Biography: TAREK N. SAADAWI received the B.Sc. and the M.Sc. from Cairo University Egypt in 1973 and 1975 respectively and the Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1980 (all in Electrical Engineering).  Since 1980 he has been with the Electrical Engineering Department, The City University of New York, City College where he currently directs the Center of  Information Networking and Telecommunications (CINT) and  a Professor teaching courses in Network security, computer networks, local area network, communications systems and information theory.

Birthing Egyptians: Mothers, Medical Doctors, and the 1919 Revolution

The story of the participation of women in the 1919 Revolution, including the mythologizing of this role, has been told. Women actively protested the British occupation, an occupation that had taken its toll on women’s bodies, health, and education. Egyptian women led demonstrations and served as symbols of the nation but were pushed from the political stage in the wake of the protests. Yet there is one area where women may have won a significant victory – inside Qasr al- `Aini Hospital. This talk focuses on the quiet rebellion by Egyptian physicians and surgeons, led by Dr. Naguib Mahfouz Pasha, against British administrators and supervisors at Qasr al-`Aini. The “father” of Egyptian obstetrics and gynecology, Mahfouz challenged inequities in a colonial healthcare system that ignored women’s sexual and reproductive health. He pushed for years for more beds for women patients and the founding of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Qasr al-`Aini Hospital and School of Medicine. The First World War and Revolution of 1919 provided Egyptian doctors with an opportunity to improve maternal health within the Hospital- School of Medicine complex. As this was the main teaching hospital in Egypt, this had wide ramifications for women and maternal health throughout Egypt.

Biography: Beth Baron is Distinguished Professor of History at the City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. From 2009 to 2014, she edited the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and from 2015 to 2017, served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her most recent book, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared with Stanford University Press in 2014.

The Egyptian 1919 revolution: a great event in the history of Modern Egypt

This talk will summarize the different factors that lead to the revolution, discuss some chronological details of the revolution starting from the historic meeting between Zaghloul and his associates with the British Commissioner in November 13, 1918, asking for a permit to travel to London to negotiate abolishing of the protectorate state of Egypt, a demand which was rejected by the British government. Details of the revolution which broke on March 8, 1919 and covered the whole of Egypt with total arrest of transportation and communication and the loss of around 1000 Egyptian lives. The talk describes the active involvement of the Copts in the revolution, the arrest and exile of Zaghloul, as well as his negotiation in Paris and the effort to gather support for Egypt from different European countries as well as the United States. The steps of failed negotiations between Egypt and Great Britain with a final unilateral declaration of abandoning the protectorate status and giving Egypt incomplete independence. This was followed by the creation of a new secular and liberal constitution, followed by a parliamentary election, the Wafd gained an overwhelming majority and Saad Zaghloul became the prime minister.

Biography: Professor Mohamed Aboulghar is a professor of medicine in Cairo University. He is the co-founder and clinical director of the first IVF center in Egypt. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Middle East Fertility Society Journal, which is a peer reviewed scientific journal covering the field of human reproduction and fertility.

The Revolution of Hearts, Minds and Creativity

The 1919 Revolution in Egypt was a significant turning point in Egyptian history. It was the revolution of national identity, national awareness and consciousness. In addition it was the revolution and the uprising of national aspirations and dreams. The cultural impact of this Revolution was huge, and lasted for decades. All aspects of arts and culture witnessed a renaissance of inspiration. Creative minds reflected what was sparked and shaped by the Revolution. Giants like Mahmoud Moukhtar, Sayed Darwish and Taha Hussein played a significant role in shaping the creative world, memory and dreams of their own and future generations. This lasting cultural impact needs revisiting, revaluing and reappreciating after 100 years.

Biography: Thomas Gorguissian is a journalist and a writer. Currently he contributes from Washington frequent reports and analysis to Egyptian print and electronic publications. Over the last 25 years he has written extensively, in both Arabic and English, on Egypt's culture, politics, and society -- as well as on US foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East, Washington politics, and US-Egypt relations -- for Al Ahram, Al Ahram Weekly, Al Masry Al Yom, Al Wafd, Al Tahrir, and other media outlets.

Whose Revolution? The Peasant Rebellion of 1918 and the Egyptian “nationalist” Revolution

During World War I approximately half a million Egyptians—most of them illiterate workers and peasants from the countryside—were recruited by the British colonial state to serve in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC). ELC laborers worked as stevedores on the docks of France and Gallipoli, they served as camel drivers in Sudan and the Libyan borderlands, and the laid the roads, railways, and water pipeline necessary for British imperial troops to cross the Sinai Desert. The massive recruitment of laborers had a profound influence on the social relationships of the countryside, and culminated in a massive wave of peasant unrest that began in the summer of 1918. In my research, I have uncovered 35 instances of rural violence associated with resistance to ELC recruitment, ranging from individual acts to village-wide demonstrations, between May and August 1918. By analyzing this body of literature and linking it to the diverse acts of protest that proliferated throughout the Egyptian countryside in the spring of 1919, I argue that the ELC was a substantial motivating factor in the 1919 revolution, especially with regard to the unrest in the countryside. I proceed to tease out the implications of this argument. First, this evidence illustrates that the 1919 Egyptian revolution cannot be reduced to sympathy with the nationalist movement. A close study of the ELC demonstrates this in two ways. First, violence in reaction to ELC recruitment and directed at recruiting figures shows that rural protests were animated by grievances against the colonial state over the issue of ELC recruiting, not necessarily by identification with Egyptian nationalism or the wafd. Second, ELC laborers who had already undergone the enrollment and training process actually stayed loyal to their British officers throughout the revolution, despite their awareness of developments in the country surrounding them. This provides evidence of at least some Egyptians who withheld their loyalty from the nationalist revolution and maintained allegiance to the British system. The second, related implication of this evidence is that historians must disaggregate the 1919 revolution into at least two distinct movements—one a centralized nationalist movement and the other a de-centralized peasant rebellion. This helps us make sense of how the British responded to the 1919 revolution; while they crushed the rebellion in the countryside, they negotiated with the nationalists and allowed them a degree of national autonomy.

Biography: Kyle Anderson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at SUNY Old Westbury on Long Island, NY. His research on labor history and the First World War in Egypt has received funding from the American Research Center in Egypt and the Social Science Research Council. He has published with journals including The International Journal of Middle East Studies and History Compass on labor history, The First World War, historiography, and organizational behavior. He is currently working on a book about the Egyptian Labor Corps.

Biography: Robert Tignor, the Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, teaches courses in African history and world history and has done research on British colonialism and its aftermath, world history, and the modern histories of Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya. His publications include Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt (1966), The Colonial Transformation of Kenya (1976), State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt (1984), Egyptian Textiles and British Capital (1989), Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya(1998), and Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World (2002).

Biography: Hussein A H Omar is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Modern Global History at University College Dublin. His monograph ‘The Rule of Strangers: Empire, Islam and the Invention of "politics" in Egypt, 1867-- 1922’ is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He is also writing a non-academic book called City of the Dead which tells the story of Egypt and the Mediterranean world through the lives of the members of a single family—that of Sa’d Zaghlul— over 500 years, from the eve of the Ottoman invasion of Egypt in 1517 to the 1960s.

Biography: Eve M. Troutt Powell is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of History and Africana Studies who teaches the history of the modern Middle East. As a cultural historian, she emphasizes the exploration of literature and film in her courses. She is the author of Tell This in my Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2012), A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California, 2003).

Civilizing Women: Gender, Sexuality, and National Belonging during the Egyptian Revolution, 1919 – 1921

In May 1921, two sisters by the name of Raya and Sakina became the first Egyptian women to receive the death penalty for their participation in a serial murder case. Although the judges at trial determined that the sisters had acted as accomplices to four male perpetrators, the Egyptian media presented Raya and Sakina as the primary perpetrators and called for their execution. The outcome of the case is even more striking when one takes into account that less than a year earlier, a similar murder case in Tanta resulted in the exoneration of the two female suspects. Through a comparison of these cases, this paper explores how and why gender and sexuality became increasingly central to the question of national belonging as the struggle for Egyptian independence intensified after 1919. Raya and Sakina’s alleged transgression of gender and sexual norms paradoxically became a symbol of both primordial backwardness and colonial corruption, unleashing a new discourse about the urgency of civilizing women for the sake of Egyptian modernity. I argue that despite their struggle against colonialism, Egyptian nationalists relied on the colonial logic of a civilizing mission to reestablish patriarchal domination after the revolution in the wake of a growing feminist movement.

Biography: Nefertiti Takla is Assistant Professor of History at Manhattan College in New York. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her primary area of expertise is modern Middle Eastern history with a sub-specialty in gender studies. She is currently working on a book about the effects of World War I on the socioeconomic history of Alexandria, Egypt. Her research has been published in journals and collected volumes, including Egypt/Monde arabe and Trafficking in Women 1924 - 1926.

Biography: Amr Kamal received his PhD in Comparative Literature, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently working on his book manuscript based on his dissertation entitled " Empires and Emporia: Fictions of the Department Store in the Modern Mediterranean." His work studies the writings of Emile Zola, Huda Sha'arawi and Jacqueline Kahanoff on the department stores in France and Egypt and the role of these texts in critiquing French and Egyptian social relations and national identity within the context of the Suez Canal Project.

Biography: Peter Gran is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840 and Beyond Eurocentrism: A New Modern World History, both published by Syracuse University