Education and Social Change in Egypt and Turkey: A Study in Historical Sociology PDF
Preview Education and Social Change in Egypt and Turkey: A Study in Historical Sociology
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN EGYPT AND TURKEY Also by Bill Williamson TilE POVER1Y OF EDUCATION: A Study in the Politics of Opportunity (with D. S. Byrne and B. G. F1etcher) EDUCATION, SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT CLASS CULTURE AND COMMUNITY: A Study of Social Change in Mining through Biography Education and Social Change in Egypt and Turkey A Study in Historical Sociology Bill Williamson Senior Lecturer in Sociology University of Durham M MACMILLAN PRESS C> W. Williamson 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-40709-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1987 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Phototypeset in 10/12pt Times Roman by Styleset Limited, Warminster, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Williamson, Bill. 1944- Education and social change in Egypt and Turkey: a study in historical sociology. 1. Education-Social aspects-Turkey History 2. Educational sociology-Turkey 3. Education-Social aspects-Egypt History 4. Educational sociology-Egypt I. Title 370.19'09561 LC191.8.T9 ISBN 978-1-349-08501-9 ISBN 978-1-349-08499-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08499-9 Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Comparison, Dependency and Historical Change 6 Egypt and Turkey 11 1 Education and Society: The Medieval Period 17 Islamic Tradition and Ottoman Education 19 Traditional Islamic Education 20 Ottoman Education 26 Education in Europe 31 2 Capitalist Development and Ottoman Decline 35 The Development of Capitalism in Europe 35 The World Economy of Capitalism 37 The Scientific Revolution 40 State Form and Capitalist Development 42 The Decline of the Ottoman Empire 45 Islamic Scholarship 46 The Impact of European Development 48 Ottoman Government 49 3 Industrial Capitalism: Modernisation and Change in Education 51 Ottoman Reforms 56 Muhammad Ali's Egypt 57 4 Imperialism, Modernisation and Revolution 68 Capitalism, Imperialism and Social Reform 69 Egypt in 1882 72 The British Occupation of Egypt 77 Nationalism, War and Revolution 83 5 Education and the Nation State in Republican Turkey 89 The First Period 92 The Second Period 95 Turkish Society after the Second World War 102 v vi Contents 6 Revolution and Modernisation in Egypt 105 The Inter-war Period 106 The Second World War and the Coup d'Etat of 1952 113 Nasser's Egypt and Strategies of Modernisation 115 7 Education in Egypt: Constraints and Opportunities 123 The Formal System 124 Drop-out Rates 128 The Social Meaning of Secondary and Further Education 132 Technical Education in Egypt 136 Conclusion 140 8 Education and Society in Modern Turkey 141 The Educational System 142 Social Inequality in Turkish Education 146 Urban-Rural Differences 151 Young People and Employment 156 Political Socialisation in Education 158 Conclusion 161 9 Higher Education, Technical Change and Dependency 163 10 Higher Education, Science and Technology and Dependency in Egypt 171 Nasser and Higher Education 172 Recruitment to Higher Education and the Student Experience 175 Resources for Higher Education 182 Higher Education and the Economy 183 Science and Technology 185 11 Higher Education in Turkey 189 Development of Turkish Higher Education in 190 Republican Turkey 194 The Structure of Higher Education in Turkey 200 Science, Technical Training and Higher Education 203 Higher Education and Political Violence 207 Military Policies in Higher Education Conclusion 217 Bibliography 225 Index 235 vi Preface The research upon which this book is based was made possible by a grant from the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies of the University of Durham. I wish to record formally my thanks for this. In some ways more important was the help given to me by the staff of the centre and staff of the Oriental Studies Library of the university. Their careful professionalism has ensured over the years that Durham is an excellent place in which to carry out research on the Middle East. Colleagues in the American University of Cairo, Ain-Shams University, the Middle East Technical University, Ankara and the Bosphorous University in Istanbul will recognise my debt to the conversations I had with them. So, too, will many Turkish and Egyptian friends who, both in their own country and in Durham, have shared with me their thoughts about education. The weaknesses of the study are entirely my own. There would have been many more than there are, however, if it was not for the careful way in which Mrs Lynda Nurse of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy of Durham University typed the manuscript, corrected its errors and discussed the whole project with me in such helpful ways. I am deeply grateful to her for this. My family, once again, have suffered the writing of a book with me, and without the help of my wife, Diane, in checking sources, tables and text I am not sure it would have ever been finished. BILL WILLIAMSON vii Introduction This is a study of the educational systems of Egypt and Turkey, two of the largest states of the Middle East. Each in its own way is critical to the geopolitical stability of the whole area and what role they play there depends on how and whether either state achieves economic development. They are states with a common Ottoman past in which determined attempts have been made both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to modernise traditional social structures along lines modelled on those of Europe. Change in education has been at the forefront of those efforts. The relative failure of both societies to realise these goals fully provides us with an interesting context in which to examine once more the subtle and ever-changing relationship between education and socioeconomic development. The fact that Egypt and Turkey are in the Middle East adds two special features to discussions about education and development. The first is religious and concerns the role of Islam in the modern world. The second is about the relative autonomy of nation states and the degree of their control of education. Both Egypt and Turkey are part of the world of Islam and for almost four hundred years Ottoman rulers claimed religious leadership of the Muslim world. Secularising trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflected particularly in the growth of a secular nationalism, have not altered the fact that both societies have predominantly Muslim populations. In recent years, in both societies, religious divisions have assumed political connotations. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was murdered by an army officer and devout Muslim who went to his own death believing his place in Paradise was assured as one who had destroyed someone who was destroying the faith. In Turkey, prior to the military coup d'etat in 1980, religious divisions were exploited by both right wing and left-wing groups for their different political ends and the situation degenerated into a virtual civil war. Religion is important, however, not just because it is part of the politics of the Middle East but also because of what it implies for the way societies of the area should develop. The question is whether what Hegel once called 'the majestic ruin of Islam' is in any way consistent with socioeconomic development in the modern world and with exploiting science and technology and the social forms which have accompanied them in the West or in the Soviet Union. 2 Education and Social Change in Egypt and Turkey The second feature which the Middle East adds to the education and development debate is the importance of assessing the ways in which the external relations of a society give shape to its internal structure. This problem has two aspects, one concerned with the role of the state in development, the other with how the effective boundaries of a social formation (society, nation state), can be drawn. Prior to the end of the First World War almost the whole area of the Middle East was, at least nominally, under Ottoman control. That control had once been strong and had resulted in a social and political formation - the Ottoman Empire - with a social structure essentially different to that of Europe, which developed from the medieval period onwards. The growth of the nation state and of modern industry in Europe took place under and created very different conditions to those which prevailed in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. This had decisive implications for the form of Ottoman modern isation and the social groups which inspired it. Modernisation was necessarily of a defensive sort to prevent further encroachment into Ottoman lands and sovereignty by expansionist European powers including Russia. It had to be centrally engineered and had to overcome resistance within the Ottoman state itself. This resistance had both a cultural and political form and features of that resistance still remain even today in attitudes and values and social structures which oppose modernisation along Western lines. In the nineteenth century, however, modernisation had to be mobilised to attempt to save a social order which seemed to many incapable of preventing its own further decline. That decline and that mobilisation cannot be understood, however, unless the changing relationship of the Ottoman Empire to the rise of modern Europe is grasped for the growth of one catalysed the demise of the other. It is against this backcloth that the educational reformers ofthe nineteenth century must be seen for they attempted to import into the empire the science and technology of modern Europe and thereby opened their societies to values and ideas potentially threatening to the Islamic and Ottoman ones which were politically ·dominant. In this sense the uniqueness of the Ottoman state provides us with a sharp contrast to the experience of several societies of Europe and, indeed, of several societies including Japan, Russia, France and Germany, which experienced the 'late industrialisation effect' (Gerschenkron, 1962) and 'defensive modernisation'.
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