Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008), 78.

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AS YOU READ IT Euro-Egyptian Romance in Turn of the Century Cairo MARIO M. RUIZ
Department of History, Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.; e-mail: hismmr@hofstra.edu
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743807080026

I put on a Malayia [robe] so as to be admitted. I sat on [a] bench with other native women & as he passed fell on my knees & asked for explanations. He did not reply but went in [his] consulting room. I followed him and upraided [sic] him. He said his brother was against marr[iage]. I offered to become a Moslem. He did not want me to do so. I upraided him again & threatened to commit suicide. He laughedsaid nothing. I said, at any rate dont abandon me, help me a little. He replied that I sh[ould] get someone else, he was not the only man in the world. I reproached him that he had ruined me.1

The above excerpt is taken from the deposition of a twenty-one-year-old Greek woman named Giorgina Rizzo, who lived in early 20th-century Cairo. Rizzo, who was on trial in a British consular courtroom for murdering an Egyptian doctor named Muhammad Abd al-Megid, narrates a dark tale of romance that captivated the jury who heard her case. This case raises a number of questions about the nature of love and romance in colonial Egypt. Why, for example, was the consular court jury persuaded by Rizzos narrative of love gone awry? What does her testimony tell us about interethnic and interreligious relationships at the turn of the century? Reading Rizzos case enables us to posit a new approach to writing the cosmopolitan history of transgression in modern Egypt. Specifically, it sheds light on the various sexual indiscretions that occurred among different classes of Europeans and Egyptians. Although Egyptians referred to Europeans by different
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8 Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008) names that emphasized their collective status as foreigners, we need to draw careful distinctions among the diverse strata of Europeans who lived side by side with local Egyptians.2 As Rizzos case illustrates, in spite of the religious and ethnic differences that existed in Cairo, transgressive notions of the illicit and the intimate were embedded in the complex relationships between European Christians and Egyptian Muslims. In her testimony, Rizzo alleges that she was seduced by Abd al-Megid after he swore on the Qur an that he would marry her. As their relationship progressed, the doctor declared that he could not marry Rizzo because his family opposed MuslimChristian marriages. Yet familial pressure did not prevent him from having discreet sexual relations with her, which resulted in three pregnancies during their relationship. After a series of botched abortions, Rizzo appeared at the doctors Cairo clinic on 20 September 1914 and shot him to death. At her trial, Rizzos recollection of the doctors seduction and her threats to commit suicide underscored the gendered choices available to her as a working-class woman. At the same time, because Rizzo claimed the legal privilege of being a European in Egypt, the jury found her not guilty of murder.3 Although exceptional in some regards, Rizzos case is by no means unique.4 Hundreds of early 20th-century court records provide insight into how ideas of sexual difference, romantic violence, and interethnic relationships were articulated in colonial Egypt. British consular court records, in particular, offer a unique perspective on the range of moral boundaries that demarcated colonial life. Through criminal cases from this period, it becomes clear that competing notions of love, jealousy, and respect were intrinsic to European and Egyptian communities that lived alongside each other. Popular notions of respectability, shared ideals of sexual propriety, and charged acts of violence helped shape the disputes that erupted in Euro-Egyptian neighborhoods. In spite of linguistic and class differences, the physical proximity of these communities often provided the framework for dangerous liaisons between Egyptian men and European women.
NOTES
1 United Kingdom National Archives, Foreign Office 841/147, Cairo, case no. 78, 13 October 1914. 2 See, for example, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, and Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 18821954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); J. R. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypts Urabi Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Robert Vitalis, When Capitalists Collide: Business Conflict and the End of Empire in Egypt (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995). 3 For a discussion of the legal privileges accorded to Europeans living in Egypt, see Jasper Brinton, The Mixed Courts of Egypt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968); Byron Cannon, Politics of Law and the Courts in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1988). 4 For another case involving a GreekEgyptian romance, see Rudolph Peters, The Infatuated Greek: Social and Legal Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Egypte/Monde Arabe 342e semestere (1998): 5365.