This paper examines the struggle between colonial authorities and national resistance over illicit sexuality, specifically prostitution, and public morality in the first years of the British occupation of Egypt. It traces the deep-rooted anxieties concerning prostitution and sexuality as it was expressed in the popular press, literature, medical writings and laws in late 19th century and early 20th century. I argue that uncontrolled sexuality of prostitutes was used by Egyptian nationalists to dramatize the British occupation, the danger of Capitulations and Western influence. Although the presence of prostitutes in Cairo and Egyptian provinces was anything but new, regulating health inspection and registration of prostitutes shortly after the British invasion symbolized the debasement brought about by foreign influence and was amplified by the defeat. In demonizing and victimizing prostitutes, prostitutes were never seen as working women; they were symbol, a metaphor, and a symptom of broad socio-political concerns. Egyptian intellectuals shared colonialists concerns over health, security and social order and overlooked women’s work and rights of prostitutes as sex workers. I conclude that the nationalist discourses against prostitution and its regulation in semi-colonial Egypt is an example of the blurred line between colonial and anti-colonial hybridity. Regulating prostitution triggered a national-hybrid discourse that adopted European anxiety over security and health mixed with what was thought to be the authentic socio-religious ideals, and consequently opposed both prostitution and the colonial authority by labeling the colonizers as responsible for polluting the “virtuous nation”.

Pervasive elements of Islamic mysticism include the importance of physical intimacy (qurba) with a spiritual guide or master, as the means of accessing baraka (blessing, in the form of knowledge or good fortune) and the ethic of spiritual concentration (dhikr) for achieving closeness to God. Striving for this connection to God, and to his friends on earth took a variety of forms in practice. This paper will contrast the rituals of initiation to the Bakriya Brotherhood described in Murtada al-Zab?d?’s Iqd al-Jaw?hir al-Th?m?n to those for initiation into the Waf?‘? brotherhood described in Mohammad Tawf?q al-Bakri’s Bayt al-S?d?t al-Waf?‘iyya. These will be shown to represent two very different ideas about the nature of mystical authority that resonated with different political and economic structures in Eighteenth century Egypt. It will be shown that the initiation rituals of the Waf?‘iyya reflect an emphasis on the complete submission of the disciple to his shaykh, a formulation which acted as the moral basis for patron-client relationships through which resources and political influence were distributed. By contrast, rituals described in the ‘Iqd prescribe solitary prayer and meditation as the means to access the dh?t or physical body of the Prophet, and be initiated by him directly. This initiation through seeing the Prophet was characteristic of the Tar?qa Mu?ammadiya movement, which was increasing in popularity through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Some scholars have suggested that the submission of the disciple to his master is implicitly feudal or authoritarian, while initiation through seeing the Prophet is implicitly entrepreneurial and thus more suited to a modern economy fueled by trade. This paper will consider the careers of key members of these brotherhoods to better understand the relationship between these competing rituals of sanctity and competing modes of production in modern Egyptian society. The paper has relevance to broader discussions of the diversity in the practice and theory of Islamic mysticism, and the mechanisms of change in Sufi institutions that have allowed them to thrive in changing contexts.

This paper explores the relationship between the empiricist tenor of nineteenth-century comparative literature and the drive toward "vernacular" realism in the modern Arabic novel. I focus on the Egyptian intellectual Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi's _Mawaqi' al-Aflak fi Waqa'i' Tilimak_ (Orbits of the Stars in Telemachus's Adventures [of Afar]), an 1850s Arabic translation (published 1867) of François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon's _Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse_ (The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses). Reading al-Tahtawi’s translation against the realist impulses of nineteenth-century British and French literary comparatism--from Joseph Reinaud and Thomas Macaulay in the 1830s to Hutcheson Posnett in the 1880s--I posit that translation as a transformational moment in the reception of the "European" literary tradition in the Arab-Islamic world. By arguing that the ancient Greek gods who populate Fénelon's 1699 sequel to Homer's _Odyssey_ are analogous to Muslim jinn--spirits of smokeless fire understood to be real--al-Tahtawi rewrites what Muslims long had dismissed as pagan "fiction" as Islamized "truth," thereby adroitly negotiating a crisis of comparison and mediating a literary-epistemic sea change in modern Arabic fiction. Indeed, the "untrue" gods of the Greeks (and of French literature) turn not just real but historically referential: al-Tahtawi translates Fénelon's original into a text that speaks to the real-historical world of 1850s Egypt, exhorting an unjust Ottoman-Egyptian sovereign to heed lessons that Fénelon’s original once had addressed to French royalty. Recent critics, notably Catherine Gallagher, have defined the fictionality specific to the modern European novel as neither pure deceit nor pure truth. Gallagher also has suggested that the modern European novel distances fiction from direct reference to external worlds. I argue that al-Tahtawi's rehabilitation of the mythological as the supernatural/historical real, of the "blasphemous" as possessed of a capacity to speak sacred or secular truths, reflects a parallel process of modern fiction-making in the Arabic-speaking world. Yet a divergent process too, for--contra Gallagher's hypothesis--al-Tahtawi's translation actively solicits *belief* in the unbelievable by making Fénelon's gods and heroes refer to "realities" (Islamic jinn, live Ottoman-Egyptian rulers) beyond the inner world of the text. Al-Tahtawi's engagement with Fénelon, I suggest, invites us to develop a translational theory of the modern Arabic novel--hence also a theory that moves beyond simplistic models of influence or imitation—and to rethink both the rise of the novel and modern literary comparatism more generally beyond Europe: to reposition both as transpositions.

In the nineteenth-century, the government of Mehmet Ali utilized the normative system of religion to produce the modern, Egyptian individual. Mehmet Ali appointed the Bakri family as heads of all Sufi orders in Cairo and offered them authority over most Sufi shrines, rituals, and personnel. The modern state began to circumscribe the boundaries of proper Islam, through the Bakris' management of the right to proselytize in public (qadam) and their official certification of religious knowledge (ijaza). Yet, as Sufi shaykhs and bureaucratic intermediaries, the Bakris assured a place for Sufi Islam in Mehmet Ali's vision for Egyptian society on the path to modernity. Sufism - defined as a tradition of Islamic knowledge, practices, and persons – provided the means of political jostling and social maneuvering between the Bakris, other Sufi heads of orders, and the modern state, in the contested and discursive battle to define modern religion. In the historiography, Frederick de Jong’s work on Sufism has drawn attention to the Bakris’ legal-rational authority as heads of orders, but this study goes beyond his pioneering work in a substantial way. We seek to uncover the multilogue of voices inherent in the sources, by which Mehmet Ali cast bureaucratic change as the logical extension of religious precedence and traditional legitimacy, or how state functionaries shifted Sufi concepts onto modern epistemes. In large part, these Imperial decrees infused Sufi terms, titles, and functions with the state's definition of religious propriety: quietist, bloodless, and secular. By taking inspiration from Selim Deringil’s evaluation of Islamicization as secularization, in the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth-century, this paper seeks to compare Abdulhamid II and Mehmet Ali’s efforts in enforcing proper Islam in Istanbul and Cairo, respectively. This study approaches Imperial decrees as sites of political contestation between the state, the Bakris, and rival religious claimants. The nineteenth-century negotiations over material largesse and social prestige demonstrate the logic of power inherent in the modern, Egyptian state’s unprecedented subordination of Sufi orders. As the primary intermediaries between Mehmet Ali and Sufi heads of orders, the Bakris navigated the twin processes of Egyptian bureaucratization and Sufi institutionalization, thereby influencing the political and poetic contours of modern religion in Egypt.

The driving question of this paper is, how did Egyptian religious (or, more specifically, sectarian) identity shift during the colonial encounters of the late 19th-early 20th centuries? My study focuses on Sunni Muslims and Coptic Christians in Egypt, and demonstrates that the colonial encounter led to an increase in religious ‘groupism.’ I explore the ways in which Western Christian constructions of religion as a category contributed theoretically contributed to this shift, which took place on the ground in multiple spaces, including that of missionary schools, which serve as the center point for my analysis of this shift. Ultimately, I argue that the contemporary sectarianism in Egypt is a remnant of the colonial encounter, during which Western ‘world religions’ discourse offered a new way to think about the religious self and the religious other. My primary theoretical sources include Talal Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa, each of whom offers important critiques of the construction of religious categories and the power dynamics that contribute to these endeavors. Additionally, Timothy Mitchell and Bruce Masters, among others, give insight into the specifics of the mechanisms of colonial control and history of sectarian identity, respectively. Heather Sharkey’s writings were also beneficial in gathering data regarding Evangelical missionary activity in Egypt during this period. Finally, I use Nicholas Dirk’s extensive analysis in Castes of Mind of the colonial impact on religious identity in India as a foil for my analysis of Egypt. The presence of Western Christians in Egypt during the colonial period instigated a new way of thinking about oneself and others in religious terms- the ‘world religions’ discourse of the West. Often Westerners assume that the sectarian divisions in the Middle East are organic and historical; however, historical sources argue otherwise. Divisive sectarianism is an ongoing legacy of the colonial encounter which continues to influence the ways in which Egyptians today think about themselves and others in religious terms. This has important implications for the recent Egyptian Revolution. Are Egyptians able to overcome the Western import of sectarian division, or is it too fully embedded in contemporary Egyptian society? I do not attempt to answer this specific question, only to raise it as a possible place in which Egyptians can fight the colonial legacy while creating a more peaceful society.