The first Coptic Christian charitable organization in Egypt, Al-Jam‘iyyah al-Qibtiyya al-Khayriyyah al-Kubra (the Great Coptic Benevolent Society), was established with the support of Islamic modernists and Muslim dignitaries at the end of the nineteenth century. The society assisted with religious endowments, educational institutions, and services to the poor outside of the church or state-run charitable institutions. Influenced by the benevolent associations of their Islamic counterparts such as the Muslim Charitable Society of Alexandria, the Great Coptic Benevolent Society also supported the plight of poor Muslims and served the less-fortunate across religious communities. The organization continued their cross-confessional collaboration into the twentieth century where Muslims and Copts both served on committees affiliated with the society to develop fundraising projects, educational initiatives, and public health institutions. Following the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, these partnerships grew along nationalistic and gender-based solidarities following widespread calls for Egyptian self-determination from British Occupation. The shortcomings of the Khedival state and conservative tendencies of the religious hierarchies within their own faith communities enabled these constitutive ecumenical networks to take form. These partnerships were made possible through the affluence and influence of elites within each religious community who shared notions of modernist and reformist sentimentalities. Building on what Ussama Makdisi has called an ‘ecumenical frame,’ I consider the scope of charitable activities of the Great Coptic Benevolent Society and its sister organizations between 1881-1931 as an alternate but parallel space where cross-confessional partnerships took form amid growing sectarian tensions at the turn of the twentieth century in Egypt. Based on Arabic, French, and English-language sources including society publications, private papers, and newspapers, I argue that the making of ‘ecumenical elites’ offers new ways to consider the relationship between reform, religion, and modernity in nineteenth and twentieth century Egypt. Egypt.

Education is a powerful nation-state building tool. In 20th century Egypt, the British Occupation asphyxiated Egyptian state education; reducing funding to remarkably low rates making it near impossible for the state to adequately fund schools. Missionaries, like many foreign institutions, established schools in this time of hindered state competition. Private missionary groups funded from international entities challenged state resources and sovereignty. In Upper Egypt, the state’s leading competitors were American Protestant missionaries who had established large networks of girls’ schools for Copts and Muslims of diverse socio-economic standings. This paper examines the socio-political consequences of American missionary and state competition to govern girls’ education during Egyptian nation-state formation (1930s-1950s). I unpack how this competition shaped and reflected constructions of female citizenship in semi-colonial Egypt, representing state notions of national identity and women’s place in society. Girls’ education reinforced gender ideology, encoding beliefs of femininity while asserting difference in gendered citizenship. Private American missionary groups with international funding built girls’ schools combining Christian beliefs with American values exported into an Egyptian setting. This contested site couched prescriptive gendered norms while exposing nationalist aims to shape the nation by fashioning the ideal female citizen, policing girls’ minds, bodies and roles in public and private domains. Offering a gendered analysis of Egyptian nationalism through the lens of education, I explore how social constructs of gender inform national identity. Amongst the different missionary schools discussed, I focus on the leading girls’ school in Upper Egypt, the Asyut Pressly Memorial Institute, during Egypt’s transition from pre-independence to nascent nationhood. Using a novel source composition from Egypt, the USA and UK including oral histories, colonial archival sources, missionary accounts and uncatalogued education material, I argue in Egypt’s nationalist milieu, foreign and domestic struggle to control girls’ education aimed to fashion the ideal female citizen in accordance with nationalist ambitions. This education race produced a unique climate giving space for students to influence their own education. Girls were not just subjects of gendered nationalist discourse, but actors who contested prescriptive gender norms and carved out new sites for participation in civil society that reflected their own ambitions and career goals. By focusing on Upper Egypt, and decentering Cairo, this paper demonstrates the ways in which nation-state formation developed in regions marginalized from central state services. This paper also contributes to an understanding of Coptic history in contemporary Egypt amidst state endeavors to nationalize education.

My paper “From Privilege to Welfare” explores government policies and estimates their social effects in the transition of the Egyptian railway from an entertainment for the notables to a means of transportation affordable to the mass. I argue that the process of technology diffusion was not a given, but was managed through careful calculations of the railway economy, as well as a series of social control measures. By the railway economy, I mean that the Egyptian Railway Administration (ERA) had to take in to account the feasibility of a low and subsidized ticket price with its meager revenue, especially after 1876 when the Caisse de la Dette Publique placed strict requirements for the ERA’s profitability. The cost of the railway welfare constantly hovered around the minds of both British and Egyptian politicians and technocrats. Using both government and non-government sources, this paper examines various way of relieving the welfare’s costs on state budget by Khedival, British colonial, and nationalist officials, and assesses their advantages and disadvantages. I continue to argue that the railway welfare encompassed much more than the management of economy, but also entailed more sophisticated social measures that marked out beneficiaries from those who were not qualified. Accordingly, the police enforced stricter regulations on fare evasion and train surfing, which caused the once-rampant phenomena to reduce in frequency. It also required clearer differentiation on carriage classes, services, and fares. I contend that although these social measures guaranteed the promotion of the railway welfare to a wider population, they also created new distinctions and privileges that had long-term effects on Egypt’s social stratification. Overall, the popularization of the Egyptian railway strengthened the state’s capacity of economic management and social control.

This paper examines Egypt’s ‘Abbasiya and Khanka state mental asylums in British occupied Egypt. It focuses on the years 1882 until 1935, the year that Egyptian psychiatrists took control of their own asylums. Using the state mental asylums as a case-study, I look at moments that display the colonial state’s fractured nature, its failures, and its lack of coherence. It is straight-forward enough to point out that Egypt’s state asylums did not achieve their purported intent. But rather than seeing these moments as devoid of meaning, I ask what they reveal about the reality of occupied Egypt and also what real effects they produced. This perspective borrows from Freud’s understanding of parapraxis, on which Lacan elaborates. Mistakes, or slips, are moments when what Lacan calls the real—a point where the symbolic order of culture, ideology, and the imagined order of identity break down—emerges in discourse. The systemic failures of Egypt’s asylums, along with the discursive slips of colonial psychiatrists, were moments when the repressed truth of Egypt’s occupation was articulated. The annual “Lunacy Division” reports, along with the memoirs of colonial psychiatrists, contain a number of the repressed truths that rested on the surface of colonial discourse. These truths can also be found in the actions and words of the Egyptian patients, families, doctors, and nurses that the reports describe. In most of these cases, it was Egyptian actions and words that generated moments of British parapraxes. I argue that these unintentional slips and mistakes unmasked the reality that the general environment of colonial Egypt was quite simply one of madness and absurdity. Part of this madness was a demand to work, conform to discipline, and be a contributing member of the “modernized” Egypt rather than to escape to spaces and temporalities of pleasure. Ultimately, the British were not in Egypt to treat the Egyptians or to even provide adequate accommodation, nor did they have the capacity to do so. Hundreds of Egyptians entered the ‘Abbasiya and Khanka asylums only to be discharged well before displaying any signs of recovery. The failure of Egypt’s asylums to achieve their own purported aim—to treat the mentally afflicted—led to the growth of state apparatus through cataloguing those who passed through asylum, and provided additional reasons to increase police presence on the streets. But even more ironic, the failures of colonial psychiatry helped justify a continued occupation of Egypt.