Eight Words

In October 1881, a month after the nationalist leader Ahmad Urabi had lined up his troops in front of the Khedival Palace and forced the regime to accept his popular demands, thereby precipitating the British invasion to restore Khedival power, a book had been published in Cairo entitled The Essay on Eight Words (Risalat al-kalim al-thaman ). The book discussed the meaning of eight words 'current on the tongues of the younger generation today', nation, homeland, government, justice, oppression, politics, liberty and education. It was written by Husayn al-Marsafi, the senior professor at Dar al-Ulum, the école normale set up in Cairo ten years earlier to produce teachers for the new government schools, who was among the most prominent of the established scholars and teachers of his time. Significantly, he was also the mentor of Mahmud Sami Pasha al-Barudi, the officer and poet

who was to become Prime Minister the following year of the short-lived nationalist government.^[6]

The vocabulary and thinking of the nationalist leadership was reflected in Eight Words . Addressing the political crisis as a crisis found in the misuse and misunderstanding of words, the book's major theme was the need for the authority and discipline of a national system of education. Colonel Urabi's own ideas concerning 'political matters' had first been formed from reading about the military training of the French and the manner in which they were 'drilled and organised', and in their manifesto of 1881 the nationalist leaders declared that the aim of the Egyptian people was 'to complete their national education'. This they sought to achieve by means of a parliament, the press, and the spread of schooling, adding in the manifesto that 'none of these means of education can be secured except by the firm attitude of national leaders'.^[7] Thus the nationalists seized power in October 1881 not so much in the name of revolution as in the name of Egypt's 'national education'. Urabi brought his regiment out of the barracks and took them by train from Cairo to the Delta town of Zaqaziq, near the village of his birth. There he gave a speech asserting 'the usefulness and necessity of a good education', and as his first act of national leadership laid the foundation stone of a new school.^[8]

Eight Words was sympathetic to the grievances of the nationalist officers, while warning them against mistaking factionalism for patriotism. The eight words it discussed were the new vocabulary of modern nationalism, whose proper use required, in turn, the school-centred authority of the nation-state. Marsafi supported the general spread of schooling, so that teachers would be able to use words like 'patriotism' repeatedly in the classroom and explain their proper meaning. The book criticised traditional scholars for having lost their moral and political authority, and advocated in their place the new authority of teachers over students in the government schools. And yet, the book was still caught up in other, older notions of authority. Unlike the nationalist leadership, Marsafi was opposed to the uncontrolled spread of printing in Egypt. He argued the need for a body of properly educated scholars who would be responsible for the books and journals to be printed, in order to control the misuse of writing. Indeed, he understood the political crisis as a whole in terms of the breakdown of a textual authority, evident in the proliferation of words 'on the tongues of the younger generation today'.

Although as a scholar of enormous talent Marsafi had been drawn into the educational politics of the new state, in many ways he still belonged to a different tradition of scholarship and authority. He was a man from a small village in the Nile Delta, trained at al-Azhar, and blind from birth. He had grown up within an intellectual and political tradition in which the city depended upon the countryside rather than dominating it, allowing particu-

lar villages to provide generations of Cairene scholars. This was a tradition which rejected the use of the printing press and accepted blindness (there was an entire college for the blind at al-Azhar) for the same reason. Namely, that the only way to read a text and retain its uncertain authority was to hear it read aloud, phrase by phrase, by one who had already mastered it, and to repeat and discuss it with such a master.

This sort of tradition in respect of words and their transmission stands in marked contrast to the proliferation of telegraphs, news reports, and even private correspondence among the British. Marsafi was a remarkable scholar. Unlike many Azhar scholars, he was open to the innovations of European methods of schooling and had even acquired, despite his blindness, the ability to read French. It seems strange, that at a moment of profound political crisis he should be as preoccupied as he was with questions of proper linguistic usage and the threat of an uncontrolled spread of new vocabularies. Marsafi's response to the crisis echoes that of an earlier Egyptian scholar, the historian al-Jabarti, writing on the previous occasion when the country faced the threat of occupation by a European army. The French forces that invaded Egypt in 1798, like the British in 1882, had employed innovative methods of communication. Jabarti's account noted, as I mentioned in chapter 2, how the French 'make signs and signals among themselves that they follow and never deviate from'. Still more indicative of the unusual nature of European power was that the French arrived to conquer Egypt with a printing press.

Landing at Alexandria and advancing upon Cairo, Napoleon's first act had been to issue a printed proclamation to the Egyptian people, prepared in Arabic by French Orientalists. Jabarti's response to this strange innovation, in a chronicle written in the midst of the crisis, was an interesting one. He began his account by copying the text of the proclamation, and followed it for several pages with a detailed list of its grammatical errors. Phrase by phrase he pointed out the colloquialisms, misspellings, ellipses, inconsistencies, morphological inaccuracies and errors of syntax of the French Orientalists, drawing from these incorrect usages a picture of the corruptions, deceptions, misunderstandings and ignorance of the French authorities.^[9]

The contrast between the critical and sometimes hostile response among Muslim scholars to the introduction of an Arabic printing press and the efficient and advanced techniques of the French military scholars is sometimes taken to exemplify the history of Egypt's relationship with the modern West. It took the Napoleonic occupation to introduce to the Middle East the first Arabic press, and the absence of printing over the preceding centuries has often been cited as evidence of the backwardness and isolation of the Arab world that the French occupation was to shatter. After the

departure of the French soldiers the Egyptian government did manage to set up its own press. But this was essentially a part of the country's new military equipment; the bulk of what was printed in the first half of the century was for purposes of military instruction.^[10] The few individuals who tried to extend the use of the press outside the military project subsequently found themselves removed from office and in some cases exiled. By the 1850s, when Egypt had been forced to abandon its military ambitions, the press had fallen into disrepair, and in 1861 it was formally shut down.^[11] Printing was started up again by the government under Isma'il, and by the time of the nationalist uprising there was an active periodical press. But the government attempted to suppress whatever publication it did not control, and establishment scholars like Marsafi spoke out against the press, blaming the political crisis in part on the wanton spread of printing.^[12] Thus the story of printing in Egypt seems to confirm the backwardness of the Arab world, its continuing resistance to change, and the irrational hostility of Muslim scholars towards modern learning. However, rather than evidence of others' backwardness, resistance and irrationality, I think these attitudes towards the technology of printing can point us towards an understanding of some of our own strange ideas about the nature of writing, and the political assumptions to which they correspond. To understand these ideas, I am going to examine Marsafi's own purposes in writing Eight Words .