Prior to the events of 25 January 2011, the question of Arab youth had captured the imagination of an increasingly vocal international and regional audience focused on the dangers of a demographic youth explosion.Footnote ¹ Scholars had presciently argued that Middle Eastern youth were burdened by “the expectations and imprecations generated by the ‘youth’ of elite imagination.”Footnote ² Youth in Egypt were emblematic of this process—maligned by their elders and increasingly confronted with a repressive political landscape in which even blogging was tainted with the hint of political or sexual sedition and in which social anxieties, for example, regarding common-law or ʿurf ī marriage, surfaced in a spate of didactic, journalistic, and psychological texts.Footnote ³ This was visible in rhetorical tensions between a moralizing public discourse that censured contemporary youth for political apathy and for “illicit” sexual activities and a failure to acknowledge the social and economic realities of everyday life. Yet, in the dramatic unfolding of the so-called youth revolution, Egyptian youth exceeded the conceptual categories of their compatriots, social scientists, and Western observers, definitively demonstrating that youth as subjects and agents of history were constituted by, yet irreducible to, the disciplinary projects and categories of public discourse and social science.

The discourse of youth as threatening sexual and political subjects illustrates the resilience of social scientific categories of analysis and political projects that have sought to domesticate youth as proper national subjects. In seeking to understand this genealogy, this article returns to an earlier moment of public discourse on youth crisis, analyzing a series of social scientific writings in Egypt from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. The research emerged out of a collaborative project, the Arab Families Working Group (AFWG), which has sought to understand the significance of youth to public discourse in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world.Footnote ⁴

My argument is that a discourse of “youth crisis” emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. Youth were recast as a problem in need of regulation and control and as a necessary object of study. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, “adolescence” had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly consolidated disciplinary space of psychology and was reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie. Indeed, sexuality, in keeping with contemporary social scientific theories, was taken to be a cornerstone of adolescent psychology. Adolescence—perceived as both a collective temporality and a depoliticized individual interiority—became a volatile stage linked to a psychoanalytic notion of sexuality as libidinal raw energy, displacing other collective temporalities and geographies while allowing for the intrusion of disciplinary social scientific projects.

The “adolescent” (al-murāhiq) thus emerged as a social scientific category of analysis, demarcating the psychological literature from the more popular writings of the mainstream press that addressed “youth” (shabāb).Footnote ⁵ The construction of the adolescent as a psychological subject was geared toward a particular mode of subjectification, which involved the elaboration of an apolitical psychological interiority and an attempt to domesticate the “boundless energy of youth” through the production of normative gendered, heterosexual, and ethical subjects engaged in the cultivation of self-health. Adolescent subjectification was thus a highly gendered process and the category of the adolescent was configured predominantly as a problem of masculinity, particularly when socially delinquent.Footnote ⁶ Nevertheless, adolescent sexual deviance was viewed as a problem of both sexes and femininity thus garnered attention as well, especially when norms of compulsory heterosexuality were violated.

Widely divergent postwar perspectives on adolescent psychology were, in fact, remarkably alike in their emphasis on overwhelming unconscious sexual impulses that threatened to disturb the balance of adolescent self and psyche and in seeking to resolve the youth crisis as a crisis of psychosexual adjustment. Adolescence had become the subject of “an alignment between the aspirations of the professionals, the political concerns of the authorities, and the social anxieties of the powerful.”Footnote ⁷ New discursive formations of a psychology centered on unconscious sexual impulses and a cavernous interiority, and new social types, such as the “juvenile delinquent,” coalesced around the figure of adolescence. Rather than reconstruct the historical experience of adolescence or youth, I explore the discursive frameworks within which the question of youth was articulated in social scientific discourses in Egypt. This is not, of course, to suggest that such discourses exhaust our range of understandings but merely to attend to the shifting meanings of the category of youth in the public sphere.Footnote ⁸

YOUTH AS A CATEGORY IN CRISIS

Like the emergence of childhood in the long 19th century, youth's emergence in the 20th century was both a local and an international phenomenon. Historians have noted the development and the reinvention of the category of youth in a variety of historical contexts, linking the idea of youth to the Bolshevik revolutionary transformation in the wake of World War I, to Italian and German fascism in the interwar period, to revitalization projects in postwar France, and to national sovereignty and geopolitical fantasies in the Cold War era United States.Footnote ⁹ In the Egyptian context, as Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski note, “a myth of youth developed in interwar Egypt, a rhetoric stressing the national role as well as redeeming power of the ‘new generation.’”Footnote ¹⁰ As representatives of the emerging national polity and economy, youth were thought to best embody the political subjectivity of nationalism.Footnote ¹¹ Such a discourse of youth was not entirely new, of course, and antecedent links between youth and nationalism were to be found in the heady days of the 1919 revolution. Indeed, throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, youth were viewed as the repository of national identity and entrusted with the task of creating a modern nation able to attain independence from the British.Footnote ¹²

Public discourse on youth in the 1930s and 1940s was, however, distinct from earlier periods in a number of ways. The vast increase in the number of secondary school and university students between 1925 and 1945 led to a close identification between the category of “youth” and “students,” as well as the prolongation of the period of pre-adulthood.Footnote ¹³ As education came under national control after Egypt was granted nominal independence in 1922, primary and secondary education expanded, state education budgets increased, literacy rates rose, and universities witnessed a rapid increase in the number of students.Footnote ¹⁴ Between 1925 and 1950, for example, the number of university students (excluding al-Azhar) rose from 2,000 to 30,000.Footnote ¹⁵ The flooding of schools and universities in this interrevolutionary period was coupled with increased political activism and ideological factionalism. As Lucie Ryzova has argued, youth of the 1930s and 1940s often saw themselves as addressing the political passivity of the 1919 generation, while that generation saw youth as troublemakers and revolutionaries and sought to co-opt them as part of a unified nationalist imperative in the face of British colonialism and European cultural hegemony.Footnote ¹⁶

Although youth were often touted as bearing the promise of the future and as purveyors of national culture in Egypt, the discourse on youth was thus inherently doubled as both peril and promise. On the one hand, adolescence conceived of as a liminal category that marked the threshold between childhood and adulthood was a perfect metaphor for the political and social transformation from colony to independent nation. On the other hand, youth was viewed as precarious and it indexed social and political anxieties. Thus, the very characteristics of youthful energy and optimism thought to be suited to nationalist politics were tempered by discussions of the labile nature of youth, which was seen to be indicated by the events of 1935 and 1936 and the fear of youth bolshevist or fascist extremism.Footnote ¹⁷

The emergence of “youth” as a category in crisis can be traced to the wide-scale student demonstrations and strikes of 1935 and 1936. In fact, it was the period following these protests that were christened “the years of youth.”Footnote ¹⁸ A complex mix of political factors spurred students to actively protest British hegemony. These included the Italian invasion of Ethiopia; the replacement of the 1923 constitution with the less democratic 1930 constitution; the Wafd's increasingly conciliatory relationship to the British and the palace; and, finally, Sir Samuel Hoare's November 1935 announcement that the 1930 constitution was “unpopular” and the 1923 constitution “unworkable.”Footnote ¹⁹ November 1935 was a month of collective student action and violent response on the part of the police, with several students killed and hundreds wounded. Further demonstrations erupted in January 1936 and led to the dismissal of Prime Minister Tawfiq Nasim Pasha's government.Footnote ²⁰ As Ahmed Abdalla notes, “the student uprising of 1935–36 marked the emergence of the student movement as a distinctive force in Egyptian politics.”Footnote ²¹ In December 1935, the 1923 constitution was restored, and shortly thereafter the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of 1936 was signed.Footnote ²² From that point forward student militant organization, activism, protest, and mass mobilization would be instrumental in influencing the political negotiations of the palace, the Wafd, and the opposition movement, illustrating the “already growing wedge between the youth and the parliamentary values and system.”Footnote ²³

Growing student disaffection with the Wafd in particular and with party politics in general was preceded by the formation of numerous groups that stood outside the traditional domain of parliamentary politics. Social and political organizations such as Young Egypt and the Young Men's Muslim Association (YMMA) were founded during the interwar era.Footnote ²⁴ As several scholars have noted, student organizational efforts after the events of 1935 and 1936 increasingly took on a factional and ideologically polarized dimension.Footnote ²⁵ At various points in the aftermath of 1935 and 1936, one could find avid Wafdists, as well as Muslim Brothers, Communists, and Young Egypt's anti-Wafdist paramilitary Green Shirts, active in the student and youth movement.Footnote ²⁶

Youth activism and organization was thus a political reality in the 1930s and 1940s, and many social reformers sought to harness youth energy to nationalist projects. The onslaught of articles in 1936 alone indicates the immediacy of the youth question and its perceived relevance to national independence. The widely read literary and cultural journal al-Hilal devoted a whole special issue to youth that year.Footnote ²⁷ Similarly, the journal al-Risala was littered with articles expounding the benefits of a youth revival and featured a column devoted exclusively to youth.Footnote ²⁸ In response to fears that youth were potentially insurgent subjects who stood outside the domain of party politics, writers in these journals recast the question of youth politics as central to national unity, highlighting the role of youth in moderate internal political reform and social welfare projects.Footnote ²⁹

The concern over youth dovetailed with the larger concerns of the 1930s: minimizing class conflict by establishing cross-class alliances, promoting social welfare and reform, and creating a political subject freed from the constraints of European hegemony.Footnote ³⁰ It was a discourse that placed youth at the vanguard of societal change and cast them as embodying the political subjectivity of nationalism but only insofar as they could enact a non-antagonistic conception of politics grounded in national unity. In an important sense, we can see the intensification of youth activity—and its attendant redistribution of bodies in public space in the form of demonstrations—as a mode of politics antagonistic to the police order of the 1930s.Footnote ³¹ In sum, by the 1930s youth had been recast as a problem in need of regulation and control, and hence as a necessary object of study.

In a 1936 article, prominent Arabic scholar Ahmad Amin remarked on the perceived dire state of youth affairs. Bemoaning the fact that the “youth problem” was Egypt's most pressing concern, he noted that no single in-depth scientific study of youth yet existed.Footnote ³² Amin identified the anger and discontent of youth as a principal cause for concern, implicitly referencing the tumultuous years of 1935–36, and critiqued colleagues who had politicized the university.Footnote ³³ Directly connecting the discipline of psychology to the youth crisis, he argued that specialists in psychology and sociology would need to conduct psychological studies of youth based on scientific principles and theories, identify illnesses, and posit cures.Footnote ³⁴ Individualized psychology was to replace collective politicization. This would require, he noted, the establishment of psychological clinics similar to clinics for ailments of the body. But before such clinics could materialize, the adolescent himself—and he was most often male—had to emerge as a distinct category of psychological experience.

THE EMERGENCE OF ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY

Historians have noted that in the post-World War II era psychologists played an increasingly central role in processes of adolescent normalization, supplanting earlier 19th-century discourses of moralization. Thus, for instance, juvenile delinquency became a sign of social maladjustment rather than a symptom of moral degeneracy. What Jacques Donzelot refers to as a “tutelary complex” enabled the family unit to remain central to the normalization processes of health and hygiene, mediated by technologies of governance.Footnote ³⁵ With the consolidation of a disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt, the literature of the 1940s conceptualized the “youth question” largely in terms of the role of psychology in the cultivation of adolescent health.

Nikolas Rose has argued that the management of the “young citizen” fell within the purview of the discipline of psychology, whose object was the regulation of normality through technologies of subjectification such as intelligence testing and studies of social adjustment.Footnote ³⁶ “With the rise of a normative expertise of childhood,” he states, “family life and subjectivity could be governed in a new way.”Footnote ³⁷ The emphasis on adolescent psychology within the nascent field of Egyptian psychology was similarly concerned with the management of the subjective experience of youth. Quantitative surveys of adolescents, the collection of memoirs and personal diaries, and the focus on adolescent self-discovery and self-analysis—as mediated by the gaze of the psychologist—were all means by which individual youth subjectivities and dispositions were to be constituted by techniques of self-management and external observation.Footnote ³⁸ Adolescence emerged as a distinctive stage of life, with its own unique psychological contours of subjective experience, in need of self-monitoring and management by experts. The adolescent (al-murāhiq) was, in other words, a product of the process Ian Hacking refers to as “making up people.”Footnote ³⁹ Psychologists fashioned a pragmatic role for themselves in postwar Egypt by taking adolescence as an object of urgent study and reform.

The emphasis on adolescence in social scientific conceptions of youth was thus very much a part of the nascent field of psychology in Egypt, whose institutionalization and dissemination was a broad and multifaceted process.Footnote ⁴⁰ Notions of the unconscious had seeped into Arabic writings in Egypt since at least as far back as the 1920s and through a myriad of sources, including Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler.Footnote ⁴¹ The imprint of Freudian psychology, in particular, was becoming increasingly visible in the 1930s and 1940s in the focus on unconscious sexual impulses as translations of Freud began to appear.Footnote ⁴² For example, a 1938 article in al-Hilal noted that a generational shift had taken place and that Egyptian youth were avidly reading Freud and were familiar with his ideas on the unconscious, the interpretation of dreams, psychoanalysis, and the sexual instincts.Footnote ⁴³ As the exemplar of modern science, Freud, it was argued, could help the East move forward.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the mid-1940s a burgeoning popular literature on psychology was so well developed that scholarly journals felt compelled to critique the unscientific literature “drowning the marketplace”—a testament to the increased salience of psychology to popular public discourse.Footnote ⁴⁵

Psychology itself had been taught at the Egyptian University in the philosophy department as early as the university's founding in 1908, and by mid-century there were academic psychologists in all the other major universities and institutes in Cairo and Alexandria, such as the Higher Institutes of Education and Ibrahim University.Footnote ⁴⁶ The field received a strong impetus with the return of Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar to Cairo in the early 1940s. Both had been trained in philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne in the 1930s and were extremely active in the translation and dissemination of psychological theories in Egypt after World War II, founding the Jamaʿat ʿIlm al-Nafs al-Takamuli (Society for Integrative Psychology) and the Egyptian Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs (Journal of Psychology) in 1945. Murad was well versed in the traditions of French scientific psychology as well as in psychoanalytic and neo-psychoanalytic approaches and had pioneered what he termed an integrative approach to psychology, publishing a popular handbook of psychology in 1948 that went through at least seven editions.Footnote ⁴⁷ The journal conceptualized psychology broadly, publishing Freudians and anti-Freudians alike, and was illustrative of the openness of the emerging disciplinary space of psychology in Egypt in the 1940s; it was understood as a science of selfhood and the soul (ʿilm al-nafs) rather than delimited as the empirical study of mental processes. The expansive nature of their intellectual agenda was reflected in the journal's opening statement, which emphasized the importance of psychology (both theoretical and applied) to an educated audience, and in particular the need to present and define psychology and its applicability to Egyptian and Eastern contexts.Footnote ⁴⁸

The postwar years of the journal's publication coincided with the return of student demonstrations, most notably in November 1945, February 1946 (including the dramatic student March across ʿAbbas bridge and ensuing clash with police forces), and November 1946; intensified political activity calling for British evacuation without negotiations; the waning of popular (and especially student) support for an increasingly discredited political establishment; an increase in student and youth activism; and the increased radicalization of student ideology, particularly of a leftist inclination.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this atmosphere of social unrest and political uncertainty, the burgeoning social sciences were increasingly relied upon in the postwar management of populations.

In fact, in 1945, the inaugural year of Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs and less than a decade after Ahmad Amin's call for a study of Egyptian youth, Yusuf Murad laid out a research agenda for the study of adolescent psychology in Egypt and the wider Arab world.Footnote ⁵⁰ Murad had insisted on the creation of an Arabic-language science of psychology that was based on the specificity of cultural factors, and he regularly published a dictionary of psychological terms in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. He was also a member of the Academy of Language for the committee on psychological terms and thus played a crucial role in the creation and standardization of an Arabic lexicon of psychology. Psychology, he argued, was unlike the natural sciences where universal laws could be discovered; each culture, and therefore psychology, had its own specificity. The particularity of culture, he argued, was nowhere more true than in the study of adolescence. European youth, he noted, would differ from Egyptian youth due to geographical, religious, and cultural differences. The implications for psychological study were numerous. For example, Freud's stages of sexuality were culturally specific to the European formation of the family, as, he pointed out, Margaret Mead's discussion in Coming of Age in Samoa had clearly demonstrated. Similarly, he argued that research had shown that adolescence need not necessarily be a combative period. A regional study of youth would certainly contribute to the larger study of the youth issue and broaden its horizon beyond its current European provincialism.Footnote ⁵¹

Although they recognized that the contours of psychology depended on culturally specific factors, Murad and others writing in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs shared a set of assumptions about adolescent psychology as characterized by introspection and acute self-perception, the manifestation of unconscious sexual impulses, and philosophical turmoil. Adolescence, in other words, marked the developmental beginnings of a cavernous interiority and represented a new category of analysis that hailed new modes of being.Footnote ⁵² This process was, of course, not unique to Egypt; it was contemporaneous with the demarcation and research of adolescence as a distinct developmental stage in European adolescent psychology, such as the writings of Maurice Debesse, a student of Henri Wallon.Footnote ⁵³ Wallon, from whom Lacan derived his idea of the mirror stage, was surprisingly popular in postwar Egypt, part of a broader set of interconnections between French and Egyptian psychology. The imprint of Debesse's pioneering 1937 work Comment Etudier les Adolescents was clear in Murad's emphasis on diaries as a means of accessing interiority, as well as on the unique significance of affect in adolescence.

Accessing interiority through diaries, correspondence, questionnaires, psychiatric tests, and observation became a principal goal of adolescent psychology.Footnote ⁵⁴ Murad thus proposed a questionnaire composed of forty-four questions, divided into seven sections: childhood memories, desire for originality, intimate diaries, friendship, philosophical preoccupations, and diverse conflicts and aspirations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Students were asked questions about their childhood years, whether they had any positive or negative memories, their concern with philosophical or religious issues, and whether or not they kept a diary: questions, in short, that required the articulation and elaboration of interior states.

ʿAbd al-Minʿam al-Miliji, who had taught philosophy in Helwan and psychology in Cairo, took up Murad's research agenda and advocated the use of diaries and memoirs as a research method specific to understanding adolescent psychology. He argued that adolescence could be clearly demarcated as a psychologically distinctive stage of life, marked by a romantic phase.Footnote ⁵⁶ The key attribute of adolescence was the way in which the individual, previously embedded and connected to the outside world, become increasingly disconnected and focused on the self while distancing himself from society and social mores. Based on a careful reading of numerous student diaries and memoirs, al-Miliji depicted adolescence as a period of intense turmoil, focusing on the conflicts youth experienced between self and society; these conflicts, he noted, could be resolved in any number of ways, ranging from personal diaries to suicide.Footnote ⁵⁷ Al-Miliji also noted the key attributes of these diaries: namely, secrecy, a focus on self-analysis, and the representation of society as cruel and merciless.Footnote ⁵⁸

A tumultuous interiority, characterized by intensive introspection, thus emerged as the developmental coordinates and cornerstones of adolescent psychology. Significantly, the predominance of psychology as a modality for constructing and understanding adolescence moved in tandem with the emergence of a depoliticized adolescent psychic interiority. Psychological discourses emphasized adolescent psychic conflicts as individualized conflicts between “self” and “society” rather than viewing adolescence as deeply embedded within, and reflective of, larger social and political struggles or conflicts.

THE ABERRANT ADOLESCENT

In keeping with the emphasis on Freudian psychology, al-Miliji viewed negative adolescent attitudes toward society as the unconscious projection of inner turmoil. Thus, having collected information using Murad's questionnaire method and his own personal observations, al-Miliji analyzed what he viewed as an extreme case of adolescent maladjustment, or juvenile delinquency, in a nineteen-year-old Egyptian secondary school student that he referred to as “A.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A's behavior was characterized by aggression toward his peers, hostility to authority, excess sexual activity, and “mental vagabondage,” such as a morbid obsession with death. A had been abandoned by his father at the age of one and was raised in the desert by his Bedouin mother. He was forcefully taken away from her at the age of ten by his father and sent to primary school, only to receive a note two years later, at the age of twelve, informing him of her death. Al-Miliji recognized, in passing, that A's situation was related to the social vulnerability of Bedouin women who married urban men without a marriage contract, but he bypassed a sociological analysis. Instead, his analysis of A was straightforwardly psychoanalytic, seeing psychic trauma as blocking normal adolescent development while searching for causes of maladjustment in an excess of either maternal affection or paternal severity. Aberrant behaviors, he argued, functioned as pseudo solutions to unconscious conflicts that manifested themselves in ontological and existential anxieties.

Al-Miliji's analysis was explicitly meant to counter popular and dominant conceptions of the juvenile delinquent as in need of punitive treatment or legal redress. The history of the emergence of the juvenile delinquent as a social and legal category in Egypt would take us well beyond the scope of the present essay. Suffice it to say that by the late 1930s juvenile delinquency had become a major topic of study and received “concentrated attention” in lectures at the Cairo School of Social Work (CSSW) during the 1937–38 academic year; the school's parent organization, the Egyptian Association of Social Studies, undertook a comprehensive project for the psychological, medical, and social study of juvenile delinquents beginning in 1940.Footnote ⁶⁰

Al-Miliji's case study of A stands amidst the figure of the delinquent, who lurked at the margins of nationalist discourse on youth and who did not conform to the proper middle-class subject of masculine nationalism; delinquents were the “stray dogs,” as one commentator put it, who roamed the streets of Cairo at night.Footnote ⁶¹ In a 1948 article in al-Risala, Abbas Khudr critiqued the abundance of free time among middle- and lower-class youth, which they filled by frequenting cinemas and cafes; concern was particularly strong for boys with a chaotic home life who had not received a proper upbringing (tarbiya). This figure of the unruly and unproductive subject was the non-nationalist subject par excellence, who was to be disciplined through youth organizations such as the YMMA that sought to assist young men in the cultivation of appropriate middle-class bodily comportment, aesthetic sensibilities, and nationalist ethics.Footnote ⁶²

While al-Miliji, and numerous others writing in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, recognized the social contours of delinquency, they placed the juvenile delinquent directly at the center of individualized discourses of adolescent psychology, oftentimes as a highly aberrant psychosexual subject.Footnote ⁶³ In this view the delinquent emerges as the symptom of the larger unconscious tendencies of the individual in his relationship to the social environment. Although poverty, ignorance, and social marginalization were critical factors, dealing with adolescents such as A in the manner that Khudr suggests (through the disciplinary projects of organizations like the YMMA) would hardly be a sufficient precondition for mental health from this perspective.

More significantly, al-Miliji's discussion provided a long-durée psychological analysis as an alternative framework for understanding juvenile delinquency as a symptom of maladjustment rather than as an emblem of moral degeneracy or an infraction of the sociolegal order. In an important sense, then, the delinquent emerged as one end of a continuum of psychological health rather than a distinct social character. This was clear in al-Miliji's analyses of adolescent diaries among representative secondary school students. Al-Miliji defined adolescence itself in terms of the emergence of unconscious sexual instincts and the conflict between these instincts and societal or religious mores (much as he had viewed the case of A). For example, in discussing the case of a young man who had begun praying, fasting, and worshipping “to the point of Sufism,” he analyzed his extreme religiosity as a form of moral guilt for sexual impulses that had been sublimated into religious impulses.Footnote ⁶⁴ I will return later to this figure of the young Sufi, suppressed at the margins of psychological discourse.

Al-Miliji's analysis was noteworthy in at least two respects. First, al-Miliji, like many psychologists at mid-century, characterized the adolescent as first and foremost a psychosexual subject, that is to say, as a subject forged at the vortex of unconscious sexual impulses. Such unconscious sexual impulses were powerful yet precarious and therefore subject to distortions that could lead to an aberrant sexuality. Second, for al-Miliji religion itself was viewed as a psychological state rather than as a set of embodied practices or ethical traditions. This was precisely the argument of an earlier article, in which al-Miliji had focused on religious feeling as a significant adolescent experience that was the complex product of individual and social factors, discussing religious awakenings during adolescence, religious enthusiasm, doubt and atheism, and religion and love.Footnote ⁶⁵ I address each of these points in turn: the adolescent as a psychosexual subject and as an ethical subject. These were prominent themes in the wider literature on adolescence in Egypt and constituted different, yet interconnected, modes of subjectification.

THE PSYCHOSEXUAL SUBJECT

Adolescent psychology in the interwar and postwar period in Egypt was predominantly concerned with academic study, but the knowledge generated by it was to play a pragmatic role in the management of Egypt's youth crisis and in particular to assist in the creation of normalized adolescents, free of psychosexual ailments. Thus, Dr. Muhammad Zaki al-Shafaʿi argued that countering the youth crisis in Egypt would not be possible without a psychological understanding of the various unconscious tendencies of youth, which would facilitate the prevention and treatment of common adolescent ailments, such as inferiority complexes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Dr. Ibrahim Naji argued for Freud's relevance to the Egyptian context, noting that Freudian theory could be employed as a potential corrective to the problems of youth, and to the question of sexual repression in particular. Freud's work, he clarified, was not only about sexuality but also about the relationship between males and females and therefore of relevance to university instructors who witnessed their co-ed students, now seated side by side in the university, unable to interact.Footnote ⁶⁷ Cairo University had admitted its first female student in 1928, and the process of coeducation in the university was completed in 1953, when Dar al-ʿUlum admitted women.Footnote ⁶⁸ Abdu Mikhaʾil Rizk emphasized the difficulties caused by gender segregation and lectured at the Popular Culture Association in Damanhur on the significance of sex education for youth in order to prevent sexual deviance.Footnote ⁶⁹

There are several larger political and social contexts for the increased emphasis on adolescent psychosexual development. First, as we have seen, the focus in the 1940s on adolescent psychology as an index of social adjustment led to the proliferation of a variety of technologies of subjectification, centered on the inner turmoil of youth. Fears that the “boundless energy” of youth would be misdirected toward sexual deviance, or projected onto the field of political activity, fueled a concern for moral turpitude that focused on the importance of the emotions and of heteronormative sexuality to proper adolescent development. Indeed, socioanthropologist Raoul Makarius attributed the political excitement and turmoil of 1945 and 1946, in part, to the sexual anxieties and repressions of youth.Footnote ⁷⁰

Second, as Hanan Kholoussy has shown, 20th-century discussions of sexual practices in Egypt need to be situated within larger discourses of the monitoring and medicalization of sexuality that produced the normative heterosexual healthy male subject as the foundation for a postcolonial nation free of sociomedical ills.Footnote ⁷¹ Prolonged bachelorhood, female prostitution, and precocious sexuality were targeted as social ills.Footnote ⁷² A final context was the larger literature on sexuality and sexual deviance, which by the late 1920s and 1930s, as Wilson Jacob notes, “had become a regular topic of cultural criticism, marshalling the opinions of doctors, journalists, fiction writers, and significantly, enthusiasts of the physical culture movement. This is demonstrated in a wide array of sources—from newspapers, magazines, and pulp novels to police and court records.”Footnote ⁷³

The literature on adolescent psychology was focused to a large extent on the elaboration of the role of unconscious sexual impulses and their normal or pathological resolution in adolescent life. In a book entitled Sikulujiyyat al-Jins (The Psychology of Sex), published as part of the popular Iqraʾ series, Yusuf Murad outlined for a lay audience the figure of the adolescent as a psychosexual subject whose complex psyche was formed at the intersection of unconscious sexual impulses rooted in childhood and societal norms of Egyptian gender relations.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was a follow-up text to Murad's popular 1943 book Shifaʾ al-Nafs (Healing the Self), which had introduced its audience to the basic theories and concepts of psychology and its schools of thought.Footnote ⁷⁵ His text was peppered with case studies and dialogues drawn from students and patients, thereby providing an enlivened psychology for his readers.

Compared to earlier Arabic writings on sexuality, Sikulujiyyat al-Jins was less of a medicalized discourse than one focused on the proper psychological resolution of relations between the sexes.Footnote ⁷⁶ Throughout his text Murad illustrated numerous incomplete resolutions of psychosexual complexes, drawing on examples from his clinical practice and interviews with adolescents or young adults. In keeping with his theoretical emphasis on integrative psychology, he focused on conflicts that emerged between different parts of the self, or between conscious and unconscious impulses. As noted previously, although adolescence was viewed in large part as a problem of masculinity, femininity garnered attention particularly in discussions of sexual deviance. Many of Murad's examples illuminated failed heterosexual attachment, for example, in his focus on situations in which females became attracted to and developed romantic attachments to classmates of the same sex. His analysis of homosocial and homosexual female attachment was predicated upon a conflict between societal norms and psychological imperatives.Footnote ⁷⁷

Murad presented femininity as an excessively fragile, almost unattainable ideal, noting that females traversed adolescence only with extreme difficulty. He argued that even when married, females often lacked awareness of the unconscious perverse sexual impulses of their own adolescent years and their negative attitudes toward the opposite sex: attitudes that could lead to frigidity or hysteria during marriage. He ended with a plea for psychological education for youth to help them combat deviant sexual tendencies and attain a harmonious married life. Heterosexuality, in other words, needed to be inculcated through psychological education and analysis. Murad's analysis of femininity was, broadly speaking, neo-psychoanalytic, placing greater emphasis on sociological factors.Footnote ⁷⁸ He was far from a thoroughgoing Freudian and had often critiqued Freudian models as mechanistic and reductive.Footnote ⁷⁹ In fact, his approach to feminine psychology as the product of social and cultural factors equally seemed more akin to that of Karen Horney, whom he cited favorably in other contexts.Footnote ⁸⁰ In his view, the Egyptian milieu intensified feminine tendencies, such as the perception of lack in comparison to males, which was only reinforced through differential treatment by parents. Similarly, he argued, as females began to experience heterosexual feelings in adolescence, the societal interdictions against male–female interactions led to a conflict between sexual feelings and societal norms. Rather than direct and discipline the female child's feelings (a process he referenced as tahdhīb), Egyptian parents reinforced the interdiction.Footnote ⁸¹

The counterpart to failed femininity was the improperly actualized masculine subject, a topic Murad and his co-editor Ziywar had addressed several years earlier. In a 1948 issue of Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs, two readers wrote in asking the editors to elaborate on same-sex love. One, who signed with the initials “Sin ʿAyn,” began by recounting his early childhood years in which his sister dressed him in female clothing and had him play female roles. The structure of his letter was clearly indicative of the extent to which the confessional self-narration of childhood had taken hold among readers of the journal. Sin ʿAyn was perturbed by the fact that as a twenty-one-year-old male he had experienced no feelings of sexual desire toward women. At school he had befriended a good-looking boy and was experiencing sexual urges despite acknowledging that homosexuality was against both custom and law. What should he do, he asked, and how could he combat his urges?Footnote ⁸² The journal's response was extensive and measured. In no less than an eight-page response, they noted the increase of homosexuality (al-jinsiyya al-mithliyya) and lamented the absence of any sustained scientific discussion in the Arabic scientific and scholarly press.

After outlining the various types of homosexuality (ranging from actual sexual contact, to sexual relationships without full sexual contact, to sexual desire), and the various psycho-social studies that had estimated the incidence of homosexuality (such as those by Havelock Ellis and Alfred Kinsey), the editors proceeded to discuss in depth numerous psychological theories of homosexuality, ranging from Freud to Adler. Crucial to their argument was the need to move away from entrenched popular perceptions of homosexuality as innate toward the idea of homosexuality as a psychological phenomenon. If homosexuality could be shown to be due to an abnormal childhood, an inferiority complex, or the separation of the sexes, then it could be resolved through psychological analysis and behavioral or environmental changes. In point of fact, the editors’ principal explanatory emphasis was neo-psychoanalytic.Footnote ⁸³ Presenting a simplified account of the Oedipal complex, they noted that the lack of proper resolution of the complex was responsible for many instances of homosexuality. In sum, the young reader troubled by his lack of heterosexual urges, they suggested, should seek psychoanalysis.

The production of normalized psychosexual subjects was thus part and parcel of the development of an adolescent psychology that sought the “normal” resolution of psychological complexes though the inculcation of heterosexual desire and companionate marriage.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet every step toward normalcy was beset with potentially “pathological” resolutions: from early childhood to marriage, and most acutely in adolescence, homosexual desire threatened to destabilize youth psychology. Although marriage emerged in Murad's account as the telos of proper adolescent psychosexual health, the process of adolescent sexual maturation was plagued by hesitations and halting failures. Heterosexual masculinity and femininity emerged in this literature as nearly impossible norms of psychosexual development. Concerns for a normalized heterosexual sexuality dovetailed with the increased prevalence and dissemination of psychoanalytic theories of self and psyche, as sexual concerns were recast as problems that could be addressed through psychological analysis. But there was another body of literature equally concerned with normalized adolescent psychosexual development. This was the literature that sought to place the adolescent within the longer-standing Islamic tradition of tahdhīb al-nafs.

THE ETHICS OF THE SELF

In exploring how notions of the adolescent were transformed through the increased dissemination of psychological notions of self and psyche, we would be remiss to neglect the significance of religious discourse. Analyzing religious discourses enables us to ask more pointedly if the emphasis on adolescent psychosexual normalization displaced, or rather converged with, earlier discourses of morality and ethical subject formation. In fact, most authors writing on youth psychology put forth a tripartite view of the care of the self as entailing a concern for the body, mind, and soul.Footnote ⁸⁵ Ethics constituted one significant pole of adolescent development, and many authors stressed the importance of longstanding concerns for the spiritual well-being of youth rooted in the Islamic tradition and emphasized existential and sexual anomie as posing the greatest threat to Muslim youth.Footnote ⁸⁶

In an extensive five-part article published in al-Risala, Ibrahim al-Batrawi faulted social reformers for tackling the problems of youth in purely physiological and psychological terms.Footnote ⁸⁷ Al-Batrawi critiqued psychologists and psychoanalysts whose analytical focus on the individual and on sexual instincts had the potential for unleashing and encouraging debauchery.Footnote ⁸⁸ The deeper issue, he argued, was a more fundamental problem of youth, namely, their skepticism of religious, ethical, and political ideals. Evoking the image of youth who spent their free time in cafes and salons talking about metaphysics and the truth of existence in the terms of modern philosophy, Batrawi expressed concern with the existential conditions of doubt and nihilism.Footnote ⁸⁹ Extreme existential states of doubt, he noted, left youth open to ideological exploitation by a variety of political factions. He pointed to two predominant modern philosophical tendencies: the French tradition of philosophical skepticism, culminating in the French Revolution and eventually leading to existentialism, and the Marxist tradition that culminated in communism. These observations would surely have been read in the context of the events of 1945 and 1946: militant student activism, the violent clashes between police and students, and the concomitant crackdown against leftist agitation inaugurated by Sidqi's repressive campaign, all of which had intensified fears of youth political activism.

Al-Batrawi's work clearly stood apart from the wider literature on adolescent psychology in its virulent critique of psychological understandings of youth while simultaneously illustrating how dominant such understandings had become. Fear of the unbridled political and sexual subject (communists and debauchees) loomed large in al-Batrawi's writings, as it did in those of many of his fellow social scientists. Unlike them, however, he did not propose psychological analysis or sexual education for youth but rather argued for the reintegration of Islamic ideals into the collective life of youth. In particular, he proposed a return to the Islamic model of combining religion and science (ʿilm), citing the late 19th-century writings of al-Afghani as an exemplar and the medieval al-Ghazali as a personal role model.Footnote ⁹⁰

Al-Batrawi's discussion of philosophical nihilism was echoed in a number of writings in Majallat ʿIlm al-Nafs. Al-Miliji similarly focused on religious doubt in adolescence as a significant psychological sentiment, based on his case studies of students.Footnote ⁹¹ His analysis concentrated on the individualized circumstances that led adolescents to experience religious doubt or atheism. It was premised on his view of religion as merely the sum content of human emotions (such as love or fear) attached to things the individual considered sacred.Footnote ⁹² Religiosity was always constituted by an individual's general psychological make-up. Thus he explored extreme religiosity as a way for adolescents to deal with inner turmoil and unconscious impulses (sexual ones in particular) in a socially sanctioned manner while noting that it could take forms such as melancholia manifested in constant prayer.Footnote ⁹³ In his discussion of the aberrant adolescent (al-murāhiq al-shādhdh) al-Miliji depicted the individual in a battle with his negative human self, trying to overcome his sexual impulses through asceticism. Evoking the figure of the Sufi who reached a state of ecstasy and self-annihilation, al-Miliji likened such adolescent responses to an extreme form of religious sickness.Footnote ⁹⁴ Citing examples such as Augustine and al-Ghazali, he argued that such processes of religious conversion (from debauchery to piety, or from doubt to belief) could be understood as the product of unconscious emotional complexes and struggles that came to be resolved through religious experience.Footnote ⁹⁵

The tormented process that al-Miliji described as akin to psychological illness is referred to in the Sufi tradition as jihād al-nafs, in which certain qualities of the nafs or self are viewed as an enemy that must be combated.Footnote ⁹⁶ In a series of articles by al-Sayyid Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, the young shakyh of the al-Ghunaymiyya Khalwatiyya Order, the entire discussion of jihād al-nafs is couched in psychological terminology.Footnote ⁹⁷ He discussed the origin of self-struggle in the repression and sublimation of instincts.Footnote ⁹⁸ Significantly, he elaborated upon what he referred to as a psychological tendency toward Sufism among Sufis. Using the same examples of al-Ghazali and St. Augustine as al-Miiji and al-Batrawi, he defined tendencies toward Sufism largely in terms of existential crises and affective states such as doubt, anxiety, depression, and a desire to know the truth of existence.Footnote ⁹⁹ This analysis was rendered in modern psychological theory to such an extent that al-Taftazani noted that psychological traumas may often be the reason behind propensities toward Sufism.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Analogizing the shaykh–disciple relationship to that of psychologist and patient, he noted that desires and unconscious thoughts were meant to be analyzed with the shaykh and that their relationship was therefore one of healing the soul. According to al-Taftazani, the process of self-disciplining or tahdhīb al-nafs that the young initiate worked through with his shaykh entailed the repression of sexual instincts uncovered in introspection. The Sufi, he argued, aimed to repress tendencies in conflict with the noble moral and spiritual principles of ethical being. Repression, in this rendering, was seen as a positive psychological facet of adolescent life.

We thus have three different understandings of adolescent existential turmoil, each with a distinct view of religion. Al-Batrawi proposed a turn to religion and science, in opposition to psychology, as a solution to adolescent turmoil. Al-Miliji viewed religion, and therefore religious doubt, as epiphenomenal, that is, as reducible to a psychological state, and thus proposed psychology as the principle vehicle for understanding adolescent turmoil. For al-Taftazani, in contrast to the others, there was no incompatibility between viewing adolescent religiosity as both a psychological state and a path toward ethical being and union with the divine.

But the differences in these writings betray an underlying similarity. Islamic writings on adolescent and youth psychology were in fact remarkably similar to their social scientific counterparts in their emphasis on overpowering unconscious sexual impulses that threatened to disturb the balance of adolescent self and psyche. In many instances the disciplining of the self (tahdhīb al-nafs) as an Islamic modality for the regulation of sexuality was in fact complementary to psychology (ʿilm al-nafs). For example, the Sufi notion of tahdhīb al-nafs or al-mujāhada al-nafsiyya could be combined with or, more precisely, translated into Freud's idea of sublimation—to arrive at the positive consequences of certain forms of repression. Thus, the modernist Freudian ethic was not antithetical to Islamic discourse but in fact complementary to it.