RELIGION AND POLITICS IN EGYPT: THE ULEMA OF AL-AZHAR, RADICAL ISLAM, AND THE STATE (1952-94) A vast literature

A vast literature has been produced since the 1980s on the emergence of Islamist movements in the Middle East. This literature offers different rationales for the emergence of new kinds of foes to the political regimes of the region. Filling the void left by the leftist opposition, the Islamist militants appeared around the 1970s as new political actors. They were expected neither by the state elites, which had initiated earlier modernizing political and social reforms, nor by political scientists who based their research on modernization-theory hypotheses. The former thought that their reform policies toward the religious institution would reinforce their control of the religious sphere, and the latter expected that secularization would accompany the modernization of society. The surprise brought by this new political phenomenon pushed observers to focus mainly on the Islamists and to overlook the role of the ulema, the specialists of the Islamic law, who were considered entirely submitted to the state. This article intends to supplement these descriptions by shedding light on the linkage between the structural change the ruling elites imposed on al-Azhar, the Egyptian religious institution, and the transformation of the political behavior of the people who belong to this institution, the ulema. The first part of this paper shows that the modernization of al-Azhar in 1961 has had unintended consequences. The declared aim of the reform was to integrate the ulema into what was considered to be the modernizing part of society. Instead, the most important and pervasive consequence of the reform was the emergence of a new political behavior among the ulema. I argue that if the nationalization of the institution was and remains resented by most of the ulema, the shape it took and the questions it raised at that time had long-term and unexpected consequences on the ulema's social and political identity. The core of my argument is the following: the ulema were forced to accommodate to overwhelming changes, but the Nasserist regime, through its "modernizing" reform, was also compelled to adjust to the ulema's state of mind and to elaborate a reform that was ambiguous in its essence. Therefore, the behavior of al-Azhar's religious scholars cannot be seen solely as a response to Nasser's policy toward the Egyptian religious