Self-Determination under Occupation? Formation of the Modern Egypt, 1879–1956

As an internationally intertwined part of the British Empire, the Arab world, the Islamic reform movement and the (post-)Ottoman region, Egypt was a meeting point for both mobile actors and globally circulating concepts at the beginning of the 20th century. Against this background, the IEG project, which is part of the Leibniz cooperation project HISDEMAB, investigated how global concepts of health and nationalization policy were implemented in local contexts, whereby differently mobile actors renegotiated their affiliation to modernity, but also to their local context.

Two individual studies summarized in the IEG project served as probes for this: the study “Noso-Politics and the Construction of Gendered Urban Spaces in Semi-Colonial Egypt” examined the expansion of public health policy since the beginning of the 20th century and the associated implementation of gender norms understood as modern; the study “Debates on Citizenship and Secularism in Semi-Colonial Egypt” dealt with the emergence of Egyptian citizenship law after formal independence in 1922. Taken together, the IEG project aimed to demonstrate the control and surveillance of spaces and bodies against the backdrop of the cooperation and opposition between the colonial administration and the national elite. In both areas of investigation, the aim was to illustrate how processes that constituted a modern, but gender-differentiated subject were strengthened and legitimized with reference to a necessary modernization - with the help of a policy of hygiene and nationalization. Following on from this, the project asked to what extent the population affected by the political transformations was able to claim existing or new forms of political participation and what opportunities for participation and resistance were available to the mobile, ethnic, religious and gender groups classified as non-normative or non-Egyptian.