Abstract
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the emerging urban professional and bureaucratic classes characterized by their Western education and Western bourgeois attire (with the important addition of the Fez) had come to occupy a central position in the Egyptian social order by virtue of their domination of the expanding public sphere and of many levels of government bureaucracy. These individuals, who came to be known collectively as the “efendiya” enjoyed, as can be seen by this unofficial titular designation, an elevated social status. The most prominent members of this group could come from or intermingle with the large land-owning families, acquire official titles, and occupy high offices of government. Yet at the same time, after the rapid expansion of government schools beginning in the 1920s, the “efendiya” came also to be associated with the modest circumstances of the petty bureaucrat or clerical employee. Nevertheless, members of the efendiya retained and continued to promote a class status founded on a putative relationship between bourgeois attributes and national representation. The publicizing of bourgeois class status is evident from the end of the nineteenth century. It is seen particularly in the print media in calls for the establishment of bourgeois norms of familial relations and domestic life, as well as of personal education, sentiments, and behavior, and especially in the association of these norms with national revival and progress.2
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Notes
On the efendiya, see especially Lucie Ryzova, “Egyptianizing Modernity through the ‘New Effendiyd: Social and Cultural Constructions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy’,” in Re-envisioning Egypt 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy J. Johnson, Barak A. Salmoni (New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 124–163
Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7–11.
Michael Eppel, “The Elite, the Effendiyya, and the Growth of Nationalism and Pan-Arabism in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 30(2) (May, 1998), 227–250.
Much of the recent scholarship on emerging discourses of motherhood and feminine domesticity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deals with these issues. See, for example, Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt” in Lila Abu-Lughod ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 126–170
Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
On women’s associations in particular, see Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 168–181.
Zachary Lockman has argued that another class category that came to the fore in Egypt during the colonial period, the “working class,” should be regarded as discursively as well as economically constituted. He shows the role that the efendiya played in helping to create this class category, for hegemonic purposes in the early twentieth century. See Zachary Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914,” Poetics Today 15(2) (1994): 157–190.
See S. Somekh, “The Neo-classical Arabic Poets” in The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 55–63.
S. Moreh, “The Neoclassical Qasidah: Modern Poets and Critics,” in Studies in Modern Arabic Prose and Poetry (Leiden: EJ.Brill, 1988), 32–56.
Ibn Rashiq al-Qayrawani, Kitab al-’Umdah fi Mahasin al-Shi’r waAdabihi wa Naqdihi (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, 1981), 2
The funeral elegy and eulogy have been employed to establish or consolidate collective identities in other contexts as well. For an analysis of the public, political role of funeral orations in ancient Athens, see Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens, tr. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Umar al-Dasuqi, Fi al-Adab al-Hadith, (Cairo: Dar al-fikr al-Arabi, 1964), 2:69.
For information on funeral rites and practices in nineteenth century Egypt, see E.W. Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1890)
In 1906 villagers in a small village known as Dinshaway were accused in murky circumstances of killing a British soldier. Four were sentenced to death and eight to flogging and jail. Egyptian public opinion was outraged, and the repercussions of the incident in England contributed to the replacement of Lord Cromer as Consul-general the following year. See Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, tr. Jean Stewart (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 236–239.
Mounah A. Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1971), 65
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and tr. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 14
Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 28.
See Suzanne P. Stetkevych, Abu Tammam and the Poetics of the Abbasid Age (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991)
Ahmad Shawqi, Al-Shawqiyat, (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1988), 3
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© 2010 Yaseen Noorani
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Noorani, Y. (2010). The Death of the Hero and the Birth of Bourgeois Class Status. In: Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106437_3
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