Egyptian Women in Napoleon’s Cairo: between Empowerment and Exploitation The three years of French occupation, 1798-1801, brought stunning culture clash and a breakdown of the mores, moralities, and hierarchies of Egyptian society. In no respect was this upheaval more disruptive than in the role of women. For some, the presence of the French was liberating: some slave girls jumped over the walls to go over to Bonaparte’s “Green Zone” in the Azbakia. For others, like the women from Bulaq who were abducted by the French as punishment for the second uprising of Cairo, it was their ruin. Among the elite, there were certain wives of the routed Mamluke amirs, who in the absence of their husbands found themselves empowered in unprecedented ways: acting as intermediaries between the French and the Mamlukes, and assuming the responsibility of paying levies imposed by the occupying forces. On the other hand, elite women were also used as pawns in a power game between men, with many an ambitious Egyptian notable pushing his daughter into the arms of the French in order to curry favor and gain advancement. Liaisons were common between the French and Egyptian women, at all levels, starting with General Menou, the third Commandant in Egypt, who married Zubeida al-Rashidiya and had a son with her. When the French withdrew, the women left behind who were accused of “horizontal collaboration” met with arbitrary fates, from retaliation to rehabilitation. This paper proposes to address specific cases, from contemporary primary sources, of Egyptian women as empowered agents and exploited pawns during the brief but cataclysmic period of the French occupation, with a view to analyzing the interconnection between the roles of occupier/occupied and the power play between the genders.

Late nineteenth century Alexandria, Egypt, teemed with a multiplicity of nationalities, religions, and ethnicities in its everyday life. Naturally, it also overflowed with these peoples upon their deaths, and, consequently, in the city’s cemeteries. This paper explores the cemeteries of the foreign communities of nineteenth-century Alexandria. I use government correspondence and communal petitions from both the Egyptian and British National Archives to explore these cemeteries as socio-spatial markers of belonging. I argue that these cemeteries, in providing space for the dead, created a local, physical place for the living populations. As such, a private communal cemetery signified acceptance within the boundaries of the human population of the city. I focus specifically on three communal cemetery requests. The Free Thinkers asked to be recognized as the first civil community in 1873. For the next many years, they worked with the Egyptian government for land, uniting with the Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox under the rubric of “European” for negotiations. The Maronites, buried with the Latin Catholics, petitioned for separate space. And the Armenians argued that burying their spillover dead in the Latin cemetery was the equivalent of a “foreign” burial, and that they, too, should be granted more land. In each case, the dead were buried in another community’s private cemetery. The requests, therefore, were not related to public health issues surrounding the disposal of dead bodies but to the symbolic and emotive value of a separate cemetery. As such, I contend that the cemetery negotiations were a means by which communities asserted their belonging within the larger city. They were negotiations of Alexandrianness. Cemeteries, by law, were placed on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the city grew, the cemeteries were engulfed within its margins and moved again. The constant give and take of land and borders replicates the back and forth of the human boundaries of the population. Cemeteries literally cemented foreign bodies to the city; to do so in a private, communal space connected the community’s living population to Alexandria as well. In so doing, the process helped identify and define the foreign communities as local Alexandrians.

This paper illustrates how the Sudanese Mahdi was used to mark (and market) identity by three separate groups. The first were British anti-colonialists, such as Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who created and circulated an image of the Mahdi as an example of a “desert dwelling Arab,” so as to make a case for the kind of pastoral, “Middle Eastern” culture he wished to preserve—against the interests of the British Empire. Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani created an image of the Mahdi that was similar to that of Blunt’s, this time situating the Mahdi as an Arab like the Rashidun Caliphs, and claiming the Mahdiyya as a predominantly Islamic movement by situating it within the context of early Islamic history. Finally, Egyptian nationalists claimed the Mahdi as a comrade in arms in the Egyptian struggle against the British, despite the fact that his movement was aimed Egyptian, and not British colonialism. In each case, the Mahdi was used to market agendas he did not necessarily represent, and mark identities that lay far outside the Sudan and Sudanese history. This paper draws on archival materials, memoirs, and the periodical press.

The forces of modernity dislodged the Egyptian Jewish communities’ deep roots in the country, giving rise to dramatic experiences of displacements. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which Jewish women remember their lives in Egypt, experiences of diaspora, homeland, and identities as cosmopolitans and Egyptian. Memoires with cuisine provide the ethnographic framework through which the sense of gendered migration from Egypt is discussed. The works analyzed will include Lucette Lagnato’s “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit”, Claudia Roden’s “The Book of Jewish Food” and Colette Rossant’s “Memory of a Lost Egypt: a Memoir with Recipes”. In each of these works cooking and meals are wedged into the emotional landscape separating their ‘homeland’ from their ‘exile’. Combined, they are an attempt to get at how not only remembered foods but also the want for it offer insight into migrant memories of larger global historical moments. While both Roden and Rossant are cookbook-memoirs and Lagnato has written a straightforward memoir, food-knowledge transmitted by women in the wake of a painful rupture feature in all three author’s reconstructions of Egypt. For this reason these memoirs also speak to a series of issues that gender studies ceaselessly debate: cultural heritage and change, homeland and nurturing, pristine and fluid lives. Though greatly variant, I will argue how all three memoirs come out in terms of gender, cosmopolitan and minority affiliation that would not have surfaced in these forms if not for the experience of rupture. Attention here is paid to the ways in which memories of the past are activated and shaped by contemporary cultural, political and social engagement. I propose that within ‘minority memoirs’ there is a value in gender for the study of cosmopolitanism and the politics of memory – and vise versa, as along the way there is also certain values of cosmopolitanism and memory for the study of gender.