UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Murder in Alexandria: The

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Murder in Alexandria: The Gender, Sexual and Class Politics of Criminality in Egypt, 1914 - 1921 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Nefertiti Mary Takla 2016 ! © Copyright by Nefertiti Mary Takla 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Murder in Alexandria: The Gender, Sexual and Class Politics of Criminality in Egypt, 1914 - 1921 by Nefertiti Mary Takla Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Nile Spencer Green, Co-Chair Professor Nancy Gallagher, Co-Chair My dissertation analyzes the effects of World War I on the port city of Alexandria, Egypt through the investigation and trial of a serial murder case that took place in 1920 - 21. The victims of the serial murders were seventeen women who had engaged in clandestine sex work in Alexandria during the war, and their death marked the rise of domestic trafficking networks in interwar Egypt. Two of the female accomplices to the murders, Raya and Sakina, became scapegoats for the crime and were the first women in Egyptian history to receive the death penalty. Numerous Egyptian films, TV shows and comedies have been produced about these murders in recent decades, and the case is still widely known throughout the Middle East today as "Raya and Sakina." Despite the many afterlives of this case, no historian has studied the two thousand pages of handwritten legal records that were produced about these murders. My dissertation utilizes the records of the Egyptian National Archives and Library, the microfilm collection of the National Judicial Studies Center in Egypt, and the digitized materials of the ii Bibliotheca Alexandrina to analyze the case in its broader historical context. I argue that the murder of the clandestine sex workers and the execution of Raya and Sakina marked the formation of new relationships of power between workers, the state, and an expanding middle class, and new discursive relationships between gender, sexuality, class and criminality. This study examines how these relationships were institutionalized legally, materially, spatially, and discursively, leading to the spread of middle-class modernity in Egypt and the beginning of the end of cosmopolitan Alexandria. iii The dissertation of Nefertiti Mary Takla is approved. Sarah Stein Michael Cooperson Nile Spencer Green, Committee Co-Chair Nancy Gallagher, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv To all the unreformables out there v Table of Contents List of Figures ..............................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements .....................................................................................................................viii Vita ..............................................................................................................................................xiv Introduction ...................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: The Changing Landscape of an Occupied City: World War I and the Beginning of the End of Cosmopolitan Alexandria ......................................................................9 Chapter 2: Navigating the Boundaries of Respectability: Mobile Sex Workers and Clandestine Prostitution Networks ...............................................................................................51 Chapter 3: In Search of the Unreformable Criminals: Positivism and the Construction of Criminality in Early Interwar Egypt .......................................................................................106 Chapter 4: The Politicization of Morality: The Gender, Sexual and Spatial Politics of Middle-Class Formation .............................................................................................................156 Chapter 5: "I Fooled the Government of al-Labbān": Political Economy and Working-Class Resistance in Early Interwar Alexandria ...........................................................191 Bibliography............................................................................................................................229 vi List of Figures Figure 1.1: Map of Alexandria showing al-Saba Banāt Street and the railway station. Figure 1.2: Map of Alexandria with enlarged sections of al-Labbān and al-‘Aṭṭārīn Figure 1.3: Table of the number of ships and tonnage arriving at the port of Alexandria between 1913 and 1924 Figure 1.4: Table of occupations declared in Alexandria census records in 1907 and 1917 Figure 2.1: Map of Alexandria showing red light districts Figure 4.1: Mug shots of Raya (left) and Sakina (right) published in Wādī al-Nīl on November 28, 1920 Figure 4.2: Cigarette Advertisement in al-Kashkūl, No. 198, February 17, 1925, page 18 Figure 5.1: Map of Alexandria showing Anasṭāsī Street and al-Saba Banāt Street vii Acknowledgements Before I acknowledge the wonderful people and places that contributed to my success, I want to acknowledge the pain and suffering that I lived through while writing this dissertation. I want to acknowledge the experience of being sexually harassed by a trusted mentor who had the power to end my career, and how that experience nearly destroyed me. I want to acknowledge the strength and courage it took to hold my ground and fight back. I want to acknowledge the way in which this struggle has empowered me and brought me back to life. I now know what it means to be a survivor. This dissertation was an integral part of my struggle. It was the one thing that anchored me to this world while I was battling severe depression after the sexual harassment. It was my only hope for victory and a happy ending. I am one of the lucky few for whom the dissertation fulfilled the promise of an academic job. I am one of the lucky few who get to write their acknowledgements while a job awaits them. I was lucky to survive a very difficult struggle. And because of this, I can acknowledge my story from a position of power. The sexual harassment I experienced in graduate school was not my first encounter with violence. During my third year of graduate school, I escaped a domestically violent husband. I was terrified and attempted to protect myself with a restraining order, but I never fought back. I never sought justice. I just ran away. We are taught that this is how to survive domestic violence. Perhaps this is true, but the act of running away did not make me whole. The act of turning to authorities for protection - authorities who did not want to believe me in the first place - was not empowering. I have learned that we cannot regain our sense of agency from running away or from running to others for protection. viii When I was violated a second time in graduate school, this time by a trusted mentor, I decided that I was not going to run away. I would stay and fight back. In fact, given the nature of academia, my survival depended on fighting back. Filing reports and complaints with various local and federal authorities was my way of fighting back. Withstanding the horror of seeing my story publicized on the internet was my way of fighting back. Finishing my dissertation and getting a job was my way of fighting back. And as I struggle not to allow my self-worth to be defined by my productivity and success, as I struggle against this dehumanizing middle-class logic that I have written about in my dissertation, I can't help but smile at the fact that I have achieved my goal of speaking out without destroying my career. As I write these acknowledgements while staring at my breathtaking view of the sun setting over the Hudson River, as I recall how it was only less than a year ago that I had wanted to die, I can't help but relish this moment of victory. This dissertation was made possible by the hospitality of the many beautiful cities and communities around the world that welcomed me and gave me shelter from the hardship I had experienced at home. Since July 2013, I have been a privileged migrant - a migrant with resources and an American passport who could go nearly anywhere in the world without fear of being deported or becoming homeless. The world has been nearly borderless to me, as it should be to everyone. Taking advantage of this privilege to write far away from sites of trauma was an essential part of my survival. I thank Buenos Aires, the city where I gave birth to my project. I thank Cairo and Alexandria for granting me access to their rich historical material. I thank Rio de Janeiro, where I wrote Chapters 2 and 4 on the hills of Santa Teresa overlooking Sugar Loaf Mountain. I thank Lisbon, which taught me how to conquer bed bugs, the fastest and most efficient colonizers the world has ever known. I thank Belgrade for letting me cry over dinner ix and live music on Skadarska Street every night for seven weeks after my story went public. I thank Belgrade, where through my tears I learned how to weave narrative into my academic writing. I thank Cape Town, where I developed a deeper understanding of the uses and abuses of the term "cosmopolitanism," and where I gave birth to Chapter 1, the chapter I used on the job market. I thank Barcelona, where I walked the streets of El Borne every night and ran along the Mediterranean Sea after endless hours of job applications. And most of all, I thank New York for giving me a new home that fills me with love, hope and

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