It's been just over eight months since my last post on account of a busy and fruitful first year of graduate studies. With summer vacation beginning soon, I hope to continue posting and sharing my love of Egyptian history and culture; and, hopefully, not stop posting when school resumes in the fall.
For my first post after this long hiatus, I'm starting with a book review of an important book written by an author from whom I've learned a great deal this past year: Nelly Hanna.
Having written extensively on the merchant, middle class of Cairo in the Ottoman period, Dr. Hanna seeks to fill a major gap in scholarship in her ambitious work: In Praise of Books. The Ottoman period is traditionally presented as having a dichotomous society divided into an upper and lower class. Hanna upturns this notion and instead presents evidence in favor of a steadily enlarging urban middle class. To this end, she argues that because of a new era of greater trade (commercial capitalism) and less state intervention (Egypt having become a province as opposed to the capital of an empire with a weak Mamluk ruling class), this new class was able to emerge and flourish.
Building on this argument, Nelly Hanna seeks to explore the cultural implications of this new class and argues in favor of the existence of a distinct middle class culture that thrived in Ottoman Cairo. This is a clear break from previous histories of the period that discussed culture according to the paradigm of a society of upper class religious and military officials and a lower class of everyone else. On this point, previous studies focused on the "courtly" and scholarly culture of the ruling elite and the "popular" culture of the masses. Dr. Hanna illustrates how a middle-class culture served to bridge the gap between the two and created unique genres and forms of literature, culture and entertainment. Because of the depth into which In Praise of Books goes into new territories, it is pioneering in both its content and approach. It leaves, however, a lot of room for future studies and serves a great starting point for scholars interested in a new and generally uncharted field. For anyone interested in Ottoman Cairo and particularly the culture of a previously understudied group, In Praise of Books is an important read.
In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
For my first post after this long hiatus, I'm starting with a book review of an important book written by an author from whom I've learned a great deal this past year: Nelly Hanna.
Building on this argument, Nelly Hanna seeks to explore the cultural implications of this new class and argues in favor of the existence of a distinct middle class culture that thrived in Ottoman Cairo. This is a clear break from previous histories of the period that discussed culture according to the paradigm of a society of upper class religious and military officials and a lower class of everyone else. On this point, previous studies focused on the "courtly" and scholarly culture of the ruling elite and the "popular" culture of the masses. Dr. Hanna illustrates how a middle-class culture served to bridge the gap between the two and created unique genres and forms of literature, culture and entertainment. Because of the depth into which In Praise of Books goes into new territories, it is pioneering in both its content and approach. It leaves, however, a lot of room for future studies and serves a great starting point for scholars interested in a new and generally uncharted field. For anyone interested in Ottoman Cairo and particularly the culture of a previously understudied group, In Praise of Books is an important read.
In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo's Middle Class, Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).
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