Events

“In Search of the Criminal: Bandits, Convicts, and Recidivists in Colonial Egypt”

November 17, 2026; 5:30 PM

FedEx Global Education Center, Room 1009

Dr. Salma Shash

This talk examines the legal and discursive construction of a criminal class in colonial Egypt known as the ashqiyā’, a category encompassing bandits, convicts, and recidivists. While many of these forms of criminality predated the colonial period, the talk argues that, between the 1890s and 1910s, changing economic conditions and nascent civilizational discourses reshaped these criminal subjectivities. The consolidation of individual property rights, the expansion of agrarian capitalism, and the reconfiguration of rural space converged with emerging trends of eugenics and scientific racism to create the ashqiya’as a dangerous, unproductive, and unreformable class of criminals. Through new technologies of policing and surveillance, like anthropometry and fingerprinting, colonial officials sought not only to identify and punish offenders, but also to mark, isolate, and exclude them from the social community. Colonial epistemologies reconfigured crime into an innate and irrevocable identity rather than a socially contingent status. Drawing on rural folklore, the talk explores the limits of these new disciplinary powers. Popular ballads and folktales subverted categories of colonial policing by transforming notorious “criminals” into heroes of national and anticolonial struggles. In doing so, folklore emerges as an understudied site of anticolonial knowledge production.