Nineteenth-century Egyptian political-economic changes destroyed the al-Azhar-based system of local authority.

Evidence

By the mid nineteenth century this system of political authority was under enormous stress, as the misfortunes of Ali Mubarak’s own family indicated. The important posts in provincial Egypt were still reserved for the increasingly unpopular Turkish-speaking elite (a situation that was about to change in the provinces, just as Ali Mubarak’s career marked the emergence of a native, Arabic-speaking bureaucracy in Cairo), oppressive levels of taxation had forced men like Ali Mubarak’s father to flee from their villages, the income of the teaching mosques had been drastically cut by the government’s appropriation of their endowments, and the precincts of al-Azhar had become an overcrowded sanctuary for those escaping the military draft. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 294