Afifa Tamer El Asmar was born in Beirut in 1900. At sixteen she ran away with a Muslim Egyptian man who passed through the Lebanese port city and promised to marry her. Between 1916 and 1919 Afifa lived with him in Al-Fayūm, a district that was a roughly three-hour train ride south of Cairo. For unknown reasons, her Egyptian paramour then abandoned her. She went on to reside in Cairo and Tanta, working as a dressmaker. Unable to make ends meet, she landed in a brothel in Ismailia, a town located in the central stretch of the Isthmus of Suez and perched on the Canal banks. The keeper of the house where Afifa operated was a woman known as “El Kharcha,” possibly the Arabic epithet for “the dumb” or “the mute.”1
The historical record hints that in 1920 the local female-led branch of a self-proclaimed “international” organization recast Afifa...
