Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal
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Book Overview
How did modern Egypt seek to reconcile Islam, political change, and the demands of social development?
Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt examines the intellectual and political career of Muhammad Husayn Haykal, one of the leading Egyptian intellectuals and politicians of the first half of the twentieth century. In tracing Haykal's intellectual development, Charles D. Smith places his ideas within the broader cultural, political, and social transformations that shaped modern Egypt.
Drawing on extensive Arabic-language sources, Smith follows Haykal's efforts to reconcile Islamic thought with the demands of political and social modernization. Haykal's writings and political activities reveal the difficulties confronting a generation of Egyptian intellectuals who sought to formulate an ideology of national development while negotiating the competing claims of Islam, nationalism, liberalism, and modernity.
The book is both an intellectual biography and a study of the political and cultural history of Egypt before the 1952 revolution. Haykal's eventual failure to achieve his political and intellectual objectives provides a revealing perspective on the weaknesses of the old political order and the forces that contributed to its collapse.
By examining the question of Islam and social development through the experience of a major Egyptian thinker, Smith illuminates issues that extend well beyond Haykal himself. The study offers an important framework for understanding the formation of modern Egyptian political thought and the continuing debate over the relationship between traditional culture, social change, and political authority.
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