Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics

Conclusion

Conclusion This book opens with the unveiling of the monumental version of Mahmud Mukhtar’s The Awakening of Egypt. Even though Mukhtar’s sculpture depicts a peasant girl unveiling, contemporary unveiled Egyptian women could not attend the ceremony, suggesting that they were favored as symbols rather than as political actors, and seemingly confirming that the more women appeared in visual culture as representations of the nation, the less they appeared in the public arena. As I have sought to show, however, the relationship of the gendering of the nation to women nationalists was more complex—as was the story of The Awakening of Egypt. Many women were attracted to the sculpture and appreciated the sculptor. Labiba Ahmad consciously selected this image when it was still a model and not yet a public monument (or anathema to Islamists) and ran a picture of it on the cover of her journal for over a decade. Safiyya Zaghlul visited Mukhtar in his atelier, and Huda Sha‘rawi gave funds to open a museum to showcase his work. In spite of their exclusion from the public ceremony, women appropriated the monument for their own use and celebrated the artist. Over time, The Awakening of Egypt became a symbol of women’s rights as well as of Egyptian nationalism.1 Part 1 of this study looked at images of the nation. It started with the ethnic origins of the nation, mapping inclusions and exclusions in the national family. The end of slavery, it was argued, contributed to the unraveling of the large multi-ethnic households of the Ottoman-Egyptian elite in the nineteenth century. This generated a crisis that led to 215 debates about the family and paved the way for a nationalist rhetoric that deployed familial terms and concepts. Nationalists used maternal, fraternal, and paternal rhetoric to render the collective as a family, and characterized the particular sort of family they had in mind as a bourgeois one. This model was presented as the best alternative for transformed elite families and the most suitable one for newly emerging middle-class families in a modern, capitalist-oriented nation-state. Nationalists appropriated the concept of family honor, elevating it to the national plane to produce a discourse of national honor. The nation not only had to defend and avenge honor, but honor defined the collective and was at the core of its identity. Those who shared honor belonged to the community; those who did not could be excluded. The notion of national honor, never static, was used for different purposes by various groups, who all claimed to be protecting it. Women writers tried to steer the concept of honor away from female purity, but never challenged the concept of honor itself, or making women its repositories. Part 1 then turned from family discourses and their sociopolitical contexts to visual culture, specifically iconography and photography. Egypt came to be depicted as a woman in nationalist iconography, whether it took the form of cartoons, paintings, monuments, or postage stamps. Rather than one model, multiple images of “Egypt” or the “Egyptian nation” emerged. These images reflected the social situation of Egyptian women and the obstacles that had to be overcome in depicting the nation as a woman when real women still veiled themselves. Initially, pharaonic and peasant women proved most viable as representations . In the early 1920s, and under the inspiration of women’s new public visibility, the “new woman” became the model. That she was fair-skinned and modestly cloaked in contrast to a dark, sexualized Sudan epitomized the asymmetry of the relationship between Egypt and the Sudan, as well as the persistence of Ottoman influence and ideals in Egypt. Cartoonists occasionally took individual women activists such as Safiyya Zaghlul or Fatima al-Yusuf as models for Egypt. They were also inspired by women’s political actions and new activities in sketching settings for the nation. Photography helped to create and disseminate nationalist iconography and the sense of the nation as a family. Over the years, the illustrated press disseminated thousands of pictures of national leaders, symbols, and rituals. The collage of photographic images showed an active, modern nation on the move. Photography became a critical part of visual culture , crucial to documenting events and packaging them for public 216 Conclusion consumption. Sharing images helped incorporate the viewer into the national community, while at the same time the images showed the proper gendering of public space...