Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805-1923

5. Table Talk: The Home Economics of Nationhood

From the 1870s onward discussions of the home and the family and their relationship to politics were not limited to state-produced literature. In an active, popular, and privately funded press, a generation of educated Egyptians, both Ottoman-Egyptian and Arabophone, articulated sentiments about themselves and politics that echoed state-sponsored projects. EVendi debates over what it meant to be Egyptian were full of references to domestic and marital habits. Likewise, their critiques of Egyptian politics reXected the idea that Egypt’s advancement toward constitutional government could be measured by the behavior of its elite classes. After the British occupation of 1882 and the subsequent imprisonment or exile of many prominent publishers and journalists, the native press went dormant for a decade. But in the years following TawWq’s death in 1892 and the ascension of his son `Abbas Hilmy II (r. 1892–1914) to the throne, political journalism reemerged and Xourished. Unlike TawWq, `Abbas was openly against the occupation and encouraged eVendi journalists to use the press to voice their opposition to the British. From the early 1890s, the tendency to couch discussions of nationalism and politics in domestic terms became more common as elite Egyptians used the press to counter British claims about the state of their homes, families, and, hence, their body politic. Until 1907, when the British allowed Egyptians to form political parties, the press alone provided the eVendiyya with an arena for expressing nationalist sentiment and for shaping political platforms. The pages of privately printed books and periodicals from the early 1890s onward thus voiced the aspirations of an C h a p t e r 5 Table Talk The Home Economics of Nationhood 132 increasingly articulate and frustrated generation of Egyptians in discussions that often appeared to be more about housekeeping than political reform. By the eve of World War I, at which point 144 locally produced journals played a substantial role in shaping public opinion, Egyptians of all classes had become exposed to the family politics of challenging British rule.1 Cultivation, Domestication, and Critique: The 1870s and the Spread of Gendered Nationalism From the last years of Ismàil’s reign onward, the press was increasingly the arena in which students and graduates of the state’s civil schools articulated their desires and demands.2 From the mid-1870s onward Egypt could claim a private press that concerned itself with politics, making it accessible to ordinary Egyptians. Ismàil himself was enamored of the periodical press and saw it as symbolic of Europe’s cultural and political progress. His willingness to allow private Egyptians to fund and print their own newspapers, coupled with substantial increases over the course of the 1860s and 1870s in the number of literate Egyptians,led to an astonishing boom in the late 1870s in the number of privately printed books, Egyptian newspapers, and Egyptians who could read them. Between the early 1860s and the early 1880s, the press went from a readership of zero to tens of thousands.3 Despite scant circulation statistics for the 1870s and 1880s, many have estimated that some periodicals circulated thousands of copies. Acknowledging individual copies that circulated among family members, “readership” estimates climb even higher.4 The nascent press was often censored or shut down and its editors were frequently exiled from the last days of Ismàil’s rule through the early 1890s. Nonetheless, a new relationship evolved between the embattled Egyptian government and a class of Egyptians struggling to deWne themselves as well as their relationship to local and international politics. Ismàil’s enthusiasm for the press (he started his own propaganda organ in 1866, Wadi al-Nil [The Valley of the Nile]), favorable market forces, and an increasingly enthusiastic reading audience led to the emergence of a whole host of privately funded periodicals from the late 1860s onward, including al-Ahram (The pyramids)—later to be one of Egypt’s most widely read newspapers—which began circulation in August of 1876. Christian editors such as Salim al-Naqqash (al-`Asr al-Jadid [The new era], founded in 1880; and al-Mahrusa (1880) [The divinely proTABLE TALK 133 tected]) and Mikha’il `abd al-Sayyid (al-Watan [The nation], 1877) took advantage of the press boom to join Muslims `Abdullah Nadim (al-Tankit wal-Tabkit [Mockery and reproach], 1881) and Hasan al-Shamsi (al-MuWd [The informer], 1881)—among others—in discussing local and international events...