Composing Egypt: Reading, Writing, and the Emergence of a Modern Nation by Hoda A. Yousef (review)

On 7 August 1922, the illustrated Egyptian journal al-Lataʾif al-Musawwara (1915–1941) published a caricature referring to Egyptian public-school tuition fees. In it two banks of a river are shown: on one side of the river is the shore of darkness (ẓalām) and ignorance (jahl); across the river is the knowl shore of light and knowledge (ʿlm). On the shore of ignorance stand the "children of the poor" (awlād al-faqr). A boat filled with "the children of the rich" (awlād al-aghniyʾ) is preparing to leave. It is led by a representative of the principals of Egyptian schools. When asked why the poor children cannot cross over to the shore of light and knowledge by paying a modest fee, he replies that "the days of modest tuition fees are over."

This caricature cuts to the heart of the end of Hoda Yousef's journey through public literacies between the 1860s and the 1920s. Literacy was a new modern idea that represented a set of reading and writing abilities. For the late nineteenth-century Egyptian reformists, education expressed itself in the acquisition of knowledge while fighting ignorance, which was defined as the true social enemy. "Ideally, a person of (lm would embrace the 'new' sciences of the West as well as the more 'traditional' Islamic sciences of the Muslim world" (131), as the target of the reformist educational policy was to create proper citizens, workers, mothers and fathers, and nationalists for Egypt's future.

The power of Yousef's book lies in the way it demonstrates how literacy was never just about reading and writing. Yousef approaches literacy as literacies, meaning a set of skills (reading, writing, and their related practices), which were available to many. This approach allows her to explore beyond the borders of schools, or of those who had access to education. Thus, reading and writing are broken down into their own different contexts and examined in their most generic terms: "consuming and producing texts" (58). Through these prisms we are exposed to the fact that reading and writing (qaraʾa, ṭālaʿa, kataba, khaāṭabta, anshaʾa and rasama) did not always have stable meanings and were constantly defined by changing relations to each other, depending on the setting and contexts.

Another important aspect of the book is that Yousef questions the vision of literacy as a universal good, since Egypt's march toward modernity excluded from public literacies communities that did participate, through intermediaries, in this public sphere prior to the modernization reforms. As Yousef demonstrates, between the 1860s and the 1920s literate, semiliterate, and illiterate Egyptians were using literacies to access public and private spaces of exchange and expression, and to interact with various publics regarding Egypt's modern political and social life. However, whereas literacy practices were fractured and varied in their uses, a singular concept of literacy became a key measure of social progress while simultaneously dividing the population into those who could read and write formal Arabic, and those who could not. Thus, entire segments of the population (such as women, the lower classes, or those who were not conventionally literate, such as the blind) found themselves categorized as backward, deficient, uneducated, and illiterate—a problem that had to be dealt with.

Yousef draws her approach from the extensive work done by historians, ethnographers, and sociologists of reading and writing—what came to be known as literacy studies. However, in the context of Egyptian historiography, her work reflects a growing renewed interest in nahḍa studies. In recent years, and especially since the Arab Spring, there are a growing number of studies that were published focusing on the intellectual history of the Middle East in general, and the Egyptian nahḍa in particular. Along-side these academic works, a mounting interest in cultural products (such as photographs) from what was also termed Egypt's "cosmopolitan era...