ZIAD FAHMY. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture.

Abstract

Egyptian nationalism has been the subject of numerous scholarly studies, most of them locating its origins in intelligentsia-led debates, khedivial reforms, capitalist integration, European colonization, or some confection thereof. Ziad Fahmy does not dispute the significance of these impulses, and he highlights khedivial railway and post office systems as particularly important aids to national unification. But his book poses probing questions about the sources used to trace the emergence of Egyptian national identity, as well as the cultural and linguistic assumptions underlying the reading of these sources. How, for instance, was the “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson's famous phrase, of an Egyptian nation evoked for a population that was overwhelmingly illiterate? Compounding the problem is the fact that the sources commonly examined are written in a form of Arabic that, while understood by an educated elite and preserving classical legacies, was largely alien to the discourse of ordinary people and was, even for the elite, distinct from the normal medium of day-to-day interactions.