Past Read: The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt

Gasper, Michael. The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008)
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Alongside Fahmy Ziad's work, Michael Gasper's The Power of Representation (2008) adds another dimension to studies of the formation of Egyptian nationalism in the period of roughly 1870 - 1920. While Ziad discusses the unifying elements of Egyptian popular culture through an integrated study of various media formats, Gasper focuses more on the rise of the effendi class of new urban intellectuals: a "proto-bourgeoisie" of teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists. Unlike other effendi studies, however, Gasper looks primarily at the way the effendiya spoke about and conceptualized the peasant classes. It was through the unifying discourse of peasant identity, Gasper argues, that some of the unifying elements of an Egyptian national identity were formed. He explains:

[T]he emergent middle classes created the illusion of consensus and unity around their corporate interest and political vision through representations of other marginal groups - specifically the peasants.... [They] eventually cast the peasant as the timeless repository of Egyptian-ness and then linked that repository to their own political and social aspirations. In short, the representations of peasants were essential in legitimating and lending authority to the social ambitions and the political position of what became the nationalist elite (19).

The fellaheen, formerly described as an "undifferentiated mass" and a permanent fixture in an unchanging landscape, were re-conceptualized as "repositor[ies] of collective authenticity," leading to romantic and novelistic depictions of the peasant as "literary icon inextricably bound up with the anti-British nationalist project" (21). Gasper contends that this shift was integral to the cultural production of Egyptian-ness in the "nascent public sphere," and that, thus, the effendi representations of peasants are a "key index in a changing sociocultural order" (23).

After setting the historical stage in the first chapter, Gasper's focus in the second chapter is on the way that the "urban literati" developed their own self-concept as society and nation. He focuses on literature produced for consumption in the public sphere, highlighting the idea of public-ness and a unified, collective notion of peoplehood, as intrinsic to this early drive toward national identity. Citing intellectuals such as Yaqub Sannu' and 'Abdallah Nadim, Gasper contends that Egyptian-ness was understood as more socially than geographically/physically bound.

He continues on in chapter three with an analysis of five peasant characters, arguing that the ways in which the effendiya depict and describe these peasant characters is an indication of their political vision, both of themselves and of the future of Egypt.  Chapter four proceeds with a more detailed discussion of representations of peasants in agricultural literature, arguing that these representations were "shaped by discourses of Islamic modernism." He argues that peasants and peasant life, particularly agricultural peasant life, became a primary medium through which concepts of cultural authenticity and political independence were expressed by the urban literati. Chapter five moves forward to the 1919 rebellion,
explaining that by then "Egypt was a political project with a discrete biography and a moral conscience" (32).

Still, Gasper concludes, this was not a discretely, separably secular biography; on the contrary, he insists, the notion that religion and secularism were articulated separately in early Egyptian nationalist discourse is a modern imposition. Islamic modernism, described in a vocabulary familiar to peasant and literatus alike, was a unifying and ubiquitous means of promoting national identity throughout this turbulent time of fledgling identity. Ideas drawn from Islam were imbricated, integrated, and indistinguishable from concepts of modernity, identity, and nationalism. This contention marks a point of significant disjuncture from common nationalist theories and histories that posit a more sharp distinction between the secular and the religious in early nationalist formation.