Making money secular in nineteenth-century Egypt

This intervention places Islam and the secular in late Ottoman Egypt at the centre of discussions on capitalism. It makes the argument that capitalism operates in the colonial modern space, itself the product of a nineteenth-century reconfiguration of the relationship between reason and ethics.

From the ground-breaking work of Peter Gran onwards, critical scholarship has argued that the Middle East developed indigenous forms of capitalism, with Islam carrying within itself the seeds of capitalist development, especially in its mercantile form. These interventions are important as they challenge an older, but persistent, strand of scholarship on the “absence” of capitalism in Islam and the Middle East more generally. But why should this “absence” be contested? Is it really problematic to argue that capitalism was, at least to a large extent, absent in Islam?

This paper will argue that while important, this critical scholarship accepts the epistemic and temporal premises of the colonial modern, especially the temporal doctrine of “progress.” What has not yet been suggested is that the “absence” of the epistemic premises of capitalism in Islam is precisely the critical standpoint scholars of the Middle East should adopt and challenge the colonial modern from the perspective of. In other words, the paper will question the scholarly compulsion to assimilate Islam and the history of Egypt in particular into epistemic imperatives of colonial modernity, especially where capitalist development is concerned.

Speaker: Rana Baker (KCL).

Image: early 20th Century postcard; from speaker’s collection.