Guardians of the Social Collective: The Legal Regulation of Religion and Morality in Modern Egypt

This dissertation examines the history of the legal regulation of religion and religious morality and the discourse of rights pertinent to religion within the modern Egyptian legal system. The dissertation assesses the influence of Islamic legal practices on the modernization of Egyptian juridical institutions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The common understanding in many historical, anthropological, and legal accounts is that Islamic Law was secularized in Egypt due to the translation of several Western or liberal legal concepts and integrating them into legal theory and practices prevailing in Egypt during this period. This process of secularization is understood to have transformed legal norms, and communal arrangements that used to regulate society were replaced by Western-styled state law enforced through obedience, punishment, and discipline. Therefore, Egyptian legal codes starting from 1883 are referred to as French codes or French laws. This interpretation is not necessarily based on studying the practices of Egyptian legal institutions but on looking at legal theories in isolation from the way they were applied. In this dissertation, I recognize the agency of Egyptian jurists, politicians, and bureaucrats and the Egyptian legal culture in the modernisation of law. The dissertation thus revises two common understandings of the legal historiography of modern Egypt: that religion and Islamic Law were relegated to the private sphere of family disputes and that positive Western law replaced them in the realm of public law. Based on archival work, the dissertation gives greater attention to the state's role in Egyptian legal thought and practice as well as in Islamic law. This study also considers several factors that influenced the development of the legal system and the legal regulation of religion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such factors include the transformations in the nature of state authority through the expansion of bureaucracy; the unprecedented growth of the public sphere, which, in turn, involved the emergence of a political press, the development of the urban landscape, and the establishment of various forms of political and intellectual platforms; and, finally, the bureaucratization of traditional Islamic authorities and mechanisms. Within this framework, I focus on how modern law regulated censorship on printing religious books; punished those who insulted, criticized, or questioned the main tenets of religion; imposed certain punitive and disciplinary measures on conversion from Islam, and policed public behaviour that violated accepted norms of decency and morality.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Abdeltawwab, Ahmed

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Fahmy, Khaled

• Egypt
• Islamic Law
• Law
• Legal History
• Modern Egypt

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.95330

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/347913