The Mohamed Ali Fellowship Lectures 2025

Dr Mohamed Abdou (American University in Cairo)

Between Two Empires: Anglo-Ottoman Rivalry and Networks of Capital, Labor, and Expertise in the Estates (Çiftliks) of Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi II in the Aegean, 1895-1914”

Mohamed Abdou received his PhD in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University in 2023. As a historian of the modern Middle East, his scholarship analyzes the transformation of Islamic Pious Foundations (Awqaf) by the precolonial and colonial Egyptian state into a public financial sector, one interconnected by a network of debt and credit, that altered the socio-spatial relationship of urban communities, beneficiaries, and agricultural tenants with religious institutions and the modern state. His work also examines non-western histories of capitalism and state formation through the interplay between religious morality, economy, and citizenship in the modern era. Mohamed Abdou currently teaches courses on Islamic, Modern Middle Eastern, and World History at The American University in Cairo.

Dr Will Hanley (Florida State University)

Competing sovereignties and jurisdictions in litigation over Abbas Hilmi’s sequestered royal estates, 1915-1924 

Will Hanley is a legal and social historian of the Middle East. He is currently working on a Cairo-centered history of international law between 1870 and 1930. The Abbas Hilmi II papers promise valuable insight into the lawyerly career in Egypt and the social ties between the legal elite (both judges and lawyers) and the khedive. The conventional historiography suggests that the Mixed Courts were quite hermetically sealed from the Egyptian government, but the various power-holders in British Egypt took an intense interest in the personnel and operations of this court system. The legal relationship between khedivial property and the Egyptian state as adjudicated by the Mixed Courts is of particular interest. Abbas Hilmi’s sequestered property litigation during the 1910s and 1920s was a key node as lawyers articulated the emergent distinction between public and private international law.