Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture

Ziad Fahmy. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Paperback $24.95Reviewed by Dina JadallahZiad Fahmy 's Ordinary Egyptians is a lively, engaging, well-researched, sometimes penetratingly humorous, and valuable addition to the new historiography that aims to "write the people" into nationalist meta-historical narratives. Fahmy combines Mikhail Bakhtin's semiotic and carnivalesque approach with James C. Scott's "weapons of the weak" socio-economic oppositional method. This technique successfully details how non-elite Egyptians engaged with, defined, cultural production in Cairene 'amiyya (colloquial dialect). Throughout, Fahmy relies on an impressive and varied collection of primary sources.One of Fahmy 's central arguments is that 'amiyya-based capitalist culture became politicized and increasingly nationalist in mass practice. He sets out to "trace how Egyptians resisted elite, and then British, domination from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 Revolution by analyzing the often hidden transcripts of newspapers, recorded songs, jokes, satire, vernacular poetry, and plays" (19). This progression involved the politicization of an increasingly literate middle class and the less literate urban masses into the "collective camaraderie" that is essential for the development of a "national imagined community. " In Egypt, this occurred in the context of multiple processes of political centralization, public education, and urbanization which produced a new effendiyya class. They also expanded the presence and strength of the state vis-a-vis "ordinary" people. Furthermore, the growth of print culture and radio both reflected and heightened the effect of an urban culture that fostered, according to Fahmy, a new national identity where the masses expressed their voice.Fahmy effectively covers most of the important leading figures of mass cultural production. Included among those are journalists, writers, playwrights, and satirists like Ya'qub Sannu', Najib al-Rihani, 'Ali al-Kassar, Badi'Khayri, Sayyid Darwish. Popular overt and covert critiques, as well as subversive proverbs, songs, cartoons, plays, and articles are situated within their respective socio-political conceptual and spatial contexts (e.g., #a/*aw//coffeehouses). The latter allowed for dialogical interaction and articulation among multiple sectors of Egyptian society.Despite the book's notable strengths in providing "ordinary" people-focused details as well as in its historical presentation of cultural changes, it is weaker in proving the over-arching arguments. Specifically, Fahmy's narrative juxtaposes colloquial Cairene against classical fusha, privileging the former in the building of modern Egyptian nationalism. According to him, media capitalism and its professionally-driven need to entertain ordinary people, was the central force in disseminating the "idea of a collective Egyptian identity" ( 1 67). Consequently, this generated a horizontal, as opposed to top-down, emergent political community.Fahmy's central thesis is that 'amiyya served as the discursive vehicle around which an Egyptian nationalist social movement coalesced. It was the (non-sacral language) vehicle for popularizing a collective identity along the lines of Benedict Anderson's horizontally-tied "imagined political community. " This claim raises fundamental questions about how Fahmy conceptualizes his main historical protagonists, ordinary Egyptians. Is Anderson's category of an "imagined" community a good fit for Egyptian identity given Egypt's long civilization and history? Is it conceivable that Fahmy has only partially described the emergence of a modern manifestation of apre-existent collectivity, now expressed in the necessarily politicized form that is amenable to the emergent international, capitalist-induced nation-state system? While I agree that the modern "nationalist" conceptualization of the collective may have acquired new capitalist-induced dimensions, this does not exclude a possible antecedent existence of the collective, the popular, and the "ordinary Egyptians" expressed in different terminology/monikers. …