| A century ago most
Egyptians who wanted a liberal university education had to seek it abroad
and at their own expense since the practice of sending students to Europe
with Government scholarships virtually ceased under the British occupation.
Shaykh
Muhammad `Abduh eloquently stated the Egyptian grievance
when he wrote: "The only schools which represent higher education in
Egypt are the schools of law and medicine and the polytechnic. Of all the
other sciences of which human knowledge is composed the Egyptian may sometimes
obtain a superficial notion at the preparatory schools, but it is almost
impossible for him to study them thoroughly, and often he is compelled
to ignore them. The result is that we possess judges and lawyers, physicians
and engineers more or less capable of exercising their professions; but
amongst the educated classes one looks in vain for the investigator, the
thinker, the philosopher, the scholar, the man of open mind, fine spirit,
generous sentiments, whose whole life is bound to the ideal."
Cromer;
first British Viceroy of Egypt responded to these remarks, which
were published in a book by a Frenchman, de Guerville, in his best
head masterly manner: `not only with surprise but with a keen feeling of
disappointment . . . I had hoped for better things of him'. But he never
really answered the point that Shaykh
Muhammad `Abduh was making, which was not that the British
had "discouraged the acquisition of knowledge" by the mass of Egyptians
but that they had tried to prevent the development of a liberally educated
elite capable of governing a modernized Egyptian state.
|
