In this presentation, the Cairo mental asylum, ‘Abbāsiyya, is examined as a reconfigured colonial space. Since its inception in 1884, two years after the British occupation of Egypt, the ‘Abbāsiyya asylum received an unusual degree of official attention and financial investment, all the more striking in light of the budgetary cuts other government departments experienced. This could only happen because ‘Abbāsiyya, from its onset, was part of an important ideological function: justifying British control over Egypt’s internal affairs. On a symbolic level, the asylum exemplified the benefits British rule could bring to Egypt; a clear indication of such rule having brought order and light out of chaos and darkness. ‘Abbāsiyya further represented a formulation of a colonial policy that was intended to cut across the self-governing regime that had up to this point been allowed to evolve in Egypt. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose, I argue that the policies and the practices associated with ‘Abbāsiyya contributed to an understanding of the emergence of the psy-sciences and mental asylums in a colonial setting. These policies illustrate the establishment of a panoptic gaze on previously neglected spaces of insanity. Systematic surveillance constituted government at a distance and made colonial lunacy administration a governable discursive space. The regulation of the medical officers, lunatic attendants, and hospital boards began the process of creating a professional psychiatric workforce. This research should be seen as an attempt to explain the mise en scène of the British establishment of the mental asylum as an institutionalized and centralized social control apparatus and argue that it was primarily the product of closely inter-related structural changes; the main driving force behind these changes being the advent of colonization and the obsession with creating “order” where there should exist an institution that not only combat but also remind of the consequences of non-conformity and deviance of the “insufficiently other” and serve to fend off the disruptive effect on an otherwise “docile” community.