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Barbaric Women: Race and the Colonization of Gender in Interwar Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2021

Nefertiti Takla Open the ORCID record for Nefertiti Takla [Opens in a new window]
Nefertiti Takla*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA
*
Corresponding author. ntakla01@manhattan.edu
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Abstract

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

Keywords

crimeEgyptgenderprostitutionracesexualityUpper Egypt
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 387 - 405
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahab, Sirdab al-Mumisat: al-Waqa'i‘ al-Mu'alim ‘Andama Tantashir al-Radhila Bayn al-Bashr (Cairo: Oscar lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi`, 2010), 120. Sakina and Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Al were divorced, and Raya and Hasab Allah Sa‘id were separated.

2 Yunan Labib Rizk, “The Women Killers,” al-Ahram Weekly, 17–23 June 1999, no. 434, https://web.archive.org/web/20140307042506/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1999/434/chrncls.htm.

3 “Malaf Qadayyat Raya wa Sakina,” Dhakirat Misr al-Mu‘asara, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 347. This file is part of a digitization project launched by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and it contains 725 pages of investigation records about this case obtained from Dar al-Mahfuzat.

4 See Salah ‘Isa, Rijal Raya wa Sakina: Sira Siyasiyya wa Ijtima‘iyya (Cairo: Dar al-Ahmadi lil-Nashr, 2002), 151, 299. For more details about Raya and Sakina's clandestine sex business and the changing nature of Alexandria's sex trade after the war, see Takla, Nefertiti, “Murderous Economies: Sex Trafficking and Political Economic Change in Alexandria, Egypt, 1914–1921,” Egypte/Monde arabe 17, no. 3 (2018): 23–48Google Scholar.

5 “Qadayyat Raya wa Sakina,” al-Basir, 11 May 1921, 2.

6 See copy of the handwritten verdict in ‘Abd al-Wahab, Sirdab al-Mumisat, 321.

7 See Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).

8 See Qasim Amin, The Liberation of Women and the New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1992). Nationalists in China and India also conflated the status of women with the status of the nation. See Jin Tianhe, “The Women's Bell,” in The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, ed. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 207–85. See also Pramila Venkateswaran, “Locating the Feminist Spirit in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries in India,” in Provocations: A Transnational Reader in the History of Feminist Thought, ed. Susan Bordo, M. Cristina Alcalde, and Ellen Rosenman (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 144–49.

9 Shaun T. Lopez, “Madams, Murders, and the Media: Akhbar al-Hawadith and the Emergence of a Mass Culture in 1920s Egypt,” in Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952, ed. Arthur Goldschmidt et al. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 371–97, 377.

10 For a discussion of the new Egyptian woman, see Mona L. Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

11 For groundbreaking studies of gender and sexuality in modern Egypt, see Pollard, Nurturing the Nation; Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt, 1898–1936 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Wilson Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Lucie Ryzova, The Age of the Efendiyya: Passages to Modernity in National-Colonial Egypt (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), which raises questions about the relationship between race and gender.

12 Amin, Liberation of Women.

13 See Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, and Madeline Yue Dong, eds., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

14 See Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), ch. 2.

15 For example, see Raya wa Sakina, a 1953 film written by Naguib Mahfouz and directed by Salah Abu Sayf; Raya wa Sakina, a 1985 theatrical comedy featuring Shadia, which became famous across the Middle East; and Raya wa Sakina, a 2005 television soap opera aired during the month of Ramadan.

16 See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Maria Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, Duke Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, vol. 2, no. 2 (2008), 1–17, https://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/sites/globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/files/file-attachments/v2d2_Lugones.pdf.

17 For more information about tattoos on southern Egyptian women, see Winifred S. Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), 50–55.

18 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 20 November 1920, 3.

19 Ibid., 21 November 1920, 3.

20 See W. R. Wilde, Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, Including a Visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus (Dublin: William Curry, Jun, 1840), 202; Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, Cruise of H.M.S. “Bacchante,” 1879–1882 (London: Macmillan, 1886), 528; and Blackman, Fellahin of Upper Egypt, 50–55.

21 See Cruise of H.M.S. “Bacchante,” 528.

22 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 27 November 1920, 3.

23 Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 26.

24 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 25 November 1920, 3. For a discussion of rural versus urban crime, see Shakry, Omnia El, “Peasants, Crime, and Tea in Interwar Egypt,” ISIM Review 21, no. 1 (2008): 44–45Google Scholar.

25 Brown, Nathan J., “Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern Egypt,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 262CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brown also notes that the media was particularly concerned with a stark rise in banditry in 1920, with al-Ahram reporting forty-five cases in January 1920 (265).

26 Timothy Mitchell mentions two nationalist works in the early 20th century that condemned both the zār and the dhikr. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 100. The concerns about these practices were therefore not new to the interwar period but were popularized by the Raya and Sakina case. Nationalists in other parts of Africa, such as Angola and Mozambique, also denounced traditional healing practices performed by women as "superstition." See Ella Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 20.

27 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 11 December 1920, 3.

28 “Al-Hikm fi Qadayyat Ikhtifa’ al-Nisa’,” al-Umma, 11 November 1920, 2.

29 “Malaf Qadayyat Raya wi Sakina,” 55.

30 “Al-Hikm fi Qadayyat Ikhtifa’ al-Nisa’,” al-Umma, 11 November 1920, 3. Wadi al-Nil mentioned that ‘Allam was from the town of Sibirbay in Tanta. See “Qatl al-Nisa’ fi Tanta,” Wadi al-Nil, 10 December 1920, 3.

31 The only distinctive feature highlighted was his full beard and large moustache. See “Qatl al-Nisa’ fi Tanta,” Wadi al-Nil, 7 December 1920, 3.

32 “Ikhtifa’ al-Nisa’ fi Tanta,” al-Umma, 16 December 1920, 3.

33 Hasan Mar'i, Sayd al-Hamam (aw Hadithat Dinshway): Riwaya Tamthiliyya ‘Asriyya Tarikhiyya Siyasiyya (1907).

34 El Shakry, “Peasants, Crime, and Tea,” 44.

35 Zeinab Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 71. In the 2021 IJMES roundtable on decentering Egyptian historiography, Abul-Magd notes that Egyptian perceptions of southern Egyptian bandits have changed over time, and they have garnered more sympathy in recent decades. See Abul-Magd, Zeinab, “When Upper Egypt Spoke: Dramatized Rebellion,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 1 (2021): 125–31, doi: 10.1017/S0020743821000052CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires, 72.

37 See Martina Rieker, “The Sa‘id and the City: Subaltern Spaces in the Making of Modern Egyptian History” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1997), ch. 4.

38 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 26.

39 May Kosba, “Paradoxical Islamophobia and Post-Colonial Cultural Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Egypt,” in Islamophobia in Muslim Majority Societies, ed. Enes Bayrakli and Farid Hafez (London: Routledge, 2019), 107–124, 109.

40 Blackman, Fellahin of Upper Egypt, 22.

41 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 136.

42 Ella Shohat shows that Israeli modernization discourse racialized Mizrahi Jews in similar ways. See Ella Shohat, “The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: The Case of the Mizrahim,” Critique 10 (1997): 3–18.

43 Lugones, “The Coloniality of Gender,” 13.

44 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.

45 Ibid. See also Jessica R. Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds., Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890–1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and “Immorality” (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

46 “Hiyya Wahshayya wa Humma Wuhush: Wa Lakin Min Sharika'uhum wa ma Huwwa al-Dawa’,” al-Umma, 23 November 1920, 3.

47 For more information about Salama Musa, see El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory, 62.

48 “Jinayat al-Iskandiriyya wa ‘Abratha,” al-Ahram, 8 December 1920.

49 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 51.

50 For more information on Musa's support for eugenics, see Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 148.

51 Shakry, “Peasants, Crime, and Tea,” 44.

52 Ibid.

53 See Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Lombroso's work highlights the fact that in racial science, anti-blackness manifested not only in color-based racism but in the inferiorization of alleged African phenotypes.

54 ‘Abbas Mahmud Al-‘Aqqad, al-Fusul (Cairo: Hindawy Institute for Education and Culture, 2013), 223, 225.

55 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 110.

56 Lopez, “Madams, Murders, and the Media,” 379.

57 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 114–19.

58 For further comparison of North–South domination in Egypt and Italy, see Peter Gran, “Upper Egypt in Modern History: A ‘Southern Question’? in Upper Egypt: Identity and Change, ed. Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 79–96.

59 Rieker, “The Sa‘id and the City,” ch. 4.

60 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 39.

61 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 126–28.

62 Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (New York: D. Appleton, 1895).

63 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 128.

64 Lombroso, Criminal Man, 15, 19.

65 Draft Penal Code (Cairo: Government Press, 1920), 5.

66 For further discussion of the modernity/rationality paradigm, see Quijano, Anibal, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–69.

68 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).

69 D'Agostino, Peter, “Craniums, Criminals, and the ‘Cursed Race’: Italian Anthropology in American Racial Thought, 1861–1924,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 2 (2002): 319–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 “Ba‘d al-Jara'im al-Akhira,” Wadi al-Nil, 25 November 1920, 2.

71 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 2 December 1920, 3.

72 The reference to Raya and Sakina's Nubian neighbors may also reflect the way brothels were seen as racialized space. See Razack, Sherene H., “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15, no. 2 (2000): 91–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 For more information on Sufism in Upper Egypt, see Mark Sedgwick, “Upper Egypt's Regional Identity: The Role and Impact of Sufi Links,” in Upper Egypt: Identity and Change, ed. Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 97–118.

74 Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 168–216.

75 “Al-Wahm al-Qatil,” Wadi al-Nil, 12 December 1920, 3.

76 Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 105.

77 See the works of Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, Edwar al-Kharrat, Naguib Mahfouz, Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell. See also Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil: Two Centuries of Travelers, Traders and Tourists in Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and Robert Elverstone, Farewell to the Horses: Diary of a British Tommy, 1915–1919 (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2014).

78 See, for example, the case of Sakina's friend, Batta, in “Malaf Qadayyat Raya wi Sakina,” 249.

79 ‘Isa, Rijal Raya wa Sakina, 151.

80 Ibid., 299.

81 See Nefertiti Takla, “Murder in Alexandria: The Gender, Sexual and Class Politics of Criminality, 1914–1921” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2016), ch. 3.

82 For a media report on Nabawiyya bint Jum‘a, see “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 26 November 1920, 3. For Raya's testimony about Nabawiyya, see “Malaf Qadayyat Raya wa Sakina,” 471.

83 “Silsilat al-Jara'im fi Buyut al-Hilak,” Wadi al-Nil, 9 December 1920, 3.

84 “Qadayyat Raya wa Sakina,” al-Basir, 11 May 1921, 2.

85 Ibid.

86 “Ba‘d al-Jara'im al-Akhira,” Wadi al-Nil, 25 November 1920, 2.

87 See Lopez, “Madams, Murders, and the Media,” 384–85.

88 Shaun Lopez, “Media Sensations, Contested Sensibilities: Gender and Moral Order in the Egyptian Mass Media, 1920–1955,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2004), 67.

89 “Ba‘d ‘Uyubna,” al-Umma, 21 November 1920, 1.

90 Ibid.

91 See Beth Baron, The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

92 For further critiques of Qasim Amin, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

93 See discussion of “Hidden Agents in Society” in Jacob, Working Out Egypt, 82.

94 Pollard, Nurturing the Nation.

95 “Hiyya Wahshayya wa Humma Wuhush,” al-Umma, 23 November 1920, 3.

96 See Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Adam C. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumption in Interwar France and Germany (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Sevinç Elaman-Garner, “Women, War and the Foundations of the Turkish Republic: The Vision of New Womanhood in Halide Edib Adivar's The Shirt of Flame (1922)” in The First World War and Its Aftermath: The Shaping of the Middle East, ed. T. G. Fraser (London: Gingko Library, 2016), 243–54.

97 “Wahshayyat al-Zawjat,” Safinat al-Akhbar, 9 September 1921, 1.

98 “Al-Marrad al-Ijtima‘i,” al-Iskandirayya, 28 December 1924, 4.

99 Although it is possible that these new images were intended to represent the Turco-Circassian elite, the image of the light-skinned, Westernized woman became a media phenomenon around the world in the interwar era. See Weinbaum et al., Modern Girl around the World, ch. 2.

100 Beth Baron, “Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman,” in Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, ed. Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 105–24. See also Baron, Egypt as a Woman.

101 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), ch. 3.

102 See Weinbaum et al., Modern Girl around the World.

103 Bahithat al-Badiyah (Malak Hifni Nasif), “A Lecture in the Club of the Umma Party (1909),” in Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writings, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (London: Virago Press, 1990), 227–38.