The concept of the ‘middle class’ is one of the many linguistic and intellectual imports of the Nahḍa, the intellectual Renaissance movement that spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century in the Middle East. Composed of the noun ṭabaqa, which in classical Arabic refers to a layer, series, category or class, and the adjectives wusṭā or mutawassiṭa, derived from the root W-S-Ṭ (meaning ‘middle’ or ‘intermediate’), the expression initially referred to the ‘middle class’ as defined by French and British authors of the time. Egyptian and Levantine reformists traveling in Europe chose to translate it faithfully as al-ṭabaqa al-wusṭā, referring to the urban and commercial social strata that they believed had led to the success of European powers. The term was subsequently adopted in Arab political thought to refer to a well-informed public opinion (al-raʾy al-ʿāmm), that is to say, which broadly corresponded to the expanding readership of the Arabic-language press, capable of taking charge of the nation’s destiny (Roussillon 1995).
In other words, the adoption of the term ‘middle class’ in Arabic borrows directly and deliberately from British and French conceptions of the middle class, among which the writings of Guizot were especially influential, which cast it as a driving force for social reform and political freedom. This Aristotelian conception of a middle class as the ‘golden mean’ – a desirable middle between two extremes – goes along with its characteristic virtues: temperance, thrift, honesty, a sense of effort, pride in craftsmanship, a love of literature and puritanical morals. This adoption was facilitated by the similarity of values between the political middle ground represented by the middle class, and the moral balance advocated by Islam, with its ‘middle community’ (umma wasaṭ, C. al-Baqara, II, 143). It also fits easily into the reconfiguration of the traditional vision of the social body, which was divided into two distinct entities: the ʿāmma (the common people, the crowd), and the khāṣṣa (the elite, the notables).
With the onset of industrialisation in the Arab world, the emergence of a working class during the interwar period, the development of socialist thought, and the challenge to colonial powers, the concept of the middle class became increasingly politicised and polarised (Watenpaugh 2006). A positive, liberal viewpoint saw it as an industrious class of professionals involved in the nationalist struggle alongside other social classes (the Wafdists and Independents in Egypt for example). In contrast, the negative, socialist viewpoint saw the middle class as an obstacle to economic liberation and the defence of workers’ social rights (hence the preference of left-wing intellectuals for the term būrjwāziyya, borrowed directly from the French ‘bourgeoisie’).
Between the 1910s and the 1930s, the Arabic term for ‘middle class’ was gradually established as its sociological positioning, defined by a growing educated middling stratum, aligned with its supposed social role of liberating the nation. Historiography has largely focused on secondary and higher education graduates employed in administration, collectively referred to as the effendiyya, to the extent that this term has become synonymous with the middle class in history books (Ryzova 2014). This later designation is problematic in more ways than one, notably because it elevates a social group that does not encompass all the strata of the middle classes brought together by the existing concept of ṭabaqa wusṭā to a sociological concept. In addition to the illiterate, poorly paid effendi who were intermediaries in every respect, new intermediate profiles emerged, such as skilled workers and technicians.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, a global developmentalist momentum emerged, which was further bolstered by the expansion of the objectives of the welfare state adopted by the newly independent Arab states (Shechter 2019 & 2023). This context aided attempts to identify and measure the intermediate layers according to profession, level of education and consumption. Egypt serves as a prime example of the technicisation of sociological discourse on its middle classes, having rendered it more complex through multifactorial studies based on statistical data collected by CAPMAS (the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics), founded in 1964 to replace the previous Department of Statistics and Census (Ferrand 2026).
Consequently, from the 1960s onward, the ‘middle class’ has evolved from being merely a tool employed by ideologists and intellectuals to call for (and criticise) national liberation processes, to becoming a sociological concept used to measure the target population of public policies. This is a salient point that merits emphasis, given that Western experts and subsequent historians have cast doubt on the relevance of the ‘middle class’ sociological concept in Arab societies, despite the assertions of Arab social experts.
References
Ferrand, Antoinette, L’Égypte de Nasser : classes moyennes et idéal socialiste (1952-1970), Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2026.
Roussillon Alain, “Réforme sociale et production des classes moyennes : Muhammad ‘Umar et ‘l’arriération des égyptiens’”, in Entre réforme sociale et mouvement national : Identité et modernisation en Égypte (1882-1962), Cairo, CEDEJ, 1995, p. 37-89.
Ryzova, Lucie, The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.
Shechter Relli, The Egyptian Social Contract. A History of State-Middle Class Relations, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2023.
Shechter Relli, The Rise of the Egyptian Middle Class: Socio-Economic Mobility and Public Discontent from Nasser to Sadat, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Watenpaugh Keith David, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2006.