From Nahda to exile: a story of the Shawam in Egypt in the early twentieth century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After important intellectual contributions to the Arab Nahda, the Syro-Lebanese of Egypt (the Shawam) underwent a far-reaching process of French acculturation. This process culminated in their cultural alienation from mainstream Egyptian society, and became a major reason for their departure from Nasserite Egypt in the sixties. Unlike previous narratives dealing with the history of the Shawam in Egypt, which underscored static identitarian choices as the driving force behind their cultural alienation, my thesis situates their adoption of French language and culture in the wider context of the Egyptian francophonie. This relatively unknown francophonie thrived in pre-revolutionary Egypt and was fully embraced by Egypt's urban cosmopolitan society. Despite the British occupation, French was the language of culture, finance, the press, justice and administration until the regime change. Using a more context-based approach, this thesis explores details of daily practices and experiences to discern the conditions in which the Shawam made their choices. I turn to their educational policies and appropriation of Egypt's prestigious French schools to assess the role played by these schools in their deep French acculturation. I also examine the vibrant francophone literary circles and salons, which flourished in Cairo during the interwar period, where they were particularly visible. Shawam intellectuals had not disappeared from Egyptian intellectual life, but had limited their activity to the much smaller, and much more powerful, francophone one. I contend that their cultural alienation was not the result of an innate separateness between Egyptians and them, but was contingent on historical factors, pertaining both to the community and its land of adoption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".