Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law, and Medicine in Khedival Egypt

Introduction

xv Introduction In the winter of 1878, a man brought his daughter, Siddiqa, to Cairo’s police headquarters after finding her away from home in the company of a prostitute . At first, Siddiqa told her father that she was still a virgin. He asked female neighbors to examine her, and they confirmed that her hymen was intact. He chose not to trust them, however, took his daughter to the police station, and demanded a medical examination. During her interrogation at the police station, Siddiqa insisted on her original version. The hakima (female medical practitioner ) who examined her, however, claimed that her hymen had been damaged and that she had been deflowered “for some time now.” Siddiqa then claimed that if her hymen was found to be damaged it was not due to premarital defloration. Her father had hit her back a few months earlier, she claimed. She bled as a result, but assumed it was menstrual blood. The police officers suspected she was lying, interrogated her further, and she then admitted that two prostitutes had seduced her into having sexual intercourse with men.1 This case, recorded in the police registers of precolonial Egypt, situates a female body at the center of competing narratives. In this story, a girl presented her own version as to the history of her body, while several authorities—her father, her neighbors, a police examiner, and police investigators—tried to confirm or challenge her versions, in search of the truth or maybe of yet another story that would reaffirm her culpability. This encounter is an instance of “state power” becoming part of familial control of a young woman’s sexuality and as part of a woman’s own experience of premarital defloration. It is one of multiple interactions that created and established a distinction between formal and informal medicine. It is also in these sites that the legitimacy of state power was xvi | Introduction established: where a young woman had to justify her injured hymen to a police officer and a father chose to use the police to discipline his daughter. This book is about the formation of the state as a process that made a formal medical examination and a police investigation part of a commonsense understanding of social relations. It was such interactions between police officials and litigants that created what came to be known as the Khedival State and modern state power. I question here how formal police procedures and forensic examinations came to occupy such a crucial place not only in the official vision of order but also in Siddiqa’s father’s vision of objectivity and in Siddiqa’s own experience of lost virginity. • Throughout the nineteenth century, the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire enjoyed increasing autonomy due to the efforts of Mehmed Ali Pasha, its governor from 1805 to 1849, and his heirs. Mehmed Ali created his own massconscripted army, waged independent military campaigns, and enacted a series of legal and medical reforms independently of Istanbul. In 1841 he forced the Empire to recognize Egypt’s autonomy and his family as its rulers. His grandson ‘Abbas (1848–54), his son Sa‘id (1854–63), his grandson Isma‘il (1863–79), and Isma‘il’s son Tawfiq (1879–92) enacted further independent economic and legal policies, and created a localized Ottoman-Egyptian elite. The governors’ policies, alongside Egypt’s integration into world economy, affected urban and rural landscapes. In Cairo, new neighborhoods featured new architectural styles modeled after Paris, and Egypt’s rulers cleaned up the cities .2 In the countryside, corvée workers dug irrigation canals and laid railroads and telegraph lines. Agricultural production was increasingly geared to meet the needs of European cotton markets. Public works projects and conscription to the army mobilized peasants, some of whom ended up in the cities.3 As historian Judith Tucker demonstrates, these developments undermined the family as an economic unit and transformed power dynamics and gender relations. Economic and social transformations affected women most powerfully, as they deprived many of family- and community-based social protection. Migration to the cities , conscription to the army, and the corvée disrupted rural communities and deprived women of their protective networks.4 The growing power of the Egyptian state over communities, families, and individuals during the nineteenth century has been the focus of much scholarship Introduction | xvii in recent years. An increasingly powerful state required more and more non-elite labor...