The Liman of Alexandria came to represent the internment policy of the civilian authorities in a very physical way. It was a prison that was interning all kinds of people that the authorities had declared "outlaws." This undifferentiated internment of "alienated" beings is partially due to the fact that a lot of those interned were so interned not because they violated a given law but because the sovereign, Mehmed Ali, decreed so after their cases were brought in front of him. More importantly, however, the generic law that functioned as the original penal code, namely Qānūn al-Filāḥa, was itself an undifferentiated, ungraded, non-codified legal text that retained a lot of the features characterizing old civilian laws. The frequent use of the whip and the bastinado, as well as the type of imprisonment explained above, points to the fact that the main aim of such law and its appendices was to make the Pasha's "presence" visible precisely by highlighting the "absence" of those who dared to violate his wish as represented in the law. In this case the Liman, like Mount Fayzuğlu, was a place of banishment and exile, not a place of correction and rehabilitation. Rather than bringing about a close association of crime and punishment in the minds of the populace, civilian laws as exemplified by this one were aimed at terrifying the people into submission by resorting to the image of the prison looming above society and reminding them of the fate of those who violated the law. So impressive was the idea of that prison in the Egyptians' mentality that the word "Liman," which in Turkish means simply a port or harbor, came to be synonymous with "prison." It still retains this meaning in Egyptian Arabic down to the present time.

XREF: Builds directly on loc 674-677 and 688-691 on civilian punishment's sovereign-terror logic, showing how the Liman and Fayzuğlu served banishment rather than correction. Builds on: "Public punishment reasserted the sovereign's momentarily injured authority."

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 698