Virginity Violated: Sexual Assault and Respectability in Mid- to Late-Nineteenth-Century Egypt

On 2 March 1864, a domestic servant named ‘Ayda ran away from the house of her employer, an unnamed but high-ranking government official living in Cairo. When ‘Ayda was found, she was sent to the Bulaq police station in Cairo where she was medically examined by a hakima (female physician) who verified that ‘Ayda had been deflowered some time ago. At this point, ‘Ayda testified that she lost her virginity when she visited the household of a man named Muhammad Abu al-'Ila. She claimed that when she arrived at Muhammad's house, his mother was not there and that he drugged and then deflowered her. ‘Ayda changed her testimony, however, after Muhammad's sister was interrogated and admitted that ‘Ayda had, in fact, visited Muhammad twice after the alleged incident.

After questioning the relevant parties, Majlis Masr, the judicial council that initially reviewed the case, sentenced both Muhammad and ‘Ayda to severe corporal punishment, or ta'zir, as prescribed in the sharia (Islamic law).¹ The case was then forwarded to the Council of Justice (Majlis al-Ahkam), the highest judicial body in Egypt at that time. When the case reached Majlis al-Ahkam, however, it set aside the ruling of Majlis Masr and instead imprisoned ‘Ayda for six months in the iplikhane, the spinning mill that functioned as the women's prison for Cairo, and sentenced Muhammad to six months of hard labor.²

While this case may seem dramatic, it is by no means unusual or shocking. Nineteenth-century legal records from the Cairo and Alexandrian police departments, as well as those of the various judicial councils active throughout Egypt from 1849 to 1884, contain hundreds of similar episodes that touch on matters of an explicitly sexual nature. In a sense, the sheer number of these cases, the rather dry, bureaucratic tone in which they were written, and the multiple references made to female sexuality raise several tantalizing questions. Why, for example, were these cases recorded in the first place? What assumptions did the nineteenth-century Egyptian state make about a woman's virginity? Finally, how were narratives dealing with sexual honor and respectability constituted by the state and molded into persuasive displays of legal knowledge?

This article attempts to provide some insight into these questions by exploring reported sexual assaults that occurred predominantly against Egyptian women. I focus on conflicting notions of female virginity and illegal offenses that violated a woman's sexual honor.³ As mid- to late-nineteenth-century legal records make clear, the concern for state officials was not so much with sexual morality per se but with transgressions from appropriate and permissible legal behavior. Changing social and economic realities led male administrators and bureaucratic intermediaries to invoke the discretionary power of the state in order to regulate the intimate behavior of its subjects. As in other societies, sexual honor stood for a set of gender norms that provided the logic for unequal power relations in both private and public life.⁴

Mid- to late-nineteenth-century Egypt, however, witnessed an unprecedented change in the juridical relationship between the state and its subjects. New penal legislation passed by the Khedives (viceroys appointed by the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul) sought not only to punish illicit sexual behavior but also to create institutions that could preserve economic order and public security throughout the country. Legal knowledge and the ways in which it was produced and practiced increasingly became a bureaucratic exercise of interpretation, one that created different ways of thinking about the judicial process and gender itself. Court records from this period thus provide innumerable insights into the various ways in which female virginity was institutionally reinterpreted, as well as the changing nature of legal justice during the mid- to...