In this fascinating follow-up to his important first book, Ordinary Egyptians (2011), Ziad Fahmy offers a novel interpretation of everyday life in Egypt through sound. Analysing a variety of documentary resources and drawing on a rich array of theoretical works, Fahmy argues that ‘sounds and sounded phenomena’ offer historians key insights into the life of everyday, ordinary Egyptians and how their lifeways changed in the transition to modernity, especially in the first half of the 20th century. The often dramatic sonic changes that accompanied the advent of modern means of transportation, electrical lighting, and sound amplification, among other technologies, can be heard not only as a backdrop to everyday life but as sonic signifiers of the agency of ordinary Egyptians to appropriate the streets ‘as their own’. Fahmy is able not so much to rewrite the history of modern urban Egypt (and especially Cairo) but to draw attention – as a scholarly ‘earwitness’ – to a wealth of new materials that historians and others have largely ignored in the analysis of modern subjectivities in the Middle East and North Africa. The emerging urban soundscapes of Cairo, for example, can also be read as indexes of newly emerging class relations and tensions; transformations in Egyptian soundscapes thereby indicate transformations in Egypt's social landscapes. This tension gives rise to a host of moral judgements since sounds and noises on the street carry ‘class anxieties and judgmental dualities concerning changing definitions of taste, class, and modernity’ (8).

The argument is organised in six chapters arranged in three parts, bookended by an Introduction that offers an overview of the text, and a conclusion that sets the stakes for the analysis. In Part I the author takes the reader on a soundwalk through urban Egypt, highlighting sounds of everyday life as a sonic template upon which later developments would enact great change. Part II focuses on the growth of new transportation infrastructure and the many sonic consequences of electrification, including the advent of technologies such as radio and cinema, and the rise of new forms of nightlight made possible by municipal lighting, neon signage, and widespread electrification. A highlight here is the discussion of café culture and ‘booming radios’ – a phenomenon that links urbanising Egypt to many urban soundscapes globally. Part III addresses what, following Hirschkind (2006), we might call the ‘ethical soundscape’ of traditional practices such as weddings and funerals as they confront new sonic and political realities in the streets. This chapter, rich in detail, sets up the concluding analysis of how such quotidian practices as celebration and mourning confront the exercise of state power. Fahmy demonstrates how the Egyptian state's projection of legitimacy and control in the public sphere (itself a proxy for class anxieties) required sonic dominance over street noise. The final chapter is the shortest and might have benefitted from deeper exploration of the nexus of state power, soundscapes and social class.

Perhaps the most important insight of this work is that it helps us understand urban class formation and state power as audible and not only as spectacle. Fahmy offers a rich ‘embodied history’ of the interrelation of Egypt's urban soundscapes and social formations. Sound studies scholars will ask, following Feld, what more we can learn from the ‘acoustemology’ of Egyptian cities that might apply to other cases in the Middle East and North Africa, and elsewhere in Africa (as in the work of Abraham Marcus, Janet Abu Lughod, Brian Larkin, Ryan Skinner, James Ferguson, Tsitsi Jaji, among others). What of other sensory markers of these transformations (olfactory, for example)? The transformations of urban Egypt in the first half of the 20th century were at once unique to Egypt and part and parcel of global transformations in many colonial and postcolonial contexts. By allowing us to serve as ‘earwitnesses’ to this history, this important and well-crafted text should spur greater interest among scholars in the multisensory ways that ordinary people engage with their built environments, and how these in turn relate to deeper processes of social transformation and political power globally.