Omnia El Shakry

Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt

Between 1936 and 1939, the Egyptian Medical Association held a series of forums on birth control and the population problem; the first full-length book on Egypts population problem was published; the first life tables for Egypt were calculated; a group of university professors organized under the rubric of the Happy Family Society to discuss the need for planned families; the first fatwa on birth control in the 20th century was issued by the mufti of Egypt, Shaykh Abd al-Majid Salim; and the Ministry of Social Affairs was created, part of its mandate being to study the population problem.

Youth as Peril and Promise: The Emergence of Adolescent Psychology in Postwar Egypt

A public discourse of “youth crisis” emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, “adolescence” had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly consolidated disciplinary space of psychology and was reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie. Adolescence—perceived as both a collective temporality and a depoliticized individual interiority—became a volatile stage linked to a psychoanalytic notion of sexuality as libidinal raw energy, displacing other collective temporalities and geographies. New discursive formations, for example, of a psychology centered on unconscious sexual impulses and a cavernous interiority, and new social types, such as the “juvenile delinquent,” coalesced around the figure of adolescence in postwar Egypt.

THE ARABIC FREUD: THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE MODERN SUBJECT

This essay considers how Freud traveled in postwar Egypt through an exploration of the work of Yusuf Murad, the founder of a school of thought within the psychological and human sciences, and provides a close study of the journal he co-edited, Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. Translating and blending key concepts from psychoanalysis and psychology with classical Islamic concepts, Murad put forth a dynamic and dialectical approach to selfhood that emphasized the unity of the self, while often insisting on an epistemological and ethical heterogeneity from European psychoanalytic thought, embodied in a rejection of the dissolution of the self and of the death drive. In stark contrast to the so-called “tale of mutual ignorance” between Islam and psychoanalysis, the essay traces a tale of historical interactions, hybridizations, and interconnected webs of knowledge production between the Arab world and Europe. Moving away from binary models of selfhood as either modern or traditional, Western or non-Western, it examines the points of condensation and divergence, and the epistemological resonances that psychoanalytic writings had in postwar Egypt. The coproduction of psychoanalytic knowledge across Arab and European knowledge formations definitively demonstrates the outmoded nature of historical models that presuppose originals and bad copies of the global modern subject—herself so constitutively defined by the presence of the unconscious.

Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (review)

provides enough of a theoretical frame so that those not working on the Middle East or Turkey can relate to the text. She uses the theoretical frame to reach her results but does not overwhelm her data with jargon or theoretical concepts. Th e data and the informants are in the forefront of this work. Th e information provided in this brief book will be a valuable resource for many scholars. Clearly, those interested in Turkish studies and women’s studies will be interested in this book, as the study takes place in Turkey and the objects of study are women and their politicization. Th is work ought to be of interest to political scientists and those interested in international relations. I can only hope that it will be continued with similarly careful and detailed studies of women involved in other politicized ideological movements in Turkey.