After the revolution of 1952, further steps were taken to control and unify education. Law No. 583 of 1955 emphasized the level of Arabic teaching in private schools and made examination in Arabic and in Egyptian history and geography obligatory for all schools. "Patriotic education" had to be equal to that in government schools and textblogs had to be approved by the government.
Law No. 160 of 1958 tightened control still further. All private schools had to follow the government plan of instruction, according to which all local and foreign students had to pass tests in the Arabic language, history, and geography. The head teacher had to be an Arab, foreign teachers could be hired only with the consent of the government, and financial subsidies from abroad had to be approved by the government. With this law, the distinction between government, community, and foreign schools was completely eliminated.
Another sensitive issue was the question of religious education in government schools. This especially concerned the Copts, who attended government schools in large numbers. (In 1937 some 80 percent of all Coptic students attended government schools.) The issue was not whether religion should be taught in government schools: Muslims supported the idea and Copts certainly did not oppose it, with such unrepresentative exceptions as Salama Musa, who demanded full separation of state and "church," that is, the rejection of any religious instruction in government schools.
The issue of religion as it presented itself to the Copts was, rather, whether in addition to the teaching of Islam the state should provide Christian students with instruction in Christianity. Here the contradiction in the two principles anchored in the Egyptian constitution of 1923 came to the fore in full force: equal rights and freedom of faith for all citizens versus Islam as the religion of the state. The Copts repeatedly demanded equal treatment for their students, that is, government-paid instruction in the Christian religion. The government argued, sometimes explicitly, that a state whose official religion was Islam could not finance the propagation of Christianity. At all events, the government had to expect heavy Muslim opposition to any step in this direction. Often the Copts were put on the defensive over an even more sensitive issue: whether Coptic students should be excused from instruction in Islam and whether they should be obliged to take exams in Islamic studies.
Education
The cultural and political goals and identities of a polity can usually be discerned from the sort of educational program it pursues. The 1920s saw an increase in the number of private schools in Egypt and in their enrollment, a trend that was to increase still further at least until the mid-1930s. This was the result of intensive activity on the part of the various minority communities and missionary groups as well as the policy followed by several foreign governments of providing general education in their respective languages.
However, foreign schools also accepted many Egyptians--Muslims as well as Copts. By the eve of the 1952 revolution there had been a sharp drop in the number of such institutions, though the number of students remained fairly steady. The number of Muslim and Coptic students increased, whereas the overall enrollment of non-Coptic minorities actually declined considerably. Although the decline in size of individual non-Coptic minorities varied, the combined effect was a decrease of one-third between 1936 and 1951. The decline began at the end of the 1930s, with the abolition of the Capitulations. These developments were accompanied, and to some extent caused, by two major trends in legislation: the systematic expansion of government control over private schools and the Egyptianization, Arabization, and, in many ways, Islamization of the program of instruction for all schools in Egypt. It is no coincidence that data collected after the revolution do not differentiate between community, foreign, or government schools or between students of different religious backgrounds.
In 1934 a feeble attempt was made to exert some control over nongovernment schools. Law No. 40 of 1934, which dealt mainly with health and building regulations, stated that private schools should follow the program of instruction instituted by the government. There does not seem to have been any attempt to implement this, but in 1938, a year after the abolition of the Capitulations, a much more serious step was taken toward the standardization and unification of education in Egypt. Article 1 of Law No. 38 of 1938 stated that all private schools were henceforth subject to control and inspection by the Ministry of Public Education. Article 11 required that even private schools that did not prepare their students for the government examination certificate had to assure the government that all students with Egyptian citizenship had a proper knowledge of Arabic and of Egyptian history and geography.
The New Civil Code
The new Civil Code enacted in 1949 implicitly recognized the authority of the communal courts concerning all matters of personal status. Article 12, for instance, reads: "The fundamental conditions relating to validity of marriage are governed by the [national] law of each of the two spouses." Articles 875 and 915 explain that matters of inheritance will be ruled according to Muslim law, implying that other matters and personal status will be subject to the jurisdiction of the respective communal courts.
A secular personal status law acceptable to Muslims and non-Muslims alike proved unattainable, and the attempt to bring only the law of the non-Muslims under government control met with total rejection by the minority communities. Under the British, the minorities could still count on their support to prevent such legislation, but afterward no government was strong enough or ruled long enough to enact it.
Only in 1955, after Nasser had established himself firmly in power, was there any significant attempt to resolve the issue. Law No. 462 of 1955 abolished all the religious courts for personal status law, including the shari'a courts, and transferred all jurisdiction in such matters to the national courts (al-mahakim alwataniyya). However, the problem remained of formulating a unified, secular, personal law applicable to all Egyptians equally. Only the court system was unified; rulings continued to be made in accordance with the personal law code of the supplicant's own community. Also, whereas the intention of the law had been the nationalization and secularization of jurisdiction, in practice several articles of the new law enhanced the role of shari'a law. Perhaps most odious to the nonMuslims was the fact that even though their own law still applied, this was now done by former shari'a court judges and not by representatives of their own community. Rather than secularizing and nationalizing jurisdiction, this was tantamount to Islamization and a drastic reduction of communal authority. It should be added that the establishment of the national courts also enhanced government control over the Muslim community by abolishing the autonomous shari'a courts.
Personal Status
The issue of personal status must be clearly separated from that of citizenship. The shari'a law had always recognized the right of minorities (Christians and Jews) to internal juridical autonomy, at least as regards marriage, divorce, guardianship, inheritance, and religious ritual.
When the khatt-i humayun of 1856 guaranteed all subjects, regardless of creed, equal treatment before the law, one intention, among others, had been to further the integration of all subjects into one Ottoman society. At the same time, however, it reasserted the juridical sovereignty of the various communities over personal status, a step that in many ways tied individuals more strongly to their community than to the Ottoman state and society at large. This principle was upheld and confirmed by the Mixed Civil Code drafted in 1876 for use in the Mixed Courts.
The Egyptian constitution of 1923 implicitly recognized the inability of the legislator to create a unified personal status law for all Egyptians regardless of creed in that it left jurisdiction in this area to the individual communities or foreign consuls. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, there were repeated attempts to reform and unify the personal status law. What these attempts usually had in common was that they aimed only at the secularization of the personal status laws of the non-Muslims and that they were vehemently opposed by the minorities, each guarding its own autonomy jealously. Small inroads on this autonomy were made nevertheless.
In 1925 it became obligatory to bring all cases of guardianship before the council called al-majlis al-hasbi, which in the absence of a civil code usually ruled according to shari'a law. In 1944 a law was passed obliging non-Muslims to follow Islamic inheritance laws. This had been the tradition in Egypt anyway because the Christians did not have their own inheritance law, but that a supposedly sec ular government made this tradition into a formal law touched a raw nerve among the minorities.
Another attempt at changing the legal position regarding personal status was made in 1948/ 1949, when the Mixed Courts were being abolished. A move was made to abolish the communal courts for personal status law, too, but the protest of the non-Muslim communities was prompt and successful.
