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Ziad Fahmy. Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Paperback $24.95
Reviewed by Dina Jadallah
Ziad Fahmy 's Ordinary Egyptians is a lively, engaging, well-researched, sometimes penetratingly humorous, and valuable addition to the new historiography that aims to "write the people" into nationalist meta-historical narratives. Fahmy combines Mikhail Bakhtin's semiotic and carnivalesque approach with James C. Scott's "weapons of the weak" socio-economic oppositional method. This technique successfully details how non-elite Egyptians engaged with, defined, cultural production in Cairene 'amiyya (colloquial dialect). Throughout, Fahmy relies on an impressive and varied collection of primary sources.
One of Fahmy 's central arguments is that 'amiyya-based capitalist culture became politicized and increasingly nationalist in mass practice. He sets out to "trace how Egyptians resisted elite, and then British, domination from the 1870s until the eve of the 1919 Revolution by analyzing the often hidden transcripts of newspapers, recorded songs, jokes, satire, vernacular poetry, and plays" (19). This progression involved the politicization of an increasingly literate middle class and the less literate urban masses into the "collective camaraderie" that is essential for the development of a "national imagined community." In Egypt, this occurred in the context of multiple processes of political centralization, public education, and urbanization which produced a new effendiyya class. They also expanded the presence and strength of the state vis-à-vis "ordinary" people. Furthermore, the growth of print culture and radio both reflected and heightened the effect of an urban culture that fostered, according to Fahmy, a new national identity where the masses expressed their voice.
Fahmy effectively covers most of the important leading figures of mass cultural production. Included among those are journalists, writers, playwrights, and satirists like Ya'qub Sannu', Najib al-Rihani, 'Ali al-Kassar, Badi'Khayri, Sayyid Darwish. Popular overt and covert critiques, as well as subversive proverbs, songs, cartoons, plays, and articles are situated within their respective socio-political conceptual and spatial contexts (e.g., #a/*aw//coffeehouses). The latter allowed for dialogical interaction and articulation among multiple sectors of Egyptian society.
Despite the book's notable strengths in providing "ordinary" people-focused details as well as in its historical presentation of cultural changes, it is weaker in proving the over-arching arguments. Specifically, Fahmy's narrative juxtaposes colloquial Cairene against classical fusha, privileging the former in...