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Sources and Documents

How to Study a State in Ruins?

Comment étudier un État en ruines ?
كيف يمكن دراسة دولة «خَرِبة»؟
Chihab El Khachab
p. 209-222

Résumés

Que ce soit en raison d'un accès restreint ou d'un manque de sources, les Archives Nationales égyptiennes ne sont pas d'un grand secours pour écrire l'histoire de l'État contemporain. Ironiquement, la croissance de l'État-providence entre les années 1950 et 1970 n'a pas donné lieu à une documentation systématique des traces matérielles de son existence, ce qui soulève une question méthodologique pratique sur les sources et les matériaux disponibles pour l'étude de cette période. Cet article vise, d'une part, à informer les chercheurs sur certaines sources alternatives pour écrire l'histoire de l'Égypte contemporaine et, d'autre part, à réfléchir à la manière dont ces sources incarnent matériellement les ruines de l'État-providence égyptien. Basé sur une étude de cas historique et ethnographique centrée sur le Ministère de la Culture, cet article soulignera comment les bibliothèques personnelles et le marché des livres et documents d'occasion peuvent servir de sites pour l'étude d'un État en ruines.

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Introduction

1One of the greatest challenges facing students of contemporary Egypt is the paucity of archival sources and materials covering the period after the 1952 revolution. Governmental archives, which have been difficult to access historically, have become even more securitized after 2013 (Fahmy 2014; El Shakry 2015; Carminati 2018). Even when accessible, these archives do not always harbor relevant documentation, given historically uneven archiving practices across state administrations as well as the systematic culling of the state’s paperwork following annual inventories. When the Egyptian National Archives were established in 1954, the objective was to grab hold of all documents pertaining to the monarchical era, chief among which were the royal daftarkhâna’s papers gathered by Mohammed Ali’s dynasty. Yet the National Archives’ collection operation was far from systematic (see Di Capua 2009, 294-298). Archival holdings were long left inaccessible in the basement of Abdeen Palace in the 1950s and 1960s, until they were slowly moved and catalogued in the new National Library and Archives building from 1972 until the early 1990s. To this day, the great majority of holdings at the National Archives cover periods preceding the 1952 revolution.

2Paradoxically, then, the contemporary state apparatus has not preserved its own heritage to the same extent as it has preserved the heritage of Mamluk, Ottoman, and British-Egyptian administrations. The sum of papers that one could judge, as an academic researcher, to have value in Egyptian administrative history do not systematically turn into archival documents at the hands of the state officials managing them, except in the case of personnel files (mahfûzât). This situation generates a significant and increasing deficit in state records, as well as a fragmentation in the sources available to write the state’s history. State archives, in this sense, are just a portion of the archive of the state, understood as the sum of paperwork produced by state institutions.

3This more expansive understanding of the “archive of the state” poses a clear practical difficulty: where can one locate sources and materials to study contemporary Egypt? When I started my ethnographic and historical study of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, I naively thought that I would spend the historical portion of the study in official archives. Not only did I find it difficult to access these sites, but I was also surprised at the poverty – or sometimes the absence – of materials about the institution’s history within its own premises. The surprise became even greater when I realized that the National Archives, though a subdivision of the Ministry of Culture, never archived the Ministry’s own paperwork in a systematic manner. In contrast, I encountered a wealth of materials in the personal libraries of state bureaucrats and, in some cases, on the used book market, which made me reorient my study towards these alternative sites. Over time, I realized the extent to which the contemporary state cannot be studied through its institutional archives, because its daily operation involves shedding enormous amounts of administrative documents. There is no pristine repository of the state’s ruins, in other words, because these ruins came down to us in an equally ruined state.

4This article points to two alternative sites for the historical study of contemporary Egypt, namely personal libraries and the used book market. Each site will be treated in turn, based on fieldwork between 2018 and 2019. Understanding the practicalities of fieldwork using personal libraries and the used book market should be, I hope, useful to all students of contemporary Egypt. The Ministry of Culture specifically offers an interesting case to diagnose how welfare institutions designed to bring “culture to the people” (al-thaqâfa lil-sha‘b) were ruined over time – their traces are still visible in the present, albeit in a decayed manner. I will conclude with a brief reflection on how the fragmentation of sources and materials about the Egyptian state reflects a deeper fragmentation of its everyday workings, and why the metaphor of a “ruin” captures this situation well.

Personal libraries

5The personal libraries of state bureaucrats and their families contain a wealth of historical documents of public as well as private import. The basic reason is that when a bureaucrat leaves office – whether after resigning, retiring or being fired – there is no systematic policy governing what happens to the office’s contents. The laws and decrees governing the civil administration’s archiving practices have evolved over time: setting aside the ineffective law establishing the National Archives in 1954, there is a 1975 law (amended in 1983) concerning the preservation of official state documents as well as a 2009 decree by the Minister of Finance on personnel files (what is known as mahfûzât). However, these laws can be vague about the specific documents to be preserved and, in consequence, they are regularly bypassed or reinterpreted by the officials managing paperwork on a day-to-day basis. Some papers may be thrown away, some may be taken home, some may be left at work, but it is difficult to know in advance what will end up where. This situation explains, in part, why governmental archives have spotty records after 1952, but it presents an opportunity to track administrative paperwork beyond the walls of inaccessible archival institutions.

6The first step in tracking paperwork is to identify its possible locations after it leaves the institution. A useful starting point is prior knowledge of the key actors involved in one’s study. When I began researching the Ministry of Culture (initially the Ministry of National Guidance), I had a sense of the major ministers who came to power from 1952 onwards, chief among whom were Tharwat Okasha and Farouk Hosny. Over time, I learned about ministers who did not stay long in power but had a long-lasting influence, including Fathy Radwan and Abdel Kader Hatem. I also learned about influential mid-level bureaucrats such as the head of the Arts Department, Yahia Haqqi; the once head of the General Organization for Theatrical Arts and Music, Ali al-Rai; and the founding head of the Mass Culture Institute, Saad Kamel. With these names in mind and the help of my interlocutors in Cairo, I traced a network of descendants who could, in principle, hold their forbearers’ paperwork. Although kinship diagrams are no longer fashionable in anthropological fieldwork, getting a sense of an official’s family tree is a useful starting point to think about the intergenerational distribution of state paperwork. This is, in part, because bureaucrats and their families are likely to maintain intergenerational properties and remain in white-collar professions, which allows paperwork to be preserved beyond a given individual’s lifetime. The wider the network of kin, the more likely one can guess where each portion of a given individual’s papers went.

7Once possible locations are identified, there remains the task of negotiating access to personal libraries, because it is entirely up to family members whether they will open their doors to a researcher or not. Setting aside internal family arrangements concerning which person owns what paperwork in which property, there are varying obstacles standing between a researcher and a given bureaucrat’s library. In my experience, some families have politely declined my request to work in their homes or kept me hanging after several phone calls without commitment. Some have claimed that their books and paperwork were sold or given to an institution (in which case one can infer that the paper itself has been discarded, since Egyptian governmental libraries tend to keep books only). Some have opened their doors to me, but wanted to remain in my presence as we were carefully sifting through their library. Some left me to work in the space as they went about their daily business. Again, there are no general rules about access, but the researcher remains at the mercy of the family’s decisions no matter what they are.

8Once granted access, it is useful to gain a sense of the library’s organization. This would be important in any public archive or library. The key difference, in this case, is that the organizational principles undergirding a personal library are seldom set down in guideline documents or handled by professionals. The researcher is left to make a survey of their own, which should include a preliminary mapping of the various media housed in the library – books, magazines, paper, photographs, films, etc. – and a preliminary sense of the main subjects in which the original owner was interested. If the library is still close to the state in which the owner left it – as opposed to being stored away in boxes for instance – different media and themes tend to more or less aggregate according to the owner’s organization. A full survey of the location can reveal somewhat hidden materials. When possible, working over several days or weeks can lead to a better iterative, spatialized understanding of the library’s logic. Unsurprisingly, working in a personal library is a highly personalized affair, but a basic survey of the contents and additional interviews with those caring for the library can save much time and provide insightful biographical details to contextualize the material accessed – for example, when was it collected by the owner? When was it moved? Why and under what circumstances? Unless the opportunity to visit a library presents itself only once, I would suggest making regular journeys back to better understand its contents and build rapport with its caretaker.

9This process is best illustrated with an ethnographic example: a personal library that I visited on numerous occasions between April and June 2019. I have decided to anonymize all interlocutors involved, and especially the caretaker, who will be called Safiyya. I initially went to Safiyya’s apartment accompanied by one of her closest friends, Mariam, as well as Ziad, a friend who was interested in her collection. Safiyya was married to a man who had briefly been a mid-level bureaucrat at the Ministry of Culture, and I was holding out hope to find out some paperwork about his time at the Ministry or books printed at the time. When Mariam, Ziad, and I arrived at the house for the first time, Mariam introduced me to Safiyya as someone from Oxford. Safiyya asked which college and I answered that I did a doctorate in Wolfson College and now work in Christ Church. “Oh, even better”, she exclaimed. My affiliation to Oxford, in addition, I suspect, to her close friend’s recommendation, encouraged Safiyya’s decision to open her late husband’s library to us.

10On the same day, Safiyya started by showing us the living room library, which mostly consisted of large hardbound tomes of 18th- and 19th-century English and French literature. The main library was on the second floor, in a large room covered in wooden shelves and parquet, with a small sitting space in front of the main door, an antique desk to the right, and another small table by the desk. Safiyya showed us the section devoted to her husband’s own publications and continued with the law section, the Arabic section, and the French/Russian literature section. On this initial tour, I made a mental note of some books in the Arabic corner, including a dictionary of cultural terms edited by the ex-Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha. More importantly to me, Safiyya showed us the chest where her husband’s unpublished manuscripts were kept. She mentioned that there were more papers in boxes inside her closet, but that she will show us these materials another time. Some days later, Safiyya invited me back to the library on my own and gave me a little table to sit and work. She enquired about what I needed to see, and I said that I would have a look at the Arabic books corner. I made a list of interesting books to add to my ongoing research on the Ministry of Culture: some of Tharwat Okasha’s works, many volumes of the Arabic Language Academy’s journal, and the first yearbook of the Egyptian Association for Fine Arts Amateurs (al-gam‘iyya al-misriyya li-muhibbî al-funûn al-gamîla). With Safiyya’s permission, I photographed the latter book on my smartphone (as I did throughout my fieldwork), because it contained valuable information about active artists and state organizations in the 1960s fine arts sector.

11Ten days later, I met Safiyya with Ziad in the morning. Safiyya stayed to chat with me and asked about what I was interested in seeing today. I mentioned the papers hidden in the chest that she showed us earlier. As we opened the chest and looked through the papers, we found a series of Arabic translations (which, according to Safiyya, were likely commissioned by Tharwat Okasha for a specific event). Later, we found a paper on the humanities in the Third World, as well as what seemed like an unfinished anthology of Graeco-Roman classics (neither Safiyya nor I could guess what they were). The chest was very full, and I had no sense of its total content, so I began writing a bibliographical list based on the works available. I counted around 22 items by hand, but I could not finish the whole chest nor photograph any of the papers until I came back a few days later. I carried on working on the bibliography while digging up the personal papers. I discovered more articles on cultural policy published by the UNESCO, which I photographed, but I still did not have time to go through everything. I came back the following week to look through the remaining papers, which included an administrative file on Safiyya’s husband’s time in office. Safiyya left me to work all day after an initial conversation in which she showed me books about the Ministry of Culture that I had not yet seen. The next day, I went back to photograph three more books that I had found as I was browsing through the library one last time: a 1969 French-language book on theatre in the United Arab Republic, a bibliography of works translated into English by the General Egyptian Book Organization, and conference proceedings about translation and cultural development.

12Working in Safiyya’s library was, in many ways, unusually straightforward. I was given access to the whole library, which included books and personal papers, and I managed to strike several conversations with Safiyya about the collection’s contents. Safiyya was knowledgeable about the library and its constitution over time, as well as her late husband’s biography. I was at complete liberty to choose which books and papers to consult and photograph. While this situation is somewhat unique, I wanted to highlight how working in a gradual manner, over several days or weeks, allowed me to uncover additional contents and context, with each new document and each new conversation with Safiyya. The material I have gathered – including ethnographic notes, bibliographical notes, and digital photographs of original documents – are part of the primary material from which I am now writing a book on the Ministry of Culture, as well as the methodological process through which one could piece together such a story based on a fragmentary record.

13This process involves not only reading the primary material derived from personal libraries for its content – say, reading the UNESCO articles on cultural policy to learn about the Ministry of Culture in the 1960s – but also situating this material in relation to the wide range of governmental publications produced by the Ministry – which is materially visible in the library itself. The Egyptian Ministry of Culture housed the biggest publishing house in the Middle East from the 1950s onwards, in addition to a large governmental cinema sector, radio (and later television) broadcasting, a country-wide network of libraries, galleries, museums, and cultural palaces and, by the late 1960s, art academies. All these institutions printed a large amount of gray literature which, although neglected in academic scholarship, illustrates the central importance of cultural service provision as a political vocation until the 1970s. This literature not only records ongoing activities at the Ministry – say, in the French-language book on theatre I found in Safiyya’s library – but also embodies, in aggregate, the very cultural products that the Ministry and high officials like Tharwat Okasha and Abdel Kader Hatem wanted to bring to the people – in this case, books. Working in personal libraries has allowed me to see how state bureaucrats kept a trace, in their own collections, of the Ministry’s ideological and material output – and more specifically, to contrast the resources invested in bringing “culture to the people” in a welfarist mode with the decay of cultural service provision today. In other words, the collection itself is just as instructive about the Ministry’s history as its intellectual content.

The Used Book Market

14Most historians and literary scholars of modern Egypt are familiar with the used book market in Cairo, which is commonly associated with the bookstalls near the Azbakiyya palace (sûr al-azbakiyya). This association is geographically reductive, however, since bookstalls aggregate near the Nasser metro station (colloquially known as al-is‘âf), behind the Sayyida Zaynab metro station (colloquially known as Abû al-Rîsh), next to the Al-Azhar and Hussein mosques, and in a weekly Facebook-based market behind Cinema Diana in downtown Cairo, where in-person deliveries are handled. My description will be restricted to the Cairo book markets, but it bears noting that these markets are coextensive with many others across Egypt – most notably, the book market on Nabi Daniel Street in Alexandria. These bookstall agglomerations are without counting the storage spaces (makhâzin) in which bigger book dealers store their goods and out of which they do business with each other or with special customers. All these spaces constitute an interface between the book trade and researchers that has become methodologically central to the study of monarchical and republican Egypt. Nevertheless, very few scholars have described the market’s empirical workings and its epistemic implications. Lucie Ryzova is among those few to theorize how historical sources are commoditized by the used book market in Cairo, thereby imposing financial and logistical constraints on what can be known about the past (2012; 2014).

15Here, I will dwell on the practicalities of the current used book market to help students and researchers who want to find fresh material on contemporary Egypt. I would like to make two general remarks before proceeding. First, what is colloquially called “the used book market” (sû’ il-kutub) is in fact filled with much more diverse media: magazines, papers, commercials, posters, postcards, photographs, and, in some cases, records and film. Some of these media can circulate in more specialized markets controlled by collectors and auction houses – for instance, collectible records or film negatives. It still remains the case that book merchants own and sell a wide array of print and analogue media, not just books. This is due to the second general remark I want to make. The used book – paper, poster, photograph – market is not an abstract entity with a well-regulated supply and demand curve but, following Elyachar’s theorization of craftsmen and their market in Egypt (2005), it is a protean network of social relations between sellers and buyers connected by a circuit in which used goods recirculate. Once a book is purchased and used, whether by a private owner or an institutional library, it is either sold in bulk (usually to a book dealer or another intermediary), given away as a gift (either to a particular or another institution), or thrown away. If not materially eradicated, the used book – or paper, poster, or photograph – can get a new lease on life by being resold, in bulk or by the unit, between different intermediaries – trash collectors, rubabikya merchants, booksellers, bookstore owners, private collectors – with an increment in price each time it reaches a new buyer. The market’s overall shape is not set by abstract economic imperatives, in this sense, but by the social embedding of recirculated goods.

16The practical description below is based on the personal connections that I have forged with different intermediaries in the used book market. Some connections are fleeting – for instance, with bookstall owners near Nasser or Sayyida Zaynab metro stations, whom I visited enough to be recognized, but not to solicit books in the long term. Other connections have been more personalized and sustained over the years. For example, in the Facebook-based market near Cinema Diana, I remain in regular contact with two booksellers from whom I have purchased several 1950s and 1960s governmental publications. Both look out to buy additional materials within my areas of interest, and I make a point of getting new books from them on my visits to Cairo. These booksellers – I will call them Taqi and No‘man to maintain their anonymity – entered the used book trade as a side business, but have profited from the growth of the Facebook-based market to connect with local and international clients. Much of what I learned about the used book market is through dealers such as Taqi and No‘man.

  • 1 Price estimates are based on my own experience in Cairo between 2018 and 2019. Prices have risen af (...)

17The vast majority of researchers enter the used book market as customers buying by the unit, since they are typically looking to acquire books on a specific topic without having to wade through piles of unwanted materials. While more expensive per item than buying in bulk, the additional expense theoretically rewards the bookseller’s labour in acquiring, triaging, and preserving used books and other media. Setting aside visits to a bookseller’s storage, which is a useful way to make bulk buys once a relationship is established with a dealer like Taqi or No‘man, the easiest way to buy books or papers is by visiting one of the numerous public markets in Cairo. Each market specializes in a certain type of book, although the destiny of specific books can be hard to predict. The used book dealers who were by the Azbakiyya walls now congregate in stalls around the back of the Ataba metro station, where around forty to fifty bookstalls are still active. The market is open every day until evening. Most sellers now concentrate on used textbooks and contemporary novels. Some of the older bookstalls, which are not regularly opened, will contain “old” (i.e., pre-1970s) books, magazines, and ephemera. Most books are sold at a negotiable price, although many sellers will leave cheap pocket novels or paperback nonfiction on tables priced at 5-15LE/book.1

18The bookstalls behind the Sayyida Zaynab metro station are open every day until night, even though the 15-odd stalls open at irregular intervals depending on the dealer’s whim. While the first two stalls by the main street sell school textbooks, the remaining ones specialize in pre-1970s and especially Nasser-era books. The Sayyida Zaynab stalls have been, in this sense, an essential stop in my quest to acquire governmental publications and papers about the Ministry of Culture. Each open stall usually has a table of cheap books available for browsing, selling at 5-20LE/book, but the genuine finds are inside the stalls, which remain in various degrees of organization. While some stalls are organized more or less by epoch and theme, others just have large piles of material in no specific order, likely because they are awaiting triage. In multiple visits to multiple stalls, I have found a wide range of books and magazines roughly covering the period between the 1940s and the 1970s. The average medium-sized book sold between 50-100LE. The last few stalls on the row, on the side closest to the metro station, belong to Hany Abdo and his family, who are best known for collecting and selling pre-1970s magazines. In fact, the family owns a small tourist-oriented shop in the Hussein area in which magazines sell for 50-100LE/magazine, though it is possible to buy cheaper by the bulk at their Sayyida Zaynab stall.

19The bookstalls near the Nasser metro station comprise four or five permanent stalls on Ramses Street, between 26th July Street and Sayyid ‘Anbar Street. This market is open most days until evening, but it is advisable to go on Sundays, when the closure of nearby workshops and stores allows more booksellers to spread their merchandise all the way down to Abdel Khaliq Tharwat Street. These bookstalls specialize in Nasser-era books, especially cheap paperbacks from the time, perhaps owing to their strategic location next to governmental institutions that discard their old books on a regular basis. The Nasser metro market is, in this sense, an embodiment of the welfare state’s ruins, as nearby institutions shed this older state’s printed traces on the sidewalk. Some books are browsable in the stall and sold for fixed prices (between 2-10LE), and some have no fixed price, although they usually sell at no higher than 20LE/book. These stalls are so affordable, in fact, that other booksellers regularly visit them to buy in bulk. The bookstalls near the Al-Azhar and Hussein area, which extend a long tradition of bookmaking and bookbinding going back to medieval times, specialize in religious books and heritage books (kutub turâth). The latter tend to be more expensive owing to their age and quality binding.

20Lastly, a thriving online book market has been gathering on Saturdays in the cafés right behind Cinema Diana in downtown Cairo since 2014 (according to its earliest denizens). In parallel with the general rise of online sales via Facebook, individual booksellers in Egypt have begun using their profile page – or creating a specialized page – to post pictures of book or magazine covers and, in some cases, a table of contents. The picture caption fixes the item’s price and, in some cases, adds a title and additional information about the item’s contents. Sellers will occasionally post pictures of postcards and other ephemera, although most merchants involved in the online book market specialize in books and magazines. Customers interested in a given item write “reservation” (hagz) under the post’s comment section, after which most sellers will confirm the sale with a comment reply (usually a simple tamm). Each seller aggregates each customer’s reservations and, every Saturday, delivers the books in exchange for the fixed sum indicated online. Counterintuitively, perhaps, it is better to start attending the market in person on Saturdays and joining each merchant’s Facebook page there before browsing and making reservations online – to acquaint oneself with the in-person delivery method. While each merchant tends to have a different specialty – some specialize in heritage books, some in “royal” books and magazines, some in Nasser-era material – the online market reflects the diversity of booksellers in Cairo’s physical book markets. The Facebook-based market has been so successful, in fact, that many dealers with established bookstalls have created their own pages and joined the social media world in recent years. The online market is, on average, pricier than other physical markets, but the convention of fixed pricing avoids the pitfalls of haggling for inexperienced buyers.

21Overall, item pricing varies according to the point at which one buys within the used book – or paper, postcard, or photograph – circuit. I got some books for free when I caught them right when a person or institution was discarding them. I bought books in bulk, which is much cheaper than by the unit. Prices by the unit, likewise, will vary between the cheap books available between 2-20LE at the Nasser metro stalls or on cheap book tables in Azbakiyya or Sayyida Zaynab, and the more expensive books sold for 25-75LE on Facebook. Pricing also depends on the personal relation between seller and buyer: over time, some sellers will provide discounts in exchange for maintaining the relationship with a certain customer. Nevertheless, there are some objective criteria affecting an item’s price in the used book market. Contrary to the researcher’s belief – that a book’s content matters to its value – few books garner a specifically higher or lower value by virtue of their topic: books on masonry, magic, or Judaism are prominent exceptions in today’s market. Most other books remain equal except by size, quality, and age.

22Size-wise, booksellers distinguish between small books (qat‘ sughayyar), medium books (qat‘ mutawassit), and large books (qat‘ kibîr). Respectively, these roughly correspond to pocketbooks (sextodecimo and smaller), octavo books, and quarto books (or larger). The smaller the book, the cheaper by default. Quality-wise, hardbound books printed on laminated paper (kushêh) are usually more expensive than paperback and/or pulp books, especially when containing images. Photographs of famous rulers – chief among which are King Fouad and Nasser in the current market, but also prominent Gulf monarchs – drive the book’s price higher. Lastly, in terms of age, the general rule is that the older the book, the rarer and more expensive it is. However, booksellers evaluate prices not on a chronological continuum, but according to pre-defined shorthands for different epochs. Heritage books (kutub turâth) designate any book published before the 1900s as well as recent editions of medieval Muslim scholarship. “Royal” books (kutub malakiyya) roughly correspond to books published between 1900 and 1952. “Nasserist” books (kutub nâsiriyya) correspond to books published between 1952 and 1970, whereas 1970s and 1980s books are usually identified by decade (kutub sab‘înât wa-tamanînât). Modern books (kutub hadîtha) generally include anything published since 1990. When I interacted with booksellers like Taqi and No‘man, I found that using these shorthands to identify the books in which I am interested is a much more effective way to find relevant material than specifying a research topic. Those interested in the welfare state, for instance, will do better to ask for small and medium paperback “Nasserist” books than they will asking about a specific name or institution.

23This brief description of the current used book market may be useful to all students of contemporary Egypt, but what about those specifically interested in the welfare state? In terms of content, some bookstalls are more likely to contain relevant material than others. For instance, governmental material printed between the 1950s and the 1970s ends up at the Nasser and Sayyida Zaynab metro station stalls more often than elsewhere. Likewise, some booksellers – such as Taqi and No‘man – are more likely to specialize in governmental material than others. However, beyond its content, this market gathers the commodified traces of the welfare state’s publications – or, in other words, the ruins of an official cultural apparatus designed to bring “culture to the people.” Although what sells on the market is not systematically or intentionally curated in the same way as in personal libraries, the nature and volume of transacted material yields interesting insights into what remains of the welfare state today. It is striking to note, for instance, that those books initially printed by the Ministry of Culture as affordable paperbacks – in keeping with the slogan “a book for the price of a bread loaf” – remain among the most affordable and widely circulated publications in today’s used book market. The Ministry of Culture paperbacks initially published in series like “We Have Chosen for You (Ikhtarnâ lak)” or “The Classics of World Theatre (Rawâ’i‘ al-masrah al-‘âlamî)” remain in great demand, possibly even greater than when they were published. Thus, an acquaintance with the used book market gives a sense of the legacies of cultural service provision institutions after 1952.

Conclusion

24This article offers some practical tips to study the contemporary Egyptian state. On one hand, since administrative paperwork is often kept and inherited within families, personal libraries become an invaluable source of information not only on private matters, but also on the workings of national institutions. On the other hand, since these institutions regularly discard official books and papers, they become accessible on the used book market. While both sites provide only a fragmentary record, they remain invaluable given the want – or, in some cases, the total absence – of integral records on the post-1952 state apparatus. This fragmentation is instructive about the operations of the contemporary Egyptian state. In direct contradiction of teleological models in which kin-based organization is thought to offer a lesser form of political organization than states, it is evident that the families of bureaucrats in Egypt have often been better at preserving the state’s heritage than its own institutions. One might argue that the state should be able to better preserve its own archives, but such a normative position masks the reality of common archiving practices across state administrations since 1952. With a weak legal framework around archiving and even weaker institutional means to enforce these laws, the bureaucrats’ default position has been to make discrete, local decisions to discard documents, to leave them in unattended piles in obscure building corners, or to bring them home and hope to preserve them. Moreover, whatever is discarded is not truly discarded until it is materially degraded beyond repair, because a wide network of trash collectors, rubabikya merchants, and booksellers ensures the recirculation of vital historical material in commoditized form. The haphazard record left in personal libraries and the used book market reflects the haphazard way in which state documents survive, which is in turn more instructive about the state’s actual operation than a normative model of how it ought to work.

25Scholars have long looked outside governmental institutions to find sources on the Egyptian state after the 1952 revolution. Setting aside Nasser-era scholars marred by direct limitations of access (see Vatikiotis 1961; Abdel Malek 1962), recent scholarship about the contemporary state’s history has relied on magazines and periodicals (see Bier 2011), political speeches and memoirs (see Younis 2012), oral histories (see Abou-el-Fadl 2018), and school textbooks (see Sobhy 2023). With a range of sources and theoretical interests, these studies depict contemporary Egyptian state administration under different guises – for instance, in Younis’ (2012) case, as an ideological project articulated by prominent politicians and intellectuals, as opposed to, in Sobhy’s (2023) case, an everyday nation-building apparatus embodied by educational institutions. Although scholars have developed different strategies to circumvent official archives in their quest to study the state, little has been written about how the fragmentation of the “archive of the state” – across official institutions, personal libraries, and the used book market – shapes our conception of the state itself.

26I will hazard two observations here. First, the ideological project of state formation after 1952 hides the material struggles between state institutions in the name of a unitary “July state” (dawlat yûlyû), but it also hides the material limitations to the concerted efforts made by bureaucrats to craft this very project. Bureaucrats never have access to enough sources to talk about the state as a whole in a substantive way. The fragmentation of the “archive of the state” means that whenever institutions like the Ministry of Culture or the Ministry of Education write about “the state,” they do so by reinforcing a localized and historically specific common sense about the size and shape of this entity; a common sense that becomes more important than critical investigation. Second, and in consequence, there is no internal vantage point from which “the state” can be described. This is important to highlight because it is not the case that state officials or lucky researchers have access to a wealth of documents in official archives to write authoritative accounts of the state’s history, whereas unlucky outsiders must be content with the crumbs beyond these archives. Both historians and bureaucrats have limited access to an already fragmented archival record, which means that insiders cannot better capture the historical changes undergone by state institutions than outsiders can at any one moment.

27To conclude, I would like to return to the metaphor in the title: how to study a state in ruins? In a sense, the Egyptian state is no ruin at all – its repressive apparatus, its financial infrastructure, and its civil administration are alive and well. Nonetheless, the welfare institutions established under Nasser – including in the cultural sector – have become a shell of their former selves. Although most cultural institutions established in the 1950s and 1960s still exist, chronic underfunding and political neglect have seriously hampered their welfare vocation. The haphazard traces left by these institutions can be understood, in this context, as a ruin – not in the sense of an ancient monument, but as an entity in the process of becoming ruined. As Ann Stoler notes, the ruin “serves both as a noun and as a verb” (2008, 195) – it is both a state in which the past is left to decay and the very process through which it suffers this fate. Stoler is specifically interested in the everyday traces left by empire in postcolonial settings – what she calls “imperial debris.” I would argue that a similar outlook can be extended to the traces left by different iterations of an anti-colonial state project into the present. To talk about a ruin, in this context, is neither to glorify the past state apparatus nor to underrate the current one. Rather, it is to take stock of the semi-defunct, semi-active state in which today’s bureaucrats inherited welfare institutions from their predecessors, whose material traces are now fragmented well beyond official archives.

Acknowledgements
Versions of this article were initially presented at the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économiques, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ) research seminar in 2019, the University College in London (UCL) social anthropology seminar in 2021, and a conference entitled Impossible Archives, co-organized by the American University in Cairo and the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale in 2023. I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to share my work in progress on each occasion, respectively, Marie Vannetzel and Marine Poirier; Lewis Daly; and Malak Labib and Pascale Ghazaleh. I would also like to thank Carl Rommel, Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Pascal Menoret, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback in writing. The fieldwork for this study was funded by the Christ Church Research Centre (Christ Church, University of Oxford).

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Notes

1 Price estimates are based on my own experience in Cairo between 2018 and 2019. Prices have risen after ongoing inflation and currency devaluation since then.

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Auteur

Chihab El Khachab



Chihab El Khachab is Associate Professor in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research explores Egyptian media production and cultural institutions. He is the author of Making Film in Egypt: How Labor, Technology, and Mediation Shape the Industry (AUC Press, 2021). His current book project is a historical ethnography of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.

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