Egypt’s 1868 civil schools were deliberately separated from mosque and military

Evidence

The organisation (tartib) of instruction, wrote Rifa`a al-Tahtawi, required that a room be taken in the market or the main street of the town and set aside for the purpose of teaching. Children were not to be taught in places that served other functions, particularly not in the mosque. This coincided with the administrative separation, in April 1868, of what were to be called the ‘civil schools’ from the military. The new civilian education was to be entirely separate from the military project, just as it was to be separate from the life and the learning of the mosque; its purpose was the discipline and improvement of every individual. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 301

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why April 1868 specifically? What administrative or political context prompted the civilian-military educational split at that moment?