Middle East and Northern Africa

ist component. Critical to understanding her work is her observation that scholarship on thought and ideology in the non-West has often been relegated to fairly simplistic categories, usually subsumed under the rubric of nationalism (and later anticolonialism). KhuriMakdisi instead posits that the nuance and range of political action that historians ascribe to the intellectual history of Europe in the same time period should be equally available in the Eastern Mediterranean. This is a difcult task, not only because the period was one in which forms of mass political action were severely circumscribed by the prevailing systems of rule in Egypt and the Ottoman Levant, but also because the term Leftist became the repository for a whole collection of formal ideologies, concepts, and ideas. However, the denition of the Left seems to imply only radicalism in the text, and as used in this book it is quite frankly overdetermined. This is unfortunate, because it detracts from the real strength of the work, which is the way it follows and unravels the complex and intricate networks of middle-class (radical and not-so-radical) intellectuals who inhabited the theaters, publishing houses, and newspaper ofces of the n-de-sie `cle Eastern Mediterranean. Khuri-Makdisi is unrivaled in the depth of her understanding of the intellectual ferment of that remarkable moment. The book is divided into ve chapters, which, although burdened by an uncomfortable theoretical overlay, unfold around the intellectual spaces created by journalism, the theater, and the circulation of intellectuals in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria. Khuri-Makdisi also sheds light on the interplay of non-Egyptian workers and Syro-Lebanese intellectuals in Egypt. Like many other historians of the period, she makes use of two of the premier newspapers of the era, al-Muqtataf and al-Hilal, citing a handful of articles from each that discuss socialism, reform, and similar ideas. Her argument becomes somewhat problematic when she identies this as proof of a socialist turn, but then admits that socialism became increasingly equated with reform (p. 38). Here again Khuri-Makdisi overestimates how socialist socialism was in the hands of the editors of these two journals. Newspapers and magazines of the time were lled with sundry political and intellectual strains that seem doctrinally incoherent when measured against a Western political spectrum, but still made perfect sense in the local/regional context. Hence a journal from Aleppo could juxtapose articles on the opening of reading rooms for the working poor, disparage the low morals of workers, and still include a poem extolling the virtues of commercial law. A similar analytical problem arises in Khuri-Makdisis discussion of drama and plays; nevertheless, her discussion of the theater and its emerging role in the Eastern Mediterranean is one of the most important contributions of this work. She explores how the stage was a place to rehearse reform-oriented concepts of the social body, or perhaps more accurately society, by drawing heavily on the work of one of Beiruts premier intellectuals, Salim Naqqash, who in the First Ottoman

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Constitutional Period linked Progress and Civilization to dramatic arts. This vocabulary would emerge again at the time of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and play a signicant role in helping to create a middleclass political agenda of reform, especially economic liberalism, nationalism, and political representations. Still, it is hard to connect the dots in Khuri-Makdisis account between Naqqashs pronouncements and big R radicalism rather than just a local rhetoric of reform targeted against the Ottoman and Khedival ancien re gimes. Indeed, these middle-class radicals radicalism was, as she admits, about creating solidarity between the middle and working classes against the elite, which is not a manifestation of any global ideology inasmuch as it is a tactical and authentic reaction to an oppressive domestic status quo. The books nal section, which follows labor unrest and the politics of a multiethnic labor force in pre World War I Egypt, is provocative, especially as KhuriMakdisi points out how readily histories of the modern Middle East overvalue ethnicity (and religion) and undervalue class. Its theoretical problems aside, this book will contribute greatly to the study of thought and ideas in the Arab Middle East and start the process of rewriting the history of the Arabs and others in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century in a way that departs from rehashed narratives of nationalists or the inevitable march of colonialism. KEITH WATENPAUGH University of California, Davis ON BARAK. On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2013. Pp. xiii, 341. $29.95. Although this dense book is weighted down with a bevy of postmodern terms, such as alterity, countertemporality, and the like, it is a most valuable study, well worth any effort needed to work through the complex terminology and methodology. At the heart of the work is time and technology, as exemplied by the introduction into Egypt of railroads and their schedules, telegraphs, phones, trams, and what the author posits as European and Egyptian time. European time represents regularity or, to use the terminology popularized by Benedict Anderson, homogeneous time, a standardized notion of time presumably ultimately accepted in developed societies and imposed with varying degrees of success on less-developed parts of the world. Egyptian time stands for a more amorphous sense of time, sometimes used by colonial Europeans to condemn Egyptians seeming lack of punctuality, and often by Egyptians themselves to mock themselves or their European rulers. Indeed, one of the themes of the book is a challenge to Andersons notion that books, plays, and lms, or what Anderson termed print capitalism, came to operate in modern times the same way everywhere in the world. As On Barak demonstrates throughout this richly researched work, colonial rule had its own set of understandings of speed, slowness,

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Reviews of Books
the Gregorian calendar for the Hijr calendar. Telegrams always bore the Gregorian date, and since many were printed in journals and newspapers, they familiarized Egyptians with the Western form of dating. In 1876, Al-Ahra m, which soon became Egypts leading newspaper, placed the Gregorian date on the right sidethe more important sideof the paper, relegating the Hijr date to the left side. According to the author, telegrams had an even more signicant impact, notably on Arabic writing. The rst literary gure to emphasize writing in simple and direct prose was Abd Alla h al-Nad m, a short-story writer and the man often credited with innovations in Egyptian prose. Few historians have made much of the fact that al-Nad m began his career as a telegraph operator, but Barak makes the claim that his occupation inuenced his style of writing, which, in fact, has often been called telegraphic. A nal theme concentrates on the 1919 revolution, in which Egyptians used the very technologies of rail lines, telegraph poles, and trams to express their discontent with British rule and make the suppression of their protest difcult. In short, this is a book of impeccable scholarship that must be added to any graduate reading list on the Middle East. ROBERT L. TIGNOR Princeton University YFAAT WEISS. A Conscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifas Lost Heritage. Translated by Avner Greenberg. New York: Columbia University Press. 2011. Pp. xviii, 252. Cloth $60.00, e-book $47.99. Wadi Salib is a poor neighborhood in the Israeli city of Haifa. Its main claim to fame is the inner-Jewish ethnic riots that erupted there in 1959, sending shock waves through the young Israeli society, and especially within the ruling Labor Party. The protest by Moroccan immigrants, a rare occurrence on such a scale, disclosed the plight of a deprived community of Jewish immigrants. It also serves to show how easily the prior residential history of Wadi Salib, as a Palestinian neighborhood evacuated during the 1948 war, was forgotten. Yfaat Weiss has written a fascinating and innovative book on the art of memory and forgetting. Covering a century of local history, which coincides with dramatic macrohistorical events that upset the world of the unsuspecting residents of the constantly deteriorating neighborhood, Weiss offers an integrative narrative focused on place. The book does not follow a direct chronological line, but rather offers a tapestry of fragments, woven within a circular narrative. Weisss innovative approach to doing history does not stand in the way of her sensitive and nuanced case studies of the most crucial moments of Wadi Salibs history, such as the evacuation of the Palestinians in 1948, the riots of 1959, and plans for renovation leading up to today. The book is a study of historical geography, and the urban topography of Haifa is one of the main protagonists. Haifa is built on a slope that falls sharply to the

and all the functions that make up the notion of time as money. To a reader like myself, somewhat jaded by the postmodern bent, the very best part of this study is the marvelous details about trains, trams, phones, and telegraphs and how they often operated differently for ruling Europeans and subordinate Egyptians. Make no mistake: the level of the research is outstanding. Poring over journals, newspapers, train schedules, and autobiographies, the author brings to life a fascinating world of technologies, introduced by Westerners and embraced in a variety of ways, sometimes quite novel, by Egyptians of all classes. Two examples should whet the appetite. The rst is the railroad, the earliest plans for which dated from the 1830s and would have made Egypt the rst developing country to boast a railway. Because of delays and false starts, the railway was not introduced into Egypt until the 1850s. As betted a railway constructed in Egypt, trains catered to Europeans and the royal family and treated Egyptians, even those of elite but non-royal status, as inferiors. Until 1870, roughly a decade and a half after the rst steam engines began to run in Egypt, the Egyptian State Railways (ESR) functioned without schedules. This enabled Egyptian trains to maintain their double standard, allowing the royal family to requisition trains whenever they needed them, whereas a full complement of European passengers had to be on board before their trains could embark from their stations of origin. That the Egyptian railway network underwent a rapid expansion in the 1870s is undoubted. It had 240 locomotives that pulled more than 4,000 carriages over a thousand miles of track. Delays occurred as they do on all rail lines, but the mainly British-run ESR had a ready-made explanation: they attributed such delays to the fact that employees are drawn from the uncivilized population on which years of training must be devoted before they become competent workmen and realize what efciency means (p. 66). W. D. Knight, the deputy chief mechanical engineer of the ESR, made this comment as late as the 1930s. In fact, Egyptian passengers were regularly critical of delays, but they communicated their complaints through the Arabic press, which was little read by the British except for its political commentary, while the passenger schedules were printed only in English and French, never in Arabic. Far from undermining traditional culture and religion, Egyptian trains enhanced them. Religious festivals and visits to the tombs of saints became large-scale events as long as the sites were near rail stations. One of Mehmet Alis reasons for constructing a railway in Egypt was to accommodate the large number of pilgrims making their way eastward to the pilgrimage in Mecca. The Ottomans beat the Egyptians to this goal, however, building the Hijaz Railway for the same purpose. The second example is the telegraph and the calendar. The telegraph had a far-reaching impact in Egypt. In the rst place, it played a major role in substituting

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