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7. Remaking Arab France
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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Remaking Arab France In a remarkable preface to his final work, published after his death, Joseph Agoub offered an eloquent defense of the Arabic language, placing Egypt for the first time in his works as just one element in a larger Arab world. In this text, Agoub acknowledged his debt to the work of Arab intellectuals like Mikha’il Sabbagh and Ellious Bocthor who had come to Paris before him. But where in his early poetry he had condemned Islam as a barbarian attack on the glories of ancient Egypt, for the first time Agoub acknowledged the Qur’an as one of the inexhaustible sources of the power and vigor of the Arabic language and culture: All the nations of Turkey, of Egypt, of Syria, of Persia and the three Arabias, the peoples of Algiers, of Tripoli, of Tunis and the empire of Morocco, those of Ethiopia and the Sahara, of the coasts of Zanzibar and Senegal—in a word, all the Muslims scattered pell-mell across the face of the old world draw from this unique and eternal book not only the dogmas of their religious belief but also the true pattern of their civil laws, the rules of their behavior, the instruction of their duties, and often the precepts of their conduct toward Europe and its agents.1 At the beginning of the s, Joseph Agoub had written paeans to ancient Egypt in which Muslims appeared only as intruders and vandals, sabotaging the civilizational transfer from Egypt to France. Here, he spoke with force of a Muslim world as a great civilization in itself, stretching across the “face of the old world,” that could speak back to Europe on the basis of its “eternal” religious teaching. In this text, Joseph no longer spoke as the ventriloquist’s dummy of Restoration Egyptomania, but as an Arab, proud of the Arabic language and culture and its Islamic heritage. He went on to assert the “superiority” of Arabic and its priority over European languages and cultures: The Arabic language, strong in its literary superiority, does not even need this political support to maintain itself in the first rank of European studies. [This] language that gave so many works to history, to geography, to all the arts . . . carelessly tossed the first glimmerings of civilization into the middle of Europe, and can still offer to the highest intellects of modern societies an inexhaustible source of pleasure and knowledge.2 This insistence upon Arab culture and history not just as an ancient source to be rediscovered by Europeans, but as both a source of and a challenge to European civilization, was something entirely new. For Agoub, the study of the Arabic language had become a place in which the exile of Egyptians, Syrians, and others in France could be made meaningful, in which their intermediary role would no longer be marginal but rather crucial to the elaboration of new identities. But, as we have seen, that project would be cut cruelly short. As we proceed toward the conclusion of this book it is the genesis of that project as well as its collapse that we must investigate. What had changed in the Arab Paris of the late s, which led Agoub to reconfigure so radically the conflicting categories that had so troubled him throughout his early career? In the first group of students from an Egypt in transformation arrived in Paris. They were a mixed group, more than forty young men drawn in large part from the family and associates of the governor of Egypt, Muhammad ‘Ali. These effendis, as they were known, were the Turkish-speaking ruling elite of Egypt. Most also spoke Arabic, but they did not locate either their culture or their identity in Egypt’s Arab heritage, but in their own wider Ottoman connections. Among them, however, was a last-minute addition, the Egyptian Arab intellectual Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who was destined to become by many accounts the most influential Arab writer and intellectual of the nineteenth-century Arab nahda, or renaissance .3 It is the encounter between this seminal figure and the Arab intellectuals of Restoration Paris that we will explore in this chapter. Rifa’a al-Tahtawi was born to a family in Upper Egypt that had been impoverished by the taxation reforms introduced by the modernizing program of Muhammad ‘Ali’s administration. He was educated along traditional lines, from the local mosque through the madrasa to the university of al-Azhar, the centuries-old intellectual center...