Hybridized education and the emergence of modern Islamic authority: Dar al-‘Ulum, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb

Journal article

This paper argues that the hybridized education provided by Cairo's Dar al-‘Ulum teacher training school was a key factor in the ability of some of its students – such as Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taki al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir – to establish themselves as leaders of major religious movements. It pushes forward scholarship on Islamic authority by arguing that Banna and Qutb should not be seen as 'lay intellectuals' because their education involved significant study of core religious disciplines. It shows how the mixed background in civil and religious educational traditions provided by Dar al-'Ulum gave them sufficient capital to establish themselves as authoritative social and religious leaders in the self-consciously modern world of the 1930s and 1940s efendi professional. This placed them in an ideal position to contribute significantly to the creation of new models for religious leadership and organization that specifically met the social, political and religious needs of efendis. Their hybridity not only enabled them to cross the sociocultural boundaries separating efendi from shaykh, but also to merge elements of each to create new ways of being religious. The examples they set as leaders paved the way for activists and intellectuals from future generations to claim Islamic authority without formal Islamic educational credentials, and demonstrates clearly the utility of hybridization in the construction of new forms of Islamic authority.

Authors: Kalmbach, H

• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Not peer reviewed
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• Edition: Author's Original
• Language: English
• Subjects: Economic and Social History; Middle East; Near East; Islam; History of other areas