“Redeeming the Wilderness: Desert Monks, Bedouin and the Civilizing Mission in Nineteenth Century Egypt” The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of profound transformation in the Egyptian lands of Northeast Africa, which was dramatically illustrated in the efforts of Ottoman provincial governor Mehmet ‘Ali to extend the influence and reach of his rule. This paper focuses on one field of this kind of intervention, namely the deserts. As the ruling regime attempted to turn the province into a regional powerhouse, the sparsely populated Eastern and Western deserts assumed heightened significance, both as critical thoroughfares for its regional ambitions and as potential sources of mineral wealth for the industrialization of the country. In the paper, I will draw attention to two broadly defined communities that have inhabited these regions – namely Coptic monks and “desert Bedouin.” In the existing literature, a number of recurring tropes have been used to describe these respective communities, including one that pictures the Bedouin as an ever-present threat to their monastic neighbors. I argue that many of these ideas are rooted not in the “objective” realities of desert life but in the imaginations of outsiders – including settled riverine populations, Western travelers and colonial and state actors. I offer a very different appraisal of these “desert communities” and the rich tapestry of relationships that constituted them, while contemplating the threats that acquisitive “outsiders” posed to their very way of life, and in particular those working in the service of the centralizing regime of Mehmet ‘Ali. This shift in focus to the “desert margins” shows how monks and Bedouin alike became the objects of a modern civilizing mission, one that assumed the charge of domesticating the desert’s brutish denizens even as it aspired to redeem the wastelands that they inhabited. The paper will draw on traveler, missionary and consular reports, the records of the French Occupation, Egyptian government circulars, the Chronicles of the Coptic Church and the manuscripts of Hekekyan Bey, an Armenian engineer who led an expedition to the Eastern Desert in the service of Mehmet ‘Ali.