The Age of the Efendiyya

Relative to its importance in modern Egyptian history, the social and cultural formation known as the efendiyya has received strikingly little attention in recent historical scholarship. The men who proudly claimed the moniker efendi, and made up the efendiyya in collective terms, are often breezily labelled modern-educated or middle class by historians of Egypt, without a serious or sustained interrogation of their world-view—a gap in the historiography that one cannot help but find perplexing, given the status these men would ultimately hold in Egyptian social, cultural and political life. Indeed, the efendiyya were regarded as the best and the brightest of the nation, the intelligentsia from which various nationalist movements would draw their leaders from the turn of the twentieth century through to the 1952 Revolution. What Lucie Ryzova offers in her book is precisely this serious, sustained and long overdue interrogation of the efendi world-view. Casting aside the usual references to the efendiyya as modern-educated or middle class, Ryzova mounts a carefully researched and nuanced exploration of what the efendi label meant in modern Egypt, particularly to those who claimed it. She manages this feat in large part by surveying the breathtaking landscape of efendi autobiographies. ‘Breathtaking’ is the only appropriate word with which to describe the task for, as Ryzova explains, those who claimed the efendi label wrote obsessively about the trajectories of their lives—the conditions which made, in their view, for their induction into the efendiyya

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