This paper analyzes how surveillance was enacted and spread through discourses of faith and superstitious practices in Malta among enslaved peoples and criminals beginning in the 18th century. The paper investigates how the projection of sovereign power and the surveillance of enslavement operated through religious mechanisms and collectives, such as healthcare provided by The Order of St. John’s for Muslim slaves (Cassar, 2012). At the same time, it examines how spiritual and superstitious practices of Muslim slaves functioned as gestures of solidarity, resistance, and fugitivity intended to subvert sovereign power and challenge penitentiary practices of discipline (such as torture and forced labor to fuel the archipelago’s war industries). Special attention is paid to the intersections of slavery, superstition, and religion in criminalized contexts – from Muslim prayer spaces in dungeons to Arab and Turkish slaves writing love potions and magic spells for criminals. In the paper’s discussion of witchcraft charges, slides of “confiscated” magic spells from the Inquisitor’s Palace in Valletta will be shared. The paper’s exploration of faith-based piety (Baron, 2014) that was embodied and enacted within contexts of criminality explains how individual and collective spiritual practices shaped subjects but also helped forge subversive bonds across religious and class lines. Thus, the paper traces how faith-based relations and spaces gave rise to the Muslim slave revolt of 1749 and reveals the impact of the surveillance mechanisms implemented in its wake on Malta and Europe as a whole. The paper concludes by looking at how carceral spaces in Malta today are curated for the tourist “gaze,” a modern mechanism of surveillance, with emphasis on how the Arab period is portrayed through dioramas of various tortures and forced humiliations. The paper concludes by noting how the western study of the Mediterranean world has been shaped by the biases of modern secularism (Asad, 1993 & 2003; Bruce, 2002 & 2006; Taylor, 2007) and, as a result, various forces and forms of surveillance in the Maltese archipelago have been denied adequate scholarly attention. Thus, this paper on surveillance in medieval Malta will provide a rare glimpse into the production of faith-based collectivities, practices, and relations in the late Ottoman world that have been largely neglected in scholarship.

For most historians, the Alexandria arsenal was the pride and joy of Mehemet Ali Pasha – the ruler of the Ottoman province of Egypt in the first half of the nineteenth century. ‘Abd al-Karim (1938) describes it as one of the first educational institutions that graduated several woodwork artificers which helped the pasha build his armada. For Barakat (1934), the Alexandria arsenal was the quintessential institution that allowed Mehemet ‘Ali’s designs for independence to materialize. Built in 1829 – after the battle of Navarino in 1827 – it was the blood, toil and sweat of the arsenal workers that allowed it to rebuild its fleet for the two ensuing wars against the Ottoman Sultan in 1831 and 1839 (Houghton, 2019; Fahmy, 1997, Peters, 2002). But what if we looked at this institution not as an industrial and national one, and instead queried it as an outright penitentiary? We know from Foucault (1975) that the French Minister of the Navy and Colonies ran the bagnards of Toulon and Marseille. Moreover, Jeremy Bentham also advocated for abolishing transport overseas to colonies as a penal punishment, making the genealogy of the prison inextricably tied to the navy and the colonies. Thus, if convict labor powered the French Royal Navy in the metropole, how then did the Alexandria arsenal differ or match its French metropolitan version which also served as a recruiting ground for Naval architects that worked at the Alexandria arsenal? By looking at the Alexandria arsenal as more than a prison, this paper problematizes early Egyptian historiography and the influence of modernization theory. It does so by looking at the political prisoners of the 1839-40 war between Mehemet Ali and the Sultan who were housed at the arsenal. By presenting a history of the early Mehemet Ali years, one that centers round the arsenal and which is from the point of view of these convicts, several different insights into Ottoman and Egyptian legal and political history can be gleaned. Specifically, this paper argues that what many described as the first birth pangs of Egyptian modernization and industrialization took place in the Alexandria arsenal through French expertise and was powered by convict labor. The arsenal was not a site of reforming prisoners as much as it was a naval factory that surveilled its convicts.

This paper argues that official representations of female criminals’ femininity were central to the construction of a separate sphere for the imprisonment of women in the late Ottoman Empire. In the recurrent reforms of this era, government officials constructed an ideal image of the female prisoner that fell under a wider understanding of femininity. This can be seen in the gendered representations of female criminal identity and the centrality of femininity to the design of women’s prisons, which combined to create peculiar carceral practices. I follow the archival records to show a separate female carceral sphere that included and spilled outside of the prison to include temporary leased locations and imam’s houses. This separate female carceral sphere was a direct product of the gendered understanding of the late-Ottoman woman criminal. This paper reconstructs the identification of women’s criminal behavior in this era’s criminological imaginary. Penal studies of this era are in important resource for tracing cliché representation of women’s criminal agency, wherein female criminals were depicted as “victim” or “self-defender” offenders. However, this understanding derived from “androcentric” penal approach towards female criminality which identified female offenders as innocent, vulnerable, physically, and emotionally weak victims and desperate self-defender. This is an important background to the specific punishments and unique practices of incarceration which were developed as a result. Prison officials emphasized the peculiarities and uniqueness of the situations of female prisoners, even if they committed violent offences such as homicide. Their femininity also entailed their representation as more vulnerable, and thus as a result more deserving of the state’s male-centric care. As a result, state officials developed distinctive treatments which they presented as more tolerant and “lenient” punishments, especially for inmates who were also mothers. Young mothers were marked off, and the Ottoman prison system developed original and idiosyncratic approaches for handling pregnant and breastfeeding mothers. These punitive methods engendered the unique dynamics and prison politics for female inmates. Using archival cases, judicial records, penal studies, and amnesty records, this paper underlines the impact of the multilayered and gendered representations of female prisoners (as dangerous criminals, vulnerable mothers, infirm pregnant and old women) to show that these were central to the construction of the late Ottoman prison system.

In May 1921, Raya Bint Hamam and Sekina Bint Hamam were sentenced to death for murdering seventeen women. The sisters became the first women to receive the death sentence in modern Egypt (Takla, 2016). They also managed unlicensed brothels in Alexandria before their arrest. Active historical amnesia of petty criminals, sex workers, and murderers is typically a pillar of nationalist narratives (Baron, 2005). But Raya and Sekina remain ubiquitous in Egyptian collective memory. They are canonical historical figures who continue to evoke fear and horror in national memory. Why did these women gain such notoriety and infamy? Was this case an anomaly as it appears in over a century of popular representations? Why and how did Raya and Sekina become such a national sensation? What can these two women and their lasting legacy reveal about the nationalist upheaval of 1919, the shaping of “new” Egyptian womanhoods, and the construction of crime as a national crisis? Once demystified, Raya and Sekina reveal a fabric of sexualities and divergent family structures that the homogenizing claims of nationalism erased. I explore these questions through a close reading of Raya and Sekina’s court records as well as the popular press. The tension between the extraordinary and the mundane punctuates my search. The most “criminal” aspect of Raya and Sekina’s case was not their serial murders but their “deviant” sexualities. This story is, above all, about the criminalization of Egyptian “sexual subcultures” (Hammad, 2016; Walkowitz, 1980) at a critical nationalist episode. I read their lives beyond the grids of murder, criminality, and most importantly extraordinariness. Raya and Sekina’s lives before the murders were part of an existing subculture among urban poor women in early twentieth-century Egypt. I argue that the “moral panic” that their case induced is not about its exceptionalism but its banality. Rather than reflecting pre-existing homogeneous “Egyptian values,” this moral panic reveals the production of these values through increased surveillance and policing of subaltern sexualities and their exclusion from definitions of Egyptianness. The extraordinary memory of Raya and Sekina is indicative of how their subculture shifted from a marginal position to an impossible mode of personhood.

While the rise of armed struggle as a component of political mobilization has been explored in scholarly literature on the mid-20th century Eastern Mediterranean, particularly for the Palestinian case (Sayigh, 1997), the relationship between popular political mobilization and state violence, repression, surveillance, and incarceration has been comparatively neglected. This paper foregrounds this understudied relationship, interrogating Arab Nationalist and Marxist political activists’ encounters with the rising security state in 1950s and 1960s Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria. As the social biographies that anchor this paper showcase, members of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement (ANM), the Ba’ath Party, and the Communist Party were routinely surveilled, detained, interrogated, and tortured by state authorities across the Eastern Mediterranean in the post-Mandate period. The timing and degree of monitoring and repression depended on intersecting factors such as activists’ nationalities, specific party affiliations, and personal connections: for example, Palestinian political organizers in Lebanon’s refugee camps described being subjected to harsh surveillance measures in the decade following the 1958 Lebanese Crisis (Traboulsi, 2012) despite political groups’ foresighted attempts to keep the camps out of that conflict, while the Jordanian authorities’ post-1957 crackdown on the Jordanian National Movement coalition of the ANM, the Ba’ath, and the Communists (Anderson, 2005) meted out particularly harsh prison sentences to avowed or suspected Communist activists regardless of their comparatively smaller numbers. However, security state practices of surveillance and incarceration operated within a local and global laboratory, with different states’ intelligence apparatuses learning techniques of espionage, interrogation, and torture from each other as well as from regional and global powers. Hence, while localized factors shaped activists’ experiences of state violence to a significant degree, the broader patterns of surveillance, confinement, interrogation, and brutality emerge consistently through the written and oral testimonies of Arab Nationalist and Marxist political activists. Indeed, this paper draws on oral histories, memoirs, and political party documents to argue that violent and coercive encounters with the post-independence security state formed such an integral part of the experience of popular political organizing that they shaped political parties’ mobilizing strategies, relationships with contemporary political movements, and practices of recruitment, training, and discipline of members.