Editor’s note: This is the final entry in our theme for the month, Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean

by Ingy Higazi

In September 1923, Egyptian writer al-Sayyid ‘Abd al-Mu‘min Kamil al-Hakim set out on a journey from al-Qantara, east of the Suez Canal on Egypt’s northeastern border, to Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. His month-long journey from Egypt to the Levant, which he embarked on “in fulfillment of the duties of nationalism and neighborliness,” was entirely by rail.[1] In his travel account, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya, published in Cairo in 1924, al-Hakim vividly describes scenes of travelers, clerks, and the then-new border regimes and health control mechanisms along the railway. On one occasion, he recounts the mishaps of passport screenings and traveling bureaucrats.[2] Overlooking Palestinian villages from his rail carriage, he is struck by their similarity to the Nile Delta villages in his native Egypt.[3] By rail, al-Hakim visited Jerusalem, Haifa, Beirut, and Damascus, before returning to Cairo on October 12, 1923. The clamor and clanks of rail travel through the towns, fields, and mountains of the Levant come to life in al-Hakim’s hundred-year-old narrative, notable for documenting leisure travel on the Hijaz Railway (al-sika al-ḥadīdiyya al-ḥijāziyya) in the Eastern Arab Mediterranean.[4] However, today this rail journey—and its mobile worlds and connected urban geographies in Egypt and the Levant—is an impossible one. [5]

A century after al-Hakim’s trip on the Hijaz Railway, railway mobility between Egyptian and Levantine cities is a remnant of the past. It has been replaced entirely by militarized borders, state highways, and transport and logistics corridors. In particular, the figurative and literal replacement of the railway by the highway as the dominant system of urban mobility in the Arab Mediterranean has served to cantonize the region’s urban publics, as much as military dictatorships, monarchies, and markets for global capital have.[6] How do we probe a past of open borders and free movement, without essentializing or romanticizing this past? How do we reconcile a railway’s violent and extractive past with the forms of political community it once enabled and made possible? And in “the age of infrastructure” and the logistical remaking of global circulation regimes, how do we imagine open and free infrastructural futures in one of the global economy’s key infrastructural zones, which borders the global maritime chokepoint of the Suez Canal?[7] Through the lens of the historical railway, I consider the politics of free movement in the Arab Mediterranean, with a focus on Egypt and the Levant. I am particularly interested in the relationship between (im)mobility infrastructure and the formation or disintegration of urban political communities. Thinking about urban (im)mobility infrastructure in the Arab Mediterranean today is further necessitated by the increasingly violent and carceral politics of the Mediterranean Sea. This has rendered the Mediterranean—much like the US-Mexican border—an epistemic space for redefining freedom of movement and reimagining open borders in our present.[8]

A Material History of the Hijaz Railway

Al-Hakim’s account of the Hijaz Railway was written during the interwar years, which “were a golden age for travel writing in Egypt and the Middle East in general.”[9] His trip to the Levant followed the end of the First World War and the British and French occupations of Palestine and Syria, respectively. The British–French takeover of the Levant did not only stir well-documented nationalist and anticolonial mobilizations in the region, evident in al-Hakim’s reminiscing about “bygone Arab glories.”[10] But it also reshaped urban mobility and travel regimes. The Qantara–Haifa line, which al-Hakim traveled on, was extended in 1918 by occupying British Forces,[11] who used the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) to build a military railway network in the Sinai Peninsula.[12] Portions of the railway network that brought al-Hakim to the Levantine lands he is deeply fond of were imbricated in—and arguably made possible—the occupation of Palestine seven years earlier in 1917. Thus, by 1924 the Hijaz Railway was a patchwork of diverse imperial designs and constructions: Ottoman, British, and beyond. The architecture of competing and collaborating empires is very much reflected in the architecture of the railway. Yet, despite the railway’s embeddedness in militarized mobilities, al-Hakim’s laudatory account of the Hijaz Railway provides a window into the urban connections and opportunities for leisure travel it also afforded.

The historiography of the Hijaz Railway centers prominently on the grand-scale ambitions of the Ottoman Sultan Abdel Hamid II, who commissioned it, and his empire that the railway physically, yet briefly, sutured.[13] Between 1900 and 1908, the railway was constructed to connect the cities of Damascus and Medina in order to facilitate the route to the annual Muslim pilgrimage (ḥajj).[14] The introduction of steam travel to the long-standing pilgrimage route was a watershed moment in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslims—particularly in India and Egypt—whose voluntary donations contributed to the railway’s construction.[15] The railway’s wide array of ritualistic practices and spaces is well documented.[16] The voluntary donations campaign reveals how the Hijaz Railway enjoyed an affective and strong communal base from its outset. This base did not disappear as the Ottoman Empire dissolved and the Arab Mediterranean was partitioned into colonial mandates shortly after the railway’s construction. On the contrary, the railway is strongly present in contemporary nostalgic musings over cross-border travel between the urban centers of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, historic Palestine, and Jordan.[17] While these collective sentiments cannot be neatly labeled as pan-Islamist or pan-Arabist, it is interesting to explore how they could be harnessed into anticolonial imaginaries of free movement and travel in and for the Arab Mediterranean.

In addition to transforming the historic pilgrimage route, the Hijaz Railway also defined new terrains of travel, trade, and mobility in the Eastern Mediterranean.[18] It fused these new modes of travel with already existing ones, particularly in the vast desert it cut through.[19] It also introduced new mobility controls and delineated colonial state space and property regimes. For example, the areas surrounding the railway “in the Syrian interior” were deemed strategic, and thus, non-Muslims were excluded from owning property in them.[20] In addition to connecting Damascus and Medina, the railway also branched out into several routes and lines. Among the most prominent is the Haifa-Semakh-Damascus line, “a supply route for the Damascus-Medina” line, which opened in 1905.[21] The railway also facilitated Palestinian and Levantine exports, particularly citrus, to Europe through the Haifa Port, which was the railway’s direct outlet onto the Mediterranean Sea until 1948.[22] As a result, the city of Haifa became “the administrative headquarters for the railway.”[23] Through the port of Haifa, the Hijaz Railway constituted an important hinterland node in the maritime trade regimes of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the twentieth century.[24] Like all railways, the Hijaz Railway thus served a “homogenizing function.”[25] It unified markets by “integrating local economies into an overarching dynamic and complex economic grid.”[26] Meanwhile, the Hijaz Railway allowed the free movement of people between cities and states in the Arab Mediterranean—one similar to that in regional conglomerates like the European Union (EU) today.

In addition to pilgrims and citrus fruits, a slew of travelers were able to use the railway for leisure. We learn from al-Hakim’s travel account of the travel company maṣāyef lubnān, which organized trips for Egyptians to the Levant. It was the same company, al-Hakim explains, that transported the daily Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram, to Arabic readers in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria.[27]  The story of al-Ahram, its media geographies, and the Arab cultural and political movements it propelled cannot be overstated. Like the Hijaz Railway, it was also born out of, and sustained, a more integrated and less fragmented regional urban geography in the Arab Mediterranean. Although he traveled, wrote, and published his account amid the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, al-Hakim situates his reflections and history of the Hijaz Railway squarely within the Ottoman Empire. It is one insight into the political imaginary that clearly underwrites al-Hakim’s travels. And it demonstrates how the Hijaz Railway was a site for “the refashioning of [both] everyday experiences and collective self-understandings.”[28] Amid our increasingly immobile present, what kind of collective self-understandings do the memories of free movement between Egypt and the Levant—however incomplete and/or distorted—currently evoke?

Free Movement and the Urban Political Imaginary

Today, it is not uncommon to come across images of old railway and bus tickets between Egypt and the Levant, as the few remaining artefacts of these transport systems, on Arabic-speaking social media. These images, widely circulated, have inspired an Egyptian fabric designer to print the names of the bus stations between Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon on a silk scarf. Retailing for almost $35 (US), the scarf, “Bus al-‘Oruba,” reminisces about “a past of no borders” and is marketed as a response to the ongoing Israeli aggression on Gaza. The bus route, which was run by the Arab Trade and Travel Company, traveled between Cairo, Arish, Jerusalem, and Jaffa until the establishment of Israel in 1948. These collective ruminations, while scattered and not organized under a particular ideological or political banner, are indicative of a broader reckoning with the politics of freedom of movement in the Arab Mediterranean. It is a reckoning we ought to take seriously as a response to a chained present and a yearning for a collective and connected future; an alternative and budding urban political imaginary.

In most of my work, I think and write about one important aspect of this chained urban present: highways. I trace how highways, as uneven and unequal urban infrastructures, immobilize urban connections and political action.[29] Needless to say, this paints a radically different picture of freedom of movement than the one offered by the Hijaz Railway. But this is not to claim that the railway did not harbor disciplinary and colonial logics of extraction and circulation. Or that it did not rely on various forms of racialized labor and spatial exclusions, as I explained in the previous section. Yet the railway enabled forms of communal circulation and connection that stand in stark contrast to the highway. The history of (un)free movement in the Arab Mediterranean as told through the Hijaz Railway is thus a damnation of our increasingly immobile world. In this way, I read collective ruminations on the railway as also a response to the violence, the wars, and the occupations that beget and sustain the region’s dominant urban (im)mobility regimes, of which highways form a central pillar. And in doing so, I cast the opposition of railways to highways as a heuristic device to probe the urban political imaginaries of free movement in the region. As new militarized infrastructures of (im)mobility are constructed in the Eastern Mediterranean—from the East Med Corridor to the Suez Canal Area Development Project (SCADP)—it is important to account for the historical geographies and competing imaginaries they are designed upon, built through, and perpetuate.[30] The rich and complex history of the Hijaz Railway is one such starting point.

Conclusion

Following the century-old rail line from Qantara to Jerusalem reveals a little-known yet once long-existing world of travel between the Mediterranean cities of Egypt and the Levant. This essay attempted to untangle this world and explore its political remnants amid an increasingly cantonized urban political landscape. I followed the material geographies that produced and sustained this railway network, and vice versa. In doing so, I grounded my consideration of the freedom to move and travel in the Eastern Arab Mediterranean—currently a right and reality denied to millions of the region’s inhabitants—in the realm of material and physical (im)mobility infrastructure. I traced how, in matter and memory, the railway shapes urban political imaginaries of open borders and connected cities. While this might seem to be a legacy specific to the Egyptian and Levantine cities once connected by the railway and now separated by militarized borders and state highways, it is also a timely deliberation for a Mediterranean—land and sea—that is increasingly hostile to the free movement of people.

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Ingy Higazy is a writer, theorist, and urbanist. She holds a PhD (2023) in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Her work explores how and why the spaces and infrastructures that facilitate movement for some people systematically preclude it for others. To do so, she spans academic disciplines—political theory, political economy, and urban geography—and geographic regions—the Middle East, North Africa, and the Euro-Mediterranean.

Featured image (at top): “To Sinai via the Desert. Train Crossing the Sinai Desert, Jerusalem-Kantra” (ca. 1900-20), American Colony in Jerusalem Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

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[1] Al-Sayed ‘Abd al-Mu’min Kamil al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya (Cairo: al-Matba’a al-salafiyya, 1924), 7. I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to Jehad Abusalim for sharing this valuable reference on his public X profile.

[2] Al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya, 182-183.

[3] Al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya, 21.

[4] The Hijaz Railway was by no means the only railway network in the Eastern Mediterranean in the first half of the twentieth century. Cities in the Levant were connected through rail networks since as early as 1892. In addition, Egypt enjoyed an extensive railway network that followed the economic geography of cotton production and export and facilitated travel across the country. See Cyrus Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ʿAbud Yasin; or, What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us about Territorialization,” American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (2011): 285.

[5] In 2012, Egyptian travel writer Sherine Adel published a memoir of her travels to Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, al-Fairuziyya, which she conducted entirely by public transportation. Nevertheless, the war in Syria, which erupted around the same time as the memoir’s publication, marked the end of the Hijaz Railway. See Alicia Medina, “The Forgotten Railways of Syria and Lebanon: Tales of a Missed Connection,” Syria Untold, October 29, 2021, https://syriauntold.com/2021/10/29/the-forgotten-railways-of-syria-and-lebanon-tales-of-a-missed-connection/.

[6] See Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (New York and London: Verso Books, 2020); Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Begüm Adalet, Hotels and Highways: The Construction of Modernization Theory in Cold War Turkey (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

[7] Wendy Steele and Crystal Legacy, “Critical Urban Infrastructure,” Urban Policy and Research 35, no. 1 (2017): 1; Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 11, 127, 184-185; Charmaine Chua, “The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism,” The Boston Review, May 4, 2021, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-ever-given-and-the-monstrosity-of-maritime-capitalism/

[8] Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani, and Maurice Stierl, “Toward a Politics of Freedom of Movement,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, ed. Reece Jones (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 52.

[9] Raphael Cormack, “What 1930s Egyptian Travel Writing Says About the ‘Arab Mediterranean’,” Arablit and Arablit Quarterly, December 2, 2020, https://arablit.org/2020/12/02/what-1930s-egyptian-travel-writing-says-about-the-arab-mediterranean/.

[10] Al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya, 30.

[11] Johnny Mansour, “The Hijaz-Palestine Railway and the Development of Haifa,” Jerusalem Quarterly 28 (2006), 17.

[12] Kyle J. Anderson, The Egyptian Labor Corps: Race, Space, and Place in the First World War (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 4; Karim Zaki-Khalil, “British Sinai: Its Geopolitical Significance in the Middle East and its Strategic Role in British Colonial Policy” (PhD diss., Durham University, 1998), 142.

[13] William L. Ochsenwald, “The Financing of the Hijaz Railway,” Die Welt des Islams 14, no. 1/4 (1973): 129-149; Metin Hülagü, Al-khat al-ḥadīdī al-ḥijazī: al-mashrūʿ al-ʿimlāq li al-sultān ʿabd al-ḥamīd al-thānī, trans. Mohamed Suwash (Istanbul and Cairo: Dar al-Nile, 2011); Murat Özyüksel, The Hejaz Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Modernity, Industrialisation and Ottoman Decline (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014).

[14] The railway cost 15 percent of the Ottoman Empire’s total expenditure in 1909. Ochsenwald, “The Financing of the Hijaz Railway,” 129-130.

[15] Al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya,178-180; Ochsenwald, “The Financing of the Hijaz Railway,” 129-130; Hasan Kayali, Imperial Resilience: The Great War’s End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations (Berkley: University of California Press, 2021), 42.

[16] David Simonowitz, “The Mobile Matrix: The Hijaz Railway as Ritual Space and Generator of Space,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 3, no. 2 (2014): 303-340.

[17] Amanda Ruggeri, “Where Steam Locomotives are Still King,” BBC News, July 17, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180716-the-railway-that-united-islam.

[18] The Hijaz Railway was also preceded by plans for a German Baghdad-Haifa railway. See Morton B. Stratton, “British Railways and Motor Roads in the Middle East—1918-1930,” Economic Geography 20, no. 2 (1944): 116-129.

[19] Valeska Huber, Channeling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 164-171.

[20] Nora Elizabeth Barakat, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023), 208.

[21] Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ʿAbud Yasin,” 288.

[22] Johnny Mansour, “The Hijaz-Palestine Railway and the Development of Haifa,” Jerusalem Quarterly 28 (2006), 6.

[23] Mansour, “The Hijaz-Palestine Railway and the Development of Haifa,” 17.

[24] Sharri Plonski, “The Mobile and Carceral Logics of Haifa Port,” Politics (2022): 7.

[25] Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 128.

[26] Goswami, Producing India, 128.

[27] Al-Hakim, Riḥlat Misrī ila Falastīn, Lubnān wa Sūriyya, 26.

[28] Goswami, Producing India, 104.

[29] Ingy Higazy, “The Violence of Memory and Movement: Reading Cairo from its Ring Road,” Égypte/Monde Arabe 3, no. 23 (2021): 105-120.

[30] See Ingy Higazy, forthcoming. Al-Qantara, where al-Hakim commenced his journey, is today a site of a new industrial zone, part of SCADP. SCZone, “West Qantara Industrial Zone,” The Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), https://sczone.eg/services/west-qantara-industrial-zone/.