Why Study Cairo?

MS

I study Cairo and teach a class on the history and structure of the city. One issue I try to explain is the importance of understanding this particular city. I usually proceed down the lines of “Cairo is important to study because it’s the only place where you can see so many remnants of diverse periods of Islamic history.” A city like Baghdad was important as the capital of the Abbasids, but visiting it now would not help you a lot since nothing remains from that time except some local place names.

Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im supplies another way to argue for the study of Cairo. His larger argument is about the necessity of a secular state for the flourishing of Islam. The only true Islam is the one chosen voluntarily, so the enforcing of Islamic practices by the state does nothing but undermine true faith. The ideal of merging religious authority with the authority of the state is illusory, since the basis of these two forms of authority are antithetical.

One problem with this view, as developed by An-Na’im, is that it’s popular to characterize the political history of Islam as marked by the compression of religious and political authority. One reads a lot that Islamic states lacked a separation between church and state. An-Na’im spends a chapter arguing that this is not a simple issue, and that counter to what one might have heard, there has always been a tension between religious and political authority within Islam.

To make this point he concentrates on two quite different Islamic states: the Fatimids and the Mamluks. It happens that Cairo was the capital of both states.. and this leads An-Na’im to defend this seemingly narrow range of examples:

Although this region is not representative of the generality of the Muslim world, it has been particularly influential in shaping political thinking and social institutions, especially during the first few centuries of Islam. Consequently Muslim elites in other regions have tended to identify the experiences of Middle Eastern societies as the only legitimate or authoritative framework of Islamic discourse. [48-9]

So despite the fact that there have been Islamic states from Morocco to Indonesia, the states that took root in what one might call the “heartland” of Islam have a weight and importance out of proportion to their more objective place in history. The solutions arrived at by a state centered in Cairo (and perhaps controlling the Levant and Mecca/Medina) will always mean more than the solutions arrived at by, say, the Mughal state in India.

An-Na’im isn’t arguing that other states should be ignored. The remainder of this book will be about Shari’a and its place in states such as India and Indonesia. But in setting up any theory of the state and religion, historical examples drawn from the Middle East.. and Cairo in particular.. must be deployed in the construction of any argument. To have an opinion in this argument will mean getting some level of familiarity with the history of Cairo.