NOTES
Introduction The Making of Modern Prostitution in Egypt
1.Here I am using the second English translation, Vivant Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt in Company with Several divisions of the French Army, during the Campaign of General Bonaparte in that Country and published under his Immediate Patronage by Vivant Denon. Embellished with Numerous Engravings, translated by Arthur Aikin in 3 vols, Vol. I (London: Longman and Rees, 1803).
2.Ibid., p. 223.
3.For an analysis of the interplay between power, colonialism, gender and representation see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, translated by Myrna Goldzich and Wlad Goldzych, with an introduction by Barbara Harlow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
4.Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, p. 223.
5.For a definition of transactional sex and the vital role of gifts, both in cash or in nature, in driving everyday sexual relations in a context characterised by gendered economic inequality, see Mark Hunter, ‘The materiality of eveyday sex: Thinking beyond “Prostitution”’, African Studies 61/1 (2002), pp. 99–120. My thanks to Professor Sharad Chari for this reading suggestion.
6.Cited in Louis Awad, The Literature of Ideas in Egypt (Atlanta, GA: Scholar Press, 1986), pp. 22–3. Shayhk al-Jabartis' chronicles of the first seven month of the French Occupation from June to December 1798 have been edited and translated into English by Shmuel Moreh in Napoleon in Egypt. Al-Jabarti's chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798 (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2003).
7.A Non-Military Journal or Observations Made in Egypt, by an Officer upon the Staff of the British Army (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1803). James Aldridge in Cairo (London: McMillan, 1969) identifies Carlos Bey with Major General Sirc Charles Holloway (1749–1827).
8.Awad, Literature of Ideas, p. 24.
9.A Non-Military Journal, p. 33.
10.Awad, Literature of Ideas, p. 24.
11.Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written in Egypt during the Years 1833, 34 and 35, Vol I (London: Charles Knights & Co., 1836), p. 99; p. 377; Denon, Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, pp. 77–8; A Non-Military Journal, p. 98. About the ghawazi see also John Lewis Burckhardt, Arabic Proverbs: Or the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians Illustrated from Their Proverbial Sayings Current at Cairo (London: Curzon Press, 1984), pp. 173–9; Bayle St John, Village Life in Egypt, Vol. I (New York: Arno Press, 1973), pp. 23–8. Learned and artistically skilled female performers entertaining women's audiences in wealthy harims were called ‛awalim. In time the term ‛almah lost its specificity and was used for performes of the lower class too. See Lane, An Account, Vol. II, pp. 61–2; Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, a Sensibility on Tour (London: Bodley Head 1992), p. 110; pp. 113–20; Auriant (pseudo), Koutchouk-Hanem, l'almée de Flaubert (Paris: Mercure de France, 1949), pp. 10–38. For a thorough, albeit quite pedantic, genealogy of the term ‛almah see John Rodembeck, ‘Awalim, or the persistence of error’, in J. Edwards (ed.), Historians in Cairo, Essays in Honour of John Scallon (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002).
12.Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 77–104; pp. 150–6. See also Khaled Fahmy, ‘Prostitution in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century’, in E. Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002), pp. 77–104.
13.Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, p. 39. See also Auriant (pseudo), Koutchouk-Hanem, pp. 10–38.
14.Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt, pp. 113–20.
15.Naguib Mahfuz, The Cairo Trilogy, translated by William Maynard Hutchins et al. (London, New York and Toronto: Everyman's Library, 1990), p. 912.
16.E. Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I.B.Tauris, 2002), p. 2.
17.This work is clearly influenced by Foucauldian scholarship insofar as it explores the theme of the construction of prostitutes' social marginality, as part of a mode of domination based on the production and disciplinarisation of various types of normative and heteronormative subjectivities. Classic points of reference are Madness and Civilization (1967), The Birth of the Clinic (1973), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977) and The Will to Knowledge –The History of Sexuality (1979).
18.Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by J. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 336.
19.Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 4.
20.Ibid., pp. 140–1, 143–4, 229; Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Edited by M. Sennelert (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). For a thorough conceptualisation of ‘power to colonize’ see also Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. IX.
21.Timothy J. Gilfoyle, ‘Prostitutes in history: From parables of pornography to metaphors of modernity’, The American Historical Review 104/1 (1999), pp. 117–41.
22.Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and City of Dreadful Delights: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992); Alain Corbain, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in 19th Century Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes, Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1900); Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1999); Laurie Bernstein, Sonia's Daughters: Prostitutes and their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous Outcasts: Prostitutes in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998); Donna J. Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); ‘Imad Hilal, al-Baghaya fi Misr. Dirasah Tarikhiyyah wa Igtima'iyyah, 1834–1949 (al-Qahirah: al-’Arabi, 2001); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Christian Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Luise White, Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
23.On this the most complete comparative work to to date is Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (eds), Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
24.Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation, Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
25.Stephen Legg, ‘Beyond the European province: Foucault and postcolonialism’, in J.W. Crampton and S. Elden (eds), Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 265–88.
26.See Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire. Scales, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 6.
27.See Corbain, Women for Hire; Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Frances Finnegan, Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitution in York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Mahood, The Magdalenes; Gibson, Prostitution and the State; Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, Prostitution in America 1900–1918 (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University, 1982).
28.White, Comforts of Home.
29.Timothy J. Gilfoyle, ‘Prostitutes in the archives: Problems and possibilities in documenting the history of sexuality’, American Archivist 57/2 (1994), pp. 514–27.
30.Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 4.
31.Gail Hershatter, ‘Courtesans and streetwalkers: The changing discourses on Shangai prostitution, 1890–1949’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3/2 (1992), pp. 245–69, p. 267.
32.For a broad overview of the theoretical shifts within the Subaltern Studies Project see Vinayak Chaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies (London: Verso Books, 2000).
33.Works like Mudhakkirat Laqit (Memoirs of a foundling, 1923), Mudhakkirat ‘arbagi (Memoirs of a cabby-driver, 1923), Mudhakkirat Futuwwa (Memoirs of a Street Thug, second edition, 1923) and A. ‘Atiya, Mudhakkirat ‘Amil fi biqa‘ al-‘ahirat (Memoirs of a worker in whores’ whereabouts, 1927) fall within this category. Cited in Marilyn Booth, ‘Between harem and houseboat, fallenness, gendered spaces and the female national subject in 1920s Egypt’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories, Envisioning Spaces and Living Places (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 348.
34.Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, p. 4.
35.Lila Abu Lughod, ‘The romance of resistance: Tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women’, American Ethnologist 17/1 (1990), pp. 41–55.
36.I thank Professor Marilyn Booth for the suggestion to elaborate on this point.
37.See Will Hanley, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
38.Julia A. Clancy Smith, Mediterraneans, North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c.1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
39.A very similar and recent conceptualisation of the term ‘sex worker’ in a historical setting can be found in Joanne M. Ferraro, ‘Making a living: The sex trade in early modern Venice’, American Historical Review 123/1 (2018), pp. 30–59. In the same issue, see also Jocelyn Olcott, ‘Public in a domestic sense: Sex work, nation-building, and class identification in modern Europe’, pp. 124–31.
Chapter 1 Selling Sex in a Changing City
1.Amédée B. De Guerville, New Egypt (London: Walter Heinemann, 1906), p. 78.
2.See Janet Abu Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971); Cynthia Mynti, Paris along the Nile, Architecture in Cairo from the Belle Epoque (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 2015); Trevor Mostyn, Egypt's Belle Epoque Cairo, 1869–1952 (London: Quartet Books, 1989).
3.For a classic account of ‘Ali Mubarak's work see Robert Hunter, ‘Egypt's High Official in transition from a Turkish to a modern administrative elite, 1849–1879’, Middle Eastern Studies 19/3 (1983), pp. 277–300.
4.Khaled Fahmy, ‘Modernizing Cairo: A revisionist account’, in N. al Sayyad, I.A. Bierman and N. Rabbat (eds), Making Cairo Medieval (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 178–9.
5.Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, p. 67.
6.Thomas S. Harrison, The Homely Diary of a Diplomat in the East (Boston: Houghton Miffin Co., 1917), p. 81. For a powerful critique of the ‘dual city’ trope, so relevant in both colonial and local sources and accepted rather unquestioningly by urban historians for quite a long time, see Nancy Y. Reynolds, A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 19 et seq.
7.See Kenneth Cuno, The Pasha's Peasants: Lands, Society, and the Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
8.André Raymond, Cairo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 319. See also Jean Luc Arnaud, Le Caire: Mise en place d'une ville moderne (Arles: Sindbad Acted Sud, 1998) and Nelly Hanna, ‘The urban history of Cairo around 1900’, in J. Edwards (ed.), Historians in Cairo: Essays in Honor of George Scanlon (Cairo: Cairo University Press, 2000), pp. 189–202.
9.Marcel Clerget, Le Caire: Etudes de Géographie Urbaine et d'Histoire Économique (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1934), p. 242. According to Janet Abu Lughod, in 1917 25 per cent of Cairo's residents whose birthplace was known came from some other Egyptian area, while ten per cent were born abroad. In 1927 the percentage of Egyptian internal migrants was already 34 per cent as opposed to eight per cent of residents born abroad. Abu Lughod, Cairo, p. 174.
10.Raymond, Cairo, p. 320.
11.See Mak Lanver, British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crisis, 1919–1937 (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012).
12.Clerget, Le Caire, p. 222.
13.Ibid.
14.See Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt 1919–1937, Ethnicity and Class (London: Ithaca Press, 1989). For an extensive account of the history of the Italian community of Egypt see Marta Petricioli, Oltre il mito: l'Egitto degli Italiani, 1917–1947 (Milan: Mondadori, 2007).
15.Census of Egypt taken in 1927 (Cairo: Government Press, 1931), p. 216.
16.Clerget, Le Caire, p. 222.
17.Raymond, Cairo, p. 322.
18.Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London and New York: Methuen & Co., 1983), p. 235.
19.De Guerville, New Egypt, p. 27.
20.After 1896, public cabs faced increasing competition from the development of large-scale, Belgian-owned transport infrastructure in the form of electric tramlines. See John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1860–1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press), pp. 134–5.
21.Waterworks were taken over by the Suarès group and extended to new parts of the city. See Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide. Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 32–6.
22.Clerget, Le Caire, pp. 242–4.
23.De Guerville, New Egypt, pp. 24–5.
24.On the origins of mass tourism in Egypt see Derek Gregory, ‘Scripting Egypt, Orientalism and the cultures of travel’, in J. Duncan and D. Gregory (eds), Writes of Passage, Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge 1999), pp. 114–51; Waleed Hazbun, ‘The East as an exhibit: Thomas Cook & Son and the origins of the international tourism industry in Egypt’, in P. Scranton and J.F. Davidson (eds), The Business of Tourism: Place, Faith and History (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2006), pp. 3–33; Robert F. Hunter, ‘Tourism and Empire: The Thomas Cook & Son Enterprise on the Nile, 1868–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies 40/5 (2004), pp. 28–54. On the hotel industry in modern Egypt see Andrew Humphreys, Grand Hotels of Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012).
25.Elizabeth Cooper, The Women of Egypt (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1914), p. 32.
26.Numbers must be treated with caution as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptian censuses are far from reliable. On some of the difficulties encountered in taking the 1917 census of Cairo, for example, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 111–12.
27.See Tucker, Women, p. 101.
28.White, Comforts of Home, p. 9.
29.See Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and the Family in Khedivial Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), p. 51. Kozma cites the seminal article by Eve Troutt Powell, ‘Will that subaltern ever speak? Finding African slaves in the historiography of the Middle East’, in I. Gershoni, A. Singer and Y. Hakan Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiography: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 242–61 which discusses the epistemological implications of recovering subalterns’ lives and perceptions from dominant sources.
30.Diane Robinson Dunne, The Harem Slavery and British Imperial Culture: Anglo-Muslim Relations in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 43.
31.Tucker, Women, p. 190.
32.Robinson Dunne, Harem Slavery, p. 44.
33.Tucker, Women, p. 190.
34.The main references on the topic of slavery in the Islamic world and legal system are Imad Hilal, al-Raqiq fi Misr fi al-Qarn al-Tasi‘ ‘Ashar (al-Qahirah: al-‘Arabi, 1999); John Hunwick, ‘The same but different: Africans in slavery in the Mediterranean Muslim world’, in J. Hunwick and E. Troutt Powell (eds), The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Muslim World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. ix–xvi; Ehud Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Terence Walz, ‘Black slavery in Egypt’, in J.R. Willis (ed.), Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, Vol. II (London: Frank Cass, 1985), pp. 137–60; Gabriel Baer, ‘Slavery in nineteenth century Egypt’, Journal of African History 8/3 (1967), pp. 417–41; Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in 19th Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (Cairo: American University Press, 2011). For a lively account of similar transitional experiences see Eve M. Troutt Powell, Tell This in Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
35.Walz and Cuno, Race and Slavery, p. 208.
36.Adam McKeown, ‘Global migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15 (2004), pp. 155–89.
37.Liat Kozma, Global Women, Colonial Ports. Prostitution in Interwar Middle East (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017).
38.See Ronal Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, the British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 146 for a good map of trafficking routes. For a thorough discussion of women trafficking in a number of different locales based on primary sources see Jean Michel Chaumont, Magaly Rodriguez Garcia and Paul Servais (eds), Trafficking in Women 1924–1926, The Paul Kinsie Report for the League of Nations (Geneva: UN, 2017).
39.Central Office of the Italian Home Office, Report on the Repression of the Traffic in Women and Children, 1927. Italian National Archive (hereafter ACS), 13.180.3, folder 2.
40.Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). With a specific reference to the Argentinian context see Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, p. 8.
41.See Women's Library (hereafter WL), 4/IBS/5/2/040, Licensed Houses: Abstract of the Reports of the Governments on the System of Licensed Houses Related to the Traffic in Women and Children, Geneva, 28 February 1929.
42.The National Archives (hereafter NA), 4/IBS/6/033 FL 113, The International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children, Its Work in Egypt (Cairo: Nile Mission Press, 1902), p. 3.
43.WL, 4/IBS/6/033, Report on Traffic in Women, 1905–1906, by Madame Tsykalas from Alexandria. With an abstract of a report by Lord Cromer. The Union Internationale des Amis de Jeunes Filles was among the purity associations active in Europe against the White Slave Trade at that time.
44.Thomas Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service: 1902–1946 (London: J. Murray, 1949), p. 26. See also Laurence Grafftey-Smith, Bright Levant (London: John Murray, 1970), p. 12: ‘In one notorious case in Cairo, two Italians, a Greek and a young Egyptian Jew called Jacoel were involved in a pocket-knife murder, unexpected when they broke in to steal. The Egyptian was the only one to be hanged. The others, after condemnation in their consular courts and release on appeal to Athens and Ancona, were back in Cairo in less than three months, buying haberdashery from the Jacoel family shop’.
45.Ibid.
46.On the role of foreigners in Cairo's underworld see Abu Bakr ‘Abd al-Wahhab, Mujtama‘at-Qahira al-Sirri, 1900–1952 (Cairo: Maktabah Madbuli, 1987).
47.WL, 4/IBS/6/034.
48.WL, 4/IBS/6/033, Report on Traffic in Women by Madame Tsykalas, 1905.
49.WL, 4/IBS/6/033, section taken from the 1927 Report of the Special Committee of the Experts on the Traffic in Women and Children.
50.ACS, 13.180.3, folder 30/3.
Chapter 2 The Geography of Sex Work
1.Thomas S. Harrison, The Homely Diary of a Diplomat in the East (Boston: Houghton Miffin Co., 1917), p. 81.
2.Douglas Sladen, Oriental Cairo: The City of the Arabian Nights (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1911), p. 55.
3.Joseph Ben Prestel, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), especially pp. 123–33.
4.Phil Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geography of Prostitution in the Urban West (London: Ashgate, 1999), p. 31.
5.Charles H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014); Philip Howell, ‘Race, space and the regulation of prostitution in colonial Hong Kong’, Urban History 31/2 (2004), pp. 229–48.
6.Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire, p. 41.
7.Alexandria offers another example of this. See Nefertiti Takla, ‘Murder in Alexandria: The gender, sexual and class politics of criminality in Egypt, 1914–1921’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, UCLA, 2016).
8.The situation is in fact very close to that in semi-colonial Shanghai as analised by Gail Hershatter in Dangerous Pleasures.
9.On the concept of heterotopia with special reference to present-day Wust el Balad see Lucye Rizova, ‘Strolling in enemy territory’, proceedings of the conference Divercities. Contested Space and Urban Identities in Beirut, Cairo and Tehran (2013). Available at http://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/orient-institut-studies/3-2015/ryzova_strolling (accessed 1 January 2018).
10.WL, 4/IBS/6/033, Cicely McCall, The International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children, Its Work in Egypt (Cairo: Nile Mission Press, 1930), pp. 11–12.
11.Sladen, Oriental Cairo; Guy Thornton, With the Anzacs in Cairo: The Tale of a Great Fight (London: Allenson, 1916); Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service or op. cit.; William Nicholas Willis, Anti-Christ in Egypt (London: Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company Co., 1914).
12.Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What ‘Isa Ibn Hisham told us, edited and translated by Roger Allen, 2 vols (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015); Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy (New York, Toronto and London: Everyman's Library, 2001), p. 912; p. 1060 et seq.; pp. 1194–7; Naguib Mahfouz, The Beginning and the End (London: Anchor, 1989), p. 171; pp. 183–5. For the middle-class flâneur or efendiyyah as an emerging urban type in modern Egypt see Lucie Ryzova, The Age of the Efendiyya, Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 209, and Marilyn Booth, ‘From the horse's rump and the whorehouse keyhole: Ventriloquized memoirs as political voice in 1920s Egypt’, Maghreb Review 32 (2007), pp. 233–61.
13.Willis, Anti-Christ, p. 28. Goshen is the Biblical name for Egypt.
14.Fillib Jallad, Qamus al-Qada’ wa al-Idarah, Vol. 3 (al-Iskandariyyah: 1906), p. 240; p. 245.
15.Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 179. This image is in fact typical of the Orientalist iconography, clearly evoking women's seclusion and sexual enslavement in the harim. It can often be found in early twentieth-century pornographic postcards, studio portraits of female natives often active in prostitution. See Alloula, The Colonial Harem, p. 24.
16.Willis, Anti-Christ, p. 44.
17.WL, 3/AMSH/B/07/23.
18.WL, 3/AMSH/B/07/05.
19.Mahmud Abu-al-‘Uyun, ‘Chastity screams!’, al-Ahram, 8 December 1923. This article opened a series devoted to the issue of licensed prostitution and the state of morals in Egypt, further discussed in Chapter 7.
20.‘Ba‘d Sitt ‘ashar Sa‘ah’, al-Ahram, 17 December 1932. The reader's list reads as follows: ‘Tawfiqiyyah, near ‘Ubur al-Mayyah (Aqueduct): 2 clandestine houses; al-Mawardi: 2; Dar al-‘Awalim: many; Harat al-Tarabish and Shari‘ ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, ‘Abdin: 1; Dar al-Muqattam al Qadim: 2; Shari‘ ‘Abdin: 2; Shari‘ Tilifun: many; Shari‘ al-Qabbanah: 2; Hilmiyyah Gadidah: 5; Shari‘ al- Dawawin: 1; Shari‘ Khayrat: 2; Shari‘ al-Sahhah: 4; Shari‘ al-Baghghalah: 10; Shari‘ Zayn al-Abdin: 7; Shari‘ al-Khudari: 1; al-Qubisi wa Shari‘ al-‘Abbasi: many; al-‘Abbasiyyah: many; Misr Gadidah: 3; Ghamrah: 10; alleys behind Katbikhanah: 5; Bulaq: 5; Shari‘ al-Khalig: 5; Kum Umm Salamah: 10; Darb al-Junaynah: 5; Bab al-Bahr: 7; Awlad ‘Anan: 4; Shari‘ Umm al-Ghulam: 1; Harat al-Zarabin: 1; Harat al-Gabbaruni: 1; Suq al-Zalat: 4; al-Faggalah: many; Shubrah: 4; Manshiyyat al-Sadr: 2; al-Dimardash: many; ‘Izbat al-Zaytun: 3; Rawdat-al-Farag: 2; al-Zahir: 3; al-Sabtiyyah: 5; Darb al-Qittah: 7; Shari‘ ‘Ashara-al-‘Abbasiyyah: 4; Clot Bey: many; Suq al-Tha‘ban: 1; Bab al-Luq: 1; Bab al-Shari‘yyah: 12; Behind the Muhafazah: 3; Kubri al-Qubbah: 2; Citadel: 7; Darb Riyyash: 2; Shari‘ Nubar: 1; Suq al-Nasari: 2.’
Chapter 3 Regulating Prostitution in Colonial Cairo
1.Gilfoyle, ‘Prostitutes in history’, p. 117.
2.See Ann L. Stoler, ‘Making Empire respectable: The politics of race and sexual morality in the 20th century colonial culture’, American Ethnologist 16/4 (1989), pp. 643–60.
3.Fahmy, ‘Prostitution in Egypt’, p. 77
4.The reasons for the ban have been extensively discussed in existing literature. See Fahmy, ‘Prostitution in Egypt’, p. 81; Tucker, Women, p. 151. Hanan Kholoussy in her article ‘Monitoring and medicalising male sexuality in semi-colonial Egypt’, Gender & History 22/3 (2010), p. 679 reconsidered the ‘civil society’ argument, according to which Muhammad Ali responded to popular distaste for foreign influence. Khaled Fahmy, in particular, reconsidered the ‘public opinion argument’ according to which the sex workers’ ban was a response to people's dislike for the Pashas’ Westernising reforms, or widespread protest against the power of such state officials like Copt Antum Tuma, who were in charge of the taxation of sex work.
5.Also known as the French System, sex work regulation was firstly theorised by the Parisian Doctor Parent in J.B. Parent-Duchâtelet, De la prostitution dans la ville de Paris: considérée sous le rapport de l'hygiéne publique, de la morale et de l'administration, 2 vols (Paris: J.B. Bailliére et fils, 1836). For essential references on the history and logic of regulation in France see Corbain, Women for Hire, and Harsin, Policing Prostitution.
6.Howell, Geographies of Regulation, p. 9, and Philip Howell, ‘Historical geographies of the regulation of prostitution in Britain and the British Empire’. Available at http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/prostitutionregulation/ (accessed 1 May 2017).
7.Hilal, al-Baghayya, p. 65. Hilal and Bruce W. Dunne, ‘Sexuality and the civilizing process in modern Egypt’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Georgetown University, 1996), pp. 141–2, both agree on the fact that the first mention of this document, of which we no original version remains, is made in Fillib Jallad, Qamus al-Qada’ wa al-Idarah, vol. III (al-Iskandariyyah: Lagoudakis, 1906), p. 240; p. 245. Here it is said that a Decree of the Ministry of Interiors dated 11 November 1882 referred that a previous ‘law’ had been promulgated by a British-appointed Sanitary Commission, with the task of addressing the most urgent matters of public health such as ‘the medical examination of women prostitutes to prevent the spread of venereal disease’.
8.WL, 3/AMSH/B/07/05.
9.N.W. Willis, Anti-Christ, pp. 35–6.
10.Ibid., pp. 103–19.
11.Jallad, Qamus, p. 240; p. 245.
12.The concept of repentance (tawbah) seems to be connected to that of islah-i-nefs, self-reform, self-discipline, appearing in a number of Ottoman legal cases from the nineteenth century. According to Elyse Semerdijan, this practice was established in court cases already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when prostitutes could express formal regret for their past misdeeds and promise not to engage in prostitution anymore. The practice had a religious undertone, symbolising a turn to the ‘straight path’. A prostitute's repentance was registered in court and allowed reintegration into society. See Elise Semerdijan, Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 202–4. The language of religion seemed to give way to that of redemptive productive work in the ideology of modern reformist institutions such as the poorhouse and refuge in modert times (see Chapter 7).
13.La'ihah Maktab al-Kashf ‘ala al-Niswah al-‘Ahirat, article 14.
14.La'ihah Maktab al-Kashf ‘ala al-Niswah al-‘Ahirat, article 18.
15.al-Qarrarat wa al Manshurat al-Sadirah sanat-1885, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1886, pp. 153–7; Nizarah al-Dakhiliyyah, Idarah ‘Umum al-Sahhah, Dikritat wa Lawa'ih Sahhiyyah (Cairo: al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1895), pp. 54–6.
16.Nizarah al-Dakhiliyyah, al-Qawanin al-Idariyyah wa al-Jina'iyyah, al-Juz’ al-Rabi‘ al-Qawanin al-Khususiyyah (Cairo: al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, n.d.), pp. 430–5.
17.See for example Duktur Fakhr Mikha'il Faraj, Taqrir ‘an Intishar al-Bigha’ wa al-Amrad al-Tanassuliyyah bi-l- Qutr al Masri wa ba‘d al-Turuq al-Mumkin Ittiba'iha li-Muharibatihima (Cairo: al-Matba‘ah al-‘Asriyyah, 1924); Muhammad Farid Junaydi, al-Bigha’, Bahth ‘ilmi ‘amali (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Nasr, 1934); Mahmud Abu al-‘Uyun, Mushkilah al-Bigha’ al- Rasmi (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Hilal, 1933); Burtuqalis Bay, al-Bigha’ aw Kathir al-‘ahara fi-l-Qutr al-Masri (Cairo: Matba‘ah Hindiyyah, 1907).
18.Thornton, With the Anzacs, p. 59. As a prominent evangelist and puritan abolitionist, Thornton could have had reasons to exaggerate the numbers in order to create panic and alarmism.
19.Frank Young, ‘The cheapest thing in Egypt’, Egyptian Gazette, 7 October 1913.
20.WL, 4/IBS/6/024, The International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children, The Case for the Abolition of the Government Regulation of Prostitution (Cairo: Nile Mission Press, 1939).
21.Ibid.
22.WL, 4/IBS/6/025, Personal communication of Russell Pasha to Mr Sempkins, Secretary of the National Vigilance Association (hereafter NVA), 23 February 1931. Russell Pasha's judgment certainly sounds as profoundly classist and moralistic, and his claim about the number of Cairene middle-class men patronising clandestine prostitution is hyperbolic and doesn't have any statistical value. As a consequence, Russell Pasha was in favour of the closing down of the licensed quarter in the city centre, and the transfer of the brothel area to the outskirts of the city. The same point of view had been advocated in his Cairo City Police Report for the year 1926: ‘I would maintain a purely native licensed prostitution quarter on the outskirts to meet the demand of the native population until what time that education and civilization made it possible to do away with licensed prostitution altogether.’ WL, 4/IBS/5/2/40, Cairo City Police Report, 1926.
23.Data for the years 1921–1927 were taken from Taqrir Sanawi ‘an A‘mal Taftish Sahhat al-Qahirah li-sanawat 1922, 1925, 1927, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-l-Qahirah. Data for the period 1928–1946 were taken from Wizarat al-Dakhiliyyah-Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi-al-‘am 1930, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1931; Wizarat al-Dakhiliyyah – Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi al-‘am 1933, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1934; Wizarat al-Dakhiliyya-Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi al-’am 1935, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1936; Wizarat al-Dakhaliyyah-Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi al-‘am 1937, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1938; Wizarat al-Sahhah al- ‘Umumiyyah, Taqrir Sanawi ‘an A‘mal Taftish Sahhat- al-Qahirah li-‘am 1936, al-Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq, 1939; Wizarat al-Sahhah al-‘Umumiyyah- Taqrir Sanawi ‘an sanat-1937, Dar al-Tiba‘ah al-Fayyada, al-Qahirah, 1939; Wizarat al-Dakhiliyyah – Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi li-sanatay 1942–1943, al-Matb‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-l-Qahirah, 1944; Wizarat al-Dakhaliyyah – Bulis Madinat al-Qahirah, Taqrir Sanawi li-sanat- 1944, Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq bi-l-Qahirah, 1944; Wizarat al-Sahhah al-‘Umumiyyah, Taqrīr Sanawi li-sanat 1946, Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq bi-l-Qahirah; Wizarat al-Sahhah al-‘Umumiyyah, al-Taqrir al-Sanawi al-’amm li-sanat 1943, Matba‘ah al-Amiriyyah bi-Bulaq bi-l-Qahirah.
24.Willis, Anti-Christ, p. 40.
25.Fakhr Mikhail Faraj, Taqrir ‘an Intishar al-Bigha’ wa al-Amrad al-Tanassuliyyah bi-l-Qutr al-Masri wa ba‘d al-Turuq al-Mumkin Ittiba'iha li-Muharibah (Cairo: al-Matba'ah al-’Asriyyah, 1924), pp. 40–1.
26.WL, IBS/6/033.
27.See also LaVerne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 3–4, p. 334; Amira el-Azhary Sonbol, The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. x and pp. 27–35; Serge Jagailloux, La Médicalization de l'Egypte au XIXe siècle, 1798–1918 (Paris: Editions Recherches sur les Civilizations, 1986); Nancy E. Gallagher, Egypt's Other Wars: Epidemics and the Politics of Public Health (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). On similar dynamics in other Middle Eastern contexts see Nancy E. Gallagher, Medicine and Power in Tunisia, 1790–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Ellen J. Amster, Medicine and the Saints. Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Marocco, 1877–1956 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Cyrus Schayegh, Who is Knowledgeable is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley: California University Press, 2004).
28.el-Azhary Sonbol, Creation, p. 114.
29.Ibid., p. 112.
30.Liat Kozma, ‘“We, the sexologists …”: Arabic medical writing on sexuality’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 22/3 (2013), p. 431.
31.Faraj, Taqrir ‘an Intishar, p. 46. In the ‘Abbasiyyah bureau, 65 women were inspected each day, while in the Sayyidah Zaynab bureau the number of checked women on a single day was 55.
32.Burtuqalis Bey, al-Bigha’ aw Khatar ‘aharah fī-l- Qutr al-Misri, tarjamah Dawwud Barakat (Cairo: Matba‘ah Hindiyyah 1907), p. 26.
33.Ibid., p. 33.
34.Muhammad Shahin, Taqrir min-Mukafahat-al-Amrad al-Zahriyyah bi-l-Qutr al-Masri (Cairo: n.p., 1933), Table 1. Muhammad Shahin was the representative of the Ministry of Interior for Health Affairs.
35.Ibid., p. 2.
36.Ibid., p. 9.
37.Faraj, Taqrir ‘an Intishar, pp. 60–1.
38.Corbain, Women for Hire, p. 11.
39.Yunan Labib Rizq. ‘Safety first’, al-Ahram Weekly Online, 6–12 December 2001, no. 563. Available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/563/chrncls.htm (accessed 1 May 2017).
40.Al-Taqrir al-Sanawi li-Bulis Madinat-al-Qahirah ‘an-Sanat, 1933, p. 6.
41.From 1875 to 1947, the Egyptian judicial system was a dual one, meaning that foreign consular courts in which foreigners were judged according to the laws of their respective countries existed alongside Egyptian National Courts for Egyptian subjects. The summary way in which law was enacted in consular courts explains why foreign citizens in Egypt were virtually free to engage in whatever sort of illicit activity. For a good overview see Mark Hoyle, Mixed Courts of Egypt (London: Graham and Trotman, 1968).
42.Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 179.
43.Sladen, Oriental Cairo, p. 60.
44.Ibid., Oriental Cairo, p. 109.
45.Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What ‘Isa Ibn Hisham Told Us or A Period of Time, translated by Roger Allen (New York: New York Univeristy Press, 2018), p. 322.
Chapter 4 Sex Work Beyond Prostitution
1.M. Fredolin, John Bull Sur Le Nil (Paris: Jules Lévi Editeur, first edition, 1886), pp. 170–1. M. Fredolin is acknowledged as the author of a scathing critique of British colonial rule in Egypt, which he based on his firsthand observation during an eight-month stay in Cairo. See W. Fraser Rae, Egypt to-day (London: Bentley and Sons, 1892), p. 246.
2.Michel Foucault, ‘The subject and power’, Critical Inquiry 8/4 (1982), pp. 777–95, p. 781.
3.Ibid.
4.Kharakhanah means ‘brothel’. The origin of this name is quite interesting. In the Levant the karakhanah identified both the workshop and the brothel. According to Jens Hanssen, in Beirut the majority of prostitutes were unmarried village girls who had formerly worked as silk weavers (banat al karakhanah) in the outskirts of Beirut: They ‘were initially sent to earn money in the factories to sustain their families by subsidizing their agricultural revenue in adverse economic conditions. Yet, as the Maronite clergy and the patriarchal system considered female labour immoral in a factory where they would come into contact with men, these women suffered social stigmatization’. See Jens Hanssen, ‘Public morality and marginality in fin-de-siècle Beirut’, in Rogan, Outside In, p. 197.
5.Wizarat-al-Dakhiliyyah, Nizam al-Bulis wa al-Idarah- Lay'hah bi-sha'an buyut al-‘ahirat, 1936. The decree confirms a previous one by the same name, issued on 15 July 1896.
6.Ibid., Art. 1.
7.Ibid., Art. 2.
8.WL, 4/IBS/6/040.
9.Labib Rizq, ‘Safety first’.
10.WL, 4/IBS/6/040.
11.The Azbakiyyah had the second highest population density in Cairo after the nearby area of Bab-al-Sha‘riyyah, with 36,323 inhabitants per sq. km in 1926. See Abu Bakr ‘Abd al-Wahhab, Mujtama‘, p. 28.
12.NA, FO/841/62.
13.Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy, p. 913.
14.The term taqtuqah (pl. taqatiq, ‘light ditties’) identifies popular songs especially composed for commercial recording on 78 rpm records since the 1920s. A notable medium for social commentary, they ‘addressed such serious themes as the reconstitution of family around the nuclear model, the dangers of polygamy, the right to get acquainted to the bride or the groom before marriage, the dangers of girls’ autonomy for a family's wealth, the minimum age of marriage, the way spouses should deal with their husbands’ misconducts, working women and women in the police and the army’. They constitute an interesting source for the study of social change and debates between modernists and traditionalists in interwar Egypt. See Frédéric Lagrange, ‘Women in the singing business, women in songs’, History Compass 7/1 (2009), pp. 226–50, p. 229. About the origins of the form, language and recurrent themes and characters – the coquette, the debauched heir, the corrupt jurisprudent – see Frédéric Lagrange, ‘Une Egypte libertine?’, in F. Sanaugustin (ed.), Parole, Signes, Mythes, Mélange offerts à Jamel Eddine Bencheikh (Damas: IFEAD, 2001), pp. 257–300. See also its extended version ‘Quand l'Egypt se chantat, taqatiq et chansons légerès au début du XX siècle’. Available at http://mapage.noos.fr/fredlag/taqatiq.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017).
15.Al-Bannà excelled in interpreting the coquettish girl, ‘therefore enhancing any comic material already contained in the lyrics’. Endowed with a high-pitched voice of almost feminine quality, he was the only male vocalist of his time who did not wear a moustache, in order to divert attention from his masculinity. See Lagrange, ‘Women in the singing business’, p. 229; p. 233.
16.Ibid., p. 12. On the relationship between spatial practices, subjectivities and the national imagination see Booth, ‘Between harem and houseboat’, pp. 342–73.
17.I am using Corbain's term to define a private house tenants made available to third parties for commercial sexual encounters. Women were not living on the premises, but frequented the house for the purpose of prostitution. Clients could be either procured by the keeper or by the women themselves. See Corbain, Women for Hire, pp. 174–5.
18.Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 178.
19.WL, 4/IBS/6/024.
20.WL, 4/IBS/6/031.
21.See ‘White slave traffic in Egypt. Revolting allegations’, Morning Post, 24 October 1923; ‘White slave arrests, Egyptian gang's GHQ raided’, Daily Express, 23 October 1923; ‘White slaves raid, 100 arrests in Cairo’, Daily Mail, 24 October 1923. It is remarkable that, although the newspapers talked about ‘White Slave Traffic’, no European woman was in fact involved in the case. The term was probably chosen for sheer sensationalistic reasons, at a time when metropolitan concerns about juvenile sexuality and consent were assumed to be universally valid.
22.The National Vigilance Association (NVA) was founded in Britain in 1885. As a purity association, it campaigned against prostitution, homosexuality, obscene publications and vice.
23.WL, 4/IBS/6/031, Letter of G.W. Hughes, Chief Inspector of Cairo's Native Court of Appeal to Miss Baker, Director of the National Vigilance Association, 3 March 1924.
24.WL, 4/IBS/6/031, Note by Sister Margaret Clare to Miss Baker, 15 November 1924.
25.WL, 4/IBS/6/031, Note by Sister Margaret Clare, 26 May 1924.
26.Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service or op. cit., p. 181.
27.Corbain, Women for Hire, p. 181.
28.Alfred Cunningham, To-Day in Egypt, Its Administration, People and Politics (London: Hurst and Blackett Limited, 1912), p. 41.
29.Ibid., pp. 42–3.
30.See ‘Egypt's morals, prominent author interviewed. A scathing indictment. Laws that help the devil’, Egyptian Gazette, 13 August 1913.
31.See the Historical Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (hereafter ASMAE), Italian Consular Courts Penal Cases, 1932/99; Report of the Commercial Agent, Italian Embassy of Egypt, 23 April 1932.
32.ASMAE, Italian Consular Courts Penal Cases, 1932, folder 3/96–140.
33.Cunningham, To-Day, p. 115.
34.Ibid. On the status of morals within the protected domestic space see Booth, Harem Histories, p. 315.
35.ASMAE, Italian Consular Courts Penal Cases, 1932, folder 4/141–95.
36.Many information on the nightlife scene in Cairo until the Revolution can be derived from local publications devoted to the arts and showbusiness in the 1920s and the 1930s, such as Alf Sinf, Dunia-al-Fann, al-Kawakib, Majallat-al-Funun, al-Malahi-al-Musawwarah and Ruz al-Yusuf. These newspapers used to devote regular columns to the programmes performed in the various venues and commented extensively on the quality of the establishments and performers. It seems that the main entrepreneurs bribed journalists to obtain positive reviews. For the description of Cairene commercial entertainment scene, I draw on Karin van Nieuwkerk, “A Trade like any Other”: Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 43–9.
37.In 1940, the Head of Police in the Azbakiyyah area found 459 garsunat without a license. After they underwent a compulsory medical check-up, it was found that 97 of them were actually infected with venereal diseases. See Hilal, al-Baghayya, p. 66.
38.In some venues, performers had to refrain from sitting with customers by contract, in order to avoid any association being made between the establishment and prostitution. A very famous performer at the beginning of the twentieth century, Tawhidah, wanted to have stated in her contract that she wouldn't drink more than five glasses of cognac in one evening and that she couldn't be compelled to sit with customers.
39.Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade like any Other, p. 198, note 8.
40.Ibid., p. 44.
41.Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, What ‘Isa Ibn Hisham told us or a Period of Time, translated by Roger Allen (New York: New York University Press, 2018), p. 322.
42.Ibid.
43.Ibid., p. 341.
44.Ibid., p. 339.
45.Ibid., p. 342.
46.Ibid., p. 343.
47.Sarah Graham Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography in the Middle East (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 171. According to a Gramophone sound engineer in the late 1920s, ‘the amount of raw spirits, cocaine and other drugs absorbed by artistes and their entourage throughout sessions lasting from early evening till two and three in the morning […] rather alarmed me until I got used to it […] I remember one obese lady consuming the best part of a bottle (full-sized) of Martell's Three Star Brandy at a single session, neat, mind you’. See Lagrange, ‘Women in the singing business’, p. 236.
48.WL, 4/IBS/6/041.
49.WL, 4/IBS/6/025, Communication of the British Head of the Passport and Permit Office to Miss Saunders, IBS.
50.Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade like any Other, p. 45.
51.Ibid.
52.Salah was the Arabic name for ‘music hall’. Unlike the term kabarê, it did not carry a negative connotation. See Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade like any Other, p. 43.
53.Fundamental references about these performers include Tawhidah, Taqatiq al Sitt Tawhidah, al-Mughanniyah al-Shahirah fi Alf Layla wa Layla (Cairo: Dal al Ma‘rusah, 1924), and Ratibah Hifni, Munira al Mahdiyya (Cairo: Dal al-Shurouk, 2001); on Badi'ah Masabni see Nazik Basilah, Mudhakkirat Badi‘ah Masabni (Beirut: Dar Maktabat al-Hayat, 1960), and Roberta L. Dougherty, ‘Badi'a Masabni, artist and modernist, the Egyptian print media carnival of national identity’, in W. Armbrust (ed.), Mass Mediations, New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 243–69.
54.Jacques Berque, L'Égypte, Impérialisme et Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 363–4.
55.See Van Nieuwkerk, A Trade like any Other, p. 47.
56.Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War, 1939–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), p. 112.
57.See Pennethorne Hughes, While Shepheard's Watched (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), pp. 51–2.
58.WL, 4/IBS/5/2/040.
59.For a description of a ‘awamah-brothel see Marilyn Booth, ‘Unsafely at home: Narratives of sexual coercion in 1920s Egypt’, Gender & History 16/3 (2004), pp. 744–68.
60.See Liat Kozma, Policing Egyptian Women, pp. 216–17.
61.Ibid.
62.WL, 4/IBS/5/2/040.
63.Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 34.
64.Ibid., p. 35. On contacts between the sexes in public space, specifically big, khawagah-owned department stores and moral danger, see Nancy Reynolds, ‘Salesclerks, sexual danger, and national identity in Egypt in the 1920s and 1940s’, Journal of Women's History 23/3 (Fall 2011), pp. 63–88.
65.NA, FO 841/146, Rex versus Giuseppe Mifsud for living on the earnings of prostitution.
66.WL, 4/IBS/6/038.
67.WL, 4/IBS/6/034, Egypt. Messageries Maritimes, folder 1, 1925–30.
68.Ibid.
69.Ibid.
70.Ibid.
71.Ibid.
72.Russell Pasha pointed out in various instances the need for a new scheme for police officers in order to discourage corruption and collusion in illicit activities. Although he was mainly referring to native policemen, it seems that his remarks may apply to British ones as well: ‘I fear however that the standard of pecuniary honesty which in the past has been high among the city police, is being undermined by the inadequacy of the pay. It is today quite impossible for a married policeman to exist on the pay he receives.’ He pressed for the introduction of a pension system, free housing in Government cantonments (such as Shubrah, Old Cairo, Sayyidah Zaynab, al-Khalifah and ‘Abbasiyyah) and free medical and educational facilities for police families. Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service or op. cit., p. 161. In 1927 a major press campaign on al-Ahram addressed the issue of reform in law enforcement, public security and police corps’ professional standards. See Labib Rizq, ‘Safety first’.
73.NA, FO 841/205, Rex versus Gordon Ainslie Ness for living wholly or in part on proceeds of prostitution.
74.Ibid. See the testimony of Eric Leslie Desmond Lees, Head Constable of Cairo Secret Police: ‘I know Sophie. She works at the Café Guindi, she sits with clients of the café and if she can come to terms with them, she will go home with them. I have seen Sophie leaving the café with one man and I have seen her go to bed with another man at Villa Napoli, 13 Sharia Qantarat al-Dekkah’. Ibid.
75.NA, FO 841/205, Rex versus John Chas. {Charles?} Shalders for living on proceeds of prostitution.
76.WL, 4/IBS/6/034, Egypt, Messageries Maritimes, 1925–1930.
77.WL, 4/IBS/6/034, Augusta Pellissier's testimony to police, 15 April 1929 (my translation). On the vol à l'entôlage see in the same file also the testimony of André Guillet, a French minor brought over by a certain Sachelli, who first seduced her and then forced her to go to Egypt by threatening her with a revolver: ‘about 7 months ago, I asked Gros Loui to go to the house of Jeanne Maury, 2 Sikket al-Manakh where I met a young man called Tonnin, whom I found later to be the nephew of Jeanne Maury and I was trained by them in the vol à l'entôlage, from the clients, and then I was arrested with the others and detained in the ELU [sic.] awaiting trial. I then was sentenced by the French Consular Court to one year's imprisonment with the first offender's benefit.’ See Francesca Biancani, ‘International migration and sex work’, in L. Kozma, C. Schayegh and A. Wishnitzer (eds), A Global Middle East Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1940 (London: I.B.Tauris, 2014), pp. 123–4.
78.WL, 4/IBS/6/037. In a speech delivered on 7 June 1932 at the meeting of the first committee on prostitution, H.E. Mahmud Shahin Pasha, Ministry of Interior and Public Health, estimated that licensed prostitutes received between eight and 16 customers per day. According to him, clandestine prostitutes received only two customers per day.
79.Clerget, Le Caire, p. 156.
80.NA, FO 841/205, Testimony of a landlady, Katina Cephalas. The rent in brothels is taken from WL,4/IBS/6/025. It is possible that in Cairo the segregation associated with regulationism was never adopted in full. A closer study of arrangements between prostitutes and brothel owners will probably support the view that Cairo's brothels were mostly closer to ‘open houses’, a sort of lodging house inhabited by public women, than thr maison fermée of the continental type. This also explains the fact that many women, although formally prohibited to do so by the law, actually attracted clients in the streets, standing in front of the buildings or under the arches of the Wagh-al-Birkah.
81.WL, 4/IBS/6/ 034.
82.NA, FO 841/146, Rex versus Giuseppe Vassallo for living wholly or in part on the proceedings of prostitution. See Biancani, ‘International migration’, p. 125.
83.NA, FO 841/164, Rex versus Pasquale Magri for living wholly or in part on the proceedings of prostitution.
84.NA, FO/841/120.
85.It is not possible to derive any information about the baby's father from the trial's minutes. The child was nursed by an old neighbour, Giovannina Valestra, from whom Pasquale Magri managed to steal 15 Egyptian pounds. It seems the baby was entrusted to the ‘Abbasiyyah Orphanage at some point.
86.NA, FO 841/186, Rex Versus James Kelly Alias James Hughes for living wholly or in part on proceeds of prostitution.
87.ASMAE, Italian Consular Courts Penal Cases, 1932, folder 2, cases 41–95.
88.‘Attempted murder at Cairo’, Egyptian Gazette, 20 August 1913.
89.ASMAE, Italian Consular Courts Penal Cases, 1926, cases 1–65. See Biancani, ‘International migration’, pp. 125–8.
90.Ibid. My translation.
91.Ibid.
92.WL, 4/IBS/6/044, Report of the IBS Cairo Branch, January 1928.
93.Ibid.
94.NA, FO 841/146.
95.NA, FO 841/186.
96.On subaltern strategic use of nationality and the notion of ‘vulgar cosmopolitism’ see Hanley, Identifying with Nationality.
Chapter 5 Imperial War, Venereal Disease and Sex Work
1.Howell, Geographies of Regulation, p. 12.
2.Chacko Jacob Wilson, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke Univesity Press, 2010), p. 28.
3.On degeneration see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
4.The acronym ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealanders Army Corps. It was part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force during World War I, formed in Cairo in 1915. They gave their contribution to the Gallipoli battle, before being dismantled as a consequence of the Allied evacuation of Gallipoli in 1916.
5.See Mario M. Ruiz, ‘Manly spectacles and imperial soldiers in wartime Egypt, 1914–1919’, Middle Eastern Studies 43/3 (2009), pp. 351–71, p. 357.
6.Available at http://www.mudgeeguardian.com.au/story/3020538/the-road-to-gallipoli-the-anzacs-in-egypt/ (accessed 1 May 2017).
7.Ibid.
8.Harold Roy Williams, An ANZAC on the Western Front: the Personal Recollections of an Australian Infantryman (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2012), n.p.
9.Ibid.
10.Charles Benjamin Purdom, Everyman at War: Sixty Personal Narratives of the War (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930), p. 311.
11.‘Hariq fi-l-Azbakiyyah’ (Fire in the Azbakiyyah), al-Ahram, 3 April 1915. Kevin Fewster, ‘The Wazza Riots 1915’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial 4 (1984), pp. 47–53.
12.Australian War Memorial (hereafter AWM), C00183.
13.Suzanne Brugger, Australians and Egyptians (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980).
14.See Ruiz, ‘Manly spectacles’, p. 551, and Frank Chung, ‘Underbelly dance: How a brush with the white slave trade sparked the first battle of the Anzacs’, 2 April 2015. Available at http://www.news.com.au/national/anzac-day/underbellydance-how-a-brush-with-the-white-slave-trade-sparked-the-first-battle-of-the-anzacs/news-story/123d51fb53067b95ce11650fe43faf33 (accessed 1 May 2017).
15.Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 31; C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Correspondent: the Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean, selected and annotated by Kevin Fester (Sidney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), pp. 38–9.
16.Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Elgood, Egypt and the Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), p. 258. Before World War I the percentage of venereal soldiers was nonetheless very high: the rate of hospital admissions for VDs in Egypt was 110.8 per 1,000 men, compared to 55.5 in India and 56.4 at home. See Mark Harrison, ‘The British Army and the problem of venereal disease in France and Egypt during the 1st World War’, Medical History 39/2 (1995), pp. 133–58, p. 150.
17.Dunne, Sexuality and the Civilizing Process, p. 212.
18.Philippa Levine, ‘Battle colors: Race, sex, and colonial soldiery in War I’, Journal of Women's History 9/4 (1998), pp. 104–30, p. 106. I would add that it also remained bourgeois.
19.For a thorough review-article on Muscular Christianity as rooted in both domestic social unrest and imperial concerns, see Nick J. Watson, Stuart Weir and Stephen Friend, ‘The development of Muscular Christianity in Victorian Britain and beyond’, Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005), pp. 1–21; Donald E. Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
20.Mark Harrison, ‘The British Army’, p. 137.
21.Thornton, With the Anzacs, p. 12.
22.Ibid., p. 22.
23.Ibid., p. 24.
24.Ibid., p. 74.
25.Ibid., pp. 86–7.
26.The committee included the Bishop of Jerusalem in exile, Rennie MacInnes, Major-General W.A. Watson, Lieutenant-Colonel T.W. Gibbard, Colonel Harvey Pasha, head of Cairo City Police at the time, Dr H.P. Keating and Dr Ferguson Lees.
27.WL, 4/IBS/6/033; Sir James W. Barrett, ‘Management of venereal diseases in Egypt during the War’, The British Medical Journal (1919), pp. 125–7.
28.‘Purification of Cairo. The question of the artistes’, Egyptian Gazette, 16 May 1916.
29.Ibid.
30.‘Purification of Cairo. Harvey Pasha and the “danse du ventre”’, Egyptian Gazette, 2 June 1916.
31.‘Corrupt males of Cairo’, Egyptian Gazette, 10 June 2016.
32.Thornton quoted in his book a report published in the Egyptian Gazette, according to which 37 per cent of the alcohol sold in Cairo was adulterated: ‘one thing is certain, banish the liquor and before 6 months 9/10 of the women would have to seek an honest means of procuring a livelihood.’ Thornton, With the Anzacs, pp. 65–6.
33.‘Britannia and Kursaal artistes assembled at Metro Café, while those of the Aziz Id troupe went to the Café de Ramses in Faggalah. Where actresses now spend their leisure time we don't know’. ‘Actresses and Cairo cafés’, Egyptian Gazette, 15 June 1916.
34.See Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 153. See also Ettie: a Life of Ettie Rout (Auckland: Penguin, 1992) and Ettie Rout: New Zealand's safe sex pioneer (Auckland: Penguin, 2015), both by Jane Tolerton.
35.Levine, Prostitution, p. 148.
36.National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA), A11803 – 1917/89/252, Prostitution in Egypt. Control of Immorality.
37.WL, 3/AMSH/B/07/05.
38.Ibid.
39.WL, 3/AMSH/B/07/05.
40.Ibid.
41.Ibid.
42.Ibid., By special dressing room is meant venereal wards for the treatment of diseased soldiers.
Chapter 6 Policing ‘Suspect’ Femininities: The Work of British Purity Movements in Cairo
1.See Philippa Levine, ‘“A multitude of unchaste women”: Prostitution in the British Empire’, Journal of Women's History 15/4 (2004), pp. 159–63; Levine, Prostitution.
2.Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York, London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 43–4.
3.Ibid., 48.
4.In order to understand the central role that discourse about white slavery played in the construction of the metropolitan and colonial orders, beyond the materialty of the transnational sex trade, see Jo Dozema, ‘Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of white slavery in contemporary dicourses of trafficking women’, Gender Issues (2000), pp. 23–50; Rachel Attwood, ‘Vice beyond the pale: Representing white slavery in Britain, 1880–1912’ (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, UCL, 2013); Rachel Attwood, ‘Looking beyond “White Slavery”: Trafficking, the Jewish Association, and the dangerous politics of migration control in England, 1890–1910’, Anti-Trafficking Review 7 (2016), pp. 115–38; Mary Ann Irwin, ‘White slavery as a metaphor: Anatomy of a moral panic’, Ex Post Facto: The History Journal, Vol. V (1996). Available at http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/irwin-wslavery.html (accessed 1 May 2017); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. 81–121; Philippa Levine, ‘The white slave trade and the British Empire: Crime, gender, and sexuality in criminal persecution’, Criminal Justice History 17 (2002), pp. 133–46.
5.Alfred S. Dyer, The European Slave Trade in English Girls, a Narrative of Facts (London: Dyer Brothers, 1880). Here the terms ‘purity’ and ‘puritan’ are used with the meaning they have in Victorian historiography, that is, referring to a number of civil society movements calling for reform of morals in Britain since the second half of the nineteenth century. Originating in earlier reformist currents such as radical utopianism, slavery abolitionism and the temperance movement, purity organisations started campaigning against the regulation of prostitution in order to cover other issues such as pornography, age of consent, alcohol consumption and contraception at a later stage. See Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 1977).
6.For a history of the term ‘white slavery’, its relation to radical labour struggles in the UK and in the USA, and the shifting role of race and gender within subsequent ideological formations, see Gunther W. Peck, ‘White slavery and whiteness: A transnational view of the sources of working-class radicalism and racism’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 1/2 (2004), pp. 41–63.
7.Victor Hugo to Josephin Butler, 20 March 1870, in Josephine E. Butler, Personal Reminescences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1911), p. 13.
8.See W.T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.’ The Report of the Secret Commission by W.T. Stead, edited and with annotations and an introductory essay by Antony E. Simpson (Lambertville: True Bill Press, 2007).
9.Ibid., pp. 109–10.
10.For a thorough discussion of the NVA and how its specific outlook impacted the operations of the Bureau, see Rachel Attwood, ‘Stopping the traffic: The National Vigilance Association and the international fight against the “white slave” trade’, Women's History Review 24/3 (2015), pp. 325–50. Other critical takes on the NVA can be found in Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London 1885–1960 (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2011), pp. 100–15 and Paula Bartley, Prostitution Prevention and reform in England, 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 170–3.
11.Bristow, Vice and Vigilance, p. 177.
12.Stephanie Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011) and Jessica Pliley, ‘Claims to protection: The rise and fall of feminist abolitionism in the League of Nations. Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1937’, Journal of Women's History 22/4 (Winter 2010), pp. 90–113.
13.See Julia Laite, ‘The Association of moral and social hygiene: Abolitionism and prostitution law in Britain (1915–1959)’, Women's History Review 17/2 (2008), pp. 209–10.
14.Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and the Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 200.
15.See Blessed Be Egypt, January 1915, no. 61, Vol. XV, p. 9. Starting in 1905, Blessed Be Egypt was the bi-monthly publication of the Nile Mission Press, an independent mission aiming at publishing tracts, books and magazines spreading the Gospel Message. A.T. P. Upson, its First Publishing Superintendent, strictly collaborated with the activists of the AMSH in campaigns for the armies’ moralisation. For more on American missionaries in Egypt, see Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionaries Encounters in an Age of Empire. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
16.WL, 4/IBS/6/024, Letter of Miss McCall to Mr F. Sempkins, 10 March 1930.
17.WL, 4/IBS/6/025, Mr Sempkins, NVA, to Judge McBarnett, Villa Rowlatt, Bulkeley, Cairo, 29 May, 1930. Letter of Mr Sepkin, NVA, to Judge Booth, Cairo, 28 November 1930. Here he says that it would be better to focus on stopping the traffic than on abolitionism: ‘You cannot go to people who are by training and early influence regulationists and expect them to do any good by the simple process of telling them that they are nasty minded people and that they must agree with you.’
18.See Levine, ‘A multitude of unchaste women’.
19.WL, 4/IBS/6/023, Miss Cicely McCall application letter, 16 October 1927.
20.WL, 4/IBS/6/044.
21.WL, 4/IBS/6/025, Miss Cicely McCall to Mr Sempkin, 8 October 1930.
22.WL,4/IBS/6/025.
23.WL,4/IBS/6/041.
24.WL,4/IBS/6/041.
25.See for examples the IBS Report of Cases, December 1928, case no. 1050: ‘French, 36 years old. This woman turned to us willing to leave the public houses and entering the Refuge. The Police has been informed and agreed on the woman staying with us for a period of 3 months. After that period, if her conduct is satisfying, we'll find her a job.’ IBS Report of Cases, January 1929, case no. 1056: ‘Italian, 40 years old. She has been working as prostitute and brothel keeper for the past 9 years. She is willing to find a job. She will stay in the refuge for 3 months. After that, if her conduct is satisfying, her name will be struck out the registration lists.’ IBS Report of Cases, February 1929, case no. 1063: ‘Rumanian Jew, 31 years old. Prostitute in the past 4 years. Now she desires to work and leave the Ezbekiyyah. With the police authorization she can leave the segregated area and go to Helouan for three weeks with her sister. Once back, she will enter the Refuge.’
26.IBS Report of Cases, February 1928, no. 1017.
27.WL, 4/IBS/6/024, ‘Vigilance record’, March-April 1929, Egyptian National Committee.
28.Ibid.
29.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case no. 748
30.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case no. 750.
31.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case no. 747.
32.IBS, Monthly Report, February 1929, case no. 1061.
33.IBS, Monthly Report, May 1925, case no. 838.
34.IBS, Monthly Report, May 1925, case no. 189.
35.IBS, Monthly Report, June 1925, case nos. 842–3.
36.IBS, Monthly Report, January 1928, case no. 104.
37.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case nos. 743–4.
38.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case no. 746.
39.IBS, Monthly Report, February 1928, without number.
40.IBS, Report of Cases, February 1929, case no. 1059.
41.IBS, Report of Cases, March 1929, case no. 1067.
42.IBS, Report of Cases, February 1929, without number.
43.IBS, Monthly Report, April 1924, case no. 751.
44.IBS, Report of Work, June 1925, case no. 846.
45.WL, 4/IBS/6/024, Letter from Miss Cicely McCall to Mr Sempkins, 17 May 1929.
46.IBS, Report of Cases, May 1925, case no. 736.
47.IBS, Report of Cases, March 1929, case nos. 1065 and 1066.
48.IBS, Report of Cases, February 1928, case no. 1020.
49.IBS, Report of Cases, January 1928, case no. 967. In the same report is also cited a case no. 996, resident in the hostel from September 1927, of whom is said: ‘She has been a good worker so far but she always has to be kept under strict control. She takes advantage of whatever circumstance to approach the men living nearby the Refuge and after her friend's Iren Death she threatens to follow her example. She also went up to the terrace, threatening to turn her plan into action. We don't believe she really wanted to do so, but in order to avoid further tragedy we decided to entrust the case to the Greek Consulate, with the hope that they will able to find a place for her at the Bonne Pasteur. Meanwhile, our Consul informed us that she has been entrusted to a Greek family. We hope for the best.’
50.Levine, Prostitution, p. 136.
51.Laite, ‘The Association of moral and social hygiene’, p. 208.
52.WL, 4/IBS/6/033 containing a leaflet by Louise Dorothy Potter, Egypt Awakening! Is it True? (n.p.), p. 5.
53.Ibid., p. 6
54.Ibid., p. 8.
55.See Dunne, Sexuality and the Civilizing Process, p. 288.
56.WL, 4/IBS/6/038.
57.Ibid.
58.Margot Badran, ‘Dual liberation: Feminism and nationalism in Egypt, 1870s–1925’, Feminist Issues 8/1 (1988), pp. 15–34, pp. 27–8.
59.Badran, Feminists, p. 199.
60.WL, 4/IBS/6/024, Miss Higson's Address to the Central Committee of the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic of Women and Children of Egypt, 25 February 1930.
61.Ibid.
62.Women marrying a foreigner had to give up their citizenship and take their husbands’ nationality. Feminists claimed that women had the right to choose, and this was prejudicial to their individual rights.
63.Badran, Feminists, p. 203.
64.WL, 4/IBS/6/041, Letter from Lady M. Nunburnholme to Mr Sempkins, 20 July 1939.
Chapter 7 Abolitionism on the Political Agenda
1.Yunan Labib Rizq, ‘Backroads’, al-Ahram Weekly Online, 7–13 June 2001, no. 537. Available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/537/chrncls.htm (accessed 1 May 2017).
2.I use the term ‘eugenic’ in the broad sense, that is as a discourse on the production of a healthy and prosperous human race, the optimisation of the species (tahsin al-nasl in Arabic) which entailed primarily the development of scientific theories about birth-control (tahdid al nasl) and reproduction, sanitation, hygiene and puericulture. In its negative form, eugenics has to do with the prevention of mentally or physically ‘inferior’, tainted individuals from reproducing themselves. See Omnia el-Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
3.See Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 7.
4.James Whidden, ‘The Generation of 1919’, in A. Goldschmidt, A. Johnson and B.A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt 1919–1952 (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), p. 20.
5.Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spreading of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 52. ‘saw the novel and the newspaper as the typical medium for the creation and circulation of the concept of Nation, for the peculiar treatment of time, both individual and collective, they featured.
6.Raya Bint ‘Ali Hamam and Sakinah Bint ‘Ali Hamam migrated with their husbands from the Sa'id, to Kafr al-Zayyat in the Delta and Alexandria, in search of fortune. They had been active as prostitutes before, and in Alexandria they decided to open a drinking den-cum-brothel in the Laban area. In 1920 they killed, with the help of their husbands, 17 women, some of them prostitutes, some others occasional acquaintances they enticed to the brothel, suffocated, robbed of any valuables they carried, and buried in the basement. They were arrested, tried and executed in 1921. See Shaun T. Lopez, ‘Madams, murders and the media: Akhbar al Hawadith and the emergence of a mass culture in 1920s Egypt’, in A. Goldschmidt, A. Johnson and B.A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt, pp. 371–98. See also Salah ‘Isà, Rigal Raya wa Sakinah, sirah siyyasiyyah wa ijtima‘iyyah (al-Qahirah: Dar al-Ahmadi li-l-Nashr, 2002) and Yunan Labib Rizq, ‘The women killers’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 17–23 June 1999, no. 343. Available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/434/chrncls.htm (accessed 1 May 2017).
7.Lopez, ‘Madams’, p. 372.
8.Fundamental works on gender, modernity, nationalism and citizenship in Egypt include Beth Baron's Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Badran, Feminists; Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, for Worse: The Marriage Crisis that Made Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Leila Ahmad, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); See el-Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory; Mona Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Educaton, and National Identity, 1863–1922 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004).
9.Botman, Engendering Citizenship, p. 23.
10.See Baron, Egypt as a Woman, especially pp. 40–57.
11.Shaykh Mahmud Abu-al-‘Uyun, ‘al-Marahid al-‘Umumiyyah’ (‘public toilets’), al-Ahram, 15 December 1923.
12.To reconstruct patterns of social interaction among popular classes, sources such as literature and folklore can be useful. Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy characters Zubaydah and Zannubah, for instance, show us how loose women were more integrated than marginalised in neighbourhood life. Social stigma was more a hegemonic construction than a lived social reality for many sex workers, who, in fact, left the trade upon marriage without this resulting in their husbands’ stigmatisation. On the ‘imagined’ quality of a virtuous and homogeneous national community created by hegemonic groups, see also Hanan Hammad, ‘Between Egyptian “national purity” and “local flexibility”: Prostitution in al-Mahallah al-Kubra in the frst half of the 20th century’, Journal of Social History 44/2 (2011), pp. 251–83.
13.Shaykh Mahmud Abu-l-‛Uyun, ‘al-‛afaf yantahib’, al-Ahram, 8 December 1923.
14.Abdallah al-Nadim, al-A‘dad al Kamilah li-Majallat al-Ustadh (Cairo: al- Hay'ah al Misriyyah al-‘Ammah li-l-Kitab, 1998), pp. 132–40; pp. 395–99.
15.Muhammad Farid, a nationalist leader, writer and lawyer, was the main supporter of Mustafa Kamil, the founder of the Egyptian Nationalist Party. After his death in 1908, he took the lead of the party until his own death 1918.
16.Hammad, ‘Between Egyptian “national purity”’, p. 772.
17.Shaykh Mahmud Abu-al-’Uyun, ‘Min Agil Qublah’ (‘because of a kiss’), al-Ahram, 19 November 1923.
18.Fikri Abaza (1896–1979), journalist and politician, member of the Nationalist Party, al-Hizb al-Watani. He seated in the Administrative Committee in 1921 and was MP in 1926. As a journalist, he worked for several major periodicals, among which al-Ahram and al-Musawwar.
19.Eventually the government passed a law about the establishment of sex-segregated beaches for women. See Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 75–86.
20.Shaykh Mahmud Abu-al-’Uyun, ‘Ala Mar'ah min al-Hukumah wa Misma‘, (‘under the eyes and the ears of the government’), al-Ahram, 20 November 1923.
21.See Yunan Labib Rizq, ‘Back roads’, al-Ahram Weekly Online, 7–13 June 2001, no. 537. Available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2001/537/chrncls.htm (accessed 1 May 2017).
22.Mahmud Abu al-‘Uyun, ‘Fada'ih La Hadd Laha’, al-Ahram, 12 December 1923.
23.Ibid.
24.Mahmud Abu al-‘Uyun, ‘Kitab Min Shaykh Haram’, al-Ahram, 28 November 1923.
25.Mahmud Abu al-‘Uyun, ‘Chastity screams!’, al-Ahram, 8 December 1923. See also Chapter 3.
26.Ara’ al-Wuzarat, al-Ahram, 26 August 1926.
27.Lopez, ‘Madams’, p. 81.
28.On the Raya and Sakina's case see Takla, ‘Murder in Alexandria’.
29.On 27 November 1917, Filippidis was sentenced by the Court of First Instance of Cairo Governorate for taking bribes from subordinates, prisoners and politicians, between 1913 and 1916, for a total amount of 784 Egyptian pounds. On the following 30 November, Cairo criminal court sentenced him to a five-year prison sentence with forced labour. His wife Asma’, who also played an active role in the affair, was sentenced to one year imprisonment.
30.Willis, Anti-Christ, p. 32. The demonisation of non-normative sexualities, more pointedly homosexuality, and the use of sexual themes to express political criticism, has been studied by Ehud Toledano with reference to Khedive ‘Abbas (1849–54) whose alleged homosexuality was used by Egyptian nationalists to call into question the Turco-Circassian leadership's ability to rule the country. See Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 114.
31.‘Qadiyat-al-Raqiq al-Abyad’, al-Ahram, 4 December 1923.
32.Al-Ahram, 27 December 1923.
33.WL, 4/IBS/6/031.
34.Hanan Kholoussy, ‘The nationalization of marriage in monarchical Egypt’, in A. Goldschmidt, A. Johnson and B.A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt, pp. 317–50.
35.Hanan Kholoussy, ‘Talking about a revolution: Gender and the politics of marriage in early twentieth century Egypt’. Available at http://www.grconsortium.org/pdf/V.1-2PDF/v12_knoloussy.pdf (accessed 1 May 2017). See also Kholoussy's monographic work, For Better, for Worse.
36.Marriage of minors, polygamy and divorce were all extensively debated issues. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of laws and proposals were formulated in order to reform the Islamic personal law in relation with marriage and divorce (talaq). As evidence of the important place of marriage in the nationalist agenda, politicians passed major pieces of legislation in 1920, 1923, 1929 and 1931. These laws were preceded by a proposal for the reform of marital law dating back to 1914. In March 1914, in fact, deputy member Zakariyyah Bey Namiq submitted a bill on marital issues, among which a proposal to set the legal female age for marriage at 16 (tahdid sinn-al-zawaj). This triggered a heated debate in the press, opposing modernist reformers to conservative Muslim authorities who were against any change to religiously sanctioned practices. For some instances of press articles on the legal marriage age controversy, see the series of articles entitled ‘Tahdid Sinn-al-Zawaj’, published in al-Ahram on 11 December 1923, 17 December 1923, 19 December 1923, 22 December 1923, 26 December 1923, 27 December 1923 and 28 December 1923.
37.Muhammad al-Bardisi, ‘A‘rad al-Shaban ‘an al-Zawaj’, Letter to the Editor, al-Ahram, 15 December 1913.
38.Ibid. ‘[M]ost young men earn no more than 5 pounds a month, and it takes an extremely long time for them to set aside from this paltry sum sufficient funds for a dowry and the costs of a wedding, let alone the expenses necessary for the upbringing of their children.’
39.Ibrahim Ahmad Fathi, ‘A‘rad al-Shaban ‘an al-Zawaj’, Letter to the Editor, al-Ahram, 19 December 1913.
40.‘Ta'adil La'ihat- al -‘ahirat’, al-Ahram, 13 April 1926. A previous report had been issued also by Chief of Cairo City Police Russell Pasha, to the attention of the Ministry of Interior, on the harmful effects of licensed prostitution and the impossibility to guarantee public security under the existing conditions, due to the Capitulary privileges protecting foreigner entrepreneurs of commercial sex and sex workers.
41.Ibid.
42.Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Problem of Licensed Prostitution in Egypt (Cairo: Government Press, 1935).
43.Ibid., p. 7.
44.Ibid., p. 38.
45.Cooper, Cairo in the War, p. 115.
46.Ibid. Artemis Cooper thus describes the Wagh-al-Birkah during World War II: ‘the prostitutes sat fanning themselves on the hundreds of little balconies that overlooked the long narrow street, and called down to the man below; while, at ground level, there were little booths, screened by a single curtain. One of these bore the legend “Esperanto spoken here”. The booths spilled into alleyways running off the Berka, with peep-shows and pornographic cabaret.’
47.Figures in Cooper, Cairo in the War, p. 136; p. 162.
48.Hughes, While Shepheard's Watched, p. 53.
49.Ibid., p.54.
50.Lisa Pollard, ‘From husbands and housewives to suckers and whores: Marital-political anxieties in the ‘House of Egypt’, 1919–1948’, Gender & History 21/3 (2009), pp. 647–69.
51.Ibid., p. 647.
52.Ibid., pp. 663–4.
53.Scott Long, Human Rights Watch Report, In a Time of Torture: the Assault on Justice in Egypt's Crackdown on Homosexual Conduct (New York: Human Right Watch, 2004), pp. 133–4. Available at https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/02/29/time-torture/assault-justice-egypts-crackdown-homosexual-conduct (accessed 1 May 2017).
54.See Kholoussy, ‘Monitoring’, p. 682.
Conclusion
1.Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. ix.