The Power of Representation

Reviewed by: The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt Wilson Jacob The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt. By Michael Ezekiel Gasper. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). The study of colonialism has received a new impetus and witnessed a "turn" in direction with the publication of several landmark texts, especially in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies over the last two decades. Michael Gasper's The Power of Representation is testament to the impact this intervention has had in the writing of colonial history. Indeed, the epigraph opening his book is taken from one of those seminal works, Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, and it captures quite nicely the contours of the turn.1 Political modernity is defined therein as phenomena that can only be grasped through an appreciation of their "European" genealogy, wherever one may look. So whether the historical focus is on Egypt or on Britain, the threshold determining the modernity of a new politics is always a colonial-European one. But as Chakrabarty argues and Gasper shows nicely this is not simply a question of one pre-formed agent working on another (as before the turn), rather it is necessary to speak now of a mutual constitution of modernity and tradition, secularism and religion, colonialism and nationalism. The value of working in this new register is evident in The Power of Representation. While regarding the modern conceptual categories of politics, public, and citizen as marked by the history of colonialism, Gasper's account of Egypt's national formation is also sensitive to the local-regional traditions of Islam that were at once reshaped by the former and shaped the terms of an intelligible cultural translation. Specifically, he examines various representations of the peasantry in the new print culture as an entry point for discussions and debates that came to constitute Egypt's nationalist project. His major contribution is to demonstrate how Islamic modernism—usually associated with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and followers—was a key component of the ostensibly secular projects of self-fashioning and social reform of the last third of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. He argues that "Islam" did not describe a past that had to be superseded, as most conventional accounts would have it, but emerged in a new form and in this position through the colonial encounter (42-48). The sources Gasper exploits are a rich and highly underused trove of published material ranging from pamphlets and newspapers to novels and textbooks (some of this material is being used here for the first time). These texts were for the most part products of a new class of historical actors representing a social formation that began to congeal in the 1870s and which the author gathers under the label of "literate urbanites" or 'afandiya (which also appears as efendiya). Producers of a new kind of knowledge about the self and the world, these self-styled "reformers" ranged from the likes of well-known figures such as Abdallah Nadim and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid to figures obscure today like Ahmad Samir and Muhammad Ghalib al-Bajuri. Obscure or not, in their time these and many others participated in and were representatives of a movement, which was not necessarily willed or organized as such, that radically reconceived the very ground on which knowledge and politics (representation) were possible. Gasper demonstrates that despite significant political differences among and between nationalist, Ottomanist, anti-colonialist, and pro-British camps, there was a tie binding individuals of this emergent class to new notions of history and culture undergirded by principles of progress and improvement and affects of modernity. The repeated articulation and dissemination of these ideas and sensibilities within a growing public sphere of print performatively constituted those individuals as the subject of a new identity—Egyptian—and inhabitants of a re-configured spatial community—Egypt. The movement forward was materialized by contrasting it to the forces pushing the newly imagined nation and its subject backward or holding them in place in a past time. These "backward" forces were inscribed as a traditional mode of Being embodied most often, though not always, by the peasantry. That very form

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• Provincializing Europe

  Dipesh Chakrabarty•Provincializing Europe•2000

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• Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

  Anthony Reid, Benedict Anderson•Pacific Affairs•1985

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