The movement to fight the spread of intoxicants, called temperance (the 18th Amendment and the Volstead act, the foundations of American Prohibition, were products of temperance lobbying) enjoyed a worldwide moment starting in the late 1800s and continuing until the 1940s. One of the biggest emblems of this reality was the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which, by the 1920s, had a presence in more that forty countries. The full extent of the organization’s activities are dutifully covered in Ian Tyrell’s Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective 1880-1930 and would be a good place to start for a country by country look at temperance ( and the sometimes prohibition). I can only talk about one of the odder cases of temperance and prohibition( or lack thereof), Egypt.

According to Omar Foda in “Anna Ahmad: Building Modern Temperance in Egypt,” there were two groups lobbying for temperance in the country. The WCTU of Egypt and the Egyptian Temperance Association (ETA). The WCTU of Egypt was a small group of Presbyterian missionaries and elite local Christian women, headed by Anna Young Thompson, that tried to spread the message of temperance. The ETA on the other hand was a small male-dominated movement headed by Ahmad Ghalwash and primarily composed of Muslims and sought to build temperance clubs across the country.

The activities of these two groups, the WCTU of Egypt and the ETA, were quite similar. They wrote letters, lobbied politicians, disseminated the message of temperance, and engaged with international temperance conferences. They both feared the deleterious effect drugs and alcohol had on the Egyptian population.

On the whole, they did not bring about their desired change. They received some token gestures from the government, but prohibition proved to be too far of step for the Egyptian government. This was so for two reasons. One, there was not a great deal of popular support of prohibition. Both of the organizations struggled for membership, as people either wanted to drink or thought temperance was unnecessary in a Muslim country. Two, the British government, who had colonized Egypt in 1882, had no desire for it. They wanted their troops , and other foreigners, well supplied with drink. For more info on the ineffectiveness of colonial Egyptian government to police its people see Nathan Fonder’s dissertation, “Pleasure, Leisure or Vice? Public Morality in Imperial Cairo, 1882–1949.”

And that brings us to why they even had a temperance movement in a majority Muslim country like Egypt. The WCTU of Egypt appeared not out of response to demands of the local population, but the desire of the American WCTU to expand the white ribbon across the world. As such it was:

tied to the British imperial presence, which eased the access of Christian missionaries into Egypt, protected them from violent responses, and provided them with an audience for the message. (Foda, 148).

It mainly served as a way to empower elite Egyptian Christian women and provide them a network of early feminists.

The ETA, on the other hand, was an ideological response to the colonization of the country. It used temperance, especially Prohibition in America, as proof of Islam’s transcendental perfection.

Thus the teleology of progress was reversed and Islam and Egypt no longer sat behind, but were placed ahead . Now every step that the West made towards temperance was an example of how it was “catching-up” to the Islamic world that had always known the benefits of the abstention from alcohol.” (FODA, 149).

Since neither had a popular base nor gained significant traction with the government, they petered out when American prohibition ended.

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