The Abbasiya Mental Asylum in the Late Nineteenth Century and Early Twentieth Century and the Abbasiya Mental Hospital Today: a Comparative Study . The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not make a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence. (Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 17). There is a struggle going on in the mental health field. (Kathryn Church, Forbidden Narratives, p. 73) Introduction The first mental asylum was established in Egypt in 1883 1 only one year after the country was occupied by the British colonial powers. The same asylum still exists today. This raises a number of questions, of which only one main question can be answered given the scope and limitations of this paper, namely, how has the mental asylum in Abbasiya developed? In other words, what are the properties and characteristics of the current mental hospital in comparison to its state at its inception? What were the laws that governed the mental asylum in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Egypt and what are the laws that govern it today? Also, what were the conditions of patients in the early years of the asylum at Abbasiya and what are the conditions of present day patients in the same mental hospital? What follows is an attempt to answer this question and the issues underlying it. Methodology In attempting to investigate and understand the mental asylum in Abbasiya in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and for limitations of time and scope of paper, I 1 Most references and reports state 1883 as the year of establishment of the mental asylum in Abbasiya. However, Nour states that it was established in 1884. 1