Jalila, daughter of Jirjis Sa'd, was a mother of eight living in the provincial capital of Shibin al-Kum to the north of Cairo. In December of 1908, Jalila sent a petition to the Egyptian Khedive’s administration requesting free admittance for two of her sons at the only secondary school in her area. Within the month, the younger of the two, Nikola, was happily attending classes. However, Jalila had further concerns to attend to and, over the next five years, sent additional requests as she sought to improve her and her family’s financial situation. By her own account, Jalila wrote frequently between the years of 1908 and 1913. Three of these letters, saved in the Egyptian National Archive among the many thousands of petitions that the have survived from this period, tell the details of her affairs and ordeals over these years. The fortunate happenstance that she received a favorable response to her first plea encouraged her to write, and write often—to no avail. Her subsequent letters went unanswered. Nevertheless, while of little recompense to their creator, fortunately for us, these petitions paint an evocative picture of what it meant to be a poor woman at the margins of the economic, political, and religious centers of her time. Jalila was an active advocate for her children, on paper and in person. She plotted and planned attempts to improve her family’s situation. And most of all, she did so by appealing to and subtly influencing the authority figures around her. Jalila was a woman who navigated the bureaucratic and discursive spaces available to her with a deft, if not always successful, awareness of what a woman of her position could possibly expect from her family, her community, and her government. By tracing one woman’s struggles, this paper highlights how those at the periphery of Egyptian society sought to “work the system” in order to raise their economic and social profiles. Using what James Scott has called “weapons of the weak,” Jalila emphasized her poverty and gender as she negotiated with family members, local and central government officials, and school administrators. Despite her efforts, ultimately, her successes and failures were as precarious as the life she lived at the edge of Egyptian society.

A broad “Islamic Revival” followed the devastating Egyptian defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the triumphant crossing of the Bar Lev line in the 1973 war. Egyptians moved towards Islam and religious elites, newly empowered by the permissive media policies of Anwar al-Sadat (r. 1970-1981), spoke to the nation through print, television, radio and audiocassette. In turn, Egyptians turned in unprecedented numbers towards greater ritual observance, public piety, and for many, a commitment to social and political transformation. Yet, this is a story told with nearly exclusive reference to Cairo and Alexandria; rarely do those outside the religious elite, let alone those outside of Cairo and Alexandria, speak. This paper seeks to fill this void by using letters to the editor and fatwa requests within three Islamic magazines between 1976 and 1981 to examine the processes of religious mobilization and subjectivity formation that underlay the broader emergence of the Islamic Revival in Egypt under Sadat. This approach serves not only serve to de-center Cairo and Alexandria but similarly to broaden the study of religious change during this period beyond the Muslim Brotherhood’s al-Da‘wa magazine to consider reader correspondence from the Salafi-Islamist al-I‘tisam and the State-affiliated Minbar al-Islam. It shows how, far from a simple “turning” to Islamism following the disappointment of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, middle class readers from the Nile Delta, Upper Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria sought to reform themselves as pious Muslims of varying political persuasions at the juncture of state educational policies, economic shifts and mass media. Collectively, these readers provide a window into the turn of Egypt’s middle class to Islam during the opening years of the Islamic Revival and the geographic, socioeconomic and gender dynamics of this crucial period. These projects of piety, though initially minority undertakings, would grow over the coming decades and public religiosity is now the norm, rather than the exception, in Egyptian society. Yet, as this paper argues, this shift was hardly inevitable; instead, it emerged out of the efforts of religious elites and middle class readers from across Egypt to make sense of political, economic and social disappointment upheaval by rededicating themselves to Islam.

This paper examines an Egyptian cookbook from the 1930s, Nazira Niqola’s ‘Uṣūl al-Ṭahī (commonly known as Kitab Abla Nazira), to explore aspects of Egyptian national identity formation connected to gender, class, and ethnicity. The product of a “colonial pilgrimage” (Niqola and her co-author studied home economics in the UK), Kitab Abla Nazira explicitly addresses itself to “the young Egyptian woman who contributes to the intellectual renaissance we are now living;” its preface refers to the “spirit of the age.” Its contents are a mix of European and indigenous foodways, underpinned by the science of nutrition and normative discourses about how a kitchen ought to be organized and run. It was by no means a marginal text; over a dozen editions were published throughout the twentieth century. The realities of how Egyptians prepared and ate their food in the 1930s would not have aligned neatly with its prescriptions; but it was (and remains) the case that what and how one eats are tightly bound up with what it means to be authentically Egyptian, and what it means to be modern. A close reading of the introductory and pantry sections as well as a number of key recipes (including béchamel sauce and koshari) demonstrates that in the kitchens of the newly emerging male elites so often associated with the rise of Egyptian nationalism, a complex mixture of influences and identities was brewing. In the decades leading up to the book’s writing, for example, French cuisine had emerged as the international standard of sophistication and modernity; according to food historian Rachel Laudan, béchamel sauce was its surest hallmark. A historical account recorded by the Orientalist Richard Burton dates the presence of koshari (a Egyptian version of the Indian dish kitchiri) as a staple in Suez to the 1850s. That a cookbook addressed to middle class, educated housewives in the 1930s included multiple variations of these very different dishes––a street food adapted from South Asian cuisine and a “mother sauce” of French haute cuisine––is telling. The strategies Niqola used to translate, adapt, reconcile, and combine the disparate influences her recipes draw upon can complicate understandings of how “tradition,” “authenticity,” and “modernity” were negotiated in the negotiation of Egyptian identity during this period. The kitchen, at the intersection of market and home, public and domestic, and symbolic and concrete, adds new dimensions to a familiar Egyptian story.