The term effendiyya (singular: effendi) appears in many articles and books on the social and political history of the Middle East between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.Footnote ¹ Many authors have made use of this term, but very few have paused to discuss its meaning.Footnote ² At least one important scholar, however, raised doubts about its usefulness.Footnote ³

The term effendiyya is not the result of analytical academic thinking; that is, it is not included in social-science theories and definitions developed in universities, nor did it grow out of Western European or American intellectual discourse. Instead, the term was adopted from popular Middle Eastern discourse, reflecting and constituting part of the social praxis. In the premodern Ottoman Empire, the appellation sometimes referred to muftis, qadis, and heads of Sufi tarīqas and sometimes to Ottoman bureaucrats and notables; at other times, the term was associated with Christian notables and heads of Christian communities.Footnote ⁴ During the 19th century, the term was increasingly used for Ottoman bureaucrats who adopted Western dress, discourse, and professions in the course of Tanzimat reforms.

The term was prevalent in the first half of the 20th century in popular discourse in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey as well as among Palestinian Arabs. In Arabic-speaking societies, effendiyya took on a double meaning. One encompassed large landowners, the ruling elite, and Ottoman bureaucrats; the other designated members of the modern middle class with a Westernized education. In the eyes of peasants (fellahin) or small merchants in bazaars, both groups adopted Western and modern patterns of dress and discourse. In Egypt, a clearer contrast developed between the effendiyya as the (primarily urban) middle class and the bashawiyya, the wealthy ruling elite.

As a popular term used by various social strata in the Middle East, effendiyya has a blurred meaning that depends on social context. This imprecision derived from its development and place in the discourse as a grassroots term that grew out of daily social praxis, unlike an academic term that aims at precision and requires at least an attempt to define its exact meaning and limitations. For the poor peasant, the effendi was the wealthy, sometimes absentee, landowner on one hand and the literate rural teacher or low-level official who wore Western suits on the other hand. In the discourses of British officials or Zionist activists, the effendi was the wealthy Westernized landowner. In the popular urban discourse of Egypt and Iraq, the effendiyya were the educated or semieducated in general, that is, graduates of secondary or primary schools who adopted ifranjī (Western) dress, engaged in modern political discourse, read newspapers, and, for the most part, worked or sought to work as teachers or state bureaucrats.

The question is whether the concepts of the middle class or of the professional middle class in European academic and political discourse are the only ones appropriate for analyzing and understanding Middle Eastern society—based as they are on the historical experience of Western Europe or the Northern Atlantic and on the development of a capitalist society. Does this terminology provide the ideal solution to the challenge of describing and analyzing Eastern societies in the period of transition from Ottoman to Western colonial rule and to independence and the revolutionary regimes led by effendiyya in officers' uniforms?

The effendiyya were the social component that, in order to escape their distress, gave modern national meanings to the social terms and signifiers Arab, Kurd, Turk, and so forth and began to “imagine” the modern Arab, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish, Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, and so forth nations. The effendiyya were the creators and disseminators of the modern political ideologies and visions of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s—mainly nationalist but also Communist and Islamist.

Members of the effendiyya—teachers, college students, high school students, and graduates—led and played a central role in significant events that took place throughout the Arab world between World War I and the 1950s. In Egypt, these included the 1919 revolution, student demonstrations in the autumn of 1935, and street demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria in 1945–48. In Iraq, they included demonstrations against Sir Alfred Mond's visit to Baghdad in 1927, national unrest during the second half of the 1930s, the wathba demonstrations of 1948, and the intifada of November 1952. The leaders who turned the local events in Jaffa in April 1936 into a strike and an Arab–Palestinian national revolt were considered members of the effendiyya. Also included were high school students and their teachers in Transjordan, in cities like al-Salt, Irbid, and Amman, who demonstrated under nationalist Arab slogans in support of the 1936 revolt of Palestinian Arabs.

Among the nationalist activists in al-shabāb al-waṭanī and the founders of al-ʿamal al-qawmī in 1930s Syria were those who could be defined as middle class, together with members of the more wealthy and respected families who, as a result of the Ottoman reforms and contact with the West, had become members of the upper class. Demonstrators who were motivated by slogans, nationalist ideology, and anti-British feelings, and even those who believed in the radical slogans of the Communists, also strived to be considered effendiyya; they constituted a real threat to the conservative regimes in Egypt and Iraq in 1945–48. The military coups of the 1950s in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which put an end to the conservative governments there, were carried out by effendiyya in uniform—the officers.

Young effendiyya who played major roles in the events mentioned previously could be viewed as members of the middle class. However, their middle-class status was not characteristic of the collective, nor was their middle-class status the principal element they had in common. Many came from poor families of the lower classes; they were children of artisans and small merchants in the bazaars, sons of lower-level clerks and even of peasants or the ʿulamaʾ. They joined the children of the ruling political elites and the wealthy upper classes (landowners, rich merchants, high-level bureaucrats, and members of the political establishment). In a rebellion perhaps explained by the generation gap, these sons of government ministers and parliament members from the leading conservative hegemonic elite demonstrated against the existing political regime and the social status quo their parents were making tremendous effort to retain. Despite differences in background, class, and social status, all these activists participated in the same experience and discourse. The best way to characterize them—these teachers, high school graduates, and college and university students—is by utilizing the term used by the participants themselves: effendiyya.Footnote ⁵

The principal common denominator that linked the members of the effendiyya in the first half of the 20th century was modernization: the acquisition of a modern education with all of its internal contradictions; the adoption and development of political discourse, primarily nationalism, sometimes colored by Communism or the Muslim Brotherhood; and an ambivalent relationship toward the West. (This ambivalence led them to oppose colonial control while adopting some of the ideas, values, concepts, and perceptions of identity that developed in the West in the process of modernization.) The national discourse concerning the Arab or national territorial dimension assumed anticolonialism while promoting modernization. The shared experience that characterized members of the effendiyya was not their class in the sense of the middle class in a capitalist European society. (Of course, those members of the effendiyya who were influenced by Communist discourse and were active in the Communist party and adopted Marxist ideology held a different attitude toward class and the class struggle.) The term effendiyya was not meant to replace terms that referred to the new middle class or the professional middle class but rather to add a choice and unique shading from the point of view of local history. Furthermore, the term does not contradict, but in fact supports, the intergenerational angle of social developments between the two world wars and up to the 1950s and 1960s.

Use of effendiyya, combined with terms borrowed from the social sciences—for example, “new middle class,” “urban bourgeoisie,” “professional middle class,” “professional intelligentsia,” and so forth—can help scholars more precisely describe and understand the social and political realities in Arab countries during the first half of the 20th century. The term effendiyya reflects a different cross section of social groups in Arab and Middle Eastern countries; it is often more appropriate than the term “the middle class” for understanding political developments and the play of social forces in the political arena.

Although the effendiyya characterized social forces active in the first half of the 20th century, they did not become a political force. In fact, no political force represented them and their interests or perspectives, just as no political forces explicitly represented different socioeconomic classes. Activists and supporters of Communist parties, which pretended to be the forces of the working class, poor peasants, and “progressive intelligentsia,” were, in fact, members of the effendiyya. Even the political parties organized by politicians from the conservative elite depended upon the activities of the effendiyya. Adoption of the hizb (party) or ḥaraka (movement) structure constituted a means of recruiting supporters from among the effendiyya, that is, those who engaged in modern discourse, thereby transforming the effendiyya into a principal factor of the political arenas of the time.

After the 1950s, it no longer made sense to use the term effendiyya because it lost its effectiveness as a tool of understanding, and its use in popular discourse decreased. Compulsory education, across-the-board modernization, spreading patterns of modern discourse—all made the characteristics of the effendiyya nearly universal. Thus, the term lost its utility in characterizing social groups.

Despite some limitations, the flexible use of universal terms, which create commonalities between regions and within periods, as well as terms unique to regions and periods is important for understanding similarities and differences between concrete historical situations in the Middle East and those of other regions around the world. In a similar vein, scholars combine the term “Junkers,” drawn from the discourse and praxis of Prussia, with the more general “landed nobility,” which by itself does not precisely reflect the society and politics of Prussia and Germany in the 19th century. Likewise, the term “intelligentsia” is essential to understanding the late 19th- and early 20th-century history of Russia and Poland. It referred, for the most part, to the bourgeoisie middle class as well as to those who had acquired an education and adopted modern discourse, from the sons of landed notables and wealthy merchants to the sons of poor peasants and workers,.

Terms based on the Western capitalist sociopolitical praxis and modern thought have not always been sensitive enough to reflect, describe, or analyze the unique characteristics of all regions/times of the world. The combination of these academic terms with local terms and signifiers may add elements missed by the common Western conceptual base. Using the term effendiyya can help balance the aim of achieving an overall historical picture, based on universal themes of history, with the historical specificity of different regions and periods.