This paper examines on-screen representations of female criminals. It focuses on Rayyā and Sakīna, two sisters who were arrested in Egypt in 1920 and executed in 1921. Since 1953, the sisters have inspired movies and TV series that have entrenched their myth in popular culture. Rayyā and Sakīna are at the core of narratives that bear moral imperatives on societal issues, such as the place ofwomen in society and the relation of the nation to its margins. I will argue that, until a recent off-screen resignification, Rayyā and Sakīna have not been deeply resignified in Egyptian movies. Instead, they have been represented as natural-born killers, in line with the first "Rayyā wa-Sakīna" movie of 1953. What I call “the 1953 codes” – the markers that make the two characters recognizable – persist in subsequent works up until 2005.

Cet article s’intéresse aux représentations des femmes criminelles à l’écran. Il se concentre sur Rayyā et Sakīna, deux sœurs arrêtées par la police égyptienne en 1920 et condamnées à mort en 1921. Depuis 1953, les sœurs ont inspiré des films et des séries télévisées qui ont ancré leur mythe dans la culture populaire. Rayyā et Sakīna sont au cœur de récits porteurs d’impératifs moraux sur des questions sociétales, telles que la place des femmes dans la société et la relation de la nation avec ses marges.

L’article montre que, jusqu’à une récente re-signification hors écran, Rayyā et Sakīna n’ont pas été resignifiées en profondeur dans les films égyptiens. Au lieu de cela, elles ont été représentées comme des tueuses nées, conformément au premier film sur elles de 1953. Ce que j’appelle « les codes de 1953 » – les marqueurs qui rendent les personnages de Rayyā et Sakīna reconnaissables – persistent en effet dans les œuvres postérieures jusqu’en 2005.

This article examines idealised models of masculinity in Alexandrian literary texts of the 1910s and early 1920s in Arabic, French, and Italian. It intends to contribute an insight into Egyptian cosmopolitanism from a discursive perspective, through the lens of literature and with a focus on Alexandria. Instead of embracing a theoretical vision of cosmopolitanism, it seeks to reconstruct the horizons of belonging as they emerge from Alexandrian sources in different languages of the so-called “cosmopolitan epoch.” The masculine heroes in the sources are meant to be universal and, in some cases, exemplary. Yet they reach universality by erasing particularities, before choosing or accepting death. They die without having offspring. Their universality will be questioned from a gendered perspective, but also in terms of nationality and social class. National and social boundaries will emerge under the claims of universality. Then, the nihilistic paths of the heroes will be linked to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the anxieties it brought about. In the 1910s and early 1920s, the Ottoman horizon in Egypt was receding before the national one was filled with meaning. Moreover, this process occurred under colonial rule. Nihilistic universality can be regarded as a response to such a complex phase, when belonging either to a declining empire or to a fragile nation-state may have seemed equally hopeless.

As Matthew Gray shows, the conspiracy theories that spread, from below, in the Arab world often stem from a gap between state and society. This may result in an attempt of some citizens to deconstruct history beyond official narratives, thus empowering themselves as masters of the interpretation of the past.

This chapter investigates a conspiracy theory linked to Egyptian history. At its core, we find the case of Rayyā and Sakīna, a criminal case of 1920–1921, still presents in the Egyptian collective memory. In recent years, both cultural actors and ordinary citizens have presented conspiracist interpretations of the case, turning the criminal myth into a bandit myth.

The common feature of such revisionist attempts is a distrust of historical research and written documents. Strong emphasis is put on pictures, yet visual sources, deprived of context, become a tool to elicit emotional reactions, instead of being investigated as archival pieces. In parallel, bloggers and journalists frantically search for eyewitnesses. The acknowledgment of the impossibility of finding any, after one century, does not restore the legitimacy of historical research. In their quest for authenticity, these actors switch from time to place. They go to visit the Alexandrian district where the crimes once occurred, taking some “elderly people” – 70-year-old men – as truth keepers of a case that was closed before they were even born.

Through social media, official media, and fieldwork sources, this paper seeks to investigate what conspiracy theories do to history as a discipline and, ultimately, to its pretention to scientific truth.

The article examines bandit myths from a socio-historical perspective, as part of the socio-cultural reality of present-day Egypt. It engages in the semiotics of banditry encouraged by Stephanie Cronin by taking a first step towards a social semiotics analysis of Rayyā and Sakīna, the two Egyptian female criminals par excellence, arrested in 1920 and executed in 1921. I will argue that Rayyā and Sakīna's criminal myth is currently being resignified in terms that can be conceived of as social banditry. Ethnography, press, and broadcast sources help to highlight two different recent shifts towards bandit myths, linked respectively to national and local circulation.

In November 1920, the Alexandria police arrested two sisters, Raya and Sakina, along with their husbands and others, and charged them with the murder of seventeen women. At the end of a trial held in May 1921, the judges sentenced to death six members of the gang, yet it was Raya and Sakina who monopolized public attention as the first women sentenced to death in the Egyptian secular justice system. A century later, they are still alive in the Egyptian collective memory, which has turned them into a long-lasting criminal myth and remembers them as former prostitutes, madams, and female murderers. Previous studies seem to see the myth as resulting from the supposedly exceptional character of the case. This paper is a first step toward exploring how this exceptionality was constructed and how it took on a national dimension after the announcement of Raya and Sakina's arrest. The focus is on al-Ahram, the main national daily newspaper at the time, which covered the issue systematically, providing information on the investigation while building the case in national terms. A micro-historic approach to al-Ahram will enable a deconstruction of exceptionality through comparison with a precedent. An analysis incorporating both the precedent and Raya and Sakina's case will lead to a first hypothesis about the longevity of Raya and Sakina's case and the disappearance of the precedent from the Egyptian collective memory. This perspective offers insight into the connection between the press, public morality, and nation-building in interwar Egypt, linking textual and extra-textual realities and shedding light on the local aspects that make the nation. Indeed, the organization of al-Ahram in the provinces may be seen as a key factor in revealing what attracts national attention and what remains confined to a local dimension.