The origins of nations have been intensely debated by scholars. A consensus has emerged among most historians that nations are “constructed,” “invented,” or “imagined” in the modern period.¹ Yet they are not invented from thin air. Rather, nationalists are bound by the cultural materials at hand, the ethnicities on the ground, and socioeconomic circumstances. Some “ethnies” develop into nations, others are absorbed into a larger national project, and still others languish or disappear.² Gender analysis challenges some of the presumptions about the construction of nations and argues that gender is crucial in the production and reproduction of ethnic and national...

All nations, it seems, have a national honor to defend. Yet just as nations are not givens, but rather communities built around ethnic, economic, linguistic, religious, and other ties, so too national honor must be seen as a modern construct and a crucial element in the making of collective memory. Nationalists worked at promoting a sense of national honor using the cultural materials and social relations at hand. The concept thus had distinct resonances and a broad range of meanings depending on the region and period. Knowing more about national honor and the notions upon which it is based should...

A nation is an abstraction. That is, it has no material form. Yet ever since the rise of nationalism, the nation has been represented visually. The nation is thus an “imagined community” that is sometimes imagined in human form.¹ The purposes of this iconography are clear: images of the nation were meant to reaffirm the unity of the collective and give the concept of nationhood greater immediacy. In societies such as those of the Middle East, they were also meant to disseminate the idea of nationalism to broad segments of the population who remained illiterate. When the nation was personified,...

A nation is made up of a multitude of people who have never seen the vast majority of their compatriots. “It isimagined,” Benedict Anderson tells us, “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Anderson points to the importance of print culture and newspapers in building that “imagined political community.”¹ Here we turn to a modern medium that suited the enterprise of nation-building and allowed members of the nation to see, if not...

Elite Egyptian women entered the collective memory and political history of Egypt when, in March 1919, a week into the unrest that came to be known as the revolution of 1919, they staged their own demonstrations.¹ A mythology has grown up around the event, which has received attention in scores of Arabic and English texts and has achieved iconic stature. Memories of the “ladies’ demonstration” were preserved and shaped through both literary vehicles and visual devices. The “ladies’ demonstration” of March 1919 comes to be one of the most prominent symbols of revolution in the nationalist repertoire.

Collective memory helps...

Safiyya Zaghlul, wife of the Wafdist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul, was on hand in March 1919 when her house was the focus of demonstrations, and she signed the women’s petitions delivered to foreign consuls. After the revolution of 1919, she became widely known as “Mother of the Egyptians.” Her title built on the nationalist role cast for elite women from the turn of the century as “Mothers of the Nation.” First among the mothers, she became a popular nationalist symbol. At the same time, she wielded a great deal of power within Wafdist and nationalist politics and became a central force...

The Wafd spearheaded the nationalist movement, and most Egyptian nationalists—male and female—fell in behind the “party of the nation.” Elite women attempted to secure a political niche for themselves by founding an auxiliary party organization—the Women’s Wafd—and by starting political periodicals that supported the Wafd. Yet these women wanted more than a symbolic role. In the wake of the revolution, the “lady demonstrators” of March 1919 sought to share the nationalist stage with male politicians. They wanted to be taken seriously as political actors and to push women’s political culture in new directions.

This chapter cuts...

The politics of Labiba Ahmad (1870s–1951) diverged from those of many of her female contemporaries. Most endorsed the secularism of the Wafd, the Liberal Constitutionalists, and other like-minded parties, although the attempts of these parties to divorce religion from politics was never complete, and their support for women’s participation in the public domain was often more rhetorical than real. Labiba, by contrast, favored the Islamic bent of the Watani Party, with its stress on Muslim brotherhood and gender segregation. She spearheaded a movement that conceptualized women’s rights in Islamic terms and pushed for a fusion of Islam and nationalism,...