In modern Egypt, what had unfolded as internal dynamics between the secular/scientific and the scriptural/clerical in Spinoza’s Amsterdam and Woolston’s England was being rehashed as part of the agonistic dynamic between the colonizer and colonized, ‘co-opted’ elites and ‘authentic’ tradition. In the 1930s the Muslim Brotherhood arose to challenge the notion that ‘Islam and organization can never coincide’ and to drive imperialism first from the hearts of Egyptians and then from Egypt itself. Arabic nationalism rolled back calls like that of Egyptian reformists in the late 1930s to follow
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