What does a casual confrontation in a rundown shack between a landlady and her factory-worker tenant tell us about the history of gender and class relations in modern Egypt? Could a lost watch in a red-light district in the middle of the Nile Delta complicate our understanding of the history of sexuality and urbanization? Can an unexpectedly intimate embrace on a sleeping mat illuminate a link in the history of class, gender, and urbanization in modern Egypt?

Trivial ordinary incidents like encounters between neighbors, stolen worthless household items, and sexual contacts between roommates have loaded the court records of provincial cities and towns in both Lower and Upper Egypt since the establishment of the modern judicial system in the late 19th century. None of these incidents was so unusual as to inspire fiction writers or elicit press coverage. They were part of the social routines of crowded provincial neighborhoods. As such, they escaped the gaze of the heavily utilized historical sources of the Cairo-based press and policymaking records. I argue that these casual encounters among ordinary people in provincial working-class neighborhoods are most telling about class relations, gender, sexuality, social morality, and public and personal security. Analyzing such incidents illuminates the experiences of the class and gender regimes of ordinary people, their interactions with the state, and modes of governance. Examining these ordinary daily moments gives us opportunities to piece together the past; to test, prove, and challenge well-established theories; and to rework new ones.

During the first half of the 20th century, rural immigration to towns increased along with the establishment of mechanical factories and the expansion of urban professions. Although they experienced similar urbanization and population growth to Cairo and Alexandria, provincial towns, such as Damanhur, Kafr al-Zayyat, al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Minya, Tanta, al-Mansura, and Najʿ Hammadi, enjoyed a vibrant urban life and diverse economy that was different from that of Cairo and Alexandria. The majority of the country's population lived in towns that were neither the host of the central government nor cosmopolitan milieus. Nationalist, labor, and gender histories, often preserving the tradition of studying Cairo as if it were Egypt, have not paid attention to the grand and complex social transformations of provincial daily life.

Decentering the history of modern Egypt does not mean downplaying Cairo or simply adding towns to the historiography; it means de-normalizing the historical experiences of Cairo as representative of the experience of the entire country. In my view, decentering history means answering questions about modern Egyptian society with evidence from the lived experiences of people in different localities. It entails acknowledging and contextualizing differences and similarities among those lived experiences. It also means raising questions specific to particular localities, Cairo included. Decentering the history of modern Egypt requires researching ordinary lives and daily encounters between individuals and groups living in a dense web of social relations and socioeconomic and sociocultural positionalities. To address the absence of scholarship on urban history outside of Cairo, historians should bring together the discrete fields of social and cultural history. Sociocultural history from below and from the gender edge, I argue, is a viable approach to weaving gender and working-people's histories together and helping us think more creatively about sources and how to utilize them.

How can we write a social history that embraces both workers and women? Labor and women's histories stem from social history, a flourishing genre in the revisionist studies of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and in the historical field as a whole. Labor historians continued to associate themselves with social history, whereas gender history distanced itself and merged with cultural studies.Footnote ¹ The social history of Egypt attracted less attention while cultural studies flourished, and labor and gender histories have suffered unneeded separation from one another. Regrettably, social history, including labor history, has lost the momentum it enjoyed in the 1980s. Scholarship that has underlined gender and sexuality as important categories of analysis has overlooked the working classes. And, not incidentally, for reasons I will outline shortly, the histories utilize primarily Cairo-based sources.

Since the publication of Timothy Mitchell's Colonising Egypt, most scholarly attention has gone to the processes of state formation and the discourses and practices of the nationalist educated middle class, or the effendiyya (sing. effendi).Footnote ² Questions that examine identity, gender, consumerism, Westernization versus “authenticity,” public morality, sexuality, and other aspects of social culture have focused mostly on publications of the Cairo-based effendiyya.Footnote ³ Focusing on colonial and elite discourses, gender historians have mostly documented and celebrated the Cairo-based Egyptian feminist movement. The contributions of gender history in this way abandoned social history and fell under the genre of intellectual history, which has become a vibrant field of scholarship but remained limited in its scope and sources.

Gender is fundamentally important to the shaping of social history and culture, just as class is important to understanding the histories of the working-class, women, and masculinities.Footnote ⁴ Examining everyday life in working-class urban neighborhoods can give a more realistic assessment of the influence of bourgeois discourses upon a complicated and fluid reality. The social practices and discourses of lower-class women and men, as preserved in a variety of archives, complicate our understanding of the social and gender dynamics in modern Egypt. The contribution and limitation of recent research becomes more evident in the scholarship of masculinity, which focuses on the legacy of intellectuals and activists as reflected in printed materials and discourses of the effendiyya.Footnote ⁵ Juxtaposing national modernist discourses with the social experiences of daily life highlights the significant, but largely overlooked, role of ordinary people—from male and female industrial workers to artisans, street vendors, lower-class landladies, and prostitutes—in shaping the Egyptian experience of modernity.

A gendered history of the labor experience also can illuminate the masculine identities of working-class men, bureaucrats, and technocrats. Class and gender are processes that are malleable enough to be shaped by historical circumstances and powerful enough to influence structures and institutions. The gendering of Egyptian labor history elucidates how gender operates with and within the social category of class.Footnote ⁶ Gender, sexuality, and morality are spatially and temporally specific phenomena, not fixed categories. The daily gender and sexual practices and discourses of ordinary people in their interactions among themselves and with state institutions and functionaries illuminate the intimate aspects of the social transformation associated with the spread of modern industrialization and rapid urbanization in 20th-century Egypt. There can be no complete examination of Egyptian modernity without decentering the historiography, examining the daily lives of ordinary people in the context of their locality, and writing history from below and from the gender edge.

How to do so is primarily a question of sources. Renowned intellectuals and politicians in Cairo published memoirs documenting their experiences and perspectives. On the other hand, only a few ordinary people documented theirs. We do not have a memoir of a prostitute, a street vendor, a housewife, or a craftsman. A few workers published accounts, but most of these followed the sanitized language of the effendiyya and focused on unionism and political activism. Only a handful of memoirists, the exceptions, did not shy away from giving an account of their intimate emotion, coarse sexual experiences, and other aspects of private life outside the workplace.Footnote ⁷ Nonetheless, archival sources that preserve the experiences and the voices of ordinary people across the country are abundant and rich. Some of these sources are published and available at libraries that are publicly accessible. Others are unpublished and stored in government archives; accessing their depositories requires security clearance.

Among the sources that can help decenter the focus of modern Egyptian history are the published records of state institutions. In particular, the statistical department in the Ministry of Finance has published population and industrial and commercial censuses every decade since 1897. The Ministry of Finance also has published annual and quarterly vital statistics in both Arabic and English titled Nashrat ‘an al-Mawalid wa-l-Wafiyyat wa-l-Amrad al-Mu‘diyya (Return of Birth, Death and Infectious Diseases). These published sources are readily available in the periodical room at the National Library (Dar al-Kutub) in Cairo, making these sources accessible to all visitors with a valid ID. Researchers also can obtain copies (paper and digital) for fees.Footnote ⁸ No one needs security clearance to get into Dar al-Kutub or to file copy orders. Some volumes of these sources are available in academic libraries in North America, and more recently Arabic Collections Online (http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco) digitized a few of these volumes and made them available for open access.Footnote ⁹ I do not suggest that the figures mentioned in these censuses accurately reflect reality or that we should take them at face value. We must recognize that the state produces the censuses and statistics to serve its own purposes and to validate its priorities. At best, these censuses provide hints about socioeconomic dynamics, including health, work, and death, in all of Egypt's provinces. We should use these documents judiciously, as indications rather than as wellsprings of accurate figures.

Parliamentary records are similarly rich sources. These thick volumes, published through the government press (al-Mattbaʿa al-Amiriyya), do not contain exclusively political debates on national issues. They also document parliamentary discussions about provincial issues and incidents. Parliamentary records also preserve the petitions that ordinary people send to members of parliament. However, sometimes only revised and rephrased versions of the petitions appear in the printed volumes. We should be mindful that the voices of parliament members and government officials, rather than those of ordinary people, dominated the discussions and that scribes recorded and filtered them. Nonetheless, they shed light on many aspects of provincial realities narrated by local people. Parliamentary records also include investigative reports of subcommittees concerning provincial and national issues. Researchers among the parliamentary personnel often prepared these reports. In so doing, they collected valuable data; they had access to a great deal of information from government sources that was rarely shared with the public.

Moreover, provincial governorates and councils of cities and towns (baladiyyāt) occasionally published reports to celebrate anniversaries or the launching or conclusion of grand projects. Such publications contain budgets and other valuable information on the specific localities of such projects. Big economic establishments, such as Banque Misr and its companies, also had to produce annual reports and submit them to the general assemblies of shareholders. Those budgetary reports contain useful information about local projects and workforces. Some companies produced reports discussing certain economic or medical issues about the labor they employed or the locality where they operated.Footnote ¹⁰ The library of Dar al-Kutub houses some of these baladiyyāt published reports, but in many cases the researcher may have to visit the headquarters in the capital city of the specific governorate. Since the 1970s, government-owned companies in the public sector have had to publish their annual budget reports in major periodicals. Researching the Egyptian press during the last weeks of the fiscal year can be a valuable source for the socioeconomic history of major provincial companies, such as Misr Company for Spinning and Weaving in al-Mahalla al-Kubra, Kafr al-Zayyat Pesticides and Chemicals, and Tanta for Oil and Soap.

Researching local collections held in Egyptian towns and cities outside the capital may prove to be more efficient than dealing with Cairo's hustle and bustle. Most towns have public libraries installed in the local municipal buildings. Some old mosques and schools also have libraries that house publications on the locality. I have found valuable collections of publications and extremely helpful librarians in al-Mahhalla al-Kubra, a town in the Nile Delta I researched intensively.Footnote ¹¹ The public library and libraries of the local cultural center (Qasr al-Thaqafa, or Culture Palace), ‘Abd al-Hayy Khalil Pasha Mosque, the vocational high school, and the Coptic middle school housed government publications and other books on the town. Although these local libraries are underfunded and their collections are small, they periodically receive donations of publications from local individuals and families, including former parliament members. As expected, local collections focus mostly on publications relevant to the town itself, which receive little attention from Cairo's central state archives. Meeting with local people also opens doors to personal family collections of documents and pictures as well as opportunities for oral history. If the researcher is lucky enough, family collections might help to avoid the often time-consuming procedure of acquiring security clearance to the state archives in Cairo.

Going through the process of applying for a security clearance and a permit to access Dar al-Wathaʾiq and Dar al-Mahfuzat (both constituting the National Archives) in Cairo can be a bureaucratic nightmare. After submitting the applications, researchers may wait for several months with no confirmation of their application status; sometimes the permit is never granted. Still, gaining access to these collections is worth going through the application process. If granted access, researchers have the chance to tap into abundant sources that preserve the experiences and voices of ordinary people across the country. Dar al-Mahfuzat al-ʿUmumiyya bi-l-Qalʿa (at the Citadel) houses al-Ahliyya or “national” court records, including volumes of the civil and misdemeanor courts of each town and markaz (“center” or group of villages). It also houses the records of the criminal and appeals courts of each mudiriyya (province) and muhāfaẓa (governorate).Footnote ¹² According to the judiciary's structure and hierarchy, established in 1883, the Ahliyya court system has handled all criminal and civil disputes. Shariʿa court records, limited to personal status and family issues, are housed in Dar al-Wathaʾiq. State agents wrote the court records and provided selective information about the individuals involved. Except when they handled criminal court cases, scribes usually filled out a prototype form rather than drafting detailed reports. Misdemeanor court records tend to narrate ordinary encounters in the urban space and quote people's coarse language as it was uttered during confrontations. Therefore their perspectives emerge even when state bureaucrats rephrase their testimonies in standard Arabic.

Among the collections of unpublished documents available in Dar al-Wathaʾiq al-Qawmiyya, the files of petitions stand out as a great source for approaching sociocultural history from below. Local people across the country send petitions voicing their demands and complaints to the royal palace and government officials. Although these may be individual petitions, they express collective struggles and concerns. Writing petitions (ʿarḍaḥal) to authorities and people in power is a deep-rooted Egyptian tradition, especially among the poor and peasants, as documented in the ancient Egyptian text known as al-Fallah al-Fasih (The Eloquent Peasant). These petition files constitute the largest unit of the collection of the ʿAbdin Royal Palace at Dar al-Wathaʾiq. The Egyptian historian ʿImad Hilal has assessed that this archival unit contains about one million petitions.Footnote ¹³ When I researched these files in 2010, I discovered 169 boxes of petitions in the ʿAbdin archival unit and a handful of boxes of ‘ara'id wa shakawi (petitions and complaints) in the Majlis al-Wuzara’ (cabinet) archival unit.

People from all walks of life and from across the country sent these petitions expressing their views, either in a very crude and straightforward way or through the mediation of professional petition scribes (kuttāb ʿarāʾid). State officials preserved these petitions selectively in the ʿAbdin archive, and we do not know how authorities responded to most of them. Sometimes petitions were written in a formula developed by scribes. Nevertheless, they not only capture local people's worries and grievances but also reflect their moral values and worldviews. On the whole, court records and petitions are rich with information on communal networks, work systems, interactions in workplaces and marketplaces, domestic relations, and encounters between neighbors in public and private spaces. Since they were produced in troubling circumstances, they must be read carefully to extract stories of routine social interactions and recover people's voices.

Security control and bureaucratic inefficiency often stand as barriers between researchers and their needed research materials. Some researchers resort to the shadow archives of black market dealers and purchase whatever they can find and afford from Sur al-Azbakiyya, a market for a treasure trove of secondhand books, magazines, and posters, as well as from antique dealers and even garbage collectors. Others hire Egyptian scholars who have acquired security permits and developed an ability to navigate the confusing and chaotic archival systems. These practices raise the issue of scholarly ethics. First, the acquisition of material and its removal from the country, even when legal, prevents other scholars, particularly local scholars, from utilizing those sources. Second, when local assistants are scholars themselves, their task does not start or end with the acquisition of copies of research material. They are in a position to select and decide which materials are best for the particular research, and as well to explain and contextualize them for the foreign researcher. Is monetary compensation for their time and a token mention in the acknowledgments enough reward for their intellectual contribution to the scholarly project? Ought this contribution rise to the level of coauthorship?

The community of scholars needs to engage in a meaningful conversation about this, not only to make these practices transparent and beneficial to all scholars—including local scholars—but also to support one another. I suggest collaborating and pooling resources to digitize any research material that scholars have taken out of Egypt to make it available to all interested researchers, inside and outside of Egypt. Collaborative work also can include developing a digital platform for databases of names and documents that researchers happen to come across, possess copies of, or have accurate notes about. Scholars might start developing research grant applications to tap federal and private grant funds, such as Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) and Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants, both from the US National Endowment for the Humanities. The number of available grants to support digital humanities is promising. Scholars need to collaborate with local Egyptian scholars on research panels and in writing workshops by sharing theoretical and methodological innovations, and to more thoroughly acknowledge coauthorship of works that have benefited from Egyptians’ access to archival sources. Historians need protocols for collaboration and coauthorship for publications appearing in Arabic and in foreign languages. Anthropologists have established ethics codes and statements that can provide a starting point for these discussions.Footnote ¹⁴ Trust and transparency can lay the groundwork for building a network of historians inside Egypt who can advise and provide contacts to newly arrived Western colleagues, so that the work can be complementary and build on prior achievements. Although all this will take time, I hope to move the discussion toward a study of Egypt that does not equate Egypt with Cairo.