This week, we dissected Wilson Chako Jacob’s chapter,
“Genealogy” discussing Mustafa Kamil and Effendi Masculinity. First to
understand the terminology, Effendi is a term to describe men of educated
status, or high social standing. When looking into this discussion of Effendi
masculinity and the creation of multivariable masculinity roles that have gone
through changes in Egypt’s history, is deeply rooted in Europe’s imposition of
how roles should be imposed, class, skin color, and a lot of similar colonial
and imperial powers found present during Egypt’s occupation.
The
creation of distant dichotomies of modernity and primitivism in colonial Egypt
is found in one of the first pages of this chapter, summed up by Ann Stoler,
“If race already makes up a part of that ‘grid of intelligibility’ through
which the bourgeoisie came to define themselves, then we need to locate its
coordinates in a grid carved through the geographic distributions of
‘unfreedoms’ that imperial labor systems enforced. These were colonial regimes
prior to and coterminous with Europe’s liberal bourgeois order… The colonies
have provided the allegorical and practical terrain against which European
notions of liberty and its conceits about equality were forged”” (Jacob 45). In
order to foster the discussion of modernity, and how that also relates to
gender and sexuality, it all very much starts with the colonial
categorizations. As Stoler writes, the liberty and “practical order” that the
Europeans had in their nation was enough to derank Egyptians from attaining
modernity. Due to the lack of military education, as discussed more intensely
on page 58, it was believed by settlers (colonizers) who were observing the men
as having effeminacy, “The category of the effendi in the precolonial period
designated a social rank within the Ottoman administration or, more generally,
distinguished the religious-scribal class from military officialdom. In this
system of lords, the effendi was at the bottom of the hierarchy that included
the royals, the pashas, and the beys… the latter part of the nineteenth
century, the term’s popular use expanded and overlapped with the English
equivalent of gentlemen” (45). As time passed, “Effendiyya” (46) managed to
change itself into something that meant the higher latter of Egyptian
civilization.
With
creating such differences within Egyptian male civilization, it created strange
power dynamics as highlighted in Jacob’s writing—creating the trope of the
“obedient but not servile” effendi, bringing together the connection to
femininity. This connection to
femininity was a cause of “colonial liberalism” throughout Egypts occupation,
where conquest was also to make Egyptian men “properly disciplined and properly
men” (47).
Although
this reading was very intriguing to me, I especially liked the quote “passivity
born out of centuries to foreign conquerors” (59) because it shows the innate
ignorance of colonizers when writing about the Orient, or the Other.
What I found most interesting in this what the definition of Masculinity as defined by Cromer. When speaking of the Turk-Egyptian, the quote “the greater the quantity of Turkish blood running in his veins, the more will his manly qualities appear”(56). The line “The English, Nubar Pasha once said to me, “are the Turks of the West” (58) confirms his idea that Turkish blood is stronger but also shows that the qualities they are comparable.
ReplyDeleteThe image on this page was upsetting, not only because it is supposed to show how the British is supposed train ‘her’ to defend herself.
I enjoyed that section where you pulled the quote our about passivity due to years of foreign conquerors as well. It’s interesting how ideas of barbarism, passivity, child-like, and submissive are all used to describe the Egyptians. They are weak yet Barbaric according to Le Due d’Harcourt. I feel they use words to describe the colonized that seem to be opposite of the French in order to gain support in colonization. To lack national feeling is a very bold statement to make. It shows how the British and French used books about the Egyptians to create racial ideologies. Another powerful part of this piece was the picture on p. 57 which further perpetuates ideas of Egyptians being uncivilized extremely low on the racial hierarchy. It is crazy how powerful not only written pieces but pictures can be in creating racial pitting. It reminds one of the first pieces we read on the postcards that falsely represented women in the hijab.
ReplyDeleteWhat i found most compelling about this article is just the heightened degree to which politics is present in even the definitions of words within a given lexicon. How a term like effendi was used and re-purposed time and time again so as to benefit the political agenda of those who in held the seat at defining these terms. A case in point is how this re-definement was materialized by the British creation of an education system in Egypt which promoted and perpetuated this notion of the "new" effendi. It is interesting how a term like effendi which as you mention as a term to describe men of educated status took on pretty overt nationalistic overtones and how that played in to topics of masculinity.
ReplyDelete