Princeton University Press
Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt
Key Metrics
- Adam Mestyan
- Princeton University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780691172644
- 9.4 X 6.4 X 1.3 inches
- 1.46 pounds
- History > Middle East - Egypt (see also Ancient - Egypt)
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
How the support of patriotic sentiments in Ottoman Egypt led to an emerging Arab nationalism
Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood.
Through extensive archival research, Mestyan examines the collusion of various Ottoman elites in creating this nascent sense of national belonging and finds that learned culture played a central role in this development. Mestyan investigates the experience of community during this period, engendered through participation in public rituals and being part of a theater audience. He describes the embodied and textual ways these experiences were produced through urban spaces, poetry, performances, and journals. From the Khedivial Opera House's staging of Verdi's Aida and the first Arabic magazine to the 'Urabi revolution and the restoration of the authority of Ottoman viceroys under British occupation, Mestyan illuminates the cultural dynamics of a regime that served as the precondition for nation-building in the Middle East.
A wholly original exploration of Egypt in the context of the Ottoman Empire, Arab Patriotism sheds fresh light on the evolving sense of political belonging in the Arab world.
Author Bio
Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Arab world. Using the approach of global legal history, he is working on a new monograph Modern Arab Kingship (under contract), a social history of constituting Arab political orders in the interwar period. His next project is a history of land administration (taxation, agrarian shari‘a, and the land survey) in modern Syria and Egypt. He is the author of Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Ifao, 2021) and Arab Patriotism (Princeton University Press, 2017).
He has been interested in digital humanities in Arabic, especially in creating tools and databases for scholars and the public. He supervises an online bibliography on Arabic periodicals: Jara'id: A Chronology of Arabic Periodicals, 1800-1929; co-directs a digital humanities project on the urban history of Cairo and another one on Islamic book history.
Source: Duke University
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