In February 1938, the Egyptian government launched a project to provide youth with opportunities for agricultural vocational training. Two months later, the governor of Cairo, ʻAbd al-Salam al-Shazli Pasha, announced his decision to use those farms to house Awlad al-Shawariʻ, or delinquent homeless children. The governor was responding to intensive press reports and public discourse about Awlad al-Shawariʻ, a newly minted term expressing a panic about the presence of poor children roaming streets and loitering around cafes, theaters, and other urban spaces in cities. In one week in July that year, police forces randomly arrested children roaming urban streets without adult companionship.
To understand how the state reached the point of “kidnapping poor children” and locking them up in poorly prepared labor camps, my research traces the history of the criminalization of children, particularly the poor in modern Egypt. I argue that the incarceration experiences of children reveal important aspects of the legal evolution through which state institutions, individuals, communities, and judges express different interpretations of the law. Childhood provides an important intervention to study state-society relations and underlines the link between the secular and Sharia laws in the modern state’s legal and health institutions, how the modern legal system evolved as a gendered and classed structure wherein different social forces have played crucial roles. Thus, examining the actual experiences of children’s incarceration and the discourses around it allows us to deepen our understanding of the often-overlooked agency of those who have been perceived as powerless; the children.
Hanan Hammad is the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History and the Director of the AAEF Center of Arab Studies at the University of Houstin. She was a EUME Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in 2010/11. She is a social and cultural historian whose research focuses on working classes, gender and sexuality, childhood, and popular culture in modern Arab World and the socio-cultural interaction between Arabs and Iranians in the twentieth century. She is the author of Industrial Sexuality: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Transformation in Egypt and Unknown Past: Layla Murad the Jewish Muslim Star of Egypt. Her books and articles received recognition and won prizes from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, MESA, the Arab American Book Awards, and the Journal of Social History, among others.
Rim Naguib received her PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University (2016) and her MA from Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence (2006). Her research interests address three different, but not unrelated, fields: the colonial practice of ideological-ethnic deportation of internationalist foreigners and ‘local subjects of foreign extraction’ in the policing of communism in interwar Egypt; the post-colonial securitization of Egyptian nationality legislation and practice and of the management of foreigners’ residence; and the political and cultural history of Egyptian patriarchal nationalism. She is also writing and illustrating a graphic biography of Joseph Rosenthal (1872-1965), and has co-translated several graphic novels into Arabic. In the academic year 2019/20, Rim Naguib was a EUME Fellow and continued her EUME Fellowship in 2020-22 through a stipend by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. From 2022 to 2024, she was a EUME Research Associate at the Forum Transregionale Studien and continues to be a Fellow of EUME from 2024-26 with a scholarship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
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