Ordinary Egyptians

Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture

Ziad Fahmy

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780804772129, 9780804772112
• eBook ISBN: 9780804777742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The popular culture of pre-revolution Egypt did more than entertain—it created a nation. Songs, jokes, and satire, comedic sketches, plays, and poetry, all provided an opportunity for discussion and debate about national identity and an outlet for resistance to British and elite authority. This book examines how, from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 revolution, popular media and culture provided ordinary Egyptians with a framework to construct and negotiate a modern national identity.

Ordinary Egyptians shifts the typical focus of study away from the intellectual elite to understand the rapid politicization of the growing literate middle classes and brings the semi-literate and illiterate urban masses more fully into the historical narrative. It introduces the concept of "media-capitalism," which expands the analysis of nationalism beyond print alone to incorporate audiovisual and performance media. It was through these various media that a collective camaraderie crossing class lines was formed and, as this book uncovers, an Egyptian national identity emerged.

CHAPTER ONE

Colloquial Egyptian, Media Capitalism, and Nationalism

Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.

—Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism

If the decoding of power relations depended on full access to the more or less clandestine discourse of subordinate groups, students of power—both historical and contemporary—would face an impasse. We are saved from throwing up our hands in frustration by the fact that the hidden transcript is typically expressed openly—albeit in disguised form. I suggest, along these lines, how we might interpret the rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes and theater of the powerless as vehicles by which, among other things, they insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct.

—James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance

In Egypt, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were rapidly replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. In this examination of modern Egyptian history, I trace the development of Egyptian national identity from the 1870s until the 1919 Revolution through the lens of popular culture. I seek to highlight and feature the role and importance of previously neglected colloquial Egyptian sources—be they oral, aural, or textual. This approach is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of the majority of Egyptians. A second objective is to document the influence of a developing colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, “hidden transcripts” of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place.¹ Third, I engage with some of the theories of nationalism and test their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. I introduce the concept of media capitalism to expand the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond print and reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media.

Until recently, scholars have almost entirely focused on the role of intellectuals in the formation of modern Egyptian identity. Jamal Mohammed Ahmed, Albert Hourani, Nadav Safran, Charles Wendell, Charles D. Smith, and Donald Malcolm Reid investigated the roots of Egyptian nationalism by examining the cultural influences of European ideas on the Egyptian intelligentsia.² Although the theoretical framework of Egyptian nationalism might have been formulated by these intellectuals, without the dissemination and the adoption of nationalist ideas by the masses, such politicized rhetoric remained an abstract notion without widespread resonance.³ In the last couple of decades, more expansive studies have been conducted by Zachary Lockman, Joel Beinin, Juan Cole, and, later, John Chalcraft, who examined in part the street politics and the economic and political mobilizations of guilds and a growing labor movement.⁴ More recently, several innovative studies have documented the literary and journalistic representation and often personification of the nation into “authentic” national archetypes. Eve Troutt Powell has examined the nationalistic “othering” of the Sudanese and Nubians in the Egyptian media. Beth Baron has described the changing personification of Egypt as a woman in Egyptian public monuments and the Egyptian illustrated press. Samah Selim and Michael Ezekiel Gasper have examined the urban intelligentsia’s representations of the Egyptian fellahin (peasantry) in novels and the press and the role that these played in the creation of national identity.⁵

The most wide ranging study on early Egyptian nationalism is Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski’s Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (1986). The book’s major contribution to the field is its use of new sources and its excellent discussion of the formulation of Egyptian national identity. Gershoni and Jankowski’s study, however, neglects several issues that need to be addressed. For instance, despite the title of their work, most of their scholarship examines Egyptian nationalism from the post–World War I era. The critical period from the 1870s, when the nationalist press began to take shape, to 1914 is discussed only in their introduction and is rarely mentioned throughout the remainder of their study. A more comprehensive understanding of the genesis and growth of Egyptian nationalism, however, must begin with an analysis of this “period of preparation,” as it is appropriately called by Jamal Mohammed Ahmed.⁶ In addition, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs focuses mainly on elite and intellectual-centered conceptions of nationalism, overlooking the important role of colloquial mass culture. Indeed, Gershoni and Jankowski themselves admit in the preface that their book “does not deal with the popular attitudes and opinions of the uneducated Egyptian masses.”⁷ The relationship and effects of popular culture and mass politics on the development of early Egyptian nationalism remain largely uncharted.⁸

POPULAR CULTURE AND COLLOQUIAL EGYPTIAN

Here and elsewhere in this book I try to historicize and see beyond this currency, straining for a concept that can preserve culture’s differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often discontinuous inventive process. Culture is a deeply compromised idea I cannot yet do without.

—James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture

Anthropologists have long debated (and are still debating) the meaning and importance of culture. However, as Lila Abu-Lughod has argued, the concept of culture is often reified and essentialized as timeless, homogeneous, and perpetually coherent.⁹ Consequently, I find James Clifford’s ideas about culture to be especially constructive. Cultures are limited, time-specific constructs that are learned and constantly in a state of flux. In fact, in this book I document many changes in the Egyptian cultural landscape—changes that accelerated as a result of the introduction of new forms of mass communication at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Egyptian mass culture at the turn of the twentieth century was persistently changing, adapting, and subverting.¹⁰

No consensus exists on the definition of “popular culture.” In his classic work Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Peter Burke argues that popular culture is “perhaps best defined initially in a negative way as unofficial culture, the culture of the non-elite, the ‘subordinate classes’ as Gramsci called them.”¹¹ This preliminary definition provided by Burke does not serve our purpose, because in Egypt at least, “popular culture,” especially in its mass-produced form, was often consumed by “elite” and nonelite alike.¹² More recently, scholars have been advocating more expansive definitions. Harold Hinds, for instance, describes popular culture as “those aspects of culture, whether ideological, social, or material, which are widely spread and believed in and/or consumed by significant numbers of people, i.e., those aspects which are popular.”¹³ Or as Gary Fine succinctly put it, popularity is the sine qua non of popular culture.¹⁴ Therefore, for the purpose of this study, I adopt these more wide-ranging definitions of popular culture, allowing for the inclusion of all disseminated cultural productions that directly or indirectly target the widest audience possible, regardless of literacy level or socioeconomic background. In other words, to be considered part of popular or mass culture, a cultural product must be accessible to all, which in Egypt requires it to be articulated in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.¹⁵

Late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Egypt witnessed the unprecedented growth of an assortment of mass-mediated popular culture productions, and this growth coincided with the rise of modern Egyptian identification with the nation. Hundreds of periodicals and books were published; new theatrical plays and thousands of new songs were performed to increasingly larger and more politically discerning audiences. Most of these new productions were created in Cairo, enhancing the capital’s political and cultural control and contributing to the formation of an increasingly homogeneous Egyptian national culture that eventually reached the national periphery. The Cairene, and to a lesser extent the Alexandrian, base of this new mass culture gave national dominance not only to Cairo’s urban culture but also to Cairo’s Egyptian dialect, effectively making Cairene colloquial Arabic the “unofficial” spoken language of Egypt.

Indeed, the colloquial language used in the thousands of new Egyptian songs, theatrical plays, and satirical periodicals was exclusively Cairene, transforming it into the de facto Egyptian dialect and provoking the gradual decline of other provincial dialects. Despite the importance of mass culture and the vital role of colloquial Egyptian as its primary linguistic vehicle, only recently have scholars begun to pay attention to the cultural and historical significance of vernacular Egyptian culture, especially azjal (colloquial poetry). Kamal Abdel-Malek and Marilyn Booth examine the written colloquial prose of Ahmad Fu’ad Nijm and Bayram al-Tunsi, two of Egypt’s most important twentieth-century colloquial poets. Walter Armbrust analyzes the “split vernacular” between colloquial and Fusha (Modern Standard Arabic) and discusses the impact of modern colloquial Egyptian cultural production, especially film. Niloofar Haeri offers an important analysis of colloquial Egyptian culture in modern Egypt, examining the sociopolitical ramifications of the split between Fusha and ‘ammiyya (colloquial Arabic) cultures. Eve Troutt Powell has examined the racial and nationalist implications of the colloquial comedic theater of ‘Ali al-Kassar; Beth Baron, Lisa Pollard, and most recently Michael Ezekial Gasper have made use of the colloquial Egyptian press.¹⁶ Through their pioneering analyses of colloquial Egyptian sources, these scholars have begun the process of incorporating more voices into the historical narrative. Accordingly, in this book I hope to expand on these recent efforts by examining late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Egyptian history almost entirely through a colloquial Egyptian popular culture lens.

EGYPTIAN IDENTITY BETWEEN FUSHA AND ‘AMMIYYA

Popular Culture has been linguistically important in Egypt because it has historically been a qualitatively different vehicle for establishing national identity than official discourse.

—Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt

In all Arab countries today, there are unresolved linguistic tensions between everyday spoken colloquial variations of Arabic and Fusha, or Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is the predominant language of written discourse. According to the linguist Clive Holes, MSA is an imprecise term used by linguists to denote modern written Arabic “from about the middle of the nineteenth century, when concerted efforts began to modernize it lexically and phraseologically.”¹⁷ Holes elaborates that MSA is “the modern descendant of Classical Arabic, unchanged in the essentials of its syntax but very much changed, and still changing, in its vocabulary and phraseology.”¹⁸ In the Arab world both MSA and Classical Arabic are simply identified as al-‘arabiyya al-fusha (the clear/ eloquent Arabic), or just fusha for short. Colloquial Arabic is referred to as al-lugha al-‘ammiyya (the common people’s language) or al-lugha al-darija (the widespread/popular language). The intrinsic definitional hierarchy differentiating Fusha and ‘ammiyya is quite clear: Fusha is reified as a clear (pure) and eloquent language with a Qur’anic and classical pedigree, whereas ‘ammiyya is regarded as the common language of the masses and everyday life.¹⁹ This Bourdieuian hierarchy between a “high” and “low” language or dialect is very much as alive today as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.

In Egypt today, Egyptian Arabic is the predominant language of daily communication, songs, jokes, cartoons, movies, television serials, and most other audiovisual and sound media. Fusha is more formalized and is largely the domain of the vast majority of print media, newspapers, school textbooks, official speeches, and television news broadcasts. This linguistic equation, however, was drawn slightly differently in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. For instance, although by the end of the twentieth century no “purely” colloquial periodicals were in print, from the 1870s to the early 1940s newspapers and magazines using a significant amount of colloquial material were quite common (see Chapters 4–6).²⁰ Charles Ferguson described this linguistic division in the Arabic-speaking world as diglossic, with a clearly defined, rigid distinction between Fusha and ‘ammiyya.²¹ However, linguists have s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• 1. Colloquial Egyptian, Media Capitalism, and Nationalism
• 2. Political Centralization to Cultural Centralization
• 3. Print Capitalism and the Beginnings of Colloquial Mass Culture, 1870–1882
• 4. New Media: Laughter, Satire, and Song, 1882–1908
• 5. Media Capitalism: From Mass Culture to Mass Practice, 1907–1919
• 6. The Egyptian Street: Carnival, Popular Culture, and the 1919 Revolution
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Urbanization and Infrastructure
• Appendix B: Plays and Songs Composed by Sayyid Darwish from 1918 to 1919
• Notes
• References
• Index