The Institute of Sociology at Cairo University was established as part of the Faculty of Philosophy. The Egyptian University, as it was then known, had been founded in 1908 as a private institution and was nationalized in 1925, shortly after Egypt gained formal independence from the British and the protectorate was abolished. In 1940, the institution was renamed “King Fuʾad I University,” and since 1953, in the aftermath of the 1952 revolution, it has been called “Cairo University.”
The university was founded as a modern, secular educational institution based on European models. However, this should not be seen unilaterally as a sign of dependence, since the Egyptian intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and politicians who promoted its foundation were aiming precisely at the attainment of sovereignty as a modern nation. Social sciences, such as politics and economics, were established early on at the university as part of this national project, in a sense even at its “heart” (Roussillon 1991: 364). There had been individual courses in sociology since 1913, namely in the sociology of crime (Zayid 1995: 42). The hegemony of European ideas is clearly evident afterwards: The holder of the chair established in 1925 was the Belgian statistician Hostelet (Roussillon 1991: 358, 2003: 456). The presence of sociology as a university subject came to a temporary end as early as 1934. The reasons for this are not entirely clear (Roussillon 1991: 367–368). A sociological institute was not reestablished in Egypt until 1947 in Alexandria; in Cairo, the academic discipline of sociology was only reconstituted after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, now as an institute independent of philosophy (Zayid 1995: 42–44).