Table Of ContentP S C I H
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Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University.
Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London.
The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary
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ing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in
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P P M:
Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment
By Shompa Lahiri
The Shelley–Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe
By Paul Stock
Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East
By Yaseen Noorani
Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context
By Scott Breuninger
The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral and Manual of Practice
By Mark Gamsa
Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (forthcoming)
By Lynn Zastoupil
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The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
(forthcoming)
By Julia Rosenbaum and Sven Beckert, eds.
Science in Practice: Law, Practices, and Institutions from the Renaissance to the Present
(forthcoming)
By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds.
Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (forthcoming)
By Jay Sherry
Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming)
By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds.
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Culture and Hegemony in
the Colonial Middle East
YASEEN NOORANI
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CULTURE AND HEGEMONY IN THE COLONIAL MIDDLE EAST
Copyright © Yaseen Noorani, 2010.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–62319–4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Noorani, Yaseen, 1966–
Culture and hegemony in the colonial Middle East / Yaseen Noorani.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–62319–4 (alk. paper)
1. Egypt—Politics and government—1882–1952.
2. Political culture—Egypt—History. 3. Hegemony—Egypt—History.
4. Nationalism—Egypt—History. 5. Ideals (Philosophy)—Social
aspects—Egypt—History. 6. Egyptian literature, Modern—History
and criticism. 7. Middle East—Politics and government. 8. Political
culture—Middle East—History. 9. Hegemony—Middle East—
History. 10. Middle East—Colonial infl uence. I. Title.
DT107.N66 2010
962(cid:1).04—dc22 2009039958
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: April 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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For my parents, Ahmed and Zakia Noorani
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 S overeign Virtue and the Emergence of Nationality 23
2 The Death of the Hero and the Birth of
Bourgeois Class Status 49
3 O rder, Agency, and the Economy of Desire: Islamic
Reformism and Arab Nationalism 71
4 The Moral Transformation of Femininity and the Rise of
the Public–Private Distinction in Colonial Egypt 107
5 Fiction, Hegemony, and Aesthetic Citizenship 149
6 E xcess, Rebellion, and Revolution: Egyptian Modernity in
the Trilogy 171
Epilogue 209
Notes 213
Bibliography 235
Index 243
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to everyone who helped me to write and publish this book. It
is not possible to name all those to whom I owe gratitude, but I can name
some of them. My colleagues in the Department of Islamic and Middle
East Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and my current colleagues in
the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, have
provided me over the years with a supportive professional and collegial
environment and plenty of intellectual engagement. I am honored to have
worked with them. A number of these colleagues—Carole Hillenbrand,
Leila Hudson, Elisabeth Kendall, Yasir Suleiman, and Kamran Talattof—
have discussed ideas in this book with me at great length, enabling me to
articulate them more fully. Laleh Khalili and Brian Silverstein read parts
of the manuscript at different stages and provided me with substantial
feedback. In developing the ideas and arguments that have gone into this
book, I have benefited a great deal from the presentations I have made in
various venues. I am grateful to the people who made these presentations
possible, to the audiences who attended them, and thankful especially to
those who engaged with my work at a deeper level and provided me with
comments and criticisms. I have also incorporated a number of central
ideas in this book into graduate courses that I have taught at the University
of Arizona. My thanks to the graduate students for the valuable discus-
sions that we have had, and especially to those who have read parts of
the manuscript. I am also grateful for the extremely useful comments and
s uggestions provided by other readers of the manuscript.
Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure and good fortune to
receive intellectual and moral support from a number of people. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to Jaroslav Stetkevych, who taught me how to
read Arabic poetry and showed me what it means to be a scholar, and
who continues to support my intellectual work. I have benefited tremen-
dously from Suzanne Stetkevych’s writings as well as her support of my
work. Anton Shammas has given me his time and encouragement. Salah
Hassan has read substantial parts of the manuscript and provided me with
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