The coffeehouse has long been a site of sociability in Egypt. Indeed, by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, coffeehouses were woven into the urban fabric, gendered public spaces in which the local population might congregate, play chess, and discuss the news of the day. They were also performance spaces in which local talents might perform comedy routines, perform shadow plays, or sing songs. Such popular public entertainments offer a unique point of entry into the social concerns, interests, humor, and imagination of a subaltern that has been largely understood through the eyes of cultural and political elites. This paper will examine how the public performances of one group of players, “muqallidin,” or “mimics,” played a significant, albeit understated, role in the creation of a common national identity. It argues that muqallidin and other public performers gave voice to what it meant for the oft-overlooked sha’b—those who made up the majority of the urban population—to be modern and Egyptian. Muqallidin imitated street vendors and famous singers but also staged original, colloquial plays where they excelled at mimicking regional accents and dialects. One of these muqallidin, Muhammad Idris, earned his reputation by impersonating a famous and beloved singer named Sheikh Salama Hijazi. Hijazi was Idris’s contemporary, a man from a poor family whose voice had propelled him to fame in the world of effendi stage-theater. As only one of many Hijazi mimes, Idris’s performances disseminated music, lyrics, and some version of Hijazi’s voice to people who ordinarily would not have been able to afford seeing him on stage. An emerging cultural icon, Hijazi transcended social divisions by virtue of his sha’bi background, religious training, and soaring melodic voice. In this way, he attained distinction as an authentic, indigenous symbol that helped to unify Egyptians in a new way. Hijazi, and those who performed and disseminated his “voice,” helped to shape an Egyptian cultural identity that would slowly supersede—but never entirely displace—the regional, confessional, and social identities already at work in Egypt. As Idris embodied Hijazi’s person and disseminated his music, it is clear that the muqallid was part of a process of cultural circulation that would affect sha’bi notions of themselves and their relationship to a larger Egyptian identity. Muqallidin helped to make music, song, and comedy central to “molding national tastes” which, in turn, facilitated the development of a national identity.

In the decades before and after the iconic 1919 Egyptian Revolution against the British Protectorate, an era of public petitioning was coming into its own; villagers banded together to push for more resources from central authorities, Coptic groups requested more political autonomy, citizens organized telegram campaigns, and students devised ever more elaborate requests for access to better job opportunities. This presentation will explore the events of the first thirty years of 20th century Egypt through the lenses of communal action and visual language in the capital city of Cairo. My proposition is that through the use of “public literacy” practices, the notion of writing for a wide audience was becoming a new social force in Egypt’s modern culture of petitioning and protest. Egyptians across the social spectrum were learning how to wield the written word in more potent and visible ways. I will focus my discussion on the group petitions that have been collected in the Abdin collection of the Egyptian National Archive. While there are, by some estimates, over 1 million petitions saved in various Egyptian archives, the subset of collective actions from the early part of the 20th century, in content and form, represent a significant break from the long tradition of petitioning that preceded it. By focusing on these public and communal petitions, I will offer a reexamination the classic literate/illiterate dichotomy that often colors the history of social change in the Middle East. Even as the educated elites were expressing themselves and their interests in the new media of the era, individuals from all walks of life were dictating their complaints to scribes, listening to newspapers, sending telegrams, and availing themselves of the expanding postal system even if they themselves were not “literate” in any official sense. This paper will shed new light on the ways in which individuals and groups were using communal expressions of discontent and new technologies to visually and publicly influence debates well beyond what we would consider the “literate” strata of society. Ultimately, it is the changing landscape of written expression, for the literate, semi-literate, and illiterate alike, that reshaped the public spaces of modern Egypt.

Following the Egyptian uprisings of January 2011, Tahrir Square has served both as a public space and international stage. The rise of street art and graffiti in Cairo following this revolution has been well-documented in local and international media. While political street art was rare in Cairo before the events of 2011, an explosion of street art of varying quality has since occurred throughout the city. In particular, the walls surrounding Tahrir Square have become a living, ever-changing canvas for the city’s artists, an evolving museum to the revolution, and a self-conscious narration of political change. Acting as a backdrop to television coverage of the revolution, widely distributed through social media, and easily visible to those in the square, these murals have served as visual signals of shifting discontent. This paper considers the murals of Tahrir Square as palimpsests, whose layers may be peeled back to reveal a narrative of artistic discontent. As the nature of the “revolution” changed, so did the nature of this public art. Focusing on the changing depiction of martyrs in the streets of downtown Cairo, it considers the vacillations between hope and despair in the political goals of the artists. The collaborative nature of street art projects, role of social media in their dispersal, and disparate sources of artistic inspiration will be analyzed. Drawing on the graphic qualities of advertisements, the folk art traditions of hajj painting and pharaonic-themed murals, as well as the international street art tradition of spray paint and stencils, the martyr murals of downtown Cairo illustrate the multivalent sources of artistic inspiration, and shifting focus of discontent in the years following Mubarak’s departure.