Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the financial assistance, for fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt, and New Delhi, India, of a Fulbright-Hays grant, a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship on Peace and Security in a Changing World, and a Fellowship for Advanced Multi-Country Research from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. I also gratefully acknowledge receipt of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend which funded the writing of this article.

Most education in the pre-colonial Middle East and South Asia was inextricably permeated by religion, in that it relied heavily on study or memorization of religious scriptures and rituals for the purpose of training believers, or on the use of religious texts or stories to teach ostensibly secular subjects such as geography or history. Colonial penetration of these areas introduced a new model of Western education, in which the curriculum was dominated by material whose truth claims were not based on religious faith, and which were not taught through the medium of religious texts. Religion, if allowed at all, was confined to discrete classes on the topic. This marginalization or exclusion of religious material did not necessarily mean that the resulting education was inexorably secular: Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated that British educators in India circumvented policies forbidding the teaching of Christianity in government schools by creating English literature courses designed “to convey the message of the Bible.”¹

The Western educational model spread slowly in some Middle Eastern and South Asian colonies, in some cases confined to the handful of schools created by the colonizer to produce the precise number of graduates needed for the colonial bureaucracy. In other colonies, however, colonizers set out to establish a Western-style school system and offered subsidies—generally raised through taxes on the local population—to indigenous schools willing to adhere to colonial regulations. Subsidy eligibility required adoption of a curriculum focused on math, science, and language, and the removal of all reference to religion to a discrete “religion” class. It also required that educators receive formal teacher training, which gradually shifted teaching from respected local figures, often religious authorities who did not teach as a primary occupation, to full-time educators with teaching certificates issued by colonial authorities. The British had in the 1860s begun to subsidize schools in Britain which focused on “the efficient teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic, rather than doctrinal matters,”³

Founded in 1875, the Arya Samaj boasted an estimated 1.5 million members in north India and the Indian diaspora by 1947.⁴

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 and grew to be Egypt's largest religious movement, with 2,000 branches and 600,000 members by 1952.¹¹

The primary sources used in this article are records seized by the Egyptian police from the Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo during the 1940s¹²

Finally, these materials also demonstrate the extent to which the creation of Western-style education systems, originally under colonial auspices and subsequently expanded by local governments, could lead to consequences unanticipated by and unwelcome to the colonizers who established the system. The Brotherhood was founded in 1928, six years after control of education was devolved to the Egyptians, but until 1952 the British remained intimately involved in Egyptian domestic politics. When the Brotherhood opposed British demands that Egypt declare war on the Axis powers in World War II, and indeed exploited the war to increase its anti-British activities, Brotherhood leader Banna was transferred for several months in 1941 from his teaching post in Cairo to one in the rural town of Qena, where it was presumed that he would cause less trouble. In October of that year he was arrested, and a member of the Qena branch wrote to Cairo headquarters that many of their regular members, terrified by Banna's arrest, had stopped coming¹⁴

The Creation of Western Education Systems in Colonial Egypt and India

At the time of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, education was overwhelmingly centered on the transmission of religious ritual and text. In Muslim kuttabs, boys memorized the Qurءan and learned rituals such as prayer and ablution; they then generally learned basic arithmetic, weights, and currency from the public weigher in the marketplace.¹⁶

The half-decade prior to the British invasion was marked by attempts by Egypt's khedives to supplement the kuttabs with a Western-style school system, ranging from the creation of a handful of Western-style schools in the 1830s to plans in 1881 to blanket the country by creating one Western-style elementary school for every two to five thousand people.¹⁸

From 1882 to 1922, the British created an educational system in which the children of a very small elite were trained in English- or French-language schools to staff the bureaucracy, while increasingly large numbers of kuttabs were retooled to provide elementary education in Arabic for the masses. By 1905, the Ministry of Education inspected over 2,500 schools and supervised the education of approximately 76,000 students; by 1906 the number of students had doubled.²¹

From 1922, when the British devolved responsibility for education to the Egyptian government, until the Free Officers' coup thirty years later, the education system was further standardized and its reach greatly expanded. Increasing numbers of kuttabs offering Western-style education were not only inspected but directly administered by the government, and the number of students in such kuttabs increased eleven-fold between 1922 and 1930.²⁵

While the primary purpose of pre-colonial kuttab education had been to teach religious rituals and aid in the memorization of key religious texts, in the new government schools the emphasis was on secular subjects, with the prominence of religion in education inversely proportional to the students' economic status. In 1933, 60 percent of an educator's time in a Westernized kuttab was dedicated to teaching Arabic, arithmetic, and other “secular” subjects; in 1932 students in primary schools catering to the elite spent 93 percent of their time on non-religious subjects.³¹

It is much harder to generalize about pre-colonial education in India than in Egypt due to India's much greater diversity and larger size, and because significant documentation exists only for those parts of India under direct British control. As in Egypt, recitation and memorization, usually of religious texts, were key methods of learning in much pre-colonial Indian education, formal teacher training was not required, and teachers had wide latitude in what and how they taught. In sharp contrast to Egypt, there were several forms of education in north India focused on languages, math, writing, and other “secular” skills, and north Indian schools were not always segregated by religion. Even in inter-confessional forms of learning, however, religious stories and texts permeated the curriculum.

Education was generally provided separately to boys of different faiths when its explicit purpose was to transmit religious practice, or to train them for an occupation monopolized by one community. Examples of the former included Punjab's Hindu patshalas, which taught Mantras and basic knowledge of the Shastras, Muslim Koran schools, and Sikh schools which taught the sacred text of Sikhism, the Granth, and the Gurmukhi script of the Punjabi language used by Sikhs.³²

Other relatively common forms of education in north India saw boys of several faiths studying non-religious subjects together. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs from more elite backgrounds often attended Persian schools which imparted literacy in Persian, the court language of the Mughal Empire. Punjabi Hindus, who made up one-third of the province's population, might study Persian with Sikh teachers, but throughout north India Persian was most frequently taught by Muslims. Early British observers in Punjab were confounded by the very unexceptionality of Hindus studying under Muslims; the author of an 1857 Punjab education report called the “attendance of so many Hindus at Mohammedan schools for the sake of learning the Persian language” a “most remarkable fact.” “The advantage taken by the teachers of this confidence,” he opined, was probably a reason for Islam's steady growth in Punjab.³⁵

Another example of the use of religious texts in inter-confessional schooling comes from Bengali elementary schools known as patshalas. In these patshalas Hindu teachers taught “reading, writing, arithmetic, letter-writing, a little Sanskrit grammar, versified Puranic tales” and book-keeping³⁷

The use of religious material to teach literacy or morals in Punjab and Bengal speaks to two elements of pre-colonial education that were eliminated in the Western-style education system. One was technical: in the absence of standardized readers to teach literacy, teachers used the few widely accessible written texts, and these were inevitably religious. The readers which frequently replaced religious texts under the British, in turn, could only have been conceived of within a heuristic framework which valued standardization of knowledge, and they could not have been disseminated until the educational practices in which individual teachers taught largely as they saw fit were replaced by a system of many schools following the same curriculum. While standardization made the broad dissemination of non-religious educational material possible, it would not have been desirable, or even intelligible, without a prior conceptual shift from a world in which religious belief made historical events, natural phenomena, and social relations comprehensible to one in which religion's purpose was solely to train individual believers in ritual and to order their personal relationships with the divine. This privatized version of religion would come to dominate the British educational curricula in India.

Protracted British involvement in Indian education began in 1813 with the Charter Act, which dedicated 100,000 rupees annually to Indian education and required the creation of educational facilities to train Indians for the public services.³⁹

Education subsidies came with requirements that reconstructed educational practice. One was that teachers undergo formal training, reversing common practice in which “public opinion, not an appointment order issued by the State or the village council, determined (teachers') deserts.”⁴⁵

Teacher training was necessary in part because subsidies frequently required both teaching new subjects—geography, mathematics, and the like—and a thorough restructuring of how existing subjects were taught. In 1900, the Bengali patshalas were required for the first time to teach science, drawing, and physical exercise. After Punjab's William Arnold “discovered” that Punjabi students were “ignorant of the geography of their own province [and] ignorant that there was such a science as geography,” he introduced required geography classes which soon turned out students who could “‘pass a good examination’ in the geography of India, Asia and the globe.”⁵⁰

While schools receiving government subsidy—although not schools run directly by the government—were allowed to teach religion as a separate class, the proliferation of secular subjects in the curriculum, and the fact that it was success in these subjects that guaranteed success in matriculation exams, combined to severely marginalize the role of religion classes. Nita Kumar has critiqued the way in which the spread of the Western school system led to a devaluing of religion: “Since recognition and aid each required the school to follow a government syllabus, if people insisted on religious education as well, the government had a solution. It repeatedly suggested that Indian schools were welcome to teach the full primary curriculum and to also give ‘religious teaching.’ . . . Schools could only complain that if they had to teach the curriculum of government schools ‘they will have no time to give religious instruction.’”⁵⁴

The Rise of Religious Reform Movements in Colonial Egypt and India

Times of crisis breed religious reform movements, as people ask why the temporal glories of their religious community have faded. The religious reformer answers by drawing a causal link between the spiritual and the temporal: we were wealthy, ruled the nations and were not colonized when we properly practiced the faith, and we lost those privileges when we abandoned it. This answer provides a way to defend the faith from its challengers and to take the mantle of reform from outsiders. When missionaries blame Hindu practices for India's decline, Hindus can respond that Hinduism is perfect, but we have failed to practice it correctly. It also provides what social movement theorists would call a “frame” which motivates people to action by rendering success possible. If the answer to an Egyptian Muslim's question, “why was Britain able to colonize us?” is “because Britain is militarily superior,” then little can be done. If the answer is “because we abandoned Islam,” then response is possible. As Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna argued, “when [the Muslims] clung to the instructions of Islam they reigned over and built up the entire world . . . [But] after that [they] denied their religion and became ignorant of it . . . thus they arrived at the situation that they are in today, and they will remain in this state until they return to their religion.”⁵⁶

The challenge to indigenous faiths posed by colonialism and missionary activity provoked the formation of a multitude of religious reform movements in colonial north India and Egypt. Five Hindu religious reform groups were large enough to be counted in the 1921 Punjab census,⁵⁷

The reform agendas of the Samaj and the Brotherhood centered on defining particular texts as the sole or preeminent sources of the faith and encouraging believers to consult them directly rather than relying on the interpretations of religious elites. Direct access to scripture would allow believers to readily ascertain correct religious practice. Like other Islamic modernist movements of its time, the Brotherhood delineated the Qur'an and hadith as the only infallible sources of guidance. Brothers criticized the shaykhs of al-Azhar—Islam's official guardians in Egypt—for focusing so heavily on ritual that they failed to make the faith relevant to everyday life, and for casting their lot with the occupier and Egyptian elites. These and other religious elites, Brothers alleged, had been insufficiently vigorous in defending Islam from unauthorized practices, including the common practice of visiting saints' tombs seeking blessings and celebrations of saints' birthdays or mulids with women singing and carnival games. Brothers worked to end the raucous elements of these celebrations and publicly urged Islamic behavior on government officials, once noting in the movement's newspaper that all of Egypt “had been saddened” that a particular minister was not fasting during Ramadan.⁵⁹

While Hinduism and its practices are derived from a multitude of scriptures, Samaj founder Dayanand Saraswati argued that only the Vedas and other texts written when Vedic scholarship flourished were authoritative. Dayanand contended that Brahmins, Hinduism's priestly caste, were well aware that the rituals over which they presided were wrong but encouraged them for their own material gain. First among these incorrect practices was the worship of images representing the Hindu gods and goddesses; according to Dayanand, correctly understood Hinduism was a monotheistic religion and image worship was an abomination. Because the Brahmins' traditional monopoly on Vedic knowledge had allowed them to misrepresent Hinduism, Dayanand called on all Hindus—including women and outcastes, who were traditionally forbidden to do so—to read the Vedas themselves.

The Brotherhood and the Samaj also sought to ensure that their faith would define the culture of their country as it emerged from colonial rule. There were three main ways of imagining Egyptian identity in the early twentieth century. The first was Arab nationalism, developed in the Levant with significant Christian input, which honored the central role of Islam in the region but posited an Arab greatness not dependent upon it. Many Egyptian intellectuals, particularly after the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, used evidence of Pharaonic civilization in particular to argue for the second version of Egyptian identity: an Egypt separate from and superior to the Arabs. The Brotherhood rejected claims of an ethnic Arab or Egyptian superiority, arguing that Muslims were distinguished only by the degree of their adherence to Islam, and that that adherence was the key to Egypt's future success. While these narratives were quite discursively distinct, their differences had few practical implications. Although Egyptian Christians figured differently in the various versions of Egyptian nationalism, actually existing Christians were active and welcome participants in the nationalist struggle, and the boundaries of an independent Egypt imagined by all three trends were the same.

In the north India of the Arya Samaj, the practical distinctions between different nationalisms were much more pronounced. With significant proportions of Muslims, Hindus and, in Punjab, Sikhs, North India was more religiously heterogeneous than Egypt at a time when religious heterogeneity had become meaningful to an unprecedented degree. Sudipto Kaviraj argues that before colonialism “the sense of the individual community had . . . been ‘fuzzier’—capable of apprehension at several different levels (sub-caste, sect, dialect, and other regional or religious groupings) and not greatly concerned with numbers or the exact boundaries between one community and the next.”⁶⁰

The standard spoken language of north India in the colonial period was referred to interchangeably as Urdu, Hindi, or Hindustani,⁶²

The attempt to draw clear lines between Hindus and Muslims and to severely marginalize the role of the latter in an independent India typified many movements generally characterized as Hindu nationalist in this period, from the Samaj to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Samaj differed from movements such as the RSS in one important way: while the RSS and most other Hindu nationalist groups saw Hinduism largely as a cultural identity and were unconcerned with whether their members practiced it as a faith, Dayanand and many Aryas—although not all—saw the Samaj's key goal as the creation of a society of Hindus correctly practicing their religion. The animosity of some Aryas toward Muslims was rooted in Muslim religious practices which violated orthodox Hindu beliefs, such as eating cattle, and Dayanand repeatedly alleged the superiority of Hinduism to all other religions, including Islam, in the most incendiary terms, particularly in his key writing Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth). The replacement of Urdu by Hindi was a key goal both of groups such as the RSS which were unconcerned with religious practice and of the Samaj, both of which saw it as a way to replace Muslim with Hindu culture and to signal the return of Hindus to their rightful position of power.

Indian Education and the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic Schools

When Arya founder Dayanand Saraswati died, Aryas decided to honor him by founding a school. The DAV High School opened in Lahore in 1886, enrolling 550 students in classes from the first grade through the college-entrance level.⁶⁵

While DAV officials frequently claimed that DAV institutions were funded by donations, touting these gifts as proof of great support in the larger Hindu community, government subsidies were frequent. The budgets of the College Managing Committee are only available in systematic form after 1920. The budgets of many schools in the CMC files make clear that they were self-sufficient and did not receive government grants. However, as the examples below demonstrate, several DAV institutions at all levels, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, did receive subsidies. The Dayanand Primary Education Board, which in 1941 oversaw nine primary schools,⁶⁸

While there is only spotty evidence about the role of subsidies before 1920, there is good reason to believe they existed then as well, particularly at the pre-college level. For example, we know that the rapid spread of DAV schools in Punjab in the 1890s marked a radical shift from educational practice in the province as recently as a decade before. Nurullah and Naik note that in the late 1850s most private secondary schools in British India were run by missionaries, but that by 1882 Indians had founded more private secondary schools than missionaries.⁷⁷

While Aryas clearly raised some of the funds for Punjabi DAV schools, subsidies may also have played an important role in the network's early growth. One reason that Indian Western-style education spread slowly relative to missionary education in Punjab before the early 1880s may have been that it was only in 1882 that the British government made clear that it intended its subsidies to create an education system based on Indian, not missionary, enterprise. In contrast to Jones' narrative on school funding, which details Arya fundraising and rarely mentions subsidies, Arya sympathizer Dhanpati Pandey notes in passing in his book about the Samaj between 1875 and 1920 that the DAV schools in this founding period were “maintained by usual grants from the Education Department,”⁸²

If we view government education subsidies as having contributed to the creation and maintenance of the DAV school system, what did these subsidies actually “buy” in the way of helping the Samaj to spread its ideas or achieve its goals? They do not appear to have been particularly useful in spreading the Samaj's specific concepts and practices of Hindu religious reform: the DAV schools were never intended to focus heavily on this subject. Samaj founder Dayanand, whose example had inspired the schools, had been a traditional guru who studied with his own guru for several years, and originally preached throughout North India clad in a loincloth. He initially proselytized exclusively in Sanskrit, but he later switched to Hindi, and never learned English. Most Aryas, though, were more government clerks than gurus: by 1900 Hindus dominated the middle and upper positions of the Punjabi bureaucracy,⁸⁴

While classroom study of reformed Arya religion was not a priority in DAV schools,⁸⁹

To the extent, then, that government subsidies helped to make the DAV schools possible, they do not seem to have helped the movement significantly in spreading its religious ideas. One area in which the DAV schools were much more active, however, was Hindi teaching. Aryas strove in every way possible to advocate for Hindi rather than Urdu as the language of India. The DAV College Lahore played a high-profile role in Hindi advocacy: its first principal argued that the Hindu community could not progress if its members did not share a common language,⁹²

To the extent that government subsidies did fund DAV schools which taught Hindi,⁹⁹

It is clear that DAV schools were not the only ones in Punjab teaching Hindi in this period; the DAV High School Batala files show that Hindi was offered as an optional subject in college matriculation exams by the 1940s, at the latest.¹⁰⁹

Egyptian Education and the Muslim Brotherhood

Like the Arya Samaj, the Muslim Brotherhood was born in a period of rapid educational growth and change. Unlike the Samaj, which took advantage of the growth of a state education system to create its own extensive school network, the Brotherhood built few full-time primary or secondary schools before 1952. However, the growth of the Egyptian state school system nonetheless benefited, and significantly altered, the work of the Brotherhood in three distinct ways. The first was through night and weekend adult education programs run by many Brotherhood branches, at least some of which included instruction in Brotherhood interpretations of Islam. In one case, the government ordered local soldiers to attend such a program; in this and other cases it also subsidized such programs. Where religious education was included in these programs, then, the government was subsidizing such education. Even if adult education did not include religious instruction, the cost of such education programs to the Brotherhood was minimal, and so government subsidies for it might well have been directed to other, non-educational Brotherhood activities.

The growth of the education system also helped Brothers spread their message in a second way: large numbers of Brothers were teachers in government and private (non-Brotherhood) schools,¹¹³

Before 1952, the Brotherhood built few full-time schools of its own for youth, either primary or secondary, and the very growth of the government education system may partially explain the movement's relative inactivity in this area. In 1933–1934, the Brothers founded at least three schools in the Delta,¹¹⁴

While the Brotherhood built few primary and secondary schools, it frequently offered night and weekend schools for workers, which could go from instilling basic literacy to, in some cases, preparing students to pass admission tests to regular secondary schools.¹¹⁹

Similar subsidies were paid to other Brotherhood literacy programs. The most formal articulation of the government-Brotherhood educational relationship came in 1946, when, as part of a new government anti-illiteracy program, the Ministry of Education—at the time in the hands of a Brotherhood supporter—agreed to pay the Brotherhood a fixed fee for every student it taught. One-third of the fee would be paid after government inspectors verified that the students were between the ages of twelve and eighteen and that classes were professionally run, with the rest paid after the schools demonstrated success.¹²⁷

Another way in which the growth of the school system could help spread Brotherhood ideas was through the activities of Brothers who taught in non-Brotherhood schools. Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna himself was a product of the first teacher-training school in Egypt, and taught full-time until the late 1940s, and many other Brothers were teachers as well. Membership lists from rural Brotherhood branches demonstrate this point: in Mansoura, a large rural town, between 9 and 10 percent of the branch's members in 1945 were teachers.¹²⁹

Teaching opened Brotherhood educators up to another possibility: that of being transferred from one school to another. To understand the way that teacher-transfers worked, it is important to place them in the context of the transfer of Brotherhood civil servants more generally. Once administration of domestic affairs was devolved by the British to the Egyptians in 1922, the Egyptian government greatly expanded its presence, sending unprecedented numbers of civil servants to rural areas to survey the land, administer justice, collect taxes, and teach. Many civil servants were presumably locally recruited, but others were transferred from one locale to another. Brotherhood correspondence demonstrates that transfers of members were not uncommon in the 1940s and 1950, including of Brothers who were veterinary inspectors, surveyors, clerks in state banks, and court employees. But if the picture of Brotherhood organization that emerges from the archives is an accurate sampling of what was happening within the movement as a whole, then Brotherhood teachers were transferred more frequently than Brothers in other occupations. There are eleven instances in the archives in which we find the occupation of a transferred Brother mentioned, rather than a generic reference to his transfer. Five of these are teachers, transferred a total of six times, while no more than two representatives of any other single profession appear among these eleven cases.¹³⁴

With the number of public schools at all levels, from elementary and secondary to vocational and religious, increasing from 277,848 schools in 1913–1914 to 1,046,482 in 1944–1945,¹³⁵

It is clear that branches feared the effects of such transfers: two letters to Banna mention the impending transfers of leaders of branches—one of whom is a teacher—and express fear that their branches would not be able to get along without them.¹³⁸

These cases suggest two things. The first is fairly obvious: that it matters which branch members were transferred. Branches probably suffered more when transfers involved leaders rather than rank-and-file members. We do know that teachers were often members of the boards of their local branches: the archives contain the membership lists of the boards of twenty-two branches, and teachers were members of thirteen of the eighteen in branches outside of Cairo. So if teachers were transferred more frequently than Brothers of other occupations, that they were frequently in branch leadership positions suggests that their transfers were particularly likely to hurt the branches they left behind. But what we would need to know to assess the overall effect of such transfers on the Brotherhood is what, if anything, transferred leaders did in their new locale, information that we do not have for the aforementioned cases of Girga and Sohag. For example, what if the transfer of the leader of the Girga branch decreased that branch's activities , but that leader then set up an entirely new branch in his new location? In terms of the overall growth of the Brotherhood, his transfer might then be viewed as a positive development, or at least a neutral one.

This all-important factor of whether transferred Brothers—whether leaders or rank-and-file members—worked for the Brotherhood in their new locations was probably influenced by a second factor: whether Brothers perceived their transfers to be punitive or merely administrative in nature. In the case of the Brothers transferred to Girga who refused to become active in the Brotherhood branch there, it seems clear that they had been active in their previous locations—the Girga writer knew they were Brothers even though they did not participate in the activities in Girga, and he identifies one of them as the former secretary of a Cairo branch. It is quite possible that these Brothers abandoned Brotherhood activity due to fear—to their believing that they had been punitively transferred, and deciding to do nothing further to invite the government's wrath.

The point that transfers of Brothers could lead them to expand Brotherhood activity in their new locations is made by the cases of Brothers transferred to the rural towns of Deshna and Bellina. In October 1944, a teacher wrote to Banna saying that he had recently been transferred to Deshna, a rural town of 126,099 inhabitants in the 1937 census.¹⁴²

In sum, a scarcity of evidence about the outcomes of a significant number of teacher transfers prevents us from saying whether they were, on the whole, a boon or a burden to the movement. If we move beyond the letters of transferred Brothers or of the branches they left behind, and turn to investigate the responses of local communities to such transfers, it becomes apparent how avidly transfers of any Brotherhood employees could be welcomed. In a letter published in the Brotherhood newspaper in 1950, a rural Brother wrote:

Whether these transferred Brothers included teachers, and whether they actually did “fill the void” or not—whether they were active in their new locations or instead avoided Brotherhood activity—we do not know. What these examples of transfers do make clear is that the creation of a modern state system—in the case of teachers, a modern state educational system—not only brought the state into new places where it had not been before, but also had the very real potential of bringing new religious movements there as well.

Conclusion

The rise of Western-style school systems significantly minimized the role of religion in education, but directly facilitated the spread of indigenous religious movements and enhanced their ability to achieve their goals. The stories of the Arya Samaj before Indian independence in 1947 and the Muslim Brotherhood before the Free Officer coup in 1952 demonstrate two points, one familiar to students of the colonial state and one perhaps less obvious. The first is that the size of the modern state, including colonial states, and the irreducible complexity of state attempts to bring about large-scale social change, often mean that it works at cross-purposes with itself, and that its policies frequently generate results the opposite of those intended. This is clearest here in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose spread was inadvertently facilitated by the Egyptian government's continuation of the policies, started by the British, of building up a centralized education system. Gregory Starrett argues that the British initially transformed the Egyptian kuttab from an almost exclusively religious institution into one focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic in part in order to tame the Egyptian masses, to ensure that they would turn a deaf ear to the appeals of religious and nationalist ideologues who were out to upset the colonial order.¹⁵⁰

The second, less obvious but more important point found in the stories of the colonial-era Arya Samaj and Muslim Brotherhood is that divisions made between the state and society are frequently artificial. This is particularly pronounced in countries, or colonies, where the state embarks on ambitious programs of social engineering for which it lacks the necessary financial or administrative capacity, and chooses to compensate for this by “subcontracting” much of its work out to organized groups in society. Colonial states were particularly likely to find themselves in this situation. On the one hand, colonizers frequently created state apparati which penetrated society much more deeply than any previous regime, studying, categorizing, and managing the colonized population through institutions as invasive and pervasive as the census, centralized tax collection systems, and the school. On the other hand, the financial logic of colonial rule—that the colony was supposed to economically profit the metropole or, in the worst case to pay for itself and its legions of European administrators—usually meant that the colonial state did not have adequate resources to fully implement its social engineering efforts itself. The logic of this position places centralized education systems that are founded under colonial auspices in a completely different position than those created in primarily Western industrialized nations, as described by Ernest Gellner in his enormously influential Nations and Nationalism.¹⁵¹