Army Reform and Elite Movements between the Maghrib and the
Near East (1830-1912)
During the "long 19th century”, the southern and eastern
Mediterranean was characterized by profound transformation, in
which intra-Muslim relations played a crucial role. This project
explores the role these relations played with respect to army
reform, which here becomes the prism through which less exposed
aspects of political reorganization in the region will be scrutinized.
The creation of a standing army can actually be considered as
one of the key elements in the course of the creation and/or consolidation
of centralized statehood. It aimed at internal societal mobilization
and control as well as at the drawing of frontiers, or, at times,
expansionism. At the local and national level, both dynamics met
with practical problems and created new demands for legitimization.
Moreover army reform did not evolve in terms of dependence on
and/or opposition to Europe alone. Indeed, the historical experience
of reform as well as the frames of reference were never a function
of political or socio-cultural boundaries, given the horizontal
mobility of religious and politico-military elites and the appeal
of translocal identities within the Muslim world. Conversely,
the experiences of reform and frames of reference were themselves
affected by change. Working from the perspective of concrete actors,
the project intends to reconstruct how contacts and references
across borders within the Muslim world have shaped the appropriation/creation
of forms of modern statehood and how these in turn influenced
such contacts and references. The sub-projects 1 and 2 were finished in 2005. The third sub-project looks at army reform in Egypt and
Egyptian expansionism from a scholar and scholarly literature
perspective at the Azhar mosque university.
Discourses of legitimation in the age of reform. The Azhar,
the Army and Egyptian Expansionism (1822-1882)
Dyala Hamzah
Dyala Hamzah looks at the creation of Egypt’s standing army
(1822) and the novel wars it waged during the 19th century from
the point of view of Azhar mosque university scholars. She asks
whether and if so, how Islamic theories of government and political
order (siyâsa shar‘iyya, khilâfa) were transformed
in the wake of state centralization and expansionism; and whether
specific jurisprudential concepts, such as ‘abd, dhimmî,
jihâd, etc., were affected in any way by military reform
itself. In order to gauge the social relevance of ulema, the scope
of their networks, and the translocal significance of their ideas
across the Ottoman Empire (and beyond), she examines the conditions
of production for scholarly literature as a whole in the context
of reform, with particular focus on legal advice literature (fatâwâ).
Ultimately, she aims at establishing the persistence of Azhar
scholars’ power of legitimation vs. the new, competing world
views that had begun to emerge from bureaucratic and technical
rationale and practice.
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