Suchergebnisse

My house and yours -- Egyptian state servants and the new geography of nationhood -- Inside Egypt -- The harem, the hovel and the Western construction of an Egyptian landscape -- Domesticating Egypt -- The gendered politics of the British occupation -- The home, the schoolroom and the cultivation of Egyptian nationalism -- Table talk, or the home economics of nationhood -- The household on display -- The family politics of the 1919 revolution -- Gender and the birth of the modern Egyptian nation-state.

AbstractIn this article I argue that the Egyptian state emerged as a welfare provider in the mid-20th century, first by depending on the services of charitable societies to feed, educate, and provide medical assistance to the poor, and later by imitating and harnessing the activities of charitable societies. Drawing on correspondence between the state and service societies from the 1880s to 1945, when King Faruq (r. 1936–52) granted the Egyptian Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) the authority to define and to circumscribe the activities of social welfare organizations, the article illustrates the interactions of and the similarities between private and state-sponsored charity. The article further suggests that the establishment of MOSA helped to consolidate the hegemony of the Egyptian state over society and, at the same time, exemplified a dialectical process of state formation engaged in by Egyptian heads of state, service organizations, and the Egyptians whose needs they served.

This article traces the transformation in the symbolic role of the modern, bourgeois Egyptian home and the political and personal relationships it allegedly engendered, showing that what had originally appeared as promising became the potential site of treason and deceit. The article relies on archival materials, political caricatures and articles from the popular press. Beginning with an assessment of the political discourse of 1919, it then illustrates how, by the 1930s, home life and marriage appeared as zones of crisis rather than promise. By the late 1940s, as a stand‐in for political commentary, the domicile appeared as a space from which men had to escape at all costs, presaging a revolution in which a new political order would restore the household to its previous order and centrality.

"The wife: I bet your friends envy you your domestic happiness!" Reprinted with permission of Mohammed Elchamaa.This cartoon comes from a 1948 edition of the Egyptian periodical Akhir Saʿa. I happened across it in Cairo, as part of some exploratory research into the fate of the female image of the Egyptian nation-state that was so central to the 1919 revolution. In previous inquiries, I had noticed that "lady Egypt" or "mother Egypt" or "Egypt as a woman," to use historian Beth Baron's expression, lost pride of place in popular periodicals as 1919 gave way to nominal independence and nation building. By the late 1920s, cartoon and caricature space was more frequently dedicated to men engaged in laying the foundations of new political, legal, and educational systems, as well as erecting the buildings that would house them. Throughout the 1930s, political caricatures also frequently lampooned prominent Egyptian men for their behavior in the institutions that they had been active in creating. In the popular press, the reified female figure of the Egyptian nation was all but usurped by the men who built the state (and who seemed determined to keep Egyptian women out of the body politic).