Egyptian class norms barred aristocrats from acting careers in the WWI era

Evidence

Like his narrator, Taymür looked back at France with a mournful nostalgia, to his stay prematurely cut off by the beginning of World War I. His vacation in Egypt in the summer of 1914 unforeseeably lengthened,Taymür looked to fill the cultural gaps he experienced in what had once been the familiar setting of Cairo. He augmented his prolific writing with attempts to become a professional actor, but Sultan Husayn Kamil forbade him, as a young pasha, to continue an acting career, which many Egyptians considered suitable only for those of the lower classes. Taymür then focused on his writing. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 942