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Print Culture, Social Change, and the Process of Redefining Imagined Communities in Egypt; Response to the Review by Charles D. Smith of Redefining the Egyptian Nation (IJMES 29, 4 [1997]: 606–22)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Israel Gershoni  and
James Jankowski
Israel Gershoni
Affiliation:
Israel Gershoni is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel.
James Jankowski
Affiliation:
James Jankowski is Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo. 80309, U.S.A.
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Extract

Charles D. Smith's review essay on our book Redefining the Egyptian Nation in the October 1997 issue of IJMES undertakes a critical analysis of the work. Simultaneously, it raises broader questions about the relevance of some of the insights of theoreticians of nationalism, particularly Benedict Anderson, to the case of Egyptian nationalism. The essay's attempt to evaluate the utility of recent theoretical writing on nationalism for the study of the Middle East is a worthwhile endeavor. However, we believe that the essay's analysis of the book itself is based on a familiarity with only a small selection of the sources relevant to understanding Egyptian nationalism, and that it provides a misleading interpretation of the contents of the work. We also feel that its observations about nationalist theory sometimes misconstrue our use of the same, and in general underestimate the importance of recent theoretical work on nationalism for the study of Egypt and the Middle East.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 81 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

Notes

1 Page numbers cited without attribution refer to the review essay by Smith, Charles, “Imagined Identities, Imagined Nationalisms: Print Culture and Egyptian Nationalism in Light of Recent Scholarship”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29 (1997): 607–22Google Scholar. Those cited as Redefining refer to our Redefining the Egyptian Nation, 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; those cited as Egypt refer to our Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

2 Husayn, Ahmad, Nisf Qarn maʿa al-ʿUruba wa Qadiyyat Filastīn (Sidon, 1971), 29–33; see also idem, Imāam (Cairo, 1936), 50–59.Google Scholar

3 al-Bannā, Hasan, Daʿwatunā (Cairo, 1937), 11–22.Google Scholar

4 For these terms, see ʿAbd al-Rahmān ʿAzzām, “al-ʿArab: Ummat al-Mustaqbal”, al-ʿArab (Jerusalem), 27 August 1932, 6, 16; idem, “al-Wahda al-ʿArabiyya”, al-ʿArab (Jerusalem), 15 October 1932, 2–3; idem, “Alaysat Misr ʿArabiyya”, al-Balāgh, part 1, 29 August 1933, 7, and part 2, 11 September 1933, 7; idem, “al-Imbirātūriyya al-ʿArabiyya wa Hal An an Tatahaqqaqa”, al-Hilāl, 1 February 1934, 385–89.

5 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, “al-Sharq al-Jadīd: al-Hadāra al-Isti ʿmāriyya”, Mulhaq al-Siyasa, 30 November 1933, 10; re-published in his al-Sharq al-Jadīd (Cairo, 1978), 49–69 (quotation from p. 68 of the 1978 edition, p. 75 of the undated [1962?] edition).

6 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, Hayāt Muhammad, 2nd ed. (Cairo, 1935), 17.Google Scholar

7 Haykal, al-Sharq al-Jadīd (1978 ed.), 64.

8 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, “Thawrat al-Adab: min Haykal ilā Tana Husayn”, al-Risāla, 15 June 1933, 41.Google Scholar

9 See Haykal, Hayāt Muhammad, 530–63.

10 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, Fī Manzil al-Wahy (Cairo 1937), 23.Google Scholar

11 Tana Husayn's position is developed in his exchange with Tawfiq al-Hakim in al-Risāla, 15 June 1933, 5–9. For further discussion of these issues, see Israel Gershoni, The Emergence of Pan-Arabism in Egypt (Tel Aviv, 1981), 65–67, 115–16; Etty Terem, “National Identity, Language and Islam in Tana Husayn's Cultural School of Thought, 1918–1938” (M.A. thesis. Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, 1997).

12 A related misrepresentation concerns Taha Husayn's Min Baāid (1935). The review essay presents this work as a protest against the “tyranny” of mass opinion; it also takes us to task for not discussing the work because its tenor did not match our conclusions. We did not discuss the work in detail simply because it consists of articles first published in the 1920s which are not relevant to our analysis of developments of the 1930s. In his introduction to the work, written in June 1935, Taha Husayn does protest against the changing atmosphere of the early 1930s in which the “official tyranny” of the Sidqī regime had been accepted by public opinion. But the review essay's implication that the work points in a different direction from ʿAlā Hāmish al-Sīra is misleading. The introduction also states that the book was intended to speak to the same younger generation of readers who were the target of ʿAlā Hāmish al-Sira (Husayn, Taha, Min Baʿid [Cairo, 1935], 3–7).Google Scholar

13 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London, 1991), 4.Google Scholar

14 Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986), 169.Google Scholar

15 Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1944), 187–259Google Scholar; for a summary, see Smith, Anthony D., Theories of Nationalism (London, 1971), 196–97.Google Scholar

16 Piterberg, Gabriel, “The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case”, in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. Jankowski, James and Gershoni, Israel (New York, 1997), 47.Google Scholar

17 Smith, Ethnic Origins, 22–31.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 157–61. See also Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (London, 1991), 91–98.Google Scholar