Abstrakt:

In the wake of studies on contemporary myths, this talk examines the memorialization of two Egyptian female outlaws, the sisters Rayya and Sakina. They were arrested in Alexandria in 1920 and executed in 1921, becoming the first women to be sentenced to death in modern Egypt. Still present in the Egyptian collective memory, they were seen as a symbol of female cruelty. Around ten years ago, the dominant criminal myth was challenged by a bandit myth, according to which the sisters were not criminals but anticolonial heroines, unjustly condemned.

This talk focuses on the two edges of this long-term process of myth-making. On the one hand, it aims to historicize how Rayya and Sakina were sensationalized as criminals. By looking at the press coverage of the case as it unfolded in 1920, it will attempt to deconstruct its exceptional character. In line with historical analyses of causes célèbres (by Partha Chatterjee, Carlo Ginzburg, Yvan Jablonka, Natalie Zemon-Davis), it will reflect on how history can make sense of the “exceptional”.

On the other hand, the focus will be on Rayya and Sakina in present-day Egypt, when a conspiracy theory spread about their criminalization. This led to a bandit myth that, while being historically groundless, became extremely popular. Building on a multidisciplinary body of research on conspiracy theories (by Michael Butter, Peter Knight, Andrew McHenzie McHarg, Annika Rabo), the aim is to reflect on what a myth can do to history when it challenges its methodology, pace, and pretension to truth.

Bio:

Elena Chiti is a cultural historian of contemporary Egypt and a literary translator from Arabic and French into Italian. She is a senior lecturer at the department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Stockholm University.

Her work focuses on cultural productions in times of social and political turmoil. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at IKOS, University of Oslo, in the framework of the project “In 2016: How it Felt to Live in the Arab World Five Years After the ‘Arab Spring’”. From 2018 to 2023, she was a member of the team of the ERC project “DREAM: Drafting and Enacting Revolutions in the Arab Mediterranean, 1950s-Today”. She is currently working on her project “Criminal Heroines”, which studies contemporary myths surrounding the Egyptian historical case of Rayya and Sakina.