Ottoman History Podcast - News, Leaks, and Propaganda in Modern Egypt

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

with Chloe Bordewich hosted by Maryam Patton | In times of conflict, state governments can be especially sensitive about protecting secrets. When new technologies are involved, like the telegraph, confusion over how exactly it functions and whether it is secure invite new debates over the nature of knowledge and what the public has the right to know. In this episode, Chloe Bordewich discusses her research about news, leaks, and propaganda in modern Egypt. By highlighting a particular court case around the turn of the 20th century involving leaks of sensitive military information and telegraph operators, Bordewich shows how Egypt was at the center of a global story involving the Egyptian public's right to knowledge, new technologies, and the pressures of colonialism. « Click for More »

And on this visit, my last visit there, an employee, a civil servant, walked an Egyptian friend and me through the museum, identifying each of the artifacts. And toward the end of our tour, he stopped to unlock a room filled with shelves of old, rare maps. Sensing our interest, he told us that for a fee, copies of these maps could be made available on CD. But then he leaned in closely and he whispered, but not all of them, because there are maps here in this collection that could cause a political crisis. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Autumn History Podcast. I'm Marian Patton, and that was Chloe Bordewick describing her last trip to the Egyptian Geographical Society and Ethnographic Museum.

Chloe is currently a postdoctoral associate in public history at Boston University, and will soon be a postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. On today's episode, we'll be speaking about Chloe's research on secrets, state knowledge, and the management of information in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Egypt. Chloe's work highlights how concerns over how to manage state information and secrets coincided with a shifting debate over the nature of public knowledge. So why don't we begin with an overview of your project? What kinds of questions should we be asking about the nature of state secrets? What did the state consider secret and how does information generally tie into this? is a global story that I seek to tell. I choose to tell it from Egypt, and I'll explain why. But in general, I want to give a bit of a general overview, which is that when the 19th century began, most states did not share basic details of how they functioned, whether it was the debt

or revenue, the size of their armies, with people who were outside government. But by the century's end, a vocal public was demanding to know more about these very things. And I argue that in Egypt, a conception of information about the state as a public good, about the public right to know, crystallized really in the last quarter of the 19th century. And this was due to a few different factors. As I see it, first and most important was a political environment riddled with frictions. And this was largely a result of Britain's semi-colonial rule. But this foreclosed Egypt's own imperial project, the importance of which in the 19th century is often understated.

And later in the 20th century, also Egypt's independence. One question that might come up is technology. What role does this play in changing how we talk about what information people have access to, what information people think they should have access to? We could talk about radio, we could talk about TV. I'm specifically just here going to talk about telegraphy, which I think is really interesting because it was a technology on which the state really relied very heavily in the late 19th century. And again, this isn't only Egypt.

And the third thing I want to talk about is the expansion of the Arabic press, which is particularly interesting in Egypt, not only because there was a lot of it in Egypt after 1876, but also because it attracted dissidents from across the Ottoman world, across the Mediterranean world, to Egypt. Also, the mass press gave public demands for more information a prominent platform. It attempted to channel the masses, the public, as well as engage them. I was drawn to your statement that at the start of the 19th century, states were not very open about sharing their secrets. And in my mind, I thought, were they ever? So could you historicize that a little bit? Like why? Like the fact that secrecy was actually the default when it came to state information.

To my mind, I'm thinking of, you know, all these like Renaissance, like ciphers and cryptography. So why is it surprising that states were secretive? Yeah, no, I don't think it's surprising at all. I mean, I guess why I'm saying at the beginning of the 19th century is because I think this is a continuation of much longer history, really. And there are changes. I mean, there are other scholars have written about, for example, late 18th century France. You know, there were debates that began emerging in certain places at certain times. It's not that there was never any contestation over what, you know, kinds of information about the state people should have access to. I think, you know, I don't want to be sort of categorical in saying that. But I do think that really until this period, when I started in the

1870s, there's no reason why openness, say, if we think of openness or what it used to be called publicity, I think that that is far more surprising than any kind of secrecy, which I think if we look across many different states at many different times, was with the expectation not only of the state, but also of the public. This doesn't mean that there was sort of no interaction between the public and the state. I think there's been a lot of work done, very interesting work about, you know, petitioning, for example, or, you know, ways in which members of the public did seek things from the state in earlier times. Let's talk about that transitional period. Why did the public, so things from the state in earlier times. Let's talk about that transitional period. Why did the public, so to speak, start demanding more and more access to public information in this, what you call transitional period between the 1870s

and the 1890s? In the 1870s, Egypt fought a war with Ethiopia that is not particularly well remembered, at least on the Egyptian side. Ethiopians do remember it better. But basically, Egypt was pursuing an empire in East Africa, actually as far south and west as present-day Congo in the mid-19th century, really beginning in the 1820s and extending into the 1870s. And the Egyptian empire eventually chafed against the expanding Ethi70s. And this eventually, you know, the Egyptian empire eventually chafed against the expanding Ethiopian empire. And in 1875 and 1876, the armies of Hadid Ismail of Egypt and Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia fought two really decisive battles on the frontier between Sudan and Ethiopia, present day Eritrea. And in both cases, the Egyptians were defeated

quite devastatingly. And while this wasn't the end of the Egyptian empire, as anyone who studies Sudan will be well aware, it was the beginning of a retreat from this imperial project in a really decisive way. And why this episode, right? What does this actually tell us about information? I think to come back to that, as I said, it's kind of the end of this period of bold expansionism. But it's also a period just before, it's a transitional moment, and I think Adam Ashton has called the regimes of public knowledge. And partly that's because in 1876, there's an explosion just after these battles happened, there was an explosion of the Arabic mass press in Egypt. Al-Huram began to publish just after the second battle at Gurra. This is not the beginning of print, of course.

The 1860s and 70s did see the beginning of a number of publications, but they were mostly ephemeral or, you know, really limited in circulation in Egypt. And so this is the reason that I choose to talk about the 1870s here is that, you know, this is before the beginning of the British occupation. It's before the mass press, but it's not sort of before empire or before, you know, print. And so this is transitional in a number of different ways. But what is decisively different between mid-1870s and, say, the 1890s, is that basically there were a lot of rumors about the Egyptian defeat. And the representative of the Egyptian government in Mosawa, which is the port city closest to the frontier where the battles took place, they were

fairly successful in containing news of the defeat. And this was through control of the post, news of the defeat and this this was through control of the post basically sealing whispers of the defeat in an envelope with a red seal and silencing them by stopping steam traffic travelers who were perceived as being a threat keeping them at the frontier basically until the news had gone stale oh wow so they would like actually would they open letters and like confiscate anything that that sent rumors about Egyptian defeats? Wow. So there was definitely, you know, censorship. I mean, the censorship of mail, postal censorship, you know, control of human traffic.

Not everybody, but people who are perceived, for example, as perhaps foreigners. I mean, foreigners are both perceived as being really gullible, like Europeans, Americans, really gullible, but also kind of potentially threatening because they're like, you know. It's not in their interest to not spread rumors that might sort of spur discontent amongst the Egyptian public. Totally. Yeah. And, you know, what is interesting is that, again, this is never, you know, these kinds of controls are never airtight, right? this is never, you know, these kinds of controls are never airtight, right? Whether if we're looking at the 1830s, you know, Khaled Fahmy has written in All the Pasha's Men about rumors that circulated around the siege of Acre. I think what kind of a threat they're perceived and the scale of the threat that they're perceived as posing changes somewhat. And so in the 1870s, mid-1870s, there was the Egyptian, official Egyptian Gazette,

and it's a really interesting moment for the official Gazette because you actually can read more about what happened in New York and the New York Herald in 1876 than you can in Cairo. So I think this is a really interesting landscape. I think the next stage of this research would be to kind of go take another step backward and to understand even the sort of the moment before this transitional period. But I still think between the 1870s, to come back to this, and the 1890s, there's also an important shift. And that I think

for me really is, it crystallizes in a trial I choose to highlight in my research that took place in 1896, where people really talk about the novelty of their arguments in a way that is quite interesting. And particularly by their arguments, I mean, demand for public information about a different military event. Yeah. Right. So the trial. Yeah. So in 18, like what's going on in Egypt in the 1890s, right now we're talking we're post British, we're during the British occupation. You know, Britain occupies Egypt in 1882. And the 1890s are an interesting kind of liminal period in terms of the solidification of the occupation because it was intended or it was stated at the beginning of the occupation in the 1880s to be a temporary thing.

It became not temporary. In the 1890s, British advisors became ensconced in a lot more ministries, particularly of government in Egypt, particularly the interior ministry. So in terms of the state itself, this is a period of transformation, but it's also a period of yet another military campaign, and that is the campaign to retake the Sudan. So in the 1870s, there's this imperial expansion halted by the conflict with Emperor Yohannes of Ethiopia. In the 1880s, Egypt loses a big chunk of Sudan to the Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed. And in the 1890s, under the leadership of General Kitchener, British general, there's an attempt and ultimately successful attempt to retake this land that was lost. So that's the context here. Now, who are the soldiers, right? And this

is when we talk about public, I think the army is a significant kind of audience here that we're talking about, or actor, let's say. And a lot of the soldiers on this campaign were themselves Sudanese. But so I want it when we talk about Egypt, you know, I think we should not lose sight of Sudan as part of this history, too, in multiple ways. Nevertheless, okay, coming back to the main point here. So Kitchener is leading an army to retake the Sudan. Ultimately, this winds up, this culminates, right, with the establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, tighter British control of Sudan, etc. At this particular moment, there's an army marching southward from Egypt into Sudan, and a telegram leaks from the front. So slight bit of context here, right? The telegraph is not

new at this particular moment. Telegraph lines were built in Egypt in the 1850s. So this is actually several decades later. What happens, right right is that kitchener sends a telegram let's start with that kitchener sends a telegram to the ministry of war in cairo uh in 1896 reporting on honestly a lot of obstacles that he's encountered kind of mundane stuff though not great i mean there's malaria uh among the troops there as per usual there's always malaria uh it's really hot i mean and also there's he's encountered problems with supply chain basically the supply chain from egypt and so as per usual also as per usual really tricky across the cataracts coming you know between egypt and sudan anyways kitchener

is basically just saying you know stuff's not going great for us down here help kind of and he sends it by telegram and the minister of war uh egyptian receives the telegram he puts it in his nightstand on his nightstand he reads it he thinks okay i'm gonna deal with this tomorrow but the next morning he wakes up and the exact text of this telegram is appears in print in a newspaper so he opens the newspaper the next morning and he's like well i have the only copy of this message how did this this happen? Yeah. So that's that's what that that's where the investigation starts. And the newspaper that has printed this telegram, Al-Mu'ayyad, was a newspaper that was pretty antagon talk about the government, we're talking about one that is led by an Egyptian hadith, a Baselmi at this time, and yet also has this kind of hybrid structure with British advisors and whatnot. And still, remember, we should remember this also still part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914, not irrelevant to the story. And so, you know, basically the minister decides to kick off an investigation to figure out how this telegram got into the hands of the newspaper.

And there's an investigative office in the Ministry of War, and they home in on the telegraph, the main telegraph bureau in Cairo, and decide, well, this is where it has to have happened because they're the only other people who had access basically to this information. Are telegraph lines private between sender and receiver? Like how did they secure them in the first place so that they could eliminate the fact that, okay, it had to have come from this office? Yeah. Well, that actually is what exact, that exact question is an answer to which the people who were investigating did not have an answer until this case. They didn't realize how it actually worked. And that's, I think, a lesson maybe that we should think about in contemporary terms, too, right? If you think about, for example, monitoring of cell phone data, like how basically the

New York Times can buy cell phone data that track the Secret Service because it's just out there. Like people, lawmakers who actually make the laws about telecommunications often don't know how this actually works. And that was totally true in this case. And so, and that came out in the trial. So in the course of the investigation, that's kind of exactly what they're trying to figure out.

Like, okay, how exactly does, you know, this message get from point A to point B and like who has access to it along the way? And like, what does that mean? And should we change something about it? Should we change something about it and is it even possible to change something about it? What they find so so basically like I'll give you kind of the overview of the trial here and then I'm going to talk about some of the arguments that specifically address that point. So the the the trial ultimately which took place a couple months later, again in 1896, brought to court a telegraph operator named Tawfiq Kirillus,

who was a young, mid-20s cop, relatively marginal social status, came from a kind of poor neighborhood. And then also the publisher of Al-Mu'ayyad, who was more of a public figure, Ali Yusuf. So this trial, you know, focuses kind of on a few different points. One is just, it's culpability, obviously, like, and it's led, of course, by the state prosecutor's office. There are two kind of star lawyers who come to defend the telegraph operator and the journalist. And so to speak to your point about, well, like, how does a telegram actually, how is it actually transmitted? What they ask, for example, is like, well, okay, so when a message comes in, right, it's Morse code, basically, tap, tap, tap. And a telegraph operator would sort of

jot down the message, they understand the code, jots down the message. The question is, you know, in this particular bureau, in this office, there were 30 different receivers because this was the central telegraph office of Cairo. Oh, I should mention this was also late at night. This was the night shift. There weren't as many messages coming in at night. The question is, could you overhear somebody else's tap, tap, tap coming in? The dits and dots, as they call them in Morse code.

And ultimately, they decide, well, like, yeah, actually, you could, right? So there's that question about just the sort of facility of, you know, what does it mean to be a skilled telegraph operator? And these operators were people who, you know, were not known often, generally not known to the sender or to the recipient, and to whom, you know, the contents of these messages were entrusted. And there's been I think the Ottoman case more broadly about a little bit more has been written is really interesting because, you know, early on, a lot of Ottoman operators were Armenians later, including the director of the Ottoman Telegraph Service. Yeah. And so it's what's really interesting here is that they were often people who actually occupied a kind of suspicious or like social status and yet had skills, often because they were trained in multiple languages and were therefore really useful. And in the Egyptian case, there hasn't really been that much written about. I've tried to decipher this from this case as well as a kind of few things that have been written about it. But I think there is a little bit of that too. Most of the operators in the Egyptian office were cops. But regardless,

you know, they were often people who like sort of occupied the lowest rung of the middle class in that they were like literate, but because you needed to be literate basically to do this job. So, you know, I think there's a lot more to say there about the telegraph operator status. And, you know, one could compare it to other parts of the world as well but regardless of the fact is like i think that the government officials um who were charged with who were actually using these offices right didn't like necessarily realize who was accessing the messages or who might have had access and so in the case that the difference between postal mail and telegraph and telegraphy comes up as a and this is for me a really interesting example of like when it's really

useful to talk about technology because actors themselves were talking about like what is the capacity of this technology versus the ones that we may have been familiar with in the past or that we still continue to use a lot. So what happened was there was a law in the Egyptian legal code that had criminalized the disclosure, divulgence of telegram contents. And the Egyptian legal codes this time and still today are based on French law. But the French code from which the law came dealt only with postal mail. But the French code from which the law came dealt only with postal mail. And so this novelty basically was played on by the defense lawyers to say, you know, this is an Egyptian innovation, but does it actually make sense? And, you know, it's clearly sort of taken lock, stock and barrel from the French.

And yet the French, you know, left out the telegraph. So how can we play on this to actually to work to our advantage? French, you know, left out the telegraph. So how can we play on this to actually to work to our advantage? To cut to the chase here, I think one of the really interesting points that the defense lawyers, the team, made was intense. The telegraph, they said, you know, it's actually open by default. That a telegram, when you send it, is basically can be heard by any of the operators or frankly anyone else who happens to know the taps, right? So want to protect it you need to put it in cipher and cipher was in widespread use as you alluded to at this time so it wasn't like that wasn't something that people could do and so that came as really a surprise to the prosecution who claimed who said during this case you know

this is the public prosecutor also an Egyptian he says you know the telegraph office is the warehouse of the whole world's secrets so you know to to sort of bust it open is itself a kind of um an unimaginable violation basically and and the defenses will know actually like you should know better yeah yeah telegram is something that you know if you if you know think of find something else find another way to transmit your message if it's that secret after all. That's the technology layer here. But then there's the question of, you know, well, do people have the right to know about the contents in the first place? And I think that's, that for me is a really interesting question, layered atop this question of the actual technological, the capacity of the technology

to protect or to conceal or to disclose. The outcome of the trial, right, also matters here, which is that actually the state lost. At the original trial, the first trial, the newspaper publisher was exonerated completely, but immediately actually both sides appealed for the prosecution and that, you know, representing the state, the Ministry of War, et cetera. Like there wasn't any question about whether telegrams were secret or whether this information should be public or not public. It was just a question of, you know, did person X disclose this information to person Y? And the defense said, well, yeah did but but he deserved they everyone deserves to know this information it's really fascinating there's lots to unpack there technologically

well first of all what comes to mind is is kind of ironically the messenger app telegram today yeah right which like has this reputation of being pretty secure and like anonymized right like encrypted back and forth so it's ironic that they call themselves telegram right because because the telegram is yeah open as you as you explain right it's not really protected the original telegram anyway and then from the perspective of the state like what what is the boundary and this basically gets at the bigger question in your whole work that boundary between information that the public deserves to know and knowledge that then actually goes too far and could be used to the detriment of the state, right? You say the same thing with military secrets today, like how much the public deserves to know of operations happening around the world that could actually endanger those troops there. Again, on the technological question, a lot of your comments so far have kind of hinted at these transitions, these moves that were maybe not caused by, but at least facilitated by technological developments.

Yeah. And I'm thinking of the Gulf Wars, right? And like television and the media broadcasting of events of the events of the Gulf War were a big part of the narrative of like how, oh, this is like the first televised war, right? So the public reaction was very different compared to previous engagements like that because they were seeing it kind of live, right? Like live on television in a very mediated format, but still very live. And then contrast that with Ukraine today,

where it is live and it's unmediated, right? Because it's from people's cell phones. Yeah's such a sort of vibrant debate about that today but i think that it's often that the kind of crisis of trust crisis of trust and experts and around particularly disinformation the internet technology it's often framed as a kind of a you know a very contemporary issue um and um both as a as a consequence of the rise of the global right and the fault right and then also also as an artifact of the digital age and i think i've been struck throughout my work often by how much how much similarity there is between the kinds of conversations that happened at the turn of the 20th century around trust, around information, around disinformation. Not just because there were new forms, there were new forms of media coverage.

And this is why I think it's important to tell this as a global story and not a story that's kind of only about Egypt or about, you know, the particular modes of manipulation or obfuscation of only about Egypt or about, you know, the particular modes of manipulation or obfuscation of information in Egypt, which is that, you know, in the period, particularly following the case I just talked about, 1896 case, yeah, beginning in the 1880s, late 1880s, and extending really through World War I and beyond, this is a period of the codification of state secrecy in a lot of different places. This concern with military secrecy is really evident in the British case, certainly in the British metropole, you know, in the years leading up to World War I and the passage in 1911 of the Official Secrets Act, there's a huge amount of concern about German spying, for example.

And that's very evident in the deliberations over the passage of the official secrets laws and other espionage related. The United States is another example of where, you know, leading up to World War I, there's a passage of new codification, again, of official secrecy. And as we talked about before, secrecy itself wasn't new. I mean, the codification was a response to what was perceived as a threat to this order, right? So I think, again, it's important to tell this story. Egypt, of course, is at the center of these networks of international communications, transport after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

And I mean, this is really sort of strategic location for a lot of, not only for the British, but also for the Ottomans. And so that's one reason why. And it has this very interesting sort of sovereign status of being a part of two empires at the same time and also its own have its own quite sophisticated state. So that's why I think it's a really interesting place to study this global story. But again, I think we should also look to the connections with other places and why is this happening at this particular moment? And I think what I talk about in terms of political tensions, but also technology and media are all part of this story. You know, the trial of the telegraph operator and the publisher in 1896 has this cast as well,

but it's not explicitly, I mean, in the courtroom, the sides are not specifically casting this as an anti-colonial struggle. I think subsequently, it did become cast that way, in part because Al-Mu'ayyad was perceived as an anti-colonial publication and was allied with people like Mohammed Farid, who was, you know, leader of the nationalist movement. All right. I have two last questions. What were some of the challenges of researching something as sensitive as how the state managed their information? Yeah. And finally, where do archives as an institution play into all of this?

Today, we take for granted the existence of institutions like archives as places that preserve information for the public, right? It's like meant to be an accessible place. But we forget that there are also places where the state effectively controls what is publicly available under the guise of open access. So yeah, what were the challenges and how do you feel about archives as an institution? One of the challenges of this project has been triangulating between a number of really different kinds of sources. I didn't actually access the state archives. I did use a huge number of periodicals.

I looked at trial records. I looked at films. I looked at short stories. I looked at radio and newsreels. So, I mean, access to archives of any sort that date from the 50s or later in Egypt is really challenging. Basically, they're non-existent, except, of course, if you have access to family papers. You know, there are some public figures who've made their papers, theoretically at least, available at the library of Alexandria,

but it's really, really challenging. So there's a sense among many scholars today that we should diversify and not rely as heavily on state archives. And I support that, but the state was at the center of my research. And so understanding the dynamics of access to the National Archives and ideally having access to the contents of them was important. So this problem of access was something that I thought about quite a bit. And ultimately, my work doesn't aim necessarily to repeat the work that others have done as we're describing the problems of access, but does, I think, speak to, in some ways, to why access is so fraught and tries to bring actually historical perspective to that, to say, you know, not only is it difficult to get access to the National

Archives, not only do we face, for example, security, multiple levels of security check, which is true. You do go through a background check with security services in Egypt in order to gain access. But actually, you know, there's a longer history that we should try to understand. It's not only about access to the National Archives. It's about the relationship between information and intelligence more broadly and the fuzziness, actually, of the boundary between those two categories. But to just circle back to your question about the other sort of challenges I faced, one of the things I thought about quite a bit was actually communicating publicly about my research

for this very reason. Because information and intelligence are two categories that are not, whose boundary is not so clearly defined, because information, when we talk about information in Egypt, it is often assumed that one is, or research, I should say not only information, but also research more broadly, there's a lot of suspicion. And, you know, I think as someone who's writing about public access to knowledge, I'm thinking a lot about, you know, what kind of access do people have to the knowledge that I'm producing, particularly as a foreign scholar working in a country that's not my own. So like, why do these, you know,

this multi-sided project? I mean, I think, you know, historically speaking, Egypt was situated at the intersection of the Ottoman and the British empires. France had a huge also kind of hand in certainly controlling media. And a lot of Egyptian students went to France and to Britain to study as well. And so I talked about surveillance of students abroad as well. In Turkey, the Ottoman commissariat in Egypt conducted also its own massive surveillance and censorship operation. And I think that's really interesting to look at an intersection with what the British were doing. But so what are the kind of consequences of doing this kind of multi-sided project? I think I've explained why I think it's historically methodologically valid, but I do think there

are also, I have certain qualms about this kind of research too, or at least what the consequences are for the production of knowledge by us. And that's because, you know, who is able to conduct these kinds of multi-sided research projects, triangulating between, you know, archives in many different countries and different languages and so forth, you know, requires a large amount of resources. And I think those resources are available to quite a limited number of institutions. Those of us associated with those institutions are lucky to be able to do this work. But, you know, it does exacerbate or risks exacerbating very kind of inequities in the production of knowledge that in some respects I'm trying to historicize in my work.

And that's because researchers in, say, in Egypt are, and even in Turkey, rarely have access to the kind of resources that permit them to do this sort of project. Institutions are really poorly financed, not to mention, you know, the challenges of things like getting visas to do work in multiple countries if you're from all but a kind of limited set of countries. And so I think, you know, as researchers, we need to be very cognizant of this and to ask ourselves, you know, what can we do to ameliorate the kind of possibly, you know, problematic effects of doing this kind of work, or at least to, I think, be open about that imbalance. You know, I would only be, I'm only able to do this project basically as a foreigner, especially in the Egyptian part of this project, because I would be much more concerned about my personal safety.

I mean, it's a concern for everyone. I think we all know since the murder several years ago of the Italian, you know, graduate student Giulio Regini, that this is something that's in personal safety is not something to be taken lightly, even for foreign researchers. But the risks are really much higher, you know, if you don't have an escape hatch. You know, I want to underscore that the risks that many of our colleagues say in Egypt and Egypt, I'm speaking about Egypt, but this is not unique to Egypt. I mean, many other countries are similar to conduct a project that deals directly with the sensitivity of information. You know, those risks are quite high.

And I think I, yeah, I'm cognizant of the fact that this is the kind of project that's really only possible to do with these kinds of, not just resources, but also, um, it's almost, it reminds me of, um, the example you gave earlier of like the telegram room, telegraph room operators who were oftentimes trained in multiple languages because they came from social backgrounds that were somewhat liminal yeah so you as the liminal non-egyptian researcher right yeah who sort of trend the intermediary between the you know trans but but which in and of itself you know is suspicious i mean you know i think you know it's it's a it's a truism i guess among researchers doing work and and even those you know, I think, you know, it's a truism, I guess, among researchers doing work. And even those, you know, again, this has become more of an issue in Turkey also, you know, of late. But, you know, the sort of scope of problematic topics differs from place to place. And in Egypt, I think that the scope of what is hard to write about is really large, you know, having the ability to leave or to come and go, let's say,

is itself something that certainly is not available to everyone. But yeah, it leaves me feeling ambivalent in some ways about the kind of methodologies that we use, you know, not because of their validity, but because of the consequences of this terrain of knowledge production. On this note of Anhoff scholars should be cognizant or at least aware of how their knowledge production either exacerbates the knowledge equities that already exist. Yeah. Do you have any final parting words of advice for graduate students? I mean, I think something that we need to think about very carefully and that I think often is not stressed enough in our graduate education certainly is the languages

that we make our work available in. You know, I think it's really important for us to think about translation in particular and not only translating sources from the languages we work in into English, but, you know, how are, what languages we make our own work available in. And in particular, it should be available in the languages, the places we're writing about to be specific, right? And I think that that also, in a way, it's, it can help, you know, go some small distance in ameliorating the kind of suspicion that our work as researchers who jet in and you know research places that to where perhaps from which we do not come or to which we do not

belong and then leave and publish things that nobody ever sees right i think that it's really important that we're cognizant of that dynamic and why why i think quite validly that engenders suspicion so that's those are my parting words. No, that's an excellent point. And I look forward to the Arabic edition of your book. Coming soon. Thank you so much, Chloe, for coming on to the podcast. It was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thanks, Miriam. Listeners, as per usual, can always go to our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, where we'll have a bibliography and images related to the topic that you just heard about.

Thank you once again. Thank you.