Sex in nineteenth-century Cairo played out on a stage of relentless change and adaptation. The city’s urban life witnessed a significant rise in population growth, transformations in family and household structures, the rise of an Egyptian nationalist elite, and the gradual demise of African and Circassian slavery. Because of the divergent approaches taken with this topic, this chapter focuses on the unequal power relations that shaped Cairene sex, using canonical texts and archival documents to tease out the connections between sex and family life, nationalism, slavery, the justice system, and sex work. Specifically emphasized are stories and narratives written by literate Egyptians and Europeans, and how their ideas of domesticity, freedom, and political authority operated in relation to sexual practices. In doing so an explanation of sex in nineteenth-century Cairo is put forward that highlights celebrated and forgotten sources, prioritizing key works that inform our current understandings of sex. The chapter discusses memoirs and political treatises written by prominent Egyptian nationalists, explores the rich possibilities raised by archival records and their differences from European traveller accounts, and concludes with what nineteenth-century sources can (and cannot) tell us about queer ideas of sex.

In the medieval Middle East, thinking about health and illness was closely connected to thinking about food and cooking. Can we know what happened in practice? Building on previous research, I will try to show how fine the line was between ‘food’ (or drinks) and ‘medicines’. I examine specific recipes appearing in two books composed in Mamluk-era Cairo – the pharmacopoeia Minhāj al-dukkān and an anonymous cookbook called Kanz al-fawāʾid – to show that some foods were also medicines, and some pharmaceutical preparations were largely food (or rather, snacks!). Comparing and contrasting not only the instructions appearing under the same headings, but also the appearance (or lack thereof) of medical indications, provides information as to which side of the divide given medico-culinary compounds were thought to fall. I also investigate to what extent Kanz al-fawāʾid contains recipes for the foods recommended in the dietetic advice found in some Cairo Genizah prescriptions.

This chapter presents the Buffalo Agency, a trade agency, school, and library that was owned and operated by Ibadi Muslims in Ottoma-era Cairo. It presents the book’s main argument; namely, that the history of the Buffalo Agency shows how Ibadi Muslims participated fully in the religious, economic, legal, and political life of Ottoman Egypt. Their ability to maintain cohesion as a community while also engaging fully with Ottoman society was in part due to their unusual status as both members of a religious minority and part of the Muslim majority. The chapter then situates this argument in the three conversations to which the book contributes: Ottoman history in Egypt, minority communities in the empire, and the history of Ibadi Islam. The chapter next introduces the main historical sources used to support the argument: shariah court records, manuscript evidence from private libraries, and archival documents. Methodologically, the chapter grapples with the tension between the emphasis on the material history of Ibadis in Egypt and my need to rely on digital facsimiles of many of the sources.

This final chapter follows the journey of Jerban student Sālim Bin Yaʿqūb (d. 1991) from Tunisia to Egypt, where he lived at the Buffalo Agency in the twilight years of its existence in the 1930s. The chapter draws on a diverse body of materials including manuscripts from his private library, his research notes, and a recorded interview from the 1980s with him about his time in Cairo. He spent much of his life in the decades following his return from Egypt to Tunisia preparing materials for a book just like this one. Bin Yaʿqūb’s story is thus at once that of the gradual disintegration of the Agency and its library and the earliest attempt to preserve the memory of the Ibadi community in Cairo and the Buffalo Agency before it disappeared. Although he died before writing it, the idea for his book both inspired and laid the foundation for this one.

This chapter lays out the broad contours of the history of North African migrants to Ottoman Cairo from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It focuses its attention on both Ibadis and non-Ibadis from the Maghrib residing in Egypt to paint a picture of the world they inhabited. More precisely, it focuses on the Tulun district of the city of Cairo, where the Buffalo Agency was located. Ibadis and other Maghribis bought and sold property in the neighborhood, went shopping in its markets, prayed in its mosque, welcomed friends and family coming from their homeland, and said goodbye to those departing for other Ottoman cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, and Mecca. In drawing attention to these aspects of everyday life, the chapter sheds light on Ibadi and Maghribi communal identity, their remarkably expansive networks in the Mediterranean, their professional and religious lives as Ottomans, and their relationship to the Ottoman government as it changed over these centuries.

Because the birth of the Egyptian novel came so late in the Arabic literary tradition (1914) and coincided so closely with the country’s independence from the British, it is no surprise that questions of national identity and authenticity are an overlying preoccupation. What is perhaps surprising is the extent to which these questions are enacted in the arena of courtship and marriage. In the canon—as in the capital—liminal space remains prime real estate in the economy of desire. For those in Cairo who are unwilling or unable to marry at a conventional age, traditional values and familial structures, combined with a culture of surveillance and patriarchy, results in a thorny romantic landscape. All of this is exacerbated by neoliberal policies that stretch the preexistent wealth gap, as well as the increased privatization, militarization and monetization of public space. This chapter will explore possibilities for desire through liminal spaces in a select survey of (mostly) 20thcentury Cairene novels: Tawfiq Hakim’s 1933The Return of the Soul, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947Midaq Alley, Latifa al-Zayyat’s 1960The Open Door, Enayat al-Zayyat’s 1963Love and Silence, Gamal al-Ghitani’s 1976The Zaafarani Files, Abdel Hakeem Qassem’s 1987An Attempt to Get Out, and Alaa al-Aswany’s 2002The Yacoubian Building.

In 1962, Sikota Wina wrote a report on the United National Independence Party (UNIP) International Publicity Bureau, which had just opened an office in Dar es Salaam, capital of newly independent Tanganyika and liberation hub in the making. Chapter 6 asks how the anticolonial culture of this cohort fell away over the course of the staggered independence dates of Tanganyika, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Accra, having just begun to host liberation movements from around 1960, appeared unable to provide a platform for activists after Munu Sipalo’s stint on the editorial board of Voice of Africa. Cairo lost much of the appeal it held in John Kale’s heyday, as conflict over the legitimacy of political parties paralleled a crisis in office resources. Lobbying groups on the Western European Left grew irrelevant in a new funding landscape that came with the timetabling of statehood, while PAFMECA soon dissolved. The acceleration of independence negotiations in the region was ambivalent: this chapter closes by arriving in Dar es Salaam by way of radio broadcasting and technical training for Zambian secretaries – whose experience was not only one of anticolonial regional solidarity.

The late 1950s saw a certain internationalisation of anticolonial campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the independence of Sudan and Ghana in 1955–1958. Chapter 3 asks how this cohort pursued strategies to hold newly independent states accountable to promises of anticolonial patronage, in the lead up to the famous All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in December 1958 in Accra. This chapter visits five moments obscured in the AAPC’s shadows: Munu Sipalo’s attendance at the Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay; John Kale’s publishing from his Cairo office; the first Pan-African Students Conference at Makerere; Abu Mayanja’s founding of the Committee of African Organisations in London; Kanyama Chiume’s role in the formation of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa at Mwanza. Activists continued to think through a regional-generational lens: their activities highlight previously unexplored tensions in the Afro-Asian and pan-African movement and recast factions in the nationalist parties of these four countries. The AAPC was never simply a galvanising force for East and Central African activists.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt represented the first modern attempt to incorporate an Islamic society into the European fold. Although the expedition was a military fiasco, it left a lasting legacy in the region. The invasion constituted the formative moment for the discourse of Orientalism, when all of its ideological components converged and a full arsenal of instruments of Western domination was employed to protect it. The occupation itself did little to modernize Egyptian society, because the revolutionary principles that the French tried to introduce were too radical and foreign, and met determined local resistance. But Napoleon created a political vacuum in Egypt that was soon filled by Kavalali Mehmet Ali Pasha, who, within a decade of the French departure, began laying the foundation for the reformed and modernized Egypt that later would play such an important role in the Middle East.

This chapter presents short biographies of Akif, Sabri, and Kevseri, describing the general lines of their thought, followed by sections looking at scholarship’s changing approach to their work, the role of Egypt as a site for intellectual discourse, and the particular engagement these three thinkers had with Ottoman, Turkish, and Arabic as modes of expression. In place of autobiography there exists a body of biographical sources in the form of their followers’ memoirs as well as letters, sermons, and photographs. Caveats apply when surveying this material: some of it is hagiographical, mistakes regarding events and dates are common, and much is left unsaid, possibly as a form of self-censorship. Still, there is a breadth of material to work with, and while there are likely more documents to be found among government records in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo, as well as letter caches, these are not historical figures to be recovered from the archive.

The authoritative texts of the Shāfiʿī school such as the Minhāj began to be circulated, interpreted and advanced across the Indian Ocean rim, where its largest followers had started to take up residence. This transoceanic transmission was mediated by other texts in the interim, mainly by the commentaries of the Minhāj. This chapter analyses the commentarial intermediation between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century with a focus on one commentary, Tuḥfat al-muḥtāj (Tuḥfa) by Ibn al-Ḥajar al-Haytamī, an Egyptian jurist who built up a successful career in Mecca. The trajectories of this commentary reflect many of the contemporary developments in political and cultural realms, such as the decline of the Mamlūks, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of the Middle East, and the increased mobility toward Mecca and beyond to the Hijaz. The Tuḥfa addressed its immediate regional contexts, while reasserting the geo-cultural superiority of Mecca and the Hijaz and the racial prominence of the Arabs. Its approach was challenged by Ibn Ḥajar’s colleagues from Cairo through their commentaries. Just as Nawawī once amalgamated two ṭarīqas, now commentators on his Minhāj were divided into two sub-schools.

Chapter Four, ‘On Leave’, explores tourism in Cairo, Alexandria and London. The chapter begins with the Egyptian cities to explore how the men responded to their expectations of an ‘ancient’ space that was brought to life by its tourist infrastructure: from the perceived ‘sideshow’ of the Middle East, expressions of racism towards the Egyptian people and the clash of ancient and modern. At the same time, though, the men exploited their newfound status as soldiers to access elite spaces and enjoy the cities’ pleasures. The chapter then turns to London. Coming ‘home’ to the metropolis called into question the colonial troops’ relationship to the British Empire – this was not straightforward tourism but had crucial stakes for identity, through better understandings of Britain and their place within it. The chapter concludes by comparing representations of sexual activity while on leave.

Following a comparative approach, this chapter foregrounds transcultural translation as it examines three different productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ play Rituals of Signs and Transformations in English, French and Arabic that were staged in Beirut, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. The chapter argues that Wannous’ play carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when rigid political, religious, and gender structures are undermined in a society deformed by a long experience of despotism.

In 1915, four months after the first convoy of Australian soldiers disembarked in Egypt, venereal disease (VD) infected roughly 10 per cent of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).1 In the Official History, Butler described it as ‘a startling outburst’ that resulted in 3 per cent of the force being ‘constantly sick’.2 Given that a significant number of soldiers were not only incapacitated but also occupying hospital beds that would be needed once combat casualties started to arrive, VD had serious implications for the efficiency of the AIF and its medical services.

Bandmann’s engagement with the many localities on his circuit required a degree of political activity at a level which is termed here micropolitical. This term refers to personal connections and networks and how they function in a political context. For Bandmann, who attempted to build or manage theatres on his circuit, this meant forging political and business partnerships that demonstrate a much deeper engagement with locality than is normal for itinerant theatre. The micropolitics of locality are discussed in relation to the most important cities on his circuit, which were mostly entrepôts, port cities designed to facilitate colonial trade. The chapter provides detailed discussion of Bandmann’s activities in Malta, Cairo, Bombay, Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong and the Dutch East Indies, as well as in connection with the Victoria Theatre in Singapore and Parsi theatre.