Roger Owen

Meaningful mediums is a study of the political economy of writing in the first Ottoman city to develop a sustained urban print culture. Cairo’s writing economy comprised the longstanding manuscript industry, the governmental printing industry from the 1820s, and the for-profit private press printing industry from the 1850s. I investigate these industries’ functions, interactions, and reputations to explore why Cairene printing developed and how contemporaries ascribed meaning to textual production during this period of flux.

This study relies on the texts themselves to generate the history of their production. I aggregate the names, dates, and other information contained within their openings, contents, and colophons to chart the work of their producers and vendors for the first time. I then contextualize this information through contemporary iconographic and descriptive depictions of Cairene texts. My sources are drawn from libraries and private collections in America, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France. They include formal and ephemeral manuscripts and printings.

Against narratives that invoke printing as a catalyst for modernity, I argue that printing was simply a tool. Its adoption increased because it was useful for different actors like the state, private entrepreneurs, and scholars who employed it to respond to specific political, economic, and intellectual needs. My argument reverses the causality of modernization narratives, in that I establish that printing was the result of practical demands instead of the origin of new demands. As a tool, printing was deployed by Cairenes flexibly. Some used it to appropriate western norms, including the idea that printing is a civilizing force. Others used it to enact manuscript tradition.

The history of this process is important to social practices, like the creation of new professions. But it is also important to historical legacy. Nationalism, Enlightenment, and civil society are assigned their origins and proof in Cairene printings from the 1870s and 1880s. Yet this narrative of the Middle East’s generic print modernity draws from the expectation for printings to engender public discourse and galvanize society, instead of from the words that these texts actually contain or an understanding of who made and consumed them and why. To counter the prevailing idea that printing is fixed and universal in its value and effects, Meaningful mediums examines printing as both a social and economic practice, and itself a space for ideas. It therefore emphasizes the significance of human agency, local context, constraints, and continuity during a period of momentous technological, textual, and cultural change.

In conclusion, this study documents Cairenes’ incorporation of printing into their political economy of writing and revises the widely held notion that this process was an agent of social change, a marker of modernity and colonial restructuring, and a foreign disruptor of local textual tradition.

How does the condition of statelessness, which is usually thought of as a political problem, affect the economic and monetary lives of ordinary people?

The deposition of Imam Muhammad al-Badr in September 1962 was the culmination of a Yemeni nationalist movement that began in the 1940s with numerous failed attempts to overthrow the traditional religious legal order. Prior to 1962, both the USSR and Egypt had been cultivating alliances with al-Badr in an effort to secure their strategic interests in South Arabia. In the days following the 1962 coup d'état, Abdullah Sallal and his cohort of Yemeni officers established a republic and concealed the fate of al-Badr who had survived an assault on his Sana'a palace and whose supporters had already begun organizing a tribal coalition against the republic. A desperate appeal by Yemeni republicans brought the first Egyptian troops to Yemen. Saudi Arabia, pressured by Egyptian troops, border tribal considerations and earlier treaties with the Yemeni Imamate, supported the Imam's royalist opposition. The battleground between Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and al-Badr was transformed into an arena for international conflict and diplomacy. The UN mission to Yemen, while portrayed as a symbol of failed and underfunded global peacekeeping at the time, was in fact instrumental in establishing the basis for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Bruce Condé, an American philatelist, brought global attention to the royalist-republican struggle to control the Yemeni postal system. The last remnants of the British Middle East Empire fought with Nasser to maintain a mutually declining level of influence in the region. Israeli intelligence and air force aided royalist forces and served witness to the Egyptian use of chemical weapons, a factor that would impact decision-making prior to the 1967 War. Despite concurrent Cold War tensions, Americans and Soviets appeared on the same side of the Yemeni conflict and acted mutually to confine Nasser to the borders of South Arabia. This internationalized conflict was a pivotal event in Middle East history as it oversaw the formation of a modern Yemeni state, the fall of Egyptian and British regional influence, another Arab-Israeli war, Saudi dominance of the Arabian Peninsula, and shifting power alliances in the Middle East.

I investigate the social history of Egypt under British imperial occupation through the lens of morality in order to understand the contestation of cultural change and authority under empire. Points of cultural cleavage between European and local inhabitants in British-occupied Cairo included two customs, gambling and the consumption of intoxicants, which elicited sustained and dynamic reactions from observers of Egyptian society on the local and international level. I show that the presence of alcohol and gambling in public spaces in Cairo contributed directly to the politicization and selective criminalization of public morality. However, the meanings attributed to social practices relating to leisure were continually under negotiation and challenge as state authorities, British liberals, Egyptian reformers and religious leaders, foreign missionaries, and representatives of international temperance movements vied to impose their visions of morality upon Egyptian society.

In this dissertation, I use methodological approaches from studies of urbanism, oil modernity, nation building, and identity formation to analyze the relationships between urban change, oil, state integration, and the politicization of group identities in the multiethnic Iraqi city of Kirkuk from 1918 to 1968. I argue that, in early to mid-twentieth-century Kirkuk, the oil industry, Baghdad’s policies, and the British neocolonial presence interacted with local conditions to produce the crystallization of ethnic group identities within a nascent domain of local politics. I find that at the time of the formation of the Iraqi state in the early 1920s, group identities in Kirkuk were fluid and local politics did not align clearly with ethnicities or other self-identities. Instead, they were largely subsumed under relations between more powerful external entities. Kirkukis’ political loyalties were based on which entity best served their interests—or, as was often the case, were positioned against a side based on its perceived hostility to their concerns. These political dynamics began to shift with Kirkuk’s incorporation into Baghdad’s domain, the beginnings of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s exploration just northwest of urban Kirkuk, and the end of British mandate rule. The Iraqi central government’s integration efforts exacerbated fault lines between emergent Kurdish, Turkmen, and Arab ethnic communities at a time when the city’s population and its urban fabric were growing rapidly. The oil industry, which provided the livelihood for a substantial percentage of Kirkuk’s population, became the focus of Communist-led labor organization. Consequently, the Iraqi government, the British government, and the oil company attempted to counter Communist influence through urban development schemes. The combination of urban growth and the expansion of discursive activities stimulated the emergence of a distinct civic identity and an accompanying arena of local politics in which Kirkuk’s ethnic communities were deeply invested. After the destabilizing effects of the Iraqi revolution in 1958, a cycle of intercommunal violence began in Kirkuk along increasingly apparent ethnic lines. Escalating conflict between Baghdad and the Kurdish movement for control of Kirkuk after 1958 fueled these tensions further. The reverberations of the revolution’s aftermath are still evident today.

This dissertation examines the reception of European law in Egypt, the origins of Egyptian movements to revive Islamic law, and foundations of transformations in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. The dissertation has two principal arguments. First, it maintains that an understanding of present-day Islamic law, both theoretical and applied, requires an understanding of developments that occurred in Egyptian legal thought and education between 1875 and 1960. Second, the dissertation demonstrates how the reception of European law in Egypt impacted the country's intellectual culture, its legal-educational institutions, the alignment patterns of its law scholars, and Islamic legal thought between 1875 and 1960. Although the influence of European law and legal thought only partially explains the transformations that took place in Islamic law and legal thought in Egypt, the dissertation argues nonetheless that European influence laid foundations for certain transformations that occurred. Section 1 narrates the evolution of the popular Egyptian desire to revive Islamic law in the face of European legal reception. Section 2 argues that scholars in Europe created fields of knowledge that influenced Egyptian scholars' approaches to secular and Islamic law. Section 3 narrates the intellectual and curricular history of Egypt's law faculties. The section focuses on the Cairo University Law Faculty. Section 4 examines a transformational treatise in Islamic obligations and contract doctrine, Chafik Chehata's Essai d'une théorie générale de l'obligation en droit musulman (1936). The treatise is analyzed as an example of how European ideas inspired the formation of "general theory" writing in Egyptian-Islamic legal thought.

This dissertation seeks to reinsert the port city of Aden into the postwar world of the rising Cold War, escalating decolonization, and growing global interconnectivity. As the world's second largest port during the 1950s, Aden is a significant venue for historical research and an under-appreciated link of the imperial and “Western” chain of port cities that circled the globe after the Second World War. Rather than retreating from “East of Suez” the British Empire re-imagined their control of Aden as a modern Cold War project inline with both enlightened imperialism and Free World interests. The city's decolonization is therefore a paradigmatic case of British postwar efforts to retain some of their more valuable and functional colonies in a bipolar world system. Aden's rise and fall also provides insight into novel forms of anti-imperial resistance that surfaced between the onset of Aden's formal colonization in 1937 and the rapid expansion of the city's postwar economy, best symbolized by the opening of the Little Aden Oil Refinery in 1954. During this time span organized labor would play the central part in resisting Aden's uncontrolled expansion as well as the determined British attempt to surgically remove Aden from the Arab political space and transform it instead into a global port city. The imperial administration attempted to do so by enhancing the city's cosmopolitan ethnic makeup and recasting Aden as an important node of the burgeoning Anglo-American alliance. Though both efforts were successful to a certain degree, the imperial administration simultaneously neglected several longstanding socioeconomic issues that plagued Aden's economy: namely, immigration, housing and cost of living. These problems gradually leached into the political debates concerning Aden's future and gradually drove Aden's labor movement and anti-imperial body politic towards extremism and rejectionism. Labor-Empire actions and reactions fulminated in a pivotal turning point of its postwar development in 1960. This moment—the removal of the right to strike—neatly illustrates how later anti-imperial movements engaged with different dialogues, networks and international spaces in order to outflank their imperial opponents and force them to adopt new and unprecedented strategies to counter and neutralize these new threats.

As a student of history, when one studies either Middle Eastern history or diplomatic/international history after the WWII, it is almost impossible to avoid coming across terms such as the Bandung Conference of 1955, the Suez crisis of 1956, the Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism, Nehru and Nasser, for instance. Student often learn how the Bandung Conference marked the watershed in the history of the so-called Third World countries. How those countries attempted to balance themselves between the two super powers representing completely different political ideologies in the Cold War. Then the Suez crisis of 1956 and how Nasser came out of the crisis as a hero in a war many people saw as an attempt of the British and the French, with the help of the Israelis, to resurrect the imperialism in Egypt.

One often learns about those historical moments. Yet the relations between Egypt and India, which were important players in the international arena, are not well studied and did not receive high priority. Many literatures in the field of foreign relations, foreign policies and foreign affairs of Egypt and India are overwhelmingly about Egypt or India with the U.S. Europe or with their neighbors, or in the region in which the two countries are located. One wonders what had happened to the cordial relationships between Egypt and India after the Bandung conference and Suez crisis when their relations reached its zenith. How did the two countries develop and nurture their relations is not well researched.

My thesis revolves around a number of core historical questions. What had become of the once strong and vigorous relations between Egypt and India? What triggered the wane in cordial relations between Egypt and India since 1956? By looking how the two countries reacted and reciprocated each other in a number of political crises, such as the Kashmir issue, the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, one can see the roots of the discord which led to the decline of their relations in 1960s. On the other hand, what were the cultural exchanges between the two countries and what were the results of such exchanges? How cultural activities across borders are vital to the fostering and strengthening of relations among nations.

This dissertation is a study of two episodes of mass mortality, in Marseilles during 1720–21, and in Aleppo, Syria, during 1761–62. Linked by trade ties, missionary outreach, and diplomatic contacts, the two cities were a microcosm of eighteenth-century relations across the Mediterranean. In these relations the diagnosis of bubonic plague was a significant factor. I argue in my dissertation that despite the contemporary belief that the Levant was a source of plague, the connection between plague epidemics in Aleppo and in southern France was almost certainly literary rather than biological, except in the sense that they both reflected sickness and death from diseases prevalent in the Mediterranean basin.

For centuries, bubonic plague has been the very emblem of epidemic disease. The mass mortality associated with it led to major historical shifts. But what was the plague? In my dissertation I argue that during the early-modern period, diagnosis of plague, and the quarantine institutions which oversaw it, arose from fierce struggles for economic, political and social dominance. They bisected the Mediterranean and contributed substantially to the present-day conceptual divide between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Rather than indicating the presence of a bacterium, I argue that reference to plague in early-modern sources are more plausibly understood as a legal category being transformed by the nation-state. The aversion of Ottoman officials to quarantine until the mid-1800s was not ‘fatalism,’ but rather a desire to protect their economic and political interests.

Diagnoses of plague that mandated quarantine were the product of a long documentary chain involving communication across several thousand miles and translation between many languages and genres. In the complex interaction between biological reality and its representations, there was ample room not only for misunderstanding, but also for deliberate distortion. And yet, diagnostic institutions like quarantine and the sanitary cordon had the power not just to specify death's official meaning, but potentially to change the rate at which it actually occurred. My dissertation therefore emphasizes the ecology of plague in Mediterranean cities, meaning not only the natural setting, but also social, economic and political relations, and the literature that provided their vocabulary.

This dissertation examines the success and survival of third-generation family firms in the Gulf States. A framework derived from a comprehensive review of the family business literature identified eleven factors necessary to the long-term survival of family firms. This framework was expanded to include five factors drawn from an analysis of the Gulf business history as it evolved from the late nineteenth century and as it responded to the oil economy from the mid-twentieth century forward.

To explore this topic thoroughly, this research developed four case studies, through personal interviews, public and private records, and archival materials. Three of the family firms, Jaidah, Zamil, and Sultan (W. J. Towell), survived to the third generation while one firm, Darwish, was divided among its three sibling founders. The framework was applied to each of the four cases to ascertain the extent to which factors affected the continuity of the firms studied.

This research found that the relevancy of the family business literature factors was often shaped by local traditions. Analyzing these firms from this dual vantage identified three additional factors—creation of venues, transferring ownership to companies, and exit funds—that can facilitate in overcoming the complexities manifested as family firms progress to later stages.

Secularism, defined simply as the full neutrality of the state in its relations with citizens, has failed to be instituted comprehensively in Lebanon, the sole Arab state whose constitution as of 1926 does not establish an official religion of state or jurisdiction. A multi-communal country par excellence, the modern Republic of Lebanon has narrowly escaped the fate of partition India, Palestine or the former Jugoslavia suffered as a result of inter-communal contest.

This dissertation traces the evolution of secular and sectarian forms of government in Lebanon from pre-modern times until the present day. The genealogy of secularism is examined as a discursive ideology, as a byproduct of socio-economic development and as an embodiment of non-discriminatory political, legal, and institutional practice. The thesis proposes that Levantine history exhibited trends towards secular nationalism as early as the sixteenth century, while presenting multiple reasons why secularism was not ratified to a greater degree by the end of the twentieth.

Thematically, the thesis moves from a broad, sweeping overview of the historical contours secularism developed on a global and regional plane to individual case studies illustrating the predicament of secularism in contemporary Lebanon. The sequence of chapters relates secularism to (proto-) nationalism, (Bonapartist) republicanism, consociationalism, capitalism, civic school curricula in history and religion, a deconfessionalized body of personal status laws and Lebanon's contemporary religious and political discourse.

The thesis argues that the political transformations Lebanon passed through, and the difficulties secularism has encountered, were different in form, but not altogether in kind, from those attendant on other countries. Comparable multi-communal cases such as the Swiss analogue are adduced as edifying examples which may relativize the preconception of exceptionalism.

Gaining a deeper understanding of Lebanon's long engagement with confessional diversity may help account for the intensity of periodic communal conflict while explaining why secularism was recognized from early on as all the more vital and pragmatic necessity for the survival of a model of coexistence. The apparent paradox posed by Lebanon is that of a country which has served at once as the "cradle and grave" ("mahd wa lahd") of Arab secularism.

In 1910, al-Mahdi al-Wazzani, a distinguished Maliki mufti of Fez, published an extensive compilation of Maliki fatwas and named it the New Mi'yar (al-Mi'yar al-jadid, or the New Standard Measure). This dissertation investigates the New Mi'yar as a mufti's interpretation of his society. Al-Wazzani thought with his fatwas, and I unpack the way he discursively constructed his world and conveyed it in his fatwa compilation. The family serves as a unit of analysis and a conceptual framework, and the New Mi'yar provides the arena for exploring al-Wazzani's interpretation of the Fasi family. This study, informed by discourse analysis and cultural anthropology, contributes another strategy for reading fatwa literature by offering a methodology for the investigation of fatwas as cultural texts. My point of departure is that the juridical opinion, even in its most specialized version, is a cultural phenomenon that takes place within a certain human culture and projects its internal logic. With this in mind, I approach al-Wazzani's New Mi'yar as an embodiment of a specific society as seen through the eyes of one mufti.

Taken together, chapters one and two present a portrait of al-Mahdi al-Wazzani and his New Mi'yar. Chapter one is a detailed account of al-Wazzani's biography. In chapter two, I investigate the New Mi'yar —that is, the historical circumstances of its production, and its nature and characteristics. Chapters three and four focus on al-Wazzani's juristic interpretation of the family in late nineteenth-century Fez. These chapters are particularly concerned with the relationship between property and family. Chapter three is an exploration of the way al-Wazzani conceptualized the association between religious endowments and the family. Chapter four examines al-Wazzani's interpretation of women's relationships to their maintenance. These chapters offer a sense of al-Wazzani's understanding of the patriarchal-patrilineal familial order. I argue that al-Wazzani understood the Fasi family as a social unit anchored in patrilineal ideology of kinship and patriarchal ideals and norms as expressed in shari'a law. However, this family form as constructed by al-Wazzani was a highly complicated unit, marked by contradictions and conflicts. Above all it was a dynamic set of relationships between individuals and was the product of negotiation and construction.

This dissertation examines the lives of Tunisian veterans who fought for the French during the First and Second World Wars. My thesis breaks new ground in that it attempts to place the story of Tunisian veterans in the wider global context of the World Wars and decolonization. Earlier studies of Tunisian veterans, while comprehensive in some aspects, limit their inquiry to a specifically Tunisian context. My research into recently-released French archives documenting Tunisian veterans in the 1950s also contributes to the importance of my thesis. Whereas most Tunisian historians have considered the veterans as "collaborators" with the French, my research indicates that such generalizations simply do not describe the complex relationship between the veterans and French colonial rule. Rather, I argue that veterans participated in and, in some cases, seem to have organized armed resistance to French rule. In contrast to similar research on African veterans from French Equatorial Africa (AOF), my research on North African veterans reveals that the political roles open to Tunisian veterans in the post-independence period were few and far between, unlike the situation in the Ivory Coast or Mali. Finally, my limited interviews with Tunisian veterans and my use of interviews transcribed by other Tunisian scholars provide unique insights as to how veterans themselves interpreted the wartime and post-war environment.

The introduction functions as an historiographical overview positioning Tunisian veterans within the wider context of veterans' movements in France, North Africa, and elsewhere. Specifically, I pose the question of why Tunisian veterans did not become politicized as did other Arab veterans (notably in Iraq and Morocco). The first chapter deals with the establishment of the French Protectorate in Tunisia and the First World War. I explore the depth of pan-Islamic and pro-Ottoman sympathies among the troops, as well as the experience of Tunisian troops in German prisoner-of-war camps. The second chapter deals with the aftermath of the First World War and the halting efforts to define social benefits for the veterans. The veterans and their descendants use their correspondence with the French administration to negotiate benefits on the basis of their wartime sacrifices. The third chapter deals with the Second World War and the enormous upheaval of the French defeat in 1940. I use an appeal by Marshal Pétain and a Free French Franco-Arabic military journal Al-Nasr, published from 1943-1946, to detail the intense French propaganda efforts to retain the loyalty of Muslim soldiers. The fourth chapter details belated French efforts to reinvigorate their policies towards the veterans, while exploring the increased militancy of some veterans as French power waned in the late 1950s. The fifth chapter deals with the post-independence period (1956-Present) and describes how Tunisian veterans were pushed to the margins of historical memory (both in France and in Tunisia). The chapter ends with a discussion of how and why the veterans have once again emerged as a potent symbol for national unity and pride in both France and Tunisia in recent years.

My dissertation is an exploration of the Nizamiye court system during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Though one of the more ambitious state projects launched in the framework of the Tanzimat reforms, the Nizamiye judicial system stands out as an understudied chapter in Ottoman history. Written from a sociolegal perspective that combines large-scale and microhistorical observations, this study approaches the law as an aspect of social relationships. It criticizes some of the major common wisdoms about the Nizamiye courts and offers alternative or complementary observations on the basis of Ottoman sources.

In the first chapter I argue that a heuristic process of legal borrowing and rationalization resulted in a syncretic judicial system which I identify as an Ottoman version of the Continental Law. The introduction of detailed procedural codes was embedded in a new "procedure ideology" promoted by the high echelons of the judicial systems.

In the second chapter I explore aspects in the division of labor between the Sharia and Nizamiye courts as a means of challenging the secular/religious divide that dominates common depictions of nineteenth century Ottoman law. Alternative explanations to the ambiguity that characterized the division of labor between the Sharia and Nizamiye lower courts are offered.

In the third chapter I explore the strategies employed by the Ministry of Justice in representing and handling issues of official discipline and systemic irregularities. I argue that the ministry's attitudes to these issues were guided by modern versions of accountability and reflexivity.

In the fourth chapter the new institution of public prosecution is examined and set against the "appearance of stateness" that was systematically produced in the period of Abdülhamid II. Civil litigation involving state agencies and private individuals is further investigated in order to offer few observations on state/law configurations in this period.

The fifth chapter is a microhistorical reconstruction of a single criminal trial that addressed a violent encounter between a group of officials and an Armenian merchant. I present several insights on continuity and change in Ottoman perceptions of law by spinning threads of meaning connecting the courtroom to both its direct and broader context.

At the end of the First World War, the Shi`i community of Jabal `Amil, along with other communities of the Arab Ottoman provinces, found themselves without a clearly defined political allegiance. Challenged by the breakdown of the Ottoman state and the rise of contending power dynamics between the colonial powers and emerging local players such as Amir Faysal, the `Amilis needed to establish a new identity to represent themselves. By 1943, this identity had developed within a newly formed Lebanese state.

This dissertation examines the evolution of the Shi`i `Amili identity in the period of the formation of the “new” Lebanon. It underlines the impact of local and regional politics as well as the cultural influences, Muslim as well as Christian, for the formation of this identity. This study is one component in a growing effort towards addressing the current shortcomings of scholarship on Lebanon and Arab Shi`ism respectively. It both analyzes the historical narrative and provides a methodological model. At the historical level, it surveys and provides an account of the evolution of the Shi`i `Amili community politically and culturally in the course of the Mandate period, and discusses its most salient events. Methodologically, it presents a model for the transformation of this community from a marginal to an active, politically participating one, through its use of matlabiyya , a politics of demand.

This study also highlights the transformation of Arab nationalism from an ideology of opposition, protest, and empowerment of marginal communities (whether Arab Muslim, Christian or rural) into a tool for the assertion of political domination by the majority. This dissertation also provides an examination of an Arab Shi`i community without the common assumptions of Irano-centrism and the primordial importance of the religious institution. It approaches the `Amili community as an independent subject with relations to neighboring communities, while avoiding the pitfall of viewing this history solely in relation to the Iran or Najaf connection which has been emphasized in previous studies.

An additional result of this dissertation is to underline the limitations and short-comings of a unitary nationalist history, as has been the case in Lebanon.

My dissertation, "Colonized Colonizers: Egyptian Nationalists and the Issue of the Sudan, 1875-1919," examines the seemingly contradictory identification with both the colonizer and the colonized that shaped the inception and the development of the Egyptian nationalist movement. This paradox of identifications began during a strange confluence of political events in Egyptian and Sudanese history. The first Egyptian nationalist movement, known as the 'Urabi revolt, arose in 1881, only to meet defeat at the hands of the British, who invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882. The same year that sparked the 'Urabi rebellion in Egypt also witnessed an even more popular and powerful uprising in the Sudan, the Mahdi's rebellion. The leader of this movement aimed to rid the Sudan of the Egyptian administration, which had been established after Egypt conquered the Sudan in 1820. By 1884, the Mahdi had succeeded in besieging Khartoum, the last stronghold of the Egyptian army. By 1885, the Egyptians had lost all authority in the Sudan to the Mahdi.

In roughly four years, then, Egyptians had become occupied by the British and in effect colonized, while simultaneously losing their territory in the Sudan. These linked events produced a startling phenomenon in Egyptian nationalism. The same Egyptians who called for the overthrow of the British and proclaimed Egypt's rights to self-determination also demanded the reconquest of the Sudan, and the return of the region to Egyptian hegemony.

Many of these nationalists concerned with Egyptian independence and Sudanese dependence also participated in a literary renaissance in Egypt, in which they cultivated the arts of journalism, plays, poetry, short stories and songs. These new media became the instruments by which the nationalists could project their image of Egypt, and share that image with an ever-broadening community of Egyptians.

The Sudan and the Sudanese often became the background against which nationalist writers measured and evaluated their own society. When these writers discussed the Sudan or represented its people, their conflictual identification with both colonizer and colonized emerged. My dissertation examines the work of prominent nationalist writers and thinkers and how they used the Sudan and the Sudanese in their construction of Egyptian national identity.