In October 1882 the Egyptian Government began to regulate the health inspections of sex workers, establishing one office in Cairo and one in Alexandria where every sex worker in the city had to register her name and undergo weekly inspections for venereal diseases. This was the first official state recognition of prostitution in modern Egypt since Muhammad ‘Ali had banished sex workers to Upper Egypt in 1836. Sanctioning health inspections and the registration of sex workers a few weeks after the British invasion inaugurated long decades of struggle between the regulationist colonial state and the abolitionist intellectuals and activists.

This chapter examines the struggle between colonial authorities and emerging nationalist resistance over illicit sexuality – specifically, prostitution – and public morality throughout the long decade of the 1890s and its aftermath. In the years following the British invasion, Egyptian intellectuals and activists, I argue, assumed reforming and resisting roles through discourses on gender, sexuality and public morality. Tracing laws and public discourses concerning sex work during these years illuminates the dual process of redefining the role of the state in structuring the moral order and the emerging construction of the national community. The regulations and calls for the abolition of commercial sex work underscored the state's power to shape public morality and social order through controlling working-class women, while overlooking and even condemning women's work and rights in general. Equally, these issues suggest the limits to state power. Egyptian abolitionists presented sex workers as demons arising from the invasion of the West, hence they saw the act of purging the sex trade as an important element in ‘restoring’ what they regarded as the virtuous community as a base of resistance against the British occupation and foreign control. The colonial authorities, on the other hand, treated sex workers as a danger to health and security that must be controlled and contained.

Before the British

The presence of sex workers in Cairo and Egyptian provincial towns was anything but new. Taxation systems under the Mamluks and Ottomans categorised sex workers as a professional group and demonstrated differing levels of official tolerance towards commercial sex.