This paper examines the emergence and intensification of a “border crisis” along Egypt’s western frontier in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although the western boundary of Egypt is a topic that has received strikingly little scholarly attention in the historiography of modern Egypt, I suggest that it is actually a crucial lens through which to explore broader questions of sovereignty, identity, and statecraft in Egypt and the late Ottoman Empire in the decades prior to the First World War. My narrative begins in 1902 when the Ottoman Government established a military presence at the Mediterranean port of Sollum, which Istanbul claimed was not in fact on Egyptian soil. This Ottoman military occupation kicked off a storm of events that ultimately added up to the appearance of crisis along the border, sending the Egyptian Government into a panic and simultaneously drawing in the British and Italian authorities, who were concerned about their own strategic imperatives in the region. Drawing on an array of Italian, Ottoman, and British archival sources, my paper seeks to reconstruct this pivotal series of events through to 1916, when the British military succeeded in quashing a Western Desert rebellion spawned by the Libyan-based Sanusi Islamic brotherhood. The main objective of the paper is not merely to account for the complicated series of diplomatic exchanges surrounding the frontier crisis, but rather to understand the crisis from the point of view of the various Bedouin tribes who inhabited the borderland. Many of these tribes managed to capitalize on the border crisis for their own advantage, harnessing the countervailing diplomatic forces to help resolve a recent spate of local cross-border disputes in their favor. At the same time, the various tribes invoked or flouted the border as necessary, and otherwise worked alternately with Egyptian, Italian, British, and Ottoman officials as it suited their needs. Ultimately this paper seeks to underscore the interactivity between this array of state and non-state actors in order to reconceptualize Egyptian history at its western frontier, and to demonstrate how this particular border episode illuminates the Ottoman-Egyptian relationship.

When the League of Nations was called in to settle territorial disputes in the Middle East, their deliberations were guided by the ideology of self-determination. Assigning territory based on collective identity required that they identify mutually exclusive communities; enforcing the new lines would institutionalize those new intra-state boundaries. By comparing the Mosul Question (1925) and the Sanjak Question (1936), this paper will analyze the processes by which Europeans introduced new taxonomies of identity into the region, emphasized the desirability of dividing Adifferent@ collectives, and, in the process, encouraged the growth of animosities based on newly-important characteristics. The League of Nations sent a commission to Mosul, claimed by both the new Republic of Turkey and recently-independent Iraq. As they fanned out into the countryside, European commissioners sought to find out how the local population defined themselves: were they Arabs or Turks. For Ottoman subjects, the question seemed quite peculiar, and the population responded instead with specific information about the kind of government they would prefer. In the end, the commissioners recognized that identity did not correlate with the political demands of Mosul=s population, giving the province to Iraq for economic and strategic reasons instead. When France agreed to a Treaty of Independence with Syria in 1936, Turkey insisted that the autonomous province of Alexandretta must not be part of the new Syrian state. France agreed that Alexandretta would become a separate state federated with Syria. The League insisted that the parliament of the newly-independent Alexandretta would reflect the groups present in the local population. Registration for the elections was to serve also to indicate the relative proportions of seven groups that Europeans identified in the province: Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Alawis, Greek, Armenians, and Other. Registrations quickly turned violent, as the League agreed that each man could choose any affiliation. The new categories assumed identities and divisions that made little sense to local voters, who agreed with the Turkish contention that local identities were fluid. Both episodes begin with notions of identity that Europeans constructed as scientific, mutually-exclusive, and representative of the population=s essential nature. The ideology of self-determination, after all, depended on the ability to recognize and interrogate a collective self. In both of these cases, European-defined collectives encouraged local exclusivist nationalisms while discouraging older forms of group solidarity.

The swimsuit in Egypt went from relative obscurity in the 1920s and 1930s to an item of use among the upper middle class and elite in the 1940s. Advertising of the era between the revolutions (1922-1952) depicts bathing suits in advertisements for other products, e.g. film or soap, as early as the 1920s. Indeed the backbone of primary research for this paper includes advertisements, cartoons, and commentary from magazines, newspapers, and journals, e.g. al-Ithnayn wal-dunya, Ruz al-yusif, al-Ahram, al-Lata’if al-musawwara, al-Muqtatif, Nashr al-‘ilanat, al-Riyada al-badaniya,al-Mar’a al-jadida, Akhr al- sa’a, Bint al-nil, al-Sinama as well as memoirs and film. These journals include popular journals, women’s journals, newspapers, literary/scholarly journals, and specialized/topical journals. I have also examined regional journals; however, for this time period they are not relevant for this topic. Egyptian memoirs include Chafika S. Hamamsy’s Zamalek and Leila Ahmed’s Border Passage, as well as non-Egyptian (however resident) Edward Said’s Out of Place. Discussing Egyptian films, as well as American film in Egypt, particularly Esther Williams, will be pertinent to this topic. This paper will argue that as women became more visible publicly after the 1919 Revolution and more active in the public realm through commerce and education, new frontiers of display emerged. The beach and the club became two frontiers where women could experiment with new fashion, including the swimsuit, so prevalent in the “splashy” new Hollywood productions, e.g. with Esther Williams. World War II brought many elements together: Esther Williams no longer swam competitively, circumstances of the war confined Egyptians to the sporting club (rather than the shore), and American companies created new fibers for better swimsuits after the war. The swimsuit did not go unnoticed. Its most vocal critic was the Shaykh Abul Ayun, who himself became a target of criticism from those who enjoyed the new frontier.

When Turkish immigrants first came to the Federal Republic of Germany as part of a foreign labor program in the 1960s, both the German government and the Turkish workers themselves considered their stay a temporary one. However, when West Germany halted the Gastarbeiter [guestworker] program in 1973, many Turkish workers, seeing their chance to return for work at a later date disappear, decided to extend their stay in the country and bring their families over to live with them. Perhaps more controversial than any other consequence of Turkish immigration was the proliferation of Muslim religious spaces in the form of mosques and Koranschule (Qur’an schools). In the debates sparked by the growing presence of Islam, the media, politicians, and, to an extent, the public attempted to define these emerging religious spaces, and delineate the borders between them and broader German society. In this paper, I focus on the connection (and disconnection) between how media constructed “the mosque” and its borders, and how Turkish immigrants understood and experienced them in their own lives. To examine this relationship, I do three things: First, I examine German media coverage of the topic of Islam and of mosques more specifically in the 1970s and 1980s to see what prompted its focus on Muslim immigrants, where the media placed “the mosque” and its members in relation to broader German society, and how their coverage reflected the perception of Turkish immigrants and their children by German society. Then, I turn my attention to how Turkish media in West Germany constructed its own image of the mosque abroad. Lastly, I examine the place and purposes of mosques in the narratives of Turkish immigrants and their children to compare how they understood, experienced and used local mosques in comparison to how media presented them. For this final section, I focus on the local level experiences of Turkish residents of a neighborhood in Berlin-Wedding, and use these examples to suggest how Turkish immigrants and their children both challenged and reinforced the borders between their religious spaces and “secular” German society.