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1 Farouk Is Gone, Long Live the Revolution The brilliant thinker, writer, and civil administrator Taha Husayn served as technical adviser to the Ministry of Education (1942–44) during one of the many brief returns of the Wafd to government. During his term, he set out to democratize and secularize education.He developed higher learning facilities , he founded the University of Alexandria, and he established one-track, universal, free compulsory primary education. Minister of education from 1950 until a few months prior to the 1952 coup,Husayn furthered what liberal nationalists had been advocating for decades. He thus instituted tuition-free secondary education.He created the University of 'Ayn al-Shams,and he laid the foundations of the University of Asyut as well as the financial grounds for the University of Mansura.1 Like other liberals, he upheld education as a keystone of national emancipation. Despite his competence, though, in the words of Egyptian intellectual Luwis 'Awad, Husayn received“honorary posts but no power at all” after the ’52 Revolution.2 The Free Officers faced an uneasy situation. They could not repudiate a man of Husayn’s stature.Yet they could not embrace a former royal minister or his liberalism. This led to an incongruous situation in which a proponent of restrictive policies and Husayn ’s former opponent, Isma'il al-Qabbani, received the portfolio of the first republican ministry of education. 'Awad suggests that this effectively severed Husayn’s expansive educational policy.3 However, Husayn was not immediately cast out. He collaborated in 1955 on one of the earliest new textbooks of the Nasserian schoolhouse.4 Moreover , the republic elevated him into a sort of Jules Ferry of the Egyptian educational system.5 Husayn thus maintains an honorific place in today’s schoolbooks . He sits among the founding fathers of the modern nation, along with patriots Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad Farid.6 In addition, the republic espoused many of the policies advocated by Husayn and other liberal nationalists ,7 such as greater state intervention,Arabic and Islamic teaching, curricular uniformity, secularization and institutional supervision of the venerable 20 | Part I. Retelling Salah al-Din Islamic university of al-Azhar, open-access to university, and expanding free education.8 Despite these continuities,the republic also departed from earlier policies. Governmental institutions promoted and at times imposed measures of social inclusion, as in al-Azhar. They worked at fashioning the schoolhouse as the matrix of the new political order.They officially and ideologically championed education (knowledge) over instruction (literacy). The ministry was renamed and textbooks proclaimed the Cultural Revolution.9 In 1954 the newly edited preparatory-level history textbook mentioned that“one of the goals of the revolution was to realize social justice and to bridge the gap between the nation’s [social] classes.”10 In contrast, the monarchy had a history of timid reforms. Political speeches and contemporaneous artifacts alike reflect this caution. The commercially successful 1939 film Al-'Azima (Determination) is indicative of royalist politics concerning education and social promotion.11 As Walter Armbrust has pointed out, the film’s main protagonist resembles an aspiring Tal'at Harb, the renowned Egyptian capitalist who promoted nationalist industrialism between the early 1920s and the late 1930s. This film was held in vast esteem after 1952 because of its explicitly nationalistic and optimistic language.12 Possibly limited by political and commercial pressures, director Kamal Salim stripped his film of social critique as he recounts a man’s honorable social ascension. He depicts an idyllic and picturesque hara (alley), where poverty is a virtue.13 In a prototypical narrative of self-achievement , the young Muhammad Hanafi toils while displaying infallible ethics. He undergoes the countless trials endemic to a world of artisans and shopkeepers , the prejudices of the bourgeoisie, and the Great Depression. Thanks to a capitalist system that prizes outstanding, hardworking individuals and fate—which rewards moral virtue—he overcomes such adversities. The patronage of the upper class is,however,indispensable.It appears in the guise of an honest pasha, Salih bey, who rewards morality, talent, and determination. At the end, Hanafi achieves the petit-bourgeois dream of material success. His rise to fortune is an ode to the middle class, and to education, which allows the transcendence of one’s birth. Hanafi’s education thus improves his material condition without alienating him. Indeed, Hanafi does not forsake his origins, and he marries his poor neighbor. In 1930s Egypt Hanafi would have enjoyed a free basic education with restrictions. The two-tiered...

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