The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance 9780748670130

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The Long 1890s in Egypt Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance

Edited by Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman

© editorial matter and organisation Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman, 2014 © the chapters their several authors, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 0 7486 7012 3 (hardback) ISBN  978 0 7486 7013 0 (webready PDF) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Tables and Figures The Contributors

Introduction  The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman

v vii 1

I  Institutionalising Authority, Claiming Jurisdiction and Space   1 Documenting Death: Inquests, Governance and Belonging in 1890s Alexandria Shane Minkin

31

  2 The Scales of Public Utility: Agricultural Roads and State Space in the Era of the British Occupation Aaron George Jakes

57

  3 Training Teachers how to Teach: Transnational Exchange and the Introduction of Social-Scientific Pedagogy in 1890s Egypt Hilary Kalmbach

87

  4 Legitimising Lay and State Authority: Challenging the Coptic Church in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt Vivian Ibrahim

117

iv  |   THE LONG 1 8 9 0S IN E GY PT   5 Criminal Statistics in the Long 1890s Mario M. Ruiz

141

II  Challenging Authority in Contested Spaces   6 Anomalous Egypt? Rethinking Egyptian Sovereignty at the Western Periphery Matthew H. Ellis

169

  7 Regulating Sexuality: The Colonial–National Struggle over Prostitution after the British Invasion of Egypt Hanan Hammad

195

  8 Internationalist Thought, Local Practice: Life and Death in the Anarchist Movement in 1890s Egypt Anthony Gorman

222

  9 Cromer’s Assault on ‘Internationalism’: British Colonialism and the Greeks of Egypt, 1882–1907 Alexander Kazamias

253

III  Probing Authority with the Written Word 10 ‘And I Saw No Reason to Chronicle My Life’: Tensions of Nationalist Modernity in the Memoirs of Fathallah Pasha Barakat 287 Hussein Omar 11 My Sister Esther: Reflections on Judaism, Ottomanism and Empire in the Works of Farah Antun Orit Bashkin

315

12 Romances of History: Jurji Zaydan and the Rise of the Historical Novel 342 Paul Starkey 13 Before Qasim Amin: Writing Women’s History in 1890s Egypt Marilyn Booth

365

Bibliography 399 Index 430

Tables and Figures

Tables 5.1 Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms 5.2 Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms 5.3 Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911 5.4 Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911

148 149

157

158

Figures 2.1 A map of Dinshawai from the investigation into the events of June 1906 10.1 Fathallah Barakat Pasha (1866–1933) 10.2 Shaykh ‘Abdallah Barakat (d. c. 1899), father of Fathallah

77 290 291

The Contributors

Orit Bashkin is Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. She received her PhD from Princeton University (2004) and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University. Her publications include a large number of chapters and articles on the history of Arab-Jews in Iraq, Iraqi history and Arabic literature. She is author of The Other Iraq – Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (2009) and New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012). She has also edited, with Israel Gershoni and Liat Kozma, Sculpturing Culture in Egypt [le-fasel tarbut be-mitzrayim], which includes translations into Hebrew of seminal works by Egyptian intellectuals. Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She directs the RCUK-funded Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW). Her current research focuses on early feminist writing in Egypt. She edited Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (2010) and a Journal of Women’s History special issue on ‘Women’s Autobiography in the Middle East and South Asia’ (2013). Her next monograph is Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (Edinburgh University Press). She is Middle East/Europe regional editor for the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (EWIC) and trustee of vii

viii  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the Council for British Research in the Levant. She has translated numerous literary works and promotes literary translation through training, mentoring and public speaking. Matthew H. Ellis teaches modern Middle Eastern history and politics at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, United States, where he serves as Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation Chair in Middle Eastern Studies and International Affairs. His dissertation ‘Between Empire and Nation: The Emergence of Egypt’s Libyan Borderland, 1841–1911’ examines broader historical questions concerning the nature of Middle Eastern state-building projects, borders and nation-state space, and sovereignty and political authority. Anthony Gorman is Senior Lecturer in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught at universities in Australia, Egypt and Britain and is author of Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (2003), as well as a number of articles on the resident foreign presence in modern Egypt. He is in the process of co-editing (with Sossie Kasbarian) a book on Middle Eastern Diasporas and another (with Didier Monciaud) on the press in the Middle East before independence. He is also completing a monograph on a history of the prison in the Middle East titled Prison, Punishment and Society in the Middle East 1800–1950, to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Hanan Hammad is a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, with emphasis on gender and sexuality among the working classes. Her articles about these issues have appeared in Radical History Review, Journal of Social History, International Review of Social History and Journal of International Women’s Studies among others. She is finishing a book manuscript tentatively entitled Industrial Sexuality: Mechanization, Gender, and Social Transformation in Modern Egypt. Currently, she is assistant professor of Middle East History at Texas Christian University. Vivian Ibrahim is Croft Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi. She obtained her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), an MSc from the London

the contri butors   |   ix School of Economics (LSE) and a BA from King’s College, London. Ibrahim held a one-year post-doc at University College Cork in Ireland examining Muslim–European identities. She is also Research Associate at SOAS. Ibrahim is author of The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity (2010) and co-editor of Political Leaderships, Nations and Charisma (2012). Aaron George Jakes is doctoral candidate in New York University’s joint programme in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. He received a BA in history from Yale University and an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. His research concerns the historical geography of colonial capitalism in the long nineteenth century and the role of political–economic thought in the emergence of Egyptian nationalism. His doctoral thesis is entitled ‘State of the Field: Agrarian Transformation, Colonial Rule, and the Politics of Material Wealth in Egypt, 1882–1922’. Hilary Kalmbach is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Sussex. She is a cultural and social historian who studies Islam in the modern Middle East. Her research focuses on the processes of reform and modernisation that radically transformed the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking in particular at how Islam, its traditions and its institutions have been reinvented to fit within – and even advance – these reform projects. She previously held a post-doctoral position, the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellowship, at New College, Oxford, and her degrees are from Princeton (AB) and Oxford (MSt and DPhil). Alexander Kazamias is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Coventry University. He has written several articles and book chapters on modern Greek politics and history and the politics and history of modern Egypt. He is author of the book Greece and the Cold War: Diplomacy, Rivalry and Colonialism after the Civil Conflict (2014). In 2005 he was Research Fellow at Princeton University and in 2011 he was CASAW Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Shane Minkin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. She received her BA from the University of

x  |   THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY P T Pennsylvania, her MA from Emory University and her PhD in the joint History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies programme at New York University. Her chapter in this volume is part of a larger manuscript project, tentatively titled ‘Managing the Dead: Death and the Foreign Communities of Alexandria, Egypt, 1865–1914’. Shane has previously published with Rethinking History and History Compass. Hussein Omar is doctoral candidate at Merton College, Oxford, where he also completed his undergraduate degree. His current research is based on the private archive of the family of the nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul. Mario M. Ruiz is Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History at Hofstra University in New York, United States. He received his PhD in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include questions of criminality, violence and sexuality. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Illicit Lives: Sex, Death, and Violence in Egypt, 1849–1949. His research has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Critique, Contemporary Islam, the Historian, Arab Studies Journal, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Paul Starkey was, until his retirement in 2012, Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Department at Durham University, United Kingdom, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World. He is currently Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Paul Starkey has published widely in the field of modern Arabic literature, as well as on Middle Eastern travel literature; he was co-editor of Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (1998) and author of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). He has also translated several Arabic novels into English, including Saladin and the Assassins by Jurji Zaydan. He is currently working on a translation of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal by Youssef Rakha and on a literary study of the Egyptian novelist Sun‘Allah Ibrahim.

Introduction The Long 1890s in Egypt: Colonial Quiescence, Subterranean Resistance Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman

W

hatever the setting, the 1890s – and its attendant label, fin de siècle – conjures bright hues and robust sensations, aesthetic daring, public discourses of fear, lassitude and possibility and, above all, manifold recognition of the New, from technologies to gendered behaviours to publishing. The capital cities of western Europe usually furnish the imagery we associate with the fin de siècle, but a distinguishing feature was the sense that, more than ever before, worlds were connected, if unevenly, and the appellation’s resonance carries far. In Egypt, the 1890s were equally a time of expectation and anxiety, reordering and regrouping, though perhaps more quietly, for Egyptians were entering their second decade of occupation and British colonial rule. In Cairo and Alexandria, cosmopolitan linkages were visually evident in new facades and broadened streets, while around them the older city remained home to most urban Egyptians. Emerging resistance to European political and economic dominance, but also a certain embracing of European lifestyles, were articulated through a newly vigorous press and an increasingly streamlined Arabic as an accessible language of public commentary, while periodicals in French, Italian and Greek – some of them bilingual – ­competed for the attention of readers. Technologies of communication and transportation offered greater mobility for some, and new industrial enterprises encouraged consumption, labour migration and, soon, activism for workers’ rights. 1

2  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY P T Affiliations amongst members of Egypt’s varied ethnic communities led to political and cultural collaborations and, at times, tensions, while a generation of elite sons trained in new government and foreign-run schools or in Europe formulated new ideas about family economies and national futures. Some women claimed new spaces, both physically and in print, while elite and middling-strata daughters were the focus of intense debate over the advisability and content of formal schooling for Egypt’s female population. In novels, tracts and magazine articles, questions of marriage and divorce, child-raising and population management, gendered identity formation and intersecting dynamics of the family and the nation were defined, elaborated on and debated. Meanwhile, public officials and their colonial line managers grappled with how to order a large and diverse, still heavily rural, country, whose human margins were not always agreeably governable. While Arab societies’ fin de siècle – or at least that of its urbanised population and Mediterranean surrounds – has drawn scholars’ attention, the last decade of the nineteenth century in Egypt remains something of an enigma, even as scholars have confronted understudied aspects of its history. Previous decades witnessed conflicting political responses to fluctuating economic, geopolitical, social and demographic conditions. Like Egypt’s most recent fin de siècle, such ferment then presaged the more visible and politically eruptive developments of the new century’s early decades, when elite and then popular resistance to colonial rule and great-power consensus burst onto the international scene, especially following World War I. In historical narratives, the 1890s often appear overshadowed by, or at least overly defined through the lens of, the more obviously momentous events of the decades that preceded and followed it, between the trauma of a foreign occupation and the stirrings of the national movement. But the subterranean cast of the 1890s was no less dynamic for that. In this volume, we collectively address the hidden dynamisms of a period recognised as pivotal for the formation of modern Egypt, if not always understood on its own merits. Contemplating the public politics of the time, one might think that in 1890s Egypt little changed on the ground between the British occupation of 1882 and the early twentieth-century tide of anti-imperial sentiment and nationalist activism. However, we can think of the decade of the 1890s as a period when various individuals and groups resident in Egypt were regroup-

i ntroducti on | 3 ing, questioning and constructing in the wake of European assumption of Egypt’s debt management and the domestic political upheaval and foreign intervention that resulted in occupation. We search for these moments of rearrangement and contestation in places as varied as cemeteries, workplaces, newspapers, rural communities, ‘outlying’ districts, urban streets, theatres and within the pages of novels. We engage with questions of political engagement and colonial rule, social rearrangements, including shifting gender roles, geographical ambiguities, the unprecedented emergence of new media, community identity formation at a time of enormous population growth and influx, new diasporas and changing possibilities for cultural production. With these rapid socio-economic, demographic and political changes came new articulations of political belonging and contestation, which in turn fed into the more visible institutional developments of the next decade and seeded the nationalist politics of the immediate pre-World War I era. All were underwritten by changes in technology and material culture – improvements in transport, urban planning, communications and access to information. For all of these reasons, the late nineteenth century is drawing increasing interest from scholars and students across disciplines and regional sub-areas within the Middle East and North Africa, broadly constituted. Long a relatively neglected period in scholarship, the decade attracts those re-evaluating cultural history and literary activity, as well as scholars of labour activism, oppositional political movements within a late colonial context, social networks and gender studies. Though we cannot address all facets of this dynamic decade, we hope to pull together many concerns and themes that repeatedly surface across seemingly diverse topics. This volume emerged from a workshop that we convened at the University of Edinburgh in 2011, under the auspices of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World, funded by the Language-Based Area Studies (LBAS) initiative of Research Councils UK and led by the Economic and Social Research Council. We are grateful for this support. Contributors to this volume, as well as other colleagues researching the period, came together for a conversation about this understudied moment in Egypt’s modern history, and together we formulated key questions that have guided our work in varying ways. Evaluating the decade across a broad swathe of geographic, demographic and discursive sites and shifts, the chapters in this volume take

4  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY P T up different strands of articulation and activism that may have intersected or been mutually constitutive. Equally, we examine the roles of various communities and identity groups during the decade’s conversations and consider transregional population flows into Egypt and the very borders of the state. Inevitably, pondering the impact of this decade, both synchronically and diachronically, and recognising that no period of time can be sealed off from antecedents or later events, contributors touch on the longer span of time arcing from the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 to the emergence of fiercer public debates and the formation of nationalist political parties in the first decade of the twentieth century. Constructing the Narrative Thus, while the 1890s is our focus, we range before and beyond the decade, defining the long 1890s as the period from the defeat of the ‘Urabist movement and occupation of Egypt by Britain in 1882 until the galvanising events of Dinshawai (1906) and the establishment of political parties by local elites in 1907. Below we offer a brief narrative of political events to contextualise the contributions to this volume. This period of twenty-five years has been seen as dominated by two competing yet complementary processes or to use Donald Reid’s characterisation, ‘Imperial High Noon, Nationalist Dawn’.1 The first – consolidation of British rule over the country following its occupation – was overseen by the towering figure of Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring, 1841–1917). Cromer presided over an evolving British policy of financial and administrative reform, which maintained its presence and virtual colonial control over Egypt, despite statements to the contrary made by British officials throughout the period. The second consists in the fortunes of the nationalist movement, from the collective trauma of 1882 until the revival of a nationalist call for action in the early years of the new century, following a slow and uncertain incubation in the 1890s. The political unrest of 1881, led by Ahmad ‘Urabi (1841–1911) and his fellow military officers, had by the beginning of the following year developed into a full confrontation between the constitutional movement that sought to curb foreign influence in the country and the authority of Khedive Tawfiq, supported by a conservative notability. The bombardment of Alexandria and landing of British troops

i ntroducti on | 5 in Alexandria following civil disturbances set in train the events that led to the defeat of ‘Urabist forces at Tel al-Kabir in September 1882, the restoration of Khedivial authority and British occupation. ‘Urabi himself was sent into exile in Sri Lanka and his supporters, such as orator and journalist ‘Abdallah Nadim (1845–96), religious scholar and civil servant Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and administrator and educator ‘Ali Mubarak (1823– 93), were cowed and scattered, with some going into hiding, while others were formally banished. In their place a compliant political elite, headed by Mustafa Fahmi (1840–1914), prime minister from 1891 to 1908 (with only a short break from 1893 to 1895), governed the country in name until the emergence, with the new century, of a coherent and articulate nationalist movement. At its head was the young Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), who galvanised discontented locals with a fiery and pointed discourse that brought together inchoate expressions of nationalist longing. Within this broader context, the 1890s stands as a critical period. If it took ten years for the British Government to establish control in Egypt (as Harry Boyle, Oriental Secretary in Cairo from 1899 to 1909, asserted), the next decade saw the consolidation of what became the ‘veiled protectorate’.2 The death in January 1892 of the acquiescent Khedive Tawfiq, scion of the dynasty founded by Muhammad ‘Ali at the start of the nineteenth century, saw the accession of his son, ‘Abbas Hilmi II. Over the next two years in the uneven contest of authority, ‘Abbas was outmanoeuvred and humiliated by Cromer, who asserted his grip over Egyptian governance, in a process captured by some of the contributions to this book. If British rule gave little ground in the area of political reform, it effectively addressed the national debt through its economic policies. By the beginning of the 1890s, Egyptian finances had been stabilised. The next decade-and-a-half witnessed an unprecedented, if unevenly enjoyed, period of economic prosperity, principally on the back of the cotton crop. The fellahin, since 1883 protected in law from the lash of the kurbaj and, by the early 1890s, the obligations of corvée, served as the agricultural workforce. Captains of industry took the helm, setting up bodies such as a series of Chambers of Commerce and a Cigarette Manufacturers’ Federation to represent their collective interests in promoting increasing trade and nurturing an emerging industrial sector. In 1898 the newly-formed National Bank of

6  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY P T Egypt began the issue of banknotes that symbolised the new prosperity as the national revenue expanded until the slump of 1907. British influence was manifest in both concrete and institutional form. The construction of the Aswan Dam (1898–1902), the Asyut Barrage (1898–1903), a new system of agricultural roads and an expanding network of railways powerfully testified to the extensive public works programme. The foundations of new public institutions were laid to accommodate the new quasi-colonial order. Adding to the already complex legal system of the Mixed Courts for cases involving non-Egyptians (est. 1876) and the National Courts (1884), a series of reforms restyled the judicial landscape that was underpinned by an extensive prison-building programme. In this volume, chapters by Mario Ruiz, Shane Minkin, Matthew Ellis and Aaron Jakes shed new light on how British administrators incorporated their new acquisition further into the institutions and processes of imperial rule, but also how local actors mounted strategies to contest and confuse them. The Egyptian public education system, by contrast, was notoriously neglected. Existing institutions of higher education, such as Dar al-‘Ulum (1871), the French Law School (1890) and the Medical School (1827), continued to operate and explore innovative curricula, as Hilary Kalmbach’s chapter shows, but opportunities for talented youth remained limited in state education. Throughout the newly vigorous non-official press, from villages as well as cities, complaints were voiced about the state’s failure to provide education for its subjects. By contrast, a series of private initiatives somewhat ameliorated the situation: in female education, the Saniyya School (1889) and a girls’ section at ‘Abbas Primary School (1895); and for the wider public, evening education at the Free Popular University (1901) and the nationalist Higher Schools Club (1905). It was not until the very end of the period that a group of Egyptian intellectuals and educators established the private Egyptian University (1908), which would lay the basis for the public university almost twenty years later. Even if under the heavy-handed rule of Cromer, the 1890s witnessed an effective (albeit temporary) constriction of the nationalist movement and successfully co-opted elements of the Egyptian elite to the service of government; it saw toleration of both public and private expression on a more contained local level, among workers, women concerned about gender-specific poli-

i ntroducti on | 7 cies and opportunities, nationalist intellectuals, both female and male, and social networks. The rising power of organised labour, the beginnings of self-directed women’s activism, local municipal politics in Alexandria, the struggle within the Coptic community between church and laity (analysed in Vivian Ibrahim’s chapter) and the constitution and operation of social networks, such as anarchists (as discussed by Anthony Gorman), offered arenas, frameworks and agency where activity emerged and even flourished. Indeed, the 1890s presided over the incipient development of energies and associations that flowered over the years leading up to 1914 and the later, more organised challenges to British control. Egyptian society was growing in size, as well as diversity. From 1882 to 1907 the population of the country increased from 6.8 million to 11.2 million, including an expanding resident foreign presence, which by 1907 stood at just over 220,000.3 Resident foreign communities – such as the Greeks, as we learn from Alexander Kazamias’s chapter – proliferated not only in size but heterogeneity, with this growth generating institution-building within civil society and yet also intensifying conflicts within such communities. Expansion of public infrastructure continued apace in transport and building. While the significant urban developments of Garden City and Heliopolis would not be launched until 1905, the capital was nevertheless in an expansive phase during the 1890s, with the opening of the Cairo–Hilwan railway in November 1889 and its first electric tramway in 1896. The establishment of the Municipality of Alexandria in 1890 marked a new development in local administration. Among workers, the first stirrings of labour unrest on the Suez Canal during the early 1880s developed into a more organised and militant workers’ movement during the 1890s. This culminated in the cigarette workers’ strike launched in December 1899, which itself provided an important inspiration – and organisational experience – to the following decade and a half of intensified industrial action. Debate on the appropriate roles of women in society and, indeed, the emerging public roles of women themselves came to the fore in the 1890s. While the notoriously contentious works of Qasim Amin, The Emancipation of Women [Tahrir al-mar’a, 1899], and its 1900 sequel The New Woman [alMar’a al-jadida] and the furious responses of Tal‘at Harb and others appeared at the end of the decade, women were already speaking for ­themselves. Hind

8  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY P T Nawfal’s al-Fatat (November 1892–4) was the first in a series of periodicals dedicated to the specific interests of women; ‘A’isha Taymur had already begun publishing her work in the 1880s, while Zaynab Fawwaz and others wrote for the press, as well as publishing novels and tracts. As they had long done, women composed poetry that circulated both orally and in print and founded charitable and educational associations that called for more educational openings for girls. As had been the case since the time of Muhammad ‘Ali, male members of the Egyptian elite were able to take advantage of educational opportunities abroad. During the 1880s and 1890s, Husayn Rushdi, Qasim Amin, ‘Ali Abu al-Futuh, Mustafa Kamil and others returned from studies in France to pursue distinguished careers in politics, law and the cultural sphere. Intellectual life was also invigorated by the arrival of immigrants from Ottoman Syria, who founded journals and wrote in others. Among them were Farah Antun, Zaynab Fawwaz, Labiba Hashim, Rashid Rida, Shibli Shumayyil and Jurji Zaydan. The return of Muhammad ‘Abduh to Egypt in 1889 spurred activity in education, religious reform and debate on the relationship between Islamic doctrine, shari‘a, governance and everyday life. In historical scholarship, the period saw the emergence of new styles and genres. ‘Ali Mubarak’s twenty-volume work, al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyya, which was published in the late 1880s, employed a traditional mode of topographical description of the city of Cairo as part of a broader mapping of physical and human geography of Egypt;4 however, over the next decade, a number of works new in both form and purpose appeared. Rising nationalist leaders Mustafa Kamil5 and Muhammad Farid6 authored histories of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire as early forays into political life. Jurji Zaydan,7 Isma‘il Sarhank8 and Mikha’il Sharubim9 provided accounts less invested with a specific political project, but nevertheless significant for their expression of historical breadth and imagination. The professional academic historian would not appear in Egypt until after the First World War, but a new, engaged scholarship had already begun to construct and reconfigure Egypt’s place in history. Meanwhile, as Marilyn Booth shows in her chapter, history writing in the 1890s could be used in the service of reconfigured agendas and emerging issues, such as gender. Others wrote on the period in their personal memoirs, whether intended for publication or not, as discussed by Hussein Omar.10

i ntroducti on | 9 These individuals and many others engaged with the challenging political, social and cultural issues of the day in a lively public debate made possible by the unprecedented flourishing of newspaper and book publishing in the 1890s. The question of national independence, the relationship of Egypt with the Ottoman Empire and the future of its relations with Britain may have loomed large, but in the 1890s many of the new insights of socialism, feminism and workers’ rights also began to gain currency and were applied to the local context in myriad and sophisticated ways. Works in translation, such as Self-Help by Samuel Smiles, Edmond Desmolins’s A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? and the works of Gustave Le Bon (the latter two translated by Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul), energised intellectual exchange.11 Those active in translating polemics and scholarship from Europe were joined by translators of imaginative literature, who in turn contributed to the emergence of Arabic fiction, as Paul Starkey outlines in this volume, as well as to early Arabic drama. New publishing opportunities afforded aspiring writers a range of venues and many experimented, producing hybrid texts that were part novel, part political tract or part translation and part ‘original’, while the continuation of long-familiar habits of oral dissemination of texts created a different kind of hybridity. A vigorous press was both a cause and a symptom of this efflorescence of activity in word and deed, an outlet for the energies of newly educated young men and women seeking a role in their society and a by-line on the page. Private newspapers, already a feature of the pre-1882 period, would proliferate during the long 1890s. Some, such as al-Ahram, were already well-established, while new titles of diverse orientation and tone emerged, assisted by a relatively lenient application of the 1883 press law. In 1889 two significant dailies appeared: the pro-British al-Muqattam and the oppositionist al-Mu’ayyad, edited by Shaykh ‘Ali Yusuf, which served as an emerging voice of nationalism. These two dailies were joined in January 1900 by alLiwa’, edited by Mustafa Kamil, who used it as a vehicle to become the young spokesperson and symbol of nationalist hopes. Other newspapers appeared and flourished and sometimes disappeared; the leap in the number of titles published by mid-decade, as well as the appearance of provincial presses, indicates how crucial the 1890s were in the history of Egyptian journalism. The magazine sector exhibited a similar vitality. Al-Muqtataf (est. 1876),

10  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT r­elocated from Beirut in 1884, was joined by al-Hilal, founded by Jurji Zaydan, from September 1892 to further invigorate readers with a miscellany of literature, biography and science. Al-Jami‘a (est. 1899), edited by Farah Antun, provided an early forum for socialist ideas. The progressive Coptic Misr (est. 1895) challenged the Christian religious establishment.12 This robust development was as true for European-language periodicals as it was for the Arabic-language press: the mainstream English Egyptian Gazette (est. 1880), the French language Le Progrès Égyptien (est. 1893), the Greek Tachidrómos (est. 1880) and the Italian il Corriere Egiziano (est. 1872) were joined by more specialist titles dedicated to culture, economics and radical politics. The proliferation of the press offered a robust – and often rambunctious – vehicle for the propagation of diverse voices and the sustained presence of political, cultural and economic debate. Yet it is important to remember that literacy remained limited, estimated in 1907 at 7 per cent of the population overall (13 per cent men; 1 per cent women).13 The long 1890s came to end with the events that followed the Dinshawai Affair in 1906. The brutal reaction of the British administration in hanging a number of Egyptian peasants, who had sought to prevent British officers that were intent on shooting pigeons, spurred on the nascent nationalist movement. By the end of 1907 the Watani Party, led by Mustafa Kamil, and the ‘Umma Party, headed by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, were formed and framed degrees of opposition to British rule. The subsequent issue of a new press law and the reorganisation of the security services narrowed the public space as it intensified the political and social struggle. If the first decade of the twentieth century was one of explicit nationalist organisation, the decade before was one in which the ideas and affects behind it were aired, argued over, thought through and tested. Studying the 1890s Western scholarship on Egypt in the 1890s has predominantly focused on the political narrative of British control and Egyptian occupation following the invasion of 1882, often with Lord Cromer cast centre stage,14 or more broadly addressed the implementation and consolidation of British imperial policy in its reorganisation of the Egyptian economy, administration and political system.15 Another approach, generally more favoured by Egyptian

i ntroducti on | 11 historians, has emphasised the national fortunes of Egypt during the 1890s, from the humiliation of the consequences of occupation to the steady reemergence of the national movement at the end of the century. This narrative was most apparent in the work of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i, whose book on the period was framed explicitly around the rise of Mustafa Kamil, his rousing call to the nationalist cause, the establishment of the Watani Party and early death soon after.16 For others less wedded to this specific agenda, the decade was one of relative political quiescence, even apathy, as Muhammad Rifaat put forward in the late 1940s: . . . at the beginning of the Occupation the people as a whole were dejected, downhearted and ashamed of their defeat. They were atoning for their sins by a complete resignation to their fate. Soon they became so absorbed in their material uplifting that they gave no time to politics.17

In time, Egyptian scholars expanded their work on the late nineteenth century in scope, emphasis and detail. The socialist historians of the 1950s stressed the accelerated penetration of the Egyptian economy by the forces of colonialism.18 In the 1960s a generation of new historians influenced by Marxist ideas produced detailed studies, often based on the extensive use of archives, exploring the interplay between economic and social forces. Ra’uf ‘Abbas’s pioneering work on the Egyptian labour movement (which dated its genesis to 1899) and his follow-up study on large landownership, along with that of ‘Ali Barakat, laid down important landmarks in our understanding of the period.19 Though published later, Latifa Salim’s work on early women’s activism emerged from the concerns and foci of the 1960s as well.20 Nevertheless, the standard narrative of the 1890s continued to be framed by the contest for power between the young Khedive and Cromer in the early 1890s, the rising star of Mustafa Kamil at the beginning of the new century, the appearance of al-Liwa’ as the standard of the nationalist movement, the Dinshawai Affair (1906) and the establishment of the formal political parties in 1907. While undoubtedly a major theme in the history of the period, the preoccupation with the clash between imperial will and nationalist aspiration tended to obscure much else that happened in the decade that would qualify or challenge this picture. Partly in response to this state of affairs, recent scholarship has taken up

12  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT more specific issues, both local and internationalist in perspective, and focused on particular sectors of society: a partial list would include monographs on gender, nationalism and the state (Badran, Booth, Hatem, Jacob and others), peasants (Gasper), labour (Chalcraft), radical politics (Khuri-Makdisi), scholarship, science and new cultural institutions (Reid, El Shakry), and literature and translation (Booth, Fahmy, Starkey, Tageldin, Selim, Noorani).21 From Egyptian scholars, historians such as ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Jumay‘i and Hilmi Ahmad Shalabi have continued to add to our knowledge of the period.22 Even if many of these works span longer historical periods, they all highlight significant developments and movements of the 1890s and join an ever-growing body of scholarship that recognises the dynamism of the Egyptian fin de siècle. There is scope for much more work on the period: local and urban histories, cultural and environmental studies, biographies, studies on architecture, science and technology, law, education and so on. The sources for such are not lacking. While the British National Archives and particularly Cromer’s annual reports have been well-trawled and much use has been made of the works and memoirs of British officials,23 as this collection shows, the 1890s offers much greater source material than this: a great range of press and periodical literature across a number of languages, the personal memoirs of public and private figures, conduct books, novels, plays, broadsheets and tracts. Of state records, the Egyptian National Archives continue to yield results from the laborious efforts of scholars, while Greek, Italian, French and other national collections remain significantly untapped. Our volume contributes to this ongoing project of recuperation and analysis by offering a series of microstudies that open up new avenues in the social, cultural, institutional and economic history of 1890s Egypt and in particular the ways that local actors drew upon, resisted and creatively reworked the myriad impingements on Egyptian society wrought by imperial politics, international economic forces, transnational and translingual cultural flows and new technologies. What are the guiding questions that led and arose from our research? Guiding Questions Some key clusters of questions and issues underlay our collective (if not always agreed on) assessments of what distinguishes the 1890s from periods

i ntroducti on | 13 before and after, why the decade is important and how the developments of these years help us to begin to understand the decade and its significance for the events of the subsequent period. Questions become part of responses, and these remain salient for ongoing work. If we have not been able to answer all of these questions or cover certain important sectors of activity in the 1890s, such as the peasantry, the full diversity of the labour movement and developments in technology, consumerism and architecture, we have highlighted their significance. First, events and discourses of the decade had to negotiate competing and changing jurisdictions. How might we even define these jurisdictions and how did they function? What sets of regulations became particular points of contestation and how? How did those very regulations act to define or set apart different individual or collective social actors or communities? Was the Capitulatory regime (which gave European subjects preferential legal and economic treatment), censorship or personal status law seen locally as the province of certain jurisdictional bodies or communities? Or as matters of ‘distant’ colonial regulation (or attempted regulation)? Did claims of Ottoman jurisdiction, for example, counter European colonial claims in this period? And if so, did they possess any efficacy? Indeed, if we think about colonial jurisdiction, how might we evaluate the nature and efficacy of colonial rule in the 1890s? How were the colonial authorities able to extend their regulatory reach and what kinds of responses did this engender? How were projects initiated by the colonial regime viewed, used, contested and negotiated by various local interests and population groups? How do questions of rule and matters of jurisdiction interact with practices of exclusion and inclusion, ideas about sovereign territory and physical as well as other kinds of boundaries? How did the coming-into-being of various regulatory regimes shape people’s notions of themselves, family and larger communities? What relationships between legislation and practice can we identify? How uniform were certain regulatory practices across ‘Egyptian’ territory? Can the state be regarded as a ‘unified’ actor? Second, this was a time of accelerated cross-cultural contacts and fluid identities. Was the cultural and linguistic pluralism of Egypt distinctive for this period? What did this pluralistic milieu make possible or impossible?

14  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT What did that pluralism look like from various local vantage points? To what extent did people perceive – and perhaps cross – social boundaries marked by linguistic or geographic difference? What did the words ‘Egyptian’ and ‘foreigner’ actually mean to various individuals in everyday interactions? And how do practices of identity formation or naming intersect with practices of a (possibly) expanding state? Is the concept of ‘fluid identity’ a useful one in capturing the historical richness of this decade? Is it more useful for this decade than others, before or after? Is identity any more ‘fluid’ at the fin de siècle than it always and ever is? Given that formations of travel, whether physical or discursive, inform many of the microhistories we elaborate on here, can we elicit new elements in cross-cultural contact, transmission and translation in this decade in reference both to Egyptians (and their ideas) travelling to Europe and Europeans (and their ideas) travelling to Egypt and circulating in various, often cosmopolitan, contexts? Did the intellectual and artistic cross-currents of the European fin de siècle generate ripples at the other end of the Mediterranean? Did increasing knowledge of, or contact with, Egyptian scholars and their works provoke new thought, reconsideration and reflection among a Western public? Third – and arising from these questions – what can we say more generally about social identities during the 1890s? Do new identity rubrics and their associations with certain patterns or visibilities of behaviour emerge in this decade and, if so, how and why? To what extent is there a qualitative shift in terms of the roles that Egypt plays for European migrants (political or economic) and their activities and aspirations in Egypt? Or, given the dense commentary on gender roles, gendered boundaries of comportment (and their transgression) of women and young men, to what extent can we see issues of sexuality and gender-role assignment, as well as discourses on the family, as expressing new, or intensifying, social and political anxieties? If the 1890s was a transitional period, what roles did discourses on the gendered organisation of society play in articulating a particular set of transitions? What kinds of institutionalised hierarchies were being weakened or were breaking down in this era and what replaced them, if anything? What impact did they have on social identities? Were certain hierarchies perceived differently in this decade by various constituents or population groups than they

i ntroducti on | 15 had been in previous decades? What kinds of affiliations to, or sense of separation from, the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman subjecthood might be posed for this decade? What did ‘allegiance’ mean to people in a political sense? Which people? How did native Egyptians ‘see’ other Ottoman subjects? Fourth, we know that this was a time of unprecedented growth in formal media of exchange. What roles did various media play in suggesting and sustaining social identities and defining political categories – and who listened and how? How did the changing presence of the technology and institutionalisation of print media during the long 1890s affect or shape the nature and extent of conversations to be had? Was the increase in periodical and book publishing in this period significant enough to be considered a qualitative change? Beyond the fact that this meant more people could access information and listen in on running debates or respond to them, did these media signify a qualitative shift in the articulation of issues? (And how could we possibly measure that?) What kinds of public spaces take on particular resonance as sites of collective response or negotiation? Is there any way we can get at the question of audiences and readerships in this era? Fifth – and related to questions of media – how do we appraise our sources? While this is, of course, always an issue, when assessing a period of marked change in the availability of circulating print sources, one must be particularly wary. If we as scholars see new things happening in the 1890s – new energies, new networks and topics or heightened debate – is it because they are novel or is it because the media change and proliferate, offering us a new set of reflections? Is it perhaps more a matter of a shift in venues of debate than a shift in debates themselves? If we cannot answer these questions, we must at least remain mindful of them. At the same time, a significantly larger circulation of periodicals and books from the middle of the decade onwards becomes in itself a qualitative, as well as a quantitative, change. The presence of these new media and the participation of new writers create a new reality; novel discursive possibilities make possible, and are part of, emerging activisms. But what, then, are the effects of the new media on activisms (or their ‘subterranean’ preludes) on the ground? Does the advent of a non-official press and robust book publishing sector change the nature of the discourse? Does it succeed in creating or sustaining new conversations? New groupings? New political energies?

16  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT This Volume We have grouped our chapters into overlapping thematic foci, as outlined above. In Part I, ‘Institutionalising Authority, Claiming Jurisdiction and Space’, contributors evaluate the capabilities of state institutions and jurisdictional bodies more loosely associated with the state to institute and maintain authority over particular sites of regulation, ‘development’ and training. In ‘Documenting Death: Inquests, Governance and Belonging in 1890s Alexandria’, Shane Minkin draws on the inquest reports of the British Consulate of Alexandria to study the role of death in creating, negotiating and maintaining the socio-political categories of the living in fin de siècle Egypt. Such post-mortem investigations highlight fractured affiliations that characterised the lived experiences of many British subjects, while by contrast demonstrating how lived complexities were flattened in death into arbitrary patterns of belonging. Minkin complicates our understanding of colonialism as a regulatory mechanism by reminding us that everyday interactions defined and redefined colonial rule, despite, and around, jurisdictional anxieties. ‘The Scales of Public Utility: Agricultural Roads and State Space in the Era of the British Occupation’, by Aaron George Jakes, takes up the question of infrastructure provision as another site on which various interests and constituencies crystallised to show the advancement of state aims as anything but smooth, even as this arena of ambitious government activity suggested how the state was working to solidify and extend its jurisdiction. Jakes traces the rural road-building campaign as a project that had to negotiate a quagmire: if such technological and construction projects facilitated communications and commercial flows, they also challenged – and needed – the authority of local officials and others. This chapter reanimates forgotten struggles that were central in shaping the state and its nationalist interlocutors, as Jakes illustrates vividly by wondering how the presence of new agricultural routes made the crucial events of Dinshawai possible. The 1890s were a crucial decade for the development of Egyptian pedagogical thought, argues Hilary Kalmbach in ‘Training Teachers How to Teach: Transnational Exchange and the Introduction of Social-Scientific Pedagogy in 1890s Egypt’. Emphasising concepts of pedagogy and curricula development as hybrid products of exchange between Egyptian and European institutions

i ntroducti on | 17 and individuals, Kalmbach scrutinises the fruits of this ‘translation’ in the changing curriculum of Dar al-‘Ulum, Egypt’s first teacher-­training institution, finding in particular a new emphasis on pedagogical methods. Like Kalmbach, Vivian Ibrahim highlights the role of certain individuals in maintaining, reshaping and also challenging the institutions through which modern Egyptian subjectivities were fostered and formed. In ‘Legitimising Lay and State Authority: Challenging the Coptic Church in Late NineteenthCentury Egypt’, Ibrahim traces an emerging lay Coptic elite whose promotion of a community lay council signalled a new perspective on their role in the Coptic community and the nation. Like other groups in Egypt, this elite established charitable, benevolent and philanthropic societies, but their activities also challenged the longstanding authority of the clerical establishment, for these activities had political and economic implications. Within a longer process, the 1890s constituted a transitional period for the Coptic Church and community; within its interstices, claiming and contesting jurisdiction over population groups were signs of emerging nationalist concerns amongst a heterogeneous elite that was not necessarily aligned with either central government institutions or those that served these groups specifically. Mario Ruiz’s chapter, ‘Criminal Statistics in the Long 1890s’, brings the focus back to the British-run administration and those who worked – and argued – with its representatives. Ruiz surveys the technologies that facilitated surveillance of perceived criminal populations; specifically the use of criminal statistics in the government’s published annual reports, which represented both a quantitative and qualitative shift in the ways the state accessed and organised information. Why and how did statistical thinking, in the form of auditing rural populations, affect governmental practices and official conversations on crime? How did the British deploy their figures to justify certain policies and mark out sites of perceived danger? What effects did this have on the direction of policy through the 1890s? These chapters show attempts at jurisdictional reach, even as they also outline challenges to state authority. Our second section, ‘Challenging Authority in Contested Spaces’, takes up this theme. In ‘Anomalous Egypt? Rethinking Egyptian Sovereignty at the Western Periphery’, Matthew H. Ellis shifts attention away from the predominantly Cairo-centric historiography of modern Egypt and towards the Egyptian West: the Libyan Desert,

18  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Western oases and Mediterranean coastline west of Alexandria. Ellis studies Egyptian sovereignty and administration in the West, in order to think about the colonial nation-state as comprising borderlands that tested the centre’s political and administrative mechanisms. Drawing on specific encounters between local concerns and centralising bureaucracies, Ellis focuses on the Oasis of Siwa as a site that elucidates the aims and pitfalls of Egyptian state administration in a far-off, marginal area. Even if nationalist articulations were uncertain and uneven during this decade, spaces of contestation between the state and Egyptian elites helped to define some of the concerns around which these articulations would develop. Hanan Hammad’s chapter, ‘Regulating Sexuality: The Colonial–National Struggle over Prostitution after the British Invasion of Egypt’, asks how illicit sexuality – specifically, prostitution – in the early years of the British occupation became a touchstone for competing notions of public morality and its regulation. Hammad argues that contentions about prostitutes’ alleged uncontrolled sexuality were used by Egyptian nationalists to dramatise the British occupation and European privileges and influence generally. British policies to regulate health inspections and register prostitutes symbolised the debasement of occupation; concomitantly, prostitutes were never seen as working women, but only as a symbol, metaphor and symptom of broad socio-political concerns. In ‘Internationalist Thought, Local Practice: Life and Death in the Anarchist Movement in 1890s Egypt’, Anthony Gorman traces the late nineteenth-century revival of a movement that previously surfaced in Egypt amongst Italian workers several decades before. Remaining largely international in its membership and imagination, in the 1890s the movement adopted a more local strategy of engagement with the ‘social question’ and emerged as an important voice on questions of labour militancy, secularism and radical thought in general. In taking up local issues, such as public health, employment and education, anarchists sought to promote an ­alternative discourse that challenged the domination of imperialist and religious frameworks for social justice and equally the chauvinism of nationalist perspectives and local ethnic communities. In so doing, they both stimulated public debate and provoked state authority and power. The internationalist and local ethnic frameworks within which Egyptian

i ntroducti on | 19 politics played out are also at stake in Alexander Kazamias’s chapter, ‘Cromer’s Assault on “Internationalism”: British Colonialism and the Greeks of Egypt, 1882–1907’. Kazamias explores the relationship between the British colonial authorities and Egypt’s largest foreign ethnic group by arguing two novel theses: first, that despite the Capitulatory privileges enjoyed by most of them, Egypt’s Greeks also turned into colonial subjects after 1882; and second, that British colonialism posed a greater threat to Egypt’s cosmopolitan urban life than did Egyptian nationalism. As Cromer attempted to restrict the Capitulatory privileges of Egypt’s foreign communities, the chapter argues, Egypt’s Greeks responded with three main strategies: collaboration, attentism and resistance. The last yielded a surprising cooperation between Greek rivals of British colonialism and the emerging Egyptian nationalist movement. Earlier, we called attention to the importance of a rapidly expanding print culture as a qualitative shift in the 1890s that made possible a more inclusive public conversation, at least amongst elements of the urban populace. The chapters in our first two sections demonstrate this by highlighting the significance of the press in making and contesting state policies. New opportunities to publish fostered the spread of new genres of imaginative and persuasive writing, and it is to this arena that we now turn in our third section, ‘Probing Authority with the Written Word’. In ‘“And I Saw No Reason To Chronicle My Life”: Tensions of Nationalist Modernity in the Memoirs of Fathallah Pasha Barakat’, Hussein Omar analyses the depiction of the ‘long 1890s’ in the unpublished autobiography (c.1932) of a well-known Egyptian nationalist politician, Fathallah Barakat Pasha, focusing especially on the years of his coming of age, 1882 to 1910, under the occupation. A sardonic corrective to triumphalist nationalist narratives produced in the 1920s, Barakat’s text undoes the historical amnesia that he saw promoted by the new Egyptian National Archive. In these accounts, the late nineteenth century was an embarrassing blip in the state’s narrative of unswerving progress. Nationalism’s heroes look decidedly less heroic in Barakat’s narrative, as they collaborated with their colonial overlords. As he unpacks Barakat’s own sense of self and estrangement and considers the ‘clashing ethical systems’ at issue, Omar also challenges recent scholarship on the ‘effendi class’ by arguing that a more complex and variable self-image governed individuals who were in

20  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT some senses members of the Egyptian elite, yet who felt themselves to be excluded, by choice or not, from the ranks of the decision-makers. In her chapter, Orit Bashkin analyses approaches to the Jewish question, as articulated through the pluralistic Egyptian public sphere of the 1890s. ‘My Sister Esther: Reflections on Judaism, Ottomanism and Empire in the Works of Farah Antun’ considers how Arab Christian intellectuals residing in Egypt wrote about Jews in Europe as a way to explore the ethics of social justice and a means to demand citizenship rights not based on religion. The chapter theorises fluid meanings ascribed to the term ‘other’ by examining media through which this ‘otherness’ was negotiated and diffused: the newspaper article, cultural magazine and historical novel. New means of communication shaped new ideas about Islamic, Jewish and Christian histories relevant to the political moment. But this was juxtaposed with local writers’ knowledge of orientalist views of their societies and the sharp dissonance that these perspectives posed for such writers. Paul Starkey focuses on one of these media. ‘Romances of History: Jurji Zaydan and the Rise of the Historical Novel’ considers the earliest historical novels, published in the 1890s, by the energetic polymath Jurji Zaydan. Zaydan’s series of novels, based on Arab and Islamic history, were immediately popular. But why the 1890s? And why the historical novel? Starkey’s answers to these questions shed light on not only a key moment in Egypt’s literary tradition, but also the state of education in Egypt at the time. In our final chapter, Marilyn Booth considers some little-known treatises from the decade to argue that debates on ‘the woman question’ strongly structured the book publishing sector as well as the periodical press throughout the decade. ‘Before Qasim Amin: Writing Women’s History in 1890s Egypt’ highlights the use of historical narratives in debating contemporary gendered practices and argues that their authors were writing for both a local audience and a transnational set of interlocutors, for their arguments are deployed within a context of homosocial male conversations about gender as a marker of historical progress, where European sources could act as both proof and foil for debates carried on locally. What, Booth asks, might be the purchase of a scare-discourse on the ‘New Woman’ in Europe’s capitals on intellectuals in Egypt? The tenor of this ‘conversation’, she argues, was specific to the 1890s as a moment when later defensiveness on gender politics vis-à-vis Europe was

i ntroducti on | 21 as yet fluidly marked and when the ‘virgin territory’ of women’s history had not yet become embattled terrain. Connections and Circulations Above all, perhaps, our volume speaks to the fact that the 1890s saw accelerated contact amongst people of varying origins in Egypt and through Egyptians’ travels abroad. Of course, the European fin de siècle was most ineluctably present in the forms of British colonial officials, as we see particularly in the chapters by Ruiz, Ellis and Hammad, as well as British and other European subjects resident in Egypt for shorter or longer periods: scientists, missionaries, teachers, travellers, builders, entrepreneurs and so on. This cosmopolitanism is particularly evident in Minkin’s chapter and has been the focus of previous works cited above. In this volume, Kalmbach shows the circulation of European educationists through their texts in Egypt’s recently formed teacher-training school, while Booth finds contact with European orientalists in locally produced treatises on gender. Bashkin addresses local awareness of the 1896 Dreyfus case in France and more broadly of the treatment of Jews and Muslims in Europe. Local communities of European ethnic origin and their ties to compatriots based elsewhere, through political and economic ties, are the foci of Gorman’s and Kazamias’s contributions. In other words, the international cast of 1890s Egypt is ubiquitous and should leave us with recognition of the coeval patterns and concerns of the fin de siècle, both there and elsewhere. If, in Great Britain, the 1890s were a time of ‘collision between the old and the new . . . [which] marks it as an excitingly volatile and transitional period . . . a time fraught with anxiety and with an exhilarating sense of possibility’,24 this is but one way in which developments across Egypt were coeval with those in Europe and where the specificity of local events and processes was not isolated from those elsewhere. It is important to keep in mind how processes – mental and material, engendered partly by empire, distinct and unevenly distributed – were nevertheless present in Cairo as they were in London (but less so in the hinterlands of both, and everywhere mediated by understandings and material striations of class). In both, if only for a relative few, a ‘cultural and political landscape . . . lit up by a constellation of new formations’ could offer a sense of possibility and generate anxiety and fear – a

22  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT ‘highly specific moment . . . of experiencing the ambivalence of modernity’. 25 In both, massive internal migration from rural areas to urban spaces engendered worries, left to us in print, about changes to the occupation and use of public spaces and concerns about health and security. In both, statistical mapping of crime and population distribution took on particular urgency, as Ruiz suggests here for colonial Egypt. In Britain, popular cultural fantasies of exoticised threats circulating at the fin de siècle invoked Egyptians and other Others at a moment when fears were circulating that Britain’s ‘New Imperialist’ gains might be fragile at best. Voices contesting the validity of the imperial adventure were beginning to be heard more loudly; at the same time, masculine romances and the popular press advanced ideas of heroism and sacrifice for the Empire, constructing and reiterating notions of strictly gendered contributions to the nation at home – just as historical novels in Egypt were offering blueprints for a local future, as we can see in Starkey’s discussion of Zaydan’s oeuvre.26 In Egypt, as in Britain, France and Germany, notions of societal and individual ‘degeneration’ – popularised by Max Nordau’s dark portrayal in his 1892 tract Degeneration (translated from the German into French in 1893 and into English in 1895) – were undergirded by understandings of Darwinian evolutionary theory, as well as concepts of race hierarchy. If some in Europe were sobered by Nordau’s warning that ‘[t]here is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day’,27 then others in Egypt may not have felt so differently about this so-called ‘Dusk of Nations’, though they might have assigned the blame differently. Warnings and theories could be circulated amongst readers in Britain and France more comprehensively than ever, for as in Egypt the 1890s saw a particular proliferation of mass media, though Egypt did not yet have the sensationalist press of France and England – the association, as Eugene Weber puts it, of ‘high thinking and low reporting’.28 In Egypt as in Europe, intellectuals read and cited Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, either in French or (from 1909 onwards) in Arabic translation. They kept up-to-date with political events, scientific breakthroughs and technological advances elsewhere (and at home) through the daily Egyptian press and popularising journals that circulated throughout the cities of the Arab world. As anarchistinspired incidents in Britain, France and elsewhere, magnified by the popular

i ntroducti on | 23 press into a pervasive security threat, fed into fin de siècle apocalyptic imaginings, Egypt had its own cosmopolitan anarchist collectives. Labour activists in Egypt had deep ties of affiliation with their peers throughout Europe. As the emerging profession of medical psychology warned against ‘hysteria’ in housewives and the young, medical students in Egypt wrote accessible narratives warning their compatriots against treating al-rih (glossed as hysteria) through folk medicine, rather than going to consult trained professionals.29 Weber reminds us that in France, amidst the scandal-sheets and verbalised worries, the perceptions of rising crime rates and accelerating social divisions, the sense of political fragility and economic uncertainty, we must also remember that technological advances, increased numbers of schools, mass production and new kinds of access made life better, if not much better, for many (and much better for a few, though they could no longer claim as much distinction from the rest). The same is likely true in Egypt, though perhaps more incrementally and less broadly. For one thing, education at higher levels was slowly becoming available to more (mostly male and at least somewhat economically and socially privileged) young people, who would form the backbone of the anti-colonial nationalist movement over the next few decades. Weber reminds us as well that most French people in the 1890s, both in provincial cities and towns as well as rural settings, faced basic daily challenges in procuring water, sanitation and foodstuffs; women queued at public fountains before dawn.30 And understandings of where women belonged, in private settings and public spaces, were not so different in France than they were in Egypt: distinctions are perhaps as much a matter of class belonging as of any other marker of experience and identity. At any rate, as we contemplate Egypt’s fin de siècle, it is well to remember that the term resonates partly because it connotes mutual concerns and supra-national pressures that had their own particular formations and effects in and upon specific national sites. Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman Edinburgh, October 2013 Notes   1. Donald M. Reid, Whose Pharoahs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian Identity From Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 137.

24  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT   2. Jacques Berque, Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 159.  3. Ministry of Finance, The Census of Egypt Taken in 1907 (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1909), Diagram.   4. ‘Ali Mubarak, al-Khitat al-tawfiqiyya al-jadida li-Misr al-Qahira wa-muduniha wa-biladiha al-qadima wa al-mashhura, 20 vols (Bulaq: al-Matba‘a al-kubra alamiriyya, 1886–9).   5. Mustafa Kamil, al-Mas’ala al-sharqiyya, 2 vols (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Liwa’, 1898).  6. Muhammad Farid, Kitab al-bahja al-tawfiqiyya fi tarikh mu’assis al-‘a’ila alkhidiwiyya (Bulaq: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya, 1891); Muhammad Farid, Tarikh al-dawla al-‘aliyya al-‘uthmaniyya (Cairo: Matba‘at al-taqaddum, 1894).   7. Jurji Zaydan, Kitab tarikh Misr al-hadith (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Muqtataf, 1889).   8. The first two volumes of Haqa’iq al-akhbar ‘an duwal al-bihar (Cairo: Matba‘a al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq) appeared in 1896 and 1898.   9. Mikha’il Sharubim, al-Kafi fi tarikh Misr al-qadim wa al-hadith, 4 vols (Bulaq: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya, 1898–1900). The fifth volume of Sharubim’s work, covering the period from 1892 to 1910, began to appear in 1998 with the publication of parts one and two and was not finally published until 2003. 10. For example, ‘Abbas Hilmi II, The Last Khedive of Egypt: Memoirs of Abbas Hilmi II, trans. Amira Sonbol (ed.) (Reading: Ithaca, 1998); Nubar Nubarian, Mémoires de Nubar Pacha, ed. Mirrit Boutros Ghali (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1983); Muhammad Farid, The Memoirs and Diaries of Muhammad Farid, An Egyptian Nationalist Leader (1868–1919), trans. Arthur Goldschmidt (San Francisco, CA: Mellen University Research Press, 1992); and Ahmad Shafiq, Mudhakkirati fi nisf qarn, 3 vols (Cairo: Matba‘at Misr, 1934). 11. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (London: John Murray, 1859), trans. Ya‘qub Sarruf, Sirr al-najah (Beirut, 1880). Desmolins’s work appeared in Arabic translation as Sirr taqaddum al-Inkiliz al-Saksuniyyin (Cairo: Matba‘at al-ma‘arif, 1889). Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules (1895) was published as Ruh al-ijtima‘ (Cairo: Matba‘at al-sha‘b, 1909). 12. Martin Hartmann, The Arabic Press of Egypt (London: Luzac, 1899); Ibrahim ‘Abduh, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-misriyya, 1898–1981, 4th edn (Cairo: Sijjil al‘arab, 1982). 13. Donald M. Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cairo: American University Press, 1990), p. 113. 14. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt and Cromer, A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations (London: John Murray, 1968); John Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt

i ntroducti on | 25 (London: Elek, 1970); Roger Owen, Lord Cromer, Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 15. Robert L Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); E. R. J. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy 1820–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). 16. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i, Mustafa Kamil, ba‘ith al-haraka al-wataniyya, tarikh Misr al-qawmi min sanat 1892 ila sanat 1908 (Cairo: Matba‘at al-sharq, 1939). 17. Muhammad Rifaat Bey, The Awakening of Modern Egypt (London: Longmans, Green, 1947), p. 229. 18. For example, Fawzi Jirjis, Dirasat fi tarikh Misr al-siyasi, mundhu al-‘asr almamluki (Cairo: al-Dar al-misriyya, 1958), pp. 92–125. 19. Ra’uf ‘Abbas Hamid, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliyya fi Misr 1899–1952 (Cairo: Dar al-katib al-‘arabi, 1967); al-Nizam al-ijtima‘i fi Misr fi zill al-milkiyya al-zira‘iyya al-kabira, 1837–1914 (Cairo: Dar al-fikr al-hadith lil-tiba‘a wa al-nashr, 1973); ‘Ali Barakat, Tatawwur al-milkiyya al-zira‘iyya fi Misr wa-atharuhu ‘ala al-ªaraka al-siyasiyya, 1813–1914 (Cairo: Dar al-thaqafa al-jadida, 1977). 20. Latifa Salim, al-Mar’a al-misriyya wa al-taghyir al-ijtima‘i (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-misriyya al-‘amma lil-kitab, 1984). 21. Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender, and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Life and Works of ‘A’isha Taymur (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums and the Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt (Berkeley,

26  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT CA: University of California Press, 2011); Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (New York, NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Yaseen Noorani, Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 22. See works cited in the bibliography. 23. Among these were Cromer’s own two-volume grand statement on Egypt, Modern Egypt; the memoirs of Harry Boyle: Clara Boyle, A Servant of the Empire, A Memoir of Harry Boyle (London: Methuen, 1938); Charles Coles Pasha, Recollections and Reflections (London: St Catherine Press, 1918); Alfred Milner, England in Egypt, 9th edn (London: Edward Arnold, [1892] 1902); Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service 1902–1946 (London: John Murray, 1949); and, as a critic of British rule, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914, 2 vols (London: M. Secker, 1919–20). 24. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction: Reading the “Fin de Siècle”’, in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900 (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xiii. 25. Ledger and Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Italics in original. 26. Ledger and Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi; ‘The New Imperialism’, pp. 133–4. Ross G. Forman, ‘Empire’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 91–111. 27. From Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895), excerpted in Ledger and Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle, pp. 13–17; for the quotation, see p. 13. 28. Gail Marshall, ‘Introduction’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3–4. There are studies, too numerous to mention here, on the late-Victorian press in Britain. On France, for a useful overview of the role of the press at the fin de siècle and its generative role in communicating anxieties, see Eugene Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 240, but see also pp. 3, 42, 114. On the similarity of press reports in France to those in Egypt’s 1890s press, see Marilyn Booth, ‘Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s’, in Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (eds), Between Politics, Society and Culture: The Press in the Middle East before Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). 29. Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, pp. 13–30. For a contemporary

i ntroducti on | 27 discussion of this, see, for example, H. B. Donkin, ‘Hysteria’, in A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine (1892), excerpted in Ledger and Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle, pp. 245–50. On Egypt, see Marilyn Booth, ‘Liberal Thought and the “Problem” of Women’, in Max Weiss and Jens Hanssen (eds), Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age, 1780s–1940s: Towards a Liberal History of the Nahda (forthcoming). 30. Weber, France, pp. 55–6.

1 Documenting Death: Inquests, Governance and Belonging in 1890s Alexandria Shane Minkin

L

ilian Irlam, a thirty-year-old British governess for a wealthy, indigenous Jewish family in Alexandria, often bathed at the Mediterranean beach at San Stefano with her friend Fotini Margaritu. One afternoon in August 1903, Lilian and her friend swam out to some rocks. Once there, Lilian removed her swim floats and waded out further. Splashing in the water at a depth she could easily stand in, she was suddenly pulled out by an undercurrent and could not fight the waves. Fotini was caught in the same riptide when she endeavoured to come to Lilian’s aid. Eugene Rosenzweig, a sunbather watching the women, ran to find the lifeguard, Bisheer Hassan Chaouich. Bisheer swam out to the women and threw a lifebuoy over Fotini. Lilian had already drowned. Edward Gould, British Consul in Alexandria, convened a three-man jury to join him in an inquest into Lilian’s death. The jury interviewed Fotini, Eugene and Bisheer and ordered a post-mortem to be performed by Arthur Morrison, Consular Surgeon to the British. Dr Morrison examined Lilian’s body in the mortuary at the German/British Deaconesses Hospital in Alexandria.1 Her organs were healthy and her body normal, he noted, aside from the presence of water in her lungs and multiple scratches and contusions, suggesting she had been dragged across the rocks. The inquest concluded with a verdict of accidental death by drowning; the jury included a plea for more lifeguards at San Stefano.2 31

32  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT In 1903, the year Lilian died, the British Consulate followed the same procedure in processing her death that had been in place long before the 1882 occupation. Lilian died a British subject, and the British Consular Surgeon examined her. A team of British men collected the data for the inquest reports and processed her for burial.3 But by 1903, although the procedures remained the same, Lilian’s death as a British subject resonated differently than it would have done in previous years. Over the course of the 1890s, as the British colonial authorities consolidated their rule in Egypt, inquests became part of the sharpening of a colonial power structure that was undergirded by the British need both to classify the Egyptians over whom they had assumed control and similarly to categorise the foreign communities who resided in Egypt. Lilian’s death and subsequent post-mortem help us to navigate the 1890s as a crucial decade, one in which the structures of British rule in Egypt were solidified and vague categories such as ‘foreign’, ‘local’ and ‘British’ were made more concrete. However, even in an era when the British were most decisive about stamping this category on the bodies of their dead, the process by which they did so worked against their purpose, leaving traces of the diverse, complex lives of British subjects far beyond the singular identification of the term ‘British’. In these records of afterlives, one can see contrasts between British authority and everyday, lived experience. Whereas the British officials were interested in claiming – and thus defining – a body as British, the lived experiences of British peoples in Egypt suggested that ‘British’ was just one of many identifications and not necessarily a limiting or exclusive one. This chapter aims to use the inquest reports of the British Consulate of Alexandria to delineate the notion of ‘British’ in the 1890s by showing that it is death that facilitates the formation of categories for the living. The people classified as British lived lives of religious and geographic diversity, suggesting that the term ‘British’ was a broad, inclusive grouping. The fact of empire and the consolidation of British military and political strength meant that a wide berth of imperial subjects could claim to be British when abroad; indeed, the British of Egypt included a large percentage of the Maltese residents in Egypt (approximately 33 per cent in 1897), as well as the occasional Indian or other colonial subject.4 Thus, those identified as British often lived far from – and

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 33 without access to – the privileges of colonial officials, only to be claimed by the British community – and thus relegated to that category – in death. In this chapter I explore the lives and deaths of British subjects throughout the long 1890s. I show that they lived complex, messy lives that defied bounded national categories, but that the process of inquest forced them into those very same classifications. The use of these inquests to ask questions of the lives and deaths of British subjects reveals to us the importance of change and continuity within colonial rule. The change, brought about by the solidification of categories and the expansion of the colonial project, rested on the continuity of practices inherited by the British colonial authorities and put to new use in 1890s Egypt. Thus, this exploration will allow us to ask broader questions about the unevenness of colonial rule, as well as about historical continuity and change. In the first part of this chapter, the reforms and transformations of 1890s British Egypt take centre stage, and I ask how categories emerged to become such a fundamental aspect of British colonial rule. In the second part, I begin by thinking of the unique history of Alexandria that opened up the necessary space for urban experiences beyond national divisions. Focusing on the British community of Alexandria provides a route for exploring the categories used in the management of death. The history of inquests and autopsies forms the bulk of the third section, which explores the legal basis for the British processing of their dead. Why does death matter, and how might we both quantify and qualify a death? Finally, individual stories of inquests, of the myriad British peoples of Alexandria who met their death in the city and were claimed by the British Consulate as theirs, demonstrates that the processing of the dead helped to flatten complicated lives into manageable categories for the living – categories that, as of the 1890s, enabled the British colonial government to organise and classify the Egyptian state. British Rule in 1890s Egypt At the beginning of the 1890s, the British occupation of Egypt was nearly a decade old. The transition to a colonial possession was a slow one, beginning with a ‘veiled protectorate’ in which the British stayed mainly in the background, but moving progressively towards open British rule, wherein the British were the ultimate authorities in Egypt, overruling both the Khedive and the Sublime Porte. It was not until 1914 that the British declared an

34  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT o­ fficial protectorate, although by 1891, the British had consolidated their hold over Egypt, despite its technically remaining an Ottoman colony.5 Although existing in a complicated relationship with the Ottomans and the Egyptian National Government, the British rapidly emerged as the primary voice in decision-making regarding Egyptian infrastructure, law, security and public health.6 As other chapters in this volume demonstrate, changes in public works were evident in the 1890s, as the British state-building system was in full swing throughout Egypt, with a specific focus on rural areas.7 The British worked to delineate boundaries in the Western Desert,8 to create what they saw to be a functioning bureaucracy and to implement a series of projects determined to expand and solidify the colonial state.9 As part of this process, the British colonial government worked to define Egypt, translating it into statistics and categories that could be managed and controlled.10 While a small cadre of officials worked with him, Lord Cromer, through personal force and political authority, was the sole authority atop the government.11 The annual reports, collaboratively written by the various governing officials and submitted by Lord Cromer to the British Parliament, documented the evolution of government policy in Egypt. Designed specifically to convince the British Government that the Egyptian occupation was a worthwhile endeavour, the reports are notable for their attention to details and numbers.12 Alongside all of the statistics for infrastructure, slavery, fiscal concerns, agricultural input and output, prisons, education and the like, those writing the annual reports glossed over the heterogeneity of Egypt’s populace, naming and categorising groups and individuals with seeming ease. Cromer was concerned about the prevalence of other Europeans in Egypt and spoke of the need to increase English language instruction and general British cultural and societal influence in order to rule effectively.13 He evoked national categories without defining them, as he presented the British, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Europeans and others as self-contained, axiomatic categories that needed no explanation.14 Moreover, while Cromer’s concern with European residents is evident in other documents, in these reports only the indigenous Egyptian people appear as concerns of the British colonial government; the foreign communities are not listed as beneficiaries of the burgeoning colonial state.15 For example, Cromer reported yearly on the government hospitals and their benefits to the ‘native’ population; the other hos-

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 35 pitals (such as the Deaconesses, Greek or European mentioned in the inquest reports) are missing entirely from Cromer’s accounts of hospital usage and public medical space. Reading the annual reports, one might think that only indigenous natives used the government hospitals and that only the government hospitals were options for them. Cromer then uses these categories not only to define the population, but also to delineate public institutions and define access to them as well. Yet, in contradiction to these reports, statistics from the Greek Hospital of Alexandria show a preponderance of indigenous patients long before the British occupation focused on public health infrastructure. Moreover, inquests from the British Consulate in Alexandria suggest that British subjects might end up in the government hospital along with all foreign communal hospitals; they used institutions far beyond those of the British community alone.16 In other words, despite the neat separation of city infrastructure and population in the annual reports, research shows that the separate spaces detailed by Cromer and other colonial officials were not as segregated as the reports imply. Instead, by speaking only of Egyptian native and government structures, Cromer suggests a stratified Egypt and a space in which categories were known and bounded. These reports mirror Cromer’s efforts at classifying and describing the overall population composition of Egypt.17 In Cromer’s Egypt, the social and national categories of Arab, Egyptian, European, Greek and British emerged as definitive and set. In his work Modern Egypt, Cromer commented: ‘The permanent British colony in Egypt is small. It consists mainly of a few merchants who reside at Alexandria . . . The Alexandrian Englishman, like most of his countrymen, is somewhat exclusive. He mixes little in foreign society’.18 Using ‘British’ and ‘English’ seemingly interchangeably, Cromer proposed a British population in Egypt separate not only from the indigenous population, but from all other Europeans as well.19 The British, Cromer wrote, did not become ‘Levantine’ or ‘semi-orientalised Europeans’; they would not integrate into Egyptian society or with other Europeans in Egypt.20 Cromer’s vision of the British as fundamentally different and segregated was not new; it mirrored broader colonial understandings of difference and racial superiority.21 Moreover, Cromer tasked himself not only with ruling Egypt, but also with convincing London that staying in Egypt was w ­ orthwhile;

36  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT he did so at least in part by arguing that Egyptians were in desperate need of London’s morally and rationally superior guidance.22 Arguably, Cromer did not see the British in Egypt as of Egypt; rather, they stood aside, separate and above others in Egypt. No matter the reason, it is clear that Cromer’s usage of these categories, both in his annual reports and his other written work, was prescriptive and not descriptive. Cromer wrote of the Egypt he wished to rule, not of the Egypt that existed. The success of Cromer’s vision of Egypt is evidenced in much of the historiography of the British and other foreign communities of Egypt. Some historians take these socio-ethnic categories for granted and write narratives of Egyptian history as if people genuinely lived in the segregated spaces Cromer aspirationally prescribed.23 A recent work by Lanver Mak on the British in Egypt, while acknowledging imperial British subjects such as the Maltese, devotes the majority of its pages to a study of national British subjects from the British Isles, thus reifying a link between the British community and the colonial project.24 Moreover, by beginning a narrative of the British community in 1882, this scholarship privileges the colonial as the defining experience of the British, as is also the case with older work on the British in Egypt.25 The British community emerges as one of colonial power and privilege, mixing only with other British from the British Isles in country clubs and closed social spaces, an image only furthered by the lack of a discussion of such power and privilege in Mak’s narrative.26 The pre-existence of a complicated, diverse British presence in Egypt is subsumed under the colonial, and the scholarship ends up substantiating the category it seeks to deconstruct. This reification of ‘British’ as a definable category confirms the image of ‘British’ found in Cromer’s writings, but it is not borne out by the evidence offered in British consular inquest cases of Alexandria. The British of Alexandria Alexandria was a primary Ottoman port city, a node of the British Empire in Egypt and a city with a large foreign population by the end of the nineteenth century. Alexandria’s population grew tremendously throughout the nineteenth century, due to the building of the Mahmudiyya Canal in the first half and the subsequent cotton boom of the 1860s, increasing from 13,000 in 1821 to 180,000 by 1865. It continued to grow in the decades

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 37 following Britain’s occupation, reaching 327,000 inhabitants by 1897.27 The further growth of the city at the end of the century was directly connected to British rule. The colonial government, as noted, focused on the building of infrastructure and the improvement of transportation resources in Alexandria (and, indeed, across much of Egypt). In the process, it facilitated and even encouraged foreign investment and interest in the city, and the city became a magnet for foreign migrants and merchants. Throughout this period, Alexandria experienced a continued influx of migrants from both inside and outside Egypt. By the 1890s, many of the so-called ‘foreign’ communities had developed well-established roots in Alexandria, with generations born and buried within the city’s boundaries.28 This multifaceted make-up of the foreign communities extended to the British as well, both before and after the 1882 invasion. A community of 3,552 in Alexandria on the eve of the occupation grew to 8,301 by 1897, larger than that of Cairo.29 Recent work on the British in Egypt shows that the population was made up of a diversity of ethnicities, including British from the British Isles, Maltese, Indian and others, and religions with nearly twice as many Catholics as Protestants – a detail that suggests that many British subjects were not from the British Isles.30 Colonial rule over Africa and Asia provided a diverse religious and geographic population with the ability to claim British subject status. In Alexandria, that diversity meant that the tangible protections and privileges of being British, associated by Cromer and some historians with upper-class lives and access to colonial power, were often beyond the living reach of many British subjects. While they may have had contact with the British infrastructure in birth, marriage or other legal matters, these moments represented opportunities they could slip in and out of, using the British Consulate and the ‘British’ category as needed. A woman, for example, might lose her British nationality through marriage to an Egyptian man, as S. J. Michael did in 1854.31 Alexandrians of the late nineteenth century, Robert Ilbert has argued, were fickle with their nationalities and would use them like credit cards, choosing that which fitted best in any given situation.32 Only ‘structured communities’, Ilbert continues, ‘could claim a fixed recognition’.33 Thus, we have a range of attitudes towards nationality by the 1890s. The British authorities used categories to classify and regulate the p ­ opulation,

38  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT assuming them to be bounded and reflective of reality. The people of Alexandria, however, used these same national classifications conveniently, when, and as, necessary. In life, then, these identifications were not restrictive; instead, the bounded national category was a product of death. Dying as a British subject in Egypt meant being claimed as a British subject once and for all. As I have stated, the inquest reports document both the categorisation of the British and the complexity of those categorised. The prevailing composite of British subjects shows a mix of imperial and national subjects, of rich and poor, of those living in Egypt as well as those just passing through. Their lives are intermixed with other foreigners and natives as friends, as employers and employees and as people sharing the same public and private space. Among them are those who died of sickness, accidents, suicides and crime. Lilian Irlam, whose death by drowning opened this chapter, is not exceptional; she is one of hundreds of stories of the lives of British subjects who lived far beyond the social and economic confines of the ‘official’ British community in Alexandria, only to be claimed by it in death. They were people like Juan Carlo Caruana, run over by a train in 1895, or Giuseppe Bellante, who died of cancer at the Greek Hospital in 1892, or John Higgins, who died of smallpox, also in 1892.34 Higgins worked as a groom for (Ahmed) Mohsen Pasha. When Higgins became sick, it was Mohsen Pasha who paid for his hospitalisation and, later, his funeral. Higgins had apparently been working for wealthy ‘Egyptians’ for some time; after his death, his father requested that the British Consulate arrange for the return of a gold watch – a gift from his son’s former employer, Cherif Bey. While their lives do not erase the very real colonial power and privilege of the many upper-class British who ruled Egypt in the 1890s and beyond, the people of these inquest reports do not sit comfortably with conventional, monolithic understandings of colonial rule. They challenge a clear-cut distinction between colonised and coloniser. Their colonial bodies memorialised a complex community, as local as it was foreign, as much a part of Alexandria and Egypt as distinct from it.35 In Alexandria, alongside approximately 1,200 military men, almost 4,000 British male subjects, both imperial and national, identified as a part of the workforce in the 1897 census, with over 100 civil servants, blacksmiths, carpenters or cabinetmakers, skilled workers and engineers or architects. Another

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 39 242 men were students.36 Of the over 3,000 British women, over 100 were identified as ‘trainees’, while others served as shopkeepers, dressmakers, laundresses and midwives, among other jobs.37 Many of the non-elite individuals who migrated to Egypt from the British Isles did so in search of money and employment, looking for a temporary job, not a permanent home.38 Before, during and after the 1890s, British officials were intimately involved in monitoring the lives and deaths of both their subjects and, at times, non-British fellow Protestants in the Ottoman Empire. International treaties had guaranteed jurisdiction over the bodies of foreign subjects in death as in life.39 However, death facilitated both the singular categorisation of corpses and the archival recording of diverse, complex lives that had been lived far beyond the singular category of ‘British’. These inquests hint at the contradictions between British authority and lived experience in British Alexandria. The authorities had a vested interest in claiming bodies as British, yet lived experiences point to lives lived between, among and around categories, but not definitively in them.40 Burying – and Processing – the Dead Inherent in the social and legal bureaucracies of death was the importance of procedures that allowed for the tracking of the dead. Inquests were a crucial state practice that allowed the government to know who had died and how and what impact these deaths might have on broader living populations. This section explores the origins of the autopsy, as well as its social and legal ramifications in 1890s Alexandria. Through the autopsy and inquest, I will explore the ways in which the British gained the authority to monitor the dead in Egypt, both before and after the British occupation. Tracing the political ramifications of the British right to autopsy will also help illuminate a site of continuity, wherein the processes were not revamped by colonial rule, even if the categories were tightened. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, recognised foreign communities, often defined by both national and religious affiliation, processed and buried their dead. These communities controlled, for example, the issuance of death certificates, the inquests, burials and estate distribution.41 There was no cemetery for the poor, and the Alexandrian Municipal and Egyptian National Governments were seen as the last resort,

40  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT if an untended body became a public health issue.42 Management of the foreign dead, though nominally under Egyptian governmental oversight, was a private, communal process tended to by individual foreign communities.43 It is unclear exactly why the Egyptian Government relegated the dead to their individual communities. Perhaps they were following the traditions of the Ottoman Empire, wherein millets took care of all ‘personal status’ issues for their own.44 Maybe the government was unconcerned with strictly regulating burial before the nineteenth-century focus on public health.45 Or, alternatively, perhaps this was a broader diplomatic tradition, insisted upon by the foreign communities.46 In the specific case of the British, the consulate followed a detailed bureaucratic process that included conducting autopsies and holding inquests when a death followed questionable circumstances. The systems through which the British worked were separate from those of the Egyptian Government, a relic of a series of Order in Council agreements between the British and the Ottoman Government delineating consular jurisdiction and extra-territorial sovereignty. By 1872 the Egyptian Government had revamped regulations monitoring the bureaucratic practices surrounding death.47 Among these new rules was the requirement of a death certificate, signed by a doctor, before a corpse could be buried, as well as the new insistence on post-mortems, should any death be suspect, be it for public health reasons such as epidemics or for reasons of possible crime. Prior to this new health blueprint, however, the autopsy already had a long history, both inside and outside of Egypt; some scholars even credit Pharaonic Egypt with its origin.48 By the nineteenth century, autopsies were regularly undertaken in Europe, used mainly to advance scientific and medical knowledge.49 Post-mortems, however, were not only about scientific and medical knowledge. By the 1830s (if not earlier) they were used to investigate possible criminal activity and support pursuance of justice in wrongful deaths.50 The autopsy as a modern practice in Egypt developed separately from that in Istanbul, evolving from a means to teach medical knowledge in the 1820s to an investigative tool by the 1850s.51 Autopsies and inquests stood as a means of establishing an intimate relationship between individual and state, highlighting the ever-increasing role of the state in individual lives

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 41 and monitoring individual deaths. They formed part of a ritual surrounding death. Previously focused on burial and religious rituals, death was now an official event. By placing the autopsy in the hands of the state and moving the right to burial from a religious right to something that first requires bureaucratic approval from a governing body, death emerged as a practice of a (supposedly) secular state and a process that served the legal needs of a political entity, as well as any personal needs of subjects and survivors for burial.52 Whether in life or death, British and European nationals were subject to a legal system separate from that of indigenous Egyptians. The Capitulations, the Consular Court system and the subsequent (and coinciding) Mixed Courts system (after 1876) fostered an environment in which ‘foreign’ nationals were not necessarily subject to Egyptian law.53 With regard to foreign nationals in post-1882 Alexandria, Consular Courts had jurisdiction over all civil and criminal cases in which parties were of the same foreign nationality and all criminal cases with a foreign defendant, as well as cases of foreign civil status.54 Thus, it follows that the Egyptian Government had no authority over the autopsies and inquests of foreign residents, despite the concession to Egyptian governance represented by the relinquishing of postmortem rights.55 Prior to the British invasion of Egypt, the British Consular Courts already held sole rights to administer the deaths of their subjects, including performing autopsies and inquests.56 Tracing the legal origins of these rights in detail has proven them to be murky.57 Inquests and autopsies are not mentioned within the detailed British consular jurisdiction agreements, which continued to be negotiated with the Ottoman Empire in the years following the British occupation.58 The British–Ottoman negotiations highlight the power of foreign nations with regard to Egypt; Britain had the power to monitor its citizens and subjects living under another government’s rule. Conversely, after 1882, while the British might have negotiated their agreements with the Ottomans, they implemented them as the colonial rulers of Egypt.59 Before the occupation, the British Order in Council of 1873 detailed how the British Consulate in Ottoman territories should process the deaths of British subjects. The Orders, unlike the Capitulations, were unilateral statements of the British Government detailing how to govern abroad.60 The Orders described the procedures for probate, the administration of wills and

42  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the property of those who died intestate.61 The requirement for death certificates in England dates back to 1837;62 it is unclear, however, precisely when specifically British inquests of British dead began in Alexandria.63 Within the Orders of Council, inquests emerge as a specific British consular duty in 1910, mentioned in an agreement that sets out the detail of the limits of British jurisdiction within Ottoman territory. This particular Order in Council is based upon an 1890 Foreign Jurisdiction Act, suggesting that the British understandings of their rights and responsibilities date back at least to that time.64 With regard to inquests, the Order in Council states that the Consular Court ‘shall have and discharge . . . all the powers and duties appertaining in England to the office of the Coroner in relation to the deaths of British subjects’.65 The Order in Council continues to claim jurisdiction over any British subjects who die at sea en route to Alexandria, either on British or other ships. Inquests are requested for any suspicious deaths, but nowhere in the charge to act as coroner is there a determination to order an autopsy. It follows, however, that if coroners in England were in charge of determining the need for post-mortems, then the British Consulate abroad would have that same right to perform autopsies on their subjects.66 The negotiations present the duality of British rule in Egypt, long before the British occupation. The British had extraterritorial rights, but they continued to frame them as agreements with the Ottoman Empire and not Egypt.67 Moreover, British consular jurisdiction does not appear to have changed much after the occupation, despite the extension of British authority from above, as well as a growing, separate legal system for foreigners represented by the Mixed Courts.68 While the inquest process may have stayed the same, as the reach of the British colonial authorities evolved in the 1890s, so, too, did the meaning and usage of the data collected. As the power of the colonial state expanded, data collected in the post-mortems, such as information on smallpox and other diseases, could be applied to projects focused on public health; this focus on public health was then touted by the British as one means by which to ‘modernise’ the Egyptian population.69 Cromer’s reports, which looked at questions of sanitation, cholera, hospital expansions, prisons, cemeteries and mosque hygiene and repeatedly highlighted public health advances, were covered extensively and very positively in the Britain-based authoritative

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 43 medical journal, The Lancet.70 Public health was intimately connected to the types of information gathered through the inquest process, from details on burials and hospital usage to information on the types of diseases prevalent, threats to mental health and public dangers at the beaches or by the train tracks.71 Furthermore, these reports profiled the peoples of Alexandria, the individuals who both created and disproved the very categories that Cromer so easily promoted. Alexandrian Lives; British Deaths Death practices stood as a means of ordering the British population, determined by British decrees focused on the Ottoman Empire and continued under British colonial rule. Periodically, a doctor other than the British Consular Surgeon performed, or participated in, a post-mortem on a British corpse, usually in cases of violent crime that might be tried in another consulate’s court.72 Likewise, the British Consular Surgeon might assist in postmortems performed on non-British corpses, should a British subject stand accused of murder.73 Overwhelmingly, however, despite these exceptions, the inquest and post-mortem represented a specifically British space and a specifically British ritual, a process that played out, over and again, with a regimented, predictable pattern regulated by legal treatise and consular norms.74 But if the inquests represent a separation of some sort by, and within, the British community – in the very nature of the processing of the dead – how can we understand the lives represented in the inquest reports and other consular cases? The inquest reports personify the intersecting lives of individual British nationals in the detailing of lives and deaths. British subjects dying of natural (but not evident) causes, suicides, drowning, murder and diseases are all included within the case files. Cases such as Luigi Mifsud, a mentally ill chemist, who threw himself out of a third-floor window in August 1903 to kill himself before ‘the Greeks’ killed him; he worked at a Greek-owned shop and was apparently worried about its upcoming sale.75 Giuseppe Mamo, who died of natural causes in 1880, causing a ‘local subject’, a female bread baker who he had been living with, to petition the British Consulate for money he owed her in back rent.76 Joseph Falconer, who died in 1894 of ‘visitation of God in a natural way and not otherwise’; only after interviewing several

44  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of his colleagues did the coroner realise that Falconer was drunk.77 In 1887, S. Walker, who spoke only English, bought what he thought was Epsom salts from a local chemist who spoke no English. Walker poured the salts into his bath, climbed in and immersed his body in brass cleaner meant to shine buttons. He died soon thereafter.78 Serafino Buhagi, a house painter, shot himself in 1901, rather than being forced into marriage with a young Maltese woman.79 Alessandro Ataliotti died of internal haemorrhaging in 1896 after a night of drinking, a possible blow to the back of his head and being run over by a cab; the post-mortem could not determine if his death was an accident or murder.80 These dead, and the dozens of others like them, were the British bodies of Alexandria; their names alone, ranging from the AngloSaxon Walker and Falconer to the Maltese Buhagi and Mamo, suggest the range and make-up of the British community. Overwhelmingly poor, they lived in and amongst others of the same socio-economic status. The responsibility of the British Consulate towards dead British subjects did not end with (British) corpses in the Deaconesses Hospital or, for those who were known British subjects, with families reaching out to the consulate in their deaths. In 1895, a train ran over Jacob Gherson and his body was taken to the Egyptian Government Hospital. Poor and without family or identification, his body was held from burial in another cemetery through British intervention, until the British Consulate could establish him as theirs.81 His was not the only corpse investigated by the British Consulate. Bodies were also dug up and reburied, even after inquest, if they were thought to have been misburied as non-British; such was the intensity of the need to have the British dead counted as British.82 Thus, it was that death was the one category from which there was no turning back; it was the last chance for a British subject to count as British, to be claimed by the British. The categorisation of the corpse as British appears to trump burial, in that bodies were held or exhumed to ensure their counting as British. Claiming a body as British was not only important for the government, but for some families and friends as well. Jessie Brown worked for the Khedivial Mail Company. She killed herself at the home of Mohammed Hassan – nationality unmentioned, but presumably indigenous – in 1906. Jessie was married to a Greek man and so was to be buried in a Greek cemetery, alongside her husband.83 Her primary doctor was Georges Varreropoulo

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 45 from Athens and her secondary doctor was an Italian man. Her close friend, holding onto a small chest belonging to Jessie, was a ‘local’ subject named Fanny Cohen, most likely Jewish, although unidentified as such. Jessie Brown was obviously able to cross social boundaries in life, slipping in and out of national and religious communal categorisation, whether or not she herself understood what she was doing as such.84 In death, the British – her birth community – processed her body. Fanny Cohen turned over Jessie’s belongings to the British Consulate – and not to Jessie’s Greek husband – suggesting that somehow Fanny, too, understood Jessie as British.85 The British Consular Court performed and documented her inquest and recorded her suicide. Even her burial in the old Greek cemetery did not abrogate the British responsibility; she was not misburied, but buried with the knowledge and help of the British Consulate.86 In death, the British Consulate attempted to render Jessie Brown’s life legible within a rigid understanding of colonial governance and communal boundaries that mandated categorisations, an understanding that may have been shared by Jessie and Fanny, possibly as a result of the very process they helped to succeed. However, it was this act of writing her death, of ritualising it as British, which concretised the blurriness and richness of her life by archiving and documenting it for posterity. British Soldiers and Seamen Will Hanley has argued that British seamen need not be counted when thinking of foreignness and localness in Alexandria, because they were not in Alexandria to integrate into the life of the city.87 Clearly, British soldiers and seamen were in direct contact with – and a part of enforcing – colonial power. Arguably, they were not in Alexandria to intermingle or to be anything other than a source of a differentiated, foreign ruling force. Yet they still walked the streets of Alexandria, drank at its pubs and interacted in the city. Moreover, for many of them, Alexandria was not only where they served and lived, but where they died as well. In death, they necessarily became ‘of Alexandria’, processed and buried in the city. The Alexandria police found the body of Thomas Maher, fireman on the SS Marathon, floating in the Alexandria harbour in May 1894.88 Several other firemen attested to Maher’s proclivity for drinking and swimming, and Dr Mackie concluded that he had died an accidental death by drowning after

46  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT an autopsy revealed all organs were healthy, but filled with water. Maurice Hammond met a similar fate in 1906, when a policeman named Abdallah Sabr Ibrahim saw him staggering across the railway footbridge heading back towards his boat. Hammond plunged over the bridge, hit his head on the way down and subsequently drowned.89 Michael Swiney left his ship for a night in town with two friends in 1883; he, too, ended up drowned in the sea.90 Daniel Bell’s body was not found right away after he toppled into the harbour in 1892. His friends were surprised he fell over and insisted he was sober, remarking that he had only consumed six or seven beers. Not until the boat pulled away did his body float to the surface.91 The stories go on and on, nearly all following the same pattern: British fireman/sailor/soldier leaves his ship, cavorts in Alexandria, gets drunk and drowns trying to make his way back on board. These cases are too numerous to be seen as outside of the British colonial community.92 In Alexandria as temporary, tangible signs of brute colonial power, they were walking the city streets, drinking at the city pubs and falling and drowning in the city’s waters. They remind us of the diversity of British subjects in Alexandria who ended their lives as corpses under the British consular knife and pen. They, too, are a part of the social history of Alexandria, while it was the British authorities that claimed them, processed them, informed their families of their demise and buried them in Alexandrian soil. Conclusion Death served to flatten a corpse into a singular national subject in 1890s Alexandria. Through the management of the dead, the state – here represented through the British Consulate – could facilitate the fiction that people lived in national categories in life as well. The processing of these lives through inquests, in a ritual performed by the state, placed these bodies into readable, understood and permanent categories. These labels were increasingly important in the 1890s in the midst of colonial state transformation. The British authorities revamped bureaucracy and built infrastructure for transportation, communication and population control and institutionalised a stratified social and legal system that relied on these divisions. In contradistinction to these specific classifications of the dead, however,

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 47 the British inquest reports present evidence of complicated, multifaceted lives, wherein people lived beyond imposed categories of belonging during the long 1890s. These reports show that British subjects integrated into the wider city, marrying Greeks, working for indigenous bosses, bathing with other Europeans. The categories used by official governing procedures to catalogue the dead were not necessarily accurate – and definitely not limiting – in daily settings. It is death that brings the categories to life. Ultimately, these inquests illuminate the stories of those who lived beyond a narrative of colonial privilege, of upper-class lives or colonial power, and yet died within its framework. In doing so, they tell us a story of colonial governance beyond the impact of the singular inquest. They show us that the onslaught of colonial governance was not a clean break with the past, but a negotiation and reinterpretation of existing practices and rituals. Detailed study of the British consular inquests suggest that the authorities processing the dead did so within both a local and broader context; they took care of their own and, by doing so, they defined who their own were within the larger political project. The living could be both colonial subjects and everyday Alexandrians, but the dead were British alone. Acknowledgements I thank Marilyn Booth and Anthony Gorman for their thoughtful comments and guidance in writing this chapter. I am also grateful to Matt Ellis, Gwynn Kessler and Dina Ramadan for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts and/or multiple conversations with me about the topic. Aaron Jakes and Lisa Pollard deserve a separate mention for their insightful comments (and patience!) on multiple drafts. I began working on post-mortems in the Swarthmore Junior Faculty Writing Group in early 2011. Different sections of this chapter have been presented at the 2011 Egypt in the 1890s workshop at the University of Edinburgh in May 2011, the Death, Dying and Disposal Conference in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in September 2011 and the Middle East Studies Association Conference in Washington, DC, in December 2011. I thank all of my commentators and questioners for their interventions as I developed this piece.

48  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Notes   1. Lanver Mak does not think of the Deaconesses Hospital as a British hospital; my own research suggests that it served as a joint German–British hospital in the late nineteenth century. The British performed autopsies at the Deaconesses, but were not responsible for all the bodies that passed through it. See Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crisis 1822–1922 (London and New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 102–4. [Note that Mak’s work is actually about 1882 to 1922; there is a typo on the front cover of the book.] For the Deaconesses and other Alexandria hospitals, see Shane Minkin, ‘In Life as in Death: The Port, Foreign Charities, Hospitals and Cemeteries in Alexandria, Egypt, 1865–1914’ (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2009), pp. 181–242.   2. TNA, FO 847/33/22, inquest of Lilian Irlam, 1903. I have left the spelling of names as they appear in court records. It is worth noting that although Lilian and Fotini met almost weekly, they did not know one another’s names.   3. The all-male inquest investigators are one of many hints, unfortunately beyond the confines of this chapter, that death was a gendered process in 1890s Egypt.  4. Mak, British in Egypt, p. 17. Malta had been a British colony since 1800, and many Maltese migrated to Egypt in search of job opportunities. While Mak notes that Indians came to Egypt for similar reasons, very few Indian subjects appear in the British Consular Court records of Alexandria. TNA, FO 847/23/9, estate of Said Basselm, 1893, an Indian British subject, age eighty, is one exception.   5. Roger Owen quotes Lord Cromer regarding the resignation of Riaz Pasha as prime minister in 1891: ‘The battle is really won. All the important administrations are subject to English influence, and mostly well chosen influence’. See Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 240. See, as well, Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 146–79.   6. Cromer makes the connection of the British authority to infrastructure, law, security and public health clear in his annual parliamentary reports.   7. See Aaron Jakes’s contribution to this volume.   8. See Matthew Ellis’s contribution to this volume.   9. Owen focuses on Egypt in Part III of Lord Cromer, entitled Governing Egypt, 1883–1907. Cromer’s plans to solidify the colonial state are detailed on pages 236–85.

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 49 10. See Mario Ruiz’s contribution to this volume. 11. Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 281–2. 12. For example, Cromer writes: ‘Over 20,000 patients were received in Government Hospitals in 1897, being about 1,000 in excess of the number in 1896. These figures afford satisfactory proof of the increasing popularity of the hospitals’. Parliamentary Papers (henceforth PP), Egypt. no. 1 (1898), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 35. 13. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1893), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 16; PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1899), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Sudan in 1898, pp. 42–3. Cromer was interested in the spread of British culture, especially as a counterpoint to the French. French rivalry with the British predated the occupation and extended far beyond Egypt. Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: Britain and France: The History of a Love–Hate Relationship (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2006). For a specific discussion of French and British rivalry in Egypt, see pp. 406–11. 14. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1892), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms (1892), pp. 4–5; PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1897). Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, pp. 23–4. 15. The other European communities were important to Cromer only inasmuch as they complicated British rule. Owen (Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3, 264) discusses the ways in which the British competed with the French for control of Egypt. 16. See, for example, TNA, FO 847/25/19 inquest on Jacob Gherson. The statistics of the Greek Hospital patients, submitted to the Egyptian Government by the Greek Hospital of Alexandria in the 1880s, shows the diversity of patients in the hospital, including hundreds of ‘indigenous’ patients. Dar al-watha’iq ­al-qawmiyya (DWQ), Majlis al-wuzara’, Tawa’if wa al-jaliyyat al-ajnabiyya, box alif baa 11/alif/baa, 20 December 1883 from the secretary of the HellenoÉgyptienne community. 17. Lisa Pollard, ‘The Soft Heart of Empire and Its Blunt Edges: Arab Policy in Colonial Egypt and the Sudan’. Paper presented at Middle East Studies Association Conference, Washington, DC, 1–4 December 2011. 18. Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1908; facsimile reprint edn, Elibron Classics, 2005), p. 252. 19. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, especially pp. 245–59.

50  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 20. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 246–50. Cromer means Levantine to be an insult. 21. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For similar themes in French history, see Patricia Lorcin, Imperial Identities: Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). 22. Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 243–9. 23. Marius Deeb, ‘The Socioeconomic Role of the Local Foreign Minorities in Modern Egypt, 1805–1961’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9: 1 (1978), pp. 11–22; Pandelis Michalis Glavanis, ‘Aspects of the Economic and Social History of the Greek Community in Alexandria during the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hull, 1989); Jacob Landau, Jews in 19th Century Egypt (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1969); Hilmi Ahmad Shalabi, al-Aqallyyat al-‘irqiyya fi Misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Cairo: Maktabat al-nahda al-misriyya, 1993). 24. See, for example, Mak’s discussion of British symbols in British in Egypt, pp. 83–116. 25. Mak is not the only scholar to associate the British in Egypt with colonialism. See Peter Mansfield, The British in Egypt (New York, NY: Holt, Rinehard and Winston, 1971); Tignor, Modernization; and William M. Welch, Jr, No Country for a Gentleman: British Rule in Egypt, 1883–1907 (New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 1988). Each of these books begins their studies from between 1881 and 1883 and focuses on British colonial officials in their accounts of British Egypt. 26. See, for example, Mak’s discussion of Copts (pp. 61–2), intermarriage (pp. 72–5) and clubs (pp. 93–8). Likewise, in his discussion of British sports (pp. 98–9), Mak mentions fox hunting, but leaves out pigeon shooting, thus allowing him to discuss British sporting life without reference to Dinshawai in 1906. Throughout the book, the lack of engagement with questions of colonial power hinders an otherwise interesting collection of data and stories. 27. Robert Ilbert, ‘A Certain Sense of Citizenship’, in Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis with Jacques Hassoun (eds), Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan City, trans. Colin Clement (Alexandria: Harpocrates Publishing, 1997), p. 23. 28. The trope of cemeteries as a sign of cosmopolitanism is repeated in literature about Alexandria. André Aciman, ‘Alexandria: The Capital of Memory’, in André Aciman, False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York, NY:

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 51 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 3–21; Michael Haag, Alexandria City of Memory (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004), p. 330; Ilbert, ‘A Certain Sense of Citizenship’, p. 21; Ilios Yannakakis, ‘Farewell Alexandria’, in Alexandria 1860–1960, p. 111. 29. Mak, British in Egypt, pp. 30–1. Mak (p. 25) notes from the 1897 census that there were a total of 19,563 British subjects, 14,171 French, 38,208 Greeks, 24,454 Italians, 1,281 German and 7,115 Austro-Hungarians in Egypt. 30. There were 4,923 Catholics and 2,718 Protestants in Alexandria in 1897. See Mak, British in Egypt, p. 39. 31. DWQ, Ahad Isma‘il, box 67, S J Michael to Khedive Isma‘il, 3 November 1873. 32. Ilbert, ‘A Certain Sense of Citizenship’, p. 25. Will Hanley documents multiple examples of this phenomena, ‘Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria, 1880–1914’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2007), pp. 226–88. 33. Ilbert, ‘A Certain Sense of Citizenship’, p. 25. 34. TNA, FO 847/25/3, inquest of Jean Carlo Caruana; TNA, FO 847/21/14, estate of Giuseppe Bellante; TNA, FO 847/21/24, estate of John Higgins. 35. I use colonial body in opposition to colonised bodies. I am not talking about the impact of British colonialism on indigenous bodies, but on those identified and classified as British in Alexandria. 36. Mak, British in Egypt, Table 4.4, pp. 126–7, expanded on pp. 117–44. 37. Mak, British in Egypt, Table 4.5, p. 127. 38. That the British in Egypt were often there as a financial respite from their lives back in Great Britain, following leads on short-term work, is a point made repeatedly by Mak, British in Egypt, pp. 135–41. 39. See, for example, the 1847 letter between the Grand Vizier and Izzet Pasha, the Ihtissab Naziri, about the protection of Protestants. Lewis Hertslet, A Complete Collection of Treaties and Conventions Between Great Britain and Foreign Powers and of the Laws, Decrees, Orders in Council, &c., Concerning the Same, So Far as They Relate to Commerce and Navigation, Slavery, Extradition, Nationality, Copyright, Postal Matters, &c., and to the Privileges and Interests of the Subjects of the High Contracting Parties . . ., vol. XI (London: British Foreign Office, 1864), p. 551. The Hertslet volumes were published regularly by the British Foreign Office, compiled by Lewis Hertslet through 1864 and thereafter by Sir Edward Hertslet (henceforth, Hertslet’s Treaties). 40. See, for example, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1915 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); and Will Hanley, ‘Cosmopolitan Cursing in Late

52  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT ­ ineteenth-Century Alexandria’, in Derryl MacLean and Sikeena Karmali N Ahmed (eds), Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2012), pp. 92–104. 41. See, for example, the 1897 petition from the Patriarch of the Armenian Catholic community in Alexandria to the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior for cemetery land, DWQ, Majlis al-wuzara’, Tawa’if wa al-jaliyyat al-ajnabiyya, box 4, documents 125–8, Finance Minister to the Council of Ministers, 8 February 1898. See also the books of death certificates of the French Consulate of Alexandria, Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes – Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes (MAEE), Alexandrie, Consulate Supplement, 20 PO/2009041 7–9. MAEE also houses boxes of wills and estates. See, for example, MAEE, Alexandrie, Consulat, 20PO/1 290 or 291. 42. There are multiple examples in both TNA and DWQ. See TNA, FO 141/454, 1924 Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider and to Make Recommendations Concerning the Provision, Maintenance, and Disaffection of Cemeteries throughout Egypt; and DWQ, Majlis al-wuzara’, Tawa’if wa al-jaliyyat al-ajnabiyya, box 4, document 15, testimony given to the Health Ministry, 21 July 1891; documents 60 and 64, Minister of Public Works to the President of the Council of Ministers, 26 Rabi‘ al-Awwal 1301/24 January 1884. 43. TNA, FO 141/454, 1924, ‘Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider and to Make Recommendations Concerning the Provision, Maintenance, and Disaffection of Cemeteries throughout Egypt’. 44. Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 252–76. Marcus discusses death and burial in Ottoman Aleppo. 45. Khaled Fahmy, ‘The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Egypt’, Islamic Law and Society 6: 2 (1999), pp. 224–71. 46. My research finds that the earliest British cemetery in Egypt dated back to 1827 in the garden of the British Consul, Henry Salt. This suggests that the British were in charge of their own burials, with neither regulation from the Egyptian Government nor concern for burial close to where people lived. TNA, FO 891/137, 1911 memorandum by Moss and Catzeflis, lawyers for the trustees of the British Protestant Cemetery in Alexandria. 47. ‘Règlement sur les cimetières, inhumations, exhumations et transport de cadavres a l’étranger, approuvé par la console internationale sanitaire d’Égypte dans ses séances des 15 Septembre 1876, 26 Mars et 30 Octobre 1877’, DWQ, Lois,

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 53 Décrets, Arrêtes et Règlements Intéressant La Municipalité d’Alexandrie 1890–1920 (Alexandria: Société de publications égyptiennes, 1920). 48. Julian L. Burton, ‘A Bite into the History of the Autopsy from Ancient Roots to Modern Decay’, Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology 1: 4 (2005), pp. 277–84. 49. Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Burton, ‘A Bite’, p. 282. 50. Joe Sim and Anthony Ward, ‘The Magistrate of the Poor? Coroners and Deaths in Custody in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine, pp. 245–67. 51. This is one of the central claims of Fahmy, ‘Anatomy of Justice’, pp. 224–71. The first autopsy is a central trope in scholarship on the history of medicine in Egypt. See, for example, Hibba Abugideiri, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010); Laverne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Amira el-Azhary Sonbol, The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt, 1800–1922 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991). 52. The management of death as a secular process, rather than a religious ritual, was directly linked to the rise of medicine and law alongside the priesthood in urban centres, according to sociologist Allan Kellehear. See A Social History of Dying (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 125–46. 53. Nathan Brown, ‘The Precarious Life and Slow Death of the Mixed Courts of Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 25: 1 (February 1993), pp. 33–52. 54. Will Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, pp. 168–225. 55. I refer to the policing and public health monitoring associated with autopsies, see Fahmy, ‘Anatomy of Justice’, pp. 224–71. 56. See the many cases in TNA, FO 847/1. 57. For the uses and limits of legal history in the telling of social history, see Nimrod Hurvitz and Edward Fram, ‘Introduction: Some Ponderings on the Use of Law in the Writing of Histories’, Continuity and Change 16: 2 (2000), pp. 169–75. 58. I found no reference to autopsies in other nineteenth-century readings about consular jurisdiction, such as James Carlile M’Coan, Consular Jurisdiction in Turkey and Egypt (London: William Ridgway, 1873). 59. This continued adherence to Ottoman law may signal respect for Ottoman

54  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT jurisdiction or a desire to bypass the Egyptian National Government. However, I am concerned with the what, not the why. In other instances, the British continued to negotiate with Egypt as a separate entity after 1882. The Hertslet Treaties index for volumes I–XVI (through 1885) lists a treaty about commerce negotiated in 1884. 60. In contrast, the Capitulations with bilateral agreements were mostly traditions and no longer negotiations by the 1890s. Email, Will Hanley, 6 December 2012. 61. Hertslet, Treaties, vol. XIV, 1880. Hanley suggests that these are reactive and not proactive documents, which would suggest that the processes of inquests and autopsies were already in practice before the treaties were negotiated. I thank Will for this observation at the University of Edinburgh workshop, ‘Egypt in the 1890s’, in May 2011. 62. For death certificates from 1837 onward, see: http://www.nationalarchives. gov.uk/records/birthmarriagedeathcertificates.htm (accessed 29 March 2013). Death certificates are held in the General Register’s Office, accessible at: http:// www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/ (accessed 29 March 2013). 63. The British consular files in Alexandria before 1880 were lost in 1882; the Cairo files date from 1830. Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, p. 168. 64. The use of this act to define consular rights and responsibilities in 1890 suggests that Egypt was still considered ‘outside of Her Majesty’s domains’. 65. Hertslet, Treaties, vol. 26 (1913), p. 994. 66. Mark Jackson, ‘Suspicious Infant Deaths: The Statue of 1624 and Medical Evidence at Coroners’ Inquests’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine, pp. 64–86. The first ‘investigative post-mortem’ took place in England in 1635 and in colonial America in 1639. See Helene Brock and Catherine Crawford, ‘Forensic Medicine in Early Colonial Maryland’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine, p. 27. 67. It is not evident to me if the British were different from other European powers in this respect, although I suspect they were not. The French Consulate, for example, kept detailed death certificates, but did not have a Consular Surgeon on staff. For details on the consular staff, see Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, Appendix E. Other European doctors, representing their consulates, occasionally appear in the British consular inquest cases. See, for example, TNA, FO 847/10/43, re: the murder of Angelo Galea, 1885. 68. Brown, ‘Precarious Life’, pp. 33–52. 69. That public health was a means by which to modernise Egypt is one of the

d oc umenti ng death i n a lex a n d r ia  | 55 main themes of Abugideiri, Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine. For elsewhere in the Middle East, see Ellen Amster, ‘The Many Deaths of Dr. Emile Mauchamp: Medicine, Technology and Popular Politics in Pre-Protectorate Morocco, 1877–1912’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 36: 3 (August 2003), pp. 409–28. 70. Lord Cromer discussed the progress made as regards questions of public health in each of the annual reports filed during the 1890s. 71. For British subjects who died of typhoid, see Annie Bernard von Sehmoke in 1892 (TNA, FO 847/21/12) and John Chisman in 1893 (TNA, FO 847/23/17). Both Sarah Colwyn and John Higgins died of smallpox in 1892 (TNA, FO 847/21/28; TNA, FO 847/21/24). Emanuele Ellul committed suicide in 1903 (TNA, FO 847/33/14). In addition to the drowning of Lilian Irlam, Antonio Kenos, a ten-year-old British subject, fell into the canal and drowned in 1894 (TNA, FO 847/24/37). British subjects were also killed on the train tracks, such as the 1896 death of Phillip Bauer (TNA, FO 847/26/18). 72. TNA, FO 847/10/43, re: the murder of Angelo Galea, 1885, and FO 847/34/23, inquest on Giovanni Bugeia, 1904, in which a ‘local’ doctor educated in Beirut performed the post-mortem on a murdered Maltese man. 73. TNA, FO 847/1/36, Regina versus Carmelo Buckingham, 1880. 74. There were exceptions to the rule within the post-mortem process in British space as well. A notable example was the 1880 death of Paolo Callus, during which Dr Mackie, British Consular Surgeon, stated that he ‘took it for granted [the court order] would come and thought it would save time and trouble to all to proceed at once . . .’, TNA, FO 847/1/31, death of Paolo Callus, 1880. 75. TNA, FO 847/33/24, inquest on Luigi Mifsud, 1903. 76. TNA, FO 847/1/30, inquest into the body of Giuseppe Mamo, 1880. 77. TNA, FO 847/24/36, inquest on the body of Joseph Falconer, 1894. 78. TNA, FO 847/15/40, death of S. Walker, 1887. 79. TNA, FO 847/31/18, inquest on the body of Serafino Buhagi, 1901. 80. TNA, FO 847/25/5, Alessandro Ataliotti, 1896. 81. TNA, FO 847/25/19, inquest of Jacob Gherson, 1895. 82. See Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, pp. 226–88; and Minkin, ‘In Life as in Death’, pp. 243–93. 83. It was usual for British women to take their husband’s nationality. This points to yet another way in which death was gendered. See, for example, DWQ, Ahad Isma‘il, box 67, 2 November 1873. 84. The variety of nationalities found in the British inquests suggests that other

56  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT European subjects also moved between various social categories with relative ease. In contrast, however, French subjects were primarily married to (and had children with) other French subjects. MAEE Alexandrie, Consulate Supplement, 20 PO/2009041 7–9. 85. Alternately, perhaps Fanny simply did not trust Jessie’s husband. 86. TNA, FO 847/36/3, Jessie Brown, 1906. See also TNA, FO 847/1/25, re: the death of Vincenzo Debono, 1880. That the post-mortem was held in the Latin Cemetery suggests that Debono may have been buried there. 87. Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, pp. 175–6. Although Mak makes brief mention of British civil and military personnel in Egypt, they are not the focus of his work, British in Egypt, pp. 118–21. 88. TNA, FO 847/24/38, inquest on the body of Thomas Maher, Fireman of the SS Marathon, 1894. 89. TNA, FO 847/36/14, inquest on the body of Maurice Hammond, Fireman of the SS Kittie, 1906. 90. TNA, FO 847/5/4, inquest on the body of Michael Swiney, 1883. 91. TNA, FO 847/21/15, inquest on the body of Daniel Bell, SS Diadem, 1892. 92. Cromer writes: ‘The discipline and good conduct of the British army in all its ranks are recognised by the most bitter Anglophobes. The worst that can be said of the soldiers is that some of them disgrace themselves by getting drunk . . .’ Based on the Consular Court cases, this would seem to be an understatement. See Cromer, Modern Egypt, p. 253.

2 The Scales of Public Utility: Agricultural Roads and State Space in the Era of the British Occupation Aaron George Jakes

Introduction: A ‘Noble Inclination’

N

owadays, the Arabic word isti‘mar serves as the standard calque for ‘colonialism’. Since at least the era of decolonisation and the high tide of Arab nationalism in the 1950s, the term has become an unambiguous catch-all for the evils visited on Arab lands by the illegitimate rule of foreign powers. But a century ago, it retained another meaning. Given the word’s overwhelmingly negative connotations in the present, instances of this older usage can be jarring. Take, for example, the short biography of Mahmud Sabri Basha, with which ‘Abd al-Latif Shukri al-Iskandari opens his Dalil al-Minufiyya [Guidebook of Minufiyya], published in 1900. After detailing Sabri’s meteoric rise from mathematics instructor at the Khedivial Engineering School to mudir [provincial governor], first of Fayyum Province in 1889 and then of Minufiyya in 1894, the biographer praises his subject for maylihi al-sharif lil-isti‘mar (‘his noble inclination towards isti‘mar’).1 Though some contemporary critics did attribute Sabri’s professional success to an opportunistic complicity with the British occupation, Shukri was not, here, praising the mudir for being a British flunky.2 Rather, by isti‘mar, he meant something more akin to infrastructural development – a process of building and thus providing provincial territory with roads, bridges, canals and schools.3 Throughout, Shukri is at pains to downplay the eventful r­upture 57

58  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of 1882, avoid questions of politics and let long lists of public works appear as self-evident testament to noble character. Yet his striking turn of phrase raises a crucial question: why, in these decades, did al-ihtilal [the occupation] assume the specific form of al-isti‘mar? The standard answer to this question, reproduced in many works on the British occupation of Egypt, reduces the zealous embrace of ‘public works’ to a basic fiscal logic of revenue extraction.4 As the argument goes, Lord Cromer’s top priority was to regularise payments of Egypt’s public debt to European banks, so he slashed other government services – most notably, education – and allocated funds to projects that would at once boost tax revenue from agricultural lands and reinforce Egypt’s economic dependency as a producer of raw cotton for English mills. Particularly in the canonical texts of Egyptian scholarship on the occupation, this assessment of British public works policy forms the basis for a more general instrumentalist critique of the colonial state.5 The term ‘instrumentalist’ has become sufficiently commonplace – and its uses sufficiently varied – to merit some clarification. Here, I specifically mean critiques that treat the state as a unitary object or instrument that may be captured and manipulated to serve the interests of a particular class or group – in this case, the colonial power. Despite the potential for confusion amidst other common usages, I choose to preserve the term for two related reasons: one historiographical, the other historical. First, this is the standard word employed by state theorists to name the conception of the state that I identify as central to dominant accounts of Britain’s public works policy in Egypt.6 Second, in tracing the historical emergence of instrumentalism as a feature of anti-colonial discourse during the era of the British occupation itself, I seek to emphasise the ways in which such critiques drew upon and subverted a colonial ideology that specifically treated the state as a machine or instrument for producing agricultural wealth. In what follows, I focus on a long-neglected aspect of British public works policy – the construction of thousands of kilometres of unpaved agricultural roads during the decade of the 1890s – to advance two main arguments about the project of colonial state-building that I refer to as isti‘mar. In the first half of the chapter, I aim to demonstrate that historiographical instrumentalism, in its singular concern with the interests served by various British policies, has tended to obscure the ways in which those policies in fact transformed

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 59 the supposed ‘instrument’ through which British interests would be realised. Though fiscal expediency did remain a central pillar of Cromer’s regime, the objectives of isti‘mar – as articulated in the statements that British officials made, both to each other and the Egyptian public – were far more ambitious than the mere stabilisation of loan repayments. What they envisioned, rather, was a reproduction of state space in ways that would substantively transform popular understandings of government and its appropriate functions.7 More specifically, they conceived of the state as an instrument or ‘machine’ that could be calibrated to maximise and distribute al-manafi‘ al-‘umumiyya [public utility] in ways that would ultimately align the general interest of the Egyptian people with that of the colonial power.8 The very appearance of the state as a neutral instrument that could be seized and manipulated by various interests, then, was an effect of isti‘mar. In the second half of the chapter, I follow the category of ‘public utility’ from high-level debates in the Egyptian Council of Ministers into the petitions of peasant smallholders and finally onto the pages of the budding nationalist press. In so doing, I argue that the aggressive deployment of this term as a key organising concept of colonial rule provided the basis for an onslaught of new instrumentalist critiques of the British occupation by the late 1890s. A long tradition of left–nationalist historiography has regarded such critiques as both timeless and self-evident. And in recent years, newer currents of cultural and intellectual history have sought to explore the culture and politics of the colonial era in Egypt in ways that often downplay the significance of the colonial state and its political–economic strategies.9 Contrary to the former trend, I show that an instrumentalist critique only became intelligible and compelling within the specific historical context of the British occupation. And in distinction to the latter, I seek to demonstrate that the discursive repertoires of anti-colonial nationalism entailed a direct, creative and oftentimes fraught engagement with the policies of the colonial state. In the moment of their elaboration, instrumentalist critiques constituted a self-conscious effort to deploy the anchoring categories of colonial ideology against the legitimacy of British rule. Yet for all the power of such arguments, the disparate voices of an emergent anti-colonial movement often hinted at the limits of a political struggle grounded solely on an endless calculation of conflicting material interests. I close with a brief account of the 1906

60  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Dinshawai Incident that reads popular responses to that infamous event as creative efforts to overcome this impasse. ‘Country Roads Suitable for Wheeled Traffic’ Egypt’s internal transportation networks attracted the attention of British officials from the early years of the occupation. In February 1884, the new Undersecretary of State for Public Works, Colin Scott-Moncrieff, presented his colleagues in the Egyptian Council of Ministers with a ‘Note sur les communications en Égypte et sur la navigation du Nile’. The report opened with a stark observation that ‘there is, first of all, not a single road outside the towns, and transport by cart is not possible even between the major commercial centres such as Cairo and Alexandria’.10 In the years immediately following the British invasion of 1882, Scott-Moncrieff and the cadre of Anglo-Indian engineers under his command tended to focus more on the efficient management of available resources than on the construction of new works. His attention, therefore, turns quickly from the apparent absence of roads to the condition of Egypt’s existing railways and navigation canals, both of which, he laments, are poorly administered and far more costly to use than they ought to be. In particular, he singles out a system of levies and fees that have become so high as to render canal transport in Egypt as much as ten times as expensive as its equivalent in England. Eliminating this cumbersome system of transport duties would be the first step in a wider effort to ‘reduce to their most simple expression the costs of transport from the fields of cultivation to market’.11 This desire to minimise transport costs and thereby return a greater share of profits to the original producers of agricultural commodities would remain a central preoccupation of public works officials for decades to come. But a mere five years after Scott-Moncrieff penned his initial note on the subject, their approach to that problem, as to many others, had begun to change. As noted above, the early efforts of the British engineers had focused on administrative reforms and repairs to existing works – perhaps most famously the restoration of the Nile Barrages at the mouth of the Delta, completed in 1890.12 With the intense budgetary pressures of the previous decade resolved and the perpetuation of Britain’s ‘veiled protectorate’ becoming more certain, the orientation of the Public Works Department (PWD) shifted more decisively

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 61 towards the construction of new works. In this sense, the project of isti‘mar took shape at the very moment when ‘the accounts of the Egyptian Treasury, which were formerly in a state of the utmost confusion’ were declared to be ‘now in perfect order’.13 Endowed with this more confident and assertive attitude, colonial officials started to see the elaboration of new projects not simply as a source of state revenue, but as a crucial component in a far more sweeping programme of social ‘reforms’. It is in this context of mounting ambitions that the story of Egypt’s agricultural roads needs to be understood. That story begins with a report submitted by William Garstin to his superiors in the PWD in January 1889.14 The proposed ‘country roads suitable for wheeled traffic’ would be unmetalled tracks of packed dirt embanked to half-a-metre in height and six metres across the top. Opening with a barrage of calculations pertaining to the exorbitant costs of the existing means of rural transport – camel crews, donkeys and canal barges – Garstin immediately sets about demonstrating the savings to be anticipated from the new roads.15 He then launches into a more zealous enumeration of the indirect advantages accruing from such a project: The merchants, their risk and cost-of-carriage being diminished, could afford to pay a higher rate to the cultivator for his cotton; the latter would consequently gain and his land would increase in value; I am sure that all lands in the vicinity of good cart roads would increase in value. This is only natural to suppose and Government would indirectly gain by this increased land value. Another thing would be that most of these roads could be made to run in connection with a railway station, and would act as feeders to the Railway. This I think would do more towards increasing the Railway receipts and diminishing the camel and donkey traffic than anything else; Government again would gain by this. The advantage to all district officials as police etc. would be great, as it would enable them to get about the interior of their district much quicker and easier than at present.16

After this optimistic exposition, however, the engineer suddenly assumes a more sober tone. For all the project’s potential, he continues, it might literally turn to dust at the hands of the local population. Egypt’s peasants tended to employ the country’s public works according to their own designs. Large accumulations of dirt, like those used for the proposed roads, often found

62  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT their way back into the topsoil of neighbouring fields; when irrigating their crops, farmers showed little compunction in running water channels through anything that might stand in their way. Garstin intones: One such cutting would break the whole road and neutralise its good effects. If such roads are to be made, not only will the law have to be very strict but the punishment will have to be inflicted at once for such breaking of the law. I would suggest that the sheikhs of the adjoining villages be held responsible for the preservation of the Road, and that if any one cut the road, or injure it in any way, the sheikh be fired at once without any appeal. [emphasis in the original]17

Whatever his wishes may have been, William Garstin was not solely responsible for crafting such policies, and the Khedivial Decree on Agricultural Roads issued the following year differed in key respects from his original plan. But if the heavy hand with which Garstin twice underlined ‘at once’ betrays a particular technocratic impatience with the social nature of the rural landscape, his proposal nevertheless offers a remarkably compact introduction to the colonial project of isti‘mar. In sketching the basic contours of that project here, I will emphasise the aspects of a vision shared among many high-level officials in the Egyptian Government. By doing so, I seek neither to imply that the Egyptian state was a monolithic entity, nor to deny that serious disagreements and power struggles took place within all levels of Egypt’s many and varied state institutions.18 Still, this conception of public works was sufficiently stable and coherent enough to organise a dramatic elaboration of new endeavours: canals, dams, railways, telegraph lines, public buildings and, of course, unpaved agricultural roads. In time, a great variety of critical responses to these policies clearly recognised and addressed the very points of consistency outlined here. ‘A Reign of Order and Regularity’ More than a matter of mere fiscal exigency, the agrarian policies of the British occupation constituted the centrepiece of a hegemonic project. In his regular correspondence with the British Foreign Office, Lord Cromer made frequent and direct reference to a necessary balance between coercion and consent in the maintenance of British rule. Early in 1889, he explained to Lord Salisbury:

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 63 It is indeed quite true that the permanent influence of the British Government in this country depends in a great degree upon the pressure of the British garrison. But it is none the less true that our capacity for carrying on the work of government smoothly without incurring great unpopularity and without coming into violent collision with local interests and prejudices, depends on the maintenance of that confidence which has been gradually and laboriously established during the seven years which the British occupation has lasted.19

For Cromer and the cadre of British officials under his command, maintaining that ‘confidence’ would mean demonstrating in practice that ‘there is a much greater identity between the interests of the bondholders, properly understood, and those of the Egyptian people than is often supposed’.20 The basis of that identity, he argued, would be ‘a reign of order and regularity . . . in Egypt such as had been heretofore unknown’.21 As envisioned by the government’s new cadre of British ‘advisers’, the new Egypt of the British occupation would be a space of even and rapid flows: of water, goods, credit, law and knowledge. Particularly in the writings of public works officials, critiques of the pre-colonial regime did not merely rail against generic problems of decadence, ignorance and injustice, but rather sought to demonstrate that those failings had been physically inscribed in the Egyptian landscape at a dire cost to the country’s productive potential. In an illustrative passage on the historically unequal relationship between the Delta Provinces of Gharbiyya and Minufiyya, for example, the irrigation engineer R. Hanbury Brown lamented: The southern province, i.e. Menoufieh, is a very highly cultivated one, and most of the land is in the hands of rich proprietors. The whole of the water destined for Gharbieh first passes through Menoufieh and, in spite of the most stringent measures on the part of the staff, the latter province undoubtedly gets more water than it is entitled to . . . Only one remedy is possible, that is, to separate the water for the two areas as far as possible; allowing Menoufieh, southern and western Gharbieh to take water, as at present, from above the Barrage, and enabling northern and eastern Gharbieh to draw their water from other sources.22

64  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT In their efforts to eliminate patterns of spatial inequality that they saw as physical products of Khedivial despotism, colonial officials asserted the alignment of their own interests with the ‘general interest’ of the Egyptian people. Conceptions of this general interest were many and varied. What is most striking about the writings of British officials from Cromer down to the provincial inspectors, however, is the degree to which they approached such calculations through recourse to a class analysis of Egyptian society. More specifically, in the first two decades of British rule, they overwhelmingly equated the ‘general interest’ with that of Egypt’s peasant smallholders.23 The function of new public works, then, was not simply to rectify the kinds of regional disparities described in Brown’s report, but, in the words of Prime Minister Riaz Pasha, ‘de faire disparaître l’injustice et d’appliquer un système égalitaire’ at the level of individual proprietors.24 Rather than dismiss this language as ideological cover for an agenda that was really otherwise, we might more productively read such statements as articulations of a conscious political–economic strategy. By improving flows and distributions through an elaborate network of new works, the British hoped to boost aggregate revenue and thereby satisfy the fiscal demands of Egypt’s creditors. But they aimed to do so in a way that would materially undermine existing forms of inequality between ‘pashas’ and ‘peasants’. In a typically blunt assessment, one official reported: It would be difficult to overstate the great value which they attach to the improvement of the irrigation and the just distribution of water on the part of the public works. The fellaheen are not so stupid as not to know that these and many other things have been done by the English and that they would not have been done had the English not come into the country.25

As this awkward concatenation of double negatives suggests, British officials in these early years of the occupation were at pains to mark the distance between their own regime and the putative ‘despotism’ that had preceded it. But to the extent that public works lay at the heart of efforts to render that difference palpable at the level of everyday experience, Cromer’s regime encountered a problem. As the French historian Jacques Berque observed: Here . . . imperialism lacked that which elsewhere guaranteed its sway: a monopoly of technical and cultural innovation. This had been under way

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 65 in Egypt for the past half-century. The basic insecurity resulting from this was reflected in manifold political difficulties.26

From the outset, the British engineers in the PWD were forced to confront the substantial legacy of works built prior to their arrival in the country. Construction and maintenance of basic irrigation systems had been a constant concern of the Ottoman imperial administration since at least the eighteenth century.27 With the onset of Muhammad ‘Ali’s bid for dynastic autonomy and the attendant conversion of Egyptian agriculture to the production of cotton for export, the development of public works projects on an altogether more massive scale became a crucial component of the Pasha’s own modernising programme.28 And particularly during the reign of Khedive Isma‘il, under whose tenure a Department of Public Works was first established,29 the Egyptian state spent tens of millions of pounds on the elaboration of new works, including railways, irrigation canals and dams.30 Though in some cases – like that of the agricultural roads – British officials could, and indeed did, claim to be filling an absolute void, far more often they were forced to acknowledge, howsoever critically, the accomplishments of their predecessors. As Scott-Moncrieff’s ‘Note sur les communications’ serves to demonstrate, British officials missed few opportunities to contrast their selfproclaimed technical prowess and administrative efficiency with the alleged incompetence and mismanagement of the Public Works Department prior to the occupation. At the same time, if the hegemonic project of isti‘mar was to succeed, then it would need to rest on something more than a marginal increase in engineering ability. At issue was the nature of the state itself. According to a long tradition of British orientalist writings on the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, the essence of ‘oriental despotism’ inhered in the arbitrary exercise of power for personal gain.31 As narrated by colonial propagandists and British officials, this was the moral of the stories they told about Egypt’s plunge into bankruptcy: generations of decadent Khedives had squandered the Nile’s God-given bounty on their own frivolous pleasures.32 Such state works as had existed prior to 1882, then, had been constructed at the expense of the Egyptian masses for the benefit of a privileged few. By contrast, British rule would work through laws and codified procedures and, over time, the state

66  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT would become a neutral i­nstrument for the advancement of al-manafi‘ al‘umumiyya or ‘public utility’. Like the physical works it was supposed to describe, this category, too, had a history that predated the British occupation. The basic notion that states should work to augment the aggregate interests of a ‘public’ had achieved considerable circulation across the Ottoman Empire among a new generation of technocrats who came of age during the decades of the Tanzimat reforms.33 Egyptian Government officials from the pre-colonial era were therefore quite reluctant to cede all ground to the British in defining the term. Moreover, as the standard by which the achievements of British reforms were to be judged, both elements of the phrase ‘public utility’ proved remarkably malleable in their meanings.34 Invocations of the ‘public’ always entailed choices about who should be considered and on what geographic scale. No less problematically, ‘utility’ had no self-evident measure. In tackling this latter problem, colonial officials overwhelmingly glossed ‘utility’ as a euphemism for material wealth. As Garstin’s enumeration of anticipated benefits suggests, the most frequent index of the wealth that British rule would bestow was the value of landed property. However, in their efforts to render apparent the distinct benefits of ‘British justice’, the proponents of isti‘mar here encountered another crucial problem: the effective realisation of new works for ‘public utility’ – building roads, digging canals, laying tracks – required acts of expropriation from the very lands through which those works would run. As British administrators observed, under regimes of ‘oriental despotism’, all land was – at least in theory – the property of the state, and acts of seizure could be carried out by sovereign fiat. Thanks to the complex variety of land classifications that existed by the 1880s – in which the wealthy holders of full property rights were entitled to payment for seized land, while ‘occupiers of land which had not paid the Moukabala in whole or in part, received no compensation from the Government for the land of which they were dispossessed’ – any large-scale programme of expropriation for public works would be likely to exacerbate the inequities that the British were claiming to resolve.35 Whatever its wider implications, the immediate motivation behind the Khedivial Decree of 15 April 1891, establishing full rights of proprietorship for all landowners in Egypt, was to ensure that every case of expropriation for public works ‘will now receive compensation at the

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 67 same rate as others’.36 The measure did not obviate the state’s need for land, nor did it assuage the frustrations of those whose property was seized. But it did enable a uniform procedure for tens of thousands of acts of expropriation lil-manafi‘ al-‘umumiyya and thereby established ‘public utility’ as a key category in everyday popular interactions with the Egyptian state. Finally, as Garstin’s admonitions about the protection of his new project begin to indicate, the task of knitting together far-flung regions of the Egyptian countryside through an integrated web of new works would at once require and reinforce an equally dramatic reconfiguration of power within the administrative hierarchies of the Egyptian state. In practice, the more British ambitions to open up and integrate remote rural areas increased, the more problems of projecting power evenly throughout that territory seemed to multiply. Garstin’s anxious tone betrays awareness that Egypt’s peasants might have their own ideas about the possible ‘utility’ of these and other new works. Time and again, the British proponents of agrarian reform settled on the existing organisation of villages spread across the country as the most viable mechanism for achieving their goals. The realisation of a more uniform and regular national space, then, would depend crucially on the redeployment of the village and village authorities – headmen, shaykhs, tax collectors and watchmen – as local agents of the central state. Far more than a mere practical convenience, this arrangement – neatly summed up by Cromer’s frequent references to ‘European head and Egyptian hands’ – betrays the more general contours of a political vision lurking behind the project of isti‘mar.37 In short, for Egypt’s rural majority, there could exist no form of politics beyond the perpetual struggle to advance their basic material interests. By delivering unprecedented material prosperity through a series of centrally planned, procedurally consistent and efficiently executed works, Cromer aspired to ‘create a large class of small holders who would constitute a conservative dead weight, averse to any radical change’.38 While this argument appeared most frequently in abstract class terms, in practice it assumed a concrete spatial form. If Egypt’s material prosperity depended on ‘regularity’, an unprecedented integration of state space through the construction of canals, roads and railways, then the maintenance of ‘order’ would require a massive centralisation of power – a clear distinction between cities as nodes of command and control and the

68  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT countryside as a domain of pure economic production.39 Holding that politics amounted, at best, to an unwelcome interruption of pastoral rhythms, colonial officials actively sought to remove any trace of political struggle from rural life. This was clearly what Cromer had in mind when, boasting of the 1895 reforms to the Ministry of the Interior, he mused: ‘Village life is no longer to so great an extent troubled by political dissensions, the result generally, of some Cairo complication which has been misunderstood and misinterpreted.’40 According to this doggedly materialist conception of politics, what opposition to British rule persisted, despite the generalised benefits of isti‘mar, could only ever appear as a petty pursuit of particular interests, the grumblings of ‘a small and . . . diminishing number of people who . . . mostly belong to the privileged classes’.41 The Scales of Public Utility From the moment Garstin submitted his proposal for consideration of the Council of Ministers, the contradictions entailed in this reconfiguration of state space became the focus of increasingly fierce critique. As Garstin’s most eloquent interlocutor at the time was quick to observe, the specific terms of his proposal depended heavily on a claim that the ‘public utility’ being advanced was singular. By early 1889, ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak – the great civil engineer of the Khedivial era – had already been removed from his former post as Minister of Public Works and reappointed as Minister of Public Instruction.42 But in March of that year, having read the draft proposal submitted to the Council of Ministers, Mubarak intervened with a strikingly impassioned ‘Note Sur le Projet Concernant les Routes Agricoles’.43 He opens by suggesting that the appeal of such a project needs no discussion. ‘Everyone knows’, he writes, ‘that the ease of communications enters significantly in the general prosperity of a country . . . as an effect of the economy of time and money which results in the greatest benefit for the material interests of the inhabitants’.44 Himself the leading light of the generation of Egyptian officials who rose to prominence under Khedive Isma‘il, Mubarak shared with his British counterparts an understanding of the state as an instrument for augmenting ‘general prosperity’. For that reason, he was uniquely equipped to perceive what was at stake in Garstin’s proposal. He thus insists:

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 69 The creation of these pathways of communication, at the same time as they interest the Government as a work of general interest, interest no less the provinces and the diverse localities which must benefit from them. This divided interest clearly demonstrates to us that it is not for the Government alone to decide on a question of this nature.45

Because of this shared or divided interest and the acknowledged benefits accruing to the country as a whole, Mubarak goes on to reject Garstin’s suggestion for how the new roads should be financed. By measuring ‘utility’ narrowly in terms of increased land value, British officials in the PWD had suggested that the cost of each new road should be covered by an additional impost apportioned among all the landholdings in the locality through which the road would run. Again, Mubarak refuses to accept both the narrow conception of ‘utility’ and the claim that such utility would be realised on a single geographic scale: Regarding the expenses necessary for establishing these routes, one must, in my opinion, take into account, the part of the interest which would return to the Government, to the provinces, and to the diverse localities as much as to the individuals. It does not, thus, appear to me possible to pose a priori general and uniform rules on this subject . . .46

Mubarak’s pointed critiques lay bare both the terms in which Egypt’s new corps of imperious British officials sought to justify their presence and the contradictions latent in those terms. At the heart of the matter was the disjuncture between total centralisation of planning, despite what Mubarak describes as ‘local circumstances, infinite in their variations’, and the equally dramatic decentralisation of financing through imposts on land adjoining new works.47 In a sense, the bizarre piece of legislation that emerged from these debates is a testament to the still tenuous position of the British in the Egyptian Government of the late 1880s. The second article of the Khedivial Decree of 3 November 1890 on ‘the Founding of Agricultural Roads’ lays out the set of formal procedures for establishing new roads in a given province. That process represents an awkward compromise between the positions outlined above and suggests that officials in the Egyptian Government like ‘Ali Mubarak still retained some ability to push back against their British

70  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT ‘advisers’. The cost of building the roads would be borne entirely by the provinces, but their planning could originate either with the mudir or the provincial inspector of irrigation (almost always a British official at this point). If they reached an agreement about the proposal, they would then notify the Ministries of Interior and Public Works, which would alert the Council of Ministers, which would then issue an order to convene the relevant Provincial Council to deliberate on the proposal. The decree stipulates that the inspector of irrigation must be in attendance at the Provincial Council to explain the proposal and acquaint the council members with the budget, but then goes on to stipulate that ‘he shall have no say whatsoever in the deliberations’.48 Though not quite so ruthless as Garstin’s original proposal, the decree goes on to outline a system of administrative justice, managed by the mudiriyya, for imposing fines on farmers who damaged the roads and village shaykhs who failed to report such abuses. Though dirt roads hardly stood a chance of attracting much attention when compared with the grandeur and financial prospects of new barrages, canals and railways, the campaign of road building inaugurated by the 1890 decree was startlingly extensive. As was true of many other projects in this era, the ramification of these new routes largely followed the geography of cotton production. The earliest decrees for new roads were issued in the eastern Delta Provinces of Daqhaliyya and Sharqiyya in 1890, followed by the remaining Delta Provinces and Fayyum over the next six years.49 Though the road networks did eventually extend south of Cairo, substantial construction efforts in Upper Egypt did not begin until the early 1900s. According to Cromer’s report for the year 1900, the previous decade had seen the construction of over 2,500km of roads across the country.50 In conjunction with a dramatic increase in the rolling stock of the railway system and the elimination of canal tariffs, this elaboration of rural transport served not only to accelerate movement between the country’s major cities, but also to knit disparate regions of the countryside into an ever more closely integrated network of communications. When coupled with the simultaneous extension of the irrigation systems that remained the focal point of the public works agenda, this project of isti‘mar set the 1890s apart as a decade of unprecedented material prosperity. Aggregate yields of the country’s most valuable crops rose year by year, and in accordance with the stated goals of the British occupation,

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 71 peasant smallholders enjoyed a greater share of the new revenues generated by increased productivity.51 Directly echoing the ideologically charged claims of Cromer himself, the Arabic press often praised the Public Works Ministry as the standard of good government: If all their men were to proceed along the true English path and to deal with people in all matters with accountability and lack of favoritism like the inspectors of irrigation, then the era of the occupation would be a golden era.52

As this backhanded compliment begins to suggest, the relative prosperity of the 1890s did not so much resolve the tensions contained in British appeals to public utility as augment them. In laying out their plans for infrastructural development, the champions of public works had specifically identified rising land values as the best measure of success. They had, moreover, emphasised the importance of full property rights as a crucial difference between their own ‘reign of order and regularity’ and the supposed despotism that preceded it. But by the early 1900s, officials from the PWD expressed mounting exasperation with the consequences of their own success. In 1903, Garstin himself complained of what he considered a vexing paradox: [The] Government, by spending large sums, increases the productiveness of the land. The proprietors, well aware of this, and equally well aware that land for the necessary works must be purchased from them, demand a rate for it, based upon its prospective value when these works shall have been completed. Thus, those who will eventually reap the benefits make their benefactor pay heavily for the privilege of bestowing such benefits upon them! Such a result could scarcely be arrived at in any other country than Egypt.53

The regulations drafted in the 1890s to govern expropriation for public works had, in fact, attempted to pre-empt this very problem by stipulating that ‘in fixing the price, no consideration will be given to the increased value that the execution of the works may bring to the expropriated property’.54 As Garstin’s griping suggests, however, efforts to settle the issue simply through the force of law sat uncomfortably with the proprietors’ own estimations of fair price.

72  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Such wrangling over the value of expropriated land was but one instance of the more general problem ‘Ali Mubarak had detected in his allusion to ‘local circumstances, infinite in their variations’. In short, calculations of ‘public utility’ that appeared favourable at one geographic scale might look very different at another; a project deemed beneficial for a given province might entail considerable sacrifices for specific localities or individual landholdings within that province. The files of the PWD are filled with petitions from disgruntled landowners and entire villages who saw in the plans to build new roads the portents, not of great prosperity, but of their own demise. What is noteworthy in these petitions, for present purposes, is less the minutiae of the complaints than the language in which they are framed. Over and over, the aggrieved parties argue back at the PWD with a counterclaim of public utility. When, for instance, the villagers of Kafr ‘Atallah in Daqhaliyya Province wrote to bemoan the plans for a new road that would divide all their farms in half and to propose a different route along a neighbouring canal embankment, they concluded by arguing: In passing the road along [the embankment] there is utility [fihi manfa‘a], and no harm will come of it. And inasmuch as the founding of agricultural roads is for nothing if not public utility [ma huwa illa lil-manafi‘ al-‘umumiyya], and your Excellency is not pleased when harm befalls us, so we appeal to your sense of justice . . .55

By the 1890s, petitions were a long-established feature of the everyday giveand-take between Egypt’s rural population and the state. As such, they hardly constituted a significant challenge to the project of colonial rule. They do, however, suggest that notions of the state as a just arbiter of public utility had achieved a high degree of currency in the Egyptian countryside. And the more widely this concept circulated, the more available it became for subversive reinterpretation. The discursive strategies of these texts show that their authors were acutely aware of British efforts to differentiate their own public works policies from those of the pre-colonial order. According to the conventions of the genre, the petitions that had long circulated throughout the Ottoman Empire presupposed a society of ordered hierarchy in which the invocation of inequality between groups of differing rank and status – between the sultan and his ra‘aya [flock] – provided the basis for making

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 73 claims and requesting assistance. While retaining the trappings of this older genre and its elaborate forms of Ottoman address, the language of colonialera petitions began to signal a dramatic shift; the state’s role was no longer to safeguard pre-ordained hierarchies, but rather to defend the public against them. In a strikingly poignant example, a group of Bedouin cultivators with lands along the Nubariyya Canal in Buhayra Province complained to the PWD that a number of large landowners and land companies with properties adjoining their own were receiving a disproportionate share of the irrigation water from the canal. ‘It is not right’, they insisted, ‘that big fish should eat the small in the presence of English justice’.56 Instrumentalism as Critique In the mid-1890s, Egypt’s agricultural roads were thrown into the centre of a new controversy that transposed the issue of public utility onto an altogether different scale. Beginning in 1895, the Egyptian Government began granting concessions to four new companies to construct ‘agricultural lines’ for light rail traffic in the countryside.57 As had been true of the agricultural roads before them, the new light railways promised a dramatic cost reduction in the transport of agricultural produce, by some estimates as much as 50 per cent.58 In addition to offering a guaranteed return on the capital invested in these companies – the three largest of which were foreign owned – the terms of the concessions granted them the right to lay tracks directly atop existing agricultural roads, thereby obviating the costs of purchasing land and constructing level beds for the proposed railways. British officials in the PWD justified these measures as necessary ­incentives for a new project in the service of public utility, but, once again, alternative interpretations of such utility provided the grounds for critique. A decade earlier, Garstin had defended the localised funding of agricultural roads by arguing that each road would primarily serve the needs of the local population. By contrast, the new agricultural railways – many of which linked up with the trunk lines of the state railways – were oriented towards the transport of export commodities, most notably cotton. While Garstin’s original report suggests that he had, in fact, construed local needs in terms of cotton shipping costs, the rural population had quickly found other more localised uses for the roads they had paid to construct. A note from the

74  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Egyptian General Assembly to the Council of Ministers in February 1898 explains, with concern: The agricultural roads are only six metres wide, and with the laying of track upon them, it becomes difficult for the resident population to walk and drive their livestock along [the roads] without great danger . . . And at the same time, they are the proprietors of those agricultural roads, since they paid the costs of their construction and the price of the lands that were taken from them for [the roads].59

In response, the Assembly goes on to make a rather modest proposal that the light rail companies at least carry the cost of building guard rails along the tracks. The note then continues with a more general rebuke of the railway scheme. After observing that the central government’s contractual share of the railway revenue confers no financial gain on the local population, the Assembly concludes: ‘Inasmuch as these roads and their like are for the utility of the people [li-manfa‘at al-ahali], it is only just that no such concession should be given to any company for any purpose until after consulting with the local population.’60 What here appears as a rather muted jibe, constrained by the formal protocols of government correspondence, became a full-blown challenge to the legitimacy of the British occupation in the pages of the popular press. On 23 April 1897, the newspaper al-Ra’id al-Misri ran a front-page story on the allocation of light railway concessions to foreign companies in the Buhayra and Gharbiyya Provinces. After detailing the terms of the concessions – the guarantee of profit for each kilometre of track and the grant of the agricultural roads as ‘easy prey [ghanima barida] to a foreign company for nothing in return’ – the anonymous author rails that ‘the Government in the era of the Occupation has become like a joint-stock company for exploiting this land’ and ‘for snatching its money and sucking the blood of the peasant’.61 He concludes by calling on the Egyptians in government, whether in the Provincial Councils, the Legislative Council or the Ministries, to fulfil their duty towards their nation [’umma] and stand resolute against foreign profiteering. The notion that Egypt had fallen prey to greedy forces from abroad was not new in the 1890s. Nor was the allegation that the colonial state

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 75 functioned in service of foreign capital unique to this particular historical moment. Indeed, such instrumentalist critiques have since become the axiomatic core of left–nationalist narratives, not just in Egypt, but across most of the postcolonial world. But in following the meandering path of Egypt’s agricultural roads into critiques of British rule, I suggest that arguments of this kind possessed both a strategic effectivity and an everyday plausibility in the 1890s that are easy to miss amid the widespread employment of similar arguments in the present. In the historical context of their articulation, instrumentalist critiques entailed a conscious effort to inhabit and thereby subvert the British logic of isti‘mar. Framed in the official language of public utility, they challenged the occupation’s legitimacy on its own terms; moreover, they did so in a way that echoed – and thereby resonated with – local responses to the mundane practices of the colonial state. If greater attention to the historicity of instrumentalist critiques helps to explain why they were compelling and meaningful to a growing number of Egyptians in the late 1890s, it also illuminates a kind of impasse that confronted anti-colonial thought in these early years. However glaring the injustice of arrangements like the agricultural railway concession, British officials could – and did – retort that criticism for such measures simply denied or ignored the unprecedented material prosperity that Egypt as a whole was enjoying in the 1890s. Invoking the class analysis that had anchored colonial policy from its earliest moments, they went on to insist that nationalist sentiment merely reflected the narrow interests of a fledgling middle class located in Egypt’s major cities.62 In a particularly strident admonition against such criticism of the occupation, the pro-British paper al-Muqattam lambasted those who ‘are maddened by the great benefit al-naf‘ al-‘azim that has come from the reforms [of the occupation]’ and yet dare to ‘call themselves “the Patriotic Party” [yulaqqibuna anfusahum al-hizb al-watani]’. Citing the 10 to 25 per cent increase in land value that had resulted in recent years from the establishment of new irrigation drains, the article praised this most recent series of works as yet another example of reforms ‘on par with those taking place in the greatest and most advanced of countries’.63 The challenge of this riposte did not escape the occupation’s critics. In an article entitled ‘Egypt and Her Children’ that ran in the daily Misr on 1 February 1897, the anonymous author sarcastically aped colonial discourse

76  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT as follows: ‘Verily, I am most deserving of [Egypt] because I have cultivated her wealth and reformed her interior. (Improving the object earns the right to possess it.) [Kan islah al-shay’ yuksib haqq tamallukihi.].’64 As land values continued to rise during the first decade of the twentieth century, awareness of the problem that the country’s economic boom posed for the viability of anti-colonial nationalism only increased. Noting that ‘all appearances suggest that in its material life this country is undergoing rapid progress, and the statements of government officials emphasise this fact every time the sun comes up or a new year begins’, one columnist writing for the nationalist organ al-Liwa’ in 1905 referred to such repetitive claims to legitimacy as the colonial administration’s ‘gilded speech [kalam dhahabi]’.65 The problem, as another commentator for al-Liwa’ framed it most succinctly, was that ‘wealth is now our diversion [tasliyatuna] and our consolation [ta‘ziyatuna] after the loss of our political independence’.66 To be sure, in so clearly identifying British efforts to substitute material wealth for political rights, nationalist critics did not simply abandon their efforts to argue against the occupation on its own terms. In both articles from al-Liwa’ cited above, the authors dwell at length on the precarious and uneven nature of an apparent boom that they see driven more and more by the speculative activities of foreign financial firms. And not surprisingly, instrumentalist critiques of British rule would enjoy a dramatic resurgence when land prices slumped and the markets crashed in the crisis of 1907.67 But in the years of such vaunted prosperity, these authors were also forced to confront the challenge of basing their claims to political legitimacy on something more than an endless calculation of material interests. In some cases, they began to articulate visions of progress grounded in the free cultivation of mind and spirit, rather than the mere accumulation of material wealth.68 In others, they appealed to notions of sovereignty and political independence as basic international rights.69 Such creative efforts to elaborate on justifications for an anti-colonial nationalism that would exceed the materialist terms of British discourse enjoyed ever-wider circulation in the burgeoning Arabic press. In their very subtlety and erudition, however, these alternative critiques ran up against the limit of well-tried allegations that they represented the misguided or self-interested concerns of a specifically urban elite. As any Egyptian schoolchild can explain, anti-colonial outrage first

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 77

Figure 2.1  A map of Dinshawai from the investigation into the events of June 1906. The diagonal thoroughfare running east–west is the agricultural road. (Source: Published with kind permission of The National Archives)

78  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT swelled past that limit in June 1906. In closing, I would like to consider the famous Dinshawai Incident – widely regarded as the signal event in the transformation of Egyptian nationalism into a mass, popular movement – as both a product of, and an unprecedented challenge to, the project of isti‘mar. The basic narrative of Dinshawai has been endlessly rehearsed. What has scarcely attracted notice is its actual setting: the entire incident played out along one of Minufiyya Province’s agricultural roads, in all likelihood constructed at the behest of Mahmud Sabri’s ‘noble inclination towards isti‘mar’. It was on this road that the British officers strolled into Dinshawai to hunt pigeons, on this road that Captain Bull collapsed and died as he fled the ensuing skirmish in the village and on this road that British soldiers and provincial police marched as they swarmed in to arrest and try the hapless villagers by the dozens.70 From this vantage, Dinshawai is not merely a tale of exceptional tribunals and colonial perversions of justice. It is also a story about the state space that two decades of public works policy had served to produce, a densely interwoven space in which not just water or cotton, but the coercive forces of security could move swiftly in all directions. As I have attempted to demonstrate, that space was, in its conception, shot through with contradictions. Unified as a singular field of rising agricultural productivity, rapid commerce and efficient surveillance, the Egypt of colonial designs would, at the same time, remain fragmented as a collection of individual villages, divided between manageable nodes of political ferment in the cities and a vast expanse of pastoral tranquillity in the countryside. Ultimately, the transformative potential of Dinshawai arose from its poignant dramatisation of this contradiction and the latent possibilities that it unleashed. The country’s new public works might have allowed the forces of the British occupation to project their power more swiftly and evenly across the whole of Egyptian territory. But they had also served to make representations of Egypt as a single, integrated space into a practical reality. The same roads that could carry British soldiers into conflict with the fellahin of Dinshawai could bring Egyptians across the country together. This possibility was not lost on the generation of anti-colonial activists who emerged in the wake of Dinshawai. Within weeks of the trial, they began devising an array of creative new practices to confront and challenge British rule. In some cases, they circulated hundreds of copies of a single petition for

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 79 signatures from every district of the country.71 In others, they coordinated the transmission of an identical message from dozens of different locations at the same time in a kind of telegraphic ‘spamming’ campaign.72 What these practices share is a conscious effort to represent a unified national space – a sentiment spread evenly across Egypt. By subverting the very networks of communication and circulation that the colonial state had worked so hard to forge, these novel repertoires of protest stood as a brazen rejoinder to British claims about the geographic and class specificity of a budding nationalist movement. And by grounding that challenge in the everyday appearance of a state space knitted together by roads and railways, canals and telegraph wires, they achieved a level of popular amplitude that earlier attempts at mobilisation had lacked. In Dinshawai, then, the colonial project of isti‘mar began to point beyond itself. Notes   1. ‘Abd al-Latif Shukri al-Iskandari, Dalil al-Minufiyya (Cairo: Matba‘at al-sharqi, 1900), p. 13.  2. Abbas Hilmi II Papers, HIL/260/83–5, Husayn Nassar to Abbas Hilmi II, ‘Ahwal al-mudir Mahmud Bey Sabri [Regarding the Mudir Mahmud Sabri Bey]’, 20 May 1895.  3. Al-Iskandari, Dalil al-Minufiyya, pp. 11–12.  4. See, for example, ‘Ali Barakat, Tatawwur al-milkiyya al-zira‘iyya fi Misr waatharuhu ‘ala al-haraka al-siyasiyya (Cairo: Dar al-thaqafa al-jadida, 1977); Ra’uf ‘Abbas Hamid, al-Nizam al-ijtima‘i fi Misr fi zill al-milkiyya al-zira‘iyya al-kabira, 1837–1914 (Cairo: Dar al-fikr al-hadith lil-tiba‘a wa al-nashr, 1973); Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914: A Study in Trade and Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Isma‘il Zayn al-Din, al-Zira‘a al-misriyya fi ‘ahd al-ihtilal al-baritani (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘amma lil-kitab, 1995). Though not primarily concerned with the issues of economic and social history that animated this earlier historiography, more recent works on the era of the occupation sometimes reproduce its account of British public works policy as an effort to render Egypt a ‘productive, debt-servicing agricultural unit’. See, for example, Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 79; John

80  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 106–7.   5. ‘Ali Barakat, Ra’uf ‘Abbas Hamid and Isma‘il Zayn al-Din all rely on critiques of this kind in their accounts of British rule.   6. For a thoroughgoing critique of ‘instrumentalism’ in state theory, see Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1978). See also Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 27–8.  7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Of particular importance to my argument is Lefebvre’s effort to explore the complex and ongoing interplay between spatial practice, spatial representations and the lived experience of space. The strategic orientation of the colonial state towards the production of space was by no means unique to Egypt. For work on similar projects in British India, see Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Ravi Ahuja, Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c. 1780–1914 (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009). For a groundbreaking theoretical elaboration of ‘state space’ that informs my analysis here, see also Neil Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  8. Lord Cromer was tremendously fond of mechanical metaphors and often referred to the ‘machinery of government’ in his official correspondence and public reports. See, for example, Parliamentary Papers (henceforth PP), Egypt. no. 3 (1891), Report on the Administration and Condition of Egypt and the Progress of Reforms, p. 1.   9. Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Noor-Aiman Khan, Egyptian–Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010). See also Aaron Jakes, ‘Review Essay: The Invisible State’, Arab Studies Journal 20: 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 236–45. 10. Dar al-watha’iq al-qawmiyya (DWQ), Majlis al-nuzzar wa al-wuzara’ (MNW), 0075-034017, Colin Scott-Moncrieff, ‘Note sur les communications en Égypte et sur la navigation du Nil’, 13 February 1884.

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 81 11. Scott-Moncrieff, ‘Note sur les communications’. The navigation dues of which Scott-Moncrieff complained were eventually eliminated in 1901. See PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1902), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1901, p. 11. 12. See Major R. H. Brown, History of the Barrage at the Head of the Delta of Egypt (Cairo: F. Diemer, 1896). 13. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1891), Report on the Administration and Condition of Egypt, p. 5. At intervals throughout this report for the year 1890, Cromer suggests that the work of his administration has reached a kind of turning point. His assessment that ‘the general financial situation is satisfactory’ (p. 5) does not then mark an endpoint for the occupation, but rather announces the opportunity for his administration to begin enacting a far more ambitious array of ‘improvements’ and ‘reforms’. 14. Garstin was at that time the Inspector of Irrigation for the First Circle, the region covering the eastern Delta Provinces of Daqhaliyya, Sharqiyya and Qalyubiyya. 15. DWQ, Diwan al-ashghal al-‘umumiyya (DAU), 4003-010856, William E. Garstin, ‘Note on Proposed Country Roads Suitable for Wheeled Traffic’, January 1889. 16. Garstin, ‘Note on Proposed Country Roads’. 17. Garstin, ‘Note on Proposed Country Roads’. 18. On the role of such struggles in shaping the British occupation in these early decades, see Nathan Brown, ‘Brigands and State Building: The Invention of Banditry in Modern Egypt’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32: 2 (April 1990), pp. 258–81; and Nathan Brown, ‘Who Abolished Corvee Labour in Egypt and Why?’, Past & Present 144: 1 (August 1994), pp. 116–37. 19. TNA, FO 78/4237, Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 23 February 1889, no. 119. 20. TNA, FO 78/4042, Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 31 March 1887, no. 197. 21. TNA, FO 78/4243, Evelyn Baring to Khedive Tawfiq, 11 December 1889, no. 404. 22. Major R. H. Brown, ‘Administration Report of the Irrigation Department in Lower Egypt for 1898’, Public Works Ministry, Report upon the Administration of the Public Works Department for 1898 (Cairo: National Printing Press, 1899), pp. 7–8. This description of regional inequality provided the justification for the building of a new barrage near the central Delta town of Zifta, completed in 1903. 23. In his nuanced study of afandi subject formation, Michael Gasper has argued that claims to speak on behalf of the Egyptian peasantry were, in these same

82  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT years, a crucial index of the rising class power of the new Egyptian nationalist intelligentsia. At the same time, by reading his sources largely from this vantage of class power, Gasper seems to underplay the kind of strategic critical engagement with colonial discourse on which I focus here. See Gasper, The Power of Representation. 24. ‘[T]o make injustice disappear and apply an egalitarian system’, TNA, FO 78/4307, Speech by Riaz Pasha before the General Assembly, 18 December 1889, no. 20. 25. TNA, FO 78/4310, Undated report by ‘Mr Evans’ in Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 24 May 1890, no. 169. 26. Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York, NY: Praeger Publishers, 1972), p. 148. 27. See Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially pages 38–81. 28. On the significance of this shift from locally-managed irrigation resources to massive state works exemplified by the digging of the Mahmudiyya Canal, see Mikhail, Nature and Empire, pp. 242–90. 29. A Public Works Department was first established under Khedive Isma‘il in 1864, though administrative control over the department and its various projects shifted between several different diwans within the government over the next fifteen years. The department assumed its status as a stand-alone Ministry of Public Works [Nizarat al-ashghal al-‘umumiyya] in August 1878. See F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, [1982] 1999), pp. 61–2; and Girgis Hanin Bey, al-Atyan wa al-dara’ib fi al-qutr al-misri [Land and Taxes in Egypt] (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘amma lil-kitab, [1904] 2008), pp. 17–20. 30. Roger Owen puts the figure spent between 1863 and 1875 on works relating to the agricultural sector alone at £30,000,000. See Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, p. 140. This figure excludes the enormous sums invested in the planning and construction of downtown Cairo during these same years. 31. For a magisterial account of how this conceptual distinction between despotism and just government figured in the constitution of a new liberal legal order that represented colonial rule as rupture with the past, see Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 32. Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1908), pp. 142–6; Sir Auckland Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt (London: Seeley and

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 83 Co., 1906), pp. 8–9; and Alfred Milner, England in Egypt, 9th edn (London: Edward Arnold, 1892 [1902]), pp. 22–6. See also, Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing, and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 89. 33. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, for example, notes that as early as 1848 the Beiruti dramatist and writer Marun al-Naqqash linked the apparent progress of Europe to its inhabitants’ concern for the ‘public interest’ [al-naf‘ al-‘amm]. See KhuriMakdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914, p. 63. Michael Gasper also observes that notions of ‘public interest’ played an important role in the project of Islamic reform, advanced by thinkers like Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh. See Gasper, The Power of Representation, p. 50. 34. On the ‘convenient ambivalence’ of such categories as ‘public works’ and ‘public utility’ within nineteenth-century British political theory, see Ahuja, Pathways of Empire, pp. 79–85. 35. TNA, FO 78/4384, Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 19 April 1891, no. 95. 36. TNA, FO 78/4384, Baring to Salisbury, 19 April 1891, no. 95. 37. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1896), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Progress of Reforms, p. 16. 38. TNA, PRO 30/57/42: Lord Cromer to Lord Kitchener, 25 July 1912, no. KK/22. 39. This conscious reproduction of town–country binaries was by no means unique to British Egypt, but it was arguably the dominant political strategy of colonial agrarian regimes in this era. See, for example, David Washbrook, ‘Law, State, and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies 15: 3 (1981), pp. 649–721. 40. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1896), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, p. 16. Among the most important changes arising from the 1895 reforms was the decision to handle the selection of village headmen through the administrative apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior. John Chalcraft has argued that in the decades immediately preceding the British occupation, Egypt witnessed a kind of proto-democratisation of village life – a development decisively aborted by the reforms to which Cromer alludes. See John Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37: 3 (2005), pp. 303–25. 41. TNA, FO 78/4310, Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 24 May 1890, no. 169. 42. Mubarak was appointed Minister of Public Instruction on 10 June 1888. See

84  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Fu’ad Karam (ed.), al-Nizarat wa al-wizarat al-misriyya, vol. 1 (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-misriyya al-‘amma lil-kitab, 1994), p. 132. On tensions between ‘Ali Mubarak and his British successors in the PWD, see Mary Albright Hollings (ed.), The Life of Sir Colin C. Scott-Moncrieff (London: John Murray, 1917), pp. 161–2. 43. DWQ, MNW, 0075-036456, ‘Ali Pasha Mubarak, ‘Note sur le projet concernant les routes agricoles’, 11 March 1889. 44. Mubarak, ‘Note sur . . . les routes agricoles’. 45. Mubarak, ‘Note sur . . . les routes agricoles’. 46. Mubarak, ‘Note sur . . . les routes agricoles’. 47. Mubarak, ‘Note sur . . . les routes agricoles’. 48. The full text of the Khedivial Decree is reprinted in Girgis Hanin Bey, al-Atyan wa al-dara’ib, pp. 421–6. 49. Filib Jallad, Qamus al-idara wa-l-qada’, vol. 3 (Alexandria: Bani Laghudaki Press, 1900), pp. 718–815; vol. 4 (1901), pp. 626–85; vol. 5 (1894) pp. 679–91. See also, Roger Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, pp. 213–14. 50. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1901), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1900, p. 14. 51. Alan Richards, Egypt’s Agricultural Development, 1800–1980: Technical and Social Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), p. 99. 52. ‘Hasanat al-muhtallin wa-sayyi’atuhum [The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Occupation]’, Misr no. 310, 19 January 1897. 53. Public Works Ministry, Report Upon the Administration of the Public Works Department in Egypt for 1903 by Sir W. E. Garstin (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1899–1904), p. 15. Emphasis is in original. 54. DWQ, MNW, 0075-036463, ‘Projet de décret réglant l’expropriation pour cause d’utilité publique’, Article 15. See also Girgis Hanin, al-Atyan wa aldara’ib, p. 505. 55. DWQ, DAU, 4003-010857, Unlabelled petition from the villagers of Kafr ‘Atallah, 28 June 1893. 56. DWQ, DAU, 4003-021882, Petition to the Undersecretary of State and Advisor, Ministry of Public Works, 15 September 1911. 57. These companies were the Mansourah–Mattarieh Company, the Delta Light Railways, Les Chemins de Fer Economiques and the Fayoum Light Railways (which was established by a group of Egyptian Coptic investors). The Chemins de Fer Economiques amalgamated with the Delta Light Railways (by far the largest of the four companies) in 1900. Construction on the new lines com-

agric ultura l roa ds a nd sta te s pa ce  | 85 menced in 1897, and by 1900 these four companies had laid a total of 924.8km of track. See A. J. Cotterill, ‘Report on Agricultural Lines’, in Public Works Ministry, Report Upon the Administration of the Public Works Department in Egypt for 1900 by Sir W. E. Garstin (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1901), pp. 345–6. 58. Coterill, ‘Report on Agricultural Lines’, in Public Works Ministry, Report on the Administration of the Public Works Department, p. 387. 59. DWQ, MNW, 0075-016221, ‘Mukatabat al-jam‘iyya al-‘umumiyya bi-talab taklif al-sharikat alati tasarraha laha bi-’insha’ sikak hadidiyya dayyiqa ‘ala alsikak al-zira‘iyya bi-‘amal darabzin laha [A Memo from the General Assembly Requesting that the Companies Licensed to Establish Railways on Agricultural Roads Bear the Cost of Building Guard Rails For Them]’, 19 February 1898. 60. ‘Mukatabat al-jam‘iyya al-‘umumiyya’. 61. ‘Hal yastaqill al-misri wa-kayfa yastaqill? [Is the Egyptian Independent, and How So?]’, al-Ra’id al-misri, 22 April 1897. 62. The budding nationalist press, in particular, was dismissed by British officials as ‘hopelessly out of tune’ and coloured by the ‘opinions of the official classes and of the Sawats’. See TNA, FO 78/ 4310, Undated report by ‘Mr Evans’ in Evelyn Baring to Lord Salisbury, 24 May 1890, no. 169. 63. ‘al-Masarif wa al-atyan [Drains and Agricultural Lands]’, al-Muqattam no. 2395, 5 February 1897. 64. ‘Misr wa-abna’uha [Egypt and Her Children]’, Misr no. 321, 1 February 1897. 65. Ahmad Hilmi, ‘al-Kalam al-dhahabi: al-hala al-maliyya fi misr (al-taqaddum al-sari‘) [Gilded Speech: The Financial Situation in Egypt (Rapid Progress)]’, al-Liwa’, 25 December 1905. 66. Muhammad Ibrahim, ‘al-Khatar al-muntazir ‘ala tharwat al-bilad [The Anticipated Threat to the Country’s Wealth]’, al-Liwa’, 8 February 1905. 67. Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–1941 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 54. 68. Among the most frequent rejoinders to the occupiers’ ‘gilded speech’ was the observation that the country’s newfound prosperity (and the increased revenue it generated for the country) had not translated into an equivalent expansion of the education system that was the best marker of meaningful progress. This, ultimately, is the argument of Ahmad Hilmi, ‘al-Kalam al-dhahabi’. 69. After parodying the British claim that development justified occupation, the author of ‘Misr wa-abna’uha’ (cited above) goes on to argue that independence

86  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT is an international right, regardless of the prosperity that colonial rule might be able to deliver. 70. TNA, FO 371/166/21487, ‘General Resume of Occurrence at Denshawai, June 13, 1906’. 71. In the Abbas Hilmi II collection at Durham University, the hundreds of copies of a single such petition to the Khedive, begging that he pardon the convicted peasants of Dinshawai, constitute an entire archival unit (HIL/61). 72. See TNA, FO 371/452/31750, Petitions from 14 September 1908 by subcommittees of the Nationalist Party protesting against the occupation.

3 Training Teachers How to Teach: Transnational Exchange and the Introduction of Social-Scientific Pedagogy in 1890s Egypt Hilary Kalmbach

O

n 7 March 1892, The Times published the following telegram from their correspondent in Cairo:

Three Egyptian students, who had completed the regular course of normal study at the Borough-road Training College, Isleworth, have just received from the Education Department, London, diplomas as qualified teachers. This is the first occasion on which the Department has granted special diplomas to foreigners . . . The Khedive, who shows a warm and practical interest in education, is greatly pleased, especially as his subjects are the only foreigners who gained diplomas at the examinations for certificates held at the various English training colleges last Christmas . . . The importance of the new privilege conferred by the Education Department is shown by the fact that the number of pupils in Egyptian Government schools selecting English as the compulsory foreign language for study is almost equal to the number choosing French, though until lately it bore a very small proportion. The increased adoption of the English language is very marked; it is heard in continual use amongst the native employés in all the public offices.1

This telegram presents the establishment of ties between the Egyptian Ministry of Education and the Borough Road Training College of the British and Foreign School Society, Britain’s pre-eminent teacher-training institution, as part of a significant increase in English linguistic influence within 87

88  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Egypt.2 Read alone, it gives the impression that, ten years into the British occupation of Egypt, the English language and English approaches to education were well on their way to becoming dominant. Yet, closer examination of the development of teacher training in the 1890s reveals that the relationship between cross-cultural borrowing and Egyptian education in the late nineteenth century was more complicated than this narrative of increasing British control and influence suggests. On the one hand, it was in the early 1890s that Egypt began sending students to study at the Borough Road College – a development that followed on from the 1889 opening of the English-language Khedivial Teachers’ School alongside the French-language Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School. However, the major overhaul of teacher-training methods in 1895 instituted a programme more closely resembling practices in France than those of Borough Road. This chapter’s examination of how Egyptian educational reformers tried to reshape Egyptian culture and society through cross-cultural borrowing related to pedagogy and teacher-training practices reveals that, despite the efforts of British administrators to increase their cultural and linguistic influence in the 1890s, ideas and practices from France and elsewhere in Europe related to education continued to be attractive to Egyptian teachers and educational administrators well into the twentieth century. The year 1895 was particularly important, as the major overhaul of pedagogical training in this year highlights how Egyptian educational reformers translated and utilised European knowledge from a diverse range of sources, in contrast to narratives of British domination and control over education throughout this period. This chapter’s examination of cross-cultural exchange stresses the important role played by educational missions in increasing the number of Egyptians who could play an active role in this translation process, especially as teachers and other government bureaucrats. It also presents the Egyptian educational system as an important conduit for spreading this translated foreign knowledge – and the linguistic and pedagogical tools needed for its acquisition – within Egypt. This was especially true of teacher-training schools, even though Egypt’s first teacher-training school, Dar al-‘Ulum, focused on teaching Arabic and Islamic disciplines. This chapter is more a history of policy than of educational practice, as it is based primarily on examination of archival records, published school

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 89 laws and curriculums, encyclopaedic works of the late-nineteenth and early-­ twentieth centuries and key Arabic-language histories of education gathered while completing a detailed study of the history of Egypt’s first teacher-training school, Dar al-‘Ulum. Where possible, it incorporates information about how these curriculums were put into practice, but sources of this information for the late nineteenth century are rare. While European-influenced schooling, such as the government-run civil school system, is often ascribed a key role in Egyptian social, economic and political change in the first half of the twentieth century,3 little attention has been paid to the teacher-training institutions that generated the staff for these schools. The omission is surprising, given the wide recognition that the overall sociocultural impact of education depends not only on the particular subjects studied, but also on how they are taught and what habits and behaviours are inculcated along the way; aspects significantly influenced by both the structure of the school and the pedagogies used within it.4 This chapter begins – with an overview of cross-cultural borrowing in nineteenth-century Egyptian civil education – by highlighting the importance of study missions to Europe. It outlines the emergence of Egyptian teacher training in the 1870s and 1880s, explains its links with European practices and discusses its development during the first decade of British occupation, from 1882 to 1892. It then presents 1895 as a key turning point in the development of Egyptian teacher training and discusses connections with both Britain and France. Postcolonial approaches to knowledge in colonial and semi-colonial contexts often emphasise the dominance of foreign ideas, practices and technologies.5 However, it is important to also capture the agency of local actors. Local agency and initiative were particularly important within the realm of education, given the long history of pre-occupation activity in this area.6 That foreign ideas are, out of necessity, translated into any new context has long been recognised by comparative education specialists,7 who point out that educational policies are not universally transferable and will fail if they are not changed to fit local circumstances.8 Of particular relevance here was how Egyptian administrators, teachers and students not only adopted, but adapted, foreign knowledge.9 Omnia El Shakry’s study of social science in Egypt from the 1870s through to the 1960s stresses the power of foreign

90  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT knowledge, while noting that Egyptians not only translated foreign knowledge, but also rehabilitated local knowledge and heritage to establish themselves as creators of knowledge.10 My work on Dar al-‘Ulum has shown that Egyptian educators took this one step further. Local knowledge was not only used by intellectuals to further goals of nationalism and independence, but also was actively inserted into new, foreign-influenced institutions to create hybrids that were seen as modern and yet retained a significant connection to Egypt’s past.11 When looking at cross-cultural transmission of knowledge, it can be especially useful to focus on the conduits through which knowledge travelled. In this case, conduits include the movement of foreigners and books to Egypt and the movement of Egyptians to Europe and back. This latter movement often occurred through official channels – for instance, when the government-hired foreign educational advisors and teachers and sent missions of students to study in Europe from the 1820s onwards. Much unofficial exchange also occurred, as families sent children not selected for missions to study in Europe – especially after 1885, when the official missions started focusing on younger students – and a wide variety of expatriate communities maintained ties abroad, while establishing themselves in Egypt.12 Foreign language instruction not only facilitated study abroad, but also enabled Egyptians to engage with imported books and foreigners living in Egypt. This chapter focuses in particular on the importance of European missions in increasing the number of Egyptian educators able to play an active role in these processes of transmission and translation. European Ideas, Cross-Cultural Borrowing, Egyptian Civil Schooling Cross-cultural borrowing of European ideas was important to Egyptian education reform throughout the nineteenth century. Foreign knowledge and expertise influenced the organisation, subject matter and approaches of the civil schools that Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48) founded to run in parallel with existing religious schools. Early efforts, initiated with the help of foreign advisors and instructors, focused on creating higher-level civil schools that would produce military officers and civil servants.13 They were supported by a secondary school (1825) and several primary schools (1833) that provided preliminary training for individuals who wanted to enter these schools. In

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 91 the 1860s, Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79), initiated a major expansion of the primary and secondary levels of this system with the goal of significantly increasing the number of Egyptians who had at least some experience of civil education – a project that was put on hold by Egyptian bankruptcy and the resulting foreign financial supervision from 1876. Aspects of the civil school system – its new subjects and pedagogies, its centralised and standardised structures and its aim of shifting of graduates’ views of the world and their place in it – reflected the influence of European approaches imported via two main channels: foreigners living in Egypt, including British missionary organisations and foreign advisors employed by the government, and Egyptians educated in Europe, such as Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–73), ‘Ali Mubarak (1824–93) and Ya‘qub Artin (1842–1919). With respect to the first channel, British missionary organisations contributed significantly to the importation of the discipline-focused monitorial education programme championed by British educationalists Joseph Lancaster (1778–1838) and Andrew Bell (1753–1832) and exported around the world. 14 Monitorial schooling was seen as an efficient and cost-effective way of spreading literacy and discipline. The schools aimed to strictly discipline both body and mind by making all student actions observable through the school layout and the introduction of a hierarchy of student monitors, who would inspect and drill students. The highly centralised, machine-like structure of monitorial schools aimed to make schooling scalable and reproducible with a high degree of central control over the end result. Monitorial and similar schools furthered functionalist goals by teaching subjects such as mathematics, science (natural, physical and chemical) and geography – all of which would be useful when pursuing further professional training.15 The principles behind monitorial schooling influenced much of the educational innovation of the nineteenth century in Egypt and elsewhere.16 In Egypt, Muhammad ‘Ali approved a British missionary attempt to found a short-lived monitorial school in the Greek Orthodox community in Alexandria in 1826.17 The Anglican Church Missionary Society ran a successful boys’ school – intending it as a model for others – in Cairo, from 1828 to 1848, and an even more successful girls’ school from 1835 to 1860. American

92  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Presbyterian missionaries, who arrived in 1854 and set up an Egyptian branch in 1860, ran three schools in Cairo and two schools in Alexandria from 1863; they expanded into Upper Egypt in 1865 and opened a seminary in 1867. With respect to the second channel, Egyptians studied in Europe as part of government-run student missions under both Muhammad ‘Ali and Isma‘il. These missions played a crucial role in giving Egyptians the necessary skills and connections with which to engage with, and import, European ideas, practices and technologies. While France featured prominently as a destination for early missions, Muhammad ‘Ali sent students to multiple locations throughout Europe from the 1820s onwards and set up a school in Paris in the 1840s.18 These missions increased Egyptian contact with European disciplinary education in both France and England. In the 1820s, Muhammad ‘Ali dispatched a delegation of twenty Egyptians to Joseph Lancaster’s Central School, later renamed the Borough Road Training College.19 In 1843, two Egyptians who had spent time in England set up a monitorial-style school, though plans for eight more ground to a halt when Khedive ‘Abbas, Muhammad ‘Ali’s immediate successor, shut down the civil school system in 1849. Monitorial-style education was also apparently delivered to army recruits for a time after 1854. While Egyptian civil schools do not seem to have adopted the monitorial system as a whole, disciplinary schooling techniques dominated Egyptian approaches to education in the nineteenth century, influencing both choice of subjects and pedagogies and leading to an emphasis on centralisation, standardisation and the transformation of the relationship between graduates and the world around them.20 Educational missions to Europe trained many of the reformers who played key roles in the second half of the nineteenth century, during Khedive Isma‘il’s reign and the British occupation in the 1880s and 1890s. For instance, Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, who lived in France between 1826 and 1831 with one of these missions, returned to Egypt for a long career as an education reformer, author and active translator of European works into Arabic that stretched into Isma‘il’s reign. ‘Ali Mubarak, a generation younger than Tahtawi, trained in Paris from 1844 to 1850. His career took off during the reign of Isma‘il when he contributed significantly to public works and education. He founded what would become the National Library, the Dar al-‘Ulum teacher-training school and the education journal Rawdat al-madaris. He

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 93 served as Minister of Education under Isma‘il and, in the late 1880s, helped Isma’il revamp the government’s system of higher schools and vastly expand primary and secondary education. Ya‘qub Artin, an Egyptian Armenian who was the son of a mission graduate and educated in France, tutored Isma‘il’s sons and then worked at a high level with European and British administrators from the late 1870s. Registered in Egypt as a French citizen, he served as Deputy Minister of Education between 1884 and 1888 and again after 1891 – the gap between the two appointments being due to disagreement with the then-Education Minister, Mubarak.21 Early Similarities between European and Egyptian Teacher Training Borrowing and translating ideas from Europe was crucial for the development of Egyptian teacher training from its inception in the early 1870s. Mission graduate ‘Ali Mubarak, Minister of Education at the time, invited students from al-Azhar, Egypt’s prestigious leading religious university, to attend the lecture series he was running in 1871 at the Dar al-‘Ulum [House of Knowledge] amphitheatre. In return for attendance, they became eligible for jobs teaching in government schools. In 1872, Mubarak proposed to the Khedive that this lecture series become the basis for a school focused entirely on training students from religious schools to teach. Dar al-‘Ulum was the only government civil school training teachers between 1872 and 1880, even though it graduated a relatively small number of teachers over this period, and it focused narrowly on training the best-performing students from religious schools to be teachers with strong Arabic skills, often in primary schools.22 The influence of European educational practices can be seen at Dar al‘Ulum, even though much of its curriculum focused on subjects long-taught within Egypt’s religious schools, and its students – as well as much of the faculty – were officially titled shaykh in recognition of their religious knowledge. First, a significant part of Dar al-‘Ulum’s teacher-training mission was to expose future teachers who had hitherto studied in religious schools to the structure, norms and habits of the civil school system.23 Dar al-‘Ulum was founded because graduates of the civil school system generally did not have a sufficient background in Arabic grammar to teach the subject well, yet many of the graduates of religious schools who had these skills did not fit well into the civil school system. ‘Ali Mubarak speaks of significant gaps

94  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT in ­understanding that led to mistrust between the two groups of teachers.24 Because Dar al-‘Ulum was structured as a civil school, the education it provided contrasted with the religious schools that most of its students had previously attended. The exposure provided by Dar al-‘Ulum to the European-influenced subjects and structures of the civil system was all the more important, given the commonly held view in Europe that teachers played a significant role in transforming the behaviour and worldview of their students. In France, the ability of teachers to imbue new behaviours in their students was regarded as sufficiently important that the teaching school regulations were changed in 1851 to emphasise memorisation, repetition and other disciplinary structures, in order to foster a sense of group identity among the trainee teachers.25 The Borough Road College also emphasised the role of the teacher’s example in inculcating particular habits of body and mind in students.26 Therefore, it is not surprising that studying at Dar al-‘Ulum not only involved honing skills in a wide range of subjects, but also mastering the habits that they would be expected to embody and teach and that were necessary to be seen as an educated individual in a modernising Egypt. Second, the initial lack of training regarding how to teach at Dar al-‘Ulum during this early period also has much in common with European practice at that time. Extensive theoretical training in how to teach was not universally established in Europe by the late nineteenth century, with teacher-training schools often focusing instead on the specific subjects that the student teachers would have to teach. Early (and isolated) teacher-training institutions, founded as early as 1795 in France and 1809 in England, emphasised subjectmatter expertise, instead of formal training in how to teach. The assumption seems to have been that students would intuitively understand how to teach, based on observation of how they had been taught as students. France led the way in changing this attitude and required its écoles normales to provide practical experience teaching as early as 1832, often in a model primary or secondary school attached to the training school precisely for this purpose.27 However, it was not until 1866, six years before the founding of Dar al‘Ulum, that French écoles normales were required to include formal instruction in how to teach. Likewise in Britain, from its founding in 1809 to the end of the nineteenth century, the Borough Road Training College focused

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 95 primarily on subject-matter expertise, combined with some degree of practical experience teaching.28 It was not until 1880, when a government-sponsored commission described the standards of teaching in Egyptian schools as poor, that formal training was extended beyond teachers specialising in Arabic. Training all teachers had been considered previously. In the 1860s, before the founding of Dar al-‘Ulum, a general teacher-training institution had been proposed during Mustafa Riyad’s tenure in the Ministry of Education.29 Also, the year after Dar al-‘Ulum was founded, Edouard Dor, the Swiss education advisor and inspector, founded a small school to train teachers named Dar al-Mu‘allimin.30 However, neither proposal nor initiative appears to have led to significant change in how Egyptian teachers as a whole were trained. The 1880 report specifically called for the creation of another teachertraining school alongside Dar al-‘Ulum, which led to the opening of the Madrasat al-mu‘allimin al-markaziyya [Central Teachers’ School] in October 1880. European influence was even more pronounced in this school, because, with the exception of the department containing Dar al-‘Ulum during its brief attachment to the school,31 it taught mainly in French and focused on training teachers with expertise in foreign languages and civil-school subjects, such as history, geography, mathematics and science. Like British and French teaching schools during this period, it had a primary and secondary school attached to it to enable students to practice teaching. James HeyworthDunne, the British author of a standard history of Egyptian education that was extremely critical of Dar al-‘Ulum, described it as ‘the first serious attempt to set up an institution in which teachers could be trained in modern methods’ and stated (without providing evidence) that it was inspired by developments in French teacher training during the 1860s and 1870s.32 It seems safe to assume that, while pedagogical instruction was introduced into both the Central Teachers’ School and Dar al-‘Ulum in the early 1880s, the schools remained primarily focused on training students in the subjects they would later teach. This is because, while practical pedagogy and teaching experience were mandated from 1880, traces of either are scarce in the archives.33 It is only in 1887 that pedagogy classes were formally slotted into the Dar al-‘Ulum schedule; even so, they were given very little class time – one hour a week during the final two years of study.34 This ­continuing focus

96  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT on subject instruction contrasts sharply with Dor’s 1873 teaching school proposal, which called for eleven times as much class time to be spent on theoretical and practical instruction in ‘the art of how to teach’ [fann tariqat al-ta‘lim].35 Teacher Training and British Educational Policies to 1892 The British invasion of Egypt in 1882 had a significant impact on Egyptian education in the long term, with the education system restricted and restructured under the leadership of British administrator Lord Cromer, then Evelyn Baring. However, the education policies for which Cromer is infamous do not seem to have been enacted until the 1890s – they were not put down in writing until 1902 and then only due to pressure from nationalist journalists and lawmakers.36 Similarly, significant changes in teacher training, due to either British or Egyptian initiative, would not occur until the mid-1890s. During the 1880s, Britain severely restricted education spending – a decision that had significant impact and generated much criticism from Egyptians – but does not seem to have been directly involved in setting education policies. Similarly, other than sending a portion of the mission students to England,37 there is little indication that British administrators were trying to increase their cultural influence. For instance, the joint authors of the 1884 report on Egypt’s finances argue that they were not qualified to make recommendations on how to reform Egyptian education and that a committee should be appointed to look into education.38 An 1887 report arguing against the idea that Europeans – specifically, the British – were playing too large a role in Egyptian governance states that foreign involvement in the Ministry of Interior had been kept to a minimum. The report points out that there were no European administrators in the Ministry of Education. In it, Cromer indicates that education is ‘in the hands of a very intelligent native gentleman’, the Francophile Ya‘qub Artin, even though Artin was officially the deputy to the Minister of Education at the time.39 The report also notes that the thirty-three foreign employees in the ministry were engaged as ‘professors of languages, &c.’, states that their number increased by only four between 1882 and 1886 and points out that nineteen out of the thirty-three (58 per cent) were French.40

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 97 Starting in 1890, British officials increased education funding. Their reports boasted that the number of civil schools funded and supervised by the government was to increase from twelve in 1887 to forty-seven by the end of 1890, and the budget in 1891 was 24 per cent greater than in 1889.41 Cromer also praises the Minister of Education at the time – presumably ‘Ali Mubarak – for agreeing to hire two Foreign Education Inspectors, one French and one English, as well as more European teachers. It was in 1890 that Douglas Dunlop, the British administrator who helped Cromer realise his education policies, was appointed to an administrative post in the Ministry of Education, having arrived in Egypt to teach English the year before. Dunlop was a Scot and former missionary who Egyptians (and some British administrators at the time) remember as overly strict and unbending and unwilling to engage with the Egyptian language or culture.42 These characteristics, as well as his centrality to British education policies during this period, made him the focus of Egyptian nationalist criticism of British education policy. Dunlop helped Cromer set up a two-tier system of fee-paying schools that gave a small number of Egyptians the access to primary, secondary and higher schooling – and foreign language training – that was needed to work in the state bureaucracy, while providing the rest with basic literacy and functional training in local kuttab schools. Cromer was motivated by financial concerns, as well as his experiences in India – where increased nationalist activity was seen by the British to be correlated with the fact that there were more graduates than government jobs available for them – and his conviction that education would only be valued if paid for.43 Dunlop’s influence led to increasing centralisation and systemisation of Egyptian education, as well as attempts to marginalise both Arabic and French, the latter in order to decrease French cultural and political influence.44 He increased the number of subjects taught in English instead of French or Arabic and hired a substantial number of young and immature Englishmen without Arabic skills to teach in Egyptian schools.45 Cromer’s 1892 report indicates that foreign language education was streamlined such that students would choose to study either English or French, instead of both, in addition to Arabic.46 The choice of foreign language was officially unrestricted, but in reality British policy seems to have been aimed at the

98  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT promotion of English.47 The 1892 report indicates that 2,091 students were studying English versus 2,836 for French. Only two changes were made in teacher-training policies before 1892: one relating to language and the other relating to foreign exchanges. With respect to the first, the opening of the Khedivial Teachers’ School in 1889 was a significant move in the introduction of English-language teacher training and, by extension, English-language instruction in Egypt. It taught an identical curriculum to the Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School, which had succeeded the Central Teachers’ School in 1888, except that it taught primarily in English, while the Tawfiqiyya’s classes were primarily in French.48 This change had the potential to significantly increase British cultural influence, given the connection between foreign language training and the ability of teachers and their students to interact with foreign knowledge in Egypt or abroad, but failed to do so before the end of the nineteenth century. This was because the Khedivial Teachers’ School struggled to attract a significant number of students until around 1906. Early graduation numbers were the lowest among the three higher teacher-training schools. No students graduated for eight of the years between 1891 and 1909, and the average number of graduates per year for this period is 2.58 students.49 In the same period, the Tawfiqiyya School’s average graduation rate was almost double, while Dar al-‘Ulum’s was over five times higher. The second area of change involved an increase in ties between Egypt and England related to sending missions of trainee teachers abroad. In 1888, the Deputy Minister of Education Ya‘qub Artin travelled to England to look into sending Egyptian students to study there, and in 1889 Egyptian educators decided to send Egyptians training to become English teachers to England to improve their pedagogical and language skills.50 Dunlop visited the Borough Road Training College in 1889 to work out the details with the school administrators.51 Groups of two or three Egyptian students were sent to study for two years at Borough Road, starting in October 1889. In contrast with accounts that claim Dunlop was responsible for this change,52 Borough Road’s annual reports attribute the initiative behind the Egyptian request to ‘Ali Mubarak, then Minister of Public Instruction, and describe the first group of students as ‘highly intelligent and industrious’ and ‘most popular with their comrades’.53

t rai ni ng teachers how to te a ch  | 99 In September and October of 1892, Shaykh Hasan Tawfiq (presumably Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl, an 1887 graduate of Dar al-‘Ulum who became a distinguished educator and literary scholar) spent time at the school as part of a more general study of public education in Europe for the Egyptian Government.54 In 1894, one of the six Egyptians at the school was Ahmad Barrada, who spent his third year studying for a further government certificate and the teaching examination of the Cambridge University Syndicate, assembling a ‘small but representative’ library on education and sending reports on educational topics to the Ministry of Education, one of which was selected for official distribution.55 An 1894 graduate of Dar al-‘Ulum, Shaykh ‘Atif Barakat, studied at the school for four years, spending time in his final year visiting schools and studying for two months in Sweden, where he earned a certificate in the Slojd [sloyd] handicraft-based education system.56 Upon his return to Egypt, he worked as a school inspector, led a project reforming elementary education in religious schools (the kuttab system) and served as the founding director of the School for Shari‘a Judges [Madrasat al-Qada’ al-Shar‘i] – a sister school to Dar al-‘Ulum that trained personnel for the shari‘a courts.57 Once again, this change had the potential to increase British cultural influence, given the importance of mission training and the associated language expertise to educational administration and reform, but it failed to do so before the twentieth century. The link with the Borough Road College was celebrated within Egypt at the time, as shown in part by the introduction of the first cohort of graduates to Artin and Cromer, as well as the appointment of an instructor from Borough Road, A. V. Houghton, as headmaster of the Khedivial (Secondary) School in Cairo.58 Subsequent scholarship has documented the importance of this link to the transmission of ideas about education between Borough Road and Egypt.59 Despite the expansion of missions to England, however, exchanges between Egypt and Europe remained heterogeneous, with students travelling to France and possibly Switzerland in addition to England. During Khedive Isma‘il’s rule, France hosted over half of the official missions (57.08 per cent), with the rest split between a wide range of destinations, such as Asia, Italy, England, Switzerland and Germany.60 Similarly, the few Dar al-‘Ulum graduates recorded as travelling abroad in the 1870s and 1880s went to France

100  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT or French-speaking areas of Europe and ties with France remained strong in the 1890s, with numerous Dar al-‘Ulum graduates teaching at Paris’ School of Eastern Languages.61 In the following period – the early twentieth century – England was much more prominent as a study destination, but exchange remained diverse, with missions of students from the Egyptian University travelling to France, England and Germany, as well as ministry offices being located in London, Paris, Geneva and Berlin, in order to supervise students in the surrounding areas.62 Furthermore, that Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl travelled to schools in multiple European countries in addition to Borough Road, and ‘Atif Barakat spent time in his final year at Borough Road studying in Sweden, further supports the argument that Egyptian educational administrators were interested in educational practices across a wide range of European countries. Finally, academic exchanges between graduates of teacher-training schools and Europeans were similarly varied. Dar al-‘Ulum graduate Hifni Nasif Bey (1882) and instructor Hamza Fathallah attended the 1886 Orientalist Congress in Vienna, with Muhammad Rashad and ministry official Ya‘qub Artin, while another graduate Mahmud ‘Amr Effendi (1880) attended the 1889 Orientalist Congress in Stockholm. ‘Amr, Nasif and Fathallah also travelled to London in 1891 for a conference on Eastern languages.63 Placing these factors into the wider context of linguistic and cultural influence, it is clear that while the British occupation increased British control over high-level decisions related to education policy and financing, as well as some of the official channels of cross-cultural exchange (such as appointment of foreign advisors), their cultural and social influence over Egyptian education and educators at the start of the 1890s was far from complete. The legacy of pre-1882 developments left many of the detailed decisions about education in the hands of Egyptians who had studied abroad within Europe, but outside of Britain, and were therefore able to engage with foreign knowledge on their own terms. Introducing Social-Scientific Approaches to Pedagogy in 1895 The major changes to pedagogical training in Egyptian teachers’ schools that occurred in 1895 further highlights the diverse range of cross-cultural exchange taking place between Europe and Egypt in the late nineteenth century in

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 101 contrast to narratives focused on British domination and control. First, the time devoted to pedagogical training in teacher-training schools significantly increased in 1895. In 1891, time spent on teacher training at Dar al-‘Ulum had increased to four hours per week in the final two years of instruction and, in 1895, it increased even further to two hours per week in the second and third year and five hours per week in the fourth and final year – a total of 12.5 per cent of class time.64 From 1895, the Khedivial and Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School were to spend 18 per cent of their total instructional time (six hours out of a total thirty-three a week) on training teachers how to teach.65 Second, the content of these classes changed radically in 1895, with a significant amount of time devoted to theoretical instruction, in addition to practical training and teaching experience. Interestingly, much of this theoretical instruction focused on the application of social-scientific ideas to teaching, at least in Dar al-‘Ulum.66 Students in the first and second years examined basic philosophical and psychological concepts – first looking at the physical, psychological and intellectual aspects of human nature. In the second year, they were to examine concepts such as perception, consciousness, memorisation, semantics, logic, language learning, ego, sex, discipline, choice and freedom. The third-year course looked at how these concepts could be applied to teaching, discussing both physical and intellectual education, as well as how to increase focus, openness to new ideas and the ability to memorise and imagine, as well as how to imbue morals and break bad habits. Only in the fourth year did the course turn to how to teach specific subjects, as well as to best practice in school administration. Some of this time may have been spent practising teaching in civil schools; in Dar al-‘Ulum’s case, the Mubtadiyan (later Nasriyya) primary school that it was attached to from 1895. This attachment to a model school brought Dar al-‘Ulum in line with current practice in France and at Borough Road and put Amin Sami, the director of the primary school, in charge of both schools. Sami, in addition to being the author of the encyclopaedic work Taqwim al-Nil, was very highly thought of by Cromer and others in the educational establishment, which may have been why he was Madrasat Dar al-‘Ulum’s longest-serving director (1895–1911).67 The 1895 curriculum also included courses in subjects that were often linked to training to teach in this period: general knowledge (ashya’ [lit. things]), hygiene and after-hours physical education. The

102  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT c­ urricular changes of the mid-1890s, therefore, appear to represent not only an increase in time devoted to pedagogy, but also a significant shift towards theoretical instruction, aimed at training students to apply social-scientific theories to their teaching. The available documents do not reveal much about how or why the 1895 changes were put into place. Despite increasing ties between Egyptian educationalists and the Borough Road College in the early 1890s, and the significance attached to these ties, it is not clear that the 1895 changes in Egyptian teacher training were modelled on educational practice at this school. Borough Road had long followed a programme that emphasised, first, subject training and, second, experience in teaching, in front of students as well as peers and instructors. It did have a class in school management that, in the 1890s, included limited coverage of social-science topics, such as physiology, logic and science, alongside a large quantity of practical information related to teaching specific subjects and ensuring efficient school organisation and proper hygiene.68 Both of the texts used in this period, Gladman’s School Work (1885) and the National Society’s Manual of Science and Art of Teaching (1879), devote over 500 pages to practical and theoretical topics.69 School Work, which was written by a former Borough Road headmaster, begins with the practical – running a class with appropriate authority and discipline, teaching using a range of techniques and organising and maintaining a school in an efficient manner. Its final section, taking up approximately one-third of the two-volume series, includes a mix of theoretical and practical material, including basic educational principles, ways to understand the mind and its development, the relationship between will and moral education, the importance of physical education and finally a short appendix summarising basic approaches to psychology and logic. The Manual, published by another British teacher-training organisation, the National Society, switches this order around, making the theoretical material more accessible and easier to apply to teaching. It begins with pedagogical theory – including consideration of the senses, child development, memory and its improvement, language and how we acquire it – and ends with more practical subjects: first, order and discipline, then general teaching and instructions for specific subjects and finally consideration of how to use the classroom and the tools available in it. Despite the presence of theoretical – even social science – material in the

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 103 Borough Road school management course, the time allotted to this subject was very small. During the 1890s, the overall time allotted was only one or two hours a week, representing 5 per cent or fewer hours spent in the classroom. Increasing the emphasis on school management was a goal as early as 1880, but the Borough Road report for 1891 concludes that: the attention of students during their two years’ training at College is so taken up with the useless iteration of subjects, which in most cases have been sufficiently studied during their apprenticeship, that genuine pedagogic training must necessarily be in large measure perfunctory and futile.70

The detail provided in the school reports about teacher-training activities increases annually for the rest of the decade, but no further time was devoted to school management classes. Therefore, theoretical instruction in pedagogy was present at the Borough Road College in the early 1890s, including some application of social-scientific ideas to teaching, but it was not as prominent as subject-specific instruction, practical training or teaching experience. Borough Road’s emphasis on non-theoretical teacher training is further reinforced by the wide range of changes made to the Borough Road teachertraining programme around the same time as the 1895 revisions in Egypt. Instead of increasing the time available to theoretical training, a wide range of new practical and experiential activities such as field trips and public exercises were introduced. Changes relating to theoretical instruction appear to be limited to small changes in the reading list: adding Fitch’s Lectures on Teaching and Jevon’s Logic from 1896 to 1897 and from 1899 to 1900 dropping the Gladman and Jevon texts and adding the ‘Day-School Code’, Ralph’s ‘Ethics of Education’, ‘Psychology in the Classroom’ and Plato’s Republic.71 In the late nineteenth century, theoretical instruction – specifically, approaches to teaching informed by social science – played a much more significant role in teacher training in France. In the 1880s, French normal schools switched to a social-science focused approach to teacher training that was similar to the new Egyptian course in content and, to a certain extent, organisation. It is described by one author as follows: During the first year, students learned the elementary principles of psychology: a general description of human faculties – physical, emotional, and

104  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT intellectual – and the application of these notions to education. Students would in turn discuss the principles of hygiene, behavior modification, and the learning process. The second year focused on moral instruction, both theoretical and practical. Instructors lectured their students on such abstract ideas as human liberty, responsibility, and duty. These notions were then applied to a more specific discussion of social obligations to one’s family and to society. Finally, moral instruction culminated in a discussion of civic duties – the concept of the state, patriotism, and obedience to laws.72

This approach remained controversial within France until the end of the 1880s for two reasons: first, it lessened the time available for practical instruction; second, it was difficult to teach students who were used to repetition and memorisation to think critically so that they could apply theories from psychology and other human sciences to their teaching. In Egypt, the 1895 changes were instituted shortly after the official publication of a letter sent to the Ministry of Education from an Egyptian teacher who had accompanied a delegation of students to the College of Paris. The letter, Risala ‘an sharh turuq al-ta‘lim al-ibtida’i bi-madaris al-mu‘allimin biFaransa [Letter Explaining the Method of Primary Education in Teacher Training Schools in France], explains the approach to primary education used in French teacher-training schools, both generally and with respect to specific subjects, such as French language, history, geography, pedagogy and morals, mathematics and science. It explains that, in France, psychology was now seen as a crucial prerequisite to further pedagogical study, because the subject was essential to understanding the physical and mental capabilities of the students.73 Its author, ‘Abd al-Rahim Salim, had graduated from Dar al-‘Ulum in 1891 and spent four years in France as teacher to the delegation sent by the Egyptian Ministry of Education to the Versailles School, after which he had a long career as a teacher and school inspector in Egypt.74 In short, the significant expansion of pedagogical training for Egyptian teachers – specifically, the introduction of social-scientific approaches – is not necessarily attributable to the developing ties between the Egyptian Ministry of Education and the Borough Road training school. First, in the early 1890s, Egyptian administrators sent trainee teachers and established educators to a wide range of destinations throughout Europe. Second, while Borough

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 105 Road’s curriculum included a small amount of time devoted to theoretical instruction, some of which was based on the application of the social sciences, its students spent a far greater amount of time honing their subject expertise and gaining experience in the classroom. The time devoted to theory in both the course introduced in Egypt in 1895 and the French teacher-training curriculum at the time, as well as the detailed letter about this curriculum sent in 1895 by a student in Paris, significantly raises the probability of French influence on this decision. Regardless, it is clear that cross-cultural borrowing of ideas related to teacher training in 1890s Egypt was not a case of a simple transfer of ideas from metropole to colony, but instead a process involving a wider range of cultural and intellectual influences. Cross-Cultural Borrowing and Egyptian Education in the Twentieth Century This discussion of teacher-training reform shows the 1890s as a period during which Britain increased its involvement in Egyptian educational policies with the goal of promoting its interests over those of France and rising Egyptian nationalism, yet the Egyptian Government was engaging in a wide range of cross-cultural borrowing, which in turn preserved the breadth of cultural influences that had already been at work within Egypt. The 1895 introduction of a theory-focused approach to teacher training similar to what was at the cutting edge of French teacher-training practice, thirteen years into the British occupation of Egypt, makes it clear that British control over Egyptian education was far from absolute, despite narratives to the contrary stressing colonial agency.75 The use of social-science knowledge in teacher training remained influential in Egypt well into the twentieth century, with subjects such as psychology remaining on the curriculum at Dar al-‘Ulum until 1940 and books such as Amin Mursi Qandil’s Usul al-tarbiya wa-fann al-tadris [Foundational Principles of Instruction and the Art of Teaching], which was in print from at least 1914 through to 1928, continuing to be used at Egyptian teacher-training schools.76 Furthermore, this investigation of cross-cultural borrowing reveals the important role played by mission graduates who returned to Egypt to work as teachers and educational administrators at various levels. It demonstrates the agency that Egyptians exercised within the transmission and

106  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT translation ­process, even during the British occupation, by applying what they had learned while studying in a range of European venues to Egyptian teacher training. The Egyptian mission graduates discussed in this chapter returned to Egypt to teach or, as in the case of ‘Atif Barakat, to serve as school inspectors. My investigation of early ties with Borough Road also reveals the activities of a more senior educationalist, Shaykh Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl, sent by the Egyptian Government to gather information about European teacher-training practices. Finally, Borough Road accounts indicate that it was ‘Ali Mubarak who was responsible for seeking out the link with Borough Road in the late 1880s, instead of Douglas Dunlop, as earlier histories have stated. While the power dynamics of occupation certainly had an impact on the activities of the Egyptian Government, the continued involvement of Egyptians with European training at all levels of Egyptian educational administration in the 1880s and 1890s discredits accounts written by those sympathetic to the colonial mission attributing sole responsibility for Egyptian educational progress in this period to Britain. Taking a longer view, the reforms discussed in this chapter show that the 1890s can be seen as an important turning point with respect to patterns of cross-cultural borrowing and, by extension, cultural influence. On the one hand, the apparent importance of expertise from other European countries to the teacher-training reforms of 1895 highlights the limits of British influence in many areas of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, a full decade into their occupation, and the extent to which Egyptians preferred – or chose to strategically cultivate – ties with France and other European countries. Even the 1892 quote from The Times correspondent in Cairo appearing at the start of this chapter prefaces its premature proclamation of a decisive shift from French to English in Egyptian schools and ministries with the caveat that until recently French had been dominant. French influence over Egyptian students and educators was a topic of sufficient interest to readers in Britain in 1895 that the congratulations offered by Egyptian students in Paris to the newly installed French President – mentioning his visit the previous year, noting that Egypt was ‘a nation warmly devoted to France’ and thanking him for his support in convincing Parliament to consider ‘the Egyptian question’ – not only warranted mention in The Times on 30 January, but also reproduction in full of their remarks on 1 February.77

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 107 On the other hand, developments during the late 1880s and early 1890s laid the groundwork for the significant expansion of Britain’s role in crosscultural borrowing between Europe and Egypt in subsequent decades. First, the study of English increased significantly in the early twentieth century. Dunlop’s language policies did face a significant setback after a 1907 educational bargain between the new British High Commissioner, Eldon Gorst, and Egyptian nationalists led to a significant increase in the number of classes taught in Arabic, a rise in classroom hours spent on religion in primary schools and the addition of a class on ‘national education’ that enabled educators to counter narratives of empire presented in history and geography classes. However, his policies gradually displaced French language and influence in favour of British influence and English language within the realm of government-sponsored education. Within teacher-training schools, foreign language education shifted definitively from French to English in the early twentieth century. In 1899, the Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School was folded into the Khedivial Teachers’ School, even though student numbers in the French programme were one-and-a-half times greater and the English programme began attracting enough students to ensure a regular stream of graduates in 1906.78 From 1901 onwards, the foreign language classes that had been introduced into Dar al-‘Ulum in 1895 were offered only in English, instead of both French and English.79 In 1904, the French language section that had been the Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School was closed down, because only one student had applied to enter, prompting Lord Cromer to point out that the demand for Egyptian teachers who spoke English was currently significantly larger than the supply.80 It is notable that administrators did not take comparable action when enrolment in the Khedivial School dropped to only one student in 1899 and then to no students in 1900, after having an average enrolment of 9.3 throughout the 1890s. In 1899 as well, an English section of the prestigious Egyptian Law School was opened. French influence was dominant in the School of Law right through to the end of the nineteenth century, but the English section rapidly expanded after opening, to the point where it had more students in 1906 than did the French section.81 Second, English schools received an increasing number of Egyptian mission students in the twentieth century. With respect to teacher t­raining, the

108  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT link with Borough Road formed in the early 1890s continued to develop, with its graduates including radical nationalist leader ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish, who enrolled after his graduation from Dar al-‘Ulum in 1897.82 In the early twentieth century, the overseas study of Dar al-‘Ulum graduates, at least, shifts decisively toward England, with between one and three students from the classes of 1907, 1908 and 1909 getting an education diploma in England.83 This is in line with wider trends in educational missions, with England becoming more of a focus from the late 1890s onward.84 By the 1920s, Egypt’s largest overseas office for educational missions was in London, and 80 per cent of the students studying in Europe with government funding during the 1924–5 academic year were based in Britain. Affinity for Britain and its cultural and educational practices appears to have increased in some circles towards the end of the 1890s. For instance, in 1899 Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul – intellectual, judge and brother of nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul, as well as cousin of ‘Atif Barakat – published an Arabic translation of Edmond Demolins’ A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?85 The book attributes the success of Anglo-Saxon imperial conquests to the English education system, among other things, and Zaghlul’s ­translation was accompanied by an introduction delivering a harsh critique of Egyptian society, its morals and its education system.86 However, despite the strengthening of British conduits of cross-cultural and linguistic exchange through language study and instruction abroad and the growing affinity for British educational practices, at least some of the diverse exchanges of the late nineteenth century continued into the twentieth century. French continued to be used in many government documents and publications, such as the government journal of record, which was published in French in addition to Arabic between 1873 and 1958, and various Ministry of Education documents, until the 1920s at least.87 Students also continued to study elsewhere in Europe, especially when their studies were not paid for by the Egyptian Government. In 1924–5, self-funding students made up three-quarters of Egyptians studying abroad and were split almost evenly between England, Switzerland and France, with over half of the students studying outside of an Egyptian Government programme in Switzerland.88 At university level – and despite significant British protest – Egyptian officials persisted in appointing non-British Europeans to posts at the Egyptian (later

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 109 Fu’ad I) University throughout the 1930s and 1940s.89 In short, while many of the educational changes of the 1890s laid the groundwork for significant increases in British influence, the role of Britain in cross-cultural and linguistic exchange between Europe and Egypt was an issue that periodically resurfaced throughout the end of the British occupation of Egypt, in part due to the continuing affinities between the Egyptians who ran the civil education system and the ideas, practices and languages of other European countries. Notes  1. ‘Egypt’, The Times, 7 March 1892.   2. In this chapter, the Egyptian education administration is called the ‘Ministry of Education’ for the sake of simplicity, consistency and clarity for Anglophone readers. Strictly speaking, this unit was, for part of this period, a department within the Ministry of Interior and the most direct translation from the original Arabic uses the Francophone ‘public instruction’ instead of ‘education’.   3. Mona Russell, ‘Competing, Overlapping, and Contradictory Agendas: Egyptian Education Under British Occupation, 1882–1922’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 21: 1/2 (2001), pp. 50–1; Bill Williamson, Education and Social Change in Egypt and Turkey: A Study in Historical Sociology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. 11; Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 319–20.  4. See my discussion of European pedagogical thought in the section ‘Early Similarities’.   5. For instance, see Timothy Mitchell, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The Stage of Modernity’, in Timothy Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. viii, xi, 18, 26–7; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 11, 15, 52–3.   6. The lack of attention paid to agency by the postcolonial approach is often criticised. For instance, see Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3–11.   7. Discussion of this appears as early as 1900. See David Phillips and Kimberly Ochs, ‘Processes of Educational Borrowing in Historical Context’, in David Phillips and Kimberly Ochs (eds), Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives (Didcot: Symposium Books, 2004), pp. 7–8.

110  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT   8. David Phillips and Kimberly Ochs conceptualise cross-cultural ‘policy borrowing’ as a four-step process: (1) interest in foreign ideas, practices or technologies; (2) choosing to borrow from abroad; (3) the actual borrowing process; and (4) integrating what was borrowed into the local context, often such that it is eventually seen as local. In the final step, the policy passes through a series of filters influenced by: (a) how a policy is seen by those initiating the borrowing; (b) how the policy is spread and publicised; (c) how the policy is perceived by those who will be carrying it out; and (d) how it is actually put into effect. Phillips and Ochs, ‘Educational Policy Borrowing’, pp. 9–10, 16–18.   9. Some Egyptian reformers did this consciously. For instance, early nineteenthcentury reformer Joseph Hekekyan (1807–75) explicitly acknowledged that foreign knowledge had to be altered to work in Egypt. See Paul Sedra, From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth Century Egypt (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 78. 10. Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 53. 11. See Hilary Kalmbach, ‘From Turban to Tarboush: Dar al-‘Ulum and Social, Linguistic, and Religious Change in Interwar Egypt’ (DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2011); Hilary Kalmbach, ‘Dar al-‘Ulum’, in Kate Fleet, Gundrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas and Everett Rowson (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 110–12. 12. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Dusuqi Jumay‘i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya al-misriyya ila Urubba: Dirasa fi al-watha’iq (Cairo: n. p., 2007), p. 96. 13. These schools included a military academy (1821), as well as higher schools for administration (1829), medicine (1829), surveying (1816), midwifery (1832), technical training (1834) and language and translation (1835). 14. The British and Foreign School Society – a non-denominational Christian organisation – was involved in the transfer of monitorial education to many locations around the world, such as Spain and Colombia, where it dominated primary education from 1821 to 1844. See Elissa S. Itzkin, ‘Bentham’s Chrestomathia: Utilitarian Legacy to English Education’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39: 2 (1978), esp. pp. 309, 316; Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 18–24, 24–31; Marcelo Caruso, ‘The Persistence of Educational Semantics: Patterns of Variation in Monitorial Schooling in Colombia (1821–1844)’, Paedagogica Historica 41: 6 (2005), pp. 721–44. 15. Itzkin, ‘Bentham’s Chrestomathia’, pp. 306–7; Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 56–8.

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 111 16. In England, for instance, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon-style Chrestomathic School used arguably identical pedagogical techniques. 17. Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 54–61, 132–3. 18. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 71–4. 19. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 69, 73–4, 89, 101–2. 20. See also Sedra, From Mission to Modernity, pp. 79–80. 21. Donald M. Reid, Whose Pharoahs? Archeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 273–4. 22. Its graduation rate varied widely in the nineteenth century, rising as high as twenty-four in 1883, but largely remaining small, with an average between 1873 and 1900 of eight graduates a year. This data, from records that no longer exist, is reproduced in Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim dar al-‘ulum (Cairo: Dar al-ma‘arif, 1951), pp. 885–8. 23. Kalmbach, ‘From Turban to Tarboush’, pp. 124–75. 24. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 17–18. 25. Anne T. Quartararo, Women Teachers and Popular Education in NineteenthCentury France: Social Values and Corporate Identity at the Normal School Institution (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), pp. 31, 50, 51, 56. 26. National Society, The Teacher’s Manual of the Science and Art of Teaching (London: National Society, 1879), pp. 219–27. 27. As early as 1808 in France, a decree required schools to provide training in how to teach, instead of just subject training; however, the time devoted to these classes remained limited until the 1870s, with a shift seemingly following on from an 1866 change in official requirements. See Quartararo, Women Teachers, pp. 31, 33, 37, 80, 99, 101. 28. Foster Watson, ‘Appendix: The Training of Teachers’, in Henry Bryan Binns, A Century of Education 1808–1908 (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1908), pp. 299–301. 29. F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, [1982] 1999), pp. 163–4. 30. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Dusuqi Jumay‘i, Watha’iq al-ta‘lim al- ‘ali fi Misr khilal al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Cairo: Dar al-kutub, 2004), pp. 617–18. 31. Dar al-‘Ulum’s attachment to the Central Teachers’ School seems to have ended in 1883. Histories of the new school claim that it began in 1880, while the

112  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Taqwim Dar al-‘Ulum dates this change (or at least its move to the same premises) to 1882. Al-Kitab al-dhahabi li-madrasat al-mu‘allimin al-‘ulya ([Cairo]: [Jam‘iyyat al-mu‘allimin], [1935]), p. 20; ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, p. 101. 32. James Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1938), p. 439. 33. Formal regulations were not published for either school until the late 1880s. Details of the form and amount of pedagogical instruction before this is not contained in the files for ‘Teachers’ Schools’ available in the Egyptian National Archives, nor in published collections of archival documents and information such as Amin Sami’s 1917 al-Ta‘lim fi Misr and ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Jumay‘i’s 2004 Watha’iq al-ta‘lim al-‘ali. 34. Nizarat al-ma‘arif al-‘umumiyya [Ministry of Education], Qarar min nizarat alma‘arif al-‘umumiyya: Tartib madrasat dar al-‘ulum [Decision to Organise the Dar al-‘Ulum School] ([Cairo]: al-Matba‘a al-maliyya al-tabi‘a lil-Matba‘a al-ahliyya, 1887). 35. The proposal mandates three hours per week of theoretical and practical instruction in pedagogy in each of the four years of study, for a total of 11 per cent of instruction time. See Jumay‘i, Watha’iq al-ta‘lim al-‘ali, pp. 617–18. 36. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 314. 37. For instance, The Times reports the landing of ten Egyptian students in Plymouth in November 1883. See ‘The Mails’, The Times, 14 Nov 1883. 38. Parliamentary Papers (henceforth, PP), Egypt. no. 28 (1884), Report by Sir Evelyn Baring, Sir R. E. Welby, Sir C. Rivers Wilson, and Sir J. Carmichael on the Financial Situation of Egypt, dated June 28, 1884, pp. 8–9. 39. PP, Egypt. no. 6 (1887), Despatches from Sir E. Baring Respecting the Employment of Europeans in the Egyptian Public Service, pp. 3–6, 10. 40. What is buried in the appendix of the 1887 report, however, is that the rate of increase was much higher among English employees, with a net increase of five over these four years, compared with one for the French. 41. During the same years, however, the budgets of other departments were increased by larger amounts. PP, Egypt. no. 2 (1891), Report on the Finances of Egypt, dated March 29, 1891, p. 18; PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1891–2), Report on the Administration and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, pp. 25–6. 42. Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3; C. W. R. Long, British Pro-Consuls in Egypt, 1914–1929: The Challenge of Nationalism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p. 248; John Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt (London: Elek, 1970), p. 291.

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 113 43. Williamson, Education and Social Change, pp. 79–82; Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 314–15. 44. Owen, Lord Cromer, pp. 242–3. 45. Marlowe describes them as ‘callow and inexperienced’. See Owen, Lord Cromer, p. 243; Marlowe, Cromer in Egypt, pp. 291–2. 46. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1892), Report on the Administration, Finances, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, pp. 29–30. 47. Russell, ‘Egyptian Education Under British Occupation’, p. 54. 48. Draft Laws for Tawfiqiyya and Khidiwiyya Schools of Teachers, 1895. Found in folder 0075-045036, Dar al-watha’iq [Egyptian National Archives], Majlis al-wuzara’ [Council of Ministers], Madaris al-mu‘allimin [Teachers’ Schools], box 14/1/A; Jumay‘i, Watha’iq al-ta‘lim al-‘ali, pp. 628, 629; ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Dusuqi Jumay‘i, Tarikh madrasat al-mu‘allimin al-‘ulya, 1880–1933 ([Cairo]: n. p., 1995), p. 20. 49. Between 1891 and 1909, 2.58 students a year graduated on average, compared with 4.37 for the Tawfiqiyya School and 14.05 for Dar al-‘Ulum. The numbers in the joint school 1935 commemorative volume contrast with those printed in Jumay‘i’s compendium of education records, and I have used the former here. Both show that the Khedivial Teachers’ School had a recruitment problem until between 1905 and 1907. See al-Kitab al-dhahabi, p. 243; Jumay‘i, Watha’iq alta‘lim al-‘ali, pp. 628–9; ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 885–8. 50. Jumay‘i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya, pp. 99–100, 102–3. 51. Colm Fintan Hickey, ‘Pathfinding and Pathmaking: J. A. Mangan and Imperialism, Education and Socialization’, in Scott A. G. M. Crawford (ed.), Serious Sport: J. A. Mangan’s Contribution to the History of Sport (London: Frank Cass, 2004), p. 54. 52. Hickey’s study, based only on examination of British and Foreign School Society papers, presents Dunlop as the sole actor – the individual who contacted the Foreign Office in 1899 and visited the school to work out the details. He does not discuss Artin’s 1888 trip to England, documented in Egyptian– Arabic language records, though he does mention in passing that Artin had visited Borough Road before the graduation of the initial cohort. See Hickey, ‘Pathfinding and Pathmaking’, pp. 54–6. 53. British and Foreign School Society, Report of the British and Foreign School Society (henceforth, RBFSS) (London: Longman, 1880–1900), p. 33. 54. RBFSS, 1893, p. 29. 55. RBFSS, 1895, p. 47.

114  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 56. Barakat was cousin of nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul and translator Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul. See RBFSS, 1899, p. 64. 57. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, p. 278. 58. Hickey does not specify whether he was head of the secondary or teacher training school of this name. However, the 1935 commemorative volume of the Higher Teacher Training School – the eventual successor of the Khedivial School – does not list Houghton as headmaster (or even as an English teacher), but instead indicates that a Monsieur Beltagi Bey was in charge from the end of 1885 until February 1906. See Hickey, ‘Pathfinding and Pathmaking’, pp. 56–7. 59. Hickey’s work on the export of English ideas about athleticism and imperialism to Egypt focuses on the link with the Borough Road Training College, noting that link contributed to Egyptian educational policies that spread athleticism via physical education and team sports, but failed to spread imperial loyalty. See Hickey, ‘Pathfinding and Pathmaking’, esp. p. 57. 60. Students travelled to Italy (7.55 per cent), England (6.60 per cent), Switzerland (3.77 per cent) and Germany (1.89 per cent), with the destination of the remainder of students marked down generically as Europe (21.23 per cent) or Asia (1.89 per cent). See Jumay‘i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya, p. 94. 61. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 145, 150, 178, 570–1. 62. Jumay’i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya, pp. 116–17, 124. 63. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 241–3, 373–5. 64. Nizarat al-ma‘arif al-‘umumiyya [Ministry of Education], Qanun madrasat qism al-mu‘allimin al-‘arabi [Law of the School of the Department of Arabic Teachers] (Bulaq [Cairo]: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq Misr almahmiyya, 1895), p. 4; Amin Sami, al-Ta‘lim fi Misr fi sanatay 1914 wa 1915 (Cairo: Matba‘at al-ma‘arif, 1917), Appendix 3, p. 45; ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, p. 25. 65. Jumay‘i, Watha’iq al-ta‘lim al-‘ali, pp. 632, 621–7; Tawfiqiyya and Khidiwiyya Laws 1895. Unfortunately, neither the law founding the Central Teachers’ School [Madrasat al-Mu‘allimin al-Markaziyya] published in Jumay‘i’s book of archival documents, nor a document I found – a law founding a General Teachers’ School [Madrasat al-Mu‘allimin al-‘Umumiyya] – is dated or indicates how much time was spent on different types of pedagogical courses, though both are likely to date from circa 1880. 66. Dar al-‘Ulum is the only school out of the three for which I have a detailed curriculum document listing the topics taught at each level of each subject. Nizarat al-ma‘arif al-‘umumiyya, Brugram qism al-mu‘allimin al-‘arabi al-tabi‘a

t raini ng tea chers how to te a ch  | 115 li-madrasat al-mubtadiyan [Curriculum of the Department of Arabic Teachers [attached to] the Mubtadiyan School] (Bulaq [Cairo]: al-Matba‘a al-kubra alamiriyya bi-Bulaq Misr al-mahmiyya, 1895), pp. 18–26. 67. Lois A. Aroian, ‘Education, Language and Culture in Modern Egypt: Dar Al-‘Ulum and its Graduates (1872–1923)’ (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1978). 68. RBFSS, 1893, pp. 35–6. 69. The Teacher’s Manual; F. J. Gladman, School Work: Organisation and Principles of Education, vol. 2 (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1885); F. J. Gladman, School Work: Control and Teaching, vol. 1 (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1885). 70. RBFSS, 1880, p. 28; RBFSS, 1892, pp. 34–5. 71. RBFSS, 1897, pp. 31–5; RBFSS, 1898, p. 45; RBFSS, p. 71. 72. Quartararo, Women Teachers, pp. 121–3. 73. ‘Abd al-Rahim Salim, Risala ‘an sharh turuq al-ta‘lim al-ibtida’i bi-madaris almu‘allimin bi-Faransa (Bulaq [Cairo]: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq Misr al-mahmiyya, 1895), pp. 56–7. 74. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 286–7. 75. For instance, Hickey, ‘Pathfinding and Pathmaking’, pp. 52, 54. 76. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 52, 54, 61, 62, 69; Amin Mursi Qandil, Usul altarbiya wa fann al-tadris (Cairo: Dar al-i‘timad, 1928). A recent thesis analyses Qandil’s textbook: Farida Makar, ‘The Art of Teaching and the Making of Modern Egypt’ (MSt dissertation, University of Oxford, 2011). 77. ‘France’, The Times, 20 Jan 1895. 78. Al-Kitab al-dhahabi, pp. 20, 243. 79. Nizarat al-ma‘arif al-‘umumiyya, Qanun wa brugram madrasat al-mu‘allimin al-nasriyya [Law and Curriculum of the Nasriyya Teachers School], found in folder 0075-045026, box A/1/14, Majlis al-wuzara’: Madaris al-mu‘allimin, Dar alwatha’iq (Egyptian National Archives, Council of Ministers: Teachers’ Schools) (Bulaq [Cairo]: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq Misr al-mahmiyya, 1901). 80. Al-Kitab al-dhahabi, p. 67. 81. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, pp. 353–5. 82. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 276–7, 290–1; RBFSS, 1895, p. 47. 83. ‘Abd al-Jawad, Taqwim, pp. 587–97. 84. Jumay‘i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya, pp. 106–7, 116–17, 124–5 (source for remainder of paragraph). 85. Edmond Demolins, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? (Paris: Librairie

116  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT de Paris, 1897); Edmond Demolins and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, Sirr taqaddum al-Inkiliz al-Saksuniyin (Misr: n. p., 1899). 86. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 181–2. 87. The Egyptian National Archives records on teacher-training schools – Madaris al-Mu‘allimin boxes (A/1/14, B/1/14, 15, 16 and 17) – cover 1885 to 1923 and contain only a handful of documents in English with the majority present in Arabic and French or Arabic only. Those in English date from April 1898, July 1907 and (twice) May 1915. 88. Jumay‘i, al-Ba‘that al-‘ilmiyya, pp. 106–7, 116–17, 124–5. 89. The issue was complicated by the relative lack of qualified British nationals willing to take up the post – a problem that was still being discussed in 1944. See Donald M. Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 91–9; and TNA, FO 924/38, ‘Position of British Teachers and Lecturers in Egypt’.

4 Legitimising Lay and State Authority: Challenging the Coptic Church in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt Vivian Ibrahim

I

n an editorial written by the proprietor of al-Mu’ayyad newspaper in 1892, Shaykh ‘Ali Yusuf commented on the ongoing factionalism within the Coptic community: ‘Any step taken by either party, other than one based on a mutual agreement, to strengthen its own position in the dispute, would not only be unlawful but also detrimental to the wellbeing of the community (ta’ifa)’.1 The ‘ta’ifa’, traditionally led by the Coptic pope, had been locked in a twenty-year conflict over a question of power and authority: who was responsible for the Coptic community? To what extent was the church accountable not just for spiritual welfare, but also material welfare? By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the control and distribution of Coptic material resources had become synonymous with the urgent need for educational and religious reform. On the one hand, Pope Kyrillos V, with his entourage of the Holy Synod, monks and clergy, vociferously claimed the right to the distribution of funds to the community and, in particular, control of waqf (pl. awqaf [religious endowments]), which he claimed traditionally fell within the remit of the church and patriarchate. On the other, the Majlis al-Milli – the Coptic Community Lay Council – which had been established in 1873 by the acting patriarch, Bishop Murqus, and landed gentry, challenged this prerogative.2 The Majlis, which increasingly viewed the church as obstructive and backwards, sought lay control of awqaf in order to implement and fund a series of reforms, with education and the 117

118  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT establishment of schools at its centre. The Majlis and its supporters hoped that through the provision of schools they could encourage greater Coptic participation in communal affairs – a process which would later also have an effect on broadening Coptic participation within Egyptian society. Less than ten days after the al-Mu’ayyad editorial, which had so strongly advocated a peaceful and mutual compromise, new discord arose. Pope Kyrillos V and his assistant Bishop Yu’annis were dismissed from their duties by Khedivial decree and banished to a monastery in the Wadi Natrun Desert. Members of the Majlis, who had strong links to the Khedive, had promoted and welcomed this action and in doing so manifested the trend of tension and discord that would continue between the two parties and have lasting consequences on the Coptic community throughout the twentieth century. This chapter will examine how the banishment of Kyrillos V and his subsequent return in 1892 demonstrates that over the last decade of the nineteenth century broad educational shifts had a tangible impact on the development of Coptic society, which subsequently challenged traditional communal boundaries, while promoting further lay participation. Examining the formation of the Majlis al-Milli, I will argue that lay Copts displaced the clergy as the main agents of reform from the 1880s onwards – a process that had its roots in broader social and educational reforms implemented by the Egyptian Khedivial state, the church and later the British occupation. By 1890, this had dramatic consequences, due, in part, to the emergence of a new urban, educated, bureaucratic class – the effendiyya. Coptic effendiyya sought to challenge the patriarch and highlight the existence of oppositional voices to the church hierarchy. In demonstrating the role and emergence of the effendiyya, this chapter departs from much of the existing secondary literature, which views the Coptic community as not only monolithic, but under constant threat.3 Instead, by utilising the press to vocalise its concerns, the Tawfiq Society [Jam‘iyyat al-Tawfiq] – a Coptic, youth-led, benevolent, social and later political society – provides evidence of how the emerging effendiyya class were able to challenge the church as an alternative voice, while also promoting participation from within the community. In securing the banishment of Kyrillos V, the Majlis, Tawfiq Society and other factions of the Coptic community revealed their willingness, as advocates of reform, to be partisan and defy the patriarch, while inviting the Khedive to interfere

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 119 in Coptic affairs. This action would have dual significance. First, it would sacrifice the traditional rights enjoyed by the Coptic Church as a ta’ifa; indeed, while the pope continued to have a significant role in the community, his authority had been severely challenged. Second, it signified lay attempts to reform communal administration, under the guise of broader participation – a process that gained momentum with the British occupation of Egypt.4 Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt: The Case for Reform (1850–70) The writings of church historians and devout lay practitioners have generally described the mid-nineteenth century as an age of reform [islah].5 The central figure during this period was Pope Kyrillos IV (1854–61), later known as Abu Islah [‘Father of Reform’].6 He has been portrayed as the leader of a Coptic nahda or renaissance, rescuing the church from a decadence characterised by illiteracy, maladministration and stagnation.7 In 1854, Abu Islah established a more centralised and streamlined administrative system for the diwan of the patriarchate to supervise church affairs. It reformed the ecclesiastical structures, focusing on the clergy, who had long been accused by lay congregations of neglecting their religious duties. The reform took a disciplinary approach, aimed at regulating the behaviour, education and dogmatic practices of the Coptic clergy, who were largely from poor backgrounds and were widely blamed as the major cause for the misuse of church property and funds.8 The church had traditionally obtained extensive funds from rent of lands, as part of the awqaf, which were poorly administered by monks and bishops. Moreover, the clergy were reported to have sold their services through performing blessing ceremonies in exchange for payment of fees.9 In order to alleviate clerical financial pressures, Abu Islah introduced a system whereby priests would receive a fixed salary, rather than rely on the alms donated by their parishioners. These salaries came partly from the revenue collected at Sunday mass.10 However, the most significant reforms occurred in education. Already in 1849, as head of St Anthony’s Monastery, Abu Islah had opened a local school. It was primarily aimed at the monks in the monastery, but later accepted local children as well, employing a local Muslim shaykh to teach the monks Arabic grammar.11 When Abu Islah became patriarch in 1854, he

120  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT required all clergy based in Cairo to attend weekly classes at the Patriarchate, which taught theology, as well as basic literacy skills.12 Thus, Abu Islah’s centralising reforms became a core part of a broader process of the expansion of Egypt’s state and social infrastructure.13 The educational reforms, in particular, were closely linked to the modernisation and centralisation policies of Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors. Beginning in 1813, Muhammad ‘Ali sent student missions to Europe; these same students would utilise their knowledge upon return and establish specialised secondary schools. Later in 1871 under Khedive Isma‘il, Dar al‘Ulum – the Teachers College – was established to train Arabic teachers in instruction at primary and secondary school level. Similar developments took place in the Coptic community with the establishment of schools. In 1853, Abu Islah set up the first of several ‘Great Coptic Schools’ [Madaris al-Aqbat al-Kubra] in the Azbakiyya district of Cairo. Prior to the creation of the schools, Copts had followed a very similar pattern of preliminary education to that undertaken by Muslim children at the local kuttab.14 The new schools taught a number of European languages, including French, English and Italian, as well as Arabic and Turkish.15 Aside from languages, a range of subjects were also taught, which included chanting, mathematics, history, geography and logic. The teachers who were appointed were both foreign and Egyptian and the schools were free of charge.16 Abu Islah had initially funded the new schools using community funds, but later, due to their success, was given subsidies and direct grants from the Khedivial Government.17 Among the first of these new schools to open was a boys’ primary and secondary school with 150 students enrolled.18 A primary school for girls was established in Harat al-Saqqayin in Cairo. By the mid-1870s, the boys’ school had over 243 students and eighteen teachers.19 These Great Coptic Schools, which were all initially concentrated in old Cairo close to the Coptic kuttab, graduated a number of Copts who were later to play important roles in Egyptian public life in the coming years: Butrus Ghali Pasha (1846–1910), the future Egyptian Prime Minister; Mikha’il Sharubim (1853–1912), judge and historian; and Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid (1830–1914), the founder of the Coptic newspaper al-Watan.20 ‘Abd al-Sayyid subsequently attended the Islamic institution, al-Azhar University, specialising in Copto-Arabic literature, while memorising whole sections of the Quran, thus highlighting

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 121 the interaction between different religious communities at higher education institutions.21 The success of the Great Coptic Schools in the capital led to the establishment of more schools outside Cairo: the first in the city of Mansura and the second in Bush in the Eastern Desert, near St Anthony’s Monastery. By the time Abu Islah died in 1861, there were a total of seven Great Coptic Schools in Egypt, including two for girls.22 The death of Abu Islah has conventionally been described as the end of the first nahda.23 More recently, however, Febe Armanios has countered this claim. Instead, she argues that there was a constant negotiation between different factions of the Coptic community to promote a ‘modest resurgence’ of religious life from the sixteenth century.24 Armanios argues that some lay Copts possessed the skills and education to acquire relative wealth and power, which they subsequently used to provide additional funds for the church and investment, while also raising their own profiles.25 Thus, while the church and clerics functioned as the focus of the social, cultural and political life of the community, lay Copts also actively played a role in challenging communal authority by promoting their own interests. This included financial support and the promotion of specific patriarchal candidates. Armanios’s contribution is crucial, as it highlights that factionalism and discord from within the Coptic community was not new or unique to the late nineteenth century. The church had been in constant negotiation over where spiritual, cultural and political boundaries of authority and power lay, while different factions – and specifically elite Copts – were able to play a role in the community through subversive means. Thus, reform cannot be uniquely attributable to Abu Islah, but he can be credited with promoting a systematic transformation of the education system, which linked clerical reform with communal educational reforms, bringing both more firmly under the scope of church administration. However, the development of a Coptic landed elite and later a Coptic-educated effendiyya class – both of which are phenomena of the earlier mentioned developments of the late nineteenth-century Egyptian state – played an important role in delineating borders of spiritual and material authority in the community through focusing on welfare and, in particular, the management, including the expenditure, of revenues of awqaf. Was the church responsible for the religious and communal welfare of the Copts? What role should the broader Coptic community play and what

122  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT role should the state play? In challenging the right to manage the distribution of endowments, a lay bloc sought to redefine the boundaries of the church’s spiritual and material role – laying claim to the latter for itself. The Formation of the Majlis al-Milli (1870–91) The state and church education reforms of the mid-nineteenth century had a decisive impact on the landed and educated Coptic elite. These men were at the forefront of a lay leadership, which sought to reform community administration and education and curtail patriarchal authority over community affairs. In an attempt to redefine the scope of the Coptic Church, the laymen allied themselves with urban factions of the clergy. The latter had been educated in the new schools and stood in contrast to the often illiterate monks and heads of the monasteries. It was under the acting patriarch, Bishop Murqus, that the nucleus for the first Coptic Community Council was created in 1870. Murqus had chosen a number of lay Copts to assist him in the administration of the financial affairs of the community.26 This was formalised in 1874 to form the community council, Majlis al-Milli. According to Girgis Filuthawus ‘Awad (1867–1955) – a progressive cleric and critic of many conservative Coptic traditions – the establishment of the council had biblical sanction and thus his full support.27 For ‘Awad and other clerics, canon law and the writings of Ibn al-‘Assal – the thirteenth-century Coptic jurist – were used to justify the establishment of a Majlis. They argued that there was precedent for specialised laymen who provided advice and practical knowledge in the fields of law, medicine and accounting, which, they claimed, would benefit the entire community.28 The creation of the Majlis represented an institutionalised shift in the balance of power of the Coptic community. Both the clergy and laity during the Ottoman period had negotiated and recognised their differing roles in order to preserve and ensure the survival of Coptic religious practice. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, it seems that the more fundamental issue and negotiation at stake was the legitimisation of the role of the layman in religious terms to assist the functioning of the community; the creation of the Majlis-sanctioned lay activities within a religious discourse. According to the 1874 constitution, the twelve lay members and twelve deputies of the Majlis were to be elected by general suffrage every five years and were to supervise

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 123 the financial and civil affairs of the community under the chairmanship of the (acting) Patriarch.29 Their oversight would include awqaf, which the Coptic Church had traditionally divided into two types: endowments belonging and affiliated to the monasteries and those related to specific churches in the form of land and properties. The incomes that awqaf generated maintained two services within the Coptic community: first, the upkeep of places of worship, including monasteries and large churches; second, public services for the wider lay Coptic community. This included the creation and maintenance of schools, printing presses and the oversight of orphans. This transfer of power, according to the new constitution, would relieve the clergy and patriarch of non-spiritual functions and place them in the hands of the laity.30 During its first few months of operation, the Majlis managed awqaf revenues and their distribution. This included the creation of a girls’ school in the governorate of Sharqiyya in 1874 and the approval of a theological college in 1875. The latter was to enrol monks and priests so that they could receive a holistic education in the history, liturgy and dogma of the Coptic Church.31 However, the capacity of the Majlis to function dramatically altered after the consecration of Kyrillos V in 1874. In descriptions by British travellers and missionaries written in the early years of the twentieth century, Kyrillos V had a conflicting image as both a reformer and despotic patriarch. British missionary S. H. Leeder argued that Kyrillos’ private life was well known and was full of ‘purity, great simplicity and self-denial with his personal expenditure not exceeding more than LE 60 a year’.32 Kyrillos can be credited with supporting the construction of churches in Cairo and making annual repairs to monasteries, churches and the patriarchate.33 Kyrillos also greatly supported the education of women, opening a girls’ school in the Fajalla district of Cairo in January 1908 and encouraging others to follow his example.34 Nonetheless, this positive perspective was not shared by all; Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General, reportedly called Kyrillos ‘the greatest reactionary force in Egypt’ – a reference to his later dispute with the Majlis and unwillingness to modernise.35 Indeed, Edith Butcher, a contemporary Western observer who had close ties to the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), viewed Kyrillos V as being influenced by the ‘dark’ and zealous clergy, thus solidifying traditional Western perceptions of Oriental despotism. According to these accounts, the bishops managed to persuade Kyrillos that he should possess

124  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT absolute power and not govern in union with any council.36 The question was not the distribution of awqaf in itself, but one of authority over the community. The Majlis, which had been left to govern under Bishop Murqus following the death of Demetrius II in 1870, responded to this threat by acting indignant, demanding its unequivocal right to deal with all civil and financial affairs.37 The result of the tension was dramatic; Kyrillos retracted reform policies beginning with the closure of the theological college created that year, in addition to refusing to attend any Majlis meetings or to appoint a deputy. For seven years the council was unable to function.38 Between 1874 and 1883, Kyrillos V was left to govern the church in a traditional, autocratic manner, refusing to convene the council and managing awqaf in the customary way. In this period, two attempts were made by Majlis members to re-establish the council through new elections, but both attempts were marred by distrust, highlighting the fiery struggle for control over the awqaf as a symbol of authority over the Coptic Church and community.39 A temporary breakthrough emerged in the 1880s. The Great Coptic Benevolent Society (GCBS), which had been established in 1881 by wealthy Copts with the aim of alleviating and lightening some of the burden of the Coptic poor from the church, acted as a broker. The Society, which had close ties to the Great Muslim Benevolent Society created by journalist ‘Abdallah Nadim with the backing of Muhammad ‘Abduh in 1879, encouraged reform and communal responsibility towards the poor in much the same way as its Muslim counterpart.40 This had won the Society Khedivial support, particularly as the patriarchate had fallen out of favour, due to accusations of the church taking advantage of its privileged position by issuing false certificates to youths that enabled them to avoid army recruitment.41 Many of the aims of the GCBS closely coincided with those of the Majlis, although it was more focused on charity and did not directly intervene in the battle over control of awqaf. In 1883, several members of the GCBS, including Butrus Ghali, visited Kyrillos V in an attempt to revive discussion regarding the urgent need for broad reform. Calling on proper administration of church funds, better schools and general improvement of the clergy, the society attempted to ‘resuscitate the bid for reform’.42 The GCBS put forward a significant amendment to the Majlis constitution in an attempt to break the

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 125 deadlock; a new council was constituted to be made up of twelve representatives and twelve deputies.43 The Majlis would also take Coptic awqaf under its control. This would include all Coptic lands, including patriarchal, monastic and charitable properties, as well as the administration of Coptic schools, printing, publishing and the oversight of the poor and orphans. This amendment was important, as it set a legal definition of the authority of the Majlis. While the 1874 agreement justified lay activities within a religious framework by citing precedence of lay expertise as a service to the community, the 1883 agreement went a step further, defining the legal scope of the Majlis in an attempt to consolidate lay responsibility. Soon after these negotiations, however, stalemate reoccurred. While Kyrillos V had agreed to the legal definition of Majlis activities, he stalled in the practical implementation of the agreement. Samir Seikaly has argued that this tactic was consistent with Kyrillos V’s stance. While the pope recognised the momentum for reform, an issue which also had Khedivial sympathy, he also had no intention of enacting the amendment until more favourable circumstances arose. The discussion with the GCBS and Majlis had forced Kyrillos to negotiate, however it did not allow him to take charge of the decision-making process, even if he agreed with the spirit of the negotiations.44 By late 1883, the upper echelons of the clergy and monks had largely sided with Kyrillos concerning the control of monastic lands, while the lay Majlis stood in opposition.45 Oppositional Voices The failure of the ‘Urabi rebellion and subsequent occupation of Egypt by the British in 1882 brought about a new administrative structure. Peter Mansfield has described the period after 1882 as ‘neither direct nor indirect rule, but a unique and curious hybrid’.46 Egypt, though not formally incorporated into the British Empire, was governed by Evelyn Baring – later Lord Cromer – as a vital strategic interest from 1883. Described as ‘the veiled protectorate’, Cromer ruled Egypt from behind a screen provided by the Khedive and Cabinet.47 Utilising his experience from India, Cromer was not in favour of expanding Western-style higher education, as he believed it manufactured a class of discontent. Despite this, however, the last decade of the nineteenth century saw the

126  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT emergence of a new, educated Coptic class, which would loosely ally itself with the reformists and represent some of the strongest oppositional voices against the patriarchate, church and, later, British occupation. The creation of the Tawfiq Society in 1891 coincided with wider educational reforms. Unlike the GCBS, which was an elite charitable institution run by prominent community figures, all twenty-one initial representatives of the Tawfiq Society were educated young men, mainly civil servants, under the age of forty.48 Throughout the late nineteenth century, Copts were consistently overrepresented in the specialist schools of law, medicine and engineering. Copts had previously lacked the education required for these schools, but following the lead of Abu Islah’s schools, the mid- to late 1800s saw an increase in the number of Coptic-run primary and secondary schools. In 1867, ‘Ali Mubarak Pasha, the Education Minister, issued legislation that included forty articles organising education under three categories: primary, secondary and higher education. Pupils from Abu Islah’s Coptic schools were permitted to sit public exams on a par with government school students. After 1882, government schools became supplemented with national schools, which were more widely available and where Copts excelled, particularly in technical education.49 This, in addition to greater access to state and foreign-funded schools, was important in increasing the number of applicants enrolled in professional schools after completing a basic education. Although Copts made up approximately 7 per cent of the population at the turn of the twentieth century, they produced 21 per cent of the law graduates, 19 per cent of graduates from the school of engineering, 15 per cent of graduates from the Medical School and 12 per cent of the teaching graduates between 1886 and 1910.50 A similar overrepresentation can be detected in the bureaucracy. Writing in 1908, Lord Cromer described the Copts as a backward community and saw little difference between the various Egyptian communities: ‘The only difference between a Copt and a Moslem is the former is an Egyptian who worships in a Christian Church and the latter is an Egyptian who worship in a Mohammedan Mosque’.51 However, he did recognise that the Copts had ‘developed certain mediocre aptitudes’: [The Copt can] add and subtract, because he knows his multiplication table, because he can measure the length and breadth of a plot of ground

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 127 without making any gross error in the measurement, and because, although his system of accounts is archaic, at the same time it is better to be in possession of a bad system of accounts than, like the Egyptian Moslem, to have scarcely any system at all.52

This ‘system of accounts’ led a British commission in 1905 to report that Egyptians, the majority of whom were Copts, occupied only 28 per cent of higher government posts. By 1911, this percentage had risen to 45.31 per cent. The Tawfiq Society represented a new class of Copt from the emerging effendiyya. The effendiyya have often been described as Western-educated town dwellers, a middle class closely associated with the bureaucracy. In the early nineteenth century, the effendiyya were drawn predominately from provincial nobility, distinguishable by their social rank, job and also dress.53 They implemented state modernisation policies, such as bureaucratic and educational reforms that took place under Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors. However, by the late nineteenth century, the profile of the effendiyya began to shift. With the emergence of new professional schools and occupations, the effendiyya were no longer simply bureaucrats, but were associated with a new urban society often sympathetic with the emergence of nationalist fervour.54 The Tawfiq Society’s primary motivation had been the creation of a reformist leadership, aimed at addressing the social inequalities prevalent in Coptic society. However, they faced serious financial difficulties: initial plans in 1891 were to be carried out on a tight budget of forty-four piastres.55 Hilmi Ahmad Shalabi has argued that the Society was ‘nothing more than a small drop in the ocean’ in comparison to the formation of GCBS and Anglican Missionary funded benevolent societies, which were being set up by both Copts and the British in the late nineteenth century. However, among the key contributions made by the Tawfiq Society, despite its size, was the way it sought to address social and economic divisions between Coptic classes.56 Unlike the landowning elites associated with the Majlis and even the GCBS, the Tawfiq Society was more closely associated with urban Copts, particularly in Cairo. Adopting a more populist position that concerned itself with the interests of urban lower-middle class Copts, the society

128  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT gained strength during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. By the end of the First World War and the events of 1919, the Tawfiq Society would play an important role in promoting the nationalist cause and would be closely associated with Qummus Sergius – the first Coptic priest to preach at the pulpit of Al-Azhar Mosque promoting national unity.57 The Tawfiq Society was extremely successful in promoting its work within the Coptic community, including printing and distributing a number of pamphlets dealing with reform, as well as establishing al-Tawfiq magazine.58 This became its mouthpiece for criticism of the religious hierarchy. It also served to counter the lack of transparency that it perceived to be prevalent in the management of awqaf by the church. In its magazine, the society annually published its own finances and inventories of expenses, as well as all charitable donations received, in contrast to the monasteries that it accused of misappropriation.59 While the declared purpose of the society was the pastoral care of the Coptic community, it also played a significant political role from its inception, challenging and attacking the patriarchate for its failure to implement educational reforms that would fund lay Coptic development, as well as reform church affairs. In particular, the society staunchly argued that the awqaf should be run by competent administrators and withdrawn from the hands of the clergy. Throughout 1891 and 1892 al-Tawfiq published articles that criticised the pope and his bishops for not providing sufficient funds for language and training at Coptic schools. They argued that there was a direct link between the systematic decay of Coptic schools and the maladministration of awqaf. In addition, they claimed that Copts were abandoning Coptic schools and going to foreign church schools, which had the effect of blurring religious identity. This charge had some legitimacy, as Protestant missionary schools, supported by the British occupation, began to flourish. The Tawfiq Society’s solution was to establish its own schools. In 1895, the society opened a primary school for boys, as well as one for girls in 1897.60 By 1907, the two schools had 512 pupils in total, with 391 boys and 121 girls; just under one-fifth of the students received a free education.61 The Tawfiq Society also established a Technical College in 1904 in the Cairo district of Fajalla. In order to cover the spiralling costs of this programme, the society

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 129 increasingly thought of ingenious ways to raise revenue. This included the creation of a carriage-hiring firm. The society rented wedding and funeral cars providing a chauffeured service for the occasion. The result was an annual profit of approximately LE750, which was to be spent on schools and other expenses.62 Butcher claimed that the popularity of the Tawfiq Society grew so rapidly that the patriarch and clergy feared its influence.63 A counter society, the Orthodox Coptic Society [Jam‘iyyat al-Aqbat al-Urthuduksiyya], was established in the same year and was led by clergy, bishops, heads of monasteries and the Holy Synod, under the auspices of the patriarchate. In creating the Orthodox Society, the patriarchate was determined to counter the influence of the lay Tawfiq Society and re-establish a spirit of deference and authority to the church hierarchy. This was carried out in several ways, most significant of which was to claim that the Tawfiq Society was working as an agent for the Protestant missionaries and that their aims were treasonable.64 The relationship between the various reformist movements, including the Tawfiq Society, and the Protestant missionaries is worth elaborating on briefly as it highlights some of the societal changes that occurred following the British occupation of Egypt. The events of 1882 not only brought about political and economic changes throughout the country, but also invigorated missionary activity by both the British-led CMS and the American Presbyterian Church, focused on the promotion of education. Viewing the Coptic Church as archaic, missionaries sponsored the creation of new schools and societies that would promote ‘correct’ Christian values. For instance, the Iman Benevolent Society [Jam‘iyyat al-iman al-khayriyya], established in 1899, and the Friends of the Holy Bible Society (FHBS) [Asdiqa’ al-Kitab al-Muqqadas], established in 1907 by Basili Butrus Effendi (1882–1922), both had ties to the CMS.65 In addition, British officials tended to be more sympathetic to the Majlis, which can be attributed to the relationship cultivated by Butrus Ghali. In contrast, British officials described Kyrillos as the ‘incarnation of the most stolid form of conservatism’.66 This ‘Protestant– British’ stance towards both Basili Effendi and Butrus Ghali, among others, gave fodder to the patriarchate, who in turn labelled the Majlis, GCBS and the Tawfiq Society agents of Protestant missionaries.67 It is hard to gauge how successful the patriarchate was in this counter propaganda. However,

130  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT it is clear that, in establishing schools and publishing pro-reform articles, the Tawfiq Society represented a particular milieu in Coptic society, which increasingly used their education and bureaucratic skills to challenge the traditional boundaries of the church. While the Tawfiq Society, during the first decades of the twentieth century, would go on to confront what they perceived as the pro-British stance of individual Majlis members – most notably, Butrus Ghali – the society also maintained a good working relationship with the GCBS well into the twentieth century. The common aim, which sought to challenge the authority and power of the church, led the Tawfiq Society to establish a convenient ideological ‘lay bloc’ with the Majlis and GCBS in 1891. Together, these groups aimed to renegotiate the status of Copts within their religious community and later more broadly within the Egyptian state. Banishing Pope Kyrillos V In 1892, after seven years of stalemate, the GCBS, the Majlis and the newly established Tawfiq Society demanded new elections, which would reinvigorate the moribund council. At the heart of their call was an assertion that the amendment of 1883 had provided a legal framework defining the authority of the Majlis and its duties. Redress was thus being sought within the context of civil jurisdiction, rather than church tradition. This represented a tactical shift away from claiming legitimacy of lay activities within the framework of religious precedent. In doing so, the bloc hoped to gain the support of the Khedive by diluting the traditional powers of the ‘millet’. Elections that were scheduled by the Majlis to take place in 1892 failed, however, after armed church guards prevented electors from entering the patriarchate to cast their ballot. Pope Kyrillos had ordered this measure in response to what he regarded as Majlis infringements on his role and convened a Clerical Council. An encyclical was released declaring that the Majlis ran counter to the traditions and doctrines of the church and was therefore null and void.68 In this battle, both supporters and opponents of the Majlis used the press to vocalise their opinions concerning the encyclical and the state of the church. For instance, al-Tawfiq magazine gave greater coverage and produced pamphlets advocating greater Coptic lay participation. The Tawfiq Society also organised demonstrations and meetings to discuss strategy.69

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 131 Denouncing Kyrillos as a reactionary, the society, its magazine and the Majlis publicly declared their support for the progressive Bishop Sanbu to act as Patriarchal Vicar – an administrative role that they hoped would help implement the 1883 reform. This action by the lay bloc not only served to fuel Kyrillos’s aggravation, but also rendered any attempts at mediation useless.70 Kyrillos, who had been undertaking secret negotiations with Butrus Ghali – the key representative of the Majlis – prematurely publicised tentative agreements, a fact that not all Majlis members had been aware.71 In doing so, the patriarchate also utilised the press – in the same way as the reformist bloc and, in particular, the Tawfiq Society – in order to inform public opinion, but also as a tool to sabotage the actual implementation of agreements as part of a stalling tactic. Kyrillos was keenly aware of the power of propaganda and regularly counted on the support of two newspapers to promote his agenda. Al-Watan had been established in 1877 by Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid – a graduate from one of Abu Islah’s Great Coptic Schools and supporter of the British occupation of Egypt.72 Initially aimed at Coptic readers as an outlet for intercommunal grievances, throughout the 1890s and into the early twentieth century al-Watan sought to distance Copts from what it regarded as Islamic/ Arab elements within Egyptian society, while asserting authenticity based on ethnicity: The Copts are the true Egyptians; they are the real masters of the country. All those who have set foot on Egyptian soil, be they Arabs, Turks, French, or British are nothing but invaders. The originators of this nation are Copts [. . .] Whoever calls this country an Islamic country means to disregard the rights of the Copts and to abuse them in their own fatherland. Not one of them would accept such a thing.73

Between 1900 and 1914, the newspaper advocated the interests of conservative Coptic elites, as well as some effendiyya, who felt threatened by the increase of Muslims in bureaucratic positions. Until the eve of the First World War, al-Watan was also staunchly critical of nationalist activities. The second newspaper that Kyrillos regularly used to comment on Coptic affairs was al-Mu’ayyad, founded in 1889 and owned by Shaykh ‘Ali Yusuf – a Muslim who would later become the leader of the Constitutional Reform

132  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Party. Al-Mu’ayyad frequently printed articles sympathetic to the pope, who it regarded as the only legitimate representative of the Coptic community. The two newspapers, although very different in outlook, both regularly promoted the agenda of the church hierarchy. Kyrillos V was able to utilise this relationship with the press in his stance against the lay bloc. The premature publication of negotiations with Butrus Ghali, along with the patriarch’s systematic obstruction and refusal to implement the 1883 resolution, raised the stakes. In late August, the Majlis, led by Butrus Ghali, convinced the new seventeen-year-old Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi and Prime Minister Mustafa Fahmi to remove the obstructive patriarch and his secretary.74 Citing numerous agreements that had been negotiated only to fail in implementation, the Majlis al-Milli and Ghali presented their case to the Khedive as one of modernisation and reform in contrast to the obstructionism of the patriarch. What ensued was historically unprecedented in modern Egyptian history: Kyrillos V was dismissed from his patriarchal duties and sent to the Wadi Natrun alBaramusi Monastery by Khedivial decree in September 1892.75 The question remains, why did the young ‘Abbas intervene in favour of the lay bloc? After coming to power earlier that year, ‘Abbas had quickly sought to assert himself by challenging Cromer’s authority. This assertion ranged from Cromer’s choice of ministers to the quality of the Egyptian Army. Consequently, one interpretation of ‘Abbas’ actions in favour of the lay bloc lies in the fact that he sought to increase his own authority, as well as that of the state, by curtailing that of the patriarchate.76 Using the Coptic dispute in part as a tool in a wider fight to assert his own authority as Khedive, ‘Abbas had dual impact on the Coptic crisis. First, concerning the administrative affairs of the Coptic Church and, particularly, its position on awqaf management and in distribution, the Khedivial decree made a clear distinction by separating the designation of material and spiritual welfare within the Coptic community. This decision promoted the role of the laymen, who were potential allies of ‘Abbas. Second, and arguably more importantly, through his intervention, the Khedive superseded the traditional autonomy of the patriarch and church over Coptic communal affairs. In doing so, he forcefully asserted the position of the state over the community, a process that coincided with the Khedive’s attempts to challenge Cromer by playing a greater role.

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 133 While the 1892 banishment was unprecedented and critical in the Coptic community, its immediate impact was narrow and short-lived. The Majlis and the GCBS as elite bodies were unable to sustain the necessary support to keep Kyrillos in the monastery, while the Tawfiq Society, although increasingly representative of the Coptic effendiyya, was still in its infancy and possessed little clout. In the months that followed, priests and bishops of the provinces, members of the Orthodox Society, along with a number of influential politicians – both Christian and Muslim, including the new prime minister, Riyad Pasha (1893–4) – petitioned the Khedive for the return of Kyrillos V. Riyad, a conservative Muslim, spearheaded this movement, as he had, according to S. H. Leeder, been genuinely shocked at the rebellion against the legitimate head and authority of the church: Riaz [Riyad Pasha] saw that the vast majority of the Coptic people, whatever the reformers might think, were desolated by the removal of a man who was still their head. And then too, Cyril’s [Kyrillos V] parting thunders of excommunication had brought the whole Church to a standstill, drying up the comforting wells of absolute and benediction [. . .] the result is an irresistible hunger made itself felt for restoration of the hierarchy.77

The Orthodox Society played an important role in rallying popular Coptic support. In particular, it targeted those who neither strongly identified with the Tawfiq Society or the Majlis. Kyrillos’ banishment exceeded the realms of the dispute concerning the distribution of awqaf and the management of schools. However, it was the Majlis, not the Khedivial state, who were held responsible for this transgression. It had humiliated and removed the religious figurehead of the Coptic community by circumventing the traditional hierarchy within the community, instead appealing directly to the state. Whilst the Majlis as a lay institution and the work of the benevolent societies were welcomed, the banishment of the pope, according to Ibrahim Filuthawus ‘Awad, weakened the image of the patriarch as the spiritual representative of the Copts and, as a result, tainted the community as a whole.78 In the days following, ‘Abbas bestowed a medal on Kyrillos, revoking his previous edict. Kyrillos was reinstated as the patriarch and escorted to Cairo by a government envoy in February 1893. Following Kyrillos’ return from exile, an agreement was made following

134  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT negotiations between the patriarch, government and the Majlis. The patriarch was to convoke the Majlis, which he had previously declined to do, but in doing so he curtailed the rights and privileges of the institution.79 The management of awqaf property was no longer to be within the competence of the Majlis, but was to be considered the private concern of the patriarch and bishops: By a mixture of stubbornness and subtle diplomacy the pope eventually obtained a repeal of the legislation which had restricted his rights in favour of the Majlis al-Milli and kept reforms at bay almost to the end of his papacy.80

It was not until 1912 that this arrangement received legislative authority, albeit with two important modifications. First, the Majlis, which had up until then been an elective body of twenty-four representatives, was to be reduced to a committee of twelve members, four of whom were ecclesiasts nominated by the patriarch and the remaining eight were laymen elected from the community. Second, in relation to awqaf, the articles of the 1883 Decree, which had given the Majlis exclusive jurisdiction over all church property, were abrogated and replaced with a new text. Awqaf property related to churches and schools remained in Majlis hands, but the second type of endowments – the property of monasteries – which was by far the richer, fell under the prerogative of the patriarchate.81 This increased Kyrillos’s ability to exert and exercise power over the community by controlling the most significant funds and left the Majlis and GCBS to pursue their own programme through fundraising. Conclusion In the act of publically challenging Kyrillos V, the Majlis, GCBS and the Tawfiq Society demonstrated an active and multi-faceted Coptic community that had been affected by broader socio-economic shifts, which had taken place across the course of the nineteenth century. For the Majlis, the awqaf served as a vehicle to finance a series of reforms with education at the forefront, but also the maintenance of schools, hospitals and libraries, which sustained the foundations of Coptic society. Through the support of the newly-formed Coptic societies, which were concerned first and foremost with charity and beneficence, an alliance was formed. Acting together as

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 135 a pressure group, the Majlis and societies highlight how the emergence of different classes, both elite landowners, but also an influential bureaucratic middle class of younger Copts, sought to use the state and their own societies to redress the traditional balance of power of the church. In doing so, they challenged the authority of the patriarch, placing greater emphasis on civil jurisdiction, rather than church precedent – a theme that was to continue throughout the twentieth century. On a broader level, Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi took advantage of the Coptic dispute to further his own agenda of greater state authority in the face of Lord Cromer’s domination. In many ways, therefore, the dispute of the 1890s did not fall along traditional historiographical lines of Muslim versus Copt. Indeed, as we have already seen, there was cooperation in the setting up of the GCBS with its Muslim counterpart, and Copts were known to have attended al-Azhar. Moreover, the line between nationalist and those who supported the British occupation was also fluid although it would be solidified over the coming years. For instance, by 1910, Butrus Ghali, then prime minister, would be labelled a traitor for his collaborations with the British and killed by a nationalist. In contrast, the emergence of Hizb al-Ahrar al-Aqbat, the Free Coptic Party, led by Akhnukh Fanus – a former member of the nationalist Hizb al-Watani Party – sought to promote Coptic rights, while asserting Copts as inalienable subjects of Egypt. Fanous, like the Tawfiq Society, represented the effendiyya as a political milieu promoting education and Coptic communal affinity through the endorsement of the Coptic faith. Notes  1. Al-Mu’ayyad, 20 August 1892.   2. Bishop Murqus was Acting Patriarch (1870–4) following the death of Demetrius II and the consecration of Kyrillos V.   3. For examples of this, see Edward Wakin, A Lonely Minority: The Modern Story of Egypt’s Copts (New York, NY: William Morrison & Company, 1963); David Zeidan, ‘The Copts – Equal, Protected or Persecuted? The Impact of Islamization on Muslim–Christian Relations in Modern Egypt’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 10: 1 (1999), pp. 53–69.   4. Samir Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies 6: 1 (1970), p. 252.

136  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT  5. See speech by Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid about the age of reform in Hafl aldhikra al-mi’awiyya al-‘ula li-Abi al-islah (Cairo: n. p., 1961), p. 94; Iris Habib al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. IV (Cairo: al-Mahabba, 1981).   6. For the purposes of the chapter, Kyrillos IV will be referred to as Abu Islah, in order to avoid confusion with subsequent patriarchs with the same name.   7. The concepts of al-nahda and al-islah are used interchangeably in the Arabic literature when discussing the achievements of Abu Islah. For example, see ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Hafl al-dhikra, pp. 32–60.   8. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 248; ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Hafl al-dhikra, p. 60.   9. Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1836), p. 553. 10. See ‘Kyrillos al Raba’, al-Hilal, 1 July 1893, pp. 339–404, although Samir Seikaly is correct to report that this has not appeared anywhere else. See ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 270. 11. Malak Luqa, al-Aqbat al-nashi’a wa al-sira‘: Min al-qarn al-awwal ila al- qarn al-‘ishrin (Cairo: Maktabat Anjilus, 2001), pp. 527–8. 12. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 248. 13. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 249. 14. James Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt (London: Luzac, 1938), p. 85. 15. Paul Sedra, ‘Ecclesiastical Warfare: Patriarch, Presbyterian, and Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Asyut’, in Abbas Amanat and Magnus T. Bernhardsson (eds), The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters, YCIAS Working Paper Series, vol. 5 (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2002), p.306; Luqa, al-Aqbat al-nashi’a wa al-sira‘, p.528. 16. Sulayman Nasim, ‘Education, Coptic’, in Aziz Suryal Atiya (ed.), Coptic Encyclopedia (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishers, 1991), pp. 931–3. 17. Land was granted in the al-Wadi region of the Sharqiyya governorate to help cover school expenses. In 1863, a further 500 feddans of land was added in the same area to be used by the church. See Luqa, al-Aqbat, al-nashi’a wa al-sira‘, p. 71; see also P. J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991), p. 102. 18. Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education, p. 338. 19. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 249; Nasim, ‘Education, Coptic’, pp. 931–3. 20. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 270.

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 137 21. Aziz Atiya, ‘Literature, Copto-Arabic’, in Coptic Encyclopedia, p. 1460. 22. It was claimed that through the education of women, the community was cultivating good mothers. See al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. IV, p. 320; Sedra, ‘Ecclesiastical Warfare’, p. 306; Luqa, al-Aqbat, al-nashi’a wa al-sira‘, pp. 528–9. 23. ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Hafl al-dhikra, p. 32. 24. Febe Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 9. 25. Armanios, Coptic Christianity in Ottoman Egypt, pp. 26–30. 26. The first council included Barsum Girgis Bey, Ya‘qub Nakhla Rufila Bey, Gundi Yusuf al-Qasabji Bey, ‘Aziz Manqariyus and Mikha’il Habashi. Two of the members of the community council had been pupils at Abu Islah’s Great Coptic School. 27. Girgis Filuthawus ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Ighumanus Filuthawus (Cairo: n. p., 1905), pp. 114–15. 28. A similar question arose during the medieval period in the Roman Catholic Church on the need to define the scope of its political institutions. For more details, see Elie Kedourie, ‘Ethnicity, Majority, and Minority in the Middle East’, in Milton Esman and Itamar Rabinovich (eds), Ethnicity, Pluralism and the State in the Middle East (London: Cornell University, 1981), pp. 26–8. 29. ‘1874 Majlis al-Milli Constitution’, republished in full in al-Manara al-misriyya, 14 March 1944. 30. Adel Azer Bestawros, ‘Community Council’, in Coptic Encyclopedia, pp. 581–2. 31. ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Ighumanus, pp. 142–3; Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 252. 32. S. H. Leeder, Modern Sons of Pharoahs: A Study in the Manners and Customs of the Copts in Egypt (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), p. 248. 33. Al-Tawfiq, 9 January 1908. 34. Writing an article in al-Umma newspaper, Kyrillos called on the Coptic community to view women’s education as a priority. See commentary in al-Tawfiq, 9 January 1908. 35. Leeder, Modern Sons of Pharoahs, p. 245. 36. Edith Louisa Butcher, The Story of the Church of Egypt: Being an Outline of the History of the Egyptians under their Successive Masters from the Roman Conquest Until Now (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1897), p. 403. 37. Al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. V, p. 27.

138  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 38. Al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. V, p. 27; Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 251. 39. Bestawros, ‘Community Council, Coptic’, p. 581. 40. For more details on both the Great Coptic Benevolent Society and its Muslim counterpart, see Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt: Challenges of Modernisation and Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 101–17. 41. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 253. 42. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 252. 43. ‘1883 Majlis al-Milli Constitution’, al-Manara al-misriyya, 14 March 1944. 44. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 261. 45. Al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. V, pp. 27–8. 46. Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East (New York, NY: Penguin, 2013), p. 109. 47. Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, p. 113. 48. Hilmi Ahmad Shalabi, Al-Aqbat wa al-islah al-ijtima‘i fi Misr: dawr Jam‘iyyat al-Tawfiq, 1891–1952 (Cairo: Maktabat al-anjlu al-misriyya, 1992), p. 33. 49. Sulayman Nasim, ‘Education, Coptic’, in Coptic Encyclopedia, pp. 931–3. 50. In 1907, the total population of Egypt stood at 11,189,978 and Christians comprised 881,693, thus making up 7.6 per cent of the total population. See ‘Percentage of Christians in Census Years 1917–1976’, in Arab Republic of Egypt, al-Atlas al-ihsa’i lil-jumhuriyyat Misr al-‘arabiyya (Cairo: Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics, 1979), p.32. 51. Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1908), p. 206. 52. Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 208. 53. See Lucie Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity through the “New Effendiyya”: Social and Cultural Contributions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy’, in A. Goldschmidt, A. J. Johnston and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-Envisioning Egypt, 1919–1952 (Cairo: American University Press, 2005), p. 125. 54. Ryzova, ‘Egyptianizing Modernity through the “New Effendiyya”: Social and Cultural Contributions of the Middle Class in Egypt under the Monarchy’, p. 129. 55. Report of Jam‘iyyat al-Tawfiq, November 1891–April 1892, taken from Shalabi, al-Aqbat, p. 33. 56. Shalabi, al-Aqbat, p. 33. 57. Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt, pp. 59–67.

c h alleng i ng the copti c ch ur ch  | 139 58. See the December 1904 edition of al-Tawfiq for details of the magazine’s publication and history. 59. For example, the Tawfiq Society’s Christmas donation fund for 1903 was LE16; see al-Tawfiq, January 1903. 60. Lambeth Palace Archives: Coptic Church of Egypt – General Correspondence 1930–59, A. O. C. File 57, Report by Boutros Effendi Simaan on ‘The Tawfiq Society’, November 1949. 61. Four-hundred-and-fifteen children paid fees, ninety-seven attended for free; see ‘al-ihsa’iyyat al-ta‘limiyya al-madrasiyya fi Misr’, al-Tawfiq, October 1907. 62. ‘al-Shu’un al-maliyya li-Jam’iyat al-Tawfiq’, al-Tawfiq, February 1903. 63. Butcher, The Story of the Church, p. 405. 64. For more on missionaries in Egypt, see Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 65. Lambeth Palace Archives: Coptic Church of Egypt – General Correspondence 1930–59, A. O. C. File 57, Report by Boutros Effendi Simaan on ‘The Friends of the Bible’, March 1949. 66. Hardinage, quoted in Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 257. 67. Leeder, Modern Sons of Pharoahs, p. 258. 68. Seikaly, ‘Coptic Communal Reform: 1860–1914’, p. 254; al-Misri, Qissat alkanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. V, pp 27–8. 69. Al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al- qibtiyya, vol. V, p. 29. 70. Al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al- qibtiyya, vol. V, p. 30. 71. Al-Watan, 26 August 1892; al-Mu’ayyad, 30 August 1892. 72. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 42. 73. Al-Watan, 22 May 1908. 74. The secretary would later become Pope Yu’annis (1927–42); al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa al-qibtiyya, vol. V, p. 35; Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, p. 259. 75. Al-Watan, 30 August 1892 and 1 September 1892; al-Misri, Qissat al-kanisa alqibtiyya, vol. V, p. 42. Two similar incidents were to take place under President Nasser, who banished Pope Yusab II to a monastery in 1953, and under President Sadat, who banished Pope Shenouda III in 1981. For more details, see Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt, p. 171. 76. Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, p. 119. 77. Leeder, Modern Sons of the Pharaohs, p. 266.

140  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 78. See the discussion of events taken from Ibrahim Filuthawus ‘Awad’s account, republished in al-Yaqazah, 1 January 1944. 79. See the agreements of 17 November 1893, republication of 1892 Majlis al-Milli Constitution and its consequences in al-Manara al-misriyya, 14 March 1944. 80. Transcript of speech given by Abba Seraphim, Metropolitan of Glastonbury, on 30 May 1995, ‘The Renewal of Coptic Orthodoxy in the Twentieth Century’, The Glastonbury Bulletin 92 (March 1996). 81. al-Manara al-misriyya, 14 March 1944.

5 Criminal Statistics in the Long 1890s Mario M. Ruiz

T

his chapter focuses on the use of criminal statistics among British administrators and civil servants in colonial Egypt. I argue that British colonial officials working in the Egyptian Government made use of specific types of crime statistics that reshaped their ideas of what Egypt was and how the state should manage its inhabitants. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, British officials championed an ostensibly more rational regime of crime statistics. For this reason, I trace statistical discussions of murders, robberies and thefts to document how British governance in Egypt relied on authoritative methods to control crime. A major conceptual shift in the use of crime statistics occurred during the long 1890s – a period that began with the regular publication of annual statistics on Egyptian crime in 1891 and concluded with the British reorganisation of the Ministries of Interior and Justice before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The use of crime statistics during this period was not mere coincidence, but rather an integral part of a broader political effort to create an impartial state bureaucracy. The production of criminal statistics therefore served not just as an enumerative exercise, but also as a basis for implementing an efficient and empirical form of governance that could manage acceptable rates of Egyptian crime. Because British administrators in Egypt increasingly relied on crime statistics during this period, the technical manner in which they classified 141

142  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Egyptian crime provides important insight into the raison d’être of the legal regime they helped to establish in the 1890s. In making this argument, I build on the works of historians such as Roger Owen, François Ireton and Timothy Mitchell.1 However, I depart from them with my focus on select crimes that preoccupied British colonial officials and which they discussed at great length. While these historians have focused on the broader classificatory logic of statistics and their relationship to economic modes of thought, they have paid less attention to the ways in which colonial officials quantified specific criminal offences, such as homicide, robberies and thefts. For the most part, scholars of Egyptian history do not write about the problems inherent in statistical representations or how the British used crime statistics. My contribution to this discussion argues for the importance of a more narrow approach. I examine the role that crime statistics played in the constitution of state power, because the practice of assembling and classifying these ‘objective’ statistics was, from a governmental standpoint, not merely a means of understanding the Egyptian population, but an instrument for regulating it. The long 1890s constituted a pivotal era where colonial officials resorted to criminal statistics in a self-conscious manner to both differentiate their efforts from earlier efforts to fight crime in Egypt and expand the investigative powers of the state. At the same time, British civil servants sought to consolidate the administrative changes that they introduced in the police force and the Ministries of Interior and Justice. The imposition of British police inspectors and advisors in key government ministries demonstrated the seriousness of colonial administrators in carrying out their agenda of improving public security in the 1890s. As I discuss below, the use of British crime statistics in Egypt operated in tandem with the systematic publication of crime returns. Nathan Brown argues that the transformation of the state under the British occupation produced new definitions of criminality in response to the increased mobility of the rural population, the need for migrant labour in urban centres and the reconceptualisation of crime as a matter of national, not local, concern.2 While there is veracity in this claim, British attempts to police Egyptian crime were, in some respects, the results of political processes set into motion much earlier in the nineteenth century. Bureaucrats working for the Khedives or Ottoman viceroys tracked and recorded crimes in ways that prefigured the

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 143 ‘rational’ regime that British policymakers hoped to establish in the 1890s. In different ways, Khedivial and British officials used criminal statistics as social power and a method of reasoning to reconstitute moral and material living conditions.3 I accordingly ask why statistical accountings of crime in this period differed from earlier state-supported attempts to track criminal suspects. Both the Khedives and the British attempted to improve the efficiency of the Egyptian Government, but colonial officials differentiated their statistics from those of the Khedives in response to the temporal and spatial demands of the occupation and in keeping with their ostensibly empirical findings. As such, British discussions of crime borrowed from broader scientific movements in the late nineteenth century that sought to better measure and quantify social life.4 British officials in Egypt also viewed their discussions of criminal statistics as intertwined with the rule of law, which meant that they paid close attention to questions of governance. Governance, in turn, necessitated the creation of bureaucratic structures that enabled policymakers to make quick and efficient decisions. The technical procedures that high-ranking officials employed in the 1890s conformed to a political model where British civil servants acted on an objective with the purpose of simplifying it by using a series of codified practices.5 It is therefore possible to discern which features of Egyptian crime troubled British administrators through a close reading of official sources, such as the annual reports on the financial and social conditions of Egypt. Given their capacious nature, government publications like the annual reports provide an invaluable lens for understanding the development of criminal statistics in the 1890s. Through a careful analysis of the reports, we can obtain important insights into how British advisors who worked in the Egyptian Government conceptualised criminal acts. Unlike other sources from this time such as the Arabic press, the reports represent a rich set of published documents, with respect to criminal statistics generated during the British occupation. My interest in these texts resides in their elite configuration of Egyptian crime and how they differed from earlier Khedivial statistical efforts. High-ranking British officials admitted that the crime statistics in the annual reports lacked precision, but their insistence on producing more detailed returns illustrate how the ideological assumptions of the occupation

144  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT evolved over the long 1890s. In an attempt to influence public opinion in London and Cairo, the British Consul-General in Egypt regularly submitted the reports to both Houses of Parliament. Local newspaper editors also translated extracts from the reports into Arabic, as well as French, Italian and Greek.6 In this sense, the criminal statistics in the reports did not simply represent unbiased information about crime in Egypt. Rather, one of the interesting tensions in the reports is the way in which police inspectors and British advisors privileged crime statistics, while at the same time downplaying their importance by insisting on their incomplete nature. The ConsulGenerals that oversaw the occupation regime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century also periodically remarked how unreliable information and fluctuations in crime statistics prevented them from prosecuting criminals. Yet British officials continued to use these statistics to justify their policies and exert more direct influence over the Ministries of Justice and Interior in the face of stringent political opposition from prominent figures, such as Egyptian Prime Ministers Nubar Pasha and Riyad Pasha.7 Given the politically charged nature of the occupation, British administrators struggled to manage a regime based on impartial ideas and principles. Since murders, robberies and thefts all challenged the coercive authority of the state and provided justification for better policing, British discussions of Egyptian crime operated on dual tracks: on the one hand, urban-based officials continued to enumerate crimes in the belief that empirical policing techniques would encourage rural Egyptians to cooperate with the justice system, while on the other hand they complained about the villagers’ refusal to provide evidence in murder cases, as well as their ‘most regrettable want of regard for human life’.8 With regard to specific crimes, the reports balanced running tabulations of homicides and thefts with definitive claims about the corrupt nature of Khedivial justice that prevailed before the occupation. At the same time, published statistics from the 1890s did not constitute a complete break with earlier efforts. British crime statistics engaged with long-standing discourses and practices of bureaucratic rule in Egypt. The central administration in Cairo persisted in differentiating between peoples and places in Lower and Upper Egypt, gathering concise forms of information and deciphering insubordinate forms of behaviour. Evelyn Baring, the Consul-General who was appointed to spearhead the occupation in 1883,

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 145 grappled with many of the same governance issues that the Khedives confronted. During his early years, Baring also relied on an inherited coterie of scribes, court personnel and police officers to implement state policies. Nonetheless, the crime statistics that colonial officials used a decade after the occupation operated with a scientific empiricism that insisted on placing Egyptian criminals into discrete and familiar categories. The police and the judiciary also produced returns that British advisors relied on to manage the growing demands of the colonial state.9 As a result, the British interpretation of Egyptian crime depended not only on enumeration, but also on the rhetorical interpretation of criminal statistics as rational facts that bolstered the colonial justice system. Senior colonial officials made effective use of their crime statistics. Beginning in March 1891, Evelyn Baring renamed his occasional reports on Egyptian finance and systematically addressed the various administrative changes introduced under his tenure each year. He requested that various governmental departments compile notes that he could later use to write his reports. Coles Pasha, Inspector-General of Prisons, fretted that the reports were written before all the relevant statistics were available, but Baring’s thinking in this regard was clear: the reports targeted audiences in Egypt and England and, as such, produced different political responses, including a counter-literature that argued that the British occupation had worsened the economic situation in Egypt.10 Baring’s decision to compile his annual reports also signalled a shift from the initial despatches that Edward Malet, the Consul-General in Cairo, submitted to the British Parliament in 1882. Malet’s despatches and correspondence included cursory statistics on prisons, but lacked detailed numbers on countrywide murders, robberies and thefts. As the occupation crept into the 1890s, however, Baring (who became Lord Cromer in March 1892) adopted a different attitude toward the use of statistics. He devoted more attention to tabulating annual totals for major national crops, for example, based on the information provided by local tax collectors and in accordance with his views of Egypt as a predominately agricultural country.11 More importantly, after a decade as Consul-General, Cromer began employing crime statistics to help him advance questionable claims that economic prosperity in the countryside produced noticeable increases in crimes involving murder and the theft of crops and livestock.

146  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Lord Cromer’s focus on rural crime was not unexpected, since the occupation authorities ruthlessly focused on the growth of the Egyptian economy. Colonial officials working for the Consul-General harboured dim views of the ability of Egyptians to govern the country politically, and the prevailing view with regard to the economy held that the Khedives ran the country inefficiently. Further compounding this perception was the tendency of British administrators to interpret their political goals in Egypt through the prism of their imperial experiences in India.12 While drawing on such experiences initially made sense to them, British advisors to the Khedivial Government gradually realised that their Indian policies did not produce the same technical results in Egypt. Top-ranking officials therefore focused on implementing measures aimed at improving economic conditions in the countryside. Cromer himself believed that one of the main purposes of financial policy was to create a conservative rural class that offered passive support for the occupation.13 However, policy decisions made during the 1890s did not mean that colonial officials dismissed prior knowledge about Egyptian life. It meant only that solutions to problems like murders, robberies and theft required complete and certain knowledge of state apparatuses; crime statistics could fill in some of the uncertainty of administrative lacunae. In this respect, crime statistics in Egypt did not assume the same cultural form as they did in nineteenth-century England, which focused on marginal figures, such as the poor, the sexually promiscuous and the insane.14 Colonial officials instead advanced a stringent narrative of progress that focused on ‘serious’ crimes. Cromer, for instance, touted the improvements made with respect to criminal justice and the punishment of rural brigands. He asserted that the ‘large bands of brigands who terrorized whole districts’ no longer existed and that the number of murder cases had dropped ‘from 347 in 1891 to 270 in 1892, and only one-third of the number are due to a desire to rob. The rest are caused by vengeance, jealousy, and land disputes’.15 One of the hallmarks of British crime statistics involved the need to produce reliable numbers that fitted into discrete categories. In his first annual report, which included his blunt assessment of the legal system in Egypt, Cromer pointed to an increase in the total number of reported murders from 1886 to 1890 as ‘abundant proof of the shortcomings of the present

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 147 system’. He predictably concluded that ‘in matters of internal administration, it became clearer every day that the state of things which I have described . . . could not be allowed to last’.16 As a result, the police began to compile more detailed returns of serious crimes and misdemeanours throughout the country. Civil servants working in the Ministries of Interior and Justice likewise studied the motives behind rural homicides, assaults, arsons and the poisoning of crops and livestock in a more critical fashion. Perhaps not surprisingly, British advisors expressed disdain toward the police department and its administrative capabilities. Cromer remarked that ‘not only is the Department of Police one of the most important in Egypt, but also that its management presents difficulties of a very exceptional description’.17 Throughout his tenure, the Consul-General reacted strongly against criticism of the police force from Egyptian nationalists by emphasising improvements made under his administration and favouring the most positive interpretation of crime statistics.18 In terms of how Cromer viewed the utility of criminal statistics, it is worth highlighting his selective use of numbers in the annual report published in 1894, which included columns of data related to indictable offences. After briefly discussing the state of Egyptian crime, Cromer cited police records to argue that the total number of reported crimes in 1893 had fallen to 1,303, as compared with 1,467 in 1892 and 1,690 in 1891. He then produced a table of specific crimes to demonstrate that, in fact, serious offences, such as murders, gang robberies and thefts with violence, had declined from 1891 to 1893 (see Table 5.1). Cromer attributed the decline in these types of crimes to improved police actions against murderers and thieves. To further bolster his claim, he immediately produced another table to show how the number of convictions for murders, gang robberies, thefts with violence, cattle thefts and general crimes increased during this same three-year period (see Table 5.2). Although the Consul-General lamented the difficulty in ‘obtaining reliable evidence’ and the ‘inherent dislike in natives to give any information to, or evidence before, the police and Courts’, he opined that the British transformation of the Egyptian judiciary and police force could produce real progress in reducing the crime rate.19 Other British officials whom Cromer asked to provide him with data on serious crimes echoed the particular sentiments found in this annual report. For example, John Scott, a British Indian

148  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT judge who worked for the Egyptian Government in his capacity as Judicial Advisor from 1891 to 1898, noted: However, in certain important directions, there is decided progress. Gangrobbery accompanied with murder, has almost disappeared. It is not ten years ago that it was so rife throughout the country that special Commissions with summary powers of life and death were appointed and failed to deal effectually with the evil. The greater efficiency of the police, the better preparation of cases by the Parquet, and the consequent increase of convictions have gradually suppressed brigandage. Murders with premeditation have fallen in number from 114 in 1894, to 93 in 1895. Homicide generally has fallen from 318 to 241; theft, robbery with violence, and wounding remain much the same.20

Notwithstanding Scott’s disbelief in the ability of the ‘special Commissions’ to suppress brigandage, British advisors to the Viceregal Government understood the political importance of maintaining ‘decided progress’ in the fight against crime. The Judicial Advisor’s remarks about the ineffectual nature of the commissions help to explain why he pushed for the creation of a more efficient police department and criminal justice system. Scott believed that having such a system would help Egyptians realise that cooperating with the authorities was in their best interests. This desire for greater cooperation conveniently overlapped with his detailed proposals for reforming the judiciary and police force.21 While senior advisors like Scott called for collaboration with law enforcement, they understood that statistical discrepancies in the crime rate challenged their political agenda of transforming the legal system. Such discrepancies were also unacceptable, since officials working for the Consul-General self-consciously styled themselves as enlightened administrators applying rational philosophies of colonial administration adapted to Egyptian conditions, which aimed to reduce crime in the provinces.22 Table 5.1  Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms. (Source: PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1894)) Murders Gang-robberies Thefts with violence

1893

1892

1891

353  35 428

324  48 461

387 120 503

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 149 Table 5.2  Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms. (Source: PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1894))

Murders Gang-robberies Thefts with violence Cattle thefts Crimes generally

1893 per cent

1892 per cent

1891 per cent

36 31 40 55 36

30 43 29 38 32

29 32 28 43 30

Criminal statistics in the long 1890s likewise constituted a shift from earlier statistical efforts, which focused primarily on the collection of tax revenues, military recruitment and public health campaigns. British civil servants may have shared some of the same utilitarian concerns as the Khedives, but the conditional manner in which colonial officials went about enumerating crimes differed in their scale and temporal scope. British crime statistics from this period, for instance, do not resemble the statistical data contained in the historical works of technocrats such as ‘Ali Mubarak Pasha (1823/4–93), who headed the Ministries of Education, Public Works and Railways, or Amin Sami Pasha (1857–1941), director of a prominent Khedivial preparatory school and the government-run school of higher education, Dar al-‘ulum. Although the twenty-volume topographical encyclopaedia that Mubarak began publishing in the late 1880s included scientific data taken from European sources, it also drew from an older Islamic literary tradition that synchronised notions of people, landscape, history and culture and ordered them alphabetically.23 Furthermore, Mubarak organised his dialectical narrative of Egyptian history and geography with the intention of transmitting nationalist knowledge that produced self-respect, patriotic pride and deference to authority.24 Sami’s monumental six-volume work, Taqwim al-Nil, similarly included detailed statistics of population growth, bridges and canals and information about the cyclical flow of the Nile, but the author compiled his vast amount of technical information, in part, as a historiographical tribute to the Khedives. Taqwim al-Nil therefore has no single subject and does not offer a single narrative of the Egyptian past.25 While the works of Mubarak and Sami align themselves, to a certain extent, with British statistical production in that these government officials valorised state institutions,

150  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT their writings prioritised the power of the Khedivial dynasty and sought to place it at the heart of modern Egyptian history.26 British colonial officials did not accord the Khedives such an esteemed position, but they nevertheless had to contend with the enumerative legacy that had been developed in Egypt before the 1890s. The eighteenth-century state, for example, undertook various projects to count and organise villages, government finances and physical objects. Numbers and counting constituted the primary tools for regulating Egyptian labourers, in addition to the physical environment.27 Crime statistics under Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–48) and his immediate successors developed simultaneously with the introduction of printing, newspapers, railroads, telegraphs and other infrastructural changes that transformed how local Egyptians viewed the state. The creation of large governmental institutions and administrative units, including new prisons, court systems and the Departments of Interior and Justice, resulted in a greater political and economic centralisation of Egyptian society, with Cairo at its centre.28 More importantly, the Khedives laid the groundwork for the use of enumerative techniques that prepared Egyptians for more invasive forms of surveillance at all levels of society. Religious scholars, police officers, provincial and urban health practitioners and other state functionaries provided crime statistics to administrators in Cairo, who sought to use this information in a coordinated manner.29 For the Khedives, building a modern state required the active production of institutions and ideologies that improved their ability to monitor the Egyptian population. François Ireton argues that the Khedivial preoccupation with public health, for example, prodded the viceroys to create statistical bureaus in 1870 and 1878, in order to supervise demographic and sanitation matters.30 Collecting statistics in hospitals was another important function of the state and was a way in which the viceroys intervened in private life and expanded their power. The medical personnel working in police stations similarly played a critical role in the compilation of crime statistics, which served as one of the most effective tools of government control before the British occupation.31 Egyptian responses to biomedical statistical practices, however, provoked different reactions, based on class, ethnic and social lines.32 Crime statistics likewise occupied an important place with respect to the administration of prisons. The impetus behind penal reforms between 1829 and

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 151 the 1870s involved judicial punishments with precisely quantified penalties designed to avoid gratuitous suffering or death for prison inmates.33 Rudolph Peters notes that statistical registers produced in the 1840s and 1860s constitute a major source of information with regard to the prison population, even if Khedivial laws and sentences did not produce a detailed and coherent philosophy of punishment.34 However, unlike prison records from the 1840s and 1860s, which contain information about the age and personal characteristics of inmates, the statistics that the British officials compiled did not show any interest in prisoners’ individual identities.35 Police and prison inspectors in British Egypt instead focused on prison expenditures and other crime-deterrent programmes when reporting to the central government.36 Some of these lengthy discussions borrowed directly from broader intellectual currents in late nineteenth-century Europe that sought to explain the development of history and society through the application of scientific models, in addition to drawing from biological materialism, social Darwinism, intellectual elitism and a deep distrust of the masses.37 On the whole, British policies toward crime originated in conditions particular to Egypt and aimed to ensure the correct application of justice, in order to prevent future offences. Officials like Judicial Advisor Scott expressed concern that the ‘improvement of the police, the better preparation of evidence, and the consequent increase in the number of convictions will fail to reduce crime if the punishment inflicted is not efficacious for either reformation or example’.38 Whereas crime statistics in the 1890s reflected the biases and priorities of colonial administrators, Khedivial efforts to police crime drew on long-standing traditions of Ottoman bureaucratic rule. Viceregal statistics owed much of their genesis to Ottoman-initiated projects, such as tax collection, military conscription and census-taking, which imperial bureaucrats in Istanbul viewed as an overall effort to enumerate the empire’s population. The Ottoman nature of the 1848 Egyptian census, for example, distinguished it from later censuses that state officials performed under colonial or nationalist contexts.39 Census-taking was responsive to Ottoman policies and norms, while also having its own local character.40 Beginning with the 1848 census, scribes and clerks at different levels of the Khedivial bureaucracy filed forms that provided their superiors with raw numerical data. Muhammad ‘Ali and

152  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT his successors cooperated with their counterparts in Istanbul and produced voluminous census registers that sought not only to count all of Egypt’s population, but also to pinpoint each individual in relation to his or her household, age, sex, marital status, religion, economic activity and place of origin.41 The Khedives undertook different types of censuses in 1848 and 1868, but British technocrats and Egyptian nationalists viewed the 1897 census as the first reliable attempt to count the country’s entire population. It generated useful demographic data, with respect to nationality, location of residents, occupation status, age and religious affiliation. The 1897 census, for instance, produced detailed information about the number of Europeans and Egyptians living in various Cairene districts.42 Notwithstanding the limitations of this data, the success of the 1897 census count encouraged government officials to administer successive censuses on a decennial basis. From 1897 onward, classification of census data followed an established international pattern that allowed for comparisons on a cross-country basis.43 By 1917, an extensive bureaucratic apparatus existed for census-taking, which included tabulating machines and a general statistical office.44 Censuses administered in the long 1890s, moreover, reflected newer ‘scientific’ views of the Egyptian population as an abstract political and social problem that required more precise management. Sceptical of earlier enumeration regimes, British civil servants relied on countable abstractions of people and resources to implement scientific policies designed to control population growth.45 With respect to policy implementation, colonial administrators first tabulated statistics with the hope of imposing an indirect form of governance that also bolstered the long-term needs of the occupation. By the second decade of the occupation, colonial administrators abandoned the pretence of indirect rule in an attempt to maintain their standards of technical professionalisation.46 British advisors working for the public security forces self-consciously defined such professionalisation as utilising science, technology and education to improve police efficiency, while making adjustments that took into account statistical methodologies that had become widespread throughout Europe.47 In keeping with the greater emphasis on professionalisation, the overall centralisation of the state continued under the occupation, and in some cases the bureaucracy became more efficient.48 More importantly, law

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 153 enforcement officials tasked with monitoring crime also understood that how they publicly discussed crime influenced their attempts to control it. Police officers and inspectors therefore used new developments in education and science to promote the technological aims of the colonial state.49 Beginning in the 1890s, for instance, officials relied on novel technologies to identify and prosecute criminals. In January 1895, the newly established Anthropometric Bureau shipped instruments to the Alexandrian Police to measure the head, fingerprints and extremities of repeat offenders.50 While the anthropometric system changed as it extended to other parts of Egypt, prison administrators were among the first to make active use of it. The practice of using evidence from the Bureau to convict suspects eventually gained broader acceptance among the Egyptian judiciary by the end of Cromer’s tenure.51 The acceptance of anthropometric technologies such as fingerprinting not only reflected a desire to identify criminals, but also was in line with one of the dominant scientific trends in late nineteenthcentury European thought – that is, the anthropological preoccupation with the classification and taxonomical organisation of different racial groups.52 At the same time, British advisors and their collaborators in the Ministries of Interior and Justice did not rely primarily on anthropometric methods to tabulate crime statistics, nor was scientific reasoning the sole basis for waging an aggressive campaign against Egyptian crime. British critics of Cromer’s technocratic approach, in fact, accused him of advancing a purely material agenda of developing Egyptian resources at the expense of more intellectual or moral reforms.53 The self-serving nature of Cromer’s approach to criminal justice manifested itself most clearly in the British takeover of the Ministry of the Interior in 1892. In the face of increasing Egyptian opposition by the Khedive and nationalist law students, Cromer installed a powerful British advisor in the ministry and tightened British control over the police.54 In addition to the takeover of the Ministry of the Interior, one of the challenges for the British advisors working in the Ministry of Justice was the number of murders and the perception that conviction rates were not in line with the numbers of cases brought to court. Judicial Advisor Scott claimed that there were 145 convictions out of 215 murder cases in 1894, compared with 135 convictions out of 186 in 1893, but ‘the proportion of convictions in all crimes taken together

154  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT is fairly satisfactory – 28 per cent for a country new to an impartial administration of justice’.55 Lord Cromer also speculated that serious crime was not only ‘diminishing’, but also becoming more ‘unpopular’ throughout Egypt: ‘It cannot yet be said that every respectable citizen is a policeman, but some steady progress is being made in the direction of leaguing together the whole population against the criminal classes’.56 As these quotes from Scott and Cromer suggest, crime statistics were more than a matter of representation; they were a language that enabled British civil servants to discuss recalcitrant behaviours that merited further surveillance. The abstract, quantifiable and transferrable quality of statistics enabled policymakers to build coalitions, dissect problems and imagine a more optimistic, efficiently run society.57 When British officials first used crime statistics in Egypt, direct communication with the local authorities meant compliance with explicit instructions from Cairo. Police officers began to gather more systematic statistics on homicides, assaults and other crimes in an attempt to forge uniform experiences out of unpredictable behaviours. Partly because of this, crime statistics in the annual reports first appear as definite numbers, which imply an allseeing government gaze. However, legal advisors such as Eustace Corbet, the Procureur-Général to the Egyptian Government, admitted that these figures were the product of inconsistent counting practices that fluctuated from year to year and varied across different provinces.58 Reflecting on the murder rate at the turn of the twentieth century, Cromer himself hypothesised that: ‘I do not think . . . that the increase in the number of murders represents anything more than an ordinary fluctuation in criminal statistics, due to accidental causes’.59 He again surmised in a later report that although ‘[t]he first year for which any trustworthy criminal statistics exist is 1891’, even these statistics were unsatisfactory, since ‘[e]veryone who is acquainted with criminal statistics is aware that the tide of crime occasionally rises and falls in an arbitrary fashion, without its being possible to assign any general causes to the movement’.60 Despite acknowledging the ‘arbitrary fashion’ in which crime rates fluctuated, British administrators dismissed nationalist critics of their policies. Officials such as Colonel Settle (later Sir Henry Settle), Inspector-General of the Police from 1892 to 1894, deflected accusations from Nubar Pasha that police misconduct undermined public security. Settle pointed to statis-

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 155 tics that the police and the Ministry of Justice published showing constant improvements in the crime rate and claimed positive results in his criminal investigations.61 British civil servants likewise took comfort in statistical data that pointed to a decrease in the rate of serious crimes from 1896 through to 1899. Policymakers expressed confidence in their better understanding of recidivist rates and criminal patterns in the countryside, as well as in stricter measures designed to stem the flow of crime. As a result, optimistic attitudes toward crime persisted throughout the late 1890s. Lord Cromer boasted that a ‘study of the latest Returns’ illustrated that the decrease in crime was not limited to a few localities, but ‘is spread generally over the whole of Egypt, and has manifested itself regularly month by month throughout the past year’.62 Nor was Cromer troubled with increases in the homicide rate. Citing the memorandum of Procureur-Général Corbet for his own purposes, Cromer advanced the proposition that the administrative apparatuses of the state could adequately handle murder: ‘On the whole, then, the analysis of the causes of homicides is satisfactory, in the sense that the increase is chiefly due to causes where the public security authorities cannot be expected to influence the numbers by direct prevention.’63 As Cromer’s views suggest, senior officials accepted the basic premise that improvements in ‘the working of the administrative machine’ produced ‘satisfactory’ results, but they nevertheless insisted that the collation of crime figures merited further improvement. The explanations that British advisors used to describe crime in their initial reports no longer sufficed. With improved statistical techniques, the central government in Cairo exposed its appetite for longer and more detailed numerical information. By the early twentieth century, British officials used crime statistics to measure the means and totals of individual offences, but their chief concerns lay not simply with fluctuations in the crime rate. Colonial administrators did not view criminal statistics as discrete from the other activities that informed public life. Instead, lawmakers concerned themselves with the most efficient way to collect more information on crime. This search for detailed statistical numbers required a greater understanding of the motives that supposedly predisposed Egyptians to commit murders, thefts and robberies. Evolving views of private property, paper currency, the stock exchange and the cotton trade during the first decade of the twentieth century prompted officials to look

156  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT for better explanations to account for seemingly inexplicable behaviours in a fast-changing economy.64 The difficulty in reconciling economic transformations with a rising crime rate emerged as an especially serious problem, given that policymakers folded their analysis of rural crime into broader discussions about the economy. The fiscal crises of 1907 and 1909 engendered widespread debates about Egypt’s economic future, which led to the creation of technical committees that asked for research and reliable data on cotton production.65 How British officials framed the problem of crime in terms of its causes and remedies, and how they situated themselves as part of the cause and/ or remedy, influenced not only their policies, but also how they discussed the role of the state in Egyptian society. Lord Cromer, for example, argued against the adoption of ‘heroic remedies’ when describing steady increases in the crime rate. He stubbornly insisted that the ‘Egyptian Government looks rather for improvement by making some important, but not radical changes in the law and procedure, and by insuring an increase of efficiency in the operation of the existing system’.66 Eldon Gorst, Cromer’s successor as Consul-General, disagreed with this sentiment and looked for other ways to improve the reliability of British statistics. Under Gorst’s tenure, which lasted from 1907 to 1911, the authorities advocated new security approaches that accommodated Egyptian notables, who feared escalating murder and theft rates. In 1909, the Public Security Department ordered the formation of local committees composed of ‘umdas [mayors] and other respected Egyptians to prepare lists of individuals in their villages who endangered public security. The police then agreed to supervise suspects with proven criminal records and imprison those convicted of serious crimes.67 In an effort to quicken the pace of administrative change, Gorst divided the Ministry of the Interior into two sections dealing with public security: the first of which dealt with ‘preventative’ measures, while the second helped to prepare criminal statistics. This dual division of the Ministry of the Interior in 1909 resulted in the creation of a technical bureau and the subsequent training of a staff in ‘the scientific methods employed in other countries in criminal investigations’.68 After its establishment, the technical bureau trained police agents in criminal investigation and research, ‘including statistical examination of the incidence and causation of crime’.69 Because of the greater emphasis on preventative measures and improved training for

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 157 the police, Herbert Kitchener, who served as Consul-General from 1911 to 1914, sought to streamline the government apparatuses that generated crime statistics. Disparities in the compilation of statistics helped to motivate the Consul-General to reorganise the Public Security Department and reconcile the data that the Ministries of Interior and Justice produced. Kitchener briefly commented on the statistical discrepancies between these two ministries, but then proceeded to reference a table showing the distribution and types of serious offences committed from 1909 to 1911 (see Table 5.3). Upon examining the figures in his table, Kitchener complained that ‘[t]here has been an increase in nearly every heading of crime, particularly in murder and attempted murder, and in arson’.70 To further illustrate his point about the rising crime rate, Kitchener pointed to comparative figures for specific governorates in Egypt from 1910 to 1911 (see Table 5.4). The Consul-General then produced another statistical table of serious misdemeanours for this same period and argued that ‘[v]igorous steps, of which I have already given an account in treating of Public Security, are being taken by the administrative authorities to prevent crime, and the co-operation of justice will I hope strengthen the hands of the police’.71 Kitchener apparently felt some satisfaction with the ‘vigorous steps’ that the administrative ­authorities Table 5.3  Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911. (Source: PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1912)) Offences

1909

1910

1911

Murder Attempted murder Aggravated assault Robbery Attempted robbery Theft Destruction of crops (Article 50)   "   "   (Articles 320, 322) Cattle poisoning Arson Rape and indecent assault Forgery Corruption Miscellaneous Total

911 647 67 546 45 490 1 143 84 492 166 95 2 139 3,828

776 509 84 329 26 495 1 123 71 559 170 92 11 125 3,371

824 560 106 403  20 499  1 153  77 680 223 136  14 178 3,874

158  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Table 5.4  Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911. (Source: PP, Egypt.   (1912)) Mudirias or Governorates

1910

1911

Increase or Decrease

Cairo Giza Kaliubieh Alexandria Behera Gharbieh Sharkieh Menufieh Dakahlieh Damietta Canal El Arish Beni-Suef Fayum Minia Assiut Girga Kena Aswan Total

309 137 194 186 139 402 194 259 117 16 37 4 139 162 196 469 176 218 18 3,371

400 158 199 215 195 391 277 271 159 24 27 2 134 217 204 542 233 184 42 3,874

192 121 15 129 156 211 183 112 142 18 210 22 25 155 18 173 157 234 124 1503

undertook, because he confidently pronounced that the Ministries of Interior and Justice had coordinated their crime statistics ‘by amalgamating the best features in the two methods of computation’.72 Looking narrowly at the crime statistics found in the annual reports suggests how modes of governance reconstituted the way that state officials understood the rule of law in Egypt. A close reading of the criminal statistics in the reports reveals that the numbers fluctuated, depending on how British officials tabulated them for official publication. This mode of tabulating statistics involved definite numbers linked to British colonial understandings of Egyptian crimes and their ideal outcomes. Statistics, in other words, gave British civil servants in Cairo statutory responsibility for management tasks that only they could monitor. The areas of responsibility that concerned government officials the most were twofold: on the one hand, Egyptian criminals and their potential danger to the public, while on the other, the effectiveness of state agencies that monitored this population. Both problems were

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 159 amenable to numerical analysis. Statistical analysis was thus part of a wider commitment to a particular way of ruling Egypt that underpinned the state by holding out the prospect of a uniform, scientific and rational form of government. While Egyptian bureaucrats employed various forms of statistical reasoning before the occupation, British crime statistics encompassed broader categories than just hospitals, censuses or prison records. Colonial statistics served multiple political and economic constituencies that diverged from the bureaucratic concerns of an earlier generation of Khedivial functionaries who apprehended and punished criminal suspects. Beginning in the 1890s, British advisors focused on specific numerical representations of crime with the rhetorical intention of rationalising incommensurable practices. Policymakers expected measurable outputs, and the process of arriving at these outputs involved further measurements and their open discussion in government publications. Since British officials, in time, viewed the occupation as a long-term affair and had no desire to return Egypt to autonomous rule, it made sense to rely on statistical production for political and security matters. By the early twentieth century, crime statistics figured more prominently in the public reality of government rule and constituted an important yardstick for a regime that insisted on counting abstract categories of peoples and behaviours. Criminal statistics created a greater illusion of control in the long 1890s and influenced how the ruling elite managed Egypt. Crime statistics and the management of Egyptian crime likewise fit squarely into elite nationalist ideologies that favoured detailed audits. Enumerative practices after the occupation had not only become an integral part of the state, but were also viewed as a legitimate means of policing the Egyptian population. Middle-class nationalists in Cairo, for example, agreed with the colonial modes of knowledge that underpinned the British enumeration of crime. Graduates of Cairene law schools in the 1890s shared similar assumptions with the British about the importance of the rule of law in Egyptian society and had a stake in the preservation of European-inspired legal codes that regulated Egyptian life.73 When confronting British administrators for control of the police and the judiciary, Egyptian lawyers and judges championed the importance of state apparatuses and public order. The professional interests of lawyers, in particular, coincided with those of

160  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT l­andowners and commercial elements of the upper-middle class who sympathised with European conceptions of constitutionality, nationalism and the rule of law.74 Bourgeois activists and prominent intellectuals understood the efficiency of legal institutions as an important part of state-building, which for them represented the means to further Egypt’s civilising process and establish themselves as the dominant political force in the country.75 Despite their vocal opposition to the occupation, Egyptian lawyers and other elite thinkers embraced the British preoccupation with crime statistics and the production of statistical knowledge. Eminent figures such as Mustafa Kamil, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and Muhammad Husayn Haykal took British officials to task in the nationalist press about the restrictions that the occupation placed on the liberty of Egyptians and their right to self-rule, but local jurists shared the frustration of British administrators who complained about rural Egyptians and their failure to cooperate with the new criminal justice system.76 Nationalist opposition to British measures designed to regulate crime existed largely on the grounds that the colonial presence impeded the development of local Egyptian measures to stop crime.77 With the increased presence of urban nationalists in both government and the courts, however, Egyptian elites grew to accept the use of statistics as an effective instrument of the state. A number of middle-class activists began to conceive of crime as a rural phenomenon that lent itself to statistical analysis. Legal reformers such as Muhammad al-Qulali, who held a doctorate from the Sorbonne, and Muhammad al-Babli, the Director of the School of Police, compiled statistical studies of the rate, prevalence and types of crimes that Egyptian peasants committed. Their solution to peasant criminality entailed state-led, educational initiatives to develop the ‘rational’ capacities of rural folk.78 Notwithstanding the efforts of al-Qulali and al-Babli, I want to conclude by noting that the use of crime statistics by elite Egyptians or British colonial officials did not always provide clear-cut answers to questions of criminality. The state continued to rely on crime statistics, but the demands placed on policymakers often exceeded their ability to respond. Nor did British administrators necessarily transform practices on the ground in the 1890s. The idea of centralised information had a powerful rhetorical appeal, but there is sufficient evidence from the annual reports to suggest that civil servants

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 161 churned out data even when they realised that such information had limited explanatory value. Lord Cromer, for example, was ‘quite prepared to admit’ that crime statistics were ‘far from satisfactory’, but that: any conclusion based wholly on the statistics would, in some respects, be misleading. It is also necessary to consider what is the nature of the offences against the law which are most commonly committed, and also why they are committed.79

Gorst also maintained that ‘there can be no doubt that the improvement in public security is far greater than will ever be indicated by statistics’.80 Statesmen freely acknowledged the limitations in their statistics, but offered heavy-handed solutions to what they perceived as an ever-increasing crime problem. Kitchener, for instance, argued that provincial crime statistics showed ‘a continuous increase’ in ‘crimes of revenge and in offences against the person – murder, murderous assault, rape, &c’, as well as ‘a spirit of lawlessness’. He concluded that if ‘administrative repression’ and ‘a stern application of the existing laws’ did not bring down the crime rate, then it would ‘become necessary to have recourse to some form of punishment which will prove a more effective deterrent’.81 To be sure, British efforts to produce reliable criminal statistics involved gaps and inconsistencies. At the same time, colonial officials staked the authority of the occupation on scientific and quantifiable information. A failure to utilise crime statistics was unacceptable, even if, as Kitchener admitted, steady improvement in public security had ‘not kept pace with the rate of progress attained in almost every other matter affecting the welfare of the country’.82 Despite their flaws, the authorities viewed crime statistics as one of the most efficient tools of state power. Not only was statistical production essential to empirical modes of governance, it was also meaningful for delineating the relationship between success and failure. Crime statistics and their attendant principles of collection, classification and distribution accordingly helped to conceptualise the hopes and fears of colonial policymakers. Enumerating specific crimes became central to how the authorities regarded some beliefs as more credible than others in a world of political uncertainty. British administrators placed such a premium on criminal statistics that it became inconceivable of governing Egypt without them.

162  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Notes  1. See Roger Owen, ‘The Population Census of 1917 and its Relationship to Egypt’s Three 19th Century Statistical Regimes’, The Journal of Historical Sociology 9: 4 (1996), pp. 457–72; François Ireton, ‘Eléments pour une sociologie historique de la production statistique de l’Égypte’, Peuples Méditerranéens 54–5 (Janvier/Juin 1991), pp. 53–92; Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).  2. Nathan Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 59–82.  3. On the broader use of colonial statistics, see Talal Asad, ‘Ethnographic Representation, Statistics, and Modern Power’, in Brian Keith Axel (ed.), From the Margins (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 84; and Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 120.   4. On the scientific use of statistics during the late nineteenth century, see Stephen Stigler, The History of Statistics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).  5. Chris Williams, ‘Labeling and Tracking the Criminal in Mid-Nineteenth Century England and Wales: The Relationship between Governmental Structures and Creating Official Numbers’, in Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein Hammer (eds), The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 158.  6. Parliamentary Papers (henceforth, PP), Egypt. no. 1 (1905), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1904, p. 1. See also Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1906 (1907), pp. 1–2.   7. Nathan Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 36–7.   8. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1896), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 41.  9. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, pp. 92–3. 10. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 246–7. 11. Owen, ‘Population Census of 1917’, p. 460.

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 163 12. E. R. J. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 1820–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 333. 13. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, p. 337. 14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 118. 15. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1893), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 21. On the relationship between brigands and crime, see Nathan Brown, ‘Brigands and State Building’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32: 2 (1990), pp. 258–81. 16. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1891), Report on the Administration and Condition of Egypt and the Progress of Reforms, p. 22. 17. PP, Egypt. no. 3 (1893), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 22. 18. Harold Tollefson, Policing Islam (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 86, 93. 19. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1894), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 15. 20. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1896), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, pp. 41–2. 21. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 61–3. 22. Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 95–106, 206–7. 23. Michael J. Reimer, ‘Contradiction and Consciousness in ‘Ali Mubarak’s Description of al-Azhar’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29: 1 (1997), p. 53; Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), p. 48. 24. Reimer, ‘Contradiction and Consciousness’, pp. 61–2. 25. Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Past, pp. 82, 84–5. 26. Anthony Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth-Century Egypt (London and New York, NY: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 15; Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Past, p. 82. 27. Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 172, 174. 28. Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 22–4, 37–8. 29. Khaled Fahmy, ‘The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic Medicine and Criminal Law in Nineteenth-Century Egypt’, Islamic Law and Society 6: 2 (1999), pp. 237–47.

164  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 30. Ireton, ‘Eléments pour une sociologie historique’, pp. 76–7. 31. Khaled Fahmy, ‘The Police and the People’, Die Welt des Islams 39: 3 (1999), p. 375. 32. Fahmy, ‘The Anatomy of Justice’, pp. 267–71. 33. Rudolph Peters, ‘Controlled Suffering: Mortality and Living Conditions in 19th-Century Egyptian Prisons’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 36: 3 (2004), p. 401. 34. Peters, ‘Controlled Suffering’, pp. 389, 391. 35. On the identity of Ottoman prison populations in the early twentieth century, see Kent F. Schull, ‘Identity in the Ottoman Prison Surveys of 1912 and 1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41: 3 (2009), p. 366. 36. Mine Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and the Politics of Benevolence, 1800–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 113–14. 37. Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘Ottoman Sources of Kemalist Thought’, in Elisabeth Özdalga (ed.), Late Ottoman Society (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p. 24. 38. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1894), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, and the Progress of Reforms, p. 28. 39. Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 150. 40. Kenneth M. Cuno and Michael J. Reimer, ‘The Census Registers of NineteenthCentury Egypt: A New Source for Social Historians’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24: 2 (1997), p. 195. 41. Cuno and Reimer, ‘The Census Registers’, pp. 193–216. 42. Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises 1882–1922 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 16, 34. 43. Kamran Ali, Planning the Family in Egypt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 26. 44. El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory, pp. 150–1. 45. Ali, Planning the Family, pp. 25–6. 46. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 100–1. 47. Tollefson, Policing Islam, p. 184; Stigler, History of Statistics, pp. 2–3. 48. Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians, p. 24. 49. Tollefson, Policing Islam, p. 181. 50. Tollefson, Policing Islam, p. 100. 51. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 115–16, 134. 52. El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory, p. 34. 53. Lisa Pollard, Nurturing the Nation: The Family Politics of Modernizing, Colonizing,

c rim inal stati sti cs i n the long 1 8 9 0 s  | 165 and Liberating Egypt, 1805–1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 95. 54. Tollefson, Policing Islam, p. 85. 55. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1895), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, p. 27. 56. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1897), Report on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, p. 17. 57. Owen, ‘Population Census of 1917’, p. 469. 58. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1902), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1901, pp. 29–30. 59. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1901), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1900, p. 35. 60. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1903), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1902, p. 40. 61. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 96–7. 62. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1898), Reports on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt, p. 25. 63. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1902), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1901, p. 30. 64. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, pp. 105, 111. 65. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, p. 347. 66. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1904), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1903, p. 50. 67. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 145–6. 68. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1910), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1909, p. 26. 69. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1911), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1910, p. 35. 70. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1912), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911, p. 40. 71. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1912), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1911, p. 41. 72. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1913), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on

166  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1912, p. 34. 73. Donald M. Reid, Lawyers and Politics in the Arab World, 1880–1960 (Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1981), pp. 112–13. 74. Farhat J. Ziadeh, Lawyers, the Rule of Law, and Liberalism in Modern Egypt (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1968), pp. 148, 154. 75. Michael Ezekiel Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 115, 205. 76. Reid, Lawyers and Politics, pp. 100–1. 77. Tollefson, Policing Islam, pp. 142–3. 78. El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory, pp. 119–20. 79. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1905), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1904, p. 44. 80. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1910), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1909, p. 26. 81. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1913), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1912, p. 34. 82. PP, Egypt. no. 1 (1914), Reports by His Majesty’s Agent and Consul-General on the Finances, Administration, and Condition of Egypt and the Soudan in 1913, p. 43.

6 Anomalous Egypt? Rethinking Egyptian Sovereignty at the Western Periphery Matthew H. Ellis

I

n the winter of 1897, the celebrated English traveller and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt undertook a private journey across the Egyptian Western Desert to the oasis of Siwa. Shortly after his arrival, Blunt’s camp was besieged by a large force of around three hundred Siwans, commanded by Osman [‘Uthman] Habun, a powerful Siwan notable and the local agent of the Sanusiyya Brotherhood. Blunt’s entire camp was pillaged, and he narrowly made it out of Siwa alive.1 Upon his return to Cairo, Blunt appealed to British Consul-General Lord Cromer in hopes of mobilising the full force of the Egyptian Government to bring the Siwan attackers to justice. Cromer replied, however, that it would be impossible to prosecute the orchestrators of the attack, given that such legal action might ‘incur a possible quarrel with the Senussia brotherhood’.2 A few months later, Blunt sent another scathing letter to Cromer arguing that, as a British subject, he had a basic right to demand government intervention in the pursuit of justice, which Cromer had flouted. After all, Blunt chided Cromer: ‘Siwah is an Egyptian town, paying its taxes to the Government, and the Egyptian Government is responsible there as elsewhere for law and order. These may be difficult to enforce, but the responsibility remains.’3 Cromer’s unsympathetic response is extremely illuminating: 169

170  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT You started for this remote region, which is notoriously inhabited by a very turbulent and fanatical population, and over which the Egyptian Government has, for a long time past, exercised little more than a nominal control, without, so far as I am aware, warning any one in Egypt of your intentions (emphasis added).4

At the same time, Cromer suggested that Siwa was hardly the secure ‘Government town’ Blunt claimed it was: To any one who has been so long acquainted with this country as yourself, I need not insist on the point that, for the purposes of the argument, Siwa cannot, with any degree of reason, be assimilated to the rest of Egypt.5

This little-known correspondence over Blunt’s hostile treatment in Siwa offers a crucial window into the tentative nature of Egyptian authority and jurisdiction in the western domains of the state towards the end of the nineteenth century. What were the implications of Cromer’s assertion that the state had only ‘nominal’ control of the oasis as late as 1897 or that it could not be assimilated into Egypt? The Blunt affair also raises several important questions about how the Egyptian Government viewed the people who inhabited this remote territory: what was the political role of the ‘fanatical’6 Sanusiyya in Siwa? And why was Cromer so loathe to antagonise them? These questions take on added significance in light of the fact that what I call the ‘Egyptian West’ – the broad swath of territory comprising the Egyptian oases, the Western Desert and the stretch of Mediterranean coastline west of Alexandria – has been completely overlooked in the prevailing scholarship on Egyptian state-building and nation-making in the long-nineteenth century. Examining the nature of Egyptian state authority and administration in the West does more than just fill a scholarly lacuna, however. This chapter argues that we lose sight of crucial aspects of Egypt’s constitution as a modern nation-state, so long as our gaze remains fixed on Cairo and the Nile Valley, where – since the time of Muhammad ‘Ali – central state authority had been growing increasingly strong and coherent. Focusing instead on the particular set of social and political mechanisms that governed the state’s engagement with its western periphery enables us to gain an alternative perspective as to how Egypt as a modern territorial nation-state developed and functioned

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 171 prior to the First World War – precisely the period we tend to associate with the rise of a cohesive nationalist discourse of ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’.7 In order to highlight the persistence of the Egyptian nation-state – very much still a work-in-progress throughout the long 1890s – this chapter ­re-examines the notion of territorial sovereignty as it played out in Egypt’s western domains. To this end, it draws on two key recent works that ­re-conceptualise the meaning and practice of sovereignty in the modern history of empires and nations. If an older generation of anthropologists cautioned long ago against fixating on static notions of the ‘sovereign state’,8 Lauren Benton’s recent study on conceptions of legal sovereignty in European overseas empires has gone much further in pushing the bounds of the scholarly debate. One of the particular strengths of Benton’s work is the way she revives key theoretical writings on sovereignty from the early modern period. In Benton’s view, these works are indispensable as critical lenses for understanding what, for her, is the best-kept secret of empires around the globe: the fact that the territorial sovereignty they exercised was always fundamentally uneven, constrained by the specific challenges that disparate, often treacherous geographies and landscapes (as well as the social relations they encapsulated) posed to the unfolding of imperial expansion. This meant, in practice, that imperial administrators were forced to brook the persistence of what Benton alternately terms ‘anomalous legal spaces of empire’ or ‘enclave territories’: distinct geographical zones that remained outside the purview of firm imperial rule.9 Anthropologist Louisa Lombard has adapted Benton’s analysis to develop her own nuanced theory of sovereignty to fit the case of the Central African Republic in the twentieth century. Central to Lombard’s analysis is the older idea, first introduced by early modern political theorist Hugo Grotius, that sovereignty has never been some unitary or monolithic charge of the state – defined by its totalising dominion (in the sense of ‘ownership’) over space – but was always fundamentally fluid and multivalent, expressed only ever in relational terms. This insight in turn leads Lombard to embrace Jean Bodin’s notion of ‘marks of sovereignty’, which she defines alternately as ‘modes of authority exercised in relation to others’ and as ‘capabilities’ allowing different actors ‘to pursue a project of authority over people, space, or resources’.10 Lombard’s work is also extremely useful for the way it posits

172  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Benton’s t­erritorial enclaves as sites where we can observe the interplay between ‘centralising’ and ‘non-centralising’ marks of sovereignty.11 Following Lombard’s lead, I suggest that the Egyptian West can, in fact, be viewed as a crucible of competing or overlapping ‘sovereign capabilities’ harnessed by different types of actors across the region’s different settings. In this way, I argue, the two key centralising projects undertaken by the state in the long 1890s that are explored in this chapter – first, the Egyptian Government’s attempt to integrate the Western oases into its reformed legal system; and second, its effort to put its administration of Siwa on firmer footing – could only ever be articulated by adapting to, and embracing, local and regional marks of sovereignty that often worked at cross-purposes. Tracking the interplay between these overlapping centralising and non-centralising marks of sovereignty thus enables us to cultivate a deeper understanding of the inner workings of how ‘political power over space, goods, and people’12 was projected into Egypt’s western periphery. In both of the examples documented in this chapter, the long 1890s proved decisive in their unfolding. If the Egyptian Government had begun to take tentative steps towards standardising or re-tooling its judicial system and state administration beginning in the 1ate 1870s, it was really only in the 1890s that it ramped up its efforts to expand these projects into the more remote provinces of the emergent nation-state. As such, the 1890s marks the critical period in which we can observe what the Egyptian nation-state as a ‘work-in-progress’ actually meant in practice: when it came to the western domains, state expansion and centralisation at this stage necessarily entailed a fundamental process of negotiation with local norms and practices, as well as with local power brokers, who accommodated the state largely on their own terms. The Persistence of Judicial Anomaly This section focuses on the geographical unevenness intrinsic to the administration of the Egyptian judiciary as a means to speak more broadly about the nature of Egyptian sovereignty in the context of state reform and c­ entralisation during the long 1890s. Particular attention will be paid to the persistence of local, traditional legal practices and judicial norms in the Western Desert and oases, in order to challenge the accepted wisdom regarding the unity

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 173 of the Egyptian state and the standardisation of its governing practices and institutions in this period. Drawing on new documentary evidence from the Egyptian archives, as well as several published memoirs and legal treatises and manuals, I argue that the difficulties that the Egyptian Government encountered in its attempt to standardise its judicial institutions at this time illuminates the more fluid, negotiated process through which central state sovereignty was introduced into Egypt’s marginal spaces. Beginning in the 1870s, the Egyptian Government sought to reorganise the country’s legal system, standardising judicial institutions and practices across the country and thereby redefining the scope and nature of the state’s jurisdiction. The consequent emergence of a new, modern Egyptian judiciary in this period, marked by the establishment of two new institutions – the Mixed Tribunals and Native Courts – has been given ample treatment in the historiography of Egyptian law.13 Much less well-known, however, is the complex history behind the fraught application of these reforms to the legal institutions prevalent in the marginal territories of the state, including the desert and oases of the Egyptian West. Much to its chagrin, the Egyptian Government discovered that it lacked the practical means to implement these judicial reforms in the country’s more remote provinces in any meaningful way, in no small part due to the steady resistance posed by the local Bedouin and oasis-dwelling populations. The upshot of this abortive attempt by the government to streamline its legal system and shore up the legal grounds for its sovereignty throughout the country was the persistence – well into the twentieth century, in fact – of an uneven Egyptian judicial regime that allowed for a significant degree of local autonomy and regional variation in territories outside Egypt’s main population centres. In June 1883, as part of an ‘administrative effort to unify and simplify jurisdiction’,14 the Egyptian Government established the Native Courts. Intended in part to ‘mimic’ the Mixed Tribunals that had been in operation since 1876, these courts were governed by a new, comprehensive legal code; after 1883, they became the destination for all criminal, civil and commercial cases not involving any non-Egyptian litigants or property.15 The initial law that established the Native Courts, passed on 14 June 1883, also outlined the jurisdiction of each court. On 30 December of the same year, the Egyptian Government passed another decree that went even further in defining the

174  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT authority of the Native Courts, providing guidelines for their territorial scope and even extending their jurisdictional reach in certain cases. It is by virtue of these two decrees that the traditional judicial order in Egypt’s Western oases was fundamentally altered. In Siwa, for example, justice had been administered prior to the 1883 reforms through a local court [majlis Siwa], presided over by a quorum of notable shaykhs, which the government had officially recognised in its role of ‘settling local affairs and Bedouin issues’ in February 1871.16 Article Five of the December law, however, essentially sought to abrogate the authority of the local majlis by placing the oasis (along with the entire governorate [mudiriyya] of Buhayra) under the firm legal jurisdiction of the Alexandria Native Court of First Instance.17 The Egyptian Government’s attempt to incorporate Siwa into a centralised Egyptian judicial framework would prove extremely short-lived. Within a year of enacting the legislation pertaining to the reorganisation of the Native Courts, the Egyptian Government passed a special law that exempted Siwa from the provisions of the December law and thereby removed it from the jurisdiction of the Alexandria Native Court. Instead, jurisdiction in all legal cases in Siwa once again passed to the local court, just as had been established in 1871.18 A mere nine months after it had passed new legislation that effectively put an end to Siwa’s judicial autonomy, then, the Egyptian Government reneged on its decision and restored the status quo. If this remarkable about-face seems mysterious, we can fortunately glimpse the reasoning behind it through illuminating documents on Siwan judicial affairs that have survived in the Egyptian National Archives. It is worth pausing at length over one of these – a letter written by the mudir [provincial governor] of Buhayra to an Interior Ministry official in June 1884 – which makes abundantly clear some of the immediate pitfalls of applying the jurisdictional law to Siwa. At the same time, the letter provides remarkable insight into the attitudes of key Egyptian state officials towards the people who inhabited the far-western reaches of the country. The mudir opens the letter by confirming that Siwa is, in fact, considered ‘among the dependent territories of the Province’ [min dimna mulhaqat bilad al-mudiriyya], but he then immediately qualifies this statement by launching into a discourse of difference, in order to describe the basic situation of the oasis:

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 175 The town is far from Egypt (al-diyar al-misriyya) by a distance of approximately 20 days traveling by camel . . . It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions (istilahat), and tastes (masharib) that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure Arabs (‘urban sirfan).19

It is for these reasons, he suggests, that a separate court had been officially established in Siwa in 1871 to begin with.20 The mudir invokes Siwa’s fundamental alterity – its distance from Egypt and the otherness of its people – in order to buttress his argument to the Interior Ministry that the Egyptian Government should reconsider its decision to apply the judicial reforms of 1883 to Siwa. Again, given the Siwans’ ‘distance from civilization, their all being of Bedouin descent, and [the fact that] their morals and customs are so completely different’, he recommends that the Siwans should still be permitted to abide by their own (legal) customs, in line with the above-mentioned decree of 1871, for this would be the best way to promote their continued ‘stability, security, and obedience’.21 The mudir also cites a more practical reason for reneging on the December jurisdictional law – namely, the fact that the extreme distance between Siwa and Alexandria rendered it impossible to ensure that Siwan litigants would show up in court in the latter locale.22 It is impossible, given the dearth of extant documentary evidence on this issue, to prove a direct link between the mudir’s letter and the Egyptian Government’s final decision to overturn the application of the jurisdictional law to Siwa with a new Khedivial decree in September 1884. Yet this in no way diminishes the more significant point that both of the basic arguments the mudir adduced to make his case to the Interior Ministry – the excessive distance of the oasis (from the Alexandria Native Court, as well as from ‘Egypt’ writ large), as well as the basic difference (meaning, apparently, nonEgyptianness) of its inhabitants23 – would consistently crop up in debates and correspondence concerning not just the anomalous judicial status of Siwa, but more generally the limits of Egyptian legal jurisdiction outside the Nile Valley for decades to come. Indeed, a similar pattern of jurisdictional wrangling between the state and local authorities in response to the 1883 Native Court laws emerged in

176  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the Western oases of Dakhla, Kharga and Bahariyya. The documentary evidence shedding light on this process is, once again, unfortunately somewhat spotty; but by reading the texts of key legislation against a narrative of law and justice in Kharga provided in the memoirs of Ahmad Shafiq Pasha – a lifelong politician and state official24 who, after the First World War, became the Director-General of the Frontier Districts Administration – we can piece together at least its basic contours.25 According to Shafiq, the Romans had established a precedent for legal autonomy in Kharga that would be consistently renewed by successive ruling regimes throughout Egypt’s Islamic era. Over the centuries, the implementation of justice in Kharga was entrusted to local ‘men who knew the customs and traditional laws [‘urf ] of the people’.26 Even Muhammad ‘Ali, bent on creating a robust central state, ostensibly acknowledged the importance of preserving local legal autonomy in Kharga. Shafiq presents a decree that Muhammad ‘Ali issued, dealing with the salaries of various local judges, as an example of how he ‘affirmed for the people of Kharga all of the rights they had gained . . . which had become tantamount to custom for them’.27 To Shafiq’s mind, at least, this decree demonstrated ‘the extent to which he [Muhammad ‘Ali] respected their customs and ‘urf ’, as well as his ‘utmost tolerance, and the vastness of his heart’.28 Similar to what we saw in the case of Siwa, the Native Court laws of 1883 disrupted Kharga’s long-standing de facto judicial autonomy.29 As a function of the particular legal institutions and customs that the Egyptian Government encountered in Kharga, however, its attempt to incorporate the oasis into Egypt’s new judicial regime played out somewhat differently than it did in Siwa and over a longer time-frame. First, the new redistricting legislation in 1883 stripped Kharga’s shari‘a representative of most of his previously wide-ranging powers. At the same time, the law mandated that shari‘a agents and judges would, from that point forward, be sent out to Kharga from the Nile Valley, rather than being appointed from among the residents of Kharga itself. The law also deprived the local district chief [mu‘awin al-tahsil] (the successor to the administrative position of kashif, or district inspector, that the Mamluks had established) of all his judicial authority, rendering him powerless to do much more than edit and sign (along with the qadi, ‘umda and shaykhs of the oasis) ‘memoranda’ [mazabit] and send them on

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 177 to Kharga’s new locus of power in the Nile Valley (first Girga, then Asyut).30 Shafiq writes that ‘it is astonishing that this mu‘awin was deprived even of the power to investigate crimes’ – a function of his exclusion from the ranks of the ‘judicial officers’ [al-dabtiyya al-qada’iyya] who had been authorised in 1883 to perform this function. The result of all these changes, according to Shafiq, was the ‘deterioration of security, disruption of work, and loss of rights’ on the part of all litigants in court, a circumstance which ‘forced the Government to remedy the situation’ by passing new legislation.31 Shafiq points directly to a significant new decree passed in February 189032 that initiated a gradual process of rolling back the sweeping judicial reforms of 1883. Other evidence suggests that this process actually began in 1888, with two short consecutive laws that granted the mu‘awins in both Dakhla and Kharga – as well as the mulahidh [superintendent] of Bahariyya – the privileges [ikhtisasat] accorded to district supervisors [nudhar al-aqsam] ‘in criminal and jurisdictional matters’ [al-mawad al-jina’iyya wa al-mawad al-huquqiyya].33 The 1890 law that Shafiq cites went even further along these lines, stipulating that these same local oasis officials (the mulahidh of Bahariyya; the mu‘awins of Dakhla and Kharga) were now to be counted as members of the same corps of ‘judicial officers’ from which the 1883 law had excluded them. Furthermore, the law provided these officials with the right to adjudicate minor infraction cases [mukhalafat] and the privilege of final arbitration [al-hukm intiha’iyyan] in civil cases whose value did not exceed 1,500 qurush.34 The government tweaked its oasis policy further by passing yet another law a year later, granting these same local officials in all three oases the right to final arbitration in infraction cases; Shafiq interprets this as an indication of the Egyptian Government’s realisation that the 1890 law ‘had been insufficient’.35 The most significant change, however, came in June 1900, when the government finally overturned the application of the Native Court redistricting law to Kharga, Dakhla and Bahariyya and officially sanctioned the restoration of local tribunals in each locale. These local oasis courts would once again be presided over by a local governing official – the mu‘awin in the case of Kharga, the ma’mur for the other two oases – as well as two local notables in each place, though these figures all had to be appointed by the Ministry of Justice and approved by the Ministry of the Interior. The law – which would

178  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT lead legal scholar Henri Lamba to designate these three oases, alongside Siwa, as zones of ‘special jurisdiction’ in a compilation of Egyptian public and administrative law that he published in 190936 – accorded the local oasis courts with the authority of final judgment in all infraction cases, as well as jurisdiction in all punishable misdemeanour cases [qadaya junah al-mu‘aqab ‘alayha] and commercial and civil cases.37 If this analysis of the stepwise trajectory of judicial reform in these three Western oases illuminates the persistence of legal anomaly at the western margins of the Egyptian state, Shafiq’s account of why the government felt change was needed in the case of Kharga is particularly significant. Again, the rationale hinges on the notion of distance – in this case, the distance between Kharga and its corresponding administrative capital of Asyut – which created practical obstacles to the proper administration of justice in the oasis. Even after the government passed its first few amendments to the 1883 law, Shafiq writes, it still realised that the prevailing system ‘did not serve the well-being of the people, since they still groaned from the harm done by the [initial] legislation as well as the distance of the locale’ to which they needed to travel in order to settle their cases. The law re-establishing the local court, however, ‘relieved the people from the burden of long travel’, which had previously ‘denied them from obtaining their legal rights’.38 Although Shafiq does not explicitly provide a similar narrative for Bahariya and Dakhla, which we have seen were typically grouped together with Kharga by the government in matters concerning legal reform, he adds (further down) that his analysis of ‘the stages through which legislation passed in Kharga Oasis’ can similarly ‘be applied to the rest of the oases in the Egyptian Kingdom’.39 Thus far, this section has attempted to demonstrate the problems that the Egyptian Government encountered in its drive to extend the standardising judicial reforms of 1883 into territory outside the Nile Valley – in this case, in four different Western Desert oases. I have argued that the two primary tropes that pervaded debates and correspondence about jurisdiction in the oases throughout the long 1890s were the impractical distance of these locales from the physical and cultural centre of the burgeoning nation-state, as well as the fundamental difference of the people who inhabited them from Egyptians. Although the pejorative overtones of this language of alterity cannot be denied, what seems most important about its invocation in this particular context is the

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 179 way it presented the Egyptian Government with a conceptual way out of the bind it now found itself in. Confronted with the basic constraints that the realities of Egyptian geography imposed on its centralising sovereign capabilities, Egyptian lawmakers – like so many of the administrators that Benton describes finding their way through the complex legal environments of various imperial enclaves – fell back on this posture as a makeshift solution. The processes of centralisation and decentralisation thus developed hand-in-hand in these cases: in order for the central government to exercise greater sovereignty in these oasis domains – to extend the scope of its legal jurisdiction and inscribe these oases in its newly standardised law books – it was necessary to allow them to continue to be different by preserving their local judicial practices and institutions. In the same vein, these very same tropes of distance and difference could, at times, become useful to local non-state actors living in the West, who appropriated them in order to register their own claims to the Egyptian state. In 1887, for instance, a local notable from the Maryut region (the desert territory just beyond the western, settled edge of Alexandria and Buhayra) named Mansour [Mansur] Isma‘il sent petitions to four different branches of the Egyptian bureaucracy, renouncing all responsibility for administering affairs in Maryut and Abu Khadiga, due to the fact that ‘these places are far from my village, I do not know them well, and they are inhabited by Bedouins’.40 In this case, Isma‘il felt that basing a claim on the distance of the lands and alterity of people beyond the edge of the cultivation would allow him to wipe his hands clean of unwanted administrative duties. Another particularly instructive case from Maryut, though a somewhat later one, returns us to the specific theme of judicial anomaly. In 1910, upon receiving the news that the Egyptian Government was about to force the local qadi of the shari‘a court of Maryut named Shaykh Ahmad Muhammad al-Najari into retirement, ‘the Umdas, Sheikhs, notables, and people’ of Dakhila (a village in Maryut) sent a petition to the Egyptian Council of Ministers imploring them to reverse their decision. In doing so, they adopted the same discourse of alterity that we saw the mudir of Buhayra use to discuss the local population of Siwa: Maryut is one of the districts that is far from civilisation (al-‘umran), containing people possessed of different morals and character (al-tiba‘), who

180  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT require someone who will provide them with the utmost refinement (altahdhib), such as His Honour, who knew our morals and understood our character.

And given the way he was able to treat ‘each tribe, regardless of its disposition (mashrab) with the utmost care, zeal, trustworthiness, piety, and supreme virtue’, as well as the fact that he ‘adhered to religious orthodoxy in all his rulings’, the petitioners requested ‘with one voice’ that the Council of Ministers accept their plea and allow him to remain in his post.41 Although we cannot know for certain that the petitioners were in fact motivated by a desire to preserve some semblance of legal autonomy for their tribes by preventing the appointment of a new qadi, this document nonetheless provides a clear example of how Bedouins could mobilise the discourse of difference (in this case, even attesting to their need for ‘refinement’) to serve their own particular interests. It is almost as if the language of otherness had become standard currency in the negotiations over sovereignty that inevitably arose between state and local society in the variegated spaces of Egypt’s emergent political community in this period. The Sanusis’ Siwa: Rethinking the Incorporation of an Egyptian Oasis This section continues to investigate the nature of Egyptian sovereignty by focusing on the key role that notable local non-state actors played in mediating the Egyptian Government’s attempt to incorporate Siwa in the 1890s. Foremost among these mediating agents in Siwa were local leaders of the Sanusiyya Brotherhood, whose history in the area will be briefly outlined below. Having first established a presence in the vast Libyan Desert in the mid-1800s, the Sanusiyya managed over a mere half-century to become the  predominant local power brokers in the region, counting among their ranks the lion’s share of the Bedouin tribesmen and oasis dwellers inhabiting both sides of the putative Libyan/Egyptian border. And yet, despite this extensive reach of the Sanusiyya beyond Libya, the Egyptian dimension of the movement has been completely overlooked in most scholarship,42 perhaps because the Sanusiyya practised a cross-border authority that challenged the very concept of national territoriality in Egypt and Libya alike. Close examination of the local political dynamics over a fairly narrow

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 181 period in one particular locale in the Egyptian West – the Oasis of Siwa – allows us to observe how Egyptian sovereignty in the region functioned in practice. To this end, I investigate the ways in which the Sanusiyya adapted to the new challenges of Egyptian state intervention. Ultimately, I argue against conventional models of straightforward local resistance to central state encroachment in the remote provinces, suggesting instead that the Egyptian state owed whatever gains it made in Siwa to the willing accommodation of the Sanusiyya and other local notables, who actually stood to gain a great deal by working to some extent with the Egyptian Government and condoning its nominal sovereignty. Siwan history in the nineteenth century – as best as can be gleaned from the very spotty extant historical literature on the oasis – is dominated by two overarching narratives. First is the ongoing conflict between Siwa’s two rival factions, known as ‘Easterners’ and ‘Westerners’ [‘sharqiyyin’ and ‘gharbiyyin’]. Although the origins of this feud cannot be pinned down with any certainty, one Easterner shaykh named Omar Musellem [‘Umar Musallam] – upon whose oral history of the oasis various European writers purported to base their accounts – claimed that it went back to a dispute over the construction of a narrow thoroughfare in the inner town of Siwa around 1807.43 Regardless of how the quarrel first arose, by all accounts it continued to dominate Siwan local politics throughout the nineteenth century, mapping onto the geography of the oasis so that the two sides largely lived apart.44 According to a count of Siwa’s male population undertaken in 1888, there were 415 Westerners (all of whom adhered to the Sanusiyya) and 755 Easterners (of whom 330 were Sanusi).45 The accuracy of this tabulation – or the degree with which it accords with the official number of 5,200 total Siwans that was recorded in the Egyptian census of 189746 – is impossible to corroborate. The second prevailing narrative that emerges from the limited historiography on Siwa in the nineteenth century is the Siwans’ dogged resistance to the atavistic efforts of the Egyptian state to incorporate it and exact an annual tribute, and the state’s ultimate triumph around 1900. There is undoubtedly much truth to this story, which began in 1820 when Muhammad ‘Ali sent somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 troops under the command of Hussein Bey Shamasherghy to conquer Siwa and bring its long centuries of autonomy

182  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT to an end by imposing a steep annual tax and appointing an ‘umda for the oasis.47 The Siwans almost immediately stopped paying their taxes, however, leading to another punitive campaign seven years later – a familiar cycle that would be oft repeated.48 Indeed, the moments when the government did succeed in making a show of its strength were almost always inevitably followed by long periods of absence or absent-mindedness throughout most of the century.49 This typical story of Siwan resistance to its inevitable incorporation misses some key themes, however. First, it overlooks the manner in which local Siwan notables actively sought to exploit this uncertain political situation in the oasis to shore up their personal authority and serve their own communal interests. For example, when the first Siwan ‘umda was murdered in 1838, his son Yusuf Balli petitioned the Egyptian Government to appoint him as his successor. A similar episode occurred around 1883, when various Siwan notables took advantage of the authority vacuum in the oasis to convince the Egyptian Government to recall a ma’mur who was hostile to the Sanusiyya.50 Second, the typical account of Siwa’s ultimate submission to central state authority around 1900 completely understates the extent to which Siwa’s incorporation was necessarily mediated by key local, non-state actors – namely, the Sanusiyya, who paradoxically operated from their headquarters outside Egyptian sovereignty in Jaghbub – and ignores the ways in which the Egyptian officials continued to be at the mercy of local notables for the day-to-day maintenance of law and order in the oasis. Before turning to a narrative of the seminal events surrounding Siwa’s putative incorporation in the 1890s, however, it is first necessary to give some brief background information on the Sanusiyya’s rise to ascendancy in the Western Desert. Commanding the Libyan Desert: The Rise and Spread of the Sanusiyya The Sanusi Brotherhood was founded by Muhammad bin ‘Ali al-Sanusi, an Algerian-born religious scholar who had travelled widely across the Arab world, studying the Islamic sciences under prominent teachers in Fez, Cairo and Mecca. If al-Sanusi developed his Sufi leanings from the mystical Islamic tradition of his home milieu in North Africa, it was in Mecca that he came under the spell of the salafi Islamic revival movement, particularly the teachings of Sayyid Ahmad bin Idris (‘al-Fasi’), head of a relatively new branch of

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 183 the Shadhili Order. Upon the latter’s death, al-Sanusi established his own order in 1837 and managed to galvanise a large number of Bedouins in the Hijaz to become his first followers. Around 1840, for reasons that are not entirely clear,51 al-Sanusi headed back west, across Egypt to Siwa, where he spent several months and began to attract a sizeable following.52 He ultimately settled in the region of northeastern Libya, historically known as Cyrenaica, under Ottoman rule at the time, after being invited by the notables of several different tribes in the region to settle amongst them. In 1843, al-Sanusi and his followers completed the construction of the Brotherhood’s first ‘lodge’ [zawiya] on the central Cyrenaican plateau in the Jebel al-Akhdar region, which became known as the ‘White Lodge’ [al-zawiya al-bayda’]. A decade later, al-Sanusi set up a headquarters for the Brotherhood, as well as a university complex, in the remote, uninhabited oasis of Jaghbub, approximately 160 kilometres from the Mediterranean coast and only about 100 kilometres west of Siwa. Jaghbub would remain the spiritual and de facto administrative centre of the Order for over four decades. In the decade-and-a-half between the founding of the White Lodge and the death of Muhammad bin ‘Ali al-Sanusi at Jaghbub in 1859, the Brotherhood had already expanded by leaps and bounds. According to one scholar, about sixty lodges were built during the lifetime of the founder, of which twenty-five were in Cyrenaica proper and nine were within Egyptian territory.53 Yet under al-Sanusi’s successor – his son, Sayyid al-Mahdi al-Sanusi – the Brotherhood continued to expand at breakneck speed. According to renowned Sanusi ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard, by the time Sayyid al-Mahdi died in 1902, the Sanusi Order had grown to encompass a­ pproximately 150 zawiyas across North Africa and in the Hijaz, of which thirty-one were on Egyptian soil54 (with seventeen of those alone belonging to tribal sections of the Awlad ‘Ali).55 This latter number is especially notable, given how often the Egyptian/ Sanusi connection has been ignored in much scholarship.56 French explorer and travel writer Henri Duveyrier estimated that the Sanusi Order comprised some three million followers;57 the Egyptian notable and explorer Ahmed Hassanein quoted a similar figure of between one-and-a-half and three million people who owed spiritual allegiance to the Sanusi leader during Sayyid al-Mahdi’s era.58 Such lofty figures are, of course, impossible to verify with any degree of accuracy. But the scope of Sanusi authority did not fail to impress at

184  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT least some British authorities: in one intelligence report from 1902, for example, the author states that: ‘Practically the whole of the oases and the nomad population between Egypt and the Sudan on the east and the Tuareg country on the west are Senussites to a man.’59 And in the eyes of Arthur Silva White, a British traveller who visited Siwa in the 1890s: ‘The Senussi [sic] rule the Sahara, and no power can touch them there.’60 The Sanusi Brotherhood operated as a sort of federal system: even as each zawiya lived off its own revenues and arbitrated local disputes, typically without recourse to the central authority in Jaghbub, each zawiya shaykh was appointed by, and responsible to, the central Sanusi leader in Jaghbub; in fact, all of the Sanusi shaykhs from around the region normally congregated once a year in Jaghbub to convene a ‘Council of the Order’, where they were required to give detailed reports on their respective lodges.61 The Sanusi zawiyas – which functioned not only as sacred prayer spaces, but also as ‘schools, caravanserais, commercial centres, social centres, forts, courts of law, banks, store-houses, poor houses . . . and burial grounds’62 – were the basic building blocks of the Sanusi system. In turn, the elaborate patchwork of Sanusi zawiyas that proliferated across the Eastern Sahara in the second half of the nineteenth century ultimately came, I argue, to constitute the defining ‘spatial logic’ of the Egyptian/Libyan borderland.63 We can see this spatial logic that the Sanusiyya crystallised at work by briefly examining the cross-border practice of politics and the implementation of justice in the oasis of Siwa in the 1890s. The Sanusiyya and the Accommodation of the Egyptian State in Siwa Eighteen-ninety-six was a pivotal year in Siwan history. In February, communal tensions between the Easterners and Westerners erupted into a ‘prolonged and bloody struggle’ that persisted throughout the year.64 Eighteen-ninety-six also marked the third consecutive year in which the Siwans had neglected to pay their taxes to the state.65 In light of the lingering state of disorder in the oasis – and perhaps part-and-parcel of the general restructuring of the Interior Ministry that had been underway since the previous year – the Egyptian Government sent the Governor of Buhayra, Mustafa Maher [Mahir] Bey (accompanied by a force of fifty soldiers) to Siwa in September to investigate the roots of these disturbances, restore order and resume the collection of taxes.

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 185 The work of the Maher Commission began rather inauspiciously. According to an important government report on Siwan affairs published in 1900 after a Dakhliyya official’s visit to the oasis, ‘Mustafa Bey was received with considerable distrust.’66 Yet on or around 3 October, the shaykhs and notables of Siwa – after the return of several Sanusi elders, who had been in Jaghbub upon Maher’s arrival – approached the Bey and promised to pay a portion of their back-taxes within a week.67 The Sanusi leadership in Jaghbub also wrote letters to their brethren in Siwa urging them to obey the government’s orders.68 At the same time, Maher won approval for a new criminal law for the oasis, upon reading it aloud to an assembly of shaykhs.69 Maher’s assertion of state authority at this particular moment was met with fierce opposition. Refusing to go along with Maher’s efforts to collect taxes, a notable named Hassuna Mansour [Mansur] sequestered himself, along with an armed force of slaves and supporters, in his large fortress-like house on the outskirts of town. He countered all attempts at arrest with armed resistance, and some Siwans ordered to apprehend him ended up joining his ranks. By all accounts, ‘[t]he whole town was in an uproar’.70 Maher, finding himself completely powerless to pacify the unruly Mansour and thus restore order, submitted to the entreaties of both Eastern and Western shaykhs to summon the Sanusi brethren once again from Jaghbub. Within ten days, a relative of Sayyid al-Mahdi al-Sanusi arrived in Siwa, and Mansour ‘at once surrendered to him’.71 Maher would later refer to this moment as ‘a striking instance of the implicit trust and absolute obedience rendered to the authority of the Senoussi [sic]’.72 The acute need of the Egyptian authorities to turn to the Sanusiyya for basic assistance in governing Siwa was actually nothing new. The special role of Sanusi authority there emerges clearly from two reports written in the early 1890s by a former Qadi of Siwa named Muhammad Makki. Indeed, Makki’s testimony evokes a world in which the Sanusiyya – poised comfortably between the Egyptian state authorities, on one hand, and the Ottomans, on the other – plays the role of chief local power broker for the Egyptian Government. For example, he writes: When a Government official goes to Siwa, he is supposed to go to Jaghbub and make a visit to the Senussi, especially if he were the Qadi, so as to be

186  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT able to live peacefully and respectably with the Senussis of Siwa. Ahmad Abdallah, the late Mamur of Siwa, could not live peacefully with the Senussis there as he refused to make a visit to the Senussi; and they repeatedly accused him to the Beheira Mudiriyeh for misgovernment until they succeeded in changing him.73

In the decade leading up to the First World War, at least, the Egyptian Government would never be able to transcend both its basic reliance on, and its fear of, Sanusi authority. The new tax law that the Maher Commission introduced in Siwa in April 1897 is a clear case in point. As far back as 1873, Shaykh al-Sanusi had been given an exemption from paying taxes on his abundant landholdings in Siwa.74 Yet even later on – at the crucial moment at which the government attempted to streamline all the oasis’ legal, financial and political affairs and bring the long era of Siwan recalcitrance to an end – the Egyptian officials ended up inscribing in law their continued reliance on the Sanusiyya to manage the basic issue of tax collection. The memoirs of Arthur Silva White – a British adventurer and travel author who visited Siwa in 1898 – also drive home the degree to which Egyptian sovereignty over the oasis hinged on Sanusi authority. For example, he was particularly nonplussed by the fact that the Egyptian ma’mur, Mahmud ‘Azmi, was beholden to the Sanusiyya when it came to his freedom of movement: ‘Here are you, the Mamur of Siwa, with 25 policemen; and you cannot go for more than a day’s excursion without permission of the Senussi.’75 Additionally, Silva White makes it clear that the local Sanusi agent in Siwa, Osman Habun, was really in charge: he was ‘the imperium in imperio of Siwa . . . the autocrat who gave me permission to go everywhere, without let or hindrance’. As such, he enjoyed ‘absolute and uncontrolled authority’.76 The author of a key Interior Ministry report on Siwa published in 1900 underscores how tenuous Egyptian authority remained in the oasis, even despite the improvements in the spheres of law, public order and taxation since the arrival of the Maher Commission. He writes, for example: ‘The power of the Government is very much curtailed by the fact that, although a law court, a Mehkemeh Shari’a, a dispensary, &c., exist, for the most part the people refuse to have anything to do with them.’77 Indeed, the Egyptian

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 187 ma’mur in Siwa remained beholden to the local notability to manage even the most basic administrative and legal duties – something inscribed in a set of laws regarding jurisdiction in the oasis enacted in 1897. One article, for example, dictates that Siwan shaykhs are to be held responsible not only for locating and arresting crime suspects, but also for collecting evidence, performing preliminary investigations and detaining perpetrators. Another legal document gives the Siwan shaykhs the power to punish criminals and deal with ‘all the tasks pertaining to public security’.78 Conclusion This chapter has explored the utility of applying new scholarship on the historical practice of territorial sovereignty to the case of the Egyptian West in the long 1890s. Through an examination of two main themes – the persistence of local, traditional judicial institutions in Egypt’s Western oases; and the basic reliance of Egyptian state administration in Siwa on the willing accommodation of the Sanusiyya at the time of the Maher Commission – I argued that the Egyptian West emerged throughout the long 1890s as a particular enclave of territorial and legal anomaly within the broader, emergent, modern nation-state of Egypt. In both examples, I have sought to demonstrate how these centralising projects on the part of the Egyptian state in the West depended fundamentally on a process of negotiation with the traditional institutions and practices of local society in these regions. In this way, the language of difference and distance frequently became a tool that state and non-state actors alike could wield to pursue their interests in a fluid political field where different centralising and non-centralising marks of sovereignty increasingly overlapped and vied for primacy. Contrary to long-standing myths concerning the continuity of Egypt as a political community since time immemorial, this chapter has sought to show how state and nation did not come fully formed to Egypt’s western domains, but rather emerged only gradually as the result of an ongoing process of contestation and negotiation between a wide array of state and non-state actors. Centralisation was not a foregone conclusion in the late-nineteenth century – the natural endpoint of a steady process of state formation launched by Muhammad ‘Ali. Rather, in the Egyptian West, at least, the processes of centralisation and decentralisation actually went hand-in-hand. The m ­ echanisms

188  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of state-making in the West that I have highlighted in this chapter serve to illuminate what Egypt as a work-in-progress continued to mean in practice in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In this way, the long 1890s represent perhaps one of the last moments when the basic underlying diversity and geographic variability of Egypt had not yet become a measure of imperfection or a source of national embarrassment, even if these posed a continuing challenge to a ‘national’ government. Notes   1. Blunt to Cromer, 3 March 1898. The British National Archives (TNA): Foreign Office (FO) 78/4956. Blunt also dealt with this episode in his entries on Siwa in his now-published diaries – a source that also underscores the degree to which the personal antipathy between the two men likely coloured their exchange in this case. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914 (New York, NY: Knopf, 1923), pp. 241–76.   2. TNA, FO 78/4956, Blunt to Cromer, 3 March 1898.   3. TNA, FO 78/4956, Blunt to Cromer, 3 March 1898.   4. TNA, FO 78/4956, Cromer to Blunt, 7 March 1898 (emphasis added).   5. TNA, FO 78/4956, Cromer to Blunt, 7 March 1898.   6. Cromer was by no means the first colonial official to use the pejorative term ‘fanatical’ to refer to the Sanusiyya. Indeed, this had become a recurrent meme in European discourse ever since the very first French studies had been published about the Order, beginning with Henri Duveyrier’s La Confrérie Musulmane de Sidi Mohammed Ben ‘Ali Es-Senousi et son domaine géographique (Paris: Société de Géographie, 1886). For an analysis of the chain of colonial thought that ultimately produced the stable ‘fanatic’ label, see Michel Le Gall, ‘The Ottoman Government and the Sanusiyya: A Reappraisal’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 21: 1 (1989), pp. 91–3.  7. Revisiting the complex articulation of the Egyptian nation-state along these lines is particularly significant for the historiography of the modern Middle East, given the fact that scholars almost unfailingly single out Egypt – unlike all the other nation-states that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire – for having maintained its ‘ancient’ and ‘natural’ territorial bounds from time immemorial.   8. See, for instance, Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems (London: Published for the International African Institute by Oxford University Press, [1940] 1970).

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 189  9. Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 8–23, 222–7. 10. Louisa Lombard, ‘Raiding Sovereignty in Central African Borderlands’ (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2012), pp. 4, 20. 11. Lombard, ‘Raiding Sovereignty’, p. 22. In this way, Lombard takes issue with much political science literature that remains locked in a more one-dimensional framework of central state encroachment and local resistance, exemplified most recently by James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 12. Lombard, ‘Raiding Sovereignty’, p. 25. 13. See, for example, Nathan Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World: Courts in Egypt and the Gulf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Will Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2007). Brown’s account emphasises the aspects of these reforms that he deems to be ‘modern’ and also focuses on the wrangling between Egyptian and British officials to control these new institutions; he does not, however, deal with the state’s attempts to apply the new judicial reforms outside the state’s main locus of authority. 14. Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, p. 7. 15. Hanley, ‘Foreignness and Localness’, p. 7. See also Brown, Rule of Law, pp. 29–33. The Native Courts continue to serve as the cornerstone of Egypt’s contemporary justice system. 16. See Dar al-watha’iq al-qawmiyya (DWQ), Majlis al-nuzzar wa al-wuzara’ (MNW) 0075-042390, Amr ‘Ali of 9 September 1884, for mention of this original 1871 law (94 of Dhu al-qada 1287). Unfortunately, I have been unable to access the original version of this decree, having to rely instead on short summaries cited as precedent in later legislation. All translations from MNW and Arabic secondary sources are my own, except when indicated otherwise. 17. See Bulletin des Lois et Decrets (Port Said: Imprimerie Française, 1883). Also DWQ, MNW, 0075-042390, 0075-003444, Interior Ministry Memo, 10 June 1884. 18. Indeed, the 1871 law confirming Majlis Siwa is explicitly invoked twice in the text of the decree. See DWQ, MNW, 0075-042390, Amr ‘Ali of 9 September 1884. 19. DWQ, MNW, 0075-003444, Interior Ministry Memo, 10 June 1884. 20. The mudir invokes here the aforementioned Law 94 of Dhu al-qada 1287.

190  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 21. DWQ, MNW, 0075-003444. 22. DWQ, MNW, 0075-003444. 23. It is, of course, very curious that the Egyptian officials refer to Siwans as ‘urban (Bedouin Arabs), given that the Siwans – marked by their Berber lineage and language, as well as their historically sedentary, agricultural lifestyle – rendered them decidedly not Bedouin. Moreover, Siwans then, as now, would never identify themselves as such. 24. Shafiq bounced around between different government posts over the course of a long career. In 1880, he was named to the European Bureau of the Khedivial palace. In 1889, Shafiq returned to Cairo after a period of several years studying politics and law in Paris; shortly thereafter, Khedive Tawfiq appointed him to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Under ‘Abbas Hilmi II, Shafiq would be the first Egyptian to hold the post of Chief of the European Bureau, and in 1910 he became the Director of the Ministry of Waqfs. 25. Ahmad Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr wa al-Sahra al-Gharbiyya (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya, 1929). 26. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 10. 27. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 11. 28. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 12. 29. It appears from the text of one document that it was the initial law passed on 14 June 1883 that altered the jurisdiction of Kharga and Dakhla, not the December law that ultimately affected Siwa, see DWQ, MNW 0075-041460, Amr ‘Ali Draft Law of 20 February 1920. 30. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, pp. 12–13. 31. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, pp. 12–13. 32. Shafiq says the law was passed on 22 February; according to DWQ, MNW 0075-041460, Amr ‘Ali Draft Law of 20 February 1920, the law was drafted at least two days earlier, on the 20 February, if not passed on that day. 33. See Decree, Amr ‘Ali no. 93 and no. 95 of 1888 (accessed through the Tashre‘aat database). 34. DWQ, MNW 0075-041460. 35. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 13; see Amr ‘Ali no. 75 of 1891 (accessed through the Tashre‘aat database). 36. Henri Lamba, Droit Public et Administratif de l’Égypte: Lois Organiques du Khédivat, Administration, Finances, Justice (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1909). 37. See Decree of 29 June 1900 (accessed through the Tashre‘aat database). Some of the text of this decree is provided in Lamba’s legal manual. Shafiq also sum-

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 191 marises it on page 13 of Mudhakkirat ‘an wahat Misr. At the same time that the local oasis courts were granted these renewed authorities, it remained the case – similar to what we saw in Siwa – that all appeals continued to be handled in the district centres, meaning Beni Suef for Bahariyya and Asyut for Dakhla and Kharga. 38. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 13. 39. Shafiq, Mudhakkirat ‘an Wahat Misr, p. 13. 40. DWQ, MNW 0075-027157, Translation of petition from Mansur Isma‘il to the Council of Ministers, 19 January 1887. 41. DWQ, MNW 0075-029853, ‘Petition from ‘umdas, shaykhs, notables, and the people of Dakhila’, 2 April 1910. The Qadi, for his part, also petitioned the Council of Ministers not to force him into retirement. 42. The Sanusiyya have typically been considered (in so far as scholarly literature treats them at all) to be a strictly Libyan phenomenon. Indeed, the Sanusiyya are most familiar to scholars for their key role in galvanising opposition to the Italian occupying forces throughout the 1920s and for the Sanusi monarchy that was ultimately established in Libya on the heels of Italian decolonisation after World War II. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949); Claudia Gazzini, ‘Jihad in Exile: Ahmad al-Sharif al-Sanusi, 1918– 33’ (MA dissertation, Princeton University, 2004); Ahmad Dajani, al-Haraka al-Sanusiyya, nasha’atuha wa-namu’uha fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Beirut: Dar Lubnan, 1967); Nicola Ziadeh, Sanusiyah: A Study of a Revivalist Movement in Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1958). 43. C. Stanley, ‘The Oasis of Siwa’, Journal of the Royal African Society 11: 43 (April 1912), pp. 321–2; Walter Cline, Notes on the People of Siwah and El Garah in the Libyan Desert (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1936), pp. 11–12. 44. In addition, the outpost community known as Aghormi – located approximately a mile-and-a-half west of Siwa, which around 1900 had somewhere between 450 to 700 inhabitants – is said to have become a Western and Sanusi stronghold. See Cline, Notes on the People of Siwah, p. 13. 45. T. B. Hohler, Report on the Oasis of Siwa (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1900), p. 17. 46. Egyptian Census Department, The Census of Egypt Taken in 1907 (Cairo: National Printing Department, 1909), p. 30. According to the 1907 census, Siwa’s population had declined by nearly a quarter over the course of a decade, from 5,200 in 1897 down to 3,884 in 1907. 47. According to authors Husayn ‘Ali Rifa‘i, Charles Dalrymple Belgrave and

192  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Federico Bonola Bey, Shamasherghy had 1,300 troops at his side; Muhammad ‘Ali Fu’ad and Cassandra Vivian put the number at 2,000. T. B. Hohler’s number is lower: 1,000 to 1,200 troops. See Husayn ‘Ali Rifa‘i, Wahat Siwah min alnawahi al-tarikhiyya wa al-jughrafiyya wa al-ijtima‘iyya wa al-iqtisadiyya (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya, 1932); Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Siwa, the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London: John Lane, 1923); Federico Bonola Bey, L’Égypte et la géographie: Sommaire historique des travaux géographiques exécutés sous la dynastie de Mohammed Aly (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889); Muhammad ‘Ali Fu’ad, Wahat Misr al-shahira: Murshid lil-mudarrisin ([Egypt]: n. p., n. d.); Cassandra Vivian, The Western Desert of Egypt: An Explorer’s Handbook (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008); and Hohler, Report on the Oasis of Siwa. 48. For instance, when the Siwans stopped paying their taxes almost immediately after Shamasherghy’s second campaign, it took another eight years for Muhammad ‘Ali’s state to respond by dispatching another military expedition to the oasis around 1835. Undeterred by this latest round of punishment and coercion, the Siwans revolted yet again and refused to pay any taxes to Cairo; this state of affairs went on for five years, until Muhammad ‘Ali decided to send a fourth punitive campaign to Siwa in 1840, led by an officer named Khalil Bey. See Rifa‘i, Wahat Siwa, pp. 24–5; Hohler, Report, p. 24. 49. It was not until around 1857 that the Egyptian Government attempted anew to set its authority in the oasis on firmer footing, creating the permanent post of ma’mur Siwa. Yet an assignment in Siwa remained extremely dangerous, even after this reform, and it is therefore unsurprising that the post of ma’mur Siwa continued to be deeply unpopular among Egyptian officials, considered ‘both by the Government and its employees as a form of banishment’; see Belgrave, Siwa, p. 109; Hohler, Report, p. 24; Rifa‘i, Wahat Siwah, pp. 25–6. 50. See Hohler, Report, pp. 24–5. 51. The conventional narrative in much European writing stresses al-Sanusi’s political differences with the established authorities and ‘ulama in Mecca, suggesting his need to flee. Knut Vikør has more recently offered a reinterpretation of al-Sanusi’s migration, refuting the idea that he was forced to leave and positing instead that al-Sanusi was actively searching for a particular environment, such as he would find in the Sahara, to implement new organisational ideas for his Islamic brotherhood. See Knut S. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar on the Desert Edge: Muhammad B. ‘Ali al-Sanusi and His Brotherhood (London: Hurst & Company, 1995). 52. According to some sources, al-Sanusi actually founded the first zawiyya in North

re t h i nk i ng eg ypti an sovere ign ty  | 193 Africa at Siwa. See, for example, Ahmed Hassanein, The Lost Oases, 2nd edn (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), p. 59. 53. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar, p. 184. 54. Evans-Pritchard, Sanusi of Cyrenaica, pp. 24–5. 55. Evans-Pritchard, Sanusi of Cyrenaica, p. 72. 56. Certain British officials, for their part, did not seem to understand the connection, either, and underestimated al-Sanusi’s authority on the Egyptian side of the ‘border’. See, for example, TNA, FO 101/79 (various writings of the British proconsul in Benghazi Donald Cameron). 57. Quoted in Arthur Silva White, From Sphinx to Oracle; Through the Libyan Desert to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1899), p. 122. 58. Hassanein, Lost Oases, p. 63. 59. TNA, FO 78/5240, ‘Notes on the History of Senussism and its Relation to the African Possessions of Foreign Powers’. 60. Silva White, Sphinx to Oracle, p. 128. 61. Vikør, Sufi and Scholar, pp. 197–8. 62. Evans-Pritchard, Sanusi of Cyrenaica, pp. 79–80. 63. This language of alternative spatial logics comes from Joel Migdal’s work on borderlands and marginal identities. Migdal suggests that states and nations ‘have constantly been defined and reconstructed by the other spatial logics put forth by the groups that they claim or with which they interact’. See Joel Migdal, ‘Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints: Struggles to Construct and Maintain State and Social Boundaries’, in Joel Migdal (ed.), Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 12. 64. Hohler, Report, p. 18. 65. Hohler, Report, p. 18. 66. Hohler, Report, p. 18. This report by Hohler became the foundational link in a long isnad of basic information about Siwa and its relationship to the Egyptian state, which would, at different moments, be both repeated almost verbatim or slightly distorted in later published works on the oasis. 67. Hohler, Report, p. 26; Rif‘at Gawhari, Jannat al-sahra: Siwa wa-wahat Amun (Cairo: n. p., 1946), pp. 100–1. 68. Hohler, Report, p. 26; Gawhari, Jannat, pp. 100–1. 69. Gawhari says that this assembly took place on 28 Rabi’ al-thani 1314, which is equivalent to 10 June 1896. This date seems impossible, however, given that no sources make mention of Maher’s presence in Siwa prior to September 1896.

194  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 70. Hohler, Report, p. 26. 71. Hohler, Report, p. 27; Gawhari, Jannat, p. 101; Belgrave, Siwa, p. 111. 72. Hohler, Report, p. 27; Gawhari, Jannat, p. 101; Belgrave, Siwa, p. 111. 73. Durham University Library, Sudan Archive – Wingate Papers, Box 131/2, Sheets 51–71: ‘Qadi’s Visit to Jaghbub’ (1892). Translated from the Arabic in the sourced document. 74. Hohler, Report, p. 35. 75. Silva White, Sphinx to Oracle, p. 179. 76. Silva White, Sphinx to Oracle, p. 193. 77. Hohler, Report, p. 29. 78. See Gawhari, Jannat, pp. 112–21.

7 Regulating Sexuality: The Colonial–National Struggle over Prostitution after the British Invasion of Egypt Hanan Hammad

I

n October 1882 the Egyptian Government began to regulate the health inspections of sex workers, establishing one office in Cairo and one in Alexandria where every sex worker in the city had to register her name and undergo weekly inspections for venereal diseases.1 This was the first official state recognition of prostitution in modern Egypt since Muhammad ‘Ali had banished sex workers to Upper Egypt in 1836. Sanctioning health inspections and the registration of sex workers a few weeks after the British invasion inaugurated long decades of struggle between the regulationist colonial state and the abolitionist intellectuals and activists. This chapter examines the struggle between colonial authorities and emerging nationalist resistance over illicit sexuality – specifically, prostitution – and public morality throughout the long decade of the 1890s and its aftermath. In the years following the British invasion, Egyptian intellectuals and activists, I argue, assumed reforming and resisting roles through discourses on gender, sexuality and public morality. Tracing laws and public discourses concerning sex work during these years illuminates the dual process of redefining the role of the state in structuring the moral order and the emerging construction of the national community. The regulations and calls for the abolition of commercial sex work underscored the state’s power to shape public morality and social order through controlling working-class women, while overlooking and even condemning women’s work and rights 195

196  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT in general. Equally, these issues suggest the limits to state power. Egyptian abolitionists presented sex workers as demons arising from the invasion of the West, hence they saw the act of purging the sex trade as an important element in ‘restoring’ what they regarded as the virtuous community as a base of resistance against the British occupation and foreign control. The colonial authorities, on the other hand, treated sex workers as a danger to health and security that must be controlled and contained. Before the British The presence of sex workers in Cairo and Egyptian provincial towns was anything but new. Taxation systems under the Mamluks and Ottomans categorised sex workers as a professional group and demonstrated differing levels of official tolerance towards commercial sex. Guilds of women sex workers, singers and dancers are the only female corporations mentioned in eighteenth-century sources.2 It was the French authorities in Egypt (1798–1801) who first imposed health and security regulations in an effort to protect their soldiers from infection.3 Initially, the French required sex workers to register and undergo health inspections. They also ordered their soldiers to confine their sexual activities to registered women and considered registered pimps responsible for the safety and protection of soldiers against any theft. Brothels were commercial establishments whose doors were lit by lamps and open to streets so that soldiers could be rescued more easily in case they faced trouble.4 Sex workers announced their fees outside the brothels using both written language and symbols to minimise any disagreement or misunderstanding due to language barriers. Eventually, however, the death toll due to venereal diseases among both the French and locals alarmed the French, alerting them to the hazards of contact between French men and local women. During the first two years of occupation, 2,419 French men died of venereal diseases.5 As a result, the French authorities ordered approximately 400 infected women to be drowned in the Nile and even more women were imprisoned.6 However, this was a short-lived war waged on commercial sex, rather than a systematic policy, and made hardly a dent in the sex trade.7 Sex workers practised their trade openly, away from police harassment in provincial towns such as Dusuq, al-Mahalla al-Kubra and Tanta in the Delta. Under the reign of Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48), sex workers enjoyed a strong presence

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 197 in Cairo and were subject to taxation, until Muhammad ‘Ali banned the sex trade and ordered brothels to be shut down in 1834. In 1836, he banished many sex workers to Upper Egypt.8 Although prostitution did not enjoy any official recognition between 1834 and 1882, sex workers frequently appeared in official documents beginning in the late 1850s, without being indicated as outside the law.9 Brothel owners and sex workers were officially identified in state records. Majlis al-Ahkam [Supreme Council of Adjudication] identified such places as karakhanas [brothels] between the 1850s and 1870s, while investigating crimes alleged to take place in brothels, such as theft and murder.10 During this period, foreign sex workers, alongside Egyptian ones, also worked for Egyptian brothel owners.11 Police records of Cairo in 1877 include a case of an Italian sex worker, who served mostly foreign customers, but also worked along with local sex workers in two brothels owned by local women.12 The Egyptian social historian ‘Imad Hilal concludes that this interaction between foreign and local sex workers was responsible for the adoption of European words, such as padrona for madam, in the sex trade in Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century.13 Regulating Morality On the eve of the British invasion, the state assumed an interventionist role in regulating public morality. The state tried to control public order by policing the presence of women in public spaces, but neither explicitly criminalised nor legalised sex work. A legal text discussing police duties and responsibilities in 1880 states: There are many female prostitutes walking through the streets and roads in a horrible state of licentiousness that offends the public and violates public order. They must be instructed to walk in the streets well-covered and with utter decency, and whoever violates these instructions must be arrested and sent to the police station [dabtiyya].14

The law empowered police to arrest sex workers who did not abide by codes of decency and to forbid sex workers from appearing in public streets or sitting by windows and doors of their homes without wearing underwear. At least in theory, it banned sex workers from residing in the neighbourhoods of al-ahrar [a term referring to respectable people who were free and did not

198  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT practice prostitution] and called for the evacuation of Jewish and Christian women and boys who operated shops for the practice of unsatisfactory [ghayr murdiyya] activities.15 Succeeding bylaws repeated the same rules, suggesting that the police were not firm or efficient enough to actually apply the rules that the state had dictated. Under British control, the state expanded its interventionist role. Under rubrics of protecting public decency and fighting corruption, the state imposed restrictions on parents and legal guardians, so that children under eighteen years of age would not become involved in the sex trade. The Native Penal Code of 1883 and its following amendments throughout the 1890s and in 1904 allowed the state to impose harsh sentences on parents and legal guardians if they used children in prostitution. The law prohibited employing those who were younger than eighteen in sex work and criminalised soliciting for sexual services. Article 249, which became the basis of Article 233 of the Penal Code of 1904, and Article 240 of the Mixed Courts Law of 1906 made attempting to corrupt morality through encouraging, helping or facilitating males or females under eighteen years old to commit adultery [fisq wa-fujur] punishable by one week in gaol. The gaol sentence was between three to seven years if the defendant was a relative, guardian, a person who was responsible for raising the child or an employer who had power over the child.16 Beyond commercial sex, both the Native Penal Code and the Mixed Courts Law punished anyone who violated public morality [hurmat al-adab wa-husn alakhlaq] with a sentence of up to one year in gaol or a fine of up to 50 LE, making it one of the highest fines in the penal code.17 To appreciate how harsh this punishment was, fees for one encounter in a licensed brothel cost between 5 and 15 piastres in Cairo and from 1.5 to 5 piastres in al-Mahalla al-Kubra.18 Thus, that fine was equivalent to fees for hundreds of encounters. Even before they tried to institute such sweeping control over the social order and public morality, the British acted swiftly to contain the dangers of venereal disease, while simultaneously making sex workers available to their own nationals. Only a few weeks after the invasion of Egypt, a government memorandum made it mandatory for each sex worker in Cairo and Alexandria to register her name and go through a weekly health inspection (as mentioned above).19 If the woman suffered from a venereal disease, she was transferred to the lock hospital for free medication until recovery. The official

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 199 justification for these inspections, according to this memorandum, was to protect the public from the venereal diseases that were already widespread. The colonial administration was also concerned about the safety of soldiers in their interactions with sex workers. Records of the Native Courts in the 1880s reveal cases in which sex workers had stolen small amounts of money from individual soldiers.20 Hence, the state issued the first comprehensive ordinance dealing with sex work in 1885. In twenty-three articles, it detailed regulations concerned with the registration and health inspections of sex workers [al-niswa al-‘ahirat] across Egypt.21 In addition to the Prostitute Inspection Bureau [maktab al-kashf ‘ala al-niswa al-‘ahirat] in Cairo and Alexandria, sex workers in the provinces had to be inspected by doctors in public hospitals and their assisting nurses. The ordinance extended health inspections to local and foreign sex workers, who had to carry a card [tadhkara] reporting the results of their weekly inspections. Female brothel keepers [‘ayqa] younger than fifty years old also had to go through the same health inspection. The age exemption indicates an assumption that there was no demand and therefore no need for older madams to practice prostitution. Statistics show that the largest age group among sex workers was between thirty and thirty-five years old, while the smallest age group was fifty years old and older.22 Consistent with the social attitude that female public entertainers were by definition also prostitutes, the ordinance subjected local dancers in Upper and Lower Egypt to health inspections, because ‘they secretly practice prostitution (sina‘at al-fawahish)’. Doctors working in the Inspection Bureau were prohibited from treating sex workers for venereal diseases or ordinary sickness at homes, seemingly to curb bribery. These regulations were mostly informed by the colonial administration’s anxiety over venereal disease (VD). The experience of the British in their colonies, particularly in India, was quite alarming. ‘Pox Britannica’ sums up how imperial troops throughout the colonies were inflicted with venereal diseases.23 Indeed, VD was the largest single cause of the hospitalisation of soldiers, and the number of infections among them increased from 205 per thousand in 1875 to 522 per thousand in 1895.24 This is equivalent to half of the army being hospitalised with VD every year.25 Thus, the colonial authorities in Egypt saw a danger in the unregulated existence of commercial sex. Replicating the controversial British Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, the

200  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT British subjected Egyptian sex workers to registration and medical examination. These regulations were based on legislation established by British colonial administrators across the Empire between the 1850s and 1880s.26 Registration laws triggered intense debates in England in the late nineteenth century and were opposed by religious groups and their overseas missionaries until their annulment in 1886. At that point, British abolitionists turned their attention to colonial laws, accusing the colonial state of encouraging vice. Their attacks were a continuing embarrassment to the government.27 Upon his return from Egypt in 1887, W. S. Caine MP told the London press: When we went to Egypt, we were going to establish the civil, moral, and Christian influences of our country on the banks of the Nile. What we have done has been to establish an enormous number of grog-shops and brothels. That is the most conspicuous sign of our civilising mission.28

Although the British were open about their disgust for public prostitution, their policies appear to have been mostly informed by the fear of venereal disease and the consequential loss of military manpower. They continued to regulate prostitution in Egypt, while they abolished it in Britain and prohibited British women from practising the trade in the colonies. The prohibition was fairly effective. Records from occupied Egypt point to a very limited number of sex workers who were British, aside from British minors in the white slave trade, who were arrested at disembarkation in 1914.29 Yet, there were still British subjects who were tried and deported for running brothels and living off the proceeds of registered sex workers.30 The 1885 ordinance subjected many groups of women to health inspections and made it mandatory for locals and Europeans to have an official license to operate a brothel. Yet, while it did not designate particular areas where these brothels could operate, it gave implicit recognition to any place in which sex workers lived and worked, stating that: every prostitute (imra’a ‘ahira) working in a place known for prostitution or in a private place is obliged to register her name with the police in the Inspection Bureau. The Bureau gives her a card with a progressive number reporting the results of all health inspections and clearly showing her name, age, address, personal characteristics and the name of the brothel keeper.31

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 201 However, police had to inform the Inspection Bureau about places known for prostitution and the number of women working and living there. Police also had to help the Bureau in subjecting those women to health inspections. The Bureau kept a full list of the names, ages and addresses of all prostitutes [‘ahirat] and was responsible for informing the police about those who were tardy in undergoing their inspections and those who violated the regulations. The ordinance was repeatedly modified. Before the end of the year, the Ministry of the Interior issued a memorandum facilitating the legal procedure through which the names of women who wished to leave the trade, due to marriage or repentance [tawba], could be erased from the registration list. Once the authorities were persuaded that the woman had given up the trade and she produced two witnesses, she would not be called for further inspection.32 The Emerging Chaste Nation The regulations came under attack from the Egyptian public and especially vocally from nationalists throughout the 1890s. This laid the foundation for the abolition campaign, which continued until licensed prostitution was abolished in 1949. The public resented having sex workers as neighbours; sex workers who enjoyed state recognition as long as they were both registered and inspected. Male intellectuals and activists, traditionalists and modernists, utilised the state recognition of prostitution as a constant reminder of the debasement they regarded as one of the products of foreign influence and as an explicit aim of the foreign presence in Egypt. Expressing a range of sociopolitical anxieties in sexual terms, they used sex work to dramatise British control and occupation and the danger of the Capitulations (laws giving privileges to foreign nationals) and Western influence in general. Throughout the 1890s, brothels were called ‘windows of hell’ [nawafidh jahannam] and sex workers were represented as demons emerging as part of the colonial filth.33 Calls for abolition were tangled up with the nationalist struggle against British authority and the Capitulations system to restore ‘authentic’ morality. In demonising sex workers, such commentators never envisioned these women as working women; rather, they were a symbol that easily became a metaphor, symptomatic of broader developments in the sociopolitical field that generated public concern. Egyptian intellectuals shared the concerns

202  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of British authorities over health, security and social order and overlooked the reasons for women’s work outside the home, as well as their rights more broadly. They employed women’s work and women’s bodies to reflect anxiety over rapid social changes and further their agenda of resistance to colonial control. Egyptian reformists invoked the sex worker as a leading symbol of decadence, social decay, urbanisation and exploitation inherited from Western colonial control. Commercial sex, though a pre-invasion reality, came to dramatise the plight of the beleaguered nation. Activists saw sex workers as a danger to the social order of the ‘virtuous nation’. The press was utilised as a main vehicle through which to speak up for the greater public good.34 ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, known as the ‘Orator of the ‘Urabi Revolution’, championed the abolition campaign once he returned to the public sphere after years spent in hiding and exile, following the defeat of the ‘Urabists in1882. He assumed the role of the educator of the nation – as he put it – and founded a magazine, al-Ustadh, in August 1892, focusing on social critique and reform.35 While avoiding overt political confrontation with the British, he accused them of being responsible for the moral decay he witnessed around him. Al-Nadim accused the West – namely, the British in Egypt and the French in Tunisia and Algeria – of corrupting the morality of the East and violating its religion.36 He also blamed Egyptians for cooperating with the British on regulating prostitution, as though they were owners of a burglarised house helping the thieves to load their stolen possessions. He wrote: The British [were able to] humiliate men, destroy homes, and violate honour only by the hands of Egyptians . . . the British permitted women to prostitute themselves under legal protection, they regulated medical checkups of prostitutes and gave them certificates stating they were valid for adultery, and violating the honour of the Qur’an, the Bible, and the Torah. [The British] legitimatised what God forbids in every [holy] book.37

Al-Nadim urged his fellow Egyptians to stop imitating the Europeans and protect themselves from European exploitation. This, he insisted, was the basis for resisting British control. In his pre-invasion social critique, he metaphorically described Egypt under European influence as the handsome, rich, healthy, young man who fell victim to a venereal disease, da’ ifrangi [le mal

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 203 Franc], when the family ignored him and let him drift along with, and be corrupted by, foreigners and thus infected by their fatal diseases.38 After the British invasion, he spoke of prostitution as a disgrace to the Egyptian nation and called for restricting personal freedoms to assure private and public morality as a fundamental aspect of the ‘Egyptian nation’. Egyptian abolitionists depicted those who patronised sex workers as ‘fools’ and ‘animals and lower than animals’ who abused their freedom of movement to go to bars [khammarat] and brothels [buyut al-‘ahirat].39 Thus, al-Nadim thought it was important to limit personal freedom. Taking the British as an example, al-Nadim wrote: The British call in their parliament to put limits on drinking and controlling drunkenness. It is more urgent for us to prevent our youth from whatever corrupts their minds and wastes money, to prevent them from being idiotic and corrupt and to stop them from violating the chastity of the Egyptian nation. Having streets full of those idiots who drink alcohol and spend time with prostitutes in public shamelessly brings shame to our glorious nation.40

Implementing the notion of Egyptianness as a virtuous community, alNadim invites the state to regulate the moral order: The law must preserve the nation’s rights without allowing what should be banned. Those who care about protecting honour (‘ird wa-sharaf ) must ask the government to establish strong barriers between prostitutes and ahrar and to cleanse streets and alleys of these houses (brothels) that have been harmful to many people and caused many chaste women to be unfairly accused.41

The abolition discourse presented sex workers as an evil that pushed men towards bankruptcy. In a long poem, religious scholar and well-known vernacular poet Shaykh Ahmad al-Qusi mocked those who spent nights in pubs and bars, drinking, smoking hashish, flirting with women and sleeping with prostitutes who cared only about money. The poem, published in Nadim’s magazine, made a sharp attack on al-Qusi’s countrymen: When I seized my inherited fortune I went out for recreation I bought alcohol for the girl who entertained me

204  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT She greeted those who were like me until we all lost our money When we became broke, we struggled to survive Some of us sell cotton crops and spend all the revenue in one night He goes to drink and sleeps with a pretty woman He laughs and plays with her while she tricks him He forgets his people and ignores his country Some of us are government employees who get drunk at the beginning of the month He is nobody in the town and attends every bar Late at night he hunts for a woman by consent with her man [pimp]42

Sex workers were thought of as a moral threat to all honourable women and the otherwise virtuous society. While married men from all classes [beys, afandiyya and awlad al-balad] spent nights with prostitutes ‘uglier than the gallala’ [woman who collects animal faeces to dry for fuel], wives might go astray, because ‘if the wife is young and desiring (fayra) and her husband falls asleep like an unconscious sheep, Satan might urge her (to commit adultery)’.43 In a comment revealing anxiety over women’s sexuality and their alleged susceptibility towards adultery, al-Nadim wrote: if Eastern peasant women, who incidentally or for a good reason meet men, were allowed to talk with young men and flirt and hug (mukhasara), they would be inclined to abandon chastity. When men and women in nice clothing meet, an electric current of passion gets triggered, leading them towards a passionate connection (wisal).44

For al-Nadim, the remedy was to lock women up at home and close the doors to anybody except close relatives and family and those whom husbands trusted.45 Dramatising the danger of the brothel and sex workers, the press circulated stories about deceptive prostitutes [‘ahirat] who claimed to be wives of respectable men, so that clients would pay them more, and about ‘ahirat dressed as chaste respectable wives to meet men at cafes, bars and gambling clubs. These disguised prostitutes would then take these men to secret brothels claiming that these were the homes of their sisters, mothers or friends. These writings painted a picture of a lawless social life in which chaste women were unfairly under threat of divorce and thereby being separated from their children:

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 205 In this animalistic life, the adulterous (fasaqa) stained the names of honoured women as if they were adulterous women (fajirat) and influenced the chaste hurra . . . Many young men and foreigners enter these houses claiming to have rendezvous with respectable wives. Once the husband hears these drunken and reckless men, he unfairly divorces her and might upset his children who are taken away from their innocent mother . . . What we hear and see is a reversion to the state of animals and transgressing the boundaries of the human.46

Abolitionists envisioned it as the state’s duty to rid the nation of commercial sex, or at least to drive it outside cities, and called upon people to pressure the state to purify cities from this ‘filth’ [najasat].47 The police were accused of turning a blind eye to unlicensed brothels, which threatened the civil order [nizam al-madaniyya] that required the isolation of prostitutes from ‘good’ people’s residences.48 The Capitulations were accused of being a hindrance that paralysed the state and made it unable to fulfill its duty of protecting ahrar neighbourhoods from the alleged dangers of prostitution.49 Abolitionists invited people to actively pressure the government to purge sex workers from the city limits: Neighbours of prostitutes (baghaya) must not keep idle, but rather must petition the ruler. People of honour must pledge to work hard for that fair and just demand of separating pure homes from these malicious houses before we face disaster.50

Enraged by the existence of licensed brothels in downtown Cairo, the abolitionists called for them to be moved to isolated edges of the city so that youth would not be exposed to brothels. They suggested that moving brothels away from city neighbourhoods would compel hesitant clients, who might be too ashamed to be seen on their way to areas designated for brothels outside the city, to give up patronising prostitutes.51 These calls came three years after the Ministry of the Interior decided to ban sex workers from living among ahrar, which indicates that the decision was not enforced effectively. In an important episode in the struggle over sex work regulation, people in different cities and towns campaigned against having prostitutes [nisa’ fawahish] working adjacent to ahrar’s homes. They complained to the

206  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT authorities, accusing prostitutes [mumisat] of ‘walking in streets and roads in a wicked manner (mutahtikat) with no respect or decency (ihtisham), which violates morality’.52 As a response, the Interior Ministry issued a memorandum in October 1893 to ban prostitutes [fawahish] from living among ahrar and designate locations for them away from neighbourhoods.53 The memorandum instructed the police to ban those women from appearing in public in a manner that violated morality [adab]. This memorandum is also significant in that it uses for the first time the term mumisat for sex workers, in addition to the medievalist morally and religiously loaded term fawahish, ‘adulterous women’. Utilising the classical Arabic term mumis/ at, meaning ‘woman/women publicly known to have sexual intercourse for money’, was a tentative acknowledgement of the professionalisation of sex work. The memorandum did not appease public anxiety, particularly with the increasing appearance of women in the mushrooming entertainment venues and the visibility of foreign soldiers and tourists seeking out such places. Some ‘ulama successfully pressured the government in early 1895 to ban Muslim women from dancing and singing in cafés and public places and from walking ‘indecently’ in the streets, particularly during mawalid [festivals associated with Muslim holy figures of the past].54 The French Consul interfered to exempt the Egyptian wives of Moroccan men holding French citizenship from this legal decision. Female belly-dancing continued in public, and the nationalist leader Muhammad Farid (1868–1919) wrote that with the Capitulatory privileges, the French Consul had turned himself into the guardian of immorality and fornication [fisq wa-fujur].55 Farid’s writings provide an interesting example of how anxiety was expressed in sexual terms both before and after the British invasion. In 1891 he had expressed his disappointment at not gaining promotion by suggesting that sexual favours were the way in which to gain Khedive Isma‘il’s support. About Isma‘il’s reign, he wrote: ‘Adultery (fisq) became so common among the upper classes that pimping one’s own women (diyatha) became the best means to gain a close status from His Highness.’56 After the British invasion, he used the same sexual interpretation against the British officials and Syrians who worked for them (a popular target in the nationalist press): ‘To get high positions many Syrians don’t mind diyatha.’57

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 207 Meddling Sex Workers Out of the struggle between the regulationist colonial state and abolitionist opposition, the 1885 ordinance was modified several times during the 1890s to isolate sex workers and assure public health and security. The marginalisation and isolation of sex workers was institutionalised in the ordinance of brothels [la’ihat buyut al-‘ahirat] in 1896, which also formed the basis of the 1905 wide-ranging bylaw. Sex workers had to be at least eighteen years old, and every woman was given a photo identification card, which was to be renewed annually. Women also had to submit to a weekly medical examination. It restricted licensed brothels to areas designated by governors and shut down any brothel operating outside these areas. To enhance the isolation of sex workers, the ordinance attempted to move inspection bureaus from public hospitals and health offices to red-light areas.58 Building on the 1893 memorandum, this ordinance defined a brothel as ‘the place where two or more women are living permanently or assembling temporarily for the purpose of prostitution’.59 This definition excluded secret brothels [buyut siriyya]; hence, authorities and governors themselves had to investigate any place whose neighbours reported it as a secret brothel. If the complaint was borne out, the house would be treated as a brothel and become subject to all relevant regulations. If the secret house was owned by foreigners, the authorities had to convince their consuls that the place was operating for the purpose of prostitution – a procedure dictated by the Capitulations. Fines were used to enforce the law. Women who missed the medical examinations or who did not produce their certificates at their regular weekly medical check-ups, were subjected to a 50 piastre fine in the first instance, followed by a 100 piastre fine for the second offence or imprisonment for between two to eight days.60 Another memorandum in 1898 required a particular form to request a brothel licence, rather than using the same form for public shops, such as cafés and groceries.61 The small surviving sample of brothel licence files between 1890 and 1941 shows that this special form was never used and the state bureaucrats continued using the generic form for commercial establishments, merely writing the word ‘brothel’ [bayt ‘ahirat] on the form.62 Security and public order dominated this ordinance. To ensure the security

208  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of clients, the brothel could have no more than one door opening onto the street. Regulations prohibited individuals who had been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanour related to adultery, violating public morality or urging a minor to commit adultery from acquiring a licence to operate a brothel. Those who were convicted of a misdemeanour of theft, hiding stolen items, pickpocketing or swindling were not allowed to acquire a brothel licence for five years after the verdict and the existing licence would be cancelled once the brothel keeper was convicted. To facilitate the state’s interference in their lives and work, the regulations granted the brothel keeper full control over sex workers. Article 8 required brothel keepers to provide authorities with a list of the names, ages and nationalities of their prostitutes [‘ahirat], servants and all of the inhabitants of the brothel within twenty-four hours. The keeper was obliged to report any change to the police within twenty-four hours and to take care of the sex workers’ health and their check-ups. The brothel owners had to provide the police, on a weekly basis, with medical reports as proof of the weekly health inspections of all women in the brothel. Sex workers and madams who were proven to suffer from venereal diseases had to be sent to the lock hospital until their full recovery. The ordinance imposed serious restrictions on sex workers’ mobility. They were not allowed to move from their current town to a different location before undertaking a medical inspection to report whether they had any infection. To push sex workers into a more invisible space, the ordinance repeated a previous memorandum aimed at moving health inspection offices from public medical facilities to offices to be established inside prostitution quarters. Madams and sex workers were supposed to pay the rent of these offices. However, this did not happen, seemingly for lack of funding, and the health inspections continued in public facilities. Police had to keep an eye on brothels [mahallat al-fahisha], in order to physically push sex workers inside if they were standing by doors or windows. The ordinance would not allow any infected sex workers to work without proof that they had fully recovered. Also, policemen had the right to enter brothels to arrest any wanted person, respond to any scream for help and make sure that regulations were followed, particularly concerning the ban on gambling, fighting and any security violations.

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 209 Invisible Carriers of National Honour Attempts to make sex workers invisible were an indispensable part of an emerging nationalist set of ideals in which women became bearers of the honour of their nation.63 Ideally – and based on long-existing notions of ‘honour’ – women had to be hidden from strangers’ eyes, an ideal that was constantly challenged by the presence of the prostitution trade and the foreign occupation. Prostitution quarters, with all that they offered to young, lonely soldiers, were the focus of attention for British troops. Recent ­historiography of the British Empire has hypothesised that colonial expansion was not only a matter of Christianity and commerce; it was also a matter of seizing sexual opportunities with imperious confidence.64 Sexual attitudes and proclivities and sexual encounters between the colonised and the colonisers surely influenced the ways that individuals interacted.65 For British soldiers as well as European tourists throughout the late nineteenth century, Egypt was a place to indulge themselves with the services of Egyptian sex workers, Ethiopian slave girls or young boys in public baths, as long as they could pay the price.66 The high visibility of British soldiers roaming in prostitution districts might have amplified Egyptians’ sense of humiliation. The American Consul-General in Egypt during the 1890s pictured the roaming soldiers in groups or regiments in the streets of Cairo as if the city had become a military camp.67 From legal texts to satire, Egyptians expressed deep anxiety over the visibility of women – working-class women, in particular – in urban spaces. Sex workers were not the only group who were represented as a source of uncontrolled sexual disorder: all working women outside the home were treated as a source of sexual danger. In his influential satirical magazine alArghul (1894–1900), the al-Azhar teacher Shaykh Muhammad al-Najjar denounced traditional female jobs, such as that of the peddling dallala. The dallala was a saleswoman who bought various commodities from merchants and resold them to women she personally knew in the quarters during home visits. Rather than appreciating the struggle of working-class women to make a living in this time of rapid social reconfiguration, al-Najjar mockingly accused them of roaming mawalid to flirt with strange men, while showing their legs and hands decorated with henna and imitating foreign (a la Franca)

210  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT women. He urged husbands to stop their wives from practising this kind of job.68 Working-class women, including sex workers, were not in a position to defend their work and discursively refute these male constructions of their morality, thus those women were the objects of the moral discourse, not the subjects. A wave of writings expressed the fear of blurring the lines between femininity and masculinity and between heterosexuality and homosexuality, as well as the collapse of social codes for decent behaviour in public. Voicing social anxieties over class and gender normativity in urban space, even the pro-British al-Muqattam newspaper raised an outcry that: men share with licentious women [ghawani] their clothing [style] and share with effeminate men [mukhannathin] their [failing] morality. Men roam the roads and streets, and whenever they see a woman, they block her way, making her hear their shameful and obscene words. Worse than that, they buy pornographic images to show them to every honourable female they meet . . . Grey-haired men every late afternoon ride the tram back and forth only to obscenely harass every woman.69

The popular writer Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti described young, educated males as reckless playboys satisfying their evil lust through the deception of young schoolgirls and the violation of their sexual honour.70 That is, as Booth argues, schoolgirls were ‘cherished but fragile’ national commodities that ‘emblematize[d] the state’s benevolent and modernising energies’ and symbolised the inverse of sex workers.71 The presence of women in urban spaces was depicted as conducive to public orgies. Al-Nadim called women who left their homes to visit the Sayyida Zaynab shrine (a Sufi festival area that was popular, particularly with women), particularly without the permission of their husbands and wearing fancy clothing, cosmetics and perfume, sinful: If she stops to watch a show in the street, men rub their bodies against hers . . . when she reaches al-Sayyida Mosque, she finds men dancing, kissing and bending over each other and behind each other like khawal [homosexual men] and women in theatres. When those (men) notice that women are watching, they dance more sleazily with more profligacy (khala‘a), and corrupted men stand behind women shamelessly.72

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 211 The newspaper al-Mu’ayyad criticised women walking in the streets unveiled, showing their arms and smiling in the face of men when playfully touched by them.73 Muhammad Rashid Rida in al-Manar poetically penned a line portraying women shopping in the Bazaar as adulterous sluts, ‘as if they were a tossed ball caught by every foot’.74 Fearing that ‘this country will not have an honourable woman’, he urged the police and the Governor of Cairo to become stringent regarding arresting men who solicited women in the streets to commit adultery.75 By the turn of the century, Cairo was portrayed as a city where moral disintegration and sexual laxity exceeded that of Western societies – a fear that obsessed some writers in the following decade. Sexual obscenity, disrespect for public morality and non-adherence to religion in Cairo were said to be ‘appalling and unimaginable in any Muslim country, let alone Egypt, considered to be the leader of Muslim countries’.76 The press warned that youth consumed tobacco and alcohol, frequented pubs and theatres, harassed women in the streets and on public transportation and patronised belly dancers and prostitutes ‘to look modern’.77 The press also accused the public of enjoying a state of excessive indulgence in lust as if the Apocalypse was approaching and people were rushing to embrace worldly pleasures lest they lose both the world and the hereafter.78 Indeed, the Governor of Cairo instructed policemen to arrest men who urged women in the streets to commit adultery and who cursed at women who rejected them.79 Along with the intensified campaigns, the state adopted a more restricted legal code, so as to consider sexual offences as a more serious ‘felony’. The 1904 Criminal Code identified sexual offences and transgressions, such as violation of the sexual honour of minors without force or threat, as felonies rather than misdemeanours. Victimised Prostitutes, Victimised Nation Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, Egyptian sex workers were also beginning to be viewed as victims. In his book, The Liberation of Women, published in 1899, Qasim Amin was among the early writers who considered sex workers to be victims by arguing that female prostitution was a direct product of women’s lack of education and ability to make a living through a dignified profession.80 Comparing the heated controversy over Amin’s call for women’s rights with that of the uncontroversial perception

212  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of Rifa‘a ­al-Tahtawi’s 1853 book, al-Murshid al-amin fi tarbiyat al-banat wa al-banin [The Honest Guide to the Education of Girls and Boys], provides a good example of how Egyptians expressed their social anxiety following the British invasion via discourses on sexuality and gender. The self-portrayed image of Egyptians was transformed gradually within the moral discourse from being the malefactor who abandoned religion and sexual restriction to being victims of economic exploitation and moral decay at the hands of Europeans. The press accused foreigners of increasingly controlling the Egyptian economy by deliberately spreading vice [razila] and establishing bars, brothels and gambling houses in every street and alley throughout every city, village and hamlet.81 The concentration of brothels in and around alAzbakiyya in Cairo – the European neighbourhood that housed the Mixed Courts – provoked images that associated foreign economic exploitation and political domination with prostitution. This association of foreigners in the area with prostitution was so intense that the assistant to Lord Cromer, Harry Boyle, was mistaken on the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel for being the hotel pimp.82 Poetry and articles portrayed the cafés of al-Azbakiyya – a major entertainment area adjacent to Cairo’s major red-light district – as locations where Egyptians fell victim to foreign stock market brokers, Mixed Court judges and foreign and local sex workers (male and female adults and children). In widely circulated poetry, the esteemed ‘Poet of the Nile’, Hafiz Ibrahim, bitterly associated the moral collapse of the Egyptian youth with the frequenting of the entertainment and prostitution quarter of al-Azbakiyya and foreign corruption.83 These Cairo-centric images were so powerful in the national imagination that they overlooked the fact that prostitution quarters in provincial towns like al-Mahalla and Shibin al-kum catered to, and were operated by, only locals.84 The discourse on the victimisation of Egyptians continued in the following decade. Medical writings demonised European sex workers and their male Egyptian customers. The Ottoman Greek Dr Burtuqalis Bey published his book, Prostitution and the Danger of Whoredom in Egypt, in French in 1907. The journalist Dawud Barakat, who would become the editor of alAhram newspaper, translated it into Arabic and published it at the expense of the author later that same year. Barakat explicitly accused the foreign press of ignoring the book when it was published in French, because it conflicted with

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 213 their interest in the Capitulations.85 Indeed, the book argued that thousands of elderly European prostitutes, who were banned from practising their trade in their own countries because they had contracted venereal diseases, subsequently came to Egypt under the protection of the Capitulations. Burtuqalis Bey wrote: ‘They collect a fortune out of fornication and debauchery and distribute diseases right and left with no deterrent or fear of a ruler.’86 The developments of the 1890s paved the way for twentieth-century discourse on, and campaigns against, prostitution. With the rise of romanticism in Egyptian literature, articles and novels, even official security and social reports began talking about sex workers as victims of deceptive lovers and brutal pimps. Influenced by nineteenth-century European romanticism, Egyptian authors encouraged readers to help sex workers to return to the ‘right path’. Al-Manfaluti went as far as to encourage his readers to marry sex workers and provide them with compassion and love so that they would give up their trade.87 This public mode lent immense popularity to al-Manfaluti’s Islamised Arabic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s La dame aux camélias, which he published as a short story, entitled Al-Dahiyya aw-mudhakkirat Margarit [The Victim, or the Memoirs of Marguerite].88 In 1922, Ra’fat alJamali published his novel, Mudhakkirat baghiy [Memoirs of a Prostitute], depicting a decent woman falling into prostitution due to her gambling husband and his exploitative friends. The novel was printed twice in the same year.89 Similar themes could be found in Mahmud Taymur’s stories, while many press reports talked about domestic servants forced into prostitution. Of course, the rise of feminism during the interwar period added to the strength of such views, which also dominated early Egyptian cinema. Government reports discussed those who fell victim to ‘white slavery’, pimps who preyed on women and the venereal diseases that preyed on national health and morals.90 Colonial Hybridity: Workers with No Rights Sex workers were viewed as victims or demons, but were never envisioned as working women. Rather, they were a useful symbol – a metaphor – that served to turn them into a symptom of broad sociopolitical concerns associated with the British occupation and European influence. Egyptian nationalists shared colonialists’ concerns over health, security and social order and overlooked

214  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT women’s work and rights. In the wake of the British invasion and with the rise of the popular press, debates about public morality, sexuality and prostitution in particular contributed to the building of an image of a virtuous Egyptian nation. In following years, thanks to state regulations, sex workers were conveniently perceived as a contamination inherited from, and imposed by, the colonial control. Neither regulations nor abolition campaigns were concerned with providing working women with legal or health protection. Mandatory registration and health inspections were theoretically intended to keep sex workers healthy, while making them available to soldiers and other clients in a safe setting. These regulations, which entailed state recognition, provoked abolitionist campaigns, while leaving sex workers with no rights; in effect, they criminalised unregistered sex workers, thus criminalising poor women’s labour. Registration also contributed to changing the trade’s structure and work conditions. It gave brothel keepers significant power over their sex workers, making it illegal for women to be self-employed and very often forcing them to surrender their autonomy to male pimps for protection.91 Starting with the 1896 ordinance, the financial burden of venereal disease was transferred from the state to sex workers. If a health inspection proved that a sex worker had contracted a venereal disease, she had to be evacuated from her brothel and sent to hospital until she was fully cured. While during the 1880s infected sex workers received free medication, from 1896 on they and their madams or brothel keepers were responsible for paying the costs of medication at four piastres per day. Put simply, the infected sex worker who was not able to cover medical expenses risked becoming unemployed, sick and homeless. In the case of ordinary sickness, sex workers had to send a certificate from their doctor on the day designated for their medical check-up proving that their condition prevented them from being present at the medical inspection. Thus, the ill sex worker who could not afford the doctor’s fee might lose her licence. Regulations showed concern with protecting clients from venereal disease and against theft, but provided no protection for sex workers from abusive customers or guaranteed a sex worker the right to return to work once she recovered from the disease. A sex worker would lose her licence if she was accused of committing robbery against clients. Women who were convicted of theft, pickpocketing or hiding stolen items were denied prostitution licences. At the same time, abolitionists heavily criticised this ordinance for

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 215 failing to completely marginalise sex workers and remove brothels to the outskirt of cities to protect the youth from the temptation of the prostitution quarters in the city centre.92 The abolitionists clearly wanted a role for the state in regulating sexuality, particularly prostitution, and reinforcing state control over women’s sexual labour. They wanted to protect the nation from women, not to protect women’s rights (or to blame men). Egyptian reformists shared a belief with colonial officials that the government was responsible for regulating sexuality and those officials shared Egyptians’ antipathy towards the Capitulations. Echoing the abolitionist calls, the British Chief of Cairo Police, Russell Pasha, blamed the Capitulations for the limits faced by the police in fighting against the presence of illegal brothels managed by Europeans.93 While serving in Alexandria between 1902 and 1913, he described the Hamamil quarter inhabited by low-class European prostitutes and their Greek bullies as: a glaring example of the abuse of the Capitulations; one saw the Egyptian police trying to deal with this scum of the Levant, every one of them with a gun in his right hand and his demotico [nationality papers] in the other, ready to claim immunity from Egyptian police jurisdiction if interfered with.94

Russell Pasha also shared with Egyptian nationalists the view of European sex workers in Wajh al-Birka (the popular name for the major Cairo red-light district). Russell depicted them as: Women of all breeds and races other than British, who were not allowed by their Consular authority to practise this licensed trade in Egypt. Most of the women were of the third-class category for whom Marseilles had no further use and who would eventually be passed on to Bombay and Far East markets, but they were still European and not yet fallen so low as to live in the one-room shacks of the Was‘a [the area licensed to brothels at the rear of al-Azbakiyya], which had always been the quarter for purely native prostitution of the lowest class. Here in the Was‘a Egyptian, Nubian and Sudanese women plied their one shilling trade in conditions of abject squalor, though under Government medical control.95

Accounts of British officials in Egypt concerning the prostitution districts of Cairo during the first decades of the twentieth century are actually ­discourses

216  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT against the trade in a language that was not much different from that employed by anti-prostitution Egyptians, but mixed with racism. British officials used crude racist terms such as ‘negro beast’ and ‘pest’ to describe local sex workers and pimps.96 Taken together, British and Egyptian discourses concerning public prostitution in Egypt exemplify the transformative process in which the colonised and the colonisers reach a hybridised outcome. Regulating prostitution in the colonial state could reflect the need of both the colonisers and colonial state to play a larger role in controlling people’s sexuality. The nationalist discourse against commercial sex and its regulation blurred the line between colonial and anti-colonial social views. The regulation of prostitution created a hybrid national discourse that adopted European anxiety over security and health and mixed it with what was thought to be authentic socioreligious ideals, which consequently opposed both prostitution and colonial authority by blaming the colonisers for polluting the ‘virtuous nation’. Notes  1. In this chapter, I use the term ‘prostitute’ as sources of the studied period employed it to refer to women who provided commercial sex, while I use the term ‘sex worker’ in my own analysis.  2. Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 108.   3. Muhammad Sayyid al-Kilani, Fi rubu‘ al-Azbakiyya: Dirasa adabiyya tarikhiyya ijtima‘iyya (Cairo: Dar al-Firjani, 1985), p. 56.  4. Al-Kilani, al-Azbakiyya, pp. 56–7.   5. Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 235.  6. André Raymond, Égyptiens et Français au Caire 1798–1801 (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1998), p. 303.  7. Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt, p. 235.   8. Historians cite different motivations behind this change in Muhammad ‘Ali’s treatment of prostitution. Judith Tucker emphasises the influence of the Muslim ‘ulama, while Khalid Fahmy argues that concerns over health and public order were behind the banishing of sex workers outside of Cairo. See Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, p. 152; Khaled Fahmy, ‘Prostitution in Egypt in the Nineteenth Century’, in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. 77–103.

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 217   9. ‘Imad Hilal, al-Baghaya fi Misr: Dirasa tarikhiyya ijtima‘iyya 1834-1949 (Cairo: al-‘Arabi lil-nashr wa al-tawzi‘, 2001), pp. 160–4. 10. Majlis Ahkam, S/7/10/60, case no. 8, 2 Ramadan 1290/ 24 October 1873 and L/4/18/4 case no. 223, 13 Rabi‘ Awwal 1295/ 17 March 1878. 11. Hilal, al-Baghaya, pp. 70–1. 12. Dabtiyyat Misr, Daftar Qayd L2/ 6/1, 5 August 1877. 13. Hilal, al-Baghaya, p. 71. 14. Filib Jallad, Qamus al-idara wa al-qada’, vol. 3 (Alexandria: al-Matba‘a albukhariyya, 1891), pp. 215–21. All translations from the Arabic are mine unless otherwise noted. 15. Fahmy suggests that the term al-ahrar refers to dominant classes that would later appropriate the terms ‘society’ and nation. See Fahmy, ‘Prostitution’, p. 90. 16. Kamil al-Misri (compiler), Qanun al-‘uqubat al-ahli mudhayyal bi-ahkam almahakim al-ahliyya li-ghayat 1930 (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-tijariyya al-kubra, 1931), pp. 107–18. 17. Filib Jallad, al-Ta‘liqat al-qada’iyya ‘ala qawanin al-mahakim al-misriyya: Qanun al-‘uqubat (Cairo: Matba‘at al-ma‘arif, 1908), p. 54; al-Misri, Qanun al-‘uqubat al-ahli, p. 77. 18. Luwis `Awad, Awraq al-‘umr: Sanawat al-takwin (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1989), pp. 550–1; Hanan Hammad, ‘Localizing Modernity: Industrialization and Social Transformation: al-Mahalla al-Kubra 1910–1958’ (PhD dissertation, University of Texas–Austin, 2009), p. 331. 19. Majlis al-nuzzar, al-Qararat wa al-manshurat al-sadira sanat 1882 (Cairo: Matba‘at Bulaq, 1883), p. 233. 20. Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, p. 146. 21. Majlis al-Nuzzar, al-Qararat wa al-manshurat al-sadira sanat 1885 (Cairo: alMatba‘a al-amiriyya, 1886), pp. 153–7. See also Nizarat al-dakhiliyya, Idarat ‘umum al-sihha, Dikritat wa-lawa’ih sihhiyya (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya, 1885), pp. 54–6. 22. Hanan Hammad, ‘Between Egyptian National Purity and Local Flexibility: Prostitution in al-Mahalla al-Kubra in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, Journal of Social History 44: 3 (March 2011), pp. 751–83. 23. Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 364. For an overview on the connection between imperialism and the spread of contagious diseases in colonies, see Lesley Doyal and Imogen Pennell, ‘Health, Medicine and Underdevelopment’, Economic and Political Weekly, Special Number: Population and Poverty, 11: 31–3 (August

218  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 1976), pp. 1235–46. See also Lesley Doyal and Imogen Pennell, The Political Economy of Health (London: Pluto Press, 1979), pp. 96–138. 24. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1993), pp. 83–4. 25. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, p. 84. 26. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), p. 1. 27. Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics, p. 3. 28. Bruce W. Dunne, ‘Sexuality and the “Civilizing Process” in Modern Egypt’ (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1996), p. 140. 29. Lanver Mak, The British in Egypt: Community, Crime and Crises 1882–1922 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 141. 30. Mak, The British in Egypt, p. 171. 31. Majlis al-nuzzar, Al-Qararat sanat 1885, pp. 153–7; Dikritat wa-lawa’ih sihhiyya, pp. 54–6. 32. Majlis al-Nuzzar, Al-Qararat sanat 1885, p. 233. 33. For example, see ‘al-‘Afaf siyaj al-‘umran’, al-Hilal 3: 73 (15 September 1895),  p.  64; and ‘La’ihat al-mumisat’, al-Hilal 4: 96 (15 August 1896), p. 941. 34. For the flourishing press in late nineteenth-century Egypt, see Salah Qabadaya, al-Suhuf al-yawmiyya al-misriyya fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Cairo: al-Hay’a almisriyya al-‘amma lil-kitab, 1982). 35. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘al-Jarayid’ [sic], al-Ustadh 1: 9 (18 October 1892), p. 208; ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘Shukr jamil wa-thana’ jalil’, al-Ustadh 1: 2 (30 August 1892), p. 41. 36. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘Bima taqaddamu wa-ta’akharna wa al-khalqu wahid’, in ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Nadim (ed.), Sulafat al-Nadim fi muntakhabat al-marhum ‘Abdallah Afandi al-Nadim, vol. 2 (Cairo: Matba‘at Hindiyya, 1901), pp. 109–20 (here see p. 110); ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Jumay‘i, Min turath ‘Abdallah al-Nadim: Majallat al-Ustadh: Dirasa tahliliyya (Cairo: al-Hay’a almisriyya al-‘amma lil-kitab, n. d.), pp. 13–14. 37. As quoted in al-Jumay‘i, Min turath ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, p. 71. 38. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘Majlis tibbi ‘ala musab bil-afrangi’, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881. 39. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘Dastur’, al-Ustadh 1: 6 (27 September 1892), pp. 121–3. 40. Al-Nadim, ‘Dastur’, pp. 122–3.

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 219 41. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’, al-Ustadh 1: 19 (27 December 1892), pp. 438–41. 42. Shaykh Ahmad Muhmmad al-Qusi, ‘al-Matla‘’, al-Ustadh 1: 6 (13 September 1892), pp. 123–9. 43. Al-Nadim, ‘Hanifa wa-Latifa’, al-Ustadh 1: 6 (27 September 1892), pp. 132–40; al-Nadim, ‘Latifa wa-Dimyana’, al-Ustadh 1: 7 (4 October 1892), pp. 149–59. See also al-Nadim ‘“Aqd ittifaq” and “Ard hall nisa’ al-sakara li-azwajihin’, alUstadh 1: 10 (25 October 1892), pp. 225–31. 44. Al-Nadim, ‘Marwiyat al-awlad ghayr al-shar‘iyyin’, al-Ustadh 1: 4 (13 September 1892), p. 95. 45. Al-Nadim, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’, al-Ustadh 1: 19 (27 December 1892), pp. 438–41. 46. Al-Nadim, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’, p. 439. 47. ‘al-‘Afaf siyaj al-‘umran’, al-Hilal 3: 73 (15 September 1895), p. 64; ‘La’ihat al-mumisat’, al-Hilal 4: 76 (15 August 1896), p. 941. 48. Al-Nadim, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’ and ‘al-‘Afaf siyaj al-‘umran’. 49. Al-Nadim, ‘al-‘Afaf siyaj al-‘umran’. 50. Al-Nadim, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’, p. 441. 51. ‘La’ihat al-mumisat’, al-Hilal, p. 941. 52. Mahafiz ‘Abdin, Sijillat Mudiriyyat al-Gharbiyya, sijill warid number 111, doc. 90, 2 October 1893. 53. Mahafiz ‘Abdin, Sijillat Mudiriyyat al-Gharbiyya, memorandum dated 12 October 1893. 54. Muhammad Farid, Mudhakkirat Muhammad Farid: Tarikh Misr min ibtida` sanat 1891, ed. Ra’uf Hamid `Abbas (Cairo, al-Hay’a al-misriyya al-‘amma lilkitab, 1975), pp. 210, 228. 55. Farid, Mudhakkirat Muhammad Farid, p. 210. 56. Farid, Mudhakkirat Muhammad Farid, p. 66. 57. Farid, Mudhakkirat Muhammad Farid, p. 124. 58. Nizarat al-dakhiliyya, al-Qawanin al-idariyya wa al-jina’iyya: al-qawanin almakhsusa (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq, n. d.), p. 433. 59. Nizarat al-dakhiliyya, al-Qawanin al-idariyya wa al-jina’iyya, pp. 430–5. 60. Nizarat al-dakhiliyya, Idarat ‘umum al-sihha, Dikritat wa-lawa’ih sihhiyya (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-amiriyya bi-Bulaq, 1895), pp. 54–6. 61. Nizarat al-dakhiliyya, al-Qawanin al-idariyya wa al-jina’iyya, p. 430. 62. Dar al-mahfuzat al-‘umumiyya bil-Qal‘a, Majmu‘at wizarat al-dakhiliyya, Idarat ‘umum al-amn, Dafatir ikhtarat tarakhis buyut al-bigha’ fi Misr.

220  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 63. Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 55. 64. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 1, 364, 417. See also Hyam, Understanding the British Empire; Derek Hopwood, Sexual Encounters in the Middle East: The British, the French and the Arabs (Reading: Garnet Publishing Limited: 2006); Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Arnold, Colonizing the Body. 65. Hopwood, Sexual Encounters in the Middle East, pp. 2–3. 66. Anthony Sattin, Lifting the Veil: British Society in Egypt 1768–1956 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons 1988), p. 185. 67. F. C. Penfield, Present-Day Egypt, 2nd edn (New York, NY: Century Company, 1903), pp. 52–3. Penfield’s support for the British invasion was highlighted in Current Literature 26: 5 (November 1899), p. 471. 68. Muhammad al-Najjar, Majmu‘at azjal (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-adabiyya, 1890), pp. 127–8. 69. Al-Muqattam 19 August 1898. 70. Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, ‘al-Adab al-‘amma’, Mu’allafat Mustafa Lutfi alManfaluti al-kamila (Beirut: Dar al-jil, 1984), pp. 606–12. See also Muhammad Rashid Rida, ‘al-Tahatuk fi Misr wa-talafih’, al-Manar, 25 September 1900. 71. Marilyn Booth, ‘Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s’, in Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (eds), Between Politics, Society and Culture: The Press in the Middle East before Independence (forthcoming). 72. Al-Nadim, ‘Madrasat al-banat: Sharifa wa-Bahiyya’, al-Ustadh 1: 17 (13 December 1892), pp. 395–9. 73. Al-Mu’ayyad, 30 October 1906. 74. Rida, ‘al-Tahatuk fi Misr’. 75. Rida, ‘al-Tahatuk fi Misr’. 76. ‘Sa’ih ‘arabi’, al-Mu’ayyad, 11 August 1907. 77. Al-Muqattam, 19 August 1898; al-Ustadh, 6 September 1892, pp. 61–3; 4 October 1892, pp. 145–7; al-Mu’ayyad, 8 January 1908. See also Shawqi Dayf, al-Fukaha fi Misr (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1958). 78. Al-Manar, 26 July 1896; al-Liwa’, 4 February 1904. 79. Rida, ‘al-Tahatuk fi Misr’. 80. Qasim Amin, Tahrir al-mar’a (Cairo: Dar al-ma‘arif, [1899] 1970), pp. 45, 48.

reg ulati ng sexua li ty | 221 81. Muhammad Muru, Tarikh Misr al-hadith: al-thawra al-‘urabiyya, vol. 3 (Cairo: Maktabat wa-matba‘at al-ghad, 2005), p. 63. 82. Hopwood, Sexual Encounters in the Middle East, p. 75. 83. Hafiz Ibrahim, Diwan Hafiz Ibrahim, eds Ahmad Amin, Ahmad al-Zayn and Ibrahim al-Ibyari (Cairo: Matba‘at dar al-kutub, 1937), pp. 256–9. 84. For the history of prostitution in a provincial setting, see Hammad, ‘Prostitution in al-Mahalla al-Kubra’. 85. Dawud Barakat, translated introduction in Burtuqalis Bey, al-Bigha’ aw khatar al-‘ahara fi al-qutr al-misri (Cairo: Matba‘at Hindiyya, 1907), p. 2. 86. Bey, al-Bigha’, p. 20. 87. Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti, al-Nazarat, vol. I (Cairo: Matba‘t al-ma‘arif, 1910), pp. 69, 168, 194. 88. On al-Manfaluti’s Islamisation of French romance, see Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (New York, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2004), p. 65. See also Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983; Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 109–13. 89. Muhammad Ra’fat al-Jamali, Mudhakkirat baghiy, 2nd edn (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-tujariyya, 1922). 90. Muhammad Shahin, Report on the Commission of the Enquiry into the Problem of Licensed Prostitution in Egypt (Cairo: Government Press, 1935). 91. Although there is no assessment of the link between police and commercial sex, the police campaign on ‘eyesores of Cairo’s underworld’ in 1916 revealed high levels of corruption among the police force and the power of pimps over women in Wajh al-Birka – the central neighbourhood for public prostitution. See Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service: 1902–1946 (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 181. 92. ‘La’ihat al-mumisat’, al-Hilal. 93. ‘La’ihat al-mumisat’, al-Hilal; Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 182. 94. Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, pp. 146–7. 95. Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p. 179. 96. Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, pp. 179–80.

8 Internationalist Thought, Local Practice: Life and Death in the Anarchist Movement in 1890s Egypt Anthony Gorman

O

n 18 March 1892 a small public meeting gathered outside Muharram Bey Gate in Alexandria to mark the anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune. Speeches were delivered and songs sung to commemorate the dramatic events of more than twenty years before, while a manifesto of Bakunin proclaiming the principles of anarchism was posted on the walls of the city. The occasion marked the revival of a movement that first appeared in Egypt in the 1860s and sustained a record of continual – if at times uneven – activism into the 1890s and beyond. Internationalist in perspective and united in their opposition to the state, religion and capitalism, anarchists began to engage more explicitly with local Egyptian issues during the 1890s as they took part in the efflorescence of political contest and social agitation of this critical decade. In pursuit of the emancipation of the individual, social justice, workers’ rights and secularism, they played an important part in the contemporary debate on working conditions, education and public health in Egypt. The contribution, even presence, of this movement has been little recognised in the scholarly literature dominated by the competing nationalist and colonialist discourses. However, its particular significance during this critical period lies in the challenge the movement mounted in both word and deed to state power, capitalism and the social establishment that both enriched the public debate and provoked the attention of the security organs of state. 222

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 223 Internationalist Beginnings Anarchists are first attested in Egypt within Italian working class circles in the 1860s.1 Their appearance was part of a wider international phenomenon of radicalism calling for the defence of workers’ interests that was formalised with the establishment of the First International (International Workingmen’s Association) in London in 1864. By 1876, support for the movement in Egypt was sufficient to sustain the formation of local sections of the International in Cairo, Alexandria and in the cities of the Canal, and their representation at socialist congresses in Europe in the late 1870s. The fragmentation and dissolution of the International during this decade, both the result of state repression and the ideological differences between anarchists under Bakunin’s leadership on the one hand and the legalitarian socialists led by Marx and Engels on the other, dealt a setback to the movement. However, with the establishment of the Second International in Paris in July 1889 progressive forces across Europe began to reorganise themselves. The next decade would mark the beginning of a new energy among international socialists and corresponding state repression.2 In Egypt, such ideas found a ready reception among foreign and particularly Italian workers. Since the Napoleonic era, Egypt had upheld a tradition of providing a safe haven for political dissidents fleeing Europe and the latest waves of repression prompted many to seek refuge there.3 An emerging international anarchist network in place since at least the 1870s, sustained by an expanding transport system across the Mediterranean, facilitated this development. Egypt also offered significant economic opportunities, especially in public works infrastructure and urban development projects, where the demand for skilled foreign labour had remained strong since the time of Muhammad ‘Ali (r. 1805–48). This demand took on even greater momentum during the reign of his grandson, Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–79), notably with the construction of the Suez Canal, which employed large numbers of Italian and Greek workers before its completion in 1869. The need for such labour continued following the British occupation in 1882, while the expanding commercial importance of the Suez Canal and Alexandria also increased employment opportunities.4 By the 1890s, a community of political exiles and workers attracted by

224  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT economic prospects constituted the backbone of the anarchist movement in Egypt. Many were skilled artisans or tradesmen – carpenters, stonemasons, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, tailors and printers – but others had the means to operate small businesses, such as groceries, jewellery stores, taverns and bars. Yet others were drawn from the free professions, including doctors, dentists, lawyers, pharmacists and journalists, or were involved in trade, owning or working for merchant houses. Italians remained the dominant national group involved in the movement, but increasingly Greeks and Jews of both European and Middle Eastern background feature in the record, particularly in labour circles. The extent of native Egyptian involvement is more difficult to ascertain, but certainly a number of Jews with Egyptian nationality were prominent syndicalists and the record of labour meetings and industrial disputes from the late 1890s onwards regularly featured some Egyptian participation. Among this diverse group certain key figures exemplified its diverse ideological trends and cosmopolitan character. Ugo Icilio Parrini (b. Livorno, 1850 – d. Mansura, 1906) boasted a long record of political activity in Egypt that went back to the 1870s.5 According to his own testimony, his return to Alexandria in 1891 after a number of years in Europe was one factor in the revival of the movement. An uncompromising advocate of the individualist trend that stressed personal agency rather than formal collective organisation as the key to emancipation, Parrini used his wine shop in Alexandria as a regular meeting place for anarchists during the 1890s. By contrast, Pietro Vasai (b. Florence, 1866 – d. Florence, 1916) was a central figure of the anarcho-syndicalist trend, which advocated workers’ associations as the vehicle for social liberation. Already an activist as a youth with a considerable police record in Europe, Vasai learnt his trade as a printer in Tunisia before arriving in Alexandria in 1898. Upon arrival, he was immediately arrested by the Egyptian police, who were tipped off, very likely by Italian authorities tracking his movements. After his release, he embarked on a remarkably energetic record of activism over the next decade-and-a-half as a labour militant, staunch advocate of workers’ education and important figure in the anarchist press. In 1916 he departed, or perhaps was deported, to Florence where he died soon after.6 If Italians were the dominant ethnic group in the movement, its Jewish

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 225 element also provided strong leaders. Solomon Goldenburg (fl. 1899–1912), a Jewish Egyptian national and cigarette worker, was one of the leaders in the successful cigarette workers’ strike in Cairo in December 1899–1900 and continued a distinguished record of labour militancy well into the decade.7 Joseph (Giuseppe) Rosenthal (b.1872–d.1960s?), a jeweller of disputed origins, had arrived in Alexandria by 1897. In a public life that extended beyond World War I, his talent for organisation and propaganda manifested itself in the labour movement, public demonstrations and journalism.8 These militants would play central, if not necessarily coordinated, roles in the anarchist movement in Egypt during the 1890s and beyond. Along with other activists who came to Egypt during this period, they brought with them experience in political organisation, underground activities, personal contacts, propaganda and a dedication to the idea of international solidarity, all of which served as important resources for the subsequent growth of the movement. This diverse set of skills, as well as a relatively high literacy rate and access to a number of linguistic communities, allowed it to draw on the varied talents of its membership in an effective way.9 Those who possessed foreign nationality were able – at least in principle – to enjoy the privileges of the Capitulations, even if the record shows that such protection was not always extended to the politically ‘suspect’ and, indeed, could be employed against them.10 Nevertheless, the movement possessed significant advantages in conducting a programme of agitation that enabled it to exercise an influence beyond its numbers. Provoking the State In pursuing an agenda that challenged social and political norms, the anarchist movement would encounter an increasingly watchful and coercive Egyptian state. While not the only social movement to provoke this reaction, its particular character, membership and international reputation triggered a determined response from the security organs of the Egyptian state, as well as from the local representatives of foreign governments. Even before 1882 the Egyptian Government had operated agents that gathered intelligence on the activities of potential subversives. Anarchists – or internationalists – were not the only objects of such attention, but they were nevertheless a significant element of an increasing anxiety within state and

226  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT diplomatic circles about public security. When the charismatic Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, visited Egypt in 1878 his movements were tracked and recorded by government watchers, ultimately leading to his deportation after seeking to mobilise European workers.11 His return to Egypt in early 1882 with some companions to assist the ‘Urabist movement and the nationalist cause again aroused the interest of state security services with rumours that he was present with Egyptian forces at the defeat of Tel al-Kabir in September, which marked the beginning of the British occupation.12 Once in firm possession of the country, the British Government gave priority to managing Egyptian financial affairs for the rest of the decade and it was not until the 1890s that it sought to extend its control more systematically over matters of law and order. In 1894, as part of the test of strength between Cromer and the young ‘Abbas Hilmi II, the British effectively took over control of the Ministry of the Interior with the appointment of a British official as Advisor to the Minister in 1894.13 Justified by continuing police inefficiency and misconduct, the move put the first Advisor, Eldon Gorst (later to take over from Cromer as Consul-General), at the centre of ministry business and served as a significant instrument of British influence over Egyptian domestic affairs. In 1898 Gorst was succeeded by Percy Machell, who over the next ten years played a critical role in matters of public security, doling out firm advice on labour disputes and being one of the leading hardliners in the British response to the events of Dinshawai in 1906. Under this new regime, the Ministry of the Interior developed its capability for surveillance of individuals and the gathering of intelligence. Anarchists were a prime target. Already the Alexandria Police had begun to compile an anarchist register following an incident in 1897. By 1900 the Italian Consulate, which began compiling profiles on internationalists in the late 1870s, had consolidated lists of ‘dangerous anarchists’ and a growing collection of dossiers on suspect individuals, fed by regular memoranda from the Ministry of the Interior.14 Such intelligence gathering was made possible by a network of police agents who regularly attended and reported on anarchist and workers’ meetings. As the industrial scene became more volatile, the police adopted increasingly violent tactics against workers.15 Such actions prompted public criticism of the police and, most loudly from the anarchists themselves, brought accusations of the abuse of state power.16

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 227 Security concerns were not confined to domestic affairs. The revival of anarchist activities in Egypt at the beginning of the 1890s had provoked some alarm from the local Italian authorities in Alexandria and Cairo, ever concerned with the political reliability of their resident community. In April 1890 the Italian Consulate in Alexandria wrote to Rome warning that internationalists had become more numerous and active in the city over the previous twelve months.17 The following year it reported that ‘socialist anarchists are working with great industry which they have not done in these recent times [conducting] subversive and injurious protests’.18 The Egyptian state and the local representatives of foreign governments looked with increasing unease at the growth of the anarchist movement internationally. From the 1890s, a series of sensational international assassinations of senior public figures, all carried out by anarchists, prompted governments across Europe to take measures to deal with the dangers, as they saw it, of international terrorism.19 An Anti-Anarchist Conference was convened in Rome in 1898 with representatives from a number of European states and the Ottoman Empire gathering to discuss ways to deal with the threat. The upshot was a series of agreements and protocols concerning the deportation of activists and the sharing of intelligence regarding anarchist militants and their activities.20 In Egypt such fears were finding some purchase in the Ministry of the Interior. In 1894, following a letter from an informant in Cairo, a newly arrived Italian, Francesco Blandini, was accused of being part of a plot to assassinate the Khedive and his expulsion was requested by the Egyptian Government.21 Similar concerns were expressed regarding the safety of the Count of Turin during his visit to Port Said en route to Eritrea in October 1898. More sensational was the announcement of the conspiracy to assassinate the German Kaiser Wilhelm during his tour of the Middle East the same month.22 This was alleged to have involved an anarchist network in Egypt and Palestine, with possible links to Istanbul; the authorities quickly rounded up eighteen suspects in Alexandria (including Parrini and Vasai) and charged them with a series of offences. Deported and tried in Ancona the following year, all eighteen were found innocent of the most serious charges, but this did not dampen concern in government quarters. In September 1900, a flurry of confidential correspondence followed more speculation regarding another rumoured attempt on the life of the Khedive.23

228  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT It is unclear how real these fears were. The long 1890s was a period full of talk of conspiracies and plots, both real and imagined. Some were no doubt the product of the overactive imaginations of individuals seeking favour or funding from the authorities. Others, including that concerning Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit, suggest that Italian officials in Egypt may have cooked up the affair to justify a strike against local activists and to support a request for an increase in policing resources. Nevertheless, during this period the Egyptian state under British supervision developed an increasingly sophisticated surveillance capability that was part of a broader project designed to consolidate state power and uphold the existing social order.24 This enabled it to monitor the movements of suspected activists and politically unreliable individuals coming in and out of the country, especially at the ports and railway stations; to infiltrate and report on meetings; and to provide close surveillance of demonstrations. In this endeavour, for example, a steady stream of correspondence flowed from the Public Security Department in the Ministry of the Interior to the local Italian Diplomatic Agency reporting on the activities of individual anarchists, meetings of reading groups, workers’ demonstrations and other suspicious activities. This volatile mix of radical movements, underground organisations, political violence and government security apparatus would be brought dramatically before the public with the assassination of Prime Minister Butrus Ghali in February 1910. The subsequent trial of the assassin, Ibrahim alWardani, revealed a murky world of nationalist associations and anarchist groups in Egypt and across Europe.25 In response, the British advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, Ronald Graham, established a political section [alqalam al-siyasi] within the ministry, later reorganised as the Secret Service Bureau in 1911. The move has been considered by some as the beginning of the mukhabarat [secret police surveillance] state, but in fact the process had begun some considerable time before this.26 The Power of the Word Notwithstanding these official concerns about political violence, the anarchist movement in Egypt in fact was characterised much more by its use of the printed word and organisation to promote its ideas and activities. A regular anarchist press in Egypt is more a phenomenon of the first decade

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 229 of the twentieth century, but during the 1880s and 1890s anarchists also participated in the general mushrooming of print publication in Egypt.27 Handbills, posters and public announcements posted overnight on walls in the streets of Alexandria and Cairo were often used to bring pressing issues to the attention of the public. On occasion, more innovative distribution methods were employed. At a ball at the Theatre Zizinia in Alexandria celebrating the birthday of King Umberto I in 1889, flyers thrown from the upper gallery rained down in great numbers on those attending: Do you know who they are who have invited you to celebrate the birthday of the HEAD COP OF ITALY today? They are ambitious imposters and liars that use you, that believe you idiots, to seize a cross that has not yet come. Wake up and no longer serve as a stool to these slackers, and to the cry of LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION rise up against the exploiters of the people!28

The prominence of Italians in the printing trade, and the militancy of printers themselves, ensured that the means by which such material was produced was readily to hand. Indeed, on a number of occasions, investigations into the origins of such politically provocative literature led the police to the presses of local Italian language newspapers such as L’Operaio and L’Eco d’Italia. Such public notices promoting the ideals of the movement most often appeared on significant days in the international socialist calendar. Foremost among these was 18 March – the date of the declaration of the Paris Commune in 1871. One such example appeared in Alexandria in 1889: Workers! It is now eighteen long years past to the day since the COMMUNE was founded in Paris. It seems a futile thing to us to recall today the story of that great revolution that made the whole world tremble. We simply have to ask ourselves what we have done since those sad but glorious days, and if we have really responded to the cry that the 30.000 victims of Republican government uttered. The COMMUNE taught us that everything that exists is of THOSE WHO WORK and that until the day that the PEOPLE will be absolute

230  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT masters of the product of their work, misery and famine will reign sovereign and they will remain as a stool to wealthy exploiters, whether priests, monarchists, Republicans, and suchlike.29

In March 1894, al-Hilal reported the arrest and prosecution of a Greek anarchist in Cairo for distributing a similar message, apparently in Arabic, that proclaimed: Remember that this day is the commemoration of the awakening (nahda) of the Paris Commune. So oppressed workers let’s unite together and rejoice with one another. Destruction to the rapacious rich! Long live the social revolution and long live anarchism! 30

In time, the anniversary of the Paris Commune would be challenged, although never replaced, by May Day in the internationalist calendar. First proposed at the meeting of the Second International in Paris in 1889 to commemorate the Haymarket massacre in Chicago three years before, 1 May was quickly adopted as the day on which to mark the cause of workers around the world. Indeed, already in April 1891 the authorities in Alexandria reported that the festival of 1 May was looming as part of a coordinated global protest and an occasion to mark a ‘reawakening’ [risveglio] among anarchists,31 very likely the first observance of an occasion that would be taken up in time by the labour movement across the Middle East.32 The tradition immediately took hold with a great number of May Day manifestos reported in the streets from the early hours the following year and thereafter.33 Such proclamations regularly invoked the international solidarity of workers and the historical struggle against the ruling classes. As one notice (in Italian) declared in 1906: Comrade workers! On this day, across the sea and borders, conscious minorities of people, diverse in race, religion, nationality and customs but united in aspirations of civil progress, love, peace, well-being and liberty, greet the fateful date of 1 May with hope . . . [a day when] those heroic anarchists that serenely gave up their lives in sacrifice for human emancipation so that history has now consecrated them with the title of Martyrs of Chicago. To these our comrades in faith, the International Socialist Congress of Paris in 1889 decreed the idea . . . that the first of May should be a day of voluntary gen-

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 231 eral strike for the international proletariat, as a solemn and severe warning to the ruling and exploiting classes and to governments, that the workers, these producers of all social riches . . . are finally conscious of their rights and moreover have the energy and will to affirm them.34

Local Labour Activism Such declarations made clear the internationalist perspective, character and imagination of the movement and stressed the common plight of the exploited masses around the world. However, the language employed was often rather formulaic, for the most part in Italian and in general providing little or no specific reference to the particular circumstances of Egypt. While this practice was maintained, during the long 1890s anarchist activism took on an increasingly local character as the high-flown rhetoric of radical internationalism began to be complemented by more specific, militant action at a local level in a number of areas, particularly the labour movement, public education and public health.35 This local engagement was perhaps most marked in emerging militant labour. Industrial action itself was not new in the 1890s. The spontaneous strikes of the early 1880s, instigated by coalheavers on the Suez Canal, had demonstrated the potential for direct action by workers.36 However, it was not until the following decade that workers established formal trade unions and premeditated strike action would begin to become a standard tactic in the armoury of industrial militancy. This new labour activism emerged from two main quarters. The first was from among Suez Canal workers, where the critical importance of the waterway and the specialised skills required for its operation and maintenance afforded labour a strong bargaining position through which to press home demands. From 1891, a series of disputes related to the expansion of Suez Canal capacity – specifically, the payment of bonuses and the conditions of dismissal for workers – provided an ongoing source of conflict between the Suez Canal Company (SCC) and its employees and workers.37 The formation of the Syndicat Professionel des Ouvriers du Canal de Suez in July 1893 served as a prelude to a three-month strike by dredgers in Port Said, Suez and Ismailia launched in August of the following year that sought clarification of their employment status. This successful collective action, which won

232  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT significant concessions from the company on redundancies and repatriation arrangements, opened up new potential for industrial action, even if the defeat of workers in another dispute in 1898 effectively quelled labour militancy on the Suez Canal for some years. The role played by anarchists in these events is difficult to ascertain. However, the controversial circumstances of the killing of Lemasson – the SCC chief engineer – in September 1894, in which there were accusations, never proven, of anarchist involvement, and the brief appearance of Il Trovatore – an anarchist newspaper – in Port Said in 1895, suggest that the movement already had some presence on the Canal.38 The other, more enduring front of anarcho-syndicalist militancy during the 1890s erupted in Cairo and Alexandria where new classes of worker were establishing a tradition of militant struggle. Cigarette rollers stood at the vanguard of this new development. In the summer of 1894, after establishing a union in Cairo they called a strike that put forward various wage demands and a request for the provision of coffee and food at work. When their employers proved unwilling to give ground, the strike spread to Alexandria, which prompted a settlement before long. The resulting agreement underwrote industrial peace in the sector for the next five years until December 1899, when the celebrated cigarette workers’ strike in Cairo marked the reopening of hostilities between worker and employer. The new association, now renamed the International Union of Cigarette Rollers (but also known simply as ‘The Union’), had by this time been reorganised, opened to cigarette workers of all nationalities and more explicitly represented the interests of its members based on principles of solidarity and self-organisation. Led by a multiethnic leadership that included Greeks, Jews and other Egyptians, its triumph over the Manufacturers’ Federation in February 1900 proved an inspiration to labour across the industrial sector, particularly among printers, tailors and shoemakers, and heralded the beginning of a period of militant labour activity.39 The influences behind this emergent militant labour were, no doubt, diverse. The changing nature of the economy and the emergence of new small-scale industries, the presence of an experienced foreign labour force and the critical importance of the Suez Canal provided the conditions whereby organised workers could press for, and at times maximise, their demands. These were articulated in a way that suggests that the broad socialist lexicon

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 233 sustained the struggle of workers not just for an improvement in material conditions, but as part of a discourse that spoke in the name of workers’ rights, universal brotherhood and social harmony. The internationalist ideas of anarchists – and, increasingly, the principles of syndicalism – were now being applied explicitly to local conditions and invoked at workers’ assemblies and in the press. At a meeting of the Association of Shoemakers in December 1901, Vasilios Kalliarekos pronounced the organisation of the working classes as a sacred means by which to attain the ‘Love of the Members of each profession. Through Love we will be able to successfully confront the misfortune with which Capital oppresses us . . .’40 For the editors of L’Unione, the shared interests of European and Egyptian workers were manifest: Labour has no frontiers or language. Therefore we make no issue of nationality, religion, or race. All feel the same needs, all suffer the same grief; all have one sole aspiration: their own well-being, which cannot be other than the result of the common well-being.41

Such sentiments expressed the internationalist imagination of the movement, even if it acknowledged obstacles such as nationality and language in realising its vision. Anarchists did at times recognise the difficulties in communicating with all workers: after all, very few Arabophone Egyptians, most of whom were illiterate in any tongue, were able to read anarchist publications in Italian or French. However, particularly in the new sectors of the economy, an ongoing pattern of collaboration between Egyptian and local foreign workers in industrial action demonstrated a shared practical vision. Educating the Public Labour activism offered one avenue through which to improve the living standards of workers, but many anarchists believed that education provided a more fundamental means to advance society and achieve the genuine social emancipation of men and women. Since at least the early 1880s this had been pursued on a small scale in study groups, such as the European Circle of Social Studies [Circolo europeo di studi sociali] in Alexandria, where members gathered to read international news and ideological tracts and discuss ideas.42 This practice continued into the new century with the establishment of socalled international reading rooms in Alexandria and Cairo, where collections

234  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of radical press and literature in a number of languages were available to interested readers, typically of Italian, Greek and Jewish backgrounds. However, the increasing aspirations of the movement called for a grander, more public platform from which to promote the cause of education for the masses. In 1901 anarchists sought to launch a Free Popular University (UPL) in both Alexandria and Cairo, inspired by examples set up in Italy and France, but with a more radical vision.43 The real force behind the plan was probably Pietro Vasai, but the project was ignited by the arrival of the dynamic Luigi Galleani, an anarchist of international reputation, who led the initial public appeal for support.44 Still, the radical intent behind the UPL was not explicitly advertised; rather, the advocates of the UPL stressed its educative purpose, along with its international and multiethnic character, consonant with its aims. In Alexandria the initiative received widespread support from the city’s main communities, evident both in the European and Arabic language press.45 At the well-attended official opening in May 1901, the welcoming address of Raoul Canivet, editor of La Réforme, was translated into Arabic by Muhammad Kalza, before other speakers followed in Greek and Italian. Kalza’s participation was particularly significant. As the correspondent of al-Liwa’, the Arabic-language newspaper launched the previous year by ­emerging nationalist spokesperson Mustafa Kamil, Kalza’s presence indicated a clear statement of support from the emerging Egyptian nationalist movement. Indeed, on the following day the pages of al-Liwa’ gave the opening of the UPL extensive coverage, reproducing the complete text of Canivet’s speech in Arabic and stressing its support for the project: ‘We earnestly hope that our Alexandrian brothers support this college and frequent its doors as students for the acquisition of its benefits because the welfare of the people is dependent on and is adorned by the triumph of education.’46 This enthusiasm coupled with the subsequent press coverage suggests that there was very considerable popular support for opportunities for adult education. The ambitious breadth of programmes made free evening courses available to working men and women across a wide range of subjects, from literature and science to law and social and labour issues. French and Italian were the dominant languages of instruction, but other courses and language classes were also offered in German, English and Arabic. Classes were given

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 235 by volunteer instructors drawn mainly from the professional classes, principally teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists. Contributors of lectures in Arabic were mostly journalists, not only Muhammad Kalza himself, but also Tawfiq ‘Azuz from the Cairene review, al-Miftah, and ‘Abduh Badran of the Alexandrian weekly, al-Sabah. Despite the initial discretion of its planners in promoting its radical agenda, the UPL soon incurred the hostility of the local Italian authorities, who were anxious to curb, if not close down, the enterprise. When a lecturer made a remark in class that was deemed supportive of the recent assassination (by an anarchist) of the Italian king, Umberto I, the Italian Consulate moved quickly to prosecute both the lecturer and an applauding member of the audience. The action appears to have turned some of the Alexandrian press against the UPL and had the effect of cowing its leadership. In the struggle for control over the following months, the anarchist nucleus was marginalised and gave way to a UPL committee more committed to the teaching of vocational skills than the liberation of the intellect. Lectures on workers’ rights, women’s issues and literature now gave way to classes on stenography and accountancy. The establishment of the UPL in Alexandria, and the less successful attempt to do so in Cairo, demonstrate an admirable if over-ambitious attempt on the part of anarchists to provide a radical programme of public education to the popular classes in Egypt. In terms of the specific aims of the movement, its relative failure – it continued for some years, but only with its sober vocational curriculum – saw anarchists return to the more modest mode of small study groups and specific associations to promote particular elements of their programme. Nevertheless, the UPL appeared at a critical time when much public debate raged in Egypt regarding the provision of public education. The failure to allocate significant resources to public instruction by the Egyptian Government, following the dictates of Cromer and policies of Dunlop, had attracted increasing criticism from Egyptians.47 While anarchists themselves had little truck with the idea of state provision of education, they consistently highlighted the vice of ignorance and stressed the virtues of education as central to the realisation of human emancipation. In this respect, the UPL very likely served as an important inspiration to the emerging nationalist movement for the establishment of the Higher Schools

236  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Club [Nadi al-madaris al-‘ulya] in 1905 and its subsequent night schools, both important forums for the nurturing of nationalist ideas, as well as, even if for a more elite audience, the Egyptian University in 1908.48 Civil Guardians of Public Health If the anarchist commitment to the education of the masses sought to liberate the potential of the human intellect, its concern with the cause of public health stressed the more fundamental importance of physical well-being, and afforded another issue by which to pursue its anti-state agenda. The issue of public health increasingly occupied both government and private interests in Egypt during the nineteenth century. This was especially so during times of epidemic, such as the outbreak of cholera that ravaged the country in 1865 and caused considerable loss of life. After 1869, with increased movement of people and goods facilitated by the opening of the Suez Canal, Egypt – particularly the port cities of Alexandria and Port Said – now loomed large as a significant site for the transmission of disease.49 In order to combat this general threat, a series of government authorities of varying constitution and competence had been set up, most recently the General Sanitary Administration of Egypt in Alexandria, renamed the Sanitary, Maritime, and Quarantine Council of Egypt in 1881, as the chief responsible authority for dealing with issues of public health.50 Among anarchists an explicit concern with public health dates back to at least 1883 when another outbreak of cholera prompted local activists to take up the matter publicly. In August of that year soon after the first signs of the disease, notices in Italian, signed by a self-appointed committee of seventeen, appeared in the streets of Alexandria. Addressed to the ‘Workers of Alexandria’, it called attention to the seriousness of the situation and emphasised that the parlous state of affairs had been exacerbated by the irresponsible behaviour of the authorities. It stressed, therefore, that workers had to rely on their own efforts and resources to deal with the crisis: With frank words, we sons of the people and workers like you must request your attention on the desolate financial and sanitary condition in which our class currently finds itself in this poor country, so much exploited. [. . .]

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 237 In the presence of the terrible epidemic imported from India (an English gift) . . . and which now has invaded all of Egypt and seriously menaced our city, in the presence of the hateful spectacle that the rich show, cowardly fleeing before the disease, leaving we workers deprived of work, we that have always been exploited, and by which they revel in riches . . . Forgotten and neglected by those whose fortune and our sweat have given gold and exuberance, let us not be discouraged; compact and united in energetic will to lend reciprocal help to each other, we have the power to implement this humanitarian principle, and to such an end, we signatories representing more than 500 signatures, make an appeal to all those who, free from vested interests, feel capable of self-denial and courage in these sad emergencies, which unite ourselves in a fraternal community of feeling and action.51

The matter of public health would remain an enduring one for anarchists and offered certain advantages. In practical terms, it held a clear immediate and obvious relevance to all. Ideologically, it provided fertile ground for a social critique, by which to reproach the government and those at its helm for their neglect of the popular welfare and an opportunity to promote the values of self-organisation and self-reliance, both central to the anarchist programme. This contest between state authority and local popular organisation underwrote the anarchist response to the next cholera epidemic in 1902, when its organ L’Operaio targeted the local authority – the Municipality of Alexandria – for its failure to deal effectively with a public health emergency. Assailing Local Government In 1890, municipal government was an innovation in Egypt. Established by Khedivial decree in January of that year, the Municipality [Baladiyya] of Alexandria represented a new regime for the administration of local affairs with responsibility for a wide range of public services, such as the provision of roads, water, sewerage and cemeteries, the maintenance of public places, gardens and the regulation of public transport.52 A locally constituted body, it was, however, far from being a democratic institution. Half of its twentyeight members were appointed ex officio and the other half were elected by a General Electoral College based on a very limited franchise that comprised

238  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT less than 1 per cent of the population.53 It, therefore, substantially represented the power and interests of the dominant, largely non-Egyptian, mercantile and propertied class in the city. Despite its oligarchic character, the Municipality nevertheless operated as an authority that could be lobbied, supported, criticised or opposed on local issues by the population of the city at large, which served as its revenue base. Anarchists readily embraced their role of critic, taking the municipality to task not only for its poor performance in fulfilling its relevant responsibilities, but also branding it as an illegitimate system in principle. Public criticism of the local administration was no doubt wellestablished during the 1890s, but the emergence of a local anarchist press at the beginning of the new century offered a larger forum.54 This was particularly evident with the launch of the anarcho-syndicalist L’Operaio [The Worker] in July 1902. A weekly edited by Pietro Vasai and Roberto D’Angio – an anarchist and professional journalist – L’Operaio, primarily addressed issues concerned with workers and the labour movement. While much of this focused on political ideas and international affairs, it also provided considerable coverage and commentary on different local Egyptian questions, often using contributions by local workers themselves. In this way, L’Operaio sought to engage the interest of all workers, including Egyptian workers (which it termed ‘a virgin element’), although since it was largely written in Italian, this was almost certainly unrealistic.55 It was probably more effective in informing resident foreign workers about the lives of Egyptians. On occasion, it carried articles translated from the Arabic language daily al-Mu’ayyad, a leading forum of emerging nationalist sentiment,56 and provided occasional pieces on aspects of native life, such as Egyptian youth, women and native industrial action.57 In the months following its launch, L’Operaio provided a running commentary on the performance of the municipal authorities in Alexandria, but its position was in some ways paradoxical. On the one hand, it maintained a trenchant critique of the local authority’s policies across a range of mundane matters, often set within a broader social critique and calling for an improvement in the situation. One persistent grievance was the condition of the city streets:

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 239 The streets where the people live are kept in an absolutely indecent state. Perhaps this happens through the inveterate prejudice, which social critique has now eradicated completely from the enlightened mind, that taxes are paid by the rich. Starting from this principle, it is natural that the poor do not participate in the expenses for the administration of a city, [and] they are forced not only to live in unhealthy and rickety hovels but must also endure the streets where these hovels are built, which in winter are always persistent mud, and in the summer a pernicious dust. This the Municipality of Alexandria does since it believes that only the rich pay taxes, while political economy has proven sufficiently that the rich produce nothing, they are unable to pay anything and they are nothing but parasites of those that work. The main streets where the bourgeoisie live are fairly well swept and watered but those of the workers are neglected. So we workers protest because it is we who producing pay the taxes not the idle capitalists. If the necessary steps are not taken by the municipality, we will return to the argument because we have decided to make ourselves heard.58

The regulation of taxation on rents, the employment conditions of municipal workers and the opening hours of the municipal library were other favoured bugbears. Some of this criticism was not restricted to anarchists. Similar complaints about the state of the streets and rents were also voiced in the Arabic language press.59 However, while the latter couched its critique in terms of the discrimination between Egyptians and foreigners, the anarchist analysis was framed in terms of the predatory rich and the hard-working poor. And yet, on the other hand, more fundamentally, L’Operaio viewed the municipality as an irredeemably flawed institution, an arm of government that fully embodied the evils of state authority: ‘. . . we have never had faith in two institutions: the Government and the Municipality. We say further that we have never had faith in any of the institutions that are the inspiration of the current order of things’.60 On another occasion, the editors despaired of anything other than a radical solution to the evils of the local administration: It [i.e. corruption in the Municipality] is an issue of social gangrene, of a sore that is not able to heal without amputating part of the diseased body. But it is not only part of a diseased body; all of the body is diseased, and in

240  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT order to heal it extreme measures are needed: [namely] the cauterisation of all decayed parts of the social body.61

This opposition to authority in principle meant, in some senses, that criticism of the local administration was a lost cause. In its evaluation of an enquiry into the high salaries paid to senior municipal officials, L’Operaio commented that since the municipality was an innately hierarchical and corrupt institution, the system, not individuals, were to blame: Given the current system of things based on privilege and on deception, abuses in all public administrations have become a necessity which even the more honest administrator cannot avoid. The connections, the compromises, products of inveterate habits are so many that the deceitful transactions and connivance impose themselves as a logical and necessary consequence. Sometimes, for example, we marvel that a fellow, very well known as an upright character and elected a municipal councillor, may then become a thief like his other colleagues. It is not his fault but that of the system.62

It concluded that it was useless to expect any real change for the better in municipal administration and stressed that ‘direct action’ [azione diretta] alone by the people was the only hope for improvement.63 The International Association for Emergency Assistance The outbreak of cholera in the summer of 1902 presented anarchists with the opportunity to demonstrate this commitment to direct action. Launched by a public appeal by Vasai in the pages of L’Operaio in late July, the campaign began with criticism of the ineffectual response of the municipal health services to the crisis and called on the citizens of Alexandria to form an International Association for Emergency Assistance [Associazione internazionale per i soccorsi d’urgenza] (henceforth, AISU). The appeal particularly stressed the international aspect of the endeavour: United, numerous, of common accord, without distinction of nationality (because we are in a cosmopolitan country), inspired by a sentiment of humanity, we do not have to do anything other than appeal to public solidarity, and afterwards, we see, we can . . . establish a service of assistance, to

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 241 provide stretchers, a pharmacy, a storeroom, and an infirmary and all will follow by itself.64

Further appeals appeared in a number of prominent Alexandrian dailies (il Messaggiere, il Corriere, il Giornale, La Réforme) the following week, while a committee organised the distribution by hand of notices in French, Italian, Greek and Arabic (but apparently not English) in all quarters of the city calling for people to support the association. Consistent with the internationalist inspiration of the project, these appeals emphasised the humanitarian values from which all social classes would benefit and, therefore, should support. On the front page, the editors of L’Operaio staked out the moral high ground: Emergency aid offered spontaneously and disinterestedly has a noble aim and a high calling; it characterises the sense of civility of an individual and of a people that, in private or public action, renders itself to the greatness of the times . . . Humanitarian feeling binds strangers in brotherly love; it does not have a language, colour or caste and it affirms all feelings, which daily develop in a better atmosphere where civilised people live.65

The broad appeal to Alexandrian society not only had the practical purpose of maximising participation, but also served an important function of bringing together the diverse elements in the city. As L’Operaio noted: ‘A population composed of diverse elements of contrary trends, divided by issues of race, nationality and religious belief, needs a fulcrum that serves harmony, a sentimental bond that may prepare it for mutual fraternal assistance to common danger . . .’66 On 2 August 1902, the organisers convened a meeting at the premises of the UPL to found the new association. Vasai opened proceedings by briefly explaining the proposed aims of the body and, after some discussion, a provisional committee was constituted.67 In due course, draft statutes were published describing the association’s main aim as ‘organising and maintaining a service for emergency medical and surgical assistance’.68 The constitution was subsequently approved at the General Assembly in September, a monthly membership contribution set and, after election by secret ballot, an

242  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT executive committee formed of about twenty members, ‘men trusted for their competence and disinterestedness’.69 Consistent with anarchist principles, the association had no president; the only formal officers were the secretary (Dr Latis) and the treasurer. The executive and administrative committee was supported by an advisory medical commission [Guardia Medica], while the AISU workers, organised into groups [squadra] made up of twenty-four assistant volunteers [assistente volontieri] – not a hierarchy of commissars and nurses, as some critics asserted – were provided with stretchers, medication and other necessary equipment to provide free assistance to those in need.70 This was, as L’Operaio reported with some satisfaction, an association constituted ‘on a modern basis’.71 By October, with the threat of cholera rapidly receding, L’Operaio was congratulating the citizenry of Alexandria for its efforts, singling out the Masonic Lodges of Caprera and Nuova Pompeia and the Fratellanza artigiana italiana [Italian Artisanal Brotherhood] as well as certain unnamed ­individuals for having offered financial backing for the AISU and encouraging others to follow their example.72 The AISU had not been the only organisation involved in the public health campaign. Indeed, it had cooperated with other community bodies, particularly Beneficenza italiana and the Comitato Italiano di soccorso ai colerosi [Italian Committee of Aid to Cholera Sufferers] in its efforts, even if L’Operaio reproved the latter for forwarding a short list of names to the Italian Consulate for commendation. Such honours, it firmly stated, should either be given to all or none.73 With the danger now passed, the AISU nevertheless maintained its commitment to the cause of public health by sponsoring a course on health and hygiene twice a week at the UPL for interested members of the public and given by Dr Latis.74 The anarchist response to the cholera epidemic, its use of the press and its extended network to deal with a public emergency provided an ideal opportunity to promote the virtues of self-organisation. It also facilitated criticism of the local authorities – ‘this damned municipality’ [questo maledetta Municipalità], as L’Operaio described it. Disparaging not only of its lack of support for the AISU, the paper took the body to task on other public health issues, particularly its failure to provide clean water to the population and its unsympathetic employment practices during the epidemic.75 The lack of public toilets was singled out:

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 243 Where are the public toilets in Alexandria? In a city so big it seems impossible that there is not even . . . a public toilet! I am mistaken, there is one, but only one, in Piazza Santa Catarina, and it is so dirty that in these epidemic times . . . well, it’s just a delight to enter it. Could not Dr Graham, our new health inspector, prepare for the cleaning of the only Alexandrian lieu d’aisance [lit. ‘place of ease’]? And could not the Municipality capitalise on the ill-fated occasion of the cholera to begin the construction of public toilets in our city? Not a chance!76

The Cemetery: A Space Apart If in their campaigns on public health anarchists stressed the common weal, in the matter of a final resting place they sought a distinct space of their own. A civil cemetery – that is, a place of burial for those without religious affiliation – had already been established in Alexandria and Zagazig before permission was successfully sought for one in Cairo in 1890. Financed in part by funds from the recently dissolved Italian Association for the Diffusion of the Language [Associazione italiana per la diffusione della lingua], the proposal was supported by a miscellany of freethinkers both within and beyond the anarchist community.77 Anarchists themselves played a notable part in La Société du Cimetière Civil – the body responsible for its administration – with Giovanni Brunello, a senior militant, serving as its secretary and noted syndicalists Guiseppe Pizzuto and the tireless Pietro Vasai serving as ­committee members.78 These civil cemeteries served a number of purposes. The most practical was that they provided for the interment of non-believers, secularists, freethinkers, masons and anarchists without the involvement or necessary sanction of a religious authority. The office of cemetery administration also furnished a place where anarchists (and probably others) could meet to discuss topical issues. In June 1901, for example, it served as the venue to discuss plans to establish a UPL in Cairo; similarly, in January 1903, it was where anarchists gathered to consider how they might assist striking cigarette workers in Alexandria.79 However, cemeteries generally served a broader social purpose – that is, they represented a community space in which religious and national groups

244  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT asserted the identity of their dead, just as they asserted the community and continuity of the living. In Alexandria the civil cemetery, sandwiched between the British and the Jewish cemeteries in Shatby, represented a clear declaration of a secularisation of space and community. In this sense, it played an important performative function during anarchist funerals, which were occasions not simply to ritualise the burial of a comrade, but to celebrate the ideals of the movement and present a visible public manifestation of its power and following. The funeral of anarchist Silvio Tamberi in Alexandria in 1902 provided such an occasion for his friends and comrades to mark his passing and for a representative from the Italian Consulate to produce the following description of the proceedings: The funeral of Silvio Tamberi took place on 2 March at 9:30 a.m. The coffin was taken out of the main gate of the hospital, instead of the one next to the morgue in Allemagne Street, with the purpose of taking a longer route for the procession and passing through some of the main streets of the city. The coffin, carried up to the exit of the hospital, was laid on the carriage and covered with a red blanket with a black border. On the coffin was laid a wreath of fresh flowers with a red ribbon, sent by the print workers, and suspended behind the carriage were two other wreaths with a red ribbon, carrying the writing on the left ‘The Anarchists of Cairo’, and on the right ‘The Anarchists of Alexandria’. Following the carriage sixty people, most of them anarchists, including those noted: Vasai, Bicchielli, Fiaschi, Losi, Albano, Tesi, Bellatuoni, Hasda, Tempesti, Piperno, Bertuzzi, Rosenthal, Tesone etc. The cortege travelled via the government hospital, the Coptic Church and, passing in front of the Italian Consular residence, through Nabi Daniel and Porta Rosetta, went to the civil cemetery where Dr Camerini, Paneghini and others waited. There were several speeches, including an extremely violent one given by Losi against institutions and the modern social order. Having performed the burial ceremony, many of those who took part in the procession went to the Bar delle Alpi and the shop of Paneghini to drink to their health and to the triumph of their ideas.80

The public ritual of the procession, the burial, the wreaths sent and laid in sympathy on the grave, the speeches and the collective displays of both

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 245 mourning and solidarity were common features of anarchist funerals that demonstrated an expression of the universalist values of the movement and a tangible manifestation of a community of believers in its ideals.81 The bar as a place for socialisation and organisation was also characteristic. Some years later, another procession, not a funeral, but a commemoration of anarchist Francisco Ferrer, served as a similar expression of anarchist community and solidarity. Ferrer, the founder of the Modern School movement in Spain, had been executed by firing squad by order of the Spanish Government in October 1909 on the charge of treason for protesting against compulsory military service. The action provoked outrage across Europe and beyond, with public protests and demonstrations held in Alexandria and Cairo to condemn the action.82 In December, the death of Ferrer – now a martyr to state tyranny – was marked by a large procession to the civil cemetery in Alexandria. The internationalist community turned out in force with a wide spectrum of progressives and radical secularists represented, including various anarchist groups, Masonic Lodges, the Stonemasons League, the Atheist Circle, the Mazzini Circle, the Socialist Section and the International Federation of Free Thinkers of Cairo. At the chosen site, the headstone was laid and various speeches delivered, first in French by Joseph Rosenthal, then by other speakers in Russian, Greek and Armenian, all in praise of the anarchist martyr.83 Conclusion The 1890s in Egypt was a period of great cultural vitality, political dynamism and social activism in which an increasingly vocal, sophisticated and diverse public debate grappled with new political, social and economic issues confronting Egyptian society. For the anarchist movement, it marked a time of revival and greater engagement as it began to apply its internationalist principles more explicitly to specific local issues. It was not alone in taking up these issues, but anarchists presented a distinctive critique of state, economic and religious authority as they prosecuted a programme of emancipation of the individual through their press, popular associations and an armoury of direct action, such as public demonstrations and protest meetings. In this activism, they stressed broad social interest that aimed to appeal beyond narrow national or community concerns to a wider humanitarian reference.

246  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Accordingly, their syndicalism sought to attract workers from both foreign and Egyptian communities and improve their common lot; their promotion of free public education attempted to engage with the pluralist character of Egyptian society; their public health campaigns explicitly stressed the virtues of cooperation across different elements of society. In so doing, they sought to resist the power of employers, the state and the social establishment and to foment a genuinely radical politics based on notions of justice, rights and humanitarian solidarity. Over time, such a project provoked a coercive response from the state, opprobrium from conservative social commentators and censure from competing political forces. Nevertheless, during a time of great fluidity in political and social thought, the movement laid down a significant foundation in its framing of vital public issues and the tactics of organisation and mobilisation that would influence both the nationalist movement and the left in the struggles that lay ahead in the twentieth century. Acknowledgements All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. I wish to thank Valentina Gorgoni for her assistance with some of the Italian translation and Marilyn Booth for her comments on earlier drafts of the chapter and her advice on translation. The following abbreviations have been used: AIE (Ambasciata d’Italia in Egitto, Archivio Storico Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy); PI (Polizia Internazionale, Archivio Storico Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Rome, Italy); FO (Foreign Office, The National Archives, UK). Notes  1. For the following, see Leonardo Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, vol. 2 (Florence: CP, 1976), pp. 281–8; Anthony Gorman, ‘“Diverse in Race, Religion and Nationality . . . But United in Aspirations of Civil Progress”: Anarchism in Egypt before the First World War’, in Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 1880–1940 (Leiden: Brill: 2010), pp. 3–31.  2. Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism 1864–1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 267–9.

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 247   3. Ersilio Michel, Esuli Italiani in Egitto (1815–1861) (Pisa: Domus Mazziniana, 1958).  4. Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), pp. 35–7.   5. Maurizio Antonioli, Giampietro Berti, Santi Fedele and Pasquale Iuso (eds), Dizionario bibliografico degli anarchici italiani, 2 vols (Pisa: Bib. Franco Serantini, 2003), s. v. ‘Parrini, Ugo’. Parrini’s own account of the movement can be found in Bettini, Bibliografia, pp. 303–7.   6. Antonioli et al. (eds), Dizionario bibliografico degli anarchici italiani, s. v. ‘Vasai, Pietro’.   7. Anthony Gorman, ‘Foreign Workers in Egypt 1882–1914: Subaltern or Labour Elite?’, in S. Cronin (ed.), Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2008), p. 244.   8. Variously described as Austrian, Russian, Italian or Lebanese, but invariably as Jewish, Rosenthal was actually born in Safed, Palestine. He is most well known for his role in establishing the Egyptian Communist Party in the early 1920s. See Rami Ginat, A History of Egyptian Communism, Jews and Their Compatriots in Quest of Revolution (Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner, 2011), pp. 28–39.   9. For the relatively high literacy rate of the Italian population in Egypt, see Robert Tignor, State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Table A.2. 10. This was certainly the case with those accused of the plot to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm in 1898 that were arrested and deported to Italy for trial (see below). 11. For a series of correspondence tracking Malatesta’s movements, see ASMAE Moscati VI, b. 1298. 12. Bettini, Bibliografia, 283; also, various correspondence, PI b. 41, Rappresentanze italiane in Alessandria, Atene ecc. 13. Harold H. Tollefson, Jr, ‘The 1894 British Takeover of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior’, Middle Eastern Studies 26: 4 (October 1990), pp. 547–60. 14. For the Alexandrian police, TNA, FO 78/4957, Cromer to Salisbury, Telegram, no. 184, 10 November 1898. For the Italian records, see one such list of over fifty anarchists in Cairo and Alexandria: Liste di anarchici, Cairo, 9 October 1900, AIE b. 86 (1900–4), Anarchici. 15. The cigarette workers’ strike of December 1901 was a notable case when police used canes and fire hoses, perhaps for the first time, to disperse strikers. Machell’s

248  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT view that the cigarette workers were not strikers, but ‘aggressors attacking the liberty of work of their comrades and the security of commerce’ is indicative of the official view; see AIE b. 88, Machell to Manzoni, 16 December 1901. 16. ‘Un referendum’, Il Corriere Egiziano, 5 August 1901; see also Parrini’s criticism, AIE b. 88, 1900–4, Ministry of Interior to Italian Diplomatic Agency, 6 January 1902. 17. PI b. 41, Rappresentanze italiane in Alessandria, Atene ecc., 1890 Alessandria, Alex. to Rome, 10 April 1890. 18. PI b. 41, 1891 Alessandria, Alex. to Rome, 18 April 1891. 19. These included the French President Carnot (1894), the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (1898), the Italian King Umberto I (1900) and the American President William McKinley (1901). 20. R. Bach Jensen, ‘The International Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol’, Journal of Contemporary History 16: 2 (1981), pp. 323–47. 21. PI b. 41, Rappresentanze italiane in Alessandria, Atene, ecc. 1894–5, Alessandria, 20 September 1894, 2 October 1894. 22. AIE b. 86 1900–4, Anarchici, 1899, Processo in Alessandria d’Egitto contro diverti anarchici. 23. TNA, FO 78/5090, Cromer, Telegram no. 107, 7 October 1900. 24. The Egyptian Government had asked the Italian Government to send some Italian police with experience in dealing with anarchists for the aborted visit of Kaiser Wilhelm, AIE b. 86 1900–4, Anarchici, 1898 Misure speciali di sorveglianza sugli anarchici in occasione del viaggio dell’ Imperatore di Germania in Palestina. 25. Malak Badrawi, Political Violence in Egypt 1910–1924, Secret Societies, Plots and Assassinations (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), pp. 28, 84–5. Such speculation was based on the possible contacts that the assassin, Ibrahim al-Wardani, had with anarchists in Switzerland. For British concerns regarding Egyptians returning from studies abroad, see TNA, FO 371/1115/46990, Lord Kitchener to Sir Edward Grey, 14 November 1911. 26. Eliezer Tauber, ‘Egyptian Secret Societies, 1911’, Middle Eastern Studies 42: 4 (2006), p. 605. 27. See Anthony Gorman, ‘The Anarchist Press in Egypt before the First World War’, in Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (eds), Between Politics, Society and Culture: The Press in the Middle East before Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 249 28. PI b. 41, Alessandria 1890. L’Operaio referred to here should not be confused with the anarchist newspaper discussed below. 29. PI b. 41, Alessandria 1890. The capitals are in the original. The ceremony at the Muharram Bey Gate in 1892 with which the chapter began marked another such occasion. 30. ‘Manshur fawdawi ‘aqim’, al-Hilal 2: 15 (1 April 1894), p. 475. Tachidrómos (20 March 1894) reported that two other foreigners of unknown nationality were also involved. 31. PI b. 41, 1891 Alessandria, 18 April 1891. 32. Modifying Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 107. 33. PI b. 41, 1892 Alessandria, Alexandria to Rome, 3 May 1892. 34. AIE b. 107, 1904–6, Primo Maggio 1906. 35. Of these three areas, the emergence of militant labour has been given most attention in the literature, even if the anarchist contribution has not been recognised. For example, the standard history of the Egyptian labour movement, Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, makes no mention of anarcho-syndicalists. For a more detailed discussion of the anarchist contribution to the labour movement, see Gorman ‘Foreign Workers in Egypt’, pp. 237–59. 36. John Chalcraft, ‘The Coal Heavers of Port Said. State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914’, International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), pp. 110–24. 37. Sami El Masri, ‘Mobilisations ouvrières dans la zone du Canal de Suez. Retour sur les débuts du mouvement ouvrier: le cas des charbonniers de Port Saïd et des ouvriers de la Compagnie du Canal de Suez, 1891–1898’, Mémoire de fin d’études (Masters dissertation, Université Paris I Sorbonne, 2010). Coalheavers on the Suez Canal also waged a campaign of petitions, occasional violence and wildcat strikes in April 1894 and again from 1895 to 1897. These usually sought redress for certain grievances resulting from the corrupt behaviour and abuses of shaykhs – the middlemen between the coaling companies and the workers – but were conducted without any formal organisation and in ways that did little to challenge the existing labour system. 38. AIE b. 86, 1900–4, Anarchici, 1898 Misure speciali di sorveglianza sugli anarchici in occasione del viaggio dell’ Imperatore di Germania in Palestina, Port Said to Cons Gen of Italy, Cairo, 11 October 1898. 39. For a fuller discussion of these events, see Gorman, ‘Foreign Workers in Egypt’,

250  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT pp. 245–9. In addition to a number of Greeks, Solomon Goldenburg and Muhammad Sidqi were among the leaders of this strike. 40. ‘Ergasia’, Tilégraphos, 26 December 1901. 41. Liberto, ‘L’Unione’, L’Unione, 13 July 1913. 42. Bettini, Bibliografia, p. 282. 43. For a fuller discussion on the UPL, see Anthony Gorman, ‘Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901)’, Middle Eastern Studies 41: 3 (2003), pp. 303–20. 44. On Galleani, see Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, pp. 223–4, 238–9. 45. Among these were the Italian language Il Corriere Egiziano and L’Imparziale and the Arabic al-Liwa’, al-Basir and al-Ahram. 46. al-Liwa’, 29 May 1901. 47. Robert Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt: 1882–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 319–48. 48. Anthony Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 82. 49. LaVerne Kuhnke, Lives at Risk: Public Health in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), p. 51. 50. Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, p. 206, n. 1. 51. PI b. 41, Alessandria, Alexandria, 4 August 1883 [emphasis in the original]. 52. Early scholarly literature on municipal government was largely driven by the question of the ‘Islamic city’; see Gabriel Baer, ‘The Beginnings of Municipal Government in Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies 4: 2 (January 1968), pp. 118–40; Steven Rosenthal, ‘Urban Elites and the Foundation of Municipalities in Alexandria and Istanbul’, Middle Eastern Studies 16: 2 (1980), pp. 125–33. For a more recent discussion, see Michael J. Reimer, ‘Urban Government and Administration in Egypt, 1805–1914’, Die Welt des Islams 39: 3 (1999), pp. 289–318. 53. Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of Egypt, Its History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing, 1909) p. 432. Only men over twenty-five years of age with rateable property of at least LE75 pa were entitled to vote. 54. Reimer, ‘Urban Government’, p. 295. 55. AIE b. 87, 1900–4, Anarchici, L’Operaio, Flyer, L’Operaio, Periodical Settimanale, 5 July 1902. 56. ‘Le Donne arabe in provincia’, L’Operaio, 6 September 1902. 57. See, for example, ‘La Gioventu egiziana’, L’Operaio, 29 November 1902; ‘La Coscienza indigena’, L’Operaio, 11 April 1903.

l ife and death i n the a na rchi st mo ve me n t | 251 58. ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 19 July 1902. 59. Reimer, ‘Urban Government’, pp. 299–300, cites a series of examples from 1891 to 1907. 60. ‘La Municipalità il popolo’, L’Operaio, 16 August 1902. 61. ‘La Municipalità . . .’, L’Operaio, 16 August 1902. 62. ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 9 August 1902. 63. ‘La Municipalità . . .’ L’Operaio, 16 August 1902. 64. P. Vasai, ‘Proposta alla cittadinanza alessandrina’, L’Operaio, 26 July 1902. 65. ‘Soccorsi d’urgenza’, L’Operaio, 13 September 1902. 66. ‘Per una proposta’, L’Operaio, 2 August 1902. 67. ‘L’Associazione per i soccorsi d’urgenza’, L’Operaio, 9 August 1902; the French name of the organisation was Société Internationale de secours d’urgence aux malades. 68. ‘L’Associazione per i soccorsi d’urgenza’, L’Operaio, 16 August 1902. 69. ‘L’Associazione internazionale per i soccorsi d’urgenza’, L’Operaio, 27 September 1902. Unfortunately, a complete list of committee members has not survived, but some of its members – notably Voivodich, de Semo and Latis, as well as Vasai – were also associated with the UPL, AIE b. 87, Ministry of Interior to Italian Diplomatic Agency, 6 August 1902. 70. ‘La squadra degli assitenti volontari ai colpiti di colora’, L’Operaio, 20 September 1902. 71. ‘Soccorsi d’urgenza, Questione practica’, L’Operaio, 27 September 1902. 72. ‘La Società internazionale per i soccorsi sanitari d’urgenza ed il municipio’, L’Operaio, 11 October 1902. 73. ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 22 November 1902. 74. ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 8 November 1902; ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 27 December 1902. 75. ‘La Società internazionale . . .’, L’Operaio, 11 October 1902. 76. ‘Cronaca’, L’Operaio, 13 September 1902. 77. AIE b. 34, Associazione italiana per la diffusioni della lingua, Report of the Provisional Committee presented at General Assembly (1889), 30 November 1890. 78. AIE b. 84 (1900–4), Anarchici, Brunello Giovanni, 26 November 1903; l’Unione, 20 July 1913. 79. AIE b. 87 (1900–4), Anarchici, Miscellanea, Università popolare in Cairo. Ministry of Interior to Italian Diplomatic Agency, Cairo, 23 June 1901; Miscellanea, Ministry of Interior to Italian Diplomatic Agency, 20 January 1903.

252  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 80. AIE b. 95 (1900–4), Anarchici, Silvio Tamberi, 25 March 1902. See also AIE b. 85 (1900–4), Anarchici, Estratto di biografia dell’anarchico, Silvio Tamberi. 81. For another example, see the funeral of Augusto Bichielli in Alexandria the following year, AIE b. 87, Ministry of Interior to Italian Diplomatic Agency, 14 July 1903. 82. Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean, p. 195, n. 1, 3. 83. ‘Corris., Alex, 8 Dec’, Il Libertario, 16 December 1909. Although significantly encroached upon by other constituents, the civil cemetery in Alexandria survives with the headstones of various anarchists (including Ugo Parrini), communists, freethinkers and non-conformists still visible, if in poor condition.

9 Cromer’s Assault on ‘Internationalism’: British Colonialism and the Greeks of Egypt, 1882–1907 Alexander Kazamias

B

etween the British invasion of 1882 and the emergence of the first nationalist parties in 1907, Egypt’s foreign resident communities were among the country’s most influential social groups. Even though their numbers were rather modest, ranging between 91,000 in 1882 to 151,000 in 1907 – that is, 1.0 to 1.5 per cent of Egypt’s total population1 – their socio-economic and cultural impact was significant. This role has been duly acknowledged by both contemporary observers and latter-day historians, but much of the historiography still portrays these groups in largely static terms as colourful accessories of an idealised ‘cosmopolitan’ past.2 On the fewer occasions when their role is more rigorously studied, we still find them described in reductionist terms as ‘middlemen’ or ‘agents’ of European ‘capitalist penetration’ and ‘expansion’.3 In either case, however, students of colonial Egypt are left to grapple with a striking discrepancy. On one hand, they learn that the country’s socio-economic life during the nineteenth century was dominated by powerful foreign resident communities like the Greeks, Italians, French and Armenians, but on the other they seldom have the opportunity to see how these ethnic groups exercised their power in practice. Apart from a few exceptions,4 much of our knowledge about Egypt’s foreign resident communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is still based on generalities and schematic abstractions. This chapter focuses on the role of Egypt’s largest and possibly most 253

254  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT powerful foreign resident community, the Greeks, with particular emphasis on their relationship to the British occupation during Lord Cromer’s term as proconsul from 1883 to 1907. Its central aim is to show how this ethnic group, because of its dominant position, was treated by the British authorities in Egypt as a potential threat and how its own members used their agential power in different ways to respond to the new colonial conditions that started to define their social, cultural and political lives. Although the number of Greeks residing in Egypt at that time was not particularly large, ranging from 38,000 in 1882 to 63,000 in 1907 – that is, around 0.4 to 0.6 per cent of Egypt’s total population – their social and economic presence was clearly much stronger. For instance, their high concentration in the country’s main urban centres, where almost 80 per cent of the community resided, gave them cohesion and greater visibility. In Alexandria, their stronghold, they accounted for 8 per cent of the city’s population in 1907, while in the same year they made up 3 per cent of the inhabitants of Cairo and 9 per cent of the residents of Port Said. These figures, in fact, are lower than their real demographic strength by possibly up to one-third, since the Greeks of Cyprus were counted in the censuses as British subjects, while the Ottoman Greeks were listed as either Ottoman or ‘stateless’ subjects and enjoyed no privileges under the Capitulations. Of greater importance, however, was their socio-economic position, which was already dominant long before the British occupation. For example, according to one source, around 1850, ‘half of the ships which entered and exited Alexandria . . . together with their cargoes’ belonged to one Greek merchant, Yanni D’Anastasi.5 This prominent position was maintained through to the end of World War I and beyond. For example, in 1918, nearly a quarter of Egypt’s cotton sold overseas was in the hands of fifteen Greek families and this accounted for 19 per cent of the country’s total exports for that year.6 Although a number of historians have identified the relationship between Egypt’s Greek community and the British occupation as an understudied area,7 there is certainly no shortage of hypotheses about its alleged character. One interpretation, advanced by both neo-Marxist and Egyptian/Arab nationalist historians, holds that Egypt’s Greeks formed essentially a ‘comprador’ class of Levantine ‘middlemen’ who acted as the local agents of British imperialism and were detached from the rest of Egyptian society, because

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 255 they were protected by the regime of the Capitulations.8 A second interpretation, developed by proponents of modernisation theory and/or Greek ethnocentric historians, claims that the Greeks of Egypt generally benefitted from British colonialism, but were ultimately detached from the occupation and chiefly preoccupied with their own affairs and the process of nation-building in their native country, Greece.9 A third interpretation, originating in a literary study of the poet C. P. Cavafy by the acclaimed novelist Stratis Tsirkas and later evoked by the historian Alexander Kitroeff, argues that the Greeks of Egypt were divided over their attitude towards British colonialism. On one hand, the older ‘first-class families’, like D’Anastasi, Zizinia and Averoff, who amassed their wealth under Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–48) and Sa‘ id Pasha (1854–63) are presented as hostile towards the British and sharing the sentiments of other members of Egypt’s indigenous bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the ‘second-class families’ of merchants and financiers who arrived during the cotton boom of the 1860s, like Choremis-Benakis, Salvagos and Goussios, emerged as a ‘comprador’ class, which aligned itself with British interests in Egypt.10 Although this thesis, as Kitroeff himself acknowledges,11 does not amount to a systematic analysis, it still deserves credit, first, for underlining the divisive effect of the British occupation on Egypt’s Greeks and, second, for unearthing an unknown record of local Greek opposition to Cromer’s rule during the 1880s and 1890s. More recently, the historian Sayyid ‘Ashmawi has also contributed to this interpretation with new evidence about the connections between the Greeks of Alexandria and the burgeoning Egyptian nationalist movement.12 Cromer and the Subdual of the Local Foreigners: A Postcolonial Interpretation A major shortcoming in all three interpretations, however, is the absence of a serious attempt to problematise the change that the Greeks (or any other local foreign community, for that matter) experienced as a result of the country’s colonisation. According to the established view, the British occupation is thought to have enhanced the already influential position of these communities, originally attained through the privileges accorded to most of them under the Ottoman regime of the Capitulations. Without showing in what ways, many studies have simply concluded that Egypt’s f­ oreign ­communities

256  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT became ‘more secure since the occupation of 1882’, while others have presented their demographic growth after that year as conclusive evidence of their ostensibly improved status under colonialism.13 Little attention, however, has been paid to the fact that, despite the general growth in the influx of foreigners, fifteen years after the British occupation, the largest local ethnic group, the Greeks, had failed to grow demographically at all; or that between 1907 and 1917, despite continuing British presence, the size of this group actually contracted.14 More importantly still, no evidence was ever cited to show that it was British colonialism that caused the demographic growth during the decade 1897 to 1907 and not the impact of the various socioeconomic factors that brought these foreigners to Egypt in large numbers before 1882. A more fruitful analysis, however, could start by paying greater attention to the fact that the colonisation of Egypt after 1882 began to convert not only the Egyptians, but also the country’s local foreign population into colonial subjects. In his book Modern Egypt (1908) Cromer reveals that one of his main objectives was to curtail the privileges of the country’s foreigners, because if Britain were to rule Egypt permanently, it would be necessary to ‘assimilate the legal status of all the inhabitants’. His justification for such a policy was that the Capitulations were required only in order to protect local foreigners from ‘the abuse’ of ‘Oriental legal and administrative processes’, but under his rule, he argued, such guarantees were needless, as ‘there would be no danger of an abuse of power’. Elsewhere, Cromer claims that curbing the Capitulations was also necessary to stop local Europeans from harming Egyptians. As he put it, ‘the cause’ of British colonialism in Egypt was ‘identified with the treatment of European ruffians’.15 Postcolonial critics like Homi Bhabha have aptly observed that ‘the construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference – racial and sexual’.16 If we were to confine ourselves to the articulation of racial difference, in contrast to the prevalent view, then British colonialism never saw the foreign residents of Egypt who came from Europe as authentic ‘Europeans’. According to Cromer, these ethnic communities had to be characterised as ‘Levantine’ – a term that he defined as referring to the ‘Orientalised Europeans’. As he put it, Egypt’s ‘Levantines’ varied in degree,

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 257 but most of them fell under the categories of either ‘semi-orientalised’ or ‘so thoroughly orientalised as scarcely to have preserved any European characteristics’.17 Other colonial officials serving in Cairo, like Alfred Milner, contrasted the French of France and the French diplomats in Egypt (whom he praised) with ‘the majority of the French colony in Egypt’, whom he described as being, ‘to put it mildly, not of a good type’.18 Rather unsurprisingly, the Greeks were another group that occupied a prominent position in Cromer’s category of the ‘thoroughly orientalised’ Europeans. Although he was careful to describe their haute bourgeoisie as ‘an unmixed benefit’ for Egypt and the small traders as ‘fully deserving of respect’, the rest of the community consisted, in his view, of ‘low-class Greeks exercising the professions of usurer, drink-seller, etc’. Their presence, he argued, was ‘often hurtful’, and in an aphorism reminiscent of William Gladstone’s famous dictum about the par excellence ‘Orientals’, the Turks, he also wished that these Greeks ‘could be turned bag and baggage out of Turkey’.19 These views were also echoed by Milner, who referred to Egypt’s Greeks in 1892 as ‘notorious . . . for truculent defiance of authority, for violence and for lawlessness’.20 With such unflattering perceptions of the country’s foreign residents, it is not surprising that Cromer would soon make it his aim to equalise their legal status with that of the other Egyptians. Still, the main obstacle to such a policy was the fifteen Capitulatory Powers, which represented what Cromer called ‘the internationalism I wish to condemn’. This phenomenon, he argued, amounted to ‘political egotism’ and he went on to criticise it for causing ‘a decadence in the authority of that European power in the maintenance of whose paramount influence the advance of true civilisation in Egypt depends . . . Great Britain’.21 Consequently, from early on, the British proconsul began to look for ways to curb the influence of this ‘internationalism’. During the London Conference of 1884 he made the approval of a £9 million international loan to Egypt conditional upon the abolition of one of the main Capitulatory privileges enjoyed by Egypt’s foreigners – namely, their exemption from paying certain taxes. On 17 March 1885, he obtained a written statement from the Capitulatory Powers recognising the ‘justice of making their subjects in Egypt liable to the same taxes as the natives’;22 on this basis, the Egyptian Government issued a decree in April 1886 making all foreigners liable to paying house tax. Another decree in March 1891 also

258  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT made them liable to pay a professional tax. Milner, who later advised the Egyptian Government on financial matters, notes that when the foreign residents started paying house tax in 1887, revenue from this measure alone rose from £45,000 to £110,000 – an increase showing both the economic power of these groups and the extent to which they started to contribute to the restoration of Egypt’s public finances.23 With respect to the professional tax, a memorandum by the Greeks of Cairo to the Greek Parliament in 1891 stated that of the 2,210 foreigners who started to pay it in the city, about half – that is, 1,048 – were Greek, while in Alexandria the ratio was believed to be higher.24 Nevertheless, following protests by both the French and Greek Governments, the professional tax was finally rescinded in early 1892; however, its abolition was also extended to Egyptians in compliance with the new fiscal principle that prevented foreigners from enjoying tax privileges over the local population.25 Consequently, as a result of these reforms, the protected resident foreigners lost every other fiscal advantage they had enjoyed over the Egyptians, except their exemption from paying stamp duty.26 Cromer, however, also managed to partially restrict the other two main privileges granted under the Capitulations – namely, the principle of extraterritoriality and the freedom of commercial activity. After threatening to abolish the Mixed Tribunals,27 the British proconsul secured the approval of the Capitulatory Powers for the Decree of 31 January 1889, which authorised the Egyptian Government to legislate on law and order in a manner that would be equally binding on local foreign residents. On this basis, five police directives were issued between 9 and 13 June 1891, regulating the operation of public shops, medical clinics, pharmacies, the sale of medicine and b­ ookkeeping. The first of these laws, with its restrictions on the issuing of licences for coffee shops, hotels, bars, theatres and countryside clubs, was highly damaging for the Greeks, who operated widely in these businesses. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the British friend of Egyptian nationalists, later claimed credit for persuading Cromer to restrict the sale of alcohol and states that in March 1890 the proconsul reassured him that the Egyptian Prime Minister would do all he could, because ‘Riaz was very hostile to the Greeks’.28 When the laws were passed, the diplomat Nikolaos Skotidis, otherwise a well-known friend of the British occupation, concluded in 1892 that:

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 259 the Egyptian Government, or rather the British, were driven to this by their prejudice against the Greeks inhabiting the interior . . . as ostensibly exploiting the good faith and needs of the Egyptians . . . Not daring to start a direct expulsion of this numerous class of Egyptian-Greeks . . . they thought they could force them into this indirectly.29

The same impressions were also conveyed in 1892 to the former Greek Prime Minister and now leader of the opposition, Charilaos Trikoupis, by one of his friends in Alexandria, the high court judge at the Mixed Tribunals, Andreas Pangalos, who wrote in a personal letter that ‘the English occupation does not view us with a favourable eye’ and that ‘the colony all over Egypt is going through critical times’.30 Although the police directives did not turn out to be as damaging as originally feared, their restrictions on commercial freedom and residential immunity, as well as the extension of the Mixed Tribunals’ jurisdiction over certain criminal cases, were widely perceived as signalling a trend towards the complete abolition of the Capitulations.31 As the lawyer and leader of the Democrats, Georgios Philaretos, remarked in the Greek Parliament on 19 December 1891, the aim ‘of Anglo-Egyptian diplomacy’ was ‘to abolish even the slightest privilege enjoyed by the foreigners and this has been partly achieved’.32 Recent scholarship on the history of modern empires stresses that colonisation usually produces three types of reaction among colonised peoples. Stephen Howe has defined those as ‘resistance, collaboration and adaptation’, while others have deployed the concept of ‘negotiation’ to underline the fact that the third type of response often involves an element of antagonism that is not denoted by the term ‘adaptation’.33 In what follows, this chapter will set out to examine how different segments of Egypt’s Greek community ended up adopting each of these three alternative positions towards the British occupation. In doing so, the analysis will provide, first, a revised version of the thesis advanced by Tsirkas and Kitroeff, concerning the divisive effect of British colonialism on the Greeks of Egypt. Under this adapted interpretation, apart from collaboration and resistance, the overlooked politics of negotiation will be presented as the dominant approach that the Greek community adopted from 1885 to the end of the 1890s. Second, having set the context of British policy towards Egypt’s foreign residents, the argument

260  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT will also stress that Cromer’s success in curbing the Capitulatory privileges of Egypt’s foreign residents over the years 1885–91 proved decisive in shifting the dominant position within the Greek community from collaboration to negotiation. This shift will also be attributed in large part to the election in 1885 of an independent and strong-minded leader at the head of the Greek Community of Alexandria, George Averoff – a development that enabled the Egyptian Greeks to assert their opposition more forcefully over several aspects of British policy in Egypt. Finally, in contrast to the view that holds that diaspora communities are somehow capable of evading the mechanisms of imperial domination and control, the following discussion will show that, despite the widespread opposition it encountered, British colonialism in Egypt ultimately succeeded in unsettling the country’s largest diaspora community and implanting sharp divisions within its ranks. The Record of Collaboration Even before the British invasion of 1882, there were groups within the Greek community of Egypt that manifested their sympathy towards the prospect of the country’s subjection to British rule. The most prominent among them were the section of Alexandria’s haute bourgeoisie, whose activities concentrated in comprador sectors like cotton and banking. Some of them, like Choremis-Benakis, Salvagos, Zervoudakis, Antoniadis and Goussios (who included both first- and second-class families), were connected to British interests long before 1882 and many even held British nationality. The second group consisted of prominent journalists and intellectuals, like Ferdinando Oddi, Eteoklis Kyriakopoulos and Nikolaos Skotidis, who influenced opinion through articles in the local press and the publication of books on current issues affecting the community. Finally, the third element that favoured British intervention was a sizeable portion of the community’s middle class who supported the liberal Trikoupis Government in Greece34 and the implementation of its policies by the consular authorities in Alexandria. All three groups were connected to one another. For example, Goussios personally advised Trikoupis on financial matters, while Skotidis, author of a wellknown book on the British invasion of 1882,35 was also vice-consul from 1880 to 1882 and consul from 1901 to 1910. If we were to historicise this record of collaboration, we must start by

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 261 tracing its origins to the eve of the British occupation. Although the ‘Urabi Revolution of 9 September 1881 was viewed with sympathy across the Greek community, the escalating dispute between the rebel general and Khedive Tawfiq after February 1882 and the sporadic acts of anti-foreign violence by some of ‘Urabi’s militant supporters started to alter this perspective. As a result, in May 1882, the Alexandrian Omónoia concluded that ‘the Greeks of Egypt are experiencing the greatest of crises’,36 while in the capital the weekly Káiron also began to revise its hitherto supportive stance towards ‘Urabi. On 19 May 1882, in a front-page editorial written by Oddi, it announced a political U-turn: We who always . . . sided with the so-called National Party . . . were tragically misled . . . All of Egypt’s European journalism embraced and greeted the September movement. In the very last hours, in which the Ruler is about to be deposed, the Consuls of the Powers massacred . . . and the European nations surrendered . . . the noble Egyptian soldier . . . i.e. ‘Urabi is saying ‘I have bought a field, and I must go and see it, I have married a wife, and therefore I can’t come’.37

Another key factor in turning a substantial proportion of local Greek opinion in favour of British intervention was the imperialist policy of the Trikoupis Government in Greece and its encouragement by his consul at Alexandria, Cleon Rangavis and his deputy, Skotidis. On Rangavis’s recommendation, Trikoupis ordered the dispatch of two Greek warships, the Hellas and King George, to join the Anglo-French squadron, which had arrived in Alexandria on 20 May 1882. The appearance of the Greek flag over the city’s harbour three days later and the warm reception that the warships’ commanders received by the leaders of the local community were decisive in turning mainstream Greek opinion in Alexandria in favour of the gunboat diplomacy which Britain and France were deploying in Egypt. Moreover, the arrival of the Hellas and King George intensified the growing fears within the community that ‘Urabi posed a serious threat, while the frequent firing of the warships’ cannons in the air provoked a few Egyptians to carry out further acts of violence against Greeks on the shore.38 British and Greek diplomatic archives confirm that on the eve of the riots of 11 June 1882, a substantial section of Alexandria’s Greek community,

262  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT together with the city’s other European residents, were preparing to fight ‘Urabi’s soldiers in the area around Place des Consuls. From the middle of May, Rangavis, in agreement with his British counterpart, Edward Malet, had put together an extensive ‘defence plan’ involving the participation of ‘3,000–4,000’ armed Europeans to protect the city’s foreign population and properties. To this end, the Greek warships that arrived in Alexandria secretly landed ‘two men-of-war’ on Egyptian soil and dispatched large shipments of ‘ammunition’ and supplies to help implement the ‘defence plan’.39 Although the ethnic composition of the local European militia is unknown, both the nationality of its leader, the financier Ambroise Synadinos, and the consulate in charge of its implementation leave no doubt that many of its members were Greek. Although Malet finally ordered Rangavis to abandon the plan, because its secrecy was violated, it is probable that the riots of 11 June 1882, which culminated in the British invasion of Egypt on 11 July, were partly incited by knowledge of its existence among ‘Urabi’s supporters.40 On the eve of the British invasion, the newspaper al-Watan wrote that ‘Urabi’s friend, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, named four groups as the main enemies of the Egyptian rebel general. Of those, one group consisted of ‘the Syrians and Europeans except the Italians’, but although the Greeks were already included in this category, Blunt singled out ‘the Greek bankers who were mostly the moneylenders in the villages’ as a fourth category deserving special mention.41 Indeed, after the British bombardment of Alexandria on 11 July 1882, John Antoniadis, a leading merchant and banker, offered the invading British troops access to his famous Gardens at Nuzha to enable them to observe the movements of ‘Urabi’s army around Lake Mariout. For this act, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1887. Similarly, Constantine Zervoudakis, another leading Greek banker, was created a Baronet by the British Queen in 1883, because he offered his warehouses in Alexandria to be used as a hospital by the invading British forces.42 As soon as the invasion was complete, the notables of Alexandria’s Greek community, led by another prominent cotton merchant, Theodore Rallis, began to engage in acts of collective flattery towards the invading power. In a telegram to the British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, they congratulated him ‘on the fiftieth anniversary . . . of his election as a Member of Parliament’.43 In later years, relations between the powerful Greek merchants of Alexandria and the occupation

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 263 became even closer. In her childhood diary, the novelist Penelope Delta notes that her father, the leading cotton merchant Emmanuel Benakis, had developed a personal rapport with Cromer, who saw him as a sort of spokesman for the Greeks before he became president of the Greek Community of Alexandria in 1901. As she wrote with a touch of youthful innocence: ‘Whenever there was a problem with the Greeks, Cromer would say: “What does Benakis say? If Benakis says no, then he is right”’.44 In 1959–60, the journalist Sofianos Chrysostomidis discovered that in 1892 Cromer had invited the former editor-in-chief of the Istanbulbased Phare du Bosphore, the Greek Eteoklis Kyriakopoulos, to publish a Francophone newspaper in Cairo that would function as the mouthpiece of the occupation. According to Eteoklis’s son, Nikolaos, this led to the publication of Le Progrès, which received an annual subsidy of L. E. 1,600–1,800 from the British Consulate, as well as an allowance from Cromer’s opponent, Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, in order to soften its criticisms against the Royal Court.45 Throughout most of the 1890s, Progrès was derisorily described in the Egyptian–Greek press as ‘the organ’ or ‘little organ of the British occupation in Egypt’,46 with its reports usually snubbed as either deliberately twisting events or performing Cromer’s dirty work. For example, in February 1895, Metarríthmisis wrote that: The little organ of the British occupation ‘Progrès’ congratulates the native high court judges in Cairo on confirming the preliminary verdict condemning the natives who attacked the British soldiers. The high court decision, it says, pleasantly surprised it; as if it did not expect it, that is!47

In April of that year, when the Greek secretary of the Olympic Committee, Timoleon Philemon, visited Egypt to raise funds for the 1896 Games, Progrès reported that the guest was a supporter of ‘the English civilising mission in Egypt’. Immediately, however, Káiron and Metarríthmisis chastised the report and stressed that Philemon was deeply disappointed by it.48 Nevertheless, by the turn of the century, Tachidrómos started to call Progrès a ‘credible’ newspaper,49 while in 1899 the leadership of the Greek Community of Alexandria finally passed into the hands of the Anglophile comprador families, starting with Salvagos (1899–1901) and then Benakis (1901–11). Collaboration with the British occupation was a policy which the

264  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Trikoupis Governments had strongly supported since the lead-up to the invasion of 1882. Together with Consul Anastasios Vyzantios, Trikoupis worked in 1883 and 1884 with the Financial Controller of the Egyptian Government, Edgar Vincent, to prepare a bilateral commercial treaty with Egypt, which came into effect on 3 March 1884. This agreement had significance on a number of counts. First, as the first treaty signed by Egypt after 1882, it gave international legitimacy to the occupation; second, it tightened the customs controls on goods imported by Greek merchants in Egypt and in this respect it formed yet another attempt to limit the ‘freedom of commerce’ guaranteed under the Capitulations; and third, the treaty also enabled Greece to triple its exports to Egypt, from £23,624 in 1883 to £87.227 in 1884, largely because Vincent fulfilled Trikoupis’s request of a 25 per cent reduction in the duty on Greek tobacco from ‘5 Piestres a kilo to 5 Piestres an Oke’, which brought it on a par with its main competitor, Turkish tobacco.50 Back in 1879, the then 22-year-old Vincent had spent some time in Greece and developed a personal friendship with Trikoupis, to whom he wrote in a letter: ‘I shall always consider myself as greatly in your debt’. From their correspondence, it also appears that Vincent shared the negative views of many British liberals about Turkey and took pride in being jocularly described as ‘over-Phil-Hellenic’.51 In this respect, the commercial treaty of 1884 appeared to reflect his old antipathy towards Turkey, his sympathies towards Greece and his personal friendship with the Greek Prime Minister. Besides Vincent, Trikoupis had another influential friend in the British proconsul’s entourage: Edwin Egerton, who had been serving in Athens before he was posted to Cairo to act as Cromer’s second-in-command and who was equally sympathetic to Greece’s commercial interests.52 Nonetheless, these personal friendships led Trikoupis to approach the treaty of 1884 with increased confidence, which eventually deterred him from seeking stronger guarantees to ensure that the level of tobacco duty remained low in future. Unsurprisingly, within a year, the treaty of 1884 became an object of fierce criticism. On 5 September 1885, Omónoia reported that the tighter checks on imports led ‘clerks at the customs to call the Greek merchants smugglers and thieves and to refuse to recognise their letters of credit and invoices’.53 Meanwhile, by 1885 the duty on tobacco was increased threefold, from 5 piastres an oke to 12 piastres per kilo, and by 1892 it rose to 20 pias-

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 265 tres per kilo – that is, a fivefold increase from 1884.54 As Milner later revealed, the driving force behind these increases was none other than Trikoupis’s young friend, Vincent, who was praised by his British colleague for discovering, as he put it, how ‘to develop that duty’ into a source of revenue for the Anglo-Egyptian Government.55 Meanwhile, those who suffered the brunt of the fivefold increase were the Egyptian consumer and especially the fellahin, who smoked in large numbers, as well as the local Greeks who owned most of Egypt’s cigarette industry, which relied on imported tobacco. Another aspect of the policy of collaboration was the indifferent attitude of the Greek consular authorities towards the other foreign communities and their diplomats, with the exception of the British. Although this trend was established under Trikoupis, the rival Diliyannis Governments (1885–6, 1890–2) did little to reverse it, either because they were short-lived and ineffectual or because they relied on diplomats, like Vyzantios, who were known supporters of Trikoupis.56 As a result, during the uproar over the police ­directives, Vyzantios refused to cooperate with the consuls of the other Capitulatory Powers – a decision that caused indignation even among Trikoupis’ own friends. One of these friends, the Mixed Tribunals judge, Andreas Pangalos, wrote to Trikoupis (now leader of the opposition) describing Vyzantios’s behaviour as follows: The inaction of our Consul General with regard to the latest decrees and especially that concerning the public shops; his failure to protest in time and the absence of the Consul General out of Egypt exactly when the consuls of France and Russia demanded their reform; the lack of guidelines from the ministry to those here, and the foolish conviction of our Consul General that his colleagues had to wait for him to act in concert, and the transmission of this view to the Minister; and the existing cold personal relations between our Consul and those of France and Russia have all led to the loss of this issue for our interests.57

Speaking in parliament on 19 December 1891, Philaretos laid most of the blame on Diliyannis’s Foreign Minister, Zygomalas, whom he criticised for letting Vyzantios ‘stay on leave in Athens’ and for saying ‘with such apathy . . . that he arrived . . . late’. This led Philaretos to conclude that ‘the former [Trikoupis] Government not only harmed . . . the Greek community in

266  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Egypt through the policies it followed, but the current Government, following the policies of its predecessor to the letter, which it had fiercely criticised’, was also doing the same. He then quoted the Parisian Journal des Débats, which called on the government in Athens ‘to sacrifice less readily next time . . . the particular interests of its Egyptian colony and to moderate the subservient tendencies of its diplomatic and judicial representatives towards the English’.58 Still, despite its ineffectiveness and acquiescence to possible British pressure, the Diliyannis Government did not follow Trikoupis’s Anglophile policy ‘to the letter’. A few weeks later, as Milner remarked, the Greek Government joined the French Government in forcing Cromer to rescind the professional tax.59 The Tactics of Negotiation From the mid-1880s to the end of the 1890s, a halfway approach between collaboration and resistance began to emerge as the dominant Egyptian– Greek response to the British occupation. This policy of negotiation, which was both volatile and ambiguous, guided the actions of the core, non-­ comprador elements of the community’s bourgeoisie, its main institutions and the mainstream Egyptian–Greek press. Its preponderance from 1885 until the end of the 1890s was a response both to the growing realisation that the British occupation was acquiring a permanent character and to the fact that Cromer’s policies towards Egypt’s local foreigners were beginning to take a clearer direction. Moreover, during the same period, the old ‘firstclass’ families, represented by Averoff, were still able to assert their hegemony over their Anglophile rivals within the community. Although the boundaries separating negotiation from the strategies of collaboration and resistance are not always clear, in this particular context their differences were apparent in two main respects. First, negotiation was premised on a relatively autonomous approach, which avoided commitment to stable alliances, either with the British or the other foreigners and Egyptians, and instead evoked the principles of Greek nationalism. Second, this policy saw adaptability and manoeuvring as higher ideals than strategic action – a view later presented by some critics as a model of Greek diaspora politics60 and allegedly advocated by Egypt’s leading Greek poet, C. P. Cavafy, in a famous verse exalting ‘the varied action of our thoughtful adaptations’.61

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 267 Negotiation was a tactic adopted by the dominant element of Egypt’s Greek bourgeoisie, which, until the end of the 1890s, was neither of the ‘comprador’ nor of the ‘national’ type. Its socio-economic character was mixed and shared many of the characteristics that the political theorist Nicos Poulantzas, writing in a different context, associated with the so-called ‘internal bourgeoisie’. In contrast to the dependent position of the ‘comprador’ bourgeoisie, the ‘internal’ bourgeoisie, according to Poulantzas, enjoys a certain level of ­autonomy, which makes its relationship with imperialism marked by ‘significant contradictions’. At the same time, however, Poulantzas adds that these contradictions do not lead it ‘to adopt positions of effective autonomy or independence’ vis-à-vis imperialism, in contrast to the ‘national’ bourgeoisie, which can support ‘popular causes’ and participate in national liberation movements.62 During the 1880s and 1890s, the main representative of Egypt’s internal bourgeoisie was the business tycoon George Averoff – the greatest benefactor not only of the local Greek community, but also of the modern Greek state itelf. His numerous donations famously included the Polytechnic of Athens, the National Military Academy, a prison, a warship and the new marble stadium of Athens, which hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896. As president of the Community of Alexandria from 1885 to 1899, Averoff’s relationship with the British occupation reflected his position as leader of a social class that enjoyed a certain level of autonomy from British colonialism. When he congratulated Queen Victoria on her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, she exceptionally requested the British Prime Minister to send him a personal message of thanks on her behalf. To this effect, Cromer informed Averoff that ‘a telegram from the Marquis of Salisbury . . . confirms that he received an order from Her Majesty the Queen requesting me to express to the Greek Community of Alexandria through You as President . . . the sincere thanks of Her Majesty’.63 Seldom did Egypt’s colonial ruler address a subject of the Empire with such deference. Nevertheless, these honours were not solicited by any acts of profound Anglophilia on Averoff’s part. The Greek press of Alexandria, which warmly backed his leadership, reveals that he was facing an organised opposition within the Community of Alexandria consisting of Benakis, Zervoudakis, Synadinos, Kazoulis and Goussios – namely, the Anglophile merchants and financiers who led Egypt’s comprador bourgeoisie.64 Moreover, in May 1894, during a school ceremony attended

268  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT by the French Consul, Averoff stood up and exclaimed ‘Vive la France!’ – a slogan normally associated with the local enemies of the British at that time.65 Nevertheless, these sentiments did not endear him to the Francophile leadership of the Egyptian nationalist movement headed by Abbas Hilmi II and his secret committees. In October 1896, al-Mu’ayyad, a newspaper which largely reflected the views of the Khedive, expressed its sorrow that ‘a great patriot’ like Averoff, despite having amassed his wealth in Egypt, never founded a charity or fund to help the country’s indigenous people.66 It was during Averoff’s presidency of the Community of Alexandria that the mainstream Egyptian–Greek press engaged in a prolonged opposition campaign against Cromer and his policies. The nature of this campaign became the subject of heated controversy from the late 1950s until the 1970s in the context of two major debates: one relating to the interpretation of Cavafy’s poetry and the other concerning the historical significance of modern Greek diaspora. On one hand, this press campaign was depicted by Tsirkas as a heroic tale of Greek anti-colonial ‘resistance’, while on the other the neo-Marxist historian Nikos Psyroukis disparaged it as an internal squabble between the British and their comprador Greek agents in Egypt.67 A more nuanced approach, however, suggests that this sustained anti-British protest was neither as glorious as Tsirkas believed nor as petty as Psyroukis implied. For example, Tsirkas’s analysis paid little attention to the fact that the chief motive of the Egyptian–Greek campaign was not so much the occupation itself as the measures which Cromer began to take against the country’s local foreigners from 1884–5. As for Psyroukis, besides his limited familiarity with this evidence, a major weakness in his analysis is the unwillingness to acknowledge the remarkably radical content of the language used in many of the Greek press reports during that period. Here is a telling example from Metarríthmissis on 30 November 1886: Since the English set foot here, discontent and wretchedness have fallen on all social classes . . . Day and night the unfortunate fellahin work with their women and children . . . but their debt eternally doubles and triples resulting in their inability to pay their taxes . . . The only solution for all Europeans and locals in general is the rapid evacuation of the English troops from Egypt.68

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 269 The same defiant rhetoric was used several years later, when Cromer introduced the professional tax and the five police directives. On 21 June 1891, Tachidrómos protested: It is hard to understand the obsession of the Anglo-Egyptian government with formulating and issuing decrees and regulations . . . whose intended outcome is disastrous for all the foreign residents in Egypt – apart from the English, of course . . . We the Greeks must not accept this absurd legislation of the atrocious English and must try to bring it down with every legal and sensible means.69

This campaign reached its climax on 12 July 1891, when the Sunday edition of Tachidrómos published two front-page editorials entitled respectively ‘Action required’ and ‘When will Egypt be rid of the English occupation?’ To underline the symbolism, both articles were conspicuously backdated ‘11 July 1891’, to mark the anniversary of the Bombardment of Alexandria by the British fleet nine years earlier. The first editorial castigated British policy over the professional tax, the prevention of Ottoman Greeks from obtaining Greek nationality (and, by implication, Capitulatory protection) and denounced the Greek Government’s Anglophile line as harmful to Egyptian–Greek interests. Regarding the professional tax, the article questioned Britain’s right to introduce such measures ‘on Turkish territory’ on the grounds that ‘the Ottomans living in Greece are also exempt from paying professional tax because of a treaty between Greece and Turkey’. The second editorial, which turned to the root cause of the Egyptian question – namely, the continuing military occupation – was even more defiant. Its devastating critique culminated in a bold call for the immediate evacuation of all British troops from Egypt: The duration of the English occupation garrison in Egypt has extended beyond what is necessary and no adequate reason exists for its further stay here. We consider that the time has come for Egypt’s evacuation, not because the desired outcome of the presence of the whimsical English has been achieved, but because the opposite has happened . . . Both the Khedive’s Government and the other European Powers must take a brave stand and demand the evacuation of Egypt by the English.70

270  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Earlier it was noted that Tsirkas’s interpretation pays insufficient attention to the fact that a major motive behind this campaign was the protection of Capitulatory privilege. On closer inspection, however, it would appear that there are stronger reasons which militate against interpreting these press attacks as forming part of a genuine anti-colonial strategy. Although the distinction between ‘negotiation’ tactics and a strategy of ‘resistance’ is not always clear, it should be noted in this particular case that one of the standard criticisms that Tachidrómos made of Cromer was that he was allegedly too lenient towards the Egyptians. For example, in February 1895, when the occupation overreacted to the assault of three British sailors by a group of Egyptian nationalists, the newspaper denounced the attack, but then went on to blame the British for not enforcing tougher penalties to deter the ‘natives’ from protesting violently: The unruly behavior of the native crowd . . . was not caused by the position of the Khedive, but by the policy of England . . . They made sure as reformers . . . to instill in it a sense of superiority over foreigners . . . After the killing . . . of at least 50 Greeks . . . without a sign of the slightest concern by the occupation, now they turn the world upside down because three English soldiers were beaten up.71

These views reflected deep-seated orientalist sentiments whose frequent recurrence suggests they were probably shared by a sizeable number of Tachidrómos readers. Indeed, throughout the 1890s, the mainstream local Greek press fervently criticised the official abolition of flogging by the British occupation. For example, in June 1896, when clashes broke out between the police and students at al-Azhar University over the handing over of the body of a suspected cholera victim, the newspaper reminded its readers of its consistent support for the return of the kurbaj: ‘Since the foreign occupation abolished the redeeming kurbaj, the once bending neck of the natives has risen up audaciously’.72 The ironic culmination of this line of opposition was Tachidrómos’s early reaction to the Dinshawai Affair on 28 June 1906, when four Egyptian villagers were publicly hanged and eight flogged with the kurbaj for attacking a group of British soldiers. Instead of condemning the decision for its cruelty, the newspaper remembered the other side of its old opposition to Cromer and

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 271 went on to express the wish that the harsh punishment of the villagers ‘will be of use as a means of containing the hatred of foreigners and the fanaticism of the natives’. Two days after the executions, Tachidrómos ran a full-length editorial claiming that Dinshawai was a by-product of the reformist ‘delusions of the British occupation’, which ‘instead of trying to control and restrain an ignorant, illiterate and fanatical people, sought to fully emancipate it . . . whilst curtailing the privileges of the foreigners’.73 Tsirkas maintains that the period of Tachidrómos’s ‘resistance’ ended in 1891 and that a new era of collaborationist journalism had taken its place since. In reality, however, this shift took place more gradually, and even when Tachidrómos started calling Progrès ‘credible’ (around 1900), it never went as far as to become, as Tsirkas argues, ‘a mouthpiece of British policy’.74 Indeed, the racist views that the newspaper expressed over the Dinshawai Affair were not new, but went all the way back to the 1880s and, although its stance towards the occupation had ceased to be hostile, its editors were still critical of some of Cromer’s policies, especially in relation to what they referred to in 1906 as his reformist ‘delusions’. The Greeks and the Egyptian National Liberation Movement In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said remarks that resistance is not ‘merely a reaction to imperialism’, but an alternative re-conception and way of life ‘based on breaking down the barriers between cultures’.75 Although the prevalent assumption in the historiography is that an alliance between Egypt’s Greeks and the Egyptian nationalist movement started to emerge, if at all, around the Revolution of 1919,76 this impression is clearly misleading. During the early period of Abbas Hilmi II’s rule, which was marked by his antagonism with Lord Cromer, a good-sized section of Alexandria’s Greek middle class supported the young Khedive in his endeavours to end the occupation. In 1893, under the penname ‘Philaleth’, Count Menandre Zizinia published a pamphlet titled L’Angleterre et Abbas II, in which he described Cromer as a ‘true dictator’ and called upon Britain to ‘end the military occupation of Egypt’.77 Intelligence reports from the Khedive’s personal network of informants also show that a developed sense of solidarity with the Egyptian nationalists was shared across wide sections of Egypt’s Greek community. For example, when Progrés blamed the Khedive’s opposition to the occupation for the assault on the three British sailors in early 1895, spreading

272  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT rumours about an imminent uprising in Alexandria, most of the city’s foreign residents firmly sided with the Egyptian nationalists. Three of the Khedive’s secret agents who toured the city’s quarters and nightclubs reported that ‘the nationals and foreigners are totally united’ and that ‘all nationals and foreigners are filled in their heart with the love of Your Highness and are not desirous of the occupation authorities’.78 An important development in this alliance came when Count Zizinia offered his famous theatre in Alexandria to the Khedive’s 22-year-old protégé, the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil, to speak on 3 March 1896 on the subject of Egyptian independence. The contact between Zizinia and Mustafa Kamil was the latter’s friend, Muhammad ‘Uthman, an official at the Municipality of Alexandria, whose plan was to invite a carefully selected audience of Egyptians and ‘some of the foreigners who love Egypt’.79 After the event, the Francophone newspaper Phare d’Alexandrie hailed the speech as a ‘great success’ and noted that ‘the expression of affection and sympathy by 800 souls . . . offers valuable support . . . for this brave young man who began to call alone for the liberation of his country’.80 This positive reception soon led to a second invitation, in which Kamil was asked to speak in French before an all-European audience. His remarkable oration, which took place again at the Theatre Zizinia on 13 April 1896, earned the young leader a warmer response. The Phare used the occasion to run a full-length editorial titled ‘Patriotism in Egypt’ and this endorsed Mustafa Kamil’s ‘defence of his country and call for independence’.81 Like Zizinia, the owner of Le Phare was another prominent Alexandrian Greek, the lawyer Nicolas Haicalis, whose friendship with Khedive Isma‘il in the 1860s had earned him the title of Bey. It was Isma‘il who had paid him a subsidy of 60,000 francs in 1873 to start publishing the newspaper, but Haicalis continued to do so independently after his patron was deposed in 1879. In a biographical sketch published in Athens during his lifetime, Haicalis was unapologetically described as having ‘defended with all the power of his pen the interests of Egypt’ – a mission statement contained in the founding document of his newspaper, which he apparently used to wave at politicians when they complained about a critical report.82 As ‘Abd alMun‘im al-Jumay‘i observes, in 1895 ‘Abbas Hilmi II and Mustafa Kamil set up a secret committee of influential Frenchmen, including journalists, ‘who

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 273 propagated the cause of Egypt’s independence . . . through newspaper articles . . . and the speeches that Mustafa Kamil gave’. Although no evidence was found to link Haicalis directly to this committee, its membership included Muhammad ‘Uthman, who was Mustafa Kamil’s contact with both Zizinia and Haicalis.83 There came a point, however, when Greece’s military defeat in Thessaly by the Ottomans in 1897 threatened to undermine the alliance between the Phare and the Egyptian nationalists. In May of that year, Haicalis’s newspaper accused Mustafa Kamil of anti-Hellenic feelings, because he publically urged the Sultan to refuse to withdraw from Thessaly unless Britain also agreed to evacuate Egypt. Kamil then sent a letter to the editor titled ‘Greece and Us’, in which he expressed his admiration for ‘the patriotic zeal’ of the Greeks, but claimed the right to be able to support what he thought was good for Egypt.84 Although this momentary clash of nationalisms revealed the limitations of both Kamil’s and Haicalis’s strategies, the priority of joining forces again to commonly fight the British occupation soon prevailed. Three weeks later, on 3 June 1897, the young Egyptian leader led an anti-British protest in Alexandria, which, as he wrote to his friend, Juliette Adam, was attended by ‘many of our Greek friends who recognise that part of Egypt’s national policy is to be with Turkey while the English are occupying our beloved country’. On 8 June 1897, Mustafa Kamil was back at the Theatre Zizinia delivering yet another impassioned speech, while the Phare, as before, covered the event with an adulatory report.85 In an attempt to restore relations with the city’s Greeks, Kamil asked his audience to endorse a motion declaring that: The Egyptian people, gathered on 8 June in Alexandria to . . . protest with all its power against the British occupation, assures the European colonies in Egypt that it intends to take no measure or any initiative against them and that it wishes nothing but a peaceful and harmonious coexistence with them.

On this occasion, Tachidrómos, which usually kept aloof from Mustafa Kamil’s activities, produced a guarded report specifically approving this motion.86 In later years, leading Egyptian–Greek socialists and radicals also expressed solidarity with the Egyptian national liberation struggle. A notable case was Egypt’s best-known Greek prose writer at the time, Ioannis Gikas,

274  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT who published several satirical texts in the Alexandrian journal Néa Zoí. One of them, ironically entitled ‘Wonderland’ (1907), parodied British policy from the viewpoint of the fellah: Because Great Britain realises that the fellahin are unfortunately so attached to their Koran as to render it pointless to try to convert them to Protestantism, it invests . . . all its Christian energies to keep them at least forever illiterate . . . Did it not build English schools throughout Egypt? Not a single fellah has set foot in them. Why? Because the ungrateful do not want to get used to European manners . . . It is not England’s fault that the fellahin are . . . determined to trust and love their animals more . . . than their British masters, whose great and sincere efforts for the intellectual and commercial development of their country they ignore.87

A year later, Gikas also wrote a book review of Cromer’s Modern Egypt, which had just appeared in the country’s bookshops a year after the British proconsul was forced to leave Egypt. ‘Cromer and the Greeks’ (1908) was yet another forceful critique of colonialism that satirised both the British proconsul’s hypocritical attempt to champion the traditional morality of the fellah and his racist views about the Greeks of Egypt.88 Another known anti-colonial writer was Petros Magnis, known as Egypt’s second most important Greek poet after Cavafy, who published a series of articles from 1907 to 1908 in the Athenian periodical Noumás under the penname ‘Kostas Kamel’, in honour of the nationalist Egyptian leader. Meanwhile, Mustafa Kamil himself also returned to the Theatre Zizinia in October 1907 to formally announce the creation of his National Party before 7,000 supporters, which included, as his speech suggested, ‘many friends from the European colonies’.89 Four months later, however, writing from Mansura, Magnis used the Egyptian leader’s name for the last time. In a moving obituary to the 33-year-old politician, he praised Mustafa Kamil for making the Egyptians ‘feel their humanism and nationalism’, for playing a major part in ‘Cromer’s departure’ and for obliging ‘England to think more seriously about its domination in the Nile Valley’.90 Conclusion According to a particular strand of theory, diaspora communities like the Greeks of Egypt pose a serious challenge to the sociocultural and political

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 275 division between the colonialists and the colonised. Braziel and Mannur, for example, have argued that ‘diaspora has emerged as an internal critique of the binarisms (colonisers/colonised; white/black; West/East) that . . . persist even within some spheres of postcolonial studies’.91 Such views, however, originate from the assumption that diaspora communities, because of their cultural hybridity and dispersed character, are so autonomous and flexible as to be able to evade the divisive impact of the world’s mighty empires. Such propositions, however, are linked to what Francesca Trivellato has called a ‘romanticised view’ of diaspora – that is, a perception that imagines diasporic communities as essentially cohesive and harmonious entities that are immune to internal ruptures and conflict.92 In addition, this perception also fails to account for the highly asymmetrical nature of power relations between empires and diaspora communities, which enable the former often to subdue the latter and turn their members into colonial subjects. As the preceding analysis has shown, British colonialism in Egypt managed to permeate the structures of the country’s largest and most powerful diaspora community and, in so doing, it deepened its insecurity and inner divisions. In particular, the orientalist discourse of colonial difference that was consistently deployed by imperial administrators like Cromer, Milner and others discriminated in essentialist terms between two main categories of Egyptian Greeks. The first consisted of those defined as ‘high-class’ or ‘influential’ Greeks, who were regularly praised, consulted and occasionally knighted with a view to becoming one of the pillars of Egypt’s local colonial elite, while the second category – which included most of the so-called ‘lowclass’ or ‘orientalised’ Greeks – was treated as a source of serious trouble and concern (Milner called them ‘the principal offenders’),93 whose confrontation required nothing less than their total expulsion from Egypt and, preferably, the rest of the Ottoman Empire. It is therefore not surprising that in response to this policy, the community’s semi-official historian, Georgios Kipiadis, would conclude his 1892 history of Egypt’s Greeks with the plea that they ‘become a cohesive and unbroken body capable of halting the powerful tide seeking the Greek element’s destruction and dislocation from the country’.94 Meanwhile, however, the overall attitude of Egypt’s Greeks to Cromer’s policy was by no means passive or reactive. Instead of submissively accepting its division into two main categories, the community responded in

276  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT three ­different ways, each adopting the distinct approaches of collaboration, negotiation and resistance. Of the three, the first strategy came closest to a passive and reactive response, insofar as it was adopted either by families who were already handpicked by the British to form part of the local colonial elite or aspired to ally themselves to this elite and possibly perform its role in future. At the opposite end, resistance was both a critical and initiative approach, insofar as it was driven by a dynamic of unqualified opposition to colonialism and a desire to replace it with an alternative socio-political order. In addition, resistance was adopted largely by intellectuals who spoke for the social groups identified by Cromer as posing a menace to his policy – namely, the so-called ‘low-class’ Egyptian– Greeks and the followers of Mustafa Kamil’s nationalist movement among the Egyptians, including the fellahin. These intellectuals were also characterised by their ability to cross national barriers, both between Greeks and Egyptians and between Greeks and the other foreign communities of Egypt, especially the French. Nevertheless, it was the third policy of negotiation that tried to embody a distinctive Egyptian–Greek diasporic response to British colonialism. For pragmatic leaders like Averoff, the ambiguous character of this approach must have been appealing both as a flexible survival strategy and a middle-ofthe-road platform around which the majority of the community could rally. Nevertheless, this option was neither representative of the values of cultural hybridism and cosmopolitanism, which much of the scholarship tends to associate with diaspora groups,95 nor was it supported by all sections of the Greek community. Under Averoff, the tactics of negotiation were always enveloped in the nationalist rhetoric of Greek ‘patriotism’,96 which his own Helleno-centric model of benefaction strongly promoted. At the same time, however, despite functioning as the mainstream Egyptian–Greek response to the occupation, negotiation was always challenged by the contending strategies of collaboration and resistance and, after Averoff’s death in 1899, gave way to a period of increased rivalry between them. In this regard, its flexibility, midway approach and cross-partisan nationalism did not succeed in providing the Greek community with the ‘cohesive and unbroken’ unity that some of its staunch advocates, like Kipiadis, had hoped to see. This outcome, however, was also closely linked to the persistent failure of this approach to

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 277 envisage a model of harmonious coexistence between the Greek community and Egypt’s indigenous population. Notes   1. Mahmud Muhammad Sulayman, al-Ajanib fi Misr 1922–1952: Dirasa fi tarikh Misr al-ijtima‘i (Cairo: ‘Ayn, 1996), p. 58.   2. Robert Ilbert, ‘Qui est Grec? La nationalité comme enjeu en Égypte (1830– 1930)’, Relations internationals 54 (Summer 1988), p. 145; Robert Ilbert, Ilios Yannakakis and Jacques Hassoun (eds), Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community (Alexandria: Harpocrates, [1992] 1997), pp. 24–31, 62–4, 108, 114–18; Robin Ostle, ‘Alexandria: A Mediterranean Cosmopolitan Centre of Cultural Production’, in Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (eds), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 314–29; Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk, Alexandria, Real and Imagined (London: Ashgate, 2004), p. xxviii; Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 16–20.  3. Marius Deeb, ‘The Socioeconomic Role of the Local Foreign Minorities in Modern Egypt, 1805–1961’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 9: 1 (1978), p. 16; Michael Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882 (Cairo: American University in Cairo, 1997), p. 192.   4. For example, Stratis Tsirkas, O Kaváfis kai i epochí tou (Athens: Kedros, 1958); Will Hanley, ‘Ta‘rif al-ajanib fi al-iskandariyya fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar’, Amkina 7 (2005), pp. 111–20; Anthony Gorman, ‘Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901)’, Middle Eastern Studies 41: 3 (May 2005), pp. 303–30.   5. Auriant, ‘Méhémet-Ali et les Grecs (1805–1848)’, L’Acropole, Revue du monde hellénique 2 (January–December 1927), p. 39.  6. Athanasios Politis, Oi ´Ellines kai i neotéra Aígiptos, vol. 2 (Alexandria: Grammata, 1928–30), pp. 200–1.   7. Alexander Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, 1919–1937: Ethnicity and Class (London: Ithaca, 1989), p. 39; Efthimios Souloyannis, I Ellinikí Koinótita Alexandreías, 1843–1993 (Athens: ELIA, 1994), p. 297.  8. Albert Hourani, Minorities in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 25; Deeb, ‘The Socioeconomic Role’, p. 16; Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, p. 192; Nikos Psyroukis, To neoellinikó paroikiakó fainómeno (Athens: Epikerotita, 1974), p. 62.

278  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT   9. Ilbert, ‘Qui est Grec?’, pp. 139–60; Efthimios Souloyannis, I thési ton Ellínon stin Aígypto (Athens: Dimos Athinaion, 1999), pp. 61–2; Manolis Yalourakis, I Aígyptos ton Ellínon (Athens: Metropolis, 1966), pp. 151–70. Yalourakis attempts to blend this thesis with the analysis advanced by Tsirkas, although he never acknowledges the latter as his source. 10. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, pp. 93–119. 11. Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, p. 39. 12. Sayyid ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr (Cairo: ‘Ayn, 1997), pp. 126–31. 13. Quote from Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, p. 1; Donald Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 17; Robert Mabro, ‘Alexandria 1860–1960: The Cosmopolitan Identity’, in Hirst and Silk, Alexandria, Real and Imagined, p. 249; Manolis Marangoulis, ‘Kairós na sinkronisthómen’. I Aígiptos kai i aigiptiótiki dianóisi (1919–1939) (Athens: Gutenberg, 2011), p. 106; ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr, p. 46; Sulayman, al-Ajanib fi Misr, p. 142; Psyroukis, To neoellinikó paroikiakó fainómeno, pp. 176–7. 14. Official censuses show that Egypt had 37,301 Greeks in 1882 and by 1897 their number increased marginally to 38,208. From 1907 to 1917, the number of Greeks declined from 62,975 to 56,731; see Sulayman, al-Ajanib fi Misr, pp. 58–9. 15. Evelyn Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1908), pp. 432, 430. 16. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), p. 96. 17. Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, p. 249. 18. Alfred Milner, England in Egypt, 9th edn (London: Edward Arnold, [1892] 1902), p. 344. 19. Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 250–2. 20. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 41. 21. Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 441–2. 22. Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 204–7; Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 418, 435. 23. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 50. 24. Georgios Philaretos, To Aigiptiakón zítima en ti ellinikí voulí (Athens: Palingenesia, 1895), p. 34. 25. Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 418, 436–7; Milner, England in Egypt, p. 56. 26. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 57.

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 279 27. Nikolaos Skotidis, Meléti perí tou zitímatos ton en Aigípto astinomikón kanonismón (Athens: Palingenesia, 1892), pp. 30–1. 28. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events 1888– 1914, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Knopf, 1923), pp. 33–5. 29. Skotidis, Meléti perí tou zitímatos, p. 61. 30. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Andreas Pangalos to Trikoupis, 23/108/j, 11 February 1892. 31. Philaretos, To Aigiptiakón zítima, p. 41; Skotidis, Meléti perí tou zitímatos, p. 45; Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2, pp. 436–7. 32. Philaretos, To Aigiptiakón zítima, pp. 29–30. 33. Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 94; Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 1, 12. 34. In the period under discussion, Trikoupis was prime minister from 1882 to 1885, 1886 to 1890 and 1892 to 1895. 35. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Goussios to Trikoupis, 25/210/α, 2 May 1892; Nikolaos Skotidis, I en Aigípto krísis en étei 1881 kai 1882 (Athens: Parnassos, 1883). 36. Omónoia, 24 May 1882, p. 2. 37. Káiron, 19 May 1882, p. 1. 38. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers. Rangavis to Trikoupis, 24/17/j, undated [c. 23 May 1882]; Official Minutes of the Greek Parliament, ΠE’, 14 June 1882, p. 405 and ΠH’, 17 June 1882, p. 423; TNA, FO 32/540, Ford to Granville, 3899514, 25 May 1882; Penelope Delta, Prótes enthimíseis (Athens: Hermis, 1980), p. 55; Alexander Kazamias, ‘To imberialistikó “frónima tou éthnous”: I ellinikí ekstrateía stin Aígipto, Máios-Àvgoustos 1882’, in K. A. Dimadis (ed.), O ellinikós kósmos anámesa sto diafotismó kai ton eikostó aióna, vol. 2 (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2007), pp. 89–100. 39. Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. AAK/M’, Rangavis to Trikoupis, 477, 6 June 1882; Rangavis to Trikoupis, 740, 1 August 1882; TNA, FO 78/3436, Malet to Granville, 11 June 1882; TNA, FO 32/540, Ford to Granville, 19 May 1882. 40. Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rangavis to Trikoupis, 740, 1 August 1882. 41. Tachidrómos, 18 May 1882, p. 2, quoting al-Watan, 13 May 1882. 42. The London Gazette, suppl. 5 January 1888 (no. 25773), p. 210; E. M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), p. 81; Delta, Prótes enthimíseis, p. 214.

280  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 43. Archive of the Greek Community of Alexandria, Official Minutes, 1882, pp. 447–8. 44. Delta, Prótes enthimíseis, p. 152. 45. Stratis Tsirkas, O politikós Kaváfis (Athens: Kedros, 1971), pp. 117–25. 46. Tachidrómos, 17 February 1894, p. 2; Metarríthmisis, 26 April 1895, p. 1; Metarríthmisis, 21 February 1895, p. 2. 47. Metarríthmisis, 20 February 1895, p. 2. 48. Metarríthmisis, 26 April 1895, p. 2. 49. Tachidrómos, 8 November 1901, p. 2; 13 December 1901, p. 2. 50. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Vincent to Trikoupis, 7/155/γ, 18 February 1884; on trade figures, see Yalourakis, I Aígyptos ton Ellínon, p. 154; Politis, Oi ´Ellines kai i neotéra Aígiptos, vol. 1, pp. 301–3; Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, pp. 165–6. 51. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Vincent to Trikoupis, 17/99α, 10 March 1879; Vincent to Trikoupis, 17/49/β, 11 April 1879; Vincent to Trikoupis, 17/51/η, 19 April 1879. 52. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Egerton to Trikoupis, undated [early 1884], 14/45/8. 53. Omónoia, 5 September 1885, quoted in Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, pp. 166–7; Milner, England in Egypt, pp. 252, 259. 54. One oke equals 1.28 kilograms. 55. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 252. 56. On the political leanings of Vyzantios, see Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 385. 57. Charilaos Trikoupis Papers, Andreas Pangalos to Trikoupis, 23/108/j, 11 February 1892. 58. Philaretos, To Aigiptiakón zítima, pp. 43, 44–5. 59. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 56. 60. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 440; Kostas Papageorgiou, ‘Oi prótoi metapolemikoí poiités kai o Kaváfis (Paroikiakós kai ideologikós filetismós)’, Diavázo 78 (5 October 1983), pp. 127–8; Marangoulis, ‘Kairós na sinkronisthómen’, pp. 22, 122–3. 61. Rae Dalven, The Complete Poems of Cavafy, intro. W. H. Auden (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 168. 62. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books [1974] 1975), pp. 71–2; Alexander Kazamias, ‘The British Occupation of Egypt and Alexandria’s Greek Bourgeoisie, 1882–1919’. Paper presented at ‘Bourgeois Seas: Revisiting the History of the Middle Classes in East Mediterranean Port

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 281 Cities’ conference, European University Institute, Florence, 19–20 September 2008, p. 5. 63. Tachidrómos, 11 July 1897, p. 2. 64. Tachidrómos (quoting Tilégraphos), 2 May 1896, p. 2. 65. Metarríthmisis, 13 February 1894, p. 2. 66. Tachidrómos, 16 October 1896, pp. 2–3. 67. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 174; Psyroukis, To neoellinikó paroikiakó fainómeno, pp. 176–7. 68. Metarríthmisis, 30 November 1886; Souloyannis, I thési ton Ellínon, pp. 60–1. 69. Tachidrómos, 21 June 1891, p. 2; Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 171. 70. Tachidrómos, 12 July 1891, p. 1. 71. Tachidrómos, 22 February 1895, p. 2. 72. Tachidrómos, 3 June 1896, p. 3. The kurbaj was the whip, usually made of hippopotamus hide, used to administer punishment. 73. Tachidrómos, 28 June 1906, p. 2; 29 June 1906, p. 2. 74. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 173. 75. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, [1993] 1994), p. 260. 76. Souloyannis, I thési ton Ellínon, pp. 182–90; Katerina Trimi Kirou, ‘Quel cosmopolitisme à l’ère des nationalismes? La colonie grècque alexandrine (1882– 1922)’, Cahiers de la Méditerrannée 67 (2003), pp. 191–2; Kitroeff, The Greeks in Egypt, pp. 42–7; Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), pp. 106–9; Sulayman, al-Ajanib fi Misr, p. 142; cf. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 174; ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr, pp. 126–31. 77. Tsirkas, Kaváfis kai epochí, p. 174. 78. ‘Abbas Hilmi II Papers, HIL/16/98-103, ‘Ali Sulayman, Muhammad Rushdi and Ibrahim Shimi to Muhammad Sa‘id Shimi, 1 March 1895; File 16: 94-7, Mohammed Rushdi to Muhammad Sa‘id Shimi, 3 Shawwal 1312 (18 March 1895). 79. ‘Abbas Hilmi II Papers, HIL/16/160-1, Muhammad Rushdi to Muhammad Sa‘id Shimi, 25 February 1896. 80. ‘Ali Fahmi Kamil (ed.), Mustafa Kamil Basha fi 34 rabi‘an: Siratuhu wa-a‘maluhu min khutab wa-ahadith wa-rasa’il siyasiyya wa-‘umraniyya (Cairo: Maktabat alLiwa’, 1908), pt. 4, pp. 165–8. 81. Kamil, Mustafa Kamil Basha, pt. 5, pp. 46–7; ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr, p. 129.

282  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 82. K. F. Skokos, ‘Nikólaos Chaikális’, Imerológion 1894 9: 0 (1894), pp. 319–22; Iraklis Lachanokardis, Palaiá kai néa Alexándreia (Alexandria: Grivas, 1927), p. 264. 83. ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Ibrahim al-Jumay‘i, ‘Abbas al-thani: Khidiwi Misr al-akhir, 1892–1944: Safahat min tarikh Misr al-mu‘asir ([Cairo]: n. p., 2009), pp. 66–7, 69; Amira Sonbol (ed.), The Last Khedive of Egypt: Memoirs of Abbas Hilmi II (Reading: Ithaca, 1998), p. 104. 84. Kamil, Mustafa Kamil Basha, pt. 4, pp. 7–9. 85. Kamil, Mustafa Kamil Basha, pt. 6, pp. 54–5; ‘Ashmawi, al-Yunaniyyun fi Misr, p. 130. 86. Tachidrómos, 10 June 1897, p. 2. 87. Ioannis Gikas, ‘O tópos ton thavmáton’, Néa Zoí 4: 39 (December 1907), pp. 708–10. 88. Ioannis Gikas, ‘Cromer kai ´Ellines’, Néa Zoí 4: 43 (March 1908), pp. 791–4; Alexander Kazamias, ‘Between Language, Land and Empire: Humanist and Orientalist Perspectives on Egyptian–Greek Identity’, in Dimitris Tziovas (ed.), Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 182–3. 89. Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 100; Tachidrómos, 25 October 1907. 90. Kostas Kamel, ‘Parádeigma yia mímisi’, Noumás 294: 4 (4 May 1908), p. 2. The article is dated 17 February, but appeared on 4 May 1908. 91. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 4. 92. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 11–12. 93. Milner, England in Egypt, p. 43. 94. Georgios Kipiadis, ´Ellines en Aigípto: I sinkrónou Ellinismoú engatástasis kai kathidrímata, 1766–1892 (Alexandria: Lagoudakis, 1892), p. 74. 95. Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (London: Polity, 2009), pp. 30–1; Dimitris Tziovas, ‘Indigenous Foreigners: The Greek Diaspora and Travel Writing (1880–1930)’, in D. Tziovas (ed.), Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700: Society, Politics and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 159; Bed Prasad Giri, ‘Diasporic Postcolonialism and its Antinomies’, Diaspora 14: 2/3 (2005), pp. 218–19, 221–2; Sebouh Aslanian, ‘Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State:

b rit ish c o loni ali sm and the g ree k s o f e gy pt  | 283 Armenian Merchants, the English East India Company, and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748–1752’, Diaspora 13: 1 (2004), p. 38. 96. Archive of the Greek Community of Alexandria, Minutes of 27th Annual General Meeting, 12/24 April 1889: Speech by President George Averoff, p. 90.

10 ‘And I Saw No Reason to Chronicle My Life’: Tensions of Nationalist Modernity in the Memoirs of Fathallah Pasha Barakat Hussein Omar

O

n 10 September 1932, six months before his death, Fathallah Pasha Barakat (1866–1933) began to dictate the story of his life from his bed. Addressing an unnamed, distant relative, he told of his education and early career in the provincial administration of Egypt in the final decades of the nineteenth century. He was sixteen in the year the British occupation commenced and would come of age in its shadow. Now close to seventy and with his eyesight failing, Barakat conjured up the years between 1882 and 1910 – a time fraught with disappointment, frustration and anxiety, as he recalled. For the Pasha, and for many of his generation who felt betrayed by the unfolding events both then and later, the long 1890s were a period of uncertainty and moral ambiguity. As his narration of these formative years revealed, the Pasha was burdened with a sense of loss that would indelibly shape his political trajectory and ethical horizons. As an early nationalist of rural origins who rose to great positions of political power, it is said that Barakat Pasha was emblematic of those known by twenty-first century scholars as the afandiyya [effendis] – a cultural category of educated men who saw themselves as standing between the illiterate peasants and the landowning aristocracy in their bid to make Egyptian state and society modern. They were also the first Egyptians to write autobiographies and diaries: several hundred such texts are known to exist, though only a handful have been published. Yet of these, most were written by the later 287

288  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT generation of afandiyya, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, and few narrate the lives of the ‘old effendis’, who came of age in the 1890s and about whom comparatively less is known.1 Fathallah Barakat was not alone among his peers: many of his generation were similarly engaged in and producing these novel forms of self-writing. And yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, Barakat’s autobiography, discovered by his family a few months after his death, deals with the formative decade of the 1890s in a highly unconventional way. He narrates his life – in particular, those years – in a manner that does not seem to conform to that of a typical afandi. This, in turn, throws into question the very utility of the term ‘afandi’ as a label for, and as a way of understanding the life of, Barakat, as well as his generational peers. By examining the self-writing of Barakat Pasha, with a particular focus on his account of the long 1890s, we gain a new perspective on the emergence of what has been described as middleclass modernity in Egypt. Though his narrative is idiosyncratic – or perhaps because it is idiosyncratic – it provides a revealing prism through which to examine the innovative ways in which his generation was beginning to engage with, and to write about, their past.2 At the time Barakat was writing his autobiography, history-writing itself in Egypt was undergoing vast changes. In the mid-1920s, King Fu’ad began to commission foreign historians to write official histories of Egypt, establishing a number of important archives to support their research. Yet one gets the sense that it was not just revisions of the past that troubled Barakat, but the very practices and principles that it was based on. For Barakat, the ‘falsification of history’ that he perceived to be occurring within these complicit epicentres of monarchical history-making was the very impetus for writing his own autobiography.3 Rather than imposing later constructs onto this icon of a lost generation, by reading his autobiography we are able to gain insight into the Pasha’s own conception of history and his precarious place within it. For as we will see, the Pasha witnessed the past being warped around him – and he was determined to set the record straight. While Fathallah Barakat’s autobiography, in two volumes, is written in the hasty scribble of his relative, the autobiography opens with an introduction penned in the Pasha’s own steady and elegant hand. He begins his story with an arresting incident. The septuagenarian Pasha, seated on the Nile-side

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 289 balcony of the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan, is suddenly approached by a former employee who throws himself at the feet of his erstwhile employer, begging forgiveness.4 He explains that in order to retain his job under the notoriously ruthless premiership of Isma‘il Sidqi (1930–3), the former employee had been forced to betray Barakat by criticising him publicly.5 Upon hearing his pathetic plea, the Pasha forgave the man. But some of Barakat’s friends, prompted by this startling avowal, advised him to publish his own testimony to counter the claims that had been levelled against him by his enemies and associates alike within the Sidqi Government.6 As the Pasha continues, this was not the first time he had been encouraged to compile his memoirs: Even though on many occasions I had been asked by my friends to tell my story, I never gave in to their request, because I saw no reason to chronicle my life. I was not a man of History [min rijal al-tarikh] . . . whose edifying vita men would follow as an example . . . or enjoy reading. One of the reasons that I, perhaps, resisted their request, was my awareness of my shortcomings and flaws as a writer, were I to write in my own hand. There was no way around this except to find a trustworthy person to whom I could dictate.7

Whether these words were written out of false modesty or sincere conviction, they betray something of the Pasha’s concern for what it is that constitutes the stuff of History with a capital ‘H’. Fathallah Barakat: A Political Life Despite his reluctance to situate himself within it in writing, Barakat was from birth a part of the unfolding of Egyptian political history as it was being made. Born in a small town near Rosetta in 1866 to a rural landowning family, Barakat is best remembered as both the nephew and cousin of the Egyptian nationalist icon, Sa‘d Zaghlul Pasha (c. 1858–1927), with whom he grew up. His mother, Sittuhum, was Zaghlul Pasha’s older sister, while his father, Shaykh ‘Abdallah Barakat, came from an old and well-connected family, related by marriage to the most prominent families of the provinces of Gharbiyya and Buhayra in the Egyptian Delta.8 ‘Abdallah Barakat’s father, in turn, had been a notary in Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha’s bureaucracy and was

290  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT one of the viceroy’s rice-growing agents in Dalhiz, northern Gharbiyya. Thus, it was a family that had enjoyed some proximity to the ruling institution for at least two generations.9 In the early 1870s ‘Abdallah Barakat became ‘umda [village chief] of Minyat al-Murshid, as well as nazir (later known as ma’mur) of the district of Dusuq.10 That he was promoted to this bureaucratic rank was considered

Figure 10.1  Fathallah Barakat Pasha (1866–1933). ‘Taken at 5:30pm on Monday at the end of April 1923’. (Source: Published with kind permission of Sana Barakat, granddaughter of Fathallah)

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 291

Figure 10.2  Shaykh ‘Abdallah Barakat (d. c. 1899), father of Fathallah. (Source: Published with kind permission of Sana Barakat, granddaughter of Fathallah)

292  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT remarkable, as few native Egyptians were able to ascend to such positions at a time generally dominated by the Ottoman–Egyptian elite. During the years of Fathallah’s early childhood, the town of Dusuq itself, which stands on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, was of some importance; as we learn from a geographical dictionary from the 1880s: it rose to become the chief township in a ward or qism of the province of Gharbiyya . . . it now boasted a railway station . . . a diwan (registry), a majlis (assembly or council), a tribunal for petitions, another which was qualified to confirm acts or contracts.11

But even as the state extended its bureaucratic tentacles into the Delta, it could never distract from the town’s true epicentre: the tomb of its local saint. The shrine would remain the social and economic locus of the township, so much so that a son of Khedive Isma‘il had even gone to great pains to replace the drapery that covered the tomb, in an attempt to insert his family into the great ‘chain of tradition’ that stubbornly dominated this province’s life. Fathallah attended the village kuttab, or primary school focused on the rote learning of the Qur’an, until the age of ten. His father then sent him to school in Rosetta and after that to the Jam‘iyya al-khayriyya al-islamiyya [The Islamic Benevolent Society] school in Alexandria, where he studied under the tutelage of a family friend, the renowned poet–orator of the ‘Urabi Revolution, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim. It was during those years that he would first be exposed to politics, both at home and in the world. At school, his tutor, Nadim, had begun to engage in political journalism and first introduced him to public oratory. At home, Barakat’s cousin, Ahmad Effendi Mahmud, soon to become an elected deputy of the Khedive’s parliamentary assembly, would visit him regularly.12 It was, indeed, through his cousin, Ahmad Effendi (later Pasha) Mahmud, that the young Barakat first encountered the most illustrious thinkers of his day. On summer evenings, many of the country’s most prominent politicians, poets and religious scholars would gather to discuss pressing political and social matters. Cognisant of his young age, those gathered would hide certain matters from him, while giving him the chance to participate in discussions. At one such gathering, the adolescent Barakat was called upon to give a speech on behalf of Egyptian youth and to lecture the assembled group – including the renowned reformist scholar Muhammad ‘Abduh – about

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 293 his generation’s concerns. He was preceded in the ceremony by none other than Nadim himself – the most prominent orator in Egypt. It was, indeed, only through such informal avenues that Barakat would be educated in the world of politics.13 Despite undertaking a short stint at a preparatory school in Cairo, Fathallah Barakat’s education remained unfinished, for reasons we shall discover. His lack of higher education haunted Barakat throughout his career and made him, in the blunt words of a British Consul official writing in 1927, ‘without appeal to cultured or decent-minded people’.14 Fathallah Barakat first achieved prominence at the local level in 1886, when he was able to resolve a large-scale crisis that had emerged between certain family members and the masarif [banks], resulting in seventeen court cases.15 After the villagers petitioned the governor to hold elections for the position of ‘umda, Barakat won by a landslide victory.16 By the end of his tenure in 1907, the crisis had been entirely resolved, the village’s entire debt had been paid and the land seized by the masarif returned. By that date, the village’s wealth had been restored . . . men and kinsmen’s confidence in each other was rekindled, to the point that they no longer sought to borrow money from the masarif and instead turned to each other for money, be it big or small, without the need for documents, receipts or witnesses.17

Fathallah’s success in restoring order to the village was such that he was appointed as a member of Majlis al-Mudiriyya [provincial council] of Gharbiyya in 1902, where he represented the districts of Fuwwa, Dusuq and Kafr al-Zayyat. Barakat writes that 1890 marked a turning point in his career. The institution of a law in that year which allowed ‘umdas to stand for local elections in majalis al-shiyakhat gave a much needed boost to his career. Having been popular, he would win every election with near unanimity.18 But within five years, the role of ‘umda itself would be severely restricted, due to sweeping reforms in the Interior Ministry. On 16 March 1895, the Interior Ministry’s ‘Advisor’, Eldon Gorst, issued a law that transformed the role of the ‘umda.19 It was the first of a number of reforms that sought to extend the power of the British into the countryside. Henceforth, elections would no longer be held and the British officials of the Interior Ministry would retain the right to appoint pliant functionaries. By doing so, they transformed the ‘umda from an independent and fairly prestigious local gov-

294  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT ernor, as he had been since the time of Muhammad ‘Ali, into a servile, petty official.20 This is perhaps why Barakat – against the wishes of the Khedive and with great discouragement from his Zaghlul cousins – stood for, and won, elections to a national body (Majlis al-shura) for the first time in 1908.21 Membership to this council would mark his entry into national politics, but it was only when he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, upon its formation in 1913, that Barakat moved to Cairo. Soon after his election in 1908, Barakat began to appear frequently and prominently in the national press. Never shy of controversy, Barakat caused a major dispute when he argued that elections and a representative government would only lead to national strife. Pointing to the events set in motion by the promulgation of the constitution in Persia, Barakat argued that such measures could only be introduced gradually. While his own writing is unsurprisingly silent about these debates (he would become known for arguing exactly the opposite a few years later), we can glean much from the newspapers that reported his speeches in great detail.22 Even after his entry into national politics and his subsequent move to Cairo, Barakat never became fully urbanised. He managed to retain strong ties to his home province, which, it was said, allowed him to ‘enjoy something of his uncle’s success with simple folk’23 and thereby – when the revolution of 1919 started gathering momentum – to galvanise support for the national cause in the countryside.24 Indeed, Barakat’s role in the 1919 uprising was so pivotal that he was described by British consular officials as the chief ‘organising power of the Wafd’ and ‘a kind of Trotsky for Zaghloul’s Lenine [sic]’.25 After the first nationwide elections in 1924, he was appointed to two ministries – agriculture and interior – in a number of Wafdist cabinets. Upon his uncle’s death in 1927, Barakat was set to inherit the presidency of the party that he had been helped his uncle establish. Although widely acknowledged to have been the better candidate, Barakat lost the election to Nahhas Pasha, for a number of political and personal reasons.26 Only a year later, Barakat resigned from the Wafd and continued his participation in politics as an independent, until his death in March 1933.

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 295 Between Diary and Autobiography: Divergent Genres of Self-Writing In his rise to political prominence from provincial roots, Barakat’s life was typical of the cultural category of men referred to today, in academic literature, as afandiyya.27 These were (exclusively) men who saw themselves, and were seen by others, as blending modern, technical expertise with a native Egyptian authenticity.28 Born into non-aristocratic but notable rural families [a‘yan], the afandiyya were able to emerge as protagonists on the national political and social stage,29 through an ‘institutional association and ideological investment in the state’s modernizing project’.30 As Michael Gasper writes: Over the course of time this increasingly self-conscious group – which eventually evolved into the ’afandiya – railed against the ‘old regime’ Ottoman elite for what they described as its feudal tendencies and its history of tyrannical and arbitrary rule . . . Ultimately the ’afandiya depicted itself as standing between the ‘backward’ and ‘ignorant’ peasants and the old order of the traditional and landed elites. They wove the knowledge they generated about the peasants, their oppositional stance towards the old regime’s ruling strata and their own privileged position into the fabric of modern Egyptian political identity. As a result, the literate urbanite became the essential political subject of Egyptian history over the course of the twentieth century.31

Several scholars have emphasised the need to distinguish between ‘old’ and ‘new’ afandiyya. The distinction is, in part, chronological or temporal and, in part, cultural. The first of the two, of which Barakat is considered a member, was a smaller and much more elite formation. It has been characterised as more educated and with closer ties (sometimes by marriage) to the Ottoman–Egyptian ruling establishment. The latter category is mainly used to describe the less educated and more ‘anonymous’ suit- and tarbushwearing urban dwellers, the sort of men who were likely to join new political groups, such as Young Egypt or the Muslim Brotherhood, and to make-up the rank and file of the Wafd from the 1920s to the 1950s.32 Having succeeded in becoming the nation’s intellectual, bureaucratic, social and political elite, these men often sealed and celebrated their ­achievements by

296  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT writing about their lives in autobiographies – a form that has been labelled by some as the ‘Efendi text par excellence’.33 Within this genre, Lucie Ryzova has identified two main types. The first, which Ryzova categorises as ‘Memoirs of Public Office’, were impersonal logbooks of appointments and events, a sort of ‘choses vues’ kept by those afandiyya who had ascended to high political office and formal positions in public life. The other type of text was more internal and private, generally produced by those effendis who occupied less overtly political positions, such as doctors, lawyers, intellectuals, journalists and university professors. This latter type of autobiography would track the personal journey of the effendi and thereby attempt to capture something of the tumultuous experience of ‘becoming modern’. These were typically written for publication or, more commonly, serialisation. Some lesser-known authors also published these texts privately, sometimes at great personal expense.34 Given Fathallah Barakat’s prominent political and social standing, one would expect his self-writings to conform solely to the ‘Memoirs of Public Office’ type. And yet the Pasha’s two-volume autobiography is largely devoted to tracking his own internal voyage and is filled with many of the leitmotivs described above. For the autobiography of a senior statesman, Barakat’s text is disarmingly personal, marking little distinction between the most confessional and private and the most public aspects of his political career. For example, about his children, he writes: I must recount, here, a lasting feeling which I could not get rid of. Every time a child, male or female was born to me I felt a weight and a grim future for them. My compassion for my children was exhausted and tired, for example. My son Bahiyy al-din became ill at the age of three or four years old and I could not see him for forty days as he teetered on the brink between life and death. But even after he started becoming better I could not look at him without tears welling up in my eyes and I was incapable of suppressing my pain or sadness . . . I had to hide my eyes lest they see my distress.35

Literary and anecdotal, the autobiography largely focuses on the early years of his ‘coming-of-age’, from 1882 to 1910. As a source of political detail, the text is rather muted: even the 1919 revolution, in which the Pasha played an absolutely pivotal role, is only briefly mentioned.

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 297 Perhaps Barakat had by then already satisfied his need to chronicle his political career. For most of his adult life, he had been the fastidious keeper of an extremely lengthy and detailed logbook, in which he wrote obsessively on a daily basis. At his death, it ran to forty-seven volumes. Unlike his autobiography, the diaries were a detached record of things as he had seen them, with little space for emotion or internality. It seems likely that he intended the logbooks to remain accessible after his death, at least to fellow political associates and family members, if not to a larger audience. That Barakat produced a public diary and a private biography is striking. Typically, the form of the diary, written in and of the present, was conceived of as a private text, lacking the benefit of hindsight, whereas autobiographies of the period (or at least those by well-known men) were generally written for public consumption.36 Another avid diarist, Barakat’s uncle Sa‘d Zaghlul, provides us with a most explicit statement of his intent that his writings should remain private. In one vitriolic diatribe, having made some characteristically nasty comments about his foes, he writes: ‘Woe is me if anyone gets their hands on this notebook after my death’.37 The diary is at times shockingly intimate, weaving the most confidential details with the most public events: sexual desires sit aside minutes of his meetings with statesmen, records of his dreams top drafts of political manifestoes, while his struggles with gambling and addiction to gin (as well as his stomach problems) pepper the entire text.38 Although he left no indications either way, in Barakat’s case it appears that his forty-seven volume diary was meant to be made publically available, whereas in his autobiography, a number of episodes (and the fact that he never published it) seem to indicate that it should remain confidential. For instance, he describes certain embarrassing occasions – such as his wedding night in 1887 – which would have been rarely included in standard Effendi texts. He writes: The pressure my parents put on me to marry was too huge to bear so I agreed to either marry the youngest of the Sar-Tujjar of Rashid (Si al-Hajj ‘Ali Badr al-din), or the daughter of my paternal uncle. I thought the latter would be better because this way the calamity would not be as big if all went wrong. As the wedding day got nearer, I became extremely anxious. Even

298  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT now I consider the wedding night (laylat al-dukhla) one of the blackest days of my life. I refused to go into my marital house until the tears flowed down the eyes of some of the men and all of the women until one or two in the morning. When I finally entered my marital chamber, the calamity was compounded when Nabiha knocked over a gas lamp, which set fire to the matted reed rug of our new home.39

The more typical afandiyya autobiographies tend to narrate a journey of great progress, from the rural to the urban, from the local to the national and from the traditional to the modern, and have been characterised as the ‘Bildungsromans of a generation’.40 Often beginning with exoticised descriptions of folkloric backwardness and oppressive patriarchs, the authors then tend to relate how they struggled to educate themselves against these odds, finally breaking with tradition by triumphantly replacing their shaykhly turbans with the tarbushes of modernity.41 This transformative moment (explicitly named takwin, ‘formation’, by some authors) is the centrepiece of such works. Yet Barakat’s autobiography does not follow these tropes. In contrast to his peers, his Oedipal impulses were limited; in the autobiography, his father emerges not as a figure to overthrow, but as one to emulate.42 He repeatedly cites his father’s wisdom, pride and bravery as desirable characteristics that he hopes to develop for himself.30 Rather than finding his father’s value system, which he calls the values of the a‘yan, backward or outdated, Barakat fears the loss of it, in light of the transformations occurring in the world around him. Unlike most afandiyya memoirists, Barakat was not only the son of an ‘umda, he himself remained one. His autobiography, therefore, does not read as a travelogue towards modernity typical of this genre as practised by his peers; it lacks the rousing, triumphalist overtones normally ascribed to that category. In most autobiographies of the same period, the great milestones of the nationalist struggle (starting from 1882, moving to the Dinshawai Affair of 1906, the establishment of political parties in 1907 and the uprising of 1919) are presented as hurdles that the afandiyya have exultantly leaped over in their race towards modernity.43 By incorporating national history into their own genealogies, effendis who wrote memoirs asserted their place within an overarching state

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 299 narrative. Yet Barakat’s journey towards an ideal modernity is a diffident one; his education and thereby his ‘efendification’ (as Ryzova calls it) is perceived through his writings as painfully incomplete. The reader encounters historic events not as socio-political moments of consequence, in which the author self-consciously played an important role, but as apolitical, deeply personal accounts of days as they were lived. There is no better illustration of this than Barakat’s treatment of his encounters with Ahmad ‘Urabi (1841–1911), the native Egyptian army officer, then lieutenant, who would come to lead an uprising against the dominance and tyranny of the Turco-Circassian ruling class in 1881–2. In a pathetic yet pivotal event in his tale of stunted progress, Barakat recounts the discrimination and violence he suffered at the hands of a schoolmaster in Rosetta, who favoured the son of a local grandee over Barakat. Though young Fathallah was obviously the brighter child, he enjoyed none of the social clout of his competitor (whose name he does not mention, instead referring to him by his initials). He found his teacher’s favouritism humiliating and vowed never to return to school. Barakat’s father, furious at what had happened, decided to take the matter to the provincial governor. While presenting his complaint to the governor, Khurshid ‘Akif Pasha,44 ‘Abdallah Barakat happened to meet none other than the young Ahmad ‘Urabi Bey. Having been stationed in Rosetta, ‘Urabi had also come to pay the governor a visit that evening. When ‘Urabi heard Barakat’s story, he urged the governor not to interfere: the a‘yan, he lectured, needed a lesson in fending for themselves. Their reliance on their fathers and family connections was creating a passive and incapable youth.45 This admonition, shocking in light of how ‘Urabi was to champion the rights of native-born Egyptians in later years, profoundly affected both father and son. As Fathallah writes in the autobiography, both felt betrayed by this man who would later disingenuously claim to be the spokesman of the Egyptian Fellah: My father responded angrily and criticised him for his inability to diagnose unethical behaviour and the absence of good manners . . . and said that in general it was not in the nature of military men to understand these matters. Their interaction would mark both men with a hatred of one another.46

300  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT In the months during which Barakat was composing his autobiography, alAhram newspaper ran a series of articles on the anniversary of the uprising, celebrating ‘Urabi as leader of a revolution.47 Perhaps it was this series, which canonised ‘Urabi as a popular Egyptian hero reflecting the official state narrative, which prompted Barakat to write about the incident with such venom. It was, after all, the Turkish governor who had come to the defence of the native Egyptian notability, not ‘Urabi.48 It is understandable, then, that Barakat, departing from the patterns that would come to characterise effendis’ selfwriting, would wish to detach his own life from what he considered to be a skewed and deficient national narrative. And yet, it was this narrative, in turn, which swerved his own trajectory off course, leading Barakat to consider his own life as, in some ways, deficient as well. As auspicious as it may have been for the nationalist cause, when the ‘Urabi revolt broke out in 1882, it came as a tremendous blow to Barakat, as its aftermath would for Egypt. A student in high school at the time, Barakat had been living in Cairo with his uncles, Sa‘d and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul. Both came under suspicion of involvement in the uprising and feared arrest. Moreover, the unrest of the previous months had placed the Barakat family under unprecedented financial pressures; they sank ever more deeply into debt. For both of these reasons, Fathallah was forced by his father to abandon his high school education and return to his home village of Minyat al-Murshid. As it led to the derailment of his education and development of a Cairo career, Barakat considered the ‘Urabi revolt not as a great step forward, but as a stumbling block in his personal trajectory. He returned home to piles of debt and mounting pressure from his father to get married, which he refused, at the time. ‘People did not know of our true financial situation’, he writes, Every now and then, I expected the scandal of our debt to become known, and I believed that the seizure of our property was imminent . . . If I was to inherit no money from my father, what I certainly had inherited from him was pride.49

His education interrupted, Barakat was thereby excluded from a significant part of the cultural experience of being an effendi, even of the ‘traditional’ kind. As his cousin–uncles, Ahmad Fathi and Sa‘d Zaghlul, went on

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 301 to publish articles, continue their education in the city and debate the finer points of Egypt’s social ills, Barakat was grounded to an increasingly irrelevant province. While his younger brother, ‘Atif Barakat (later Pasha), was sent to school in Cairo and would later become dean of the law department at Dar al-‘ulum, Fathallah stayed in their village desperately trying to improve his family’s financial situation. Without the privilege of a higher education and a career in the civil service or the liberal professions, Barakat was barred from accumulating the social capital enjoyed by his peers. When he finally succumbed to marriage in 1887; however, unlike his cousin–uncles, Barakat did not marry into the Turco-Circassian dhawat [elite], but rather was wed to one of his own cousins.50 It is curious that, after he relates the events of his marriage in the autobiography, Barakat switches his system of recording the date. While the story of his childhood is told using the Islamic hijri calendar, Barakat changes to the Gregorian dating system after his wedding. Further, his conversions of dates seem to have actually been wrong, as many of the dates are crossed out and corrected by a different hand.51 This equivocal dating practice, this lack of linearity in Barakat’s framing, hint at a larger tension in the text. It somehow suggests that Barakat did not conceive of his life as an unswerving road to modernity. Further, one senses in his self-writing that he is suspicious of the entire project of modernisation and deeply questioning of the very milestones trumpeted by his peers. For Barakat, 1882 to 1910 was a period not of progress but of loss, both in his own life and on the national political stage. As he observes in his autobiography, those crucial years were marked with quiescence, if not collaboration, between the educated, elite politicians and bureaucrats of the country and the British occupying forces. A complete integration into, and investment in, the state’s modernisation – the necessary condition in those years, according to Ryzova, for becoming an effendi – would necessitate full collaboration with Khedive and High Commissioner alike. Barakat argued that, in doing so, men would be forced to disavow their a‘yan origins and values.52 In this way, he accused the prominent statesmen of the ‘long 1890s’ of having made a Faustian pact with the state to further their personal careers. Among such figures were his own uncles, Sa‘d and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, as well as the afandiyya politicians with whom they associated, such as Lutfi

302  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT al-Sayyid, Isma‘ il Abaza and Butrus Ghali. Decades later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the embarrassingly close relations that these politicians and the British enjoyed would seem to have been expunged from both the public record and the press. As Barakat writes in 1900: It was during those years that I finally came to realise that dignity does not come with titles or medals . . . I also realised that national interests and personal interests (of achieving high office etc.) were in direct contradiction with one another, and that personal achievement often was in contradiction with maintaining the most basic amount of dignity.53

Effendis, Old and New As we have seen, unlike other afandiyya who have narrated the story of their lives as a trajectory of progress, with a radical break between tradition and modernity, Barakat tells a different tale, and indeed he appears ambivalent about the modernisation project itself. Moreover, in the autobiography Barakat refers to himself as being ‘min abna‘ al-‘a’ilat al kubra’ [‘a descendent of the great families’] and as a member of ‘al-a‘yan’, but never as an effendi.54 Nor does he seem to have been perceived by others as one of the afandiyya.55 He only uses this term once in his text, and it is clear from this instance that he did not believe that he fitted this rubric. To the contrary, he uses it to describe some low-ranking clerks in the Legislative Assembly. This also seems true of others usually associated with the afandiyya class. For example, in Ryzova’s study, Tawfiq Nasim Pasha (whose sister was married to Barakat’s uncle) is considered an archetypal effendi.56 Yet he was the great-grandson of one of Muhammad ‘Ali’s chief cronies, Lazoghli Bey, and came from a line of titled Ottoman–Egyptian dhawat and military men. His extensive obituaries in al-Ahram on 8–9 March 1938 suggest that he came from, and had himself amassed, considerable wealth and was perceived as coming from the landed aristocracy, so far as one can be said to have existed in Egypt. By the standards of Fathallah Barakat and his contemporaries, Tawfiq Nasim Pasha would have been considered too aristocratic and elite to have been an effendi. Ryzova, Schulze and Lashin also argue that Zaghlul, in his youth, would sign his name as ‘Sa‘d Zaghlul Afandi’. Yet it seems that Zaghlul frequently

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 303 switched between referring to himself as ‘al-Shaykh Sa‘d Zaghlul’ and as Sa‘d afandi, suggesting that to his mind these categories were not as mutually exclusive as they are to historians.57 Articles in al-Ahram from a similar period do not refer to him as afandi either, but as shaykh.58 During the long 1890s, the term appears rather infrequently in the press. Where it does appear, it seems to refer to the members of a bureaucratic rank, rather than a social category with a distinct form of behaviour, a clear-cut mentality and a specific collective identity as such, as it later would.59 One of the earliest instances in which the afandiyya appear as a cultural category, rather than a mere bureaucratic rank, is in a 1914 article in al-Ahram.60 In the article, an anonymous author (‘An Observer and Hearer’) attempts to explain to his readers what is meant by ‘afandi’ in colloquial parlance, suggesting the novelty of the phenomenon. The author, much like contemporary scholars of the afandiyya today, emphasises the importance of clothing in defining this new type of man. But here the resemblance stops. Such a man is neither the virtuous agent of middle-class modernity that appears in scholarship, nor a harbinger of authenticity: The Afandi, as understood colloquially, is he who wears an Istanbul tarbush, even if he continues to wear a galabiyya. Some rural dwellers think that doing so is all that needs to be done in order to leave the ranks of ‘shaykhdom’ and join the ranks of ‘afandiyya’. But it seems to us that by abandoning the turban and by wearing the tarbush on his head, the latter infiltrates his head and his conscience, for it no longer becomes appropriate for the afandi to work in the field. Instead he sits in cafés. The afandi’s desire for money without sweat makes him dishonest, someone who finds ways to embezzle money from others. The urban afandiyya’s profession seems to be the sexual harassment of women, seeking them out in cafes and bars, and their repetitive gambling. Stories of those afandiyya can be read in the papers every day.

After listing a number of violent incidents of sexual harassment, the writer continues: If all these incidents were to be surveyed and were our government interested in morality and manners, it would create a police force to throw all

304  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the afandiyya wearing tarbushes into prison or to places where they could be taught morality and manners. We therefore need to teach these corrupt afandiyya manners by the stick of law, for now even some turban-wearing men have descended to their corruption . . . There is nothing that wounds and humiliates the dignity of our umma and violates the sanctity of the people more than this violation of honour and modesty, this assault on freedom and good behaviour, out in the open on the streets.

This example, as well as the particular use of, and mostly the absence of, the term in Barakat’s self-inscription, highlights the extent to which there might be a gap between the term as it was understood then and how it is now deployed by academic scholarship. Though Ryzova’s distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ afandiyya may gesture towards resolving this, if the afandiyya were seemingly invisible in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and if the term was rarely used, one wonders what, if anything at all, distinguished them from the ‘native’ bureaucratic elites of the 1860s to 1880s.61 Indeed, a wider-ranging study of autobiographical texts for this period – one which cannot be undertaken here – might well generate a more carefully nuanced consideration of the term and its relation to the self-identities of this loosely defined group of men as they changed over a longer historical period. If not to celebrate his achievements and his transformation into a modern effendi, why then did Barakat write such an autobiography? In an introductory paragraph entitled ‘The Idea of Compiling the Story of My Life’, Barakat described a trip to the newly established archives at Abdin Palace. He was hoping to consult the minutes of a debate that he had sparked twentythree years earlier in the Legislative Council. Barakat had argued, against the wishes of the majority, that the Rector of al-Azhar should be elected, rather than appointed by the Khedive, as had been the case since the accession of Muhammad ‘Ali. As a young delegate, Barakat was disturbed by this development. He was concerned that the Khedive, who since 1904 was thought to be increasingly pro-British, was attempting to limit the independence of this bastion of Muslim and Egyptian identity. He writes: I saw how the Khedive was using al-Azhar . . . and I saw how he held absolute power over it. I wanted to limit this as much as possible . . . When

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 305 my intentions became known, a document was received by the president of the majlis shura al-qawanin from Shaykh of al-Azhar, Salim al-Bishri, at the time. It did not matter to me whether he had sent this note out of his hypocritical desire to please the Khedive, or whether he had been ordered to send it. The note was read out to the assembly . . . it was filled with words of praise, admiration and support [for the Khedive] Most of the hypocrites gathered, raced to add their voices to the Shaykh’s praise, speaking into that the ears of the messengers of opinion (rusul al- ra’i) . . . ‘We condemn the motion proposed to elect the Shaykh of al-Azhar for this could lead to a marginalization of the Khedive’s desire . . . Worse, the conflict might lead to fitna’.62

Before long, delving into the archives, Barakat realised that all evidence of this debate had gone missing, prompting the bitter yet lucid remark that an unnamed and all-encompassing ‘they’ had ‘changed and replaced’ the documents he sought: ‘The abuses perpetrated against the evidence were protected by my own memory of the matter, intact and clear, which shed light on those who posed in the transparent garments of nationalism.’63 By posing as nationalists, those responsible for guarding the past had actually betrayed it.64 Barakat’s comments reveal something of the discomfort that he felt with ‘the infrastructure of historical practice’ that was designed to forge a monolithic national (and more deeply, monarchical) identity.65 In contrast, his autobiographical project opposed the push for group cohesion that was necessary at the expense of accuracy and nuance. As a small yet significant way of railing against the distortions of modern history-writing, in his autobiography Barakat insisted on referring to people by their patronymics, which he always bundled in brackets, after the names by which they were publicly known. Barakat opposed the common ‘Turkish’ practice of changing young, rural boys’ names when they were sent to school, which effectively erased all traces of a boy’s roots.66 Barakat’s uncle (only five years his senior), Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, was renamed Fathallah Sabri, and Fathallah Barakat, himself, was forced to adopt the name Fathallah Zaki.67 By reverting to traditional naming practices – similar in spirit to his return to the hijri calendar to write of his childhood as an old man – Barakat again reveals his own uneasy relationship to that which is celebrated by his generational

306  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT peers as modernity and its way of revising and misremembering the past. In his eyes, Barakat’s memory was the final sentinel, guarding truth against the onslaught of the public historical record, in all its forms. When I first approached the autobiography, I did not think much of the fact that it had been dictated. This practice was not unheard of. For example, yet another Wafdist defector, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi Pasha, had accepted to dictate his Hadhihi hayati [This is My Life] late in life to a pestering journalist.68 Moreover, Barakat’s relative old age and failing eyesight were reason enough for me to explain away his choice. Yet I was surprised to find that Barakat updated his diary of appointments as regularly during the twilight of his life as he had in his more active years, always in the same distinctively steady and elegant hand. And furthermore, on closer examination of the autobiography, the handwriting in its introduction is, again, unmistakably his. Therefore, one can safely assume that Barakat’s decision to dictate his memoir was not born out of necessity, but was rather a matter of choice. It was a choice to forsake the written word, which mediates and calcifies thought, and to deliver his confession instead in oral form, which he presumably thought was better suited to rendering the nuances of the historical record he was attempting to set right. It was a choice in keeping with his distrust of the disembodied texts produced by the state, and a decision to counteract their power of misrepresentation. In doing so, the Pasha made a peculiarly appropriate choice of scribe: an unnamed relative, who was not, as one might expect, a journalist, but rather ‘a man of the law’. This detail lends a testimonial tone to Barakat’s self-examination, in that he is not only speaking to his peers, but also, as it were, ‘before the Law’. In the last paragraph of his two-page introduction, the only section written in Barakat’s own hand, he testifies: It is my duty to acknowledge the bounty of God . . . for He has defended me from forbidden monetary gain, and from the temptations of wine . . . from neglecting my fast and my prayers . . . and from saying anything untruthful, and from giving false testimony [in matters of the law] . . .69

The text, having been orally composed, was a gesture that recalled the early days of Barakat’s education in the kuttab, as he writes the final chapters of his life.

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 307 Perhaps in trying to delineate the contours of a single, monolithic and continuous effendi culture, historians have elided the distinctions between individual lives and generations. In doing so, one loss appears to be that of sensitivity to the religious dimensions of the lives these men aspired to lead. It certainly seems that Barakat’s contemporaries were much more actively concerned with matters of religion and personal piety than some scholars might have us believe. Like Zaghlul, whose volumes of diaries are woven with prayers, Barakat’s text is strikingly religious. It comes as no surprise, then, that he was described in a popular biographical dictionary in 1924 in a manner verging on hagiography: This Egyptian genius is descended from Abi Bakr al-Siddiq, may God be pleased with him, and in his blood runs the spirit of thirteen centuries. It is possible that his spirit is a part of the spirit of Islam itself. His good traits flood . . . because of the nature of the blood that runs in his veins . . . no different from the River from which he drank.70

For those in the self-assured 1930s who read the Pasha’s autobiography after his death, it must have seemed unsettling. Far from a celebration of an illustrious career, it reads as an ambiguous elegy by an author caught in a world split in two. There is no better illustration of this than one of the last photographs we have of Fathallah, in his role as ‘the Fallah Minister’, taken outside his house in the ‘izba he had inherited from his father (see Figure 10.1). From the ill-educated son of a provincial ‘umda, Barakat had risen to become the right arm of the nation’s uncrowned ‘king of hearts’, Zaghlul.71 In the photograph, Barakat stands beside an open Qur’an – the holy book of an illiterate Prophet. Such heavy-handed symbolism would have been lost on no one. Moreover, he wears both the elegant caftan of a shaykh and the tarbush of the effendi. The tarbush sits at an uneasy angle, poignantly pointing to the two worlds he tried to reconcile. At some point, the family of Barakat Pasha must have handed the manuscript over to a publisher. Yet it was returned. In the end, it was because of Barakat’s reticence to conform to the new-fangled practices of history-writing that the self-appointed gatekeepers of the past have written him out of their narrative. At the back of the manuscript, a note hastily scribbled in biro by an editor dismisses the work as unsuitable for publication.

308  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Notes   1. Lucie Ryzova, ‘Efendification: The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Modern Egypt’ (PhD dissertation, Oxford University, 2008), pp. 97–106; Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 207–10; Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation: 1930–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–31.   2. Samera Esmeir has recently argued that instilling a new historical sensibility in Egyptians was a crucial aspect of the British political project; it tried to make them experience and understand colonial rule as a break with the past. See Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 43–53.   3. Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 91–141. On the relationship between the emergence of afandi culture and the professionalisation of history writing, see pp. 142–6.   4. Fathallah Pasha Barakat, ‘An Autobiography of H. E. the Late Fathalla Pacha’ (Cairo: n. p., 1932), pp. i–iii. These pages are the only ones written in Barakat’s own hand and are numbered in the manuscript. The first numbered page of the manuscript is the fourth, and it is numbered ‘page 2’. Barakat Pasha’s autobiography and diaries are held in the private archive of his granddaughter, Sana Barakat, in Cairo. It is with her kind permission that sections of the autobiography appear in this text.   5. Isma‘il Sidqi Pasha (prime minister from 1930–3) aggressively sought to curtail the influence of the popular Wafd Party to which Barakat had belonged.   6. Interestingly, the impetus for publishing Zaghlul’s own diaries resulted from a perceived falsification of the historic record when Sidqi attempted to take credit for forming the Wafd in 1948. See Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, p. 232.  7. All translations from the Arabic are my own. The three-page introduction referred to above is the only part of the text written in Fathallah Barakat Pasha’s own hand.   8. ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, Sa‘d Zaghlul: Sira wa-tahiya (Cairo: Matba‘at Hijazi al-Qahira, 1936), p. 50. See also al-Ahram, 8 August 1881, for an unusual panegyric to the family of Barakat’s cousins. In a moving letter to Muhammad ‘Abduh, Sa‘d Zaghlul describes Abdallah Barakat as his father. See Muhammad

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 309 Rashid Rida, Tarikh al-Ustadh al-Imam al-Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Manar, 1931), p. 276.   9. The Barakat family wealth was many centuries old and had not been exclusively rural-based. A fifteenth-century document preserved in the family archive ‘proving’ the family’s descent from Abu Bakr, the first caliph, shows a number of wealthy ancestors, including a Mamluk-period khawajki, a long-distant merchant who officially provided goods for the state. A facsimile of this document is in the possession of Sana Barakat. 10. Muhammad Ibrahim al-Jaziri, Athar al-za‘im Sa‘d Zaghlul (Cairo: Matba‘at Dar al-kutub al-misriyya, 1924), p. 247. 11. Geographical dictionary from the 1880s. 12. In fact, Nadim would soon become a family friend. He came to visit the Barakat household at Minyat al-Murshid one year for the Shamm al-Nasim festivities for which he composed a number of short couplets – quoted in the autobiography – for the occasion. 13. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 29–34. 14. TNA, FO 371/12359, 296, 5 September 1927. Also, Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (London: Praeger, 1972), p. 368, describes him as an ‘“ignorant peasant” who was also a big landowner’. 15. The details of this affair are not clear in our sources. Barakat’s autobiography hardly mentions this incident. We are forced to rely on Safwat al-‘asr, a biographical dictionary compiled by Zaki Fahmi and published in 1924, which cites this as a major turning point in Fathallah’s career. Zaki Fahmi, Safwat al-‘asr (Cairo: Matba’at al-i‘timad, 1926), pp. 206–8. 16. Local elections for the position of ‘umda were introduced by Khedive Isma‘il in the 1860s, alongside the institution of the Constituent Assembly. However, the British led a number of reforms in 1894–5, upon Gorst’s accession to the Ministry of Interior, largely putting an end to elections and replacing them with a system of executive appointments. The secret police from 1891 onwards investigated cases of ‘umda misconduct. Also see John Chalcraft, ‘Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 37: 3 (2005), pp. 303–25, wherein he examines a cache of petitions similar to the ones described. Chalcraft demonstrates how peasants were able to manipulate and respond to the state through aggressive petitioning campaigns. Many examples of peasant petitions crop up in the British National Archives indicating that the practice continued after the occupation when peasants appealed to the British against the Khedive and the

310  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT ‘native’ ruling elite. See TNA, FO 371/1115, 1911, pp. 7–15 for an example of these. 17. Fahmi, Safwat al-‘asr, pp. 207–8. 18. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 56. 19. Dar al-watha’iq al-qawmiyya, Majlis al-nuzzar wa al-wuzara’, 0075-003426: La’iªat al-‘umad wa al-mashayikh, 16 March 1895. The minimum age for both ‘umdas was set at twenty-five. An ‘umda needed to own at least ten feddans of land and preference was to be given to the literate. 20. See Aaron Jakes, ‘Egypt’s Colonial Interior’ (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2014), pp. 15–31, for a comprehensive account of these reforms. 21. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 62. Barakat recounts that Zaghlul told him that standing for elections would be above his station and that, at the same time, the Khedive had a favourite candidate, Ibrahim Sa‘id Pasha. It was only because of the supervising judge’s piety and honesty that Barakat was able to win this election. 22. Al-Ahram, 3 October 1908; 5 October 1908; 6 October 1908; 6 November 1908, p. 2. 23. TNA, FO 371/12359, p. 294, 1 September 1927. 24. Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, 1922–36 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 73. 25. TNA, FO 371/12359, J2730. 26. Hussein Omar, ‘When the Father Died Egypt Became a Widow’ (MPhil dissertation, Oxford University, 2009). This is the only detailed account of the election of Nahhas Pasha. A rather more concise account can be found in Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, p. 105. 27. Although Barakat and his biographical writings seem to conform culturally to this designation, it is problematic because afandiyya was neither used by him to describe himself nor by others. Perhaps in their attempt to ‘do’ theory as well as history, therefore ‘making area studies central to debates in the humanities and social sciences’ students of the afandi have not paid close enough attention to its historical specificity. See Esmeir, Juridical Humanity, p. xi. 28. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 110. 29. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 43, n. 87. 30. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 2. 31. Michael Gasper, The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants and Islam in Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 10. 32. This is the basic thesis of much of Gershoni and Jankowski’s collaborative work. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Redefining the Egyptian Nation, for an example.

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 311 33. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 43–4, n. 87. 34. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, pp. 270–5. 35. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 55. Because the title of Barakat’s text is on a sticky note on the front cover in English as ‘Autobiography’ [sic]. I suspect this was written by Madame Frieda, the German secretary who was responsible for arranging and numbering Zaghlul’s diaries as well. 36. Memoirs by Isma‘il Sidqi Pasha, Muhammad Farid Bey, Ahmad ‘Urabi Pasha, Ahmad Shafiq Pasha and Muhammad Husayn Haykal are but some­ examples. 37. Sa‘d Zaghlul Pasha, Mudhakkirat (Cairo: n. p., 1900–27), 28: 1531. 38. Zaghlul, Mudhakkirat, 3: 28. 39. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 51–2. 40. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 231. 41. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 52. 42. See Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, pp. 218–23, for examples. 43. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, p. 226. 44. Despite being a close friend of the Barakats, Fathallah tells us that ‘Akif Pasha was a Turk who ‘understood nothing’; see Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 18. 45. This echoes with the work of Wilson Jacob, who describes a certain kind of masculinity as a desirable afandi trait. See Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 46. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 22. 47. See al-Ahram, 16 January 1932, for one example of this series. 48. Interestingly, Barakat’s contemporary, Mustafa Kamil, seems to have felt the same distrust towards ‘Urabi. In a 1902 article, he would charge Urabi with the incitement of fitna – a term that recalled the wars that divided the early Muslim umma. See ‘Ali Fahmi Kamil (ed.), Awraq Mustafa Kamil: al-Maqalat (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-misriyya al-‘amma lil-kitab, 1992), 2: 273. Dislike of ‘Urabi seems to have been more common than acknowledged. Native Egyptian nationalist figures that one would expect to have been sympathetic were overwhelmingly ambivalent towards him. This was particularly the case in the 1890s and early 1900s. For example, Zaghlul, despite having been involved in the uprising, was fairly silent on the affair in later years. Nationalist ideologue Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, while lauding ‘Urabi’s constitutional efforts, criticised the fall-out between various national elements that it caused. However, Barakat’s criticism stands out for being personal, rather than political. See Thomas Mayer,

312  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT The Changing Past: Egyptian Historiography of the Urabi Revolt, 1882–1983 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1988). 49. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 50. 50. As British reformers, such as Cromer, Blunt and Dufferin, were calling for the Egyptianisation of the state bureaucracy, educated men such as Zaghlul, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi, Muhammad Mahmud and Isma‘il Sidqi (all ‘native’ Egyptians) would become increasingly desirable matches for the daughters of the pashas, belonging to the dhawat class, who were keen to perpetuate their influence, class and wealth by marrying their daughters to them. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the term dhawat becomes increasingly rare in obituaries in al-Ahram, for example, and men that we would normally describe as being members of the dhawat are described as a‘yan. For example, Sayfallah Yusri (second husband of Princess Shivikar) is described as a member of al-a‘yan in al-Ahram, 25 June 1902, p. 2. Perhaps this trend can be tied to Lockman’s argument about ‘middleness’ being the desirable moral position and dhawat as increasingly coming to be seen as a morally bankrupt class. See Zachary Lockman, ‘Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899– 1914’, Poetics Today 15: 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 157–90. See also the Yeghen/ Yakan obituary in al-Ahram, 4 November 1902, p. 2. This can be contrasted with the wedding announcement of Fahmi Bey’s daughter in the issue of 7 May 1887, where the distinction between a‘yan and dhawat is very obvious. 51. The only other example I have found of this is in another autobiographical text. ‘Ali Mubarak’s account of his own life, which is embedded in his monumental Khitat al-Tawfiqiyya, has a similar switch between the Islamic hijri and Gregorian calendars. The autobiographical text has been reprinted separately in ‘Ali Mubarak, Hayati: Sirat al-marhum ‘Ali Mubarak Basha (Cairo: Maktabat al-adab, 1989), p. 57. Also see the discussion of this in On Barak, ‘Egyptian Times: Temporality, Personhood, and the Technopolitical Making of Modern Egypt, 1830–1930’ (PhD dissertation, New York University, 2009), p. 308. Barak notes that Mubarak switches to the Gregorian calendar at the mention of Egypt’s bankruptcy. Like that which occurs in Barakat’s text, the switch between dating systems seems to occur after a traumatic event. 52. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 67. 53. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 67. It is worth noting that Ryzova, Jacob and other cultural historians of Egypt who touch upon the subject seem to entirely ignore, in their approach to the study of the afandiyya, the role of the state in their subjectivity formation. As investment in the state both institutionally and

t e nsions of na ti ona li st mode r nity  | 313 ideologically was one of the most important defining features of afandi formation, it seems imperative to consider its role more carefully. 54. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 24. 55. His elegy in al-Ahram describes him as a ‘fallah’ and a ‘shaykh’. See al-Ahram (1934). The one time that Barakat refers to afandiyya, he does so in a strictly descriptive sense, to describe a group of non-titled employees. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 67. 56. Ryzova, ‘Efendification’, pp. 104–6. 57. See ‘Abd al-Khaliq Lashin, Sa‘d Zaghlul: Dawruhu fi al-siyasa al-misriyya hatta sanat 1914 (Cairo: Dar al-ma‘arif, 1971), p. 31. Rida, Tarikh al-ustadh, includes innumerable examples of Zaghlul switching between the titles of Shaykh and Afandi. 58. See al-Ahram, 11 October 1882, for an example of this. 59. John Chalcraft alludes to this in his review of Gasper’s book. He argues that many of Gasper’s afandi protagonists (Afghani, Nadim, Sannu‘ and others) shared very little in either background or worldview. See John Chalcraft, ‘Review of The Power of Representation by Michael E. Gasper’, American Historical Review 115: 3 (2010), pp. 920–1. Marilyn Booth notes that that many articles in the press, both daily and monthly, are signed effendi, but these are unknown people who are often teachers, students or occasionally other civil servants (personal communication from M. Booth, July 2013). 60. Al-Ahram, 28 June 1914, p. 5. The article seeks to explain to readers what is meant by ‘afandi’ in common parlance [‘fi al-‘urf al-darij’], suggesting that it was somewhat of a neologism. 61. The lack of ‘native Egyptians’ in high administrative and state positions during those years has been overstated. Aside from the ubiquitously cited example of ‘Ali Mubarak, we can list ‘Abdallah Fikri Pasha, Muhammad ‘Ali al-Hakim Pasha, ‘Ali Ibrahim Pasha and Mahmud al-Falaki Pasha as but some examples. 62. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, pp. 2–3. 63. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, p. 3. 64. Without much explanation, he points his finger at ‘Abd al-Latif al-Sufani, ‘umda of Abu al-Khawi and later Wafd member. 65. Di-Capua, Gatekeepers, pp. 91–141. 66. There are countless examples of this, but for the purposes of this article a few will suffice: Prime Minister Husayn Rushdi Pasha was the son of Mahmud Hamdi Pasha Tapozada (sometimes Tapazoglu). Likewise, the important jurist ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi was born with the surname ’Umar. His uncle, Ahmad Hishmat

314  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Pasha, sometime Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Education amongst many other things, was also born with the surname ‘Umar. Likewise, the notorious Premier and impetus for Barakat’s autobiographical project, Sidqi Pasha, was the son of Ahmad Shukri Pasha. 67. He seems to have also been known as Muhammad Bey Fathi Barakat. In 1898, al-Mu‘ayyad published a small report describing how the villagers of Minyat alMurshid were extremely pleased upon hearing that the Khedive had raised him to the title of Bey. See al-Mu’ayyad, 6 July 1898, p. 3. 68. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Fahmi, Hadhihi hayati (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1963). The text was originally serialised in 1949, only two years before Fahmi’s death. 69. Barakat, ‘Autobiography’, pp. i–iii. 70. Zaki Fahmi, Mir’at al-‘asr, p. 204. 71. Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment, p. 75.

11 My Sister Esther: Reflections on Judaism, Ottomanism and Empire in the Works of Farah Antun Orit Bashkin

T

his chapter considers the writing about ‘empire’ and ‘Judaism’, and the connections between the two concepts, in Egypt during the long 1890s, through a close reading of works by novelist and intellectual Farah Antun (1874–1922). I underline the fact that the Egyptian print media of the period encouraged important conversations about conquest, imperial domination, citizenship rights and democracy, in which writing about ‘the Jew’ was pivotal. I likewise want to challenge an orientalist narrative that suggests that Arabs adopted anti-Semitic discourses as part of their experience of modernity. As noted by Israel Gershoni, the 1890s marked a new era in which modernity was introduced to Egyptian society through the print media.1 The existence of several overlapping public sphere venues in Egypt, consisting of networks of clubs, literary salons and cafés, as well as a market of printed books and newspapers, which reached the upper and middle classes, enabled the proliferation of new ideas about nationalism and empire. The print market was dominated by Christian immigrants from Ottoman Syria [alSham], although they did face considerable Muslim–Egyptian competition. British censorship limitations notwithstanding, the competition between various intellectuals advancing different political viewpoints (Egyptian and Shawwam [Syrians], Muslims and Christians) fostered debates on key issues relating to modernity and encouraged cultural pluralism.2 315

316  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT One of the characteristics of this Egyptian print market was an attempt to position Egypt within a world of empires. In 1895, for instance, national thinker and intellectual Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) wrote in the newspaper al-Mu’ayyad that Egyptians ought to address European audiences in English and French, in order to inform them about the wrongdoings of the British occupation.3 The French public sphere was an important arena for such activities. The globalisation of the Arab intellectual field and the diasporic location of many Egyptian intellectuals (mostly in Paris) during the 1890s generated discussions about French colonial policies (which were often positioned visà-vis British imperial policies in Egypt). Ziad Fahmy argues that [i]nfluencing European public opinion regarding the ills of the British occupation and ‘enlisting sympathy’ for Egyptian independence was one of the key objectives of the Egyptian nationalist movement. This tactic was used in an attempt to compel the European powers, especially France, into politically forcing the British out of Egypt.4

The comparison between French and British imperial policies, however, generated the idea that empires in themselves were not a bad thing, yet the ways in which empires won territories and governed them, as well as the rights they gave to, or denied, their subjects, created different kinds of empires. These views were of immense importance to Egyptian intellectuals, who often wrote about other empires, especially the Arab empires of the past, and the Ottoman Empire in the present, in order to promote various contemporary agendas regarding citizenship and sovereignty in colonised Egypt. Egypt’s relations with the Ottoman Empire occupied many writers during the long 1890s. Although the Ottoman sultan was Egypt’s titular sovereign until 1914, in the late nineteenth century Egyptian writers had conflicting views with respect to the Ottomans. For many intellectuals, the Islamic identity of the Ottoman state played a vital role in their perceptions of their Muslim identity, despite the emergence of a territorial Egyptian nationalism during this era. These Pan-Islamic frames of identity held that Egypt’s Islamic–Arab history and its Arab heroes and myths were ‘symbolic reservoirs from which could be constructed modern values, symbols, mythology, literature, poetry and art’.5 In the 1890s, Pan-Islamic intellectuals, such as Islamic reformer Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and the nationalist Mustafa

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 317 Kamil, viewed the Ottoman Empire as a global power, which might assist Egypt in its struggle for liberation, and as a political entity within whose framework Islamic reform could be carried out. Intellectuals originating from al-Sham discussed whether Ottomanism – a form of political affiliation to the empire based on civic, rather than religious, affiliations – was the remedy for the sectarian tensions in the regions of Syria and Lebanon. Many of the Syrian–Lebanese Christian intellectuals residing in Egypt favoured citizenship rights that were not based on religion. While the approach of many was highly critical towards the tyrannical and Pan-Islamic policies of Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II (1842–1918, reigned 1876–1909), the debates about the meaning of Ottomanism were nonetheless significant, both to them and their Shami readership, which extended well beyond the borders of Egypt. The degree of Egypt’s Ottomanisation during the nineteenth century has been discussed by several historians, but as far as the intellectual field was concerned, it is important to note that many of the Egyptian elites were bilingual and read Ottoman–Turkish books and newspapers.6 As Hasan Kayali has noted, Cairo itself was an important centre of the Young Turks – the group of officers and intellectuals that was at the forefront of the opposition to Hamidian policies. When the Young Turks established a branch in Cairo toward the end of the nineteenth century, they addressed Egyptian residents, like the Syrian migrants. The Ottoman Consultative Society [Jam‘iyyat alshura al-‘uthmaniyya], which was founded in Cairo in 1897 by Syrian Muslim Arabs and Young Turks from Istanbul, called for Islamic unity embodied in Ottoman unity, yet deplored Hamidian rule and European imperialism. Its publications in Arabic and Turkish were read all over the empire, especially in the Arab provinces, and were printed in the journal al-Manar, whose editor, Rashid Rida, played a leading role in the society.7 The construction of, and meditations about, various imperial models generated an interest in the imperial past of the Middle East in general and Egypt in particular. The production of history books shaped the print market of the long 1890s; some dealt with global history, others with Egyptian and Arab histories. Yoav Di-Capua has shown that the writing of Egyptian history was intimately linked to the project of Egyptian modernity and Egyptian perceptions of rise and decline. The historical works written in the late nineteenth century, for example, framed the understanding of Egypt’s relations

318  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT to the Ottoman Empire.8 Michael J. Reimer suggested that Egyptian historians held different views with respect to Egypt’s Ottoman past. While ­intellectual and bureaucrat ‘Ali Mubarak (1823–93) regarded Ottoman rule over Egypt to be disastrous, nationalist intellectual Muhammad Farid (1868– 1919) praised the empire in his 1892 history book. According to Farid, the Ottoman Empire was a thriving state in which all ethnic and religious communities enjoyed protection and religious tolerance, an attitude very different from the brutality of Western imperial ‘civilisers’.9 The connections between history, empire and Muslim empires – both Arab and Ottoman alike – as well as the perception that Islamic empires were far superior to European ones, especially with respect to their minorities, appeared also in articles about history in cultural magazines, historical plays and dramas and in historical novels. Egyptian cultural magazines printed many stories about the histories of ancient empires and the histories of the Semitic people of the region. The two most dominant journals of the period, al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf (al-Muqtataf was established in 1876 in Lebanon and moved to Egypt in 1884; al-Hilal was established in Cairo in 1892), covered stories on archaeology, ancient history and historical linguistics. Many articles acknowledged the fact that the Middle East was typified by a multiplicity of languages and cultures, which flourished under one or two imperial bodies. The emphasis on reciprocity and cultural exchange in the ancient and medieval Middle East suggested that pluralism and cultural hybridity were driving forces in the region. The conceptualisation of Islam as a culture and a civilisation, in addition to being a religious faith, further shaped these constructions of pluralistic imperial identities.10 Many of the historical novels and plays written in the 1890s pondered the meaning of historical change and imperial conquest and attempted to provide definitions as to the relationships between East and West, the conquerors and the conquered and rulers and the ruled. Anti-imperialist intellectual ‘Abdallah Nadim (1843–96) encouraged Egyptian teenagers to produce plays set in the medieval Middle East that would energise resistance to the British colonisers.11 A good example of these tendencies is Mustafa Kamil’s play Fath al-Andalus [The Conquest of Spain] (1893), which highlighted the significance of the Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamic past.12 According to Dennis Walker’s analysis, the play’s retelling of the war between Byzantium – the representative

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 319 of Western civilisation – and the Islamic East, led by commander Musa Ibn Nusayr (640–716), constructs the image of the Arab nation as an expanding empire that successfully assimilates non-Arab populations. The Arabs, moreover, are able to expand their rule, not only because of their supreme ethical position, embodied in the Islamic faith, but also because Spain is ruled by a tyrant, whose corruption and debauchery turn his people against him.13 Another important text in this context is a historical novel written by one of the most prominent historians, novelists and publishers in Egypt, Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), titled Armanusa al-misriyya [The Egyptian Armanusa] (1896), which chronicles the conquest of Egypt by ‘Amr ibn al-‘As (573– 664). Armanusa, the daughter of the Copts’ leader, is torn between her love for a son of a local Byzantine commander and the desires of the Byzantine Emperor, who wishes her to marry his son. Armanusa’s father, troubled by the oppression of his religious community by the Byzantines, is suspected of aiding the Arabs in the hope of replacing the Byzantine.14 Marilyn Booth maintains that: Zaydan, contrasting the respectful treatment of Coptic churches, property and women by the invading Muslims with the destructive and humiliating treatment visited on them by the Byzantines, offers a contemporary message of Muslim-Christian unity consonant with the nationalist strand that envisioned a secular nation, a strand stronger over the next three decades and one advanced forcefully by Syrian Christians (like Zaydan) resident in Egypt and highly conscious of their double minority status.15

Both Zaydan’s novel and Kamil’s play share much in common with other plays and historical novels written in the 1890s: the notion that corrupt rule leads to the destruction of society, celebration of the tolerance of Islamic empires and the rights they bestowed on religious minorities and the perception of Islamic history as a reservoir from which novelists and intellectuals can mold a variety of political allegories. Moreover, the interest in Arab empires, especially interest in the period of the Rashidun, promoted an exploration of the time when the Arabs themselves were the conquerors, rather than the conquered, thus juxtaposing the just methods of ruling practised by Islamic empires with those of Great Britain. The conversations about the meaning of empire – in particular, the

320  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT comparison between the imperial policies of Western and Muslim empires – greatly affected the representations of Jews in the 1890s Egyptian press. orientalist discourse advanced the idea that while in the pre-modern era Jews and Muslims enjoyed a coexistence marked by cultural reciprocity, this tradition ceased to exist in the modern period, largely due to the rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism. Bernard Lewis, for example, emphasises that antiSemitic literature, brought to the region by Christian missionaries, found a ready audience in the Arab print market beginning in the late nineteenth century.16 There are alternative views. Sylvia Haim, writing earlier, challenged this narrative, acknowledging that while Arab Christians were involved in the translation and propagation of anti-Semitic literature starting in the 1890s, Arab Muslim intellectuals showed great sympathy for the plight of the Jews.17 Many of the products from the Egyptian print market from the long 1890s, however, suggest that both Christian and Muslim intellectuals were engaged in the condemnation of anti-Semitism and that their appropriation of discourses relating to modernity did not entail the blind adoption of European racism. As part of their general coverage of historical affairs, cultural magazines such as al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf published essays on Jewish history, both ancient and modern, the Jewish religion and Hebrew and Semitic linguistics, celebrating the harmony between Muslims, Jews and Christians under Islamic rule. Furthermore, journalists protested against the persecution of Jews in Europe and supported Jewish emancipation.18 A key event was the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906); the persecution of the French Jewish captain brought to the fore the problem of international anti-Semitism and was covered extensively in the Egyptian press, with some very sympathetic accounts in support of Dreyfus. In 1898, for example, al-Manar condemned the anti-Semitism manifested in the Dreyfus Affair. Critiquing those who espoused the anti-Dreyfus position in the Arab world, Rashid Rida argued that this was an instance of racial fanaticism and deplored the fact that this ‘disease’ had contaminated some Egyptian newspapers as well.19 Writing about ‘the Jewish question’, intellectuals projected their ideas about empires and the virtues of Muslim empires onto the European arena. Some of these pro-Jewish accounts were responding to a Pan-Islamic discourse, of which one element was concern for the welfare of Muslims in Europe. Writings about the ways in which Jews were abused in Russia, Eastern

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 321 Europe and the Balkans fitted with the general condemnation of Russia, as well as other nations in the Balkans, for the ways in which they treated their Muslim subjects. On the other hand, many of the Syrian–Lebanese Christian intellectuals writing in these Egyptian journals favoured citizenship rights that were not based on religion. The critique of the mistreatment of the Jews outside the Ottoman Empire thus dovetailed with their campaign to promote secularism and equality within that empire.20 The perception that Jewish history was important for the understanding of Arab and Islamic history likewise generated an interest in the lives of ancient Jews. Jurji Zaydan offered the following analysis regarding the role of Judaism in the formation of Arab–Islamic culture: Jews had an immense impact on the Arabs of Hijaz, in matters concerning religious practices and rituals, and the Arabs borrowed from them many things which were unfamiliar to them beforehand, such as pilgrimage, sacrifice, [laws concerning] divorce and marriage, priesthood, the celebration of religious holidays and so on. The Jews taught them some of the stories of the Torah and parts of the Talmud, and spread amongst them some of their traditions and customs.

Later in this piece, Zaydan explains how other peoples – namely, the Chaldeans, the ancient Egyptians and the Ethiopians – also influenced the development of pre-Islamic Arab culture.21 A polyglot, Zaydan was also interested in the Talmud. Jonathan Gribetz has recently analysed the translation of the Talmud into Arabic by the Jaffa-born Jewish writer Shim‘on Moyal (b. 1866). The immediate impetus for Moyal’s project, writes Gribetz, came from Zaydan, who received readers’ letters asking him about the meaning of the text; consequently, he encouraged Moyal to translate the work into Arabic, in order to dispel the slanderous rumours about the Talmud once and for all. 22 In his novels, Zaydan paid great heed to the rights of minorities and the need to foster societies in which rights were granted based on citizenship rights and not religion, which might have also influenced his position on the ‘Jewish Question’.23 Finally, Egyptian intellectuals were aware of the fact that Jewish intellectuals had very positive ideas about Islam, and that Jews, like Arabs, were categorised under the rubric of Semitic people. Simon Wolf, a Jew who served

322  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT as the American Consul-General in Egypt (1881–2), respected the ‘Urabi Revolt and wrote about its achievements very favourably in the American press.24 Both Jews and Muslims responded to the reflections of the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823–92) regarding the nature of Semitic culture from 1884 onwards.25 The greatest scholar of Islamic theology and law in Europe at the time was Jewish intellectual Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), who travelled to Palestine, Syria and Egypt (1873–4). During his stay in Cairo, he attended lectures in al-Azhar and took part in the Friday prayer, as a Muslim, in a mosque. He supported the movement of Islamic revival, befriending one of the movement’s leaders, Pan-Islamic intellectual Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97). After his return, he expressed sympathy for the ‘Urabi uprising in Egypt and the resistance to Western imperialism.26 When Goldziher died, the journal of the Arab Language Academy (established in Syria in 1918 through the initiative of the Syrian Muslim intellectual and literary critic Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali [1876–1953]) published a long obituary that reviewed the scholar’s life and his important works on Islam and Judaism. The obituary opened with the following words: ‘Semitic Studies, and, moreover, Arabic in general and our academy in particular, grieves the loss of the great Hungarian scholar.’27 In-Between Empires An intellectual who played a leading role in negotiating new ideas about citizenship and empire was Farah Antun. Born in 1874 in Tripoli, Lebanon, Antun was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen and later, like many of his peers, migrated to Egypt. There he first worked as a journalist for the newspaper al-Ahram and later founded his own journal, al-Jami‘a, in Alexandria in 1899. He is considered by Albert Hourani to be one of the ‘Christian secularists’ – in other words, journalists and novelists committed to ideas of citizenship based not on religion, but rather on justice and social equality.28 Traumatised by the sectarian violence in Lebanon across the previous decades, these intellectuals sought other means by which the Christian community could define its identity and used new and innovative modes of expression available in the Egyptian print market to disseminate their anti-sectarian ideology (the press for the most part, but also the novel and the short story).29 The characterisation of Antun as a secularist can be

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 323 traced to his famous debate with the Egyptian legal reformer Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) as regards the ways to interpret the works of Ibn Rushd (1126–98). Antun considered Ibn Rushd to be the most important Arab philosopher, famed in both the East and the West. He believed that Arabs should take inspiration from Ibn Rushd, who had advocated openness to science, separation of church and state and freedom of thought. Antun, however, was influenced not only by European orientalists, but also by Egyptian Muslim writers.30 Moreover, as Donald Reid pointedly remarks, Antun was far less radical than many of the Christian secularists. First, he believed in the harmonisation of scientific and religious knowledge, rather than atheism or radical secularity. Second, unlike many of his peers, he was a staunch supporter of Ottomanism, even under the Hamidian regime, to such a degree that he had to defend himself against accusations that he had collaborated with the Ottoman Government. Third, he was much less educated than most of the Christian secularists, who were graduates of the Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut). Antun, by contrast, was an autodidact, whose knowledge relied on his own interpretation of religion and literature.31 Antun’s writings about different empires and the Jewish position within them aimed at illustrating the superiority of the Islamic state in its treatment of minorities. The themes of empire, minority rights, the interest in history (both ancient and modern) and the attempts at understanding the current global order were all themes that were discussed in the Egyptian press of the 1890s, and Antun’s works capture many of the tensions, conceptualisations and discourses emblematic of this period. Antun’s journal, al-Jami‘a, covered topics related to Judaism by way of condemning European hypocrisy and colonialism, as well as calling for equal rights for all citizens of the Ottoman Empire. Like other Egyptian intellectuals – most notably, Mustafa Kamil and playwright Yaq‘ub Sanu‘ (1839–1912) – Antun showed great interest in French politics and in the influence that the French exercised in the Middle East. These tendencies were most evident in the paper’s coverage of the trial of Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), his unjust conviction and the French campaign to prove his innocence, which shaped French politics during the 1890s. In 1899, Antun wrote that the trial concerned religious affairs, as Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish [isra’ili] officer who was blamed unjustly for betraying his homeland.

324  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Antun portrayed the battle on behalf of Dreyfus as hopeless at first, since the French military was against the innocent officer, and the French people, as well as their government, were known for their support of the military. When efforts to save Dreyfus seemed doomed, the famed French writer Émile Zola printed a defence of Dreyfus titled ‘J’accuse’ [Ashku].32 This essay, in Antun’s opinion, marked a turning point in the affair, since Zola’s reports created a great deal of interest in the affair among the reading public. Moreover, many scientists and intellectuals [rijal al-‘ilm wa al-falsafa] in France protested the injustice being done to Dreyfus. However, the danger, Antun wrote in the summer of 1899, was not over yet:33 ‘[T]he army seeks revenge on Dreyfus and his supporters, and feels that acquitting Dreyfus was humiliating to itself and to the War Ministry that tried him.’ Antun also observed that the enemies of Dreyfus – the royalists, the conservatives, the military men and the enemies of the Jews – still yearned for the demise of the republic.34 A few points are in order concerning Antun’s analysis of the trial. First, it was an extremely detailed account, which provided the reader with all of the names of the leading protagonists involved in the trial. It seems that Antun intended that readers have as much information as possible about the affair. It should be remembered that the trial was discussed at length in the Egyptian press, and therefore it was vital that readers knew how to interpret these events. Second, Antun saw this trial as a battle for justice. He positioned himself in the camp that identified the persecution of Dreyfus, because of his Jewish background, as an act contradictory to the ideals of truth and justice, and the trial as a great battle between a conservative camp that privileged militarism and counterfeit notions of patriotism over ideas of equal citizenship and a true democracy. Finally, the article accorded much importance to the activities of the intellectual. The protagonist of the story was not so much Dreyfus as Zola – a man willing to protest injustice, fight for equality and pay the price for his challenging authoritarianism and conservatism. In Antun’s account, it was Zola who ignited the process that eventually cleared Dreyfus’s name. As a journalist in Egypt, trying to promote equality and some notions of secularity in the public sphere, it seems that Antun identified with Zola’s goals and admired the lengths to which the latter went to attain them. The ideas discussed in relation to the Dreyfus Affair were evoked in other articles in al-Jami‘a. The notion that the Ottoman state should promote ideas

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 325 of equality and social justice was voiced in numerous articles. One article by Antun, ‘Brotherhood and Freedom’, suggested that religious separatism was harmful to the nation. The Christians in the East, for example, were divided between Greek Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism, with each sect considering the others its enemies. Antun outlined three venues through which to remedy this sorry state of affairs: ‘the mother in the household [bayt], the teacher in school, and the newspapers in the market’. Newspapers inform the Easterner, especially the Ottoman, about principles of political liberty: The best way for the East . . . [is] that its sons feel that they are brothers and not enemies; that they know that they are all the sons of one God, one Sultan, and one homeland; and that they are brothers like Joseph and Benjamin, and not like Cain and Abel.35

The interest in history that emerged in the 1890s was also influential in Antun’s writings. Like many of his colleagues, Antun turned his attention to the ways in which empires gained control over weaker nations and their subjects.36 He proposed that global politics were always determined by some system of equilibrium – what the French called équilibre politique and the English called the balance of power – a system that was governed by the laws of nature. Antun divided the colonised world into three zones: (1) Eastern lands where the West had been triumphant, such as India, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Algeria; (2) Eastern lands that were targeted by the West, such as Iran, Afghanistan, Siam and China; and (3) proud Eastern nations that had managed to be free of the shackles of colonialism, such as the Ottoman Empire and Japan. Brotherhood, in this sense, not only between Muslims, but also between Easterners of various religions, was the surest path to attain some local power against colonialism. Nonetheless, if religious sectarianism and civil wars were to tear apart the Ottoman Empire from within, any attempt to regain independence would be doomed to fail.37 Furthermore, similar his fellow intellectuals who printed stories in alHilal, al-Muqtataf, al-Manar and al-Ustadh about the region’s past in order to glean insights about the present, Antun constructed an ancient regional history to promote the ideals of non-sectarian brotherhood under an Ottoman state. He paid heed to the reign of Ramses II in Egypt, the history of the

326  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Hittites and the Phoenicians, the politics of Assyria (a great empire torn asunder by internal strife) and the struggles between mighty empires and smaller nations dating back to the days of Alexander the Great. There were differences between the European politics of Antun’s day and those of the ancient empires, yet important lessons were to be learned from these events in terms of conceptualising current political theory and learning how to maintain Ottoman imperial order and counter Western colonialism.38 Antun praised the great Assyrian Empire and argued that various archaeological excavations confirmed that the ancient Assyrians were interested in science and committed to the advancement of knowledge. The great empires of the past – namely, Assyria, Babylon, Carthage and Armenia – and likewise the great states – the Hittites, Chaldeans, Phoenicians and Philistines – were now included within the Ottoman Empire, Antun reminded his readers. Their interest in science and learning should now be shared by modern Ottoman subjects. Moreover, one should be aware that in the former lands of the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians and Chaldeans, French and German companies could easily obtain concessions from the state; that new railways were about to be built in the region, funded by Western capital; and that the tombs of the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Abbasids were being ransacked by foreigners.39 The region, thus, had a shared imperial past that shaped its inhabitants in specific ways. While these arguments do not necessarily reflect Antun’s positions on Judaism, they do attest to his vision about minorities’ rights in the Ottoman Empire more generally – a debate in which writing about Jews played a part. Antun attempted to promote an image of a region typified by heterogeneity and cultural hybridity in the past, which could be very beneficial for debates in the present. Antun thus constructed new historical narratives that imagined an Arab antiquity inspired by the grandeur of past Near Eastern empires, a past in which various Semitic and non-Semitic cultures had played a prominent role. Islam, moreover, did not mark the beginning of the history of either the Arab nation or the Ottoman Empire, which in fact could be traced back to the traditions of the Hittites, Babylonians and Assyrians. The interest in Semitic cultures and ancient history was encouraged by the rise of archaeology, history and linguistics as scientific and academic disciplines in Egypt and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, but was mainly deployed here to inspire anti-colonial pride. The journey to the imperial

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 327 past was also connected to Jewish and Christian histories under Byzantine rule. This history, however, was explored through other means – namely, the modern novel. The New Jerusalem In the long 1890s historical novels functioned as national allegories. The Syrianrun periodicals in Egypt serialised novels and short stories, and Christian Shami intellectuals were very prominent as both writers and translators of novels. As Marilyn Booth and Samah Selim have shown, these novels were central to the formation of new notions of subjectivity and gender in the long nineteenth century.40 Antun’s historical novel, The New Jerusalem [Urshalim al-jadida] (1904),41 appeared in a print market dominated by the historical novels of Jurji Zaydan.42 Both authors used medieval settings to discuss contemporary political and social theory and to convey radical political suggestions about the present. Had it not been for Zaydan and others writing such novels through the 1890s, Antun’s fiction might not have taken the focus it did, and perhaps it would not have found a ready audience, either. As in his essays, the question of multi-religious communities comes to the fore. The links he drew between the Byzantines and the West and the notion that the Arab–Islamic Empire constructed by the Prophet and his successors could serve as a model for contemporary empires were key themes in this work. Antun, moreover, linked these themes to the treatment of Jews in these empires. If a just empire was to be measured by its treatment of its minorities, the Jews stood out as a powerful global symbol as to the ways in which empires should, and should not, treat subjects whose religion is different from that of the state. Antun’s novel takes place during the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the year 637. It focuses on Iliya, a devoted Christian living in Jerusalem.43 Disappointed with the politics of the church, he establishes a farm where he and his mentor, a monk by the name of Mikha’il, try to uphold the ideas of true Christianity. They call the farm ‘The New Jerusalem’. Iliya falls in love with Esther, a Jewish woman who comes to Jerusalem from Alexandria with her father, because they believe that a new political order is about to emerge in the region with immense consequences for the Jewish community. Iliya saves Esther and her father when a Christian mob discovers their religious identity. He hides her in a nunnery in the hope of saving her life. In the

328  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT course of their travels from Bethlehem to a nunnery, Iliya finds himself in love with Esther, yet she does not express affection for him, due to her religious beliefs. Because of local intrigues instigated by Iliya’s Christian friends, she escapes from the nunnery and tries to rejoin her father. Iliya spends a great deal of time trying to meet Esther again and is captured by the Muslim armies. He grows to appreciate their faith and decides to join their forces. He finally meets Esther, but at this point she is exhausted from her travails, her search for her father (whom she eventually finds) and her unfulfilled love for Iliya. As the Muslims take Jerusalem, she becomes more and more ill and eventually dies of typhoid. Iliya dies shortly afterwards. The novel expresses fascinating ideas regarding the concept of empire and notions of civil brotherhood, suggesting that religious hatred and persecution are not motivated by questions of dogma or faith, but rather by ignorance and the most debased human instincts, such as sadism, aggression and violence. As shown in a thoughtful article by Shim‘on Ballas, the novel was a political manifesto expressing new ideas about proto-socialism and served to condemn religious fanaticism.44 Antun believed in the principle of religious freedom and thus dedicated his novel to the study of anti-Semitism as a way of understanding religious extremism and intolerance and how these phenomena facilitated the decline of empires and the rise of new ones. Antun’s condemnation of persecution based on religious identity is articulated fully on the first pages of the novel, where he depicts the mob searching for Esther and her father. On Christmas Eve, a mob in Bethlehem is enraged by a rumour that a Jew has entered their city. Iliya finds himself in a street where the incited masses are looking for the Jew in a great panic: One said: ‘I saw him passing from here; he has a beard as long as an arm and his face is yellow like those of the dead.’ Another said: ‘Not only his beard, but also his height; he is four feet and his head is very small, like a pomegranate.’ A third one said: ‘No, no, I did not see someone like this, but observed someone short, shorter than a foot. His beard, in fact, touched the ground because of his short height.’ Iliya laughed to himself [amused] by these conflicting narratives.45

Iliya is told by one individual that the masses wished to crucify the Jew once they found him. When he tries to convince the mob of the futility of their

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 329 search, he is accused of being a Jew himself and is nearly lynched. Iliya later finds out that two Jews – Esther and her father – are, indeed, in the city. Being ‘a noble man who knows his human duty in a situation like this’, he helps them escape.46 As they reach the tomb of Rachel in the vicinity of Bethlehem, Esther begins to cry not for the pains of Rachel, but for her own suffering. Antun adds a long footnote here explicating that when he had visited the tomb of Rachel some thirteen years previous, he found many Jewish women crying there, saddened by the fate of the ancient Israelites and that of Rachel. The opening scene of the novel is of great importance. With much literary talent, Antun provides a close description of a mob mentality – a theme that, as shown by Timothy Mitchell, was of great interest to Egyptian intellectuals, both prior to, and after, 1882.47 The crowd’s ideas of what a Jew might be did not spring from any religious beliefs, but rather from stereotypes, superstitions and rumours fuelled by ignorance and a love of violence. Thus, when the bloodthirsty crowd does not find a Jew, it attacks a Christian. Second, Antun compares the ill-treatment of Jews to that of early Christians. While there was much persecution of Jews under Byzantine rule, there was hardly any actual crucifixion of Jews in this period. By using the powerful image of the cross, Antun alludes to the fact that Jews, just like the early Christians, were wrongly persecuted for their faith. Concurrently, he shows the ease with which the victims of the past, the Christians, become victimisers. Finally, the comment about the tomb of Rachel connects the past to the present, as it suggests that Jewish women today might grieve for similar reasons. Readers later learn about Iliya’s and Esther’s lives prior to the event. The fact that the plot does not unfold chronologically, but rather opens with the mob scene, indicates the significance Antun attributes to that particular scene. It frames the novel and sets forth two of the novel’s major themes: persecution and imperial political violence. The novel then goes on to narrate the Byzantine Empire’s decline. Our first introduction to the Christian inhabitants of the empire thus is framed in such a way as to incline our sympathy toward the Muslim conquerors, rather than the local, about-to-be-colonised Christian population. An important theme touched upon throughout the novel is that religious persecution destroys societies and states. It damages the social fabric of everyday life, renders the existence of a social contract impossible and leads to

330  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT the enflaming of hearts, feelings of revenge and to the creation of unending cycles of violence. The novel makes the case that, on numerous occasions, the internal strife between Christians and Jews and between Christians and Christians led to the fall of Byzantium. In fact, via prophecies and dreams, characters sense that the age of Christian dominance in Jerusalem is about to end. A Jerusalemite prophet, Jeremiah, even declares that ‘our [Byzantine] kingdom will be destroyed, just like the Jewish kingdom had been before, and the Arabs will take over Palestine’.48 These sentiments are expressed in a conversation between Iliya and the Patriarch, in which the Patriarch argues that the Jews will collaborate with the Arabs against the Christians, while Iliya feels that the Jews behave in such a fashion ‘because of the Christian oppression [zulm] and their persecution’.49 The connections between the denial of citizenship rights, religious persecution and the inability to identify with the imperial state is articulated in the character of Esther, who is depicted as a Jewish beauty at the age of twenty. Antun uses the character of Esther to tell his readers about the faults of the Byzantine Empire; this time, from the vantage point of its Jewish victims. Esther refuses to be courteous to the kind nuns who saved her life, and, when asked by Iliya why, she responds: I know God better than you do . . . He is my God and the God of my fathers and my forefathers. He is the one who got us out of Egypt and brought us to the Promised Land, protected us during the centuries, and if it were not for us [Jews] you would not have known Him. He allows you to rule this land as a punishment to us, as He had let the Babylonians beforehand. Yet what has happened to the Babylonians will happen to you as well, and our God will return to us our Kingdom, and destroy our enemies.50

Esther, we note, thinks in terms of groups: us (Jews) versus you (Christians). God is only the God of the Jews, while the state is a temporal institution meant only to symbolise that Jews are being punished for their sins. Esther at first refuses to treat Iliya as an individual, seeing him as merely representing his religious community. Nonetheless, although uncertain as to his intentions, she lets him take her to a safe haven. During the course of their travels, Iliya learns that the Jews in Egypt have heard rumours that the Messiah is coming and that he is going to return their kingdom and build their

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 331 Temple of Solomon. Iliya tries to convince Esther that he is her friend and her brother, calling her ukhti, ‘my sister’. Esther is baffled by this: ‘She asked herself; is it permissible for a Christian to call her his sister?’ Iliya attempts to explain to her that the common people [‘amma] have been led astray; they are not thinking with their minds, but rather with the minds of others. Most reasonable human beings, he continues, know that we need to live with different elements [‘anasir mukhtalifa] in our community. Ironically, when he wants to declare his love for her, she thinks he is trying to convince her of the righteousness of Christianity. Iliya and Esther quote verses to one another from the Torah regarding the Messiah, after which Esther admits ironically that although God abandons His People from time to time to educate them, ‘God has given us enough of this humiliating education’.51 Iliya confesses that he believes that those who attack the Jews are not true Christians, yet he also feels that once the victims regain power, they might turn against their victimisers in similar ways. He considers those Christians who want to crucify the Jews and imagines a situation in which, after some years, Jerusalem becomes Jewish again, and the Christian monastery on the Mount of Olives is replaced by a Jewish synagogue, where they would crucify young Christian women who refuse to betray their faith. What influence would accrue to the words of the Christians, when they say that the Jews are barbarians[?] . . . The Jews would answer them by saying: ‘You taught us this barbarism yourselves.’52

Iliya’s position, then, distinguishes between different kinds of Christianity: the ignorant Christianity of the masses; true Christianity, which promotes love and understanding; and the brutal Christianity of the imperial state, which might incite Jewish violence. The alternative to zealotry, therefore, is a new political order, as well as knowledge and curiosity regarding other beliefs and systems of knowledge, and the harmonisation between these elements. Another important idea conveyed in the text is that all religions at their core aspire to similar ideals. Institutionalised religion, by contrast, leads to loss of faith. Iliya is constructed as a modern Jesus: he is from Nazareth and later moves to Jerusalem; he loves the poor; and he is being instructed by a nonconformist monk, Mikha’il, who has been expelled from the ­priesthood

332  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT because he protected Jews from the government. Iliya, in fact, sees Jesus as a Jewish human being [ibn al-insan], who saw that his people had forgotten the ideas of the Torah regarding justice and equality, and a man whose preaching led to his persecution by the Jewish priests – a special class that had unjustly accumulated much power, wealth and prestige, while the people suffered in poverty. Iliya declares to Esther that he admires Jewish history and the power of this nation’s spirit [quwwat nufus ummatikum] and calls Jews and Christians to embrace a shared religion promoting social justice. This anachronistic promotion of a proto-socialist ideology in Byzantine Palestine led Antun to add footnotes discussing individualism in Britain and various ideals of charity associated with monotheistic religions, especially Islam.53 According to this naive form of socialism (which fellow Christian secularist, Shibli Shumayyal [1850–1917], also injected into his writings), one’s religious identity is not formed solely based on faith, but also on class and wealth, and the way to combat such class-based divisions in society is to promote some shared ecumenical notions amongst various believers and a universal system of justice. The role of Arabs and Islam in the newly conquered Palestine is of immense importance, because it frames Antun’s perceptions of the ideal Ottoman–Muslim order in which minorities are respected and tolerated. To do so, he constructed an image of a just Arab empire, which represents the opposite of the corrupt Byzantine Empire. In the novel, Arabs first appear as an imperial power that does not speak the languages of the region. On the other hand, the text portrays their deep appreciation of Jerusalem, as the place where God made his Prophet rise to Heaven, where Jesus will defeat the anti-Christ and where all the prophets of Israel wanted to be buried. When Iliya discovers that some intrigues on the part of people whom he considered to be his Christian friends have separated him from his beloved Esther, he defects to the Muslim camp as well: Did Iliya betray his country [watan] and helped to spy against it? . . . Yes, he was not an extremist with respect to his country and his kingdom, because the Greeks were the dominant element in it, and therefore it was possible that this conquest could help the oppressed Syrian nation against the occupying elements.54

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 333 Antun’s depictions of the Caliph ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab (592–644) construct his image as a just and magnificent ruler. The meeting between the Patriarch and ‘Umar is described as an encounter between two great leaders, who recognise each other as ‘great souls’. The Patriarch says to ‘Umar that they agree on the meaningful things in life and consequently need to look at what they have in common. ‘Umar agrees with the Patriarch, based on the principle that there is no compulsion in religion,55 and gives the Christians the Pact of ‘Umar.56 He then visits Temple Mount, accompanied by Ka‘b al-Akhabar – a Jew who had recently converted.57 Ka‘b then explicates to him the meanings of various sites in Jerusalem. Concurrently, ‘Umar decides to feed the poor of the city and to use the zakat money for the benefit of the community in its entirety. A few comments are in order with regard to this section of the novel. Antun seems to justify Iliya’s betrayal of his Christian community. His seventh-century Jesus thus leaves his faith because he realises that the ideals of social justice were to be found in the faith of the ‘enemy’. Antun, moreover, presents various narratives of conversion to indicate that the Islamic religion has much to offer. The high point of the entire novel is the establishment of the Pact of ‘Umar – a code meant to protect the rights of minorities in the newly established Muslim empire. As such, the Muslims are presented as ethically superior to the Christians and the Jews, because their faith does not entail the persecution of other religious minorities. This depiction is grounded in Antun’s support of the Ottoman Empire, even prior to the revolution of the Young Turks. It also reflects, as Reid suggests, his strong opposition to the Greek clergy in Arab Orthodox churches.58 The focus on the Pact of ‘Umar, at a time when Ottomanism was hailed as a political option for Egyptians and Syrians alike, might indicate that Antun was promoting here a just society under an Ottoman imperial order – a political option that many of his Egyptian compatriots were championing at the time, the same compatriots who objected very strongly to his positions on Ibn Rushd. This vision of Ottomanism, then, was promoted in the 1890s by such Muslim intellectuals as Rashid Rida, Mustafa Kamil and the Jewish Ya‘qub Sanu‘. Here, Antun advances the image of a just political Islamic order through the binary between the Byzantine Empire, which persecuted its Jews and, to a lesser degree, Christians, and the Arab–Islamic Empire, which protected the

334  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT rights of minorities. Antun, however, ends the novel commenting that the just empire established by ‘Umar would disappear and taking its place would be a world dominated by a brutal struggle for survival. Like Mustafa Kamil and Ya‘qub Sanu‘, Antun’s construction of the Muslim imperial order had to do with a transnational context in which French culture was dominant. Antun’s construction of both Iliya and Jesus referenced the Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan, a text which is mentioned in several footnotes in the novel and which Antun translated into Arabic. Antun attempted to Arabise Renan’s biography of Jesus, which represented Jesus as a human being and used the Bible as a historical source for the reconstruction of his life. In fact, Renan compared Judaism and Christianity to Oriental religions like Buddhism, as well as to Near Eastern faiths, like the Sumerian and the Assyrian, and to Greek and Roman mythologies, in order to understand the new message of Christianity (comparisons that Antun evoked in his essays in al-Jami‘a). Renan’s work, which was dedicated to Renan’s sister, Henriette, did include anti-Semitic motifs, depicting the Jews as egotistical, cruel and narrow-minded. At the same time, the Jews were seen as the founders of the finest monotheistic movement and, as a people, interested in ideas of progress. Jesus was seen as a Jew – the greatest Jew who ever lived, in fact – who came to put an end to the religion of his forefathers. Importantly, Renan located the rise of Jesus in a messianic context, filled with prophetic poems, which were projected onto Antun’s construction of Byzantine Palestine as a site of prophecies of doom. Renan argued that Jesus did not belong solely to those who called themselves his disciplines, but to humanity as a whole; a notion that fitted well with Antun’s ecumenical ideals. Finally, Renan’s analysis of Jesus’ social struggles as reflecting the interests of the poor against the Jerusalemite aristocracy and its corrupt priesthood was compatible with Antun’s proto-socialism. By ignoring most of the antiJewish motifs in Renan’s book and utilising Renan’s biography to construct the lives of both Jesus and Iliya, Antun’s novel could be read as a secularising manifesto that reached out to fellow Egyptians and Syrians.59 Antun’s novel was written in a world of empires. As such, it constructed two empires: Byzantium and the Arab–Muslim Empire. The importance of the text, however, is that each could be seen allegorically as representing either the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire, and the novel’s ambiva-

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 335 lent message concerning both empires was shaped in part by the British occupation of Egypt, two decades before Antun’s novel appeared. His footnotes on the lack of social justice in England and the constant references to anti-Semitism – a theme he discussed in relation to France during the Dreyfus trial in his journal – connect the image of Byzantium with that of Great Britain and other Western imperial powers – most notably, France. In that, the novel offers some hope to Egyptian readers, insinuating that internal strife between rich and poor and minorities and majorities might, albeit in the far-off future, lead to the collapse of these Western empires as well. The Byzantine Empire, however, is also similar to the Ottoman Empire. Despite his support of Ottomanism, Antun was troubled, very much like Zaydan, by the question of the fate of minorities in the empire. In this sense, Ottoman politics in Lebanon and Syria, as well as Antun’s reflections on his childhood, his Orthodox Church and Lebanon’s most recent history, inspired his construction of the kingdom of Byzantium. He hinted to supporters of the Ottoman Empire that they ought to be respectful of the rights of its religious minorities, lest the Ottomans follow the path of their Byzantine predecessors. The Arab Muslims in The New Jerusalem are seemingly depicted as the Western powers, especially Great Britain, were depicted in the nineteenthcentury press: they form a powerful nation, armed with translators and an insuperable army that enjoys superiority over the nations they conquer. On the other hand – and very much unlike Great Britain in Egypt – the Muslims are represented as members of an ideal and just empire, whose leaders promote social equality and respect the beliefs of Jews and Christians, whom they salvage from an oppressive state. The novel thus underlines ideas expressed in al-Jami‘a – namely, that religious identities should be thought of as ideologies promoting social justice, not as measures of confessional discrimination. This shared ecumenical goal could only be achieved within a Muslim imperial order. A multi-ethnic and socialist polity is thus the solution proposed by Antun, who seems to believe that socio-economic reasons lay behind the rise of Christianity (Christ’s battle against the corrupt priests) and Islam (the privileging of the ideals of zakat and the Pact of ‘Umar in contrast to the religious persecution in Byzantium); he underlines their significance in the past, in order to champion their implementation in the present.

336  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Conclusion The discourse about Ottomanism in Egypt, as articulated by Antun, included a strong condemnation of European anti-Semitism and racism. While writing about the Jew as an ‘Other’, Antun was also very much advancing a discourse about the Eastern ‘self’, be it that of the subjects of the Ottoman Empire, the colonised Egyptian readers of al-Jami‘a or the Arab Christians. His modern ideas called for the promotion of equality before the law, citizenship rights to minorities and social justice. These ideas were formulated in response to discourses emerging in the Egyptian press of the 1890s. Both the novel and the articles published by Antun suggest that citizenship should be a prime concern, while at the same time taking into account the compound nature of religious and minority rights. Antun’s call for justice, equality and the fair distribution of wealth as a solution to sectarian strife, his promotion of a humane message which respected individuals and their choice of faith and which detested the abuse of citizens’ rights (through his condemnation of the abuse of minority rights in Byzantium) were likely highly desirable to many contemporary Egyptian and Shami readers. His writings expose his creative adaptation of ideas that were circulating in the 1890s print media regarding Ottomanism and imperialism, ideas which were often expressed by Pan-Islamic intellectuals like Rashid Rida, as well his use of the literary genres that the long 1890s brought to the fore, especially the newspaper article and the historical novel. His works, in other words, underline the fluid nature of a trans-regional public sphere in this decade, whose members challenged ‘the exercise of political power’ in Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and colonised Egypt.60 Notes  1. Israel Gershoni, ‘The Evolution of National Culture in Modern Egypt: Intellectual Formation and Social Diffusion, 1892–1945’, Poetics Today 13: 2 (1992), pp. 325–50.   2. On the Egyptian print market, see Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Donald M. Reid, ‘Syrian Christians, the Rags-To-Riches Story, and Free Enterprise’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 1: 4 (1970), pp. 358–67; Juan Cole, ‘Printing and

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 337 Urban Islam in the Mediterranean World, 1890–1920’, in Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (eds), Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 344–64.   3. Ziad Fahmy, ‘Francophone Egyptian Nationalists, Anti-British Discourse, and European Public Opinion, 1885–1910: The Case of Mustafa Kamil and Ya‘qub Sannu‘’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28: 1 (2008), p. 173.   4. Fahmy, ‘Francophone Egyptian Nationalists’, p. 170.   5. Gershoni, ‘Evolution of National Culture’, pp. 329–31.  6. Gabriel Piterberg, ‘The Tropes of Stagnation and Awakening in Nationalist Historical Consciousness: The Egyptian Case’, in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski (eds), Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 43–63; Kenneth M. Cuno, ‘Muhammad Ali and the Decline and Revival Thesis in Modern Egyptian History’, in Raouf Abbas (ed.), Reform or Modernization? Egypt under Muhammad Ali (Cairo: Supreme Council for Culture, 2000), pp. 93–119; Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Ehud Toledano, ‘Forgetting Egypt’s Ottoman Past’, in Jayne L. Warner (ed.), Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S. Halman (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), pp. 150–67.   7. Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), Chapter 1.   8. Yoav Di-Capua, Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History, Writing in Twentieth Century Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).   9. Michael J. Reimer, ‘Egyptian Views of Ottoman Rule: Five Historians and Their Works, 1820–1920’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31: 1 (2011), pp. 149–63. 10. Orit Bashkin, ‘The Arab Revival, Archaeology, and Ancient Middle Eastern History’, in Geoff Emberling (ed.), Pioneers to the Past: American Archeologists in the Middle East, 1919–1920 (Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute Publications, 2010), pp. 91–104. 11. Dennis Walker, ‘Egypt Arabism: Mustafa Kamil’s 1893 Play Fath al-Andalus on the Muslim Conquest of Spain’, Islamic Studies 33: 1 (1994), p. 51. 12. Mustafa Kamil, Fath al-Andalus: Al-nass al-kamil li’l-masrahiyya al-wahida allati katabaha Mustafa Kamil (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘amma li’l-kitab, 1973).

338  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 13. Walker, ‘Egypt Arabism’, pp. 55, 64–6. 14. Jurji Zaydan, Armanusa al-misriyya (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, [1896] 1983). 15. Marilyn Booth, ‘On Gender, History . . . and Fiction’, in Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer and Y. Hakan Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), p. 235. 16. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 154–93. 17. Sylvia G. Haim, ‘Arabic Antisemitic Literature: Some Preliminary Notes’, Jewish Social Studies 17: 4 (1955), pp. 307–12. 18. Sha’ul Sehayyek, ‘Demut ha-yehudi be-re’i ha-‘itonut ha-‘aravit ben ha-shanim 1858–1908’ (PhD dissertation, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1991); Lital Levy, ‘Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History, and the Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914’ (PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley, California, 2007). 19. Haim, ‘Antisemitic Literature’, p. 309. 20. Orit Bashkin, New Babylonians: History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), Chapter 1; Sehayyek, ‘Demut ha-yehudi’; Levy, ‘Jewish Writers’. 21. Jurji Zaydan, Ta’rikh al-tadammun al-islami (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Hilal, 1922), Vol. 1, p. 20. All translations, unless mentioned otherwise, are my own. 22. Jonathan Marc Gribetz, ‘An Arabic-Zionist Talmud: Shimon Moyal’s At-Talmud’, Jewish Social Studies 17: 1 (2010), pp. 1–30. 23. See for example, Zaydan’s construction of the Barmakids in al-‘Abbasa Ukht al-Rashid, as individuals who object to the dominant religious ideology: Jurji Zaydan, Al-‘Abbasa ukht al-Rashid aw nakbat al-baramika (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, [first serialised in al-Hilal in 1906; first published in 1911] 1965). See also Orit Bashkin, ‘Concubine J Demands Her Freedom: Harems and Political Tyranny in the Works of Jurji Zaydan’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 290–319. 24. Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 264. 25. The most important work in this domain is Ignaz Goldziher’s Der Mythos bei den Hebräen (1876, published in English as Mythology among the Hebrews in 1887), which intended to refute Renan’s thesis that denied the existence of mythologies amongst ancient Semitic peoples; the most famous Islamic critique

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 339 was that of Pan-Islamic intellectual, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in Journal des Débats (Paris), 18 May 1883 (written in Arabic and translated into French for publication). 26. Martin Kramer, ‘Introduction’, in Martin Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1999), pp. 1–48; Robert Simon, ‘Goldziher, Ignác’, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 9 August 2010. Online at: http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Goldziher_Ignac (accessed 16 August 2012). 27. Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al-‘arabi 1 (1921), p. 387. 28 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (London, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 245–460. 29. Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. 245–460; Donald Reid, The Odyssey of Farah Antun, A Syrian Christian Quest for Secularism (Minneapolis, MN and Chicago, IL: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1975); Shimon Ballas, ‘“La nouvelle Jérusalem” ou la république utopique de Farah Antun’, Arabica 32: 1 (1985), pp. 1–24; on sectarianism in Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 30. Anke von Kugelgen, ‘A Call for Rationalism: “Arab Averroists” in the Twentieth Century’, Alif 16 (1996), pp. 97–132. 31. Reid, Odyssey. 32. The reference here is to the famous letter published by French intellectual Émile Zola in support of Dreyfus, I accuse (J’accuse, January 1898). 33. At this point, Emile Zola published his treatise in favour of Dreyfus (1898). By the summer of 1898, Dreyfus’ innocence was established in the press, and an anti-monarchic, Republican camp was formed in his favour. The affair – and the findings of various forgeries committed by French officers in order to frame Dreyfus – led to the resignation of two governments. Nonetheless, a military court still found Dreyfus guilty in 1899, although he was pardoned by the president. The private struggle of Dreyfus to establish his innocence continued until 1904, and he was acquitted from guilt in 1906. 34. Al-Jami‘a 8 (1 July 1899), pp. 146–7. 35. Farah Antun (ed.), ‘al-Ukhuwa wa al-hurriyya’ [‘Brotherhood and Freedom’], al-Jami‘a 3 (15 April 1888), pp. 33–5. 36. Farah Antun (ed.), ‘Hajatuna al-siyasiyya al-kubra’ [‘Our Gravest Political Needs’], al-Jami‘a 5 (1 May 1899), pp. 53–5.

340  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 37. Farah Antun (ed.), ‘Kitab maftuh’ [‘An Open Letter’], al-Jami‘a 7 (15 June 1899), pp. 113–15. 38. Farah Antun (ed.), ‘Al-Tawazun al-dawli’ [‘Political Balance’], al-Jami‘a 6 (1 June 1899), pp. 94–6. 39. Farah Antun (ed.), al-Jami‘a 21–2 (1 February 1900), pp. 523–5. 40. Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied – Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001); Samah Selim, ‘The Nahda, Popular Fiction and the Politics of Translation’, MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (2004), pp. 71–90. 41. Farah Antun, Urshalim al-jadida, in al-Mu’allafat al-riwa’iyya (Beirut: Dar alTali‘a [appeared originally in Alexandria, February 1904] 1981). Ballas argues that the novel should be read together with two other novels by Antun, al-Din, wa al-‘ilm wa al-mal, al-mudun al-thalath [The Religion, The Knowledge, and the Capital, the Three Cities, 1903], al-Wahsh, al-wahsh, al-wahsh [Barbarism, Barbarism, Barbarism, 1903]; all three were published in al-Jami‘a within seven months; see Ballas, ‘La nouvelle Jérusalem’, pp. 3–4. 42. Thomas Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān: His Life and Thought, Beiruter Texte und Studien 5 (Beirut: in Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1979); Ballas, ‘La nouvelle Jérusalem’, pp. 4–5. 43. Importantly, Antun’s full name was Antun ibn Ilyas Antun. 44. Ballas, ‘La nouvelle Jérusalem’, pp. 1–24. 45. Antun, Urshalim, p. 161. 46. Antun, Urshalim, pp. 161–2. 47. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 48. Antun, Urshalim, pp. 174–7. 49. Antun, Urshalim, p. 171. 50. Antun, Urshalim, p. 217. 51. Antun, Urshalim, p. 230. 52. Antun, Urshalim, p. 230. 53. On Antun’s ideas of Great Britain, and his analysis of Spenser, see Ballas, ‘La nouvelle Jérusalem’, p. 16. 54. Antun, Urshalim, p. 254. 55. The reference here is to Qur’an 2: 256: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ [la ikraha fi’l-din]. 56. On the pact and on ‘Umar, see G. Levi Della Vida and M. Bonner, ‘‘Umar (I) b. al-∞a††āb’, in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel

j u d aism , o t tomani sm a nd empi re i n f a r a h a ntun | 341 and W. P. Heinrichs (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Brill online at: http://www.brillonline.nl.proxy.uchicago.edu/subscriber/ entry?entry=islam_SIM-7707 (accessed 9 December 2011). 57. See M. Schmitz, ‘Ka‘b al-Aªbār, Abū I‚hāk’, in P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, ˙ C.  E.  Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds), Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2011). Brill online at: http://www.brillonline. nl.proxy.uchicago.edu/subscriber/entry?entry=islam_SIM-3734 (accessed 9 December 2011). 58. Reid, Odyssey. 59. Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (Paris: Calmann Lévy, [1863] 1885). 60. Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere’, New German Critique 3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 49–55.

12 Romances of History: Jurji Zaydan and the Rise of the Historical Novel Paul Starkey

T

he 1890s witnessed one of the most intriguing phenomena of modern Egyptian cultural history – the publication of the first of Jurji [Jirji] Zaydan’s historical novels, of which he produced some twenty-two in total between 1891 and 1914. Widely read, frequently republished and occasionally even banned,1 these novels have been recognised as occupying a pivotal position in the history of modern Arab culture, but despite this have, until recently, seldom received much scholarly attention in the West – at least, by comparison with the author’s other contributions to the development of Arab culture. Thomas Philipp’s study of Zaydan, for example, published in 1979 and generally reckoned to be the standard Western account of the author,2 devotes no more than a page-and-a-half or so of some 250 pages to Zaydan’s novels; while of the major accounts in English of the development of modern Arabic literature, only Matti Moosa accords Zaydan’s novels an extended discussion.3 Fortunately, however, this situation looks set to change, thanks largely to the establishment by the writer’s grandson of the Zaidan Foundation in 2009, which was set up with the purpose of enhancing inter-cultural understanding, and whose activities to date have included, in addition to a one-day conference, the commissioning of a further volume on Zaydan by Thomas Philipp, as well as the commissioning of translations of five of Zaydan’s historical novels into English, each accompanied by a study guide.4 The present 342

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 343 chapter may therefore be regarded – in addition to its obvious relevance to Egypt in the 1890s – as a contribution to a reappraisal of a set of works that, as I suggested in my Modern Arabic Literature (2006), have been ‘[a]rguably . . . in need of reassessment’.5 In so doing, I also hope to shed light not only on the Egyptian literary tradition, but also on the state of education and intellectual life in Egypt at the time and on the interplay between Egypt and Greater Syria (including Lebanon) during this period. Jurji Zaydan’s Background It is impossible to understand the genesis and significance of Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels without some consideration both of the general Arabic literary context and of Zaydan’s own personal background. Zaydan is well known as one of the leading Syro-Egyptian contributors to the Arab literary and cultural revival known in Arabic as the nahda,6 but for a number of reasons defies easy classification. As a non-Muslim writing extensively about Islamic history, he presented his Muslim contemporaries with an intellectual challenge – arousing such suspicion that, towards the end of his life, he was forced to abandon a series of lectures at the newly established Egyptian University.7 On another level, as a novelist for whom the main attraction of fiction was arguably educational rather than literary, his works have never fitted comfortably into attempts to map the early development of modern Arabic literature. It is, however, perhaps precisely for this sort of reason that a consideration of his life and works can throw light on the complexities of the intellectual life of the period. Jurji Zaydan’s family background and early life are recorded in an autobiography that he began writing in October 1908, but which was not published in Arabic in full until 1968. This autobiography was subsequently translated into English by Thomas Philipp and incorporated into his study published in 1979.8 It covers Zaydan’s life history up to 1883, when he left Beirut and emigrated to Egypt, where he lived until his death in 1914. Zaydan was born in Beirut in 1861 in humble circumstances into a family that had probably originated in the Hawran and that belonged, at least nominally, to the Greek Orthodox community. His parents had married the previous year – a year that had seen the culmination of inter-communal riots in Damascus and Mount Lebanon9 – and Jurji was their first child. His

344  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT father, who remained effectively illiterate all his life, worked first as a baker before opening a small restaurant. The family moved frequently – according to Zaydan’s own account10 – occupying sixteen or so houses in twenty-two years. A measure of the lack of sophistication of the society in which he grew up is that, as the church kept no records, he did not discover until thirty years later the precise date of his birth (14 December 1861), and the date was remembered by his father only because it had coincided with the death of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert.11 Much of Jurji Zaydan’s early life was spent helping his father in his restaurant, with an interlude of some years during which he served an apprenticeship as a shoemaker – an occupation that he had to quit, as it did not agree with his health. Ironically, it was his father’s illiteracy that arguably provided the first motivation for his subsequent career as a man of letters, for his father, finding himself unable to handle the accounts that his trade as a restaurateur required, had enrolled him at the age of four in a school run by the brother of the local priest. The standards, and methods, of education he encountered there (which bear a remarkable resemblance to those described earlier by his fellow-countryman [Ahmad] Faris al-Shidyaq)12 clearly left something to be desired, and after two years his teacher declared that he had finished his studies, as ‘he has begun to spell words’. His father, however, had higher ambitions for him and enrolled him at the newly established Madrasat al-Shuwam, from where he transferred to the Greek Orthodox school known as ‘al-Aqmar al-Thalatha’ [Collège de Trois Docteurs]. He subsequently moved to a private school run by Zahir Khayr Allah al-Shuwayri, the former principal of Madrasat al-Shuwam, until he was recalled by his father to assist again in the restaurant.13 By this stage, Jurji had begun to emerge as a child who felt somewhat ‘out of place’ – set off from his contemporaries by his bookishness, while at the same time apparently envious of at least some of their exploits. ‘Nothing but learning interested me’, he records in his autobiography; ‘I differed from the other students with regard to playing, because I had absolutely no inclination towards amusement and distraction’. Two pages later, however, after describing the tales of adultery and fornication that he heard from his companions, he notes:

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 345 I felt sad deep inside that I was not able to understand a thing of what they were bragging about. I told myself . . . that I was going to do just like them . . . Occasionally, I would cover up my shame with a story which I decided happened to me and which contained the things they were boasting about.14

Zaydan’s continued employment in his father’s restaurant, which moved from one location to another in the area of al-Burj Square, enabled him to acquaint himself with many aspects of contemporary popular culture, including storytelling, jugglery and the Karagöz (shadow puppet performances). Some aspects of what he heard – stories of heroes and brave men – clearly enchanted him, but he was less impressed with the drinking bouts and the obscene language that marked the speech of both the lower and upper classes.15 Speculatively, we may suggest that it was this period that sowed the seeds for the strong current of personal moral responsibility that marks many of his essays in al-Hilal and elsewhere, as well as the historical novels. From this environment, he appears to have been rescued by a number of factors, which combined the personal with wider social and cultural developments. At a personal level, he made the acquaintance of Khalil Shawul – a watch repairer a year older than himself, who awakened his interest in classical Arabic poetry and in reading more generally, as well as introducing him to a better educated circle of friends.16 Zaydan’s horizons were further extended by his efforts to learn English, and he seems to have become an omnivorous reader, devouring scientific articles from the monthly magazine al-Muqtataf (first published in 1876) and elsewhere with the same enthusiasm that he extended to Nasif al-Yaziji’s Majma‘ al-bahrayn. This collection of sixty maqamat in the style of the medieval Arabic authors al-Hariri and al-Hamadhani, despite its traditional format, represented a pioneering work in its concern to wed classical forms to contemporary concerns.17 Zaydan’s devotion to books and learning was the cause of some friction in the household, for his father was long convinced that Jurji’s leaving the restaurant would lead to financial ruin. However, changes in the family’s circumstances eventually allowed him to acquire more independence and to formulate plans for his future.18 It was at this point that Zaydan made the acquaintance of a work that was to be a major influence on his personal development and, indeed, on his general outlook for the rest of his life – Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, first

346  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT published in English in London in 1859 and subsequently translated into Arabic by the Lebanese journalist and novelist Ya‘qub Sarruf and published in 1880.19 The thrust of this work, which told of men and women, ‘amongst them, barbers and shoemakers, servants, artisans and maids who rose through their eagerness and vigilance to the station of great people’, seems to have accorded perfectly with Zaydan’s own situation. Most immediately, it provided a way out of what seems to have been a sort of intellectual inferiority complex – though paradoxically, it seems to have also made such a powerful impact on him that he became depressed and was unable to finish reading the book.20 As Philipp rightly notes, however, the impact of this and other works of ‘popular science’ (as he terms them), such as Demolins’ A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?, was not confined to Zaydan’s youth, but influenced his attitude for the whole of his intellectual life. Rejecting socialist and Marxist concepts as ‘unnatural’, he opted instead for a liberal ‘Victorian’ philosophy that identified individual talent and willpower as the key to success – a Western intellectual export to the Arab world that is easily lost amidst discussion of other, more precisely articulated, intellectual currents of the time, but which perhaps for that very reason deserves further consideration.21 By this time, much influenced by a group of medical students with whom he was socialising, Zaydan had set his sights on enrolling as a medical student in Beirut at the Syrian Protestant College, which he entered in 1881. It is perhaps from this point onwards that one could say that his personal career became inextricably entangled with the wider intellectual currents and controversies of the day. The Protestant College had been founded in 1866 by American missionaries, quickly establishing itself as a leading centre of intellectual activity in the region, with some of its graduates playing a prominent role in the fledgling Arab national movement.22 Almost from the beginning, the Protestant College had been beset by controversy over issues such as whether the language of instruction should be Arabic or English and the extent to which the Protestant values of the college’s founders should be reflected in the syllabus. It was, however, over the issue of Darwin’s theory of evolution, as propounded in The Origin of Species, that divisions between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ (to use Philipp’s terminology) came to a head in 1882, the year after Zaydan entered the college.23 The significance of the dispute for Zaydan himself may be gauged from the fact that he devoted some

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 347 twenty-five pages of his autobiography to a description of these events, which proved a formative episode in Zaydan’s life, providing the direct occasion for his departure from Beirut for Egypt.24 Zaydan’s account – which includes, inter alia, verbatim quotations of correspondence between students and faculty – makes clear that the episode was a complex one. Initially sparked by an address from the ‘liberal’ chemistry teacher Edwin Lewis, in which he discussed Darwin’s theories and for which he was subsequently dismissed, the dispute also embraced day-today, practical, down-to-earth administrative issues, such as the language of instruction and examination, and the status of the college’s medical diploma within the Ottoman system. Jurji Zaydan played a prominent role in the subsequent student protests, being elected at one point as chairman of the student committee, on the basis that he was ‘far removed from any issues and was always strongly inclined towards conciliation’ – a trait that he records in his autobiography ‘till this day . . . has remained my nature’.25 Space forbids a full account of the twists and turns of this complex dispute (for which the reader is referred to Zaydan’s autobiography itself). Suffice it to say that, though most of the students returned to their studies, Zaydan himself stuck to his principles. Following a path taken by many Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century, he decided, with his fellow-student Amin Fulayhan, to emigrate to Egypt to complete his medical training at the Qasr al-‘Aini School in Cairo. Zaydan’s autobiography describes the preparations for the voyage from Beirut to Egypt in October 1883 (the first time that Zaydan had travelled by sea) and their arrival in an Alexandria that was still recovering from the aftermath of the ‘Urabi revolt the previous year and a cholera epidemic that summer. From Alexandria, they moved on to Cairo, but for reasons unknown, at this point his autobiography stops, tantalisingly, in mid-sentence, leaving us guessing about his precise motivation for the next major change of direction in his life – the abandonment of medicine as his chosen career. Whatever the explanation for this radical step (for which Philipp suggests financial constraints as at least one significant factor),26 Zaydan’s career between 1883 and the early 1890s, when he both founded al-Hilal and embarked on the series of historical novels, may perhaps best be regarded as a transitional period between his youthful ‘formation’ and the seemingly

348  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT tireless enterprises of his mature years. The period appears, in retrospect at least, to have been a rather unfocused one. For a year or so, he edited a daily newspaper, al-Zaman, then, with his friend Jabr Dumit, served for some months as a guide and dragoman with the British Expeditionary Force sent under Wolseley to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. After the failure of the expedition, he returned briefly to Beirut in 1885 and visited London in 1886, but curtailed his trip for health reasons to return to Cairo, where he lived until his unexpectedly early death in 1914. In Cairo, he worked during the 1880s as administrative manager and assistant editor on the magazine al-Muqtataf, which had moved from Beirut to Cairo in 1885, and launched his career as an author with al-Alfaz al-‘arabiyya wa al-falsafa al-lughawiyya [Arabic Expressions and Linguistic Philosophy] (Beirut, 1886), followed by two other works, Tarikh al-masuniyya al-‘amm [General History of Freemasonry] (Cairo, 1889) and al-Tarikh al-‘amm [General History] (Cairo, 1890). Though rather slight in themselves, the titles of these works are indicative of some of the main strands in Zaydan’s thinking that would remain with him for the rest of his life, providing the inspiration for major works on history, language and literature, including Tarikh al-tamaddun alIslami [History of Islamic Civilization] (5 vols, Cairo, 1901–6), Tarikh allugha al-‘arabiyya [History of the Arabic Language] (Cairo, 1904) and Tarikh adab al-lugha al-‘arabiyya [History of Literature in Arabic] (4 vols, Cairo, 1910–13).27 On a more personal level, his interest in Freemasonry at this period may perhaps be taken as indicative of a ‘moral and ethical approach to life . . . based on integrity, kindness, honesty and fairness’,28 rather than on strict adherence to the doctrines of any particular religion or sect – a philosophy that is in accordance with the generally secular approach to history and culture evident both in the novels and elsewhere.29 Zaydan’s life in Cairo from 1891 to his death in 1914 was an extremely rich one, both on a personal and professional level. On a personal level, in 1891 he married a fellow Beiruti, Maryam Matar, with whom he had four children and appears to have enjoyed a happy and contented family life.30 On a professional level, in addition to his scholarly books on history, language and literature, two main projects occupied him: the first (and more substantial), the periodical al-Hilal [Crescent], which he founded in 1892; the second, the series of historical novels, which he started in 1891.

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 349 Al-Hilal, one of the most important scientific, historical and literary periodicals in the Arab world, and aptly described by Philipp as ‘perhaps the most important project of [Zaydan’s] career’, was founded in 1892, edited by Zaydan until his death in 1914 and is still in existence. The names of contributors over the years read like a roll call of distinguished Arab literati of the early and mid-twentieth century: they include, in addition to Zaydan himself, the Lebanese–American Jibran Khalil Jibran, author of The Prophet, Naguib Mahfouz [Najib Mahfuz], the Arab world’s only literary Nobel laureate to date, and many others.31 Zaydan’s choice of name for the magazine was explained in the first issue to indicate the projected monthly frequency of publication; to gain the blessings of the Ottoman Empire (whose symbol was the crescent moon); and to suggest that the magazine would grow like the moon towards a fuller light. He originally foresaw the magazine as being divided into five discrete sections – famous men and events; articles; serialised novels; news summaries and contemporary literature – but in practice, as the periodical progressed, the arrangement and frequency of publication, as well as the size and frequency of the various sections, fluctuated considerably. However, what did remain constant, at least during Zaydan’s editorship, was his preference for the historical perspective, rather than direct comment on current political issues, as well as a certain emphasis on the individual, rather than the collective. This trait may perhaps be traced back to the emphasis on individual effort that characterised Samuel Smiles’s Self Help32 and which is exemplified in the section entitled ‘Most Famous Events and Greatest Men’, which occupied a leading place in most issues of the magazine.33 For present purposes, however, the main significance of al-Hilal is that it provided the vehicle for the publication in serial form of almost all of Jurji Zaydan’s twenty-two historical novels – a series of works that began with Al-Mamluk al-sharid [The Mamluk Who Fled] (1891) and continued at a rate of approximately one per year until Shajarat al-Durr, which appeared in 1914 – the year of Zaydan’s death.34 The Arab and Egyptian Novel Before embarking on a discussion of Zaydan’s novels, it would be well to remind ourselves briefly of the general state of Arabic fiction at the beginning of the 1890s. The starting point for the development of modern Arabic

350  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT literature – a process that included the progressive substitution of Western literary genres (novel, short story, drama and so on) for traditional Arab ones – has usually been taken as 1798, the date of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.35 Although such a periodisation begs several questions – not least the fact that 1798 has little or no significance for Greater Syria,36 the other main centre of Arabic literary innovation during the nineteenth century – the three-year French occupation that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt undeniably marked a step change in the cultural encounter between Europe and the Middle East. During the reigns of Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–48) and Isma‘il (1863–82) in particular, contacts between Egypt and Europe increased dramatically: students were dispatched to Europe (mainly France and Italy) to study; foreign teachers were imported into Egypt; printing presses began to be used; an official newspaper (al-Waqa’i‘ al-misriyya) was founded; and translations began to be made from Western languages (mainly French at first) into Ottoman Turkish37 and Arabic. Meanwhile, following nearly a decade in which Greater Syria had been effectively occupied by Egypt during the 1830s, Syria and Lebanon witnessed a major surge in Western missionary activity that not only led to the foundation of several major higher educational establishments (including, in 1866, the Syrian Protestant College),38 but also paved the way for a major expansion in Western-style journalism and other literary activity. Within this framework, the growth of novel writing in Arabic during the nineteenth century was at first rather hesitant. The first translations in Egypt from French into Turkish and Arabic had been essentially functional ones: translations (many of them made by students on their return to Egypt from abroad) of military and technical material required by Muhammad ‘Ali for the effective fulfilment of his military and administrative ambitions. New impetus, however, was given to the translation movement, with the founding of a School of Languages in Cairo in 1835 and a Translation Bureau in 1841, both under the Directorship of Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–73), who had been the Imam of the first Egyptian educational mission sent to France from 1826 to 1831.39 It was not long before literary and historical works in French began to attract the interest of students, and al-Tahtawi’s Arabic translation of François Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque, published in 1867, set a precedent that was enthusiastically followed in the years to come.

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 351 In the meantime, the Lebanese [Ahmad] Faris al-Shidyaq, an idiosyncratic polymath who spent several years in Britain translating religious material for the Church Missionary Society, had published in Paris in 1855 a work entitled al-Saq ‘ala al-saq fi ma huwa al-Fariyaq [Leg Over Leg in Respect of Fariyaq] that has been described, not without exaggeration, as the ‘first real approach to fiction in modern Arabic literature’.40 Frequently characterised as ‘Rabelaisian’, and almost certainly indebted to Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, this work was too eccentric to have had any direct successors, but the increasing popularity of translations from European languages in the second half of the nineteenth century soon led Arab authors to attempt original works in their native language. In Greater Syria, for example, Nu‘man ‘Abduh al-Qasatili (1848–1920) contributed three romances to al-Bustani’s periodical al-Jinan,41 and Fransis Marrash (1836–73) produced an allegorical work entitled Ghabat al-haqq (1865), which revolves around the question of how to achieve ‘the kingdom of civilization and freedom’; his original style, bordering on prose poetry, was later to influence Jubran Khalil Jubran.42 A little later, in Egypt, ‘Ali Mubarak published his four-volume ‘Alam al-Din (1882), which relates the story of an Azhari shaykh (possibly modelled on alTahtawi himself) who travels to the West with an English orientalist (perhaps inspired by E. W. Lane) to educate himself in the ways of the West43 – a scenario that was later to become a literary topos in modern Arabic writing. The Arabic Historical Novel None of the precursors described above adequately explains the genesis of Jurji Zaydan’s series of historical novels [riwayat tarikhiyya], which began with the publication of al-Mamluk al-sharid in 1891 and is clearly aimed at a wider, less intellectual readership than most of the author’s other works noted above. Of the luminaries of the Lebanese and Egyptian nahda, only Salim al-Bustani (1846–84) had attempted – in Zenobia (1871), as well as in the later Budur and al-Huyam fi futuh al-Sham – works that might be regarded as laying the foundations for an Arabic historical novelistic tradition prior to Zaydan himself. Among possible Western sources of inspiration, the most frequently cited authors are, in English, Sir Walter Scott (1771– 1832), and, in French, Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70), both of whom have proved popular in translation with the Arab reading public. However, I

352  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT can find no direct evidence for Albert Hourani’s oft-repeated statement that Zaydan’s novels were produced ‘on the model of Scott’s works’.44 Indeed, Zaydan himself seemed to have been keen to distance his approach from his European counterparts. As Matti Moosa suggests, Zaydan’s major interest was in history, rather than in fiction, his main concern being (in the words of Zaydan himself) ‘to arouse the desire of the public to read their history’.45 Moosa himself goes on to draw a contrast between the use, by both Scott and Dumas, of historical events ‘only as a frame for the novel’ and Zaydan, who ‘stuck to actual historical events because his main objective was to teach history to the public’;46 though this formulation seems to me to downplay the imaginative element in Zaydan’s novels to an unwarranted degree. As the style and construction of al-Mamluk al-sharid serves to some extent as a template for the full sequence of twenty-two historical novels, they will be worth considering in detail. In so doing, I will draw on Stephen Sheehi’s analysis of the work,47 in which he uses a number of modern literary theorists to suggest ‘several simultaneous but not contradictory allegorical readings’ of the novel, ‘rooted in an epistemology of the Nahdah that struggled to create new social, subjective, cultural and political spaces’.48 Although such an approach is illuminating, in my view it leads Sheehi to miss some important aspects of the novel (not least that the alternation of the geographical setting of the novel between Lebanon and Egypt, with an excursus to Sudan, carries obvious echoes of Zaydan’s own life). My own account will therefore focus on the overt context and narrative texture of the work. The novel, as reprinted in book form, comprises a fairly slim volume of 124 pages and perhaps 42,000 words, arranged in fifty short chapters, each of which is given a short title. These sometimes consist of the name of the place where the action of the chapter is set (‘Jabal Lubnan’, ‘Dar al-Harim’) or the character forming the subject of the chapter (‘al-Amir Bashir’, ‘Ibrahim Basha’); other titles provide a short description of the action, sometimes in terms that can only be described as deliberately ‘cryptic’ (‘A Deep Secret’, ‘Searching for Gharib’). Though most subsequent novels were conceived on a somewhat larger scale, Zaydan preserved this basic formula throughout the series of twenty-two works, reflecting the manner in which the subsequent works were produced: written over the summer (when al-Hilal did not appear), then serialised in the periodical during the remainder of the same

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 353 year. Intriguingly, the title page of the fourth edition49 refers to the novel as having been ‘translated into Russian, English and French’, but continues: ‘but we do not know whether any of those translations has been published’. The narrative opens on a stormy evening in a monastery near Amir Bashir’s palace at Bayt al-Din on Mount Lebanon, where the monks’ repast is interrupted by three people seeking sanctuary: a lady, Jamila, accompanied by the slave, Sa‘id, and the baby, Gharib.50 The following morning, Sa‘id describes to the abbot how they had fled from Egypt, following Muhammad ‘Ali’s celebrated massacre of the Mamluks in the Cairo Citadel in 1811. Thinking that her husband had been killed, the pregnant Jamila had escaped to Lebanon with Sa‘id and her elder son, Salim. However, after the birth of Gharib, Salim had disappeared from a beach in Palestine, presumed drowned. On meeting the Amir Bashir himself, however, Sa‘id modifies this story and explains that they arrived at the monastery by hiring a local Lebanese guide from Sidon. These two conflicting accounts set the tone of ambiguity and mystery that permeate much of the remainder of the novel, whose setting, as already noted, moves between Egypt and the Levant (with a brief excursion to the Sudan) and whose cast of characters includes both historical figures, such as the Amir Bashir, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha and Ibrahim Pasha, in addition to a cast of fictional or semi-fictional characters. All such characters are embroiled in a plot, according to Sheehi’s reading, which ‘demonstrates the complexity of the movement from a precarious-false to a stable-true identity’ – a process that Sheehi claims ‘can be read allegorically as a return to national unity and cultural revival’.51 As part of this process, Chapter 7, for example, sees the Amir travel with his sons and Gharib to Cairo, where they embark on a sightseeing tour that ironically includes the Cairo Citadel where the Mamluks were massacred, while Chapter 19 (entitled ‘Kashf al-Mukhabba’ [‘Revealing the Secret’])52 identifies Amin Bey, Gharib’s father, as al-Mamluk al-sharid – the one Mamluk to escape Muhammad ‘Ali’s massacre in the Citadel.53 As the narrative proceeds, two marriages take place, and the novel moves towards a generally harmonious conclusion. This pattern serves as a sort of template for most (though not all) subsequent works, which most frequently involve a hero and heroine in love, and a romance acted out against the background of documented historical events. Let us, however, return to consider some of the general characteristics

354  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of Zaydan’s style and technique, as exemplified in these novels.54 In the first place, in terms of narrative technique, it may be noted that most of Zaydan’s fictional writing is stylistically unadventurous, to the extent that it is likely to strike most readers today as pedestrian and often monotonous. Almost invariably, the plot advances by means of a sequence of past-tense verbs (‘this happened, that happened’). This point may be illustrated by a chapter taken at random from the later Ahmad ibn Tulun (1909), in which Dimyana seeks refuge from her persecutors in a church with Zakariyya, her servant. The first seven paragraphs of the chapter all begin with perfect-tense verbs (‘wasalat’, ‘dakhalat’, ‘wa-sakatat’, ‘thumma akhassat’, ‘fa-adraka’, ‘fa-mashat’, ‘thumma sara’), and this structure may indeed be regarded as the norm in much of Zaydan’s narrative.55 When, as not infrequently happens, Zaydan chooses to advance the action by means of dialogue, the effect is usually similarly wooden, most conversations consisting of short units of dialogue almost invariably introduced by qala or qalat as appropriate.56 In the second place, as almost all commentators have noted,57 characterisation is generally weak and often one-dimensional, with little character development as such. Characters are usually either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, remaining so throughout the novel in question. In the absence of a convincing technique for character development, the author is forced to resort to other means of advancing the plot, so that, as Moosa notes, rather than the plot being driven forward by the cast, in most novels ‘fate and coincidence play a large role in the weaving together of historical events’.58 This trait can be illustrated several times in al-Mamluk al-sharid, not least in the sudden revelation that Jamila is none other than the Shihabi Princess Salma – a most unlikely coincidence, and one that makes Amir Bashir’s failure to recognise her earlier in the novel almost unbelievable.59 (We may also note the character of Gharib himself, who, as Moosa notes, is simply ‘too good to be true’.) Such weaknesses almost certainly reflect the fact that Zaydan’s main motivation in composing these works was as a historian and educator, rather than a litterateur – a set of priorities in turn reflected in the title pages that accompany many reprints and later editions, detailing the historical subject matter to be found in the pages within. One undated edition of Ahmad ibn Tulun, for example, is prefaced as follows:

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 355 a historical novel containing a description of Egypt and the land of Nubia in the middle of the third century ah at the time of Ahmad ibn Tulun, including a description of its political, social and literary circumstances, the relations between the Copts and rulers, the political relations between Egypt and Nubia, a description of the Bujja, etc.60

Zaydan’s educational motivation is also reflected in an over-fondness for geographical and historical descriptions, as well as a frequent failure to satisfactorily integrate them with the other elements in the plot. Sometimes these descriptions are presented as part of the main narrative, as in the geographical and historical description of Mount Lebanon at the opening of Chapter 1 of al-Mamluk al-sharid: It [Mount Lebanon] is a chain of high mountains in a fertile region with a fair climate, looking out over the Mediterranean Sea, from which it is divided by the shores of [Greater] Syria – a populated mountain covered by forests and fields, clothed in snow like a white turban all the year round. Up to the middle of the last century [sic]61 its government was in the grip of various tribes . . . these were the Shihabi amirs.62

Another good example is provided by the final chapter, entitled ‘Withdrawal of the Egyptian Troops, and the Exile and Death of the Amir’, which has all the flavour of a history textbook, rather than a novel, and begins: In 1840, the European states joined with the Ottoman Empire to expel Ibrahim Pasha and the Egyptian troops from Syria. As Amir Bashir had been loudly proclaiming his alliance with the Egyptian troops, he became anxious and confused. That year saw dreadful wars that ended badly, for after a defence of several months the Egyptian troops were forced to withdraw from Syrian territory . . .63

At other times, as a variation on this technique, descriptions and explanations may be placed in the mouth of one of the characters, as when Ahmad gives Gharib a history lesson on the Mamluks during their tour of Cairo;64 while in subsequent novels (though not in al-Mamluk al-sharid itself), Zaydan does not hesitate to quote verbatim from previous historians and other writers, sometimes at considerable length. In Ahmad ibn Tulun, for

356  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT example, he incongruously inserts a quotation from the nineteenth-century religious reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, in order to emphasise the power of prayer.65 Chapters 19 to 21 of al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf contain no fewer than ten references to Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-aghani; while in Chapter 41 of the later Salah al-Din al-ayyubi, entitled ‘The End of the Dynasty’, he quotes verbatim over a dozen lines from the historian Shihab al-Din Abu Shama’s Kitab al-rawdatayn while describing Saladin’s looting of al-‘Adid’s palaces with no attempt whatsoever being made to disguise the insertion, as can be seen from the quotation that follows: He and his men took a large number of ornaments and jewelry too numerous to list and describe. We will content ourselves with the account of the historian of the two dynasties [Shihab al-Din Abu Shama] in enumerating what they seized: Saladin emptied al-‘Adid’s palaces and sealed all the gates, over which his soldiers had total control. There was nothing left to weigh or to count. He confiscated everything that was of value or potential use to himself or his family . . . [etc.] (emphasis added).66

If the above paragraphs have perhaps presented a somewhat uninviting picture of al-Mamluk al-sharid and its successors, it should immediately be said that Zaydan’s technique has to be judged in the context of Arabic literary development at the time, which in many respects was at a comparatively rudimentary stage. To take just one example, the use of dialogue in a way familiar to us from the modern Western novel – though certainly found in alShidyaq’s al-Saq ‘ala al-saq – had probably first been extensively undertaken in Arabic less than ten years previously in ‘Ali Mubarak’s ‘Alam al-Din.67 Given this timescale, it is hardly surprising that Zaydan’s technique in alMamluk al-sharid seems rather crude and undeveloped; what seems more surprising (and a further indication, perhaps, that his priorities lay in education, rather than in literature) is that his literary technique appears to have undergone almost no significant development between his first novel and his last, Shajarat al-Durr, published in 1914. That said, the favourable popular reaction to Zaydan’s first novel, alMamluk al-sharid, demonstrated beyond doubt that his work answered to an unsatisfied need among the Egyptian reading public at the beginning of the 1890s. Indeed, the fact that Zaydan apparently felt able to resign from

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 357 the Arabic teaching post that he had taken at the Greek Orthodox School in Cairo some two years earlier suggests that the work was an immediate critical and commercial success.68 Such a reaction was undoubtedly linked to the state of the contemporary Egyptian reading public, for the spread of education in nineteenth-century Egypt had from the start been a somewhat fitful and selective one, even under Muhammad ‘Ali and Isma‘il. This trend was exacerbated by the British occupation beginning in 1882, which had been marked by a deliberate attempt, for political reasons, to restrict the educational opportunities available to the indigenous population.69 In such circumstances, it is not difficult to see why Zaydan’s work, which struck a novel balance between straightforward and accessible imaginative narrative and subject matter relevant to the cultural and historical identity of the Egyptian people, should have met with such an enthusiastic reception on its appearance, for it filled an obvious intellectual and educational gap in the Egypt of the early 1890s. Zaydan’s response to the reaction to his first novel was to quickly publish a number of successors, of which two – Asir al-mutamahdi [The Mahdist Pretender’s Captive] (1892) and Istibdad al-mamalik [The Tyranny of the Mamluks] (1893) – deal with events during the early and middle part of the nineteenth century. They thus hark back to the same general historical period as the author’s first novel. The Sudanese theme of Asir al-mutamahdi in particular, with its obvious relevance to Zaydan’s own experiences, reinforces the impression that the initial motivation for the subjects of these works may have been as much personal as intellectual. The third work, Jihad al-muhibbin (1892), set in Egypt in 1887, is the only one of Zaydan’s fictional works that is not a historical novel – the main characters, like Zaydan himself, being contemporary Syrian émigrés – but despite the judgement of a number of critics, such as Muhammad Yusuf Najm, that the work represented ‘a step forward in the writing of a realistic novel’,70 this work had no direct successors, and it may be presumed that the author either judged it a failure or calculated that such a style did not serve his educational or other purposes. It is, indeed, only at this point, around the mid-1890s, and with the publication of Armanusa al-misriyya in 1896 in particular, that Zaydan’s series of historical novels can be said to have embarked on what seems, in retrospect at least, to have been an unstoppable course. The idea of a series of

358  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT novels treating the entire history of Islam was, by his own account, suggested to him by friends,71 though at precisely what stage is not quite clear. In all events, Armanusa, analysed in some detail by Marilyn Booth in the context of a wider examination of gender and history writing of the time,72 details the conquest of Egypt by ‘Amr ibn al-‘As in AD 640, its main events turning on the relations between the local Coptic Christians and the Byzantines. As Booth points out, the contrast between the respectful treatment of [the Copts] by the invading Muslims [and] the destructive and humiliating treatment visited on them by the Byzantines, offers a contemporary message of Muslim-Christian unity consonant with the nationalist strand that envisioned a secular nation . . . and one advanced forcefully by Syrian Christians (like Zaydan) resident in Egypt and highly conscious of their double minority status.

This general theme echoes, in general terms, the theme of al-Mamluk alsharid, while also finding echoes in several of the historical novels that were to follow, not least in Salah al-Din al-ayyubi, for example. Space forbids a full discussion of the entire sequence of these novels – which in any event would take us far beyond the 1890s. Suffice it to say that following the publication of Armanusa al-misriyya in 1896, Zaydan continued to publish a historical novel every year in a sequence that reflects the development of Islamic history, from its beginnings through to the period of Ayyubid rule in Egypt. This sequence was interrupted only once, by alInqilab al-‘uthmani (1911), which deals with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 – a departure from Zaydan’s overall pattern that no doubt reflects his political interests and priorities at the time. We may speculate that, had he lived, the sequence would have been continued well beyond Ayyubid rule, possibly even up to the nineteenth century. It is, however, important to stress that the novels do not in themselves provide (and were never intended to provide) a full account of the history of the period in question. Zaydan’s purpose and technique was not to write a complete history in fictional form, but rather to identify significant periods and events to arouse the interest of his reader in Islamic history, using fictional, romantic techniques to make his subject more attractive.

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 359 Conclusion The renewed interest in these novels, and the highly welcome efforts by the Zaidan Foundation to make them more widely available in English, may presage a reassessment of their significance in the development of modern Arabic literature. Almost all literary histories of modern Egyptian and Arabic literature have made mention of the novels and conceded their importance in ‘establishing literary fiction as a principal literary form’, even if the impression has also often been given that they are to be regarded largely as a prelude to better things to come.73 Despite the new translations and studies available, however, we still (to my knowledge) lack a comprehensive analysis based on a scholarly reading of all twenty-two novels; the scale of this task is likely to entail a lengthy wait for a thorough re-evaluation. In the meantime, however, the instant popularity of the novels in the Egypt of the ‘long 1890s’ provides strong evidence that Zaydan’s generally secular approach to Islamic history and his distinctive mix of history and fiction had, in some way, struck just the right chord with an expanding literate population, whose identity as Egyptians was being stifled under the British occupation and who were hungry for accessible reading material related to their heritage. Although Zaydan himself nowhere formulated any convincing Egyptian or Arab nationalist agenda (being, rather, concerned to explore the concept of Arab cultural identity in an historical context),74 the novels throw significant light on the development of the intellectual climate in the country at the time, suggesting that the expectations aroused by the expansion of Western educational methods during the nineteenth century had remained unfulfilled. Their continued popularity with a vastly more extensive reading public throughout the wider Arab and Islamic world in the hundred or so years since their initial publication suggests that the author’s ‘winning formula’ has also answered to a wider and longer-lasting need, which it is beyond the scope of the present volume to explore. Notes   1. His books were reportedly banned in the United Arabic Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia around 1990 (Peter Clark, personal communication), though I have not been able to find written confirmation of this.

360  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT  2. Thomas Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān: His Life and Thought, Beiruter Texte und Studien 5 (Beirut: in Kommission bei Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1979).  3. Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, 2nd edn (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1983; Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), pp. 197–218.   4. For details, see the website of the Zaidan Foundation at: www.zaidanfoundation.org (accessed 13 January 2014).   5. Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 99.   6. A term widely regarded as having been used for the first time by Zaydan himself.   7. On this, see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 30–2.  8. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 123–206 (see above, endnote 2). It is also available separately as The Autobiography of Jurji Zaidan, Including Four Letters to his Son, trans., ed. and intro. Thomas Philipp (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990). The full Arabic text was published as Mudhakkirat Jurji Zaydan, ed. Salah al-Din al-Munajjid (Beirut: Dar al-kitab al-jadid, 1968), though parts had already appeared in al-Hilal in 1952 and in al-Abhath in 1967 (see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 126).   9. For which, see Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies and I. B. Tauris, 1994). 10. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 133. 11. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 131. 12. See, for example, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, al-Saq ‘ala al-saq, ed. ‘Imad al-Sulh (Beirut: Dar al-ra’id al-‘arabi, 1982), p. 29. 13. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 136–9. 14. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 138–45. 15. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 142–9. 16. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 149–58. 17. For al-Yaziji and Majma‘ al-bahrayn, see Paul Starkey, ‘Nāsīf al-Yāzijī’, in Roger Allen (ed.), Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1850–1950 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), pp. 376–82. 18. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 161–4. 19. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 11–15, 164. 20. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 164. 21. See Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 12–13. It should, however, be noted that as Demolins’ book appeared in French only in 1897 and in Arabic in 1898, it

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 361 cannot be accorded quite the same ‘formative’ status in Zaydan’s development as Smiles’s Self Help. On the intellectual environment of the time more generally, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), passim, particularly pp. 245–323. 22. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 18. 23. Originally published in English in 1859. A partial Arabic translation by Isma‘il Mazhar (1891–1962) was published in 1918, with a further four chapters added in 1928, but the complete work was not published in Arabic until 1964. See Muzaffar Iqbal, Science and Islam (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), p. 158. 24. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 179–204. 25. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 183. 26. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 24. 27. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 24–7; a fuller bibliography of Zaydan’s works is given at Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 237–9. 28. United Grand Lodge of England, What is Freemasonry? Online at: www.ugle. org.uk/what-is-masonry/ (accessed 27 September 2012). 29. For some remarks on Zaydan’s (probably short-lived) interest in Freemasonry, see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 23. 30. The first child, Farid, died in infancy. See Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, p. 28. 31. Other well-known authors featured in al-Hilal at various times include Rawhi al-Khalidi, Amin al-Rihani, Iliya Abu Madi, Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Mahmud Taymur, Ahmad Amin and Yusuf al-Siba‘i. 32. See above, note 19. 33. Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 229–34; see also P. C. Sadgrove, al-Hilal (1892– ), in J. S. Meisami and P. Starkey (eds), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1998), I, p. 287. A forthcoming volume, Jurji Zaidan’s Secular Analysis of History and Language as Foundations of Arab Nationalism, to be published by the Zaidan Foundation, will contain a selection of articles by Zaydan translated into English on Religion and Science; Language; History; Nationalism; and Society and Ethics. Online at: http://zaidanfoundation.org/ ZF_Website_StudiesOnJZ_one_tableofcontents.html (accessed 29 September 2012). 34. For complete lists, see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 238–9; also (with some minor mistakes in transliteration) online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurji Zaydan (accessed 30 September 2012); Walid Hamarneh, ‘Jurjī Zaydān’, in Roger Allen (ed.), Essays in Arabic Literary Biography 1850–1950 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,

362  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 2010), pp. 382–92 (from which the last two novels appear to have dropped out by mistake). 35. On this, see, for example, Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 23–4. 36. Including the territory now forming the state of Lebanon. 37. As the official language of administration of the Ottoman Empire. As Egypt became effectively an independent country during the nineteenth century, Turkish was progressively replaced by Arabic in most areas of public life. 38. The Syrian Protestant College was renamed the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1920. On this period generally, see Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature, pp. 23–38. 39. For whom, see Daniel Newman, An Imam in Paris: Al-Tahtawi’s Visit to France (1826–31) (London: Saqi Books, 2004); J. A. Crabbs, The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1984), pp. 67–86. 40. Boutros Hallaq, ‘Love and the Birth of Modern Arabic Literature’, in R. Allen, H. Kilpatrick and E. de Moor (eds), Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi, 1995), p. 17. On al-Saq ‘ala al-saq generally, see Paul Starkey, ‘Fact and Fiction in al-Sāq ‘alā al-Sāq’, in R. Ostle, E. de Moor and S. Wild (eds), Writing the Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi, 1998), pp. 30–8. Shidyaq is currently also the subject of an international research project, for which see ‘Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq Research Project’, online at: www.ceu.hu/afsrp (accessed 1 October 2012). 41. Moosa, Origins, pp. 191–5. 42. Moosa, Origins, pp. 147–53. 43. On ‘Ali Mubarak, see Crabbs, The Writing of History, pp. 109–19. 44. Hourani, Arabic Thought, p. 277. 45. Introduction to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf in al-Hilal 10 (1901), quoted in Moosa, Origins, p. 198. 46. Moosa, Origins, p. 199. 47. Stephen Sheehi, ‘Doubleness and Duality: Jurjī Zaydān’s al-Mamlūk al-Shārid and Allegories of Becoming’, Journal of Arabic Literature 30: 1 (1999), pp. 90–105. 48. Sheehi, ‘Doubleness and Duality’, pp. 104–5. 49. In other words, al-Tab‘a al-rabi‘a (1904). No distinction is usually drawn in Arabic terminology between tab‘a as meaning ‘edition’ and ‘printing’. 50. Transliterated by Sheehi as ‘Ghurayb’. 51. Sheehi, ‘Doubleness and Duality’, pp. 94–5.

j urj i z ay d an and the ri se of the hi s to r ica l n o ve l  | 363 52. The title recalls that of al-Shidyaq’s work Kashf al-mukhabba’ ‘an funun Urubba, first published in 1881[?], though whether any allusion is intended seems doubtful. 53. For a brief account of the incident and the more general political context, see Khaled Fahmy, ‘The Era of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, 1805–1848’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2: Modern Egypt, From 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 139–79. 54. The following paragraphs draw on material previously published as Paul Starkey, ‘Egyptian History in the Modern Egyptian Novel’, in H. Kennedy (ed.), The Historiography of Islamic Egypt (c.950–1800) (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 251–62. 55. Jurji Zaydan, Ahmad ibn Tulun (Cairo: n. p., [1909] n. d.), pp. 129 ff. 56. For examples, see Jurji Zaydan, al-Mamluk al-sharid, 4th edn (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Hilal, [1891] 1904), pp. 50, 58, 100. 57. See, for example, Moosa, Origins, p. 209; Hamarneh, ‘Jurjī Zaydān’, p. 387. 58. Moosa, Origins, p. 209. 59. Zaydan, Al-Mamluk al-sharid, p. 95; for other examples, see Moosa, Origins, p. 209. 60. Title page (probably not by Zaydan himself) from Ahmad ibn Tulun. 61. Meaning, presumably, the middle of the nineteenth century: Shihabi rule ceased in 1840. 62. Zaydan, Al-Mamluk al-sharid, p. 1. 63. Zaydan, Al-Mamluk al-sharid, p. 123. 64. Zaydan, Al-Mamluk al-sharid, pp. 23–7. 65. Zaydan, Ahmad ibn Tulun, p. 129. 66. Jurji Zaydan, Salah al-Din al-ayyubi (Tunis: Dar al-shabab, [1913] 2002), p. 153; English translation, Saladin and the Assassins, trans. Paul Starkey (Bethesda, MD: Zaidan Foundation, 2012), p. 185. 67. On this, see J. Crabbs, ‘Mubārak, ‘Alī (1823–93)’, in EAL, II, p. 535, where he describes ‘Alam al-Din as ‘the first modern Arabic literary work in which the action is advanced largely through dialogue – a distinction often mistakenly attributed to al-Muwaylihī’s superior literary creation, Hadīth ‘Īsā ibn Hishām’. 68. On this, see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, pp. 26–7. 69. On this, see, for example, Judith Cochrane, Education in Egypt (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 9–20. 70. As quoted in Moosa, Origins, p. 215. 71. Moosa, Origins, p. 198.

364  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 72. See Marilyn Booth, ‘On Gender, History . . . and Fiction’, in I. Gershoni, A. Singer and Y. H. Erdem (eds), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 211–41, especially pp. 234–5. 73. See, for example, P. Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 112–13, from where this quotation is taken; M. M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 97–8. 74. On this, see Philipp, Ğurğī Zaidān, especially pp. 113–14.

13 Before Qasim Amin: Writing Women’s History in 1890s Egypt Marilyn Booth

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cholars of the history of Arab gender activism have recognised that Qasim Amin’s famously explosive Tahrir al-mar’a (1899) – which earned him the title, from the early 1920s onwards, of the ‘Father of Egyptian Feminism’ – did not come out of a discursive vacuum.1 Arab female intellectuals (‘A’isha Taymur, Zaynab Fawwaz and Maryam Makariyus) were already writing on questions of gender right; male educators (Butrus al-Bustani in Ottoman Syria, ‘Ali Mubarak and Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi in Egypt and Namık Kemal in Ottoman Turkey) had advocated for schooling girls, and not always solely to make them better mothers to baby nationalist men. That questions of gender saturated the Arabic publishing scene of the decade before Amin’s book appeared is less recognised: all but a few leading writers and publications remain untapped sources. Yet in the 1890 press and book publishing sector of Egypt, gender trouble could be found everywhere: on the front pages of daily newspapers, in magazine features, in back-page reports on everyday events and crime, throughout poetry (formal and colloquial), in novels (translated or not) and in biography.2 In one way or another, by the mid-1890s, ‘women and the nation’ already constituted a ramified discourse. This chapter examines texts that approached gender politics in that decade by turning to history – indeed, to ancient history. How did authors deploy historical narratives to intervene in debates on gender in the first decade, when such debates truly could be said to circulate publicly to a 365

366  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT (small) reading public through print channels? Was there a specific tenor to this conversation in the 1890s? I discuss three works: ‘Ali Jalal’s AH 1308 (1890–1 CE) Mahasin athar al-awwaliyyin, fima lil-nisa’ wa ma ‘alayhinna fi qawanin qudama’ al-misriyyin [Merits of the Ancestors’ Traces, on Women’s Duties and Legal Places, in the Ancient Egyptians’ Laws and Graces];3 Habib Effendi al-Zayyat al-Dimashqi’s al-Mar’a fi al-jahiliyya [Women in the Pre-Islamic Era], al-Diya’’s 1899 gift to subscribers;4 and Shaykh Hamza Fathallah’s Bakurat al-kalam ‘ala huquq al-nisa’ fi al-Islam [First Lights on Islam and Women’s Rights], also appearing in AH 1308 (1890–1 CE).5 Imagining these books within a broader ambit of cultural production, I propose that in their representations they argued for the historical authenticity of attitudes and practices that would modify, but not fundamentally alter, local patriarchal structures of family, community and state. Furthermore, these treatises speak in two voices to two different audiences: to a local male audience, especially the slowly expanding new elite educated in government schools; and to a farther-flung audience comprised of European orientalists. The latter might be local writers’ most sympathetic and knowledgeable overseas interlocutors, but they were also best positioned in their own societies to make the oft-heard critique (and imperial justification) that Egyptian society was retrograde and women’s status proved it. European orientalists both contributed to, and contested, late imperialism’s pointed critique of the treatment of women in colonised societies, such as India and Egypt, as justification for extended colonial rule. Local elites may well have seen orientalists as influential and potentially sympathetic individuals; there were personal ties between them, generated by travel in both directions. It seems no coincidence that late nineteenth-century orientalists did begin to speak of Islam as reforming women’s status in the era of the Prophet, perhaps both in response to imperial rhetoric and due to conversations with their peers in Cairo, Istanbul, Delhi and elsewhere. This doubled audience (local and European intellectuals), already present in texts on gender before Amin’s book emerged, may offer a new perspective on Amin’s project and its reception. In the 1890s, I argue, the gender conversation – amongst men both local and remote – could occur within one text meant for two audiences. The decade’s intellectual politics distinc-

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 367 tively allowed diverse (male) interlocutors to be imagined and addressed on more-or-less equal grounds, permitting a frank homosocial conversation less possible in the following decades as female readership grew and nationalist anticolonial politics crystallised, impelling a shift in tone and topic. Furthermore, anxieties about the politics of gender – and specifically, the demands and doings of some women – were commonly voiced in the ­periodicals of European cities, as well as in those of Arab cities in the 1890s. But how does a sense of audience shape the text? How might audience require (even embody) a certain intertextuality? Authors appropriated European texts and audiences, and that appropriation, in its broadest ­citationary sense, entails accommodation of European sources as a means of supporting and justifying Egyptians’ focus on the local. Two of these works are ‘travelling texts’, in that they rely fundamentally on, in one case, translation into Arabic of a work in French about Egypt; and in another, on a multi-site and multi-origin audience of learned Arabophone men in dialogue, sometimes uncomfortable and uneven, and mediated by an Ottoman intellectual speaking for his Egyptian colleague in French to a cosmopolitan group of learned men in Stockholm. Gender as a theme and organisational analytic serves as an intervention in contemporary politics and as a symbolic focus for other issues. Its deployment does very little for actually existing women: as in many coeval novels, it serves a modern patriarchal agenda whose outlines were becoming clearer in the 1890s, simultaneously with (and crucial to) the emerging performance of an anticolonial nationalism through the press, oratory, theatre and everyday negotiations. Like Amin’s controversial 1899 work Tahrir al-mar’a [The Emancipation of Women], these volumes emerged from particular professional sites: defining their status on their title pages, the professions that authors name make it clear that they hailed from state apparatuses of law and education. ‘Ali Jalal (d. 1932) writes as a young deputy attorney in the public prosecutor’s office, Court of Asyut: he is a junior functionary in a provincial arm of the bureaucracy.6 His thirty-nine page, small-print book came out with a private press in Cairo. He would go on to a career as a judge in the Egyptian system and write several books: at his death, he left a large cache of compiled research for a work on ‘the Arabs before Islam’.7 Hamza Fathallah (1849–1918) was Senior Inspector for Arabic Sciences in the Ministry of Education and a teacher

368  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT at the Khedivial teacher training college, Dar al-‘Ulum, and had already ­published three works when this one appeared; he would go on to publish at least four more.8 The prestigious official press at Bulaq published this 108page treatise. Al-Zayyat al-Dimashqi (‘the Damascene’, 1871–1954) was not Egyptian in origin, but he spent time there, as well as in France. His fortypage book, printed in Cairo, was available in Egypt – at least to subscribers of the journal publishing it, al-Diya’. He was a Melkite Orthodox Christian, who acquired enough of a fortune in Alexandria as a merchant to emigrate to France, where he lived in some style in Nice and devoted himself to research, travelling widely in search of (amongst other things) Arab Christian sources on the history of Arab civilisation. They had stakes in journalism as an emerging civil institution, in libraries, in transnational scholarly networks and in state institutions, therefore, but when these men wrote these books, all relatively early on in their careers, they were not at the pinnacle of the bureaucratic pyramid where the new British-‘shadowed’ colonial administration sat. They define themselves as speaking from and to bani al-watan: children (or sons) of the homeland/ nation. They use history to shape indigenous discourses of what it is to be modern. It is fascinating that each felt compelled, in this decade, to write on gender; indeed, they never did again, later in life. Two focus on Egypt, writing for a Syrian Christian-founded journal and from a Christian Melkite perspective, while the third canvasses Arabs’ pre-Islamic heritage. Amateur historians, they offer local perspectives on gender’s segmentation of society, while engaging with thinkers from outside their region and language, instigating conversations between indigenous histories and European scholarship that engage parallel professional interests and social/gendered positionings across national boundaries. Incorporating historical narratives, these works are explicitly polemical, hailing an assumed audience for their constructions of women’s pasts. The tone is one of peer exchange: contestatory, but not hierarchised. Not yet do these texts show defensiveness or ambivalence about holding a conversation with Western sources. Yet, given the trajectory of their careers and their writings, it is difficult to avoid the question of whether these men felt obligated, rather than interested, to write on gender, which makes their writings all the more interesting.

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 369 Publishing In 1869 – and in Beirut, not Cairo – educator Butrus al-Bustani complained of a lack of reading material, of shops dispensing it and of cultural institutions fostering debate in a city that he characterised, even so, as ‘civilisingminded’.9 He bemoaned the social effects of this, noting that because there are not enough books for the benefit and enjoyment of those who know how to read, and this is insufficient for the spirit of the age, cafes are packed with youths and elders who go there for the sake of killing time by day, and fill their homes with dominoes and card tables where they kill time by night. 10

The same could be said for Cairo into the late 1880s. But one stark ­distinguishing characteristic of the 1890s is an upward leap in the quantity and range of publications. Available data for newspapers and magazines beginning publication in Egypt in the 1880s versus the 1890s indicates a fivefold increase. In the decade from 1880 to 1889, over fifty newspapers and magazines appeared, with the majority in Cairo; the next decade, from 1890 to 1899, saw about 300, with a steady yearly increase and a mid-decade jump.11 In 1890, there were two or three; probably seven the next year, but from 1893, more than twenty periodicals were founded each year in Cairo and Alexandria, with a few in provincial cities. Some were short-lived, and we lack circulation figures for most. But even partial data suggest significant expansion in reading material (in cities at least). Moreover, the 1890s were the decade of dailies. Al-Ahram was already well-established, but new nationalistoriented dailies also began to appear, from 1889 (al-Mu’ayyad) on. Whether in Beirut or Cairo, as Ayalon says, ‘the appearance of thousands of printed works in millions of copies where nearly none had existed several decades earlier surely signifies a major cultural shift’.12 Increased activity and intersections between printing, publishing, editorial activity and dissemination are crucial for understanding this decade. The emergence of an independent publishing sector (along with continuing output from Bulaq) meant that gender issues were inscribed concretely and consistently. Within an emerging public sphere circuit of argumentation in print on the gamut of issues articulating construction of a modern independent nation-state, the discussion on gender

370  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT was no longer ephemeral, and many perspectives contended for attention. The texts I discuss – and these are just a few culled from a much larger field of possibility – suggest the discursive reach of gender; they demonstrate the interests and anxieties of an elite, both traditional and newer, concerning gender as an axis of social organisation and a discursive pivot point between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Uses of History In his 1869 speech, al-Bustani invoked history by comparing past European and Arab gender practices. By leaving women in ignorance, he argued, Arab societies had not respected them. Something had to be done.13 As in his 1849 speech ‘The Education of Women’, in this speech he argued from a historical perspective that ‘progress’ meant giving attention to raising women’s status.14 But al-Bustani did not elaborate on this historical perspective or propose a fuller historical narrative of gender right and progress, and nor did others before 1889, except (and importantly) in the emerging historical novel. A more forceful, elaborated intersection of gender themes and historical argument emerged from about 1890. Perhaps to shape an historical argument on gender and society required at least the embryonic presence of a debate on nation formation, concentrating minds on historical narratives for the nation – a project made urgent by Egypt’s recent occupation and made possible by new publication avenues. It was common in the press and in books published in this era to construct and analyse human categories – peasants, women, the afandiyya (middle-stratum educated male professionals and government employees) – for their assumed and potential national contributions or lack thereof. This was a consistent strategy of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim in his 1892 journal al-Ustadh, and it is also found in journals such as al-Nil (est. 1891), as well as in satirical–colloquial journals, such as al-Arghul (est. 1894). Such a categorisation was implicated in a discourse on the comparative civility of different ‘nations’ historically, a clear feature of the works discussed here. In Merits of the Ancestors’ Traces, ‘Ali Jalal summons criss-crossing conversations and histories as he explains how he came to write the book. Revealing citational practices that expose a cross-cultural dialogue or at least a revised monologue, his work ponders history writing as a national and

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 371 local ­responsibility – and gender as a problematic and inescapable focus for modernising elites: In Europe to complete my law studies, I grew determined to write a book on women’s rights and duties according to all countries’ laws, from the beginnings when nations were becoming organised to our day. What propelled me was zeal for truth, the need to display our shari’a’s nobleness, and the utility of comparing it with modern and ancient law systems [shara’i‘] in countries of the East and Europe. I had not come across even one book on ancient Egyptians’ laws until there appeared in France a treatise written by a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeals on rights and duties of women in ancient Egypt. I arabised it, planning to make it a chapter in the book I intended writing. More than two years have passed since my return to my homeland. The duties of my post have precluded finishing my project. But, I figured, what is not completed should not be abandoned; this would not prevent my publishing the treatise, since it addresses our country’s laws which we are obligated to know. How can I not, when the Europeans have taken such interest, entire schools teaching [these laws] though they have no direct relation to their countries’ history? They are the basis of the Greeks’ laws from which the Romans took theirs, which became the basis of laws of all existing civilised countries. They are without doubt important, even if the only benefit in knowing them is contemplating conditions in the world’s first organised community.15

Tracing the trajectory of ‘civilised’ countries through their legal systems, Jalal’s book emerges from the encounter between Egyptians seeking learning and European educational institutions, instigated by Egypt’s ruler Muhammad ‘Ali earlier in the century with educational missions, mostly to France. The encounter yielded works of travel-literature-cum-reformist-tract incorporating narratives on gender-distinct practices as significant to a nations’ progress – a genre continuing through the 1890s.16 Jalal, though, directly exploits European orientalist scholarship to produce an indigenised investigation into history of the (pre-)nation as a history of gendered practices, seeing these as a core legal–social configuration with impact on the present. He does not emphasise the text’s status as a carrying-over of work done elsewhere: the title

372  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT page does not label it a translation, and Jalal never names the title or author of his source text. He starts with his sense of purpose: to demonstrate ‘our shari‘a’s nobleness’ through cross-society synchronic and diachronic comparison, which is not an announced aim of the original. As the demands of his professional role stymie him, Jalal opts for a partial project, elaborating on a European work on ancient Egypt as the history of his nation and, simultaneously, a pre-history of Europe that privileges his nation as originating practices of gender equality and freedom. Thus, a local teleological endpoint emerges, and the text Jalal incorporates (that is, translates without naming it) facilitates this. Indeed, Jalal’s translated history presages famous women biographies in women’s magazines (from 1907 on) that highlighted ancient Egypt as modelling progressive gender relations.17 To rhetorically map Egypt as possessing a uniquely stable longevity and identity, emphasising its global primacy as lawgiver, was a political performance spurred on partly by Britain’s occupation of Egypt. Bridging genres and sites of publication, such a mapping certainly offered one foundation stone for the emergence of Egyptian nationalism. Contemporary journals – notably, al-Muqtataf and al-Lata’if – dedicated many pages to discussion of ancient Middle Eastern cultures. Jalal’s text is one indication that modern Egyptian interest in connections with Greek culture predated the more famous engagement of Taha Husayn with such connections following World War I.18 Jalal’s source text turns out to be a book published in Paris in 1886: Georges Paturet’s La condition juridique de la femme dans l’ancienne Égypte.19 Like Jalal, Paturet was a rising professional – a solicitor at Paris’ Court of Appeals, Jalal explains (without giving his name). In his own book, Paturet describes himself additionally as a diploma student at l’École du Louvre.20 Following Paturet, Jalal divides his translation into ‘Ahwal al-mar’a alshakhsiyya’ [‘Condition personelle de la femme’] and ‘Ahwal al-mar’a almaliyya’ [‘Condition pécuniare de la femme’]. Part I comprises chapters on women ‘outside’ and ‘within’ marriage, thus defining women according to their social–sexual status. Part II discusses inheritance rights, ‘capacity’ and marriage contracts. Within the interstices of translation appears Jalal’s indigenous project, in his word choices, additions and deletions, added emphases, elaborations and compressions. Even before explaining his goals (quoted above), Jalal situates his inquiry

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 373 locally, deploying a conventional Islamic authorial opening invoking the divine, reiterating his monotheistic faith, while gesturing proudly to the ancients’ legacy: I praise God for bequeathing us the land of the pharaohs who deified [others], and I dedicate the purest blessing to the one He sent with a shari‘a distinguished by elevating the level (daraja) of women in human society and differentiated thereby from all other divine legal systems (shara’i‘) and laws (qawanin). He made it incumbent on [Islam’s prophet] to salute the ancient Egyptians whose traces resisted time and whose exquisiteness bewilders the brains of civilised nations.21

Though focusing on ancient Egypt, Jalal deploys Qur’anic diction: while it is an ordinary word, daraja also was, and remains, a key word in interpreting whether and how the Qur’an stipulates an incontrovertible male–female hierarchy within and beyond the family, through its use of this and related words.22 Without addressing Islamic practice directly, Jalal uses daraja repeatedly. Readers likely linked his diction to emerging debates over the Qur’an’s role in defining gendered spatial and social assignments. This is but one implicit echo of local rhetoric surfacing in the translation. Paturet, invoking ancient Egypt’s wonders, names one ‘wonder’ as the law treating ‘la condition privée de la femme’; Jalal translates this as huquq al-mar’a [the rights of women or what is due to women], suggesting a sphere broader than the private, emphasising due rights rather than ‘condition’. Jalal follows Paturet in noting that Pharaonic era writings made male and female equal before the law.23 For Paturet, this is ‘capacité juridicale’; for Jalal, again, it is ‘rights’ – not only a broader term, but a more provocative one then emerging in Arabic discourse as a political and not just a legal category. But this is an ambiguous term, for in earlier and contemporaneous juridical texts on marriage, the term haqq appears frequently with the sense of ‘what is due [to the wife or to the husband]’ – a meaning out of which came its later crystallised sense of ‘rights’, the plural huquq.24 Yet, with Jalal’s references to current politics (specifically, to European feminist activism, as we shall see), the term assumes a different signification. This sense is associated with the European context in which the source text was produced: a context of ‘rights’. At the same time, locally, this term was taking on political resonance

374  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT in the context of European imperialism, for Egyptians were beginning to write about their ‘rights’, vis-à-vis the colonial power. The text thus effects a semantic transition from the juridical and conduct-related or ethical meaning to an emerging political one. Paturet’s text, with Jalal’s semantic expansion, next facilitates a political argument resonant in 1890s discourse on gendered behaviour and ‘the nation’ in Egypt: ‘Were it not for the spread of the Greeks’ ideas in Egypt, and for women breaching boundaries of their rights [hudud huquqihinna], those rights would not have grown deficient’.25 No details are forthcoming on how women breached boundaries. A close translation, the potential effects of this declaration on readers in Cairo likely diverged from its resonance for readers in Paris. Although the text speaks of ancient history, for Egyptians it would echo concerns reiterated throughout the press about the contemporary invasion of foreign ideas, the permeation of southern Europeans into Egyptian society and women’s public behaviour – in particular, the apparently expanding visibility of ‘respectable women’ in the urban streets or at least an expanding discourse on this alleged public presence. The reading context indigenises the translated text. Both source and translation continue to emphasise that equality amongst individuals, irrespective of gender, organised ancient Egyptian law, yet Jalal also continues to diverge subtly from his source text. The French speaks of a historical progression from the ancient world’s emphasis on maternity and matriarchy to marriage as a rooted social institution and to polyandry’s disappearance and polygyny’s resilience, generating a belief in women’s ‘moral weakness’.26 Jalal’s Arabic reads simply: ‘a belief that women were weaker than men’. Declining to qualify ad‘af [weaker], Jalal retains an ambiguity (is this a physical or other weakness?) consistent with his undefined use of ‘rights’. Similarly, where the French speaks of ‘predominance of the woman or rather the mother in society’, the Arabic says simply al-mar’a [woman], resulting in a stronger (because more sweeping) claim: ‘Thus we see woman in the forefront, influential in society’.27 If the divergence seems minor, by omitting mothers here Jalal emphasises women’s status overall, rather than one biological–social role – a powerful alteration. Avoiding some qualifying statements in the source and adding significant modifications (‘important rights’ for ‘rights’28), Jalal’s text appears broader of

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 375 purview, almost categorical, making a political rather than a narrowly legal argument. But Jalal also takes advantage of local political rhetoric to assign moral–spatial boundaries to women, warning readers to bear in mind possible outcomes of women’s legal ‘capacity’. He uses Paturet’s legal genealogy for a different agenda, perhaps addressing cautious advocates of feminine education in service to the Egyptian family and nation who worried about the ambitions of educated girls. Speaking of ‘marriages of equality’ [le mariage d’égalité, nikah al-musawah] where contracts placed men and women on equal footing, both texts elaborate on this to mean a woman is ‘absolute mistress of the household’.29 In the context of local debates on gender segregation, seclusion and education, this could imply that (contemporary) women were not to play roles outside the household. The source text is malleably useful: celebrating ancient Egypt as a society of progressive, gender-equal laws, it simultaneously foregrounds household and family, while remaining silent on other rights that female readers (anywhere) might be pondering. Jalal returns to the theme of foreign influences. The Arabic text follows Paturet’s narrative on the ‘deterioration’ of women’s rights in marriage with the coming of ancient Persian practices and Hebrew customs, but the Arabic text adds an evaluative clause: kana al-nikah fasidan [marriage was corrupt/ed].30 The suggestion is made, with this addition, that in a purely Egyptian society marriage was a system of ‘equality’; ‘corruption’ (as in mixing) of populations (and ultimately miscegenation) meant corruption of practices or the degeneration of Egyptian society, as Persian, Jewish and Greek practices entered Egypt. Beyond the legal sphere, implications again create a harmonics in the Arabic text, a doubled referent, ancient Egypt and 1890s Cairo. Consider how the chapter ends, following an anecdote on contract marriage. In the Arabic: This anecdote is sufficient evidence of the absolute freedom women had in the Ptolemaic era and how they went to extremes [or transgressed] in using it, proof of how Egyptian marriage deteriorated in the Greek state and furthermore of how different was this purely financial transaction from ancient marriage when woman knew respect and honour, giving over all her wealth so she and the husband she chose would be one person.31

Thus, Egyptians enjoyed a venerable legacy of gender equality, the deterioration of which was essentially the fault of Greeks and women: the former

376  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT with their corrupt ideas, the latter with their readiness to ‘go to extremes’ in exercising freedom. Since Egyptian laws were more favourable to women and the Greek nation ruled then, naturally women’s condition deteriorated and their capacity diminished. We saw earlier that woman took her absolute freedom of association/transaction [ta‘amul] beyond bounds. When marrying, she forced her husband to give her substantial property . . . Even then she disposed and managed her property in a way that impinged on her husband’s honour.32

Jalal uses a more general, unqualified term [ta‘amul] to translate Paturet’s ‘liberty of contracts’ – a right that French women at the time, under the Civil Code (the ‘Napoleonic Code’ of 1804), did not have, while Muslim women in Egypt did. Paturet may have been responding to this code, as did others.33 Perhaps there is also an echo of English law and the doctrine of coverture, where spouses were ‘one person’ in the law, represented by the husband. In this passage, too, Paturet’s ‘dignity’ becomes Jalal’s ‘honour’.34 It seems reasonable to argue that this double message was more (or differently) sensitive and obvious for Egyptian Arabophone readers than for French readers, given the distinct political contexts of each readership – though family honour was resonant in both contexts, as well as Jalal’s use of locally resonant diction and his tendency to turn Paturet’s legal terminology into broadly descriptive language. As the treatise nears conclusion, Jalal moves further from his source. Paturet reiterates that ‘women’s juridical state’ was far superior in Egypt to what it was amongst other ancient peoples. He concludes (in my translation of the French): From the perspective of our completed study, one could say Egyptian civilisation has nothing to envy in that of the modern nations; women of today who in the liveliest way are reclaiming what they call their rights, would no doubt have been very content with the position of the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.35

It seems that Paturet, too, was implicitly addressing a quasi-local audience (or target): European feminists. How does Jalal translate? In his rendering, it is not ‘women’s juridical

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 377 state’ that compares favourably with other ancient societies. Rather, ‘women in Egypt’ had it better tout court. Nor are ‘women in Egypt’ qualified as ancient. (Conventional Arabic verb tense usage helps.) Women in Egypt are of higher level [daraja] and better state than women of all other ancient nations; it is no exaggeration to say that Egypt’s forward position [taqaddum] in this is one the civilised nations in our era have not reached – and that the women of these countries today who demand with utter sharpness what they call their rights would have reached the summit of their hopes had they obtained the legal situation which the women of the Nile Valley had.36

Jalal’s conclusion emphasises that ‘Egyptians unlike other nations never flagged in any era or historical stage from preserving woman’s high status and broadening her ability to act’; Paturet is more qualified: ‘higher’ not ‘high’ and nothing about ‘never flagging’.37 Paturet ends by invoking ‘a French commission in Egypt at the beginning of this century’ – the Napoleonic expedition, which, Paturet observes, found customs amongst Egyptians that surely were legacies of ancient Egyptian laws. Thus, Paturet manages to give some credit to French orientalism (he was a Louvre student, after all) and ends neatly with the French in Egypt. The Arabic makes no mention of the French, ending with contemporary Egyptians: ‘Those who contemplate habitudes of Egyptians today find precise expressions of ancient Egypt’s laws’.38 The French text offered fertile soil to seed a local discourse based on historical–legal analysis, taking authority from European scholarship, while modifying the source text’s message, creating an Arabic text resonant within local discourse, and one which in form bears little relationship to existing Arabic-language history writing. Offering a scholarly source allows Jalal to highlight European interest in, and respect for, ancient Egypt, while subtly contesting this perspective in a locally (indeed, provincially) produced treatise. The Arabic text follows the French closely, yet alterations in diction, emphasis and explanation – and repetition of 1890s keywords (huquq al-mar’a, daraja, inhitat, sharaf, fasad) – yield a text perfectly localised in its championing of an Egyptian practice said to be more advanced than any other in its origins, but which must also take wary account of foreign ways and women’s ready exploitations of opportunity. Praising the ancient Egyptians for legally

378  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT establishing equality between the sexes, the text circumscribes this to the home sphere, mentioning women’s outside economic activities, but focusing on female ‘transgressions’ of rights in an intermix of marital and financial dealings. A narrative of ancient Egypt’s glory is put in service to contemporary debate on gendered social organisation, involving marriage rights and practices, the household, economic rights, inheritance and women’s disturbing propensity to ‘reclaim what they call their rights’ – a topic that periodicals were beginning to report on precisely during these years. Back-page reports in 1890s Egyptian dailies focused on women’s and young men’s conduct regularly and fiercely. Anxiety about women on the streets and in bars, and about illicit sexual conduct percolating into ‘good neighbourhoods’, filled reports from provincial towns and major cities alike: Bulaq, from our correspondent: Among deviations from the rules of decency we find bars meant to intoxicate and hashish cafes opening on women’s initiative not [just] men’s. If only women restricted themselves to this, but no – they imbibe both [alcohol and hashish] along with the men, leading these women into quarrelsome, depraved behaviour. They roam the streets in a state humans find disgusting.39

Such reports helped create the discursive context in which Jalal’s work and others operated as commentary on local behaviour. Carrying over a text produced in a French scholarly–legal context, Jalal produces a semantically and politically localised version that responds to, and recirculates, local anxieties voiced in the press, as does our next text. From Pharaohs to Bedouin Appearing in 1899, eight years after Jalal’s book, Habib al-Zayyat alDimashqi’s treatise focuses on women ‘before Islam’ – that is, Arab women, precursors to the community of the faithful. Like Jalal, al-Zayyat begins with methodology and claims precedence, declaring unawareness of previous ­writings on this subject. Furthermore, a dearth of sources other than ‘stories and legends’ makes it difficult to ‘construct knowledge . . . Poetry is nearly our only source’.40 Al-Zayyat offers a different kind of translational narrative – poetry into history – to ground an understanding of 1890s women’s conditions through ‘reading’ earlier eras.

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 379 Al-Zayyat discusses women’s ‘material life’ and ‘cultural/moral life’. He begins with Bedouin ecology: raids into new camel-grazing areas led to abductions of females who might move from man to man until their families retrieved them, whereupon women ‘returned home with shame attached’. Examples follow: women who, despite years with captors, apparently mutual affection and children, fled, returning to natal homes.41 Turning to the practice of burying infant girls [wa’d al-banat], al-Zayyat explains its genesis as fathers’ ‘fear of shame and poverty’, offering examples of the practice, but also of men who resisted it by word or deed: ‘[s]ome Bedouin were otherwise, loving and striving to honour daughters, giving them fine upbringings’.42 Al-Zayyat recuperates ancient Arab history for a girl-friendly modern agenda – and he was not alone, since the Prophet of Islam’s abolishing of wa’d albanat was regarded by nineteenth-century reformers and conservatives alike as demonstrating Islam’s pro-feminine foundation, a recognition that percolated as far as the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where in the Congress of Women, Laura Clark speaking on ‘The Religion of Islam’ noted Muhammad’s many ‘radical and blessed reforms’, including abolishing female infanticide.43 Like Jalal’s concerns, though, al-Zayyat’s interests appear ambiguously circumscribed by a masculinist perspective that views females as emblematic of a national threshold inscribed on the home via the sequestered female body; the threshold blurs, threatens to erupt, as women emerge in the streets. Allusions to contemporary concerns surface. He endeavoured, al-Zayyat explains, to locate information on domestic lives – ‘what household duties she spent her time doing, the task of ordering the home’;44 a common 1890s concept and rhetoric of domesticity, households as sites of management and ordering. Ancient women practised ‘arts of magic’ against which the Qur’an warned.45 This topos echoes contemporary reformers, inveighing against the zar (spirit exorcism). Describing dress, al-Zayyat notes: one of the strangest sights showing how far their interest in [appearance] went is this cushion women of the Europeans and ours place under their gowns at the hip to magnify their backsides: not a European sartorial invention, this comes from practices known to Bedouin women of old, as ‘uzzama, hashiya, rifa‘a.46

380  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT The attention to dress makes sense, given the late 1890s public rhetoric on women in public spaces. Al-Zayyat explains veiling practices in pre-Islamic Arabia as simply the women’s equivalent of men’s litham – the tail of his head wrap, gripped in his teeth, pulled across his lower face. ‘Only when men of passion and whimsy became unable to see a pretty woman without falling in love with her and composing poetry that circulated, did women begin protecting themselves with niqabs curtaining their beautiful features’.47 (He recounts the story of poet al-Nabigha catching glimpses of al-Mutajarrida, wife of al-Nu‘man, King of Hira. Seeing her raise her arm to shield her face, al-Nabigha grew ecstatic at its fullness – it nearly covered her face – and composed a poem celebrating her features. When he began describing her saliva, the king could not repress his irritation.) Al-Zayyat explains niqab as strategic choice: not all ‘free women’ [hara’ir] used it. If afraid of being taken prisoner, a woman removed it to appear as a slave unavailable for the taking:48 a woman’s body was not off-limits, but a man’s property was. Women used this to (limited) advantage. He offers evidence for face-veiling’s variability amongst ancient Bedouin. To attract suitors, girls wanting to marry did not veil: ‘a man wanting marriage could propose based on knowledge and sight, not solely from others’ testimonies. Some of this remained after Islam [came]’.49 His observations resonate against 1890s debates on female embodiment and marriage practices. Contrary to what many believe, he says, ancient Bedouin girls were consulted on their marriage choices, often made their own selection and frequently initiated divorces. This was, he asserts, ‘a good indication of woman’s stature in alJahiliyya, in that her rights approximated man’s. She could divorce him if he treated her badly . . . in this is justice and fairness, as is obvious to all’.50 Nor was beauty the only criterion: many Arab men were most affected by beauty of the self, honourable lineage and discerning intellect, he says, echoing arguments in the press, linked (for instance) to fears that young, educated Egyptian men preferred marrying European women. Proponents of girls’ schooling argued that education would produce attractively educated local wives. Al-Zayyat offered historical precedent. Al-Zayyat criticises extreme practices in testing women’s chastity, noting women’s own fierce care to remain chaste. Yet, Bedouin women’s ‘overwhelming sense of chastity did not keep some women from loving debauch-

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 381 ery and provoking fornication, for no place is free of prostitutes, no nation secure from the bane of them’, even if these prostitutes [mumisat] were ‘negligible’ when set against the overwhelming majority of (ancient) Arab women with their unmatched ‘chastity and intelligence’.51 Gradually, the figure of the ideal woman emerges: history fades into the present. Al-Zayyat’s historical anthropology yields the perfect 1890s woman: al-mar’a al-kamila [the complete woman], not al-mar’a al-jadida [the new woman]. This paragon combines qualities of chastity and self-protection, training in needlework and the belief in its importance (contrary to views that ‘most women disdain such work’), care for reputation and family honour, all resulting from ‘her parent’s good discipline. I single out the [ancient Bedouin] mother: with her moral upbringing she is careful to watch over her daughter’s refinement.’52 Al-Zayyat tackles the sensitive issue of women’s public presence by invoking Bedouin women’s vaunted presence on many a battlefield. Responding to critics of women’s non-domestic work, paralleling the rhetoric in women’s magazine biographies of famous women, he labels such work as selfless acts for community survival, not individual women’s wishes to foster conflict or see blood. Insisting that women share qualities to which men aspire, amongst them generosity and courage, he recognises the fear that generosity with her property will yield generosity with her honour; if ‘courageous’, she will grow accustomed to male heroes’ presence, becoming men’s familiars, no longer curtained from them.53 A generous woman might too readily give away her husband’s wealth. What al-Zayyat thinks of his female contemporaries is only hinted: ‘Perhaps such is true of other women, but not Jahiliyya women’.54 Highlighting hallmarks of medieval misogyny in Arabic letters as unfair, he yet implies that contemporary women do not attain the perfection of his depicted historical figures: No doubt partakers of the small taste I give here . . . will be astonished, contemplating the high stature woman reached in al-Jahiliyya; they will see she was created for something other than satisfying appetites and serving pleasures. She was not man’s plaything nor a shoe to don when he wished, as one early commentator described her. Yet I find many failing to perceive her properly . . . judging all [women] alike, as ignorant . . . the truth will be clear to those with eyes.55

382  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Like Jalal, al-Zayyat elaborates on an historical argument to suggest that present local gender practices are not reflective of ‘local’ (idealised) pasts. Both imply that past practices offer blueprints for the present, with which Europeans could find no fault. But they stop short of urging the latitude they see in past practices for their female compatriots, whom they imply as morally and productively inferior to the ancients. Whatever past the writer chooses – amongst competing ideologically salient pasts, ancient, pre-Islamic or Islamic-era – shapes (and likely was chosen for) his argument about gender in the present, and yet whatever the choice, contemporary women somehow never measure up. Islam and the Orientalists Shaykh Hamza Fathallah sets his more formally conventional treatise within Islamic history, pinpointing shari‘a as the institution controlling human passions. Only a knowledgeable Islamic society will be a strong one; the Prophet emphasised seeking knowledge, but now, Fathallah laments, Muslims are ‘guests and dependents’ on Europeans for knowledge, even in the Arabic tongue. Fathallah acknowledges European orientalist scholarship, while articulating his concern to dispel the misunderstandings it propagates and his desire to seize for himself the role of knowledge–producer. Like Jalal, Fathallah takes on European interlocutors, while invoking a local audience. Both conceived their projects in dialogue with European scholarship and in contexts of travel to Europe. But the dialogue with local interlocutors is primary. Fathallah addresses an explicitly male but differentiated audience: speaking to Arab peers on questions of marriage and sexual practices, when he speaks on women’s status more generally, he is also (or more so) addressing men attending the 1889 Stockholm Orientalist Congress. The genesis of Fathallah’s work suggests the intensity and reach of debates over Islam, femininity and national vigour: how vital a topic of contestation it was between local and imperial audiences. When ‘Ali Mubarak assumed the Directorate of Education, our shaykh explains, he appointed Fathallah to teach Arabic at Dar al-‘Ulum and publish his lessons at the government’s expense for inclusion in the curriculum. ‘It was my intention to limit myself to [that project]’, he declared,

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 383 had the one whose gesture is a command not signalled that I must write something on women in Islam, their care and treatment and what the pure shari‘a stipulates of their rights, repelling fancies of some ignorant foreigners that women in the shari‘a of Islam are like beasts or grazing cattle, untended, uncared-for, never welcomed, neither here nor there.56

Intriguingly, Fathallah never names the source of this request. Likely it was Mubarak or the prime minister, possibly even the Khedive. The title page announces that the book ‘was published by order of His Eminence, Prime Minister Mustafa Riyad Pasha’. At the highest levels of government, it seems, there was interest in producing such a book. Bakura echoes bikr [virgin], from the same linguistic root, playing on the book’s topic; moreover, in 1891, this was nearly virgin discursive territory. The title hints at an awareness that ‘women’ constitute an issue both important and insufficiently addressed; moreover, one crucial to foreign policy. Similar interactions and concerns yielded Qasim Amin’s first book, a defensive response to the Duc d’Harcourt’s grim 1880s portrait of Egyptian society (and women).57 Amin wrote in French, Fathallah in Arabic. The latter’s primary sense of audience comprises local (and transnationally Muslim) men, but he negotiates a double audience. Fathallah’s prefatory invocation, exceeding (both in length and elaboration) Jalal’s and al-Zayyat’s, is as motivated as theirs. Praising ‘God who created the married pair, male and female, and gave everything its nature’,58 Fathallah launches into analysis of human nature and the body–soul split. In most humans, the body triumphs, but ‘the magnanimous Muslim community and Muhammad’s pure shari‘a form the decisive [cure] for these sicknesses, most healthful among remedies’.59 Fathallah sets out a conventional worldview: God’s will is to populate the earth; the species depends on marriage, a careful and balanced exploitation of resources and moderation. Addressing men, he elaborates on the metaphor of tilling and sowing the earth, drawing on hadith and historical anecdotes, adducing evidence from European travel literature that ancient Arabs were as interested as others in ‘imran [populating and building society].60 This is but one example of how Fathallah, critical of European writings on Arabs, Islam and Egypt, also draws on them. Fathallah turns to issues of pleasure [lazza], defined as: ‘attainment of

384  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT what is desired’. He elaborates on its subcategories: intellectual, having to do with the imaginary, and physical, including sexual pleasure and its relation to appetite or lust [shahwa]. The shari‘a channels human desire, creating a flourishing moral society. The pious Muslim shows a love of God by increasing the number of humans on earth; shows a love of the Prophet by increasing numbers of people who honour him; and works toward blessed status by producing pious children. God created humans, both male and female, and gave them tools: ‘proof [of God’s deliberate creation of sexual desire in male and female] is written on these body parts’.61 Fathallah turns to pre-Islamic practices only as a foil: killing infant girls was prohibited, because it might reduce lives – not just infant girls’ lives, but infant girls’ later potential pregnancies. Jealousy is aroused by imperatives of ‘honouring what is sacred’ – women – whom God created as ‘a safekeeping for the human [man!]’ [siyanatan lilinsan].62 Invoking (sexual) desire, Fathallah urges men to be moderate. One must not suspect the worst or spy into the hidden; the Messenger forbade men to follow and peer at women.63 The solution lay in females’ spatial siting: avoid jealousy by not allowing women to see unrelated men or go out to markets: Trained upbringing (tarbiya) is not on its own a preventive against corruption because it is not strong enough to prevail over hearts of fine men nor does it demolish the forces of appetite – for these are instinctual – nor repel their willfulness when provoked.64

Fathallah cites a European historian, who he claims showed how men and women with the most elevated tarbiya and furthest reaches of knowledge . . . found that the willfulness of their desires rebelled against tarbiya’s restraints, throwing them into chasms of behaviour which ears are loathe to hear . . . In France seventy-one of every hundred men are adulterers, and ninety of every hundred women have been abandoned, says its official gazette.65

Thus, Fathallah declares gendered seclusion (of women) a first principle on logical grounds (as antidote to horrific developments reported from Europe) and because, as stipulated by the sunna, ‘the Messenger of God’s Companions blocked window holes lest women gaze out at men’.66 Bakura does not address

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 385 the possibility of changing men’s practices. Unlike al-Zayyat, Fathallah does not note women’s capacity for guarding their own probity. None of these authors mentions that women were beginning to air their own views in print, for instance, on tarbiya – a ubiquitous if variously defined concept then, central to modern understandings of gender and social organisation. A nation was unthinkable without tarbiya, which encompassed the moral, aesthetic and bodily training that the young (should have) received at home, as well as in educational institutions, as a necessary prerequisite and corollary of academic learning [ta‘lim]. Repeatedly, Fathallah emphasises imperatives of good treatment and fairness, provision of all household needs and gentleness, as he assumes the rightness of prevailing (though declining) seclusion practices. ‘All that is required of her is settling there, staying in his home, not going out unless with his permission.’ The Prophet stipulated the ideal female marriage partner as possessed of religion over beauty, name or property; if all qualities are present, so much the better. A father choosing a husband for his daughter should seek ‘a man who fears God; if he loves her he will honour her, and if he despises her he will not wrong her’. Better to choose a spouse outside the family, for stronger progeny and because sexual desire is weak toward family members. (That the Prophet’s daughter Fatima married cousin ‘Ali was God’s choice, he adds hastily.)67 Fathallah thus privileges sexual attraction over intra-family emotional ties. He cites the Prophet’s reported marriage practices and advice, including advising partaking in sexual intercourse at the start of the night, before the odours of the stomach hover around the mouth and nose, ‘possibly causing loathing’. Adab toward one’s wife also means ‘not performing that thing suddenly but only after preliminary play and pleasantry until what he wants happens, which is wise because then she likes having from him what he likes having from her’.68 Sexual desire might lie behind polygyny, he all but admits, rather than considerations of procreation or support for females without guardians. Bakurat al-kalam does not avoid issues of sexual pleasure, including its benefits and dangers, nor does it deny that women’s sexual appetites are equal to men’s. Such forthrightness on the primacy of sexual desire and etiquette in the marriage bed is less evident in later writings on marriage. Perhaps Fathallah assumed a male-only audience, whereas later authors could not. Indeed, Fathallah’s chapter on how to treat women

386  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT is addressed unequivocally to men. Keen though we may be to explore the extent of female reading audiences, we must recognise the masculine orientation of most writings on gender in this decade (including Amin’s books) in their construction of audience and approach. Fathallah’s chapter on the care of women is a discourse on ‘them’, documenting sympathy but distance towards othered beings, objects more than interlocutors. But does Fathallah switch audiences? If not between genders, then within the masculine world? In his ‘Chapter on Tarbiya’, he notes his purpose: ‘refuting what some think: that there is no tarbiya among Muslims, especially girls’. These thinkers base their views on ‘our ignorant ones who have abandoned the faith’. His target audience earlier in the book seemed to be these ‘ignorant ones’: Muslims ‘who do not know the shari‘a, especially its words on honourable morals and rules of treatment’.69 Yet not only Muslim men are target addressees, and these ‘ignorant ones’ suddenly seem more target than addressee, for here are outsiders who witness the bad deeds, corrupt morals and transgressions of social honour they see amongst the ignorant . . . and think these reprehensible practices are stipulated by shari‘a and Qur’an. They conclude that this Islamic faith . . . stands for destruction and ruin . . . and all else they accuse it of when it is innocent . . . they are right to notice these reprehensible practices but wrong to ascribe them to Islam. As for the fine men who know shari‘a, our words are not directed to them.70

The shari‘a ‘is something other than what is done with it. We are talking about what it stipulates, regardless of how it is used’.71 Fathallah is in good company: this is the ground on which Muhammad ‘Abduh and Qasim Amin operated in propounding reforms, though Fathallah’s proposed outcomes differ from Amin’s. Fathallah warns against overenthusiasm about European ways. He does not urge girls’ formal education, but ‘we do not contest permitting females to learn writing, as long as it does not cause corrupt behaviour’ (presumably a reference to the fear that females who could write would inscribe letters to potential lovers, an oft-repeated worry in writings from the 1890s on).72 He cites often-mentioned precedents from the Prophet’s milieu – women who taught writing, wives of the Prophet who wrote. He notes early Muslim wom-

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 387 en’s battlefield roles and women’s ability (Jahiliyya and later) to rule; ‘good managers, they undertook burdens of state in the best possible manner’.73 He warns against thinking that memorising the Qur’an suffices: females, too, need to understand it, so they might need to study relevant sciences. Though calling his treatise a bakura, Fathallah seems aware of joining a debate in progress. But where is the crux of the debate situated? For, returning to seclusion and veiling, Fathallah seems intent on attacking an unnamed but specific and different adversary and claiming a spokesperson’s role based on collective communal identity. ‘Let me remind you that not all you see Muslim men and Muslim women doing is in accord with the religion’. The tone heightens to vexation approaching diatribe: ‘You are preoccupied with women sharing in worldly affairs with men. Well, it is fine for them to voluntarily help their husbands’. Early Muslim women did so, with ‘appropriate’ work: ‘spinning, weaving, sewing and similar pursuits that aided men, but none necessitated degradation [ibtidhal] or absence of hijab’.74 He elaborates on ‘differences by nature’ between the sexes as a basis for criticising European projects: women were created for gentleness and repose, preservation and care . . . men for work, effort, tribulation . . . and thus they were in charge of [qawwumun ‘ala] women as the Cherished Book says . . . For so long, the efforts of extreme Europeans endeavouring to put women in higher positions and treating them entirely like men have failed, because this is against creation which they call nature.75

Fathallah is both steeped in the earlier jurisprudence on marriage and seclusion and very up-to-date in his formulations and references. He cites French sociologist Gustave Le Bon on the deleterious effects of ‘European training in the colonies’ and notes Europeans’ ‘extreme injustice’ to women, citing Fénelon, Molière, de Maintenon and Rousseau, summarised from the popularising journal al-Muqtataf.76 Thus, his treatise on shari‘a is also a commentary directed outward that both critiques European-provenant practices and defends Islam against external detractors, using (alleged) gender practices cross-culturally to distinguish the morally acceptable from the reprehensible and dangerous. Fathallah says that he finished the treatise in Paris, then made a clean

388  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT copy ‘in the city of London in the state of the English in the early morning of Thursday 25th Dhu al-hijra 1306 [22 August 1889]’. (Bukra [early morning] echoes the title’s allusion to a first or early discourse on women’s rights.) A second copy he submitted as a ‘gift’ to the Eighth Orientalist Congress in Stockholm in September 1889. This (the printed book) was completed on Thursday 14 Dhu al-Hijja 1307 (1 August 1890) in Alexandria, ‘[p]raise God first and last’.77 A finale offers a glimpse into a multilingual, multi-origin encounter defining the salience of the issue that Fathallah had been asked to address. When I presented this book of mine to the aforementioned conference, in its Arabic section . . . that day’s section chair, His Eminence renowned scholar Ahmad Midhat Efendi, head of the Ottoman delegation . . . ­extemporised an eloquent oration in French praising this book. Stockholm newspaper reproduced it – the entire French text, even though the newspaper is in Swedish – in No. 205, of 4 September 1889. The English Times summarised it . . . the speech was arabised in our official newspaper al-Waqa’i’ [al-misriyya] early November 1889 with the response of King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway, His Majesty’s graceful acceptance of our participation, and our poem concluding the conference . . . I decided to append [here] the arabisation of [Midhat’s] praise, the king’s response, and the aforementioned ode, in response to our dear friends’ wishes.78

In fact, the newspaper does not seem to have published it, at least not on the above-mentioned date: that day’s issue of Stockholms Nyheter (which is no. 205) contains only brief mention of the congress, which would have been of interest to the city elite at the time.79 What is important, though, is that Midhat’s oration elaborates on Fathallah’s doubled audience as it captures the context of first reception, while the text was still in manuscript form: This Arabic section requested me eagerly to elucidate merits of my friend the shaykh’s composition and he gave me leave. Though many honourable European men [here] know the Arabic language and strive over it, when articulated by a shaykh of Arab origin who speaks eloquently and swiftly it might be hard to comprehend, as they are unused to hearing Arabic from shuyukh of this rank . . .

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 389 ‘Alim Shaykh Hamza, with his composition on issues pertaining to Muslim women, their duties and the rights they have, has garnered glory and attained ever greater honour by solving this riddle, revealing what has remained obscure and invisible, detecting what had gone astray though persistently searched for, and which remains a long-cherished end for Europe: yet still it has found no answer. As you know, only recently Europe turned attention to researching matters of the East, having seen it before as merely an unknown image or soulless skeleton, not giving it particular concern or striving to understand its reality, as any careful scholar must. As for Europe’s ancient scholars, they expended their energies and exhausted themselves claiming one could not possibly imagine the Muslim woman as anything but a plaything for recreation, a contrivance for adornment and the beauties of the east; her only use was in the service of lust. In sum, according to them, the Muslim woman could not be mistress of a home, manager of a household, matron of a family establishment, or raiser of children, but only a lascivious, libidinous instrument for satisfying her husband’s or master’s animal desires and psychological needs. They did not realise that if the Muslim woman were really as they said, the East – whence [Europe’s] sun rises and its earliest cradle emerges – would not merit their concern nor match the ambitions of their gazes toward it, their enlightened mental work or their efforts expended in investigating all pertaining to it. If that were so, what could possibly be anticipated from its sons, formed from an implement of lust or pretty plaything? Can the rearing of a woman denuded – they seemingly believe – of every virtue but that lustful aim, produce sound sons prepared for high government posts, skilled military leaders, distinguished scholars, eloquent poets, brilliant scientific thinkers and so forth? Yet Europe, substantiating for itself the East’s conditions after long investigation . . . finds it worthy of attention. It has become the focus of ambition where gazes turn . . . Astounded and pleased, Europe congratulates itself for its efforts . . .80

Midhat’s address turns even more directly to orientalists and their societies, characterised not by the sexual lust they assume governs ‘Eastern’ societies, but by power lust and a desire to possess ‘the East’ itself: No, no! Such a yield could not be hoped for from a mere instrument of lust. Thus the East has not been object and site of your research, endpoint

390  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT of your striving [ijtihad],81 that which you address in words recited by your ancients and your moderns, but for the virtues of its fine sons, born in [the East] of women who are not as your poets reckon them but rather as described by my friend, the scholar Shaykh Hamza in his small book.82

Using Fathallah’s project, Ahmad Midhat challenges the imperial enterprise, suggesting that scorn for ‘Eastern’ women (and their treatment by Eastern men) was a helpful (yet materially erroneous) discourse in satisfying their eager greed for the East’s skills and riches. These Eastern men and these skills and riches, Midhat points out, would not exist without strong and able women. He highlights a core contradiction in Europe’s prevailing view of the East, shaped by an understanding of gender relations. Introducing his colleague’s treatise and urging its translation, he sets gender politics at the heart of the imperial–imperialised encounter. And while this book and its author are sited in Egypt, Midhat’s involvement shows a larger circuitry of debate, between Ottoman Istanbul, Egypt and Europe. In understanding the intellectual map of 1890s Egypt, we cannot ignore this broader discursive network. Midhat’s intervention underscores the doubled audience for this debate in this decade: doubled yet entirely masculine, a very particular audience that comprises both local elite males and non-Arab but Arabophone interlocutors, hailed through direct address. There is also a sense that this audience of Arabophone Westerners is ‘listening in’, following such debates with interest and perhaps interjecting commentary, at least through their own writings. This is not yet a sense of invasion of the culture or the text, but it is a sense perhaps of being monitored by these inside–outsiders. This doubled audience, in turn, intensifies the pressure of address with regards not to audience, but to topic – that is, the obligation to address ‘the woman question’. To understand the primacy and sensitivity of gender as a topic for Arab politicians and intellectuals of the 1890s, we must consider the rhetorical harmonics of the decade, when growing unease about European imperial might was in place, but had not yet generated a fully-fledged nationalist movement; when some elite men saw themselves as intellectual peers of European interlocutors, yet recognised their uncomfortable positioning within a contentious field of power relations governed by imperial interests

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 391 and presence. ‘Woman’, as a node of meaning, served as discursive shorthand in this contestatory field; ‘woman’ signified more than gender relations, even as it named the political centrality of gender and sexuality to nation formation. Not only in Egypt, either: for in Europe, the 1890s were the decade of the New Woman – a ‘novelty’ that many European men (and women) did not welcome, an icon in public discourse embodying variously the threats and the possibilities that the fin de siècle seemed to promise. Those in Stockholm, whether Arab or European, may well have had shared anxieties about what some women were beginning to demand and do and how and where they were visible, whether in Cairo, London, Stockholm or Paris, whether in the streets or (perhaps more often) as a sustained discursive presence in the press. For late-Victorian Britain, the New Woman as image could ‘mark an apocalyptic warning of the dangers of sexual degeneracy, the abandonment of motherhood, and consequent risk to the racial future of England’.83 Discursive touchstone and political imperative: interrelated in discourse, ‘woman’ fuses two distinct if entangled audiences. Recognising this dual (and overtly male) audience, might we recast the late twentieth-century debate over whether Qasim Amin was a Lord Cromer crony?84 Amin, as much as these writers, had to face two audiences: a local, mostly male intelligentsia and scholar–bureaucrats of Europe (with varying knowledges and outlooks, as Midhat recognised explicitly and cunningly in his Stockholm address). I suggest that with the new century, gender became increasingly a local issue embedded in nationalist politics, where ‘the transnational’ was more target than audience and ‘encounter’ was more theme than structure of textual address (although this is not to deny local resonances amongst the small knots of intellectuals clustered in the intellectual capitals of Arab societies before this decade). This also offers a new perspective for considering women as writing and reading participants in debate. Scholars have speculated that women writing on gender in 1890s to 1920s Egypt spoke from, and to, experience more than from, or for, an abstract political programme (though we must not assume gendered preferences).85 Perhaps, rather, women saw their interests served best through staking local claims. Perhaps intellectual comfort, rhetorical strategies and practical reasons were all entailed: women were not party to orientalist congresses. That was a job for the men.

392  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT These works show a consciousness of joining a debate in progress and yet doing something new. There is a sense of history writing’s importance to the nation’s formative needs and even of gender history as inescapably, politically central. If, as Tony Gorman argues, ‘the bureaucrat–historians in Egypt, the so-called ‘amateurs’ of the nineteenth century, were the forerunners of the academic historian . . . in their relationship to political authority’,86 these three men, lodged professionally in the law, teacher education and probably journalism, are both representative of, and somewhat tangential to, this early strand of history writing in the modern era. None produced a ‘major’ history; indeed, had they regarded their enterprise as that of a historian, they probably would not have written women’s history. Fathallah comes closest, his career not unlike those of the ‘bureaucrat–historians’ who produced modern Egypt’s earliest national histories. Clearly, he had strong ties at the pinnacle of bureaucratic Egypt and was trusted to make this intervention: to write women’s history as an act of informal diplomacy through the channels of orientalist scholarship and its conferencing. Yet this book was a departure for Fathallah; professionally, he needed to (and did) produce works on grammar and belles-lettres. Of course, service in a variety of roles and production across what we now see as distinct academic disciplines was typical of the scholar–bureaucrat. Thus, while Fathallah was asked from within government circles to write his treatise, he did so as a traditionally trained Islamic scholar of language arts. His book, combining historical narrative, social commentary and informal exegesis, and written both for elite male readers in Egypt and critics of the Egyptian nation beyond it adheres firmly to a nascent nationalist and nation-state focused framework: like Jalal’s, in particular, it is generated by concerns about the nation and a desire for reform that would enhance its unity. Indeed, women as potentially disruptive forces within the nation – by threatening the unity and integrity of its familial microcosm and by aspiring to feminist demands, whether in Europe or in Egypt – are as much objects of chastisement as subjects of history. Furthermore, gender history inevitably conjures a dual (though rhetorically homosocial) audience for these men, who write simultaneously to their mates and peers, both in Europe and locally. Addressing entangled but distinct audiences of elite men, Jalal, al-Zayyat and Fathallah find them-

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 393 selves called upon to ponder the primacy of gender to sociopolitical organisation everywhere, not to mention the expanding demands and visibilities of women, hovering half-concealed on the margins of these ‘manly’ texts. Notes   1. This was implicitly noted in the very fact of early work on women’s journals and women writers; see, for instance, Thomas Philipp, ‘Feminism and Nationalist Politics in Egypt’, in Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (eds), Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 277–94. It is by now widely recognised. For a few representative notations of it, see Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 14–19; Marilyn Booth, May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 23; Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 (Edinburgh and Syracuse, NY: Edinburgh University Press/Syracuse University Press, 2012), pp. xxiii– v; Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesvillle, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), p. 83.   2. On representations of women as troublesome presences in back-page reports, see Marilyn Booth, ‘Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s’, in Anthony Gorman and Didier Monciaud (eds), Between Politics, Society and Culture: The Press in the Middle East before Independence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). On fiction, see Paul Starkey’s chapter in this volume; Orit Bashkin, ‘Harems, Women and Political Tyranny in the Works of Jurji Zaydan’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 290–318; Marilyn Booth, ‘Fiction’s Imaginative Archive and the Newspaper’s Local Scandals: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Egypt’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 274–95.   3. ‘Ali Jalal, Mahasin athar al-awwaliyyin, fima lil-nisa’ wa ma ‘alayhinna fi qawanin qudama’ al-misriyyin (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-khayriyya, ah 1308 [1890–1 ce]).   4. Habib Afandi al-Zayyat al-Dimashqi, al-Mar’a fi al-jahiliyya (al-Fajalla [Cairo]: Matba‘at al-ma‘arif, [1899] n. d.). ‘Printed for al-Diya’s subscribers 1898–9, as its annual gift to them. This treatise is not for sale nor found in bookstores’.

394  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT   5. Hamza Fathallah, Bakurat al-kalam ‘ala huquq al-nisa’ fi al-Islam (Bulaq Misr: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya, ah 1308 [1890–1 ce]). My translation attempts to capture the rhyming prose characteristic of book titles at this time; a more literal rendering would be ‘First word/discussion on the rights of women in Islam’.  6. Jalal has family cachet, calling himself ‘al-Husayni’ (descended from the Prophet’s grandson). He datelines his introduction Asyut, Friday, 23 Rajab 1307 [15 March 1890].   7. On ‘Ali Jalal al-Husayni, see Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli, al-A‘lam: Qamus tarajim li-ashhar al-rijal wa al-nisa’ min al-‘Arab wa al-musta‘ribin wa al-mustashriqin, vol. 4 (Beirut: Dar al-‘ulum lil-malayin, 1980), p. 269.   8. Information drawn from ‘Ayda Nusayr, al-Kutub al-‘arabiyya alati nushirat fi Misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashara (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1990), pp. 80, 129, 131, 156, 172, 190, 214. Born in Alexandria to a father whose name suggests an Islamically elite pedigree and also intra-regional immigration (al-Sayyid Husayn b. Muhammad Sharif al-Tunisi), Fathallah was educated at al-Azhar, spent time in Tunis as a journalist, returned to Alexandria and was involved in journal publication before being hired by the Ministry of Education, from which he retired after thirty years’ service (al-Zirikli, al-A‘lam 2: 280).  9. Butrus al-Bustani, Khitab fi al-hay’a al-ijtima‘iyya wa al-muqabala bayna al‘awa’id al-‘arabiyya wa al-ifranjiyya (Beirut: Matba‘at al-ma‘arif, 1869), p. 10. 10. Al-Bustani, Khitab, p. 11. 11. Statistics drawn from my research over the years and from: Filib di Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya, vol. 4 (Beirut: al-Matba‘a al-adabiyya, 1913–14); Yusuf Q. Khuri and ‘Ali Dhu al-Faqqar Shakir (eds), Mudawwanat al-sihafa al-‘arabiyya, vol. 1 (Beirut: Ma‘had al-inma’ al-‘arabi, 1985); Qustaki ‘Attara, Tarikh takwin al-suhuf al-misriyya (Alexandria: Matba‘at al-taqaddum, 1928); Ibrahim ‘Abduh, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-misriyya 1798–1951 (Cairo: Maktabat al-adab, 1944); and online at: http://www.zmo.de/jaraid/index.html (accessed 14 January 2014). 12. Ami Ayalon, ‘Private Publishing in the Nah∂a’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40: 4 (2008), pp. 562–3. 13. Al-Bustani, Khitab, pp. 33–4. 14. ‘Ta‘lim al-nisa’, delivered 14 December 1849, appeared in A‘mal al-jam‘iyya al-suriyya (1862) and al-Bustani’s periodical al-Jinan (vol.) 12. I use Fu’ad Ifram al-Bustani (ed.), al-Mu‘allim Butrus al-Bustani: Ta‘lim al-nisa’; Adab al-‘Arab; Dars wa-muntakhabat (Beirut: al-Matba‘a al-kathulukiyya, 1929), pp. 1–24.

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 395 15. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 2. All translations from Arabic and French are my own. 16. For example, Muhammad ‘Urfi, Kitab al-isfar ‘an fawayid [sic] al-asfar (Cairo: Matba‘at al-ra’y al-‘amm, 1894); Ahmad Zaki, al-Safar ila al-mu’tamar (Bulaq: al-Matba‘a al-kubra al-amiriyya, 1893). 17. Booth, May Her Likes. On biography and history in the 1890s, see Marilyn Booth, Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces: Writing Feminist History through Biography in Fin-de-Siècle Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 18. I thank Orit Bashkin for pointing this out and for her helpful comments throughout. 19. Georges Paturet, La condition juridique de la femme dans l’ancienne Égypte (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1886; facsimile reprint edn, Elibron Classics, 2006). 20. The original, bearing L’École du Louvre’s imprimatur, reproduces a forty-four page letter from Professor M. Revillout, to whom Paturet dedicates his book. Paturet mentions several years’ study there; see Paturet, Condition, p. 4. 21. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 2. Traces [athar] is also ‘writings’, ‘legacies’. 22. Marilyn Booth, ‘Islamic Politics and John Stuart Mill: Street Literature, Translation and Gender Activism in Egypt’, Feminist Studies 39: 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 1–32. 23. Paturet, Condition, p. 5 (also pp. 37, 41); Jalal, Mahasin, p. 3 (also pp. 21, 34). 24. I am indebted to Kenneth Cuno for pointing this out in his own ongoing research. 25. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 3. 26. Paturet, Condition, p. 6. 27. Paturet, Condition, p. 7; Jalal, Mahasin, p. 3. 28. Paturet, Condition, p. 17; Jalal, Mahasin, p. 10. 29. Paturet, Condition, p. 18; Jalal, Mahasin, p. 10. 30. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 11; Paturet, Condition, pp. 18–19. 31. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 20; Paturet, Condition, p. 33. 32. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 35. 33. I am indebted to Kenneth Cuno for this point. See H. D. Lewis, ‘The Legal Status of Women in Nineteenth Century France’, Journal of European Studies 10: 3 (1980), pp. 178–88. Perhaps Paturet was following the lead of earlier commentators, such as Paul Gide, Étude sur la condition privée de la femme dans le droit ancien et moderne et en particulier sur le Sénatus-consulte velléien (Paris: Durand et Pédone-Lauriel/Ernest Thorin, 1867).

396  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 34. Paturet, Condition, p. 43. 35. Paturet, Condition, p. 62. Emphasis in the original. 36. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 36. 37. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 38; Paturet, Condition, p. 66. 38. Jalal, Mahasin, p. 38. 39. ’Al-Murasalat’, Al-Mu’ayyad 1: 12 (18 December 1889), p. 3; Booth, ‘Disruptions of the Local’. 40. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 2. 41. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 5. 42. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, pp. 6, 8–9. 43. Laura H. Clark, ‘The Faith of Islam’, in Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (ed.), The Congress of Women, 2 vols (Chicago, IL: official edn, published by authority of the Board of Lady Managers, 1894; Milton Keynes: reprint edn, Dodo Press, n. d.), vol. II, pp. 173–9; quote, p. 173. 44. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 9. 45. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, pp. 10–11. 46. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 12. 47. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 16. 48. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 17. 49. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 17. 50. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 23. 51. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, pp. 30, 31, 33. 52. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, pp. 33–5; quote, p. 34. 53. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, pp. 37–8. 54. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 38. 55. Al-Zayyat, al-Mar’a, p. 40. 56. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 5. His Arabic grammar text, al-Mawahib al-Fathiyya fi ‘ulum al-lugha al-‘arabiyya, was published the next year (ah 1309/1891 ce) with the Bulaq (government) Press and also with Matba‘at Madrasat al-funun wa alsana’i‘. It was reissued at Bulaq in ah 1312/1894 ce (Nusayr, al-Kutub, pp. 131, 156). 57. Kassem-Amin, Les Égyptiens: Réponse á M. le Duc d’Harcourt (Cairo: Jules Barbier, 1894). 58. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 2. 59. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 3. 60. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 9. 61. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 23.

w rit ing women’s hi story i n 1 8 9 0 s e gy p t | 397 62. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 12. 63. Awrat al-nisa’ [women’s private parts], comprising the entire body or all but face and hands; for some, this includes a woman’s voice, too. 64. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 12. 65. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 12. 66. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 12. 67. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 27. 68. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 30. 69. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 32. 70. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 32. 71. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 33. 72. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 44. 73. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 46. 74. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 61. 75. Fathallah, Bakura, pp. 61–2. 76. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 65, mentioning the journal, but giving no specific article reference. 77. Fathallah, Bakura, pp. 94–5, title page. 78. Fathallah, Bakura, p. 95. 79. I am grateful to Tetz Rooke for checking this. It has not yet been possible to check other dates. 80. Fathallah, Bakura, pp. 95–6. 81. Ijtihad appears in the Arabic translation of Midhat’s original French speech, which I have not located. It is probably used here not as a legal category or doctrinal imperative, but in the more secularised (but still religiously salient and resonant) sense that was just emerging at the time. On Midhat, see A. Holly Shissler, ‘The Harem as the Seat of Middle-Class Industry and Morality: The Fiction of Ahmet Midhat Efendi’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 319–41. On Midhat’s support for women writers – via his help and encouragement to Turkish writer Fatima Aliye – see Booth, Classes of Ladies of Cloistered Spaces, Chapter 3. 82. Fathallah, Bakura, pp. 96–7. 83. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction: Reading the “Fin de Siècle”’, in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900 (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xiii.

398  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT 84. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), Chapter 8. 85. Booth, May Her Likes; Badran, Feminists, pp. 16–17. 86. Anthony Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation (London and New York, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2003), p. 11.

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Index

Abaza, Isma‘il, 302 ‘Abbas Hilmi I (Viceroy of Egypt), 92 ‘Abbas Hilmi II (Khedive of Egypt), 5, 11, 118, 132–5, 190n, 226, 263, 268, 271–3 ‘Abbas, Ra’uf, 11, 80n ‘Abd al-Hamid II (Ottoman Sultan), 317 ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Mikha’il, 120 ‘Abduh, Muhammad, 5, 8, 83n, 124, 293, 308n, 323, 386 Abu al-Futuh, ‘Ali, 8 Abu Islah see Kyrillos IV Abu Shama, Shihab al-Din, 356 Adam, Juliette, 273 adultery, 198, 204–6, 208, 211, 344 afandiyya see effendis Afghani, Jamal al-Din al-, 83n, 313n, 322, 356 agricultural roads, 6, 16, 57–79 agriculture, 5, 58, 60–2, 65, 70, 72, 78, 79n, 82n statistics on, 34, 145 see also Ministry of Ahram, al-, 9, 212, 250n, 300, 302, 303, 312n, 313n, 322, 369 al-Azhar (University), 93, 120–1, 128, 270, 304–5, 322 alcohol, 44, 45–6, 203–4, 211, 257–8, 297, 303, 345, 378 Alexandria, 1, 4–5, 7, 16, 18, 31–3, 35–47, 60, 91–2, 153, 158, 175, 179, 195, 198–9, 215, 292, 322, 327, 347, 368, 369, 388, 394n anarchists in, 222–46, 252n British Consulate in, 16, 31–47, 48n, 52n, 54n, 263 Greeks in, 254–5, 258–63, 267–8, 271–4

Municipality of, 7, 39, 237–40, 272 Native Court in, 174–5 population of 36–7, 38–9, 254, 258–60 Algeria, 182, 202, 325 Americans in Egypt, 91–2, 129, 209, 321–2 Amin, Qasim, 7, 8, 211, 365, 366, 383, 386, 391 anarchists and anarchism, 6, 18, 22–3, 222–46 Anglican Church Missionary Society, 91, 123 anti-Semitism, 315, 320, 328, 335–6 Antoniadis family, 260 John, 262 Antun, Farah, 8, 10, 20 as novelist, 327–36 education and career of, 312–13, 315 writings and outlook of, 323–7 Arabic language, 1, 144, 362n, 383, 388 anarchists’ use of, 234–5, 241 in education, 88–9, 93–4, 97, 107, 108, 120, 234–5, 346 see also translation Archives, Egyptian, 12, 19, 95, 174, 304–5 Arghul, al-, 209, 370 Armanios, Febe, 121 Armenian language, 245 Armenians of Egypt, 52n, 93, 253 Artin, Ya‘qub, 91, 92, 96, 98, 99, 100, 113n ‘Ashmawi, Sayyid, 255 Association of Shoemakers, 233 Assyrian Empire, 326 Aswan, 158, 289 Aswan Dam, 6 Asyut, 158, 178, 191n, 367 autobiography see memoirs and autobiographies

430

i ndex | 431 autopsies, 39–44, 46 Averoff family, 255 George, 260, 266–9, 276 ‘Awad, Girgis Filuthawus, 122 awqaf see waqf Ayalon, Ami, 369 Azbakiyya, al- (Cairo), 120, 212, 215 ‘Azuz, Tawfiq, 235 Badran, ‘Abduh, 235 Bahariyya (oasis), 176–8, 191n Bakunin, Mikhail, 222–3 Ballas, Shim‘on, 328 bankruptcy and indebtedness of individuals, 203–4, 268, 300 of the Egyptian state, 3, 65, 91, 312n of villages, 293 Barakat, ‘Abdallah, 289–92, 299–300, 308n Barakat, ‘Ali, 11, 80n Barakat, ‘Atif, 99, 100, 106, 108, 114n, 301 Barakat, Dawud, 212 Barakat, Fathallah Pasha, 19, 287–307 career of, 293–4, 297–9, 302, 304–5, 307 childhood and education of, 289–93, 300–1, 306 memoirs of 287–9, 296–302, 304–7 Baring, Evelyn see Cromer Barrada, Ahmad, 99 Bashir, Amir, 352–5 Basili, Butrus Effendi, 129 Bedouin, 173–88, 190n, 378–82 Beirut 10, 343, 346–7, 348, 369 Bell, Andrew, 91 Benakis, Emmanuel, 263, 267; see also Choremis-Benakis family Benton, Lauren, 171–2, 179 Berque, Jacques, 64–5 Bhabha, Homi, 256 Bible, the, 202, 321, 334 Bishri, Salim al-, 305 Blandini, Francesco, 227 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 169–70, 188n, 258, 262, 312n Bodin, Jean, 171 Booth, Marilyn, 210, 313n, 319, 327 Borough Road Training College (Isleworth, UK), 87–8, 92, 94–5, 98–106, 108, 113n, 114n Boyle, Harry, 5, 212 British Empire, 21–2, 32–3, 36, 64n, 107, 125, 200, 209, 267, 319, 334 British subjects in Egypt, 16, 21, 31–47, 51n, 97, 200, 254 marriages of, 37, 44, 47, 50n population of, 36–7 see also death, Great Britain brothels, 196–7, 200–1, 203–5, 207–8, 212, 214–15

Brown, Nathan, 142, 189n Brown, R. Hanbury, 63 Buhayra (province), 73, 74, 174, 179, 186, 289 Burtuqalis Bey, 212–13 Bustani, Butrus al-, 351, 365, 369, 370 Bustani, Salim al-, 351 Butcher, Edith, 123, 129 Byzantines, 318–19, 327, 329–36 Cairo, 1, 7, 8, 21, 60, 82n, 91–2, 99, 120–1, 123, 127, 128, 150, 152, 158, 159, 182, 195 anarchists in, 227, 229–30, 23–6, 243–5 Citadel of, 353 Fathallah Barakat in, 293–4, 300 Greeks in, 258, 263 in historiography, 17, 170 labour activism in, 223, 225, 232–3 population in, 37, 254 publishing in, 369 Renan in, 322 sex work in, 196–9, 205, 209, 211–12, 215–16, 221n Young Turks in, 317 Zaydan in, 347–8, 357 canals, 36, 55n, 57, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 70, 72, 73, 79, 82n, 149; see also Suez Canal Canivet, Raoul, 234 Capitulations, 13, 19, 41, 54n, 201, 205–7, 212–13, 215, 225, 254–9, 264, 270 Catholics in Egypt, 37, 51n in the Ottoman Empire, 325 Cavafy, C. P., 255, 266, 274 cemeteries and burial, 42, 44, 45, 52n, 243–5; see also autopsies censorship, 9, 10, 315, 342 censuses, 38–9, 51n, 151–2, 159, 181, 254, 278n Chalcraft, John, 83n, 309n, 313n Choremis-Benakis family, 255, 260 Chrysostomidis, Sofianos, 263 citizenship rights, 20, 206, 315, 316, 317, 321–6, 329–30, 335–6 Clark, Laura, 379 Coles Pasha, Charles, 145 Consuls and consulates in Egypt (non-British), 52n, 54n, 206, 207, 209, 215, 226–7, 235, 242, 244, 260–5, 268, 322 Contagious Diseases Act (Britain), 199–200 Coptic Church and clergy, 10, 17, 117–35, 244 Coptic Community Lay Council see Majlis al-milli Copts 6, 17, 50n, 117–35, 319, 355 and journalism, 10 see also Majlis al-milli, Tawfiq Society Corbet, Eustace, 154–5 Corriere Egiziano, il, 10, 241 corvée, 5

432  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT cosmopolitanism, 1, 14, 19, 21, 224, 240, 253, 276 Council of Ministers, 59, 60, 68, 70, 74, 179, 180, 191n cotton, 5, 36, 58, 61, 65, 70, 73, 78, 155–6, 204, 254–5, 260, 262–3 Courts Consular, 41–5 Mixed, 6, 41, 42, 173, 198, 212, 258–9, 265 National/Native, 6, 173–80, 189n, 199 crime, 17, 22, 23, 38, 40, 43–4, 196, 197, 199, 208, 214, 365 cases involving, 41, 187 statistics for, 141–61 Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring), 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 19, 34–6, 37, 42–3, 48n, 49n, 55n, 58, 62–4, 67, 68, 71, 80n, 96, 97, 99, 107, 123, 125, 126–7, 132, 144–7, 153–5, 161, 169–70, 212, 226, 235, 253–77, 301, 312n, 391 Cyprus, Greeks of, 254 D’Anastasi, Yanni, 254, 255 D’Anglo, Roberto, 238 Dakhla (oasis), 176–8, 190n, 191n Daqhaliyya (province), 70, 72, 81n Dar al-‘Ulum, 6, 17, 89, 90, 93–4, 95, 98, 99–100, 101–2, 104, 105, 107–8, 120, 149, 301, 368, 382 Darwinism, 22, 151, 346–7 death and its handling, 16, 31–3, 38–47; see also autopsies, cemeteries debt, Egyptian national, 3, 5, 58, 79n; see also bankruptcy decrees, Khedivial, 66, 69–70, 118, 132, 175, 237 Delta, Egyptian, 60, 63, 70, 81n, 196, 289, 292; see also individual provinces Delta, Penelope, 263 Demolins, Edmond, 9, 108, 346, 360n Di-Capua, Yoav, 317 Diliyannis, Thedoros (government of ), 265–6 Dinshawai incident, 4, 10, 11, 16, 50n, 60, 78–9, 226, 270–1, 298 map of, 77 disease see health policy, venereal disease divorce, 2, 204–5, 321, 380 Diya’, al-, 366, 368 domesticity, discourses of, 379, 381; see also family, marriage Dor, Edouard, 95, 96 drama, Arabic, 9, 318–19, 367 dress, practices and representations of, 127, 204, 211, 295, 298, 303–4, 307, 379–80, 387 Dreyfus Affair, 21, 320, 323–5, 335, 339n Dumas, Alexandre, 213, 351, 352

Dunlop, Douglas, 97, 98, 106, 107, 113n, 235, 113n, 235 Dusuq (town), 196, 290, 292, 293 Eco d’Italia, L’, 229 education and anarchists, 222, 231, 233–6, 246 curricula of, 88–9, 91, 93–5, 97–8, 100–4 girls’, 6, 91, 120, 121, 123, 128, 210, 211, 233, 370, 375, 380 in Egypt 6, 16–17, 18, 20, 23, 58, 85n, 87–109, 117–35, 274, 292, 357, 385 in Europe, 8, 16, 40, 87–8, 91, 94–5, 101–5 policy reports, 34 reform in Coptic, 119–21, 123 teacher training for, 87–109 see also Dar al-‘Ulum; educational missions; Great Britain, educational policies of; Khedivial Teachers’ School, Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School educational missions, 88, 89, 90, 92–3, 96, 98–100, 104, 105–8, 120, 350, 371 effendis, 19, 118, 121, 126, 127, 287–8, 295–9, 302–7, 370 Egerton, Edwin, 264 Egypt, Upper, 70, 92, 144, 195, 197, 199 Egyptian Gazette, 10 Egyptian (later Fu’ad I) University, 6, 108–9, 236, 343 Egyptians, ancient, 40, 321, 373–8 Egyptians in Europe, 90, 100, 316, 367, 368, 382, 388–91; see also educational missions El Shakry, Omnia, 89–90 empire understandings of, 256, 259, 274–5 writings on, in Egypt, 315–20, 322–4, 326–8, 333–6, 366–7, 389–91 see also British Empire English language, 87–8, 97–8, 106–7, 120, 234, 241, 316, 346; see also translation Esmeir, Samira, 308n European Circle of Social Studies, 233 Europeans in Egypt, 14; see also British subjects in Egypt; French citizens in Egypt; foreign communities in Egypt; Greeks, Italians in Egypt; Maltese in Egypt Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 183 Fahmi, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 306, 312n, 313n Fahmi, Mustafa, 5, 132 Fahmy, Khalid, 216n, 217n Fahmy, Ziad, 316 fallah see peasants family, 14, 373, 375–6, 381; see also marriage Fanus, Akhnukh, 135 Farid, Muhammad, 8, 206, 311n, 318 Fathallah, Hamza, 100, 366–8, 382–90, 392, 394n Fawwaz, Zaynab, 8, 365

i ndex | 433 Fayyum (oasis, province), 57, 70, 158 fellah see peasants feminism, 9, 213, 373, 376–7, 392; see also women’s rights Fénelon, François, 350, 387 Ferrer, Francisco, 245 fiction, Arabic, 9, 20, 22, 213, 318–19, 327–36, 342–3, 349–59, 365, 367, 370 foreign communities in Egypt, 3, 7, 13–14, 21, 39–40, 41, 44–5, 253, 255–60, 268–9; see also Europeans in Egypt; individual ethnicities and nationalities France, 22–3, 92, 94, 99, 103–6, 108 adultery and abandonment in, 384 as imperial power, 202, 316 influence and policies in Egypt, 49n, 54n, 103–5, 258 occupation of Egypt by, 196, 223, 350, 377 soldiers of, 196, 198 see also educational missions, French language Free Popular University, 6, 234–6 Freemasonry (Masonic Lodges), 242, 243, 245, 348 French citizens in Egypt, 96–7, 253, 257, 276; see also France, influence and policies in Egypt French language, 1, 87, 95, 96, 97–8, 100, 106, 108, 120, 144, 212, 233, 234, 241, 245, 272, 316, 350, 367, 383; see also translation Galleani, Luigi, 234 gambling, 204, 208, 212, 213, 297, 303 Garstin, William, 61–2, 66, 67, 68–9, 70, 71, 74, 81n Gasper, Michael, 81–2n, 83n, 295, 313n gender, 1, 2, 3, 6–7, 8, 12, 14, 20–1, 22, 48n, 55n, 195, 210, 212, 327, 358, 365–93 General Assembly of Egypt, 74 Germany, 99, 100 Gershoni, Israel, 315 Gharbiyya (province), 63, 74, 289–90, 292–4 Gikas, Ioannis, 273–4 Giornale, il, 241 Gladstone, William, 257, 262 Goldenburg, Solomon, 225, 249–50n Goldziher, Ignaz, 322, 338–9n Gorman, Tony, 392 Gorst, Eldon, 107, 156, 161, 226, 293, 309n Gould, Edward, 31 Goussios family, 255, 267 Graham, Ronald, 228 Great Britain administration of Egypt by, 4, 13, 16–18, 21, 31–3, 35–6, 39–47, 58–79, 259–60; see also names of individual colonial officials, Ministries agrarian policies of, 61–7, 83n; see also agriculture, agricultural roads

consular records of, 54n consular surgeons of, 31, 43, 54n, 55n] consuls and consulates of, 16, 31–47, 48n, 52n, 54n, 263 Consuls-General of, 123, 144–8, 156–8, 226, 254, 257–8, 264 educational policy in, 88, 96–100, 105, 274, 357 Egyptian critiques of following occupation, 68–9, 71–9, 97; see also empire, nationalist discourse and movement financial and fiscal policies of, 5, 10, 58–9, 61, 64, 73, 81n, 85n, 96, 155–6, 226, 257–8 invasion and occupation of Egypt (1882), 1–5, 10–11, 41, 57–8, 96, 119, 125, 197, 206, 212, 213, 226, 253, 260, 261–2, 335 occupation of Egypt (1882–1914), 18, 19, 33–4, 58–9, 63, 78, 79n, 118–19, 141–61, 287, 316, 319, 370, 372 Parliament of, 34, 106, 144, 145, 203, 262 soldiers and sailors of, 38, 45–6, 56n, 78, 199, 206, 209, 214, 270 see also Capitulations; Cromer; Dinshawai Great Coptic Benevolent Society, 124–7, 129, 133 Great Coptic Schools, 120, 121, 131, 137n Greece Government of, 258, 264–5, 269; see also Trikoupis, Diliyannis Parliament of, 258, 259, 265 Greek language, 1, 144, 234, 241, 245, 263 Greeks ancient, 371–2, 374–6 of Egypt 7, 19, 34–5, 43, 44–5, 47, 212, 215, 223, 224, 230, 231, 233, 234, 253–77, 374 population of in Egypt, 254, 256 see also Byzantines; Greek language Orthodox Church Gribetz, Jonathan, 321 Grotius, Hugo, 171 Habun, ‘Uthman, 169, 186 Haicalis, Nicolas, 272–3 Haim, Sylvia, 320 Hanley, Will, 45 Harb, Tal‘at, 7 Harcourt, Duc d’, 383 Hashim, Labiba, 8 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 160, 311n health, mental, 43 health policy and public health, 18, 23, 31–5, 40–7, 150, 195–200, 207–8, 214 anarchists and, 222, 236–7, 236–7, 240–3, 246 disease and, 23, 38, 40, 42 270 see also death, inquests, autopsies, suicide, hospitals, venereal disease

434  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Heyworth-Dunne, James, 95 Higher Schools Club, 236 Hijaz, 183, 321; see also Mecca Hilal, al-, 10, 230, 318, 320, 325, 345, 347, 348–9, 352, 361n Hilal, ‘Imad, 197 historiography Greek, 245 nationalist, 59, 75 on Egypt, 10–12, 17, 58–9, 255 history ancient, 321, 325–7, 365, 370–82 Islamic, 348, 354–9, 366, 382–90 women’s, 366, 370–93 see also history writing history writing, 8, 10–12, 20, 287–9, 300, 305–7, 308n, 316–22, 348, 365–93 through fiction, 351–9 see also historiography hospitals in Egypt, 31–2, 34–5, 38, 42, 44, 48n, 49n, 150, 159 Hourani, Albert, 322, 352, 361n Howe, Stephen, 259 Ibn al-‘Assal, 122 Ibn Nusayr, Musa, 319 Ibn Rushd, 323, 333 Ibrahim (Viceroy of Egypt), 352, 353, 355 Ibrahim, Hafiz, 212 Idris, Ahmad b. (al-Fasi), 182–3 Ilbert, Robert, 37 immigration, 8, 14, 37, 39, 48n, 51n, 315, 317, 322, 343, 347, 368, 394n; see also diaspora; individual nationalities in Egypt India colonial administration and administrators of, 97, 125, 146, 147–8, 199, 215, 237, 325, 366 Cromer in, 97, 125 nationalism in, 97 Indians in Egypt, 32, 37, 48n infrastructure see public works; Public Works Department; roads; railways; health; hospitals inquests, 16, 31–3, 38, 39, 42–7 International Association for Emergency Assistance, 240–2 International Union of Cigarette Rollers, 232 investment, foreign, 37, 73–5 Iran see Persia Ireton, François, 142, 150 Irlam, Lilian, 31–2, 38 Isfahani, Abu al-Faraj al-, 356 Isma‘il (Viceroy, Khedive of Egypt), 65, 91, 92, 93, 99, 120, 206, 223, 272, 292, 309n, 350, 357 Ismailia, 231 Italian language, 1, 10, 120, 144, 229, 231, 233, 234, 236–7, 238, 241, 243

Italians of Egypt, 18, 45, 197, 223–46, 253, 262 Italy, 99 Jacob, Wilson, 311n, 312n Jaghbub (Libya), 182–5 Jalal, ‘Ali, 366–8, 370–8, 379, 382, 392, 394n Jam‘iyyat al-Tawfiq see Tawfiq Society Jamali, Ra’fat al-, 213 Jami‘a, al-, 10, 322–5, 334, 335, 336 Jews of Egypt, 31, 45, 223, 224, 231, 234 representations of, 320–4, 327–36, 385 see also Judaism, Dreyfus Affair Jibran, Jibran Khalil, 349 journalism see press, the Judaism, 20, 315, 320–2, 330–2, 334; see also Jews, representation of Jumay‘i, ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-, 272 Káiron, 261, 263 Kalliarekos, Vasilios, 233 Kalza, Muhammad, 234–5 Kamil, Mustafa, 5, 9, 10, 11, 160, 234, 272–4, 276, 311n, 316–17, 333 as author, 8, 318–19, 323, 334 Kayali, Hasan, 317 Kemal, Namık, 365 Kharga (oasis), 176–8, 190n, 191n Khedivial Teachers’ School, 88, 98, 101, 107, 113n Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, 83n Kipiadis, Georgios, 275, 276 Kitchener, Herbert, 157–8, 161 Kitroeff, Alexander, 255, 259 kurbaj (courbash) 5, 270, 281n Kyriakopoulos, Eteoklis, 260, 263 Kyriakopoulos, Nikolaos, 263 Kyrillos IV (Coptic pope), 119–21 Kyrillos V (Coptic pope), 117–19, 123–6, 129–35 labour activism see Cairo; workers Lamba, Henri, 178 Lancaster, Joseph, 91, 92 Lancet, The, 43 land ownership, value and expropriation, 11, 66–7, 71–3, 75–6, 127, 135, 287, 289, 309n Lane, Edward W., 351 Lashin, ‘Abd al-Khaliq, 302 Lata’if, al-, 372 Latis, Dr, 242, 251n Law School of Egypt, 107 French Law School, 6 law see Capitulations; courts; judicial system and judicial reform lawyers and the legal profession, 159–60, 224, 235, 259, 272, 296, 367–8, 371

i ndex | 435 Le Bon, Gustave, 9, 22, 387 Le Progrès Égyptien, 10, 263, 271 Lebanon, 317, 318, 322, 335, 350, 352, 353, 362n; see also Beirut; Mount Lebanon; Syrians in Egypt Leeder, S. H., 123, 133 Lefebvre, Henri, 80n Legislative Assembly (1913), 294, 302, 305 Legislative Council (majlis al-shura), 74, 294, 304, 305 Lewis, Bernard, 320 Lewis, Edwin, 347 Libya, 182–4, 191n Libyan Desert, 17–18, 34, 170–87 literacy and literacy training, 10, 91, 120, 225 Liwa’, al-, 9, 11, 76, 234 Lockman, Zachary, 312n Lombard, Louisa, 171–2, 189n London Conference (1884), 257 Louvre, l’École du, 372, 377 Lutfi al-Sayyid, Ahmad, 10, 160, 301–2, 311n, 312n Machell, Percy, 226, 247–8n Magnis, Petros, 274 Mahalla al-kubra, 196, 198, 212 Maher Commission, 184–8 Maher, Mustafa see Maher Commission Mahfouz, Naguib, 349 Mahmud, Ahmad Effendi, 292 Maintenon, Mme de (Françoise d’Aubigné), 387 Majlis al-Milli (Coptic Community Lay Council), 17, 117–18, 121–5, 130–5 Mak, Lanver, 36, 48n, 50n Makariyus, Maryam, 365 Makki, Muhammad, 185–6 Malatesta, Errico, 226 Malet, Edward, 145, 262 Maltese of Egypt, 32, 36, 37, 44, 48n, 55n Mamluks, 176, 196, 309n in fiction, 349, 353, 355 Manar, al-, 211, 317, 320, 325 Manfaluti, Mustafa al-, 210, 213 Mansfield, Peter, 125 Mansura, 121, 274 Marrash, Fransis, 351 marriage, 2, 37, 201, 213, 295, 301, 312n, 319, 321, 353, 372–6, 378, 380, 382–7 Maryut (Mariout), 179–80, 262 Matar, Maryam, 348 May Day, 230 Mecca 182, 192n memoirs and autobiographies, 19, 173, 176, 186, 287–307, 343–7 Messaggiere, il, 241 Metarríthmisis, 263, 268 Midhat, Ahmad (Ahmet), 388–91 Miftah, al-, 235

Migdal, Joel, 193n migrant labour, 1, 142; see also migration; immigration migration, internal, 22 Milner, Alfred, 257, 265–6, 275 Ministry of Agriculture, 294 Ministry of Education/Public Instruction, 68, 83n, 87, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 104, 106, 108, 109n, 149, 367, 394n Ministry of the Interior, 69, 83n, 96, 109, 142, 144, 147, 150, 153–7, 174, 175, 177, 184, 186, 201, 205–6, 226–8, 293–4, 309n Ministry of Justice, 142, 144, 147, 150, 153–5, 177 Ministry of Public Instruction see Ministry of Education Ministry of Public Works, 71, 82n, 149; see also Public Works Department Minufiyya (province), 57, 63, 78; see also Dinshawai Misr, 10, 75–6 missionaries and missionary organisations, 91, 127, 129, 200, 320, 350 Mitchell, Timothy, 142, 329 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Pocquelin), 387 Moosa, Matti, 342, 352, 354 Morrison, Arthur, 31; see also Great Britain, consular surgeons of Mount Lebanon, 343, 353, 355 Moyal, Shim‘on, 321 Mu’ayyad, al-, 9, 117, 118, 131–2, 211, 238, 268, 314n, 316, 369 Mubarak, ‘Ali, 5, 68–70, 72, 83n, 84n, 91, 92, 93–4, 97, 98, 106, 126, 149, 312n, 318, 351, 356, 365, 382–3 Mughal Empire, 65 Muhammad ‘Ali (Viceroy of Egypt), 5, 8, 65, 90–1, 92, 120, 127, 150, 151–2, 170, 181–2, 187, 192n, 195, 196–7, 216n, 223, 255, 289, 294, 302, 304, 350, 353, 357, 371 Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, 379, 382, 383, 384–6 mukhabarat, 228 Muqattam, al-, 9, 75, 210 Muqtataf, al-, 9–10, 318, 320, 325, 345, 348, 372, 387 Murqus (Coptic Bishop), 117, 122, 124 Mutajarrida, al-, 380 Nabigha, al-, 380 Nadim, ‘Abdallah, 5, 124, 202–5, 210, 292–3, 309n, 313n, 318, 370 nahda (awakening), 343, 351 Coptic, 119, 121, 136n of workers, 230 Nahhas, Mustafa al-, 294 Najjar, Muhammad al-, 209 Najm, Muhammad Yusuf, 357

436  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Nasif, Hifni Bey, 100 Nasim, Tawfiq, 302 National Bank of Egypt, 5–6 Nationalist movement and discourse, Egyptian, 2–5, 10–11, 18–19, 58–9, 75–9, 81–2n, 90, 96, 105, 107, 152, 159–60, 171, 195–6, 201–5, 209–11, 215–16, 234, 255, 271–4, 294, 316, 367, 372, 390–1; see also Revolution of 1919; Kamil, Mustafa Nawfal, Hind, 7–8 Nil, al-, 370 Nile Valley, 170, 175, 176–8 196, 274, 376, 377 Nile, River, 60, 63, 65, 149, 200, 288, 292, 307 Nordau, Max, 22 Noumás, 274 novel, Arabic see fiction, Arabic Nu‘man, al-, King of Hira, 380 Nubar Nubarian Pasha, 144 Nubia and Nubians, 215, 355 oases see Bahariyya; Dakhla; Fayyum; Kharga; Siwa Oddi, Ferdinando, 260, 261 Omónoia, 261, 264 Operaio, L’ (1889), 229, 249n Operaio, L’ (1902–3), 237, 238–43, 249n orientalism and orientalists, 20, 22, 315, 320, 322, 323, 351, 366–7, 382–3, 391–3 orientalist congresses, 100, 367, 382–3, 387–91 Orthodox Church and adherents, 91, 325, 343, 368 Orthodox Coptic Society, 129 Oscar II (King of Sweden and Norway), 388 Ottoman Empire and Ottomans, 9, 13, 15, 39, 40–2, 43, 65, 66, 72–3, 183, 227, 254, 269, 273, 275, 315, 323–6, 335, 355, 365, 388, 390 Egypt as Ottoman 34, 36, 40–2, 65, 151–2, 196, 301–2, 316–18 Owen, Roger, 142 Palestine, 227, 247n, 322, 330, 332, 334, 353 Pangalos, Andreas, 259, 265 Paris Commune (1871), 222, 229–30 Parliament of Great Britain see Great Britain, Parliament of Parliament of Greece see Greece, Parliament of Parrini, Ugo Icilio, 224, 227, 252n patriarchy, 297–8, 366–93 Paturet, Georges, 372–7 peasants, 5, 10, 13, 59, 61–2, 64, 67, 71, 72, 78, 81–2n, 204, 265, 268, 274, 287, 294, 295, 304–5, 309–10n, 314n, 370 Persia, 325, 385 constitution of, 294 Peters, Rudolph, 151 petitions, 43, 52n, 59, 72–3, 78–9, 86n, 133,

179–80, 182, 205, 249n, 292, 293, 309–10n Phare d’Alexandrie, 272–3 Phare du Bosphore, 263 philanthropy and benevolence societies, 17, 118, 124, 127, 129, 133–5, 268, 292, 332 Philaretos, Georgios, 259, 265–6 Philipp, Thomas, 342, 343, 346, 347, 349 police, 45–6, 78, 142, 144–8, 152–3, 197–8, 205, 206, 208, 211, 215, 224, 226, 247n, 258–9, 270, 309n population of Egypt, 3, 7, 32, 36–7, 138n, 152, 181, 253, 254, 256 Port Said, 227, 231, 232, 236, 254 postcolonial studies and approaches, 89–90, 109n, 255–7, 274–5 Poulantzas, Nicos, 267 press, the, 6, 8, 9–10, 15, 20, 22, 59, 71, 74–6, 85n, 118, 143–4, 204, 206 211, 214, 266–7, 268–71, 294, 303, 313n, 315–18, 323–5, 350, 365–72, 378 anarchists’ use of, 228–9, 234, 235, 238–43, 245–6 in Europe, 22 see also individual periodicals prisons, 6, 34, 42, 145, 150–1, 159 proconsuls see Great Britain, Consuls-General of; Cromer, Lord prostitutes and prostitution see sex workers Protestants in Egypt 37, 51n in the Ottoman Empire 39, 325, 346–7 see also missionaries Provincial Councils, 70, 74, 292, 293 Psyroukis, Nikos, 268 Public Security Department, 156, 157, 228 ‘public utility’ [al-manaf‘i al-‘umumiyya], 59, 65–9, 71–3, 75, 83n public works, 6, 16, 34, 35, 36, 37, 46, 57, 223–8; see also infrastructure; roads Public Works Department (PWD), 60–1, 64–73, 82n; see also Ministry of Public Works publishing, 9, 15, 315–16, 317–18, 350, 365–6, 369; see also press Qalyubiyya (province), 81n Qandil, Amin Mursi, 105 Qasatili, Nu ‘man ‘Abduh al-, 351 Qulali, Muhammad al-, 160 Qur’an, the, 120, 202, 274, 292, 373, 379, 386, 387 Qusi, Ahmad al-, 203–4 Ra’id al-misri, al-, 74 racial difference or diversity, 215, 230, 233, 241, 256 racial/ist hierarchies and views, 22, 23, 35, 153, 215–16, 256, 271, 274, 320, 336, 391

i ndex | 437 Rafi‘i, ‘Abd al-Rahman, al-, 11 railways and trains as a cause of death, 38, 44, 46 in Egypt 6, 7, 60, 61, 65, 67, 70, 73–4, 79 in the Ottoman Empire, 325 Rallis, Theodore, 262 Ramses II, 325 Rangavis, Cleon, 261–2 Rashad, Muhammad, 100 Rawdat al-madaris, 92 readers and audiences, 1, 15, 22, 106, 131, 185, 213, 228, 233–4, 270 289, 303, 315, 317, 321, 324, 327, 335–6, 345, 351–2, 354, 356–9, 365–70, 376, 383, 386–93 Réforme, La, 234, 241 Reid, Donald, 4, 323, 333 Reimer, Michael J., 318 Renan, Ernest, 322, 334, 338–9n Renan, Henriette, 334 reports, annual British colonial, 12, 17, 34–6, 42–3, 49n, 55n, 70, 80n, 81n, 97, 143–61 Revolution of 1919, 128, 271, 294, 296, 298 Riaz Pasha see Riyad, Mustafa Rida, Muhammad Rashid, 8, 211, 316, 317, 320, 333, 336 Rifaat, Muhammad, 11 Riyad, Mustafa, 48n, 64, 95, 133, 144, 258, 383 roads, 6, 16, 58, 60–79 Rosenthal, Joseph (Giuseppe), 225, 245 Rosetta, 289, 292, 299 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 387 rural Egypt, 18–19, 34, 58, 61–79, 144–61; see also agricultural roads; agriculture; Great Britain, agrarian policies of; peasants Rushdi, Husayn, 8, 313n Russell Pasha, Thomas (Chief of Police), 215–16 Russian language, 245 Ryzova, Lucie, 296, 299, 301, 302, 312n Sa‘id (Viceroy of Egypt), 255 Sa‘id, al- see Egypt, Upper Sabah, al-, 235 Sabri, Mahmud Pasha, 57, 78 Said, Edward, 271 sailors see Great Britain, soldiers and sailors of Saladin, 356 Salim, ‘Abd al-Rahim, 104 Salisbury, Lord, 62, 267 Salt, Henry, 52n Salvagos family, 255, 260, 263 Sami, Amin, 101, 149 Sanu‘, Ya‘qub, 333, 334 Sanusi, Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-, 182–3 Sanusi, Sayyid al-Mahdi al-, 183, 185 Sanusiyya, al- (Sufi order), 169–70, 180–8, 191n Sarhank, Isma‘il, 8 Sarruf, Ya‘qub, 346 Scott, John, 147–8, 151, 153–4

Scott, Walter, 351–2 Scott-Moncrieff, Colin, 60, 65 Secret Service Bureau, 228 Seikaly, Samir, 125 Selim, Samah, 327 Settle, Henry, 154 sexuality and sexual conduct, 14, 18, 195, 210, 375, 378, 380–6, 389; see also patriarchy; sex workers sex workers, 18, 195–216, 381 Shafiq, Ahmad Pasha, 176–8, 190n, 311n Shalabi, Hilmi Ahmad, 127 Shamashergi, Husayn [Hussein] Bey, 181–2 shari‘a, al-, 8, 99, 176, 372–3, 382–7 Sharqiyya (province), 70, 81n, 123 Sharubim, Mikha’il, 8, 120 Sheehi, Stephen, 352, 353 Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris al-, 344, 351, 356, 362n, 363n Shukri al-Iskandari, ‘Abd al-Latif, 57–8 Shumayyil, Shibli, 8, 332 Sidqi, Isma‘il, 289, 311n, 312n, 314n Silva White, Arthur, 184, 186 Siwa (oasis), 18, 169–70, 172, 174–6, 178, 179, 180–8, 188n, 190n, 191n, 192n, 193n Skotidis, Nikolaos, 258–9, 260, 261 Smiles, Samuel, 9, 345–6, 349 socialism, 9, 10, 11, 222–3, 227–32, 245, 273–4, 328, 332–4 soldiers see Great Britain, soldiers and sailors of; France sovereignty, theories of applied to Egypt, 13, 17–18, 169–72, 187–8 space, public, 15, 22, 23, 38, 58–9, 78, 80n, 203, 205–6, 208, 237–9, 303–4 women in, 23, 197, 203, 205–6, 209–11, 374–5, 378, 379, 381, 384 Spain, 319 Government of, 245 statistics, 17, 34–5, 141–61, 162n, 199 Stockholm see orientalist congresses Stockholms Nyheter, 388 Sudan and Sudanese, 184, 215, 325, 352, 353, 357 Suez Canal and Zone, 7, 158, 223, 231–2, 236, 249n Suez Canal Company, 231 Sufism 182–3, 210; see also Sanusiyya, alsuicide, 38, 43, 45, 71n Sweden, 99, 100; see also orientalist congresses Switzerland, 99, 100, 108 Synadinos, Ambroise, 262, 267 Syrian Protestant College, 323, 346–7, 350 Syrians in Egypt, 8, 20, 206, 256–7, 262, 315, 317, 319, 321, 327, 357, 358; see also Antun, Farah; Zaydan, Jurji Tachidrómos, 10, 263, 269–71 Tahtawi, Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-, 91, 92, 212, 350, 365

438  |  THE LONG 1 8 9 0 S IN E GY PT Talmud, the, 321 Tamberi, Silvio, 244 Tanta, 196 Tanzimat, 66 tarbiya, 384–6 Tawfiq (al-‘Adl), Hasan, 99, 100, 106 Tawfiq (Khedive of Egypt), 4, 5, 190n, 261–2, 383 Tawfiq Society, 118, 126–30 Tawfiqiyya Teachers’ School, 88, 101, 107, 113n taxes and duties, 58, 149, 151, 169, 182, 184–6, 192n, 196–9, 239, 257–8, 264–6, 268–9 collectors of, 67, 145 Taymur, ‘A’isha, 8, 365 Taymur, Mahmud, 213 Tel al-Kabir, 5, 226 theatre see drama Times, The (London), 87, 106, 388 tobacco and smoking, 211, 264–5 Torah, the, 202, 321, 331–2 translation of ideas and concepts, 88–90, 93, 105–6, 346, 367 of works, 9, 22, 92, 108, 213, 235–6, 321, 327, 334, 342, 343, 346, 350–1, 353, 359, 365, 367, 371–8, 390 transportation, 1, 3, 7, 37, 46, 60, 61, 70, 223, 237 duties on, 60 see also canals; Nile, River; railways and trains; roads travel literature, European, 123, 181, 183, 184, 186, 383; see also orientalism and orientalists Tribunals see Courts Trikoupis, Charilaos, 259–61, 264–6 Trivellato, Francesca, 275 Tsirkas, Stratis, 255, 259, 268, 270, 272 Tucker, Judith, 216n Tunisia, 202, 224, 325, 394n Turkish language, 120, 317, 350, 362n ‘Umar b. al-Khattab, 333–4 Umberto I (King of Italy), 229, 235 Umma Party, 10 Unione, L’, 233 ‘Urabi movement and revolt, 4–5, 125, 202, 226, 261–2, 292, 299–30, 322 ‘Urabi, Ahmad, 4, 262, 299–30, 311n Ustadh, al-, 202, 307 ‘Uthman, Muhammad, 272–3 Vasai, Pietro, 224, 227, 234, 238, 240, 241, 243, 244 venereal disease, 195–6, 198–200, 202–3, 208, 213, 214 Victoria, Queen, 262, 267, 344

Vikør, Knut, 192n Vincent, Edgar, 264, 265 Vyzantios (Greek Consul General), 265 wa’d al-banat, 379, 384 Wadi Natrun, 118, 132 Wafd, 294, 295, 306, 308n, 313n Walker, Dennis, 318–19 waqf, 117–18, 121–4, 128, 134–5 Wardani, Ibrahim al-, 228, 248n Watan, al-, 120, 131–2, 262 Watani Party, 10, 11, 75, 135, 261, 274; see also Kamil, Mustafa Weber, Eugene, 22, 23 Western Desert see Libyan desert Wilhelm, Kaiser, 227, 228 Wolf, Simon, 321–2 women 18, 20–1, 23, 365–6, 370 activism of, 6–8, 11, 367, 391 harassment of, 210–11, 303–4, 319, 384 occupations of, 39, 195–216, 378, 387 pre-Islamic Arab, 378–82, 384, 387 see also education; feminism; gender; space, public; women’s rights women’s rights, discourses of, 195–6, 201–2, 211–12, 215, 235, 373–93 workers’ rights and labour movement, 6–7, 9, 11, 13, 18, 23, 221–5, 229–33, 235, 236–7, 243, 247–8n, 249n; see also sex workers World War I, 8, 128, 131, 141, 171, 176, 186, 225, 254, 372 World’s Columbian Exposition, 379 Yaziji, Ibrahim al-, 345 Young Turks, 317, 333 Yu’annis (Coptic Bishop), 118 Yusuf, ‘Ali, 9, 117, 131–2 Zaghlul, Ahmad Fathi, 9, 108, 114n, 294, 300–1, 305 Zaghlul, Sa‘d, 108, 114n, 289, 294, 297, 300–3, 307, 308n, 310n, 311n, 312n Zaidan Foundation, 342, 359 zar, 379 Zaydan, Jurji, 8, 10, 20, 319, 321, 327, 335 fiction of, 342–3, 349, 351–9 life and career of, 343–9 Zayn al-Din, Isma‘il, 80n Zayyat al-Dimashqi, Habib Effendi al-, 366–8, 378–82, 383, 385, 392 Zervoudakis family, 260, 262, 267 Zionism, 320 Zizinia family, 255 Menandre, 271–3 Theatre, 229, 272, 273, 274 Zola, Émile, 324, 339n