In a work of fiction from late-nineteenth-century Egypt, the main protagonist is a writer who goes to the tombs outside Cairo for inspiration. One day he encounters an elderly noble who steps out from one of the graves. After a brief introduction the grave dweller asks the writer to go to his house and fetch him his horse and some clothes. The author respectfully replies that he does not know where the nobleman lives. The infuriated elder curses and says:

“Tell me which country you are from, for heavens sake? It’s clear that you are not an Egyptian. There is...

A promotional video on counseling techniques that is shown in Egyptian family planning clinics tells the story of Fatima. Fatima lives in a workingclass neighborhood in a large city. She is shown to be frustrated by her daily chores and by the burden of caring for her children alone while her husband is away at work. One day a neighbor explains to her the benefits of family planning. The neighbor then accompanies Fatima to the clinic where she is received with extreme courtesy and is counseled on the pros and cons of a range of contraceptive choices. The neighbor, although...

As I discussed in my analysis of the Egypt Male Survey in the preceding chapter, demographic studies on Egypt tend to be constructed in terms of the rural-urban divide. In this formulation the rural is defined as the traditional space, and the urban pertains to the modern and the progressive. Egyptian health- and population-related surveys are generally designed to capture the negative impact of rural living and peasant behavior on contraceptive prevalence and acceptance. Arguably there are social distinctions that need to be recognized within a population group on the basis of where people live. In this chapter I use...

My introduction into Qaramoos, the Delta village community in which I did part of my fieldwork,¹ was through a local family health center, staffed primarily by doctors from a medical research university in Cairo. The doctors provided services and conducted research in the area for their postgraduate degrees. At this stage of my research, I was interested in becoming familiar with the people who used the clinic.

One of the doctors, a senior gynecologist and obstetrician attending to the clinic, suggested that conducting focus groups would aid in the process ofmy introduction. To broaden the research agenda, the focus groups...

“Ihna rabish” (we are rubbish) was how Rasha responded when I asked her whether she had any opinion on the family planning program in Egypt. She was a high-school-educated clerk employed by the family planning clinic near Qaramoos. Her disgust, expressed partly in English, was directed at the kinds of contraceptive pills available at the clinic. Women she knew had suffered multiple medical problems while on the pill and could not afford the luxury of a healthy diet that could counter their harmful effects.

While the Egyptian state implements its population management policy under the guidance of international donors and...

The Lacoutures continue by emphasizing that “the population increase in Egypt, from a social point of view, is linked to ignorance, superstition, ill health, poverty and the Islamic customs themselves (polygamy and divorce)” (1958: 358). Like many authors of the colonial and contemporary eras, the Lacoutures argue that these demographic and social problems could be corrected only through education and social development and by “restoring women to a sense of their human dignity and men to the sense of their responsibility” (360).¹

Leila Ahmed (1992) reminds us that arguments that linked Islam and its traditions with the subjugation of women,...

The population debate in Egypt has many actors. As much as it is a site of dialogue between the Egyptian state and international donors such as USAID, it is also an arena of discussion and confrontation between the state and other social forces in contemporary Egypt. Among them are the women’s groups, who criticize the state’s population policy from a secular women’s/feminist perspective,¹ and the Islamists, who take a religious perspective.² These political and social groups compete with the Egyptian state on the terms on which modern domestic spaces should be incorporated into a future nation.

Through ethnographic examples and...

It is important to note that some Egyptian scholars opposed the late-nineteenth-century liberal agenda of scientific progress and domestic change. Many Egyptian male intellectuals of that time took a critical stance against the advocacy of unveiling and female education by female writers and liberals like Qasim Amin.¹ Their opposition to women’s public education and participation in the workforce indicates a different response to colonial cultural pressures by some within the educated class. Omnia Shakry (1998), in an important essay on domesticity in latenineteenth-century Egypt, argues that the changes in the domestic sphere arose out of a dialogue with colonial discourse,...