The camel-mounted baltagiyya gangs storming Tahrir Square at the height of the anti-Mubarak uprising in winter 2011 lent political relevance to the historical scholarship of Jacob's Working Out Egypt. As part of what soon came to be known as the Battle of the Camel, the thugs' belligerence symbolized illegitimate mercenary violence in diametric opposition to shabab al-thawra—the revolutionary youth, the true agents of popular revolt. Tellingly, the discussion of the baltagiyya as the radical other of bourgeois nationalism and normative citizenship concludes Jacob's thorough analysis of masculinity and sovereignty in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. However, while thugs for hire have remained a resource for authoritarian regimes and criminal networks, other historical figures like the futuwwa urban brotherhoods or the effendiyya middle class—protagonists in Jacob's book—were doomed to dissolve by the mid-1900s. After 1945 the term effendiyya itself, protagonist of this book, gradually lost relevance in popular discourse.Footnote ¹ Recently, intense mobilization brought such legacies back to collective memory. Of late a website entitled “The Effendi” has been seeking to translate the effendiyya's politics into present-day terms. “During the early twentieth century,” the web portal states, “the Effendiyya imagined an Arab world free from colonialism and utilized their education to spark new political discourse in the region. In a time of political transition we hope to rekindle their spirit through the conduit of media art and culture.”

Few historical monographs provide as sophisticated an analysis of colonial masculinity as does Jacob's Working Out Egypt. In Middle East studies this is an exceptionally important achievement. The book proposes a critical cultural history of colonial modernity and gendered subjectivity during the upheavals of British colonial rule in Egypt. To do so, it draws on a breathtaking variety of sources in Arabic, French, and English, ranging from colonial reports to newspapers, novels, biographies, and memoirs. Reading against the grain of conventional narrative history, Jacob excavates a gendered life-world fraught with contradictions and ambiguities.

Thematically organized, the book traces the emergence of the Egyptian effendiyya in physical culture, fashion, and youth movements. However, notwithstanding Jacob's overall brilliant exposition of the birth of effendi masculinity as it negotiated its position among the paradoxes of colonial modernity and nation-making, the book has several shortcomings.

Insisting on the centrality of masculinity as performance, defined as “a recursive act of communicating a truth through varied forms of representations” (p. 17), the analysis of Egyptian modernizing masculinity evokes comparable attempts to articulate a historically specific phenomenology of the body and its intimate and public manifestations.Footnote ² Jacob, however, chooses to subscribe to a scholastic conceptual apparatus, engaging in great detail the debates du jour on Foucault, Althusser, and Agamben, among others. This framing of effendi masculinity as a subject-producing discursive formation not only obfuscates the relational agency of individual performativity, but also ultimately traps the book itself in a narrow conceptual space. It should be acknowledged that Jacob does much to bridge the disciplinary gap between the anthropology of empire and Egyptian conventional history, but it still deploys an opaque theoretical terminology that will be unfamiliar to many readers.

In light of Jacob's sophisticated conceptualization of colonial governmentality, subject formation, and gender ideologies, it is surprising that recent advances in masculinity studies are by and large absent from his analysis. One marker of contemporary masculinity studies has been the attempt to pluralize and deconstruct the appearance of a homogenous and hegemonic masculinity and expose instead a field of differential masculinities. Jacob's recurrent deployment of the trope “effendi masculinity” as a singular discursive formation begs the question: how can effendi masculinities be read as a stratified category of practice rather than a discursive formation? Since the concept of effendiyya was elastic, one wonders how women, men and children disrupted “the consolidation of an effendi masculinity” that had been legitimized through objects like tarbush, practices like weightlifting and scouting, spaces like the sports club, and ideologies like heternormativity (223).

One fruitful site of differential action is consumption, which not only visually externalized a collective sense of commonality but also indexed internal differences between men and women and amongst men from various generations and social positions. Shechter's social history of smoking as a gendered and class-inflected practice reveals a fascinating array of inter-group distinctions and intra-group contradictions, but it is surprisingly absent from Jacob's discussion.Footnote ³ The contested plurality of categories of practice is largely neglected by Working Out Egypt despite the fact that the effendiyya was a social stratum defined in opposition to the peasantry and the bashawiyya and their sociocultural practices.

Focusing on colonial rule over the indigenous complexity of Egyptian society leads to overlooking an important exogenous actor. Between British colonizers and Egyptian subjects, and beyond the dualism of nation and empire, in the first half of the twentieth century there operated a network of communities we now identify as Levantines. This slippery category consisted of Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks, often described as transnational hybrids, highly mobile and extremely resourceful middlemen but ultimately foreign and potentially alien to the national order of things. Described in similar terms as the “oily snake-like” effendis (48), the Levantines were portrayed as cunning and double-dealing, but they played an important part in the emerging Egyptian economy and the thriving cosmopolitan culture of cities like Cairo and Alexandria. Mediating colonial rule, and expanding networks of commerce, they remained cultural strangers—ambivalent products of the very colonial system they sought to exploit. Since the two groups often shared cultural spaces, one wonders how the Levantine figured in the effendi landscape of desire. Can the story of effendi masculinity be told without taking into account these Jewish and Christian strangers? In the second half of the century, the Levantines were expelled from the post-colonial state as the nation's foreign Others just like the al-Futuwwa groups were previously suppressed as the urban Other of bourgeois nationalism.

These omissions by no means undermine the major achievement of Jacob's fascinating book. Greater than the sum of its parts, Working Out Egypt stands as a fine-grained cultural history of colonial masculinity, a crucial reading for scholars of the Middle East at large.