In 1933, at the Swedish Salaam Mission in Port Said, Egypt, an incident took place that had far-reaching effects, Beth Baron argues in this engrossing book, not only on the status of Christian missions in Egypt but also on the Egyptian state's welfare provision structures and on the expansion of critical interlocutors to that state, particularly in the form of the recently founded Muslim Brotherhood in nearby Ismaʿiliyya. A pupil at the combined orphanage and school, Turkiyya al-Sayyid Hasan Yusuf, was beaten by her teacher for alleged insubordination, likely in response to pressure to convert or at least to show openness to Christian ways and rites. Turkiyya became something of a media star; the Brotherhood galvanized popular opposition to Christian mission work with Egyptian orphans and abandoned children; and state actors responded defensively, eventually taking on the responsibility of caring for Egypt's most vulnerable subjects.
As Baron says, the status of these children and what happened to them, as subjects and as objects of these contending political forces, “have the potential to tell us a great deal about family, society, and the state” (xiii). This book joins other recent works that tackle political and social history by looking at and from the social margins, through the stories of those whose voices have not generally been amongst history's narrators. In successive chapters, Baron tells the story of Turkiyya from different perspectives—those of local and national state actors, of the missionaries at her institution and at others, of the founders and supporters of the new Muslim Brotherhood, and of British officials. This is an effective strategy that interpellates the orphans as both actors in their own right and as symbolic vectors in a “larger” struggle over political state power and the question of state responsibilities, as well as, crucially, the distribution of economic resources. As in the case of education, following the British occupation in 1882, spending on social welfare decreased; and the struggle to define and defend state prerogatives—to provide needed services to vulnerable Egyptians—was also caught up in questions of property control, such as control over waqfs, as Baron shows. Her detailed tracing of the many groups and individuals involved in the history of orphan care—and the rhetoric around it—is admirable and makes a fascinating read.
The Orphan Scandal also joins other recent work on missionaries in the Arab region as a signal force and sometimes a disruptive presence, particularly in the foundation and expansion of education at all levels. Finally, while the missionary orphanages took in both girls and boys, Turkiyya's story also suggests the particular valence of girls’ training as a sensitive area of social activism in the context of nationalism and resistance to the imperial presence, of which missionaries were seen to be a part. That girls, many of them from Muslim families, were being raised and educated by Christian foreigners, was a stab at the heart of the national family that reformers of all stripes sought to construct and buttress as the foundation of an envisioned postcolonial society. Apart from the agencies of the state, various nongovernmental bodies positioned themselves as both representatives of the children in the name of Islam (such as the Islamic Benevolence Society) and as critics of the state. Baron gives the Turkiyya incident and similar ones much credit for the Muslim Brotherhood's success in gaining support, indeed for its very formulation. In short, she argues, “[t]he orphan scandal politicized Islam in new ways” and buttressed institution-building by individuals who argued for social reform with specifically Islamic content (150). To argue that “orphan scandals” were so central to the Brotherhood's fortunes specifically seems a rather overdetermined analysis of the Brotherhood's early history, but as one element that was part of a complicated mix, it is persuasive. She also points out an irony: resisting the Christian missions, activists who labeled their approach as Islamic found in those missions a kind of model: “Islamists wanted institutions that mirrored those of Protestant and Catholic missionaries in their rigor in inculcating religion” (149). But can it be said that “[m]ethods adopted from the missionaries became a blueprint for building support for Islamist organizations throughout the world” (198)?
Although one of Baron's aims is to give us the voices of those at the center of this story—the orphans and abandoned children—the nature of the material and its sparseness work against this. Turkiyya's voice must be extracted from British diplomatic reports, missionary documents, and the Egyptian press. Children's agency is evident between the lines, in reported misbehavior that seemed aimed at having oneself expelled or having relatives obliged to “recover” one from the orphanage. But these children, not surprisingly, remain elusive as historical subjects. Turkiyya trained as a nurse; her “guardians” in the press and amongst activists received many a letter from supporters asking to marry her. The media star disappeared from view, though as Baron says, she had “left her mark on Egyptian society and politics” (201).
