How clean they are
NAPOLEAN'S invasion of Egypt in 1798 signalled the growing dominance of European power over the Muslim world, a dominance which was virtually complete by the end of the First World War. More or less rapidly, the elites of Muslim societies realised that they must learn more about the sources of wealth and power of the European peoples who threatened them. The Ottomans redoubled their efforts to learn more about Europe, founding a translation unit in the 1830s and reopening their European embassies, a process that led from 1839 to the great reform period, the Tanzimat; the Persians founded the Dar al-Funun, or Polytechnic, in Tehran in 1851, with the aim of making Western knowledge and languages available to government; and in 1869 the Indian Muslim Saiyid Ahmad Khan made his visit to England, leading a few years later to the foundation of Aligarh College and the creation of an educational environment in which Indo-Muslim elites could embrace Western knowledge on their own terms.
Among the earliest and most influential of these attempts to acquire knowledge of Europe was the educational mission dispatched by Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, to Paris between 1826 and 1831. Forty-four students were sent. The Pasha took a personal interest in their progress. "My dear Effendis", he wrote to them in 1829, after being disappointed by the monthly reports of their activities:
what are our hopes of you? Each one of you should send us something of the fruit of his labours and proof of his skill. If you do not exchange this idleness with hard work, diligence and zeal, and if you return to Egypt after having read a couple of books, thinking that you have studied the [European] arts and science, then you are deceiving yourselves.
To judge by An Imam in Paris, the situation was not nearly as bad as the Pasha feared, at least as far as one member of the mission was concerned. The book is the record kept by Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, and first published in 1834. It reports a life of disciplined effort and increasingly profound engagement with French culture, covering topics such as the sea journey from Alexandria to Marseilles, life in Paris, the organisation of the French State and education, al-Tahtawi's studies, discussions of various fields of knowledge including language, logic and arithmetic, and an eyewitness account of the 1830 Revolution. That al-Tahtawi profited by the experience was demonstrated by the great impact he had on 19th-century Egypt as a writer and educational reformer. His record, moreover, was the first comprehensive account of a European society available to his Arab compatriots. It was responsible for introducing to Arabic some 70 adaptations of French words, such as nimra (number) and busta (post), which exist to the present.
An Imam in Paris lets us share the responses of a highly intelligent scholar, educated at the great traditional university of al-Azhar, to Western civilisation. Like many 19th-century Muslims of his background, he is highly impressed by much of what he sees. On several occasions, for instance, he refers to the high standards of hygiene he encountered:
among the laudable qualities of the Franks that distinguish them from other Christians is their love of external cleanliness. Indeed, all the dirt and filth which God — may he be praised and exalted — has cursed the Copts of Egypt he gave the Franks as cleanliness.
Al-Tahtawi relished the world of the mind in Paris where he found people curious, mentally agile and passionate for the new. Caussin de Perceval, the conservator of Arabic manuscripts at the Royal Library, became a friend, as did Silvestre de Sacy, the founder of the Société Asiatique.
Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu (the Ibn Khaldun of Europe) and other philosophers discussed. Indeed, al-Tahtawi declared: "the Parisians distinguish themselves from many Christians by their keen intelligence, profound perceptiveness and depth of mind when treating recondite issues". As we might expect, he was greatly impressed by the levels of organisation and infrastructure he discovered: the great libraries and institutions of higher learning, the range and specialisation of medical facilities, the systems of public transport, the workings of the post, the newspapers and so on. But what seems to have impressed him more than anything else was the idea expressed in the French Constitution that all, even the King, were equal before law. Indeed, one can almost hear his excitement as he describes the arrest, trial and imprisonment of the ministers whose actions were thought to be responsible for the July Revolution.
There were, of course, aspects of French values and life by which he was less impressed. "The French show charity in words and deeds, [but] not when it involves their money and possessions". Generosity with one's wealth he regarded as a peculiarly Arab trait. He was offended by those who told him that "the intellect of their philosophers and physicists is greater and more perceptive than that of prophets". But what struck him more than anything else, as it did all Muslim visitors to Europe, was the freedom of women: they shop, run businesses, travel by themselves and commit adultery (although only the upper and lower classes, not the middle classes). Moreover, "the men are slaves to women here, and under their command, irrespective of whether they are pretty or not".
Daniel L. Newman is to be congratulated on making the first translation into English of this remarkable book, and on supporting the text with a first-class introduction and with footnotes that are as full as one could wish; among many other things, we learn that today Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi has an official website. This is not surprising: he was a true Egyptian patriot. Following French models, he fostered a new literary genre, the patriotic poem (wataniyaat). And, in the epilogue to his book, written not long after the Turks sold the Parthenon friezes to Elgin, he inveighs against those who are selling Egypt's pre-Muslim heritage to foreigners.
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FRANCIS ROBINSON
An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi's Visit to France (1826-1831), Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, translated from the Arabic and edited by Daniel L. Newman, Saqi, p.405, £24.99. 0 86356 346 5
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