Sex Work in Colonial Egypt

Women, Modernity and the Global Economy

Francesca Biancani

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838609061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kolonialismus & Postkolonialismus

In the early 20th century Cairo was a vibrant and booming global metropolis. The integration of Egypt into the global market had led to rapid urban growth and increased migration. As occupational prospects for women outside the family were limited, sex work became a prominent feature of the new modern city. However, the economic and social changes in Egypt ignited national anxieties about racial degeneration, social disorder and imperial decadence. Francesca Biancani argues here that this was a period of national crisis that became inscribed on the bodies on female sex workers.
Based on a wide range of rare primary sources, including documents from court cases, reformist papers, police minutes and letters, Biancani examines the discourses around sex workers and shows how prostitution was understood in colonial Egypt. The book argues that from initially regulating and managing prostitution, local and colonial elites began to depict sex workers as a threat to the physical and moral welfare of the rising Egyptian nation. However, far from being a marginal activity, prostitution is shown to play a central role in the history of Egyptian nation-making. By exploring the interdependence of power and marginality, respectability and transgression, Biancani writes sex work and its practitioners back into the history of modern Egypt. The book is an original contribution to the global history of prostitution and a vital resource for scholars of Middle East Studies.

CHAPTER 1

SELLING SEX IN A
CHANGING CITY

A Japanese passing through Cairo asked, I presume out of curiosity, if there was such thing as a ‘yoshiwara’ in the town. ‘My dear sir’, said the English officer to whom the question had been put, ‘it would be quite unnecessary. We have here so many ladies quite comme il en faut’.¹

A.B. De Guerville, New Egypt, 1906

The shift from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ sex work encompassed both changes and continuities. An exact quantification of the increase in the actual number of practitioners is very difficult, not to say impossible, to establish due to the fragmentariness of the data at hand. Yet, the last quarter of the nineteenth century surely saw the emergence of a qualitatively different type of sex work. Prostitution was comprehensively commodified, and the – legal – selling of sex in brothels was placed in public thoroughfares in the centre of the newly planned, modern city. This process should not be understood as a linear trajectory, through. The transformation of sex work in the colonial period was an irregular phenomenon, whereby transactional sex was restructured through the articulation of different and complex degrees of interaction with the State and the market, from formal institutionalised brothel prostitution to informal and casual, clandestine sex work. While transactional sex continued to be a choice that women could make more or less deliberately, in order to alleviate their harsh economic constraints, the structure of sex work and its social meaning deeply changed due to its increased integration within the realm of market forces and state intervention.

In this chapter I introduce an analysis of the emergence of modern Cairene prostitution as a consequence of globalisation, colonialism, domestic and international migration, urban modernisation and social change. These structural factors, I argue, constituted the broad canvas against which prostitution came to be seen by an increasing number of local as well as foreign women in Cairo, as a viable strategy to cope with female economic vulnerability. At the same time, a novel social meaning was assigned to sex work by both the political elites and the general public.

Urban Transformation

Throughout Mamluk and Ottoman times, Cairo underwent a remarkably steady and continuous development. From the 1860s onwards, however, it rapidly grew into a global metropolis. According to a prevailing historiographic perspective, Khedive Isma‘il was the promoter of a radical transformation of the city along European – and more specifically, Parisian – aesthetics, especially after his visit to Haussmann's ‘new’ Paris in occasion of the Universal Exposition of 1867.² Supported by the visionary and energetic Minister of Public Works ‘Ali Mubarak (1823–1893),³ Isma‘il launched an unparalleled programme of urban renovation. His frenzy with Cairo's upgrade was made all the more pressing by an imminent occasion such as the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As historian Khaled Fahmy rightly observed, though, such emphasis on the catch-all term ‘Europeification’ risks obscuring not only the fact that the origins of Cairo's transformation predated Isma‘il's accession to the throne, but also that this process was far more complex, hybrid and gradual than usually portrayed.⁴ For all the influence that Parisian urbanism may have had on modern planning in Cairo, the renovation of the city was in fact largely defined by a mixture of conjunctural circumstances, such as budget constraints imposed by the Casse de la Debte Publique after Egypt's bankruptcy in 1875; the interests of private companies; and the peculiar structure of local governance, notably the complex relationship between the khedive, private investors and a number of administrative bodies with overlapping competencies. Modern urban planning in Cairo also implied the manipulation of the local legal system, especially in relation to waqf buildings, prioritising interpretation over strict literalism because of pragmatic considerations. In 1866, a La'ihat al Tanzim (Tanzim Ordinance) further specified the criteria for the organisation of public space in accordance with the dominant medical and political ideas of the day; the sanitation of space equalled the deployment of a correct functioning civic order. Straight, ample streets and spacious squares structured the urban space, allowing free circulation of people and fresh, healthy air. As Timothy Mitchell aptly remarked,

Open, well-lit streets were a benefit not only to health but to commerce, for they embodied the principle of visibility and inspection […] The dark ‘interior’ of the city, cleared of its human agglomerations, would become easier to police, and artificial lightning would enable the new shops and places of entertainment to do business into the night. Financially, the need for cleanliness in the streets reflected the newly envisaged relationship between the city as a site of consumption and the countryside as a place of production.⁵

Change was undoubtedly fast and selective. The demolition of unsanitary, narrow streets and old houses in order to make space for neat thoroughfares and new apartment blocks in European style meant relocating low-class Egyptians to the margins of the new modern city: in the words of American diplomat Thomas S. Harrison, Cairo offered ‘the spectacle of two distinct cities in one, each filled with a different people, unlike in race, customs, and religion’.⁶ All those trends that had already marked Cairo's development during Ismaʿil's reign – expansion of built-in areas, urban planning and increasing Western economic and cultural penetration – intensified on an unprecedented scale after British occupation. The British invaded the country in response to a broad proto-nationalist movement in 1882. They quickly enthroned a pliable ruler, the young and dull Khedive Tawfiq (r. 1879–1892), and set about developing a form of colonial enterprise that lasted formally until the country's unilateral independence in 1922, in fact ending only after the Free Officers Revolution. As Egypt was further integrated into the global market, as a supplier of raw materials to the British textile manufacturing industry and as a purchaser of finished goods, a plantation economy was fostered with the aim of maximising cotton export to the global market. Small cultivators saw a rapid increase in the pace of dispossession they had been subjected to since the middle of the nineteenth century.⁷ For many, the choice was between staying on as sharecroppers or leaving the countryside in search of new employment opportunities in cities. Rural exodus to Egyptian urban centres was a major consequence, and one that greatly changed the face of cities such as Cairo and Alexandria.

According to urban historian André Raymond, Cairo's population increased from 374,000 in 1882 to 1,312,000 in 1937, that is, 250 per cent over a time span of 45 years.⁸ Much of the demographic influx was constituted by rural migrants seeking employment opportunities and better living standards.⁹ They usually settled in the poorest neighbourhoods of the medieval Islamic city, such as Gamaliyyah, Bab-al-Sha‘riyyah, Darb al-Ahmar and the northern commercial district of Bulaq, where they could rely on the social networks of urbanised co-villagers, who could offer material and psychological support. However, a significant number of newcomers also consisted of foreigners. Due to favourable investment conditions under the Capitulation laws and as a result of better occupational possibilities, European presence in the city increased constantly: aggregate data given by Raymond show that the number of foreign residents in Cairo rose from 18,289 in 1882 to 76,173 in 1927.¹⁰ The British (11,221 individuals in 1927, tenfold their number in 1882) and French communities (9,549 units in 1927), wielded most of the political influence and economic power. Over time they also became increasingly stratified, as wealthy businessmen and speculators were joined by a growing number of working-class people in search of a better life in the Empire.¹¹ The largest communities, namely the Greek (20,115 individuals in 1927),¹² and the Italian (18,575 individuals in the same year),¹³ had deep historical roots that could be traced back to the early nineteenth century.¹⁴ In the last quarter of the century, though, the incipient crisis of agrarian economies in the South of Europe sustained a steady emigration towards the booming North African countries. Other than these four main European communities, many other national groups were present in Cairo as well: the 1927 census of Egypt enlisted 23 nationalities,¹⁵ not to mention the shawwam community that originated from the bilad al-sham, which shared the Ottoman nationality with native Egyptians. Moreover, in that same year 23,103 Jews lived in the Egyptian capital,¹⁶ the majority being local subjects from the Egyptian diaspora community that had established itself in Cairo in ancient times: although it had preserved its cultural identity, it was fully integrated within the local society.

Steady population growth resulted in a dramatic expansion of Cairo's built-up area (i.e., from 1,000 hectares in 1882 to 16,330 hectares in 1937),¹⁷ accompanied by blatant speculation in the real estate sector. During the speculative boom of 1897–1907, when the inflow of private, foreign and local investments was considerable, Cairo became known as a sort of El Dorado.¹⁸ The combined effect of the increase in agricultural output and the confidence in the realisation of high profits from any kind of business related to rural lands or urban properties generated an investment upsurge in all types of sectors, from mortgage and banking to transport. Visiting Cairo in 1906, freelance journalist and commercial agent Amédée Baillot De Guerville thus described Cairo's speculative bubble:

The whole population seems to have been bitten with a mania for building. The streets are crowded with builders’ carts, full of material, and on all sides, surrounded by scaffolding, are houses under construction. Huge flats, immense palaces, super hotels, have arisen where, a year or two ago, nothing but gardens were to be seen. Egypt, at this moment, is passing through a period of great prosperity. Everyone is coining money and, as the value of land and property is increasing daily, all those who have capital, and they are many, hasten to build.¹⁹

Circulation within the city was made easier thanks to the paving of large tracts of the street system, to the effect that by 1917 public taxicab-driving constituted the single most common occupation in Cairo,²⁰ while municipal utilities like sewage and gaslights were introduced in the newly planned parts of the city.²¹ Modernisation impacted the urban fabric rather selectively, though. The old city quickly overpopulated. Between 1882 and 1927, the population of Gamaliyyah increased by 44,788 residents, while the number of people living in Darb al-Ahmar increased by 52,544 units during the same period. In 1927 the more recent, highly popular commercial area of Bulaq accommodated 79,681 people more than in 1882.²² Here services and infrastructures, not having been subjected to any significant modernisation, quickly collapsed under demographic pressure. Colonial elites, a foreign-comprador bourgeoisie and rich locals populated the newly built wealthy quarters, which seemed to combine European high society life with the exoticism of the Orient. The main commercial district around Shari ‘Kamal and Midan al Opera, with its big Department Stores displaying ifrangi goods of every type, seemed to defy – in De Guerville's words – the stereotype of the dual city, with a rigid separation between colonials and natives:

it would be impossible, even in dreams, to picture anything more animated than this living panorama, where East meets West, and meeting seems to mix one in the other. The eye is first struck by the thousands of little red spots on which hang tassels of black silk. It is the tarbouche, head-covering of so many different types that it seems as if all Africa had given rendezvous here. The majority are of the sterner sex, with nothing Oriental in their dress but the tarbouche; otherwise they are clothed as the ordinary European, whilst many of them attain to the last thing in elegance. In this extraordinary crowd are negroes, Arabs in their flowing robes, Jews with shifty eyes, eunuchs, Egyptian soldiers, well set up; and, making their way amongst all these Orientals, tourists of every country and speaking every tongue, young foreign girls with a knowing look about them, mondaines and demi-mondaines, the latter with a smile indifferently for black or white. Here and there a native woman, hidden beneath her veil, passes rapidly, silently, mysteriously.²³

Nearby one could find the Azbakiyyah Gardens, and the international hotels catering for the throngs of tourists ‘doing’ Egypt in the season.²⁴ In 1914 Elizabeth Cooper, an American writer, described the exterior of the famous Shepherd's Hotel – a veritable institution of Cairene modern mass tourism – as a display of ‘cosmopolitan cool’:

During the season, that is from November until March, there is always a well-dressed crowd sitting around the little tables on the big verandahs of the hotels. One sees the French woman with her exaggerated styles, the American, looking as if she had just come from her Fifth Avenue milliner, the heavy but practical German frau with her heavier husband and uninteresting daughters, and finally the English woman with her blasé air and feather boa.²⁵

Women and Labour

Life in the city exposed men and women to the vagaries of the market, and especially to harsh competition for waged labour, in the absence of a strong industrial sector. Unskilled and untrained as most of them were, women were extremely vulnerable on the job market, and occupational possibilities for them were particularly scarce. In 1907, for example, 103,856 women in Cairo were unemployed as opposed to 32,843 men, while the largest female occupational group was constituted of unpaid labourers (domestic workers in their own households numbered 126,919).²⁶ Women generally – and often casually – found occupation in the informal economy as providers of services, such as domestic workers, peddlers, hairdressers, seamstresses and so on.²⁷ Poor wages and lack of alternatives might have led a growing number of women to turn to sex work, whose demand was sustained by the unprecedented growth of Cairo and Egypt's socio-economic change. Hence, the expansion of prostitution had much to do with the encroachment of global economy and state power on the lives of poor Egyptians and Europeans, men and women, during the long nineteenth century. In such a context, not only women who were deprived of the support of a husband (e.g., divorcées and widows) might have had recourse to the selling of sexual services for economic reasons, but also women whose husbands, pauperised and in menial unstable jobs for most of the time, were simply not able to fulfil their duties as household heads. In this sense, the idea that there is a direct causal link between the spread of prostitution and a crisis of patriarchal values and forms of control on women, a favourite argument of middle-class reformers and social workers, misses the point. Indeed, prostitution was not only the labour of women coming from ‘morally degenerated’ working-class families, as maintained by bourgeois observers; more accurately, it was the labour of women coming from economically weak, patriarchal families. Luise White has forcefully driven the point ho...