Foundling children: Born in shame to die in silence

To describe someone as “ibn nas”, that is well-bred, has the almost magical effect of creating two kinds of people: those with known parentage and genealogy, who can be situated within the social hierarchy in accord with their status, and those of unknown origin, who have no place on the social scale, not even at the very bottom. The term used for them is foundlings.

At Cairo’s flea market, Souq Diana, I came across documents concerning foundlings. A ragbag of official correspondence going back to 1914 between police stations across Egypt and the director of the Qasr Al-Aini, a Dr Keating, on the admission of foundlings into the hospital’s chidren’s home. That home, which I had read about previously, was founded in 1898 in memory of the late Lady Cromer.

The home took in foundlings and the children of the poor. Some of the letters I saw concerned leaving a baby with the home permanently, while in others the police were asking for a baby found abandoned in a Cairo neighborhood to be admitted.

In 1914, Egyptians were conscripted into the British Army in large numbers to fight in World War I. In the absence of the men who had supported them, some poor women were forced to turn to sex work.

The papers I found reveal a great deal: women who had to give up their children under the pressure of need and shame; abandoned babies whose very cries seemed aimed to proclaim their existence, not as victims but as part of a history and a memory fighting against willful ignorance.

An admission of illicit sex

In those faded pages, the tragedy of mothers and their abandoned, foundling, children does not seem simply the result of wars, crises, and abject poverty. Their tragedy is also the result of the absence of justice and the policies of conscription, forced labor, and exclusion.

Part of the suffering of a woman called Latifa is recorded on one of these fragments: “I am Latifa, daughter of Ramadan from Bandar Al-Minya, residing with Ahmed Effendi in Al-Taloul Street in the Al-Baghala quarter of Sayyida Zeinab police district in Cairo. I undertake to Qasr Al-Aini Hospital that I will leave my son, Ramadan son of Abdallah, for his upbringing in the manner of foundling children. I allow it to give this child to whosoever it wishes. From this point onward, I shall have no right whatsoever to request him back, and this undertaking of mine was written to that end, Latifa daughter of Ramadan.”

With those words, Latifa hands over her baby forever. What made her do it? The answer comes in another piece of paper, dated the same day, in which she admits that her child was born from an illicit relationship. “The honorable director of Qasr Al-Aini Hospital, please issue an order for the admission of my son Ramadan, who was born out of wedlock, among the foundling children. From this point onward, I shall have no right whatsoever to request him back, given that I am unable to nurse him, and I must go out and earn my living. Latifa, daughter of Ramadan.”

In search of her newborn’s survival, a mother delivers her child to the home and gives him up for good. Yet survival isn’t guaranteed. Perhaps that’s the message another child, Mohamed Shaaban, is trying to send us: simply being at the home wasn’t enough to save him.

“To the Honorable Effendi, Superintendent of Imbaba Precinct: the child Mohamed Shaaban, admitted here per your report no. 7 of this month, register no. 1523, for his upbringing, has died today. We therefore send Your Honor this notice accordingly. 15 July 1914. [Signed] Director of Qasr El-Aini Hospital.”

“Forwarded to the Omda of Al-Agouza, to notify the aforementioned’s relatives accordingly and to send his personal papers along with the birth certificate. 17 July 1914. [Signed] Superintendent of Imbaba Precinct.”

The response came back: “The precinct has verified the entry for the child Mohamed Shaaban in both the birth register and the death register, as of 30 July 1914.”

The correspondence shows that the baby Mohamed Shaaban had a family. Furthermore, foundling children were normally given the patronymic of Abdallah.

The deaths of children come up in Lord Cromer’s Report for 1904: “The mortality amongst [foundlings] still keeps very high; it is chiefly due to the terrible condition in which the majority are brought to the hospital. The mothers abandon them, immediately after birth, on some piece of waste ground or in some abandoned building, and they are seldom found until after they have been exposed, in a state of nudity, to the weather for several hours.”

To complete the picture concerning prostitution, poverty, and the general state of the country during World War I, one can read the report titled “The White Slave Market” on a scandal from 1914 published in “Al-Dunya Al-Musawwara” on Aug. 28, 1929.

An alternative story

Those old pieces of paper provide a glimpse of a long history during which the human condition swung from one extreme to another. 

Foundlings did not always have such a miserable existence. Some were lucky, including King Sargon of Akkad (24th–23rd century BCE). His mother is said to have given birth to him in secret on the banks of the Euphrates, then placed him in a reed basket sealed with pitch and cast him off into the river.

The basket floated away with him until a farmer operating a shadoof (a pivoted pole used to draw water for irrigation) on the riverbank saw it and pulled it out. Finding the newborn, he took him as his own son. Aspects of the story resemble that of the prophet Moses. Sargon worked his way up to become cup-bearer to the king, before taking the throne himself and founding what was known in the Akkadian period as the land between the two rivers, or Mesopotamia.

In those far-off times, there was no concept of being “born out of wedlock,” and King Sargon of Akkad never knew who his father was. According to the legend, his mother bore him after she had dedicated herself to the Lord and the temple.

The story belongs to matriarchal culture. When humanity domesticated plants and took up agriculture, it viewed the mother as a sacred figure, the belly that generated the hands to work the fields. And at the time, human beings created a legion of gods who granted fertility and protected and blessed mothers and newborns in ancient agricultural civilizations, as well documented in “Sexual Life in Ancient Egypt,” by Lise Manniche, where she describes the shape of daily life, the rules governing sex, and the status of women.

Books from the Islamic tradition concerning the Arabian Peninsula before Islam are full of stories about strong women who gave their names to their children, and others who chose who the father was.

Control over bodies, surveilling them, and disciplining them through laws, regulations, and punishments, did not begin with the modern state. It more likely began with the criminalization of sex outside of marriage as imposed by the Abrahamic religions, and the emergence of terms like guilt complex, haram and halal, and adultery and illegitimate pregnancy. With that, humanity entered a new phase in which the sanctity of life receded behind wealth and religious rulings, and stigma and corporal punishment took center stage to terrorize anyone who defied society and religion.

Theorists of modernity, such as Michel Foucault, hold that the control, surveillance, and discipling and punishment of bodies emerged with the modern state in the 19th century. And in the modern age, seals and stamps, signatures, and laws and regulations smothered the cries of foundlings and concealed the suffering of their mothers, who were accused of illegitimate pregnancies. In the end, this system gave birth to other crimes, such as the killing of children to escape stigma or their abandonment on the side of the road.

Foundlings in the Islamic state

We do not have reports of foundlings from the pre-Islamic period, and the term foundling child is first used during the caliphate of Omar ibn Al-Khattab at a time when the boundaries of the Islamic state were expanding. New problems emerged, including large numbers of foundlings, a situation that called for the promulgation of laws to deal with it. Omar ibn Al-Khattab is reported to have said, “The foundling is free [not a slave], and his loyalty and mind are with the Muslims.” Foundlings were to be provided for from the Muslim treasury (Bayt Al-Mal), unless someone was found to provide for them.

Women lost their old sway and, in the folk tradition, became “one of Satan’s talons.” Islam also prohibited adoption in an effort to preserve genealogical purity. 

During the Middle Ages and until the 19th century, the poor in Egypt received a range of services through the religious endowments (awqaf) left by rulers and the wealthy. These might take the form of hostels (tekkiya), hospitals, schools, and water cisterns (sabil). The best known is the Bimaristan, or hospital, of Sultan Qalawun.

These endowments provided services to poor men, women, and children, with the benefactor wishing to perform good deeds and secure a place in the afterlife. At the time, the authorities did not intervene to oversee orphans and foundlings, register them, or define the state’s relationship with them.

In the 19th century, Mohammed Ali took power in Egypt and gained control of the endowments’ funds. Aiming to build a modern state, he issued orders to subject the population to his will and set out to create an army of Egyptians and the institutions, like schools and hospitals, to serve this army.

In his study “Women, Medicine, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Egypt,” Khaled Fahmy describes Mohamed Ali’s “ravenous conscription policy, which forced tens of thousands of men to move around from city to city and from region to region, leaving their wives, mothers, and daughters behind.” As a result, according to a contemporary account, “Numbers of young wives thus abandoned are compelled by starvation, or to prevent their children from perishing to join the almé [i.e., prostitutes].” 

This situation meant more foundlings and the proliferation of syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases. 

Against the backdrop, the first “government” children’s home for orphans and Cairo’s foundlings was established in the 1830s within the Ezbekiyya School of Midwives. Between one and three foundlings entered the home each month, according to Mine Ener in her book “Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800–1952.” 

Amid the rubble of poverty and homelessness, the monuments of “old” Cairo emerged as both witness and key player in the process of “modernization.” The story didn’t stop at haphazard excavation and the plunder of Egyptian antiquities. The mosque of Ibn Tulun also entered the scene, converted into a tekkiya for the poor.

The Tekkiya of Ibn Tulun

Over time, old sites become abandoned, and they may take on new functions. In the 18th century, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun was turned into a workshop for making woollen shoes, a storehouse for salt, and an ironworks. In the 19th century, the mosque witnessed further, telling changes to its function. In 1846, Clot Bey ordered that the mosque become a military hospital, then a shelter for the homeless, the disabled, and the elderly. The transformation that led to the demolition of some of the mosque’s arches.

The shelter was known as the Tekkiya of Ibn Tulun, and Ener notes that it housed close to 600 people from its opening in 1847-48 until it was closed down before 1880 to preserve the mosque’s architecture. The institution also took in the residents of Qalawun’s hospital.

The Tekkiya was a place of safety for poor, marginalized, and unmarried pregnant women. Dozens of births are recorded, with 49 in a single year. Some women would go there to give birth, then leave; others remained to nurse their babies.

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun served as a refuge for the poor and homeless for 30 years. Its high walls screened the misery that “tarnished the image of Egypt” and allowed the country’s “enlightened” rulers to preserve their image before the dominant West. 

In the 1880s, the mosque came under the control of the Committee for the Conservation of the Monuments of Arab Art, which undertook its restoration and returned it to its religious function, placing it among the Pyramids, the River Nile, and other towering mosques which formed Egypt’s touristic image.

The period of the Tekkiya goes unmentioned in the history of the mosque, which rightfully carries “the fingerprints, voices, and memory of the city” and is considered among its most prominent landmarks. The mosque is simply said to have been “abandoned.” After all, who wants to remember “bastards” and the homeless, if only to preserve Egypt’s reputation?

In the modern era, from the second half of the 19th century through the mid-20th century, Egypt’s foundlings witnessed new events: missionary campaigns, conflicts, and laws, through which we can read fragments of the history of Egypt, penned by “religious reformers” and proponents of European civilization.

The Missionary Societies

From the second half of the 19th century through the mid-20th century, competition intensified between American (Protestant) missionary societies, European (Catholic) ones, the English colonial elite, Egypt’s wealthy, and Muslim and Coptic nationalist reformers alike over the provision of “charitable services” to foundlings, the poor, and street children.

Shelters opened up to absorb the surplus output of human poverty across Egypt. Shelters were the fashion of the age: their doings filled the newspapers, and charity galas were held on their behalf. But controversy swirled around some of them over Christian proselytizing and the baptism of children from other sects and religions.

In 1933, a fierce wave of anti-missionary backlash struck the Fowler Orphanage. Pressure intensified further when it was discovered that six girls had been baptized, on top of the presence of 15 other non-Christian girls at the home. Eight girls were forced to leave.

In response to the missionary societies, the largest wave of Egyptian orphanage-building, both Islamic and Coptic, took place in the 1930s and 1940s, to care for Muslim children who had been pulled out of orphanages run by missionary bodies.

Foundlings, bureaucracy and the law

After 1912, as the number of shelters and foundlings grew, women who found an abandoned infant were often granted the right to keep it under informal arrangements. In 1946, the provision “whoever finds an infant may keep it” was abolished. By 1965, all foundling children had to be brought to the nearest police station or shelter, where police would register the child and fabricate a lineage with made-up names and birth dates.

From the late 1950s onward, the Islamically permitted kafala system (a form of fostering under state supervision) was promoted as a solution to the problem of foundling children. However, its bureaucratic procedures could stretch for up to three years, even after the child was ‘delivered’ for fostering.

Not having a recognized father amounted to a sentence of social death, even becoming material for numerous artistic and literary treatments. That sentence was handed down by a long legacy of domination and surveillance over bodies, and the construction of a rigidly controlled social order with no tolerance for anyone who could not be counted as “ibn nas”. The prime example is the foundling, who can simply be defined as the person who committed no wrong, yet will be held to account for every wrong.