“A GARDEN WITH MELLOW
FRUITS OF REFINEMENT”
The great question in the new khedivate was to find out what this regime type was exactly and to whom it belonged. A small group of Muslim intellectuals attempted to manipulate the regime by making patriotism its official ideology. They were constrained by both the Ottoman universe (including Ismail’s own Ottoman milieu) and the Western European representations. The spatial transformation required the adjustment of sound and body. They turned to a third solution: a language and a historicity that could compete with the power of European aesthetics and still be acceptable in Muslim-Ottoman terms. This was Arabness, a linguistic and spiritual quality. Muslim patriotism transmuted into a patriotism that now also contained a moral idea of Arabness and a clear Egyptian territorial historical narrative.
In this part of the book, I focus on the relationship of Arabic-speaking intellectuals to power in their efforts to negotiate with the khedive through this complex ideology. Importantly, they were dominantly Muslims. They confidently engaged with the new spaces and technologies. Their work exemplifies a noncolonial moment of Muslim modernity. The social world of khedivial Egypt in this rapidly changing period was similar to what is described in contemporary sociology as an “emergent action field,” which is “an arena occupied by two or more actors whose actions are oriented to each other, but where agreement over the basic conditions . . . has yet to emerge.”1 In many ways, the actors did not agree on “what is going on” and could not position themselves. Since patriots defined the interest of the waṭan their ideas challenged khedivial authority. From 1876, there was foreign financial control. An unsettled, emergent action field was directed by the logic of stabilizing the political world but finally attained the opposite of this goal. Unintended consequences resulted from making Arab patriotism the ideology of the khedivate.
1 Fligstein and MacAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields,” 11.