Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book as much as I have Re- Envisioning Egypt, 1919- 1952. The book is certainly one of the best publications by the American University in Cairo Press. The volume is edited by Arthur Goldschmidt, professor emeritus of Middle East History at the Pennsylvania State University, Amy J Johnson, who was associate professor of history at Berry College, Georgia, and author of Reconstructing Rural Egypt, also published by AUC Press, and Barak A Salmoni, assistant professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

The book is in five parts, with 17 chapters and a conclusion by distinguished scholar Roger Owen, professor of history at Harvard University and author of a number of books on Egypt and the Middle East. Owen's latest books are State, Power, and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East and Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul. The contributors are Egyptian, English, Irish, American, French, Japanese, Canadian, which goes to show the importance of Egypt on the map of world affairs.

The broad themes of the collection of essays range across policy and diplomacy with a focus on the generation of 1919, the "Egyptianisation" of modernity, social discourse and the empowerment of women and the fellahin, and the role played by the cinema, literature and historiographical memory in the engendering of the modern Egyptian nation.

I have always felt that the period from 1919 to 1952 in Egypt has been mishandled and misrepresented by the 1952 Revolution historians, as I like to refer to them. In their nationalist-based enthusiasm for the revolution, they have, consciously or unconsciously, presented a distorted, mainly ideological picture of that period. In this they are reminiscent of a generation of East European historians whose work is now being revised.

In his wonderful summing up of the book, Owen writes that the monarchical period covered in the volume lasted only 33 years, "less than a generation and half". And yet, he goes on, as the essays collected in the volume demonstrate, these three decades are crucial to an understanding of Egypt in the 20th century, and the paths it took, and those it did not take. I would add here that this period witnessed the political maturity of Egyptians, which began in 1919.

That moment of maturation started with the 1919 revolution, led by Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd Party. It represented a kind of awakening and was met with great optimism. It also resulted in a movement of self-discovery. A number of questions were asked and debated: What is Egypt? Who are the Egyptian people and what should their political, economic and social goals be? Are we Arabs, or should we see ourselves as descendants of the Ancient Egyptians?

Knowledge of and insights into the events that took place can be gleaned from literary works written by Yusuf Idris, Yehia Haqqi, Mahmoud Teymour, Fathi Ghanem and, of course, Naguib Mahfouz; but, again, the historians, as such, did not give this period its due.

Owen discusses the reasons behind the negligence of such an important period. The reasons are, in his opinion, relatively well-known. One was the ideology of Nasser's regime itself "beginning with the views of its leader". Such views focussed on the corruption of the monarchs and the problems of trying to run a one man/one vote democracy "in a predominantly peasant country". Moreover, Owen continues, the ideology of the regime ideology emphasised "the incompleteness of the 1919 Revolution and the need to supplement it with an equally comprehensive social revolution as well". Owen continues with his analysis, which I shall cover in my next column.