Fascination with Egypt either as a site of antiquity or an imagined Orientalist landscape was a distinctive hallmark of cinema beginning with its emergence in 1896. Yet, except for a handful of celebrated 'silent' epics produced in France, Italy, and the United States, films made in Egypt from 1896-1913 have failed to attract serious scholarly inquiry. In part, this scholarly neglect stems from the fact that Egyptian cinema before the First World War largely consisted of 'actualities' (such as royal and state occasions or sporting events) or 'interest' films (such as travelogues and ethnographic films), which were short in length and intended primarily for projection in urban cinema halls. In this paper, I argue that these films constitute a rich, if frustrating, field of archival material that demand further exploration and analysis. Short films dealing with diverse subjects ranging from nationalist funerals to archaeological excavations invite numerous theoretical and methodological research questions, which are relevant not only to cinematic history and its process of archivisation, but also to the 'Global Middle East' and broader cultural studies. Accordingly, I maintain that the cinematic output from this period cannot be understood simply as 'Egyptian' film. Rather, it represents a charting of local and transnational histories that reveal both the aesthetic/commercial investments that went into identifying with fluid social identities and competing nationalist ideologies. I therefore sketch out some key theoretical and methodical issues and possible research strategies with the explicit aim of encouraging multidisciplinary conversations by Middle East historians with other scholarly disciplines. Specifically, I engage with Ziad Fahmy's call to pay serious attention to sounds and soundscapes in studying Egyptian history and to refrain from historical narratives of the past that are soundproof and devocalized. By examining 'silent' films that were made in Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we can begin a discussion of cinema that serves as a fruitful starting point for crafting more sensorially grounded historical narratives.

Although motion pictures with synchronized sound first screened in Egypt in 1906, Gaumont’s chronophone exhibition waxed as novelty, as the device itself proved little more than an industrial experiment. “Talkies” would arrive permanently in Egyptian cinemas in 1928, with the screening of three musicals in Alexandria--Miss Venus (1922), Das Mädel von Pontecuculi (1924) and The Jazz Singer (1927). Soon, Egyptian cinemas were being built or refurbished to integrate sound reproduction systems. This conversion began with first run cinemas in the major cities and spread to smaller locales and lower rung venues. However, the exhibition industry’s adoption of synchronous sound technology was delayed by the currency of two competing formats, sound-on-film and sound-on-disc, and by the reverberating global effects of the Great Depression in the United States. The first Egyptian talkies would appear in 1932, Sons of Aristocrats being the first. Despite longstanding and varied grievances about the talking cinema, by audiences and reviewers alike, Egyptian producers seemed bent on getting with the new. Although Egyptian silent films would be produced for a few more years, the unprecedented success of the White Rose in 1933 convinced even the naysayers that the talking cinema (al-sinema al-natiqa) was here to stay. This essay discusses reception of talkies beginning before their reemergence 1928, up to their assumption as the standardized form for commercial cinema. It does so by drawing mainly from two short lived but significant film periodicals of the time—fan al-sinema (1933-34) and Kawakib al-sinema (1934)—as well as from US Department of Commerce papers relating. Despite similarities to cinemagoers and cultural critics’ reactions to synchronized sound film worldwide, language, literacy, and national political interests inflected Egyptian audience reception to sound cinema in distinct ways. This study interrogates and revises existing and at times contradictory historical accounts of the silent-to-sound conversion, accounting for relevant political developments of the day, against turbulent economic times in Egypt and beyond.

Framed by the critical literature regarding Western depictions of the ‘Middle Eastern Orient’ – depicted loosely, often incoherently, as Arab-Persian-Turkic and inevitably Muslim – this paper looks outward in a different direction. My gaze is the cinematic depiction of an equally amorphous ‘India’ in Egypt, long the center of Arabic language studio film production. I focus on comic depictions of an exotic other, perhaps Muslim, perhaps not, who is culturally foreign and decidedly imaginary. I start in the ‘golden’ black-and-white era with Salama fi Khayr (1934) and Si Omar (1941), both starring Arab cinema’s first comic king, Najib al-Rihani. These films feature the foreign ‘maharaja’ and ‘fortune teller’ who, sharing visual imagery and linguistic wordplay with Western imaginings, would be imitated over the years. Following up with filmic treatments from successive decades, up to and including recent years, I explore images and wordplay that are particular to Egyptian/Arab inflected films. In so doing I ask what these filmic images and caricatures may say about an Egyptian/Arab view of neighbors who are at once fellow Muslim others, part of a particular shared civilizational history, and/or non-Muslim strangers. Both Muslim and non-Muslims constitute a broader construct that Vijay Prashad has called the ‘Oriental menagerie’ and what here I term as ‘alternate Orientals.’ This is all mediated through a shared anti-colonial drive – by Egyptians/Arabs and South Asians alike – against a common British master, as well as the post-independence politics of the cold war and Bandung/non-aligned era, and the long standing cultural impact of Bollywood on the Arab and Arabic-speaking world.

A quick glance at Egyptian films of pre-1952 revolution can easily lead to conclusions that modernity in Egypt is as predominately secular domain. However, a closer look at supporting roles reveals that Islam served as a substratum of the everyday life practices of film characters. This paper examines metaphors representing Islam in the cinematic critique of modernity in post WWII Egypt. I draw on selected scenes from popular family dramas such as Talaq Su‘ad Hanim (The Divorce of Su’ad Hanim, dir. Anwar Wagdi, 1948), al-Zawja al-Sabi‘a (The Seventh Wife, dir. Muhammad ‘Imara, 1950) and al-Bayt al-Kabir (The Great Household, dir. Ahmad Kamil Mursi, 1949). These films are popular classics that continue to have a visible presence in Egyptian popular culture until today. They share a critique of the false ways in which modernity materializes and leads to the appropriation of Islamic legal tradition in order to sustain a class hierarchy that thrived on colonization and war. They present a rising trajectory showing the changing images of feminine agency in response to the appropriation of Islamic personal law of divorce amidst caricatures of modernity. In doing so, I argue, these films presented a fairly early recognition of how religion has not shrunken away under the pressures of modernization. They served as an exemplar of a secular public sphere that is not anti-religion—one which accentuates the crucial difference between Islam as a faith and a body of legal knowledge that has the ‘vital semantic potentials’ to be translated into secular idioms and in a ‘universally accessible language.’ They underscored the importance of decoding the ethical intuitions of religious traditions, which could be incorporated into a ‘postsecular’ stance that finds an ally in religious sources of meaning in challenging the forces of global capitalism. More importantly, they stressed that such a task falls not only to experts and religious citizens but also to all citizens—both religious and secular—engaged in the public use of reason.