Beth Baron will use the Turkiyya Hasan affair in the summer of 1933 as a lens to explore the dynamic between Christian missionaries, Islamists, and the Egyptian state. The attempts of Protestant evangelicals to convert the orphans in their care aroused the concern of Muslim activists, for whom the beating of Turkiyya Hasan at the Swedish Salaam Mission in Port Said served as a wake-up call. In battling missionaries for the bodies and souls of Egyptian youth, Muslim Brothers and other Islamists mobilized and appropriated evangelicals’ tools, in the process creating their own network of social welfare services.
Beth Baron is a professor of history at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. From 2009 to 2014, she edited the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the flagship journal of the Middle East Studies Association, and she is currently president of the association. Her most recent book, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared with Stanford University Press in 2014. She also authored Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005) and The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994). Baron co-edited Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (Yale University Press, 1991) with Nikki Keddie and Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History (Mazda, 2000) with Rudi Matthee. She co-founded and now directs the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Woodrow Wilson Foundation have funded her research.