"These essays are of uniformly high quality, scholarly in tone, while addressing concerns of utmost importance for an understanding of Middle East politics. [The editors] provide an excellent overview . . . and there-after the reader is treated to historical and comparative studies that are very informative. A first-rate collection."--Foreign Affairs Contents 1. Peasants Defy Categorization (As Well as Landlords and the State), by John Waterbury 2. Changing Patterns of Peasant Protest in the Middle East, 1750-1950, by Edmund Burke III 3. Rural Unrest in the Ottoman Empire, 1830-1914, by Donald Quataert 4. Violence in Rural Syria in the 1880s and 1890s: State Centralization, Rural Integration, and the World Market, by Linda Schatkowski Schilcher 5. The Impact of Peasant Resistance on Nineteenth-Century Mount Lebanon, by Axel Havemann 6. Peasant Uprisings in Twentieth-Century Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, by Farhad Kazemi 7. War, State Economic Policies, and Resistance by Agricultural Producers in Turkey, 1939-1945, by Sevket Pamuk 8. Rural Change and Peasant Destitution: Contributing Causes to the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939, by Kenneth W. Stein 9. Colonization and Resistance: The Egyptian Peasant Rebellion, 1919, by Reinhard C. Schulze 10. The Ignorance and Inscrutability of the Egyptian Peasantry, by Nathan Brown 11. The Representation of Rural Violence in Writings on Political Development in Nasserist Egypt, by Timothy Mitchell 12. Clan and Class in Two Arab Villages, by Nicholas S. Hopkins 13. State and Agrarian Relations Before and After the Iranian Revolution, 1960-1990, by Ahmad Ashraf 14. Peasant Protest and Resistance in Rural Iranian Azerbaijan, by Fereydoun Safizadeh John Waterbury is professor of politics and international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton. Farhad Kazemi is professor of politics at New York University.

The Power of Representation traces the emergence of modern Egyptian national identity from the mid-1870s through the 1910s. During this period, a new class of Egyptian urban intellectuals—teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists—came into prominence. Adapting modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and universal citizenship, this group reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and created a national sense of "Egyptian-ness" drawn from ideas about Egypt's large peasant population. The book breaks new ground by calling into question the notion, common in historiography of the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that in the nineteenth century "secular" aptitudes and areas of competency were somehow separate from "religious" ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions Michael Gasper shows how religion became integral to modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.

Publisher Description

Joel Beinin's book offers a survey of subaltern history in the Middle East.

"Art and cultural production in Egypt during much of the last hundred years has operated against a backdrop of political crisis and confrontation. Patrick Kane focuses on the turbulent changes of the 1920s to 1960s, when polemical discourse and artistic practice developed against the entrenched and co-opted conservatism of elite and state culture. Radical forms of cultural criticism and dissonance emerged, and this legacy continues to resonate through contemporary activism and dissent. Kane charts the rise of key art movements, like the Egyptian Surrealists and the Contemporary Art Group, and explores their resistance to the Nahda paradigm of elite culture, as well as Nasser's state authoritarianism and nationalist agenda. Through the work of artists and critics like Abd al-Hadi al-Gazzar and Gamal al-Sagini, Kane provides rare insight into the Egyptian cultural and aesthetic experience, and how it has been shaped within a context of political and social conflict."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Introduction. Townspeople, company people, and textiles : a woven history -- Pt. I. Gendered experiences -- 1. Competing masculinities : docile workers, aggressive afandiyya, and the mechanization of the modern subject -- 2. Urbanizing masculinity : workers, weavers, and futuwwat in violent alliances and fluid identities -- 3. Mechanizing women : industrial workers or women adrift? -- 4. Ladies in urban times : work, property, and gender in the modernity of the poor -- Pt. II. Industrial sexuality -- 5. Sexually speaking : unveiling the harassment of women, child molestation, homosexuality, and hetero-intimacy in industrial-urban space -- 6. Striking and sex-working : living with tuberculosis, syphilis, and other monsters -- Conclusion. The anxiety of transition

A conceptually rich, historically informed study of the contested politics emerging out of decades of authoritarian neoliberalism in Egypt.

The history of capitalism in Egypt has long been synonymous with cotton cultivation and dependent development. From this perspective, the British occupation of 1882 merely sealed the country's fate as a vast plantation for European textile mills. All but obscured in such accounts, however, is Egypt's emergence as a colonial laboratory for financial investment and experimentation. Egypt's Occupation tells for the first time the story of that financial expansion and the devastating crises that followed. Aaron Jakes offers a sweeping reinterpretation of both the historical geography of capitalism in Egypt and the role of political-economic thought in the struggles that raged over the occupation. He traces the complex ramifications and the contested legacy of colonial economism, the animating theory of British imperial rule that held Egyptians to be capable of only a recognition of their own bare economic interests. Even as British officials claimed that "economic development" and the multiplication of new financial institutions would be crucial to the political legitimacy of the occupation, Egypt's early nationalists elaborated their own critical accounts of boom and bust. As Jakes shows, these Egyptian thinkers offered a set of sophisticated and troubling meditations on the deeper contradictions of capitalism and the very meaning of freedom in a capitalist world.

Egypt has changed enormously in the last half century, and nowhere more so than in the villages of the Nile Valley. Electrification, radio, and television have brought the larger world into the houses. Government schools have increased educational horizons for the children. Opportunities to work in other areas of the Arab world have been extended to peasants as well as to young artisans from the towns. Urbanization has brought many families to live in the belts of substandard housing around the major cities. But the conservative and traditional world of unremitting labor that characterizes the lives of the Egyptian peasants, or fellaheen, also survives, and nowhere has it been better described than in this classic account by Father Henri Habib Ayrout, an Egyptian Jesuit sociologist who dedicated most of his life to creating a network of free schools for rural children at a time when there were very few. First published in French in 1938, the book went through several revisions by the author before being translated and published in English in 1963. The often poetic yet factual and deeply empathetic description Father Ayrout detailed of fellah life is still reliable and still poignant; a measure by which the progress of the countryside must always be gauged.