Taha Hussein (1889–1973) is one of Egypt's most iconic figures. A graduate of al-Azhar, Egypt's oldest university, a civil servant and public intellectual, and ultimately Egyptian Minister of Public Instruction, Hussein was central to key social and political developments in Egypt during the parliamentary period between 1922 and 1952. Influential in the introduction of a new secular university and a burgeoning press in Egypt—and prominent in public debates over nationalism and the roles of religion, women, and education in making a modern independent nation—Hussein remains a subject of continued admiration and controversy to this day. The Last Nahdawi offers the first biography of Hussein in which his intellectual outlook and public career are taken equally seriously. Examining Hussein's actions against the backdrop of his complex relationship with the Egyptian state, the religious establishment, and the French government, Hussam R. Ahmed reveals modern Egypt's cultural influence in the Arab and Islamic world within the various structural changes and political processes of the parliamentary period. Ahmed offers both a history of modern state formation, revealing how the Egyptian state came to hold such a strong grip over culture and education—and a compelling examination of the life of the country's most renowned intellectual.

How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Historical Dictionary of Egypt, Fifth Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

This book offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which Egyptian and British novels represent the Egyptian nationalist project in its struggle against British hegemony in the aftermath of two revolutions: the 1881-82 Urabi Revolution, known for inaugurating the British occupation of Egypt, and the 1919 Revolution celebrated in Egyptian national memory as the classic Egyptian revolution par excellence. Reading the novels against the grain, the study recovers female voices that are multiply marginalized, due to their gender and/or ethnicity, whether by colonial imperial powers, the nation, their immediate regional community or, finally, by the works under discussion themselves. Using a comparative lens, the study foregrounds the ways in which the authors confirm, critique, rewrite/revise, or reject developmental narratives. Female Voices and Egyptian Independence pays particular attention to women that range from the uneducated black slave, to the uneducated rural Siwan woman with artistic talent, to the wealthy cultured Coptic housewife, to the rising late nineteenth-century British female professional, and finally to the eclipsed twentieth-century Egyptian female national intellectual, all of whom play crucial roles in the journeys of the respective male protagonists, and by extension, the Egyptian national project.

How Arabic influenced the evolution of vernacular literatures and anticolonial thought in Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference offers a new understanding of Arabic’s global position as the basis for comparing cultural and literary histories in countries separated by vast distances. By tracing controversies over the use of Arabic in three countries with distinct colonial legacies, Egypt, Indonesia, and Senegal, the book presents a new approach to the study of postcolonial literatures, anticolonial nationalisms, and the global circulation of pluralist ideas. Annette Damayanti Lienau presents the largely untold story of how Arabic, often understood in Africa and Asia as a language of Islamic ritual and precolonial commerce, assumed a transregional role as an anticolonial literary medium in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining how major writers and intellectuals across several generations grappled with the cultural asymmetries imposed by imperial Europe, Lienau shows that Arabic—as a cosmopolitan, interethnic, and interreligious language—complicated debates over questions of indigeneity, religious pluralism, counter-imperial nationalisms, and emerging nation-states. Unearthing parallels from West Africa to Southeast Asia, Sacred Language, Vernacular Difference argues that debates comparing the status of Arabic to other languages challenged not only Eurocentric but Arabocentric forms of ethnolinguistic and racial prejudice in both local and global terms.

In this book, Robert K. Beshara applies decolonial film theory to an analysis of Youssef Chahine's (1997) Al-Masir (Destiny). Transmodern Cinema and Decolonial Film Theory is the first book on decolonial film theory, which unpacks key concepts in decoloniality and decolonial aesthetics. Decolonial film theory is then applied to Youssef Chahine's (1997) historical drama al-Ma?ir in an effort to juxtapose the Egyptian filmmaker (Chahine) and his decolonial cinema to the Andalusian polymath (Ibn Rushd) and his Islamic philosophy.

This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their constitution and production, the dynamics of their translatability, the politics of their use, the struggle over their status of truth, and the conditions that make secular narration so central to our existence. The book ranges from a medieval narrative of the secular to a modern narrative, to anthropological secularism and religious experiences, to narratives of translation produced by what the author calls translation ideology, to historical narratives regulated by archival power and state secrecy, to narratives of violence, to narratives of recollection, as well as narratives of silence. Particular attention is paid to postcolonial French contemporary cultures and politics. Transdisciplinary approaches are deployed to not only reframe old questions in new ways but also posit new questions out of old ones. In doing so, this innovative work opens up fresh discursive possibilities that cross traditional disciplines. It will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, history, and beyond.

The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. This book offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda, from 1860 to 1915. Drawing on rare Arabic publications, it challenges historiography that focuses on Western male actors. Instead it shows that Syrian Protestant women and men were agents of their own history who sought the salvation of Syria while adapting and challenging missionary teachings. These pioneers established a critical link between evangelical religiosity and the socio-cultural currents of the Nahda, making possible the literary and educational achievements of the American Syrian Mission and transforming Syrian society in ways that still endure today.

Arab debates about the critical relationship between religion and modernity began in the early nineteenth century. Such debates are now integral to the struggle for power between a variety of political groups and their opponents, and are vital to understanding the modern Middle East. This unique volume introduces writings of Arab Christian and Muslim revisionist and radical "free thinkers" who have tried to redefine the relationship. It challenges the deeply entrenched idea that the contemporary Islamic world has been impermeable to a critique of religious ideas and practices. Authors from the nineteenth century to the present are included. Some are avowed believers, even if they adopt positions many might regard as heretical; others are openly agnostic and atheistic. Despite their differences, all have been united in disputing the notion that life should conform exclusively to a system of values and laws based upon the Qur'an or the Bible, or, in some cases less radically, upon these as they were widely understood before the onset of modernity. They have also rejected many of the standard religious 'liberal' assumptions that are regularly invoked against traditionalism. The book's originality lies in its evaluation of the social and cultural impact of these thinkers.