On 10 September 1932, six months before his death, Fathallah Pasha Barakat (1866–1933) began to dictate the story of his life from his bed. Addressing an unnamed, distant relative, he told of his education and early career in the provincial administration of Egypt in the final decades of the nineteenth century. He was sixteen in the year the British occupation commenced and would come of age in its shadow. Now close to seventy and with his eyesight failing, Barakat conjured up the years between 1882 and 1910 – a time fraught with disappointment, frustration and anxiety, as he recalled. For the Pasha, and for many of his generation who felt betrayed by the unfolding events both then and later, the long 1890s were a period of uncertainty and moral ambiguity. As his narration of these formative years revealed, the Pasha was burdened with a sense of loss that would indelibly shape his political trajectory and ethical horizons.

As an early nationalist of rural origins who rose to great positions of political power, it is said that Barakat Pasha was emblematic of those known by twenty-first century scholars as the afandiyya [effendis] – a cultural category of educated men who saw themselves as standing between the illiterate peasants and the landowning aristocracy in their bid to make Egyptian state and society modern. They were also the first Egyptians to write autobiographies and diaries: several hundred such texts are known to exist, though only a handful have been published. Yet of these, most were written by the later generation of afandiyya, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and few narrate the lives of the ‘old effendis’, who came of age in the 1890s and about whom comparatively less is known.

Fathallah Barakat was not alone among his peers: many of his generation were similarly engaged in and producing these novel forms of self-writing. And yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, Barakat's autobiography, discovered by his family a few months after his death, deals with the formative decade of the 1890s in a highly unconventional way. He narrates his life – in particular, those years – in a manner that does not seem to conform to that of a typical afandi.