In the Islamic world, universities have, since the 1960s, been a strongly conservative influence. This wasn’t always true - there were thriving leftist, socialist and secular nationalist movements at them for much of the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries - but beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative religious intellectuals began to dominate. A lot of academic religious figures came to power, and student bodies became much more religiously conservative - customs like gender segregation, strict modest dress codes actually became common in Pakistani and Egyptian universities, among the middle classes, in the 1980s before they did so among many more common urban people. The universities of the Arab world played a key role in the increase in religious conservatism in the region since the siege of Mecca - particularly the most famous Muslim university, Al Azhar, which has been an intellectual center for Sunni Islam for over a thousand years. Similar things occurred in Shia Islam - is it not interesting how so many student revolutionaries in 1979 helped an austere religious conservative overthrow a secular government? Many didn’t know what they were doing, but many did - religious Islam offered many young people unsatisfied with secular nationalism a spiritual philosophy in the waning decades of the 20th century.

Across Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria and Syria, many of the most ardent and committed (and radical) Islamist figures were converted or radicalised at university. The common tale of some moderate or secular-ish, kind of hippie son who smokes and flirts with girls who goes to a university and comes out a thawb wearing Islamist is, well, common. As the failure of secular nationalism in the MENA region became clearer, the Islamist intellectuals were waiting in the wings.

So the idea that intellectual culture trends progressive is clearly false. It is possible to have a conservative or reactionary academy, even one much more right wing than the population as a whole. But it probably has to be religious in character.

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