When the television drama series The Women's Prison (Sijin al-Nisā’) was aired in Egypt during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in 2014 (covering thirty episodes, each around 30 to 40 minutes), it became a hit and attracted a huge audience (Fig. 1).Footnote 1 This was partly due to the popularity of its major theme, which focused on women and crime through characters inhabiting the famous al-Qanatir al-Khayriyya women's prison, located on the outskirts of Cairo. Another reason for its success was the group of creative women who produced it: director Kamla Abu-Zikri, scriptwriter Maryam Naʿum, art director Shirin Farghal, costume designer Rim al-ʿAdil, and director of photography Nancy ʿAbd al-Fattah. Abu-Zikri and Naʿum had collaborated on earlier works, most notably for their 2009 acclaimed film One-Zero (Wahid-Sifr) and the drama series Zaat, adapted from a famous novel of the same name by the veteran Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, which aired during Ramadan in 2013. Moreover, the key female role in both Zaat and The Women's Prison was played by the popular star actress Nelly Karim, guaranteeing high viewing rates.
Advertisement for the television drama Sijin al-Nisāʾ (2014), depicting the characters (from right to left) Ghaliya , Dalal, and Reda, played by Nelly Karim, Dora, and Ruby.
The Women's Prison was adapted from a play of the same title by the late writer Fathiya al-ʿAssal (1933–2014), published in 1993.Footnote 2 Al-ʿAssal was a prolific writer who contributed a substantial volume of plays and television drama scripts.Footnote 3 Even though she was deprived of school education at an early age, she educated herself and gradually became a public figure, playing many important roles in Egyptian public life. She was a member of the Writers’ Union Board of Directors, an activist in the leftist al-Tagammuʿ political party and head of its Women's Progressive Union, and director of the Egyptian Women's Writers Society.Footnote 4 She was known for her socialist-feminist writings that shed light on many injustices that Egyptian women face in society, whether within the marriage institution or the legal system, or the multiple discriminations they are subjected to in the education, employment, and health sectors. Her writings underscored significant political ideas, particularly those pertaining to notions of class divisions and gender inequalities. Al-ʿAssal herself was imprisoned three times during her lifetime as a political dissident against the regime and had an insider's knowledge about women's situations in prison.
In this paper, I explore the trajectories of some of the women characters in both the play and the television series and discuss how the lives of these characters intersect within the prison setting. The prison serves as a metaphor for the larger society and allows the writers to dissect the theme of women and crime through a sympathetic feminist lens that ultimately endeavors to understand the deeper issues lying behind violent crimes committed by women.
Al-Qanatir Women's Prison as a Metaphor for Society
There is one main prison to which Egyptian women are sent: al-Qanatir, which also is the primary setting for both the play and drama series under discussion here. When the phrase sijin al-nisāʾ is mentioned, one immediately relates the reference to al-Qanatir, which was built in 1957 in the Qalyubiyya governorate (part of Greater Cairo) and is about 25 kilometers to the northwest of the capital.Footnote 5 The prison comprises different units: murder, robbery, prostitution, fraud, and drugs, among others. It also hosts a hospital, a canteen, a cafeteria, and a handicraft factory.Footnote 6 However, the female political detainees who are unlawfully arrested due to their dissent and outspokenness against the regime in power do not have a designated unit in the women's prison and are placed with other inmates. Al-ʿAssal's play reflects upon the subdivisions within the prison while introducing the reader to a gallery of characters who have committed various crimes. The internal structure of the actual women's prison allows the author to discuss a broad range of injustices faced by women in society by situating them as prisoners, suggesting that it is the class-based patriarchal structure of society itself that imprisons and traps women within unequal power dynamics, especially working-class, illiterate, and underprivileged women.
Indeed, the structure of the women's prison as a metaphor for society captures perfectly the key argument in Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.Footnote 7 The system of discipline and surveillance based on power and knowledge inside the prison, which Foucault studies in detail in 19th-century Europe, spills over to society's institutions, such as the schools, the hospitals, and the religious establishments, to normalize two major concepts: discipline and surveillance. Women in Egyptian society grow up disciplined to have specific manners and morals because they carry the honor (sharaf) of the whole family. They are watched and observed in everything they do, which can lead to a feeling of being imprisoned within their own female bodies.
Al-ʿAssal's original play opens with massive street demonstrations against inflation—the rise in prices (referencing the bread riots of 18–19 January 1977). We are introduced to Salwa, a journalist and a leftist opposition figure who is taking part in the demonstrations and has just come back home, having evaded the police. Her husband Kamal, a university professor and a political dissident as well, calls to warn her that the police might come to their house to inspect it. He asks her to get rid of all the political leaflets they have at home. Salwa is expecting another member of her political group, Dr. Amina. But instead of Amina's arrival, Salwa receives an unexpected visit from a school friend, Layla, whom she has not seen for years. Layla pushes her way into Salwa's house and tells her that she has been beaten up by her husband and could not think of anyone else to turn to. This twist in circumstances perplexes Salwa, especially as the police arrive and they arrest both Salwa and Layla, thinking that Layla is Dr. Amina. Layla tries to explain to the police officers that she has nothing to do with politics, but to no avail.
As both Salwa and Layla have now arrived at the women's prison, the writer introduces us to various characters who have committed different crimes. We follow the women characters as they speak about their imprisonment and their perception of law, social injustices, and the driving forces behind their crimes. Salwa, the journalist who has been detained several times before (resembling al-ʿAssal) listens to the women's stories and tries to support their causes. For example, we learn about a woman who murdered her husband when she caught him sexually abusing their son, another who had no other option but to become a sex worker to feed her younger siblings, and yet another who was duped into drug dealing to escape poverty. We also see how the women have come to establish a strong support network and solidarity as a collective; nevertheless, if there was one who tried to deceive them or worked as an informer for the police, they would exclude her from this network and even punish her.
When Layla arrives at the prison, she is in a state of shock and disbelief. She perceives herself as a victim, first of her abusive husband, and then by the police who have arrested her without any evidence of a crime. We begin to learn about Salim, her husband, who is a wealthy businessman. Layla has no idea that Salim has accumulated his wealth by dealing in drugs and weapons. He abandons her while she is in prison. When she realizes that she was blind to his catalogue of crimes, she begins to transform from within. She is no longer the naive, subdued woman who suffered abuse in silence, but becomes a strong voice inside the prison. The play closes on this significant transformation in Layla's character.
Whereas the play juxtaposes the trajectories of the women prisoners to empower them with voice and agency, the television drama expands on key themes in the play, taking the viewer in new directions that critique present-day Egyptian society, with its power hierarchies of patriarchy and class inequalities. It also is noteworthy that the producers of the drama series construct a set that recreates the real al-Qanatir women's prison.Footnote 8 According to art director Shirin Farghal, after a few visits to the actual prison, they constructed the set on 6500 meters in Shabramant, which is located on the outskirts of Cairo.Footnote 9 The repetitive images and sounds of locks do not escape the series viewers, effects that heighten the feeling of entrapment behind prison walls and inside cramped cells. Interestingly, this leitmotif of confinement extends beyond the iron gates when the camera takes us to the homes of some of the would-be prisoners: we see narrow alleyways, dark rooms, cracked walls, and poor furniture. This dimness prepares the viewer for the crimes that will take place later inside these rooms.
We are introduced to a young woman, Ghaliya, who has recently lost her mother, a guard at al-Qanatir women's prison. Ghaliya has no siblings, and suddenly finds herself all alone. Her next-door neighbor, a friend of her mother, who also works in the women's prison, convinces Ghaliya to replace her mother at the institution so as to secure a regular income and keep the small flat in which she lives. This is how Ghaliya's trajectory begins to shift, from being a free-spirited woman who wanted to establish a small textile factory of her own, to becoming a prison guard who deals with the reality of violence and crime.
Complicating matters, Ghaliya is in love with Sabir, a microbus driver, who dupes her with promises of marriage after her mother's death. He coerces her to buy him a new microbus with the money she receives from her mother's pension, then leaves her and marries another woman who is well off. However, this young wife dies while delivering their child, so Sabir comes back to Ghaliya to beg for forgiveness. Despite Sabir's earlier deception, Ghaliya agrees to marry him and shortly afterward becomes pregnant. Viewers can easily sense her vulnerability as a working-class woman living on her own and yearning to have a family. On Ghaliya's first day at work as a prison guard, she immediately feels alienated from the job and says to Sabir when they meet later by the river:
The prison is a completely different world, not as we imagine it; for example the prostitutes and drug dealers, there are so many of them. The drug dealers wear a lot of gold. But some of the women murderers break one's heart. I don't know whether to hate them or be sympathetic towards them. . . . I don't want this job, I felt I was a prisoner. The prison is not just the high fence and locked doors; imprisonment can be felt in a piece of clothing you don't want to wear, people you don't want to see, or a job you don't like. The prison is something that breaks you and oppresses your soul. And I want to be free, similar to this river here.Footnote 10
This feeling of confinement and alienation on Ghaliya's part foreshadows her later trajectory, when she becomes a prisoner herself. Events take a sharp turn when Sabir's ex- father-in-law, Radi, pays them a visit at home to request the sum of money that Sabir owes him. As the fight escalates in the presence of the heavily pregnant Ghaliya, Sabir takes out his knife to threaten both Radi and his wife, because Ghaliya is questioning him about the sums of money she gave him to pay the debt. Sabir finally thrusts the knife into Radi's neck and quickly escapes the scene, leaving Ghaliya sobbing next to Radi's bleeding body.
Complicating matters, Ghaliya's friend and next-door neighbor, Nawwara, has been engaged in a secret relationship with Sabir. Hiding behind the door of Ghaliya's flat, Nawwara is the only one who witnesses Sabir killing Radi, but she accuses Ghaliya of the crime. Eventually, Ghaliya is convicted and incarcerated in the same women's prison where she had worked. Overnight her position transforms from respected employee and authority figure in al-Qanatir to convicted criminal and prisoner.
Ghaliya spends seven years in al-Qanatir for a crime she did not commit. She gives birth to her son in prison, but after two years the child is taken by law from the mother and placed in a state-run children's home, where he eventually dies due to neglect and malnutrition. Consequently, Ghaliya's mind becomes focused on revenge. On the day she leaves prison, she finds Sabir and Nawwara and kills them both. The series concludes with Ghaliya being taken back to the women's prison, this time as a real murderer.
Although I highlight Ghaliya, the thirty-episode drama series presents many stories of other women inside and outside the prison: mothers, daughters, and wives who tell each other why they had to kill or steal or deal in drugs or work in prostitution networks. This constant shift between the prison's setting and life outside its walls and gates reinforces the prison as a metaphor for social, gender, and class relations in society. When the women guards or ex-prisoners step outside it, we do not get the sense that they feel liberated. On the contrary, they feel as if they are moving from a small prison to a larger one.
Unlike al-ʿAssal's play, which foregrounds political ideas around the theme of women and crime, there are no overtly political discussions or political prisoners in the television drama. Rather, the series focuses primarily on social and gender issues and what is defined as a crime by the legal system (murder, fraud, drugs, etc.). The scriptwriter, Maryam Naʿum, draws on key motifs from al-ʿAssal's play to paint portraits of the women inside the prison, but she also introduces new characters and addresses other crimes.
Imprisonment within the Feminine Body and Sensibility
In her book Women and Crime Frances Heidensohn draws attention to the fact that the feminist critique of criminology came late to scholarly works and academia. For a long time, she writes, “women were invisible in conventional studies in the [academic] discipline. To a large extent that remains so.” However, with new feminist interpretations of the legal injustices that women prisoners in particular confront within a justice system that is dominated by men, she believes a breakthrough in criminology studies has been established. Nonetheless, she asserts, “there is still much to be done, not least in developing useful theories.”Footnote 11 I would like to argue that both al-ʿAssal's play and Abu-Zikri's drama series can be considered feminist interventions and critiques of the prison system in Egypt, specifically regarding crimes committed by women.
To complement the society-as-a-large-prison metaphor in both the play and the drama series, the writers situate what society and law refer to as crime from the vantage point of women. Here, the crime is committed by a female who could be a mother, a wife, or a daughter who finds herself imprisoned within her feminine body and the sensibility of the female self. For example, in al-ʿAssal's play we are introduced to Shafiqa, who keeps repeating a specific mantra: “I fell in love, I was deceived, I killed, now I feel at peace.”Footnote 12 Shafiqa was in love with her husband, and she had a flourishing business in belly dancing and performance. However, she discovered that her husband was cheating on her, sleeping around with younger women who worked as dancers in the business. One day, she found him sleeping with a young woman who was married to their son. Enraged, she struck her husband on the head with a kitchen pestle (īd hūn), killing him instantly. Shafiqa tells her fellow prisoners that she has never regretted her crime. She tells Layla:
The real prison is the darkness in which a woman finds herself. The real prison is when you feel your heart is broken and fate has deceived you. The real prison is the confusion and oppression. . . . Since I grew older and my youthful body was aging, I could see my husband's gaze following young women's bodies. I lived in a prison of jealousy. Since the moment I killed him, I've lived in happiness and peace.Footnote 13
This signifier of a woman entrapped within her feminine body and sensibility also is highlighted in the drama series, on several other levels. For example, the main protagonist Ghaliya is unable to leave Sabir despite her knowledge of his lies, thefts, and deception because she is emotionally and sexually attached to him. Once she becomes pregnant, the possibility of leaving Sabir diminishes because now she wants to fulfil her longing for motherhood and also to provide a stable home for the child. Yet, despite the heavy price she has paid to protect Sabir and their marriage, he escapes the crime scene, leaving her to carry the burden of a crime she did not commit while pregnant with his own child. Here, the viewer is confronted by several significant questions: Is it only Sabir who has violated Ghaliya, or is it the entire legal system, one that sides with men and fails to align with an underprivileged, wronged working-class woman? How could Ghaliya have killed a man larger than her while in an advanced stage of pregnancy? For the prosecutors, the easy option was to accuse Ghaliya because she was the one left at the crime scene, alone with the victim.
Furthermore, in both the play and drama series, the writers provide important insights into the lives of sex workers who find themselves entangled in networks of prostitution either through a conscious choice on their part, to establish power and prestige in a patriarchal society, or through the pressing need to provide for their families. In al-ʿAssal's play, we meet Saniyya, who finds a way to make money by posing nude in her own home in front of older men who come and pay just to watch her body. Saniyya has been taken to the women's prison and placed in the prostitution unit after someone reported her to the police (she never knew who reported her). She is driven by her sensuality, and the interesting point here is how she openly shares with the other inmates her feelings about her “burning” bodily needs for love and sex. Similarly, in the drama series, we meet young women who resort to sex work to escape poverty and destitution, but also those who have chosen it as a profession. Here, the profession empowers them with money, authority, and independence. In this context, both the play and the drama series demonstrate the feminist sensitivity of the writers, which aligns with the sensibility and field of emotions exhibited by the female prisoners.
Another key character who reinforces the idea of victimizing others to fulfill physical and emotional desires is Nawwara. Nawwara and Ghaliya grew up together like sisters. Yet this does not stop Nawwara from cheating on Ghaliya and persuading Sabir to marry her. Whether she is consumed by jealousy or is driven by an obsessive love for Sabir, she becomes entrapped in a scheme of betrayal and lies to fulfill her deepest desires as a woman. Later on, we learn that Sabir and Nawwara have established a car business together, and when Ghaliya kills them Nawwara is pregnant with Sabir's child.
Conclusion
The Women's Prison, the original play by the Egyptian writer Fathiya al-ʿAssal published in 1993, and then the television drama series of the same title produced in 2014, provide the audience with significant social, political, and cultural insights into the theme of women and crime. The key subject in both works is the notion of justice, positioned at the intersection of gender, class, and femininity. Both works focus on the trajectories of female characters who have been subjected to forms of injustices, either by the legal system or by their close family members and friends. It is often the case that women commit crimes such as murder and fraud to protect loved ones, like a son or a daughter. Women can find themselves victims of other criminals who implicate them in schemes of murder, prostitution, and drugs. In fact, the importance of these two works lies in the way they investigate the thin line between crime and justice through a feminist lens.
By establishing the setting of the play and the drama series within the confines of the famous al-Qanatir women's prison, with its high walls and iron gates, the viewer or reader can relate to the stories of the women characters who speak through the first-person narrative voice, sharing their sensibilities as women and the reasons that have led them to become victims of crimes or victimizers. This continuous oscillation between the position of woman as victim versus victimiser presents a realistic view of the injustices and inequalities to which women are subjected in Egyptian society. In both works, the prison serves as a metaphor for the society in which so many women are trapped inside their female emotions and sensibilities.
