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This chapter focuses on the style of the secular city, which springs in part from the societal shape provided by the anonymity and mobility discussed in the previous chapter. Two motifs in particular characterize the style of the secular city: pragmatism and profanity. Pragmatism refers to secular man's concern with the question “Will it work?” The secular man views the world not as a unified metaphysical system but as a series of problems and projects. Meanwhile, profanity refers to secular man's wholly terrestrial horizon, the disappearance of any supramundane reality defining his life. The secular man views the world not in terms of some other world but in terms of itself. Pragmatism and profanity, like anonymity and mobility, are not obstacles but avenues of access to the modern man. Pragmatism and profanity enable the urban man to discern certain elements of the Gospel which were hidden from more religious forebears.

This chapter looks into the work of Desmond Morris, particularly his book, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's View of the Human Animal (1967). Morris took a more light-hearted approach to human nature than had either Ardrey or Lorenz, choosing to emphasize the pleasure-seeking aspect of human nature and the resulting sexual dilemmas of modern man. According to Morris, “the naked ape is the sexiest primate alive.” More than in any other species, he suggested, human social bonding resulted from sexual attraction and interactions. In The Naked Ape, Morris provocatively suggested that humans lost the fur covering the bodies of most other mammals because it facilitated sexual caresses and made possible the development of other, now accessible, sexual signals.

Excavations in the last twenty years in Africa, Asia, and the Levant have played an essential role in laying down new ideas about the origin of modern man, his relations with cultural phenomena, and on psychic development. This chapter provides a summary on the data gathered which can serve as a basis for further discussion. In Africa, the chapter focuses on two deposits in South Africa, specifically in Border Cave and Klasies River Mouth, and the two skulls discovered in the Kibish formation of the Omo valley in East Africa. In Asia, the Niach skull from Borneo and a skull from Tabon, in the Philippines, are examined. In the Levant, two deposits are cited and analysed, those of Skhul and Qafzeh.

This chapter contains an essay by D. T. Suzuki in which he describes how the modern intellectual man enslaves himself with an idea of being “as great as the Creator.” Published in the men's fashion magazine Gentry in 1952, the essay argues that the situation of the modern man is caught in a web of complexities and that scientific knowledge and its applications to various fields of life have resulted in its mechanization—that is, generalization and conceptualization, which in turn means dehumanization of an individual being. Suzuki explains how Zen can help the modern man out of this predicament of intellectualization and mechanization by narrating two stories.

This chapter examines an important aspect of effendi culture as youth culture, and looks at the experience of modern schooling among first-generation efendis. Modern schooling, and the ensuing novel concept of “youth,” cannot be understood without both its material dimensions (physical distance from families, young men living together in a community of peers) as well as its strong ritual aspects which centered around new urban spaces and the consumption of modern popular culture. This chapter traces the shaping of young efendi middle class generational identity through encounters with the two key forms of authority to which young school men were exposed, patriarchy (the family) and the colonial state, embedded in the institution of the modern school. Themes such as romantic love or nationalism provided key idioms around which this efendi youth culture articulated itself, at times discreetly and contingently challenging both normative disciplinary structures.

This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the book—local Egyptian middle-class modernity articulated by and embodied in the category of the efendi—and sets them within existing historiographical traditions. A “history from the middle” is proposed to fill the gap in histories written from the perspective of political elites or the subaltern. “Representation,” while often a crucial site of historical evidence, is cast aside in favour of working with concepts of social experience and social context. The book’s key themes and arguments are outlined through a thick reading of a key text of modern Egyptian literature, Yahiya Haqqi’s The Saint’s Lamp. Read contextually along countless non-canonical texts, the content of this novel encapsulates the social experience of becoming an efendi. Read as literary act, it represents a cultural practice (one of many) through which a rising efendi social formation made and expressed itself.

This chapter begins with Michelstaedter's satire of the self-satisfaction of the “man of the world,” who takes himself to be learned, tasteful, and attentive to duties; who relies on the perks of office, the prospect of a state pension, insurance, and medical science to cushion him against the human condition; and who is, from Michelstaedter's point of view, entirely fatuous. The satire of the thoroughly modern man takes the form of a Leopardian dialogue between such a person and an incredulous interlocutor, reaching its culminating reductio ad absurdum when the self-satisfied gentleman claims to have insured himself against death by merely taking out life insurance.

This chapter discusses the meanings of the category efendi through the colonial period. “Being an efendi” was always synonymous with “being modern,” but “modernity” had many vernacular interpretations. For some (or in some situations), it rested in external diacritica of appearance; for others it was a matter of education and employment, or of particular habits and practices; for yet others modernity entailed claims on new kinds of knowledge and as such justified particular social, cultural, or political positions. In popular culture, the efendi became conflated with a class position. It came to signify a rising national middle class defined against two contrastive social others: “traditional society” whose lack of “modernity” translated as backwardness bestowed on them a marginal position; and colonial elites whose excessive westernization and lack of “authentic roots” made them into lockays of colonial interests. Popular culture of the colonial period constructed the efendi as morally superior to both, as the only social category in possession of both modernity and authentic roots.

This chapter focuses on narratives of young men, sons of the “traditional” families discussed in the previous chapter. It looks at the experience of “becoming modern” as a particular classed and gendered social experience, as well as one enacted through a specific genre of texts: modern Egyptian autobiography. In these texts, life histories are framed as linear journeys from “tradition” and towards middle-class modernity. This chapter looks at the generational dimension of such autobiographical acts and their shared narrative strategies: departure and personal metamorphosis, often presented as a matter of struggle and self-education, and the role “traditional” parents and places of origin play in these texts.

This last, concluding chapter, examines the efects of effendi culture, or the role that generations of efendis played in the social, cultural and political landscape of modern Egypt. The theme of this book was effendi becoming, his formation through different social, cultural and institutional practices; therefore this chapter looks only very broadly at what happens when the efendi “returns”—when the formed and transformed modern Egyptian subject assumes his role in public life. As the local sons who have been modernized, the efendis believed themselves to be in exclusive ownership of the right mixture of “authentic roots” and modern knowledge and expertise. Thus constructed, efendi subjectivity places itself into a privileged position against both “traditional” society and against western (colonial) modernity. It allowed generations of efendis to concentrate in their hands key social, cultural and political capital as reformers responsible for bringing modernity to the “other” Egyptians, as anti-colonial elites, and as the makers of a modern national state, both before and after the 1952 revolution.

This chapter explores the translation and cultural history of Good News for Modern Man or Today’s English Version. It starts with the translation theory of dynamic equivalence behind the translation and introduces translator Eugene Nida, one of the most important Bible translators of the twentieth-century and the head of ABS translations, to the book’s narrative arc. This chapter examines the Good News for Modern Man as a cultural phenomenon, exploring its mass-market appeal, its place among American Catholics, and the story of its illustrator, Anne Valloton. Finally, this chapter examines the reviews of the Good News Bible and the letters the ABS received about its publication.