Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History

Transcription

1 Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University. Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University. Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London. The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Indian Mobilities in the West, : Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (forthcoming) By Lynn Zastoupil

2 The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) By Julia Rosenbaum and Sven Beckert, eds. Science in Practice: Law, Practices, and Institutions from the Renaissance to the Present (forthcoming) By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds. Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (forthcoming) By Jay Sherry Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming) By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds.

3 Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East YASEEN NOORANI

4 CULTURE AND HEGEMONY IN THE COLONIAL MIDDLE EAST Copyright Yaseen Noorani, Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Noorani, Yaseen, 1966 Culture and hegemony in the colonial Middle East / Yaseen Noorani. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (alk. paper) 1. Egypt Politics and government Political culture Egypt History. 3. Hegemony Egypt History. 4. Nationalism Egypt History. 5. Ideals (Philosophy) Social aspects Egypt History. 6. Egyptian literature, Modern History and criticism. 7. Middle East Politics and government. 8. Political culture Middle East History. 9. Hegemony Middle East History. 10. Middle East Colonial influence. I. Title. DT107.N dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April

5 For my parents, Ahmed and Zakia Noorani

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7 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Sovereign Virtue and the Emergence of Nationality 23 2 The Death of the Hero and the Birth of Bourgeois Class Status 49 3 Order, Agency, and the Economy of Desire: Islamic Reformism and Arab Nationalism 71 4 The Moral Transformation of Femininity and the Rise of the Public Private Distinction in Colonial Egypt Fiction, Hegemony, and Aesthetic Citizenship Excess, Rebellion, and Revolution: Egyptian Modernity in the Trilogy 171 Epilogue 209 Notes 213 Bibliography 235 Index 243

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9 Acknowledgments I am grateful to everyone who helped me to write and publish this book. It is not possible to name all those to whom I owe gratitude, but I can name some of them. My colleagues in the Department of Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and my current colleagues in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, have provided me over the years with a supportive professional and collegial environment and plenty of intellectual engagement. I am honored to have worked with them. A number of these colleagues Carole Hillenbrand, Leila Hudson, Elisabeth Kendall, Yasir Suleiman, and Kamran Talattof have discussed ideas in this book with me at great length, enabling me to articulate them more fully. Laleh Khalili and Brian Silverstein read parts of the manuscript at different stages and provided me with substantial feedback. In developing the ideas and arguments that have gone into this book, I have benefited a great deal from the presentations I have made in various venues. I am grateful to the people who made these presentations possible, to the audiences who attended them, and thankful especially to those who engaged with my work at a deeper level and provided me with comments and criticisms. I have also incorporated a number of central ideas in this book into graduate courses that I have taught at the University of Arizona. My thanks to the graduate students for the valuable discussions that we have had, and especially to those who have read parts of the manuscript. I am also grateful for the extremely useful comments and suggestions provided by other readers of the manuscript. Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure and good fortune to receive intellectual and moral support from a number of people. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jaroslav Stetkevych, who taught me how to read Arabic poetry and showed me what it means to be a scholar, and who continues to support my intellectual work. I have benefited tremendously from Suzanne Stetkevych s writings as well as her support of my work. Anton Shammas has given me his time and encouragement. Salah Hassan has read substantial parts of the manuscript and provided me with

10 x Acknowledgments extensive commentary. His intellectual input has been invaluable to me. John Chalcraft was present to critique many of the ideas in this book as they took shape and has read substantial portions of the manuscript. It was a privilege to have him as a colleague at the University of Edinburgh. Rachana Kamtekar s contribution to this book is inestimable. Aside from the spiritual sustenance of her intense and fervent engagement with ideas, her rigor as a philosopher has made me aim for a higher standard. I am thankful to her. I would also like to acknowledge Koninklijke Brill N.V. for permission to include material in Chapter 2 of this book from my previously published article, A Nation Born in Mourning: The Neoclassical Funeral Elegy in Egypt in The Journal of Arabic Literature, 28:1 (1997)