The Police and the People in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Fahmy, Khaled

doi:10.1163/1570060991570613

Cited by 35 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…This paper highlights the multiple sources al-Ahr am relies upon by reading the threads it displays. Deeply rooted in Carlo Ginzburg's lesson (1994;1976), this methodological frame is also indebted to Khaled Fahmy (1999) and…”

Section: Zooming In or Al-ahrā M As An Archivementioning

confidence: 89%

“…This paper highlights the multiple sources al‐Ahrām relies upon by reading the threads it displays. Deeply rooted in Carlo Ginzburg's lesson (1994; 1986; 1976), this methodological frame is also indebted to Khaled Fahmy () and Liat Kozma () . Both interrogated an allegedly uniform set of sources, such as the Egyptian police and court records of the late nineteenth century, to shed light on the police organization, the state apparatus, and the people's attitudes towards the two.…”

Section: Zooming In or Al‐ahrām As An Archivementioning

confidence: 91%

“…As for Alexandria, some Tanta articles recommended that the authorities ensure the safety of the country by neutralizing “this evil gang that spread moral corruption ( fasādan ) on earth and started committing murders after having satisfied satanic desires ( tamattu' bi'l‐shahawāt al‐shayṭāniyya ).” Coverage in both places put strong emphasis on the corrupt environment as a factor that predisposed people to break the law. It constantly linked public order to public morality, building on a deterministic view that accompanied the formation of modern nation‐states (Foucault, ; Fahmy, , p. 360).…”

Section: Zooming Out or Finding A Precedent For The Unprecedentedmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, olfactory perception points to hygiene and medicine (Corbin, ). It is science in the service of the nation, since it stands for the capacity of the well‐trained officer to analyse his sensorial experience and display an arsenal of modern knowledge to ensure the public order (Fahmy, ). Al‐Ahrām 's accounts from Alexandria bear frequent references to scientific methods so as to prove Egyptian institutions' reliance on fact‐based, empirical data.…”

Section: Going National In Alexandria: the Correspondent The State mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building a national case in interwar Egypt: Raya and Sakina's crimes through the pages of al‐Ahrām (Fall 1920)

Chiti

2020

History Compass

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In November 1920, the Alexandria police arrested two sisters, Raya and Sakina, along with their husbands and others, and charged them with the murder of seventeen women. At the end of a trial held in May 1921, the judges sentenced to death six members of the gang, yet it was Raya and Sakina who monopolized public attention as the first women sentenced to death in the Egyptian secular justice system. A century later, they are still alive in the Egyptian collective memory, which has turned them into a long‐lasting criminal myth and remembers them as former prostitutes, madams, and female murderers. Previous studies seem to see the myth as resulting from the supposedly exceptional character of the case. This paper is a first step toward exploring how this exceptionality was constructed and how it took on a national dimension after the announcement of Raya and Sakina's arrest. The focus is on al‐Ahrām, the main national daily newspaper at the time, which covered the issue systematically, providing information on the investigation while building the case in national terms. A micro‐historic approach to al‐Ahrām will enable a deconstruction of exceptionality through comparison with a precedent. An analysis incorporating both the precedent and Raya and Sakina's case will lead to a first hypothesis about the longevity of Raya and Sakina's case and the disappearance of the precedent from the Egyptian collective memory. This perspective offers insight into the connection between the press, public morality, and nation‐building in interwar Egypt, linking textual and extra‐textual realities and shedding light on the local aspects that make the nation. Indeed, the organization of al‐Ahrām in the provinces may be seen as a key factor in revealing what attracts national attention and what remains confined to a local dimension.

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Section: Zooming In or Al-ahrā M As An Archivementioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Zooming In or Al‐ahrām As An Archivementioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Zooming Out or Finding A Precedent For The Unprecedentedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Going National In Alexandria: the Correspondent The State mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Building a national case in interwar Egypt: Raya and Sakina's crimes through the pages of al‐Ahrām (Fall 1920)

Chiti

2020

History Compass

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“…Scholarship on Egypt in the same period reveals a similar blurring of boundaries that for too long have been assumed to be clear and self‐evident 16 Khaled Fahmy's (1999…”

Section: Rethinking the Nineteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 96%

Goodbye to the Despot: Feldman on Islamic Law in the Ottoman Empire

Greene¹

2010

Law soc. inq.

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Noah Feldman's 2008 book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, provides a sweeping review of the constitutional history of the Islamic polity that connects the past to developments in the Middle East today. The Ottoman Empire is vital to his argument. This essay critically evaluates Feldman's treatment of the Ottoman period, within the larger context of Islamic history, and in so doing considers the understudied constitutional history of the empire. Without denying the importance of the ulema and the shari'a, it argues that the empire was a hybrid of many different traditions and the centrality of Islamic law should not be overstated.

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Justice between Islamic Sharia and Liberal Law

Agrama¹

2015

A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East

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The Police and the People in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Cited by 35 publications

References 0 publications

Building a national case in interwar Egypt: Raya and Sakina's crimes through the pages of al‐Ahrām (Fall 1920)

Building a national case in interwar Egypt: Raya and Sakina's crimes through the pages of al‐Ahrām (Fall 1920)

Goodbye to the Despot: Feldman on Islamic Law in the Ottoman Empire

Justice between Islamic Sharia and Liberal Law

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