Appearing on the back pages of the Cairo daily newspaper al-Muʾayyad in September 1891 and December 1889, respectively, these brief reports, juxtaposed, encapsulate some central arguments of the books under review.Footnote ¹ They exemplify everyday resort to state apparatuses for individual or collective ends, and invoke consumption practices viewed as inimical to national health and reputation at a time when the new nationalist press was beginning to voice senses of collective pride, political unease, and anticolonial antagonism. They entail perceptions of transgressed boundaries, wayward actions, or gender-inappropriate behaviors impervious to commonly recognized moral and political authority. They illustrate blurrings of “public” and “private” actions and spaces, whether in the name of public good or for ill, that might have threatened Egyptians’ felt values of moral propriety—the disciplining pull of “respectability”—in urban Egyptian society at that time. And the reportage, publication, and circulation of such stories illustrate (and make) an emerging “public sphere” of narrative, commentary, and reader consumption, simultaneously constructing and interrogating an emerging nationalist master-narrative that placed gender-marked acts and sexual practices, transgressive or not, at the center of national/ist efficacy and perceived threats to it.

The authors of these six books ask in various ways how people and their daily lives engender discourses and institutions through which those lives come to be lived. They investigate how transformations of historical subjects into subjects of locution—whether in courtrooms or schoolrooms, police bureaus, boudoirs or bodybuilding emporia, newspapers or memoirs—incessantly shape people's acts and identities, as well as the collective bodies in which they live. All are concerned with power: its aims and flows, its occasions and limits, its modes, articulations, and silences at the hands of various actors, including national elites, colonial masters and mistresses, and “subaltern” subjects. Questions of sexuality as central to nation formation hover over these analyses though are not as thoroughly explored as they might be. All seek to use newly tapped as well as familiar sources innovatively, and to ask new questions of them. The books under review thus suggest the sophistication, vigor, and thick descriptive powers of analysis characteristic by now of Middle East gender scholarship. In their intensive excavations, they have taken advantage of the inroads and insights of earlier scholars who by necessity had to work extensively, covering large swathes of discourse, place, and experience at a time when women's and gender studies was still a fledgling enterprise, the work of source retrieval was overwhelming, and such scholarship was not always given enthusiastic welcome in the academy.

If there is one central question that links these studies, it is that of how the collective subject of the (Egyptian) nation was formed and reformed through disparate performances of gendered identities and sexed bodies, where those performances (though not always the associated identities) came from, and what roles state actors played in encouraging, suppressing, or supporting them. How were some choreographed by the nation's representatives, and how did others elude the music? This scholarship suggests how, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century and beyond, consolidations of gender-specific and sexualized performances, as well as processes of imagining and building a modern Egyptian nation-state, worked on and shaped each other—a focus of Middle East gender scholarship since at least Deniz Kandiyoti's 1991 volume, Women, Islam and the State.Footnote ² Secondarily, these studies consider how women and men used state structures and disciplines to further their own aspirations and meet their daily needs, material and psychological. This uneven consolidation occurred through individuals’ creative negotiations with (and intermittent disregard for) institutions of rule, as they manipulated and reformed ideas about the state and molded practices of governance. Zannuba and her friends, the would-be swindler they dragged to the Darb al-Ahmar qism, the correspondent submitting his report to al-Muʾayyad's editor, and the “quarrelsome” women in the street outside the bar, are all very much a part of the story.

Perhaps inevitably, these studies focus more on narratives from the political center than on the human subjects who performed or eluded them. But in doing so, they not only offer some vivid portraits but also go beyond “women” and “men” to consider the work that gender as a fundamental ideologically and socially constructed human concept does within and upon discursive formations and, thus and then, on institution building in a late colonial and postcolonial state. In this sense they are mindful of Joan Scott's famous and wise dictum urging that gender be seen not primarily as social fact but as a way of seeing the world, an analytic lens, part of a human impulse to categorize and divide that has repercussions on all aspects of human sociality.Footnote ³

These scholars affirm and interrogate intersections of gender, subjecthood, and national entity in Egypt through different lenses and with varying timelines. Liat Kozma's lens is the mid-19th- to early-20th-century organization and consolidation of state institutions whereby Egyptians learned to become subjects of a modern state. They did so through daily microcosmic interactions with its representatives, who likewise learned their roles and acquired authoritative purchase through the very same interactions. The state, argues Kozma, was not a preexisting body but an amalgam of structures-in-formation that could only become an entity through the repeated performances of individuals in negotiation. For Omnia El Shakry, the critical axis is the creative rethinking and distinctive production of social-science disciplines as locally modulated intellectual and political projects with indigenous as well as European-provenant theoretical roots. These disciplines were shaped locally in a nationalist-inflected environment that made urgent policy demands. For Hanan Kholoussy, the key focus is the discourse of family and marriage as central to the hopes, fears, aims, and self-identifications of a discursively fertile middle-class elite. She sees this discourse, and the institutions she argues it helped to shape, as putting family organization and individual expectations at the core of modern Egypt's political structure and national collective identity as it developed through the 20th century. Wilson Chacko Jacob's lens is the concept and proliferating institutions of a national masculinity meant to define and guarantee the emergence of a muscular Egypt capable of virile performance on the emerging postcolonial world stage. Jacob suggests that this occurred partly through excluding or defining out of existence other models of masculine selfhood and disciplining femininity into a properly complementary national handmaiden. Hoda Elsadda takes the establishment and maintenance of a national literary canon of the novel as her critical and historical framework. As the genre of territorially based collective identity par excellence, based on and fostering the dominance of a particular (and programmatically gendered) vision of national/ist selfhood, novelistic fiction mediated the institutions of the state's cultural apparatus, and the visions of readers, encouraging particular kinds of gendered identities and discouraging others. Finally, for Laura Bier, the lens of state feminism in post-1952 Egypt offers the beacon of an assertively new sociopolitical nationalist map that rearranged and repackaged prerevolutionary social policy.

As keen as these authors are to establish their distinct contributions and narrative plots—and each has a timeline for the character, emergence, delineation, or consolidation of “the new” at the heart of their Egyptian story—they also demonstrate continuities past and future. Reading them together establishes rich intersections and persuasive commonalities. Carving out discrete sites of investigation, they build on the copious extant scholarship on gender, nation, and collective imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial Egypt and elsewhere, though not always with enough explicit comparative purchase. On their theoretical scaffolding, the fingerprints of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Anne Stoler, Partha Chatterjee, Judith Butler, and Timothy Mitchell are particularly traceable. As each monograph pursues its thematic thread, together they tell a complex story of many patterns coming together to form a dense weave of disciplined and disciplining practices that shaped Egyptian national subjectivity.

A gender-defining, class-striated, and racially localized body politics as crucially defining this emerging subjectivity (and its “others”) is key to all of these studies. Complicating the easy evocation of something called colonial modernity (or related formulations), this politics of the body predates the formal colonial presence in Egypt, as Liat Kozma's study of the formation of institutions that would come to be recognized as “the state” shows. Kozma draws on court and police records, and the early Arabic press, to show that disputations around the proper sites and behaviors of Egyptians as men and women that we associate with the turn of the 20th century and later were logical outcomes of institutional developments as well as economic and social transformations beginning earlier in the 19th century. Throughout, these sources and the creative use Kozma makes of them indicate the salience of gender politics to the crystallization of an anticolonial nationalist project defining itself against and through European imperialist ideology with its Orientalist legacy.

Kozma opens with an illustrative case that demonstrates the centrality of sexual politics to political projects. A young woman found in a Cairo brothel in 1878, facing her father and the police, insists that she has remained a virgin (pp. xi, xv). Their exchange, argues Kozma, is both a recognition of and a spur to establishing state power as a legitimate force in people's lives: the local police become an element in “familial control of a young woman's sexuality” (p. xv), feeding into “a commonsense understanding of social relations” (p. xvi). Such everyday encounters did not so much seed institutional development (although inevitably they did that too) as emerge from facts on the ground—moments that disciplined Egyptian subjects into becoming targets and interlocutors of state actors in a variety of institutional settings that could only take shape from such encounters: “the role of central authorities in monitoring communal life was an outcome of social interactions that legitimized newly created institutions” (p. 22). Kozma's elucidation of the socioeconomic backdrop draws on earlier work, such as that of Judith Tucker, to emphasize the radical changes to Egyptian society wrought by the policies of Mehmed Ali and his successors. These top-down transformations weakened local networks of support on which women could rely as families lost the underpinnings of economic wellbeing and social solidity, even while the state instituted a new circuitry of health and safety apparatuses. Rather than viewing the state as an alien body or imposition from above, Kozma argues that “modern state power [w]as an outcome of multiple interactions between institutions and individuals” (p. xvii). It was created through the very negotiations that made resistance to its overtures possible and that shaped the contours of the state as much as those contours shaped the interpellations of individuals as subjects of a modern government.

To elicit these processes, Kozma examines the unstable margins of the normative, focusing on slaves, prostitutes, and girls or young women implicated in premarital sex. She investigates domains of law and the attempted regulation of bodies and sexuality; medicine and its categories of practitioner (ḥakīma, dāya, and patient or consumer); and the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. Her case studies bring alive a situation of flux and ambiguity, anything but an implacable or consistently effective imposition of state authority. These vignettes suggest instead a series of trials and errors, accommodation and resistance, across the institutional landscape. For example, she observes ambivalence or at least ambiguity around the status of midwives. Dāyas sat both inside and outside the state, at once needed and marginalized, cooperative and resistant. They worked with state-trained ḥakīmas (female physicians) and the police while sometimes subverting these officials—and the new regulations and bodily disciplines accompanying them—in their own choices to act (or not), and their ability to exert influence on women in need of services. Looking at family-state negotiations over young women's sexuality, Kozma also demonstrates that we cannot assume particular stances within and among patriarchal families. Family members (including fathers) were as likely as not to support young women's assertions of innocence (if not their possible desires for semi-autonomous decision making)—though it was probably family needs or certain kinds of authority and “not women's well-being that was at stake” (p. 21). Successes—from the perspective of state actors—were uneven, given individuals’ and families’ negotiations of their own needs and perceptions. If the state's new apparatuses provided more services, they also restricted women in many ways. For example, while some women or their male guardians may have called in official ḥakīmas, for other women, a perception that even midwives were part of the system and were compelled to report data might mean a reluctance to summon a neighborhood midwife if the woman or her family knew that some aspect of their immediate circumstances might prove questionable or even illegal.

Kozma traces shifts in practice within state apparatuses at the ground level. As international pressures for the abolition of slavery grew more intense and translated into state action, the Egyptian security apparatus shifted gradually from protecting slave-owners’ interests or presumed rights to protecting slaves and ex-slaves. Kozma notes how the dissolution of social bonds that had been part of slaves’ lives troubled the benefits of their transition to a free status, which was socially and economically unsupported. After all, slavery was “legalized violence and, at the same time, a form of attachment” (p. 51). Freedom meant vulnerability to an increasingly document-based system, to racial attitudes, and to limited employment opportunities.

Methodologically, Kozma is careful not to assume that she can hear the voices most at stake. She prefers to “elicit shifting conditions that shaped women's choices” (p. 52) as she draws on legal records, police documents, and the narratives of European travelers and residents in Egypt. She warns against “overreliance on prescriptive texts” (p. xxii) and her cases remind us that law and practice rarely step in synchrony. Her claims occasionally overreach the evidence she lays before us. Her discussion of ḥakīmas as state-trained scribes of a new documentary presence in Egyptians’ lives is intriguing but a short quotation adducing possible reasons for a miscarriage does not seem sufficient to carry the point. It would have been more persuasive to unpack the specific ways in which ḥakīmas used the language of law and logic; how did their narratives actually work? Kozma writes that the ḥakīma's “forensic examination at the police station created new kinds of thinking of the body and of the knowledge it could manifest” (p. 42). But what, how, and for whom? How can we know that people saw these reports as capable of proving a fact they could not otherwise prove? It is fascinating to ponder the possibility that people who came to police stations in quest of formal documentation of evidence sometimes believed that the very existence of a document such as the miscarriage report would be enough to prove their case, when in the end it was not. This suggests a belief in, along with a very partial knowledge of, the state's justice system. But if “the power of the police station to infiltrate family and community life was consolidated in exactly such moments” (p. 46), is it not also possible that the likelihood that cases based on such reports were rarely successful might have discouraged those seeking intervention and help? And might the likelihood that women's own testimonies about their bodies were “ignored” (p. 46) diminish the use they made of the police? What about the role of oral community knowledge? For these stories of documentary inefficacy before the bar surely circulated among women (and their men). Did the number of cases brought to court multiply over time, suggesting that people believed in the process nevertheless? Furthermore, when Kozma calls this case “a typical one,” (p. 43) how do we know? What sampling method did she use? Without examples of midwives’ versus ḥakīmas’ testimonies, how can we evaluate their divergences? Limitations in the archival evidence notwithstanding, such evaluative scaffolding seems important.

Focusing mostly on precolonial Egypt, Kozma notes intersections of different power centers (local, central/state, Ottoman, European). She traces their consolidation over time into a more centralized and territorially defined entity. She delineates legal reform not as a series of institutionally decreed edicts but as an outcome of state needs, notably for order, security, and information. These needs had to be met through microcosmic negotiations between individuals who were themselves negotiating shifts in social relations crystallizing around a hierarchized institutional order. Increasing articulation of hierarchical authority was made possible partly through people's very resort to it at the level of village and town, though surely other levels of negotiation and policy formation were equally significant. As my opening quotations suggest for the 1890s, individuals may have invited local state representatives to intervene, and thus did not necessarily regard them as external, coercive, and unwanted presences. Her model moves away from the notion of an elite institution that people contested from their everyday positioning to one where that institution itself was a thing in formation, shaped as much by everyday contestations and invitations as by elite discursive and institutional energies. Kozma's thesis, that “a modern state was thus articulated . . . by these communal disputes in which central authorities were not interested, yet which people kept bringing to the offices of lower-ranking officials” (p. 11), is appealing, but it is not the whole story. Kozma focuses on one slice of the story, while recognizing that both “bottom-up and top-down processes . . . turned the state into a meaningful presence in everyday life” (p. 11).

Kozma's argument intersects with the work of Jacob, Elsadda, and El Shakry particularly, in recognizing that processes of state formation that her study traces entailed molding a populace gradually into normalized subjects, shaped by changing spatial, cultural, and legal boundaries of sociality and proper subjecthood. Kozma interrogates extant conceptual formulations of subjects in their encounters with the state as always already “disciplined selves” or “resistant agents,” asking what the processes are that actually produce these typified social subjects. Among the books under review, hers is the most attentive to what has generally been shorthanded as “subaltern selves,” those who define and indeed create the normalized subject through their very difference and the impossibility of producing modes of expression (in shorthand, “speech”) that the normalized subject (and state) can or would respond to. Their presence hovers over all of these books. Kozma's ability to construct everyday encounters out of her texts is of course an outcome of normalized discourses, for the shadows of the subaltern would not grace Cairo's archival pavements were it not for the recording presence of state-related actors. They would not exist were it not for the presence of the power that (re?)constitutes them, and in this lies their very subalternity, although the same could no doubt be said for subjects of discourse whom our scholarly perspectives do not regard as “subaltern.” Yet, as she notes, such documents must be seen as produced out of dialogues, yielded from processes with uncertain, unpredictable, outcomes.

The narrative of how elites might form and claim “the state” and its apparatuses (and discourses) is itself a discursive construction that other authors reviewed here trace through the writings, speeches, and other acts of social scientists and politicians, fiction writers and judges, journalists and bodybuilders, medics and cartoonists, from the late 19th century through the al-Nasir period. The shifting and broadening socioeconomic origins and allegiances of those who came to see themselves as a national elite constitute a crucial ongoing area of investigation with which all of these books grapple. But whatever the foggy edges of eliteness were, and however much the currents shifted, on the other bank were those on the nether side of respectability who defined its attributes by default. In Working Out Egypt, Wilson Chacko Jacob traces the discourses and institutions through which there developed, he argues, a prevailing concept of masculinity based on attributes of education and professional potential, demeanor and appearance, and embeddedness in a certain family structure with an associated set of social roles, institutional linkages, and perhaps above all, bodily practices.

Jacob's book shares with that of Kozma (and the others) the principle that gender's operations within the disciplining forces of colonial power, anticolonial nationalism, class-specific restraints or possibilities, and racialist attitudes are not easily predictable. Nor can the regimes of gender be said to programmatically establish individual behavior, whether that of leading intellectuals and political movers and shakers or that of unnamed individuals negotiating their daily lives with, against, and through thickets of state authority and ideological pressures or assumptions. In working out his concept of effendi masculinity as essential to the nationalist ethos, Jacob (following Judith Butler and others) emphasizes the vagaries of performance. He places stress on the ways that individuals subvert as well as comply with established and accumulating prescriptive expectations as they make themselves into proper subjects of the nation.

Jacob is careful to circumscribe the discourses he traces within a small circuitry of Egyptians, the effendi “class” as he sees it, while showing the expansion of this hard-to-define group over time, though probably less through the discursive pressures he highlights than because of increasing institutionalized opportunities in education, work, mobility, and sociability. He explains his project as an investigation of

Jacob begins with emerging nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil's 1890s visit to European exhibitions and Kamil's anger especially at the spectacle of Egypt “as a feminized and sexualized body” in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1894 (p. 3). This reaction to how European public spectacles constructed Egyptianness in the 1890s was shared by other men and women of the elite.Footnote ⁴ Jacob's informed speculation on Kamil's reactions to Europeans’ representations of otherness leads him to claim that “[t]he style and content of Kamil's politics would be profoundly affected by this sexualization, feminization, and temporalization of the East as Other” (p. 3). Assessing the mammoth memorial biography compilation composed by Mustafa's brother, Jacob finds embryonic tracings of a nationalist masculine genealogy of service to others, differently realized from father to son, and a sort of wistful brotherhood of aspirations. Pondering affective elements in how a (middling class) boy becomes a model nationalist man in these particular colonial circumstances yields numerous and moving vignettes of individual predicament and existential agony: Mustafa Kamil in Lyons; bodybuilders trying to make their mark for Egypt on the world stage; athletes sent to the Olympics without money to buy proper shoes and returning to their homelands without clear futures; Palestinian Boy Scouts coming to Alexandria to socialize with their Egyptian peers, only to confront the hostility of colonial officials; ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq wrestling with the question of whether to continue wearing his turban.

In succession, Jacob elucidates a series of sites where he finds the elaboration of masculinity to be particularly notable. He traces the end-of-century discursive outcomes of British imperial models of exemplary masculinity, formed partly through canonical boy-story texts valorizing pointed heroisms against a category of others, in the face of fin-de-siecle anxieties about Britain's national-imperial strength. He moves to the ways in which emerging nationalist thinkers in Egypt began to conceptualize a notion of masculinity proper to nationalist ambitions, a topic difficult to tease out, as in the writing of men masculinity is often an undeclared concern. Later in time came the institutional and publicly performative channels through which “effendi masculinity” was conveyed to young male Egyptians: Boy Scouts, competitive sports, and international contests, with the fascinating local rivalry between members of the royal family to sponsor competing institutions. Body building and the discourse of physical culture were another arena in which manhood was on display, if only accessed by some periodicals specializing in bodily comportment and sexuality, as well as related debates over the masculine fashions of modernity. Finally, Jacob sketches an alternative model of masculinity, that of the futuwwa, hovering elusively over the apparent social, economic, political, and cultural triumph of the effendi.

Jacob draws on Tani Barlow's formulation of colonial modernity to emphasize the push and pull of international cultural and economic forces on the formations of a local, middle-class, and gendered national politics. He also reminds us (following the insights of Homi Bhabha and many others) that an inescapable feature of performance is the ever-present possibility of performing differently. How does one make, or become, a usefully wayward subject out of the paradoxes of colonial praxis, wherein the colonizer was to train the objectified other into a submissive likeness which by definition was unattainable, for that would put the colonizer out of a job and expose the fallacies of colonial superiority? In what is perhaps his strongest chapter, Jacob shows how scouting, advocated both by colonial officials and (differently) by the Egyptian state apparatus and nationalist leaders, yielded logical outcomes that were distasteful to these elites—whether new nationalist solidarities or, in the 1930s, groups of young men with paramilitary leanings. In another strong chapter, he lays out the changing prewar and interwar attitudes toward dress, in a complex political environment where the emotions roused by European-provenant garb and by the Turkish government's proclamations on suitable attire highlighted the sensitivity of the issue for a local nationalism. Choices of dress, naturally, bespoke visible political allegiances as well as announced one's credentials as a modern and patriotic man.

In Working Out Egypt, how performances of gender created national/ist subjects is far more evident for males than for females. If effendi masculinity was to be “a receptacle for, and a lens into, the work of purification through which a universal subject was materialized in the name of Egypt” (p. 21), where were the women? Elsewhere I have argued that much of the male-authored writing on women at the turn of the century was actually about men (who were veiled subjects of discourse if ever there were), and of course this is evident in the well-known and much-discussed writings of Qasim Amin.Footnote ⁵ It is welcome to find such a careful elucidation of the extent to which maleness and masculinity were explicitly topics of anxious debate. In Jacob's scheme, women and girls form the boundary limit that frames nationalist masculinity: for some writers, through women's and girls’ consumption habits that allegedly placed undue financial pressures on men, and for others, as the ultimate cause (through “bad mothering”) of men's shortcomings as national paragons. Jacob does a fine job of elucidating these themes in the texts he targets. But women also wrote about men (a topic that has yet to receive its due). Did they perceive the materialization of a masculine exemplary subject as the vessel of national modernity? (Or, for that matter, did men? Much of late 19th-century writing on gender and sexuality might suggest otherwise.) Whatever the gender of the authorial name on the page (the effects of which on readers constitute another topic that bears consideration), could one not posit that intertwined with this construction of masculinity as the exemplary “universal” (but local) subject, the feminine was also mobilized as an exemplary universal-national subject, perhaps in tension with effendi masculinity? Didn't the contours of both figures compete to define the perfect national/ist body?

There is also the question—raised not only by Jacob's book—of the effendi himself. This label has generated considerable scholarship by now, which makes it possible to raise questions about the category, to which I can only gesture here. To what extent is “effendi” a meaningful category, and if so, meaningful to whom, and when? Not all of those whom we now might include under such a rubric were likely—especially before the 1920s—to have seen themselves as such. One spanner in the works is that in the late 19th century, the term effendi was also occasionally used for women. And as Noga Efrati has pointed out astutely in this journal, a bigger issue is that the term effendi with its assumed masculine exclusivity effaces the contributions of rising groups of educated females to the actions and discourses that the effendiyya are said to represent.Footnote ⁶ Are we in danger of reifying an analytical category and missing out on the complexities of self-identification? Fine-tuned work such as Jacob's should encourage further historical nuance concerning the concept of the effendi.

A related challenge to the coming-to-dominance of Jacob's “effendi masculinity” lies in the evidence that the effendi was also a figure of fun and mockery in the interwar years (and, in fact, though not necessarily by name, considerably earlier). In Egypt's rising visual-satirical press as well as in vernacular poetry from the late 19th century on, urban men of a certain class were repeatedly stereotyped as vain, spendthrift, superficial in habits and thoughts, and excessively given to (European-like) bodily comportment. More often than not, this figure was produced in the press by men (and occasionally by women) who hailed from that same bourgeois socioeconomic formation that Jacob places at the heart of the creation of “effendi masculinity.” Were these satirical critiques meant simply as correctives, to protect the effendi masculine from excessive enthusiasm? Or were they a reaction to the rising dominance of this shifting discursive and social category? Who was their audience and what exactly was the target? Jacob does discuss such images briefly, but does not unpack the possible significance of this challenge to an effendi ideal, if such existed. And to what extent was “the effendi” created (if created he was) by the trans- or cross-national performances that Working Out Egypt highlights? Jacob excavates a broad swath of discourses and representations from the period. But the devil always lurks in the details and sometimes he seems to overreach in making claims for the “spatial distinction between the colonial and the national” that was “a condition of possibility” (p. 4) for a sense of time and difference that effected this nationalist construct and sustained its lasting effects.

Perhaps historical discursive shifts within Egypt are most telling. Jacob sets out the changing semantic fields of terms long resonant within Arabic thought: the older riyāḍat al-nafs, when adopted by early 20th-century thinkers who made links between self-care and national discipline, came to annex and then to signify an ethics of bodily care and comportment, riyāḍat al-badan or simply riyāḍa, “exercise” or “sports” as we know it today. The older term conveyed a holistic sense of care and responsibility toward all aspects of one's self. The futuwwa, as well, underwent semantic shifts as the political and socioeconomic fields reshaped senses of community and masculine duty, though the older ethical attributes the word conveyed could not be erased entirely by the rise of the middle-class urban man. Omnia El Shakry, in The Great Social Laboratory, similarly emphasizes the creative synthesis of premodern Arab/ic scholarship and 19th-century European social sciences by Egyptians and others resident in Egypt who in various ways participated in formations of state policy and the implementation of state projects for social welfare, national health, and security. El Shakry asks the question of what happens to the European-ness of social-sciences discourse when we consider “other historical trajectories [and what they] can tell us about the development of modern forms of statecraft, political governance, and knowledge production under the pressures of European global hegemony” (p. 2). If imperial Europe drew on the emerging social sciences to manage colonized populations, to what uses did the elites of those colonies, aspiring to and then at least partially obtaining a postcolonial status, and often trained in Europe or by European scholars, put these bodies of knowledge? How did the discourses themselves shift to become differently legible in the process?

El Shakry's book was published several years before the others under review. Her careful exposition of how social sciences scholarship and its implementation were shaped partly by “the rule of colonial difference”—in other words, her emphasis on the paramount salience of the local through reliance on conceptual categories developed within Euro/American paradigms, which created a paradoxical dependence on precisely the logic of power that one wants to subvert—has its echoes in Jacob's, Kholoussy's, and Bier's books especially. All four emphasize the continuities between colonial practices and those of the nation-state, as well as (in the cases of El Shakry and Bier) the continuities between pre- and post-1952 legal, administrative, and policy structures and processes with their associated targeted categories among the populace, particularly women and peasants.

Equally important are the local reformulations of these modalities and the arguments behind them. El Shakry pinpoints “uniqueness” and “educatability” as the watchwords of Egyptian activist intellectuals who sought to build a new Egypt by disciplining its subjects (subalterns and others) into proper national citizens. Through perceptive and painstaking analysis of an immense range of dissertations, books, articles, and project proposals, El Shakry shows the “subtle translations and subversions of the categories of Western thought” (p. 6) with which social scientists (some turned policy wonks) from many origins, living in Egypt, formulated locally tailored planning blueprints for Egyptian modernity. In particular, Egyptian academicians and scholar–bureaucrats brought together Western positivism, historical “sociology” à la Ibn Khaldun, and a romantic nationalist mode of envisioning rural Egypt (and more broadly, the prehistory of Egyptian modernity). Discursively, this was accomplished through an amalgam of “ethnographic” and “literary” Orientalisms, locally deployed. This mode—romantic and often nostalgic, though also forward-looking—was dominant in the interwar years, and was a complex amalgam of indigenous and European inspirations. Invocations of nature and understandings of popular ritual—to name just two themes of this literature—gave Egyptian scholars imagined local foundations for a political entity (including, for some, the Sudan) envisioned and constructed as an inherently harmonious, ethnically and geographically continuous unity. Such a territorial-ethnic-ethical entity was to be guided by a progressive social-welfare ethos, one that, at times, was imagined in paternalistic and rigidly classed and gendered terms, all of which El Shakry opens up deftly. The founding of institutions such as the Royal Geographic Society provided intellectual homes where categories of “imperial,” “national,” and “local” came together in intricate ways through individuals’ personal and professional ties. It is one of the strengths of this book that the aspirations of individual laborers in the academic field—whether professionally trained or amateur, on a state salary or not—are not lost beneath the broader institutional developments; rather, they are shown as contingent historical actors shaping institutions through popularizing intellectual work and state-led enterprises. Intellectual ferment and reformist aspirations yielded projects targeting rural Egyptians and women of middling and lower socioeconomic brackets, from model villages to family planning clinics. These initiatives were fueled also by worries over perceived overpopulation and economically unfeasible reproduction patterns, alleged rises in rural violence and crime, and the (also alleged) nefarious effects of too much tea-drinking among peasants. The logical outcome, El Shakry finds, was a “social-welfare model of regulation” (p. 197) that extended through the al-Nasir years, in which the state could market itself to its citizens as a benevolently paternalistic provider of proper welfare for all. Like Kozma for an earlier period, El Shakry stresses that the formations of Egyptian modernity, the sciences that molded it and its official institutions, were not solely the products of elite energies but were engineered just as much by the demands of people the system sought to discipline: in El Shakry's case, “subalternity as a discursive effect” and pressure (p. 220).

The subaltern herself does not really make an appearance in El Shakry's book; the focus is entirely on the discourses and elite institutions that managed her reality. The material effects of this social science framework remain in the shadows along with their target populations. Women may have been silenced in the policy debates on managing reproduction, but (as Kozma shows for the century before), in police stations, clinics, and homes, those at the receiving end of state policy were neither silent nor always cooperative—and when they were, it was because doing so suited their needs. But El Shakry's focus is on the imposed projects that objectified these subjects. A perceived “problem of population” thus generated a battery of programs targeting all women as well as rural men, yielding a “process of fixing women in healthy, modernized, and regulated reproduction” and “reforming rural and peasant life in order to lead the peasantry to modes of life and social practices appropriate to the progress and civility of the modern world” (pp. 147–48). Reproduction was a key axis for formulating a local modernity, and El Shakry gives us the scenario of a 1937 conference on population and eugenics that brought together medical and sociological perspectives, even while making reproduction political meant that women were not part of the public conversation. Nor were they even really the subject: highlighting the middle-class family as the space of reproductive sexuality and decision-making, and putting family planning on the public social reform agenda, blotted out women themselves.

In that conference, one topic of discussion was the supposed increase in Egyptian men remaining bachelors, and the effect of this on Egypt's population and general state of health. El Shakry's discussion of the discourses and regulation of fertility offers good contextualization for Hanan Kholoussy's focus in For Better, For Worse, which her subtitle describes as “the marriage crisis that made modern Egypt.” Kholoussy argues that in early 20th-century Egypt, marriage was “a site of contested national identity formation. . . . Egyptian men and women conceptualized the nation and understood their rights and duties through marriage” (p. 3). Meanwhile, marriage was one way in which differently configured nationalist identities were offered to women and to men. Juxtaposing legal cases with texts from the press, Kholoussy's approach is somewhat akin to that of Kozma in that she emphasizes processes as well as institutions (in this case, marriage) in formation through people's negotiations and court appearances. As a discourse-based investigation, it is also similar to El Shakry's book. Public discourse encapsulates for her what “middle-class Egyptians” thought was happening to the Egyptian family. Meanwhile, the law court records reveal what individuals of all classes made of their own marriage situations. Considering the years 1898–1936, Kholoussy examines marriage and divorce cases as a comparative check against debates in the press over what was defined as a “marriage crisis”—the alleged failure of Egyptian men to marry, for which commentators gave reasons ranging from economic hardship to the lack (or presence, or inadequacy) of feminine learning, to fathers’ high dower demands, to men's behavior patterns and lack of discipline, to Egyptian women's lack of discipline in roaming the streets of Cairo (these two latter concerns circulating in print from the late 1880s at least), to the unproven claim that divorce was on the rise and would deter bachelors, to the presence of European women on the same streets, and finally to the westward travels of Egyptian shabāb. She notes discursive themes similar to those Jacob finds, which operate to define a respectable masculinity of active care for the self and others. Kholoussy also traces the shifting though consistent emphases of a domesticizing discourse that might laud the fading of practices of seclusion yet find new ways to “protect” women and keep them busy at home. This discourse has been scrutinized in earlier work by myself and others, but Kholoussy adds a new dimension with her close focus on the marriage debates.

But for middle-class Egyptians (to follow Kholoussy's focus), was the marriage crisis really a microcosmic representation of the nation's failure or was it actually more about marriage as a lived (or not lived) experience? If people were understandably worried about how local conditions under continued imperial rule would affect their own lives, surely they articulated this on many fronts. How truly “widespread” (p. 8) were perceptions of conjugal crisis, beyond commentators in mainstream urban periodicals? Kholoussy is careful not to assume that acts mirrored words (and indeed she finds evidence from the courts that belie certain claims in the press, for example that marriage would make men into reliable providers, though at times her balance of sources appears uneven, with comparisons seemingly based on cases mostly from very early in the century versus press reports from the 1920s to 1930s). And the notion of marriage as a disciplining force on men easily stands in as a statement of concern about a range of social issues. But is it too much to give the articulation of this crisis discourse and its symbolic or allegorical possibilities such prominence in the making of modern Egypt?

Undoubtedly, marriage and family structures are central to the political make-up of any nation-state, including of course its judicial system and the workings of a national economy. And they are amongst the most sensitive of public-sphere topics: in England, feminist Mona Caird's 1888 essay on “Marriage,” which took a social constructionist view toward the institution, sparked an enormous public debate and thousands upon thousands of letters to the editor.Footnote ⁷ But just what difference did an eruption of concern over marriage make to Egypt as a nation or as a state? The question of how people perceived marriages—their own and others—as related to being subjects of a modern nation is a fascinating one. But if it is reasonable to claim that vocal anxieties about the state of marriage actually expressed “escalating anxieties about the political, social and economic state of the fragile nation” (p. 8), did the fact that writers hammered at marriage as a national duty really shape what Egyptians thought of themselves or their spouses? Or, did it make a difference in their decisions about when and whom to marry? And how precisely did this “make” modern Egypt? The conjunction of scientific, social-science, religiously inflected, and liberal-political discourses that El Shakry traces so well for issues of rural development, population, and infrastructure—and which of course entailed a lot of thinking along the way about what marriage meant for the nation's fortunes—surely suggests that the relations between marriage, individual and collective aspirations and fears, and successful nationhood (whatever that means) are complex indeed.

Reading For Better, For Worse alongside the other books under review gives one a strong appreciation of how urgently, assiduously, and responsibly many Egyptians aired issues of sociality and its ordering as they watched their homeland move from colonial to early postcolonial status. Another forum for the airing of ideal social organization and its realities was that of imaginative writing, particularly prose fiction. In Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel, Hoda Elsadda traces the formation of a national canon of novel production as an effect of, and contributor to, the consolidation of an Egyptian national ethos. Elsadda is interested in what difference gender makes to defining that canon, and how issues of inclusion and exclusion, as well as of representation, in a national formation and its canonical literary counterpart operate to sustain or challenge each other. The prevalence of the novel is itself a mark of exclusion (of other modes of expressive culture, including oral arts and popular storytelling, whether in print or not), as Elsadda notes. But she chooses to focus on it, given the well-established idea in world literary scholarship that the novel provides a historical parallel to the process of nation formation. In Egypt, its very proliferation became (as it had in Europe and was doing in a myriad of other societies) “a measure of the attainment of modernity” (p. xv).

Like marriage, the novel might stand in for anxieties about the direction of the nation: “many of the well-known literary debates among the Arab literati, about literary standards, artistic tastes, controversial award ceremonies, criteria for selection of texts for translation, and women's writing, are all, in the final analysis, cultural battles about the formation of the Arabic national canon and the construction of national identities” (p. xvi). Thus, Elsadda analyzes not only a range of novels but also their paratexts, or the mediations and challenges that shaped the environments in which readers approached them. She argues that the definitive criterion for inclusion in the canon was “the symbolic power of a liberal national elite whose cultural imaginings shaped the literary canon so as to represent their own worldview and their ontological and cultural conflicts” (p. xx), including their gender ideology. Predominant themes until at least the al-Nasir period were also those evident in much of the writing considered in the works discussed above: the plight of the Arab male intellectual making his way between European modernisms and the heritage of his homeland, as well as his relationship to his society; and the questions of East–West, tradition–modernity, and women as national subjects. The paramount status of the nation as literary focus also explains a longstanding critical negativity about fiction focused overtly on the self—a response that has, similar to other regions, particularly slammed writers in Egypt (as elsewhere) who happen to be women.

The emblematic figure in this century-long canonization process is what Elsadda calls “the nahda hero,” which corresponds more or less to the prevalent masculine ideal that Jacob and Kholoussy trace. In Elsadda's words, this icon is “invariably middle class (or espous[ing] middle-class mores and values), literate, modern . . . ambivalent about his relationship with women (aspiring to a more egalitarian relationship with women that does not, however, compromise male dominance and control” (p. xxxi), and both admiring of and resistant to Western ways. Elsadda begins by outlining late-19th- and turn-of-the-century writings by women and men which set the agenda for the gender ideology that came to shape the nation and the canon. Shadowing the nahḍa hero from this early point was the ambiguously constructed “New Woman,” a global figure that in the Egyptian case (as in others) embodied ambivalence for male (and some female) writers as a sought-after symbol of modernity and yet a chimera fraught with dangerous possibilities. It is perhaps most telling that the New Woman seems an Eve-like rib: a projection of desire, a sharp emblem of masculine lack, a gift and sign of doom for the masculine psyche, and above all, a derivative shadow that could be neither erased nor allowed an independent and vocal existence. Elsadda sets up her thematic scheme by tracing the “beginnings of cultural imaginings of gender and nation in . . . early texts” (p. 4) and counterposing dominant figurations of manhood and womanhood with alternative visions, notably that of Malak Hifni Nasif. The early texts also manifest the marking out of approaches arising from more-or-less secularist and Islamic outlooks, though all of the studies under review offer the welcome and overdue recognition (recently attested by a range of scholars) that in fact these were both modern frames of reference that shared many assumptions about gender and nation.

Elsadda goes on to provide sensitive readings of early 20th-century male writers who constructed protagonists of New Man-hood—Haikal, al-Mazini, and al-Rafiʿi—and argues persuasively that the “New Man” as symbol emerged before, and was necessary for, the New Woman. I would add that the ambivalence striating the latter figure was a product of that sequence. Importantly, the appellation al-rajul al-jadīd is rarely to be found: this, as I see it, is the “masculine given” of which al-marʾa al-jadīda is the Eve-like appendage, a structure of gender relations and assumptions about sexuality that formed the backbone of the nationalist imaginary, whether “Islamic reformist” or “secular reformist,” so similar in assumptions if not necessarily in proposed solutions.Footnote ⁸ These early works of fiction center on the hero's struggle to be a nationalist man, given the apparent dearth of appropriate female partners, the valorization of bachelorhood (but also the anxieties it raised, as addressed by Kholoussy), and the tug-of-war between leaving behind older patterns and yet nostalgically rehearsing the seeming certainty they offered in the face of women exercising new kinds of mobility and even choice. In Zaynab, Ibrahim al-Katib, and al-Rafiʿi's short stories, these tensions are evident. Elsadda's reading of al-Rafiʿi, an understudied figure, is especially rich for its insights into the ambiguities with which fictional writing at its best confronts the reader. Elsadda's ensuing chapter on Tawfiq al-Hakim builds on these earlier fictions to explore the painful necessity of coming to terms with deep attraction to Western societies (so often allegorized in female figures). This attraction arises within the context of firm anticolonial nationalist allegiances and (El Shakry's discussion is an enriching context here) both a romantic attachment to the Egyptian peasant as symbol of Egypt's steadfast identity and an urban intellectual alienation from the realities of the countryside. To al-Hakim, Elsadda traces the popularity (from the 1930s into at least the 1960s) of the “theme of the misguided modern woman who abuses her newly acquired freedom and requires the firm control and guidance of a man to put her on the right path” (p. 73), which is of course his path. This is the indirect but certainly logical outcome of al-Hakim's “exaltation of Egyptian national masculinity. . .premised on a hierarchical opposition between men and women” (p. 64). Thus, Elsadda's analyses parallel a consistent pattern evident in texts Jacob analyzes. Elsadda's fullest and finest chapter treats the trilogy of Najib Mahfuz, where the history of the nahḍa hero emerges in its mature form.

One strength of Elsadda's book is that she analyzes works by both male and female authors and moves away from the tendency to focus only on one gender whether as culture producer or as theme. Her chapter on the great writer and activist Latifa al-Zayyat argues persuasively that al-Zayyat's “life and literary oeuvre embody the precarious and tenuous location of gender politics in Third World nationalist movements” (p. 98). Celebrated (though unevenly) for her 1960 national allegory al-Bab al-Maftuh, al-Zayyat published no fiction for many years, although we know that some of her later publications were written in the 1960s. Elsadda attributes this to al-Zayyat's unease about the positioning of women in discourses of nationalist anticolonial liberation movements as well as to the specific unfolding of Egypt's political history. Al-Zayyat thus occupies an equivocal place in the canon: revered for her activism and lauded for her first novel which subordinated gender freedom to national liberation, but much less appreciated for her later works which explore feminism's need to detach itself from the masculinist structures of the nation.

While I agree with this analysis, it is particularly here that Elsadda's thesis provokes questions. Al-Zayyat has been firmly canonized, as have some of the other writers whom Elsadda takes on. Canonization can never be a hermetically sealed space, for its exclusions have a way of infiltrating sacred canonical precincts, as Elsadda knows. But a stronger reading of counter-canonical—and thus canon-reshaping—texts might decenter the nahḍa-hero in interesting ways, and might also introduce the pivotal question of sexuality more forthrightly. Her analysis of the work of Sunʿallah Ibrahim begins to do this. His first novel also appeared in the 1960s to ambivalent reception for its unprecedented boldness in theme, language, and form, and its portrayal of (in one sense) the anti-nahḍa hero. Ibrahim's paradigm-shattering novel Tilka al-Raʾiha “ushers into Arabic literature a long array of impotent, defeated Arab men, who have been emasculated by oppressive regimes and are rendered icons of the general political weakness and powerlessness of Arab nation-states” (p. 121). Yet this is just as linked to the nahḍa as were earlier treatments of manhood: the nahḍa dream gone wrong produces these protagonists and shapes their trajectories. Ibrahim's ambiguous positioning with regards to official or hegemonic Egyptian literary culture—offered prizes that he has refused, recognized as a great writer but now and then condemned for his writings (and his “attitude”)—exemplifies the price writers can pay when they exceed the boundaries of good (complicit) state-defined nationalist behavior. Elsadda brings into the discussion one of my favorite writers, who has (as Elsadda notes) been largely ignored: Asmaʾ Halim, whose works offer a counternarrative to the story of national success, a partial parallel to Ibrahim's more recent novels. Her characters cannot by definition thrive in the shadow of a nationalist “success story.” An analysis of the uses of irony in fiction since the 1960s (or even since the 1940s) would be a good path for developing this complexity further.

Elsadda ends with cogent analyses of works and issues sparking controversies in the 1990s over “writing the body.” This was often translated by hostile critics into kitābat al-banāt (girls’ writing), not only insulting authors who happened to be female but also ignoring that this was not a single-gendered phenomenon. Elsadda contextualizes the scene with commentary on both the shifting publication situation and the longstanding prejudices against female writers, while also noting the welcome emergence of writers from “previously marginalized communities” (p. 147), which she then takes up in a chapter on the postcolonial nomadic novel. In both contexts, new writing from the social margins encapsulated political thematics not from the nahḍa hero's perspective but from other vantage points. An emerging focus on embodiment and identity and on Cairo's marginalized neighborhoods have made and continue to make claims for the essential centrality of such spaces to a critical interrogation of how the history of the nation has been dominantly narrated.Footnote ⁹ The proliferation of new writing has set the scene for the cultural exuberance of the post-Mubarak era, where insistence on dismantling patriarchal structures is not simply a matter of changing the formal political edifice but also of demanding freedoms and new life and work patterns across all aspects of existence, as has been evident from the range of protests that post-Mubarak Egypt is continuing to witness as I write.

The final work reviewed here also offers a perspective on the radical shifts in structures of expectation in Egypt now. Like many of the past decade's novels, Laura Bier's Revolutionary Womanhood is partly an analysis of historical memory, considering how later constructions of the al-Nasir period revive it for the present, in the context of what is usually labeled “Islamization,” with the female figure yet again symbolically at the center. Bier takes up the story of gender as a key political organizing principle within the 1952 revolution, by analyzing projects of the al-Nasir regime that “aimed at transforming women, as historical individuals, into ‘the Egyptian woman,’ as national subject” (p. 2). Disagreeing with analyses that attribute inadequate progress on women's rights to the persistence of male privilege, Bier takes a critical stance on the modernization paradigm (as does El Shakry for the same period). She assesses “state feminism” in the revolutionary regime for its aims, achievements, and blindnesses. And, like El Shakry and Jacob, she notes the tensions Egyptians faced trying to incorporate both “the terrain of the modern and that of Egyptian particularity” (p. 12). “State feminism” meant simultaneously offering women rights as ungendered citizens and laborers while retaining a regime of duties and appropriate sites for their realization that was firmly gendered. It meant concrete outcomes such as encouraging women to use new (and Egyptian-made) domestic technology: washing machines and so forth, which also had the benefit of advertising Egypt's industrial strides. Domestic and national could come together in a vivid representation of a holistic modernity driven by material progress. Bier provides a fascinating description of advertising imagery which places women in the home but which, through spatial placement and dress, emphasizes the “affective” role of modern accoutrements while avoiding issues of domestic labor, whether that of a middle-class domestic goddess or that of the effaced figure of a poorly paid domestic servitor.

Bier argues that the post-1952 difference lay in overt state assumption of responsibility for “solving the woman question in a way that was consistent with the dictates of a secular nation-state project” (p. 16). This was made possible partly by the incorporation of “women's issues” (my quotation marks) into the existing social-science paradigm that El Shakry traces so finely, continuities that surface especially in Bier's chapters on law and reproduction. From judges to midwives, some of the inadvertently state-building (and state-resistant) negotiations between Egyptians and state representatives that Kozma elicits from the mid-19th century seem not so very different in the 1950s. Nor does the transnationality of texts about exemplary women in the al-Nasir period differ much in theme or reach from those of the 1920s, despite the new third-worldist cast.

Indeed, the other studies under review remind us that the processes Bier outlines were in play long before this era. While Bier emphasizes continuity and finds in it part of the explanation for the aborted top-down (and actually quite conservative) women's rights agenda of Nasirism, her study never really comes to grips with how “state feminism” differed from earlier state-centric projects (apart perhaps from its rhetorical emphases, which are of course significant). How did it add value to Nasirism's overall expansion of opportunities? Nor does it tell us much about “historical women” beyond a handful of individuals who worked within the regime's agenda, a few of whose writings Bier addresses. Yet the activities of Amina Saʿid, Latifa al-Zayyat, and others were broader and more critical in both senses than Bier suggests through her representation of these activists. (They were also obliged to play a canny political game of public support for, and less public resistance to, the state.) Part of the problem may be that Bier's encapsulation of the pre-Nasir story tends to downplay the complexity of, and fissures in, women's feminist activisms, which never did bury political demands in maternalism as deeply or consistently as Bier implies. We are left to wonder the extent to which women actually bought into the regime's plans, beyond benefiting from the early changes that gave new options to both males and females, notably the expansion of state education horizontally and vertically. Bier does not offer many examples of women's responses to new state policies, but in one case she does. Concerning birth control, her data suggest that women either ignored the state's social-welfare overtures or made use of them only when it suited them, and not necessarily in line with state policy aims (as Kozma's subjects had done a century before). It is not clear, either, that al-Nasir's state feminism ever sought to “dismantle the patriarchal structures” (p. 3) more than cosmetically or on the official level. For example, Bier states that because pre-1952 debates on veiling, higher education, and women's work “largely disappeared from public discourse,” the controversy over suffrage was “resolved” (p. 16). But does the disappearance of these debates in the public state-controlled realm mean that any of these issues were definitively solved for historical women, or that they did not continue to be discussed by women and men in various forums? Were state aims or actions monolithic, or might there have been internal contestations or working at cross purposes that stymied whatever movement the Nasirist bureaucracy made? Finally, although Bier argues sensibly that it is important to move beyond formal politics to assess the cultural and social facets of the Nasirist project, she focuses mostly on the formulation and attempted implementation of policy from the political center. She does provide some good examples of the complications inherent to these policies, such as in the principle of including women in the labor force without a shift in attitudes or policies toward women's responsibility for home and family.

But perhaps the biggest question Bier leaves us with is the usefulness of the concept of “state feminism,” at least in this case. Mervat Hatem's strong work some time ago on this aspect of Nasirism implies that the term as originally conceived in the context of Scandinavian politics is differently modulated for Egypt, and perhaps even a less useful framework.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, the concept of state feminism as well as its deployment harbors a legion of contradictions, not only between notions envisioning women as individual members of the labor force and the continuation of inherited policies that “protect” their status within the family. The tension between giving women more “choices” (circumscribed ones) in reproduction and production and more quietly maintaining the patriarchal structure of the family (and the state) would seem to undermine the project from its inception. In the context of Bier's discussion, one wonders to what extent the gender agenda of the state (as opposed perhaps to the hopeful visions of a few individuals at its margins) really did pose “a normative vision of female ‘liberation’” (p. 7)—that Bier puts “liberation” in quotation marks might acknowledge this. Or, despite attempts to regulate women's lives according to modernization theory's instrumentalist program, was “state feminism” not much more than a quasi-cynical use of “feminism” to further political goals including those of foreign policy, much like Laura Bush's “feminism” with regards to the women of Afghanistan, which Bier mentions (p. 12)? Can “state feminism” ever be good for women? Bier recognizes these tensions but I for one felt that more exploration of them would have produced a richer canvas.

Each of these studies, then, puts a particular strand of experience and debate at the center of a national modernity in formation. One could line up these books and trace certain topoi through all of them, allowing each to contextualize the others, putting them in conversation about changing meanings of the state, the family, material effects of racialist discourses, anxieties over the occupation of public space, consumption as a shaper of identity, or convergences of religiously labeled and secularist outlooks that shared similar assumptions about modern life. And, though more tentatively and less explicitly, disciplines of sexuality are also at issue. Eyes trained on representative texts, these scholars vary in their locations along the spectrum between the two poles of discourse analysis and attention to everyday practices. Kozma's study is more embedded in everyday practices by virtue of her argument and her sources; El Shakry, Elsadda, and Bier are more interested in the sweep of overarching narratives; Jacob and Kholoussy fall somewhere in between, parsing debates reactive to contours of lived lives.

Most of the books under review gesture to the importance of comparative thinking, but more extended engagement would be welcome. The authors could have drawn on the sophisticated body of historical work on the profound political effects of gendered discursive practices in South Asia and the material contours of body politics that has done so much to help us reflect on how colonial modernity comes about, what exactly it is, and how sexuality and gender were central to its uneven formation. References in several of these books to Partha Chatterjee's controversial conceptualization of the “political–public/spiritual–secluded” gender bifurcation in early elite Hindu nationalism suggest that Egypt differed in the attention given to “woman” as a sign around which issues of modernity clustered. But by now, Chatterjee's formulation has received thorough critique from South Asianist scholars.Footnote ¹¹ Attention to that scholarship might encourage more reflection on how discourses of gender enacted and effaced sexuality as a range of social practices that marked out particular bodies as il/legitimate vessels of nationalism, and how the texts we study formulate modernity in thoroughly sexualized spaces—questions that the material in these books could open up beautifully, with more explicit attention to such issues and critiques.

As historians, we must rely on the written archives that our predecessors have chosen to leave to us. Most of us cannot interview our subjects, except in our dreams. We read deeply and widely, and we hope that our interlocutors trust our sense of, and sensitivity to, human choices, actions, and aspirations. The authors reviewed here are generally careful to delineate the limits and restraints of their discursive analytic approaches, and are aware of methodological pitfalls. Jacob, for instance, notes that we must account for representations as material facts, for they “enmesh” lives (p. 42): images of masculinity and the masculinity of individual persons were mutually constitutive with material effects. Yet the temptation is often pressing (and I am deeply empathetic here) to make broad claims on the basis of the lone suggestive nugget. Jacob's and Kozma's careful excavation of cases and texts brings individuals alive: the girl in the brothel protesting her innocence; young Mustafa Kamil experiencing the abrupt reaction to his European dress of Algerian guards at the Algerian pavilion in Lyons. But we cannot know whether his “ethical formation was called into question” through this encounter (p. 13), though we can appreciate his self-stated “sadness and grief” (p. 2) over the imperial appropriation of Arabs and their territories, and his clear assumption that such emotions were shared by many. Similarly, the precise readings that El Shakry and Elsadda bring to their social-science and literary archives yield rich harvests, but texts hovering around the edges of marked-out ideological formations continuously trouble the discourse. That is part of the point, of course, and read as a group, these books confront readers with productive questions about how neatly (or not) discourses operate.

These books also confront readers with questions about source bases. One issue shared among most of the studies is source-related: the tendency to draw on one or two periodicals and then imply that this stands in for the whole of what was becoming a diverse and internally riven national press by the late 1890s and much more so three decades later. We might call this the “al-Muqtataf effect.” Indisputably an extremely important player on the discursive stage, this journal and its slightly different sister, al-Hilal, were no doubt widely read by the Egyptian elite as well as by educated Arabic speakers elsewhere, including in the far-flung Ottoman Syrian diaspora. Yet, they were distinct in their contents and outlooks (and editorial provenance) from most coeval magazines and certainly newspapers that we think may have been read by slightly different constituencies. For example, when Jacob cites articles only from these two journals to suggest that their writings on physical culture evidence a prevalent discourse, one wonders what readers of the time thought. Jacob dismisses the Syrian proprietorship of these journals as a salient fact, arguing that a “radical recontextualization of the texts . . . is necessary to illuminate the nature of the work that seemingly scientific tales of sports and fitness were made to perform”—that is, it is important to highlight what these articles did for the popularity of physical culture, on the “discursive level . . . as much as the social historical for what they were or intended to be” (p. 69). Precisely. This is why the (nigh-impossible but necessary to raise) question of readership is crucial: how did various groups of Egyptians read these journals, and along with what other journals? How did Egyptian readers’ awareness of who the editor-proprietors were shape their readings? Such questions, if empirically unanswerable, are imperative to consider carefully when we look to, as Jacob notes, “sources as sites of cultural production” (p. 69). It seems important in this case to ask whether physical culture was a theme picked up by, for instance, explicitly nationalist newspapers. (When we learn that authors of articles on physical culture tended to focus only on the positives of European culture, it is hard not to see the fact that particular Syrians ran these particular magazines as salient.)

For her part, Kholoussy defines the Arabic-language press as “middle-class,” as opposed to an “upper-class” French-language press; and yet, these divisions are not so neat, and Egyptians of all classes appeared in the Arabic press, as targets and as writers, and not always in predictable guises. Bier's discussion of images of women in the Nasir-era press would be stronger had she attended to the politics of the specific magazines she uses, their agendas, internal contradictions, and sought readerships (including school pupils). Moreover, none of these authors worked with the vernacular newspapers of the fin-de-siècle, with the provincial press or, for example, with children's magazines and school journals. It might have been beneficial for all of these discursive analyses to think about different sectors of the press as addressed to different if overlapping constituencies, with differing rhetorical aims. When azmat al-zawāj (the marriage crisis) was discussed in a women's magazine, was it the same animal as when it appeared in a nationalist daily? The advertisements for new domestic technology that Bier discusses fascinate in their envisioning of the precise paradoxes of “state feminism,” but how might differently positioned women (and men) have read them? We cannot necessarily answer these questions, but we need to remain mindful of their significance, and to draw carefully and contextually on as varied sources as possible.

As Jacob remarks, the stratagems of formal politics do not offer a comprehensive explanation of how political subjects are made. One must go to other archives and—as many scholars in many places are striving to do—think more broadly about the nature of modernity, its requirements, and the vulnerabilities it masks and creates. These ambitions animate the books reviewed here, with rich and mutually resonant results. Zannuba and her grape-bearing, coin-soliciting swindler—and the district supervisor whose name he took in vain, and the loud women outside their bar over in Bulaq—probably knew all about such things, even if they never said so or said so in ways we could never hear, and even if we must go to other sources to construct the circumstances and discourses that molded their lives and minds.