Hoda A. Yousef. Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870–1930.

Abstract

In Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation, 1870–1930, Hoda A. Yousef examines the many “literacies” practiced during the era of political, educational, and societal change in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Egypt. Yousef illustrates the ways that Egypt’s population related to an Arabic language in flux, an educational system being transformed, a communication network expanding as a result of new technologies, and a society grappling with how it should modernize. Studies of this era in Egyptian history and of the Arab Nahda (Awakening, Renaissance) have frequently cited the expansion of literacy as a primary goal of the modernizers, but Yousef brings a fresh perspective to a familiar story by analyzing the implications attendant to producing a mass of readers and writers for the first time in Egypt’s history. The strength of the book lies in Yousef’s decision to use the noun “literacy” in the plural, and thus she opens the analysis up to a wide-ranging discussion about the relationship between literacy and education and reading and writing. To engage with these debates, she frequently goes back into history to compare how these terms and processes changed with the new era of reform in the late nineteenth century. For centuries, reading frequently meant oral memorization; in Arabic, reading and recitation stem from the same word. Writing skills took a lifetime of study to master because of the stylistic requirements of Qurʾanic exegesis; clerks acquired the written eloquence necessary for producing governmental and diplomatic documents. These men largely learned only some aspects of reading and writing, so they would not have fulfilled the definition of literacy put forward by the nineteenth-century modernizers, but were respected for the roles they played in society. While their ranks were relatively small, Yousef explains that those who were incapable of reading and writing at all were nonetheless engaged with this literate world through the use of scribes who wrote letters, petitions, and documents on their behalf. As a result, the scribes’ clients were literate in how the system of the printed word worked.