For thirty years Kevseri had lived in Cairo, writing at home and teaching students in an impenetrably high literary Arabic lightened by the labial delicacy of his Turkish accent. And he had raged. He had raged against Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate, God’s shadow on earth and Muhammad’s rightful successor. He had raged against Egypt’s stupid, bewitched reformists, whose aim of matching the Western powers was matched only by their need to please them. He had raged most of all against the modernist ulama, who ‘tore up our religion to adorn our earthly world,’ not realizing that ‘our world
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