In this innovative book, Keith Watenpaugh connects the question
of modernity to the formation of the Arab middle class. The book
explores the rise of a middle class of liberal professionals,
white-collar employees, journalists, and businessmen during the
first decades of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and
the ways its members created civil society, and new forms of
politics, bodies of thought, and styles of engagement with
colonialism.
Discussions of the middle class have been largely absent from
historical writings about the Middle East. Watenpaugh fills this
lacuna by drawing on Arab, Ottoman, British, American and French
sources and an eclectic body of theoretical literature and shows
that within the crucible of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908,
World War I, and the advent of late European colonialism, a
discrete middle class took shape. It was defined not just by the
wealth, professions, possessions, or the levels of education of its
members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity.
Using the ethnically and religiously diverse middle class of the
cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, Syria, as a point of departure,
Watenpaugh explores the larger political and social implications of
what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the
twentieth century.
Well researched and provocative, "Being Modern in the Middle
East" makes a critical contribution not just to Middle East
history, but also to the global study of class, mass violence,
ideas, and revolution.
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