University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 8-2016 Youth…Power…Egypt: The evelopmeD nt of Youth as a Sociopolitical Concept and Force in Egypt, 1805-1923 Matthew lB air Parnell University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the African History Commons, African Studies Commons, Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons, and the Social History Commons Recommended Citation Parnell, Matthew Blair, "Youth…Power…Egypt: The eD velopment of Youth as a Sociopolitical Concept and Force in Egypt, 1805-1923" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1707. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1707 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Youth…Power…Egypt: The Development of Youth as a Sociopolitical Concept and Force in Egypt, 1805-1923 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History by Matthew B. Parnell University of North Carolina Wilmington Bachelor of Arts in History, 2002 University of North Carolina Wilmington Master of Arts in History, 2006 August 2016 University of Arkansas This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. ____________________________________ Dr. Joel Gordon Dissertation Director ____________________________________ ____________________________________ Dr. Lisa Pollard Dr. Nikolay Antov Committee Member Committee Member ABSTRACT This study focuses on youth as a symbol, metaphor, and subject involved in processes related to Egypt’s modernization, colonialization, and liberation from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. It demonstrates that youth was not simply an unchanging stage of development between childhood and adulthood, but a construct reflecting the political, social, and cultural interests of specific eras and perspectives. I critically analyze the local and global discourses on Egypt’s modernization, colonialism, and nationalist movement to understand how changing power relations within and outside the country affected conceptions of youth and youthfulness. Additionally, I suggest by the time of the 1919 Revolution, representations of an ideal youth transferred into a real political and social force. This dissertation argues that the transformation of self-identity, embodied in a growing pride in the youthful spirit of a deep-rooted, old civilization helped drive Egypt’s modern “awakening.” While this project focuses its attention specifically on Egypt, I situate all these developments within a global context in order to showcase the paradoxical connections of youth culture formation between the colonized and colonizer, as well as between generations within this era of modernization and dramatic social transformation. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance of numerous people and to them I owe a tremendous debt. First, I would like to collectively thank my two great teachers, Drs. Lisa Pollard and Joel Gordon, for their unwavering dedication to me and this project. Their mentoring and encouragement has meant more to me than I am able to describe. I have been blessed not only with their wisdom but also their friendship for many years and I hope for many more. I would like to thank Dr. Nikolay Antov for serving on my dissertation committee and pushing me to think about my research topic in new ways. And finally, I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Mona Russell for reading parts of my dissertation and providing critiques as well as her willingness to take me under her wing at a moment’s notice. I would like to thank the Department of History, the King Fahd Center of Middle East Studies, and the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas for their consistent support and for funding my research. Through the years, a significant number of people in the UA community have directly or indirectly contributed to my scholarship and intellectual growth. I have benefited greatly from my friendships with Ahmet Akturk, Sarwar Alam, Kaveh Bassiri, Nicole Fares, Ethan Morton-Gerome, Yulia Uryadova, and Keith Whitmire. I have amassed a debt to Nani Verzon and Sanket Desai that I will never be able to repay. They have made the process of dissertating, while not always enjoyable, at least bearable. A special thank you to Dr. Tom Paradise for his consistent backing, thoughtfulness, and willingness to let me escape to his cabin to write. The staff at Mullins Library and especially in Interlibrary Loan have been incredibly helpful and patient with my unending requests. For non-native speakers, the challenge of acquiring proficiency in Arabic is a challenge not for the faint of heart. Here too, I have enjoyed incredible teachers both in the United States and in Egypt. A warm thank you goes to Nasser Isleem formerly of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for introducing me to Arabic and the Arabic-speaking community in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. At the University of Arkansas, Paula and Adnan Haydar instilled a solid foundation in the language before my first adventure to Egypt in 2009. I have to thank Mona Kamel at the American University in Cairo for encouraging me to take what I learned in the classroom onto the streets of Egypt’s capital city. And finally, I have to recognize and thank Nagwa Hedayet and my teachers at the Hedayet Institute in Cairo for not only preparing me to engage my research in Egypt but embracing me as a member of their “family.” None of these people are responsible for any errors made in the process of reading, interpreting, or translating, but it was only thanks to their efforts that I was able to conduct my research and use the results in this dissertation. I am incredibly appreciative of the support and funds I received from the Bi-National Fulbright Commission in Egypt and the American Research Center in Egypt to conduct research in Cairo and Alexandria. The Director of the BFCE, Dr. Bruce Lohof, was incredibly generous to me and my family during our stay in and out of Egypt in 2010-11. I would like to thank Djodi Deutsch at ARCE for her backing during my short stay in Cairo as a Research Fellow in 2013. I want to give a shout-out to my fellow Fulbright and ARCE fellows Andy Ver Steegh, Casey Primal, and Jeff Culang who made exploring Egypt’s research terrain all the more enjoyable. I appreciate the assistance I received from the staffs in the periodicals section at Dar al-Kutub, the archives at the Ministry of Education, and in Special Collections at the American University in Cairo. In London, the staffs at the National Archives and the British Library provided me with more documents than I could use here. Back in Egypt, my family and I have benefitted greatly from numerous friends and acquaintances. You all know who you are and how special you are to us! Thank you for helping make Cairo our second home. I say a thousand thank you’s to all my family and friends in the Carolinas and Virginia who have provided streams of love, encouragement, and understanding even if it meant long absences and the occasional emergency intervention. And finally to my wife and teammate in life, Ashley, who has sacrificed and soldiered through so much for me and our beautiful children. I never would have finished this without her inspiration and thus to her this dissertation is dedicated. DEDICATION To my wife, Ashley, TAS and my inspiration TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on Transliteration………………………………………………………………………1 I. Introduction: Youth, Power, Egypt…………………………………………………..2 II. Creating a Few Good Men: Egypt’s Youth and Youthfulness in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century………………………………………………………………….11 III. A Great Man and his Degenerate Dynasty: Representations of Muhammad `Ali and his Successors in the British Discourse on Egypt…………………………………..57 IV. Egypt as a Knave, Beast, and Child: Depicting the “Egypt Question” in the British Satirical Press, 1869-1895…………………………………………………………..93 V. Disobedient, Dimwitted, Heroic, Hope of the Future: Representations of Children and Youth in the Egyptian Nationalist Discourse, 1879-1908…………………………167 VI. A Revolt of Egypt’s Youth: Students, School Strikes, and the 1919 Revolution…223 VII. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………254 VIII. Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….261 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION I have used the system of transliteration of Arabic words followed by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Arabic diacritical marks are omitted, except for the `ayn (`) and hamza (’). The Arabic letter jim has been rendered as j, except where the Egyptian pronunciation (gim) is more common. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 1 1. Introduction: Youth, Power, Egypt In April 2011, while conducting research in Egypt, I visited the well-known Egyptian publishing company, Dar al-Hilal, on Muhammad Ezz al-Arab Street in Cairo’s Sayyida Zaynab neighborhood. After finishing my work there that day, as I walked back to the nearby Sa`d Zaghlul metro station I noticed a billboard in a public garden at the corner of Muhammad Izz al- `Arab and Mansur streets. The board contained a picture of hundreds of Egyptians standing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square holding a long Egyptian flag during the protests against the government of Hosni Mubarak sometime between January 25 and February 11, 2011 (Figure 1). In the foreground, a young girl held a smaller flag and a placard that read, “Egypt, my love” (ya Habibti ya Masr). What caught my eye was the expression in the bottom right corner of the picture, “Youth…Power…Egypt” (al-Shabab…Quwa…Masr). What exactly did this mean? It is no secret that young people played a significant role protesting and mobilizing against Egypt’s ancien regime in early 2011.