Best-selling music records and popular vaudevillian theater shows, rather than political pamphlets and newspaper columns, were driving forces behind shaping the national identity of the Egyptian people before their 1919 revolution against their British occupiers, said Ziad Fahmy, speaking on campus Sept. 20.

Fahmy, assistant professor of modern Middle East history in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, presented a "Chats in the Stacks" talk about his new book, "Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture" (Stanford University Press), in Olin Library's Amit Bhatia Libe Café.

Fahmy explained that his book offers a reconception and expansion of the seminal theory of "print-capitalism," advanced by Benedict Anderson, Cornell's Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government and Asian Studies. Print-capitalism argues that a society's national identity is largely formed through the commercial success of its print media.

In Egypt, however, popular vaudevillian or burlesque musical theater and songs recorded from those shows were far more influential in shaping a national identity for "ordinary Egyptians" than the print media, claimed Fahmy, who coined the term "media-capitalism" for the phenomenon.

The linguistic and sociological divide between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and everyday "Egyptian" Arabic accounts for the importance of nonwritten media in early 20th century Egypt, Fahmy said. The gap is so great between the two forms of Arabic that Egypt is considered a "diglossic" (dual-language) society.

"It's hard to explain, really," said Fahmy of a diglossic society like Egypt where MSA, with its "sacred" and classical pedigree, is only used for written works and in religious or scholarly contexts. "Nobody speaks [MSA] in their everyday lives. It would be hilarious if someone did ... like me speaking Shakespearean English," said Fahmy. "You can't tell a joke in [MSA]."

In 1910 or so, because less than 10 percent of Egyptians were literate, popular theater and the blossoming recorded music industry provided ordinary Egyptians with mass entertainment that they could understand and enjoy, Fahmy explained.

The shows were essentially folk musicals, full of humor, risqué flirtatiousness and plots centered on everyday life, he said. Beloved actors and singers attained instant stardom and signed contracts to record the most popular "short little ditties," Fahmy said, which were then played on phonographs throughout the cafes and streets of Cairo.

Increasingly, during and immediately after World War I, the content of these "pop songs" shifted toward socio-economic concerns of ordinary Egyptians and the burden of the British occupation.

From the ironic "Abundance," lamenting strict British rationing, to the more overtly nationalistic "Rise Up, O Egyptian," the songs were instrumental not only in promoting national unity among Egyptians, he said, but even more importantly, in spreading the Cairene dialect of Egyptian Arabic throughout the larger population. Some of the choruses would even be sung during the 1919 revolution.

Rightly nervous about the potential mobilizing power of these shows and recordings, Egypt's rulers decried the people's descent into vulgarity and "moral corruption," Fahmy said. Opinion columns that Fahmy read aloud from contemporary newspapers championed Western-style dramas in MSA.

Nevertheless, Fahmy also read a response to critics of popular entertainment written by an intellectual who appreciated vaudevillian-style theater himself. "The theater was created for the masses," he wrote, "and a joke is not humorous unless it is completely understood by everyone."

But when Egypt gained partial independence from the British in 1922, popular entertainment had gotten the last laugh.

Paul Bennetch '12 is a writer intern for the Cornell Chronicle.