Grey Room

Outdating: The Time of “Culture” in Colonial Egypt

On Barak

The ex libris of King Farouk (1920–1965), representing the printing press in Egypt.

Abstract

At a moment in the late nineteenth century when such technologies as the steamer, the railway, the telegraph, and the Suez Canal affixed colonial Egypt to Europe anew, the Hijrī calendar—the lunar timekeeping scheme predicated on the logic of the transmission of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad—came to be eclipsed in key spheres of life by the Gregorian calendar. The article argues that the result of this calendric reform was not the decommissioning of a previously operative form of timekeeping but rather its relegation into a purely “cultural” domain, a free-floating sphere wherein human belief, solidarity, manners, and customs could be divorced from a host of new technologies and transformed into a suitable vessel for new ideological substance.

Outdating: The Time of “Culture” in Colonial Egypt

On Barak

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