Post-Doc, History
Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies
University of Oxford, Oriental Studies
Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow
New College
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Walter Armbrust
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About
Hilary Kalmbach is the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow at New College, Oxford.
Hilary's research focuses on Islam and society in the modern Middle East, with particular attention to changing structures of leadership, authority, knowledge, and education in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt and Syria.
Female Islamic Leadership and Authority
Hilary first researched female Islamic leadership while on a year-long Fulbright Fellowship in Damascus, Syria. An article based on this research won the 2007 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Graduate Article Prize in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and was published subsequently in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2008.
In October 2009, she co-organized a conference at St Antony's College that brought together scholars studying female Islamic authority in countries around the world. Twenty papers from this conference will be released 30 November 2011 in the edited volume, Women, Leadership and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority. (See: http://www.brill.nl/women-leadership-and-mosques) As an outgrowth of this project, she runs a mailing list for scholars interested in all aspects of female leadership in Islam. See http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant1959/Mailing%20List.html
Dar al-'Ulum and Sociocultural, Religious and Linguistic Change
Hilary is working on turning her dissertation on Cairo's Dar al-'Ulum teacher's training college during the interwar period into a book manuscript. The work uses the Dar al-'Ulum teacher-training school and its graduates as a prism through which to view sociocultural change in Egypt, 1900-1950. Founded in 1872 as part of Khedive Isma'il’s efforts to expand the Egyptian government’s civil-school system, the school trained top students from religious schools such as al-Azhar to be schoolteachers with strong Arabic skills. It became a faculty of Cairo University in 1946.
The work as a whole presents a new vision of how modernisation and colonialisation affected colonised societies. It demonstrates that a major engine driving sociocultural change in interwar Egypt was the agency exercised by individuals who crossed boundaries and consciously mixed elements of local tradition and European-inspired modernity.
Dar al-'Ulum is best seen as a hybrid institution that not only bridged but also mixed elements of civil and religious education. Throughout its seventy-four years as a higher school, its curriculum combined the Arabic and Islamic disciplines that formed the core of religious tradition with basic instruction in the non-religious subjects – such as mathematics, science, geography, and history – taught in the European-influenced civil-school system.
The school represents a new type of religious education, as it taught religious subjects using the ocularcentric, concept-driven pedagogies of civil schools. It was an early contributor to the functionalisation of Islam, or the use of religious knowledge further specific sociocultural, religious, or political goals.
Dar al-'Ulum presented opportunities and challenges to its graduates. The mixed range of cultural capital it provided enabled graduates to cross and straddle sociocultural boundaries, such as the one drawn between the efendiyya and the 'ulama', which presented top students in religious schools with a chance at becoming an efendī professional.
The school and its graduates have often been incorrectly described as overly conservative, in part due to their in-between status. While the graduates generally maintained a strong connection with Egypt’s Arabic and Islamic traditions, their commitment to adapting these traditions to meet the needs a rapidly modernising Egypt was equally strong. Graduates combining the authenticity gained from local Arabic and Islamic knowledge with the cachet of European-influenced practices to modernise Arabic or Islam include Ḥasan Tawfīq al-'Adl, Hifni Nasif, 'Ali al-Jarim, Tantawi Jawhari, Muhammad Madi Abu al-'Aza'im, Taki al-Din al-Nabhani, as well as Ḥasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Past Experience in the Field
Before starting at Oxford, Hilary was introduced to the study of the modern Middle East while an undergraduate at Princeton University majoring in Near Eastern Studies. She studied Modern Standard Arabic at Princeton, during two summers at Middlebury College's Summer Language School for Arabic, and while a Fulbright Fellow. She has also studied and used Syrian and Egyptian colloquial Arabic while completing research in Damascus and Cairo.
Contact Information
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