt 132
Conclusion 147
Chapter Four: Missionaries, the State, and the DAV

and Muhammadiyah Schools 151-185
The Missionary Menace, or: The Educational Environment
in Punjab circa 1886 154
Missionaries and Muhammadiyah: The Case of Java 162
What Have You Done for Me Lately? Or: How the DAV and Muhammadiya
Schools Strengthened the Movements That Founded Them 172
Organizational Resources 174
Financial Resources 178
Extending the Geographical Reach of the Movement 180
Gaining Activists for the Movement 182
R e p ro d u c e d with perm ission of th e copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Chapter Five: Religious Nationalism 101, Section A: How
Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya Schools Spread Religious
Nationalism 186-224
Geography, History, and Language 101: The Religious Nationalist

Educational Project in Indonesia 191
The Languages of the Arya Samaj’s National Renewal Part One:
Sanskrit vs. English 208
The Languages of National Renewal Part Two: Hindi vs. Urdu 218
Chapter Six: Nationalism 101, Section B: The Muslim

Brotherhood 225-265
The Beginnings O f A School Network, and The End 228
The Roles That the State Educational System Played in Expanding
The Muslim Brotherhood 236
Transfers 244
Channeling State Funds to Brotherhood Educational Institutions 256
Chapter Seven: The Norm, or Colonies With Noncentralized

Education 266-285
Colonies Without Centralized Education Systems 270
School Systems to Varying Degrees - Tunisia, Kenya, and
Algeria 275
Cases for Future Study - Vietnam and the Philippines 284
Chapter Eight: Concluding Comments 286-291
Selected Bibliography 292-298
ii
1
Chapter One: Setting the Stage, and Shaping the State
Politically active religious movements, often termed fundamentalist movements,1
have become increasingly central to the political life of non-Westem countries from
Algeria and India to Turkey and Sri Lanka. While these movements may appear to hark
back to age-old interpretations of religion, they in fact represent a distinctly modem form
of religious activism which first developed during the colonial period. Unlike their
predecessors - religious movements led by charismatic figures assumed to be vehicles of
divine prophecy and followed unquestioningly - many of the religious movements
which emerged under colonial rule embodied the type of organization we have come to
associate with civil society - bureaucratic structures run largely in accordance with
rational-legal norms. While earlier religious movements rarely survived the death o f their
charismatic founders, the new movements did, because the charisma of their founders
was institutionalized through the creation of organizations from schools to medical clinics
to newspapers, giving the movements a raison d ’etre and a clientele committed to their
continuation. To paraphrase Daniel Gold’s description of contemporary Hindu
nationalist movements in India, with the advent of these new religious movements,
1 I do not use the term fundamentalist in this study because I think the term obscures more than it
illuminates. The term stems from an attempt early in this century by conservative Protestants to seek the
“fundamentals” o f their faith through a literal interpretation o f particular texts, and it is not particularly
useful in describing religions, such as Hinduism, which have a much less clearly defined textual canon.
Even for faiths whose textual canons are much more clearly defined, such as Christianity or Islam, the
concept o f “fundamentalism” assumes the existence o f texts whose meanings are clear to all but which
fundamentalists think should be applied literally while others do not, when in fact in most disputes it is the
interpretation o f the text itself which is at issue. The difficulty in operationalizing the concept o f
fundamentalism is perhaps best demonstrated by the five volume Fundamentalisms project directed by R.
Scott Appleby and Martin Marty, which abandoned the attempt to define the phenomenon in favor o f
referring to fundamentalist groups as bearing a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” to one another.
2
“where once people found religious authority in their family priest or a lineage of gurus,
they may now find it in a formalized organizational hierarchy” in which “the importance
o f caste membership may be outweighed by that of committee membership.”2
This dissertation addresses the development of a particular subgroup of modem
religious movements - religious nationalist movements - and advances a hypothesis
about the conditions which facilitated their growth in the colonial era and beyond.
Movements which made reform of the religious practices of their community the sine qua
non o f national revival sprung up in many colonies, but most o f them died a quick death,
and only a handful outlived the colonial conditions under which they were created to play
an influential role in post-independence politics. The longevity of the more enduring
movements, I argue, was not simply a matter of their political skill; many colonial-era
religious movements were willing to exploit new forms of organization and mobilization
brought by capitalism and colonialism to advance their goals, but faded into irrelevance
nonetheless. What distinguished the enduring religious movements from their more
ephemeral counterparts was the former’s ability to exploit one particular colonial
innovation - the creation of a Westem-style school system.
Prior to the advent of colonialism, most education in the non-Westem world was
provided by religious authorities and was primarily concerned with the transmission -
often through rote memorization - o f religious texts and practices.3 Western penetration
2 Daniel Gold, “Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation”, in Accounting fo r
Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character o f Movements, eds. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby,
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1994), 533
3 This, o f course, was also the case for the Western world until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. In general, many of the educational developments which colonial powers enacted in their
colonies - such as the exclusion o f the Church from public education in France, or the establishment of
3
of these areas established a competing model of Westem-style education, which I define
as a process o f education in which people who had received formalized, replicable
training as teachers taught students divided into groups on the basis o f their age a set of
subjects which were perceived as being independent of one another and whose truth
claims were not based primarily on religious faith. The idea of subjects being separated
into distinct categories implies the creation of a discipline of education; more
importantly, it implies a conception of the function of that education as going beyond the
transmission o f religious knowledge to encompass other forms of knowledge as well. It
does not necessarily mean, however, that colonial-era Westem-style education was
“secular.” In a colonial environment in which the British developed an English
curriculum devoid o f religious texts but nonetheless designed to disseminate
Christianity,4 and in which missionaries avidly taught science because they believed that
it would undermine Hinduism by demonstrating the impossibility of acts ascribed to
Hindu gods and goddesses,5 no neat dichotomy between pre-colonial “religious” and
colonial-era “secular” education can be constructed. Westem-style education was
distinctly different from the more traditional forms of education which preceded it,
however, in that it was not centered on explicitly religious knowledge, and because it
public education’s claim on the state treasury in England - came simultaneously or only a short time
after, their introduction in the metropole.
4 See Gauri Vis wana than, Masks o f Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989)
5 Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda o f Education: A Study o f Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, (New Delhi:
Sage Publications, 1991), 63
4
invested its students with an array of non-religious skills which constituted “strategies of
survival”6 in an ever-changing colonial milieu.
In almost every colony, initial fears of Westem-style education soon gave way to
an enthusiastic reception and local demand that the colonizer furnish this education on a
large scale. This demand, however, was rarely met. In some colonies, particularly those
of Belgium and Portugal, minimal levels of government aid ensured that Westem-style
education remained little more than an exotic foreign implant which never took root
beyond a handful of elites. In other colonies, such as Kenya, government disinterest in
supporting education was met with private initiative, as locals mobilized to finance and
found their own schools. While these efforts were often successful, local self-help efforts
were severely constrained by the limited geographic reach and financial resources o f the
groups that mounted them. The most that these efforts could accomplish was to create a
myriad of schools unconnected to one another and set adrift in a sea of institutions
providing more traditional forms of education. Operation on such a limited scale,
however, was not conducive to the production and dissemination of a new vision o f the
nation among significant numbers of the colony’s youth.
In a handful o f colonies, the colonial power went beyond founding a handful of
Westem-type schools to forge a Westem-style educational system. Robert Jervis argues
that a system exists when two conditions are fulfilled - that “a set o f units or elements is
interconnected so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in
other parts of the system, and the entire system exhibits properties and behaviors that are
6 The term is that o f Joel Migdal in his Strong Societies, Weak States: State-Society Relations and State
Capabilities in the Third World, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 27
5
different from those of its parts.”7 For the purposes of this dissertation, a Westem-style
school system existed if the government established a set of common criteria for the
provision of Westem-style education (for example, requiring the teaching of certain
subjects, the use o f certain textbooks, the division of students into classes on the basis of
their age) and offered subsidies to those schools willing to follow them. In these colonies
government education officials directly administered a large number of Westem-style
schools, as well as subsidizing the educational efforts of foreign and local private groups,
and schools teaching under this colonial umbrella soon constituted the overwhelming
majority of schools providing a Westem-style education in the colony. I argue that just as
Westem-style schools opened up new opportunities and provided new resources to the
individuals who graduated from them, the development of Westem-style school systems
created unprecedented opportunities for new political and social movements to expand
and mobilize their constituencies. This happened in one of two ways - either the building
of these systems required the state to contract parts of the educational project out, leading
it to provide funding for schools founded by religious nationalist groups as long as they
complied with specific state regulations, or members of these groups became teachers in
and employees of the state educational apparatus themselves. Whether the first or the
second of these scenarios occurred, I argue, was dictated by the extent to which
missionaries played a key role in the provision o f Westem-style education in the colony.
In colonies in which missionaries, buoyed by colonial subsidies, provided a
substantial proportion of the opportunities for Westem-style education, religious
7 Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 6
6
nationalist movements were motivated to build their own counter-networks of schools to
provide that education in a “safe” environment. While religious movements in colonies
with no centralized education system may have been similarly motivated to respond to
the missionary challenge by opening their own schools, they were unable to do this on a
large scale based solely on their own resources. In colonies with centralized educational
systems, government education subsidies made possible for the first time the creation of
private networks o f schools which followed the same curriculum and worked for the
same goals despite being spread out over large geographical areas. The creation of these
school networks, in turn, fostered the growth of the religious nationalist movements that
sponsored them, and the spread of the ideology that they advocated, in at least three
ways. The first is perhaps the most obvious - running their own school networks allowed
religious nationalist movements to construct curricula which communicated the twin
messages that religious reform was essential to the rejuvenation of the religious
community, and that the religious identity o f the community must be the basis for
national identity. The second is that these school networks, whose provision of “safe”
opportunities for Westem-style education made them enormously popular, tunneled
substantial amounts of human and material resources into the movements which
sponsored them. In some cases, this meant that the schools served as a type of “cash
cow” for the movement as a whole, raising resources from the community which could
then be used to support the movement’s other, non-educational activities. Finally, by their
very construction as institutions limited to students of a particular religious community,
religious nationalist schools served to inculcate solidarities based on that affiliation rather
than solidarities which cut across religious communities, constituting an institution
7
around which only members of a particular religious community would rally, as well as a
kind of visible marker of the community’s educational progress vis-a-vis that of other
communities.
Where missionaries were not the main beneficiaries of the colonial subsidy
system, religious nationalist movements in colonies with centralized educational systems
were not as motivated to build counter-networks of their own Westem-style schools, as
“safe” (read: relatively secular) opportunities for Westem-style education were widely
available. These movements, nonetheless, benefitted enormously from the construction of
centralized education systems, in ways that were often unintended by the state and the
movements alike. On a scale unmatched by any other institution except that of the
military, Westem-style systems of education brought young people who would
otherwise have been scattered across the country into discrete locations, creating a captive
audience which was larger in size - it included girls and young boys - and longer in
duration - classes lasted longer than conscription - even than that of the armed forces.
In their capacity as state employees, members o f religious nationalist movements taught
in the new state schools, transmitting their religiously-based imaginings o f the
community to this newly captive audience through curricular and extra-curricular
activities. In their capacity as state employees, religious nationalist teachers could also be
transferred throughout a school system that was newly nationwide in its scope. Although
these transfers were involuntary and unwelcome, religious nationalists quickly exploited
them to bring the message of their movements to new areas. In this way, a state apparatus
which had in many cases initiated the transfers in order to weaken religious movements
found itself unintentionally helping to expand their reach.
8
It may be most effective to outline what my argument actually is by first
clarifying what it is not. I am not arguing that the construction of Westem-style school
systems was necessary for the emergence o f religious nationalism in a given colony. I
am not trying to explain the emergence of religious nationalist sentiment at all, but rather
the endurance of religious nationalist movements - organized groups which have
continued functioning under the same name and in accordance with the same fundamental
principles throughout the colonial period until the present day. Religious nationalist
sentiment, as I define it in Chapter Two, has existed in numerous colonies and informed a
myriad of uprisings against colonial rule; it also constitutes an important political force
today, sometimes in countries in which it first emerged during colonial rule and then lay
dormant for decades. What I am trying to understand, then, is not why or how religious
nationalist sentiment can erupt, in the colonial period or today, but how movements
which base themselves upon it can build themselves into institutions which can endure
over the long-term, despite fundamental shifts in the political and social contexts in
which they operate.
Despite the limited nature of the phenomenon which I am examining, the
implications o f this research are much broader, and center on the ways in which the
growth o f systems and institutions in civil society is not only a response to, but is also
dependent upon, the growth of modem states and the resources at their disposal. This
dissertation builds on and engages three bodies of work which will be reviewed in this
chapter and the next - the literature on nationalism, the subset o f that literature on the
connection between education and nationalism, and the literature on the state.
Contemporary attempts to account for the rise o f religious nationalist movements are
commonly situated within a discourse of state failure in which “society,” in the form of
religious nationalist movements, takes on responsibilities which should have been the
province of the state. The image of Muslim Brothers supplying food and tents in the
aftermath of the 1992 earthquake to Cairene slums with no state officials in sight has
become almost ubiquitous in journalistic discussion of the Brotherhood’s influence in
Egypt, an apt metaphor for a religious nationalism that gains support by moving in on a
terrain where the state has failed, or more specifically where it has abandoned the field
entirely. Upon seeing the Brotherhood’s post-earthquake efforts, Egyptian Interior
Minister Abd al-Halim Musa is reported to have asked “what is this becoming, a state
within a state?”* What Musa missed was that much of the strength of the Brotherhood
and similar religious nationalist movements stems not from their being a state within a
state, but from being within the state itself. Put another way, the growth o f these
movements is in large part inseparable, and derives enormous resources from, the growth
of modem states. Colonial rule created a state apparatus which penetrated society much
more deeply than any previous ruling regime had. This process was predicated upon the
function of two other processes - the incorporation of large parts of society into that
apparatus as state employees, and state subsidization of private groups providing services
which the state wanted to make available but did not have sufficient resources to provide
* Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, “Islamic Mobilization and Political Change: The Islamist Trend in Egypt's
Professional Associations,” in Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, eds. Joel Beinin and Joe
Stork, (Berkeley: UC Press, 1997). Attempting to prevent Islamic groups in Turkey from appearing too
“state-like” in the wake o f its own haphazard response to Turkey’s August, 1999, earthquake, the Turkish
government banned these groups from providing assistance to earthquake victims. Stephen Kinzer,
‘Turkey Seeks to Keep Muslim Groups Out o f Quake R elief Effort,” New York Times, August 27, 1999.
10
on its own. Education was one of the largest and most important of these state projects. It
required taking members of society and training them to be teachers, then putting them in
charge of a captive audience which was larger - in that it included girls and young boys -
for a longer period of time - in that classes lasted longer than conscription - than any
previous state institution except the military. It required subsidizing groups which were
willing and able to provide that education within certain state guidelines, which dictated
the teaching of certain subjects in certain ways but also left significant room for the
teaching of other material more congruent with the goals of the group, but often not with
those of the state. Finally, this educational project laid the foundations of future
generations of the state apparatus, as graduates of the new schools represented the
overwhelming majority o f those hired to work in every area of the state bureaucracy and
implement a wide variety of state policies. The working of religious nationalists within
educational institutions which were either directly founded by the state, or founded by
nationalists but funded by the state, then, provided these nationalists with an
unprecedented platform from which to espouse their ideas, as well as significant
opportunities to put the material and moral resources of the state at the disposal of their
movements. Paying more attention to the ways in which the growth of the modem state
incorporated members of organized societal groups into the state apparatus, and the
resources that that incorporation provided them, would help us to re-evaluate how some
of these groups, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, manage to withstand periods of
severe government repression and re-emerge with their powers intact, as well as putting
the question o f what happens if these groups gain the citadel of state power and “take
over” the resources o f the state in a substantially different light.
11
The Question of Definitions
While movements which define and seek to legitimize their political agendas in
religious terms are legion in the contemporary world, most of them are not religious
nationalist movements. As the argument that I advance in this dissertation applies only to
that subset o f religious movements which can be conceptualized as religious nationalist
movements, it is essential that these movements be understood as a distinct type of
religious activism which operates according to a specific logic. In defining religion, I rely
on Durkheim’s argument that while not all religions believe in a god or a supernatural
being, all religions classify things into two opposing groups - the profane and the sacred.
For Durkheim, then, a religion is “a society whose members are united by the fact that
they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane
world, and by the fact that they translate these shared ideas into common practices.”9
Some religions, such as Christianity and Islam, have a limited number of clearly defined
theological statements and behavioral prescriptions to which all believers at least pay lip
service, and which those believers identify as the minimal markers distinguishing them
from their non-Christian or Muslim neighbors. Other religions, such as Hinduism, are
much more diffuse in nature, with a variety o f sacred texts, deities, and sources of
authority.
The very idea of Hinduism as a discrete corpus of beliefs comprising a single
religion dates only to the colonial period and was heavily influenced by the research of
the European Orientalists who preceded and accompanied the extension of British rule
9 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms o f the Religious Life, (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 59
12
throughout India.10The fact that other religions have had a much longer-established, and
more clearly bounded, corporate identity than Hinduism should not obscure the point
that a central part of the religious nationalist project - of any religion - is to ever more
strictly define what it means to be a member of the faith and to continually fortify the
border between that faith and practices deemed alien to it. This process, which I argue is
inherent in the religious nationalist project in any period, was further compounded in the
colonial era by the implementation of colonial policies which irrevocably changed the
political calculus of local groups and the bases on which they would organize, as well as
the level o f abstraction at which the community would be defined. As Sudipto Kaviraj
has noted for the case of India, colonialism “transform(ed) the very sense o f ‘community’
and redefined it at every level. In an earlier period the sense of the individual
community had ... been ‘fuzzier’ - capable of apprehension at several different levels
(sub-caste, sect, dialect, and other regional or religious groupings) and not greatly
concerned with numbers or the exact boundaries between one community and the next.”"
“Changes in communications, politics, and society more generally” brought with them a
new understanding of identity which Kaviraj calls the ‘ennumerated’ community -
“communities (which) were now often territorially more diffuse than before, less tied to
a small locality, less parochial,” but also “centrally concerned with numerical strength,
well-defined boundaries, exclusive ‘rights’ and not least the community’s ability to
10 See, for example, Romila Thapar, “Communalism and the Historical Legacy: Some Facts,” Social
Scientist 18, Nos. 1-2, July 1990
" Sudipto Kaviraj, 'Im aginary History,’ Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi, Occasional
Paper, second series, No. VII, September 1988, quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction o f
Communalism in Colonial North India, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 158
R e p ro d u c e d with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
13
mount purposive action in defence of those rights.”12 In this dissertation, then, the
question of what constitutes a particular religion is constantly being contested, creating
at least as much confrontation between members claiming allegiance to the same faith as
between them and their religious “others.”
I define religious nationalist movements as movements which place religion at
the center o f national identity by advocating that their co-religionists - not only those in
the territory in which they themselves live, but their co-religionists worldwide - should
live within state which govern them in the name o f their religion. As I will discuss this
definition and its implications in some detail in Chapter Two, I will only discuss the way
in which this understanding of national identity dictates the agenda which religious
nationalist movements pursue. This agenda has two parts. The first is the call for reform
o f the way in which their religions are practiced as a necessary prerequisite not only fo r
the spiritual but also fo r the temporal well-being o f the community o f believers. While
religious reform is a necessary prerequisite for national renewal, it is not a sufficient one;
it must be complemented by aggressive efforts to obtain or preserve the political,
economic, and social power o f members o f the religious community as a whole. Only the
combination of campaigns to reform religious practices within the community with
campaigns to improve the position o f that community vis-a-vis other (religiously defined)
communities is sufficient to achieve the ultimate goal of religious nationalists - making
the (reformed version of) their religion the basis o f national identity in society. This
definition separates religious nationalists from two other seemingly similar, but in fact
12 Kaviraj, quoted in Pandey, 159
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14
conceptually very distinct, types of religious movements - pietistic movements and
communal movements.
The distinction between pietistic and religious nationalist movements is perhaps
best conceptualized by employing Weber’s ideal types of world-rejecting asceticism as
opposed to inner-worldly asceticism. Pietistic movements usually involve some level of
world-rejecting asceticism, in which concentration on the pursuit of salvation leads to a
withdrawal from the world, from possession of material things, ties with the family, and
political and economic activities, all of which may be seen as an acceptance o f a profane
world and thus distancing oneself from god.13 More importantly for the purposes of this
dissertation is the fact that pietistic movements, while not always requiring full
withdrawal from the world, do not seek to change it either; their quest for religious
reform is confined to and justified at the level of the individual believer and his or her
relationship with God. A quintessential example of a pietistic movement is the Tablighi
Jamaat, a Muslim movement founded in north India in 1926. The purpose of Tablighi
Jamaat is the conduct of tabligh, which Barbara Metcalf translates as “conveying or
communicating divine guidance.”14 Tabligh as practiced by the Jamaat primarily entails
Muslims encouraging other Muslims to live in accordance with Islamic principles, as well
as periodically absenting oneself from one’s everyday life to go on trips to visit and
persuade other Muslims to correctly practice Islam. While Tablighi Jamaat is
undoubtedly influential - its 1988 annual conference in Raiwind near Lahore, Pakistan,
13 Max Weber, The Sociology o f Religion, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 166
14 Barbara Metcalf, “’Remaking Ourselves’: Islamic Self-Fashioning in A Global Movement o f Spiritual

Renewal,” in Accounting fo r Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character o f Movements, eds. M artin Marty
and R. Scott Appleby, (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1994),707
15
drew one million attendees from over 90 countries, and Mumtaz Ahmad describes the
annual conference as “the second-largest congregation of the Muslim world after the hajj
”15 - it does not seek to be powerful, as both rank-and-file members and leaders eschew
political activity of any kind. “The movement’s goals,” Metcalf writes, are not to
‘remake the world’ by reorganizing social and political institutions, but to remake
individual lives, to create faithful Muslims who undertake action in this life only because
of the hope and promise of sure reward in the next thus, it follows that this emphasis
on individual transformation is not viewed instrumentally, that is, by the expectation that
the transformation of individuals will ultimately produce a just society the shape of
the larger world is simply left to God.” 16 Tablighis are charged with practicing tabligh
without worrying about how it will be received, for even if “not a single Muslim is
persuaded by the Tablighi’s preaching, his goal might still be achieved.”17
In contrast to pietistic movements, religious nationalist movements embody
Weber’s concept of inner-worldly asceticism, in which the “unique concentration of
human behavior on activities leading to salvation may require (the) participation within
the world (or more precisely: within the institutions of the world but in opposition to
them) in this case the world is presented to the religious virtuoso as his
responsibility. He may have the obligation to transform the world in accordance with his
ascetic ideals, in which case the ascetic will become a rational reformer or
13 M umtaz Ahmad, “Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia: The Jamaat-I-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat,
in Fundamentalisms Observed, eds. Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, (Chicago: University o f Chicago
Press, 1991), 510
"■Metcalf, 711
17 ibid
16
revolutionary.” 18 For religious nationalist movements, the problems that the religious
community is experiencing - colonial subjugation, disease, poverty - are caused by that
community’s diversion from the correct practice of its faith. The reason to reform
religious practices, then, is not only to improve individuals’ standing in the spiritual
sphere but also to revitalize the position of the community as a whole in the temporal one.
In the words o f Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, history had shown that “when
(the Muslims) had clung to the instructions of Islam they had reigned over and built up
the entire world, illuminated for ail mankind the way of prosperity, and brought
happiness to the world with a civilization which is still and will remain the epitome of
splendor and virtue. (But) after that (the Muslims) had denied their religion and become
ignorant o f it and ignored it................ thus they arrived at the situation that they are in
today, and they will remain in this state until they return to their religion.” 19Similarly, for
Arya Samaj founder Dayanand Saraswati “the causes of foreign rule in India are: mutual
feud, child-marriage, marriage in which the contracting parties have no will in the
selection of their life-partners, indulgence in carnal gratification, untruthfulness the
neglect of the study of the Vedas, and other malpractices. It is only when brothers fight
among themselves that an outsider poses as an arbiter.”20 A Muslim Brother might
encourage Muslims to return to the essentials of their faith such as praying five times a
18 Weber, 166
19 Hassan al-Banna, quoted in Ibrahim al-Bayyoumi Ghanem, Al Fikr al Siyaasi li-llmam Hassan al-Banna
(The Political Thought o f Imam Hassan al-Banna), (Cairo: Dar al Towziah wa al Nashr al Islaamiya),
1992, 207
:o Charles Heimsath. Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), 128
17
day or fasting in Ramadan, just as a Tablighi would, but the Brother would never share
his Tablighi colleague’s lack of concern about how his message would be received,
because in the Brother’s world-view the stakes of the success or failure of his cause were
incomparably higher.
While religious nationalists see religious reform as essential for national revival, it
is not sufficient in and of itself to achieve this goal. Reform must be complemented by
efforts in the “profane” world to defend the material and symbolic interests of the
community vis-a-vis those of other faiths, an engagement with non-religious strategies
shared by communal movements. In the words of Bipin Chandra, the essence o f
communalism is its assertion that “because a group of people follow a particular religion
they have, as a result, common social, political, and economic interests.”21 Communal
activists seek to protect their religious community from persecution (however defined)
and to secure the conditions necessary for it to flourish in the secular world. This may
take the form of creating new territories under the sovereignty of the religious
community, as in the case o f the secular Zionist movement or the Muslim Indian
separatists who fought for the creation of Pakistan. It may also take the form o f agitating
for the establishment of a privileged claim on the part of the religious community on state
resources in employment, education, or other arenas, as in the case o f the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the leading Hindu nationalist organization in contemporary
India.
21 Bipin Chandra, Communalism in Modem India , (Delhi, 1984), p. 1, as quoted in Pandey, 7
18
While communal activists’ work on behalf of their community can take many
forms, one form it does not take is a concern with whether, how, or even if members of
the community practice their faith. As a result, it is a misnomer to refer to communal
movements as being “religious nationalists,” as on the institutional level there is very
little if anything that is religious about them. The members, and even the leaders, of
communal movements in many cases do not practice their faith - David Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, had been in the yishuv almost forty years before he attended
his first temple service there, and the well-known reluctance of secular Zionists to
compromise with religious Jews on the role that Judaism would play in the new state
stemmed in large part from their deep-seated aversion to most Jewish religious practices.
Many pracharaks, the regional leaders of the RSS who are the organizational mainstay
of the movement, say that they are not religious,” and even identifying oneself as a Hindu
- practicing or not - is not a criteria for RSS membership, as the movement is “open to
people of all religious persuasions or none.”23 The idea of Muhammadiya or the Muslim
Brotherhood accepting non-Muslim members, by contrast, is incomprehensible; when a
Christian admirer of the Brotherhood asked if he could join the movement in the 1930’s,
the Brotherhood’s answer was that insofar as Egyptian Christians shared the Brothers’
~ Ainslee Embree notes that “in private conversations (RSS) members frequently emphasize that they are
not religious. When pressed as to the meaning o f this statement, they tend to say that they do not do puja,
the making o f an offering to a deity’s image or symbol.” (630). The position o f the RSS as a whole is that it
is a cultural, not a religious, organization, although some RSS leaders define religion in such general terms
that the movement could also be considered a religious one, as per the view o f an RSS leader who argued
that “for the Hindu every action o f life is a command o f religion. ‘We make war or peace, engage in
arts and crafts, amass wealth and give it away - indeed we are bom and die - all in accord with religious
injunctions.’” “The Function o f the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh: To Define the Hindu Nation”, in
Accounting fo r Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character o f Movements, eds. Martin Marty and R. Scott
Appleby, (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1994) 631
23 Embree, 619
19
concern about the country’s moral decline, they should work to reverse it through their
own (religiously-based) organizations.
The actual practice of the rituals of the faith is essential to religious nationalist
conceptions of “religion,” while this understanding of religion is only peripherally
important if at all to communal movements. This difference, however, is sometimes
obscured by the fact that communal and religious nationalist movements may converge
on the same goals, as in the joint commitment of religious and secular Zionists to bring
Jews to Palestine. These movements, however, engage in this shared activity for
different reasons. Secular Zionists’ commitment to settling in Palestine as opposed to
Argentina or Uganda had two main motivations. The first was Palestine’s religious
significance - not to them personally, but to other Jews, who they judged would be
unwilling to migrate to a place to which they had no historical connection. The second
motivation was that for socialist Zionists who ascribed the Jews’ supposed deficiencies as
a people to the unnatural class position which they had been forced to occupy by
European restrictions on their livelihood, Palestine - “a land without a people for a
people without a land” according to early Zionist conceptions - was a place where these
problems could be corrected by having Jews work the land. Note that neither of these
motivations is religious - the first represents bowing to the exigency o f the situation and
choosing a place based on other people’s presumed religious sentiments, while the second
has no religious connection whatsoever. Religious Zionists like Rav Kook, however, had
only one motivation in working to create a Jewish state in Israel - settlement in the Holy
20
Land was a mitzvah, a commandment and a religious duty, which was enjoined by God
upon every Jew no less than observance of the High Holy Days.
If religious nationalist and communal movements often end up doing the same
things, then why is it important to distinguish between them? One of the major works on
this phenomenon in the contemporary period - Mark Juergensmeyer’s The New Cold
War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State24 - groups movements that by
my definition are religious nationalist - such as Meir Kahane’s Kach party in Israel and
the Muslim Brotherhood - as well as movements that are communal - like the RSS - into
a single category which he calls religious nationalism and analyzes as an undifferentiated
phenomenon. I think that the distinction is an important one because an accurate
understanding of these phenomena depends on us understanding why people do what they
do and what their ultimate goals are. By re-examining the historical evidence, for
example, Gyanendra Pandey has demonstrated that despite the attempt of the British to
reduce all instances of Hindu-Muslim protests and riots in colonial North India to what
Stanley Tambiah has called a master narrative” o f Hindu-Muslim rancor,25 many such
instances were motivated as much if not more by people o f one religious community
trying to assert or improve their position within their community as they did with their
hatred o f people outside the community.26 In the contemporary period, distinguishing
24 Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, (Berkeley:
University o f California Press, 1993)
23 Stanley Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia,
(Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1996), 23.
26 As ju st one example, Pandey re-examines the evidence o f Hindu-Muslim conflict around the issue o f
cow-protection in Shahabad in 1917 to demonstrate that the lower-caste Hindus who participated were
members o f “marginally ‘clean’ castes who aspired to full ‘cleanness’ by propagating their strictness on the
21
between communal and religious nationalist movements may provide some insight into
the policies which they might follow upon coming to power. The difference in a
communal (secular) Zionist government in Israel and that o f a religious nationalist one
would almost inevitably be huge, as secular Zionists can justify relinquishing territory in
the name of the higher goal of bringing security to Israel, while for religious Zionists
there is no higher goal than fulfilling the religious commandment of settling the entire
Biblical land of Israel. Similarly, some observers of the Indian electoral scene have
argued that the domestic policy of the recent BJP government was not noticeably
different from that o f the Congress party before it. Given its calls for the implementation
of Islamic law, a strong case can be made that whatever else Egyptians would say about
the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood were it to take power in Cairo, one thing that they
would not say is that its rule was indistinguishable from that of its predecessor, Hosni
Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. To the extent that scholars have any role to play at
all in reducing instances of “communal” or “religious nationalist” violence, I would
suggest, it behooves us to understand why they happen. And to the extent that secularist
forces wish to undermine religious nationalist ones, it behooves them to understand how
they grew so strong in the first place.
The Cases
The movements upon which I build my argument are the Arya Samaj, a Hindu
religious nationalist movement in north India, and Muhammadiya and the Muslim
issue o f cow-slaughter.” Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction o f Communalism in Colonial North India,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 195
22
Brotherhood, Muslim religious nationalist movements in Indonesia and Egypt
respectively. The oldest of these movements is the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 in
Bombay but first becoming prominent in the province of Punjab. From Punjab, the
Samaj rapidly spread across north India as well as to centers o f the Indian diaspora,
boasting an estimated one and a half million members worldwide by Indian independence
in 1947.27 The Samaj sought to redefine what it meant to be Hindu, creating for the first
time a mechanism for conversion to the faith which was at first denounced and later
seized upon by orthodox Hindus28 and vigorously encouraging other fiercely
controversial reform practices, such as the remarriage of widows and the breaking of
some caste taboos. It played an equally critical role in institutionalizing a dominant role
for Hindus vis-a-vis other religious communities in India, initiating cow-protection
movements in Punjab, leading campaigns to replace Urdu with Hindi as an official
language in North India, and providing crucial assistance to “the first politically oriented
Hindu communal group”29 - the Hindu Mahasabha - in the latter’s first decades. Charles
Heimsath has argued that “the Arya Samaj has had a greater direct impact on Indians over
a longer period of time than any other religious or social reform movement in modem
times,”30 and the movement’s most lasting achievement has been its network of
27 Gold, 534
28 Orthodox Hindus “came around” to the idea o f conversion after the much-publicized forcible
“conversion” o f Hindus to Islam by the Muslim Mappila community in Kerala in 1921; in a time when the
community, to use Sudipto Kaviraj’s term, had become “ennumerated”, with the census measuring the size
o f each religious community vis-a-vis others, Hindus o f all stripes soon came to appreciate the way in
which conversions to Hinduism boosted the size o f the community.
29 Gold, 539
30 Heimsath, 292
R e p ro d u c e d with perm ission of the copyright owner. Fu rther reproduction prohibited without permission.
23
Dayananda Anglo-Vedic (DAV) schools, 179 of which were operating in India and
Burma by 1941.31 The Samaj suffered severely during and after Partition, as its center of
activity - Lahore - became part of West Pakistan and thousands of Punjabi Aryas
became refugees.32 It reclaimed an active presence in north India, however, particularly
in the educational arena; in 1990 it ran over 500 DAV schools at all levels, including
engineering, medicine, and teacher-training colleges.33 Founded in Java in 1912,
Muhammadiya rapidly spread through much of the Indonesian archipelago, with 1,275
branches in 1942.34 Muhammadiya was an integral part of a new movement in the
Malayo-Muslim world - Kaum Moda, or New Faction - made possible by the
opportunities for travel opened up by the steamship’s arrival in the region in the late
1800’s. Increasing numbers of Malaysians and Indonesians went on hajj and then on to
al-Azhar in Cairo, where they studied the teachings of one of the founders of Islamic
modernism, Muhammad Abduh.35 Muhammadiya propagated the tenets o f Islamic
modernism, including a stress on direct access to the Quran instead of reliance on
interpreters, in an archipelago whose population had been overwhelmingly Muslim since
the end of the 1500’s, but whose practice of Islam was often so thoroughly permeated
with local traditions and Hindu practices as to be almost unrecognizable to the orthodox
31 Gold, 557
31 ibid, 540
33 Krishna Kumar, "Hindu Revivalism and Education in North-Central India", in Fundamentalisms and
Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott
Appleby, (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1993), 550
34 James Peacock, Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam,
Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1978), 52
33 Peacock, Purifying the Faith, 23
24
Muslim. This syncretism was particularly pronounced in the Javanese residency of
Jogjakarta, the birthplace of Muhammadiya and “the very center and climax o f Hindu-
Javanese culture.”36 Muhammadiya sought to sharply differentiate between Islam and the
folk, Hindu, and animist practices around it, as well as to place its vision of reformed
Islam at the heart o f Indonesian national identity. These projects were carried out
through Muhammadiya’s extensive network of social welfare institutions, the crown
jewels o f which were the roughly 872 Westem-style schools which the movement ran in
1939.37 After independence Muhammadiya continued to grow, creating a “religious-
welfare-state-within-the-secular-state” whose social welfare organizations give it a
“cradle-to-grave” attachment to its six million members in the early 1980’s.38 With
Indonesia currently heading into the second phase of a tumultuous democratic transition,
Muhammadiya under leader Amien Rais is the second-largest Islamic movement in the
country and may well be poised to play kingmaker in the choosing of Indonesia’s new
president in November, 1999.
The youngest of the three movements studied in this dissertation is the Muslim
Brotherhood, founded in the Suez Canal zone of Egypt in 1928. At a time when most
political parties had no sustained presence outside the big cities and the establishment of
voluntary organizations on a national scale was almost unheard of, the Brotherhood had
56 Clifford Geertz, The Religion o f Java, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 134
171 extrapolated the number of 872 schools from Alfian’s statement that in 1939 Muhammadiya ran 1,744
schools, roughly half o f which were Westem-style and the other half o f which were madrasas, which
focused more intensively on Islamic studies. Alfian, Muhammadiyah: The Political Behavior o f a Muslim
Modernist Organization Under Dutch Colonialism, (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1989),
38 James Peacock, “The Impact o f Islam”, The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1981, 142
25
2,000 branches across the country and 600,000 members by the end of de facto colonial
rule in 1952.39 Like Muhammadiya, the Brotherhood worked hard to define correct
Islamic practice, separating it from “un-Islamic” accretions such as rowdy celebrations of
saints’ birthdays and defending it against the onslaught of perverted Western practices,
such as parties in which unmarried men and women mingled. It also rallied to the cause
of gaining or retaining Muslim sovereignty across the Middle East and South Asia,
assassinating British soldiers in Egypt, strongly supporting the cause of Pakistan, and
sending thousands of Brothers to fight in the 1948 war in Palestine. After decades of
severe persecution under Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the Brotherhood emerged again stronger
than ever, winning the majority of votes when it was allowed to run for parliament in
coalition with the Wafd party - the secular nationalist party which had led Egypt's
struggle for independence and which was always notable for the predominance of Coptic
Christians in its leadership positions. It also quickly came to dominate unofficial politics
by winning control of the country’s most important professional syndicates in the late
1980’s and early 1990’s.
The Question of Religion, Education, and the State
The statist literature that monopolized comparative politics in the 1980’s posited
the state as a clearly recognizable set o f institutions separate from society and sought to
ascertain the conditions under which the state could reshape society according to its own
39 Richard Mitchell, The Society o f the Muslim Brothers, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1969), 328.
Although the 2,000 branch figure undoubtedly includes some branches which were relatively inactive, the
reams o f correspondence between small rural branches and Brotherhood headquarters which I read details
the activity o f these branches and convinced me that in fact the Brotherhood did have a sustained presence
in the most far-flung regions o f the country.
26
goals.40 In this literature, the success of the state in remaking society depended upon its
ability to be autonomous - to mark out and enforce boundaries between itself and society.
Some analyses inspired by the statist literature accorded more weight to societal power
than others; Peter Evans’ concept o f embedded autonomy, for example, suggested that
successful policymaking depends not on the state alone but on the construction of
particular types o f relationships between the state and societal organizations,41 while Joel
Migdal’s Strong Societies, Weak States accords the distribution of power within society
more importance than most analyses in determining how powerful the state will
eventually become. These accounts, however, still share the fundamental premise upon
which the statist literature is based - the existence of a clear distinction between the state
and society.
My analysis begins from a different point, one which challenges the utility, and
more fundamentally the accuracy, o f drawing strict distinctions between the state and
civil society in attempting to understand how groups within the latter operate. Perhaps
the most important and far-reaching change instituted by colonial rule was the creation of
a state apparatus which penetrated society much more deeply than any previous regime
had been capable of doing. A bureaucracy capable of studying, categorizing, and
managing the colonized population through institutions as invasive and pervasive as the
40 This new wave in studies o f the state was initiated by the 1985 publication o f Bringing the State Back In,
eds. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Theda Skocpol, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
41 Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995)
27
census42 required the recruitment of large numbers of local people into state employment;
in this context it is worth remembering that in the colonies with the most developed
bureaucracies as many as 90% of the colony’s bureaucrats were locals by the time of
independence.43 The question of how to insulate these state employees from the claims
and causes of the society from which they came, the better to loyally implement the
policies of the state vis-a-vis that society, was never far from the colonial mind.
Pandey’s discussion of the strenuous efforts made by the British to keep their (locally-
recruited) armed forces loyal in times of Hindu-Muslim tension such as those in Banares
in 1809, when the British prevented the sepoys from taking time off for twenty days in
order “to prevent them as much as possible from communicating with the people,”’44 is
just one example of this difficulty, and o f the magnitude of the interests at stake in
successfully addressing it.
While the challenge of recruiting a military and insulating it from society has been
much-discussed in the state-building literature, the enormous expansion of state power
necessary to establish centralized state education systems in the colonial period has
42 Perhaps the most definitive statement on the creation o f the census in and the ways in which it
restructured the political game in the colonial context is that o f Bernard Cohn’s “The Census, Social
Structure, and Objectification in South Asia," in his An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other
Essays, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). Cohn’s demonstration of the ways in which the creation o f
various census categories in turn gave rise to new forms o f identification and affiliation among Indians,
particularly in the field o f caste, is an excellent example o f precisely how thoroughly the extension o f the
colonial state could reshape life within the colony.
43 Benedict Anderson notes that in the last days o f the Dutch presence in Indonesia, 90% o f its officials
there were ‘natives.’ Anderson, “Indonesian Nationalism Today and in the Future,” New Left Review, May-
June 1999, 3. As early as 1891 in India, the subordinate civil service had 110,000 officers, 97% o f whom
were Indian. In that year a typical district o f a million Indians was reported to be governed by at most six
European officials. Richard Symonds, The British and Their Successors: The Government Services in the
New States, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 63
44 Pandey, 48-9
28
received little attention.45 This is somewhat surprising, given that state educational
systems brought more people under the tutelage of the state, for a more prolonged period
o f time, than the military did. Given the large, relatively captive audience available for
socialization in the schools, it would seem that the question of insulating those who
taught in state-founded - or state-funded - schools from the political agendas which they
subscribed to in their private lives - making sure they taught what the state deemed
appropriate, did not exploit their access to a captive population to disseminate
information in conflict with state policies and goals, and did not siphon off state
educational resources for private purposes - was a game whose stakes were very high.
This was particularly the case because, unlike the military, which jealously guarded its
prerogatives of the stockpiling of weapons and the use o f physical force and was
separated from the rest of the population by barracks and uniforms, the scope o f the state
educational project required that much of it be “contracted out” - run directly by civil
society organizations funded by the state. The educational project, then, represented an
exercise o f state power on an enormous scale, and because it was responsible for
socializing future generations and preparing many members of them to actually serve the
state as bureaucrats, this project had enormous implications for state stability.
Strangely, the effects that the creation of state education systems might have on
the mobilizational potential of organizations in civil society - religious nationalist or
otherwise - have not been discussed much in the state literature. They have, however,
been addressed in the literature on the link between education and nationalism. Most of
43 Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism is an important exception to this generalization; his work will
be discussed at length in Chapter Two.
29
this literature, with the important exception of the work of Ernest Gellner, which will be
discussed at length in Chapter Two, is not overly concerned with the content of
education or even with education as an institution in and of itself. This literature sees
education’s central importance as resting primarily in its position as a prerequisite, a
stepping stone, into an institution which is better positioned to facilitate or hinder the rise
o f nationalism - the colonial bureaucracy, and it can be broken down into two camps
which advance diametrically opposite arguments. The first camp, represented largely by
colonial officials, saw exclusion from the bureaucracy as a main cause of nationalist
sentiment, presuming that young men who received an education but were unable to
obtain jobs in the bureaucracy would channel their frustrations into nationalist activism.
The second camp, by contrast, suggests that obtaining bureaucratic jobs - not being
excluded from them - inspired and equipped people to express opposition to the colonial
regime.
Max Weber argued that as increasing numbers of the colonized society get
educated and find employment in the colonial bureaucracy, a middle class is formed
which becomes alienated from the colonial project by colonial attacks on its culture and
religion. Members o f this class then joined to defend and strengthen their religion through
religious reform movements. While this analysis does seem to describe the chain of
events which occurred in at least some colonies with religious reform movements, the
logic of why that chain of events should happen, and what Weber thought the connection
between state employment and religious reform actually was, is unclear. Was it the
process o f working closely with colonial officials and thus being exposed more frequently
than the general population to religious slurs and condescension that made bureaucrats
30
more likely to be religious reformers? Or was it something about middle class status - the
availability of education and leisure time, for example - which allowed the mobilization
o f resources towards religious reform? If the latter is the case, then it would seem that
bureaucratic employment is important for the rise of religious reform movements not
because of any special resources or mobilizational potential inherent in that career path,
but only because it was often the most secure route to middle class status in a colonized
society, and it is middle class status that is inherently revolutionary.
Benedict Anderson, by contrast, invests the process of bureaucratic employment
itself with substantial importance in producing nationalism through the effect that it has
on shaping the national imaginings of the bureaucrats. In his narrative, as aspiring
bureaucrats climbed the ladder of educational achievement within the colony, they ended
up receiving the higher levels of education with students from other areas of the colony
with which they had previously been totally unfamiliar. While this proximity to other
students who turned out to share much in common with them spurred a sense of national
identity among the students, Anderson argues that it was the trajectory of the
bureaucratic, not the educational, pilgrimage, that dictated the boundaries of the nation
imagined by budding bureaucrats. If students who attended the same schools in the
capital could not be sent to bureaucratic posts in the same territory after graduation, then
their sense of the boundaries o f the national community would adjust to fit more
accurately with the boundaries of the territory to which they might be posted. Students
who met at the top of the Dutch educational pyramid in the colonial capital of Batavia
could all be sent to posts anywhere in what would subsequently become Indonesia.
Aspiring bureaucrats in the French territory of Indochina came together from what is now
31
Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos into the same schools in Hanoi and Saigon, but after
graduation the similarity ended with Khmer and Lao students only being posted back to
what would be Cambodia and Laos, while the Vietnamese could be posted anywhere in
Indochina. This difference in bureaucratic trajectories, Anderson argues, may be one
reason why a single Indonesian identity coalesced out of the myriad of hitherto-
unconnected-islands under Dutch rule, while the more geographically contiguous
Indochinese world produced separate Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian nationalisms
rather than a sense of a united Indochinese identity.46 Once again, in this analysis,
education is not particularly important in and of itself, except insofar as it funnels
students into a bureaucracy whose terminal postings are not dictated by one’s place of
origin within the colony. Bureaucratic employment does not provide people who are
already nationalist with particular material resources to advance their cause; it determines
the borders of their imagining of the nation by making them coterminous with the borders
of bureaucrats’ employment trajectories.
In his Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, Paul Brass accords
substantial importance to both education and bureaucratic employment in accounting for
the emergence of Muslim separatism in north India. Differentiation between relatively
similar groups in the same place occurs, Brass argues, because elites, acting to protect
their own interests, choose to stress symbols that divide rather than unite the groups.
Beginning from the premise that the “objective” differences between Hindus and
Muslims in North India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not
46 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 120-132
32
significant enough in and of themselves to lead to the foundation of a Muslim separatist
movement, he argues that over time Muslims began to see Hindus as fundamentally
different from them because the north Indian Muslim elite chose to emphasize symbols
which clearly demarcated Muslims from Hindus rather than symbols which reflected
shared traditions and pasts. Employing a Deutschian analysis of mobilization, Brass
argues that the Muslim elite chose to emphasize divisive symbols as a response to an
environment in which the rates of social mobilization of a rival group (Hindus in this
case) were faster than the rates of assimilation of that group to the language and culture of
the other group (Muslims).47 In laymen’s terms, Hindus were becoming educated,
obtaining jobs dependent on a Westem-style education, and moving into north Indian
cities at a faster rate than they could be assimilated into an elite culture which, in late
nineteenth-century north India, was heavily informed by the traditions of a Muslim elite
which had monopolized bureaucratic employment for generations.
As in Weber’s theory, for Brass education and bureaucratic employment are
important in large part because of their role in creating a Muslim middle class and elite. It
is this elite status which makes Muslims more receptive to the separatist call, as Brass
assumes that the practices and traditions of the Muslim elite differed from those o f the
Hindus more than those of the Muslim and Hindu masses, who purportedly had more in
common. Education and bureaucratic employment are also important in Brass’s
understanding of the creation of separatism because Muslims saw the rates at which they
were able to obtain both vis-a-vis the rates at which Hindus did as a key barometer of the
47 Brass, 44
33
standing of the community, with any perceived decline in either used to demonstrate that
Muslims were condemned to minority status vis-a-vis the Hindus as long as they
remained part of the same country.
While I think these analyses are valid, my argument differs from those of Weber,
Anderson, and Brass in two important ways - by stressing the content of colonial-era
education, and by stressing the resources that bureaucratic employment provided
members of religious nationalist movements who were simultaneously bureaucrats. For
Weber, Anderson, and Brass, education is important in creating and sustaining nationalist
sentiment primarily because of the elevated status that it provides and the way that it
brings students from all over a diverse territory together in ways that would not otherwise
have occurred. While the content of that education is not particularly important for their
theories, it is for mine. I will demonstrate that the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya
schools, through a myriad of choices about such things as what languages to teach and
how to teach history, offered a curriculum which sought very intentionally to entrench a
particular imagining of the nation among their students. While we have no way of
knowing how many of their students “bought” that imagining, and acted to make it a
reality, I would suggest that when thousands of children receive their education in schools
whose curricula are intentionally designed to convince them that the only legitimate
nation is the one based on a particular understanding of the religion practiced by their
community, it behooves us as social scientists to understand how this conviction is
formulated and transmitted. This is particularly the case, I argue, when these thousands of
children are educated not in a myriad o f different schools set up by different people
espousing roughly the same ideology, but in a large number of schools set up by a single
34
movement which is thus in an excellent position to disperse a unified understanding of
the nation to a large number of the colony’s youth.
For Weber, Anderson, and Brass, bureaucratic employment helps to produce
nationalism in one of three ways - by serving as a conduit to middle or upper class status,
by stretching and shaping bureaucrats’ imaginings of the nation, and by serving as a kind
of barometer of the success of particular communities vis-a-vis others in the competition
for prestigious jobs. I would agree with Weber and Anderson that while exclusion from
the bureaucracy may lead frustrated youth to join nationalist movements, it is entry into
the bureaucracy which gives rise to more institutionalized and long-term opposition to
colonial rule. While I don’t argue with Anderson’s suggestion that bureaucratic
employment could have profound effects on bureaucrats’ imaginings of the nation, I am
much more interested in how bureaucrats who had already formulated their particular
imaginings of the community could, through obtaining bureaucratic employment, gain
access to state resources which they could put at the service of the nationalist movements
to which they belonged. The creation of centralized Westem-school systems required
enormous increases in the size o f the state bureaucracy, which brought many members of
political and social movements into the state apparatus as well as putting increasing
amounts of state funding into the hands of private groups willing to run their own schools
in accordance with government regulations. When social movements are given significant
amounts of state resources to support activities which are in important ways oppositional
to state projects, then the familiar construct of the state as an entity entirely separate from
organized movements for change in society begins to break down. In the words o f
Timothy Mitchell, “resistance movements often derive their organizational forms from
35
the military and their methods of discipline and indoctrination from schooling, and in fact
are often generated within the barracks, the campus, or other institutions o f the
state.. ..just as we must abandon the image of the state as a free-standing agent issuing
orders, we need to question the traditional figure of resistance as a subject who stands
outside the state and refuses its demands. Political subjects and their modes of resistance
are formed as much within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some
wholly exterior social space.”48 As a result, Mitchell concludes, “the state should not be
taken as a free-standing entity, located apart from and opposed to another entity called
society. The distinction between state and society (should be seen) as the defining
characteristic o f the modem political order The essence o f modem politics is not
policies formed on one side of this division being applied to or shaped by the other, but
the producing and reproducing o f this line of difference.”49 In highlighting the difficulty
of drawing sharp boundaries between the state and civil society, I am not suggesting that
the concept of the state is irrelevant. On the contrary, this dissertation attempts to
demonstrate the enormous relevance of state institutions and resources for the growth and
development of oppositional movements in civil society. I am suggesting, however, that
in understanding why some of these movements are more powerful and long-lived than
others, examining the extent to which the state has “contracted out” its own work to
groups which oppose the very basis on which that state is constructed, and the extent to
which members of the movements become state bureaucrats themselves, is an important
48 Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits o f the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics, " American
Political Science Review, March 1991, 93
49 ibid, 95
36
step in solving the puzzle.
The Question of Comparability
A study attempting to draw conclusions from the experiences o f one Hindu and
two Muslim nationalist movements, two of which are based in countries with the world’s
second and fourth largest populations, virtually begs to have its methodology challenged.
Comparisons of dissimilar systems producing similar results are a stock in trade of
comparative politics, but they are always subject to challenges that the systems being
compared are too dissimilar - over-endowed with variables whose effects cannot all
adequately be accounted or controlled for - to produce valid results. There is no question
that the contexts within which the Arya Samaj, Muhammadiya, and the Muslim
Brotherhood operated - colonial North India, Indonesia, and Egypt - were quite different
from one another, and they were different in ways that have enormous implications for
the construction o f a national identity. They include an area which was extremely
religiously diverse - North India; a colony which was quite religiously homogenous -
Egypt; and a colony in which a large number of animist and Hindu rituals and world
views subsisted under the umbrella o f an Islamic identity claimed by the majority o f the
population - Indonesia. They also include a colony whose existence as a political unit far
predated colonialism - Egypt; an area which had some precedent for being governed
(albeit in some cases rather loosely) by a single political entity - North India under the
Mughal Empire; and a colony whose colonial boundaries did not remotely resemble
those o f any pre-colonial state or empire - Indonesia. The religions in whose name these
three movements organized - Islam and Hinduism - are also very different. One is clearly
monotheistic; the other, in the understanding o f the overwhelming majority of its
37
followers, is not. One is centered on a single text whose centrality is acknowledged by all
members of the faith; the other contains a variety of scriptures upon which practitioners
may draw for inspiration and guidance.
Despite these differences in political and religious context, religious nationalist
movements emerged in each o f these three areas which organized in very similar ways to
achieve strikingly similar goals. One of these goals was religious reform. The reform
agenda advocated by these movements revolved around three axes - returning to
particular texts which were defined as the sole legitimate sources of correct practice,
assaulting practices and traditions whose foundations could not be traced back to those
texts, and battling traditional religious leadership for its alleged laxness in pursuing the
first two.
As was noted earlier, Muhammadiya and the Muslim Brotherhood are two
manifestations of a wider current of Islamic modernism, articulated most powerfully by
the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh and transmitted to Indonesia in the late 1800’s largely
by Indonesian pilgrims who studied at al-Azhar in Cairo. The most central tenets of
Islamic modernism are a stress on the Quran and hadith (sayings and actions attributed to
the Prophet) as the sole infallible sources of guidance for Muslims, with learned
commentaries on the texts being relegated to a much lesser position except insofar as they
clarify what is already in the former two, and an emphasis on ijtihad, or individual
engagement with and interpretation of religious texts. This call for a return to particular
texts as the model for correct practice was even more sharply pronounced in the case of
the Arya Samaj. While all Muslims, modernists or not, view the Quran as the central text
outlining their faith, mainstream Hinduism draws scriptural sanction from many different
38
religious texts, none of which alone is viewed as central or exclusive o f the truths
addressed in the others. Samaj founder Dayanand Saraswati, by contrast, began from the
premise that only the Vedas and other Hindu scriptures written while Vedic scholarship
still flourished were authoritative. After the war described in the epic Mahabharata
Vedic scholarship had declined, which to Dayanand meant that any post-Mahabharata
text which differed from the Vedas was a priori incorrect and should not be consulted.
This attempt to stress one particular text in Hinduism as central was alien to the Hindu
tradition; it entailed, among other things, labeling popular post-Vedic scriptures such as
the Puranas as false, and it has been suggested that it was part of a larger campaign to
make Hinduism more similar to Semitic faiths30on the assumption that a more centralized
faith with fewer authoritative texts would be more politically and mobilizationally viable
The concept of returning to particular texts meant that only practices whose
origins could be traced directly back to those texts could be sanctioned. This position in
many cases set the Samaj, Muhammadiya, and the Brotherhood on the warpath against
common practices often, although misleadingly, referred to as "popular" Islam or
Hinduism which the movements argued had no such scriptural sanction. For
Muhammadiya, this meant eliminating Hindu and animist traditions from the rituals
practiced by Indonesian Muslims, discouraging them from seeking the help of dhukuns
(magical healers)31 or participating in rituals to celebrate or placate various gods and
goddesses whose very existence Islam denied. Muslim Brothers battled particular ways
30 Romila Thapar, “Syndicated Moksha?”
51 Mitsuo Nakamura, The Crescent Arises Over the Banyan Tree, (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University
Press, 1983),91
39
o f celebrating mulids, or the birthdays of Muslim saints, which to their mind diverged
significantly from proper Muslim behavior as outlined in the Quran and hadith. "A very
strong element o f the medieval fair,"52 in Gilsenan's words, obtains at most mulids,
complete with women singing, people sleeping in the streets, and brightly decorated
carnival games; the Brotherhood condemned these practices in its newspapers in the
harshest of terms55and sought the intervention o f the Minister of Religious Endowments
to “reform” the Sufi brotherhoods which the Brothers blamed for these and other “un-
Islamic” activities.54 Dayanand took on a ritual which was one of the most widely-
practiced at all levels of Hindu society - image worship. While this practice was so firmly
imbedded in everyday Hindu life that “to open a place o f worship where there was no
image of a god or goddess was in itself a revolution,” 55 Dayanand was convinced that
Hinduism as outlined in the Vedas was a monotheistic religion and that image worship
was an illegitimate, post-Vedic accretion which must be ended.
Many of the widespread practices which the Samaj, the Brotherhood, and
Muhammadiya attacked were also opposed by the Hindu and Muslim religious
establishments, and at times common cause was made against these customs. More often
than not, however, these movements condemned the orthodoxy, either for intentionally
d2 Gilsenan, Michael, Saint and Sufi in Modem Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology o f Religion, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 48
53 For example, the November 1, 1934, issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood asked rhetorically, “Have you
seen the women in the clubs o f the mulid, claiming that they are the sheikhs o f the brotherhood while they
do what the sharia rejects?” The article goes on to describe women’s activity at the mulid as “reeling
among the men moaning” and asks “isn’t the voice of women proscribed and her dancing among
m en in the name o f .... religion even more shameful?”
54 Ghanem, 273
55 op cit, 1
40
perverting the doctrines o f the faith for their own gain or for being insufficiently zealous
in rooting out these perversions. Aryas argued that Brahmins knew that the practices over
which they presided were in fact violations of Hinduism, but that they continued to do so
because it was profitable to them. While accepted practice only allowed Brahmins to read
or hear recitation of the Vedas, Dayanand argued that this monopoly on access to
religious texts was the reason that the Brahmins had been able to continue their
perversion of Hinduism unhindered, and called upon all Hindus to read the Vedas for
themselves. Aryas often referred to Brahmins as “popes,” “an epitaph of condemnation
assimilated from the Protestant missionaries ”56 which is made all the more evocative by
the rough symmetry between the project of Luther and that of the Aryas, and in order to
diminish the centrality of Brahmins in the community’s religious practices Dayananda
wrote the Samskar Vidhi, a set of instructions and Sanskrit texts for ceremonies
commemorating births, deaths, and other important life events which enabled Aryas to
perform these ceremonies without Brahmins. The Muhammadiya reform project was
similarly premised on allowing direct access to religious texts while denying the
centrality of “corrupt” religious officials to the community’s practice of its faith.
Members of the movement stressed the importance o f thoroughly learning Arabic rather
than just memorizing the Quran, so that students would not have to rely upon the
inadequate or incorrect interpretations of traditional religious teachers. The movement’s
actions in various parts of Indonesia often targeted the religious establishment, as in the
late I920’s when it moved to take the collection of zakat (religious taxes) at the end o f
56 Jones, 109
41
Ramadan for religious officials in the village of Kotagede on Java and put it in the hands
of “representatives of the umma,”” thus depriving the religious establishment of an
important source of income.38 Similarly, the Muslim Brothers routinely attacked the
ulema of al-Azhar, the seat o f religious orthodoxy in Cairo and a world-renowned center
of Islamic learning, for being too concerned with obtaining degrees and titles and too
oblivious to the decline o f Islam.
These three religious nationalist movements were pursuing similar agendas of
religious reform for an identical purpose - the rejuvenation of the nation through its
return to correct religious practice. Their understanding of the “nation,” and their attempt
to counter “secular,” territorially-based imaginings of the community, will be addressed
at length in Chapters Two, Six, and Seven; the common thread running through those
understandings was that the “nation,” regardless of how many religious communities
lived in it, was to be defined by the traditions and practices of the religious community
which these movements represented.
As the paragraphs above have made clear, members of the Arya Samaj, the
Muslim Brotherhood, and Muhammadiya were trying to carve out a very distinct terrain
for themselves within their societies, one which often put them at odds with both the
masses and the religious elite of the community. This was simultaneously an attempt -
to borrow economic terminology - to accomplish “product differentiation” between
themselves and religious reform/nationalist movements which sprung up before and after
57 Nakamura, 91
38 Some indication o f the threat that this posed is given by the fact that one district level religious official
told Nakamura that prior to these reforms he collected enough rice in this period to support his household
for six months.
42
them within the same colony. The Samaj, Muhammadiya, and the Brotherhood were not
the first movements which sought religious reform in their areas. The Arya Samaj was
preceded, and initially heavily influenced by, the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform
movement which was founded in Calcutta in 1828; similarly, the establishment of the
Brotherhood in 1928 followed the founding of the Gamaiyya el Sharaiyya in 1913 and
the Supporters of the Sunna (Gamaiyyat Ansar el Sunna el Mohammadiya) in 1926.
These movements are not indistinguishable from one another; each movement’s reading
o f the texts, its goals, and the way it went about achieving them differed substantially
from its predecessors and followers. In focusing on the three movements that I have
chosen, then, I am not suggesting that these movements emerged, tabula rasa, out o f an
organizationally barren colonial context, nor am I suggesting that they pioneered within
their colonies all of the understandings of religious reform that they were trying to enact.
They were, however, the first movements to combine a vision o f religious reform and one
o f national renewal in a set of institutions which allowed their appeal to outreach, and
outlast, any previous incarnation of organized religious activism in their milieus.
The goals and methods of the Arya Samaj, the Brotherhood, and Muhammadiya
were quite similar; how similar were the colonies in which they emerged? The reason
north India is considered as the unit of analysis rather than India as a whole is because
identity-based conflict in north India revolved largely around religiously defined
communities - Hindus, Muslims, and in some cases Sikhs - whereas in South India these
conflicts were centered more on a narrative of Aryans from the north conquering non-
43
Brahmin Dravidians in the south.59 Beyond the similarity engendered by India and Egypt
having been part o f the same imperial empire, these three areas were very different from
one another; even the seeming similarity of British control in Egypt and India was
mitigated by the fact that many British officials in Egypt had come from India determined
to implement different policies in Egypt those that they felt had failed in South Asia. As
will readily become apparent, my background is as a Middle East scholar, and the
sections of this dissertation which discuss the Muslim Brotherhood are based primarily
on research that I conducted in Cairo archives. The most provocative result of this
research was the discovery of correspondence between Brotherhood leaders in Cairo and
members throughout Egypt, particularly in the Egyptian countryside. As our best
historical studies o f the Brotherhood in this period focus almost exclusively on the
development o f the movement in Cairo,60 locating large numbers of letters from rural
Brothers was an especially exciting find. My research on North India and Indonesia is
59 Nicholas Dirks, “The Conversion o f Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation,” in Conversion to
Modernities: The Globalization o f Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 117-
120. Dirks demonstrates not only that the premise o f much Dravidian activism - that Dravidians were
suppressed by northern Aryans - is largely the “invention” o f the missionary Robert Caldwell, but also that
Caldwell developed this concept - premised on an assertion that Brahmins were “foreigners” in the
Dravidian south - out o f frustration with the ways in which Brahmins repeatedly stymied missionary
attempts to convert Indians.
60 Without question, the best study in English (as well as the most thorough study o f the Brotherhood that I
have read in Arabic) o f the Muslim Brotherhood is Richard Mitchell’s 1969 classic The Muslim
Brotherhood. The book is based in large part on several years o f in-depth interviews with Brothers in the
mid-1950’s, a level o f access which contemporary American researchers, gathering data under the ever-
watchfiil eye o f a security-conscious Egyptian state, can only dream of. When I first began presenting my
research on the Brotherhood in the U.S. I was asked several times what I could possibly add to M itchell’s
magisterial work. My answer is twofold - while Mitchell had an unparalleled, birds’-eye view o f the way
the movement functioned in Cairo, his work does not address in any detail the very different context in
which the Brothers functioned in the countryside, where the bulk o f their members were located. And
secondly, while Mitchell’s research is based on published Brotherhood documents and on interviews, both
o f which may well censor out unflattering information, most o f my work is based on correspondence which
was never meant to be read by someone outside the movement and which discusses in detail the
difficulties, both in the countryside and in the city, o f sustaining Brotherhood activity.
44
based almost entirely on secondary sources; in the case of Indonesia, these sources
included a number o f outstanding ethnographies, such as those of John Bowen,61 which
center on or make substantial reference to, religious nationalist movements in the colonial
era. Among the secondary sources on north India, there are a number of books written
originally in English by members of the Arya Samaj which I was able to consult, and
much of the Arya Samaj literature quoted in the secondary sources which I consulted,
particularly many of the Samaj newspapers, were also originally written in English.
Having conducted original research in Egypt after having spent several years there and
after having become fluent in Arabic, however, I am very sensitive to the limitations of
research based on secondary sources used by someone unfamiliar with day-to-day life in
the country on which they are based, and hope that my in-depth knowledge o f religious
movements in the Egyptian milieu has provided me with enough more generalizable
background to make a wide-ranging comparison such as this one fruitful, and not too far
off the mark.
M See, for example, John Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Bowen’s Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History,
1900-1989, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)
45
Chapter Two: Nationalism, Religious and Otherwise: An

Interrogation (And Extension) of the Literature
One of the most evocative parts of Partha Chatteijee’s Nationalist Thought in the
Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse comes in his discussion of the way that Nehru
interpreted Mahatma Gandhi, his partner in the Indian national struggle. Chatteijee
argues that in reading Nehru’s discussions o f Gandhi in the former’s autobiography,
“what comes across most strongly is a feeling of total incomprehension.” 1 Nehru was
puzzled by the fact that although Gandhi's economic and social ideas were (to Nehru's
mind) obsolete and even reactionary, “the fact remains that this ‘reactionary’ knows
India, understands India, almost is peasant India, and has shaken up India as no so-
called revolutionary has done.”2 Recalling Gandhi's increased role in Congress activities,
Nehru writes “I used to be troubled., .at the growth of this religious element in our
politics....I did not like it at all the history and sociology and economics appeared to me
all wrong, and the religious twist that was given to everything prevented all clear
thinking but I was powerless to intervene, and I consoled myself with the thought that
Gandhiji used the words because they were well known and understood by the masses.
He has an amazing knack o f reaching the heart o f the people.”2
Just how Gandhi reached the people is described in another passage of Nehru's
autobiography: “His calm, deep eyes would hold one and gently probe into the depths: his
1 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, (Minneapolis:
University o f Minnesota Piess, 1993), 150
2 ibid
3 ibid, p. 151
46
voice, clear and limpid, would purr its way into the heart and evoke an emotional
response. Whether his audience consisted of one person or a thousand, the charm and
magnetism o f the man passed on to it.”4 Unable to rationally explain Gandhi’s appeal,
Nehru says that this “feeling had little to do with the mind”5 and likens Gandhi to a
magician.6 Despite their discomfort with him, Nehru and his more secularly minded
allies in the Congress “allowed” Gandhi to interpret the nationalist struggle to the masses
as he wished, because while his “irrationality” was useful in mobilizing the masses,
Nehru and associates planned to make sure that after independence a more “rational” way
of doing politics prevailed. “We gave him an almost blank cheque,” Nehru says in his
autobiography, “for the time being at least. Often we discussed his fads and peculiarities
among ourselves and said that when Swaraj (independence) came these fads must
not be encouraged.”7
While Gandhi frequently formulated his appeals in religious terms, and while his
privileging of issues and symbols central to Hinduism alienated many non-Hindus, he and
Nehru were both striving to create a territorially defined political community which
would accord all of its citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, would have equal rights
and responsibilities. Nehru’s description o f Gandhi’s role implies a two-track approach to
nationalism, in which educated, rational Indians would be won over by Nehru’s well-
reasoned, secular analyses of the nation while Gandhi’s simpler, religion-suffused
* ibid
5 ibid
6 ibid, p. 150
7 ibid, 151
47
appeals would simultaneously bring the masses on board. This two-track approach
exemplifies the same assumptions and biases that inform most social scientists’
understanding o f the religion-nationalism connection. In this understanding, nationalism
is an inherently secular project - a “state of mind in which the supreme loyalty is felt to be
due the nation-state”8 - and so dressing it up in religious terms can only mean one o f two
things. Either the use of religious discourse to define and justify the existence of the
nation is merely a way o f making nationalism more appealing to the masses - while in no
way altering its fundamentally secular nature - or else this religious discourse accurately
reflects the intent of the nationalists who espouse it, in which case what they are
advocating is not nationalism at all but something else entirely.
The work of almost all scholars on nationalism presumes a teleological view of
history in which pre-modem religiously-based forms of identity were definitively
replaced by secular nationalist imaginings of the community in the modem era. While
scholarly conceptions of nationalism have changed in many ways over the years, this
teleological view has not; it informs Hans Kohn’s 1955 suggestion that “an
understanding of nationalism and its implications for modem history and for our time
appears as fundamental today as an understanding of religion would have been for
thirteenth century Christendom”9 as much as it underlies Benedict Anderson’s Imagined
Communities. If this teleology is accepted, then a framework of analysis is created in
which secular nationalism, as the only modem form o f national identity, becomes the
8 Hans K.ohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1955), 9, quoted in
Juergensmeyer, 14
9 Kohn, Nationalism, 4, quoted in Juergensmeyer, 14
48
yardstick against which all other forms o f national identity are measured, and in relation
to which these other forms can only be understood as deviations from, perversions of, or
at best as immature forms of secular nationalism. Pandey has traced the ways in which
colonialist writers sought to understand communalism in India by situating it in a
universe o f irregular or perverted forms o f secular nationalism, referring to it as a
“subcontinental version of nationalism - the nearest thing to the genuine article that the
South Asian region could produce,”10 as some “Eastern form of nationalism,”11 or, in the
words of Louis Dumont, as an “intermediary form” of identity which bridges the gap
between pre-modem and modem political formations.12 If Dumont imagined the
development of national identity as a progression in which communalism was a
preparatory step on the path to secular nationalism, Juergensmeyer implies that religious
nationalism is a successor to secular nationalism gone bad. The very structure of his A
Mew Cold War?, in which his attempt to explain religious nationalism appears under the
heading “The Loss of Faith in Secular Nationalism,” makes clear Juergensmeyer’s
assumption that the roots of the success o f religious nationalism lie in the ruins of failed
secular nationalism.11
Borrowing from Bipin Chandra, who defines communalism as the belief that
“because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common
10 Pandey, 1
" ibid, 2
12 Dumont, Religion/Politics and History, p. 110, quoted in Pandey, 4
13 Juergensmeyer introduces his discussion o f religious n atio n alism under the heading o f “the loss o f faith
in secular nationalism,” (11) later discusses “how secular nationalism failed to accommodate religion”
(26-44), and repeatedly frames the rise o f religious nationalism as coming chronologically after, and in
49
social, political, and economic interests,”141 would define secular nationalism as a set of
two beliefs - the belief that because a group of people live within a particular territory
they have, as a result, common social, political, and economic interests and values, and
the belief that these common interests and values are more central to the identity of, and
deserve to be privileged over, any commonalities that people within the territory might
have with those outside it. This does not mean that secular nationalists are themselves
irreligious, or that they never make religiously-based appeals or use religious language or
symbols in talking about the nation. What it does mean is that the vision o f the nation
which they advocate does not elevate the status o f a particular religious community above
that of the others, and that the discourse o f nationalism which they employ accords equal
importance to the contributions and cultures of each religious community to the nation,
even though this purported equality may not be borne out in actual state policy after
independence.
[f the first task of secular nationalists is to establish why a shared geographical
identity should be privileged above all others, then the second task is to construct a basis
for legitimate sovereignty - to establish that only someone from within the territorially-
circumscribed nation has the right to rule over it, or in Hobsbawm’s words, “that the
political and national unit should be congruent” - that Egyptians should rule over
Egyptians.15 Sovereignty exercised by any other person or people constitutes what
Gellner calls “a quite outstandingly intolerable breach o f political propriety” - “the
response to, the rise and decline o f secular nationalism.
u Bipin Chandra, Communalism in Modem India, (Delhi, 1984), p. 1, as quoted in Pandey, 7
15 ibid
50
rulers of the political unit belong(ing) to a nation other than that of the majority of the
ruled.” Since those within the territory share interests and values that are not shared to
the same degree by others outside it, it follows that people from outside the territory
could not correctly apprehend and defend those interests, and that their rule over the
territory would thus be inherently exploitative in nature.
In contrast to secular nationalism, the concept o f religious nationalism has
remained exceedingly amorphous and ill-defined. Juergensmeyer and other authors,
primarily scholars such as Peter van der Veer whose background and primary expertise are
in South Asia, employ the term religious nationalism without really defining it.16The
closest Juergensmeyer comes is to suggest that religious and secular nationalisms are based
on competing ideologies of order,17with religion “answering) the question o f political
legitimacy” that is answered in the “modem West” by secular nationalism.18 “Religious
nationalism in today’s parlance,” he continues, “means the attempt to link religion and the
nation-state.”191 define religious nationalists as those who place religion at the center o f
national identity by advocating that their co-religionists - not only those in the territory in
which they themselves live, but their co-religionists worldwide - should live within states
which govern in the name o f their religion. Religious nationalism as I understand it, then,
16 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India, (Berkeley: University o f
California Press, 1994), never defines what he means by religious nationalism, although in fairness to his
argument he does not claim to be “explaining) religious nationalism as it occurs in India in its full
historical and social complexity”, and that he is not striving to “provide a straightforward narrative o f the
development o f religious nationalisms.” Van der Veer, ix.
17 Juergensmeyer, 31
18 ibid, 34
19 ibid, 40
51
is just as concerned with sovereignty - with the right of the community to be ruled by one
o f its members —as secular nationalism is, but it defines the community as those who share
the same religion, and so only those of a particular religious identity have the right to rule.
In other words, Indonesian Muslim religious nationalists believe that Indonesia should be
ruled by an Indonesian Muslim in accordance with Muslim principles; they also believe
that Muslims outside Indonesia who wish to be governed in the name of Islam by a Muslim
from their territory should be supported in their quest to achieve this. This point is worth
dwelling on for a moment, because it shows that while both secular and religious
nationalists seek to expel the colonizing power, they do it for entirely different reasons. For
Egyptian secular nationalists, the British must be expelled from Egypt because only
Egyptians have the right to rule over Egyptians, and because the only way to national
prosperity is to turn that right into a reality. For Muslim nationalists in Egypt, the British
must be expelled not because British men per se should not rule over Egyptians, but
because the British as Christian occupiers stand in the way o f a return to true Islam, and a
return to true Islam is the only route to national prosperity. This understanding of national
identity is very similar to that advanced by John Stuart Mill in Considerations on
Representative Government - an understanding which similarly focuses on feelings of
loyalty and the centrality of sovereignty but does not insist that it they be defined in
territorial terms. “A portion of mankind,” Mill wrote, “may be said to constitute a
nationality if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist
between them and any others, which make them cooperate more willingly than with other
people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by
52
themselves, or a portion o f themselves exclusively.”20For secular nationalists, “themselves”
is a reference to people living in the territorially-defined nation and the “common
sympathies” are feelings of shared interests and values which they purportedly share as the
result of living in the same geographical area. For religious nationalists, “themselves”
refers to people who share their religion, and the “common sympathies” are the desire to
have a reformed version of that religion inform daily life within the nation.
In this chapter I will argue that many of the most persuasive theoretical
expositions of nationalism are so insistent on its inherently secular character because their
theories of its emergence are excessively structural in nature. I will use the analyses of
Benedict Anderson and Ernest Geilner to illustrate my point; both highlight the way in
which the advent of capitalism gives rise to institutions - print-capitalism and mass
education systems respectively - which in their theories inevitably work to render a secular
conception of the nation hegemonic. I agree that these institutions are extremely essential to
nationalism, but that Anderson and Geilner’s excessive structuralism, which functions to
factor human agency out of the equation entirely, blinds them to the possibility that these
institutions could be used to different ends - or in fact consciously used to serve any ends
at all. If we reread people back into the picture, I argue, we can see how these institutions
can be, and have been, used very effectively to propagate religiously-based imaginings of
the nation in the colonial period. The first part o f this chapter will demonstrate how
Anderson and Geilner’s excessive structuralism lead them to accept a teleological view
20 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter XVI: O f Nationality, As

Connected with Representative Government, excerpted in The Nationalism Reader, eds. Omar Dahbour
and Micheline Ishay, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), 98
53
which presumes that secular nationalism definitively replaces religiously-based imaginings
of the community in the modem era. I will then flesh out my definition o f religious
nationalism and respond to some common critiques of this concept, and will conclude by
demonstrating that one of the main vehicles in the spread of secular nationalism - Benedict
Anderson’s newspaper - was used very consciously to propagate religious imaginings of
the nation in British Egypt.
What Is Nationalism?
The trees that have been felled in the attempt to fashion a universally acceptable
definition of the nation could fill a small forest. Attempts to define a nation as a group of
people who share a particular ascriptive characteristic such as a common language,
religion, or history have foundered, as Hobsbawm notes, because “either cases
corresponding to the definition (of nationalism) are patently not (or not yet) ‘nations’ or
possessed o f national aspirations, or undoubted ‘nations’ do not correspond to the
criterion or combination of criteria.”21 Even the attempt to base the definition of
nationhood on such a relatively amorphous concept as shared traditions has become
increasingly problematic, as historical research continues to demonstrate that many of
these “traditions” are relatively recent “inventions.” The attempt to reduce the varied
universe of nations to a single shared set of ascriptive characteristics, it seems, can only
be successful if it is phrased in the most general of terms and punctuated with many
caveats, as in Ernest Barker’s 1928 definition o f the nation in The Study o f Political
Science and Its Relation to Cognate Studies as “a body o f men, inhabiting a definite
21 E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5
54
territory, who normally are drawn from different races, but possess a common stock of
thoughts and feelings acquired and transmitted during the course of a common history;
who on the whole and in the main, though more in the past than in the present, include in
that common stock a common religious belief; who generally and as a rule use a common
language as the vehicle o f their thoughts and feelings; and who, besides common
thoughts and feelings, also cherish a common will.”
In light o f the difficulty in finding ascriptive characteristics shared by all members
of a given nation, the seminal contribution of Benedict Anderson to the nationalism
literature lay in his argument that nationalism is based not on a set of shared objective
criteria, but rather on a set of shared imaginings of the community. For Anderson, “the
nation is an imagined political community it is imagined because the members of
even the smallest nation will never know most o f their fellow-members, meet them, or
even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion it is
imagined as a community because, regardless o f the actual inequality and exploitation
that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal
comradeship.”22 According to Anderson, all nationalists basically engage in the same
process - they seek to create a convincing story about why one type of identity must be
privileged over all others, and they work to create the conditions under which people who
possess that privileged identity will rule over those who share it. As will become clear
throughout this dissertation, I find Anderson’s conception of nationalism as a way of
imagining the community one of the most compelling that we have for understanding this
22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread o f Nationalism,
(London and New York: Verso Press, 1983), 7
55
phenomenon. What I find ironic, though, is the strict limitations which Anderson assigns
to his process o f imagining. He suggests that the national community is imagined
because it requires people to pledge their ultimate loyalty to others whom they have never
seen, yet whose existence they firmly believe in and on whose behalf they are willing to
sacrifice themselves, somewhat like the imaginary friends whose existence young
children believe in just as strongly as they do the existence of their more physically
tangible schoolmates. But in contrast to more common understandings of the word
imagination, in which the constraints of the physical world are abandoned and people are
free to dream o f things as they could be rather than as they are, the end-result of
Anderson’s imaginings is strictly circumscribed - he sees no other way o f imagining the
modem national community except as an entity which prioritizes loyalty to and
commonality with people who live in the same geographical area over all other types of
commonality. The limited scope of this imagination conjures up Henry Ford’s statement
that one could buy the Model-T in any color he wished, as long as it was black.
I suggest that the reason that Anderson and other theorists see nationalism as an
inherently secular phenomenon is that despite their emphasis on the importance of people
coming to imagine new forms of identity, their theories of how national identity is
constructed are not based on agency or human creativity at all, but on an excessively
mechanical understanding of the development o f the particular institutions which they
single out as central to the creation of national identity. For Anderson and Geilner, two
of the most influential theorists of nationalism, these institutions are the newspaper and
mass education systems respectively. Both argue that capitalism in the first place makes
possible, and in the second place both sustains and is sustained by, the development of
56
these two institutions, and that the structure of the market requires that these institutions
have a secular content.
The issue of religion and religious identity appears repeatedly in Imagined
Communities, but almost exclusively as part of a recurring narrative in which secular
nationalism comes to substitute for religion in the fulfillment of particular functions in
society. Anderson first argues that the success of nationalism is largely due to the fact
that it fills a psychological need previously satisfied by religion - the need for
immortality.
“In Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn
of the age o f nationalism but the dusk of religious modes o f thought. With
the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed
did not disappear. Disintegration o f paradise: nothing makes fatality more
arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more
necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into
continuity, contingency into meaning. ...few things ....are better suited to this end
than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and
‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of
an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future.”
(emphasis m ine)23
Lest he appear to be embracing a teleological view of history the end-point of
which is secular nationalism, Anderson is careful to issue a caveat: “needless to say, I am
not claiming that the appearance of nationalism towards the end o f the eighteenth century
was ‘produced’ by the erosion of religious certainties, nor am I suggesting that
nationalism historically ‘supersedes’ religion. What I am proposing is that nationalism
has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies,
23 Partha Chatteijee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 5
57
but with the large cultural systems that preceded it.”24 He then proceeds, however, into a
discussion of the rise o f print capitalism in which the premier carrier of secular
nationalism - the newspaper - rises out of the ashes of the former carrier o f religious
identity - the sacred language. Religious identity organized around the idea of sacred
languages such as Latin became a casualty of the printing press, whose advent led
printers to go beyond the small market of Latin readers to exploit the profits made
possible by printing in the vernacular. Interestingly, the printed work that “for the first
time (created) a truly mass readership and a popular literature within everybody’s reach”25
was not a secular work but a statement of religious reform - Luther's theses - whose
popularity Anderson credits with being a major factor in the spread of vernacular
printing, accounting for one third of all German language books sold in a period between
1518 and 1525 in which the number of books published in German increased threefold.26
Curiously, Anderson does not remark on the irony of the fact that it was a religious text
whose publication initiated the process of commercial vemacularization which would
reduce sacred languages to the dustbin of history. Perhaps this is not surprising, though,
since in Anderson’s narrative Luther’s theses and the Reformation itself are important not
for their content, but only because of the function that they fulfill, which is to act as a key
“factor” giving impetus to the “revolutionary vemacularizing thrust o f capitalism” by
24 Anderson, 11-12
25 ibid, 39
26 ibid
58
encouraging the publishing o f (secular) works written in the vernacular rather than
religious texts written in the sacred languages.27
This sense o f the substitution of secular nationalism for religious identity is
especially pronounced in the metaphors which Anderson uses to describe the role which
the carrier of the new secular nationalism - the newspaper - plays in modem life. In
describing this role, Anderson notes that “the significance of this mass ceremony is
paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair o f the skull. Yet each
communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated
simultaneously by thousands (or millions) o f others of whose existence he is confident,
yet o f whose identity he has not the slightest notion.”28 While the language Anderson uses
in this passage seems to conjure up some kind of trans-national religious observance,
such as Muslims gathering for prayer or Jews observing the Sabbath, Anderson is in fact
describing the members of an incipient nation reading the newspaper. He goes on to make
the substitution of secular for religious identity explicit by noting Hegel's statement that
newspapers serve modem man as a substitute for morning prayers,29 and in presenting the
image of the new newspaper reader he asks “what more vivid figure for the secular,
historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?”(emphasis mine)30 When
describing readers’ awareness that many other people also read the same paper, Anderson
notes that “these fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in
ibid
28 ibid, 35
29 ibid
30 ibid
59
their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined
community.” (emphasis m ine)31
In Anderson’s narrative, then, print capitalism has severely marginalized the role
of sacred languages in favor of (secular) vernacular ones, the morning newspaper has
been substituted for dawn prayers, and the feeling of connection to members of one’s
religious community has been supplanted as one’s primary form of identity by connection
to one’s fellow newspaper-readers. But while we can all agree that the mass printing o f
the newspaper in vernacular languages came about as an impersonal, unintended response
to the profit structure of capitalist markets, why can these newspapers subsequently
function only to spread a territorially-based imagining o f the community? For Anderson,
the content of the newspaper is dictated not by the predilections of its editors but once
again by the “natural” and “apolitical” evolution of capitalist markets, as “what brought
together, on the same page, this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was
the very structure of the colonial administration and market system itself. In this way, the
newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined
community among a specific assemblage of fellow readers, to whom these ships, brides,
bishops, and prices belonged.”32 In this formulation, editors and writers do not choose to
cover certain events and neglect others in order to promote secular imaginings of the
community; they merely cover the events which occur in the geographical area in which
they are located. Their juxtaposition of the story, in Anderson’s words, of this bishop
31 ibid, 44
32 ibid, 62
60
with that ship arrival with news of that marriage “just happens” to foster secular
imaginings of the community which supplant the religious ones that preceded them.
Anderson starts from the assumption that the agents of nationalism are literate and
then analyzes how literacy-dependent activities such as newspaper reading contribute to
the imagining of national communities. Ernest Geilner, by contrast, makes the process of
becoming literate and educated the main hallmark o f nationalism itself, but he shares
Anderson’s acceptance of a teleology in which religion is the key force which binds
people together in the pre-modem period but is effectively privatized and driven out of
the sphere of national imagining in the modem era. For Geilner, the progression of world
history is as much about the expansion of educational opportunities as it is about the rise
and fall of empires. Mankind first develops literacy during the agrarian age,33 when it is
confined to the clerical class, as “(agrarian) societies simply do not possess the means for
making literacy near-universal and incorporating the broad masses of the population in a
high culture.”34 Nor do they possess the need to do so, as literacy is not necessary to
perpetuate the socioeconomic system found in agrarian societies, in which the majority of
people are either peasants or skilled craftsmen who learn their trade not in school but
through apprenticeships.35 In agrarian society, then, the main purpose of literacy is to
serve the sacred; monopolized by the clerics, it is used almost exclusively to read holy
texts and to transmit religious knowledge to the next generation of clerics.
55 Geilner, 8
34 ibid, 11
33 ibid, 26
61
Industrial society, however, as “the only society ever to live by and rely on
sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement,”36 requires
that literacy assume a completely new function. The perpetual growth which underlies
industrial society presumes a perpetually changing division of labor in which a man,
rather than being bom and dying a shoemaker, may enter the work force as a secretary,
go back to school and become a lawyer, and then open his own consulting firm. In order
to move from job to job, members of industrial society must share a common educational
base that allows them to quickly pick up the skills necessary for many different
workplaces over the course of their lifetimes, making generalized literacy transmitted
through a school-based culture the hallmark of industrial society. It is also, for Geilner,
the defining characteristic, the prerequisite, o f nationalism. “What happens,” he asks,
“when a social order is accidentally brought about in which the clerisy does become, at
long last, universal, when literacy is not a specialism (sic) but a pre-condition of all other
specialisms, and when virtually all occupations cease to be hereditary?....in an age of
universalized clerisy the relation of culture and polity change radically. A high culture
pervades the whole of society, defines it, and needs to be sustained by the polity. That is
the secret of nationalism.” (emphasis Gellner’s ) 37
Why, in Gellner’s narrative, must this high culture, and the educational
institutions which perpetuate it, be inherently secular? Because once education becomes
universal, “the absolutist high cultures o f the agrarian age are obliged to shed their
36 ibid, 22
37 ibid, 18
62
absolutism, and allow the wells of truth to pass into public, neutral control. In brief, the
price that these high cultures pay for becoming the idiom of entire territorial nations,
instead of appertaining to a clerkly stratum only, is that they become secularized. They
shed absolutist and cognitive pretensions, and are no longer linked to a
doctrine.”(emphasis m ine)38 More to the point, an education focused on religious
doctrine does not permit the production of people with interchangeable skills who can be
trained for many jobs; in a capitalist world, a woman who knows her prophets is not as
useful as one who has the secular skills to make profits. “Nationalism,” Geilner argues, is
“the organization of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous
units” - i.e. units characterized by mass secular education.39
According to both Anderson and Geilner, then, the impersonal, invisible hand o f
the market dictated the emergence of both a newspaper which would create a territorially-
based sense of community, and a mass school system which would create a homogenous
culture based on shared secular knowledge. I would agree that both the newspaper and the
mass school system came into being in response to the demands of capitalism and were
not the creations o f individual political activists keen to find more effective ways of
spreading their message. And not being a Europe specialist, I am in no position to assess
whether once these institutions had come into being, nationalists of one stripe or another
consciously used them, at the peak of the development of national feeling in Europe, to
disseminate their imagining o f the community as opposed to other extant imaginings. In
38 ibid, 78
39 ibid, 35
63
many places in the non-Western world, however, almost as soon as the newspaper and the
mass school system were transplanted into foreign soil they were used quite consciously
by proponents of different national imaginings to spread those imaginings. While the
spread o f Gellner’s mass education may have been an organic part of the development of
domestic capitalism in Europe, it was not in most colonized non-Westem societies, which
at the moment of their encounter with colonialism and the rise of nationalist movements
cannot be characterized as being either capitalist or industrialized. In these societies, a
social order in which the clerisy becomes universal and literacy the pre-condition of all
specialisms was not, in Gellner’s words, “accidentally” brought about as an organic
outgrowth of a process of capitalist development - the development of a secular
education system. To the extent that such a social order was created at all, it was the
product of an institutional mechanism - Westem-style education - consciously initiated
by two foreign intruding forces - the colonial power and missionaries - for their own
purposes. In the case of the latter, this mechanism, far from being introduced to impart
the secular skill of literacy, was designed purposely to impart a particular set of religious
beliefs. Little wonder, then, that religious nationalist movements in some o f these
colonies responded to missionary efforts to spread education with their own schools,
which were similarly designed to shore up particular religious beliefs. As much o f the rest
of this dissertation will be dedicated to demonstrating how Western educational systems
in India and Indonesia were purposefully used by religious nationalists in both countries
to spread their religious imaginings of the community, I will not respond any further to
Gellner’s arguments here. In the rest of this chapter, I will further develop the concept o f
religious nationalism as I define it, respond to some common critiques o f that concept,
64
and demonstrate how Benedict Anderson’s insights about the importance of the
newspaper as a vehicle for national imaginings can be reread in order to see how religious
nationalism and its claims for sovereignty were intentionally advanced through that
vehicle.
The Definition of Religious Nationalism
I define religious nationalists, once again, as those who place religion at the
center o f national identity by advocating that their co-religionists - not only those in the
territory in which they themselves live, but their co-religionists worldwide - should live
within states which govern in the name o f their religion. The idea that national identity
can be based on a shared religious identity rather than on a shared existence in the same
geographical territory, however, is not widely accepted by scholars, who generally raise
three types of objections to the concept - one of scope, one o f sovereignty, and one of
what constitutes nationalist activity.
The question of scope seems to be the most troublesome part of the idea of
religious nationalism for many scholars. They argue that while nationalism by definition
is supposed to be limited to a particular, geographically circumscribed area, religious
nationalism seems to be an inherently trans-national phenomenon which conjures up
images, for example, of a Muslim caliphate superseding individual Muslim nation-states
as the repository o f the supreme loyalty of Muslims worldwide. While it is true that
earlier in this century Egyptian, Iraqi, and Palestinian Muslims found nothing unusual in
swearing allegiance to a Muslim caliph of Central Asian descent based in Turkey, I
65
would agree with authors such as James Piscatori40 and Juergensmeyer that for today’s
religious nationalists “virtually every reference to nationhood assumes that the
modem nation-state is the only way in which a nation can be construed.”41 Contemporary
Muslim religious nationalists in Egypt, for example, would not suggest that there is no
distinction between themselves and Chinese or Australian Muslims, nor are Muslim
religious nationalists living in established states such Egypt, Algeria, or Pakistan
seeking to dissolve the states in which they live in favor of some new supra-national
Muslim government. These nationalists do, however, advocate that the states in which
they live be ruled in accordance with Islamic norms as they define them, and that
Muslims in other countries have the ability to construct similar states for their own
governance.
This conception o f religious nationalism does not mean that the phenomenon and
its goals are limitless in scope. It does not mean, for instance, that Muslim religious
nationalists seek to turn every country in which Muslims are located into a Muslim state
(the claims of some Muslim groups that Britain will be a Muslim state in a matter of
decades notwithstanding). It does mean, however, that where Muslims are striving to
create a state ruled by Muslims in the name o f Islamic law, Muslim religious nationalists
living in other countries would feel compelled to support their efforts. This concept of
shared identity may well require Muslim religious nationalists in Egypt to provide aid to,
and perhaps even to go and physically fight for, the right of Afghani Muslims to be ruled
40 James Piscatori, Islam in A World o f Nation-States, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
41 Juergensmeyer, 40
66
by a (sufficiently rigorous) Afghan Muslim government. It would explain why Muslim
Brothers in colonial Egypt dedicated as much effort to fighting Zionists in Palestine as
they did to expelling the British from Egypt - not because Egyptian Brothers wanted to
incorporate Palestine in some trans-national Muslim political entity, but because Palestine
was an Islamic land which could only legitimately be ruled by Muslims. Religious
nationalists’ understanding of sovereignty - i.e., the necessity of and their right to work to
establish the sovereignty of their co-religionists - may well lead them to violate accepted
norms o f the sovereignty of the nation-state, which presume that the only legitimate
action to change the balance of power within a state is taken by those living within that
state. In this, of course, they would be very similar to Western democrats, whose
expressed concern for the sovereignty of the nation-state has rarely prevented them from
supporting people in other countries challenging their sovereigns in the name o f
democracy.
Religious nationalism, then, is not about establishing a new type of sovereignty in
which independent, self-governing states would be replaced by or subsumed within larger
political entities grouping all or most of the adherents of a particular religion. It is about
establishing who has the right to rule a particular country, and who has the right - indeed
the responsibility - to intervene in the politics o f that country if outside aid is sought to
make that a reality. The secular nationalist criterion o f sovereignty is satisfied as long as
some national of the country - in theory, any national - rules over it. For a secular
Indonesian nationalist, a Christian Indonesian has as much right to rule the country as a
Muslim one; for an Indonesian Muslim religious nationalist, the universe o f potentially
appropriate rulers is smaller. It is smaller in two ways - because only Muslim
67
Indonesians can rule this predominantly Muslim country, and because not just any
Indonesian Muslim will do, only those Indonesian Muslims who will rule in the name of
a (reformed version of) Islam. This is why religious nationalism can be just as relevant a
concept in a country made up overwhelmingly o f members of one religion - such as
Egypt, 85 to 90% of whose population is Muslim - as it is in a more religiously
heterogeneous country such as India. It is also why religious nationalism can remain such
a potent concept long after the colonial power has left the scene. For a secular Egyptian
nationalist, the battle has been won when the British have been expelled and an Egyptian,
of whatever religion, rules the country. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the fact that Egypt
has been ruled by Egyptians for almost fifty years, and that all of its presidents in those
years have been Muslim, is not nearly enough; until those rulers agree to rule Egypt in
accordance with Islamic law, the movement’s main goals have not even begun to be
achieved, living within its borders.
The question o f establishing the right of a particular, religiously-defined group to
exercise sovereignty might suggest that religious nationalists are primarily engaged in a
political struggle, waged on the familiar political terrain of demonstrations, boycotts,
elections, and extending, in more extreme circumstances, to armed struggle against one’s
opponents. When religious nationalists engage in this kind of activity directed against the
colonial power, most would have little trouble in classifying them as nationalists, of
whatever kind, and the three movements discussed in this dissertation did participate in
these types o f activities throughout the colonial period. I want to make the case, however,
that their involvement in ostensibly “apolitical” activities, such as agitating in favor of
widow remarriage or encouraging fasting during Ramadan, were also nationalist activities
68
because of the way that these movements understood the causality underlying the
establishment, and future demise, of colonial rule in their countries.
My understanding of what constitutes nationalist activity is informed by the work
of Chatteijee. In The Nation and Its Fragments, Chattel]ee argues that “we have all taken
the claims of nationalism to be a political movement much too literally and much too
seriously.”42Traditional historiography of Indian nationalism, he notes, dates the
beginning of the nationalist movement to the 1885 founding of Congress and suggests
that this was preceded by a preliminary phase, from the 1820’s through the 1870’s, in
which future nationalists dedicated their efforts to social reform, including projects such
as banning sati and raising the age of marriage. In Chatteijee’s rereading, however, the
rise of a nationalist sensibility and action dates back to the point, decades before the
founding o f Congress, at which Indian social reformers stopped enlisting the assistance o f
the British for their projects because such assistance had come to be seen as interference
in national culture. At this point nationalists began to see their own society, and the
effects of colonial practice on it, as divided into material and spiritual domains. The
material domain, including the economy and most particularly science, was one in which
the West’s “superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully
studied and replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the
‘essential’ marks o f cultural identity. The greater one’s success in imitating Western
42 Partha Chatteijee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 5
69
skills in the material domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of
one’s spiritual culture.”'13
Chatteijee’s ascription of a bifurcated world view to nationalists - one in which
the technological superiority of the West is acknowledged while the spiritual superiority
of the East requires that “native” cultural practices be insulated from colonial interference
- is to some extent an overgeneralization. Many religious nationalists in the colonial
period would not accept the idea of placing science outside the realm of culture and
religion and recognizing Western superiority in the former. Dayanand argued at great
length that all of the scientific triumphs o f the modem age had been pre-figured in the
Vedas, while the Muslim Brotherhood triumphantly touted scientific discoveries
delineating behaviors which had been shown to decrease incidences of cancer, gleefully
noting that they were the very behaviors enjoined upon Muslims by God - such as
abstaining from drink, ablution, and fasting - through the daily practice of their religion.34
While they may have been unwilling to concede scientific superiority to the colonial
power and the world from which he came, religious nationalists absolutely agreed,
however, that their cultures were spiritually superior, as long as that culture was defined
in terms of practices and symbols of their own religion and not those of other religious
communities within the colony. Chatteijee views the withdrawal of social reform
projects from the colonial political arena as nationalist because it is an assertion of
41 ibid, 6
44 The Muslim Brotherhood, August 24, 1934, reported excitedly on a paper presented by an Egyptian
doctor, Dr. Muhammad Afifi, at the International Conference o f Cures By X-Ray, Electricity, and Radium
in Zurich, which purportedly demonstrated that the daily practices o f Islam were particularly good for
preventing cancer. The article concluded that these findings demonstrated that the teachings o f Islam were
appropriate for all times and places.
70
sovereignty on the part of the nationalists, who are thereby saying that only nationals o f
the country were permitted to act, reform, or reshape power in the arena which really
mattered - the way in which culture was practiced. In this reading, social/religious reform
becomes “political” and “nationalist” when certain categories of people are defined as
unable to participate in it. My argument, in contrast, is that these reform projects are an
inherently nationalist activity if they are motivated by the conviction that the reforms are
preconditions to expelling the colonial power and creating a politically and culturally
sovereign nation. I see Chatteijee’s contribution here as being his contention that what is
deliberately done outside the sphere of interaction with the colonial power can be just as
nationalist as that which is done in direct confrontation with it; in the same way, I would
argue that seemingly apolitical reforms which have no immediate implications for the
continuation of colonial rule can be nationalist if they are done with the understanding
that colonial rule cannot be ended without them. In the words of Dayanand, “the causes
o f foreign rule in India are: mutual feud, child-marriage, marriage in which the
contracting parties have no will in the selection of their life-partners, indulgence in carnal
gratification, untruthfulness....... the neglect of the study of the Vedas, and other
malpractices. It is only when brothers fight among themselves that an outsider poses as an
arbiter.”45
The question o f ostensibly apolitical activities, and their role in spreading
nationalism, brings us back to the work of Benedict Anderson. For Anderson, the
newspaper serves to spread secular nationalist conceptions of community not because its
45 Charles Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform , (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), 128
71
writers and editors consciously use it to do so, but because the “natural” and “apolitical”
evolution o f capitalist markets bring together, “on the same page, this marriage with that
ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the colonial administration and
market system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even
apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow
readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged.”46 The juxtaposition
of the story of, in Anderson's words, this bishop with that ship arrival with news of that
marriage “just happens,” in his narrative, to foster secular nationalism. In the final section
o f this chapter, I will use the case of Muslim Brotherhood newspapers to demonstrate that
the decision of which brides, bishops, and ships were written about in the newspapers of
any particular territorial area under colonial rule was a hotly contested and inherently
political one, and that religious nationalists could use the medium of the newspaper very
successfully to project conceptions o f the boundaries of the nation, and who should
exercise sovereignty over it, than those espoused by secular nationalists.
Pharaohs vs. Pakistanis: The Print Battle over the Boundaries of the Egyptian
Imagined Community
Unlike the many Arab and African countries which were created out of whole
cloth by the colonial powers, Egypt had existed within basically the same geographic
boundaries since the time of the Pharaohs. Prior to World War I, Egyptians took pride in
an Egyptian heritage which distinguished them from other Muslims and Arabs, but they
also perceived a strong bond between themselves and other Muslims which manifested
itself politically in loyalty to the Ottoman Empire.
46 ibid, 62
72
By the early 1920s three major political changes had brought the boundaries of
the Egyptian imagined community into question. The first was the collapse o f the
Ottoman Empire after its defeat in World War I. This meant that although Egyptians still
felt a spiritual bond with other Muslims, there was no longer a larger entity to bring Arab
and Turkish Muslims together and to mark them off as a community distinct from other
groups. The second was Egypt’s 1919 ‘revolution,’ a series of widespread anti-British
uprisings resulting from Britain’s exile o f Saad Zaghloul and other Egyptian nationalist
leaders to Malta. As Gershoni and Jankowski point out, the 1919 ‘revolution’ was
characterized by an unambiguously territorial nationalist character and was centrally
concerned with Egypt’s existence as a nation and its right to full political independence/7
and the political party founded by Zaghloul - the Wafd - vigorously promoted a secular
conception o f the Egyptian nation.
The coup de grace to the idea of Egypt as part of a larger Muslim community,
however, was delivered by the third political change - Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate
in 1924. Although the political roof of the Ottoman empire had been destroyed in World
War I, Egyptians had continued to look to the Caliph as their nominal leader and a living
link between themselves and other Muslims. Now, the idea of a larger Muslim
community had no institutional basis whatsoever. Small wonder, then, that by the mid
1920s the idea of a secular, territorially based Egyptian nationalism seemed to have won
out over the idea o f a religiously based pan-Islamic sense o f community.
47 Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian
Nationhood, 1900-1930, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 40
73
The question of which imagining would reign supreme was fought out in the
newspapers, the result of a print capitalism which had become well established in the
1860’s, when Reuters established an international news agency in Alexandria, and in the
1870’s, when Egypt's flagship paper until the present day - al-Ahram - was founded. A
“second wave of nationalistic (sic) publications”48 appeared in 1881, the year before the
British occupation, and in the period between 1880 and 1908 a remarkable 514
newspapers were being published in Cairo and Alexandria, a 21-fold increase over the
number of papers published in the preceding 28 years.49 While it is safe to assume that
most of these papers never gained a substantial readership, it is also clear that the number
o f Egyptians reading a newspaper was dramatically increasing. In 1927-28 the total
circulation for the leading dailies and weeklies was 180,000; in 1947 the circulation of
the leading dailies was 200,000 and weeklies 360,000.5° And as in all countries with a
high degree o f illiteracy, a single newspaper was often read by, or to, several people. Ami
Ayalon quotes travelers in turn of the century Egypt who wrote that “we often see
servants, donkey breeders, and others who cannot read gather around one who reads
while they listen. The streets of Cairo and of other towns are full o f this.”51 The evidence,
then, suggests that by the 1920's reading, or listening to the reading of, newspapers on a
48 Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
45
49 ibid, 50
50 ibid, 151
51 ibid, 157
74
regular basis had become an established habit among a sizeable part o f the Egyptian
population.
By the 1920’s, then, regular access to newspapers had become part of many
Egyptians’ lives, and the newspaper was to play a central role in the formation of
Egyptians’ imaginings of their community. However, the community that came to be
imagined was not created as a result of the invisible hand of capitalism producing
newspapers which unconsciously furthered the spread o f secular nationalism by
juxtaposing stories o f this sheikh from Cairo with the story of the arrival of that boat in
the port of Alexandria with a description of a marriage in Minoufiyya, a la Anderson. The
issue of the way in which the Egyptian community was to be imagined was a hotly
contested one, and advocates o f many different imaginings purposefully and cleverly
used the newspaper as a medium to win converts to their particular conception of what
Egypt and its loyalties should be.
By the early 1920s the collapse of the Empire and the euphoria surrounding the
1919 ‘revolution’ had made Egyptians more receptive to territorial imaginings of their
community. Throughout this decade, the editors of Egypt’s most widely read newspapers
- such as Abd el Qadir Hamza, editor of the Wafdist el Bilagh el Usbuuiyi, Salama Musa,
editor of el Hilal, and Ismail Mazhar, editor of el Uusuur - were committed to the
concept of Egypt as a secular nation separate from any larger Muslim entity. The idea of
Egypt as part of a larger Muslim community played heavily on a belief in the superiority
of the Arabs as the people to whom the Quran had been revealed, and in practice that idea
meant strengthening Egypt’s ties to the rest of the Arab world. In order to promote their
view of a separate and secular Egypt, then, the secular nationalists needed to discourage
75
greater ties with other Arabs. This was done mainly in two ways. The first was by
regulating the amount of coverage of Arab affairs that would appear in Egyptian
newspapers and, in the instances when such coverage did appear, by promoting a sense
that these affairs had little to do with Egypt, lest Egyptian readers begin to feel that events
in Baghdad or Damascus concerned them as much as events in Cairo did. For example,
when the Syrians were engaged in major battles against the French in July of 1920, these
battles were covered in-depth only by the Syrian-run papers in Egypt. While Egyptian
editors wrote articles criticizing the French use of force against the Syrians, Gershoni and
Jankowski note that “there seems to have been no sense that Egypt was either involved in
or able to influence events in Syria.” The British assessment of the situation agrees with
that of Gershoni and Jankowski, noting that the July 1920 clashes “evoked little
excitement (in Egypt) outside of local Syrian circles, and no serious attempt has been
made to arouse anti-European feeling in this connection,” which suggests that beyond
occasional articles condemning the French position Egyptian-run newspapers did not
devote much attention to these events.52 In Anderson's terms, by declining to put battles
in Damascus on the front page of the newspaper next to the arrival of a ship in
Alexandria, a sheikh in Cairo, and a marriage in Minoufiyya, Egyptian newspaper editors
were painstakingly trying to negate any sense of Egyptian community that extended
beyond the Sinai.
The second way that newspaper editors lobbied for a secular and separate
imagining of the Egyptian community was by printing negative portrayals of Arabs in
52 ibid, 51-52
76
their newspapers. Many scholars of nationalism have commented on the tendency of
nationalists to rewrite history in order to convince peoples who may have had little in
common historically that they are members of a single nation which has existed from
time immemorial.53 For Egyptian territorial nationalists, the task was the reverse. Instead
o f having to convince people in Cairo that they shared a historical link with people in
Aswan or Alexandria in order to create loyalty to a larger Egyptian nation, territorial
nationalists needed to fragment the conception of Egyptians as part of an overarching
Arab Muslim civilization and convince them that Egyptians were distinct from, and
superior to, the Arabs. This was a delicate task, since the territorial nationalists had to
disparage the Arabs without diminishing the glory of Islam, in whose history they had
played a central part. One way of doing this was through a proliferation of newspaper
articles (as well as books, but that is beyond the scope of this article) which presented
new versions o f Islamic history in which the Arab contribution was carefully ignored or
minimized. In a 1925 article on ‘The Arabs and Islamic Civilization,” Muhammad
Hussein Heikal argued that the Arabs had contributed little to Islamic civilization. True,
they had created the unified political and administrative framework that brought people
from Iran to Spain together and created a brilliant new cultural synthesis, but this was not
a difficult task because these cultures already shared a common geographic and climatic
milieu. The real triumphs o f Islamic civilization - the pioneering developments in the arts
and sciences that had made medieval Islamic culture famous - in fact had nothing to do
with the Arabs at all. At the time of the coming o f Islam, Heikal posited, the Arabs had
53 See, for instance, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 48-
49
77
had no civilization of their own, and it was only through coming into contact with more
advanced civilizations through the conquests that Islamic civilization flourished.54
Having thus “de-Arabized” Islamic history, territorial nationalists then went on to
contrast the Arabs' purported lack of civilization to the triumphs of Egyptian history.
While the Arabs were a people who had wandered in the desert for over a thousand years,
incapable of creating a durable, lasting civilization, the Egyptians had built the pyramids
and supported great dynasties during their millenia of sedentary rule. Lest any reader
think that this distinction between the nomadic Arab and the settled Egyptian was a
purely historical one, Heikal and other writers noted that this same situation of wandering
“continues to prevail in the Arab peninsula to this very day.”55 One important point needs
to be made in regard to the negative stereotypes o f Arabs that flourished in Egyptian
territorial nationalist publications in the 1920s and 1930s. Although territorial nationalists
like Heikal, Taha Hussein, and Salama Musa undoubtedly personally believed that
Egyptians were superior to Arabs, the articles that they wrote to that effect were not just
unconscious mirrors of their own prejudice to the wider Egyptian public. As Gershoni
and Jankowski argue in discussing the newspapers of this period, “it must be
emphasized that this negative image o f the Arabs was an intentional construct.
Consciously created rather than unconsciously assumed, it was an image that Egyptian
nationalist intellectuals sought to inculcate in all Egyptians. In their view, the Egyptian
nation had to adapt a negative image o f the Arabs in order to achieve its own renewal.”56
34 Gershoni and Jankowski, 111-112
53 ibid, 105
36 ibid, 97
78
This use of newspapers to spread a secular nationalist view o f Egyptian history
represented a deliberate attempt to use the weapons print capitalism offered in the battle
between different imaginings of the Egyptian community, and, implicitly, different
directions for its future.
While the downgrading of Arab contributions to Islamic civilization may have
been effective in a negative sense - that of convincing at least some Egyptians not to
identify themselves as part o f a larger Arab community - it did little to convince them o f
the positive nature of identifying solely as Egyptians. The Egyptian territorial
nationalists were well aware of this problem, but in 1922 they were provided with, as it
were, a godsend to their efforts to create a separate Egyptian identity - the discovery of
Tutankhamun's tomb.
The discovery of the tomb, coming so soon after the explosion of Egyptian
nationalism manifested in the 1919 ‘revolution’ and the demise of the Ottoman Empire,
provided the foundation for an alternate imagined community, that of the Egyptians as a
separate people which stretched back into antiquity and whose ancestors had created
some o f the greatest marvels known to man. Although Egyptians, particularly the
territorial intellectuals, had certainly been aware o f Egypt’s Pharaonic heritage before
1922, it had seemed like a somewhat dead history, one that was certainly harder to relate
to than the more recent triumphs of Islamic - and by extension, Arab - civilization. After
the discovery of the tomb, however, territorial nationalists lost no time in repeatedly
publicizing the wonders of Pharaonic civilization in their newspapers in order to bolster
their claim that Egypt had been, and could once again be, a great nation all by itself.
79
Tut’s tomb figured prominently in newspapers throughout the 1920s, becoming a
powerful symbol of the destiny of an independent Egypt. The ceremonial opening of the
tomb was timed to coincide with the inauguration of Egypt's first elected parliament in
March, 1924, and days before the inauguration the king and several deputies of the
parliament toured the tomb. Far more interesting than this elision of political power with
historical greatness, however, was the relation of the territorial nationalist newspaper
editors themselves with the tomb. Many of the most outspoken o f these nationalists went
on pilgrimages to Lower Egypt to visit the the tomb. Only months after the discovery of
the tomb in 1922, Heikal visited the tomb, the Valley of the Kings, and the Kamak
temple complex. He effusively described in the papers how amazing these sites were, and
he encouraged all Egyptians to make pilgrimage to the tombs themselves. “As men of
today,” Heikal exhorted, “you will never be able to accomplish anything and will be
retarded in your understanding of science, art, and the precision characteristic of your age
until you have stood in the presence of these monuments.”57Abd el Qadir Hamza, editor
of el Bilagh el Usbooyi, also made the pilgrimage to the tomb and subsequently informed
his readers that “we must look at....(the Pharaohs’) remains in order to fill our spirits with
pride and power, in order to escape this (mentality of) inferiority which centuries of
humiliation and slavery have created in us.”58 Ahmed Hussein wrote about his trip to
upper Egypt as part o f a school tour in 1928. He reminisced that the night he first saw
57 ibid, 171
58 ibid, 173
80
Kamak was a turning point in his life; he felt as if the statues were speaking to him and
he dedicated himself to reviving the glory o f Pharaonic Egypt.59
Perhaps the most interesting part of the pilgrimages of the secular nationalists, and
their accounts of these pilgrimages in their newspapers, was the heavy religious
symbolism conjured up around this highly secular trip. The fact that prominent
intellectuals all felt it necessary to embark on the long trip to the tombs in search of
enlightenment, and the fact that they encouraged their readers to do the same, gave the
Pharaonic sites the aura of religious monuments and the trip to them the feeling o f a
religious pilgrimage. Just as Muslims make pilgrimage to Mecca because this is where
the Quran was revealed, or as Christians journey to Jerusalem to travel the stations of the
cross where Jesus walked, Egyptians were encouraged to make pilgrimage to the
Pharaonic tombs that symbolized the birth of their own great civilization. Just as people
make pilgrimage to holy sites in search of blessings and miracles, Heikal and Hamza
promised miraculous results upon seeing the tombs - that by seeing them Egyptians
would trade centuries of humiliation for an ability to truly understand the science and art
o f the age and be filled with power. Hussein, in describing how he felt the statues at
Kamak speaking to him and was moved to rededicate his life to reviving the glory of
Egypt, sounds uncannily like Paul on the road to Damascus, who heard the voice of God,
was temporarily struck deaf, and as a result o f this experience converted to Christianity.
Through their pilgrimages to the tombs, and through their repeated coverage o f Pharaonic
issues in their publications, secular nationalist newspaper editors consciously attempted
” ibid, 173-74
81
to displace their readers’ sense of affiliation with a brilliant Muslim - and Arab - past and
replace it with a loyalty to an even greater past, one which was the patrimony of
Egyptians alone and was not tied to a specific religion.
In the same year that Ahmed Hussein went on his school trip to Kamak, the
Muslim Brotherhood was formed. Far from basing Egyptians’ sense of community on
past Pharaonic glories, the Brotherhood wanted to expand that feeling o f belonging even
beyond its previous borders, those delineated by the Ottoman Empire. The community to
which Egyptians properly belonged was not only that o f Arab Muslims, it was that o f all
Muslims worldwide. That this revised definition of the community left Egypt’s Coptic
Christians - approximately ten percent of the population - in an uncomfortable position
was clear. According to Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Brotherhood, Egyptian
Muslims and Christians could and should live together in harmony and dedicate
themselves to a common struggle for the betterment of Egypt. But it was clear that the
primary solidarity of Egyptian Muslims should not be to those who lived in the same
geographical area as they did, but to those who followed Islam, wherever they lived.
The Brothers understood the importance of newspapers to his campaign to
Islamicize Egyptian society and lost little time in establishing their own newspaper. The
first Brotherhood newspaper was published on June 16, 1933, and promoting the paper
was one of the group's primary goals. The records of the meeting of the Brotherhood's
Consultative Council (Maglis el Shura) in early 1934 give a sense o f just how high a
priority the paper was; after a set of measures crucial to the institutionalization of the
movement, such as an agreement that Banna would compose a list o f the Brotherhood's
general principles so that new Brothers could better understand the movement, and a plan
82
to make branch presidents provide lists of their members to the head office in Cairo, were
quickly dispensed with, the lion's share of the meeting was dedicated to discussions on
how to encourage the spread of the paper, and on the logistics of founding a Brotherhood
printing press.60 The Brotherhood’s paper in the first year of its existence was published
by a religious colleague at his printing company, but the Brothers were keen to establish
their own press as a prelude to the expansion o f the paper, and in 1934 they formed the
Brotherhood printing company. Like all of the Brotherhood’s later business enterprises,
the printing press was funded by the issue of low priced shares. Unlike the other
enterprises, however, it was written into the printing company's rules that only members
of the Brotherhood could own shares in the company, in order to ensure that Brothers
could oversee its moral content.61
From the very inception of the paper, the Brotherhood’s view of the borders o f
Egypt’s imagined community was made clear. In the first issue, editor Tantawi Gowhari
wrote, “the Muslim Brotherhood newspaper considers itself the servant of every Muslim
whatever his homeland or his nationality, and it views ahl el qibla (literally, the people
who pray in the direction of the qibla\ i.e., all Muslims) as one man as they were
represented by the Prophet....that is why (the newspaper) brings to its readers all of the
news of the Muslim world so that every reader may be aware o f it and so that every
reader can do his duty towards his Muslim brothers. (The paper is) not biased in favor of
any particular group o f Muslims, but wishes all Muslims well”(my translation).62 What
60 See accounts o f the meeting as described in The Muslim Brotherhood, February 8, 1934
61 ibid
"2 The Muslim Brotherhood, June 16, 1934
83
is included in this statement is as important as what is excluded; not only is there no
mention o f Egypt in the newspaper’s statement of purpose, but Gowhari goes so far as to
promise that the paper will not be biased in favor of any particular group o f Muslims,
implicitly including his fellow Egyptian Muslims.
The Muslim Brotherhood quickly became a central component of the
Brotherhood’s efforts to create an imagined community of Islam. Although the
Brotherhood was an important part o f the battle to expel the British from Egypt, coverage
of Egypt’s anti-colonial struggle and other aspects of Egyptian life did not dominate the
newspaper. Instead, stories on Egypt were juxtaposed with stories of Muslims in other
parts o f the world, and the paper’s Egyptian readers were exhorted to help those Muslims
just as often as they were called upon to work for reform in Egypt. The April 18, 1948,
issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood illustrates this juxtaposition well. The main story on
the front page recounts a battle between Egyptian and Zionist forces in Palestine, in
which Muslim Brotherhood volunteers played an important part. This story shares the
front page with an article about the Brotherhood's request that the king cancel a party
planned by the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate, partially because the entertainment would
be provided by a famous belly dancer. This article reprints another newspaper's criticism
o f the Brotherhood’s position, to which the latter responds that journalists are supposed to
be a “tool of guidance” for the public and an “example of good morals” who should never
sully their moral credibility by participating in an immoral party o f this nature. On the
second page there is an article about the resolution of a conflict between the Egyptian
government and Bank Misr, Egypt's largest bank. This is juxtaposed with an article on the
84
Muslim Brothers who were martyred in the fight in Palestine.63 For the Egyptian reader of
The Muslim Brotherhood, the fight against Zionist colonialism in a neighboring country
is every bit as relevant as attempts at social reform within Egypt (the journalists’ party)
and news about domestic Egyptian finances (Bank Misr).
The November 17, 1947, issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood similarly
demonstrates the seamless interweaving of “foreign” and “domestic” issues so
characteristic o f the paper. The first page is dominated by an article about the attempts of
Muslims in America - some of whom were missionaries from the Brotherhood in Egypt -
to spread their faith there. The second, third, and fourth pages contain stories about a
cabinet shakeup in Egypt, a protest against the hiring practices of the British-owned Suez
Canal Company, which is accused o f discriminating against Egyptian workers, and an
article urging readers to mobilize for the battle to expel British troops from Egypt. Side
by side with these stories are articles about the president of Syria’s call for a fight to the
death to defend Palestine, news of the building of a large mosque in London, a story
about Indonesia's negotiations with Holland over independence, and another about
Pakistan and India's conflict over Kashmir.64
It is important to note that these stories are not separated into different sections of
the newspaper; the articles on Indonesia, Pakistan, and London are not relegated to the
back pages of the paper while Egyptian domestic news is in the front, nor do the
“foreign” stories appear together under a heading entitled “foreign affairs.” They appear
63 The Muslim Brotherhood April 18, 1948
64 The Muslim Brotherhood, November 17, 1947
85
side by side with the stories on domestic events in Egypt, and are not distinguished from
them in any way. In discussing how the rise of print capitalism spread secular nationalism
in the Americas, Anderson argues that “what brought together, on the same page, this
marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the colonial
administration and market-system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas quite
naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific
assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices
belonged.”65 In Egypt, what brought together this independence negotiation in Indonesia
with that cabinet shakeup in Cairo, this mosque in London with that discrimination by the
Suez Canal Company against Egyptian workers, was not the apersonal structure of the
colonial administration or an agent-less market system. To paraphrase Anderson, by
bringing these “foreign” and “domestic” events together, The Muslim Brotherhood
“quite intentionally, and quite politically, created an imagined community” which was
not that of a territorially circumscribed Egyptian nation, but one o f a world community of
Muslims.
In addition to spreading imaginings o f community, newspapers also create a
perception o f power and of sovereignty. Just as readers who repeatedly see stories of
Caracas bishops and brides in the newspaper come to view themselves as Venezuelans,
readers who constantly see accounts of Nehru traveling around Indian support o f the
national cause, or o f Gandhi addressing the enthusiastic masses, come to believe that
Nehru and Gandhi are powerful men who have a right to rule India and deserve popular
65 Anderson, 62
86
support. The Muslim Brotherhood was very successful not only in portraying an
imagined community of Muslims, but in conveying the idea that the Brotherhood was a
leading force in that community. The Brotherhood engaged in many “foreign” policy
efforts that are usually reserved only for official representatives of sovereign nations, and
The Muslim Brotherhood afforded extensive coverage to these efforts. The front page of
the November 23, 1947, issue of the paper, for example, juxtaposed a story about a
Brotherhood religious celebration in Cairo which was attended by 20,000 people with a
story of Brotherhood assistance to Pakistan, and with a long letter from the editor o f the
paper, who was visiting Pakistan at the invitation of the Pakistani government. Other
issues of the paper carefully highlighted similar Brotherhood efforts in far-flung parts of
the Muslim world, and the standing which they were accorded by Arab leaders.66 The
first page of the September 7, 1947, issue of the paper printed Hassan al-Banna's letter to
King Abdullah of Jordan advising him against pursuing his plan of creating a greater
Syria that would incorporate present-day Jordan and Palestine within its borders. The
letter had been hand-delivered to King Abdullah by Banna’s emissary, and Abdullah’s
letter in reply was printed in the paper side by side with Banna’s.67 Similarly, during the
March, 1948, civil war in Yemen, the March 7, 1948, issue documented the activities of
the Muslim Brotherhood delegation to Yemen, including the head of the Arab League’s
taking a member o f the delegation aside to ask why Hassan al Banna was not part o f the
group, and the reception of the delegation at Sanaa airport by Yemeni princes.68 The
66 The Muslim Brotherhood, November 23, 1947
67 The Muslim Brotherhood, September 7, 1947
“ The Muslim Brotherhood, March 7, 1948
87
March 10 issue prominently displays a picture o f Abd el Rahman Azzam, the head of the
Arab League, with the Brotherhood delegation in Saudi Arabia on their way to Yemen.69
By juxtaposing the letter of King Abdullah with that of Banna, or photographing Azzam
with the Brotherhood delegation, these stories (which are always featured prominently on
the front page) give the unmistakable impression that the Brotherhood’s power and
influence in the Muslim world is on a par with that of official representatives of sovereign
nations, and supports the group’s claim to moral (if not political) leadership of that
world.
The rise of print capitalism in Egypt coincided with the beginnings of the
nationalist struggle for an independent Egypt. The first Egyptians to realize the potential
of the newspaper to inculcate various imaginings of the community were the secular
nationalists, whose newspapers reinterpreted Islamic history and revisited the Pharaonic
past in an attempt to convince Egyptians that they were a separate nation. Soon after its
founding, the Muslim Brotherhood entered the battle of imaginings with its own
newspaper, whose extensive coverage of events throughout the Muslim world did much
to communicate the idea of Egypt as part o f a larger Muslim community. Gershoni and
Jankowski have persuasively argued that while an “exclusivist territorial nationalism” had
reached the height of its popularity in Egypt in the 1920s, by the mid 1930s it had lost
significant ground, while the popular perception of Egyptians as part of an overarching
community of Muslims had grown substantially.70 While The Muslim Brotherhood is not
09 The Muslim Brotherhood, March 10, 1948
70 Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995) 1, 54
88
the sole reason for this shift, it was an important part of the battle in favor of imagining
the Egyptian community as part of a larger Muslim one. By the 1940s, then, the Muslim
Brotherhood as a movement and as a newspaper had made many Egyptians see
Palestinians and Pakistanis as being a more relevant part of their identity than the
Pharaohs.
89
Chapter Three: The Creation of Centralized Education

Systems in North India, Indonesia, and Egypt
“At the heart of the colonial enterprise was an adult-child relationship.
The colonizer took the role o f the adult, and the native became the
child. This adult-child relationship entailed an educational task. The
colonial master saw it as his responsibility to initiate the native into
new ways of acting and thinking....some of the natives had to be
educated so that they could be civilized according to the master’s
idea the agenda was to train the native to become a citizen.”
Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda o f Education: A Study o f

Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, (New Delhi: Sage Publications,
1991), 24
Political science analyses o f the ways in which colonialism altered non-Westem
political landscapes often highlight the heightened salience of ethnic identity, or the
reshaping o f local power structures through the elevation o f some groups within the
population and the demotion of others. They rarely, however, examine the effects that the
colonial-era creation of centralized systems of Westem-style education had on local
communities.1This may well be because so few of these systems were created in the
colonial period, as most colonizers were content to leave educational provision to
missionaries or local private incentive, despite its very limited scale. The result o f this
type o f education policy - or lack of policy - was that the provision o f Westem-style
education was spotty in the extreme and that its content varied widely across the colony.
1 Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt, (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988), while focusing on
changes implemented in the immediate pre-colonial period, is one o f the few exceptions to this rule and has
been instrumental in my thinking on this issue. Unlike political scientists, anthropologists have paid much
closer attention to the reshaping o f methods o f transmission o f knowledge under colonial rule, and the way
that m odem concepts o f education affected non-Westem societies. For the most part, though, their studies
focus on analyses o f educational change in individual communities or on textual analysis o f curricula,
while m y work focuses on change at the systemic level, or more accurately, the creation o f a system o f
W estem-style education to begin with.
90
In some colonies, however, the educational enterprise was taken much more
seriously. In these cases, the colonizer went beyond subsidizing the scattered efforts o f
missionaries or the creation of a handful of government schools to create a centralized
school system which provided Westem-style education according to a set o f rules and
regulations formulated by the colonial government. This did not necessarily mean that
the colonial government itself built and managed an extensive network of Westem-style
schools. In fact, in the three cases to be discussed in this chapter, it meant that the
government decided what education should look like in the colony, founded schools
which provided it, and subsidized schools run by private groups which followed
government regulations.
A recapping of the definition of the key terms of my argument - “Westem-style”
schools and “school system” - is in order here. By “Westem-style” schools, I mean
schools in which a person who had received formalized, replicable training as a teacher
taught students divided into groups on the basis of their age a set of subjects which were
perceived as being independent o f one another and whose truth claims were not based
primarily on religious faith. As Gauri Viswanathan’s analysis of British government
schools in India has demonstrated, even if a subject’s truth claims are not based on
religious faith, purportedly “secular” subjects can easily be taught through materials and
methods thoroughly permeated with religious beliefs and values.2 As long as these
beliefs and values are not justified through reference to religious texts, however, schools
teaching them can still be considered “Western” schools according to my definition. As
the term “formalized, replicable training” suggests, the idea o f these schools existing in
2 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks o f Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India , (New York: Columbia
91
large numbers as independent entities, outside o f a larger institution which supplied them
with instructors and formulated their curricula is difficult to conceptualize. By the
existence o f a system of Westem-style schools, then, I mean the insertion of these schools
into a framework in which decisions about what subjects to teach, what age students
should be at each level of schooling and how they should pass from one level to the next,
and how people become qualified to teach are centrally made and enforced.
Just how different this system of Westem-style schools was from the type of
education prevailing in most areas prior to colonialism, and specifically from the type of
education found in North India, Indonesia, and Egypt, will be the subject of the first part
of this chapter. The remainder of the chapter will be a detailed discussion of the
emergence of a centralized system of Westem-style schools in these three colonies,
demonstrating that in these colonies, over a period of roughly a century, what was
initially a largely alien understanding of education came to be the norm, and in some
cases the only game in town, for increasingly large segments of the population.
Some General Statements About Pre-Colonial Education
When Western powers first established their control over colonial territories, the
transmission o f skills and knowledges from adults to the young as practiced in most of
these territories was a completely decentralized affair. Boys learned religious ritual and
practice from a local religious figure and were initiated into their roles as hunters or
merchants or craftsmen by adult practitioners o f those skills. According to Michael
Crowder, in non-Muslim Africa prior to the advent o f colonial rule education consisted of
learning how to hunt, fish, wage war, dance, practice religion and understand their
physical environment. These sets of knowledges, essential for the functioning o f the local
92
community, were complemented by the skills necessary to integrate the community into
the larger world, aschildren were taught the skills of barter and the rates of exchange
among the different currencies in use in their area.3 In religiously heterogeneous areas,
the process of transmitting knowledge - and the content o f that knowledge - often
differed substantially among different religious communities. Obviously the rituals and
practices which boys had to master to become full members of the religious community
were different for different faiths, but because it was common for certain confessions to
monopolize certain professions, the functional knowledges which boys of different faiths
were expected to absorb might also be completely different. The institutionalization of
different practices of education leading to different trades and professions in different
religious communities may have reached its most formally elaborate level in the
immediate pre-colonial period in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman territories were formally
divided into millets, or separate religious communities which enjoyed almost complete
autonomy as long as they paid their taxes and did not violate Ottoman law. In a typical
Ottoman city each millet would occupy a particular portion of the city, govern itself in
accordance with its own religious laws, educate its own children, and practice the
occupations historically associated with its religious community. While the education
and occupations of members of different faiths may not have been subject to such rigid
divisions in other areas, religious difference often resulted in different educational and
professional trajectories in the pre-colonial period.
While all communities had accepted norms for what constituted an education,
individual teachers usually had great latitude in how, when, and what they taught. In fact,
3 Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Rule, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
372
93
to call them “teachers” is something of a misnomer, since in today’s parlance this
conjures up an image o f a person whose full-time occupation is the transmission o f a
specific body o f knowledge to others. In the pre-colonial period, however, at all but the
most advanced levels of religious education there were no adults whose full-time
responsibility was to educate. Outside o f the highest levels of religious schooling, there
was no larger hierarchical structure which took responsibility for producing and
replicating teachers or holding them to particular standards. Teachers were hardly
unaccountable, however; rather than reporting to a remote and impersonal educational
structure they were responsible on a much more regular basis to a more local and
demanding constituency - the community in which they plied their trade. This
ecommunity controlled their livelihood by providing for them in the form of gifts or fees,
but it also accorded them honored status and held them in great esteem.4
Pre-Colonial Education in North India, Indonesia, and Egypt
Education in Indonesia, Egypt before the Ottoman-era reforms begun by
Mohammed Ali, and to a somewhat lesser extent in North India prior to colonial rule,
strongly resembled thepicture sketched above. Since education was largely inseparable
from religion, Egyptian and Indonesian boys of different faiths rarely studied together.
Each community followed its own educational trajectory, with each step up the ladder of
educational achievement - from teaching the alphabet to becoming a renowned scholar -
located within the confines o f one’s religious
community.
4 Yet another way in which education has changed from the pre-colonial period until the present.
94
Egyptian children - Muslim and Coptic Christian - attended schools known as
the kuttab. In Muslim kuttabs children memorized parts o f or the entire Quran and
learned the rituals necessary to correct practice of the faith. The specificity with which
these rituals might be imparted is described by a European visitor to a Muslim kuttab in
the 1830’s, who noted that “inquiries as to the quantity o f adulteration, which makes
water improper for ablution, into the grammatical turn of the language or prayer, into the
cases in which the obligations to fast may be modified, into the gestures in adoration
most acceptable to Allah - are the controversies which are deemed of the highest
importance” in kuttab study.5 Upon concluding their kuttab studies, most Muslim boys
learned basic arithmetic, weights, and currency from the public weigher in the
marketplace.6 The handful of boys who were inclined to seek further knowledge - and
whose families were able to spare them from more immediately remunerative activities -
embarked on an educational pilgrimage whose first stop was madrasas located at
teaching-mosques in Egypt’s larger cities, such as al-Ahmadi in Tanta and Ibrahim Pasha
in Alexandria. The path o f higher education for Muslim boys culminated in Cairo at the
pinnacleof learning not just of Egypt but of the entire Muslim world - al-Azhar. At al-
Azhar future religious scholars studied Koran recitation and exegesis, Islamic
jurisprudence, the traditions of the Prophet, calculation o f the times of prayer and o f
Islamic holidays, and mysticism, as well as grammar, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, and
algebra. Coptic children in Egypt also began their education in kuttabs, which taught
them to memorize portions of the Psalms and the Gospels or the Epistles as well as
5 Gregory Starrett, Putting Islam to Work:Education, Politics, and Religious Transformation in Egypt,
(Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1998), 39
95
prayers in the Coptic language for use in church services.7 Since the range of occupations
which Coptic boys would practice, including such traditional Coptic professions as tax
collecting, accounting, or land-surveying, were fairly clearly defined, Coptic kuttabs
supplemented religious studies with subjects such as arithmetic and geometry that were
necessary for the successful practice of those occupations.8 According to Heyworth-
Dunne, in Egypt in this period there is no evidence of distinct higher education for
Copts.9 As in Egypt, children of different faiths followed different educational paths in
pre-colonial Indonesia. Elementary education for Muslims revolved around recitation of
the Quran, which was learned either in the homes of mosque leaders or in prayer houses
known as langgars.10 In Java the next step for Muslim boys was the pesantren, “a
monastic school of sorts” where students began at the age of about ten and sometimes
continued into their thirties.11 Products of the pesantren might journey to regional
centers of Islamic learning analogous to Egypt’s teaching mosques, or to Mecca or to
Cairo to study at al-Azhar. Elementary education for Christian children centered on
reading Malay translations of the Bible and learning songs for church services, with the
latter receiving as much attention as prayer and ritual instruction did in Indonesian
6 J. Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to The History o f Education in Modem Egypt, (London: Frank Cass
and Company Ltd., 1968), 2-3
7 ibid, 85-87
8 ibid
9 ibid, 87
10 Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam, Contacts and Conflicts, 1596-1950,
(Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1993), 86
11 H. Kroeskamp, Early Schoolmasters in A Developing Country: A History o f Experiments in School

Education in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia, (Assen: Van Gorcum and Comp, 1974),?
96
Muslim schools.12
The educational situation in India differs somewhat from those of pre-colonial
Egypt and Indonesia. Information on what pre-colonial schools were like in India is quite
limited,13 and the only systematic attempts to report on the state of education in particular
areas of the country were conducted by the British in the first three territories which came
under their control - Bombay, Madras, and Bengal. Some information on pre-colonial
education in Punjab is included in Nurullah and Naik’s magisterial A History o f
Education in India, in Mukeiji’s History o f Education in India: Modem Period, and in
Mehta’s History o f The Growth and Development o f Western Education in the Punjab,
and I have tried to indicate the differences that these reports highlight between the
educational process in Punjab and that of other parts of India. These reports sketch out an
educational process which, while heavily informed by religion, was not exclusively
determined by it.
North Indian boys, like their counterparts in Egypt and Indonesia, seem to have
frequently enrolled in schools meant only for members o f their own faith. In Punjab
Mehta reports that the menu of choices for elementary education included Hindu
pathshalas which taught Mantras and imparted a basic knowledge of the Shastras,
Muslim Koran schools, and Sikh Gurmukhi schools. The latter provided instruction in the
Gurmukhi script o f the Punjabi language historically associated with Sikhs, exposed boys
to the Granth, the sacred text o f Sikhism, andtaught them skills specific to their position
12 Steenbrink, 86
13 Syed Nurullah and J.P. Naik, among the foremost historians o f Indian education, note that “it is
unfortunate that the sources o f information regarding the character and extent o f the indigenous system o f
education in the earlier half o f the nineteenth century should be extremely meagre the available sources
refer only to British territories which, at that time, formed but a small part o f India, and w e have next to no
97
as members o f the Punjab’s ruling class, including “learning to ride and being a
warn or.
. . f n r r .V -L r
Unlike the cases of Egypt and Indonesia, however, we also have evidence of
Indian children o f different faiths attending the same schools, at least at the elementary
level. British inquiries about education in Bombay carried out from 1823 to 1825 noted
that at the elementary school level “it must be said that as a rule, the common schools
were not communal in their working and they were open to all who could afford to pay
for their schooling. The schools conducted for the Muslim community where Persian or
Hindustani (Urdu) was taught were, no doubt, exclusively resorted to by Muslim
children. But the Hindoo (sic) schools were open to the Muslim boys if they wanted to
attend them.” 15 In Punjab, Mukeiji reports that two types of elementary schools
dominated—Sikh and Muslim ones, with many Hindu boys attending Muslim schools.16
Literacy in Persian, the court language until 1837, was a central component of elementary
education in Punjab, and while it was taught almost exclusively by Muslims, it was
learned by students of all faiths in whatever elementary school they attended.17 Prakash
Tandon, the Hindu memoirist of British Punjab, noted that in the early 1850’s his
data regarding the vast remaining area which was under the rule o f several Indian potentates.” Nurullah and
Naik, A History o f Education in India, During the British Period, (Bombay: Macmillan Press, 1951),!
u H.R. Mehta, A History o f the Growth and Development o f Western Education in the Punjab, 1846-1884,
(Punjab Government Records Office, Monograph No. 5), 1929, 14
15 A Source-Book o f History o f Education in the Bombay Province, Part I, Survey o f Indigenous Education
(1820-1830), editorial note by Shri R.V. Parulekar, quoted in Nurullah and Naik, 9
1<>S.N. Mukeiji, History o f Education in India - Modem Period, (Baroda: Acharya Book Depot, 1966), 108
17 ibid, 15
98
grandfather received his elementary education and learned Persian at a school attached to
a Sikh dharamsala or temple.18
Beyond the level of elementary education, it seems that most opportunities for
higher education in pre-colonial India were separated on the basis of religious affiliation.
Descriptions of education in Bombay in the 1820’s mention Hindu schools o f higher
learning, including 16 in Ahmednagar and as many as 164 in Poona C ity.19In the Bengal
of the 1830’s William Adam, author of the most reliable British assessments o f pre
colonial education, reported that there were no Muslim institutions of higher learning but
there were 38 Sanskrit colleges.20 In Punjab Mehta cites the existence o f Hindu secular
schools “of various kinds” which taught philosophy, astronomy, astrology, and medicine;
Muslim madrasas which taught theology,/?^, astronomy, and the yunarti system of
medicine, and Sikh seats of learning, such as the Amritsar Akalbunga, which provided
students with free education as well as shelter, food, and clothing.21
From the reports cited above we know that pre-colonial education in Indonesia
and in Egypt was provided separately to children of separate faiths, a pattern which
seems to have occurredless frequently at the lower stages of education in India and very
commonly at the higher levels. These reports and others also tell us what the everyday
experience of education was like for students in these areas, an experience which is
characterized most strongly by three elements; the lack of boundaries separating
18 Punjabi Century, 1857-1947, Prakash Tandon, (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1961), 15
19 Nurullah and Naik, 15
20 ibid, 23
21 Mehta, 17
99
education from other arenas such as religion and commerce, the centralityof recitation
and memorization as methods of learning, and the almost absolute autonomy
which teachers possessed in their schools.
The most immediate difficulty preventing the establishment of education as a
discipline separate from other arenas was the physical space occupied by the school.
Schools in this period were almost never located in buildings solely used for the process
of learning. Elementary education in India seems to have been overwhelmingly provided
at home; an 1830’s report on the state o f education in Bengal found that “the number of
children under domestic instruction was nearly nine times the number of pupils in public
schools,”22 while Bombay elementary schools in the mid-!820’s were located in sites
which varied from private homes to the sheds of barbers and potters. Government
surveyors of education in Bombay noted that “in all the reports under consideration, there
is no mention of a single school which was held in a house exclusively used for itself.”23
Elementary education in Modjokuto, a region in Java, was provided in schools known as
pondoks which were founded by pilgrims returning from Mecca. Since these schools
were literally a one-man affair, they were located wherever that man could find space for
them. The most formal and permanent sites for education in this period were invariably
houses o f worship; Egyptian Muslim kuttabs were located in mosques, at saint’s tombs,
or, in larger towns, in buildings adjacent to the public fountain, while Mehta reports that
23 ibid, 9
100
Punjabi schools were usually attached to places of worship - mosques, Hindu temples, or
Sikh dharamsalas.24
One difficulty in creating a discipline of education separate from the practice of
religion or commerce was the location of the schools in which that education took place;
this difficulty was only compounded by the fact that teachers were not full-time
educators. Egyptian Muslim kuttabs were presided over by a f i q i , which Mitchell
defines as the “local healer, Quran reciter, and holyman,” 25 and teachers in Punjab, as in
much of the rest of India, were often priests or mullahs. Commercial endeavors often
went hand in hand with educational ones. In the pondoks o f the Modjokuto region of
Java, students divided their time between learning to recite the Quran and working in the
fields of their teacher or at cloth-dyeing or cigarette-producing factories attached to the
pondok2t while children in Egyptian kuttabs could at times be found making straw mats
for the teacher to sell or use.27
Just as there was no clear division between various life activities and schooling,
there was also little if any division of different types of knowledge into different
disciplines, each based on its own sources. Books used to inculcate religious faith also
served as the primer o f more “secular” subjects, as in the Christian schools in Indonesia
in which “geography was limited to Palestine and the Apostle Paul’s travels,” and
“history was practically identical with the biblical history.”28 Epics and collections of
24 Mehta. 15
25 Mitchell, 87
25 Clifford Geertz, The Religion o f Java, (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1960), 134
27 Starrett, 35
28 Steenbrink, 86
101
moral sayings also served as the basis for the teaching of history. William Arnold,
Director of Public Instruction in Punjab from 1856-59, was scandalized to find that
students’ knowledge of the rise of Islam in India was derived from the Sikandamama, a
mythical history which sought to underline the high status of the Moghul emperors by
placing them in a lineage with, and implicitly comparing them to, Alexander the Great.
The Sikandamama was routinely recited by Punjabi students as an integral part of the
process of becoming literate, but because in Arnold’s estimation it was a “narrative of
facts which are not true,”29 it had to be replaced with “authentic” history.
Whatever texts were used, the key way of internalizing them was through
memorization and recitation, commonly referred to as “singing,” “chanting,” or
“rocking” by disapproving British officials. One European author wrote that in an
Alexandria kuttab which he visited in the early 1830’s,'“while studying, or rather learning
to repeat, their lessons, each boy declaims his portion of the Koran aloud at the same
time, rocking his body to and fro, in order, according to their theory, to assist the
memory.”30 Alfred Milner, under secretary for finance in Egypt, had choicer words for
the process, saying that “to sit on the ground swinging your body backwards and
forwards, and continually repeating, in a monotonous chant, a quantity of matter which
you are taught to regard with religious reverence, but never taught to understand,” was in
fact “anti-educational.” 31 Similarly, Arnold wrote that in the Punjab of the 1850’s “a
whole population agreed together that to read fluently and if possible to say by heart a
29 Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda o f Education: A Study o f Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, (New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 1991), 57
30 James S t John, Egypt and Nubia, 1845, pp. 31-32, quoted in Starrett, 35
31 Milner, England in Egypt, p. 366, quoted in Starrett, 36
102
series of Persian works of which the meaning was not understood by the vast majority,
and of which the meaning when understood was for the most part little calculated to edify
the minority, constituted education.”32
While each community had a common understanding of what constituted an
“education”, within those broad parameters teachers exercised a great deal of freedom in
picking what and how they taught. Geertz describes each Modjokutan pondok as “a kind
of small religion of its own under its own teacher and as often as not antagonistic to all
other schools in the area.”33 In pre-colonial Punjab, Mehta reports that teachers were not
subject to any systematic oversight, either by the state or by town or village councils.34
Certain texts by common agreement were supposed to be learned, but “individual
teachers seem to have had considerable room for exercising their own judgement and
taste in the selection of texts that students could read on their own”35 once they had some
degree of language proficiency.
Just as there was often a great deal of variety in what was taught, in many cases
there were students of a great variety of ages and skill levels in a single school learning
the same material together. The students learning Koran recitation in Modjokutan
pondoks ranged from six to twenty-five years of age,36 while in many schools in Punjab,
“all though (sic) small knots of boys received their lessons together in some o f the books,
32 Kumar, 50-51
33 Geertz, 134
34 Mehta, 22
35 Kumar, 72
36 Geertz, 134
103
yet there was no system of classes, nor teaching boys in divisions according to their
different attainments.”37 But other Indian and Indonesian schools developed elaborate
mechanisms for dividing students into different skill levels and teaching them
accordingly. In the larger Muslim schools in Java rural religious teachers known as
kiyais taught the advanced pupils or santris, who in turn taught the beginners, meaning
that a school run by one kiyai could have thousands of students.38 Written exams, which
were not in use in Britain before the 1800’s,39 were unknown in pre-colonial India,
Indonesia, or Egypt; individual teachers decided when a student had mastered enough
material to move on to the next level of education.
While teachers were largely autonomous in this period, that autonomy was
tempered by teachers’ need to please their constituency - the community in which they
taught. Mehta’s description of the place of teachers in Punjab accurately describes their
position in Indonesia and Egypt as well. “His status, the respect he might command, and
indirectly his remuneration were all determined by the reputation he enjoyed for his
learning, character, and his interest as a priest in the well-being o f his flock.” While
teachers in Muslim kuttabs in Egypt might receive some sort of salary from the
adminstration of waqf properties, like teachers elsewhere they also depended on the
largesse o f the community in which they practiced. To paraphrase Mehta, “in a word,
public opinion, not an appointment order issued by the State or the village council,
determined (the) deserts and (the) living wage ”40 of pre-colonial teachers in India,
37 Mehta, 21-22
38 Steenbrink, 85
39 Richard Symonds, The British and Their Successors: The Government Services in the New States,
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 45
104
Indonesia, and Egypt, and many teachers enjoyed the esteem of their community and
enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.
On the eve of colonial rule in India and Java, and prior to the inception of
Muhammad Ali’s modernizing reforms in the 1820’s in Egypt, education was a process
almost inseparable from religion, equated with memorization, provided simultaneously to
boys o f different ages, and purveyed by teachers with a great deal of autonomy in what
and how they taught. Beginning in 1813 in India, in the 1820’s in Egypt, and in the
1830’s in Java, a system of Westem-style schools would be created which would first
grow side-by-side with, and would eventually supplant, their pre-colonial predecessors.
The rest of this chapter describes in some detail how these systems evolved in each o f my
three cases.
The Construction of A Centralized Education System in India
The Portuguese discovery o f the sea-route to India in 1498 initiated four and a
half centuries of close contact between Europe and the subcontinent. The first Westem-
style schools for Indians were founded by Portuguese missionaries in the 1500’s, efforts
which were continued by French and Danish missionaries over the next two centuries. It
was a German missionary, Frederick Schwartz, who created what seems to have been the
first school system providing Westem-style education - albeit on a very small scale -
subsidized by a local government in India. Schwartz’s schools, which taught English,
Tamil, Hindustani, and account-keeping, were, by his arrangement, inspected by and
40 Mehta, 16
105
submitted their financial statements to the Court of Tanjore, in return for which they
received Court subsidies/7
When the British East India Company assumed control o f Bengal in 1757,
making Britain the pre-eminent European power in India, the Company displayed no
interest in going into the education business. Company officials, however, had founded
two important schools by the end of the century. At the urging of the local Muslim elite,
concerned even at this early stage with communal competition for bureaucratic posts,
Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, founded the Calcutta Madrasa in
1781 in order to “qualify the sons o f Mohamedan gentlemen for responsible and
lucrative offices in the state, even at that time largely monopolised by the Hindus.”42 This
institution was followed by its logical counterpart in 1791, when the Resident at Benares
founded the Benares Sanskrit College, intended to “accomplish the same purpose for the
Hindus as the Madrasa for the Mohammedans, and specially to supply Hindu assistants to
European judges,” while also acting “for the preservation and cultivation of the Laws,
Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos.”43 While support for traditional learning helped
the Company to curry favor with the Hindu and Muslim elite, missionary attempts to
spread Christian education paid no such dividend, and in 1783 private Europeans were
forbidden to enter India without the permission o f the British government.44
41 Mukerji, 20. This account of the development o f Westem-style education in India during the colonial
period is based largely on the works o f Mukeiji and o f Nurullah and Naik.
42 A.P. Howell, Education in British India, (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1872), p. 1, as quoted in
M ukeiji, 22.
43 H. Sharp, ed.. Selections from Educational Records, Part I, (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1920), p.
31, as quoted in Mukerji, 23.
44 Mukerji, 25
106
The missionaries, however, would not be denied. They continued, under the threat
of deportation, to surreptitiously conduct the educational institutions that they had already
established, while mounting pressure in England for the removal of the ban on their free
entry into India. Almost all of the major changes in the East India Company’s policy
were made by parliament on the occasion of its renewal of the Company’s Charter every
twenty years, and the Company’s policies on education were no exception. Prior to the
1813 renewal missionaries blanketed the English public with “evidence” that the
Company was blocking the spread of Christianity in India, and when the charter was
renewed that year, two provisions had been inserted which were to change the face of
education in India dramatically. The first was that parliament authorized the Governor
General to spend 100,000 rupees a year on education in India and instructed him to
provide educational facilities which would enable Indians to enter the public services.45
The second was that British subjects, including missionaries, were to be permitted to
enter the country freely.
Nurullah and Naik, whose history of education in British India is one of the most
authoritative texts on the subject, call the 1813 Charter Act “the beginning o f the State
system of education in India under the British rule.”46 As with all good state projects,
this one began with a call for a study on the topic. In 1822 the Governor of Madras
authorized a survey of educational efforts in his province, followed by similar studies
begun in Bombay in 1824 and Bengal in 1835. Surveyors in Madras were charged with
gathering a list of the schools in each district which taught reading and writing, a list of
45 Mukeiji, 46
46 Nurullah and Naik, xvi
107
the books used in these schools, a count o f the number of students in each school, their
caste affiliations, how long they remained at the school, the sum that they paid for their
education, and the existence, if any, of a public endowment to supplement these school
fees.47
By the end o f the 1820’s, then, the East India Company had begun to ascertain the
shape of education in the territories under its control, and had been committed to
spending part of its revenues to further develop that education. The question of what kind
of education the Company’s money would support remained to be decided, a decision
which came in 1834. The Charter Act of 1813 had authorized the Company to spend
100,000 rupees for “the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of
the learned natives of India and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the
sciences.”48 Disagreement about how to interpret this authorization had erupted among
various British officials, who can be roughly divided into three camps: Orientalists,
Anglicists, and Vemacularists. Orientalists contended that by “literature” the Charter
intended Arabic and Sanskrit literature, and they argued that the Company’s resources
should be used to support the extension of education in those areas. Anglicists, as their
name implies, advocated instead the spread of European knowledge through English,
while Vemacularists supported giving instruction in the medium of the vernacular
languages of a given area. Lord Macaulay, as the head of the General Committee of
Public Instruction which managed education under the East India Company, was asked to
decide this controversy, a decision with enormous ramifications for the school system
47 Sir Thomas Munro, Minute o f June 25, 1822, quoted in Nurullah and Naik, 2-3
48 Mukeiji, 33
108
that developed under British rule. Macaulay’s decision, issued by Lord Bentinck as a
Minute in 1834, stated that Company-supported education should not be carried out in
the Indian vernaculars, which in his opinion were “too poor and crude to be made
vehicles of thought and expression.” He also argued that English was more useful as a
medium o f instruction than Arabic or Sanskrit because the former was the “key to
modem knowledge,”49 in addition to which vocal members of the Indian elite wanted the
Company to commit itself to English-language education, a point which will be discussed
further in Chapter 6. The Company’s decision to promote English-language education,
and the receptiveness of many Indians to it, were further supported by the substitution of
English for Persian as the official language in 1837, as well as a Government Resolution
in 1844 opening the doors to higher posts in the civil service to Indians who had received
English-language higher education.
The educational policy of the Company from 1834 until 1854 was based on what
Mukeiji calls “the filtration theory” - the idea that the duty of the Company was not to
educate the mass o f Indians, but to illuminate a handful of elites who would then assume
the task of educating their countrymen. This elite, who would serve as the gatekeepers of
education for their countrymen, would be trained to carry out their task properly by being
given a European education in the medium of the English language, creating “a class of
persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in
intellect.”50
49 Mukeiji, 70-71
50 Macaulay’s Minute, quoted in Mukerji, 71
109
The filtration theory remained at the core o f Company education policy until
1854, when Wood’s Despatch was issued. On the occasion of the 1853 renewal o f the
Company’s Charter, it was noted that in that year in the five provinces under British
control - Bengal, Bombay, Madras, the Northwest Provinces, and Punjab - only Bombay
Presidency and the NW Provinces had a system o f Westem-style elementary education.
By this point fewer than 40,000 students in all five provinces studied in government
schools of one type or another, and less than 1% of government revenue was being
directed toward education.51 In 1854 Wood’s Despatch, sometimes attributed to John
Stuart Mill, who was a clerk in the India Office at the time, signaled a sea change in the
form that subsequent Company educational efforts. The Despatch stated that the efforts
of the government would heretofore be focused on providing education for the masses
rather than for a handful of elites and charged the government with “creating a properly
articulated scheme o f education, from the primary school to the university” which would
spread Western learning by creating vernacular schools for primary instruction and
English-medium instruction for middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities.52
If Wood’s Despatch signaled the Company’s intent to become actively involved
in the provision of Westem-style education from the elementary level on up,
parliament’s 1854 mandate that the Company substitute competitive written exams for
patronage53 as the way to gain jobs in the service ensured increased Indian demand for
precisely that type of education. The exam which granted admission to the coveted higher
posts in the Company service required knowledge of European classics as well as facility
51 Mukerji, 111
52 ibid, 48
no
in Latin and Greek; lower-level appointments were less demanding but still necessitated
completion of varying levels of Westem-style education. Increasing numbers of Indians
sought that type o f education over the next decades as the Company’s service, and the
local bureaucracy of the Crown once the Queen assumed direct control of India after the
Mutiny of 1857, became more and more Indianized. In the 1860’s and 1870’s a “broad
vernacular education” was necessary for any position paying more than Rs. 20 per month;
promotions to jobs paying Rs. 25 per month required passing a middle school
examination, and higher positions required literacy in English and a college degree.54 In
1879 almost all appointments to posts with salaries over 200 rupees were restricted to
Indians,55 and by 1891 the bureaucracy at all but the highest levels had been Indianized;
in that year a typical Indian administrative district of one million Indians had at most six
European officials. The subordinate civil service, which accounted for the overwhelming
majority of civil service positions, had a total of 110,000 officers in 1891, 97% of whom
were Indian.56
Just as the bureaucracy was Indianized in the period from 1854 until 1891, so was
the provision o f the Westem-style education necessary to gain access to it. Wood’s
Despatch, while calling for a major expansion of elementary education, simultaneously
threw the responsibility for its creation on private shoulders; the Despatch envisioned an
educational system in which non-state bodies would found schools and the government
53 Symonds 30
54 Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1976), 59-60
55 Symonds 63
56 ibid
Ill
would help to support them through the provision o f grants-in-aid.57 The main non-state
bodies involved in education in 1854 were missionaries; in that year they were already
educating almost twice as many primary school students as the 36,000 children enrolled
in government primary schools,58 and “it was expected that Government would gradually
withdraw from direct educational enterprises and would leave the field entirely to private
effort, which consisted mainly of missionaries at that time.”59 Between 1854 and 1882,
however, that private effort was increasingly being made by Indians, a pattern which
continued more dramatically after the Hunter Commission o f 1882. The Elementary
Education Act of 1880 had made elementary education compulsory for boys in
England,60and the Hunter Commission carried this concern for elementary education to
India by reaffirming the Wood’s Despatch decision to focus government efforts there on
primary education. The Commission also insisted that government should continue to
withdraw from direct educational provision and organize a better, more tightly-run
program of grants-in-aid to private sector providers. Affirming that the government did
not consider missionaries to be truly “private sector” entities, the Commission noted that
the government’s intent was not to cede the provision o f Westem-style education to
missionaries but rather to create a national education system based on private Indian
enterprise assisted by government subsidies.61 The result, as Nurullah and Naik report,
57 Nurullah and Naik, xvii
58 Mukeiji, 132
59 ibid, 123. The fact that according to Wood’s Despatch grants were to be based on perfect religious
neutrality did not constitute an obstacle to funding missionary schools in practice, since while “the
Government declined to force the study o f the Bible on non-Christian students, they did not refuse
to give grants to schools where Christianity was taught.” Mukeiji, 123-124
60 ibid, 142-3
61 ibid, 142-150
112
was that between 1880 and 1900 that Indians had founded so many schools and colleges
that they had become “the key agency for spreading Western education.”62 Outside of
Madras, Bengal, and Assam, however, by 1902 the government was still funding and
founding the lion’s share of primary schools as well as many o f the secondary schools.63
Large-scale British involvement in Indian education only began in 1813, but over
the next century the shape of that education had changed enormously. “In the early
1800’s,” Nurullah and Naik argue, “the indigenous system o f education held the field, but
by the end of the 1800’s this system had “disappeared almost completely and a
new system of education, which aimed at the spread of Western knowledge through the
medium of the English language, was firmly established in its place.”64 Nurullah and
Naik contend that when Wood’s Despatch called on the government to create a system
of Westem-style education from primary school to the college level, the British had not
intended this as a death blow to indigenous education. But after 1854 “the officials of
those days generally neglected these (indigenous) institutions out o f utter contempt; in
some instances attempts at improvement were made which, though well-meant, were so
ill-advised as to lead rather to destruction than to improvement (and) these errors of
commission and omission combined with the patronage that was extended to the new
system by the free employment of persons trained in it in Government service led to the
almost complete extinction o f the indigenous system of education..... by 1900, practically
62 Nurullah and Naik, xix
63 Mukerji, 157
64 Nurullah and Naik, xiv
113
all the institutions of higher education used English as the medium of instruction and
aimed at the spread o f Western knowledge and science.”65
Students of Indian history will notice that I did not single out the 1857 Mutiny
and the subsequent transfer o f control over India from the East Indies Company to the
Crown as an important turning point in the development of a Westem-style education
system there. In fact, the assertion of Crown control over India did not signal any change
in Britain’s educational policy in its colony. Parliament, through the medium of its
renewals of the Company’s Charter every twenty years, had been making education
policy for India for decades prior to the Mutiny, and while Westem-style schools
expanded after 1857, they did so within the framework of a system that had already been
set in place by the mid-1850’s.
The Particulars of Punjab
Since my argument about the role that the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic schools
played in the expansion o f the Arya Samaj centers in large part on the founding and early
growth of these schools in Punjab, I want to briefly place Punjab in the context of the
overall story about the evolution o f a Western education system in India in the nineteenth
century. The case of Punjab is not markedly different from that sketched above, but it
does suggest some important qualifications to it. Punjab came under British control later
than educational pioneers such as Bengal and Madras, only becoming a British province
in 1849. Perhaps this difference in timing accounts for the comparatively slower
development in Punjab both o f Western education in general and in the extent to which
Indian groups and individuals were providing it. Nurullah and Naik report that between
1880 and 1900 the initiative in spreading Western education in India had devolved from
65 Nurullah and Naik, xviii
114
the government and missionaries onto Indians, some of whom received government
subsidies while others did not. This was definitely true of Madras and Assam, and
especially of Bengal, where Indian effort in the educational sphere far outstripped
government effort. In the rest of India, however - in Bombay, the United Provinces, the
Central Provinces, Berar, Coorg, and Punjab - the total number of Westem-style schools
at all levels were, by 1902, still overwhelmingly being run directly by the government. In
Bombay in 1881-82 there were 3,811 government primary schools as opposed to 196
aided private schools; in 1901-2 the numbers were 4,670 government primary schools
compared to 1,929 aided private schools.66 In the United Provinces Indian educational
effort, helped by government subsidies, increased dramatically between 1881-2 and
1901-2, but in the latter period the government still decisively held the field. In 1881-2
there were 5,561 government primary schools in the U.P. compared to 243 aided primary
schools; in 1901-2 the numbers were 4,598 government primary schools and 2,463 aided
ones. 67
In Punjab, the number of privately founded, government-subsidized Western
schools also increased much more slowly than the number of government-founded ones
did. In 1881-2- four years before the Arya Samaj’s first DAV school opened - there
were 1,549 government primary schools and 278 private, government-subsidized ones. In
1901-2 there were 1,802 government primary schools compared to 636 Indian-founded
primary schools receiving government assistance.68 The government was also way ahead
of private initiative at the secondary school level; in 1883-84 government English
66 Mukerji, 157
67 ibid
115
secondary schools (as opposed to vernacular secondary) enrolled 3,289 students, while
aided private secondary schools educated only 1,393 students.69 Not only did
governmental provision of Western education outstrip that o f private provision in Punjab;
in 1881-2, four years before the first DAV school opened, almost all private secondary
schools in the province were being run by non-Indians. In that year the Punjab had only
two English-language private secondary schools run by Indians, while 118 secondary
schools were being managed by non-Indians. Since private initiative in the educational
sphere was overwhelmingly taken either by Indians or by missionaries, it seems safe to
assume that this means that only four years before the first DAV school opened almost all
private secondary education was being provided by missionaries,70 a point which will be
revisited in Chapter 5. According to Nurullah and Naik’s figures, this was the most
lopsided ratio of non-Indian private secondary schools to Indian private secondary
schools to be found among the provinces of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, N.W. Province
and Oudh, the Central Provinces, and Assam in that year.71
The statistics cited above all refer to schools either directly run by the government
or receiving aid from it, which means that these schools were teaching a fairly similar and
standardized curriculum. This curriculum represented a radical change from pre-colonial
education and was developed largely by William Arnold, the Director of Public
Instruction in Punjab from 1856-9.
68 Mukerji, 157
69 Mehta, 63
71 ibid, 287
116
Upon surveying the educational landscape in Punjab as he found it in the mid-
1850’s, Arnold found many practices which clashed with his conception o f what
constituted an education. “We found a people ignorant o f the geography of their own
province, ignorant that there was such a science as geography, and therefore prepared to
reject geography as men are inclined to reject whatever is strange or new to them.”72
Local methods for teaching math were equally unacceptable in Arnold’s eyes. He
described “Khattries” (sic) - a Hindu trading caste - as quite adept in “mental arithmetic”
but unable to “(go) beyond their accustomed problems because (they were) unacquainted
with scientific methods.”73 This way of learning math would not be tolerated in Arnold’s
government schools, because after all, “a Government school is not an eleemosynary
institution. We are bound to give them the best education we can; and if we think the four
rules of arithmetic - the rule of three methodically taught through the medium of legible
character - more profitable to the scholar than the cumbrous processes and illegible
handwriting of Banias’ book-keeping, we are I think bound to teach the former.”74 By
1858, Arnold was proud to report that students in schools at the sub-division level could “
‘ pass a good examination’ in the geography of India, Asia, and the globe,”75 as well as
knowing the “first four rules” of math.
The biggest sea change affected by Arnold and his successors in Punjabi
education, however, was in the subject of Persian instruction. In 1837 English and the
vernacular languages o f British India replaced Persian as official languages, and in North
72 Arnold, quoted in Kumar, 56
75 Kumar, 57
117
India the vernacular which became the official language was not Hindi in the Devanagari
script but Urdu in the Persian script. By 1855 Urdu had taken the place of Punjabi and
Persian as the official language o f the lower levels of administration.76 Yet in the late
1850’s Arnold found that “a whole population agreed together that to read fluently and if
possible to say by heart a series of Persian works of which the meaning was not
understood by the vast majority, and of which the meaning when understood was for the
most part little calculated to edify the minority, constituted education.”77 This situation
was rapidly rectified by making Urdu - a vernacular language - the language of
instruction, a change which “went against the idea that people had of a language fit for
education, for they associated being educated with ‘erudition and learning’.”78 Until this
point Urdu had not been taught in schools in Punjab, nor in Bengal, where Adam reported
with astonishment that while Urdu was the spoken language o f educated Muslims, there
were no schoolbooks written in Urdu and “it is never taught or learned for its own sake or
for what it contains.”79 Arnold was well aware of the popularity of Persian in Punjab,
noting that “little as the w ords are understood by these boys, there is no doubt that
they are much enjoyed. In one of the too frequent cases of child murder with robbery o f
ornaments, the victim, a lad of 13, was enticed out by his murderer.. ..on the pretext of
having the Bostan (a Persian text) read to him.”80 Neither popular enjoyment, nor
76 Jones, 59
77 Kumar, 50-51
78 ibid, 55
79 Adam’s Reports, quoted in Nurullah and Naik, 26
80 Kumar, 55
118
widespread local conceptions o f what constituted an education, however, could be
allowed to stand in the way of creating a proper system o f education in Punjab, and
Arnold reported that “ we have greatly limited (the) number (of Persian books),
prohibiting everything which is grossly indecent.. .and everything which pertains to
religion on another ground, and limited altogether the time allowed for Persian as
distinguished from Urdu studies.”81
Not only were students opposed to these changes, but so were teachers, who were
unfamiliar with the subjects in the new curriculum and had to be sent for periods from six
months to two years to study subjects such as history, geography, and math at the Normal
School in Lahore. As Kumar describes it, “what (the teacher) had been used to regarding
as knowledge was now declared to be either false or useless.”82 This indignity was
compounded by the appearance of government inspectors on the horizon, expecting to
receive the reports and paperwork that teachers were now required to file. Perhaps the
worst change faced by teachers in British Punjab, however, was a precipitous drop in
their standard of living. Salaries for teachers in government schools were set by the
government and based on its calculation of teachers’ pre-colonial standard of living, a
calculation which was often quite wide of the mark. In the late 1850’s in Bengal, for
example, the British decided that Rs. 3 per month was what primary teachers lived on;
between 1854 and 1900 primary schoolteachers in other areas o f the country were
allocated government salaries o f Rs. 5- 15, with salaries in Northern India generally
lower than those in the South. The gap between this salary and the teacher’s pre-colonial
82 Kumar, 58
119
pay is demonstrated by the fact that in the pre-colonial period each student usually paid
his teacher 2 rupees per month, in addition to a monthly gift of rice, vegetables, salt, and
other edibles sufficient to provide one day’s breakfast and dinner for the teacher’s family.
These payments were supplemented by gifts on holidays and special occasions. But
“once the teacher started to get a government salary, (these extra earnings) began to dry
up. Thus, the village teacher was squeezed from both ends - the government paid him a
low wage on the ground that his income had always been small, and his extra earnings
from the community started to shrink as soon as he entered the government’s payroll.”83
Considering the decrease in his autonomy, the devaluation of his knowledge, and his
greatly diminished standard of living, it is no wonder that one teacher of the period noted
in his memoirs the comment of a colleague that “an ass who dies carrying others’ burden
and munching dry grass becomes a teacher in his next life.”84
Centralized Education Systems, Dutch-Style: The Case of Indonesia
Just as British influence in India began through the commercial ventures of the
British East India Company and evolved into direct control o f the country by the British
government, so in Indonesia were hundreds of years o f trading by the Dutch East Indies
Company supplanted by the establishment of direct Dutch government control over the
archipelago, beginning with the conquest of Java at the conclusion of the Java War in
1830 and continuing over the next decades into the Outer Islands until 1910. Unlike
India, however, where the foundations of a system of Westem-style schools had been set
during the period of Company control, the creation of such a system in Indonesia only
33 Lai Behari Day, quoted in Kumar, 76
84 Padumlal Punnalal Bakshi, quoted in Kumar, 83
120
began after the Dutch government established itself as the ruler o f Java in 1830. From
this point on the development of a system of Westem-style education can be divided into
four distinct periods. In the first period, dating from the end o f the Java War in 1830 until
1871, the government founded the first Westem-style schools but made no effort to
standardize the education provided in them nor to induce indigenous schools to adopt
Western methods or curricula. In the second phase, from 1871-1890, the foundations of a
system of Westem-style schools were set by the formulation o f detailed legislation
regulating the conduct of government schools, and a grant-in-aid policy was created to
bring private schools willing to comply with the regulations under the government
educational umbrella. The third phase, from 1890 until the announcement of the Ethical
Policy at the turn of the century, saw a remarkable expansion of opportunities for
Westem-style education as the government dropped its prohibitions on funding religious
schools, rendering mission schools eligible for government funding. In the final phase,
from the announcement of the Ethical Policy until the Japanese occupation of Indonesia,
the contours o f the system laid in the previous three phases were filled out by a further
increase in the number of Westem-style schools as the Dutch government put more of its
own resources into education, in addition to “inducing” villagers to do the same.
When the Dutch initially took over Java, it was not a paying concern. Like most
colonies, however, it would have to come to pay for itself, and to ensure that it did the
cultuurstelsel or cultivation system was rapidly implemented. Cultuurstelsel replaced
land taxes with compulsory cultivation o f export crops which would be sold to the state at
fixed prices. While this policy resulted in severe hardship for the Javanese, prompting
famines and epidemics as resources were diverted away from basic staples such as rice
121
into the cultivation of export crops, it very effectively achieved the Dutch goal of
wringing profit out of Indonesia. In thirty years Indonesia had become one o f the most
profitable colonies in the history of imperialism, generating crops which accounted for a
remarkable 31% of Holland’s aggregate government revenue between 1851-1860.85
Ensuring the extraction and management of this level o f resources required the
creation o f a state bureaucracy, staffed at the highest levels by Dutch officials but relying
largely on educated Javanese. To produce local bureaucrats, an 1848 Royal Decree
authorized the Governor-General to “make provision in the East-Indies budget for a sum
of fls.25,000 per year for establishing schools among the Javanese, chiefly intended for
training native civil servants.”86 This was followed by the decree o f 30th August 1851,
which mandated the creation in each of Java’s twenty residencies of one school teaching
reading and writing in the vernacular, basic math and knowledge o f weights and
measures, the geography of Java and surrounding countries, and surveying and levelling,
would be founded. It was these twenty schools which would constitute the foundation
on which Java’s Western educational system would be built.
The government’s plan to provide residency schools unleashed extensive demand
for further Westem-style education. The Dutch had divided Java into twenty
administrative divisions known as residencies, which were further subdivided into 75
regencies; each regency in turn was made up o f smaller units called districts.
85 Gouda 24. Holland’s success at exploiting Indonesian resources became the marvel o f the colonial world
and a model for other colonizers. Between 1891 and 1904 25 French study missions visited Indonesia to
study the mechanics o f the cultivation system, and it was regularly featured in the Quinzaine Coloniale, the
magazine o f the French Colonial Union. According to Frances Gouda, the 1861 publication o f J.W.B.
M oney’s Java, or How to Manage A Colony led Belgium’s King Leopold II to “literally and figuratively
(go) shopping for a colonial empire in 1862 after reading i t ” Gouda 46.
86 Kroeskamp, 451
122
Dissatisfied with the 30th August plan of establishing only one school per residency, the
regents - who constituted the highest-ranking Indonesian officials in the Dutch
administrative hierarchy - began establishing schools in the capitals o f their regencies, on
their own initiative and often from their own funds. With the 1860 institution of the
statistical and topographical surveys, which created a great need for clerks who could
keep the survey registers,87 the initiative for starting Westem-style schools passed from
o o
the regents to the masses, as local communities banded together to bring schools to the
district level. A division of labor emerged between regency and district schools in which
district schools which provided only two years o f reading, writing, and math were
attended by lower-ranking officials, while regency schools, which provided a more
extended form of elementary education, catered to the children of officials who would go
into government service.
By the end of the first phase of the development of Western education in Java in
1871, 77 government schools and 72 community or district schools funded almost
entirely by village communities constituted the foundations upon which the Western
education system would be built. These foundations, however, were very shaky. The
difficulty of arranging ongoing funding meant that district schools sprang up quickly and
died just as rapidly. The more fortunate schools were adopted as subsidiaries o f the
Regency schools, which then provided them with some funding. At this juncture, while
Westem-style schools were beginning to emerge in Java, nothing remotely resembling a
Westem-style school system had come into being. In the absence of central legislation or
87 ibid, 328
88 ibid, 329; Kroeskamp notes that this “was probably the first initiative in the sphere o f education in Java
which originated from below.”
123
general school regulations, there was little approaching a common curriculum. The
closest approximation of a centralizing force - the 1848 establishment o f a teachers’
school in Surakarta - had not created uniformity in practice, as teachers were frequently
recruited from outside the teachers’ school.89 While the Westem-style schools existed
independently o f and with very little effect upon one another, they had even less effect on
indigenous Javanese education. They were two completely different types of education
catering to two totally different constituencies - Western schools to the Javanese elite,
and traditional schools to the masses.
In the 1860’s, however, two developments combined to produce both an increased
demand for Westem-style education as well as the commitment of the Dutch government
to provide it. The first development was a relaxation of restrictions on the entry of
educated Javanese into the bureaucracy. Since 1825 Dutch policy had restricted higher-
level posts to people bom and educated in the Netherlands, but in 1864 this restriction
was repealed. Admission into the service became contingent on passing either the major
or minor civil service exams; the purpose o f the latter was “to make possible the
appointment of so-called native children and natives, who may apply for a position as
clerk, telegraphist, or the like and can be usefully employed as such.’,9°Preparation for the
exam required completion of the full course of primary school as well as the possession
o f basic math, Dutch, and handwriting skills. Since only European schools taught Dutch,
and since after 1849 these schools had only been open to the children o f prominent
Indonesians, making the possibilities offered by the minor civil service exam a reality
89 For example, more than twenty schools had been established before the first class o f teachers graduated
from the teachers’ school in 1854. Kroeskamp, 325
124
required opening the European schools to all Indonesian children, which was done in
1864.9’ The 1864 legislation was fully in keeping with the second key development o f the
1860’s - the rise o f Liberal governments in Holland determined that education in the
colony should be made available to all children and that the Dutch would assume the
financial responsibility for doing so. In 1867 the Department of Education, Religion,
and Industry was created to oversee government education, setting the stage for the
second phase of the development of Westem-style education in Indonesia.
This second phase, from 1871-1893, witnessed two fundamental changes in the
Dutch approach to education in Indonesia. The Fundamental Education Decrees and the
General Regulations issued in 1871 and 1872 signaled the government’s intent to bind
the heretofore independent Western schools scattered across Java into an educational
system operating in accordance with regulations determined in the colonial capital of
Batavia. They also made clear that the Dutch would not be satisfied merely with creating
a system of Westem-style schools while leaving indigenous education untouched. To
effect these changes, a grant-in-aid policy was formulated in accordance with which
indigenous schools which agreed to submit to government regulations would become
eligible for government subsidies.
The process of creating a standardized Western school system proceeded apace in
the 1870’s. Uniformity among different schools would be assured first by the creation of
nine teachers’ schools instead o f the previous two; each o f these schools would become
the apex of the Western educational pyramid in its region, drawing students from that
90 Publ. H.I. Onderw, Cie, No. 9 (1 “ Part), pp. 66-68, quoted in Kroeskamp, 385
91 Kroeskamp 385
125
region and delivering graduates to it to serve as teachers. Teachers had to strictly observe
the table o f subjects laid down by the government inspector, and were forbidden to use
books other than those listed in the government catalog.
While the aforementioned regulations would not require schools seeking
government grants to drastically change their way of educating, other regulations would.
Government-subsidized primary schools had to substantially expand their offerings by
teaching not only reading, writing, and math but also optional subjects picked from a
government list.92 By far the most dramatic change, however, was the stipulation that
government-funded schools could not offer religious instruction. As if this would not
constitute a sufficiently fundamental shift in Javanese conceptions of education, aid
regulations also sharply curtailed the possibilities of supplementing Westem-style
schooling with traditional religious instruction. In this period Javanese Muslim boys
regularly received religious instruction from the age of six until they were twelve or
fourteen; only after this instruction was finished did they continue on to government-
funded schools.93 This meant that, by 1863, the ages of students in regency schools -
which were extended elementary schools - ranged from six to 29, with well over two-
thirds of the students coming from the 13-18 year old age group. In an attempt to impose
some uniformity on this diversity, Article 5 of the General Regulations stipulated that
each school should be subdivided into three forms or classes, and in 1886 new
regulations insisted that no pupil over the age of 17 would be permitted to attend school.
The result of this policy was that by 1893 the distribution o f age groups in the various
92 Kroeskamp, 454
93 ibid, 333-334
126
levels of government-funded education had become much more standardized. Now that
Westem-style elementary education was limited to young boys, however, the traditional
Muslim education that they had been expected to obtain prior to enrolling in Western
schools had to be significantly condensed. In this way changes initially intended
primarily to affect schools providing Westem-style education leaked into the surrounding
milieu o f traditional religious education as well.
The initial result of the Fundamental Education Decrees and the General
Regulations was to increase both the number of schools run by the government directly as
well as the number of indigenous schools brought into the government education system
through grants-in-aid. In 1873 there were 82 government schools in Java and Madura
educating 5,512 children; ten years later this had increased to 193 government schools
educating 16,214 students.94 The common practice among prominent Javanese of inviting
a relative or a teacher - frequently low-level government clerks - to teach their children
to read and write became eligible for subsidies on the condition that these classes be
opened to Indonesians of any social class, enroll a minimum of twenty students, teach
reading, writing, and math in the vernacular or Malay languages, and provide proof of the
ability of the teacher.95 As was the case in schools directly administered by the
government, these schools were eligible for subsidies only if they did not provide any
religious instruction.
After an initial increase in Westem-type schools prompted by the Fundamental
Education Decree and the General Regulations, the number of subsidized schools
94 Kroeskamp, 391
95 ibid, 408-410
dropped off considerably, from a high of 119 schools in Java and Madura in 1878 to a
low of 55 early in 1888. The realization that the spread of Western education had hit a
road block led the Dutch government back to the drawing board, and into the third phase
o f the colony’s development of a Western school system. Seeking an explanation for the
decline of Western schooling in the colony, in 1884 the Dutch East Indies government
commissioned a study o f education in India and Sri Lanka in the hope that these colonies’
experience could shed light on that of Indonesia. The study found that a key reason for
Indonesia’s poor performance in Westem-style education was the Dutch government’s
insistence on religious neutrality in its schools. The study’s author compared the
lackluster Dutch performance with the positive results which mission schools achieved
and argued that the success of the latter could be directly attributed to their religious
beliefs.96 These conclusions gained strong support in 1888 when the Dutch Protestant
party won the Netherlands elections and a mission supporter was appointed Colonial
Affairs Minister. The new minister lost little time in replacing the previous policy
mandating “religious neutrality” with a concept which he termed “positive neutrality,”
under which all types of private education, including Islamic schools, would be eligible
for subsidies as long as they fulfilled certain government conditions.97
Making missionary schools eligible for government funding paved the way for a
significant increase in Westem-style schools in the archipelago. It also came to signal a
shift in the identity o f those providing that education, as the number of students in
schools founded by the government became much smaller than the number of students in
96 Jan Aritonang, Mission Schools in Batakland (Indonesia) 1861-1940, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 13
97 ibid, 14
128
missionary schools funded by it. At the end o f 1871, when mission schools were
ineligible for government subsidies, the government directly educated the lion’s share of
those receiving Westem-style education in Java - there were 4,850 students in regency
(government) schools and 3,100 students in district or community schools (paid for by
local government in the form of district schools) in Java in that year, compared to only
350 students in mission schools. By 1898 the balance between government and
missionary schools had definitively shifted - the number o f government schools and the
number o f mission schools was almost identical in that year- 505 to 503 - but the
number o f students they enrolled differed considerably, with government schools
educating 22,400 students while mission schools enrolled 57,000 students.98 This
dramatic increase in mission schools demonstrates the centrality of state funding to the
spread of Western education in the colony. Making missionary education eligible for
subsidy also furthered the standardization of Westem-style education in Indonesia, as
acceptance of subsidies after 1890 required mission schools to come into compliance
with government regulations regarding school buildings, curriculum, administration,
teacher qualification, the number of classes schools would offer and the exams or other
ways in which students would progress from one class to another.99
To recap the story until this point, in the first two phases of the spread o f
Westem-style schools in Java, the foundations o f a Western educational system had been
set, first by creating schools providing Western education and then by creating a grant-in-
aid policy which had begun to incorporate some indigenous schools into a nascent
98 Kroeskamp, 414
99 Aritonang, 29
129
government school network. The number o f schools in - and thus the number of students
affected by - this network, however, remained small until, in the third phase, the lifting
of restrictions on subsidizing mission schools greatly increased the number o f Western
schools in a very short period. In the fourth phase, opportunities for Westem-style
education continued to dramatically expand as the government directed more resources
into the Westem-style school system. This phase also saw an increase in the need for
Javanese civil servants which led both to more Javanese enrolling in that system and to
an integration of the various levels of schools such that more Javanese could now
proceed all the way to university-level education.
The fourth phase in the development of a Western school system in Java was
ushered in at the turn of the century by the pronouncement of the Ethical Policy in 1900.
Beginning with the 1860 publication of Max Havelaar by a former Dutch official,
increasing exposes of the suffering of the Javanese under the cultuurstelsel system
appeared in Holland and created guilt in some quarters. By the turn of the century the
Queen spoke o f a shift in Dutch priorities in the archipelago, in which the Dutch would
embark upon a “moral mission” to educate and uplift Indonesians. This would be
accomplished by creating more schools, building transportation and infrastructure, and
increasing access to health care;100 between 1900 and 1930 Dutch spending on health
care alone grew by a factor of almost ten.101 This expansion of services required
additional civil servants, whose production was a key goal of the Ethical Policy in its first
years. Producing a larger Javanese bureaucracy, the first director o f education under the
100 Gouda, 24
101 M.C. Ricklefs, A History o f Modem Indonesia, (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), 147
130
Policy proclaimed, would not only reduce the need for Dutch civil servants and thus
Dutch costs - it would also produce a “grateful and cooperative elite” and help to
“(restrain) Islamic ‘fanaticism.’”102
In order to produce this expanded cadre o f Javanese bureaucrats, not only would
new schools have to be added, but the existing schools would have to be integrated into a
progression whereby Javanese could achieve the highest levels of education. In 1893
elementary schools for Indonesians had been divided into two kinds: Second Class
schools which provided three years of elementary education and were intended for non
elite Indonesians, and First Class schools, which provided a more advanced elementary
education over five years for children of elite families.103 These schools were upgraded
under the Ethical Policy, with First Class schools being lengthened to six years and
adding Dutch to their curriculum, while Second Class schools, which now became known
as Standaardschools, extended their program to five years. These improvements,
however, did not solve a fundamental problem - First and Second Class schools
constituted a school system for Indonesians, and since the only secondary schools were in
the European school system, graduates of the First Class schools had no way to continue
their education. In 1914 this problem was remedied with the transformation o f First Class
schools into Hollandsch-Inlandsche Schools (Dutch-Native Schools), thus bringing their
elite Indonesian students into the European school system. MULO schools - which
Ricklefs terms a “sort o f junior high school”104 were opened in 1914 to Indonesians,
Chinese, and Dutch who had finished primary school; in 1919 AMS or middle schools
102 Ricklefs, 148
103 Aritonang, 14
131
were created to take students to the level of university education, and in 1920 the opening
of a technical college in Bandung enabled Indonesians to attend university within the
archipelago for the first time.105 Education for non-elite Indonesians was expanded
through the creation in 1907 of “village schools,” or three year primary schools. These
schools, which were unwillingly funded by villagers themselves and supplemented with
some government subsidies, continued to spread, largely because o f the “ ‘ gentle
pressure’ (exerted by the Dutch) which typified the Dutch approach to village welfare
measures.”106 By 1912 there were more than 2,500 village schools; by the 1930’s this had
increased to 9,600.107 In 1900 there were 265,940 students in private or government
schools across the archipelago; by 1930-1 this number had grown to 1.7 million.108
From Mohammed Ali to the Modern State: The Creation of A Centralized

Education System in Egypt
In India and Indonesia, centralized Westem-education systems were created under
the auspices o f British and Dutch colonial power. Half a century before the British
occupation of Egypt in 1882, modernizing leader Muhammad Ali initiated a reform
package —including the creation o f Westem-style schools - designed to strengthen Egypt
and protect it from potential Western incursions. Ali’s policies began the first of three
stages in the process of creating a centralized Western education system in Egypt, a
process which was largely complete by the time of the Free Officers’ coup in 1952. In the
104 Ricklefs, 150
105 ibid - up until this point a handful o f Indonesians had gone to university in the Netherlands
106 Ibid, 151
107 Ricklefs, 151
108 ibid
132
first period - from the 1820’s until the British occupation in 1882 - Ali and his
successors tried to create a system of schools providing Western education alongside the
existing kuttabs which continued to educate the overwhelming majority of Egyptians.
The success of these attempts was closely tied to the fate of Muhammad Ali’s military
campaigns and to the dramatic fluctuations in state revenue faced by his descendants, and
their end result was the creation of some Western schools at all levels of education while
the kuttabs remained largely outside government control. That would change in the
second phase of the development of a Western educational system in Egypt - the period
from the British occupation in 1882 until Britain granted Egypt partial independence in
1922. In this period, the creation of a grant-in-aid policy brought increasing numbers of
kuttabs into compliance with state-formulated regulations on education, creating for the
first time a system o f schools providing Westem-style education which enrolled a large
percentage of students in Egypt rather than a tiny elite. By the final phase, dating from
partial independence in 1922 and concluding with the Free Officers’ coup in 1952, the
contours of a Western educational system had been created, and the task that remained
for the quasi-independent Egyptian government was to fill them out. That government’s
commitment to universal education, as well as its need for increasing numbers of
bureaucrats as the reach of the state continued to grow, led to the commitment of
substantial resources to the spread of education, such that while in 1878 only 2-4% of
Egyptian children attended elementary schools as represented by the kuttab,109 by 1940-1
69 out of every 1,000 Egyptians was enrolled in some level of government school.110
109 Starrett, 28-29
110 Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation: 1930-1945, (Cambridge:
133
Muhammad Ali was sent to Egypt in 1798 by the Ottoman sultan to turn back the
Napoleonic invasion. After the French had been sent packing, Ali embarked upon a
process o f defensive modernization designed to bring Egypt’s resources under central
government control so that they could be made available for the larger project of creating
a modem military machine. One resource that Ali laid claim to was that o f educated
boys; in the 1820’s he began to establish preparatory and technical schools on the
outskirts o f Cairo which were filled with boys between the ages of ten and 20
requisitioned from the kuttabs. The prospect of having their sons subjected to this type of
“scholarly conscription,” 111 which would presumably be followed by outright military
conscription, led parents to withdraw their sons from the kuttabs in droves,112 prompting
Ali to bring some kuttabs under government control as well as to spread state primary
schools into the provinces.113 Ali’s purpose, however, was not to revamp Egyptian
education but to create a network of institutions for the elite who would staff his military
machine, so these efforts at centralizing control of the kuttabs were limited at best. By
1837 the outlines of a Western educational system on a very small scale begin to emerge
with the creation of 50 primary schools teaching Arabic and religious studies in a three to
four year curriculum. These schools, in turn, would feed into two four-year preparatory
schools teaching algebra, geometry, history, geography, Arabic, Persian, Turkish,
drawing, and calligraphy.114 Ali’s rule also saw the creation of professional schools for
111 The phrase is that o f a future Egyptian minister o f education, Yacoub Artin, quoted in Ibrahim Salama’s
L 'Enseignement 1stantique en Egypte: Son Evolution, son influence sur les programmes modemes, quoted
in Starrett, 27
112 Starrett, 27
1.3 ibid
1.4 Starrett, 27-28
134
engineers, doctors, veterinarians, and translators. Ali’s attempts to build a primary and
secondary school system which would prepare students for these professional schools,
however, largely failed; the fate of an educational system meant to create a strong
government and military was inextricably linked to the success of Ali’s military
campaigns, and after his 1841 rout in Syria the size of the army was severely decreased
and all but three o f his flagship primary schools were closed.
The modernizing enterprise, however, was far from dead; it would be resuscitated
and fundamentally modified under Ali’s successors. Ali’s son Ismail, who came to power
in 1863, continued his father’s project of extending the reach of the central government
throughout the country, building 1,200 miles of railway lines and 9,500 miles of
telegraph lines and presiding over the proliferation o f government councils and courts
throughout the countryside responsible for “exercis(ing) a host of supervisory and
regulatory functions, recording births and deaths, overseeing tax collection, (and)
inspecting charitable foundations.”115 But while Ali’s understanding o f bringing human
resources under state control amounted to placing increasingly wide swaths of the
country under the reach o f his military machine, Ismail and his successors were
developing a more sophisticated understanding o f state control, one in which state
resources would be used to remold Egypt in such a way as to create a new Egyptian
socialized into the good health, morals, and behaviors necessary for the country’s
entrance into the modem world. Social reformer Ali Mubarak, wearing his hat as Ismail’s
Minister of Public Works, presided over an unprecedented overhaul o f the capital,
bulldozing huge sections of the narrow, crowded streets of Cairo and replacing them with
115 Hunter, “Egypt Under the Successors o f Muhammad Ali,” 190
135
spacious boulevards in accordance with contemporary European beliefs that the former
were incubators o f crime and disease.116 Wearing his other hat - that o f Minister of
Schools - Mubarak presided over the first attempt to develop regulations standardizing
Western education. Symbolizing that modem education would no longer be limited to
military citadels on the outside of the capital as it had been during Ali’s day but would be
a key force in the lives of all Egyptians, Mubarak began by placing the new Bureau of
Schools as well as several of the government’s most prominent and newest schools in a
palace in the heart of Cairo.117 Legislation passed in 1867 withdrew what had been one
of the key prerogatives o f teachers - the ability to decide when their charges had
mastered the materials given to them and could be called “educated”. The 1867 law
stipulated a complicated hierarchy for the conduct of exams for students in government
schools, in which students would be examined each month by their teachers, each term by
the superintendent of their school as well as by government inspectors, and at the end of
each year by the district governor as well as other government officials.118 The Organic
Law of 1868 went much further, “determin(ing) the subjects to be taught in every
(elementary) school and those who were to teach in them, those who were to administer,
the books to be used, the timetable o f instruction.............the location o f each school, the
source o f its funds, (and) the schedule of its examinations.”119 In 1873 the creation of an
Inspector-General of Schools office launched a national system of school inspections.
116 Mitchell, 65
" 7 ibid, 64-65
1.8 ibid, 77
1.9 Mitchell, 76
The culmination o f pre-colonial attempts to centralize the fledgling Western
school system came in the 1881 work o f the Commission on the Organization of
Knowledge. The Commission signaled its intent to bring the educational system
described above to the entire country, dictating that every village or group o f villages
with a population of 2 -5,000 would have a third class elementary school (one teacher and
forty pupils), that each area whose population was between 5,000-10,000 would have a
second class elementary school (two teachers and two classes), and that every large town
would have a first class elementary school. Students continuing their education would
attend secondary schools, of which there would be one in every province, and their
education would culminate in Cairo, where the apex of the system would naturally be
located. All children - boys and girls - would attend reformed primary schools, whose
curriculum would move beyond a primary focus on religion to encompass reading and
writing skills obtained through study of the Quran, basic grammar and math, and training
in swimming, horsemanship, and “methods of protecting and fighting for the nation.”120
Preparatory or secondary education would be limited to a smaller number o f students,
while higher education would be only for those o f the political elite.121 The
Commission’s plan sought to regulate the provision of schooling to the minutest degree -
including drawing specific building plans for each type of school which were then used
as the blueprints for state schools in Giza, Zaqaziq, and Damanhour. The intent to create
a discipline o f education distinct from the performance of other life activities was made
120 ibid, 77
121 ibid, 76-77
137
clear through the Commission’s instructions on what the interior of the schools would
look like, including rows of benches with teachers sitting at a chair on a platform.122
Ambitious though these plans were - and Egypt’s repeated financial crises in the
1870’s and early I880’s prevented many of them from being fully realized - the attempts
o f Ismail and his successors to create a national education system only created a new
form o f education - government controlled schools providing Westem-style education -
which existed parallel to the form of education which educated the overwhelming
majority of Egyptian children - the kuttabs. Hunter notes that government plans in this
period included establishing “control over a large number of Islamic primary schools in
the countryside, establishing rules that minutely regulated their activities, and
administering the properties and monies bequeathed to them from charitable
endowments,” 123 - waqf - but by 1878 the approximately 5,000 kuttabs which remained
the “only formal source of entree into the literal tradition”124 were still largely outside of
government control. It would fall to the British to create a single unified system in which
the kuttabs, the heart of the Egyptian educational system and the site from which
religious education was delivered, came under government control.
The second phase of the development of a Westem-style education system in
Egypt began with the British occupation o f the country in 1882 and ended when Egypt
was granted partial independence - including complete control o f its educational affairs -
in 1922. Egypt’s position in the British empire was always somewhat anomalous -
122 Mitchell, 76-8
123 F. Robert Hunter, “Egypt Under Muhammad A li’s Successors," The Cambridge History o f Egypt,
Volume 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 190
124 Starrett, 28-29
138
occupied in 1882 as a response to a nationalist uprising, it remained technically a
province o f the Ottoman Empire until 1914, when the British desire to preserve the
fiction of Ottoman control was superseded by the need to guarantee the loyalty o f this
strategic area during World War I and a protectorate was declared. Protectorate status
continued until partial independence was granted in 1922. As in several o f its other
colonies, the British had disparate goals in occupying Egypt - primarily protecting the
route to India and ensuring that bankrupt Egypt repaid its debts to European creditors -
and what was supposed to be a brief occupation evolved into forty years o f direct British
involvement in the everyday affairs o f the country and thirty-four more o f physical
presence there.
The British approach to education had two parts - improving the Westernized
government school system to transform members of the elite into an efficient civil
service, and providing elementary education in Arabic to the masses through the kuttabs,
supplemented by technical education so people outside the primary and secondary
schools could leam a trade.125 In pursuit o f the latter goal, in 1895 the Department of
Public Instruction began to transfer to itself control over kuttabs. The kuttabs had
previously been subject to the waqf authorities, but this should not be understood to have
constituted an educational system of the kind intended in this chapter. While waqf
authorities had periodically checked kuttabs to ensure that Quran instruction was in fact
going on, and had then disbursed waqf funding to said kuttabs, they did not oversee the
training of kuttab teachers, did not impose a syllabus or course of instruction on those
teachers, and did not interfere in their conduct of their work. By contrast, when the
125 Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt. 1882-1914, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1966), 322
R e p ro d u c e d with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
139
Department of Public Instruction stepped into the kuttab arena, it began by distributing
regulations and a syllabus. Kuttabs which wished to compete for government aid had to
open themselves for a monthly inspection by the Department of Public Instruction, had
to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic, and were not allowed to teach foreign
languages.126 Over time the number of kuttabs both administered and those regularly
inspected by the Ministry of Education soared. In 1905 the Ministry ran over one hundred
kuttabs itself and inspected 2,500 other schools, bringing a total of approximately 83,000
students’ education under government supervision.127 By the following year the number
of inspected kuttabs had increased by 70%, doubling the number of students in
supervised kuttabs. The increases in school enrollment which were registered in the
1920’s occurred primarily in kuttabs directly administered by the government - in 1922
government-administered kuttabs enrolled over 23,000 students, but by 1930 these
schools served over eleven times as many students, while the number of kuttabs under
government control had increased by a factor of 13.128
While the British viewed (reformed) kuttab education as being appropriate for as
many non-elite children as wanted to take advantage o f it, access to higher levels of
foreign-language education was another issue entirely. Many of the early British officials
in Egypt had come from postings in India,129 including Evelyn Baring (later Lord
Cromer) himself, the first consul-general in Egypt and the formulator of Egypt’s early
126 Tignor, 46-47
127 ibid, 68
128 Starrett, 68
129 Tignor, 185.
education policy. On the basis of his Indian experience, Cromer was loath to expand
opportunities for foreign-language education beyond the point where its graduates could
be absorbed into the bureaucracy, and when the British reduced appointments to the civil
service by one-third between 1883-1888 in order to redirect Egyptian resources towards
the repayment of debt,130 this led the British to discourage large numbers o f children from
pursuing a foreign-language education. The British policy of charging fees for schooling
at all levels, based on the belief that people would not take education seriously if they
received it for free, helped to limit access to post-kuttab education, as did the foreign
language requirements. Elite children began their educations in four-year primary
schools; in theory kuttab graduates could enter primary school after passing an entrance
exam, but since elementary school was conducted in English or French until 1915, while
government-aided kuttabs were only allowed to teach in Arabic, it was almost impossible
for children to make that transition. Elementary school was followed by four years of
secondary school, which was also conducted in French or English until 1915. At this
point, then, there were two tracks of education - Arabic-language kuttabs or trade schools
for the masses, and foreign-language elementary and secondary schools for the children
of the elite.
The conditions for entry into elementary and secondary schools in the British
period were always closely calibrated with the need for graduates of those schools who
could staff the civil service. In 1892 the bureaucracy was divided into upper and lower
levels; lower ranks would be filled with graduates of primary schools, who accounted for
130 Tignor, 203
141
the majority of civil service members,131 while the upper ranks would be reserved for
graduates of the secondary schools. “This system,” Cromer stated in 1893, “will give a
very great impetus to the spread of education in this country. With an assured prospect of
employment in the Administration before them, a very considerable increase must take
place in the number of those who apply for the secondary and primary certificates of
education. Parents will more willingly spend money in having their children taught when
they feel that they are thereby providing them with a certain future.”132 Cromer had
predicted correctly; the increase in bureaucratic opportunities, coupled with Egyptians’
conviction that foreign-language education was the key to the future, led to systematic
increases in the enrollment of students in primary schools throughout this period. In 1890
there were 5,761 students in primary schools; in 1910 this number had increased to 8,
644.133 After Egypt’s debts had been repaid and the British began channeling more
resources into education, these numbers increased much more quickly - while in 1913
there were 73 government primary schools educating 11,810 boys, in 1922 87 such
schools educated 18,157 boys.134
As the number of educated boys increased, standards for admission into the
bureaucracy were raised. In 1901 Cromer decided that there were more students
concluding their educational paths at primary school than could be absorbed by the
government. In order to encourage these students to go on to secondary school, he
131 ibid, 202
132 Lord Cromer to the Earl o f Rosebery, from Cairo, March 9,1893, quoted in Morroe Berger, Bureaucracy
and Society in M odem Egypt, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 29
133 Tignor, 323
134 Fuad Mitwalli, The History o f General and Technical Education From the Beginning o f the Nineteenth
Century Until the End o f the Twentieth Century,, (Alexandria: Dar al-Ma”rifa al-Gamaiyya, 1989), 94
142
increased tuition charges in the primary schools and issued the government mling that
holders of the primary certificate could not receive a salary in excess of LE 11/month.135
In 1905 the four year program o f secondary school was divided into two parts - students
finishing the first two years became eligible for lower-ranking government positions,
while taking the whole four qualified students for higher-ranking government jobs or
entry into professional schools.136 To avoid creating a glut of secondary school graduates,
however, Cromer kept the number of state secondary schools from going beyond three
until 1907; in 1902 they were only producing 100 graduates a year.137 Cromer’s adamant
opposition to the creation of an Egyptian university meant that it could not be opened
until 1908, after Cromer had left his post. In 1915, in response to years o f nationalist
demands, the British mandated that the language o f instruction in primary and secondary
schools be Arabic, which at least in theory meant opening them up to kuttab graduates.
By the end of the second phase, then, the foundations of a Westem-style school
system had been laid with the issuance of regulations for each level of schooling and the
incorporation of increasing numbers of kuttabs into the government regulatory regime
through the grant-in-aid policy. In the third and final phase of the development o f this
system, from the grant of partial independence in 1922 until the Free Officers’ coup in
1952, the number of state-funded schools at all levels increased dramatically.
In 1922 the British granted Egypt independence subject to what were called the
four Reserved Points - the British retained responsibility for the defense o f Egypt’s
135 Tignor, 204
136 Mitwalli, 89
137 Reid, 18
143
borders, the protection o f foreign interests in Egypt, the Sudan, and British imperial
communications. Outside of these areas day-to-day control of Egyptian affairs -
including the conduct of government and the provision of education. - was now in
Egyptian hands. The 1923 Constitution stipulated that primary education would he made
free and universal and that government jobs would not be given to foreigners except in
exceptional circumstances, and by 1929 the number o f Europeans in the civil service had
dwindled to a very small number.139 In 1915, in response to years of nationalist pressure,
the British had made Arabic the language of instruction in primary and secondary
schools, and in 1927 the Egyptian government laid down new regulations for the primary
schools regulating the length of their program and setting requirements for admission and
exams.140 These new regulations had been preceded in 1923 by the creation o f a school to
train secondary school teachers and the setting o f minimum requirements for admission
into that school.141 The final move to create a system of education truly under
government control came in 1934 when foreign language schools were put under
government supervision, with their syllabi and exams decided by the Ministry of
Education. All foreign language schools would now have to include Arabic in their
curricula, and schools preparing students for government exams had, at a minimum, to
follow the ministry’s curriculum in civics, history, geography, and Arabic.142
138 M.W. Daly, “The British Occupation,” The Cambridge History o f Egypt, Volume 2, (Cambridge:
139 Berger, 32
140 Mitwalli, 117
141 ibid, 90
142 Cochran, 29
144
From 1922 on opportunities for Westem-style education and for employment in
the civil service both increased dramatically, as did government spending on education.
In 1923-4 the state education budget was 1,546,951 LE, constituting 4.9% o f the overall
state budget. In 1933-34 it was 3,467,723 LE, or 11.3% of the budget - and from this
point until the Free Officers’ coup in 1952 education spending never accounted for less
than 10% of the overall budget.143 In 1925 the government founded 762 primary schools;
144 in 1925-6 210,123 students were studying in state primary schools, and 16,979 in
state secondary schools. By 1935-6 the number o f students in state primary schools had
increased to 706,228 while 45,203 students were in state secondary schools, and in 1945-
6 there were 1,039,177 in state primary schools and 75,096 in state secondary schools.145
The growth of the reach of the state system of education in this final phase from 1922
until 1952 is made clear by the fact that while in 1925-6 only 15 of every 1,000 Egyptians
were in school, in 1940-1 the number was 69 of every 1,000.146
How Centralized Systems Changed Religious Education in Egypt
In approximately 130 years - from Muhammad Ali’s initial educational reforms
in the 1820’s until the Free Officer coup in 1952 - the educational arena in Egypt
underwent such a profound change as to be almost unrecognizable. An educational
process which until the 1880’s had relied almost entirely on the efforts of unregulated
kuttab teachers instructing students to memorize the Quran had expanded to include large
numbers of students in Westem-style elementary and secondary schools and universities
143 Mitwalli, 122-123
144 ibid, 111-112
145 Gershoui and Jankowski, 12
146 ibid
145
on the one hand, and a thorough reorganization of the kuttabs which left their every
activity subject to government regulations on the other. Perhaps the best illustration o f the
magnitude o f these changes in the way that the provision of religious education was
changed is provided by an examination of the “reforms” in kuttab education undertaken
by the British.
When the British began bringing the kuttabs under their control, they were acutely
aware o f the sensitivity of a foreign government seeking to oversee and direct the
evolution o f schools the main purpose o f which was to teach students the practice of
Islam. Cromer himself, hardly a model of sensitivity to Egyptian concerns, wrote that “it
is hardly necessary to point out how much tact, prudence, and caution are called for in
making any attempt to direct....these indigenous schools,” concluding that “there must,
o f course, be an entire abstinence from interference with religious instruction.”147 These
hands-off intentions were short-lived, however. By 1903 Cromer was touting the success
o f his kuttab reforms, particularly in the area of the qualification o f kuttab teachers; “in
order to qualify for the post of head-teacher in a Mohamedan kuttab, a thorough
knowledge of the Koran and of the principles of Islam is required.” 148 In 1904 British
efforts to improve the quality of kuttab teachers were institutionalized with the
foundation o f a school to train kuttab teachers - something the Egyptian Muslim
population had never felt a need for before. The kuttab teachers’ school was continually
professionalized, expanding from a one-year program to two years in 1908 and
eventually to five years in 1910. Over a period of three years the kuttab teacher had gone
147 Cromer, “Reports on the State o f Egypt and the Progress o f Administrative Reforms,” Parliamentary
Papers, 1896, Vol. 97, p. 1011, quoted in Stanett, 47
146
from being the “local healer, Quran reciter, and holyman ” 149 who did not need
specialized training in how to teach, to being the product o f a professional school whose
curricula were set by the British. The irony o f Christian, British colonial administrators
purporting to elevate the standards for the teaching o f Islam heretofore observed by a
Muslim population scarcely needs comment.
Of course, the whole point of the teacher training “reforms” is that the kuttab's
main purpose was no longer to teach about religion, but to provide basic reading, writing,
and arithmetic skills to the children of the masses. The newly marginalized role of
religious education in the kuttabs was made even more clear after 1910. In that year the
British began allowing Egyptian-run provincial councils to tax their populations and
spend the receipts on public works, particularly schools.150 Once the tax was put in place
in 1910, the issue of taxation without representation arose, leading later that year to a
Coptic Congress which demanded “the right of Copts to take advantage o f the
educational facilities provided by the new provincial councils.” 151 Copts felt excluded
from these facilities for two reasons. The first is that Copts attended their own kuttabs,
which were largely ineligible for government subsidies because they did not observe the
government prohibition on teaching foreign languages at the kuttab level. The second is
that most kuttabs funded by the government also received money from waqf bequests,
which meant that they had to teach the Quran. Short o f a change in policy, then, the Copts
148 Cromer, Annual Report, Parliamentary Papers, 1903, Vol. 87, p. 1009, quoted in Starrett, 47
149 Mitchell, 87
150 Starrett, 64
151 ibid, 65
147
would be taxed in their communities to fund schools teaching the Quran, while their own
schools remained ineligible for such funds.
Faced with this dilemma, the British decided that government-funded kuttabs
would henceforth be open to both Muslim and Christian children. These kuttabs would
continue to provide instruction in the Quran, from which Coptic children would excuse
themselves. If there was a critical mass o f Coptic students in a given area, a solely Coptic
kuttab could be opened to provide Copts with a Christian education.152 It now became
necessary for the Anglican British to decide who was sufficiently qualified to teach
Coptic Christianity to Coptic children, and in 1910 the Khedivial Training College
created Christian religion classes to teach Christians about their faith at the primary
school level.153 As a result of these changes, the time-honored practice of educating
children of different religions in separate schools was discouraged. Under British
auspices, kuttabs were changing from schools intended primarily to train students to
become practitioners of their faith to Westem-style schools in which religion was just one
more subject in the curriculum.
Conclusion
In the course of a little over a century, the provision of education changed
dramatically in Punjab, Java, and Egypt. Where teachers had been honored members of
the community, financially supported by their students and autonomous in the conduct of
their classrooms, they were now employees of the state, living on the salary o f a
government which told them what to teach, when, and how. Where students had been
gathered with other boys of a variety o f ages, absorbing skills and knowledges as
152 Starrett, 66
148
disparate as reading, writing, history and geography from religious texts, they were now
divided into separate classes to absorb a body of knowledge which had been separated
into distinct disciplines, each with its own sources and none reliant on religious texts as
proof of their truth or accuracy. Over that period o f slightly more than a hundred years,
then, a system of Westem-style schools, which I defined in the introduction to this
chapter as schools in which a person who had received formalized, replicable training as
a teacher taught students divided into groups on the basis o f their age a set of subjects
which were perceived as being independent of one another and whose truth claims were
not based primarily on religious faith had emerged. These schools replaced many o f the
more traditional forms of schooling, and rendered those that remained less and less
capable of equipping students for success in the colonial milieu.
One of the most significant changes that occurred in the educational arena in this
period was a change in the role religion played in the school. In the pre-colonial period,
education was provided primarily by religious figures to children separated into different
schools on the basis of their religious affiliation, and its central purpose was to train boys
in the rituals and practices necessary for full membership in their religious community.
The first addition to this traditional educational milieu came from other religious
providers - missionaries - but many of the missionaries initially functioned in the same
way that local religious educators did, observing no distinction between disciplines and
basing all learning on the Bible, just as Muslim kuttabs did on the Quran. Just as most
local religious figures teaching students in places like Java had no training in how to
teach, neither did the overwhelming majority o f mission teachers; just as knowing one’s
religion was enough o f a qualification to teach in the former case, so was it in the latter.
153 Starrett, 66
The creation by the colonial state of Westem-style education systems led to the insertion
of a new model of education into the colony, in which teaching was a measurable and
transferable skill and teachers were expected to have mastered particular pieces of
information deemed by the colonial power to constitute “knowledge.” In addition to
introducing new, more “secular” subjects into the curriculum, Westem-style school
systems both marginalized the role of religion in education and professionalized and
standardized the ways in which it would be taught and the people who were judged to be
qualified to teach it.
The next two chapters will demonstrate the ways in which religious reform
movements were able to take advantage of state subsidies to build their own networks of
schools, in which their conceptions of religion and its role in the nation would play a
prominent role in the curriculum. This should not, however, be seen as the pendulum
swinging back to its original position, as Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya schools had
almost nothing in common with their pre-colonial predecessors beyond the fact that they
purported to act in the name of the same religion. These schools provided Westem-style
education not only in order to get subsidies, but primarily because that was the only style
of education that they believed could create the modem Hindus and Muslims upon whom
national renewal depended. In fact, Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya schools had much in
common with those of their arch enemies; reading missionary statements about the need
to free their students from religious superstitions sound eerily like those of Samaj and
Muhammadiya teachers. As the next several chapters will demonstrate, Arya and
Muhammadiya educators were modernists through and through, and the educational
150
networks which they constructed represented a completely new synthesis o f reformed
religion and Western educational practice.
151
Chapter Four: Missionaries, the State, and the DAV and

Muhammadiyah Schools
“When colonial rule had established itself so definitely that fear (of
Islam) was no longer required a clear feeling of superiority gained the upper
hand and a patronising attitude developed. The Dutch began to consider
themselves teachers or even as guardians of the still uneducated people. This
was manifested in two ways: secular ideas o f development, centred mainly on
education, and Christian missions. The two cannot finally be separated, however.
Perhaps it is not coincidental that the flourishing of the great missionary activity
took place precisely during the period o f the extension of the colonial system of
education. Indeed, many missionary activities were conducted by way of that
system of education.”
Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian

Islam: Contacts and Conflicts, 1596-1950,
(Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1993)
“(The missionaries) are prepared to use every foul and unchristian means
to convert the people to Christianity. At present boys of tender age are mostly
their victims. These boys know nothing o f their own religion; they have not even
read their alphabet the boys who read in the mission schools rarely avoid
catching the disease with which their masters are afflicted for six mortal
hours daily have they to remain in the society of their Christian masters and how
is it possible for the poor things not to accept as truth whatever is said by
them whatever kind be the ideas you infuse in their minds in their infancy,
they will retain it to the end of their life unless some timely measures are
taken to nullify their influence.”
The Regenerator o f Arya Varta, (an Arya Samaj

newspaper), September 3, 1883, quoted in Kenneth Jones,
Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century
Punjab, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976),
48
A key argument of my dissertation is that religious reform movements were able
to build networks o f their own schools on a large scale only in those colonies in which
centralized Westem-style education systems had been constructed. These centralized
education systems provided the funding which made the creation of parallel school
152
networks possible, but it does not follow that it building them desirable. Even with state
assistance, building schools was a daunting project reqi-'ring an enormous amount of
time and effort for uncertain return. Indeed, it might be more logical to assume that the
creation of a centralized system of education would lessen the motivation for religious
movements to form their own schools - if the government was willing to educate
members of the Arya Samaj in state schools, which cost the Samaj nothing, why should
the Samaj burden itself to build its own educational network? And if they built it, would
people come? If options for Westem-style education were readily available, why would
Indonesian Muslims choose to enroll their children in Muhammadiya schools?
One obvious answer to these questions would be that by building their own
schools, the Arya Samajes and Muhammadiyas of the colonial world could utilize these
institutions to educate children in their own beliefs. Presumably all religious movements
would jump at such an opportunity, but in fact religious nationalist movements did not
seek government subsidies to build their own schools in every colony which had a
centralized Westem-style education system. The existence of a centralized education
system with subsidies at the ready, then, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for
religious nationalist movements to create their own educational networks. In the first
half of this chapter, and in the first section o f Chapter Six, I will argue that only when
government subsidies of centralized educational systems were combined with prominent
missionary presence in the Westem-style educational arena did religious nationalist
movements seek to build their own school networks and succeed in doing so. In Chapter
Three I demonstrated that in Egypt, India, and Indonesia the British and the Dutch had
created centralized education systems willing to subsidize private schools which
R e p ro d u c e d with perm ission of the copyright owner. F urther reproduction prohibited without permission.
153
conformed to their regulations; only in the latter two colonies, however, did religious
nationalist movements build their own schools on a large scale. This difference, I
suggest, can be explained by the fact that missionaries played a much more prominent
role, for a much longer period of time, in the provision of Westem-style education in
Punjab and Java, where the Samaj and Muhammadiya were founded, than they did in the
Muslim Brotherhood’s Egypt. This concentrated missionary presence in education made
the question of who taught the colony’s children a very controversial one and propelled
religious nationalist movements into the educational arena; where missionary schools
peaked early and then were marginalized, the incentive for religious nationalist
movements to found their own schools was significantly less pronounced.
Although groups such as the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya were prompted to
found schools by the missionary presence, the schools soon came to provide a number of
benefits, and channel a variety of resources, into the parent movements and the other,
non-educational activities which they sponsored. While the Arya Samaj and
Muhammadiya dedicated enormous effort to school-building, both movements, having
mounted other religious and national reform campaigns which required substantial
resources to achieve success, had other irons in the fire as well. The extent to which the
school networks helped in concrete ways to support the movements’ non-educational
activities - for example, by fiinneling human or material resources into them or by
gaining members for the movement who then participated in its non-educational work -
is the subject of the second part of this chapter. In this section of the chapter I will
demonstrate the ways in which the DAV and Muhammadiya school networks
strengthened their parent movements by providing them with viable organizational
154
structures which allowed them to survive crises within and outside of the movement, by
attracting money to the movement which could then be used for its other activities, by
helping to spread the movement itself throughout the colony, and by mobilizing new
members and activists on behalf of the causes which the movements sought to advance.
The Missionary Menace, or: The Educational Environment in Punjab circa 1886
Roughly half a century before the Arya Samaj founded the first Dayanand
Anglo-Vedic school in 1886, missionaries had begun establishing themselves in Punjab.
The first mission in Punjab - the Lodhiana Mission o f the American Presbyterian Church
- planted its flag there in 1834,' and each successive extension of British control in the
province brought new missions in its wake. Two years after Punjab was brought into the
East India Company’s orbit in 1849, a chapter of the Church Missionary Society (CMS)
was established there at the request of British officers stationed in the province.
Supported by the considerable moral and material resources of these officers,2 CMS
activity blossomed, growing from 13 central and 13 branch stations in 1882 to 23
central and eight branch stations by the turn of the century.3 When the East India
Company was replaced by the Crown after the 1857 Mutiny, missionaries extended their
reach once again, and by the 1880’s the American Presbyterian Church, the United
1 Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab, (Berkeley: University
o f California Press, 1976), 8
2 John Webster notes that “without the initiative, continuing concern, and financial support o f these
evangelical officers, the CMS would have been a very small and probably very insignificant missionary
group in the Punjab.” John C.B. Webster, “Mission Sources o f Nineteenth-Century Punjab History,” in
Sources on Punjab History, (Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1975), 178
3 ibid
155
Presbyterian Church o f North America, and the Punjab Mission of the Church of
Scotland each had full-scale mission networks covering the entire province.4
As the number of missions grew, so did the number of converts. By 1881 3,912
Punjabis had converted to Christianity; this number increased to 19,750 converts in
1891, and again to 37,980 converts by 1901.5 As Jones notes, the number of conversions
compared to the population of Punjab was “statistically insignificant,”6 but relative to
their own earlier rates of conversion missionaries were gaining ground fast, increasing
the size of their flocks by 410% between 1881 and 1891.7 In the Sialkot District of
Punjab alone, the number of converts to Christianity increased over 3,000% during the
same ten year period.8
As had been the case in much of the rest of India, missionaries were the first to
provide Westem-style education in Punjab. Not all Punjabi missions built schools; the
CMS focused its efforts primarily on hospitals,’ and the Sialkot Mission of the United
Presbyterian Church o f North America characterized building mission schools to gain
converts as a cart-before-the-horse approach. As a leader of the mission wrote,
“Looking at it from a military standpoint, the educating o f men is

like the drilling of soldiers. If a British officer should enter Russian
territory, there to drill an army o f Russians, in the hope that some of
them would enlist and fight loyally for the Queen of England, we
would all pronounce his course unwise, and say that he had better
enlist them first and drill them afterwards. So men should first be
4 Jones, 8
5 ibid, 10
6 ibid
7 ibid
* ibid, 12
9 Webster, 177
156
enlisted under Christ’s banner and then trained up to power and

efficiency in our institutions of learning.” 10
While missionaries were not unanimous on the usefulness of education as a
conversion technique, those missions which did build schools - particularly the
American Presbyterian (A.P.) mission - virtually monopolized the provision of Westem-
style education in Punjab for decades. As John Webster describes it, “the work of
the A.P. Mission followed a common pattern. Its missionaries usually began a school
in each city where they established a station. For at least thirty years, theirs were the
only schools both recognized and aided by the Government offering a Western
education in Ludhiana, Ambala, Jullundur, and Rawalpindi the A.P. Mission was
thus a pioneer in western education in the Punjab and in several important Punjabi cities
enjoyed a lengthy monopoly in this field.”"
Not only did missionaries pioneer Westem-style education in Punjab, their role
in providing that education remained much more important, for a much longer period, in
Punjab than it did in most of the rest of India. By the 1880’s the missionaries were
slowly but surely being edged out of the educational arena in provinces such as Madras,
Bombay, Bengal, and the Northwest Provinces, with government schools on the one
hand and private, Indian-run schools on the other providing the lion’s share o f Western
educational opportunities in those areas.12In Punjab, by contrast, there had been very
little private Indian initiative in providing Westem-style education, leaving a situation in
10 ibid, 180
" ibid, 173
12 J.P. Naik and Syed Nurullah, A History o f Education in India, During the British Period, (Bombay:
Macmillan Press, 1951), 287
which almost all such education was provided either directly by the government or by
missionaries. In 1881-2, four years before the first DAV school opened, Punjab had 120
private, English-language secondary schools; two were run by Indians, and the other 118
by non-Indians.13If, as it seems safe to assume, almost all of the 118 non-Indian private
secondary schools were run by missionaries, then only four years before the first DAV
school opened private secondary education in Punjab was being provided almost
exclusively by missionaries. The reason for the disparity between local educational
initiative in Punjab and other Indian provinces is not clear; it may be that fewer private
resources were available in Punjab, making the extension of state subsidies to alternative
educational networks all the more essential to their success. What is clear, however, is
that this disparity constituted a strong incentive for private Indian groups, such as the
Arya Samaj, to begin building their own education networks.
On the eve of the founding of the first DAV schools, then, missionaries were at
the zenith of their power - educational and otherwise - in Punjab, and the six-year-old
Arya Samaj turned its attention to combating their efforts. After becoming aware of a
Hindu student’s intention to convert, Aryas in Lahore founded the Arya Updeshak
Mandali (Aryan Mission Circle) in 1882 “with the special object of dealing a death blow
to Christianity with weapons of reason and fair argument.”14Arya media kept up the
focus on student vulnerability to missionaries, noting in the September 3,1883, issue of
The Regenerator o f Arya Varta that
“they (the missionaries) are prepared to use every foul and unchristian (sic)
means to convert the people to Christianity. At present boys of tender age are
13 ibid, 297
14 Regenerator o f Arya Varta, Vol. 1, No. 7, August 20, 1883, p 3 , quoted in Jones, 47
158
mostly their victims. These boys know nothing o f their own religion; they have
not even read their alphabet the boys who read in the mission schools rarely
avoid catching the disease with which their masters are afflicted and which,
though a disease, is put by those masters in the most favorable light. For six
mortal hours daily they have to remain in the society of their Christian masters
and how is it possible for the poor things not to accept as truth whatever is said
by them whatever kind be the ideas you infuse in their minds in their
infancy, they will retain it to the end of their life and their conduct, while living,
will be according to them unless some timely measures are taken to nullify their
influence.” 15
When Samaj founder Dayananda died in 1883, the perceived need for Hindu Westem-
style educational institutions combined with a desire to honor Dayanand's commitment
to religious reform prompted the Samaj to begin the campaign to found its own school.
After years of painstaking work, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) High School
opened in Lahore on June 1, 1886, enrolling 550 students in its first month of
operation.16The High School was a comprehensive school offering classes from the first
grade through the college entrance level, and once the DAV College was opened in
1889, the foundations had been laid for an educational system in which students could
progress from learning the alphabet to earning a bachelors’ degree completely within
Arya institutions. This foundation was quickly fleshed out by the proliferation o f DAV
schools; from urban Lahore the DAV schools expanded throughout the province, to
Jullundur in 1889, where the local Samaj founded a school which soon enrolled 300
students, to Ferozopore, where the Samaj started a popular girls’ school,17and even to
the Baghbanpura branch of the Samaj, which despite being one of the poorest in Punjab
15 The Regenerator o f Arya Varta, September 3, 1883, quoted in Jones, 48
16 Jones, 77
17 ibid, 87-88
159
maintained both a boys’ and a girls’ school.1* In the words of Kenneth Jones, “education
became one of the major preoccupations of the Aryas. During the 1890s Aryas would
build an educational system throughout the entire province, from the primary grades
through college.”19The DAV schools soon spread beyond the borders of Punjab and
throughout North India, with “outposts as far south as Sholapur, Maharashtra, and
Hyderabad state,”20 and by 1941 the Samaj listed 179 schools and 10 colleges affiliated
with it in India and Burma.21
How was this effort possible in a province in which private Indian initiative in
founding Western-type schools had been limited at best as late as the beginning of the
1880’s? One answer is that the schools seem to have been perceived as filling an
important void in the community, and they quickly won financial support from a
remarkably wide base o f Hindus in Punjab and elsewhere. It also seems, however, that
government aid was an important part of their success in at least two ways - both
through the direct provision of government funds to the schools, and by giving the
schools the imprimatur of government approval by granting them official recognition
and praising their success in producing successful exam candidates, which in turn made
the Hindu public more willing to contribute to the enterprise.
The question o f how much financing various DAV schools obtained from
government sources is a sensitive one in Arya Samaj hagiography. The idea that the
**lbid
19 ibid
20 Daniel Gold, "Organized Hinduisms: From Vedic Truth to Hindu Nation", in Accountingfor
Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character o f Movements, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott
21 ibid
160
DAV College, as the flagship of the DAV system, was built solely on the contributions
of the Hindu public is reiterated time and again in Arya publications as a way o f
demonstrating the College’s centrality in the community. It is also used as a way of
differentiating the College from other communal institutions whose willingness to
accept government aid, it is implied, compromised their message in some way. At a
1914 Founder’s Day celebration in London, Arya educational leader Lala Lajpat Rai’s
recounting of the founding of the College included reference to an “unwritten law” of
the institution which created what he called a “moral obligation” not to seek government
aid.22 In his 1920 book The Problem o f National Education in India, Rai recalled that the
original prospectus of the College was marked by “an insistence that (its) scheme of
national education be absolutely independent of Government patronage and Government
help”23 - an insistence, he is careful to point out, that was not shared by the Mohamedan
Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh and the Hindu College in Benares, which did receive
such aid.24 Government financial assistance did come at some point, however, as Rai’s
1914 speech notes that the College’s “moral obligation” not to seek government aid had
been met, “unless a petty grant of a few thousand rupees made by the University be
considered an exception.”25 If we knew when this grant had been made we would have
more of a sense of how important it had been to the College’s early work. When the
DAV High School - the first part of the College project - was founded in 1886, the
22 Lala Lajpat Rai, A History o f the Arya Samaj: An Account o f its Origin, Doctrines and Activities with a
Biographical Sketch o f Its Founder, (Bombay: Orient Longmans Ltd., 1967), 141
23 The Problem o f National Education in India, Lala Lajpat Rai, (London: George Allen & Unwin., Ltd.
1920), 20
24 Rai, The Problem o f National Education, 23
23 Rai, A History o f the Arya Samaj, 141
161
Samaj sought monthly subscriptions for its support based on an estimate that the
expenses of the school, which included classes from first grade through the college
entrance level, would be Rs. 400 a month;26 in this environment a grant of “a few
thousand” rupees may well have been indispensable to the School’s functioning. What
we do know for certain, however, is that while the flagship DAV school and subsequent
college may not have received government aid, many other DAV schools, in the words
o f Arya sympathizer Dhanpati Pandey, were “maintained by usual grants from the
Education Department.”27To that extent, even if the original DAV High School and
subsequent College did not receive government aid, it seems clear that the Arva Samaj
might well not have been able to go beyond these flagship institutions to build an
educational network without government grants. In this respect, the Arya Samaj would
be like any number o f religious nationalist or other groups which were able to pool all of
their resources and establish one or a small number of schools on their own, but which
were not able to go beyond this point without government assistance.
The existence of a state-run school system in North India, and of a government
willing to aid privately-run schools, helped the DAV schools financially in indirect ways
as well. The DAV College and later the affiliated schools offered a curriculum designed
to produce students who could successfully compete in the government exams which
regulated entry into the bureaucracy and the universities. In order to do so they had to
gear their syllabi to the content of those exams, and the DAV High School in particular
did this so well and so early in its development that by 1888 it was being praised by the
26 Jones, 76
27 The Arya Samaj and Indian Nationalism (1875-1920), Dhanpati Pandey, (New Delhi: S.Chand & Co.,
Ltd., 1972), 101
162
government for having “supplied nineteen successful candidates for the Entrance
Examination or more than any other schools in the Province.”28 Official government
recognition of the school followed almost immediately. It was the success of the DAV
High School, and soon of its network of DAV schools, in providing a religiously “safe”
environment which was also praised by the government and which could produce young
men successful in government competitions which won it the strong and consistent
financial support of Hindus throughout Punjab and the United Provinces and made the
continuation of the Arya educational project possible.
Missionaries and Muhammadiyah: The Case of Java
Largely due to early Dutch restrictions on, and refusal to adequately fund,
missionary activity, missionaries were much slower in mounting a full-fledged effort
against Islam in Indonesia than their counterparts had been in seeking converts from
Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism in North India. Once these restrictions were removed,
however, missionaries turned their sights on Java, and they clearly visualized the
provision of educational services as a key weapon in their arsenal for conversion. “Once
the transformation of the Dutch presence in Java from a makeshift bazaar into a
decorous empire had taken place,”29a parallel institutionalization of missionary efforts
in Indonesia followed with the founding in 1797 of the Dutch Missionary Society in
Holland. Islam was considered to be much tougher competition for Christianity than the
animist or polytheist faiths practiced by a small minority of the Indonesian population
located mostly outside of Java - as late as 1911 one disheartened missionary at the 25th
28 Jones, 78
29 Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942,
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), 66
163
an intimidating opponent?”30- and missionaries’ initial efforts focused on converting
“pagans” to Christianity before they could be incorporated by Islam.31 When Dutch
regulations preventing missionary activity in Java were lifted in 1848, however,
missionaries flowed to the island, and in reports from missionaries in Indonesia in this
period, Steenbrink notes, “one significant element appears to emerge again and again:
Islam should not be attacked directly but should be curtailed by any means
available - from the promotion of ancient folk customs, adat and folk religions, regional
dialects (in contrast to Malay, thought to be of Islamic origin) to the modernization of
health care and education in particular .”32
Constrained by government willingness to subsidize mission schools, the
missionary educational effort initially grew very slowly. In 1871, twenty years before
government subsidies were made available, “mission schools on Java were still of little
significance,”33 enrolling only 350 students in comparison to the 4,850 students in
regency schools and the 3,100 enrolled in community schools.34 The turn of the century,
however, saw a dramatic strengthening of the missionary position. Changes in political
leadership, both within the colony and back home, brought avid supporters of
Christianizing Indonesia to the fore. The colony’s Governor-General, Idenburg,
publicly termed “the spreading of Christianity in the Indies a matter of great
30 Karel Steenbrink, Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam, Contacts and Conflicts, 1596-1950,
(Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 1993), 98
31 ibid, 106-7
32 ibid, 98-99
33 H. Kroeskamp, Early Schoolmasters in A Developing Country: A History o f Experiments in School

Education in Nineteenth-Century Indonesia, (Assen: Van Gorcum and Comp, 1974), 331
34 ibid, 332
164
political importance;”35 his repeated attempts to increase the observance o f Christianity
in the colony led to such a backlash that it was said that the initials of Sarekat Islam,
Indonesia’s first nationalist movement, actually referred to “salahnja Id e n b u r g or
Idenburg’s mistake.36 In 1909 Dutch clerical parties which openly announced their intent
to subsidize Christianization in Indonesia obtained a majority in the States General in
the Netherlands, and in the wake of their success subsidies for missionary activity
increased sharply.
In 1901 there had been 50 missions in Java and 150 in the archipelago as a
whole; by 1912 - the year Muhammadiya was founded - these numbers had grown to
130 missions in Java and 279 throughout Indonesia.37 In the three years immediately
prior to Muhammadiya’s founding, government subsidies for missionaries increased by
almost 300% - from 04,000 to f98,0003S - which allowed the number of Christian
schools to increase by 40% between 1909 and 1913.39 Not only were the years
immediately before Muhammadiya’s founding a period of marked missionary expansion
in Java, the residency of Jogjakarta on Java, where Muhammadiya was founded, seems
to have been the focus of particular and prolonged missionary attention since the
beginning of the century.40
35 Fred von der Mehden, Religion and Nationalism in Southeast Asia: Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines,
(Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1963), 179
36 ibid, 180
37 ibid, 179
34 ibid
39 ibid
40 Alfian, Muhammadiyah: The Political Behavior o f a Muslim Modernist Organization Under Dutch
Colonialism, (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1989), 143
165
Unlike the Arya Samaj, whose first school was founded a decade after the
movement began, Muhammadiya was intent on creating an educational network from
the very beginning. The movement’s founding statute listed its goals as the spreading of
Muslim religious teachings and promotion of religious life among its members, goals
which would be achieved in part by “establish(ing) and maintain(ing) good support of
educational institutions, where besides common (secular) subjects the principles of
Muslim religious teachings would also be given.”41
Muhammadiya clearly saw educational provision as one of its central
responsibilities from the day it was founded; I would argue that the reason that that
focus continued was largely because missionaries remained an important provider of
Westem-style education in areas where Muhammadiya was active for a long period after
the latter’s founding. In Chapter Six I will demonstrate that after its first years the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt seemed to have lost its early interest in education, and I
will argue that there were two reasons for this. The first was that soon after its founding
the Brotherhood moved from the missionary-saturated Suez Canal zone to Cairo, where
many alternatives to missionary education were available, making Brotherhood
provision of “safe” opportunities for such education less of a priority. In addition, within
ten years of the Brotherhood’s founding, the enormous expansion of secular
opportunities for Westem-style education provided by the Egyptian government
throughout the country meant that the threat of conversion through education had
become less and less o f an issue for all Egyptians, not just Brothers. Neither o f these
41 ibid, 154
166
factors - moving out of an area in which missionaries dominated education, or a marked
decrease in the share of educational opportunities provided by missionaries country
wide - obtained in the case of Muhammadiya, which found itself in exactly the opposite
position from that of the Brotherhood. Far from being able to leave an area full of
missionaries for another area in which they had less of a presence, Muhammadiya was
forced to restrict its activity to the missionary-targeted residency of Jogjakarta for most
of its first ten years, as the Dutch denied the movement the permission that it sought to
operate throughout Java and Madura until 1921.42 Muhammadiya had surreptitiously
begun to spread outside Jogjakarta before 1921, but the fact that it was legally confined
to act within a residency which was a particular target of missionary educational efforts
may well have intensified the movement’s interest in school-building. Also unlike
Egypt, where increasing governmental presence in education and restrictions on
missionary activity combined to significantly reduce the role of missionaries in
education within the Brotherhood’s first decade, missions and their schools continued to
expand in Indonesia throughout the Dutch colonial period. In the 1920’s Gouda
describes Java as having “resembl(ed) a busy beehive of missionary zeal,” 43 with the
result that “fears of Christian expansion, particularly missionary education, were often
expressed during the interwar years, especially following World War I, in such
42 ibid, 1S2. Muhammadiyah had begun to spread surreptitiously outside o f Jogjakarta before 1921, but its
inability to function openly outside that residency ensured that work in Jogjakarta, and work which met that
residency’s particular needs, would be the movement’s primary focus for its first nine years.
43 Gouda, 67
167
newspapers as Medan Moeslemin, Oetoesan Hindia, Tjahaja Soematra and even
for a time in the Communist organ Sinar Hindia.”**
While the leadership of Muhammadiya clearly shared these groups’ concerns,
until the death of Muhammadiya founder Ahmad Dahlan in 1923 the movement did not
publicly attack missionary schools. Dahlan’s unwillingness to openly condemn
missionary education as Muslim Brotherhood and Arya Samaj leaders regularly did has
been ascribed to the fact that Dahlan was reputed to be friends with several Christian
clergymen,43 but in light of the restrictions which the Dutch had put on Muhammadiya’s
geographical reach, Dahlan may well have calculated that it was unwise to push his luck
and attack missionary institutions at a time when the Dutch government was solidly pro
missionary. The effect of missionary schools as a model for Muhammadiya institutions,
however, was clear, as Dahlan “even copied without shame and regret those institutions
which were originated by the Christians. Thus he was to copy their H.I.S. met de Bibel
(HIS with Bible, a missionary version of the government’s HIS advanced elementary
schools with Dutch education) by establishing his own HIS met de Koran, (just as) he
copied their social activities such as their health services - clinics and polyclinics.”46
Muhammadiya school advocates did not hesitate to use the specter of spreading
missionary education and impending Christianization to raise funds for Muhammadiya
counter-institutions. When the missionaries began construction on another H.I.S. met
de Bibel in 1918, Fakhruddin, Muhammadiya’s first vice-chair, castigated rich Muslims
44 von der Mehden, 180
45 ibid, 161
46 ibid, 150
168
and Muslim leaders in his periodical Sri Diponegoro for their unwillingness to sacrifice
to match the progress achieved by the missionaries. Muhammadiya, Fakhruddin noted,
had been unable to establish a single H.I.S. met de Koran because it could not afford it,
and he warned that if Muslims failed to act as fast as Christians did in this field there
was a very good chance that their children would convert to Christianity, as the rapid
growth of Christian education would penetrate the entire society.47
While Muhammadiya began its educational work almost immediately after its
founding, it took years of struggle to create a network of Muhammadiya schools parallel
to those run by the government and the missionaries. The trajectory o f Muhammadiya
school development in the town of Kotagede in Central Java demonstrates how
components of this network were built on the local level, as well as their inability to
properly function except as part of a larger Muhammadiya school system.
Muhammadiya founded its first school in Kotagede - a second-class native school - in
the 1910’s. The school was very popular, quickly moving from the private home it had
initially used as a classroom to a permanent building. The further expansion of
Muhammadiya schools in Kotagede, however, was hampered by a lack of teachers. This
forced Muhammadiya leaders to rely for the teaching of secular subjects on graduates of
the government teacher-training schools, and to use - undoubtedly with gritted teeth -
teachers who were products of the traditional Islamic education provided in the
pesantren, which Muhammadiya strongly attacked for its emphasis on rote
47 ibid, 162
169
memorization of religious texts,4* for the teaching of religious subjects. With the
founding of the first Muhammadiya teacher-training school in Jogjakarta in 1922, this
problem began to be solved; by the late 1920’s graduates of Muhammadiya’s primary
schools had begun enrolling in the schools and coming back upon graduation to teach in
Kotagede. In the late 1920’s a Muhammadiya HIS school and a girls’ school were
founded in Kotagede, laying the foundations for a Muhammadiya school network in the
town which soon came to overshadow its government counterpart, even attracting
children of court officials who would normally have gone to government schools.49 By
the mid-1930’s, the Muhammadiya educational system throughout Java had developed
to the point that the movement had opened schools parallel to those of the Dutch
government from the elementary through the secondary level,50 a trajectory which
would be crowned by the founding of Muhammadiya universities after independence. In
1932 Muhammadiya operated 207 Westem-style schools in Java and Madura;31 by
1939, this had increased to some 872 Westem-style schools throughout the
archipelago.32
A key reason for the initially slow growth o f the Muhammadiya school network
seems to have been its difficulty in obtaining adequate amounts of government subsidy
for its work. The standards for receiving government educational subsidies in Indonesia
4* Mitsuo Nakamura, The Crescent Arises Over the Banyan Tree: A Study o f the Muhammadiyah Movement
in A Central Javanese Town, (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983), 85
49 ibid, 84-85
30 ibid, 53
31 ibid, 189.
32 ibid
170
appear to have been far stricter than those in North India, and the difficulty that
Muhammadiya initially had in qualifying for them at all seems to have been due to its
difficulty in meeting government standards on curriculum and qualified teachers.53 By
the early 1920’s at the latest, however, the subsidies were flowing in regularly, and once
they started they continued to grow substantially in absolute terms throughout the period
of Dutch rule. According to Muhammadiya’s 1923 annual report, the movement’s total
revenues from all sources that year were 69,356 guilders, 6,461 o f which came from
government subsidy, with the rest accounted for from school fees, zakat, private
donations, and a subsidy from the sultanate.54By 1929-30, the movement was receiving
a subsidy of 83,251 guilders - more than the entire budget of the movement from all
sources only six years earlier - in addition to 6,290 guilders from the sultan of
Jogjakarta. When compared to Muhammadiya’s 1932 budget of 579,354 guilders, it
seems that subsidies accounted for about 15% of its total income in this period.55Not
surprisingly, it was in precisely this period o f large increases of government subsidies
from 1923 until 1932 that Muhammadiya’s schools first spread throughout the
archipelago.56
Perhaps the strongest proof of how important government subsidies were to
Muhammadiya schools is the lengths to which the movement was willing to go to keep
53 Alfian, 169
54 James Peacock, Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam ,
Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1978),46
35 Alfian, 197
56 ibid, 180
171
them. Almost since its inception, Muhammadiya had been intimately connected with
Indonesia’s first nationalist movement - Sarekat Islam - which reached Jogjakarta in
1913, the year after Muhammadiya had been founded there. Members o f each movement
initially played leading roles in the other, with Muhammadiy': founder Dahlan serving as
the religious adviser of Sarekat’s central board at its first national congress in 1916, and
Fakhruddin, Muhammadiya’s driving force after Dahlan died, serving as Sarekat’s
treasurer from 1920 until 1927.57 In 1920 a meeting of both groups decided that “ they
should cooperate in the following manner: Muhammadiya was to abstain from playing
politics by concentrating on the socio-educational line of Islam,” while Sarekat Islam,
with Muhammadiya’s support, would take on the political role.” In 1924 Sarekat
adopted a policy o f non-cooperation with the Dutch, and in 1926 it began launching
attacks on Muhammadiya, accusing it of stealing its members and attacking its
continued acceptance o f government subsidies in contrast to Sarekat’s non-cooperation
stance. Angry at what it saw as Sarekat jealousy of Muhammadiya’s success, and
unwilling to give up its subsidies, Muhammadiya stood firm, and the two movements
split apart. In retrospect, the political “price” of insisting on retaining the subsidies was
not particularly high, as Sarekat lost members after the split while Muhammadiya
continued to grow. Muhammadiya’s willingness to defend its receipt of subsidies,
however, in a period in which Sarekat’s non-cooperation policy was winning increasing
57 ibid, 201
3‘ ibid, 217
172
support and picturing subsidy recipients as traitors, suggests the importance which it
accorded to its continued receipt of government funds for its educational projects.
What Have You Done for Me Lately?, or: How The DAV and Muhammadiya
Schools Strengthened The Movements That Founded Them
The previous section of this chapter demonstrated that DAV and Muhammadiya
schools proliferated tremendously and over a large geographical area during the colonial
period. We also know that the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya grew enormously in
terms o f numbers of members, branches, and material resources during the same period.
What, if anything, does this tell us about the role that the school networks played in
strengthening the movements that founded them? While education was a central focus of
both groups, it was not the only activity in which they were engaged, and schools were
not the only institutions that these movements sought to build. In addition to the DAV
schools, Aryas devoted themselves to other campaigns consonant with their view of
religious reform and national renewal, including arranging the remarriage of widows
and “converting” Muslims and others “back” to Hinduism; Muhammadiya crusaded
against syncretic religious practices, published newspapers, and ran businesses and
medical clinics. To what extent, if at all, did these movements’ school networks help to
advance the Samaj’s and Muhammadiya’s larger goals?
There are several ways in which school networks could conceivably help to
advance the agendas of the movements that founded them. The most important - by
converting the school’s students to the religious imagining of the nation that these
movements propagated - is also the least tangible. In Chapter Six I will demonstrate the
173
ways that the schools sought to develop and disseminate a religious imagining of the
nation among their students, but we have no way of knowing how many of them adopted
that imagining as their own. Evidence like that which Francis Robinson has collected
on some of the more prominent graduates of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College
at Aligarh, the cradle of the Muslim separatist movement in India, detailing their
activity on behalf o f communal causes,59would allow me to do more than speculate that
graduates of DAV or Muhammadiya schools actually went on to play prominent roles in
either of these movements or in religious nationalist activities more generally, but in my
research to this point I have found little evidence of such data. In any case, even
Robinson’s data focuses on only a handful of the most prominent Aligarh graduates,
giving little sense o f the ways that more mainstream students reacted to Aligarh’s
communal - not religious nationalist - approach to imagining the Muslim Indian
community. In the case of the DAV and Muhammadiya schools, we know that they
educated tens of thousands of young people during the colonial period. If even five
percent of the students adopted the religious imaginings propagated by the movements
and acted to make them a reality, then the schools of the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya
did a great deal to help these movements meet their ultimate goals.
Moving more students towards Arya or Muhammadiya understandings of
religious nationalism, however, is not necessarily the same thing as moving more
students into the movements as members, adding to the movements’ stock of material
59 See, for example, the appendices to Robinson’s Separatism Among Indian Muslims, which contains the
biographies o f some sixty “Young Party” Muslims, including their educational background and their
subsequent occupational and political trajectories.
174
resources, or otherwise providing concrete assistance to these groups. Some of the
benefits which the schools brought to the movements are readily apparent, including the
creation of a durable organizational structure for the Arya Samaj where there had been
none, and the money which the schools brought into the Samaj, making it not just an
educational but a financial powerhouse as well. Other connections between the growth
of the schools and the growth of the movements are necessarily more speculative in
nature, and in the rest of this chapter I will detail the ways in which the available
evidence suggests that the DAV and Muhammadiya schools can plausibly be argued to
have brought much-needed financial, organizational, and human resources into the
movements which founded them.
Organizational Resources
During his lifetime Arya Samaj founder Dayanand had provided an ideological
basis for his fledgling movement but no organizational one. Hindus sympathetic to
Dayanand’s recipe for reform opened local Samajes, but in the absence of any
overarching organizational hierarchy they operated completely independently of one
another, to the point that upon Dayanand’s death in 1883, “the local Samajes were so
free that they were in danger of becoming absolutely a law unto themselves - no
provincial or national coordinating machinery had yet been set up.”40Attempts to link
the extant Samajes into a single group began almost immediately, as Dayanand’s legal
heir, the Paropkarini Sabha, met and resolved that “the Arya Samajes in India should
60 James Reid Graham, The Arya Samaj As A Reformation in Hinduism with Special Reference to Caste,
Ph.D. dissertation submitted to Yale University, 1942,393
175
form a representative committee to serve as a channel of communication between the
different Arya Samajes.”61 Letters to this effect sent to all Samajes brought little
response, however; the closest individual Samajes would come to coordinating their
efforts was an informal gathering of members of several different Samajes to celebrate
the anniversary of one Samaj’s founding.61 With each Samaj pursuing its own programs
with its own resources, the project of creating a larger organizational structure seemed
irrelevant. It was only when the effort to embark on a project too big for any single
Samaj to do on its own - the founding of the DAV school - began that Aryas began to
see the lack of coordination as a serious problem.
While many different Samajes had independently pledged support for the idea of
such a school immediately after Dayanand’s death, each Samaj collected its own funds,
and in the absence of an agreement as to where the school would be located no Samaj
was willing to turn its collections over to a larger body. Financially crippled by this
dispersion of its resources, the DAV effort lagged along until an offer by a prominent
Arya to be the principal of the DAV school without pay spurred the Lahore Samaj to
revisit the question o f an organizational superstructure. Noting that “the time has now
arrived for combining these isolated efforts, and for placing the scheme on a permanent
and effective footing,”" the Aryas adopted the British idea of registered societies as their
61 As quoted in The Regenerator o f Arya Varta, February 18, 1884, p.5, quoted in Jones, 121
" ib id , 121
63 ibid, 73
176
model. In January 1886 the DAV Trust and Management Society was formed to control
the funds and the property of the schools movement, as well as a Managing Committee
to direct the day-to-day affairs of the school. An elaborate system of representation of
various Samajes on the Managing Committee was worked out, with each Samaj that
donated more than 1,000 rupees receiving a seat on the Committee and donations of
more than S, 000 rupees entitling a Samaj to additional seats.64
It was the type of formal institutionalization of the decision-making process
outlined above, I suggest, which allowed the DAV schools to weather a split within the
Samaj and come out intact, and which presaged the ability of the Samaj as a whole to
endure despite its existence in a very turbulent environment. The first test of this ability
came in the early 1890’s, when advocates o f a more Sanskrit and Vedic-centered DAV
curriculum withdrew from the Managing Committee after repeatedly losing battles over
the content of DAV curriculum, and after failing to convince their colleagues on the
Committee and within the Samaj that true Arya beliefs required the adoption of a strict
vegetarian diet. The split between the “College”Aryas and the “Vegetarian” Aryas
extended throughout the Arya Samaj, with individual Samajes pledging loyalty to one or
the other side and henceforth having little contact with those who disagreed. As a result,
the resignation o f the “Vegetarian” camp from the Committee not only deprived the
Committee of some of its key leaders, it also deprived the schools of the financial
apparatus which had raised money for them, since the Samajes which had controlled the
64 ibid, 74-75
177
money-raising schemes allied with the “Vegetarian” side of the debate." The model of
directing DAV education through a Managing Committee made up of representatives of
Samajes on the basis of the size of the donations that they had made, however, enabled
the “College” wing to quickly recover from the split, to reconstitute the Committee with
supporters of its own vision o f DAV education, and to reconstruct an apparatus for
raising money not only for the schools but for those Samajes which had remained allied
with the “College” wing. The concept that it was the Committee who made decisions for
the schools, and only the Committee, had been firmly established, and future internecine
battles over the schools’ direction or funding centered on the rules governing
membership on the Committee as much or more than they did on any substantive issue.
Samuel Huntington argues that “the institutionalization of any particular organization
can be measured by its adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence,”66 with
adaptability being defined as “a function of environmental challenge and age.”671
suggest that it was the Samaj’s early experience with creating a viable and complex
organization - the Managing Committee - which could adapt to fundamental changes in
its environment which allowed not only the DAV schools but the Samaj as a whole to
thrive and endure throughout the turbulent environment o f pre-independence Punjabi
politics.
63 ibid, 173-4
66 Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968),
12
67 ibid, 13
178
Financial Resources
Raising money to keep the DAV schools afloat and expand the network was a
constant challenge in the early years of the DAV project. While sizable amounts were
sometimes donated at the anniversary celebrations o f various Samajes,“ Aryas
“recognized and alternately praised or denigrated the fact that their members were
mostly clerks, ‘pen pushers,’ who could only contribute small amounts,”" and in the
early years they alternated between bemoaning their inability to get large donations
from what Jones calls the Hindu aristocracy and boasting of their ability to keep the
schools afloat without it.70 As the profile o f the DAV schools was raised and their
prestige increased by their consistent ability to produce students successful in
government exams, Arya public events to raise money for the schools became “a
regular part of Punjabi Hindu life not only provid(ing) funds for Arya schools but a
social forum for the educated elite.”71 Fundraising then expanded outside Punjab, with
Aryas traveling to the North-Western Provinces, Sind, and Rajasthan to gather funds on
the schools’ behalf. 71
" For example, Jones reports that in 1890, Rs. 7,245 - o f a total o f Rs. 12,322 in funded capital accruing to
the schools in that year - came from Samaj anniversary celebrations. Jones, 80
" Tribune, September 15,1888, p 2 , quoted in Jones, 82
70 The Arya Patrika o f July 20,1886, noted that the money raised to date for the schools “has all been
subscribed by common people and gentlemen o f the middle class. No Raja and Maharaja has yet been
appealed to. This is the reason why so much general interest is shown in the progress o f the College
m ovem ent” The Tribune, a non-Arya publication but a supporter o f the schools, noted on September 15,
1888, that “it is a pity that our Rajas, Maharajas and Sirdars and Jagirdars have practically kept themselves
aloof from the Anglo-Vedic College M ovem ent” Both quoted in Jones, 81-82
71 ibid, 79
72 ibid
R e p ro d u c e d with perm ission of the copyright owner. Fu rth er reproduction prohibited without permission.
179
Over time, then, the amount of funds raised for the schools became rather
substantial. The Managing Committee - the repository o f all DAV school funds -
initially deposited the funds raised on behalf o f the DAV College in different banks for
short periods at fixed interest. As these funds grew, they were consolidated, so that by
1911 they were deposited almost exclusively in the Punjab National Bank. By 1911 not
only were the sums in the school fund substantial - a total of 299,403 Rs. - but the fund
had enough of a cushion that a large proportion of the money could be recycled back
into the Punjabi community at large in the form o f loans. These loans did not go
exclusively to Hindus; “the Investment Sub-Committee was far more interested in
collateral than community,”73 and Sikh aristocrats accounted for the biggest share o f the
loans.74
More importantly for our purposes, the Investment Sub-Committee also used the
funds raised for the schools to finance the expansion o f local Samajes, loaning it to these
Samajes to buy land and build temples in which Dayanand’s ideas o f reform Hinduism -
including a ban on idol worship - were practiced. In this way, money that was raised for
the schools ended up directly supporting other Samaj ventures which might very well be
unable to raise such funds on their own behalf. Many mainstream Hindus who did not
agree with the Samaj’s entire agenda o f religious reform supported the DAV schools; as
Jones notes, the schools had come to represent the “concrete expression o f the Punjabi
Hindu elite's dream of achieving economic and social status, of educating their sons in a
73 ibid, 232-33
74 ibid
180
safe Hindu environment.”15 This means, then, that money raised for the schools - which
did not directly teach many of the most controversial Arya reform practices, preferring
to believe that when students learned their Sanskrit in the schools, they would use it to
discern the legitimation for these practices in the Vedas - may well have financed more
controversial activities, such as widow-remarriage campaigns or “conversions” of
Muslims to Hinduism, that DAV school supporters themselves would not have
knowingly supported. In this way the DAV schools served as something of a cash cow
for the Arya Samaj as a whole, enabling it to raise money from Hindus who were not
prepared to sign on to the Samaj’s entire agenda o f religious reform but supported the
schools as a necessary part of a healthy Hindu community.
Extending the Geographical Reach of the Movement
In Muhammadiya’s first decade, when by Dutch order its activities were
restricted to the residency of Jogjakarta on Java, its message was spread not as much by
planting Muhammadiya schools in uncharted waters as by sending movement preachers
to contact students in government schools. These preachers, known as muballaghiin,
seem to have focused their efforts on terminal-level schools, especially those which
trained teachers and native civil servants, offering classes in the movement’s reformed
version of Islam to students of these schools at the end of their regular school day. As
Alfian notes, this was a cost-effective way for the movement to spread its ideology, as it
required “some funds for travel expenses o f the muballighiin, but the amount would
have been very little in comparison to the fund needed to operate a regular school
75 ibid, 235
181
system.”76 In fact, it is possible that the movement’s heavy reliance on the muballighiin
system in the early years was partially dictated by finances, as the strict Dutch
requirements for school subsidies kept Muhammadiya schools from receiving these
subsidies in their first several years of operation.
After the Dutch allowed Muhammadiya to operate outside of Jogjakarta in 1921,
and in the subsequent years as Muhammadiya schools began to obtain increasing levels
o f government subsidy, Muhammadiya spread rapidly throughout Java and Madura.
The trajectory o f the movement’s spread, however, shows just how dependent it was on
the reception o f the local population to the spread of Muhammadiya schools. Between
1924 and 1933 Muhammadiya spread throughout the archipelago;77 in roughly the same
period, Muhammadiya was recording substantial growth in Central Java but hitting a
roadblock in the more rural western and eastern parts of the island as well as in Madura.
This roadblock was Nahdatul Ulema, a Muslim organization committed to traditional
Islam and opposed to Muhammadiya’s message of religious reform. Nahdatul Ulema’s
base of power, in turn, was in the pesantren that they ran - the traditional Islamic
schools discussed in Chapter Four whose curricula focused almost exclusively on
recitation of the Quran.7* Muhammadiya consciously presented its schools as a form of
Muslim education superior to that o f the pesantren; its 1925 congress in Jogjakarta, for
example, featured a play in which an orthodox Muslim who had initially sent his son to
a pesantren discovers that it is in bad shape and transfers his son to the (infinitely
76 Alfian, 166
77 ibid, 180
78 ibid, 188
182
superior) Muhammadiya school.79In the areas of Java where Muhammadiya had been
most successful, its schools had not entirely supplanted the pesantren but had
successfully wooed away many o f their students, but “the apparent success of Nahdatul
Ulema to keep the pesantren alive and running was probably the most important
factor of Muhammadiya’s apparent failure to penetrate the rural areas of Java and
Madura.”10 In key swaths of Java and Madura, then, the spread o f the Muhammadiya
movement piggybacked on the spread of its schools, not vice versa - where the
Muhammadiya version o f modem Muslim education was rejected, the movement itself
was as well.
Gaining Activists for the Movement
The question of Muhammadiya’s growth was not solely one of extrinsic growth
- gaining new supporters from outside Islamic modernism - but gaining ones from
within it as well. I noted in the introduction that religious nationalist movements
proliferated in many colonies, but that few survived for long. In Southeast Asia, James
Peacock notes that “during the half-century since the florescence of reformism in
Southeast Asia, the movement has evolved differently in the varied regions. Only in
Indonesia does the Muslim reformation remain a major, organized force. Represented
early in the twentieth century by numerous small movements, the reformation in
Indonesia has coalesced into a few large regional movements and a single, powerful
national one - Muhammadiya. The Muhammadiya schools seem to have played an
79 Peacock, 47
“ Alfian, 188
11 Peacock, 24
183
important role in helping the movement attract members o f other Muslim modernist
movements to join it. As Alfian notes about JIB, another Muslim modernist movement,
“many JIB members also found good reason to like Muhammadiya, simply because
many of them were to become teachers o f Muhammadiya schools or doctors of its
clinics or polyclinics.”*1 This incentive seems to have gone beyond the limited sphere of
Islamic modernism to incorporate representatives of other trends as well. As Alfian
speculates, Muhammadiya’s social services, including its schools, “had provided a
number of jobs to a variety of people - secular nationalists, Muslim modernists, the
kiyais and the religious teachers. The meaning of the few jobs that Muhammadiya could
offer was probably increased when the depression of the early 1930’s had also reached
and hurt Java.”*3 People who worked for Muhammadiya did not have to join the
movement, but it seems that many of them did, perhaps initially coming to work for the
movement solely because it provided a good job but becoming more convinced of the
truth of its message through sustained interaction with its members.
Just as Muhammadiya’s schools and other social services served to bring both
other Islamic modernists as well as people not initially sympathetic to the movement
into it, so did the DAV schools. The DAV schools’ ability to produce graduates who
could successfully compete for government jobs and university positions meant that it
recruited students far beyond Arya Samaj families - many Hindus who did not endorse
the more radical tenets of the Samaj on religious reform nonetheless sent their sons to
K Alfian, 239
** Alfian, 240
184
DAV schools or to the College. Students of the College, in turn, were repeatedly
recruited into non-educational activities which reflected or directly advanced the
religious reform agenda of the Samaj. The College developed a system of boarding
houses which by 1914 housed 687 students in an environment which mandated the
implementation of at least some parts of the Samaj’s reform agenda; for example, no
boarding house run by the College was allowed to set up different dining rooms or
dining times for members o f different castes,*4 which meant that students of different
castes ate together in defiance o f common Hindu practice at the time. Kenneth Jones
notes that “with practice mobilization of college students proved relatively easy,
creating a pool of talent and energy that could be used to support a variety of causes.”*5
These causes ranged from relatively innocuous charity work, such as participation in
campaigns to provide famine and flood relief, to projects intimately connected with the
Samaj’s message of religious reform, such as converting members of other religions
“back” to Hinduism**. Pandey reports that Lala Hans Raj, the College president, “sent
his workers to Malabar where they challenged the foundations of the local caste
system,” helping members of low castes to assert their right to engage in such activities
54 Pandey, 75
*5 Jones, 239
** The Arya Samaj, along with other Hindu nationalist groups, believes that the original population o f India
(before the Muslim conquests) was entirely Hindu, and argues that any Indian who is now Christian or
Muslim is descended from Indians who were originally Hindu and converted to Christianity or Islam.
Therefore, they see the conversion o f Christian or Muslim Indians to Hinduism as a conversion o f these
Indians ”backn to their original religion - Hinduism
185
as using the public roads and to defend them to court*7 The British clearly thought that
students o f the DAV College in particular were major participants in provincial politics
- commenting on the 1907 disturbances in Punjab that resulted in the short-lived
deportation of Lajpat Rai, one o f the Samaj’s most prominent leaders, Home Political
Department Proceedings in 1912 quoted Denzil Ibbetson, the British official designated
to investigate the causes of the unrest, as having “informed the Government that the
Samaj was a centre of seditious talk and the students of the DAV College took part in
the riots.”** Fearing precisely such a perception, shortly after the riots College president
Lala Hans Raj led a delegation to the Lieutenant-Governor to argue that “the Samaj was
an organization which had for its sole object the religious educational achievement of its
members and that at the time of the last disturbance in Lahore the College was closed
and he firmly believed that DAV College boys had no hand in it.”” While the DAV
College’s excellent reputation for providing a quality education attracted many Hindu
students unconvinced by the full Arya reform agenda, then, the evidence strongly
suggests that many of these students had become active in advancing that agenda by the
time they left the College.
17 Pandey, 75
** Home Political (Confidential) Department Proceedings, Part A, April 1912, No.4, quoted in Pandey, 144
” Tribune, May 28,1907, p .l, quoted in Jones, 275
186
Chapter Five: Religious Nationalism 101, Section A: How

Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya Schools Spread Religious
Nationalism
“It is quite true that I am one o f those persons who raised the cry of ‘national
education’ in North India and I have since then used it rather effectively for
enlisting sympathy and collecting funds for the various institutions that were
from time to time started to impart education on ‘nationalist’ lines The
Mohamedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh was a symbol of the new
Muslim nationalism educational in function, but political in scope and
effect. The Arya Samaj, representing the new nationalism of the Hindus,
followed suit, and the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College.... was the fruit of its
efforts....each professed to provide its own kind of national education....... each
institution created an atmosphere of its own - national to a certain extent, so far
as the cult of love of country was concerned, but otherwise openly sectarian.”
Lala Lajpat Rai, The Problem o f National

Education in India, (London: George Allen
& Unwin Ltd, 1920), 16-17
Lala Lajpat Rai, the most prominent Arya Samaj ist after the death of
Dayananda Saraswati, was also one of the loudest and most well-known cheerleaders
for the DAV school cause. His 1920 analysis of the type of “nationalist” education
offered in the DAV schools came in the form o f a self-critique, offered years after his
brief deportation to Burma after “disturbances” swept Punjab in 1907 had made him a
household name in North India, and after he had distanced himself from the Samaj.
Lajpat Rai participated sporadically in the Congress Party, particularly after curtailing
his involvement in the Samaj, and the view o f DAV and Aligarh education which he
expresses here is informed by an aversion to religiously-based imaginings of the
community shared by Congress. It also communicates very effectively the self-
conscious agenda o f the DAV schools in the pre-independence period: to “impart
187
education on ‘nationalist’ lines,” subject to their understanding of what constituted the
“nation.”
In the previous chapter I demonstrated that the DAV and Muhammadiya
schools were part and parcel of the state-subsidized system of Westem-style education
in India and Indonesia. Eligibility for state subsidies required these schools to adopt a
curriculum very similar in its basic outlines to that in use in government schools, a
similarity also motivated by the schools’ desire to produce students capable of passing
government exams for entrance into the bureaucracy or the university. Given these
constraints, how did the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya impart their religious
imaginings o f the nation through their schools? And quotes horn leaders of these
movements aside, what constitutes evidence o f nationalism - religious or otherwise -
in these or any other school curricula?
Some evidence of national feeling transmitted through schools is readily
apparent - the surreptitious singing of the Indonesian “national anthem,” for example,
in a 1930’s secular nationalist school in Sumatra documented by Bowen,1or books
which incited such anger at colonial rule that “by the end of the class students were
aching to go kill a Dutchman.”2 Religious nationalist education, by contrast, was often
less focused on animosity towards the colonizer and more on the internal dimensions of
national identity - spreading the movements’ understanding of the correct practice of
the faith within the community, and ensuring the dominance - moral and material - of
that community within the colony. One way o f accomplishing this was through the
1John R. Bowen, Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), 95
2 ibid, 98
188
construction and teaching of a history which centered the contributions o f the
community at the heart of national identity, while defining other communities’ histories
and traditions as alien to it. This approach to nationalist education can be seen in the
case of the DAV schools studied by Kumar in the 1980’s, which offered “a specific
view of history in which the conquests of India by the Mughals and the English are
seen as causes of India’s cultural and moral decline. Special respect for warriors like
Rana Pratap and Shivaji, both of whom fought the Mughals, is symbolic of the
ideological themes embedded in this view of history.”3
The content of curricula can be religious nationalist; so can the medium in
which the curricula are taught The decision to anoint one particular language as the
language of the nation in a linguistically heterogeneous colony is a highly charged one,
with the potential to define speakers of other languages as somehow being outside the
nation or to deprive them of the material benefits which come with speaking the official
lingua franca. The elevation of a particular language in a multilingual society to
national status can have inclusive implications, as the choice of Hebrew rather than
Yiddish or any other European language spoken by immigrants to Israel did. It can also
have intentionally divisive implications, as was the case with the campaign to adopt
Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the bureaucracy and
education in North India. To the extent that a school teaches a language particularly
associated with one religious community while situating that instruction in the context
o f the assumption that that language will, or should, be the official language o f the
3 Krishna Kumar, "Hindu Revivalism and Education in North-Central India", in Fundamentalisms and
Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott
189
nation, then I would suggest that religious nationalist education is being practiced. If
a school attended solely by Hindus taught Hindi in Devanagari script solely as a way of
preserving that community’s tradition or inspiring pride in its heritage without
suggesting a larger role for the language and script which transcended the boundaries
o f the community, this would not be a religious nationalist action, because it would
have no implication for relations between Hindus and other communities, nor would it
place members o f those other communities at any disadvantage. But to teach Hindi in
Devanagari script as part o f a larger campaign to make that language and script the
national language, with all o f the attendant disadvantages that that would visit upon the
Muslim population, would be a religious nationalist project.
The question of an intent to place one’s own religious community in a more
privileged position than other religious communities which are defined a priori as
being rivals can also be an integral part of religious nationalist education, even if it
leads to teaching subjects which on their face seem to have no religious or communal
content. In colonial north India, the success of Hindu and Muslim young men in
obtaining coveted bureaucratic posts had early on become a barometer of the relative
strength of their communities as a whole. The concept o f creating educational
institutions restricted to students of a particular community for the express purpose of
increasing that community’s chances to obtain bureaucratic posts had a provenance
almost as old as British rule itself; the first school founded by the East India Company -
the Calcutta Madrasa —was founded in 1781 in order to “qualify the sons of
Mohamedan gentlemen for responsible and lucrative offices in the state, even at that
190
time largely monopolised by the Hindus.”4 Concern almost a century later over
Muslims’ purported “backwardness” in obtaining their “share” o f bureaucratic posts led
Sayyed Ahmed Khan to found the Mohamedan Anglo-Oriental College, known as
Aligarh, in the United Provinces in 1875, and Aryas in Punjab from the beginning
intended their schools to equip Hindu students in the same way. Since the higher-level
posts in the bureaucracy required fluency in English, the desire to equip DAV students
to compete for those posts led DAV school leaders to insist that the education which
they provided stress knowledge of English, rather than focusing primarily on Sanskrit
and Vedic studies. The level of their commitment to this cause is demonstrated by the
fact that they were willing to cause a split in the DAV Managing Committee -
described in the previous chapter - rather than agree to tilt the school’s curricula more
heavily towards the provision o f purely religious studies which would not equip
students for success in the colonial world. In this context, then, the decision to focus
DAV education more heavily on English than on Sanskrit can be seen as a decision to
engage in religious nationalist education.
Having said this, however, it is important to note that religious nationalist
education also includes at least some emphasis on the teaching o f reformed religion as
the movement understands it. Solely preparing students to compete against members o f
other communities defined as rivals based on their religious affiliation, or solely
prioritizing the historical contributions of one community instead of another, is not
sufficient to create religious nationalist education; what such strategies are creating, if
they are not complemented by religious education, is communal education. If this type
4 A.P. Howell, Education in British India, (Calcutta: Government Printing, 1872), p .l, as quoted in
Mukeiji, 22
191
of education is supplemented, however, with education in reformed religion, then it can
be considered religious nationalist education. As was discussed at length in Chapter
One, reformed religion for the religious nationalist is not some obscure topic
unconnected with daily life - the lack of its practice is responsible for the calamities
experienced in daily life, and only when reformed religion is truly practiced will the
community prosper.
As will have become clear from my discussion above, my concept of what
constitutes religious nationalist education places a lot of emphasis on motivation -
why something is being taught, not just what is being taught. Motivation, of course, can
be hard to assess, particularly in a historical study in which the participants cannot be
interviewed to assess the reasons for particular curricular decisions. To the extent that
subjects taught in the DAV and Muhammadiya schools can be connected to larger
campaigns waged by these movements, whose rationale we do know, then I would
argue that it is safe to infer that this same rationale informs the decision to teach these
subjects in the schools. For example, if we know that the Arya Samaj was a key
promoter of the adoption of Hindi in the Devanagari script on the grounds that Hindus
needed a common language to be a nation, and on the grounds that Hindi should be the
national language of India, it would seem safe to assume that Hindi is being taught in
the DAV schools for the same reasons, thus clearly categorizing it as religious
nationalist education.
Geography, History, and Language 101: The Religious Nationalist Educational

Project in Indonesia
Indonesian nationalists - religious and secular - worked in an archipelago of
thousands o f islands which had never before been linked under a single political regime
192
or shared a corporate identity. As in other colonies, developing a sense of national unity
would require downplaying a history in which Indonesians had “actively assisted in the
subjugation of each other,”5 with forces from the areas first conquered by the Dutch,
particularly Java, playing an instrumental role in subduing later conquests, such as
Minangkabau and Aceh in Sumatra. Both religious and secular nationalists fought to
create this sense o f national unity, and the schools that they founded were at the forefront
of this battle. In some cases both types of schools waged the campaign for national unity
in the same way - teaching the geography of the archipelago as a whole rather than
focusing solely on Java, for example, or teaching Bahasa Indonesia - the Indonesian
language - rather than or in addition to the languages o f particular regions. In other cases
the curricula of secular and religious nationalist schools diverged more sharply, with
Muhammadiya schools prioritizing the teaching of Arabic - usually absent from secular
nationalist schools - and situating the teaching of Indonesian history in a very different
context than that o f their more secular counterparts. It is important to realize, however,
that even where the curricula of both schools appeared to be the same, they were
informed by very different understandings of what constituted Indonesia, and what
Indonesia’s place in the larger world was. In seeking a unified nation, secular and
religious nationalists both argued that underneath all of its diversity Indonesians shared a
single cultural base. Within this framework secular nationalists played down differences
in the various cultures o f the archipelago in favor of an insistence that all of these cultures
shared a common cultural base, an approach which required recognizing and validating
the contributions o f animist, Hindu, and other non-Islamic religions and practices to
5 A History o f Modern Indonesia, M.C. Ricklefs, (London: Macmillan, 1981), 139. Ricklefs notes that in
1905 15,866 Europeans served in the colonial army and navy, while 26,276 Indonesians did. Ricklefs, 140
193
Indonesian culture. For Muhammadiya, Indonesia was a country 90% o f whose
inhabitants claimed to be Muslim; influences deemed non-Islamic had to be filtered out
of that majority’s practices, and only those influences which could be traced back to
Islam should be enshrined at the heart of national culture. By examining various aspects
of Muhammadiya curricula, then, and by comparing them with secular nationalist
approaches to education whenever possible, we can discover the ways in which
Muhammadiya schools attempted to create an “Indonesian national consciousness in
Islamic terms,” terms which rendered Indonesian history understandable only in terms of
larger themes of Islamic history and which placed Indonesia firmly at the center of a
larger Malayo-Muslim world.
The Teaching o f Geography
One area in which both Muhammadiya and secular nationalist schools were
similar to each other - and different from their government counterparts - was in their
teaching o f geography. Government schools on Java spent a significant amount of time
teaching Indonesian students geography because the Cultivation System
(cultuurstelsel), which was based on compulsory cultivation o f export crops to be sold
to the state at fixed prices, required the constant production o f surveyors capable of
carrying out annual redivisions o f desa (village) land there.6 Since the teaching of
geography in government schools was exclusively for the purpose of the production of
such surveyors, government schools on Java, routinely taught only the geography of
Java and not that of the rest o f the archipelago. In good liberal colonialist fashion,
Kroeskamp, the historian of Dutch education in Indonesia, notes that the Javanese
6 Kroeskamp, 34S
194
student had rather narrow horizons - his “knowledge and interest usually did not
extend beyond the desa in which (he) lived and (his) immediate surroundings”7 - and
bemoans the fact that while in-depth geographical study of the archipelago would
“have been useful to expand the mind o f the Javanese student,” a lack of teacher-
training, good geography books, and a shortage of maps turned geography in
government schools into “a dull framework o f topographical facts, especially
concerning the island o f Java, sometimes extended in a small way to the other islands.”*
Where Kroeskamp traced Java-centric courses on geography to the unintended
but unfortunate cause of inadequate resources, members of later generations of
Muhammadiya, not surprisingly, saw the hand of Dutch officials determined to keep
Indonesians from knowing about and feeling solidarity with each other. Ahistorically
projecting back in time a concept of “Indonesia” which was only beginning to exist
during his childhood, an elderly member of Muhammadiya recalled his tum-of-the-
century government education, by noting that “children of my generation did not know
what Indonesia was. What is Indonesia? There is no Indonesian people. What exists is
‘Javanese’. In the (government) primary school the geography of Indonesia was not
taught, only the geography of Java.” This informant brings up the Java-centric view
taught in government schools in order to counterpose it with that of Muhammadiya
schools, which, wherever they were located in the archipelago, taught about that
archipelago as a whole. In this Muhammadiya and secular nationalist schools did not
differ, in that they both instructed students that they were part of a larger entity called
7 Kroeskamp, 345
* ibid
195
Indonesia, and they were both instrumental in disseminating this understanding of
“Indonesia” as a single entity which should be ruled by “Indonesians.”
The Question o f Language, Part One: Malay/Bahasa Indonesia
The state-building project in Indonesia required the creation of laws through
which the colony would be administered, but that administration presumed the prior
creation of a colonial bureaucracy sustained by Indonesian bureaucrats. At the highest
levels that bureaucracy would function in Dutch, but an appropriate native language had
to be chosen for the conduct of lower level bureaucratic affairs. Nothing approaching a
common mother tongue existed - on Java people spoke Javanese, Sundanese, or
Madurese; the Minangkabau people in Sumatra spoke Minangkabau, and throughout the
archipelago hundreds of languages and dialects coexisted. To the extent that there was
any lingua franca, it was Malay, spoken as a mother tongue by almost no Indonesian
before this century but a base - in varying degrees o f looseness - for several of the
regional Indonesian languages,9 and it was Malay which became the language o f the
bureaucracy.
Malay did not, however, become the main language taught in government
schools. J.C. Baud, the initiator of government education, had stipulated that education
be delivered in the vernacular of a given area, and only if that were impossible would
Malay be used. Since a major purpose of the government school system was to produce
bureaucrats, the practice of discouraging Malay instruction in these schools was highly
impractical. As the government educational system evolved, Malay was taught in schools
charged with preparing prospective bureaucrats, but even in these schools it received less
9 Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia, Joel Kahn,
(Providence: Berg Publishers, 1993), 135
196
attention and fewer resources than the teaching of the native languages of a given area.10
In practice this meant that in the early years of the educational system, when Westem-
style education was restricted almost exclusively to children o f the elite heading for
bureaucratic posts, almost all government schools taught Malay. As educational provision
widened, a ranking system was introduced into the schools, with enrollment in Grade I
schools being limited to elite future bureaucrats while students o f more humble origins
and fewer bureaucratic prospects were routed into Grade II schools. Children in Grade I
schools learned Malay; for the most part, children in Grade II schools did not. Recalling
his study in a (presumably Grade II) government school in Java under Dutch rule, an
elderly member of Muhammadiya noted that “the language taught there was only
Javanese. Teachers spoke Javanese in the classroom...counting numbers was also in
Javanese.”11
While colonial officials saw creating a viable colonial bureaucracy as the only
reason for the spread of Malay, Indonesian nationalists - religious and secular - looked
more to the language’s potential to unify people from across the archipelago into a single
nation. Malay became known as Bahasa Indonesia, which has been the official language
of Indonesia since her independence, and Kahn argues that by 1928 all segments of the
nationalist movement which began to emerge in Indonesia in the first decades of the
twentieth century had become committed to the widest possible dissemination of
Indonesian throughout the islands. The 1920’s and 1930’s saw the publishing of the first
10 In 1862, for example, students in the first four grades o f government schools spent 46 hours a week in
courses addressing various aspects o f the Javanese language as compared to 34 hours on reading, dictation,
and letterwriting in Malay. Kroeskamp, 340
11 Mitsuo Nakamura, The Crescent Arises Over the Banyan Tree: A Study o f the Muhammadiyah Movement
in A Central Javanese Town, (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983) 87-88
197
novels in Indonesian, as well as the production of Indonesian-language textbooks12 used
in nationalist schools. Some of these schools, such as the short-lived secular nationalist
Our Teaching House school in the highlands o f northern Sumatra studied by Bowen,
made a point o f loaning students newly-published Indonesian novels, not yet widely
available during the school’s three-year existence in the late 1930’s.13
Muhammadiya supported the spread of Indonesian as strongly if not more so than
its secular nationalist counterparts. Indonesian was taught in Muhammadiya schools,
even those in areas where the majority o f the population were traders and craftspeople
and the students were not expected to pursue the bureaucratic employment which would
have provided an economic incentive for the study of Malay. In the Javanese village of
Kotagede bilingual or multilingual graduates of Muhammadiya schools in this period
spoke Javanese at home and Indonesian in Muhammadiya,14 and Indonesian was used in
Muhammadiya’s national meetings and publications.
So far, the story of Muhammadiya’s attachment to Indonesian appears
indistinguishable from that of the secular nationalists. But Muhammadiya’s
commitment to Malay/Indonesian predated its elevation to the status of a national
cause by the secular nationalist movement, and the reasons for its prioritization of
Malay were different in many respects from those which informed secular nationalist
attachment to it. Knowledge of Malay had long been the key to advanced learning in
Islam; after learning basic Arabic and Javanese in the traditional Islamic schools
12 Bowen, Sumatran Politics, 95
13 ibid
14 Nakamura, 87
198
known as pesantren, students wishing to continue their study of the faith could only do
so in Malay.15 When advances in steamship transportation made it possible for large
numbers o f Indonesian Muslims to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in the late nineteenth
century, Malayo-Indonesians quickly came to be the largest foreign group in Mecca.16
In Mecca, as Dutch Orientalist Snouck Hurgronje noted in the 1890’s, Malay was used
to communicate between Muslims o f “Malay race in the fullest meaning o f the
term.............from Siam and Malacca to New Guinea;”17it also provided entrde into an
Islamic modernist trend emerging in the larger Malayo-Muslim world and centered in
Singapore, where Islamic modernists founded schools, journals, and groups which later
spread into Malaysia and Indonesia.16 Muhammadiya founder Ahmad Dahlan had
spent several years in this Malayo-Muslim milieu in Mecca, learning Malay there and
ensuring its use in Muhammadiya during his tenure - a tenure which, in its stretch from
1912 until his death in 1923, predated the widespread adoption of Malay by the secular
nationalist movement. Other members of Muhammadiya who had spent time in Mecca
played a key role in the spread of Muhammadiya throughout the archipelago,19 and
Muhammadiya activists consciously tried to associate their movement not just with the
Malay language but also with symbols of Malay as opposed to strictly Javanese culture,
which tended to be more infused with non-Islamic symbols and practices. This seems
15 Snouck Hurgronge, The Achehnese, (Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906), 5
16 James Peacock, Purifying the Faith: The Muhammadijah Movement in Indonesian Islam, (Menlo Park:
The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, 1978) 23-24
17 Snouck Hurgronje 1931: 215,229 ff, quoted in Nakamura, 86
16 Peacock, Purifying the Faith, 23-4
19 For example, a Muhammadiya pilgrim introduced the movement to West Sumatra in 1925 upon his
return from Mecca
199
to have particularly been the case for younger members o f Muhammadiya; at the
movement’s 1925 congress, Fakhruddin, the movement’s first vice-chair, wore Western
clothes with a Javanese headdress, but younger Muhammadiya members usually
donned the Malay cap rather than Javanese headdress, which Indonesia scholar James
Peacock interprets as “Javanese syncretic culture (being) replaced by a Malayo-
Indian santri culture.”20
While the spread of Indonesian throughout the archipelago was a goal for both
Muhammadiya and secular nationalist movements, then, the reasons o f each for doing
so differed substantially. Both sets of movements saw Indonesian as a tool for unifying
an extremely diverse population around the dissemination of a common language, but
for Muhammadiya the importance of spreading Malay/Indonesian went far beyond the
language’s usefulness in uniting people within the archipelago. Knowledge of Malay
would firmly anchor Indonesian Muslims within a larger Malayo-Muslim world which,
to Muhammadiya members’ minds, sustained a culture that was more authentically
Muslim and less permeated with non-Islamic practices than that found around them on
Java, and parts o f which were specifically involved in the transmission of Islamic
modernist concepts. Interestingly, missionaries in Indonesia sensed exactly the same
potential for the spread o f Islam in the archipelago through the spread o f Malay as
Muhammadiya did; believing that Malay was o f Islamic origin,21 they promoted
20 Peacock, 47
21 Steenbrink, 98
200
regional dialects instead of Malay and with very few exceptions did not teach the latter
in their schools.22
The Teaching o f History
Muhammadiya sought to situate Indonesian Muslims not only within the larger
Malayo-Muslim world, but also within the universe of Islam as a whole. In
government schools, the history of Indonesia and her islands was noticeable by its
absence; government educational reports from the late nineteenth century “did not
contain a single reference to the teaching o f history,”23 although “interesting historical
events” were occasionally mentioned during geography lessons,24 and anecdotal
evidence from the early twentieth century do not suggest that history was subsequently
added to the government school curriculum. Muhammadiya schools, by way of
contrast, taught the history of Indonesia as a part of a larger history of Islam. In classic
reformist style, “the glory and perfection of Islam’s early period were emphasized and
contrasted to the regressions in the subsequent periods of Muslim world history,
including that of Indonesia. The upshot of casting Islamic history in that perspective
was to hold Muslims themselves responsible for the regression and degenerations,
urging Muslims to strive to restore the greatness of Islam in the modem world.”23
In Muhammadiya schools, Indonesia’s history could only be understood as part
of a trajectory of development of the Islamic world as a whole, and only those parts of
Indonesia’s history which had witnessed the triumph of Islam within the archipelago
22 Missionaries in the Minahassa taught Malay in their schools. Kroeskamp, 301
23 Kroeskamp, 398
" ib id
23 Nakamura, 89
201
should be looked to as a model for the future. This latter stress was particularly
important on Java, whose history of Hinduized empires, lasting from the founding of
the central Javanese kingdom, Mataram, in the eighth century until the demise of the
east Java kingdom of Majpahit in the seventeenth century, had allowed a climate in
which, in Muhammadiya’s view, correct Islamic practice had been corrupted by Hindu
traditions. With the rise of a newly Islamized Mataram in the seventeenth century, the
kingdom of Majpahit had fallen and its remaining royalty fled to Bali, and in 1925
Muhammadiya aroused sustained protest over the publication by a Dutch company of a
Javanese folk history entitled Serat Dermagandul, which blamed Islam for the
downfall of the Majpahit empire and argued that Islam had rendered the Javanese half
hearted. The only cure for the Javanese, the folk history suggested, was the revival of
the old Hindu Javanism.26 Members of Muhammadiya would not brook this
interpretation of Javanese history, and more particularly this recipe for Javanese
renewal, and protested strongly against the publication of a book which would make
such claims.
Whose Traditions? - The Question ofAdat, and the Role o f Arabic
Just as Java’s Hindu empires had been a symbol of (Muslim) Indonesia’s
downfall in Muhammadiya historiography, so were the incorporation o f animist and
Hindu practices into the everyday lives o f Muslims a concrete manifestation of the
latter’s demise which had to be eliminated. Muhammadiya’s understanding of what
constituted correct everyday practice in the religious and social world set it on a collision
26 Alfian, 206
202
course with the Dutch, who from the early part of the twentieth century had been
involved in a systematic attempt to gather information about, and base customary law on,
the practices of the various peoples in the colony. Just as the British had embarked on
their efforts to systematically study Indian languages and customs almost immediately
after their assumption of political control in 1772, when the Dutch completed their
conquest of Indonesia by bringing the Outer Islands under their control in the first decade
of the twentieth century, they began what was perhaps their most sustained attempt to
understand Indonesian “tradition” —the process of cataloguing adat. The Encyclopedia
o f the Dutch East Indies, published between 1917-1935, defined adat as “the customs and
practices that guide every aspect of indigenous life: social relations, agriculture, treatment
of the sick, judicial arrangements, ancestor worship, burial of the dead, games and
popular entertainment, etc,”27 and Dutch civil servants were sent out to study and detail
these practices throughout the archipelago. Just as British officials in the late eighteenth
century consulted Hindu pundits and Muslim ulema in an attempt to unearth a base of
shared customs which could serve as the foundation of British law for the two
communities, so a major motivation for the Dutch cataloguing o f adat was to find a basis
for Dutch law. As Comelis van Vollenhoven, Holland’s foremost scholar o f adat argued,
“the colonial administration should engage in ‘expert examination’ and incorporate
indigenous social prescriptions and customary law in its administrative procedures
whenever appropriate.”28Van Vollenhoven sought to mine the adat of various regions in
27 Gouda, 54
“ ibid, 57-8
203
order to unearth common values and mores which could serve as the basis of a single
customary law to be applied throughout the colony.
The maintenance of adat in and of itself posed no particular ideological or
political problem for Indonesia’s secular nationalists. To the extent that, as Gouda notes,
“the emphasis on the internal differences and fragmentation o f ethnic cultures indirectly
yielded a ‘divide and rule’ colonial policy” which “tr(ied) to reinforce the political
sovereignty and local pride of the various regions of the archipelago.............(in order) to
quell the burgeoning sense of supra-ethnic national identity among all Indonesians,” 29
secular nationalists opposed not adat itself but the Dutch fetishization of the differences
within it. The secular nationalist response to the potentially divisive implications of the
Dutch adat discourse was that despite their attachment to practices which varied on the
regional level, Indonesians possessed a common pool o f values and traditions. Secular
nationalists would have found no political advantage in attacking local traditions or
attempting to winnow them in an attempt to come up with a more truly uniform culture;
this would have would have earned them unnecessary enemies, and so they adopted the
much more palatable strategy o f praising the diversity-within-unity that Indonesians were
alleged to share.
Members of Muhammadiya saw the adat question quite differently. In their
minds, adat represented a perversion of true Islam which had to be erased and replaced
with correct Islamic practice. Muhammadiya’s assessment of the wide gap separating
Islam and adat was almost identical to that o f C. Snouck Hurgronje, the Orientalist
“expert” on Islam who almost singlehandedly formulated Dutch policy on the subject.
*lbid
204
Hurgronje argued that while a large majority o f Indonesians were Muslims, “the great
majority pursue their lives in their half-pagan and wholly superstitious thoughts and
practices, only imperfectly clad in a few phrases and other outward and visible signs of
Mohammedanism.”30 It was adat and domestic law, Hurgronje asserted, that dictated
Indonesians’ behavior, not Islam, and in Java this adat was based largely on a view of
the world as filled with gods and goddesses who must be placated by particular actions,
such as building one’s house facing a certain direction in order to respect a particular
goddess31 or celebrating communal feasts (slametan) which keep people safe
(“slam ef ’) when practiced at particular points in the life-cycle such as the day that a
child first sets her feet on the ground.32 Winnowing this adat and removing the parts
which it viewed as incompatible with Islam was essential to Muhammadiya’s project of
religious reform, and “correct” Islamic practice shorn of these “un-Islamic” accretions
was taught in Muhammadiya schools.
An important part of discerning what truly constituted an “authentic” Muslim
Indonesian culture was learning to read - not just memorize and recite - the Quran, and
to this end Arabic was a key subject in Muhammadiya schools. In the traditional
Islamic schools known as pesantren, children learned the Arabic alphabet, memorized
30 Alfian, 19
31 Haji Masjhudi, a prominent Muhammadiya leader in the Javanese village o f Kotagede interviewed by
Nakamura, noted that the construction o f his house was “irregular” in that it had ignored the local belief
that houses must face southward as a manifestation o f respect for the Goddess o f the Southern Ocean.
Nakamura, 73
32 James Peacock, Muslim Puritans: Reformist Psychology in Southeast Asian Islam , (Berkeley: University
o f California Press, 1978), 44-46. Slametans are also held to celebrate days in the Islamic calendar, such as
the birth o f the Prophet, but the “animistic” form o f these celebrations alienates modernist Muslims, who
usually do not practice them. While much o f Muhammadiya’s aversion to Javanese adat is based upon its
belief in spirits, it is interesting to note that in Peacock’s 1970 survey o f Muhammadiya members he found
that 80% o f Muhammadiya students interviewed believed in jin n . Peacock, 42
205
Quranic verses in Arabic, and had particular verses explained to them in Javanese,
explanations which they had to accept on faith since the level of Arabic that they had
achieved did not enable them to interpret the texts for themselves. Because products of
the pesantren could not analyze the Quran for themselves, they depended on the
explanations of their teachers as their outline for correct practice of the faith, and it was
this reliance, Islamic modernists charged, that allowed the continuation of un-Islamic
practices under the guise that they were Islamic. Only if students achieved a level of
Arabic instruction that enabled them to read and interpret the Quran for themselves
would they come to realize the correctness of the version of reformed Islam that
Muhammadiya and other modernists were preaching. In Muhammadiya schools, then,
Arabic was taught for the purpose of enabling students to read the texts for themselves,
with students being encouraged to question others’ interpretations of them.33
Of course, the teaching of Arabic had another benefit beyond simply allowing
Muslims direct access to the Quran - it also made it possible for students to read books
produced in the Arabic-speaking Muslim world. In Takengen in the highlands of
Sumatra, students in the older, more traditional Muslim schools had learned to recite
Arabic passages but had studied about Islam in Malay; students in the new Muslim
schools, modernist or not, which opened in the highlands in the 1930’s studied Arabic
grammar and then Islamic topics in Arabic. This wider knowledge of Arabic, in turn,
allowed students o f these Takengen schools to use Arabic books which were first
ordered from West Sumatra and then from Cairo, opening up new possibilities for the
33 Nakamura, 88
206
transmission of knowledge about and ideas from the Muslim Middle East into the
Indonesian Muslim milieu.34
In very substantive ways, the imagining of the Indonesian community which
Muhammadiya sought to disseminate in its schools differed from the imagining that
secular nationalists advocated. While the secular nationalist project was an inclusive
one which respected various Indonesian traditions and practices as a way of bringing
everyone on board, for Muhammadiya the force that united all Indonesians was not
some putative shared past or history - it was the universalizing force of correctly-
practiced Islam, and the process of reviving that version of Islam would require
winnowing other practices out of the Indonesian national culture. Perhaps the most
vivid sense o f the diversion of these two national imaginings is prefigured in the
account of one of Bowen’s informants, Tengku Asaluddin, in Takengen. Asaluddin had
entered Muhammadiya in the 1930’s, and as a sixteen-year-old he left his home town
of Isak in 1933 to pursue religious studies in Takengen, where he studied Arabic at the
Muhammadiya school. The following is Asaluddin’s account, with Bowen’s asides in
parentheses.
“In Takengen I joined the youth group o f Muhammadiya, the Hizbul Wathan. We
joined together to defend our land. We learned “Indonesia Raya” (Greater Indonesia,
the nationalist anthem, banned at that time by the Dutch), but we sang it with different
words as theHizbul Wathan anthem. It went (he sings to the tune of “Indonesia Raya”):
“Islam is based on the Quran

Religion is the command of God
Brought by the Prophet Mohammed
May God bless him and grant him peace
Come, let us all
Obediently carry it out.”35
34 Bowen, Sumatran Politics, 98
207
“Indonesia Raya”’s three stanzas, by contrast, contain no reference to Islam; the first
stanza, which is very similar in tone and reference to the other two, is quoted below.
“Indonesia, our native country

Consecrated with our spilt blood
Where we all arise to stand guard
Over this our Motherland
Indonesia our nationality
Our people and our country
Come then, let us all demand
Indonesia united
Long live our land,
Long live our state
Our nation, our people, and all
Arouse then its spirit
Organise its own bodies
To obtain Indonesia the Great.”
Chorus:
“Indonesia the Great, independent and free,

My beloved land and country
Indonesia the Great, independent and free,
Long live Indonesia the Great.” 36
The beauty of Asaluddin’s story is compounded by his aside that although “Indonesia
Raya” was banned by the Dutch, when Asaluddin and his colleagues sang the Hizbul
Wathan version, the Dutch district officer would sit listening and nodding to the
rhythm, not comprehending the meaning.37
Just as Muhammadiya sought to stress only what it deemed to be the Muslim
aspects of Indonesia’s languages, culture, and history and denied the validity o f other
influences in shaping the national culture, so did the Arya Samaj seek to prioritize
35 Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse, 58
36 As translated in National Anthems o f the World, Seventh Edition, ed. W.L. Reed and M.J. Bristow,
(London: Blandford Press, 1987), 236
37 Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse, 58
208
languages, cultures, and parts of north Indian history associated with Hindu triumph in
their imagining of the Indian nation. For the Arya Samaj, teaching reformed Hindu
practice, creating and ensuring a privileged position for Hindus in north Indian society,
and unifying Hindus into a single nation was done in large part through the choice of
languages which were taught in the DAV schools.
The Languages of the Arya Samaj’s National Renewal Part One: Sanskrit vs.
English
If the Arya Samaj’s primary purpose was to fashion a recipe for the renewal of
the Hindu community, Samaj founder Dayananda Saraswati would have said that that
recipe was written in Sanskrit. “The causes o f foreign rule in India,” Dayananda wrote,
were “mutual feud, child-marriage, marriage in which the contracting parties have no
will in the selection of their life-partners, indulgence in carnal gratification,
untruthfulness the neglect of the study of the Vedas, and other malpractices. It is
only when brothers fight among themselves that an outsider poses as an arbiter.”38
Listing “neglect of the study o f the Vedas” as one o f many causes of foreign rule does
not adequately reflect the centrality of these texts to Dayananda’s vision of Hindu
renewal, for he consistently argued that child-marriage, lack of agency in choosing
marriage partners, and the other “malpractices” enumerated above were all the result
of diversion from the correct practice of Hinduism as outlined in the Vedas. The only
way to restore Hindus to their former glory was to resuscitate Vedic teachings, and
since the Brahmins had systematically perverted these teachings for their own benefit,
the only way for Hindus to ascertain what constituted correct practice was to read the
38 Charles H. Heimsath, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform , (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1964), 128
209
Vedas themselves. Since this required knowing Sanskrit, knowing Sanskrit was, in a
very real sense, the key to national renewal for Dayananda.
Sanskrit, used not as a medium of communication but as a needle with which to
prick the balloon of Brahmin superiority, was also central to the Samaj’s public identity
in its early years. One early way o f publicizing the movement took the form of Aryas
descending upon a given area and engaging pandits in debates, or shastrarth, about
various aspects of Hindu practice. These debates commonly included the Aryas
challenging any pandit present to enter into a discussion in Sanskrit; upon finding that
no pandit could do so, “the Arya Samaj party would return from the ‘field’ and pass
through the streets with bands playing triumphantly, the processions stopping here and
there for short speeches to proclaim the defeat of the orthodox party.”39 Besting
Brahmin pandits in Sanskrit was akin to demonstrating that the emperor had no clothes;
more importantly, it represented an attempt to stake the Aryas’ claim that they, not the
Brahmins, were the most qualified interlocutors of Hindu tradition. After all, if the
Brahmins did not know the language in which those traditions had been recorded, how
could their claims that Arya reform proposals represented a perversion of those
traditions be true? These carefully engineered pieces of political theater, however,
masked the fact that very few Aryas could speak Sanskrit; one of the few who knew it
fluently - Guru Datta - often wrote and memorized Sanskrit speeches on a given topic
and then challenges pundits to a Sanskrit debate on the topic on which he was already
prepared.40 Aryas, then, were far from the desired state of being able to access the
39 Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Centtuy Punjab, (Berkeley: University
o f California Press, 1976), 70
40 ibid
210
Vedas for themselves, but presumably the foundation of an Arya educational system
would change all that.
While Sanskrit was central to the Samaj's plan for the revival o f the Hindu
community, so was English. Dayanand himself had been unconcerned with the issue of
foreign languages. While his message o f religious reform was radical, Dayanand's
persona was that of a Hindu guru par excellence; before founding the Samaj he had
studied for years with his own guru and then traveled throughout North India speaking
on reform while clad in a loincloth.41 He had never had occasion to learn English, and
saw no need to do so; alter all, why was Western learning necessary when all of the
triumphs o f Western science and civilization had been prefigured in the Vedas? The
leaders of the Samaj alter Dayananda’s death may have shared his reverence for the
Vedas, but they were almost uniformly products of Western schooling who did not
share his indifference to Western learning through the medium of English.
Incorporating that learning, they believed, was essential to building a modem nation.
But learning English was also essential for a more immediate and tangible reason - it
allowed Hindus to gain jobs in the bureaucracy, and get more of them than Muslims
did.
One o f the central manifestations of Hindu-Muslim competition in colonial
North India was the race between the two communities for bureaucratic jobs. A
memorial sent to the viceroy by Muslim activists in 1906 summarized the concern:
“the political importance of a community to a considerable extent gains strength or
41 Many accounts o f Dayanand’s preparation to form the Samaj note that, while in Calcutta, Brahmo Samaj
founder Keshub Chandra Sen suggested to Dayanand that his message would be better received if he would
211
suffers detriment according to the position that the members of that community occupy
in the service of the State. If, as is unfortunately the case with the Mohammedans, they
are not adequately represented in this manner, they lose in the prestige and influence
which are justly their due.”42 North Indian Muslims in general were very sensitive to
the fear of losing “their” share o f bureaucratic posts, their recent history as a ruling
class whose primary occupation was government service being fresh in their minds.
Despite this history, Hindus were making dramatic strides in winning bureaucratic
posts, and nowhere was the ability to keep doing so more essential to the relative
position of the Hindu community than in Punjab, where the DAV schools movement
began. Outnumbered and largely excluded from positions of political power by Sikhs
and Muslims, the one arena which Punjabi Hindus unquestionably dominated was that
of the middle and upper levels of government jobs, with a full 80% of the ‘superior’
government appointments in the province going to Hindus.43
Members of both communities were hyper-sensitive to the relative success of
their co-religionists in the competition for bureaucratic posts, and they were well aware
that English-language education was essential to that success. Punjabi Hindus were
“beating” Muslims in the competition because a much higher percentage of their
children were enrolled in English-language Westem-style schools than were Muslims,
who tended to attend vemacular-language schools.44 In 1871 there were 2,200 Muslim
make two changes: speak in Hindi instead o f in Sanskrit, and w ear something more concealing than a
loincloth.
42 quoted in Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics o f the United Provinces
Muslims 1860-1923, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 145
43 Jones, 59-60
44 ibid, 60
212
children in Punjab middle schools and 5,433 Hindus, and the gap increased even more
sharply at the higher levels of education, with 1,658 Muslims in higher schools
compared to 4,468 Hindus.43 It was precisely this perceived backwardness o f Muslims
in obtaining Westem-style, English-language education, not only in Punjab but
throughout North India, which prompted Sayyed Ahmed Khan to found the
Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, commonly known as Aligarh, in the United
Provinces in 1875. Over time Sayyed Ahmed became progressively more convinced of
the importance o f English education, abandoning his earlier support of vernacular
education in Urdu to testify in front of the Hunter Commission on education in 1882
that English should be the language of education46 and moving to incorporate much
more English education in Aligarh’s curriculum. Arya activists explicitly cited Aligarh
as a model in their attempts to raise money to found the DAV schools,47 and in
founding the DAV schools they were building upon a concept of founding educational
institutions to better equip certain communities for the race for bureaucratic posts that
had a very long pedigree.
Both Sanskrit and English, then, were integral in different ways to the Samaj’s
conception o f national renewal. Lack of access to the Vedas through the medium of
Sanskrit had allowed the proliferation of incorrect practices of Hinduism; these
diversions from true Hinduism had weakened the community to the point that first
43 ibid
46 David Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India , (Delhi: Oxford
47 The November 5, 1883 issue o f the Regenerator o f Arya Varta noted that in the effort to found the DAV
College, “all difficulties will give way if w e have recourse to labor and perseverance. Look at Maulvi
213
Muslim and then British invaders had been able to subjugate the Hindu majority to
their dictates. Reversing this trend and regaining Hindu power, then, would require
increasing numbers of Hindus to leam Sanskrit and to reform their behavior in
accordance with what they read in that language in the Vedas. In the shorter term,
however, maintaining the Hindus in a position of strength vis-a-vis Muslim competitors
required mastery of English. From the inception o f the plan to build Arya Samaj
schools, then, the teaching of both languages was assumed to be central to the schools’
mission. Even the name chosen for the schools - Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools -
embodied this dual commitment. As Lala Ganeshi Lall outlined the shape of DAV
education in Arya Magazine in 1882, “When people will find no difference between
the Anglo-Vedic, Government, and mission schools as regards English education, and
see in the former additional advantages of Vedic instruction, the Vedic schools will be
crowded with boys.” “The English language will also be a medium o f comparison of
the Aryas to the Modem Science and enable the boys to be acquainted with the
manners and ideas of the greatest nations of the modem world.”4*
Although all concerned agreed that the DAV schools should balance Western
and Vedic learning, within five years the Samaj had been brought to the brink of
schism by divisions over the relative weight which should be assigned to each. The
issue was not only one o f languages - English vs. Sanskrit - but also one of the types
o f knowledge that each language provided access to, and the importance of each. In
1889, advocates of the more religious approach proposed that all students would study
Sayyed Ahmed Khan, the great founder o f Aligarh College who single-handed, with the aid o f
perseverance, brought about such wonderful results.” Quoted in Jones, 68
U Jones, 69
214
Sanskrit from the fourth grade of primary school, and they would also extensively
study Dayananda’s writings.49 While this proposal merely emphasized the importance
of Vedic and Sanskrit studies without downplaying that of English and secular studies,
an 1891 proposal of this group went much further, suggesting that the study of science
and English be made optional while a Vedic department would be established. Guru
Datta, hero o f the early Aiya-pandit Sanskrit debates referred to earlier, had already
made clear that to his mind learning English was a useless enterprise.50 For the most
part, though, advocates of the more religious approach did not wish to see Western
learning eliminated entirely from the curriculum, only counterbalanced by a heavy
emphasis on Vedic learning and Sanskrit.
The more secular wing of the DAV movement successfully opposed both
proposals, insisting that the DAV schools prioritize Western learning delivered through
the medium o f English. Educated Hindus - reformers and traditionalists - had long
denounced British attempts to further traditional Hindu learning at the expense of
English-language Western education, seeing in these attempts a conspiracy to keep the
Hindu community backward by preventing it from obtaining modem knowledge. In
1823 Rammohun Roy, the founder o f the Brahmo Samaj, North India’s first Hindu
reform movement, had protested the founding of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta,
characterizing it as a project which would only “load the minds of youth with
grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions of little or no practical use to the
49 ibid, 90
50 Jones, 86
215
possessors or to society.”31 The 1870 opening by British Orientalist Dr. Leitner of the
Punjab University College with an Oriental College which would focus on the
“indigenous educational elements” of different religious communities in Punjab -
Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs - prompted a similar response, with reformist Hindus -
Brahmos and Aryas - as well as orthodox Hindus “damn(ing) Orientalism as
obscurantism” which would forestall the emergence of a Punjabi Hindu upper class and
demanding English-language education.32 If Aryas were unwilling to countenance
British-sponsored educational institutions focusing on Sanskrit texts because this focus
would prevent Hindu progress, they certainly were not going to duplicate that model in
their own schools.
Over the years, a balance between Sanskrit and English education was achieved
by gradually increasing the amount of time dedicated to, and the opportunities for,
Sanskrit and Vedic studies within a context in which English-language studies
remained supreme. In 1899 Sanskrit study became compulsory for students in the ninth
class, and at some point soon afterwards Sanskrit became a part of the curriculum from
the third class onwards. By 1914 the Vedic Studies Department of the College boasted
37 students, and a Theological Department o f about the same size had been created.33
But English language, science, math, and other “secular” studies still dominated the
curriculum; while young men in the DAV College could opt to specialize in Vedic and
Sanskrit studies, students in DAV schools were required to study subjects such as
31 Roy, quoted in Basu, “Policy and Conflict in India,” 56
32 Jones, 61-62
33 ibid, 226-7
216
English, math, geography, physical science, and sanitation.54The only nod to the
demands o f the more religious members o f the Managing Committee was the fact that
these students were also required to take a Sanskrit course each year. The curricula of
the DAV schools, then, did not differ significantly - with the exception of their
Sanskrit courses and the Hindi courses to be discussed below- from those used in
government schools, which was essential because it allowed DAV students to compete
successfully in the exams governing entrance into government universities. By 1888
the DAV school had demonstrated its success in this arena; in that year the government
singled it out as having produced more students who passed the entrance exams of
Calcutta University than any other school in Punjab.55
The relative mix of Sanskrit/Vedic and English/Western learning study adopted
by the Managing Committee of the DAV schools positioned their graduates to maintain
the Hindu lock on high-ranking government positions in Punjab, and thus to keep the
position o f the community there vis-a-vis Muslims afloat. What it did not do was
appease the more Vedic-minded members o f the Managing Committee. Arguing that
the DAV schools had not been founded to “supply clerks, judicial officers, engineers,
or other strata o f the government machinery,”56 but to implant Hindu religious ideals
in the youth, supporters of a curriculum more heavily focused on Sanskrit and Vedic
studies resigned from the Managing Committee to form their own counter network of
schools centered on the Gurukul, which was founded in 1902. In many ways the
Gurukul represented what an educational effort based solely on religious reform - with
54 ibid, 322
55 ibid, 78
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217
little or no concern for the temporal position o f the community - would have looked
like, so this alternate model of education is worth examining briefly.
In creating the Gurukul, Aryas looked back to the traditional model of students
following a guru, a more holistic conception o f education in which learning was not
only taught in the classroom but modeled on a daily basis by the students’ mentors. The
Gurukul insisted that its students leave home to live at the school so as not to be
corrupted by outside influences, often for ten to fifteen years. While it taught practical
subjects such as science and English, the Gurukul curriculum heavily emphasized
Sanskrit and focused on Vedic and other religious studies; it also imposed a very
ascetic lifestyle, characterized by pre-dawn swims and strict vegetarianism, on its
students. Prakash Tandon, the memoirist of colonial-era Punjab, noted that his mother’s
only brother had enrolled in the Gurukul; Tandon noted that “the education they gave
was amazingly out of time with the changing times, and he always remained very
unworldly.”57
Before leaving the DAV Managing Committee, supporters o f the Gurukul had
attempted to impose a much stricter moral regimen in line with reformed Hindu
practice on the students at the DAV College. In 1889, they had suggested that the DAV
College Boarding House would be “operated according to a rigid set o f rules, with
scheduled activities throughout the day” under heavy supervision.5* The rest of the
Managing Committee refused to accept this idea, and instead of imposing restrictions
which would withdraw DAV students from the larger Hindu community the College, as
56 ibid, 167
57 Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century, 1857-1947, (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1961), 36
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218
was discussed in Chapter Four, encouraged its students to take an active role in that
community through work against caste regulations, intervention in famine relief
campaigns, and related activities to advance religious reform while protecting the
temporal interests o f the Hindu community. It was this combination of efforts which
made the DAV schools a true manifestation of religious nationalist activity as I defined
it in Chapter One.
The Languages of National Renewal Part II: Hindi vs. Urdu
After the East India Company’s assertion of direct control over swaths of North
India in 1772, the Company set its scholars to work studying and systematizing various
North Indian languages. One of these was Hindustani. Once considered by British
traders to be a “ ‘ jargon’ associated with Muslims,”39the inimitable efforts of Scottish
physician John Gilchrist to create a lexicon and grammar for the language pushed
Hindustani into the ranks of the vernacular languages which, in 1837, replaced Persian
as the official languages o f the lower levels of the bureaucracy. In its capacity as a
vernacular language, “Hindustani was equated with Urdu, as opposed to any
geographically defined ‘dialect’ of Hindi, and was given official status through large
parts of North India.”40 In the United Provinces, the vernacular which became the
official language was Urdu; when the British arrived in Punjab in 1849 they brought
Urdu with them, and by 1855 Urdu had become the official language of the lower
38 Jones, 90
39 David Lelyveld, “The Fate o f Hindustani: Colonial knowledge and the Project o f A National Language,”
in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1993),
194. My discussion o f the early “origins” of Hindustani is based primarily on Lelyveld’s article.
40 Lelyveld, 197
219
levels of Punjabi administration61 as well as the language of instruction in government
schools.
The key differences between Urdu and Hindi are their written form and the
languages from which they derive their vocabulary. While the same standard spoken
language of North India during the colonial period was variously referred to as Urdu,
Hindi, and Hindustani,62 the Mughals had written Urdu in the Persian script rather than
the indigenous Devanagari, and while both Muslims and Hindus used the Persian
script, Devanagari became identified solely with Hindus. Urdu draws on words from
Persian and Arabic, while Hindi draws more of its vocabulary from Sanskrit. While
Hindu authors had contributed enormously to Urdu literature, the latter half o f the
nineteenth century saw two closely related developments: the rise of Hindu attempts to
define Hindi in Devanagari script as the language of the Hindus and Urdu in Persian
script as the language of the Muslims, and a campaign by Hindus to see Hindi in
Devanagari replace Urdu in Persian script as the official language of administration and
education in North India. Pro-Hindi activists argued that “Hindi was a ‘pure’ language
whereas Urdu was a barbarian mixture,” and that Persian script was “confusing” while
Devanagari was “scientifically accurate.”63 More apropos to the development of
different conceptions o f the nation was the Hindi activists’ claim that Urdu in Persian
script was a “foreign” language; Urdu’s use o f a script associated with the Mughals
and its incorporation of Arabic and Persian words fit nicely with Hindu nationalist
61 Jones, 59
62 Paul Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1974), 129
63 J.T.F. Jordens, Dayananda Saraswati: His Life and Ideas, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 223
220
claims that the Muslim presence in North India was alien, the remnants o f a Muslim
“invasion” o f “Hindu” India.
The campaign to replace Urdu with Hindi in North India drew strong support
not only from reformist Hindus such as members of the Brahmo and Arya Samajes but
also from the same orthodox Hindus who usually fought the Aryas tooth and nail. The
Arya Samaj, however, played an absolutely central role in that campaign in Punjab and
the United Provinces. The speech o f an Arya preacher led to the founding o f what
Kumar calls an “institutional base” for the Hindi campaign in the Nagari Pracharini
Sabha (the Conference for the Propagation o f Nagari Script), which would play a
central role in getting Hindi recognized as a court language in the United Provinces.64
Shortly before founding the Arya Samaj in 1875, Dayanand switched from speaking
Sanskrit in public audiences to Hindi at the suggestion of Brahmo Samaj leader
Keshub Chandra Sen." Dayananda initially did not know Hindi. His speeches were
delivered not in his mother tongue o f Gujarati but in Sanskrit, and he required the
services of an interpreter when conversing with non-Sanskrit speakers.66 Like Zionist
leaders fluent in European languages trying valiantly to deliver speeches in Hebrew,
Dayananda’s early efforts to lecture in Hindi were only partially successful, as
“hundreds o f words and even sentences still came out in Sanskrit.”67 From that point
64 Kumar, 539
65 Jordens, 82
66 ibid, 51
67 ibid, 83
221
forward, however, he lectured almost entirely in Hindi, even in Gujarat where he could
have used his native language with greater facility."
Prioritizing Hindi over other vernaculars, and eschewing Urdu in particular,
required major shifts in the daily practice of individual Aryas, in the medium used to
communicate Arya ideas to the Hindu community, and in Arya thinking about their
future educational endeavors. Dayananda repeatedly urged to Aryas to use Hindi, and
“the volumes of incoming letters show how hard they tried: some of the letters written
by Punjabis, Marathas, and Gujaratis are a strange mixture of Hindi and their own
vernacular.”69 In 1883, three years before the founding of the first DAV school in
Lahore, the Arya Samaj published three newspapers there - one in Urdu, two in
English, and none in Hindi;70 Kumar notes that it is ironic that Aryas turned against
Urdu when their early leaders had all used it to great effect in converting Hindus to the
Arya cause.71
While Dayanand lent enormous prestige to the early campaign for the adoption
of Hindi, the DAV College and schools kept the profile o f the Hindi issue high for
decades. Even more importantly, it taught its students Hindi. Lala Hans Raj, the first
principal of the DAV school and the most influential member of the schools movement
in its first decades, argued that the three things necessary for the Hindu community to
progress were that its members share a common origin, a common language, and a
“ ibid, 224
" ib i d
70 ibid, 201
71 Kumar, 540
222
common religion.72 Promoting the study of Hindi was a major aim of the college,
because its founders believed that in order to revitalize the Hindu community, Hindus
had to share a common language.73 In deciding to teach Hindi in the College and in the
DAV schools, however, the Samaj was going against the prevailing trend in education
in north India at that time.
The medium of education in government schools in north India in this period
was Urdu at the lower levels and English at the upper; this mirrored the use of
languages in government administration, in which Urdu was spoken at even the lowest
levels and English in the higher levels. In 1872 22,000 students were learning Persian,
Arabic, or Urdu in government schools, while only approximately 5,000 students were
taking Hindi or Sanskrit in Oudh,74and as late as 1901 there were more Hindus in the
Punjab literate in Urdu than there were Muslims.75This would not deter the DAV
schools, however, from emphasizing Hindi and downplaying Urdu in their curriculum.
Over the objection o f some members of the DAV Managing Committee, Urdu was
made an optional language in the DAV schools, while Hindi was taught as a language.
The inclusion of Hindi in the DAV curriculum - and also in that o f the Gurukul
- contrary to the established practice in government schools in this period was intrinsic
to the Samaj’s efforts to educate a new generation of Hindus cognizant of their status as
members of a Hindu nation separate and distinct from that of the Muslims. In 1897
72 Lala Hans Raj, Mahatma Hansraj Granthavali, Volume 4, quoted in Kumar, “Hindu Revivalism in North-
Central India,” 540
73 Kumar, 540
74 Brass, 157-158. In the vernacular elementary schools in the combined North-Western provinces and
Oudh in 18%, there were 50,316 boys studying Urdu and 100,404 studying Hindi.
75 ibid, 303
223
Muslim public opinion was agitated by the suggestion of DAV College principal Lala
Hansraj that “Hindus should write the addresses of all letters in the Devanagari
character and thus compel the government to employ Hindu peons. It is apparent that
these men are bent on depriving the Muhammadans of all means of livelihood.”76
The Arya Samaj’s Hindi campaign was a clear manifestation of the difference
between religious and secular nationalism in north India. The Congress Party was very
heavily committed to the promotion of Hindustani, not Hindi. As the Constituent
Assembly convened at independence to draw up an Indian constitution, a main question
at issue was when English would be replaced by an Indian language, would that Indian
language be Hindi or Hindustani? Congress leaders, especially Gandhi and Nehru,
spent much effort to trying to get it to be Hindustani; four days before partition, Gandhi
cautioned that “during the crisis the Congress must stand firm like a rock. It dare not
give way on the question of the lingua franca for India. It cannot be Persianized Urdu
or Sanskritized Hindi. It must be a beautiful blend of the two simple forms written in
either script.”77 By this time, however, even many of the secular nationalist cadres, as
represented by Congress party activists, had joined the religious nationalist bandwagon
on the Hindi issue - a vote within the party on the issue in 1949 found supporters of
Hindi winning over supporters of Hindustani by one vote - 78 votes to 77.71 As a result,
Article 351 of the Indian Constitution tried to find a way out, stressing that while it was
the duty of the country to promote the spread o f Hindi, this would be done by
76 Tribune, April 24, 1897, quoted in Jones, 199
77 Harijan, August 10, 1946, quoted in Kumar, 549
71 Kumar, 549
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224
“secur(ing) its enrichment by assimilating the forms, style and expressions used
in Hindustani and in the other languages of India, and by drawing, wherever necessary
or desirable, for its vocabulary primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other
languages.”79In the first years after independence the concept of a Hindustani language
all but disappeared, a tangible symbol o f a unified Hindu-Muslim culture abandoned.
79 Quoted in Kumar, 549
225
Chapter Six: Religious Nationalism 101, Section B: The

Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiyya in
1928, and by the time of the Free Officer coup in 1952 its reach extended from Egypt’s
largest cities to her smallest villages. The Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo presided
over some 600,000 members gathered in an estimated 2,000 branches, many of which
were integral providers of social services to their local communities. Key among these
social services were schools; when the movement founded its first primary schools in
1932, it appeared poised to follow in the footsteps of the Arya Samaj and
Muhammadiyah and build an educational powerhouse that could bring resources into the
movement while disseminating its ideas among Egyptian youth. However, by 1952 the
bulk of the Brotherhood’s education activity was concentrated on night and weekend
classes for illiterate adult workers, supplemented by tutoring sessions for boys and young
men in some of the larger branches. The pattern followed by the Samaj and
Muhammadiyah, a pattern of developing a network of primary and secondary schools in
which boys could progress from learning the alphabet to entering college completely
within the confines o f the movement’s educational institutions, was not adopted by the
Brotherhood in the colonial period.
This chapter will first outline the educational activities of the Brotherhood, and
will argue that the reason that its leaders chose not to provide primary and secondary
schooling on a large scale was that, after the movement’s formative years in the Canal
zone, there was no competitive incentive to do so. The heavy concentration of
missionaries in the Canal zone, combined with the high profile accorded to the schools
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226
and other social services which they administered there and elsewhere in the early
1930’s, served as the catalyst for the Brotherhood’s initial push to found its own primary
schools. By the late 1930’s, however, the abolition of the Capitulations which protected
the activity of foreigners in Egypt, the imposition of increasingly strict controls on that
activity by the Egyptian government, and most particularly the enormous growth of the
state educational system after partial independence in 1922 meant that the amount of
education being provided by missionaries fell off sharply by the late 1930’s. Since other
Egyptian movements and groups competitive with the Brotherhood were not creating
their own networks of primary schools, then, by the late 1930’s there was no competitive
incentive to spur the Brotherhood on in its quest for educational primacy.
While the Brotherhood did not take advantage of state subsidies to build its own
network o f primary and secondary schools as the Arya Samaj and Muhammadiya did, the
emergence o f a state educational system in Egypt still played an essential role in helping
to spread the Brotherhood’s ideas, and the Brotherhood itself, throughout Egyptian
society. It did so, I will argue, in three ways. The first way is by bringing an increasing
percentage of young men into the confines of the state school system, creating a captive
audience which teachers and activists who targeted them were uniquely poised to exploit.
An inordinately large number of Brothers were teachers - in the state school system -
and many o f them showed little hesitation in bringing their religious convictions into
their classrooms. In attempting to build and expand their branches, particularly outside of
Egypt’s big urban areas, Brothers of all occupations made special efforts to recruit
teachers in the local public schools, and subsequently to use those teachers to spread
Brotherhood ideas among as well as to directly recruit their students. The second way in
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227
which the creation of a national school system helped the Brotherhood to expand was
through the practice of transferring Brothers who were teachers from one state school to
another. While these transfers were sometimes done simply so that the state could better
allocate its educational resources, in many cases transfers of Brotherhood teachers were
clearly punitive in nature, usually uprooting an active Brother from a school in a well-
populated area and sending him to a much smaller one where it was hoped that he would
be unwilling or unable to continue working for the movement. When these transfers were
punitive, I will argue, they spectacularly backfired, working in many cases not to quiet
energetic Brothers but simply to spread their energy and expertise to new areas. And
while Brothers in the overwhelming majority of cases did not seek these transfers, and
often bitterly opposed them, they were quick to realize the potential they held for helping
to spread the movement and to exploit it to the fullest.
The first two ways in which I argue that the Brotherhood benefitted from the
creation of a state school system in Egypt focus on the Brotherhood’s ability to operate
within state primary and secondary schools. The third way in which the movement
benefitted was by taking advantage of the state’s willingness to subsidize private groups
running educational programs for un- or under-educated adults, particularly programs to
abolish illiteracy among adult men. While much of the post-1922 government push to
provide a Westem-style education centered on children, government officials were
deeply concerned about the large numbers of illiterate adults too old to enroll in the new
school system. With its resources stretched to the limit by its ambitious program of
building primary and secondary schools, the state was unable to create large numbers of
adult illiteracy programs itself, but it was more than willing to subsidize private groups
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228
who would do so in accordance with government regulations. The Brotherhood, in turn,
had already started such programs at many o f its branches throughout the country as a
means of simultaneously spreading education and Brotherhood ideas. These programs
cost the branches little, since they did not require acquiring buildings which could be put
to full-time use as schools, and since the teachers in these adult illiteracy programs were
invariably Brotherhood volunteers. Any government subsidy of these programs, then,
was money that was funneled into the movement itself, subsidizing the non-educational
activities of Brotherhood branches throughout the country even in periods when the
police were rounding up members of those same branches.
The Beginnings O f A School Network, and The End
In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, it would have been difficult to find any area in
Egypt more thoroughly permeated by Western influence than the Suez Canal zone, the
birthplace of the Brotherhood. Descriptions of this area by Brothers exude an almost
physical sense of a Muslim minority confronted by manifestations of foreign domination
at every turn. Describing the Ismailiyya that he saw upon his arrival in 1927, Hassan al-
Banna sketched out the geography of a city spatially dominated by the British. The
town’s borders, he wrote, were marked off by the British army camp and the offices o f
the Suez Canal Company. The Company, Banna noted, had assumed all of the attributes
and responsibilities usually reserved for governments, to the point that “even the roads
and entrances which connect Ismailiyya to the rest of Egypt (are) all in the hands o f the
Company, and there is no entry or exit without its permission.”1In Ismailiyya itself, even
the street signs in the Arab section of town were all in English, including those
' Hassan al-Banna, Memoirs o f the Message and the Messenger (in Arabic), (Cairo: Dar al-Towzi’ah wa al-
Nashr al-lslamiyya), 82
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229
identifying the street in which the mosque was located.2The paucity o f mosques when
compared to Western churches in the Canal towns was a particularly sore point; in 1934
Brothers in the neighboring Canal town of Port Fouad petitioned the Governor of the
Canal zone asking him to intercede with the King to build a mosque in the town, which
according to the Brothers had no public place for Muslims to pray other than a modest
prayer area erected by the Brothers themselves, in sharp contrast to the town’s
“imposing” church / Little wonder, then, that, in Brotherhood hagiography the story of
the movement’s origins has six employees o f the Suez Canal Company seeking Banna
out and complaining of “a life of humiliation and shackles,” saying that “the time is
coming in which the Arabs and the Muslims will have no hope of achieving status or
dignity, and (no hope of) surpassing the position o f hirelings dependent on the
foreigners.”4
While Muslims in the Canal zone and elsewhere were acutely aware of the
economic component of Western colonial domination, many felt that nothing posed such
a threat to their long-term well-being as the attempts of missionaries to convert them to
Christianity.5 And while missionary attempts at converting adults were roundly
2 Banna, Memoirs, 82
3 The Muslim Brotherhood, October 13, 1934

4
Banna, Memoirs, 83
5 While missionaries clearly viewed Egypt’s Muslims as their ultimate aim, in many cases they were more
actively involved in trying to convert Coptic Christians. In the words o f B.L. Carter, “many missionaries
believed that unless they could persuade enough Egyptian Christians to do the work o f the Lord, their
overriding goal o f converting Muslims was doomed to failure,” and it was certainly the case that most
Egyptian converts to Catholicism or Protestantism w ere Copts. B.L. Carter, “On Spreading the Gospel to
Egyptians Sitting in Darkness: The Political Problem o f Missionaries in Egypt in the 1930s,” Middle
Eastern Studies, October 1984, pp. 18-19. The Brotherhood realized that Egyptian Christians were also
under attack from the missionaries and occasionally called for cooperation between the two against the
foreign menace. See, for example, The Muslim Brotherhood, July 27, 1933.
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230
condemned, it was their efforts to infiltrate the Muslim community through its weakest
and most defenseless link - children - in the very institution that was supposed to help
them attain a better life - schools - that incited the strongest response among the
Brothers. This response initially took the form of scattered “rescue” efforts to save
individual Muslims who had fallen into the missionaries’ “clutches.” The July 13, 1933,
issue of The Muslim Brotherhood reported the case of a Muslim girl in the province of
Buheira whose father sent her to live in a Christian missionary school after her mother’s
sudden death left him unable to care for her, noting that upon learning o f her plight local
Brothers had “rescued” her from the school and temporarily housed her with the branch’s
vice-president until more suitable accommodations could be found.6
As the “rescue” efforts continued, however, leading Brothers were coming to the
conclusion that their attempts to combat missionary influence on the level o f particular
individuals were insufficient in the face of the missionary threat and could never achieve
more than winning individual battles while losing the war. The only way to truly succeed
against the missionaries, they concluded, was to beat them at their own game - that of
building institutions to provide social services to needy Muslims on a large scale. The
July 27, 1933, issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood chronicled Brotherhood leader Abd el
Latiif el Shaashai’s trip across the country seeking to raise consciousness about the
dangers of missionary activity. At one point during the trip Shaashai disembarked in a
town which hosted a missionary hospital, and when he asked a local police officer if the
hospital had many patients, he was told that “since the public (government) hospital
opened, nobody goes to (the missionary hospital) anymore.” This and other encounters,
6
The Muslim Brotherhood, July 13, 1933
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231
Shaashai wrote, made him realize that “the best way to fight missionary influence is to
create institutions like (those of) the missionaries through which people will lose their
need (for them.)”7
While in Shaashai’s narrative it is the missionary hospital that alerts him to the
need for Brotherhood replacement institutions, the movement’s initiative to supplant
missionary institutions with their own was carried out primarily through schools. The
first concrete manifestation of this initiative came in 1933 with the founding of a primary
school for boys and one for girls in Ismailiyya. The movement was explicit about the fact
that these schools were meant as alternatives to missionary education, noting in its
newspaper that the schools had been created for the boys and girls whom the Brothers
“rescued” from the missionaries.* This opening salvo in the battle of educational
institutions was followed by the founding of another Brotherhood primary school in Abi
Suweir in the province of Sharqiyya. Once again, the process began with the Brotherhood
identifying the missionary threat - missionary plans to open a school - and then moving
to pre-empt it. In July, 1933, The Muslim Brotherhood noted that missionaries were
trying to open a school in Abi Suweir and announced the Brotherhood’s plan to forestall
this by founding their own school;9by May, 1934, the same newspaper was carrying the
comments of the headmaster of the new Brotherhood school there.10 Mention of
missionary institutions in The Muslim Brotherhood in this period was commonly paired
7
The Muslim Brotherhood , July 27, 1933
t
See, for example, The Muslim Brotherhood issues o f July 13 and 20,1933, and The Brotherhood Weekly,
October 18, 1934
9
10
The Muslim Brotherhood, May 4, 1934
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232
with a declaration o f the Brotherhood’s intent to create a competitor institution - the July
20,1933, issue noted that after finding that missionaries in Mahmoudiya al-Buheira were
gaining access to girls under the pretext of teaching them sewing and embroidery, local
Brothers began thinking about creating a weaving and carpetmaking factory for girls
rescued from the missionaries, and reported that the role o f Brothers in Suez in rescuing a
brother and sister from the missionaries had led the branch there to consider attracting
children away from missionary schools there by creating one of their own."
Despite the Brotherhood’s early enthusiasm for school building, the movement
did not go beyond these early institutions to found a network of schools analogous to
those created by the Samaj and Muhammadiya. Richard Mitchell, one o f the pre-eminent
chroniclers of the Brotherhood in this period, notes that until World War II the group’s
school-building efforts “remained largely informal and haphazardly organized.”12 The
post-war period brought renewed interest in educational projects: in June, 1946, the
Brotherhood’s education committee announced that it would found four elementary
schools, one for boys and one for girls in both Cairo and Alexandria. " This was followed
in July by the creation of a corporation to fund further Brotherhood school building. The
July 16, 1946 issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood reported that half of the LE 8,000 worth
of shares put out in the initial offering had already been purchased, and that the
" The Muslim Brotherhood, July 20, 1933. The reference to possibly establishing a factory for sijaad wa
nasiij for girls rescued from the missionaries in Mahmoudiya is somewhat puzzling, since The Muslim
Brotherhood mentioned in its June 16, 1933, issue that the Brotherhood branch there had just celebrated its
opening o f such a factory. Perhaps the aforementioned factory only employed men, while the success o f
missionaries in obtaining access to girls by teaching them marketable skills had led the Brotherhood to
think o f expanding its commercial operation in Mahmoudiya to incorporate these girls as well.
12 Mitchell, 287
13 The Muslim Brotherhood, June 10, 1946
233
corporation planned to start by building a preschool, a primary school for girls, and a
school to teach girls sewing arts.14A similar project was started in Alexandria in 1948,
establishing a kindergarten, a primary, and a secondary school by the end of that year.'*
With the exception o f these schools, however, and an undetermined (but small) number
of schools run by the Brotherhood branch in Port Said,'6there is very little evidence that
this second Brotherhood initiative ever got off the ground.
Why did the Brothers stop what appeared to be an all-out attack on missionary
educational institutions through founding their own schools? Because while the Brothers
began their educational initiative in 1933, by 1937 missionary work in all fields had
declined substantially. The first reason for this decline was increased government
restrictions on missionary entry into and activity in Egypt. While missionary institutions
were coming under increasing scrutiny in the Canal zone in the Brotherhood’s formative
years, they were the subject of sustained negative publicity in Cairo as well. In 1932 and
1933, several incidents in which Muslims were claimed to have converted under duress,
including the alleged kidnapping of a Muslim student at the American University in
Cairo by “evangelistic faculty members” and claims that a Muslim girl living in a
missionary orphanage had been beaten to force her to convert, were given sustained
coverage by the Cairo newspapers and led to substantial public outcry.17By 1936 the
government had cracked down on the entry o f missionaries into the country, controlling
13 Mitchell, 288
16 Jeep case, 1944, fiche #11919
17 Carter, 22-24
234
the influx by only granting visas to new missionaries if they were replacing departing
ones." In 1937, the abolition of the Capitulations, an Ottoman agreement exempting
foreigners and Ottoman subjects under their protection from the application of local
criminal law, significantly weakened the position of those missionaries remaining in
Egypt.'9
The second, and longer-term, reason that missionary educational efforts posed
less and less of a threat as time went on was that their educational institutions were
simply eclipsed by those of the state. As national newspapers called in the 1930’s for the
creation of more schools and orphanages in order to keep Muslim children away from
missionary institutions, the government authorized additional spending on replacement
institutions; the case o f the girl who converted in the missionary orphanage prompted the
Minister of the Interior to allocate LE 70,000 for providing housing and schooling for the
poor.20 In the end, however, it was the Egyptian government’s phenomenal efforts after it
achieved partial independence in 1922 to extend the reach and capacity of the state-run
school system - described at some length in Chapter 4 - that rendered missionary schools
almost obsolete. In the thirty years between 1922 and the Free Officers’ coup in 1952,
government spending on education increased dramatically in both absolute and relative
terms - in 1923-4 the state education budget was LE 1,546,951 LE or 4.9% of the overall
state budget; in 1933-34 it LE 3,467,723 LE or 11.3% of the budget, and from this point
" ibid, 30
19 ibid
20 ibid, 24-25
235
until 1952 it was never less than 10% of the overall budget.21 These expenditures made
substantial increases in the numbers of students receiving a state education possible: in
1925-6 210,123 students were studying in state primary schools, a number which had
increased to 706,228 in 1935-6 and again to 1,039,177 in 1945-6.22 The result was that
during this thirty year period the percentage of Egyptian students enrolled in missionary
schools as compared to that enrolled in state schools dropped off precipitously. In 1925/6
there were 210,123 students were enrolled in state primary schools and 16,979 in state
secondary schools; by comparison, there were 68,823 students in foreign schools, the
23
overwhelming majority of which are missionary schools. In 1944-46, by contrast, 93%
of secondary students were in state schools, with religious schools only educating the
. . 24
remaining seven percent.
In light of the decreasing importance of missionary education during the 1930’s
and 1940’s, it becomes understandable why the Brotherhood did not feel compelled to
sustain its drive to replace missionary institutions with its own. Clearly some Brothers,
though, sought to restart the momentum for a Brotherhood educational system after
World War II - why didn’t this get off the ground? I would suggest that in the absence of
any competitive incentive, it was hard for Brothers to justify the enormous amount of
work and resources that would be required to found and maintain a school network. By
21 Mitwalli, 122-123
22
Gershoni and Jankowski, 12
23
Cochran, Judith, Education in Egypt, (London: Croom Helm Publishers, 1986), 28
Reid, Donald Malcolm, Cairo University and the Making o f M odem Egypt, (Cambridge: Cambridge
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the end of World War II, missionary education hardly posed a threat - it was educating
only 7% of Egyptian students, many of whom were probably Christian in any case. In
Java and North India I argued that not only missionary schools, but also those of other
local religious or social reform groups, such as the Budi Utomo schools in Java and
Aligarh in north India, played an important role in convincing Muhammadiya and the
Arya Samaj to begin their own school networks. No such domestic competitive incentive
existed for the Brotherhood, as the social and religious reform groups active in the
Brothers’ milieu, such as Gamaiyya al-Sharaiyya and the Supporters of the Sunna, did
not sponsor networks of schools either. Thus, I would argue, there was no incentive for
the Brotherhood to pour a substantial amount o f time and resources into the development
of their own network o f primary and secondary schools parallel to those of, and receiving
subsidies from, the government. This was particularly the case when the movement was
able, instead, to penetrate the state school system to spread its ideas about religious
nationalism and reform from within government schools, to use those schools as bases of
recruitment for the movement, and to obtain government subsidies to finance its own
educational programs on the side, as will be detailed in the next sections o f this chapter.
The Roles That the State Educational System Played in Expanding the Muslim
Brotherhood
The fact that the Brotherhood did not seek government subsidies to build its
own network of primary and secondary schools analogous to those created by the Arya
Samaj and Muhammadiyah does not mean that the emergence of a state educational
system in Egypt played no role in helping the Brotherhood spread its ideas and its
organization. The first way that it did so was by using state schools as platforms from
which Brothers could spread the ideas of the movement, and in which Brothers could
237
recruit new members for it. In schools which employed Brothers as teachers or
administrators, this was done by those Brothers using their classrooms to advocate
Brotherhood conceptions of the proper role of religion in determining the behavior of
society and the boundaries o f the nation. Schools which had no Brothers on the faculty
were often targeted by Brothers in the town or village where the school was located, with
the movement making every effort to recruit teachers in order to gain access to their
classrooms. These efforts were often highly successful, bringing large numbers of
students into the movement.
The Brotherhood was well-positioned to use schools as a platform from which to
disseminate its views because a disproportionately large number of its members,
particularly in branches in the countryside, were teachers. In Beilina, a town of 215,363

25 26
residents in 1947 , only .3% of the population at large were teachers while 10% of the
27
members of the Brotherhood branch were. In Mansoura, a regional center of 259,725
28 29
people in 1947, 9% of the members of the Brotherhood branch were teachers, while
somewhere between 1 and 2.6% of the population of Mansoura were.30
23
1947 census, Girga Govemorate, p. 1
26
1947 census, Girga Govemorate, p. 1 and p. 116
27
Jeep case, undated, fiche #12074-12075
28
1947 census, Daqhaliyya Govemorate, p.3
29 Jeep case, 1945, fiche #11495-11502

3°
1947 census, Daqhaliyya Govemorate, p.3 and p. 167. The confusion arises here because the census
splits the occupational data up into Bandar Mansoura - the more urban part o f the district - and Markaz
Mansoura - the more rural surrounding area.
238
Brothers who were also teachers in state schools frequently seem to have spread
movement ideology through their classrooms. Many Brothers taught in girls’ schools, and
girls figured prominently in the Brotherhood’s understanding of how a truly Islamic
society would be brought about, since as future mothers they would influence their sons
and husbands to live in accordance with Islamic dictates. This view stressed the provision
of education to Muslim girls just as it did to Muslim boys, and Brotherhood teachers in
state girls’ schools spared no effort to inculcate girls with their views on the role o f Islam
in creating the model society. Brotherhood activist and teacher in a rural girls’ school
Ahmad al-Biss describes in his memoirs his work in encouraging his students to wear the
veil, while the May 31, 1946, issue of The Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated the role
that other Brotherhood teachers were playing in teaching girls about the role that Islam
should play not only at home but in the nation at large- both in determining its
boundaries and in ensuring its prosperity. The paper carried a story about a play
presented as part of an end-of-the-year celebration at a new girls’ elementary school in
the village o f Samnoud. The subject of the play was the unity of the Nile Valley, echoing
the conviction that the Sudan was an inseparable part of Egypt that was shared by all
Egyptian nationalists of the time. Several scenes in the play, however, demonstrated the
degree to which this shared view about the boundaries of the Egyptian nation had been
infused by a more exclusively Brotherhood understanding of the main actors in and
content of proper nationalism. At one point in the play the girls assumed the role o f the
first Muslim women ecstatically receiving the Prophet, and the Brotherhood
correspondent noted that the “enthusiasm of the headmasters intensified when the
239
Brotherhood flag with its picture of the Quran appeared on the stage,” accompanied by
the girls singing:
“By the Quran the East was illuminated

It is the lighthouse which guides us to the truth
We will always be supporters
of Islam and of the fatherland”
Educating girls about the role that Islam should play in the home and in the nation
had long-term significance for the Brothers because girls’ future role as mothers made
them key agents o f social change - the Brotherhood’s first girls’ school was even called
the School o f the Mothers o f the Believers. Gaining access to and influence over male
students, however, was important for a more immediate reason - the need to recruit large
numbers of activists if the Brotherhood was to become an influential, nationwide
movement. As the Egyptian government poured resources into the state school system,
more and more boys and young men left their work in the fields or the factories to go to
school. In 1925-6 only 15 of every 1,000 Egyptians was enrolled in school; by 1940-1 the
ratio was 69/1,000, and in the ten years between 1925-6 and 1935-36 enrollment in state
32
secondary schools increased by a factor of three. The expansion of the school system,
then, meant that ever larger numbers of boys were pulled out of their disparate
backgrounds and concentrated into educational institutions, severely reducing the costs of
trying to mobilize them and creating a ready-made captive audience for activists with
access to the schools.
3!
The Muslim Brotherhood, May 31,1946
32
Gershom and Jankowski, 12
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240
Student members were important to the Brotherhood for the same reason that they
are important to all social movements - they combined a seemingly inexhaustible supply
of energy with a relatively free schedule and a heady disregard for the dangers of joining
a movement which frequently clashed with the government. In many ways students were
the foot soldiers of the movement, expected to dedicate enormous amounts of time to its
efforts and filling its ranks with new members in the wake of periodic government
crackdowns which scared older members away. Little wonder, then, that Brotherhood
historian Mahmoud Abd al-Halim notes that Banna considered convincing one university
student o f the truth of the Brotherhood’s message more beneficial to the cause than
getting an entire village to subscribe to its principles,33 and suggests that the main reason
that Banna moved the Brotherhood to Cairo in 1932 was so that he could be closer to the
34
university. Banna himself dedicated substantial time and energy to the cause of trying
to recruit university students. In one case, upon learning that the university’s law school
had assigned first year students to study one hundred hadith or actions and sayings of the
Prophet, Banna published a detailed explanation of these hadith in the Brotherhood
magazine, which was then distributed among the law school body.35 The Cairo
headquarters’ student division rented apartments for young Brothers coming from the
countryside to study in Cairo’s technical institutes and universities,36 thus decreasing the
Mahmoud Abd al-Halim, quoted in Sayyid Y ousssef s The Muslim Brotherhood, Part 2: Hassan al-
Barma and the Philosophical Foundations (in Arabic), (Cairo: al-Mahrusa Press, 1994), 120
34
Mahmoud Abd al-Halim, quoted in Youssef, 120
35 ibid
36 The Muslim Brotherhood, October 13, 1948
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241
chances that in the bright lights of the big city they would defect from the movement, and
the student section o f headquarters - encompassing high school and college students -
was one of the most active in the movement.
The importance of access to local public schools in building up Brotherhood
branches is even clearer in the rural towns of Egypt, where relatively educated potential
members were much harder to come by than in the big cities. Archival documents allow
us to trace the role that teachers and students in the state schools of some of these rural
towns played in building up Brotherhood branches over a period of several years, as in
the case of the branch in Qena, a rural town with 188,305 inhabitants in 1947.37
Brotherhood efforts to penetrate local schools began in 1939 and initially relied upon the
38
9% of Qena Brothers who were teachers. Brothers who taught in the high schools and
teacher preparation schools of Qena began their efforts by printing the Brotherhood
39
anthem and distributing it to their students. (While spreading Brotherhood principles
among high school students is one good way to create support and new members for the
movement, gaining converts in the teacher preparation schools is the mobilizational
equivalent of a slam-dunk, as mobilized students can carry their commitments with them
into the schools that they teach in.) The payoff for these initial efforts was not immediate
—in October, 1939, the secretary of the branch wrote to Supreme Guide Hassan al-Banna
that “although you know that I wanted very much to form a group o f dedicated Muslim
(Brothers).... it just has not been possible because o f the very entrenched poverty,
37
1947 census, chapter on Govemorate o f Qena, 1
38
Jeep case, undated, Fiche #11697-11703
39 Jeep case, 1939, Fiche #11847
242
40
ignorance, and tribal allegiances here.” The Qena Brothers persisted in the face of
adversity; perhaps the difficulty of swaying “ignorant” locals into the movement led them
to concentrate their energies even more on those who could provide access to the better
educated segments of the community. The Qena branch’s monthly report for September,
1941, noted that the branch had invited area teachers to come to a Brotherhood program
in which the branch’s president and several of its members explained the group’s
message to the teachers. The program, well attended according to the report, concluded
41
with applications for Brotherhood membership being filled out by all present. The fruits
of a policy focused on attracting student members became clear the next year, when a
wave of government repression of the movement saw Banna and many others arrested.
In a letter to headquarters, a member of the Qena branch wrote that the branch was
extremely active among the local student population, having created a student committee
which met every Monday night and convening lectures on the movement every Thursday
night for students from throughout Qena. This was particularly important, this
correspondent noted, since the number of older Brothers coming to the branch had
decreased considerably since Banna’s arrest, which had “induced severe fear in the spirits
42
of those Brothers whose faith is weak.” But, he noted, God has replaced these weaker
members with student members who attend Brotherhood activities regularly, and the
correspondent rhetorically asks God to send the movement more such trials, as they
Jeep case, 1939, Fiche 11832

42
Jeep case, 1941
243
“clarify who really meant (his) oath of allegiance (to the Brotherhood) and who (had
43
been) liars.”
The outcome of the Qena branch’s efforts to penetrate local schools illustrates
some of the ways in which gaining access to the state education system could help to
strengthen an already established branch. The impact gaining access to local teachers
could have was even more pronounced in cases where a new branch was being started
from scratch. When Brothers found themselves in a new area devoid of Brotherhood
activity, either because of transfers or because they were sent by the movement to found a
branch there, their first step was very frequently to approach local teachers and enlist
their support. A January 1944 letter from a Brother who was also the head clerk o f the
Credit Bank in the rural town of Beilina documented this Brother’s efforts to start a
branch there, and the central role which the local schools played in that effort. Upon
arriving in Beilina the clerk teamed up with a local sheikh, and the two of them
approached teachers at the local primary school. Two of the teachers joined the fledgling
branch’s advisory board, the supervisor of education pledged his support, and another
teacher was enlisted to help set up the branch’s Quran-memorization sessions for local
44
children. Six months later, a representative sent by Cairo headquarters to check on the
progress of the new Beilina branch reported back that the branch had acquired 70
members, a large office in the center of town, and a sizeable budget - an impressive
43
Jeep case, 1941
244
showing given the branch’s youth, and one that might well have been impossible without
the role of the teachers.45
By devoting substantial resources to the cause of education, the Egyptian
government between 1922 and 1952 transformed the Egyptian landscape by gathering
unprecedented numbers o f young men into institutions of learning. Through Brothers
who were teachers, as well as through aggressive efforts to make other teachers into
Brothers, the Brotherhood skillfully exploited the new opportunities for mobilization
inherent in this change. This is one way in which the creation of a state school system
helped to spread Brotherhood ideas and build up the movement; another way is through
the transfer of Brothers who were state employees - primarily teachers - throughout the
country, a process which will be discussed in the next section of this chapter.
Transfers
As I discussed at some length in Chapter Four, the creation o f a centralized
education system meant that teachers were transformed from being individuals who were
quite autonomous but nonetheless inseparably woven into the fabric of their local
community into interchangeable ciphers, subject to the whim of a state which could send
them to practice their craft in an entirely new area against their will and at a moment’s
notice. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson speculates on the effect that the
circulation of members of the colonial bureaucracy - teachers and others - throughout the
domains of the colony might have on the bureaucrats’ emerging sense of the boundaries
of their nation. As aspiring bureaucrats climbed the ladder of educational achievement
within the colony, they left the primary schools in their villages to eventually congregate
245
with boys of other villages at the more advanced schools situated in regional centers, and
at the highest levels in the capital. While realizing the similarities between themselves
and other students from villages with which they had previously had no contact spurred a
sense of national identity among the students, Anderson argues that sharing the school
benches in and o f itself was not enough to form a lasting sense of shared nationhood. In
Anderson’s argument it is the trajectory o f the bureaucratic, not the educational,
pilgrimage, that dictates the boundaries of the nation imagined by the bureaucrats who
make it. If students who attended the same schools in the capital could not be sent to
bureaucratic posts in the same territory after graduation, then their fledgling sense of
national communion would be replaced by one whose boundaries more accurately
coincided with those o f the territory to which the colonial administration might post
them. Students who met at the top of the Dutch educational pyramid in Indonesia’s
colonial capital o f Batavia could all be sent to posts anywhere in what would
subsequently become Indonesia. Aspiring bureaucrats in the French territory of
Indochina came together from what is now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos into the same
schools in Hanoi and Saigon, but after graduation the similarity ended with Khmer and
Lao students only being posted back to what would be Cambodia and Laos, while the
Vietnamese could be posted anywhere in Indochina. This difference in bureaucratic
trajectories, Anderson argues, may be one reason why a single Indonesian identity
coalesced out o f the myriad o f hitherto-unconnected-islands under Dutch rule, while the
more geographically contiguous Indochinese world produced separate Vietnamese,
246
Cambodian, and Laotian nationalisms rather than a sense of a united Indochinese

•j • 46
identity.
I will argue in this section that trajectories of bureaucratic assignments played a
key role in spreading religious nationalism in Egypt, but in a somewhat different way
than Anderson predicted. In assessing the importance of bureaucratic pilgrimages for the
subsequent emergence of nationalism, Anderson focuses on the effect that these
pilgrimages had on the perceptions of the individual bureaucrats who came to make them,
as individuals came to perceive commonalities of heritage and interest which linked them
to people in a much wider universe than they had previously imagined. In addressing how
these bureaucratic pilgrimages affected the spread of Brotherhood versions o f
nationalism, however, I am starting from a logically later point - 1 am assuming that
Brothers who were bureaucrats had already absorbed the Brotherhood’s understanding of
nationalism prior to their first posting in a new part of Egypt, and am arguing that the
central importance of the establishment of the centralized system was that it provided an
institutional mechanism for transferring people with these ideas to new places whose
inhabitants had not been exposed to those ideas before.
In 1922, six years before the Brotherhood was founded, Britain’s grant of partial
independence to Egypt resulted in responsibility for state administration being transferred
from British to Egyptian hands. Freed from British insistence on minimizing the size of
the civil service in order to maximize the percentage o f state revenues which could be
directed towards satisfying Egypt’s debt, the Egyptian bureaucracy grew precipitously. In
1940-41 47,480 bureaucratic posts requiring a minimum of a primary education were
46 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 120-132
247
47
provided for in the budget, and in the period from 1940-1 to 1953-4 positions for
48
educated employees increased from 47,000 to 170,000. Committed to improving
conditions throughout Egypt, the government sent unprecedented numbers o f civil
servants into the countryside in this period to survey the land, to administer justice, to
collect taxes, and perhaps above all, to teach in the state schools which proliferated in this
period. Many civil servants working in the countryside were locally recruited, but many
others were transferred from urban centers, leading to the type of bureaucratic circulation
envisioned by Anderson.
Members o f the Brotherhood were particularly subject to this process, because
disproportionately large numbers of them were state employees. In 1945 the
Brotherhood branch in Munira ( a district of Cairo) had 60 members, 25-40% of whom
were state employees. The Brotherhood branch in Mansura (govemorate of Daqhaliyya)
in the same period had 165 members, some 40-50% of whom were state employees.
Brotherhood correspondence demonstrates that transfers were not uncommon in the lives
o f Brothers in this period, making repeated reference to the transfers o f Brothers who
49 50 . , 51 , . 52 , ,
were veterinary inspectors , surveyors, clerks in state banks and in courts. I have
47 Berger, 82
48
Gershom and Jankowski, 13
49 Jeep case, 1941, Fiche # 1 1 7 9 1
so
al-Mabahith, December 5, 19S0
si
Jeep case, 1944, Fiche #12094
248
found more evidence, however, of Brothers who were teachers and school employees
being transferred53 than of Brothers in any other single occupation.
Transfers could be bad news for a branch, depriving it of skilled and committed
leadership that was hard to replace. The transfer o f the head of the Brotherhood branch in
Domyat - a teacher - in 1947 reduced another member of the branch to writing Hassan
al-Banna saying “we were stunned (by his transfer) we cannot fill his place, so
54
please do whatever you can to prevent him from being transferred.” Many of the
transfers seem to have affected Brothers and non-Brothers indiscriminately and to have
been justified by purely administrative concerns. But the difficulty which transfers posed
was often compounded by the fact that in many other cases they were - or more
importantly, were perceived to be - punitive in nature. There were at least three different
times - in 1942,1947, and 1951 - when concentrated government campaigns to quell
Brotherhood activity resulted in transfers, which the government clearly hoped would
accomplish at least one of three goals. The first would be that the transfers would cripple
Brotherhood activity in an important branch by removing one or more of its central
players, which was exactly the outcome feared by the member of the Domyat branch
cited above. The second goal is that transfers would impress upon the transferee the
wisdom of avoiding affiliation with the Brotherhood in his new location. This goal was
also achieved in some cases. A 1947 report from Girga branch noted that while the
Brothers had previously been quite active there, that activity had precipitously declined
since the recent transfer o f the president of that branch. “But (what) really saddens me,”
M For example, see Jeep case, 1941, Fiche #11803; Jeep case, 1944, Fiche #12056; Jeep case, 1947, Fiche
#12466
249
the correspondent added, “is that many o f the Brothers who were transferred to Girga
(act) as if they know nothing about the movement as if it were forbidden for them to
as much as enter the branch office.”55 One of these transferees, a former secretary of a
Brotherhood branch in Cairo transferred to work as a clerk in the Girga court, had
apparently relied on the assistance of Girga Brothers to find housing, after which he
56
promptly cut all ties with the group.
The third goal of punitive transfers was to transfer an active Brother to a location
so remote or backward that even if he was so inclined, he would be unable to continue
organizing on the Brotherhood’s behalf there. One outcome which the government seems
not to have anticipated, however, was that the transfer of Brothers from one location to
another, far from crippling the original branch, might well help to create or fortify others.
Transfers, whether punitive or merely administrative, usually transferred state employees
from larger cities to smaller towns or villages. When those smaller towns and villages
had not previously been sites of Brotherhood activity, the transfer of experienced
Brotherhood activists often served as the catalyst to start it. When these towns and
villages had already experienced some Brotherhood activity, the transfer o f Brothers from
the larger branches often helped to revitalize and expand it.
The story of the way in which the Brotherhood built its branch in the rural town of
Deshna in the mid-1940’s clearly illustrates the way that transfers of teachers could
simultaneously transplant the movement to which they belonged to a new environment.
250
In October, 1944, a teacher in a school in Deshna wrote to Hassan al-Banna to apprise
him of his efforts to start a Brotherhood branch there. This teacher appears to have been
the victim of not one but several punitive transfers; his letter opens by noting that “this
employee has been amazed that just as he has been on the verge of settling down in an
area and getting to know his Brothers there and work cooperatively with them in
spreading the message, transfers came to send them to different places.”37 (Speaking of
messages, the progression of transfers that this employee experienced - from an unknown
location to the remote location of Nag Hammadi to the arguably even more remote small
village of Deshna - suggests that he didn’t get the government’s message about ceasing
Brotherhood activity.) Soon after his transfer to Deshna, the teacher noted that while the
village had no Brotherhood branch, “pro-Brotherhood feelings abound” and he had
received an enthusiastic reception from employees he had contacted about starting a
branch there. This was in October, 1944; a July, 1945 report on the status of various
branches in the area reported that the Deshna Brotherhood branch had 134 members.3*
Just as the transfer of Brothers to remote areas could spark interest in the
Brotherhood where there had been none, it could also revitalize existing but moribund
Brotherhood branches in the countryside. One key problem that rural Brothers faced was a
dire need for the input of skilled leaders knowledgeable about Islam and savvy in the
ways of organizing a movement. Like many underdeveloped countries, in colonial-era
Egypt the best educated and most skilled natives of the countryside usually fled it, and
while most of the Brotherhood’s national leadership hailed from Egypt’s small towns and
3* Jeep case, 1945, Fiche #12046
251
villages, almost all o f them relocated to Cairo to work there, leaving the countryside
deprived of skilled leadership. National Brotherhood leaders attempted to fill this void
through frequent visits to even the most far-flung towns and villages of Egypt. Banna was
59
out o f Cairo almost every weekend traversing the country, and his arrival in a town or
village was usually cause for major Brotherhood public events ranging from the more
sedate, such as Friday sermons attracting listeners from all the surrounding areas,60 to the
more exuberant, including public marches by Brotherhood scouts during the
aforementioned Buheira visit6' and the shooting off of guns at the branch in Ein Ghasiin
62
in July, 1948, to celebrate Banna’s arrival. Religious holidays saw not only Banna but
all o f the top leadership of the movement visiting the far comers of the country; the 1948
schedule of visits on the occasion of the Prophet’s birthday, for example, had 17 Cairo-
based leaders - a veritable who’s who of the movement - visiting over 60 towns and
63
villages over a 15-day period. This pattern of leaders fanning out from Cairo to spread
the message to more remote areas was duplicated on the regional level as well, as
59
The August 3, 1933 issue o f The Muslim Brotherhood noted the schedule o f Hassan al-Banna’s trips for
the month, including visits to Brotherhood branches in Abi Suweir, Sharqiyya, Ismailiyya, Suez, Port Said,
Daqhaliyya, Damanhour, Miit Khudeir, Tanta, and Qalyubiyya, among others. Banna’s stay in these areas
varied from one to eight days in each, a period o f time made possible by the fact that, as a teacher, he was
on summer break.
60
A s just one example, The Muslim Brotherhood claimed that Banna’s sermon on a June Friday in 1946
was attended by thousands; I have no independent proof o f these numbers, but many different sources
suggest that these events were extremely popular. The Muslim Brotherhood, June 10, 1946.
61
The Muslim B rotherhood June 10, 1946
62
The Daily Newspaper (in Arabic), July 23, 1948
252
members of Brotherhood strongholds in the larger rural towns periodically went to

64
smaller towns and villages to spread the message.
These visits provided a strong impetus to and show of support for local efforts to
mobilize support for the Brotherhood’s message. Significant numbers of new branches
were founded in the wake of these trips,65 but it took a lot more than the enthusiasm
generated by the visit o f prominent Brothers to keep a fledgling branch afloat, or to
sustain an established but troubled one. As a result, members of rural branches repeatedly
requested that Cairo loan them more experienced Brothers for extended periods of time.
As one Girga Brother expressed it in a 1945 letter to Banna, the most serious problem
Brotherhood work faced in rural areas was its dire need for experienced activists.66
Cairo’s response, or lack thereof, to this Brother’s request was also typical - the Brother
noted that he had sent several letters to Banna asking for the activists, as well as
requesting that visitors make the case to Banna in person, but to no avail.67 Government
crackdowns sometimes prevented known Brotherhood leaders from spending time in the
countryside; the Girga Brother mentioned above concluded his request by admitting that
sending Cairo Brothers to Girga was probably not possible due to the government’s
For example, see the list o f visits by the branch in Qena to surrounding towns and villages in June and
July, 1941, contained in Jeep case, 1941, Fiche #11754
65
As just one example, in the early 1940’s the founding members o f a new Brotherhood branch in Esna
forwarded the list o f the branch’s board o f directors to Cairo with a note that the branch had been formed as
the result o f the earlier visit o f two Brothers to the area Jeep case, 1942
68
attack on the movement at that time. There is also evidence that many Cairo Brothers
were not particularly eager to spend time in the more remote locations o f the country. A
July issue of the Brotherhood newspaper The Daily Newspaper carried a rebuke to
Brotherhood activists who were loath to accept assignments, even brief ones, at particular
branches. The article initially frames the problem as a purely administrative matter,
forbidding Cairo activists to accept invitations to speak at branches directly and saying
that these invitations must be forwarded to Cairo headquarters, which would then
delegate an activist to fill the job. The current practice, the article argues, o f individuals
taking it upon themselves to agree to visit particular branches hinders headquarters’
efforts to ensure equal coverage of the country. It soon becomes clear, however, that the
bigger problem is not one of scheduling but of a lack o f willingness on the part of some
activists to go to certain parts of the country. When an activist is asked how he would feel
about visiting a certain branch, the article instructed, the correct reply would be that
“(each of us) is (but) a soldier in the ranks at all times, and nothing prevents him from
working in certain areas except his busyness in others.” The rewards which are bestowed
by God for good deeds, the article warns, are only achieved when one rids oneself of
personal desires and individual choices, and so activists should go wherever they are sent
69
without discrimination or preference - for “all places are places of God.”
Absorption in Brotherhood activities in larger cities and towns, government
restrictions, and unwillingness to spend time in remote locations, then, combined to
deprive rural branches of the Brotherhood of leaders with the experience and charism a
69
The Daily Newspaper, July 22, 1948
254
needed to sustain their work. In light of this problem, it becomes clear how the
government practice of transferring Brotherhood activists from more urbanized areas to
more rural ones could actually strengthen the movement. Perhaps the best example of
how this process could function comes from the transfer of the head of the Brotherhood
him self- Supreme Guide Hassan al-Banna - from Cairo to Qena in 1941. As was noted
earlier, one key result of the creation of a centralized school system in Egypt was that
teachers became interchangeable and could be moved from school to school within that
system, and the transfers of Banna - a teacher in the state school system from 1928 until
his resignation in 1946 - played a key role in helping to spread the Brotherhood
throughout Egypt. A product of Dear al-Ulum, an advanced teacher-training school
founded some fifty years before as “the first Egyptian attempt to provide ‘modem’ higher
70
learning, Banna joined the state school system and was sent by it to teach Arabic in a
primary school in Ismailiyya, where he founded the Brotherhood one year after his
arrival. When Banna decided to move the Brotherhood’s headquarters to Cairo in 1932,
he asked for and received a transfer from his school in Ismailiyya to one in Cairo.
Almost a decade later, Banna would experience firsthand the effects o f a wave of
punitive transfers affecting his colleagues throughout the movement. When the outbreak
o f World War II and the Brothers’ call for Egyptian non-belligerency in the war and
stepped-up action against British colonialism in Egypt became too much for the British to
take, the British pressed the Wafdist government to do something about the problem. In
May 1941 Banna was transferred to a state primary school in Qena for four months, while
his deputy Ahmad Sukkari was transferred out of Cairo as well. Mitchell reports that
70 Mitchell, 3
255
when several members of parliament challenged the government to explain this action,
Prime Minister Hussein Sirri “justified the transfer on the ground that Banna, a civil
servant of the ministry of education, had been neglecting his work;” the Brotherhood
responded by submitting documents based on ministry of education inspection files
which sought to demonstrate the patent fallacy o f this charge.7' Their appeal went
unheard, and Banna went to teach school in Qena for four months.
The idea of a prolonged Banna stay in Qena, not surprisingly, delighted the
Brothers there. Mohammed Abd al-Zahir, an active member of the Qena branch and
owner of The Muslim Brotherhood Bookstore there, enthused that Banna’s presence
among them would do great things for the cause in Qena and Upper Egypt as a whole and
likened Banna’s transfer to the hijra o f the Prophet Mohammed in 622. Just as repression
at the hands of non-believers in Mecca had forced the Prophet and his followers to flee to
Medina, where the first community living by the principles of Islam was established, so
Egyptian government repression had forced Banna from Cairo to Qena, which Abd al-
Zahir expected would have similarly momentous results in terms o f spreading the
72
Brotherhood’s message.
Abd al-Zahir was not alone in his expectation that transfers intended by the
government to paralyze the Brotherhood would actually strengthen and expand it. In
response to another wave of punitive government transfers in 1950, a Brother penned the
following letter to the Brotherhood paper of the time, al-Mabahith. While the sarcasm is
71 Mitchell, 22
256
unmistakable, the Brotherhood’s realization of the ways in which state transfers aimed at
weakening the movement could spectacularly backfire is also clear.
El Mabahith, December 5,1950
“Welcome to the Transferred Brothers”.

Honored Sir:
May the peace o f God and his blessings be upon you.
For a long time I have been thinking of sending for some of the missionaries of
the Brotherhood message to come and live - for a short vacation or a longer
period - in these areas that are thirsting for their presence, areas which remain
untouched by (Brotherhood beliefs). And I wish that you could see for yourself
how people here - in the towns and in the villages - crowd around, and how eager
they are, and how willing to travel and to spend their money - (just) so that one of
the Muslim Brothers would come and visit them. They read about the ideas of the
Brotherhood and they devour everything that the Brotherhood issues; they gather
in groups around copies o f al Mabahith. And now God Almighty has willed that
(this issue of) al Mabahith would suddenly descend on us bearing the news of the
transfer of some o f the Brothers to remote areas far away from Cairo. While I was
deeply sorry to hear about this deviant policy because of the family problems that
the transferred Brothers will have to endure, I was also very happy because we
will soon meet with some of our Brothers, and they will fill the huge void (that we
have experienced).”
Channeling State Funds to Brotherhood Educational Institutions
The previous sections o f this chapter have illustrated the ways in which Brothers
teaching in schools founded and run by the state were able to exploit their positions to
spread the Brotherhood message. This final section will demonstrate the ways in which
the Brothers were able to found their own “schools” - not elementary and secondary
schools for children, but programs to eradicate adult illiteracy - as a type of educational
subcontractor for the government, receiving government subsidies and legal protections
for their efforts in this and other social service arenas.
While the Brotherhood did not get heavily involved in the provision of education
to children, it did devote substantial amounts of time to another educational project:
offering night and weekend courses of basic education to illiterate men. In Cairo, the
257
Brotherhood branch in Shubra ran an extensive adult literacy program73, while the Qalaat
Qabsh wa Tulun branch in the Cairo neighborhood of Sayyida Zeinab hosted an active
Committee for the Abolition of Illiteracy.74 Outside of the capital Brotherhood branches
in several regional centers in the Egyptian countryside offered a full menu of courses
directed at illiterate or undereducated adults. In 1946 the Girga branch was teaching
reading and writing Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday evenings from 8 to 9 p.m., math
from 8-9 on Sundays, religion from 7-8 on Tuesdays, and “general information” from 8-
9 on Thursdays;73 in the same year the Tanta branch opened a school for abolishing
illiteracy attended by 100 local workers.76 The menu of adult educational offerings on tap
in the Brotherhood branch in Qena varied throughout the 1940’s, beginning with nightly
classes in Islamic history, hadith, jurisprudence, and commentary (on the Quran) in
1941T In 1942 the menu was changed to consist of lessons in religion, dictation, and
arithmetic offered three nights a week to a substantial crowd of illiterate men,7* and by
April 1947 the branch was providing undereducated workers with basic education at
night and reporting a class of thirty students in the first year of this program and twenty
• • 79
in the second year, in addition to a program aimed solely at illiterate men. Some rural
The Muslim Brotherhood, August 3, 1948
74 Jeep case, 1945, Fiche #1 1090
76 ___
The Muslim Brotherhood, June 3, 1946
258
branches - perhaps because of the higher rate o f illiteracy in the countryside - saw
fighting illiteracy as such a priority that it was one of the first activities that they took up
after they were founded; the Bani Quraysh branch in the govemorate o f Sharqiyya had
only been open a month when it started its anti-illiteracy activities.80
The Brothers’ anti-illiteracy activities were fueled by their belief that a strong
nation required an educated citizenry. Anti-illiteracy work was also a good way to
communicate the Brotherhood’s message to a new audience; a report from the Qena
branch to Cairo in December 1942 details the branch’s activity in adult education and
ends with the suggestion that “all branches be advised to adopt this system because the
religious lessons that are delivered are part of the mission of spreading our
81
message.” Adult education work also helped to strengthen the movement in another,
unintended way - by bringing state resources into the movement. After partial
independence was attained in 1922, the Egyptian government was committed to
spreading education, but its ambitions outstripped its resources. As was detailed in
Chapter Four, between 1922 and the Free Officer coup thirty years later, government
spending on education increased enormously in both relative and absolute terms, going
from 1,546,951 LE and 4.9% of the overall state budget in 1923-24 to 28,763,659 LE and
82
12.43% of the budget in 1951 -2. The number o f students educated with this money also
increased tremendously in this period: in 1925-6 there were 210,123 students enrolled in
SO
The Muslim Brotherhood, November 23, 1933
82 Mitwalli, 122-123
259
83 84
state primary schools; in 1935-6 there were 706,228 students in state primary schools,
8S
and in 1945-6 1,039,177 state primary school students. Particularly after elementary
education was made mandatory in the 1923 Constitution, public demand for education
outpaced the government’s ability to provide it, leading in the case o f elementary schools
to some children going to school during the morning and others in the afternoon because
86
of a shortage o f buildings and qualified teachers to accommodate them.
While the government focused its educational efforts on children, it also launched
new initiatives to fight illiteracy among adults on a nationwide scale. As in the cases of
India and Indonesia, the state was willing to fund private groups to do what it could not,
and over time a symbiotic relationship developed between Brotherhood branches
providing adult education, particularly outside of Egypt’s urban centers, and a state eager
to enlist them as its partner. A 1942 report from the Brotherhood branch in Qena noted
that the branch’s night school had developed substantially, particularly because of the
govemorate’s decision to mandate that all illitcr:*.':e soldiers in the area had to attend its
classes. In response to a request from the education department, the branch had begun to
offer its classes on a daily basis, in return for which the branch asked the ministry for
87
assistance equaling the salary of one teacher. In 1944 the branch’s annual budget shows
83
Cochran, 28
S4
Cochran, 28
15
Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930-1945, (Cambridge:
**Mitwalli, 111
260
it getting a substantial amount of assistance from the Ministry of Social Affairs and a
88
smaller amount from the department of education for the branch’s night school.
The Brotherhood’s involvement in providing adult education, and the
government’s willingness to subsidize these initiatives, played a key role in helping to
formalize the Brotherhood’s role as a sort of junior partner in the provision of social
services, making it eligible for government subsidies and legal protections it would not
otherwise have enjoyed. Ironically enough, this once again came as an unintended result
o f state policy. In 1945 the government sought to delink charitable activity from political
organization by passing Law 49. This law delineated the types of organizations which
could be registered with the state as charitable associations; it also made it incumbent
upon groups providing social welfare services to register as such by forbidding
associations not registered with the state to collect contributions from the public for their
charitable activities. Registered groups, however, would have their activities accredited
by the Ministry of Social Affairs and thus become eligible for Ministry funding. Groups
which engaged in political activity and sponsored social welfare services found
themselves facing a dilemma. One the one hand, if they registered as political and not
charitable associations they would lose the funding which made their charitable work
possible. On the other hand, if they registered as charitable associations and continued to
be active in politics their charitable associations could be dissolved, as the law forbade
such associations to engage in activities not detailed in their founding charter while
making it clear that charitable groups which included political activity in their founding
charter would not be allowed to register as charitable associations to begin with. In
** Jeep case, 1944, fiche #11714
261
constructing this law the government hoped to force the Brotherhood in particular to
choose between its more explicitly political activities, such as giving public lectures on
events of the day and organizing demonstrations, and its social welfare activities, thus
making them sacrifice one or the other of their constituencies. The Brotherhood,
however, neatly sidestepped this dilemma by dividing itself into two parts - the Muslim
Brotherhood, a political organization, and The Section for Charity and Social Service of
the Muslim Brotherhood, registered with the Ministry of Social Affairs as a charitable
organization. While the Brotherhood maintained the legal fictions necessary to
demonstrate that these groups were indeed separate - drawing up different budgets for
the two and heading them with different boards of directors - they were in fact two sides
of the same coin.
The Brotherhood’s registration with the government as a charitable association
opened the doors to legal protection of its status and ensured a continual flow of financial
subsidies to fuel its work. When the owner o f the apartment which served as the office of
the Section of Charity branch in Misr al-Qadima, an area of Cairo, tried to reclaim his
apartment so that his son could live there , the Section took the owner to court, charging
that he could not legally expel them because a 1946 law exempted charitable associations
from normal real-estate laws allowing the owner of a property to evict its inhabitants if he
planned to personally occupy said property. The court upheld the Section’s case, ruling
that its registration as a charitable association protected its right to the apartment. The
implications o f the ruling for protecting Brotherhood branches around the country were
262
not lost on the Brotherhood, which published an article on the court case in its daily paper
89
under the headline “An Important Legal Principle Concerning Brotherhood Branches.”
As important as the legal protections ensured by registration with the state might
have been, these paled in comparison to the financial privileges which this status
accorded to the Brotherhood. In 1946 Minister of Education Muhammad Hasan al-
Ashmawi sought the assistance of the Brotherhood for a new government program to
fight illiteracy. According to the terms of the agreement, the ministry would pay the
Brotherhood a fixed fee for every student it taught, one-third o f which would be paid
after government inspectors verified that the students being taught were between the ages
of 12 and 18, that they regularly attended the classes, and that those classes were
adequately supplied with teachers, and the rest to be paid when the schools provided
90
evidence that they were successful. Registration paved the way for sizeable increases in
the amount of state funds funneled to Brotherhood branches such as the one in Qena. In
91
1944 the branch received 58 LE from the Ministries of Education and of Social Affairs.
In 1946-7 the branch’s total budget was 152 LE, 70 LE of which, or 47% of the budget,
92
was made up of state assistance, while members’ dues and private contributions only
93
accounted for 38%. When the literacy program of Shubra’s Section of Charity was
accredited by the Ministry of Education, it became eligible for monetary bonuses which
89
The Muslim Brotherhood, March 30, 1947
90 Mitchell, 287
92 Jeep case, 1946-47, fiche #11607
93 Jeep case, 1946-47, fiche #11607
263
the Ministry offered to accredited literacy schools when more than a certain percentage of
94
their students became literate.
I am not suggesting that the Brotherhood founded night schools for adults in order
to channel state money into its coffers - the movement’s conviction that a strong nation
required a well-educated population, shared by all nationalists of the time, as well as its
interest in using that education as a medium to spread Brotherhood ideology and gain
new recruits were reason enough. What is clear, however, is that in many cases the
provision of this education brought desperately needed state resources into many
Brotherhood branches. When a branch received government subsidies for its adult
education programs, this money was almost pure profit, since compared to the costs of
running a full-time primary or secondary school the resources necessary to fund adult
education were negligible. Adult educational programs, which almost inevitably met at
night or on the weekends, could be conducted in the Brotherhood office, unlike primary
or secondary schools, whose conduct would have required building or renting a separate
space for that purpose. Teachers in a primary or secondary school would be employed
full-time and would need to be paid a salary by the Brotherhood; teachers in its adult
educational programs often were teachers in state primary or secondary schools during
the day who volunteered in the Brotherhood’s educational activities in their off hours.
Thus state subsidies of Brotherhood adult education activities were a net money-maker
for the group, and the important role that they could play in keeping entire Brotherhood
branches afloat is made clear by the case of the Qena branch whose work in educating
illiterate soldiers was described above.
94
The Muslim Brotherhood, August 3 ,1 9 4 8 , p.2. The fact that the Shubra school had a 70% success rate
also made it eligible for additional bonuses offered to the most successful o f the Ministry-funded schools.
264
Beginning in 1940 and lasting for at least three years, the Qena branch mounted a
sustained campaign to raise money to build a Brotherhood office and meeting place in the
center of the city. Such meeting places were essential to sustained Brotherhood activity in
a given location, giving the movement visibility and a place to conduct a full schedule of
events. Letters from the Qena branch of the Brotherhood detailed its attempts to raise
money to build a Brotherhood office and meeting place in correspondence with Cairo
over a four-year period, detailing the decision o f members of the board of directors to
95 96
donate from their personal incomes, fundraising efforts in the community, and
unsuccessful efforts to enlist state assistance for the completion of the office and building
97
of a mosque. Despite Cairo headquarters’ awareness of Qena’s financial problems,
there is no evidence that it came to their assistance, even when the secretary of the branch
wrote to inform Banna that the Brothers’ application for a permit to rent a piece of land
for the office had been forwarded to local officials in Qena to determine if the branch
there had the money to pay for the construction of the office. Explaining that the branch
had no money and no bank account and that if this was discovered the building permit
would be denied, the secretary asked Banna what they should do, but even this thinly
98
veiled plea for help from Cairo seems to have fallen on deaf ears. This lack of financial
assistance from Cairo to needy branches was not unusual; funding in the movement
flowed upward from local branches, each of which was required to pay monthly dues, not
” Jeep case, 1942, Fiche #11775
265
downward. In this context, the money which the branch received through government
subsidies of its adult illiteracy activities - 58 LE from the Ministries o f Education and
Social Affairs in 1944 and 70 LE, accounting for 47% o f the branch’s budget that year, in
1946-7, were essential to the branch’s growth.
266
Chapter Seven: The Norm, or Colonies With Noncentralized

Education
The first six chapters of this dissertation have sought to demonstrate the
opportunities which the state’s construction of a Westem-style education system in a
given colony offered religious nationalist movements in that colony. Religious nationalist
movements in such colonies, I argued, sought government subsidies to build their own
schools if they were active in areas in which missionaries played a critical role in the
provision of Westem-style education. Where the missionary educational presence was
more muted, the movements had less reason to build their own educational institutions,
and members of these movements who were teachers and who might well have taught in
schools founded by the movement - had there been any - became teachers in the state
schools instead. Their position within the state educational system, in turn, could be
consciously used by these teachers as a platform from which to express the views of the
movement to a captive audience. It could also, unbeknownst to the school and against the
wishes of the teachers, help to spread the movements by transferring teacher-members to
schools in remote parts of the country which were subsequently exposed to the movement
for the first time. Thus a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for colonial-era religious
nationalist movements to outlast the colonial context in which they were founded and
endure throughout the post-independence period was the building o f a centralized state
education system.
While religious nationalists could exploit the opportunities which state
educational systems provided to help them spread and strengthen their movements, these
educational systems were only constructed in a handful of colonies. In Chapter One I
267
defined a Westem-style education system in a colonial context as existing if a) the
colonial power established a set of common criteria for the provision o f Westem-style
education (for example, requiring the teaching o f certain subjects, the use of certain
textbooks, the division of students into classes on the basis of their age) and b) it offered
subsidies to schools which taught in accordance with those criteria. State subsidies, I
argued, were central to the ability of movements to build up their own alternative
educational networks because, left to their own resources, members of society could at
best fund a small number of schools themselves, but no single group could fund a large
number of schools infused with that group's ideology and teaching from its curriculum
unless it received state funding to do so. Facing the imposition of a myriad of new taxes,
the collapse of livelihoods based on local handicrafts in the face of the onslaught of
cheaper manufactured goods from the metropole, and in some cases forced labor, many
colonized peoples had little disposable income to donate to the educational projects of
nationalist or other movements in their societies. What is remarkable, in this context of
colonial privation, is that many of the colonized managed to donate as much as they did,
and that in many colonies which did not have centralized education systems these
donations allowed local communities to fund their own schools from scratch. But the
opportunity to develop and mobilize people around an alternative imagining of the nation
was much more pronounced when a single movement had the resources to found one
hundred schools teaching its world-view than it was when one hundred individual groups
or communities, independent of one another, each founded a single school. The former, I
argue, could almost never be achieved without the help of state subsidies; when it was, as
in the case of Algeria, discussed below, it took a very long time for the movement to
268
muster the resources to found such an alternative network. The later in the colonial period
that an alternative schools network was founded, the more restricted the ability of that
network to disseminate an alternative imagining o f the nation before that nation became
enshrined in a state was. Additionally, the later in the colonial period that an alternative
schools network was founded, the less time both the schools and the movements which
founded them had to become institutionalized, which in turn made it less likely that they
would endure in the post-independence period. Indeed, while religious nationalism as I
define it emerged once again as a strong presence in Algeria in the mid-1980’s, it did not
survive as a movement from the colonial period until the present day; if my argument is
correct, then an important reason for this is the fact that its religious nationalist schools,
due to the impossibility of their obtaining subsidies, were so short-lived.
In my argument then, the construction of state educational systems helped
religious nationalist movements in two ways - it provided subsidies for their schools,
and/or it brought members of their movements into the state schools as teachers. This
argument is built on two assumptions - that the colonial power was willing to provide
members of the colonized society with state subsidies for their own schools, as opposed
to limiting those subsidies only to missionaries or to private educational groups based in
the metropole and active in the colony. The second assumption is that the colonizer was
willing to fill openings in the state bureaucracy with qualified members of the colonized
population, rather than with bureaucrats from the metropole or members o f non-
indigenous minority groups. I will demonstrate in this chapter that in the cases of Belgian
and most British African colonies, the first assumption rarely held, and after the
beginning of this century, neither did the second. In these cases, almost all government
monies given to subsidize education were given to missionaries, and openings in the
colonial bureaucracy, after the turn of the century, were staffed almost entirely by whites
or by members o f groups who had immigrated to the colonies, such as Asians in the case
of British East Africa. The second part of this chapter will discuss a French colony in
which a religious - although not religious nationalist - movement was able, with state
subsidies, to found a large-scale alternative school network, and briefly examine the cases
of two movements - the Kikuyu schools movement in Kenya’s Kikuyuland and the
Association of Ulema in Algeria - which were able, in varying degrees, to a relatively
large number o f schools without state subsidies. In the case of the former, I will argue
that the Kikuyu schools movement did not succeed in creating an alternative school
network in that it never progressed beyond the point of being a loose alliance of schools
founded by disparate groups of people throughout Kikuyuland and, to the best of my
knowledge, these schools did not share any common curriculum or agenda other than
providing a high-quality literary education that stressed English to their students. In other
words, there was a relatively large number of Kikuyu schools, but they did not constitute
an alternative school system in the way that DAV and Muhammadiya schools did
because of the lesser degree of coordination and common curricula tying them together.
The case of the difficulties which the Association of the Ulema faced in creating their
alternative school system without government subsidy and in a colonial environment
hostile to their work further demonstrate my argument —without these subsidies, the
schools were able to transform themselves from scattered institutions into a coherent
network very late in the colonial period; their resulting lack of institutionalization may
well have accounted for the ease with which they and the religious nationalist movement
270
that they represented were marginalized for decades by various FLN regimes after
independence. Finally, this chapter will conclude by suggesting some specific cases
which would be ideal for further testing o f the arguments advanced in this dissertation.
Colonies W ithout Centralized Education Systems or Private School Networks
The Congo was one of the most pronounced examples in the colonial world of a
colony in which opportunities for secular education and bureaucratic employment were
systematically denied to members of the colonized population. What little aid Belgians
made available for education in the colony went to Belgian missionaries; the only
alternative to mission schools was the primary and secondary schools founded by the
army, which believed mission schools were not adequate to the task o f molding the
country’s future soldiers.1 Education led to one o f two careers - the priesthood or the
army; graduates o f the army school became officers, and at independence in 1960 some
400 of the approximately 430 Congolese who had graduated from secondary school had
been trained as priests. The only attempt to build a secular system of education outside of
the military schools in the Congo came very late - only five years before independence,
in the form of schools o f public administration to produce future bureaucrats - and it was
closed after only two years as a result of pressure from Church officials fearful of the
effects of the creation of a local elite trained outside the Church school system.2
While the missionaries all but monopolized the provision of education in Congo,
the Belgians all but monopolized posts in the colony’s bureaucracy. Posts requiring a
secondary education or higher were reserved for Belgians until the year before
1 The British and Their Successors: The Government Services in the New States, Richard Symonds,
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 224
2 ibid, 223
271
independence, and at independence there were 10,000 Belgian officials in the colony and
only 3 Congolese graduates in the colony’s bureaucratic apparatus.3 With no
opportunities for a secular, civilian education, no career path which a graduate of secular
schools could have followed even if they existed, and no chance of locals becoming state
bureaucrats, the possibilities for any organized movement in Congolese society to use
state resources to its own ends were almost nonexistent. As a result, the possibilities for
members o f any organized movement in society to obtain state funds to start their own
schools, or to obtain bureaucratic jobs and try to funnel state resources from those jobs
into the movements, were almost nonexistent.
While British educational policy in Africa was not as categorical in denying
provided many more opportunities for education than Belgian policy did, but the bulk of
British subsidies also went to missionaries, and after the beginning of this century there
was also little opportunity for educated Africans to obtain posts in the colonial
bureaucracy. In British West Africa, with the exception of Northern Nigeria, only a
handful of schools were run directly by the colonial government, and almost all
educational initiative was left to the missionaries.4 In the interwar period almost all
Westem-style education in Britain’s East and West African colonies was provided by
missionaries; by 1940 what Gifford and Weiskel call a “quid pro quo” had emerged in
which missions would receive grants and be represented in the councils which made
educational policy, in return for which they would submit to Education Department
3 ibid, 223-225
4 Michael Crowder, West Africa Under Colonial Ride, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968),
376
272
inspection and produce students capable o f obtaining secular degrees and certificates.5 As
was the case in Belgium, the entrenchment o f missionaries at the citadel of colonial
education hampered possibilities for the development o f secular education, as
missionaries occasionally opposed the expansion of secular government services,
including education, into areas in which the missions were already established.6
The British were not prepared to financially support secular Westem-style
education in their African colonies, and after the turn of the century they saw little need
to, as their colonial bureaucracies were not staffed with educated Africans in any case. In
the British East African colonies - Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya - the reason for this
was the large concentration of educated Asian populations, which led to a bureaucratic
employment structure in which the British occupied the highest posts, Asians occupied
the middle posts, and only the lowest posts were left to Africans. The Asian communities
in these colonies predated the establishment of British rule; founded by Asians who had
come to the coast to work in the Customs Office of the Sultan of Zanzibar and to finance
Arab slavetraders, their numbers were substantially increased afier the inception of
British rule when the British brought Punjabis over to build the colonies’ railroads.
Perhaps due to the capital which they were able to accumulate through trade, the Asian
communities had established their own schools; this meant, in turn that there was less
incentive for the British to train West Africans to staff the bureaucracy, since Asians
were already educated and could fill bureaucratic openings relatively cheaply. The extent
to which Asians occupied the lion’s share of bureaucratic posts in East African colonies
5 Prosser Gifford and Timothy Weiskel, “African Education in A Colonial Context: French and British
Styles,” in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule, eds. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis,
(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1971), 701-2
273
is demonstrated by the fact that at independence in Kenya, government positions other
than teaching which required a secondary education were filled primarily by Asians, who
occupied 2,600 such posts, then by Europeans, with 1,900 such posts, and finally by
Kenyans, who had 900 such posts.7
Rather than being dictated by demography, the rationale for the exclusion of
educated Africans from the bureaucracy in West Africa was much more heavily
influenced by the twin spread of disease and racist ideology. The British presence on the
West African coast had been established much earlier than its presence in East Africa,
and missions provided most o f the Westem-style educational opportunities until very late
in the colonial period. Prior to 1890, however, these schools were run largely by African
Christians rather than foreign missionaries, and Africans filled the majority of the
bureaucratic posts, even at the highest levels. Symonds reports that in 1870 it would not
have been unusual for a traveller to the West Coast to encounter solely African senior
officials while carrying out his business, including officials at the level of Colonial
Secretary and Director of Education.8 This extraordinary level o f bureaucratic
opportunity was due largely to disease - the high death rate of missionaries and British
troops in Sierra Leone in the 1820’s led the Secretary of State for the Colonies to
mandate that the Sierra Leonean bureaucracy be staffed as much as possible with
Africans.
The control of disease toward the end of the century, however, allowed a sharp
shift in this policy. After the means o f transmission of malaria and yellow fever were
6 ibid
7 Symonds, 176
274
discovered and spraying began to limit their spread, Europeans flocked to the coast. This
was also a period of the spread of another insidious pest - racist conceptions about the
inherent inferiority o f blacks. Influenced by Darwinism and by Gustave Le Bon’s theory
that mankind's division into four groups - superior, intermediate, inferior, and primitive
- was permanent and that it could not be altered by education, the ability of the British to
finally fill their bureaucracy with whites was now justified in terms of racist theories, and
Africans were rapidly purged from the colonial bureaucracies of British West Africa. In
1883 in the Gold Coast, nine out of 43 higher posts in the bureaucracy had been held by
Africans; in 1908 the Coast’s 274-person strong bureaucracy included only five, very
junior, Africans.9 In Sierra Leone, the story was the same - Africans had held 18 of 40
senior posts in the bureaucracy in 1892, but by 1912 they held only 15 of 92, and five of
the fifteen posts were phased out soon afterwards.10
As Africans were expelled from the management o f the colony’s affairs in West
Africa, they were also expelled from the management of its schools. At the end o f the
nineteenth century the spread of racist ideologies led to African priests and bishops being
demoted as European missionaries refused to work under them. This led in many cases to
Africans breaking away from the European churches and setting up their own African
churches, but I have not seen any evidence which suggests that these churches then ran
their own schools in large numbers. Africans in British colonies did found schools, and a
lot of them, on an individual or a community basis - in southern Nigeria and Uganda,
unsubsidized schools educated, by varying estimates, up to two-thirds of southern
* ibid, 119
9 ibid, 123
275
Nigeria’s primary school-age children; in 1938 the ratio of unsubidized to subsidized
primary schools in Uganda was more than five to one.11 Existing outside o f a system
which could produce and provide qualified teachers and subsisting on minimal funds, the
quality of the education which these independent schools provided varied greatly and
rarely went beyond the imparting of basic literacy. More importantly for our purposes,
these schools were not unified by any common curriculum or infused with any common
ideology or world-view, and so they were ill-equipped to help any oppositional
movement that might have existed spread its beliefs on a large scale.
School Systems to Varying Degrees - Tunisia, Kenya, and Algeria
Outside o f Indochina, a unique case which will be discussed later in this chapter,
French colonies’ approach to education differed significantly from that adopted by their
British counterparts. While most British education subsidies in Africa went to
missionaries, after the beginning of this century the French state cut off all subsidies to
mission schools and assumed responsibility for providing education directly to residents
of the colonies. This did not mean, of course, that missionaries ceased to function, only
that the scope o f their educational efforts was necessarily curtailed by the withdrawal of
state subsidies for their efforts.
In French North Africa, the potential for Westem-style education to be provided
in an Islamic context was manifested by two quite different movements - the Young
Tunisians in Tunisia, and the Association o f Ulema in Algeria. While the French
government was providing secular opportunities for Westem-style education in Tunisia
10 ibid
" Gifford and Weiskel, 703
276
by the 1880’s, those opportunities had begun to be sharply limited by the end of the
century. In response to the opposition of the colons to the education of Tunisian children,
at the end o f the century the French began to prevent Muslim children from enrolling in
their schools, closing ten such schools in 1901 and decreasing the Muslim student
population by over one-third between 1897 and 1903.12 While Tunisian supporters of
Westem-style education were not motivated to found their own schools by missionary
prevalence in the educational arena, then, they may well have been motivated to found
them by the sharp limitations on Tunisian education in French schools that began at the
turn of the century, and the Young Tunisians built their first school in 1906.
Members of the Young Tunisian Movement opposed, just as Muhammadiya later
would in Indonesia, the traditional kuttabs or Quranic schools, on the grounds that they
facilitated rote memorization rather than understanding of the texts and that they did not
equip students for Western learning. After securing funding from Islamic endowments
(waqf generally known as habous in North Africa), leading Young Tunisian Khairallah
ibn Mustafa was able to open the first of a series of what John Damis calls “modem
Quranic schools” in 1906. This school combined, as did Muhammadiya schools, the
study of the Quran rather than simply memorizing it without understanding it; like
Muhammadiya schools, it also included a full quotient of “secular” studies, with
grammar, math, geography, and science. In sharp contrast to Muhammadiya, however,
the Young Tunisians viewed the role of religion in society as a primarily private affair;
“rejecting Islamic reform as being inadequate for the modem world, the movement
favored a policy o f assimilation to France in order to bring Tunisian society up to the
12 “The Free-School Phenomenon: The Cases o f Tunisia and Algeria,” John Damis, International Journal
o f Middle East Studies, Volume S, 1974,437
277
level of the West.” 13 In fact, the Young Tunisians only supported modem Quranic
schools combining Quran instruction and secular Westem-style education as a temporary
measure for educating children in areas where secular French government schools did not
exist, viewing modem Quranic schools only as a temporary substitute until such secular
schools would be founded. 14Since they did not place religion at the center o f their
formulation of Tunisian national identity, and since they would have strongly opposed
any attempt to have independent Tunisia governed in accordance with reformed Islam,
the Young Tunisians were not religious nationalists. They were, however, with French
financial support, able to start their own alternative school network.
The beyclical decree of November 12,1898, had stipulated that the opening of
any Quranic school - “modem” or traditional - had to be authorized by the French
inspector o f Quranic schools and Arabic instruction. The Young Tunisians’ modem
Quranic schools were thus recognized by the French government, and in 1929 the
government accorded them a subsidy of 180,000 francs, which Damis calculates was the
equivalent of about $15,000 at that time.15 Given that the Young Tunisians only had
seventeen modem Quranic schools in 1929,16 this was an enormous sum of money.
Subsequently, whenever the subsidies increased, the number of modem Quranic schools
run by the Young Tunisians shot up accordingly. Between 1929 and 1936, a period in
which subsidies were not increasing, the movement only opened four new schools. As the
subsidy almost doubled, going from 180,000 francs in 1929 to 378,000 francs in 1936,
13 ibid, 435
14 ibid, 437
15 ibid, 438
16 ibid, 437
278
six more schools were opened; by 1938 the subsidy was 1,301,400 francs, and in 1939
the Young Tunisians had 42 modem Quranic schools with 10,116 students.17 In 1938 the
government also more firmly placed these schools within the government school system
by issuing a beyclical decree regulating their curricula, the diplomas which teachers were
required to obtain, and the procedures for operating the schools.18 By 1952 27,497
students were enrolled in modem Quranic schools, which meant that for every three
children in the French government-run schools there was one in the modem Quranic
system.19
In Tunisia, then, we have an alternative school system of precisely the kind
described in India and Indonesia, although the much higher levels of subsidy here made
the modem Quranic schools able to enroll a higher percentage of students than the Arya
Samaj or Muhammadiya could have ever dreamed o f doing. While the Young Tunisian
schools may have enrolled more students than the DAV or Muhammadiya schools did,
their mobilizational potential was somewhat limited by the fact that for the most part the
Young Tunisian schools were only elementary schools, whereas both the DAV and
Muhammadiya networks had schools from the primary through the secondary, and in the
case of the DAV through college, levels. The potential of a large and financially secure
network of schools such as these to develop and disseminate an alternative imagining of
the community on a large scale is clear, but the reason that the modem Quranic schools in
the end did not do so was precisely the reason that they were able to gain the French
subsidies that undergirded their growth in the first place - the French saw them as
17 ibid, 438
'* ibid
279
“apolitical.” The Young Tunisians pretty closely approximated France’s idea of the
perfect North African Muslim - devout but only on the private level, and aspiring to all
things French for himself and his country. When religious nationalists opposed to the
French presence attempted to build their own alternative school network in neighboring
Algeria, the conditions were much less conducive.
The closest case of something roughly approximating an alternative school system
unsupported by government subsidies comes from the East African colony of Kenya. As
in its other African colonies, the British left most educational initiative in Kenya to
missionaries. The first secular government school was founded by the British in 1913;
this teacher-training school became the nucleus of a network of village schools.20 Overall,
however, very little education was provided either by missionaries or by the government,
and what little education was provided was often not Westem-style education at all, but
training for manual and agricultural labor. This type of education for “rural development”
was further entrenched by the Phelps-Stokes Report, which stressed the need to “educate
the African for his environment;”21 white settlers in Kenya, as well as British officials,
agreed that whatever education was provided should aim to “condition the native for his
‘role’ in the order of things.” 22 What this meant, in practice, was classes which taught
Kenyans how to farm “better”, rather them providing them with a literary education,
particularly one that would give them facility in English.
19 ibid, 439
20 John Anderson, The Struggle fo r the School: The Interaction o f Missionary, Colonial Government, and
Nationalist Enterprise in the Development o f Formal Education in Kenya, (London: Longman Group Ltd.,
1970),38
21 ibid, 39
22 ibid, 38
280
The response of Kenyans in Kikuyuland to the government/missionary approach
to education was to agitate for a more literary, Westem-style education. In the late 1920’s
the Kikuyu, frustrated with the established churches’ refusal to provide such an
education, broke away from the churches to start their own schools. The first such
schools were started by groups of families who pooled their resources, or prosperous
traders who funded them; in 1929 supporters of independent African education began to
organize self-help groups to raise funds on a more systematic basis. This led in 1934 to
the creation of KISA, the Kikuyu Independent Schools’ Association; by 1938 the annual
Education Department Report reported the existence of 41 independent schools, most of
which were probably affiliated with KISA, that were registered with the government. By
1952 the government was reporting the existence o f 220 independent schools, all of
which were closed down by the government in that year as the Emergency spread
throughout the colony. What this means, of course, is that due to the difficulty in raising
money to fund the schools, the great majority of them were founded after 1938, and they
were closed in 1952. They only had fourteen years, then, to try to disseminate any
oppositional ideas that they had - a much shorter time than the DAV or M uhammadiya
schools did.
This would seem, then, to be a Westem-style educational system that arose
without benefit of government subsidy. We have no way o f knowing how many of the
220 were actually affiliated with KISA, and even affiliation with KISA did not mean that
teachers in these schools were centrally recruited, that the schools taught the same or a
very similar curriculum, or that they constituted a system of education in the ways which
have been detailed throughout this dissertation.
281
While the motivation to establish a network of Westem-style schools espousing a
religious nationalist ideology was very strong in a colony like Algeria, the conditions for
founding such a network could not have been less propitious, for at least two reasons.
The first and perhaps most important reason for this was that unlike Tunisia, Algeria was
a colony, not a protectorate, and it was governed as directly from Paris as if it were
Alsace-Lorraine. This meant that just as in France after 1903 the government controlled
education at all levels, training teachers, offering exams, choosing texts, and refusing to
subsidize private education, so did the French colonial government in Algeria, where an
Office of Public Instruction was created to oversee the hiring of teachers, determine the
curricula, and inspecting schools.23Another reason is that the colon community is Algeria
was much larger and more powerful than it was in Tunisia, numbering over three-quarters
of a million people in 1931 who occupied most of the best land in the colony.24 The
building of these settlements had required the sequestration oflarge swaths of property
whose income had gone to mosques and mosque-related social services through
endowments (wqfq/habous)\ the sequestration of these properties singlehandedly
destroyed the main source of income for Quranic schools, forcing most of them to
close25 By 1850, according to Heggoy, the Algerian system of free education had been
thoroughly destroyed.26
23 “Introduction”, Gail P Kelly and Philip G. Altbach, in Education and Colonialism, Kelly and Altbach,
eds., (New York and London: Longman Press, 1978), 11
24 The exact figure is 880,000. Ibid, 440
23 “Colonial Education in Algeria: Assimilation and Reaction”, A lf Andrew Heggoy, in Education and the
Colonial Experience, Altbach and Kelly
26 Heggoy, 100
282
While opportunities for Muslim education - religious nationalist or traditional
Quranic - had been cut off at the root by French policies, the French began to create their
own Islamic schools. In 1830 the French had promised non-interference in Islam and
Islamic courts, but the takeover of endowment property had closed the schools which had
formerly produced preachers, judges in Islamic courts, and the teachers who had trained
them. In 1850 the French created three special schools which taught Islamic subjects but
were forced to teach French or be deprived of the income which kept them afloat. In 1895
the French stipulated that only teachers trained in these official schools could teach in
schools preparing students for them, and all new imams would also be produced by these
new French schools and appointed by the French. For children not seeking to be imams
government schooling was, at least in theory, available, but very few Algerian children
could gain admittance to the French schools - as late as 1930, only seven percent of
children of elementary school age in Algeria attended French schools.27
Religious nationalist Algerian Muslims began to form “free schools” in the
1930’s. In sharp contrast to the Young Tunisian project, Algerian religious nationalists
rejected almost everything French. Two-thirds o f the curriculum in these schools was
devoted to Islamic and Arabic subjects; Damis notes that many of the schools “were not
too far advanced over” the traditional Quranic schools which almost exclusively taught
the rote memorization of the Quran.28 It is important to note that given my definition of
Westem-style education, which stipulated that that education be based on subjects whose
truth claims were not based on religion, these religious nationalist Algerian schools were
27 Damis, 442
21 ibid, 446
283
not providing Westem-style education in the first place. Severely limited by a lack of
funds, most of these schools had only one or two classes and very few qualified teachers.
In an attempt to subvert the schools, the French developed legislation in 1938 which
made it more difficult for such schools to comply with colonial educational law, and
several of them were closed.
After World War II, the Algerian religious nationalist schools finally overcame
some of their earlier difficulties and began to approximate a school system. In 1947 the
Association o f Ulema “established a uniform curriculum, a contract to bind local
founding committees, and an obligatory oath of fidelity for teachers,”29 and later set up a
higher commission which decided on the hours of study and the curricula.70 But as late as
1956 there seem to have been only 48 schools affiliated with the Association - so it was a
school network, but quite a small one compared to those of the DAV schools,
Muhammadiya, or the Young Tunisians. And once again, as in the case o f the KISA
schools, the impossibility of getting sustained funding - combined in the Algerian case
with French attacks on Association schools, meant that the schools got off the ground too
late to have a sustained influence - the schools were only united under a single
organization with a unified curriculum and leadership in 1947, and in 1954 the French
began closing the schools, giving them less than a decade to function, and less than a
decade to disseminate a unified alternative imagining of the Algerian nation.
What can the cases of the Young Tunisians, KISA, and the schools of the
Association o f Ulema tell us about the validity o f my hypothesis that the construction of a
29 ibid, 447
30 ibid
284
state Westem-style school system is a necessary but not sufficient condition for religious
nationalist movements to outlast the colonial context in which they were founded? The
Young Tunisians’ modem Quranic schools were not religious nationalist schools, but the
ability of the movement to found its own alternative school system on a large scale was
undoubtedly due in very large part to the very generous French government subsidies
which it received. The struggles that an incipient schools project faced in the absence of
these subsidies is suggested by the case o f Kenya, where no alternative schools system,
but instead a large number of loosely related schools was the most that could be created.
The Association o f Ulema, on the other hand, created a system of schools at least at the
elementary level, but they were not Westem-style schools. Why does this make a
difference to the potential longevity of the movement which sponsored them? I would
suggest that it does because these schools did not qualify their graduates to enter the state
bureaucracy, thus denying the movement the access to state resources, or the ability to
teach within state schools, which bureaucratic employment could bring, and which was
so important, for example, in spreading the message of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
I would suggest, then, that these three cases further confirm my hypothesis than only
when the colonial state erects a Westem-style educational system which provides
subsidies to schools providing a similar education in accordance with government
guidelines can a religious nationalist movement emerge which can outlast colonial rule.
Cases for Future Study: Vietnam and the Philippines
This dissertation has argued that when colonial powers set up a centralized state
education system in a colony, this has great potential to strengthen incipient religious
nationalist movements in the area. One o f the best tests of my hypothesis, then, would be
285
to see whether it has any relevance in two of the colonies which boasted the most
extensive state educational systems —French Vietnam and the American Philippines. I do
not know if the educational system in either colony made subsidies available to local
citizens running schools in accordance with government regulations - I highly doubt
that this was the case in Vietnam. The Americans in the Philippines educated a higher
percentage of the colonized population than was educated by any other colonial power,
making this an excellent case to examine for connections between long-lived religious
nationalist movements and state education systems.
Similarly, the deep opposition of traditional school teachers in Vietnam to the
French presence, and the fact that these teachers were rooted in a very highly developed
indigenous school system which predated colonial rule in Vietnam led the French to
supplant this indigenous system with their own. This existence first of an extensive
Vietnamese education network and then o f an extensive French one which attempted to
eliminate the first and take its place would make the Vietnamese case one which against
which it would be fruitful to test and refine my hypothesis.
286
Chapter Eight: Concluding Comments
Standard accounts for the rise of religious nationalist movements are commonly
situated within a discourse of state failure in which it is the state’s withdrawal from areas
which it should control - such as the provision o f social services - that opens the way for
religious nationalists to take the field. According to this discourse, it is precisely in
countries where the state is weak - or more precisely, where the state is retreating from
engagement with and provision for the needs o f society - that we should expect religious
nationalist movements to be the most successful. This dissertation has made the opposite
argument - that it was precisely where the state was historically the strongest and most
involved in social welfare provision - defined in this case as education - that religious
nationalist movements were most likely to grow and endure.
If this argument is valid for the colonial era in which I have situated it, then it may
cast a different light on our understanding of struggles between religious nationalist
movements and states in the contemporary period as well. Commentators on these
struggles in authoritarian regimes such as Egypt are often asked to estimate the chances
of these movements “taking over the state,” and when religious nationalists win power in
democratic elections such as those in Turkey, much nail-biting inevitably ensues among
secularists over what will happen when these Islamists are able to “take control of the
state.” While I am not discounting the magnitude o f the shifts that have taken or would
take place when religious nationalists achieve state power, I am suggesting that in many
ways their more important power is exercised already through their positions in the state
bureaucracy and through state-funded institutions such as schools which they control.
287
While the policies passed by elected governments or authoritarian regimes can be
overturned by their predecessors, religious nationalist “work” that is done from within the
state - and particularly from within state apparatuses charged with the cultural production
of the citizen - is often much less apparent, but much harder to undo.
One of the clearest examples of the permanency o f religious nationalist “work”
conducted by bureaucrats within the state’s cultural apparatus is the story o f how Hindi -
Hindi in Devanagari script, not the Hindi-and-Urdu blend called Hindustani - became the
standardized language of post-independence north India. In Chapter Six I detailed the
ways in which the Arya Samaj and other pro-Hindi activists mobilized to make Hindi the
official language o f education and the bureaucracy in north India, based on a conception
of Urdu as a “foreign” language and a belief that the Hindu “nation” needed a common
language to bind its members. At the end of that chapter, I had ended my narrative on the
subject with the story o f how, during the Constituent Assembly debate in 1949 on
language, the Congress party took an internal vote on the Hindi vs. Hindustani issue.
Within the Congress party - a party dedicated to a secular nationalist understanding of
the nation and headed by Nehru, an inveterate supporter of Hindustani - Hindi supporters
won by 78 votes to 77. The result was Article 351 of the Indian Constitution, which
spoke of “the duty of the Union to promote the Hindi language,” but within a
framework of “secur(ing) its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its
genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of
India.”1
1 Krishna Kumar, “ Hindu Revivalism in North-Central India,” 549
288
Supporters of Hindi - religious nationalist or communal - working outside the
state in the familiar form of a pressure group seeking to influence political parties - had
succeeded in pushing Hindi to the top of the political agenda of the new government.
They were not able, however, to insure the complete success of their cause. Secular
nationalists within Congress insisted on keeping Hindustani alive, enshrining its role in
the Constitution and, through the offices o f Minister of Education Abul Kalam Azad,
attempting to mobilize state resources behind the campaign to develop and support
Hindustani.2 Hindi supporters attacked these activities in the familiar form of political
activists - challenging Azad’s actions in the Parliament. While this controversy was
going on, however, its outcome was already being decided by Hindu nationalists -
religious and communal - who were working from within the state apparatus and state-
funded institutions. The secular nationalist elite who functioned primarily in English
hired Hindi supporters in the state television and radio organizations. In this way, after
developing a version of Hindi which depended almost entirely on Sanskrit, was written in
Devanagari script, and had been largely purged of Arabic and Persian influences, the
Hindi supporters, “having shaped Hindi in accordance with their ideology were able to
develop a device uniquely suited for working within the secular state’s apparatus.”3
In the mid-1940’s, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Mansura, in the
governorate of Daqhaliyya, had 165 members, 40-50% of whom were state employees
who worked in such diverse areas as land surveying, the Ministry of Religious
2 ibid
3 ibid, 50
289
Endowments, or the government irrigation department.4 Several Brothers held less
innocuous and more politically sensitive jobs, including the secretary o f the military
prosecution office, a prosecuting attorney in the (civilian) state prosecution office, and a
chief official in the tax department Several members of the Assyut branch of the
Brotherhood in the mid-1940’s were judges.5 In 1945 in Munira, a district of Cairo, the
Brotherhood branch had 60 members, 25-40% of whom were state employees, holding
jobs ranging from employment in the ministries of health, social affairs, and agriculture
to the military maintenance department.6 78% of the board of trustees o f the Munira
branch held government jobs;7 50% of the board o f trustees of the Brotherhood branch in
Port Said did. The Arya Samaj was known for the large percentage of its members who
were government bureaucrats; as Kenneth Jones notes, Aryas “recognized and alternately
praised or denigrated the fact that their members were mostly clerks, ‘pen pushers,’ who
could only contribute small amounts,”8 while a 1901 government report referred to the
Samaj as “a notorious party of Hindus headed by a disreputable clique of dismissed
clerks and others of doubtful character”9 (emphasis mine). The British colonial
government’s Home Political Department Proceedings quoted Sir Macworth Young, the
Jeep case
3 ibid
6 ibid
7 ibid
* Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm, 82
9 ibid, 251
290
Lieutenant-Governor o f the Punjab, as saying in 1897 that “although there are many
servants of Government in its ranks, (the Samaj)’s general tendency is disloyal.” 10
To the extent that large percentages of the members of religious nationalist
movements in the colonial era are state bureaucrats, how much purchase do we get in
attempting to understand these movements’ longevity by attempting to draw strict
distinctions between the “state” and “society”? Lest one answer “OK, so they’re
bureaucrats, but how can they use state power to help their movements?” consider an
example from contemporary Egypt. It has long been noted that Islamists have been very
successfully in “colonizing” the social services provision arena through the myriad of
voluntary organizations which they support. Voluntary organization activity in Egypt was
until very recently governed by a Nasser-era law known as Law 32. In allowing the
Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) to oversee and control almost every aspect of
voluntary organizations’ activities, Law 32 also allows organizations which are supported
by members of the Ministry enormous privileges, which often make the difference in
whether or not the organizations can continue their work. As Sami Zubaida has noted,
“Islamic societies apparently enjoy special favors and privileges with ministry officials.
Reportedly, ministry officials are included on the boards of management of many of these
societies and paid a salary. This arrangement is apparently legal under Law 32, and in
some cases required. Islamic associations are reportedly the most likely to obtain
authorization to collect money from the public............. (they) seem to have greater
freedom of operation - not by virtue of empowering legislation but thanks to informal or
10 Home Political Department Proceedings, April 1912, No.4, quoted in Pandey 14S
291
semi-formal arrangements with ministry officials.”11 In light of this analysis it is hardly
surprising that Islamist and Islamic groups have never joined the consistent opposition of
all other Egyptian opposition movements to Law 32. To the extent that religious
nationalists or their supporters are active within state bureaucracies, then, they are
positioned to offer significant assistance to the cause, often without the population or the
government even being aware that that assistance is being offered. Re-examining the
“state”, then, would seem to be an important part of solving the puzzle of how long-lived
religious nationalist movements got to be that way, and how they may continue to
succeed in the future.
11 Sami Zubaida, “ Islam, the State, and Democracy: Contrasting Conceptions o f Society in Egypt,” Middle
East Report, November-December 1992,7
292
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Religious Nationalism 101: How the Growth of State Educational

Vickie Anne Langohr

Standard explanations for the strength of contemporary religious nationalist movements

Egypt, and Muhammadiya in Indonesia - to demonstrate the opposite. It was precisely

aspect of social service provision - the creation of centralized Westem-style educational

created to play an important role in post-independence politics. When the creation of

Westem-style education systems was accompanied by a pronounced role for missionaries

in the educational arena, religious nationalist movements availed themselves of state

which to espouse their religiously-imagined conceptions of the nation and by funneling

an unprecedentedly large proportion o f the population into state-run schools by working

as teachers within those schools. The dependence of religious nationalist movements on

The Question of Definitions 11

Chapter Two: Nationalism, Religious and Otherwise: An 45-88

Chapter Three: The Creation of Centralized Education 89-150

Some General Statements About Pre-Colonial Education 91

Chapter Four: Missionaries, the State, and the DAV

Geography, History, and Language 101: The Religious Nationalist

Chapter Six: Nationalism 101, Section B: The Muslim

Chapter Seven: The Norm, or Colonies With Noncentralized

Chapter Eight: Concluding Comments 286-291

Selected Bibliography 292-298

Chapter One: Setting the Stage, and Shaping the State

Politically active religious movements, often termed fundamentalist movements,1

predecessors - religious movements led by charismatic figures assumed to be vehicles of

divine prophecy and followed unquestioningly - many of the religious movements

continuation. To paraphrase Daniel Gold’s description of contemporary Hindu

o f caste membership may be outweighed by that of committee membership.”2

This dissertation addresses the development of a particular subgroup of modem

religious movements - religious nationalist movements - and advances a hypothesis

an influential role in post-independence politics. The longevity of the more enduring

innovation - the creation of a Westem-style school system.

of these areas established a competing model of Westem-style education, which I define

as a process o f education in which people who had received formalized, replicable

into distinct categories implies the creation of a discipline of education; more

transmission o f religious knowledge to encompass other forms of knowledge as well. It

“secular.” In a colonial environment in which the British developed an English

curriculum devoid o f religious texts but nonetheless designed to disseminate

it would undermine Hinduism by demonstrating the impossibility of acts ascribed to

colonial-era “secular” education can be constructed. Westem-style education was

survival”6 in an ever-changing colonial milieu.

beyond a handful of elites. In other colonies, such as Kenya, government disinterest in

providing more traditional forms of education. Operation on such a limited scale,

nation among significant numbers of the colony’s youth.

In a handful o f colonies, the colonial power went beyond founding a handful of

Westem-type schools to forge a Westem-style educational system. Robert Jervis argues

interconnected so that changes in some elements or their relations produce changes in

provision of Westem-style education (for example, requiring the teaching of certain

government education officials directly administered a large number of Westem-style

In colonies in which missionaries, buoyed by colonial subsidies, provided a

substantial proportion of the opportunities for Westem-style education, religious

nationalist movements were motivated to build their own counter-networks of schools to

provide that education in a “safe” environment. While religious movements in colonies

religious nationalist movements to construct curricula which communicated the twin

opportunities for Westem-style education made them enormously popular, tunneled

very construction as institutions limited to students of a particular religious community,