Egypt’s government suppressed a half-million-attendee fair citing hygiene

Evidence

The feast was an enormous occasion, and had grown particularly following Tanta’s connection to the railway system in 1856. Its visitors in the 1860s and 1870s were said to number more than half a million every year. Already in this period the festival began to receive criticism: that religious practices which occurred there contravened the law, and that it was harmful to the country because it kept people from their work. Such criticisms were answered at the time by pointing out that the festival was an enormous annual market, like the great markets found in every part of the world, at which business and commerce thrived. These views, however, did not prevail, and in the last three decades of the century the entire festival was suppressed, an act carried out in the name of hygiene. There was concern in the 1870s about ‘the profusion of diseases and bad air’ each year following the event. The problem was blamed at the time on the town’s physical structure and resulted in the destruction of buildings to create open streets, discussed at the beginning of the last chapter. These measures were evidently insufficient for the purpose however, because by the turn of the century the government had suppressed the festival more or less completely, ‘for sanitary and other reasons’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the moral-panic and ‘hygiene’ justifications for controlling popular gatherings seen in the noise/soundscape readings; also resonates with how ‘public health’ becomes a cover for political suppression.
• SEED: Potential article angle: ‘hygiene’ as the recurring alibi for state suppression of popular culture across empires and eras — from Egyptian fairs to medieval carnivals to modern crackdowns.
• STORYSTEM: A character whose entire social and economic calendar is built around an annual fair that a distant bureaucracy quietly dissolves ‘for sanitary reasons’ — the moral world of that town unraveling.