ABSTRACT
In November 1920, the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram reported the sensational case of the “Women’s Massacre,” recounting the story of Raya and Sakina, two peasant sisters from Upper Egypt who had made their way to Alexandria via the Egyptian Delta. The press, police reports, and the criminal case that followed claimed that the two sisters, aided by their husbands and two other men, masterminded the murder of seventeen women and girls over a two-year period in Alexandria. Elites and the Egyptian government had very little interest in the case until Egyptian periodicals politicized the unsolved murders in terms of Egypt’s nationalist movement against the British Occupation (1882-1936/1956).1
