This article examines the newspaper obituary as a source for historians of the late 19th and early 20th century Egypt. Long utilized by genealogists, these sources have been neglected by historians, for a number of reasons. Rather than read them as an uncritical reflection of social relations, as genealogists have, historians ought to engage with them critically as a way of understanding how individuals imagined themselves and their social worlds. The article argues that reading and writing obituaries was one of the ways in which a previously differentiated and divided Egyptian elite began to imagine itself as belonging to a single, horizontal class. It further demonstrates how obituaries can be used to chart social mobility in a context where surnames were neither heritable nor standardised. Obituaries provide unique insights into social transformations independent of the political ruptures around which state archives are organised and official histories written. The article shows how sociocultural developments (such as the rise of Islamic modernism) are reflected in and were transformed through, the reading and writing of obituaries. Discourses around the ‘good Muslim death’ were inscribed and indeed prescribed through this form, even as it came under increasing attack at the turn of the 20th century for being un-Islamic. Aside from opening up new methodological avenues for writing the history of class, and the history of gender beyond the state, the article emphasises the importance of death as a historical subject of enquiry in its own right.

中文翻译：

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“被命运之手抢走”：Ob告与现代埃及阶级的建立

本文考察了报纸ob告作为19世纪末20世纪初埃及历史学家的资料来源。由于种种原因，这些资料已被家谱学家长期使用，但被历史学家所忽略。历史学家们不应该像家谱学家那样将它们视为对社会关系的非批判性反映，而应与其进行批判性接触，以理解个人如何看待自己及其社会世界。该文章认为，阅读和写作ob告是先前分化和分裂的埃及精英开始将自己想象成属于一个单一水平阶级的方式之一。它进一步表明，在姓氏既不可继承又不规范的情况下，how告如何用于绘制社会流动性。itu告提供了对社会转型的独特见解，而不受政治破裂的影响，政治破裂围绕国家档案的组织和官方历史的撰写进行。这篇文章说明了社会文化的发展（例如伊斯兰现代主义的兴起）如何在in书的阅读和写作中得到反映和转化。围绕“好穆斯林的死亡”的论述被铭刻并确实通过这种形式进行了表述，即使在20世纪初由于非伊斯兰而受到越来越多的攻击时。除了开辟新的方法论途径来编写阶级史和国家以外的性别史外，本文还强调了死亡本身是一个历史性研究课题的重要性。