Rifa’a al-Tahtawi

Works

• 1834The Extraction of Gold in an Overview of Paris

  Account of five years in Paris (1826–31): French education, science, customs and government, with a translation of the constitutional charter of 1814 and an account of the July Revolution of 1830; the first Arabic book to present a European political order in detail.

• 1872The Faithful Guide for Girls and Boys

  Book on education written for the new state schools: girls should be educated as boys are, education forms good citizens and spouses, and work and love of the homeland are duties of all.

Position

Al-Tahtawi is on the map as the first major thinker of the Arab renaissance (Nahda) and as a mediator between Islamic learning and the European Enlightenment. His account of Paris, “The Extraction of Gold” (1834), describes French schools, sciences, newspapers, theatre and customs, and translates and comments on the constitutional charter of 1814 – a law, he notes, that limits the king and secures the rights of subjects, and much of which accords with the justice that Islam requires, although it is not derived from the Qur’an; he describes the July Revolution of 1830 as a struggle over the charter. In Paris he read, by his own account, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and Rousseau’s Social Contract. In his later works, above all “The Paths of Egyptian Minds” (1869) and “The Faithful Guide for Girls and Boys” (1872), he argued that a ruler must govern by law and consult the learned, that the homeland (waṭan) is the object of patriotic love and duty, that girls should be educated as boys are, and that the modern sciences, which Europe had partly learned from the Arabs, belong to a heritage Muslims should recover. Albert Hourani (1962) opened his account of the first generation of the Nahda with him and saw in him a forerunner of later reformers such as Muhammad ʿAbduh; Daniel L. Newman’s translation of the Paris book (2004) is the standard English edition.

Life & context

Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi was born on 15 October 1801 in Tahta in Upper Egypt into a family of religious scholars that had lost its wealth. He studied at al-Azhar in Cairo, where the reform-minded scholar Hasan al-ʿAttar became his teacher and patron, taught there and served as an imam in the new army. In 1826, on al-ʿAttar’s recommendation, Muhammad Ali sent him as imam with the first large educational mission to Paris; he learned French, read widely under the guidance of the geographer Edme-François Jomard and others, and translated texts on geography, history and law. Back in Egypt from 1831 he worked as a translator and in 1835 founded the School of Languages, which trained translators and produced hundreds of translated books. Under ʿAbbas I he was sent to Khartoum (1850–54), in effect into exile; under Saʿid and Ismaʿil he returned to teaching, translating and editing, led the education ministry’s journal Rawdat al-madaris from 1870 and wrote on education and history. He died in Cairo on 27 May 1873.

Further main works

• The Paths of Egyptian Minds in the Joys of Modern Manners (Manāhij al-albāb al-Miṣriyya fī mabāhij al-ādāb al-ʿaṣriyya, 1869)
• Translations from French on geography, history and law