Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In his "Note about the Term Effendiyya in the History of the Middle East" (International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 [2009]: 535-39), Michael Eppel clarifies his own use of effendiyya in an article he wrote for IJMES in 1998.1 In the 1998 article, Eppel emphasized the value of studying the effendiyya, or what he called the "Westernized middle stratum," and its dominance in political life to better understand Hashimite Iraq (1921-58). Members of this group, he argued, benefited from modern education and donned Western dress. They were young state employees (officials, teachers, health workers, engineers, and, later, military officers) who adopted Arab nationalism and Pan-Arab ideology as a means to cope with their socioeconomic and political discontent. From the 1930s, Eppel noted, the effendiyya created the radical political atmosphere that lent backing to the "militant-authoritarian trends" that led to the pro-German Rashid Ali coup and the war with Britain in 1941. After World War II, they joined with other nationalist forces to lead the 1948 Wathba (uprising) against prolonging the Anglo-Iraqi treaty. In 1958, the army officers among them overthrew the monarchy. This "middle stratum" differed from the Western concept of the "new middle class," and the indigenous Arabic term effendiyya, as employed by Eppel, endeavored to grasp the essence of this difference. It reflected a common experience that was the result of its members' similar education, culture, and concerns rather than their economic status, social origins, and type of employment.
Scholars reacted differently to Eppel's argument, and a debate ensued concerning the appropriateness of the term and the delineation of the young, discontented social group to which it refers. Peter Sluglett granted that because the term was widely used in correspondence by British diplomatic representatives in various part of the Middle East, it had some utility in the sense of "new middle class." He utterly rejected, however, the characterization of the Iraqi "middle strata" as overwhelmingly Pan-Arab in outlook. Pan-Arab ideology, with its generally Sunni Arab vision of the Arabo-Islamic world, was less appealing to the Shia, who comprised more than half of Iraq's population, and the Kurds, who were at least one-fifth. It was rather Iraqi nationalism, with its emphasis on Iraqi...