Early Twentieth-century Egypt Research Articles

A Latin Alphabet for the Arabic Language: Romanizing Arabic in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt and Beyond

AbstractThis article explores early attempts to romanize the Arabic language in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt and situates them within a global history of script reforms in the modern period. I focus on the models to write Arabic in the Latin script developed by the Cairo-based magazine al-Muqtataf between 1889 and 1897 (which, to the extent of my knowledge, have never been examined before), relating them to the responses they elicited from the magazine's readers and some of the romanization practices found in advertising, commercial displays in the streets, and governance at the time. I demonstrate that, in this period, romanized Arabic was envisioned as an original way to pursue financial profit and technological efficiency, confront European knowledge production, and redefine the standing of Arabic within transregional publishing networks that encompassed different languages and alphabets. This analysis thus offers an alternative geography of script reform that supersedes the national framework.

Occult Epidemics

AbstractIn the 1903 text Madar al-Zar (The Damages of Zar), Egyptian writer Muhammad Hilmi Zayn al-Din decried the growing popularity of zar rituals and the superstitious women who participated in them as an epidemic ravaging his country. This article employs Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s method of “epidemiological reading” to reveal and analyze the racial and imperial anxieties that underlie this understudied text. The article begins with a summary of Madar al-Zar and an account of the sociopolitical context in which it was published. It then pulls back the surface layers of the text to reveal that the “disease” running rampant in early twentieth-century Egypt was not zar, but the scourge of African enslavement and the ever-looming specter of Egypt’s imperial desires in Sudan. The article concludes with a meditation on zar as an archive of African dispossession, displacement, and resilience.

Kadriye Hüseyin: a forgotten female intellectual and a representation of Ottoman consciousness in early twentieth century Egypt

Kadriye Hüseyin was a member of the Egyptian ruling family and a prolific female intellectual, who has been largely ignored by scholars of late Ottoman Empire and modern Egypt. Focusing on Kadriye Huseyin’s works, which she wrote in Ottoman Turkish, this study examines the situational nature of identity in early twentieth century Egypt and, challenging the conventional narratives, argues that Ottoman consciousness continued to inform the worldviews of the Egyptian ruling elite until the First World War. The article first presents Kadriye Hüseyin as an intellectual, who identified herself as an Ottoman in various historical contexts. It then demonstrates how she was influenced by the Islamic reformist thinkers who had a major impact among the Ottoman and Egyptian intelligentsia in the early 20th century. Finally, the article introduces Kadriye Huseyin as a female intellectual, whose works argued for improving women’s status in the Muslim world from an Islamic reformist perspective.

Cuno Kenneth M. — Modernizing Marriage. Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt

Le livre de Kenneth M. Cuno traite de la transformation de l’ideologie de la famille dans l’Egypte de la seconde moitie du XIXe et du debut du XXe siecles. Ces transformations, appelees « modernisation », se sont manifestees a la fois dans les ecrits d’intellectuels egyptiens, la pratique des gens et le droit, que ce soit au niveau legislatif ou de la pratique judiciaire des tribunaux de la chari‘a. L’auteur a utilise avec efficacite et habilete les differentes sources disponibles : memoires,...

Constitutionalism in Poetry, Poetry in Constitutionalism: Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s Imagining of Contemporary Constitutional Movements

Abstract This paper focuses on the sociocultural and historical context in which the Egyptian poet Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (c. 1872–1932) represented contemporary constitutional movements in the Muslim world, with special emphasis on developments in the Ottoman Empire and in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Egypt – back then, at least nominally, still a part of it – and extending to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution. References in Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s poetry to constitutionalism in Japan will also be discussed in order to point out that the poet, while closely following constitutional movements in the Ottoman Empire and in Iran, in fact viewed constitutionalism as an historical process transcending geographical and cultural boundaries. Therefore, we shall also try to identify the general idea of history underlying Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm’s portrayal of constitutionalism. Comparative references to constitutional poetry in Iran of that time are intended to point out the supra-regional dimension both of constitutionalism itself and of poetical modes of imagining it. Likewise, this approach is designed to make the point that constitutional poetry in the Muslim world at that time was more than just poetic commentary on constitutional movements; it was itself part of them.

Implications of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic (1918–1920) for the History of Early Twentieth-Century Egypt

Implications of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic (1918–1920) for the History of Early Twentieth-Century Egypt

Identity, Land and Revolt in Egyptian Earth: An Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract This article rethinks the representation of Egyptian rural culture and peasant participation in the nationalist struggle against British colonialism in Abdel Rahman al-Sharqaawi’s well-known novel Egyptian Earth, Al-Ard (1954). It specifically examines the concepts of identity, land, and revolt in Egyptian Earth from an ecofeminist perspective, relating peasants’ resistance against corrupt feudal-imperialist injustices in early twentieth-century Egypt to the dominant patriarchal cultural attitudes towards women’s and nature’s positions in the pre- and post-1952 revolutionary Egypt. It argues that although al-Sharqaawi’s Egyptian Earth gives marginalized Egyptian peasants the opportunity to participate in an important transitional period in the history of modern Egypt, it discusses the invisible psycho-cultural, environmental and social reasons and circumstances that hinder democratic transition in post-1952 revolution, with a particular focus on Egyptian countryside. Within this context, Egyptian villagers in Egyptian Earth are not just colonized people fighting colonial violence and discriminations through reconnecting to their land. They also stand for a patriarchal place and land suffering complicated, deep-seated problems of cultural isolation, sexism, and tribalism. In this way, Egyptian Earth develops ecofeminist ethics that condemn the colonial rule and the nationalist discourse, as both maintain hierarchical relationships between the urban and the rural, the male and the female, culture and nature, and authority and common people.

Centering the black slave in Bahāʾ Ṭāhir’s Wāḥat al-ghurūb

ABSTRACT This paper constructs the story of Niʿma, a Sudanese or Nubian slave in Bahāʾ Ṭāhir’s Wāḥat al-ghurūb (2006; Sunset Oasis 2009). Set in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt, the novel revisits the 1881–1882 Urābī Revolution and the subsequent British invasion. Through the male protagonist, Maḥmūd ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir and his relationship with Niʿma, his concubine, Wāḥat al-ghurūb re-evaluates Egypt’s nationalist rhetoric. Made to represent an essence of Egypt, Niʿma is denied her history and memory except as an exotic, jasmine-scented Scheherazade whose folktales captivate Maḥmūd, and whose sexuality satiates him. I argue that despite the absence of her voice Niʿma shows agency mainly through casting herself as an active storyteller and additionally through her decisions to stay with her masters after their bankruptcy, and later to leave the house when she realizes that Maḥmūd sees her as a commodity.

Gender Roles in Transition Across the Globe

Gender Roles in Transition Across the Globe Michelle Mouton (bio) Kenneth M. Cuno. Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015. xxi +305 pp.; ill; tables. ISBN 0-8156-3392-0 (cl). Ji-Eun Lee. Women Pre-Scripted: Forging Modern Roles through Korean Print. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015. xi + 182 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8248-3926-9 (cl). Marti M. Lybeck. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. x + 289 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-4384-5221-7 (cl); 1-4384-5222-5 (pb). Jill Suzanne Smith. Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. xii + 221 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8014-5267-8 (cl); 0-8014-7834-0 (pb). Gillian Sutherland. In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xi+187 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 1-107-09279-5 (cl). At the end of the nineteenth century, middle-class women in Europe and the United States began to challenge traditional gender roles that relegated women to the private sphere of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. They demanded the right to attend universities, enter professional workspaces, and—eventually—participate in the political arena. Although the First World War interrupted women’s struggle, at the end of the war they continued to press their claims for a place in the public sphere. A great deal of outstanding scholarship has addressed many aspects of both generations of these New Women as they challenged gender roles rooted deeply in social convention, government policy, legal structures, scientific theory, and religious beliefs. The books under consideration in this essay, while differing in their thematic focuses, methodologies, and locations, contribute to this conversation in new ways. One argues that, in spite of the vast literature, we still do not know exactly who the New Woman was. Two books explore sexual identities and efforts to police women’s evolving sexual behaviors. Two additional books, finally, take us beyond the [End Page 176] familiar geographic and thematic parameters of gender. Together, these studies deepen our understanding of how women challenged traditional gender roles and how modernization, colonialism, religion, and nationalism affected their efforts. At the heart of Gillian Sutherland’s exemplary new study, In Search of the New Woman, lies a central question: Who exactly was the New Woman? She calls the frenzy that surrounded the New Woman in Britain between 1870 and 1914 “a wildly skewed reductive media construct” that did not reflect “the real lives and work of those women it purported to describe” (6). In five tightly written chapters, she explores the relationship between the New Woman presented in media and actual middle-class women in teaching, public service, the caring professions, white-collar jobs, and the arts. Each chapter explores women’s employment opportunities in one of these professions, the educational requirements for that work, and whether it helped women achieve independence or become New Women. Sutherland is particularly interested in the question of how economic independence could be achieved without sacrificing middle-class women’s status as ladies and respectable women. Sutherland’s first two chapters draw heavily on the records of two women’s colleges, Newnham and Girton, to explore women’s educational options and the employment they opened to women between 1870 and 1914. School records enable her to trace individual women’s trajectories to understand exactly how societal and legal obstacles and familial attitudes influenced women’s lives. Sutherland concludes that for women in teaching, upper-level government positions, and the caring professions, it was possible to achieve economic independence while maintaining one’s status as a lady. But this did not mean they escaped traditional gender roles. Societal pressure prevented these women from marrying. In addition, the strong association of ladies with philanthropy meant that part-time and voluntary work persisted, and educational standards were difficult to apply to women’s work. The scarcity of jobs in many areas, furthermore, forced women to rely on private money while they trained or waited for a job, thus precluding many women...

The Ambivalent Émigrée: Mayy Ziyādah’s Rhetoric of Nationhood

This paper reflects on the idea of exile in relation to the fractured intellectual landscape of identity formation as pronounced in a series of conceptualizations of homeland, nation, and nationhood in early twentieth-century Egypt. Where there is strong anti-colonial feeling and a need to forge a clear understanding of belonging, the conceptualization of homeland assumes paramount importance, with prominent Arab intellectuals and littérateurs like Mayy Ziyādah sharing in the ongoing discussion. Ziyādah was ambivalent toward mainstream applications of national identity at the time, not only because of her multilayered, fluid personal identity, but also because, under the impact of Enlightenment thought, she believed in world citizenry.

Kenneth M. Cuno.Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt.

Kenneth M. Cuno’s book is a most welcome addition to histories of the family in the Middle East. It builds on current historiographies, usually focused on transformations of family law or on the emergence of companionate marriage as the new notion of the ideal family. The preface opens with an anecdote that captures Cuno’s central observation: “Khedive Ismail had multiple wives and concubines . . . However, his grandson . . . practiced polygyny surreptitiously, like a man with a mistress in a legally monogamous society, even though polygyny remains legal in Egypt to this day” (xv). The overwhelming power of the idea of monogamy, by the turn of the twentieth century, had made polygyny a culturally unacceptable practice even for the ruler of the country. Cuno argues that “these hegemonic ideas . . . have only a limited connection with Islamic concepts of an earlier time . . . The idea of the conjugal family as the basis of society comes from Enlightenment thought, as does the notion that the purpose of marriage is the formation of a family and childrearing” (2). Yet, he rightly resists any simple projection of the emerging hegemony of the ideal conjugal family as a colonial import. As Cuno notes, “the transition to conjugal family households seems to have been caused by multiple factors, including the development of modern education, a rising age of marriage for both sexes, and the adoption of European architectural styles” (7).

Transnational Connections and the Making of Modern Childhood in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: A review article

Transnational Connections and the Making of Modern Childhood in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries:A review article Temilola Alanamu Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt By Heidi Morrison. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and emotions in South India and Denmark By Karen Vallgårda. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church evangelicalism and colonial childhood, 1860-1895 By S.E. Duff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories Edited By Saheed Aderinto. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. The 1960 publication Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès propelled childhood history into academia. Ariès’ controversial claim that childhood, as a separate and distinct period of the human lifecycle, did not exist in Europe until the eighteenth century historicised childhood, prompting scholars to recognise for the first time that childhood, like other categories of analysis, is historically, socially and culturally constructed. By so doing, Ariès’ work revealed that childhood history was a crucial arena of social enquiry.1 The study of this biological and social category—one which is liminal, universally experienced, and yet uniquely implicated in matters of sex, gender, race, ethnicity and socio-economic status—has made significant strides in the social sciences. However, advances in such fields as sociology, anthropology and psychology have been difficult to replicate in historical scholarship. Contemporary perspectives on childhood suggest that children’s views and voices are crucial to understanding childhood experiences.2 However, historical sources by children are rare. Children are seldom actors, and are thus often invisible in the archives. The records that do exist arise from adult contact, exchanges and interactions with children, and are often mediated by the adult experience, as documented in missionary collections, court records, government archives or adult reflections on childhood in autobiographies. This impediment has commonly resulted in the history of childhood being subsumed within such fields as state history, colonial and imperial history, women and gender history, or the history of migration, missionaries, education and reproduction.3 All of the four books reviewed here encountered this same obstacle. Notwithstanding their aspirations to analyse the histories of childhoods in India, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, the paucity of children-authored texts compel the authors to evaluate the subject matter from the perspectives of adults and through the ideological burden children were made to bear by nationalists, religious organisations and imperialists. Lending weight to Peter Sterns’ contention that the history of childhood is “mainly centred on what adults were doing or saying about this or that aspect of children’s lives,”4 these books argue that notions of what constitutes a “good” or “proper” childhood are both contested and continually changing. While the family and community have been dominant historical influences, beginning in the nineteenth century, childhood was increasingly fashioned by the church, state and nationalist movements, all of which often co-opted childhood to advance their respective modernisation agendas. Debates concerning childhood were seldom solely about children; instead, they foregrounded anxieties concerning nation building, racial and social hierarchies, religious conversion and other social, economic and political contests. While childhood histories have blossomed in Western academia since the 1960s, aided by the postmodern emphasis on the complexities of social phenomena constituted by intersecting matrixes of race, gender, class and age, outside the West, childhood studies is still in its infancy, though authors such as Marie Rodet, Elodie Razy, Benjamin Lawrance and Abosede George have recently begun to bridge the gap.5 Given this comparative dearth of studies, the four Palgrave Macmillan books reviewed here constitute significant progress in non-Western, imperial, transnational histories and a crucial addition to the growing genre of global childhood history. In Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt, Heidi Morrison explores changing ideologies of childhood in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt amidst nationalist agitation, semi-autonomy, independence and Egyptian modernity. The author argues that the new hybrid ideas concerning childcare that came to the fore in this period were rooted in both modern science and ancient adab literature, “a literary genre dating to the ninth century that focused on norms of conduct such as building children’s moral character.” Such...

Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Egypt. By Kenneth M. Cuno

In Modernizing Marriage, Kenneth M. Cuno addresses how changes in the Egyptian legal system helped transformed conceptions of marriage and the family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This detailed history connects profound social and cultural shifts with their legal underpinnings and, in doing so, argues that any assumption that women have been consistently subordinated by Islamic marriage laws does not take into account earlier forms of family and lineage. As Cuno relates Egyptian society's movement away from polygyny and toward monogamy, he additionally makes the case that these changes were not simply derived from European colonialism but should be understood in connection to shifting Ottoman policies, transnational pathways of influence at work throughout North Africa, and the growth of Egypt's intelligentsia. Cuno examines the Ottoman roots of early nineteenth-century marriage and family law, how those policies were put into practice, and the subsequent legal changes that coincided with shifting social and cultural ideas about marriage. From there, he carefully examines the codification of marriage and divorce and the complex roots of those new policies, questioning in the end how beneficial the apparent modernization of marriage was for Egyptian women.

‘Life Would be a Meaningless Game and a Bad Joke’ Without Freedom: Naguib Mahfouz as an Oppositional Writer

Mahfouz is generally known as a master ‘storyteller’ of Cairo. However, he can also be read as a great resistance writer, if we depend on Edward Said’s idea of the oppositional intellectual as a humanist writer who uncompromisingly unmasks the workings of power in society. I argue that a remarkable humanism works at the heart of Mahfouz’s adversarial project by reading The Cairo Trilogy as a counter-hegemonic piece, rather than only as a familial tale that mirrors early twentieth-century Egypt. Since Mahfouz remains obsessed with the presence of power in human life, his central struggle is to demystify the hegemonies related to race, gender, class, religion and success in order to de-effectuate them from a deeply humane perspective and assert his intellectual freedom through the process. We need the Saidian framework to comprehend the well-established analyses of Mahfouz’s works in a new light and realize that his writing is no mere rumination on Egypt’s sociopolitical situation. Rather, it is his primary means of obstructing power through revealing its ways in his society.

Common Skies Divided Horizons: Aviation, Class and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Egypt

How is high-technology consumed by societies that cannot shape technology but could only be shaped by it? As the first study of Egyptian aviation, this article examines the unique process through which Egyptians embraced aviation as an exemplar of high-speed modernity and as an instrument of social transformation. It illustrates how, under colonial circumstances, Egypt’s upper-class shaped a vision of aviation as a tool that could bring an array of utopian benefits to all Egyptians, including prosperity, freedom of movement, social status, equality, and ultimately, a smooth transformation to the happiness of the modern world. In reality, this vision was a self-serving survival strategy whose aim was to contain the frustrated middle class, or effendiyya , which did not profit from the process of modernization. After World War II and the gradual collapse of the upper class, the effendiyya entrusted the state with the mission of adopting high-technology and modernizing society on an equal basis. Beginning in the early 1950s civil aviation was arranged accordingly.

Turning Syrians into Frenchmen: The cultural politics of a French non-governmental organization in Mandate Syria (1920-67)--the French Secular Mission schools

Although the French Secular Mission (Mission Laïque Française (MLF)), founded in 1902, was not an official organ of the French state, its cultural politics, expressed through the establishment of overseas schools in places such as late Ottoman Salonica (in 1906), early twentieth-century Egypt, early Mandate Syria and elsewhere, paralleled and coincided with the official French government program to promote the use of the French language and a knowledge of its civilizational values amongst non-Francophone peoples as a means of furthering its foreign interests. These interests should be seen within the double context of the international French ' mission civilisatrice ' as well as with regard to France's longstanding rivalry with Great Britain in the economic, political and cultural domains. The present study examines the objectives of the MLF both in relation to the domestic situation in France during the first half of the twentieth century, especially as concerns the separation of church and state in 1905, which gave 'official' sanction to the MLF's mission to establish secular schools overseas in the name of France, and also as a cultural instrument, largely funded by Paris, to promulgate French Enlightenment values in regions of the world which were deemed important on the imperialistic scale. Turning Syrians into Frenchmen was not the goal but turning Syrians (not only Christians, but especially Muslims) into Francophiles was definitely part of the MLF strategy which straddled and swerved between the associationist and the assimilationist philosophies, creating an intellectual colonization amongst its students and thereby generating a sort of cultural schizophrenia (Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic societies confronting the West (Syracuse NY, Syracuse University Press, 1997).

Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyada's Studies of Three Women's Lives

Biographical sketches of Famous Women appeared regularly in the women's press of turn-of-the-century Egypt. Drawing on a long Arabic tradition of biographical compilation, they yet were something new in choice of subject and rhetoric. Aiming not only to educate but also to shape the middle-class female audience that the editors of the women's press sought, these brief life stories elucidate agendas as much as they point up conflicts. Found in many periodicals directed at women in Egypt throughout this century, this genre may be an important source for charting the development of subjectivity and self-image among middle-class women; it is certainly a useful source for mapping struggles over the definition and control of women's lives. These short sketches had come to pervade the women's press by the 1910s and early 1920s; and it was in this period that women's biography became explicitly part of the drive to create a feminist consciousness among a middle-class urban audience, through three studies on women writers by the Lebanese-Palestinian essayist, poet and orator Mayy Ziyada (1886-1941). First published in 1919-25, Ziyada's biographical works came at a time when organized feminism in Egypt was just emerging. In length and depth her studies moved beyond the short biographical sketches of the women's magazines while retaining similar emphases. Ziyada attempted a full and contextualized study of individual women whose lives encapsulated and could in some way shape contemporary Arab women's construction of their pasts and futures. And, revealing the impact her subjects had had on her own life and thought, stressing commonalities between her own experience and theirs, Ziyada acknowledged—if she did not directly confront— the intersection of a biographer's own situation and interests with the life stories she produces.1 Undermining any presumption of a biographer's objective distance, this recognition also served the rhetorical and feminist purpose of creating an illusion of personal linkage between subject, biographer, and an audience of women. Ziyada's biographies have been recognized as achieving a sympathetic and careful treatment of three women's lives; what has not been pointed out is how those works built upon the demonstrated capacity of women's biography in the women's press to highlight gender-role shifts in process and also to suggest an agenda for further change. They activated,

Unveiling in early twentieth century Egypt: practical and symbolic considerations

Proclaiming itself 'the mouthpiece of women', the newspaper al-'Afaf began publication in Cairo in 1910. It declared itself dedicated to improving women's condition by encouraging morality and modesty, and showed on its cover a drawing of a woman standing in front of pyramids and a sphinx and holding her arm aloft with a banner 'Modesty Is My Motto'. Across her face she wore a light, translucent veil which left her eyes uncovered and allowed her mouth and nose to show faintly through. But three issues later, the plate was revised and the nose, face and chin were blotted out, covered by a thick veil. After opponents had attacked the paper for its possible immorality (owing to an alleged mixing of male and female staff members at a reception), the paper emphasized its conservative stance by changing the style of the veil shown on the cover.' In early twentieth-century Egypt positions on the veil were becoming more polarized in a lively and widespread debate over al-hijab (veiling) versus al-sufur (unveiling). The growing schism over veiling reflected the larger struggle between traditionalists and modernists, for the veil proved one of many issues which divided them. It signaled modesty and honor to traditionalists and the backwardness of the nation to modernists. Yet, the trends in veiling were not only a response to ideological debates but also a reaction to social, economic, and cultural changes. Thus the veil was both a symbol of contention and a practical issue. For those concerned with fashion and separation, the veil was an item of dress with a functional purpose. As fashion changed and lines of separation began to blur, use changed and further fueled debate. Women set the discussion on veiling into this broader context, balancing abstract arguments with practical considerations.