The Interpretation of Culture and the Culture of Interpretation

At the height of the Second World War, psychological anthropologist George Devereaux and his colleague Edwin Loeb, members of a generation of American scholars who found their civilization under the threat of an aggressive foreign military machine, wrote an article outlining the strategies a besieged culture might use to resist annihilation. One of these strategies, “antagonistic acculturation,” they described as the process of adopting lower-order practices and institutions from foreign cultures for the purpose of resisting adoption of their higher-order goals; essentially, adopting new cultural tactics to resist the adoption of new values.^[2] The authors criticized the earlier trend of diffusionist scholarship by emphasizing the purposive nature of what they termed “autoplastic culture change,” and in an unusual literary conceit, they quoted from the Qur’an itself as the best possible summary of the human interest in setting boundaries: “And I shall not worship that which ye worship/Nor will ye worship that which I worship/Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion” (sura 109, al-Kafirun, 4–6).

The phrase “antagonistic acculturation” has not aged well, perhaps because of a vague semantic prejudice sparked by the alliterative terms, the latter recalling the stolid scientific neutralism of some colonial acculturation studies, and the former implying perhaps that indigenous resistance to “culture contact” was a matter of the stubborn native's impenetrable rejection of progressive change. But while the phrase has been all but forgotten by anthropologists, who now prefer the concept of resistance, the process it describes is a central feature of cultural flow in the colonial and post- or neocolonial world. As we saw in examining the development of European-style education in Egypt, this was the force behind the calculated military appropriation of schooling in the early nineteenth century. Since that time, the state's strategies for maintaining a Muslim identity while extending ideological influence over an increasingly urbanized and literate populace has included the transformation of Islamic institutions, beliefs, and values through altering the form and the context of their production and their inculcation. That context—the European-style school—works both through new principles of organizing interpersonal authority on a massive and centrally administered scale and through the use of new types of cultural production, particularly the imported form of the school textbook. This chapter addresses the specific mechanisms through which the textbook both furthers and expresses the functionalization of the Islamic tradition.

The process of altering cultural production to match, compete with, and fend off imported models, while simultaneously increasing its political usefulness, is obviously not confined to the Nile Valley. In his important book The Calligraphic State, Brinkley Messick has shown how Ottoman and Yemeni nationalist reformers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed the flexible and multivocal tradition of Islamic legal scholarship, the shari‘a, into a closed, self-contained, and relatively rigid set of “modern” legal codes. Ottoman reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century had likened the shari‘a to “an ocean without shores,” vast, difficult to access because of the specialized training required, and inappropriate for the times.^[3] Criticizing its “lack of order” relative to European-style legal codes, they were concerned with making the law “known,” fixing it in structured form in numbered paragraphs, “making a portion of the shari‘a manageable and perusable,” and issuing works that contained “only the least contested and least controversial opinions and composed in a manner which would be sufficiently clear so that anyone could study it easily and act in conformity with it.” ^[4] At the same time that colonial translations of Muslim legal works were pulling together different versions to create authoritative Arabic texts, local elites as well as the colonial powers themselves endeavored to spread shari‘a consciousness to the hinterlands of Yemen, both because it was considered “ “tidier” and more predictable than custom” and because, according to contemporary sources, it “provides better political propaganda.” ^[5] With more recent reorganizations of Yemeni political life, responsibility for the production of a corpus of “Islamic law” has been removed from the hands of the ‘ulama and given over to public officials and parliaments.

The same sorts of processes have operated in Egypt through the production of both official textbooks and private sector childrens' literature. Textbooks are an offspring of print (as opposed to manuscript) culture, both because printing allows the creation of sufficient numbers of books to allow feasible mass instruction and also because of the uniformity of printed products. “With print,” Walter Ong writes,

for the first time, a teacher could stand before a class and say, “Everybody turn to page 48, fifth line from the top, third word from the left,” and everybody could find the word. In a manuscript culture the students might all have had manuscripts, but you would have had to pronounce the word and wait for them to locate it because it would be in a different position on a different page in virtually every manuscript.^[6]

As we have seen in the classroom itself, the text recycling that springs from practical economic pressures means this is not always so, but the infinite standardization of the textbook does have the universal effect of flattening controversy and rigidifying current understandings of open questions as indisputable fact.

Moreover, and most importantly, by propagating a synoptic vision of Islamic belief and practice, sanctioned either by the state or by groups of “experts” working in the private sector, mass education and its pedagogical materials effectively create a new Islamic tradition derived from, but not identical with, the historical tradition (just as Yemen's “Islamic” legal codes drew on the corpus of shari‘a scholarship, while the latter drew directly on the Qur’an and sunna.) Furthermore, these materials automatically draw new populations into the field of cultural reproduction: not only the new elites of the Ministry of Education and the corporate boardroom, but, importantly, the students themselves, who are supposed to derive from their classroom training the ability to produce “correct” Muslim behavior. This installation of habitus, however, is complicated by the fact that it is an explicit, verbal inculcation that couches Muslim behavior in functionalist terms, terms that actively encourage students to draw connections between the world of life and the world of texts. Once the possibility of this sort of interpretation is opened, the construction of additional, or alternate, readings of Muslim practice is inevitable.