1. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, pp. 58–59.

2. George Devereaux and Edwin Loeb, “Antagonistic Acculturation,” American Sociological Review 8, 2 (April 1943), pp. 133–47.

3. Messick, The Calligraphic State, p. 54.

4. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 55–56.

5. Messick, The Calligraphic State, pp. 65–66.

6. Ong, Interfaces of the Word, p. 88.

7. See, especially, Willis, Learning to Labour, pp. 171–76; also Williams, Sociology of Culture, p. 188.

8. A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 264.

9. Yusuf al-Hamadi and Muhammad Shahhat Wahdan, Kitab al-tarbiya al-diniyya al-islamiyya, lil-saff al-sadis al-ibtida’i (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘amma li-shu’un al-mutabi‘ al-amiriyya, 1976), pp. 108–10.

10. Yusuf al-Hamadi, Muhammad Mukhtar Amin Mukram, and Dr. ‘Abd al-Maqsud Shalqami, Tarbiya al-Muslim, lil-saff al-sadis al-ibtida’i (Cairo: al-Jihaz al-markazi lil-kutub al-jami‘iyya wa al-madrasiyya wa al-wasa’il al-ta‘limiyya, 1981), pp. 97–98.

11. First grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. v–vi.

12. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 3.

13. First grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. v.

14. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 3.

15. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 3.

16. Third and fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 3.

17. Table 3 summarizes an analysis of the proportion of the textbooks devoted to specific topics. The analysis was made easier by the fact that the texts are divided into sections with particular, labeled themes. Because of the way the text was organized, each page could usually be treated as a unit for the purpose of coding; i.e., there was not usually more than one kind of material covered on a single page. Where this was not the case, and a page had more than one category of material on it, an even fraction (one-quarter, one-third, one-half, etc.), was usually sufficient to express the proportion of space devoted to particular topics. Where material of one type was included in a section of text of another type (e.g., a story about the Prophet Muhammad in a section on the pillars of Islam), it was not coded differently from the section in which it was included; the authors' categorization of material is treated as primary.

18. I should emphasize that these processes are derived from my own examination of the texts, and do not necessarily correspond to the conscious intentions or productive processes of their creators.

19. First grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 65.

20. Illustrating the Ramadan sections in the first, second, and fifth grade textbooks are what appear to be three different drawings of the same mosque, a medium-size structure set against the background of some multistory dwellings that could exist in any but the very smallest towns in the country.

21. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 40.

22. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 37.

23. Fifth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 89. There is a matching question in the section of review questions following the story, “What is the role and status of Egypt in the Arab and Islamic world?” From an Islamic rather than a political perspective, this is an odd interpretation of the story of Joseph. A. Chris Eccel points out that he has “rarely seen the ‘ulama’ refer to ancient Egypt except as a symbol for paganism, as it is treated in the Kur’an.” Egypt, Islam, and Social Change: Al-Azhar in Conflict and Accommodation (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1984), p. 350.

24. This is an astounding feat, given that even the Pharaoh Akhenaton's monotheism was at that point still at least three hundred years in the future. Yusuf ‘Ali's commentary on the Qur’an places the story of Joseph “somewhere between the 19th and the 17th century B.C.” The Holy Qur’an (Brentwood, Md.: Amana Corporation, 1983), p. 406.

25. See, for example, discussions of plastic surgery (al-Liwa’ al-islami, 1 December 1988, p. 5), or conversations with the mufti on family planning (al-Ahram, 7 February 1989, p. 8).

26. Zamzam (July 1989), p. 22. The discovery is credited to Dr. ‘Abd al-Nasir Ibrahim Muhammad Harara.

27. One will occasionally find photographs in Muslim periodicals of honeycombs in which the bees have blocked off cells to spell the divine name, or “Allah” inscribed by natural blight on the surface of a leaf. In the summer of 1993 I found a particularly good example of this convention on the wall of a Cairo juice bar. The proprietor had taped up a double-page spread from a private sector religious periodical purporting to be a photograph of a grove of trees, the trunks of which had naturally grown into the shape of Arabic letters spelling the shahada: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” For similar understandings in Europe, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), ch. 2.

28. Fifth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 73–75. “Al-nidafa min al-iman” is a common proverb in Egypt, appearing painted (ineffectually) on trash receptacles in some parts of Cairo. The siwak itself has become, in the rhetoric of the ‘ulama, a symbol of Islamic alternatives to Western practices (e.g., al-Liwa’ al-islami, 13 October 1988, p. 7).

29. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). “Even if some of Moses's dietary rules were hygienically beneficial,” she wrote, “it is a pity to treat him as an enlightened public health administrator, rather than as a spiritual leader” (p. 29). Max Weber attributed such “reinterpretation of the ritualistic commandments of purity as hygienic prescriptions,” to “modernization.” The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1963), p. 93.

30. Concern with the health implications of ablution is relatively recent. A century ago, in his “Report on the Medical and Sanitary Administration of the Government of Egypt,” H. R. Greene, surgeon major and under director of the Services Sanitaires d'Egypte wrote,

Mosques in town and country are all provided with a basin for ablution, in which the water is seldom changed oftener than once in three months. Around this basin are placed a number of foul latrines communicating with a common drain, which, in most instances, runs into a tank or canal from where the drinking supply of the neighborhood is obtained. An examination of most of the principal mosque drains in Lower Egypt last year showed that 73 per cent. ended in the Nile or its branches and that 23 per cent. flowed into stagnant ponds of which the water was used for drinking purposes. In Egypt the Deity is invariably held to be the author of all disease, which should accordingly be submitted to with resignation; nor should any attempt be made by remedying defects to endeavor to controvert the will of the Almighty. (Enclosure in item no. 19 in “Egypt” no. 15 [1885], “Reports on the State of Egypt and the Progress of Administrative Reforms,” Parl. Pap., 1884–85, vol. 89, p. 78)

Sanitary reforms have been treated briefly in Mitchell's Colonising Egypt, pp. 64–68; and extensively in LaVerne Kuhnke's Lives at Risk (University of California Press, 1990).

31. First grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 44n.

32. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 28.

33. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 35.

34. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 36.

35. F. O. Mann, who evaluated the Egyptian school system in 1929 at the request of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, complained that the

process [of examination and cramming] is objectionable in itself but most of all when applied to such subjects as hygiene and morals. Not only is examination in these subjects apt to confuse the essential issue but it attempts to test what obviously cannot be tested by the simplicities of question and answer. The dirtiest little boy ever born might easily get full marks in a written examination in hygiene, and the most doubtful juvenile ever conceived the first place in morality by sheer capacity for the reproduction of platitudes, in the one case physiological, in the other, ethical. (Report on Certain Aspects of Egyptian Education, Rendered to His Excellency, the Minister of Education at Cairo [Cairo: Government Press, 1932], p. 21)

36. The choice of this topic should be obvious from the theme of the book, but should not be interpreted to mean that this theme is “dominant” in the texts in the sense of the proportion of space allotted to it, or that it is singled out for attention by the authors. The discussion here is representative of all instances in the texts in which either the family or the school is recommended or shown to be a source of moral advice to the child.

37. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 73.

38. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 75.

39. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 54.

40. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 24.

41. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 13.

42. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 14–16.

43. The description of the trials and tribulations of ideal families was a central feature of the Victorian Sunday school textbook and the popular religious tract, a genre wonderfully parodied by Mark Twain in “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Bantam, 1957), pp. 6–9. In Egypt, the rhetorical technique of depicting the school as one of the primary sources of moral and religious lessons matches alterations in the behavior of educated rural families, in which mothers tend to encourage their children to spend their time studying or playing by themselves, isolated from the feared “bad influences” of neighborhood children. Neither exposed to their local age-mates nor expected to care for younger siblings, such children are raised to be more ego-oriented and less concerned with family loyalties. Schoolbook lessons become increasingly more important as sources of social knowledge because notions of neighborliness and of filial piety, as well as of appropriately differentiated sex roles, differ substantially in educated families from those of the surrounding communities. Judy H. Brink, “Changing Child Rearing Patterns in an Egyptian Village,” paper presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, November 1990.

44. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 78–79.

45. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 27.

46. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 21.

47. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 20–21.

48. Fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 20.

49. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 43–45; fourth grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, pp. 75–76.

50. Third grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 46.

51. Karim Shafik, interview, 9 August 1989, p. 568.

52. Karim Shafik, interview, 9 August 1989, p. 569.

53. Al-Muslim al-saghir fi ‘alam al-talwin (Cairo: Safir, n.d.), p. 1.

54. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Latif and Dr. Yahya ‘Abduh, Al-Udhun al-kabira (Cairo: Safir, n.d.).

55. Second grade religious studies textbook, 1988–89, p. 29.

56. ‘Abd al-Tuwab Yusuf and Dr. Yahya ‘Abduh, Al-Sufuf al-munadhdhama (Cairo: Safir, 1988), p. 14.

57. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 87–94; see also Starrett, “The Hexis of Interpretation.”

58. Bourdieu, Outline, pp. 167–69.

59. “Order,” as Sami Zubaida reminds us in his review of Mitchell's Colonising Egypt, “…is not given in a particular situation, but read into that situation.” “Exhibitions of Power,” Economy and Society 19 (1990), p. 364.

60. John Bowen, “ Salat in Indonesia: The Social Meanings of an Islamic Ritual,” Man, n.s., 24 (1989), p. 615.

61. Fischer and Abedi, Debating Muslims, p. 291.

62. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961).