The Age of the Efendiyya

Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Oxford Historical Monographs

A new study in a key period of Egyptian and World history
Written in accessible language
Uses tools from many disciplines, such as ethnography; visual culture; class, gender, and generation analysis; literary theory; and sociology of literature

The Age of the Efendiyya

Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Description

In colonial-era Egypt, a new social category of "modern men" emerged, the efendiyya. Working as bureaucrats, teachers, journalists, free professionals, and public intellectuals, the efendiyya represented the new middle class elite. They were the experts who drafted and carried out the state's modernisation policies, and the makers as well as majority consumers of modern forms of politics and national culture. As simultaneously "authentic" and "modern", they assumed a key political role in the anti-colonial movement and in the building of a modern state both before and after the revolution of 1952.

Lucie Ryzova explores where these self-consciously modern men came from, and how they came to be such major figures, by examining multiple social, cultural, and institutional contexts. These contexts include the social strategies pursued by "traditional" households responding to new opportunities for social mobility; modern schools as vehicles for new forms of knowledge dissemination, which had the potential to redefine social authority; but also include new forms of youth culture, student rituals, peer networks, and urban popular culture. The most common modes of self-expression among the effendiyya were through politics and writing (either literature or autobiography). This articulated an efendi culture imbued with a sense of mission, duty, and entitlement, and defined the ways in which their social experiences played into the making of modern Egyptian culture and politics.

The Age of the Efendiyya

Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Oxford Historical Monographs

The Age of the Efendiyya

Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Oxford Historical Monographs

Author Information

Lucie Ryzova, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Faculty of History, University of Oxford

Lucie Ryzova is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Modern History, University of Oxford. She is a cultural historian working on modern Egypt.

The Age of the Efendiyya

Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt

Lucie Ryzova

Oxford Historical Monographs

Reviews and Awards

Joint Winner of the 2015 Royal Historical Society Gladstone Prize
Winner of the 2017 Philip Leverhulme Prize in History

"Lucie Ryzova's research represents a generative contribution to the embryonic sub-field of afandi studies, and her fine monograph elaborates this scholarship in original and provocative ways." - Journal of Arabic Literature

"essential reading for scholars of modern Egypt and the Middle East." - Kenneth M. Cuno, American Historical Review

"While so much of the recent social and cultural history of Egypt has aimed at rewriting the literature from below, this bold effort to reconceive Egyptian history from the middle advances the field enormously. This book is certainly essential reading for those who would seek to understand modern Egypt but there is much here for those working well beyond Egyptian frontiers as well, particularly as regards the uses to which modernity is put in post-colonial contexts." - Paul Sedra, English Historical Review

"An outstanding accomplishment, original, illuminating, and thought provoking. The Age of the Efendiyya offers an entirely fresh reading on the rise, evolution, and formation of Egypt and the Middle East's modern middle class: the "new man/woman." Ryzova systematically and comprehensively explores the critical role of the Efendiyya in producing and propelling authentic, home-made modernity in society, culture, and politics. Exploiting impeccable archival, print, and visual sources, never before used, Ryzova is the first scholar to penetrate the mindset of the Efediyya, through its discourse, actions, and daily minutiae." - Professor Israel Gershoni, Tel Aviv University