Modern Egypt

This article uses Spain's participation at the Cairo Congress of Arab Music (1932) as the basis to raise questions pertaining to the place of Arab music in the racial imagination of Europeans. It argues that Spain's unique response to the challenges arising from the study of Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry reveals still uncharted tensions and fractures running through musicology and Orientalist discourse at the time. My line of inquiry sheds light on the origins and characteristics of the forms of self-reflexivity evident in the musicological work produced by Spain and other European countries. In what ways did the shifting tectonics of North African politics impact or even impair the capacity of European musicological discourse to inscribe Arab music in the global imagination in ways supportive of Europe's identity projects? To what extent was the discourse on Arab music emerging in the context of colonial rivalry suitable for Spain to rewrite the memories of its past of anti-Muslim violence? What could Spain's unique position as both an insider and an outsider relative to notions of Europe reveal about western attitudes towards Arab music in a context of colonial rivalry? The answers to these questions lie not only with the peculiar ways in which Spain addressed its identity crises, but also with the extent to which the Cairo Congress exposed the inadequacy of reigning paradigms in musicology, anthropology and the social sciences, and underscored their inability to keep up with the changing face of North African societies.

“Food, Hunger, and Rebellion: Egypt in World War I and its Aftermath,” in Justin Nordstrom, ed., The Provisions of War: Expanding the Boundaries of Food and Conflict, 1840-1990, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 161-176. ISBN: 978-1-68226-175-0.

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Over two percent of the Egyptian population perished during World War I due to starvation, malnutrition, and disease. Although technically neutral, Egypt was the staging ground for British and Dominion troops fighting the campaign against the Ottoman Empire. The prioritization of military needs led to government recruitment of civilian labor—mostly from the agricultural sector—and requisitioning of food supplies for the troops. The drop in labor and available supplies for the civilian market caused supply shortages and runaway inflation in the cost of basic provisions.

This chapter uses government documents, statistical data, and the press to illustrate anxieties over the cost and availability of food among Egyptian civilians during the war. There are few studies that examine the history of wartime Egypt at all, and even less that focus on the civilian home front. Most work heretofore has focused on political developments that led to a nationwide uprising against British rule in the spring of 1919.

I discuss the impact of the war years on the home front, when the colonial government took little action to alleviate suffering or address the needs of the civilian population. Although a tariff regime was introduced to standardize the cost of staples, it was ineffective, and complaints were frequently lodged that goods could not actually be purchased at the official price. The lack of coordination in the cost of raw materials and finished products led to strikes, bread famines, and food riots.

The relationship of the Anglo-Egyptian government toward the civilian population was profoundly affected by government and military policies about the requisitioning of food during the war. This is not only an important factor in the historiography of early 20th century Egypt, it is also an important case study to consider the obligations of governments toward civilian populations in war time.

Presenter/Producer: Annabelle Quince

The Suez Canal is one of the world’s most vital trade routes. It’s the shortest sea link between Asia and Europe and about 12% of global trade passes through it each year. But the Canal is situated in one of the most volatile regions in the world and its history has been defined by that geography. 

Duration: 29min 6sec
Broadcast: Sun 25 Apr 2021, 12:05pm

Guests

Dr Lucia Carminati
Social and cultural historian of modern Middle East and an assistant professor at Texas Tech University. Author of Suez: A hollow canal in need of peopling. Currents and stoppages in the historiography, 1859-1956.

Mohamed Gamal-Eldin
Historian of Modern Egypt specialising in architecture and social history - including the Suez Canal cities from 1856 to 1936.

Zachary Karabell
Author of Parting the desert: the creation of the Suez Canal.

Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood.

Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestyan investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. He describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House's staging of Verdi's Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the ‘Urabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, Mestyan illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East.

A wholly original exploration of Egypt in the context of the Ottoman Empire, Arab Patriotism sheds fresh light on the evolving sense of political belonging in the Arab world.

The parliament elections are now finished, and the problem of setting the new constitution is now rising especially because the islamists have gained the majority of the parliament.
It has been along debate between the Liberal and the Islamists since the addition of the second article to the constitution in 1971. The second article of the Egyptian constitution states that:
"Islam is the religion of the State and Arabic its official language.
Islamic law (Sharia) is the principal source of legislation."
These two parts of the article have many bad implications.

Hai Weiliang a.k.a. Badr al-Din (Hayy) al-Sini (1912–?), a Chinese Muslim from rural Hunan, led a deeply transnational life. Hai was the only Chinese Muslim known to have studied in both India and Egypt in the modern period, spending considerable time at the Nadwat al-‘Ulama in Lucknow and al-Azhar in Cairo. After Chinese, he learned four more languages in two decades: Arabic, Urdu, English, and Persian. While the Second World War transformed him into a Guomindang diplomat, his time at the Nadwa and al-Azhar in the 1930s was largely devoted to questions of Islamic unity. Hai first pursued these questions in a doctrinal mode informed by Salafi currents, then in a political mode influenced by his translation of Iqbal’s “Allahabad address.” His move to Cairo brought him closer to the network of al-Fath and its editor Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, a strong voice on behalf of Islamic unity, but geopolitics soon intervened. Disillusioned by the failure of the East Turkistan Republic, Hai coped by turning toward a cultural-historical mode of imagining Islamic unity, one that required no immediate political action. The eventual result was his Arabic-language opus, Relations between the Arabs and China (1950). Overall, Hai’s story defies both Sino-centric and Arabo-centric understandings of Chinese Islam, showing that early-twentieth-century Chinese Islam can be used to write a highly integrated history of the modern Islamic world. To that end, this article contrasts Hai’s numerous Arabic and Chinese writings to show how he embodied the tensions between national and transnational community felt across the Islamic world during this period.

يستعرض هذا البحث وباء الكوليرا في مصر عام 1883 ودور الأجانب من اطباء وعلماء وصحفيين في مواجهة الوباء طبيا وعلميا وكذلك بتسجيل الاحداث الجارية بمدن مصر المختلفة. كما يستعرض البحث أثر الوباء على المصالح التجارية البريطانية خاصة وأنه قد بدأ عقب عام واحد او أقل من الاحتلال البريطاني لمصر
نشر في العدد 90 مجلة كلية الآداب جامعة الإسكندرية

British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 10 (2008): 1-37.
This essay examines the conceptual development of Egyptian museums from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. It is particularly concerned with the narrative themes and poetic structures through which colonial and postcolonial identities have been negotiated in modern Egypt. Over the past 150 years, Egyptian museum display has retained much of its traditional architecture based on Victorian aesthetics, but a new archaeological narrative has emerged in the past 50 years that redefines the colonial characterization of Egypt. This narrative integrates the full span of Egyptian history into a single identity, and in so doing it joins the independent present to the indigenous past.  To contextualize the Egyptian museum condition, day-to-day museology and issues of audience are also addressed, and a directory to the complete museums of Egypt is included. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20190801114604/https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/online_journals/bmsaes/issue_10/doyon.aspx

مكمنُ تفرُّد هذه النسخة، أنها الطبعة الأولى والوحيدة -خلال قرن ونيف- «المطابِقَة» لأقدم أصل مطبوع، أمكَن العثور عليه لجريدتنا الغراء. وهي النسخة المطبوعة بمطبعة التوفيق في بيروت، لصاحبها نسيب صبرا، سنة 1328هـ ق (نحو 1910م).
وتكشِفُ لنا النصوص الكاملة للجريدة، حين توضع بجانب نصوص الأفغاني الأخرى؛ أن دور محمد عبده في هذا السِفر -بوصفه مُحررًا- لم يكُن يتعدَّى دور المصحح اللغوي، أو المستَملي، وهو دور لا يختلف كثيرًا عن دور محمد المخزومي في الخاطرات، كما لا يختلِف عن دور المحرِّر الثاني للجريدة، الذي يتجاهله كافَّة المشتَغلين العرب بهذه المسألة؛ ألا وهو «المثقف» الإيراني غريب الأطوار: ميرزا باقر بواناتي!
إن قلَّة اكتراث السيد بالكتابة، لم تُوهِن حرصه الشديد على إملاء ما يراه ويعتقده كلمة بكلمة، وتحرير كل المصطلحات والتدقيق في كافَّة الألفاظ، بل واختيار عناوين ما يُنشَر باسمه، وذلك كما قد يفعل أي مفكر أصيل يحترِم نفسه. وأدلة ذلك كثيرة، بل ومتواترة. غير أن عدمَ عنايته الكافية بإنتاجه المدوَّن؛ قد جعل من الميسور على بعض «تلاميذه» مُصادرته، حتى لينسب عبده إلى نفسه بعض كتابات جمال الدين، أو يسكُت عن فعل رشيد رضا ذلك!
ورغم ضخامة هذا المجلَّد، فلا زالت رحلتنا مع نصوص الأفغاني في أولها. قد بدأناها بنشر خاطرات السيد كاملة مُحقَّقة، وها نحن نُثني بهذا السِفر العظيم، ونَعِدُ قارئنا الكريم بكتابين آخرين من كُتب السيد، بعد تحقيقهما وضبطهما على صورة لم تُسبَق منذ قرن أو أكثر، وهما: «تتمَّة البيان في تاريخ الأفغان»، و«الرد على الدهريين»؛ فالله المستعان.

The 1919 anti-colonial revolution is a key moment in modern Egyptian history and a historical reference point in Egyptian culture through the century. Dina Heshmat argues that literature and film have played a central role in the making of its memory. She highlights the processes of remembering and forgetting that have contributed to shaping a dominant imaginary about 1919 in Egypt, coined by successive political and cultural elites. As she seeks to understand how and why so many voices have been relegated to the margins, she reinserts elements of the different representations into the dominant narrative. This opens up a new perspective on the legacy of 1919 in Egypt, inviting readers to meet the marginalised voices of the revolution and to reconnect with its layered emotional fabric.

Togo Mizrahi, an Egyptian-born Jew, established a movie studio and production company in Alexandria, and became one of the most prolific filmmakers in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s. Films produced in Mizrahi’s Alexandria studio between 1934 and 1939 represent a culture of coexistence among the lower classes, featuring Jewish, Greek, Nubian, and Levantine characters, alongside the majority Muslim population. I argue that these films attempt to shape to the popular imaginary of what it means to be Egyptian through their representations of a diverse urban landscape.

This article examines two films that Mizrahi wrote, directed, and produced featuring a friendship between a Chalom, a Jew, and 'Abdu, a Muslim: al-Manduban [Two Delegates, 1934]; al-'Izz Bahdala [Mistreated by Affluence, 1937]. These films construct an ethics of coexistence, perhaps best articulated through the repeated celebration of the dual weddings between Chalom and Esther, 'Abdu and Amina.

In contrast to the social status of the Egyptian Jewish Bourgeoisie, this article argues that Mizrahi’s films specifically seek to articulate the place of Jews in the Egyptian polity through characterization of Chalom as a salt-of-the-earth, Arabic-speaking, ibn al-balad.

This article explores how Mizrahi’s films contributed to debates about who was Egyptian.
The 1930s and 40s saw the rise of notions of Egyptian national identity that excluded minorities. Despite Mizrahi’s effort to portray a culture of coexistence, the Chalom and 'Abdu films contain with themselves the discourse of otherness that were employed to drive a wedge between Egyptianness and Jewishness.

In B. Effros and Guolong Lai (eds), Unmasking Ideology in Imperial and Colonial Archaeology: Vocabulary, Symbols, and Legacy, 173-200. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2018.
https://ioa.ucla.edu/press/unmasking-ideology

This article is in two parts. The first part provides an overview of the life of the Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik by drawing extensively on the work of her biographer Cynthia Nelson. This allows readers unfamiliar with Shafik to understand her social, political, and cultural milieu. The second part consists of translations from the Arabic of four editorials that Shafik wrote in her feminist magazine Bint al-Nīl.

This essay looks at two early essays on Shakespeare by Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy, as well as his unpublished poem "King Claudius." The critical approach is postcolonial: Cavafy at that time (the 1890s) had recently begun employment with the British colonial administration in Alexandria, and I find traces of his subject position not only in the revisionist "Hamlet" proposed by the poem, but in the relativist positions implied by the essays.  The essay began as a seminar paper for Arthur Kirsch's graduate course "Shakespeare Our Contemporary" at the University of Virginia.  It was my first published essay on Cavafy and the first to employ the critical terms of postcolonial theory.  The translations are my own.

Les travaux d’Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-1879), figure savante qui a accompagné la naissance de l’égyptologie, constituent une entreprise scientifique de très large envergure, qui embrasse aussi bien les vestiges de l’Égypte ancienne et les monuments de l’Égypte islamique que la culture matérielle de l’Égypte contemporaine. Le présent ouvrage s’attache à cerner les contours d’un oeuvre dessiné et imprimé foisonnant, mais méconnu, à partir d’études fondées sur les papiers conservés à la Bibliothèque nationale de France et les sources complémentaires identifiées dans d’autres fonds français, mais aussi néerlandais, italiens ou britanniques. Les essais rassemblés font le point sur les multiples curiosités de celui qui aimait à se définir comme «artiste et antiquaire », sur ses méthodes de travail, sur ses lectures et sur le réseau d’interlocuteurs et de collaborateurs qui ont enrichi sa documentation, en Égypte comme en France. Des inédits et extraits de correspondance, ainsi qu’une bibliographie générale des écrits d’Émile Prisse d’Avennes, sont présentés pour
la première fois. L’ensemble renouvelle, au travers d’une personnalité scientifique sans doute moins atypique qu’il n’y paraît, la connaissance des relations entre art du dessin, sensibilité ethnographique et science antiquaire au XIXᵉ siècle.

In May 1851, the Great Exhibition opened in London. By the time it closed its doors five months later, British designers and educators were already taking stock of its accomplishments and failures. It had been a grandiose display of British industry and imperial possessions that was visited by nearly one-fifth of the British public and put on display Britain's global empire for an international audience to see. At the same time, it had confirmed what some British artists and designers already knew: the design of British manufactures did not appeal to a public that preferred French designs. The solution suggested by the exhibition's chief organizer, Henry Cole, was to reform the British system of drawing education. On the South Kensington corner of the exhibition grounds in Hyde Park, Cole founded a school of drawing. Its method of drawing education, known as the South Kensington method, taught linear drawings based on geometric designs as opposed to human figures or landscapes. The geometric drawings of the South Kensington School were such a success that they came to dominate drawing education curricula until the Acknowledgments: For comments on earlier versions of this article I would like to thank, the late Raouf Abbas, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers. This article is part of a book project that was researched in Egypt, Japan, France, and Great Britain. In Egypt I am grateful to the late Alain Roussillon for hosting me at the former Centre d'études et de documentation écon-omiques, juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) and in Japan to Yoshimi Shunya for hosting me at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. These research trips were generously supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Foreign

Under the impulse of the Comité de conservation des monuments de l’art arabe, architect Max Herz Bey expressed the idea in 1897 of creating a museum for the Christian antiquities. With the support of Patriarch Cyril V, the site selection focused on the old patriarchal residence of Qasr al-Sham‘. Marcus Simaika Pasha launched in 1908 a subscription to raise funds for the last restoration works of the buildings. The museum opened in 1910 soon considered too small and expansion works are then projected. The discovery of unpublished archives allowed to reconsider the history of the museum but also the sense that it has taken in the first half of 20th century in identity construction scheme for the Coptic community.

Conventional narratives of world architecture devote little attention – if any at all ! - to modernism in Egypt, beyond the “invention of vernacular” pursued all his life long by the talented Hassan Fathy (1900-1989). Of late recognition, the work of Hassan bey, and of his disciples, is now passionately discussed in academic circles – along  a “modern traditionalism” vs. “ alternative modernism” debate -,  and widely mimicked in Egyptian popular and cultured architecture as a formal language rather than as a sustainable approach adapted to its environment. Yet, it represents but an episode, among others, in the mediation and domestication of architectural modernity in Egypt. There were, indeed, much earlier ones,  and local professionnals played a significant role in the process, although modernity in the so-called developing world is commonly attributed primarily to colonial agency.

(abstract/introduction).

The “Spanish influenza” pandemic that struck Egypt in fall 1918 resulted in the death of eleven out of every one thousand people. Despite the mass suffering caused by the pandemic it has been largely ignored by historians. I describe how the Egyptian public health service was unprepared for a major health crisis because resources were redirected to serve military needs. Rural and poor Egyptians were particularly vulnerable as war food policies failed to meet their stated goal of ensuring a consistent and affordable supply of commodities; by summer 1918 conditions had deteriorated to the point that food riots and wheat famines were reported throughout the country. I conclude by raising questions about the impact that the pandemic had on the political situation in Egypt, arguing that the government’s inability to manage the crisis contributed to pressures underlying the 1919 nationalist uprising.

In this article, I argue that audiocassette technology decentralized state-controlled Egyptian media long before the advent of al-Jazeera and the Internet. By enabling any citizen to become a cultural producer, as opposed to a mere consumer, the mass medium and its users sparked significant anxiety in the mid-to-late 20th century, when contentious cassette recordings led many local critics to assert that “vulgar” tapes were poisoning public taste, undermining high culture, and endangering Egyptian society. This article breaks down these arguments and shows that audiotapes actually broadcast a vast variety of voices. Thus, underlying many criticisms of cassette content, I contend, was not simply a concern for aesthetic sensibilities but a desire to dictate who created Egyptian culture during a time of tremendous change. By unpacking these discussions, this article harnesses Egypt as a case study to enhance prevailing investigations of sound, popular culture, and mass media in Middle East studies.

The Greek newspaper 'Kathimerini' wrote ahead of the paper's publication: "A different view is expected from Alexander Kazamias, a political scientist in Britain. 'Most Greeks left Egypt before and after the Nasserite period, not during it', Mr Kazamias says". Kathimerini, 4 June 2008.
Full report: http://news.kathimerini.gr/4Dcgi/4Dcgi/_w_articles_civ_8_04/06/2008_272526

Solo, improvised, torso-articulated dance, usually referred to in English as belly dance, is a fundamental part of the dance vernacular of many Middle Eastern cultures, yet is conspicuously unclaimed by national governments. The cultural reforms that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk enacted in Turkey after the First World War, intended to distance the country from the Ottoman Empire that had preceded it, idealized the rural peoples of Anatolia and the Black Sea region as the “true” Turks and identified their line dances as “authentically” Turkish dance. The state dance troupes that were founded in Egypt in the middle of the twentieth century and that represented Egyptian culture to international audiences presented group choreographies that were heavy on Western-influenced footwork and light on torso articulation.

The reluctance to claim ownership over belly dance extends from state governments to the citizenry itself. Many of the words for “belly dance” in Middle Eastern languages attribute the dance to foreign cultures: Turks and Persians have called it “Arab dance” while Egyptians called it “Turkish dance”. Although everyone was belly dancing at celebrations and in the privacy of their own homes, professional performers of the dance in both Egypt and Turkey were historically members of ethnic minorities, particularly the Rom and Dom (Gypsy) peoples, who were considered cultural outsiders and therefore able to operate outside cultural norms. 

This paper examines the perpetual outsider status of this dance form in its cultures of origin and argue that this has influenced the globalized belly dance that is now practised in Western countries and around the world.

In transnational historical labour movement studies, the African anarchist / syndicalist movement is as under-studied as those of Central or South-East Asia and the Caribbean. This is despite the fact that the movement arose in Egypt in the same phase, the late 1860s, as it did in locations as disparate as Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico. This monograph - the first ever continental historical analysis of African anarchist movements - starts by providing a comparative analysis of the rise of the phenomenon in late 19th / early 20th Century Egypt versus South Africa, then sketches its traces in other African countries, examines its role in the post-WWII national liberation struggles of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, then concludes by asking whether there is a distinctly "African anarchism" by drawing on organisational positions from South African libertarian socialists of the 1970s, to self-described anarchists in Senegal in the 1980s, from Nigeria and South Africa in the 1990s, from Morocco and South Africa in the 2000s,  then Egypt in the Arab Spring of the 2010s.