The Power of Representation: Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt 9780804769808

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The Power of Representation

The Power of Representation Publics, Peasants, and Islam in Egypt

Michael Ezekiel Gasper

;

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gasper, Michael, 1963– The power of representation : publics, peasants, and Islam in Egypt / Michael Ezekiel Gasper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5888-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. National characteristics, Egyptian. 2. Egypt—Intellectual life. 3. Peasantry—Egypt—History. 4. Islamic modernism—Egypt—History. I. Title. DT70 .G37 2009 962'.04–dc22 2008011831 Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/12 Sabon

To my parents who have always unconditionally supported me in all of my sundry endeavors

The phenomena of political modernity—the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of political modernity without these and other related concepts that found a climatic form in the course of the European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. —Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix Note on Transliteration, xi Introduction, 1 1. The Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question, 15 2. People, Peasants, and Intellectuals, 62 3. Five Peasant Characters in Search of Bourgeois Identity or ’Afandis in Gallabiyas, 108 4. Scientific Agriculture: Cultivators, Agriculturalists, or Peasants?, 148 5. The New Peasant, Colonial Identity, and the Modern State, 180 Conclusion, 217 Notes, 229 Bibliography, 263 Index, 283

Acknowledgments

This project was completed only with the assistance of a great number of mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends. Since this book is based on my doctoral dissertation it is fitting that I begin by thanking my advisor and the rest of my committee. Zachary Lockman’s unwavering support and gentle persistence were essential to the completion of the dissertation. His guidance and advice continued through the writing of this book. I am forever grateful. Khalid Fahmy and the rest of my committee, Michael Gilsenen, Bernard Haykel, and Yanni Kotsonis, all contributed in significant ways to the shaping of the dissertation on which this book is based. Of course I take full responsibility for any error or misstatement in this pages. I have had the good fortune over the years to study with gifted and generous teachers. My debt to them is manifest. They include: Samira Haj, Peter Gran, Sima Fahid, Talal Asad, Timothy Mitchell, Lila AbuLughod, Michael Hanagan, Louise Tilly, Aisha Jalal, Ra’uf Abbas Hamid, and Hasan Hanafi. I am deeply indebted to the many critics, advice givers, counselors, editors, guides, gurus, mentors, and friends who consistently challenged me in so many beneficial ways and from whom I learned (and continue to learn) so much. Although some of them may not even be aware of their importance to this project, to my education, and to my growth as a person, I want to thank them one and all, Özlem Altan, Wael al-Ashari, Sabri Ates¸, Aslı Bali, Banu Bargu, Michael Behrent, Cecile Belavoine, Laura Bier, Eileen Bowman, Koray C¸alis¸kan, Jessica Cooperman, Florence De Lavalette, Samera Esmeir, Tamara Fadl, Ilana Feldman, Nancy Finton, Leila Hamdan, Hanan Hammad, Dyala Hamza, Taja-Nia Henderson, Charles Hirschkind, Najib Hourani, Aisha Ikramuddin, Wilson Jacob, Hamdy El-Jazzar, Arang Keshavarzian, Nermeen al-Khafagi, Saba Mahmood, Khalil Makary, Karuna Mantena, Lisa Pollard, Ramzi Rouighi, Armando Salvatore, Joshua Scherier, Lise Nathan Scherier, Ahmad Shahata, Omnia El Shakry, Nicole Tammelleo, Rabie Wahba, and Muhammad Yousry.

x

Acknowledgments

The research and the writing of this book was conducted in Egypt, Lebanon, Italy, and the United States and I would like to express my gratitude for those who made this possible. Yale University’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and its Middle East Council funded several summer research trips to Egypt. The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University awarded me an A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Award to conduct research for this project. I am also grateful to them for awarding me a Frederick W. Hilles Publication Award for the preparation of this manuscript. New York University’s Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge was kind enough to award me a Dissertation Fellowship in 2001–2002 which afforded me the time to read for and write much of my dissertation. The American Research Center in Egypt awarded me a USIA Fellowship in 1998–1999 to conduct research in Cairo. The United States Department of Education provided funds for Foreign Language and Area Studies awards that I received from New York University. FLAS fellowships funded both a year of study at Cairo University and research related to this project in the Egyptian National Library and National Archives and several other libraries and collections in Cairo and Beirut, Lebanon. I am also grateful to the Center for Arabic Study Abroad at the American University in Cairo for awarding me a fellowship to study Arabic in 1995–1996. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the faculty of the History and Philosophy departments at Cairo University (in particular to Ra’uf Abbas Hamid and Hasan Hanafi), who welcomed me so warmly into their midst in 1998 and 1999. Finally, I wish to thank the ever helpful and resourceful staffs of the National Library and National Archives in Cairo and the Egyptian National Geographic Society. With near certainty I can say that without their kind words, their encouragement, and most of all their wry sense of humor this project would never have come to fruition.

Note on Transliteration

Arabic words and names have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet according to a simplified system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies. To facilitate reading for the nonspecialist, all diacritical marks have been omitted except for the ‘ayn (‘) and hamza (’). Arabic words in common usage in English such as “Nasser” and “fallah” remain in the common form. Arabic names of authors who wrote in English or French have not been changed (e.g., Anovar Abdel-Malek, not Anwar Abd al-Malik). For authors who published in both Arabic and French or English, alternate spellings of their names may occur (e.g., Taha Husayn and Taha Hussein), but the standard Arabic transliteration has been retained in the notes and bibliography for their Arabic works.

The Power of Representation

Introduction

; This book traces the emergence of modern Egyptian identity from the last third of the nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Egypt’s incorporation into the Western-centered global network of production and consumption spawned a new urban intelligentsia comprising teachers, lawyers, engineers, clerks, accountants, and journalists. This increasingly self-conscious social formation reconfigured religiously informed notions of the self and of the social order through its adaptations of modern ideas of individual moral autonomy and transcendent notions of universal citizenship. The present work describes the ways in which this intelligentsia carved what might be termed Egyptian-ness out of this raw material into a cultural, social, and political project, largely through its representations of Egypt’s peasant majority. The new forms of public discussion so essential to this process were intimately tied to the flourishing Islamic modernist movement of the nineteenth century. This book explicates these links and illustrates the importance of Islamic modernism in the elaboration of political, social, and cultural questions during this period. In so doing, these chapters call into question the notion, common in both scholarship and popular writing on the modern Middle East and the Muslim world in general, that there existed a set of secular aptitudes and areas of competency in the nineteenth century that were somehow separate from religious ones. Instead, by tying the burgeoning Islamic modernist movement to the process of identity formation and its attendant political questions, this book shows how religion became an integral part of modern Egyptian political, social, and cultural life. The present account recalls a uniquely vibrant and creative period of cultural exploration and innovation in Egypt. From the last third of the

2

Introduction

nineteenth century until after World War I, self-assurance was the most salient characteristic of the cultural landscape in Egypt, and indeed in much of the eastern Arab world. During this period the challenges posed by creeping colonial domination, poverty, and social upheaval did not diminish a brimming optimism about the future. This was a time when Muslim clerics as well as Christian and Jewish professionals, literati, and journalists sat together or debated in print such issues as the merits of constitutional rule, the essential qualities of the civilized home, and the importance of educating girls. Not only in Cairo and Alexandria, but also in such dusty provincial towns as al-Mansura, Zaqaziq, and Tanta, in literary and political salons, clubs, welfare societies, and learned associations, the efforts of the educated classes were instrumental in producing a modern political sensibility that remains the basis of Egyptian identity. A central component of this story is the important role played by the technologies of the nascent public sphere. Newspapers, journals, and new spaces and forms of sociability provided relatively large numbers of people with immediate access to new ideas for the first time. This book places these cultural and intellectual changes in historical context by showing how they were embedded in the emergent social terrain of turn-of-the-century Egypt. I maintain that the construction of modern Egyptian identity was a political and social project. The ideal of Egyptian-ness embodied in the figure of the civilized, urban, and literate sophisticate was not a mood, a trope, an image, or an intellectual development; rather it was a claim to political authority on the part of a rising social formation. Literate urbanites were attempting to position themselves as the group most able to lead the social body to autonomy and prosperity. Until 1914 Egypt continued to be, as it had been since 1516, a province of the Ottoman Empire. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, Egypt became increasingly autonomous. This move toward relative independence had not been a smooth transition. Indeed, the preceding half-century had been as tumultuous as any that Egypt had experienced in its long history. Expanded cotton cultivation enabled the well placed to accumulate unimaginable riches. This new wealth fueled the ambitions of Egypt’s young ruler, the Khedive Isma‘il, who dreamed of making Egypt a “European” state through such elaborate development schemes as the building of the Suez Canal. All of these plans came crashing down, however, in the wake of economic collapse, crushing recession, and bankruptcy. Isma‘il’s European creditors deposed him in 1879. Scarcely three years later British troops occupied the entire country to quell a rebellion undertaken by native Egyptian junior army officers against their Turco-Circassian superiors.

Introduction

3

With the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of the collapse of Isma‘il’s grand schemes and the foreign occupation that followed in its wake, Egyptians were beginning to discuss, debate, and write about what made them Egyptians. These reflections occurred within circles made up of the new urban literate classes that sought avenues for political expression and access to political power in Egypt’s evolving social geography. They endeavored to create an illusion of societal consensus and unity around their own increasingly coherent corporate interests and political aspirations. Essential to this collective process of self-imagining was their understanding of Egypt as a site of economic production. These journalists, professionals, and Muslim clerics articulated a vision of Egypt’s future while positioning themselves socially and politically in Egypt’s present through representations of “the peasant.” In lavishing attention on the peasantry, the educated urbanites generated a new understanding of the countryside and its inhabitants. Through new forms of ethnography, agricultural critique, and social commentary they depicted themselves as standing between the oppressed, submissive, backward, and ignorant peasants and the “tyrannical” and “despotic” Ottoman ruling elites. Representations of the peasants were an essential element in their constitution of themselves as ideal moral and political subjects and the guardians of Egypt’s honor. This emergence of an elite defined by education or professional status was not a seamless linear process. For example, in the first years of the twentieth century one prominent journal whose masthead described it as a “reform and politics” review portrayed the peasants as “uncivilized” and “backward,” while the same journal featured an Egyptian critic of the British occupation praising the peasants’ simple and unpretentious manners. In the same issue another political activist promoted rural folk as a good example for all Egyptians to follow because of their work ethic and piety. In yet another article an agricultural engineer bemoaned the inadequacy of peasant farming methods that putatively dated to the time of the pharaohs. It seems that the peasants were simultaneously dirty, clean, hardworking, feckless, honorable, gullible, prudent, reckless, strong, and submissive; they were at once good Muslims and so superstitious as to be ignorant of the most basic principles of Islam. These inconsistent representations reflected the shifting currents comprising the process of identity formation. In the Egypt of the 1870s enactments of collective identity coalesced around “urban” and “rural” registers. Town and country seemed to belong to different worlds. For the so-called civilized urbanite, the denizens of the village were superstitious, gullible, and only nominally Muslims. By the 1890s, however, new representations of “civilized peasants” began to make their way into print. The

4

Introduction

advent of the figure of the “thoughtful peasant” whose political consciousness overlapped that of the urban intelligentsia coincided with the crystallization of a new kind of societal vision. Urban literate groups increasingly understood “Egypt” to imply an indivisible economic and political entity. This development marked a shift in the logic by which Egypt could be defined along a physical boundary between city and country. That logic no longer held. Then, over the course of the first decade of the twentieth century, the literate culture increasingly placed peasant and city dweller alike into the same sociopolitical and indeed moral category, namely “Egyptian.” This development was the first instance of something recognizable as modern Egyptian nationalism. i. Over the course of the nearly five decades treated in this book, literate Egyptians shaped their identities in a number of different ways; however, they most often articulated them in the new spaces of urban sociability and through the new media technologies of the public sphere. Therefore, the literate products and the public activities chronicled in these pages were an important arena, although certainly not the only one, within which this complex historical process unfolded. Through the 1880s activist intellectuals in the public sphere began to conceive of Egypt as a community defined to a large extent by its capacity to produce agricultural commodities. These same intellectuals were also concerned with the increasingly powerful role of foreigners in Egyptian society and government. These two concerns merged into a consensus among intellectuals that they could no longer ignore the abject material and spiritual poverty of the peasantry if they wanted Egypt to prosper economically and throw off the yoke of foreign domination. Specifically, the peasants would have to develop the proper moral and social vision to appreciate the benefits that would accrue for all Egyptians if they were to adopt more productive methods of cultivation. Accordingly, it became the conventional wisdom among the intellectuals that improving the capacities of Egyptian agriculture could be accomplished only within a larger project of moral and social regeneration of peasants. The impulse to reform the peasants and to remake their life in order to improve agricultural production became incorporated into the processes of nation building and eventually state building in Egypt. It is helpful to think of this reform movement as an episode in the emergence of Egyptian political modernity. In defining political modernity as “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise,” the histo-

Introduction

5

rian Dipesh Chakrabarty reminds us that such modernity is impossible to conceptualize without thinking about “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice [and] scientific rationality.”1 Put another way, the unfolding of this historical phenomenon entailed the fashioning of new relationships between individual and society, between individual and state, and between state and society. The Power of Representation narrates these changes in Egyptian society through an examination of the literate intelligentsia’s representations of the peasants. These pages outline the social, political, and economic developments of the period in light of evolving conceptions of community and self. It tells the story of Egypt’s nascent middle classes—a protobourgeoisie made up of teachers, engineers, doctors, journalists, and lawyers— crafting a new kind of social, political, and moral outlook that neatly complemented their own political aspirations. Through their writing, their civic, learned, and charitable associations, and their political activism the middle classes put forward a gendered, classed, and “civilized” subject—one that largely resembled their own self-conception—as the primary agent in Egypt’s social and political life. These chapters retell the history of the constitution and consolidation of this subject, the Civilized Egyptian, and how he came to represent Egyptian modernity. It is important to point out at the outset that the inauguration of this national political subject in Egypt was the product of social struggle. In order to show the workings of this struggle, these pages trace the contours of the provisional structures of Egyptian social relations at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The book then proceeds to illustrate the ways in which the emergent middle classes created the illusion of consensus and unity around their corporate interest and political vision through representations of other marginal groups— specifically the peasants. These middle classes eventually cast the peasant as the timeless repository of Egyptian-ness and then linked that repository to their own political and social aspirations. In short, the representations of peasants were essential in legitimating and lending authority to the social ambitions and the political position of what became the nationalist elite. The urban intelligentsia’s representation of peasants and other nonelites in their efforts to secure their own predominant place in emergent notions of community is hardly unique to Egypt. Partha Chatterjee’s work on India shows how the urban intelligentsia established a dominant position for themselves in the emergent social landscape of the nation through their power to represent possible rivals to their dominance. The process of

6

Introduction

representation was designed to restrict the idea of the nation to the vision crafted by the protonationalist middle classes and thereby to secure their place as the dominant social group.2 Representation in this formulation is a disciplinary act “which encodes a dominant point-of-view and a strategic relationship to social and political power.”3 Therefore, by examining the ways in which the literate intelligentsia constructed and deployed myths of unitary identity, we can gain critical insight into the development of Egyptian political modernity. Indeed, Samah Selim, an authority on the place of the village in Egyptian fiction, argues that the discursive project of “nation” to “create consensus and the myth of unified identity through suppression or ‘sanitization’ of dissonant cultures and voices—women, minorities, social outcasts, and the poor” is “primarily enacted through the process of representation.” Social groups represent power in ways particular to their discrete circumstances. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, increasing numbers of Egyptians worked in new professional and technical fields, in state bureaucracies, and in the growing commercial and educational sectors. This inchoate assemblage of literate urbanites expressed their political and social views through their production of the “peasant question.” Peasants became central to their representations of power, first because the peasants comprised the great bulk of the population, and second because they were closely associated with the physical territory of Egypt. Although peasants had been objects of mocking curiosity in the 1870s, portrayals of them evolved in a different direction during the 1880s and 1890s. Journalists, engineers, educators, and social reformers writing in newspapers and elsewhere depicted the fallahin as a timeless and undifferentiated mass. The descriptions of the literati presented rural people as a stagnant and unchanging feature of the landscape. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, however, “new knowledge” about the peasants led those writing in the press and in new genres of popular literature to recast the fallahin as a repository of collective authenticity, in a manner familiar to students of nationalism elsewhere. Then, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Egyptian protonationalists reinterpreted what had been formerly called the “stagnation” of the peasant as “permanence.” They then combined this reinterpretation with new kinds of romantic perceptions of peasants and peasant culture. Such innovative literary forms as the village novel did much to consolidate the romanticized view of the peasant. Novelistic representations of peasants produced a literary icon inextricably bound up with the anti-British nationalist project.4 This new aesthetic element attached to representations of the fallahin set the revised versions apart from the older images of peasants.

Introduction

7

Neither the consolidation of a self-conscious urban intelligentsia nor the newfound representational importance of the fallah can be understood in isolation from the transformations brought by capitalism and colonialism. The discursive products of these transformations were the loci in which Egyptians crafted new conceptions of self and community. There is a great number of works that address various aspects of the material, cultural, and intellectual effects of this transformation. Indeed, these works examine a broad range of issues, from land tenure and Egypt’s position in the evolving system of global economic production and consumption to the administrative and police apparatus established under British occupation, the introduction of new legal regimes, and the development of the press and print capitalism.5 As useful as these works are in explaining Egypt’s economic, social, and intellectual transformations, however, few have aimed exclusively at explaining the ways in which fundamental change was translated into the everyday practice of Egyptian cultural production through the nascent public sphere.6 I use representations of peasants in my work as a key index of a changing sociocultural order. Accounts of peasant life of the 1870s and early 1880s differed very little from those engrained in the popular imagination through poetry, songs, and traditional forms of entertainment. These accounts depicted the rural population as backward, superstitious, and unchanging.7 Newspapers and popular literature of the time often commented on the fact that the peasants’ lives and their methods of cultivation, their implements, habits, and routines had not changed since the beginning of time. For the producers and consumers of the new forms of literature, peasant life was utterly static, completely lacking in dynamism. These descriptions of the peasantry’s unchanging nature created an impression that the peasant population was an inert part of the rural scenery. The fallahin became just another feature of Egypt’s natural environment; they were described as a “natural” force, seemingly isolated and insulated from the modern (mutamaddun) world. In the 1890s, however, the qualities of permanence and immovability were infused with civilizational critiques of Muslims and the “East” that circulated widely at the time. The Islamic reform movement criticized Muslims and Muslim society for deviating from what its supporters described as the True Path of Islam. Muslims, so claimed the reformers, had allowed superstition and syncretism to corrupt their practice of Islam, resulting in a stagnant and backward society. Echoing but redirecting the critiques offered by Islamic reformers, Egyptian social reformers, agriculture officials, and members of voluntary associations and learned societies pointed to the depraved state of the peasants as an embodiment of

8

Introduction

this crisis and the explanation of Egypt’s decline [inhitat]. This critique signaled an important change in thinking about peasants in Egypt. While the fallahin continued to be represented as inert objects, for the first time they were also seen as an indispensable dimension of society—they could not be ignored. The peasants thus required reformation and revitalization in order for Egypt to become civilized. Literary representations of peasants continued to evolve well into the twentieth century. Although popular writing often continued to mock the rural population for its simple and uncouth manners, the qualities of permanency and timelessness found in representations of the peasant began to take on new meanings in the confrontation with British occupation. These qualities became positive markers of the collective identity of Egyptians. Egyptians, peasants and urbanites alike, were rooted in the Nile Valley through their age-old connection to the land and by their shared customs and culture. Thus the peasants acquired unprecedented value in deliberations about Egyptian identity and in the emergence of what I refer to as Egyptian-ness. If one considers the way in which peasants had been identified previously, one cannot help noticing the irony in the fact that truth claims related to social, political, economic, and agricultural questions acquired an increasing measure of authority when attached in some way to the permanence and timelessness now symbolized by the peasant. Within this shifting terrain fallah and middle-class urbanite (’afandi/ efendi) were depicted as constituting a single people by the first decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, for the first time the entire range of views about the peasantry, from mocking to celebrating to romanticizing to criticizing, were now harnessed to reinforce the sense that peasant and ’afandi shared the same collective identity—both were Egyptians. We can mark this change in the way the reformers placed ’afandi and fallah in the same moral universe. They were now convinced that the peasants, like their literate ’afandi coreligionists, would have to cultivate a modern (mutamaddun) Muslim disposition. After the turn of the century, the peasants were accused of committing the same kinds of transgressions for which religious reformers had previously condemned the urban middle classes. But the peasants also presented a particular kind of problem. Because they so stubbornly resisted change, they stood in the way of Egypt’s advance and presented a formidable obstacle to achieving a civilized social, political, and collective moral vision. Accordingly, the fallah must learn to overcome his impiety and behavioral indiscretions in order to become an upstanding and respected member of the community; in other words, the new peasants, like the ’afandis of old, must be reformed. All signs of differences among the fallahin were erased by this discourse of moral reform. This discourse abstracted the socioeconomic

Introduction

9

component of peasant existence from consideration; thus peasants could be dolts or they could represent a reservoir of authenticity, but they could not make independent political claims—especially if those claims were based on their status as subalterns marginalized by an emerging plantation economy or by the political maneuvering of the urban ’afandiya (efendiya).8 Indeed, nationalist discourses after 1900 silenced the now romanticized and folklorized peasants by depicting them as the embodiment of the nation. Their inclusion within the concept of the “Egyptian people” did not provide equality, for the discourses of reform and nation—which emphasized the peasants’ ignorance and backwardness even while valorizing their rootedness—masked their subordinate status. In effect, these discourses delegitimated political claims made on the basis of social and economic differences or on any question of status not authorized by emergent discourses of nationalist unity. Any such demand was deemed a threat to the “people” at a time of existential danger posed by the British occupation and the power of the West. The ’afandi classes were the only ones authorized to speak for the people and as such they were the agent of a new kind of future. The peasants, on the other hand, were a voiceless and passive object of knowledge and reform. In this way, the representations of the fallahin that cast them as a part of an indissoluble Egyptian people inaugurated their subaltern status within the career of the modern nation-state. ii. Scholars of Egyptian history have recently come to recognize that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a seminal period in modern Egyptian cultural history. Historians and literary critics alike look to this period for clues about the way in which educated urbanized Egyptians came to speak for Egypt through their romantic and sometimes metaphorical reflections on the peasants and other groups.9 Journalists, reformers, and commentators of the new urban professional classes maneuvered for social and political positions within the modernizing colonial state. They depicted themselves as the only legitimate agents of change and the embodiment of civilization by producing technical, moral, and social information about the peasants to which only they had access. As the peasantry, the great bulk of the population, became a focus of concern and object of knowledge, the urban elites’ monopoly on the elaboration of the “peasant question” conferred upon them a dominant position within the social geography of the colonial (and indeed the postcolonial) state.

10

Introduction

In sum, these pages examine the evolution of the middle classes brought into existence as a byproduct of the modernizing and colonial Egyptian state. An essential feature of their growing consciousness entailed elaborating notions of an Egyptian people in which fallah and ’afandi were integrated into a single whole. The middle classes established a hierarchy within this arrangement, however, through an emphasis on being “civilized.” The urban professionals described themselves as the embodiment of civilization while portraying the peasantry as “uncivilized.” The peasants, however, were not the only obstacle to the ambitions of the incipient middle classes. Not only did the traditional elites still block their path, but the establishment and consolidation of British control further complicated their position. Over the course of time, this increasingly selfconscious 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. The reformers advocated rational and stable government and societal institutions, equality before the law, and representative political institutions. Ultimately, the ’afandiya depicted itself as standing between the “backward” and “ignorant” peasants and the old order of the traditional urban 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. iii. In the pages that follow, I make use of newspapers, journals, books, memoirs, and speeches of the time to illustrate the ways in which the figure of the peasant unified the discourses of decline, community renewal, and Islamic reform with the imperative of cultivating civilized moral dispositions. I discuss the ways in which the image of the fallah in news reports about rural violence and official corruption, moneylenders and irrigation, and agricultural pests and the courts was inflected by the discourses of religious reform and societal revitalization. I do not claim that the texts on which I draw were influential in themselves. With the aim of demonstrating the depth of the social and cultural changes I identify, I read widely across various genres in order to take examples from a range of literature. Consequently, I am drawing on a wide variety of materials ranging from newspapers, novels, short stories, and humorous pamphlets to agriculture journals and manuals, memoirs, and

Introduction

11

official documents. To be sure, these texts in and of themselves were not agents of change. Instead, I am here citing literature that best reflects the broad changes occurring in Egyptian society during this period. These texts, for example, illuminate the growing currency of notions of an Egyptian people and what I call Egyptian-ness within the literate strata. A reading of these texts affords us insight into how change was understood at the time. The texts also tell us much about the kinds of cultural resources that people of the time drew on to come to grips with the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. These texts tacitly affirm that Western-centered global capitalism and the expansion of commodity production in Egypt produced the conditions that were shaping modern Egyptians. In the texts, one can see traces of the dominance of commodity export agriculture, the rise of protonationalist thought, the escalating volume of calls for “civilizing” according to an “Eastern” or more specifically “Egyptian” way,10 and the impact of religious and social reform on public discourse. Thinking about Egyptianness in the early twentieth century milieu is unimaginable without taking those factors into consideration. The first chapter describes the general historical background and identifies the major historical issues of the period that animate this text. In sketching the historical picture, this chapter begins to lay the groundwork for the rest of the chapters. It explains the cumulative effect of a variety of historical events from the nineteenth century that had such momentous consequences for Egypt over the course of the twentieth century. Developments such as the explosion of cotton production, the introduction of new legal and administrative practices, and the emergence of a nascent public sphere quite naturally led to an interest in rural affairs with a particular focus on the condition of the peasants. Another important part of this historical tableau was the role played by the protagonists of the Islamic modernist movement. This chapter, and indeed the entire book, argues that in order for one to more fully comprehend historical developments in Egypt over the last century or more one must examine the pivotal role played by Islamic modernism in that history. The second chapter focuses on the ways that the urban literati of the late 1870s and early 1880s thought and wrote about their own collective identity. The chapter shows that, from the very beginning, questions of identity were often articulated through writing about peasants. It highlights how literate Egyptians writing in the newspapers and other kinds of capitalist print media emphasized the importance of civilization in their deliberations about the importance of building new kinds of social, economic, and moral bonds and in the practice of politics and political organizing. That these discussions occurred in the burgeoning public sphere is a testament to the

12

Introduction

importance of public-ness to the modern Egyptian identity formation. The chapter also underscores how the impetus to write about Egypt led intellectuals such as Yaqub Sannu’ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim to conceive of Egypt less as a physical unit and more as a social entity. Chapter 3 examines the social, political, and economic developments of the 1890s that were instrumental in the emergence of something clearly recognizable as Egyptian nationalism after the turn of the century. It also explicates the ramifications of the nationalist turn in the emergent Egyptian social imaginary. I proceed by looking at five peasant characters depicted in a variety of literature, ranging from popular humor pamphlets to journals of social and religious reform to daily newspapers. I argue in this chapter that the ascendant Egyptian urban literate classes created a protobourgeois social and moral framework in this period, within which they crafted a political vision of their future through their vast intellectual production. Paradoxically, they put themselves forward as the primary agents of modern political thinking and acting through their representations of the peasants. I read their representations of themselves as the gendered, classed, and civilized ’afandi as both a political claim and an attempt to outmaneuver their potential rivals within Egyptian society. In the fourth chapter I map out the changing social relations of the period in a more precise way through an examination of representations of peasants in agricultural literature and the ways in which these representations were themselves shaped by the discourses of Islamic modernism. The chapter shows how the political aspirations of the urban intelligentsia were increasingly articulated through the scientific idioms of agricultural knowledge and the moral values of cultural authenticity and political independence. At the center of this convergence was the peasant question. Due to its importance, the peasant question became the primary vehicle through which power relations were most starkly represented. This focus on the peasant question furthered the process described in Chapter 3 of installing the ’afandi class as the ideal political actor in the nationalist rendering of Egypt. Chapter 5 brings the study forward to the 1919 rebellion. Over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century the notion of Egypt as a people became further integrated into the consciousness of Egyptians. This integration is evidenced by the increasing salience of modern social categories and political concepts in representations of collective identity. That Egypt was a political project with a discrete biography and a moral conscience were notions that became increasingly embedded in Egyptian life due to the urban literati increasingly making use of new concepts of the individual, of society, and of collective history. Accordingly, it was

Introduction

13

also in this period that the idea of Egyptians as a single people gained increased currency as the literati more completely assimilated into their writing on Egypt notions of social collectively that had previously belonged to Islamic conceptions of the social. Therefore, in the prelude to the 1919 anti-British rebellion, this collective identity for the first time came to resemble modern Egyptian nationalism. The concluding section of the book reiterates that perceptions of the world in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt were not shaped by a contrast between secular and religious worldviews. For example, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish professionals, activists, theorists, and polemicists alike were inspired by and worked to accomplish the social, cultural, and political goals of Islamic reformers. Islamic reformers had aimed their appeals directly at a mass audience, and their arguments often drew on elements outside the purview of the institutions and norms of Islamic jurisprudence. As a result, Islamic reformism was the first modern sociopolitical philosophy and ideology of mass mobilization in Egypt. Its literate middle-class supporters regarded themselves neither as Islamists nor as secular political activists. Instead, they understood themselves as the natural representatives of a new form of community and the political elite of a new form of polity. Nevertheless, these new contexts for the articulation of religious knowledge and the reconfiguration of aspects of Islamic social constructs did not signal their disappearance. Islamic notions of self and community continued to be reproduced in surprising and often contradictory ways in Egyptian thought and writing. New categories of social organization and new forms of identity did not simply erase what came before; rather, a complex and perhaps even dissonant admixture of customs and traditions of knowledge, practice, and belief blended together to produce a novel but nonetheless recognizable form of modernity.

chapter one

The Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

; This chapter presents a general outline of the major historical questions of nineteenth-century Egypt in order to frame the argument of the entire book and link the concrete historical events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unexpected ways. The reader should note that the expansion of cotton production in the wake of the blockade of the Southern states during the American Civil War and the introduction of a new European-inspired legal regime in Egypt resulted in greater interest on the part of various social and political constituencies in the peasants and the conditions under which they produced and consumed. The emergence of the Islamic modernist movement is an essential component of this story. This chapter accordingly lays out the case for the centrality of Islamic modernism in the unfolding of Egyptian cultural history. I maintain that Islamic modernism played a decisive role in the cultural products of the new media in Egypt as well as in the wider Muslim world. Islamic modernism linked the discourses of moral reform and the imperative to build a modern Muslim society with questions of political sovereignty and public interest. It also provided new models of familial and societal relationships and personal comportment while outlining the proper desires and aspirations for “civilized” Muslims. These new models had a direct impact on the social contours of modern Egypt in general and on the place eventually occupied by the peasant majority in the new social geography in particular.

introduction During the late 1870s and early 1880s, intellectuals, journalists, political activists, and self-described reformers debated the causes and consequences

16

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

of the abject state of Egyptian peasants. Discussions were dominated by such questions as the disproportionate tax burden borne by the fallahin,1 the post–cottonboom economic crash, the monetization of the Egyptian economy, and the repercussions of the newly established Mixed Courts on the peasants’ holdings. These issues formed the backdrop of the political and social reform projects in which some of these figures became involved. At the same time religious reformers and social and political activists worked to achieve what they considered a complete societal transformation or revitalization. To a large extent their concerns crystallized around a narrative of Muslim decline. One finds a veritable host of contemporary accounts of the ways in which Muslim society fell into its present “wretched” and “moribund” state. Muslim society had lost its dynamism as its sense of purpose and shared endeavor waned. Superstition and a slavish, unthinking imitation of the past handicapped Muslims in all their worldly and spiritual pursuits.2 I will proceed to discuss the economic and political milieu that produced the new urban intellectual classes of writers, activists, and reformers in the nineteenth century. These groups were responsible for the vitality of public discussion around this historical narrative of decline; they also played an important role in the functioning of the modernizing state apparatus. The history of the Egyptian public sphere and the increasingly wide dissemination of opinions and ideas are inseparable from the emergence of these new social groupings in Egypt. An examination of their writing offers a unique window into the period’s history. I suggest throughout the following chapters that we read their words as self-reflexive meditations on both themselves and on Egypt as a collective social and political project. Their public writing was instrumental in laying the foundations of Egyptian political modernity.3 Their observations about various kinds of issues and their public deliberations, as well as the controversies they entered into, were essential to the development of new concepts of citizenship; notions of political rights; and questions about democracy, equality, and morality. At the same time, in order to explicate the revolutionary nature of change occurring at that time the historian must examine the history of the incipient public sphere through more than simply cataloging debates and identifying the partisans of particular arguments or policies.4 Indeed, our exploration of the public sphere is not exhausted by such work; it merely serves as an introduction. These pages propose accordingly that we look at the public sphere also as a site for the deployment of a form of power that was experienced as free social exchange.5 This form of power worked through the spaces of novel forms of social exchange.

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

17

Through literate Egyptians’ participation in these new spaces of interaction and exchange, they were impelled to possess desires and to describe their interests in ways that facilitated the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. These desires and interests were brought together and assigned positive value under the rubric of “civilization.” In effect, being “civilized” came to mean to aspire to political modernity. Likewise, through acting publicly, participants were encouraged to reject wants and to avoid pursuits that were contrary to the projects of modernity. Such wants and pursuits were understood as “ignorance,” “superstition,” “backwardness,” and “blind imitation” or “languidness.” As we will see, these terms came to represent the attitudes and behaviors of the peasantry. Thus, through our study of the practice of public discussion we will see how the “backward peasant” and the “civilized urbanite” subjects were constructed and authorized, in part, through this new form of power. The following pages chart the early stages of the emergence of the modern Egyptian political subject by looking at the treatment of the fallah question during its formative period. Specifically, such representations of peasants as those found in the work of the satirists ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Yaqub Sannu‘ generated new knowledge and fresh information about peasants on the one hand; at the same time, they created the ground on which a new gendered and civilized urban figure operated. These texts valorized this figure as the living embodiment of the future of Egypt-asmoral-community while proffering a peasant subject as an obstacle to achieving that future. As we will see in the subsequent discussion, a composite portrait of the civilized urbanite was presented as the ideal Egyptian political and moral subject. monopoly, markets, and the growth of export agriculture Markets By the close of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mehmet ’Ali,6a Mamluk who had come to Egypt with the Ottoman forces sent to confront the French after their 1798 invasion, had consolidated his position as the supreme ruler of Egypt. He accomplished this feat by replacing the inefficient tax-farming [iltizam] system with a system of government monopolies; in the process he rid himself of potential rivals among the often mutinous tax-farmers. As is well documented, ’Ali’s tight grip over trade enabled him to secure direct control over most of the agricultural production and distribution within Egypt and gave him complete mastery

18

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

over the lucrative export trade. In essence he became the only export merchant in all of Egypt. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1820s, the monopoly system of ’Ali’s regime progressively extended its control over an array of crops, particularly those cultivated for export, such as cotton and wheat. Producers were obliged to sell their harvests at fixed prices to government storehouses. These storehouses eventually stopped paying the agricultural producers in cash and instead paid them with coupons. The resultant decrease in money circulation, together with government monopolies applied to an ever wider array of crops, severely damaged market farming but proved to be a boon to Mehmet ’Ali’s efforts to regulate production. Through these controls he obliged peasants to grow only certain kinds of crops, such as those that could be exported—primarily wheat and rice, and then after 1820, cotton.7 That said, it is important to note that even during this period of government monopoly Egyptian market agriculture continued. The weekly and thrice-monthly markets for livestock, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and dairy products found in many provincial towns were still held, if on a smaller scale. The command economy of the early nineteenth century did not completely supplant an ancient and complex commercial market system. Market agriculture for export, especially in wheat, had been an important part of Egypt’s commercial activity for centuries. In contrast to historians who maintain that Egyptian commercial agriculture emerged after the end of the monopoly system, Ken Cuno has argued that market farming returned and rebounded in the 1840s.8 Indeed, Cuno’s work challenges many of the assumptions about nineteenth-century Egyptian economic history found in the work of such scholars as Charles Issawi, Gabriel Baer, ’Ali Barakat, Ra’uf Abbas, and Roger Owen. Cuno argues that the commercial and financial framework supporting agriculture that historians associate with the late nineteenth century was in operation long before this period. He found evidence of widespread commercial agriculture, a monetized economy, moneylenders traveling throughout rural Egypt, and de facto inheritable property rights among even small peasant landowners centuries earlier than historians had previously thought. He does concur with other historians, however, that the nineteenth century was a unique period for a number of reasons—not the least of which were the scale of export production brought about by the introduction of long-staple cotton and the transformation of trade patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. Cuno sums up his contribution by stating that historians should revise the thesis that the appearance of the West introduced something unprecedented into Egypt that transformed the mode and relations of production, and that they should instead regard the emergence of

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

19

Western-centered markets as simply a corollary of the reemergence of “market relations and commercial agriculture” in Egypt. Low government purchase prices paid by the monopoly system drove up the numbers of peasants and rural notables falling into debt. The results of these pressures were predictable. Peasants abandoned the land in large numbers to escape their mounting debt, the imposition of military conscription, and the increasingly onerous corvée. The abandoned lands were then “reassigned” to those seemingly able to pay the arrears and cultivate the properties. Those families receiving these grants, if unable to pay the arrears and farm the new land, were not immune from the harsh treatment meted out to even the humblest debtors. The family of the great educator and geographer, ’Ali Mubarak (1824–1893), is a case in point. His relatives from the village of Birnibal al-Jadid enjoyed the prestige brought by education and their position as the local prayer leaders and shari ‘a court judges. After receiving a grant of abandoned land, but failing to meet the demands of the local tax collector, the members of Mubarak’s family were subject to beatings and imprisonment “just like the peasants”; in the end they too abandoned their village.9 It was not until years after the end of Mehmet ’Ali’s rule and the demise of his monopoly system that the Egyptian cash economy fully recovered and agriculture became reoriented more fully to capital-driven market production. During the years of transition back to a cash economy, however, continuing shortages of cash obliged the poorest cultivators to continue to sell their crops to government storehouses. They could pay their taxes in kind at the government depots; the value they received for their produce, however, fell far below the prices that could be obtained in the open market. Moreover, the promissory notes the cultivators received in exchange were only redeemable in payment for the following year’s taxes.10 As a result, the legacy of Mehmet ’Ali’s monopoly continued to affect the humblest cultivators through the 1840s. The persistence of its after effects had dire consequences for the productive capacities of Egyptian agriculture, driving Egypt’s rulers in the late 1840s up until the early 1860s to take positive steps to protect small cultivators. For example, the 1847 land law provided a framework for adjudicating disputes arising out of confusion between customary or Islamic law on the one hand and government decrees on the other. Adjudication was necessary as the peasants reclaimed lands abandoned during the Mehmet ’Ali period. Even some peasants unable to reclaim all of their land were assured of a livelihood through smaller grants of land. The government also forbade European merchants from dealing directly with peasants, to protect them from debt. And later it eliminated the octroi or internal tariff on goods brought to the cities from the countryside.11

20

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

As a result of the early nineteenth-century expansion of trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, Egyptian commercial agriculture quickly developed and surpassed its pre–Mehmet ’Ali levels when it was revived in the 1840s. The expansion of market agriculture was fueled by such export crops as wheat and cotton. Although long-staple cotton had been grown in large amounts from the 1820s, it became increasingly cultivated over the course of the early nineteenth century. Cotton provided more than 50 percent of Egypt’s exports before the huge expansion of cotton cultivation caused by the American Civil War’s disruption of Southern cotton production. Because of Egypt’s emphasis on export agriculture, especially cotton, by 1900 the country had become a net importer of cereals to feed its rising population.12 With the excellent potential for high profits, large numbers of cultivators, even many small and medium landholders, turned to growing cotton. Market agriculture became increasingly oriented toward the export rather than the local market. Mehmet ’Ali’s fourth surviving son, Sa‘id (1822–1863), ruled as a viceroy or wali between 1854 and 1863. The Ottoman title conferred on Egypt’s ruler was wali [or vali; usually translated as “governor”] until Mehmet ’Ali’s nephew Isma‘il (ruled from 1863 to 1879) paid the Porte [the name by which as the Ottoman government was known] a substantial sum to have the title “Khedive” made official in the early 1860s. Sa‘id was said to be something of a Francophile—at least in comparison with his nephew Abbas (1812–1854), whom he followed. Perhaps this preference for the French is the reason for his granting the concession to build the Suez Canal to his friend Ferdinand de Lesseps. Sa‘id encouraged the revitalization of market relations in local production by returning Lower and Middle Egypt to paying taxes in coin rather than in kind, as had become customary during the Mehmet ’Ali era. Sa‘id’s order immediately benefited moneylenders and spurred some agents of Alexandrian merchants into entering the moneylending business because some cultivators, especially cotton growers whose production required large amounts of cash for irrigation and labor, found themselves short on ready cash when the tax collectors arrived.13 This trend toward monetization quickened throughout the second half of the nineteenth century until Khedive Tawfiq (1879–1892) decreed in 1880 that even in regions where the economy was not fully monetized, such as Upper Egypt, taxes should be collected in coin.14 The economic backdrop of Tawfiq’s order was the unraveling of Egypt’s finances due to massive foreign debt accumulated over the previous twenty-five years. The buildup of debt stemmed from such huge public works projects as the Suez Canal and from the sudden collapse in cotton prices that occurred after the end of the American Civil War; the British, perhaps unfairly, also blamed the profligacy of Egypt’s rulers. British

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

21

views of the Egyptian royal family were influenced by travel literature, some of it clearly fantastical. One can observe this influence in many of the opinions voiced in official British documents of the time.15 By switching to cash payment of taxes, Egypt’s rulers hoped to pay off their government’s mounting debt at a time when European creditors were pushing for the Great Powers to intervene more directly in the financial affairs of the Egyptian government. There was already a precedent for intervention in the case of the Ottoman government. Europeans fearing for their investments in the Ottoman domains forced the sultan to accede to their wishes for financial oversight. Therefore, just as had occurred in Istanbul, a European-supervised Public Debt Administration (Casse de la Dette Publique) was forced on the Egyptian government in Cairo in the wake of its declaration of bankruptcy in 1876. The ruler at the time, Khedive Isma‘il (1830–1895), is one of the most controversial of Egypt’s modern era. Wali, and then later khedive, Isma‘il ruled from 1863 until 1879. He endeavored to develop Egypt’s productive capacities and to achieve greater independence from the Ottoman Empire. He undertook a number of reforms in education and administration and built up Egypt’s infrastructure to make it easier to bring export crops to market and port. The British blamed Egypt’s bankruptcy on what they called Isma‘il’s financial mismanagement. However one reads the history of the period, one can safely say that his heavy-handed style and the financial crisis through which Egypt suffered in the 1870s created an atmosphere conducive to his deposition in 1879, unrest and rebellion through the early 1880s, and ultimately to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In the wake of his acceptance of the Public Debt Administration with the European governments representing Egypt’s largest creditors, Isma‘il was obliged to accept French and British ministers in his cabinet to oversee the country’s finances. On several occasions these new ministers pressured the khedive into collecting taxes early in order to make payments to European bondholders when their coupons on Isma‘il’s huge loans matured. For example, in 1876 and again in 1878, the government collected taxes nine and twelve months early to pay the July 1878 bond coupon.16 The switch to collecting such assessments in coin allowed government tax collectors to arrive at a village at any time of the year rather than after the harvest season as had been customary. Accordingly, small landholders were often forced to borrow money at exorbitant rates to meet their tax obligations. Land Tenure Nathan Brown describes three systems of agricultural production that were functioning in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century. Commercial estates existed in the outer Nile Delta, the outskirts of Cairo,

22

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

Fayyum, and northern Asyut, and central Aswan. In the inner Delta were smallholdings, while smaller estates existed in Giza, Bani Suwayf, and parts of Asyut. Smallholder commercial agriculture existed mainly in Upper Egypt alongside subsistence farming. Sharecroppers or renters carried out much of the estate-based commercial farming, although some contract labor existed in the outer Delta on many of the largest estates.17 Until the 1860s, the large estates produced most of the cotton for export while small landholders grew less labor-intensive market crops such as wheat. From the end of the Mehmet ’Ali era in the 1840s and then the Abbas and Sa’id periods in the 1850s, market-based landownership became increasingly prevalent. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the market had reshaped the land tenure structure of rural Egypt. The market economy led to the consolidation of large estates, often at the expense of peasants, that enabled the members of the royal family and those allied with them to transform themselves into a powerful landowning class. Then, as the government was forced by its European creditors to sell off some of its holdings—thus lowering some prices—urban Egyptians of more modest means began to invest in agricultural land. Soon European capital, looking for new opportunities, followed Egyptian merchants and began to invest in land, becoming an increasingly important presence in the countryside. There was one crucial difference, however, between European land purchasers and their local agents and between Egyptian investors: the former group of profit-seeking investors was protected by the legal privileges granted by the Capitulations while the latter was not. The Capitulations were a series of treaties or contracts between the Ottomans and various states, mostly European powers. When first promulgated during the seventeenth century, a time of Ottoman strength, the treaties were intended to assuage Italian merchants’ fear of doing business within the Ottoman Empire by granting the foreigners immunity from Ottoman law. Over time, with the shift in power toward northern Europe and away from the Ottoman Empire, these treaties had the effect of creating groups of merchants exempt from taxes and local law, therefore beyond the reach of local officials throughout the Ottoman domains. As the western European powers became stronger, they extracted greater and greater concessions from the Porte. The capitulatory powers in the nineteenth century were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.18 Indeed, the capitulatory powers eventually obliged the Ottoman state to recognize consular protection extended to their nationals and to others able to obtain a consular certificate. Many Levantines and some Egyptians secured this protection. Thus there was a considerable incentive on the part of Egyptian locals to acquire a letter

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

23

granting protégé status from a foreign consul. Besides the chaos and legal complexity that consular immunity engendered, its net result was that those holding this privilege, whether foreigners or their Egyptian protégés, were exempt from all manner of taxation in Egypt.19 Even as the Capitulations gained strength, Europeans successfully challenged the trade and tax polices upon which Mehmet ’Ali had built his short-lived empire and that were a source of the unequal land distribution that became accentuated through the rest of the century. The Mehmet ’Ali regime had aimed to maintain agricultural production and a steady flow of tax revenues at any cost. Accordingly, land was “reassigned” whenever a cultivator was either unable to farm it or when tax arrears accrued. The result of these policies was an increasingly uneven distribution of land in the countryside.20 The beneficiaries were often the shaykhs al-balad (village headmen, sometimes rendered as “mayors”), many of whom were assimilated into the ranks of the rural notable class or the ayan. Maha Ghalwash contends that a sense of moral obligation and economic interest compelled the government to try to maintain the economic viability of even the “lower-rung” peasants. After Mehmet ’Ali was defeated in Syria by a joint Ottoman-British-Austrian force in 1840 and 1841, he was compelled to sign the Treaty of London (1841), which bound him to comply with the Ottoman-British Balta-Liman Agreement of 1838. The Balta-Liman Agreement forbade government trading monopolies and set low fixed tariff rates. In order to sidestep these strictures, however, Mehmet ’Ali granted huge tracts of land to members of his extended family and to high Egyptian officials. Since these estates were formed out of the areas producing the greatest percentage of profitable export crops, particularly cotton, the ruling family in effect controlled commercial export agriculture. Many of these estate lands had been seized from peasant cultivators who in theory would receive compensation in the form of “equivalent” land supplied by other members of the royal family. Practice surely deviated from theory, however, as many peasants received lands that were often far from their place of residence, sometimes in “other provinces [mudiriyat]”; or if they were given land nearby it was often uncultivated and therefore required heavy investment to bring under the plow.21 Moreover, these exchanges often occurred without the consent or even the knowledge of the peasant proprietors. Ultimately, many of the “compensated” peasants were for all intents and purposes simply dispossessed of their land, and had little choice but to become tenants or laborers on the estates created out of what had been their fields. Khedive Isma‘il was especially rapacious, as he seized thousands of faddans of peasant-owned land and combined it with land classified as uncultivated, although in practice much of it was farmed.22 He

24

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

reallocated these lands to himself, his family, high state officials, or military officers.23 The end of the monopoly system and the return of market agriculture encouraged Egyptian merchants in provincial towns to invest in land, especially after a slump in world cotton prices caused land values to decline in the 1840s.24 According to ’Ali Shalabi, Viceroy Sa’id further accelerated this trend when he cancelled tariffs on internal trade.25 Urban investors, mainly Egyptian merchants and local minorities, became an absentee landlord class. During the last third of the nineteenth century, investing in land became even more attractive. After Khedive Isma‘il was forced to give up title on his lands in the midst of the financial crisis that eventually toppled him, land prices declined. This decline accelerated the pace of estate formation. Perhaps even more important was the manner in which these sales were conducted. Government officials were known to provide assistance to favored landowners by such methods as arranging “auctions” so that the land sold well below its market value or by accepting only a single bid on a parcel of land. Other officials also might “resurvey” the local holdings and redraw the property lines in ways more favorable to their powerful landowner-patrons.26 In one such case dating from 1879, detailed in the weekly newspaper alKawkab al-Misri (an influential Cairo-based newspaper that appeared between 1879 and 1881 which echoed the reform positions of al-Tijara and al-‘Asr al-Jadid, and was owned and edited by two protégés of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, Musa Kastali and al-Sayyid Wafa Muhammad), an unnamed local landowner, himself probably a descendant of tax-farmers or multazims, lost his twenty faddans to an “appointee of the former Khedive [Isma‘il].”27 This “Pasha,” whom the writer referred to as a well-known member of Egypt’s dhawat [aristocratic elite], used his influence to illegally acquire the parcel of “government [Miri] land” for sale that lay adjacent to his fields. Not content with his three hundred and fifty faddans, the Pasha compelled the local governor to declare that “according to the official land register” his holdings had been illegally trespassed upon and farmed by his neighbors. A conspiracy involving the governor, the governor’s local agents, headmen of the surrounding towns, and the regional superintendent resulted in the redrawing of the boundaries. In the end, the outraged correspondent was not only deprived of his land but was also imprisoned when he protested.28 Even if the story is apocryphal, it reflects a measure of the anxiety felt by the proprietors of medium-sized holdings at a moment characterized by uncertainty brought on by crushing debt, increasing taxes, and an alliance between local officials and large landholders. Levantine traders, who had begun to arrive in large numbers during Isma‘il’s reign primarily due to their language skills, and other foreigners

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

25

who had adopted the “time-honored methods of local merchants and money-lenders in dealing with villagers” began to move into the countryside, first as agents for the merchant houses of Alexandria and then as moneylenders.29 In many cases the newcomers adopted the same local trading practices, including various forms of money lending, in which their local competitors had engaged for many years. The appearance of the Syrians beginning in the 1860s caused no small amount of resentment on the part of Egyptian merchants and moneylenders. Opportunities for financial enrichment that brought Syrians in large numbers to Egypt in the 1860s had already begun to attract large numbers of Europeans beginning in the 1850s. The Greeks, numbering some thirty-five thousand by 1875, were the most numerous, followed by fourteen thousand Italians and seven thousand French nationals.30 At first many of the foreigners invested in the speculative land market. Thus by the 1880s, a number of land reclamation companies and mortgage credit agencies began by preparing land for cultivation and then reselling it.31 Eventually European agents for these and other trading companies based primarily in Alexandria began to purchase land with the intention of farming it themselves, following the example of Egyptian merchants. These European companies specialized in such reclamation projects as clearing fields or draining swamps.32 According to Gabriel Baer, Europeans indeed started to acquire land in Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s when they recognized the investment potential of agriculture, and when they did so they concentrated their holdings in large estates.33 By the late 1890s, Europeans owned about 12 percent of the total of cultivated land in Egypt and 23 percent of the large estates responsible for producing export-grade cotton.34 These new investors differed from their Egyptian counterparts in one important respect: in contrast to most Egyptians, Europeans (and a large percentage of the Syrians) enjoyed consular protection through the Capitulations. Because the vast majority of those involved in commercial activity in Egypt enjoyed the immunity conferred by the Capitulations, a large percentage of Egyptian commerce was untaxed. instruments of the state: tax collection and the mixed courts The transformation of the land tenure regime was not the only factor driving the deepening interest in the countryside and the state of the peasantry. Concern about tax rates, new tax collection practices, and government and private debt animated public discussions at the time. For example, many of the landowners serving in the Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab [Assembly of

26

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

Consultative Representatives] initially joined the rebellion of 1882 because of the anger they felt at the recent tax policies of the government— especially the repeal of the Muqabala law.35 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, rising financial pressures led successive Egyptian governments to raise taxes.36 Egypt took out its first public loan in 1862 to pay for shares in the de Lesseps Company after Sa‘id’s ill-fated decision to award it a concession to build the Suez Canal.37 In addition to not paying the salaries of state employees and borrowing money from European merchants, Sa‘id’s government raised taxes on kharaj land (the classification that covered much of the land held by small proprietors) from one-quarter to one-third of the total yield in 1856. Recent scholarship has shown that one should not automatically associate all kharajiya with small fallah landholders and all ‘ushriya (theoretically based on paying a tenth of the harvest in taxes, ‘ushr meaning “a tenth” in Arabic) with larger landowners. Some smallholders were able to accumulate large tracts of kharajiya land while inheritance and debt caused the fracturing of some large ‘ushriya holdings. The protagonist of the story cited above from al-Kawkab al-Misri, whose land was taken by the corrupt member of the dhawat, is a case in point. His ‘ushriya holdings amounted to only twenty faddans.38 Many of those possessing large areas of kharajiya land worked with government officials to have their land declared ‘ushriya, thus significantly lowering their tax assessments. Between 1863 and 1877 the amount of kharajiya land remained roughly the same while the amount of ‘ushriya land doubled to nearly one-quarter of the entire cultivated area. Even allowing for land reclamation, this expansion indicates the success of some of these landholders in having their land reclassified as ‘ushriya. In 1864 Isma‘il increased the tax on kharajiya to one-half of the yield, and subsequently introduced a whole series of new taxes between 1867 and 1871.39 At the same time, officials often resorted to simple extortion in order to collect higher payments than those delineated in the official tax rolls. The Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab almost certainly exacerbated this problem when it decreed in 1871 that the committees appraising land values and assessing taxes should include ‘umdas (village headmen) and such local officials as the ma’mur (head of a unit of provincial administration) and the na’ir al-zira‘a (local agricultural inspector). Previously it was not unheard of for ‘umdas and shaykhs al-balad to be charged with these tasks. Since the days of Mehmet ’Ali, the shaykhs al-balad had been at various times responsible for appraising land values, collecting taxes, reallocating land that became vacant in their villages, recruiting for the corvée and military, overseeing the distribution of water, and inspecting the fallahin’s fields. However, after the 1871 decree corrpution substantially

Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

27

increased.40 Complaints followed about the arbitrariness of the new assessments and about the integrity of the local officials charged with determining and implementing them. Some in the press charged these committees with ineptitude while others accused them of corruption. Bribery was so ubiquitous that many simply referred to it as another form of taxation. Tax collectors’ wages were derived from a percentage of the total tax they collected. In addition, in order to obtain and to keep their positions they were compelled to pay bribes to other local officials that came to as much as 25 percent of their income. As tax receipts fell off dramatically during the late 1870s and early 1880s, the tax collectors’ wages fell between 25 and 35 percent. Thus it is not surprising that at the same time accusations appeared of local officials levying their own “taxes” either to compensate for shortfalls in the salaries owed them or simply to supplement their wages. The frustration among Egyptian officials grew as more and more Europeans were hired to serve in the Egyptian administration after 1875. The foreigners were awarded large salaries even while Egyptianborn officials were placed on half pay or dismissed altogether, while more “fortunate” officials simply had their salaries “reduced arbitrarily.”41 There was suspicion among critics in the press that the central authorities condoned even if they did not encourage this practice. For example, alKawkab al-Misri declared that “the finance minister was delighted when some mudirin [provincial governors] levied their own [extra] taxes.”42 Complaints were rife about the conflict of interest among some of the tax collectors [sayarif], who remitted tax payments to the state from the same peasants to whom they were loaning the money to pay these taxes.43 These officials profited not only by assessing the fallahin higher taxes than those prescribed by law, but also through their role as moneylenders on the loans taken by peasants struggling to meet their tax burdens. An anonymous writer in the daily Misr examining the condition of the fallah in 1879 found it suspicious that tax collectors, although they were “paid ten Egyptian pounds a month and have large families . . . nevertheless, before long own a large house . . . and a hundred faddans.”44 One observer summed up conditions in the countryside, bemoaning that “the [peasants] lose three-quarters of their crops to . . . the khedive [in tax payments], the village headman, the local inspectors, the tax collector and others” in extralegal payments and bribes.45 Bribery and corruption were not limited to tax collectors and soon became endemic in most government operations, especially in the countryside. According to contemporary accounts, the performance of even the simplest government services required some kind of extralegal payment or bribe. For example, the newspaper al-Tijara criticized the Health Commission [majlis al-siha] doctors for refusing to register births and

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deaths until satisfied with the “plunder” they received.46 The paper declared sarcastically that “the dead are not dead and the murdered are not murdered” until the contracts of “death incorporated” were completed. In other words, the Health Commission would not issue birth or death certificates until petitioners paid a bribe. In the 1870s the accumulation of peasant debt took on new significance against the backdrop of the transformation of the Egyptian legal system. In 1875, after nearly ten years of complex and difficult negotiation, the capitulatory powers, with the help of Nubar Nubarian, one of Isma‘il’s closest aides, succeeded in overhauling much of the Egyptian legal apparatus with the ratification of the Mixed Court agreement.47 In 1876 the Mixed Courts replaced the Consular Courts in commercial litigation by adjudicating disputes between foreigners of different nationalities as well as lawsuits between Egyptians and foreigners. Isma‘il supported the court reforms because he hoped that by establishing a single legal framework in which commercial interests would operate, he would attract European investment to his large development schemes, such as the Suez Canal. The Mixed Courts helped to limit the chaos that had marked commercial litigation between and among the many competing foreign and Egyptian business interests. Before the inauguration of the Mixed Courts, the Capitulations regime had granted foreign nationals the right to have their cases heard by their own consular courts. The question of jurisdiction was thus a perpetually thorny one, with “suits brought in as many different forums as there were defendants.”48 Even worse, appeals of consular court rulings were heard in the home country of the nationals involved rather than in Egypt. Thus appeals of the French consular court’s decisions were heard in Aix-en-Provence, Italian appeals were heard in Ancona, and Greek appeals in Athens.49 In the end, Isma‘il and Nubar achieved their aim, as the Mixed Courts simplified questions of jurisdiction and thus facilitated the penetration of foreign capital into the countryside. The first foreign land investment company, Kawm al-Akhdar, was incorporated less than a year after ratification of the agreement.50 Establishment of the Mixed Court system was a watershed because it helped to further the expansion of European-style juridical institutions in Egypt. This trend was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that this new legal institution helped make a secular concept of moral autonomy more commonplace in Egyptian society. Nevertheless, we should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of the Mixed Courts on the Egyptian land tenure regime. As a practical matter, the new courts and their legal codes based on French property law did not grant new kinds of authority to the government.51 Courts in Egypt had foreclosed on property or ordered the seizure and forced sale of land and livestock

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for debt prior to 1876.52 Indeed, thirty years before the signing of the Mixed Court treaty, Sa‘id’s 1847 Land Law stipulated that borrowers could permanently forfeit mortgaged land after a period of fifteen years unless the outstanding debt was satisfied. The 1858 Land Law then shortened the period to five years for a debtor to repay a loan and reclaim his or her land. Therefore, if the Mixed Courts are viewed within the context of nineteenth-century Egyptian history, they are most accurately described as a step in the process of legal transformation that began in the 1840s. Three decades before the launch of the Mixed Courts, debtors faced the possibility of losing their land to creditors. If many Egyptians, especially peasant cultivators, initially found the courts’ formal procedures and use of French somewhat bewildering, they had decades of experience to draw upon to understand the implications of a judgment against them in a case of mortgage debt.53 The economic and legal developments of the 1870s, combined with the legacy of the land laws of the 1840s and 1850s, resulted in the reconfiguration of the socioeconomic geography of Egypt in the wake of the cotton boom of the early 1860s. In the postboom crash during the mid- and late 1860s, the same factors that had traditionally driven peasants to abandon their land, such as rising taxes, decreasing commodity prices, and the burden of the corvée, once again induced many to take flight. In contrast to earlier periods of peasant flight, however, when peasants returned to their lands in the 1870s they came face to face with a new reality: Egyptian land tenure law had been transformed since the previous periods of large-scale peasant flight. Barakat points out the irony in the fact that that the land laws had been putatively drawn up to guarantee the security of private landholding rights but in practice caused the peasants “to lose most of their lands.”54 The peasants’ unfortunate encounter with the new reality resulted in large numbers of them becoming permanently landless.55 The Mixed Courts heard many cases involving peasant debt since many of the mortgage holders were foreigners. In accordance with French property law, the time between a declaration of bankruptcy and foreclosure was shortened to a matter of months, thereby accelerating the pace at which a creditor could gain control of mortgaged lands. the peasant in the early ’afandi imagination An examination of Egyptian cultural production in the late nineteenth century reveals the links between the expanding state, rural and urban social transformations, and Egypt’s position as a commodity producer. We

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can trace the origins of the intellectual and professional classes that became so pivotal in Egyptian history to this period. To a great extent these classes were an outgrowth of the modernizing state’s growing legal and bureaucratic apparatus, which created the need for literate functionaries. Intellectuals and professionals were part of an urban, literate middle stratum that lay somewhere between the mass of rural (and increasingly urban) poor and the dhawat or aristocratic, often Ottoman, elite. Due in part to its professional or technical training and education, this professional and technocratic cadre coalesced into a more or less coherent social cluster that became known as the ’afandiya. This stratum developed a distinctive self-consciousness through such new forms of sociability and technology as the literary salon, the learned and welfare societies, and the burgeoning press and capitalist print media. Through the ’afandiya’s circulation in new public social spaces, its members came to conceive of themselves as playing a major role in the shaping of Egypt as a bounded moral-political entity. Moreover, public deliberations about the future of Egypt and the state of its agriculture helped to cement a link in their minds between the potential viability of the moral-political project that was Egypt and the success of peasants in producing crops, especially cotton, for export.56 The press was the site of much of this discussion. In 1881 ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s weekly al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, based in Alexandria, became well known for its literary representations of peasant life and its interest in social and economic conditions in the countryside.57 Al-Nadim was a polemicist and perhaps the best-known writer and publisher of his time. He was born in Alexandria under rather humble circumstances. His father operated a small bakery and had previously been employed in Mehmet ’Ali’s shipworks, which were closed after the Egyptian defeat in Syria in 1840. Al-Nadim eventually fell out with his family, who objected to his literary pursuits. He traveled widely throughout Egypt, working in Cairo, al-Mansura, and various places in the Nile Delta region. He spent nearly a decade hiding from the British after the failure of the 1882 revolt. Eventually he was captured, tried, and convicted, but his death sentence was commuted by Khedive Abbas II to a period of exile in Palestine. AlNadim returned to Egypt briefly from 1892 through 1894, but the British exiled him again to Istanbul, where he died in 1896. His two newspaper ventures, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit [1881] and al-Ustadh [1892–93], were among the most popular and influential of the period. Likewise, one finds prominent peasant characters in the work of a contemporary of al-Nadim, Yaqub Sannu‘. (Following other authors in English I have transliterated his name as “Sannu‘ ” throughout these pages. There are, however, references to his work in many databases under the spelling

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“Sanua,” usually with the first name James.) Despite the fact that both alNadim and Sannu‘ were children of the city—Sannu‘ was born in Cairo and al-Nadim in Alexandria—they shared an interest in the countryside and its inhabitants. They were from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Sannu‘ came from a prominent Jewish family originally from the Italian city of Livorno. He was educated in Europe and his father was an advisor to the royal court. After Sannu‘ completed his education, he returned to Egypt and became a major figure in the Egyptian theatre as a producer and playwright. Later he turned to journalism and political humor as artistic outlets; he established his influential satirical journal Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa [The Man with Blue Glasses] in 1877. Sannu‘ became a vociferous critic of the ruling dynasty and of the British and was exiled permanently in 1879. Al-Nadim and Sannu‘ were major figures in the early Egyptian press. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’ was for many years one of the most popular publications in Egypt even after Sannu‘ had to publish it from exile in Paris and its importation into Egypt was prohibited. Similarly, although alTankit wa al-Tabkit published only nineteen issues between July 6 and October 23, 1881, the periodical was extremely influential in the development of the modern Arabic-language press. Al-Nadim’s, and to a lesser extent Sannu‘’s, many linguistic and stylistic innovations are still regarded as groundbreaking by linguists and historians. For example, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit and Abu Nazzara were the first modern publications to report direct speech in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Both al-Nadim and Sannu‘ excelled in reproducing not only regional variations in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but also enjoyed mimicking the accents of nonnative speakers of Arabic. Al-Nadim’s biting sarcasm was rivaled only by the bawdy and profane language of Sannu‘’s Abu Nazzara, among critical journals at the time. Nevertheless, these were not the only Arabic-language periodicals that reported on contemporary rural life in Egypt. Indeed, one finds articles in such papers as al-Tijara, al-‘Asr al-Jadid, Misr, al-Kawkab al-Misri, al-Waqt, al-Watan and al-Mufid with such titles as “The Egyptian Fallah,” “Judges and the Fallah in Egypt,” or “The Condition of the Fallah.” These items detailing the economic and social conditions in the countryside, the general state of the peasantry, and problems with Egyptian agriculture began to appear in the nascent Egyptian commercial press in the 1870s. Journalists wrote about the land tenure structure and the court system, they reported about rural crime and decried the “inadequacy” of the peasants’ agricultural implements, or they called for a lending institution to assist small peasant cultivators. The press was rife with criticisms of local officials; it chronicled the financial arrangements obtaining between peasants and moneylenders and offered advice on such administrative matters as tax collection and irrigation management. Jour-

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nalists also put forward preferences for particular agricultural methods and husbandry techniques.58 Observations about the situation of the peasants were often found next to stock and commodity market news from Egypt as well as from Liverpool, Paris, and London—to which the Arabic-language press of Cairo and Alexandria devoted considerable space.59 Newspaper coverage of Egyptian agriculture reflected the growing interest in export crops and foreign markets. Routine summaries and technical discussions of agricultural developments, harvest forecasts, and reports about pests, especially the cotton weevil, were commonplace items. In 1880, the Egyptian Agricultural Association (later the Royal Agricultural Association), headed by Haydar Basha, began to publish a monthly Arabic-French language journal, Nashrat al-Jama‘iya al-Zira’a al-Misriya, which was devoted exclusively to “expanding and improving agriculture” by fostering communication among “persons working in agriculture.”60 In addition to al-Nadim and Sannu‘, a small but increasingly influential group of public commentators began to focus on the condition of the peasant cultivators. There was a range of such figures with a variety of political positions that were to a certain extent reflected in the ways they chose to write about the countryside. While this inchoate grouping shared common cultural values and social habits, it held no determinate political position with regard to the British occupation—as we can see from a few examples of individuals who began to write about peasants and to concern themselves with agriculture and related issues. For example, Hamza Fathallah (1849–1918), the Muslim scholar, littérateur, poet, and newspaper publisher, generally steered clear of the political controversies swirling around him at the time. Fathallah began his writing career in the 1870s with articles for al-Rawdat al-Madaris, the journal started and edited by Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), the Egyptian educator and translator. Fathallah was noted for his pro-Ottoman views and his connections to the khedival court. He spent the last three decades of his life working in the Education Ministry under the British as an inspector of Arabic education. On the other side there was Mustafa Thaqib, the firebrand publisher of two newspapers in Cairo before the ‘Urabi rebellion. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim described Thaqib’s al-Mufid as unparalleled in its capacity to “breathe the spirit of anarchy into the Arab umma.” Not surprisingly Thaqib soon ran afoul of the Khedive Tawfiq, who closed down alMufid in 1882. Immediately afterward, Thaqib began publishing a successor journal with Hasan Shamsi, al-Najah, which was also closed down.61 Two other representative characters of this pro-‘Urabist orientation were the publisher of the short-lived weekly al-Fustat, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Madani, and his assistant and editor, Muhammad ‘Abdallah. During the course of the rebellion in the summer of 1882, al-Fustat devoted nearly the

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entire paper to the fighting between the ‘Urabist forces and the British. In fact, according to the decidedly anti-‘Urabist early twentieth century chronicler of the Arabic press Filib Di Tirazi, al-Fustat was the paper in which the ‘Urabists communicated their “despicable aims [ma‘rab al-safila].” Such other writers as Hasan Husni al-Turani (1850–1897) were noted for their pro-British or pro-Ottoman sympathies. Al-Turani had been brought to Egypt from Istanbul by the British with the express purpose of publishing “al-Nil . . . in order to support the occupation and to defend its policies.”62 Born in Cairo in 1850, the pro-Ottoman al-Turani was a prolific writer of prose and poetry in both Arabic and Turkish and authored a number of books on religious themes. He established a string of newspapers beginning in Istanbul in 1880. At the same time his writing appeared in a number of Egyptian newspapers and journals associated with pro-Ottoman editorial positions such as al-Burhan. On al-Turani’s arrival in Egypt in 1882, he promptly became the editor of the newspaper al-Zaman. Al-Zaman had a colorful history. It was established as a twiceweekly publication in Cairo by the Syrian Armenian Alkasan Sarafiyan in 1882. During the run-up to the rebellion of 1882 al-Zaman ran afoul of the ‘Urabist cabinet and was suspended. It reappeared after the defeat of ‘Urabi and was the first Arabic-language newspaper to support the British. By this time its editor was another Syrian, Mikha’il ‘Awra. Eventually Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) took over the editorship. The paper was closed soon afterward by the khedival government on a request from Mukhtar al-Ghazi for insulting the Ottoman government.63 Al-Turani established a number of newspapers including al-Nil, al-Shams and alMajalla al-Zira‘iya. Many who belonged to this literate cadre of journalists and editors, as well as their readers and letter writers, retained direct and indirect connections to middle-stratum landowners. They were often the children or descendants of village headmen or shaykhs, such as ’Ali Mubarak, who rose from his rural beginnings to become one of the most important intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Egypt. Mubarak held a number of government posts, including Minister of Public Works and Minister of Education. The village elite of shaykhs and ‘umdas also produced the likes of Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the jurist, Islamic reformer, and Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani’s collaborator. Briefly in exile after the failure of the 1882 revolt, he eventually made peace and cooperated with the British occupation after his return to Egypt. ‘Abduh became an extremely influential figure, not only in the history of Islamic reform thought but also in the development of modern educational and judicial reform in Egypt. He ended his life as the Mufti of Egypt, the highest position that a Muslim jurist could hold.

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Still another figure was Saad Zaghlul (1859–1927), who came from a family holding the position of ‘umda in Gharbiya province in the Delta. Zaghlul edited the official Egyptian government journal, al-Waqa’i‘ alMisriya, in 1881 and then became a prominent lawyer. He served as Education Minister and Justice Minster and then was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1913. Zaghlul eventually became the preeminent nationalist leader and a fierce opponent of British occupation. He was arrested by the British as he tried to travel to the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I to submit Egypt’s demands for independence. His arrest and threeyear exile precipitated the 1919 Revolution. In the end the British were not only forced to bring Zaghlul back but also to ask him to form a government when his Wafd Party won a large majority in the 1923 elections. Dislocations in the relations of production in the countryside brought about by the economic changes of the last half of the nineteenth century and new legal arrangements surely affected the ’afandi. Thus it is not surprising that bankruptcy and foreclosure caused palpable disquiet among the ’afandi journalists, many of whom came from landowning families.64 Two articles from the January 1882 edition of Thaqib’s al-Mufid, ostensibly addressing problems that the fallahin encountered when seeking credit, reveal a slippage between the journalist’s view of the fallah and the troubled position of his own group. In the first article, the author characterizes “saving the miserable fallah” as a moral “duty” for “pious and good-hearted” locals [watanin]. “How could this not be a duty? . . . the fallah is [the locals’] servant”; thus they must be “sympathetic” and “humane to him.” But saving the fallah is not purely a matter of pious good works. The rich must “ameliorate the circumstances of the fallah” in order to “purify the homeland [al-watan] from outsiders” who are a “noose” closing around “our life” as they seek to “own the land.”65 Three days later, in a subsequent issue, the same author reiterates the imperative of “saving” the fallah, and again situates this mission within a larger political project. He warns that failure to save the fallah will result in “foreigners” owning “the peasant’s land,” but even more distressing, if left unchecked, the “outsiders will take control of the ’afandi’s home.”66 Historians have generally taken these kinds of accounts at face value. More recent scholarship, however, has cast some doubt on the depictions of progressively worsening conditions for Egypt’s rural poor.67 Thus, while these texts might not provide objective information on the state of the countryside at the time, we can read them for insights into the ways in which the literate classes began to think about notions of political subjectivity and an Egyptian (as opposed to a Muslim or Eastern) future. This rereading is a vital step in coming to grips with the way in which these notions then became translated into social and political reform projects during the twentieth century.

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Beginning in the late 1870s the Egyptian press reported on the “state of the peasantry” by reference to the question of peasant “indebtedness.”68 Over the course of the subsequent thirty years, concern with peasant debt was one of the primary sites in which representations of peasants and urban intellectuals alike were forged. Some critics cited the reign of Mehmet ’Ali as initiating an unending period of peasant anguish and the genesis of the debt problem of the later decades of the nineteenth century. For example, al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, the journal that the activists most often associated with the beginning of Islamic reformism, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, published in Paris after their exile from Egypt in 1884, assailed Mehmet ’Ali’s rule for the hardships it brought on peasants. The activists excoriated Mehmet ’Ali for “kidnapping” children for his schools and the soldiers for his army; for forcing peasants to flee their land for fear of military conscription; and for causing the spread of disease and death in the countryside.69 By the 1890s, journalists and polemicists alike identified Mehmet ’Ali’s tax policies and monopoly system as the primary cause of the “time of insihab” or peasant abandonment of land.70 Not just due to the clamor created by such antikhedive activists as al-Nadim and Sannu‘, such progovernment journalists as Musa Kastali and al-Sayyid Wafa Muhammad sought to draw attention to what they saw as an unprecedented increase in peasant indebtedness and its dangerous implications for all Egyptians. Kastali came from a well-known Cairene Jewish intellectual family. His family had established the al-Talyaniya publishing house in the 1840s, which was noted for publishing a wide variety of books ranging from Muslim religious treatises to works of popular literature. Kastali’s al-Kawkab al-Misri newspaper, although it was contemporaneous with alNadim’s Tankit, was no rival because it rendered “absolute and unceasing support to the Khedive and to members of his government.”71 Wafa Muhammad was both an Azharite scholar and the superintendent of the khedival library. Because of Muhammad’s links to the khedive, it is not surprising that his al-Kawkab al-Misri was progovernment in the period preceding the ‘Urabi rebellion. There was a general consensus among the intellectuals that the cause of the problem lay with the ubiquitous and rapacious moneylenders and tax collectors taking advantage of hapless naive peasants.72 Al-Nadim decried the “inhuman conditions” under which peasants were forced to borrow money.73 Tax agents were accused of arriving on purpose before harvest time so that the cash-poor peasants were thrown into the arms of moneylenders who charged exorbitant rates of interest.74 Accounts of the small landholders’ problems in obtaining credit figured prominently in the press at the time. Nevertheless, historical evidence suggests that peasants had engaged moneylenders for centuries and had interacted on a fairly consistent basis with merchants, tax collectors, multazims,

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and so on. Far from being ignorant of the ways of a monetized economy and such accompanying commercial and financial practices as money lending, the peasants of the Delta had been involved in cash-market agriculture stretching far back in time. Money lending was an ancient practice, well known in the countryside. Indeed, there is evidence that money lending dates back to the Ptolemaic period. Some money-lending practices prevalent at the time, such as the advance sale of unharvested (and sometimes even unplanted) crops, dated at least to the time of the Fatimids.75 In addition, the ancient Greeks introduced the practice of paying taxes in coin, and since both of these practices make sense only in a commercial environment, we can conclude that market farming was an ancient practice in Egypt.76 But the view of the isolated, simple, and gullible peasant susceptible to moneylenders’ deceptions and unprepared for the perils of the “new” market economy endures in both Arabic and English-language histories of Egypt.77 Discussion of fallah debt almost invariably invoked the figure of the wily Levantine or Greek moneylenders who were clearly distinguished from locals [wataniyun]. Historians writing in Arabic and English have often used the terms of the contemporary press to describe the moneylenders, classifying them according to their putative ethnicity, national origin, or religion.78 Certainly, enough evidence exists to be confident that contemporary narrators were not simply embellishing their accounts as they recounted peasants selling everything from their livestock to their wives’ jewelry, and eventually their land, in futile attempts to pay off their accumulating debt. Debt and bankruptcy did ruin large numbers of peasants, and moneylenders unquestionably contributed to peasant indebtedness. Without doubt some moneylenders were Levantine Arabs, Europeans, or persons with European sponsorship, but it is equally true that many ‘umdas, shaykhs and ordinary Egyptian merchants engaged in money lending of one sort or another.79 Nevertheless, almost all accounts describe these moneylenders as crafty foreign characters who used guile to “trick” the fallah into borrowing money. The many references to the dishonesty of moneylenders had the effect of conjuring up the fallah as hapless ignoramuses swindled by the fast-talking, gift-giving foreigners based in the cities. Indeed, newspaper accounts often put more emphasis on moneylenders as a cause of fallah debt than on high taxes, falling commodity prices, and the venality of officials and village headmen. For example, the Syrian Armenian Alkasan Sarafiyan, a fierce opponent of the increasing European role in the Egyptian judiciary and administration, described the “simple” fallahin who lived such “isolated” lives in the countryside and were easily “duped [inkhida‘]” by crafty foreign merchants and moneylenders in his newspaper al-Zaman in 1884.80 Sarafiyan pinned the blame for fallah indebtedness on peasant

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naiveté, arguing that the peasants were apprehensive of financial arrangements associated with banks and preferred to deal with the local moneylenders. According to other accounts, however, even if the peasants were able to overcome their fears, these financial institutions found little profit in lending the relatively trivial sums the peasants sought, and would routinely either mistreat the occasional fallah who did venture through their doors or force him into other kinds of exploitative arrangements. For example, according to al-Mufid the peasants could “only borrow money from a bank through an agent,” perhaps only a casual bank customer who would borrow a large sum of money and in turn relend the money in smaller amounts at higher rates of interest to a number of peasants. These agents charged usurious rates of interest and used other “corrupt” means to “swallow up everything” the peasants owned. 81 These sorts of pressures forced small landholders into the arms of the moneylenders. The press carried complaints against the government for ignoring peasant grievances about moneylenders and despotic local officials, and rebuked government officials for taking no heed of the ill consequences of policies drawn up in offices in Cairo or provincial capitals.82 From the late 1870s reformers of all stripes proclaimed it a primary goal to ameliorate the conditions of the peasant. During this period the image of the insular, obtuse, and ignorant creature victimized by the deceptions of the moneylenders, the arbitrary tyranny of government officials, and the petty humiliations of the shaykhs al-balad dominated all accounts of peasant life. Thus one would come across various accounts that would argue that the “peasants’ needs are simple,” and because these folk are patient, they surrender “three-quarters of their crop to . . . the khedive . . . the shaykh al-qariya, the mufatish, sarraf, and others who take whatever they want,”83 and uncomprehendingly accept their fate. AlNadim, in a passage perhaps a bit more evocative than most, but expressing this general attitude, described the peasant in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit: “The most trustworthy person in this land [balad] is the fallah. He has few clothes, but has many words. His appearance is shabby, but you see that he is generous although his lot is grim. He is shoeless and given to delusions about the world. His legs are bare and saliva drips out of his mouth. He wears rags. His status is low and his body is dirty.”84

civilizing, reform, and subjectivity Novel forms of sociability along with the technologies of the capitalist print media distilled an unprecedented type of public-ness and produced a new kind of performative subjectivity. Engaging in public deliberation about the introduction of the Mixed Courts, the 1877 Russo-Ottoman

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War, and the atmosphere of general political restiveness was an important marker for the urban ’afandi intellectual.85 Social clubs, Masonic lodges, salons, and learned and welfare associations were other important sites of discussion and the performance of early ’afandi subjectivity, in which one demonstrated that one was civilized [mutamaddun]. The civilized [mutamaddun] ’afandi, through public discussion of prosaic political and social questions, articulated a moral and social vision of the nature of society and the desirable architecture of the polity. In addition to discharging these “duties,” the civilized ’afandi possessed a deep appreciation of Arabic letters and embodied thoughtful, almost sober religiosity. Traditional accounts of the new forms of public-ness quite rightly emphasize the novelty of free exchange and the radical potential of multiple vertical social interactions. Social class did not impede one’s admission to Masonic lodges or participation in literary salons. Accordingly, the humble beginnings of such figures as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim in the 1870s or ’Ali Yusuf in the 1890s did not bar them from interacting with the most powerful political figures in Egypt and becoming important intellectual presences in their own right. Scholars have also described the importance of the new sites of sociability and the discourse that circulated within them as conduits of new political ideas. Nevertheless, despite its insight and thoroughness, the historiography on the emergence of public-ness in Egypt has not yet exhausted the subject. For in addition to facilitating the spread of ideas, the new forms of exchange were also sites for producing and inculcating new knowledge about modern Egypt. In a sense the press, salons, and social clubs “civilized” the ’afandiya into identifying interests in line with a new sort of social and political vision and “refined” them in the direction of developing desires appropriate for a new way of literate, urban middle-class life. In this sense, these new spaces and modalities of exchange were inextricably linked to the production of new kinds of subjects and provided venues for the performance of these new subjectivities. Likewise, this new terrain of public-ness, performance, and discussion enabled or disabled certain forms of life and modes of collective identity.86 For example, the emergent new order impelled solidarities of religion and clan to acquire forms of individuality built around particular notions of self-interest, desire, and the idea of a nation. This move toward individualism made possible the articulation of a new politics of personal rights, freedom, and equality. This trend was a necessary step in the process that enabled Egyptians to learn to formulate interests and to express desires that cohered in the new regime of private landownership and the legal structure that supported it that was taking shape at the time.87 It is against this backdrop that we can fully appreciate the importance of alNadim’s 1881 declaration that “just laws [al-qawanin al-‘adila]” through

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which “we know our rights” are the essence of “justice [‘adl]” because they protect “money, property, and land.”88 Reconstructing Islamic sensibilities and recasting the Muslim past were integral elements in the overall transformative project that historians have come to call Islamic reform or Islamic modernism. The ramifications of this project reach beyond a narrow discussion of Islamic jurisprudence or ritual, for the ethos of Islamic reform left a very distinct impression on the emergent social formation of the ’afandiya. The burgeoning self-consciousness of this heterogeneous assemblage of literate intellectuals crystallized around what they saw as their appointed role as agents of change. They came to see it as their duty to put in place the conditions to create a new society based on a vision of enlightened civilization. They were convinced that an epoch unique in history was unfolding in Egypt and that moral reform, technology, and knowledge [ma‘arif] were the instruments to deliver the umma from the “night of inferiority and ignorance [layl al-naqs wa al-jahl]” and the “lowness of backwardness [hadid al-ta’akhar]” and to inaugurate an era of “civilization [tamaddun].”89 In contemporary Arabic, the word “progress” in the modern teleological sense is usually translated as taqaddum and “civilization” is rendered as hadara. Fahmy Jaddane, in Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith, his seminal work on modern Arab-Muslim thought, argues that these two terms did not acquire these meanings until the interwar period. Instead, the term tamaddun was used to communicate the idea of “civilization.” Similarly, the original translation from the French “progrès” was taraqqa rather than taqaddum.90 A fairly typical expression of this idea in al-Kawkab alMisri lauded the “armies of justice and knowledge [‘ilm]” marching against the “the evils of ignorance [‘ashrar al-jahl]” and likened their pens to “arrows of virtue [siham al-‘iffa]” in the battle for justice.91 The piece concludes by exalting “thank God Egypt has overcome the depths of those horrors” through “building virtue [al-istiqama].”92 The civilizing process was both a material and moral project for the literate activist who spoke of his duty to reform Egypt. While the task certainly involved developing practical skills, accumulating theoretical knowledge and know-how, and “revitalizing useful arts” [al-funun almufida],” renewal could be achieved by only men with a particular kind of (gendered) disposition. Developing and nurturing such a disposition depended upon “true education,” through which students would “cultivate their morals [tahdhib akhlaquhim],” build their self-respect, and foster a “love of the homeland [al-mahabba al-wataniya].”93 These common expressions of the reform ethos of the time clearly reflect the influence of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani (1838–1897). Al-‘Afghani

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was and is a controversial figure. Iranian-born, he was known as an Islamic reformer, political activist, and polemicist. He traveled widely throughout the Muslim world and Europe and was involved in a number of political intrigues throughout his travels. At various times he was accused of being a British, Russian, Iranian, or French agent. Eventually, the Ottoman sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid placed al-‘Afghani in close surveillance in Istanbul in what became known as his “Golden Cage,” where he spent the last years of his life.94 Al-‘Afghani stressed that all “true” knowledge was oriented towards the same end—living a pious and virtuous Muslim life. He highlighted the importance of inculcating a true Islamic vision in the ordinary Muslim as a part of the same education that provided practical skills and imparted theoretical and scientific knowledge. Indeed, only this sort of complete preparation ensured the moral competency that would equip Muslims to study Western technical and scientific knowledge without “blindly imitating” European social mores and customs. The same rational capacity that would enable Muslims to judiciously absorb and comprehend modern scientific knowledge while preserving their own way of life would provide them with the conceptual tools to recognize and abandon heretical accretions that had corrupted the practice of Islam. These characteristics added up to strength and power; without them Muslim society would be relegated to submission and degradation.95 Echoing al‘Afghani, al-Kawkab al-Misri argued that the absence of men with these “honorable, sacred characteristics [al-sajaya al-sharifa al-muqaddasa]” would render society subservient, for no umma could achieve “absolute independence” if it lacked men of this character.96 Such was the case prevailing in the contrast between the “civilized and uncivilized countries [duwwal al-mutamaddina wa ghayr al-mutamaddina]” as the “uncivilized” countries, lacking these essential characteristics, were dominated by their “civilized” counterparts.97 Public discussions of the time often combined the qualities of strength, independence, and civilization into an idealized ’afandi disposition. These discussions almost always articulated this arrangement in gendered terms. Indeed, in looking back it is hard to conceive of the emergent ethos of reform and renewal apart from the honorable, virtuous, civilized masculine subject that dominated so much of the discussion. Either in his position in government administration or as a writer or agitator, the refined and active ’afandi acted publicly to achieve independence for the umma. This gendered discourse was fundamental to the formation of a new kind of heroic masculine subject—the literate ’afandi who, if properly civilized, could attain the status that ‘Abdallah al-Nadim called nabih—discerning or high-minded, sensible, and perspicacious. The civilized ’afandi acquired “useful” forms of knowledge that guided him to identify beneficial interests

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and enabled him to have the correct desires and make appropriate choices. An untitled article appearing in al-Kawkab al-Misri on August 1, 1879, tied the “maturity of the umma . . . we all seek” to the dissemination of useful knowledge through “versatile men” possessing the technocratic know-how to organize economic and agricultural production and to manage government administration.98 Exemplars of these new kinds of “versatile men” took it upon themselves to impart such “useful knowledge” in order to assist others in developing the correct disposition. They wrote and published didactic works to introduce some of these subjects in cheap, readable formats to ready the public for the new era. For example, the newspapers Misr [Egypt] and al-‘Asr al-Jadid [The New Era] serialized Khalil Ghanim’s textbook-like introduction to economics, al-Iqtisad al-Siyasi: fann tadbir al-manzil [Political Economy: The Art of Domestic Organization].Ghanim was a Maronite Christian born in Lebanon who was forced to flee to Europe due to his association with the Ottoman constitutionalists and the Young Turks. There he began to publish newspapers critical of the Ottoman government. In his work Ghanim denounced foreigners’ “protection” of the Ottoman Empire’s Christian populations. In his book on political economy he intended to inform the reader about “this exalted and beneficial science” which is one of the “modern arts” in providing for “happiness to all members of the umma.”99 To Ghanim, happiness was found in a life of industriousness and capitalist production. Amin Shumayyil, a contributor to Misr and ‘Abdallah Nadim’s alTankit wa al-Tabkit, wrote a book priced to be easily available to the widest readership possible, titled Nizam al-Shura [The System of Consultative Rule].100 Shumayyil’s book was also serialized in al-Tijara to educate the public about the workings of representative government.101 By way of comparing book prices, Shumayyil’s book sold for one-half a French franc while Maryam Nahhas’s al-hasna’ fi tarajim mashahir alnisa’, according to an advertisement in al-Kawkab al-Misri on June 5, 1879, sold for thirty francs. These prices were advertised at a time when per capita income has been estimated to have been a little over five Egyptian pounds per year. Thinking about Egypt’s future was shaped by the desire of the masculine ’afandi subject for perpetual societal improvement. An article in al-Mufid put it this way: “To achieve civilization [tamaddun] . . . every individual in society” must “develop a virtuous character [malaka] . . . refined through knowledge.” These “civilized” men were oriented towards promoting the “public interest.” 102 In this formulation public-ness itself came to be gendered insofar as only those exhibiting the necessary (and masculine) attributes of a strong will and independence were authorized to make public utterances and to circulate in public.

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al-‘afghani, ‘abduh, islamic reform, and history-making In the late 1870s and early 1880s Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh were dominant figures among the rapidly crystallizing social formation of reformers and social critics. Through their work and deeds they supported and inspired many of those engaged in the production and consumption of new media and involved in public discussion. Al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh were instrumental in instilling in a generation of intellectuals a sense of optimism and purpose born out of a commitment to improve, reform, and “civilize” Egypt and the Muslim East. For these two writers the press represented an important tool for disseminating useful forms of knowledge, inducing the correct desires, and identifying the interests that would clear the way for constituting a civilized Muslim population. Al‘Afghani was one of the first activist-reformers to see the potential of the press as a tool of agitation and social mobilization, and he is said to have been the first to use the phrase “public opinion” in Arabic.103 He is also said to have provided the startup capital for such reform-oriented newspapers as al-Tijara, al-‘Asr al-Jadid and Misr; and he encouraged both alNadim and Sannu‘ in their own journalistic efforts.104 While it is difficult to exaggerate al-‘Afghani’s and ‘Abduh’s contribution to the Islamic reform movement and its subsequent history, they were also important political figures. In addition to their interventions in questions of Islamic law and their reading of Muslim history, an important part of their legacy was the political role of reformers in later Egyptian history. ‘Abduh and al-‘Afghani were well known to the local ruling elite and to European leaders; they interacted with both groups on a regular basis. One such figure that ‘Abduh counted among his friends and allies was Wilfrid Blunt (1840–1922). Blunt was a wealthy British landowner who sympathized with and became an advocate for the ‘Urabist rebels in Britain.105 Blunt’s solidarity with the rebels and his friendships with ‘Abduh and Ahmad ‘Urabi himself led him to become a severe critic of the British occupation. Al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh were also acquainted with such British antagonists as Evelyn Baring (1841–1917) the future first Earl of Cromer and the British agent and consul general (thus de facto ruler of Egypt) from 1883 to 1907. Both al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh had celebrated battles with European intellectuals who attacked the place of Islam in Muslim society.106 It is therefore not surprising that those making up the coterie surrounding al-’Afghani and ‘Abduh (‘Abduh alone after the 1879 deportation of al-‘Afghani) became important figures in their own right beginning in the

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1870s. These intellectuals are loosely referred as reformers in these pages. Some of them, such as Salim Naqqash and Adib Ishaq, are still well known in the early 2000s, while such others as Ahmad Samir have fallen into relative obscurity. Naqqash, a Syrian Christian, was from a family well known in intellectual and theatrical circles in Syria. Upon Naqqash’s arrival in Egypt, he soon became a prominent figure in Alexandria’s active theatre scene, and along with Ahmad Samir, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, and his eventual collaborator Adib Ishaq, a well-known journalist and agitator. With Ishaq, Naqqash translated a number of plays from French into Arabic. The two of them later published several influential newspapers, such as Misr, al-Tijara, and al-‘Asr al-Jadid. Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani provided some funding for Misr, although it was owned and edited by Naqqash and Ishaq. Naqqash was also noted at the time for writing the first definitive work on the ‘Urabi uprising of 1882—Misr lil-Misriyin [Egypt for the Egyptians], a slogan he boasted of coining. His partner, Ishaq, also a Syrian Christian, was born in Damascus and emigrated to Egypt in 1876. Besides his work with Naqqash in theatre and journalism, Ishaq briefly joined the side of the ‘Urabists in 1882.107 The Egyptian Ahmad Samir was a confidant and collaborator of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Hamza Fathallah. He contributed articles to a number of newspapers and was an advocate for reform of the al-Azhar madrasa in Cairo. Later he was al-Nadim’s biographer and published his own journal, titled Bab al-Funun.108 Al-‘Afghani’s and ‘Abduh‘s younger votaries later comprised the intellectual and political elite in Egypt into the twentieth century. For example, Sa‘ad Zaghlul, the eventual prime minister, counted himself among this group. Another example is the Syrian Muslim scholar Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who came to Egypt in the 1890s to study with Muhammad ‘Abduh. He quickly became ‘Abduh’s closest associate and biographer. He later achieved his own degree of notoriety as the publisher of the most acclaimed Islamic reform journal in history, al-Manar, from 1898 until his death in 1935. Rida remains a controversial figure to this day; some have come to see him as ‘Abduh’s “conservative” heir whose legacy was at odds with much of ‘Abduh’s reform project. These assessments are simplistic. Rida is often decried for the thought and sometimes the acts of his followers. He became close to Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, at the end of his life. The Brotherhood is often regarded as the breeding ground of more radical and violent Islamist movements of the period between 1950 and 1990. In any case, for these observers Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid (1872–1963), another of Abduh’s young followers and a future Egyptian nationalist and educator, is the more legitimate disciple of the socalled secular aspects of ‘Abduh’s thought.

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Al-‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, and their followers developed their reform agenda through concepts drawn from Islamic traditions of jurisprudence and ethics. At the same time, however, they were very much agents of—to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term—political modernity.109 Their interventions in debates about history and the formation of correct moral dispositions contributed to the consolidation of the moral and political subjectivity necessitated by the transformations brought by British occupation and its de facto colonialism. Nevertheless, even as the reformers made their interventions, they emphasized or introduced certain elements and concepts that could not be subsumed into colonial or modern projects of subject formation. Traces of premodern forms of collective solidarity (religious, ethnic, and social) and historical temporality (summed up as a sense that history is a divine expression marked by the continual repetition of circular patterns) were preserved by the centrality the reformers accorded to Islamic texts and the traditions built around readings of those texts.110 Al-‘Afghani’s influence was such that both his supporters and opponents embraced his ideas. For example, editorialists and journalists of all stripes came to adopt his views about collective responsibility, a concept that owes as much to definitions of modern citizenship as it does to fard al-kifaya or the notion of Muslims’ collective duty. Following al-‘Afghani, they argued that it is a duty to participate in modern democratic institutions as part of a virtuous Muslim life. Taking up this notion also entailed adopting al-‘Afghani’s reading of the Islamic tradition, which, he claimed, enjoined Muslims to reject the “blind imitation [taqlid]” of the past and instead allow themselves to be guided by a rational skepticism, accepting knowledge only when there is sufficient evidence of its value. One consequence of al-‘Afghani’s intervention was that the term taqlid took on the contemporary meaning of “blind imitation” and was therefore transformed. A careful reading of medieval and later Islamic sources suggests that this meaning indeed represented a new understanding of the concept.111 It may be a coincidence, but more likely it shows al-‘Afghani’s and Abduh’s influence on such Western scholars of the time as Ernest Renan and such colonial officials as Baring, that their descriptions of the recent Muslim past and their understanding of taqlid as “blind imitation” came to be reflected in the thinking of Europeans. Arguing about the meaning and validity of taqlid became a way for reformist shaykhs to attack and marginalize their opponents at the al-Azhar madrasa in Cairo. The reformists argued that blind imitation held Muslims back and that the enemies of reform were a regressive force in Muslim society. Indira Falk Gesink suggests that Orientalist scholars and colonial officials then took the rhetoric of these Muslim polemics literally, understanding neither the context of their utterances nor the aims of their authors.112

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Perhaps al-‘Afghani’s most significant contribution was that he created the basic formula Islamic modernists came to embrace for diagnosing the predicament of Muslims. As al-‘Afghani saw it, there were three principal factors that explained the present decrepit state of the Muslim world. First, Muslims were ignorant of the true nature of Islam. Al-‘Afghani blamed the educational and legal institutions of religious schools and courts as well as preachers and jurisprudents for this situation. Second, centuries of stultifying and despotic rule resulted in Muslim rulers choosing expediency over proper Islamic practice and thereby deviating from the example set by the first generations of Muslim rulers. Third, a combination of extreme arrogance and narrow-mindedness [ta‘assub] drove Muslims to disdain the beneficial ideas and technological advances of nonMuslims. Only proper religious and scientific education, he argued, could ameliorate the stagnation and ignorance that afflicted Muslims. Thus al‘Afghani urged Muslims to rediscover Islam by choosing a reasoned path between an impulse of cynical excess [al-ifrat] that actively rejected settled practice and all social mores and a fatalistic passivity that closed the door to internally-generated change [al-tafrit]. Rida later refashioned these notions into a formula through which the Islamic reform movement became the party of moderation between the partisans of al-ifrat and al-tafrit; between those eager to jettison the entire corpus of tradition and embrace everything that came from the West and between those unquestioningly adhering to precedent and settled practice. Extremes of cynicism and passivity had extinguished the coherent social dynamism that drove the Muslim community to great cultural and political heights at its peak. Writing in Ishaq’s and Naqqash’s Misr, al‘Afghani defined “excess [al-ifrat]” as that which “challenges everything . . . until nothing is stable,” while languid fatalism [tafrit] leads to the worst form of slavery, which causes the “ignorant” to accept all that issues from fortune, chance, and circumstance.113 A properly educated and refined Muslim would not unquestioningly adhere to the beliefs and practices of those around him even if the others claimed to be Muslims themselves.114 Only through reason could one come to know true Islam. Rida recast the dialectic between “excess [al-ifrat]” and “fatalism [altafrit]” into a wide-ranging cultural vision for the Muslim world. He came to refer to the Islamic reform movement as the “Party of Moderation” between the “fatalists,” the unquestioning adherents of precedent and settled practice, and those practicing “excess,” who were overly attracted to novelty, particularly Western innovation. The reform ethos that motivated al-‘Afghani, the coterie around him, and his later emulators emerged from a particular understanding of Islam. Although Rida elaborated this ethos most clearly in the early twentieth

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century in his journal al-Manar, it is clear that even in their earlier incarnations, the groups of intellectuals associated with al-’Afghani viewed Islam as a tradition of practice whose virtues and telos are fixed but whose elaboration is specific to time and place. Following this logic they understood the eternal duty of each individual Muslim, and of the Muslim aggregate or umma as well, to realize the expression of Islam most appropriate to his own historical circumstances. The essential idea underlying this sensibility was that God entrusts human beings with the use of reason [‘aql] in order to discover the meaning of Islam for “every time and place [kull zaman wa makan]” in a practical and sensible manner. Accordingly, each generation accumulates knowledge and experience that succeeding generations are duty bound to evaluate and take account of through their God-given reason [‘aql]. This accumulation also implies that Muslims are enjoined to align those areas of their lives not specifically bound by Islamic prescription with the attitudes and conventions of the era and the place in which they live. Drawing on elements of discussions occurring among Muslim reformers and on some of the major themes informing their own studies of the East and Islam, Europeans suggested that the “weakness of the East” was a direct consequence of Muslims’ blindly imitating their ancestors and never questioning settled practices.115 European critics contended that Islam was a retrograde force in society because it discouraged its adherents from questioning Islamic prescriptions. As a consequence, Muslim life was marked by a stagnation born of rejection, even fear, of change of any kind. Muslim society was doomed to backwardness until it experienced a reformation along the lines of the changes in European Christianity in the sixteenth century. Dissenting from his European interlocutors, al-‘Afghani provided a very different narrative to account for the corrosive influence of blind imitation in Muslim society. In contrast to those who concluded that Muslim society could never achieve democracy and equality or enjoy freedom of expression and benefit from scientific learning without abandoning Islam, he argued that these ideals were the hallmarks of early Islamic civilization. Indeed, their presence in the Muslim world predated their appearance in Europe by several centuries. Thus in his view the question at hand was the best way to help Muslims learn to again recognize and embrace these essential Islamic principles. The problem as he saw it was that Muslims had strayed from the truth of their revelation; as a result, the dynamism of the early Muslim community turned to stultifying blind imitation. In the end, un-Islamic political absolutism and intellectual conformism dampened Islam’s inherent democratic spirit and put an end to the scientific and intellectual renaissance it had originally inspired.116

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While there were a number of slight variations on these themes circulating among al-‘Afghani’s devotees, they all shared an important conceptual affinity with European accounts of Islam’s backwardness. Egyptian reformers couched their responses to negative depictions of Islam within a sort of historical imagination new to Egypt (and much of the Muslim world) in the 1870s and 1880s. Their European interlocutors, in line with nineteenth-century currents of historical thought, included “Mohammedanism” in an emergent vision of the past. European observers recognized Islam’s contribution to the unfolding of the universal history of humankind (albeit in a derivative mode as merely the conduit for classical learning).117 Crudely put, Europeans willingly inserted something called “Islamic history” into a secular and rational historicist unity—the universal historical experience of humankind. Implicit in their view of the past were evolutionary and progressive notions as well as certainty about the applicability of universal rules of causality. Egyptians did not challenge this historicist understanding of the unity of “human” experience, the validity of the “empty homogeneous” time of modern historical sensibilities, and the upward progress of history’s march; indeed, they readily accepted and employed these same organizing criteria in proffering counternarratives to the Europeans’ largely negative views of Islam.118 For the first time, Muslims writing in the East and working in this new historical idiom began to create something called Islamic history. Accounts of Islam’s contributions to the universal legacy of humankind written by nineteenth-century religious and social reformers would hardly have sufficed as an “Islamic argument” in the past. Much of the writing of Islamic history tended to be quite distant from Islamic traditions, whose authority derived from the history of argumentation and the discourses of legitimation built up around Islam’s canonical texts.119 Nevertheless, while historicist progressivism and causality became essential to the renderings of the Islamic past among Muslims, there remained other kinds of elements unsettling to these new ways of knowing the past. Despite the powerful historicist imperative of the time, Egyptians and others writing in Arabic proffered an account of Islamic history at odds with a purely historicist reading. Even while seeming to embrace the new kind of historical imaginary, Muslims continued to draw on forms of historicity radically different from that which gave coherence to the unity of “human experience.” They still drew on the authority of such Islamic sources as the Qur’an and traditions of the prophet in ways that converged with the new historicism only by coincidence. For example, it became very common at the time for Islamic reformers to describe their movement both as an inevitable historical development from within Islamic civilization and to establish its authority on Islamic tradition by citing a hadith to the effect

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that “Truly Allah shall send forth for this Community, at the onset of every hundred years, those who will renew its Religion.”120 city versus country The introduction of the Mixed Courts, the shadows cast by the foreign banks, and the resentments caused by the existence of the Dual Control ministry were all part of a milieu that impelled journalists to announce the arrival of a new era marked not only by challenge and danger but also by potential. One reflection of this general attitude was in the name that al‘Afghani’s Lebanese followers Ishaq and Naqqash chose for their newspaper, considered by many the mouthpiece of the “al-‘Afghani party”—al‘Asr al-Jadid or The New Era. Press reports were replete with declarations that this new era would redefine economic, social, and political relationships, and that new competencies and technical skills would shape the conditions of quotidian life. The 1883 inauguration of the al-Mahkama alAhaliya, or what Egyptians called the National Courts and the British the Native Tribunals, further substantiated this statement. Nevertheless, the future of Egypt seemed uncertain, with financial and political crises looming and the growing European hegemony in both government and society continuing apace. The Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Russians in the Crimea in 1877 and the subsequent end of Istanbul’s constitutional experiment sent shock waves through Egypt’s intellectual elite. Close on the heels of these events, a series of natural disasters disrupted agriculture throughout much of Egypt. A low Nile inundation in 1877 followed by a disastrously high flood in 1878 combined with an epidemic of cattle murrain resulted in an extremely poor crop in 1878. A coincidental drop in cotton prices and a corresponding shortfall in tax receipts compounded these agricultural problems. The Dual Control government ignored warnings of imminent starvation and insisted on collecting taxes as usual. Consequently, ten thousand people were said to have starved in Upper Egypt.121 In the midst of this upheaval, the press was the principal conduit of critical ideas and the dissemination of useful knowledge that Egypt’s much-desired future demanded. Journalists often ascribed an Islamic character to the modern technologies of newspaper publication, other print media, and their own field. They depicted these novelties not as innovations but rather as new ways of discharging tasks traditionally carried out within terrain marked as Islamic. Al-‘Afghani spoke of newspapers as fulfilling a role similar to that of mosque preachers, and al-Nadim equated the newspaper with the Friday sermon as it was originally intended. He explained that the khutba during

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the time of the “the prophet of God . . . [and] under our glorious forefathers [al-salaf al-salih] and the Rightly Guided Caliphs” was intended to enlighten the “people [qawm],” “enable them to know their rights [yu‘arrifahum huquqahum],” and instruct them about “wisdom [al-hukm].”122 All of this was done in plain language with the intention to communicate as clearly as possible to the “people [al-nas].” Al-Nadim argued that during the infancy of the umma the Friday sermon was meant to serve a pedagogic function in Muslim society. The preacher or khatib warned of temporal and spiritual danger but also informed the public about political developments as well as recent advances and innovations in various fields of knowledge.123 Continuing with this theme, al-Nadim explained that the current era differed from the past insofar as newspapers could now perform this same service for a literate public. Indeed, he even suggested that if the umma’s people could read, “there would not be the urgent need to reorient the khutba” to carry out its original didactic function that newspapers were now able to perform for the literate.124 Likewise, al-Kawkab al-Misri marveled at the speed of communication made possible by newspapers. The writer declared that this swiftness made newspapers a worthy substitute for “preachers” traveling “slowly from town to town.” Editorial pages were replete with elaborate descriptions of the mission of the press.125 Just as the journalists perceived the original function of the khutba being displaced by the new technology of capitalist print media, they also came to regard the original object of the sermon—the individual Muslim—in a new light. Or to be more precise, they looked at the literate, newspaper-reading individual Muslim in a new light. The act of newspaper reading and its implied public-ness became an indispensable marker of the new civilized, urban literate subject. Of course, notions of being civilized predate the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and they almost always carried with them some relationship to urbanity. Indeed, the Arabic term used most often at the time to signify “civilized” was tamaddun, which is derived from the same root that furnishes the word “city [madina]” in Arabic. The adjective madani, derived from the same root as “city” and “civilized,” has come to mean “civilian” or “nongovernmental.” In the usage of the 1870s and 1880s, however, it approximated the word “urban.” An interesting remnant of this period’s linguistic evolution is that among rural folk in Egypt today, the word ’afandi has come to denote a person from the city or someone who has adopted the manners and the comportment of the urbanite. Therefore, although the extent of a person’s perceived piety and moral probity were indexes by which to gauge their degree of being civilized, the very idea of being “civilized” often evoked the city.

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This period, however, also witnessed something new introduced into the extant dialectic between city and country. Even as the Egyptian press spent much of its energy on explicating international politics, focusing on the comings and goings of local officials, and following the activities of the khedive, it also very self-consciously called for religious, social, and political reform aimed at civilizing the entire society. The urban, publicoriented newspaper readers who produced and embraced this pedagogical vision cultivated new qualities that the “civilized” folk of just a generation earlier would not have recognized. This transition had a pronounced effect on the perceptions of the largely illiterate rural population. Previous distinctions between city and country acquired a new moral and cognitive veneer. Because the new civilizing aimed to produce a literate ’afandi subject, the denizens of the countryside, the fallahin, were now regarded as uncivilized on two accounts: first, they were uninterested in and did not understand the goals of societal reform; and second, their illiteracy precluded them from acquiring the useful forms of knowledge that defined one as civilized. The sharpened divide between country and city was articulated in stark terms as a dichotomy between an “uncivilized” fallah and a “civilized” ’afandi. Meanwhile, the Islamic reformers focused on developing properly Islamic dispositions among literate Muslims. By so doing they hoped to lay the groundwork for building a truly Muslim polity appropriate for the new era. This disquiet about the short- and long-term future of Egypt and the Muslim East was reflected in the development of the refined, selfconscious, educated, and pious “civilized” ’afandi [mutamaddun] subject in Egyptian culture. Al-‘Afghani underscored the importance of dynamism to the civilized Muslim as he argued that “perfection is only achieved through movement;” the energy of this subject was manifested in active striving to improve the “public interest” by mastering “useful” knowledge and skills that would provide the greatest communal benefit. Civilized Muslims acted in concert with other like-minded Muslims to influence government policy and effect change.126 Here it is worth noting that a number of terms in use at the time may be roughly translated as “public interest,” such as al-maslaha al-‘amma, or al-qawwam al‘umumi, or manafi‘ al-‘umumiya. Each of these carried with it, however, diverse repertoires of meaning.127 Talal Asad reminds us that in the midst of major social change people are often unclear about the nature of the event that is occurring. Changes taking place in the late nineteenth century engendered new vocabularies that were linked to older ones in complex ways. Nevertheless, in translating these terms as “public interest,” the historian acknowledges the complexity of this formative moment in the development of modern literary Arabic and the significant instability in many linguistic terms at the time.128

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The convergence in the requisite qualities for the civilized Muslim and that of the urban ’afandi points up the slippage in the elaboration of these two subjects. Through the late 1870s and 1880s writers in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, Misr, and other later newspapers and books used several terms to describe this ideal subject. Al-Nadim, for example, used the term nabih while others favored mutamaddun, and we can read the two of them as roughly equivalent to “civilized.” Both terms had the effect of subsuming the ideal nabih/mutamaddun into the category of ’afandi, and whatever differences there might be between civilized [nabih/mutamaddun] ’afandis and civilized Muslims practicing their faith “correctly” were collapsed. Civilized Muslims understood the “true” meaning of the phrase that “Islam was appropriate for every time and place.” They knew, for instance, that their religion did not enjoin them to unquestioningly imitate their forefathers. Instead they were commanded to seek out and acquire any new knowledge and learning that would help them uphold the independence and vitality of the Muslim community [umma]. This injunction was an individual and collective duty insofar as maintaining the strength of the umma was a necessary condition for them to live properly Muslim lives. Thus the civilized Muslim, similarly to the civilized ’afandi, was obliged to master the arts of “this era.” He should grasp the complexities of modern finance, maneuvering easily and confidently through the intricacies of mortgages and contract law. Being civilized implied that one knew how to comport oneself in the new kinds of institutions and the new sites of sociability that defined “this era.” It meant that one knew how to act, and therefore, how to hold one’s body in a “civilized” manner in “public,” thereby comporting oneself well in the new courtrooms and banks. The masculine self-assurance and dignity of the civilized Muslim/’afandi guaranteed that he would not be intimidated in the company of strangers speaking foreign languages, and his sober practice of Islam averted any intercourse with superstition. Therefore, new repertoires of practices (sober, antimystical, and opposed to such popular acts of piety as tomb visits); forms of knowledge (modern sciences and foreign languages); and modes of performance (reading newspapers, attending public fora, and holding the body in a dignified way) came under the purview of Islamic duties. backward peasants and civilized ’afandis In examining the cultural landscape of Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s one cannot help being astonished by much of what was said at the time about the countryside and the nature of the peasant. Given the substantial and widely acknowledged changes that had occurred in the Egyptian countryside over the previous few generations, not to say the preceding fifteen

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years, it is remarkable that well-informed Egyptians, most of whom either originated from or still had deep roots in the countryside, held some of the opinions they did. Almost without exception they depicted the countryside as unchanged for millennia and its peasant inhabitants as isolated and unaware of the world outside the village. In addition, one would be mistaken in assuming that the provincial press—presumably closer to the ground of agricultural production and peasant lives—produced accounts diverging from those of the Cairene and Alexandrian press. As for the provincial press, it is somewhat perplexing that despite the robust literary life that had existed in the provincial towns, it was not until the press was nearly twenty years old before newspapers began to be established outside Alexandria and Cairo. One of the first provincial newspapers was al-Fayum, which debuted in 1894 in the town of al-Fayum. It disappeared shortly afterward and then reemerged in 1896. Al-Tafrih appeared in Dumyat in 1896 and in the following eight years, nine newspapers started up in Delta towns. Such as it was, the provincial press too was filled with descriptions of the putative timelessness of the countryside, the unchanging nature of peasants’ lives, and the ceaseless routine of their agricultural work. We can assume that Egyptian writers were to some degree acquainted with rural life because they had either grown up in the countryside or visited it frequently. One also assumes that they recognized that their depictions of that life did not correspond with reality. The content of such accounts of rural life then presents an interpretive challenge to the historian. Because writing about the peasants, the countryside, and Egyptian agricultural production so often incorporated important and seemingly unrelated questions about the nature of Egypt and its people, these genres offer considerable insight into conceptions of personhood and community in circulation at the time. Indeed, this writing was a site in which the notion of Egypt as a modern political entity was framed and in which the modern Egyptian political subject was conceived. One of the ways that this writing accomplished this task was through sharpening conceptual distinctions between civilized ’afandis and backward peasants by contrasting their cognitive styles and their ways of life. In the 1870s and 1880s Egyptian reformers began to identify the habits, forms of life, and ways of being in the world that stood in the way of their transformative project of civilizing their society. In this regard they seemed to have much in common with the British colonial officials who ruled Egypt from 1882 to 1919 who also conceived of their mission as bringing civilization to the ancient land.129 There is a certain irony in the fact that the British occupiers spoke about Egyptians as a whole using almost the same terms that Egypt’s new urban intelligentsia used in speaking about the peasantry. Of course, given how much attention historians of colonialism

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have paid to the question of Orientalism in the last few decades, it is hardly surprising that British officials, often drawn from other areas of the imperial service, saw many parallels between their colonial subjects in Egypt and those in India. Many of the British officials who served in Egypt between 1882 and 1919 had previous colonial experience in India. References to India abound in their memoirs and other writings.130 In Egypt, as in India, they saw the “religiosity and extremism” of the East, “primordial” social ties, and an innate aversion to change. Such were the general characteristics of the malaise in which the benighted East found itself, and which enlightened British rule would eliminate. The similarities between the ways in which the British described the East and the ways in which Egypt’s urban literate classes looked at the peasants are striking. Evelyn Baring’s description of the Easterner (“devoid of energy and initiative, stagnant in mind, wanting in curiosity about matters which are new to him, careless of waste of time and patient under suffering”) was almost identical to characterizations of peasants found in the Egyptian press.131 The British, however, often claimed to have intervened in Egypt in order to protect the peasants from despotic rulers and abject poverty. Despite the similarities in their framing of the problem, however, the British and their Egyptian interlocutors differed on the meaning of “civilizing.” Such Egyptians as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Ahmad Samir envisioned throwing off non-Islamic accretions, widening the scope of education, and returning to the dynamism of the Islamic past, whereas the British conceived of their mission as “introducing European civilization into Egypt.”132 Both agreed, however, that one of the biggest obstacles to civilizing Egypt was its “backwardness.” But what was backwardness and where did one find it? A perusal of the Arabic press and other kinds of literature indicates that Egyptians regarded the “ignorant” denizens of the countryside as the embodiment of backwardness. The peasants were illiterate; they possessed no sense of religious-cum-civic duty and seemed to be overwhelmed by the changes sweeping across Egypt—even as they were simultaneously depicted as unaware of these changes. Furthermore, they were isolated and insular, afraid of the new legal and financial institutions that were reaching into the countryside. Peasants knew little about adjacent provinces, to say nothing of the international economic and political forces affecting their lives. Worse still, their social and cultural worlds were defined and circumscribed by superstition and ignorance.133 For literate Egyptians, backwardness—defined by superstition, lassitude, and blind imitation—sapped the vitality of the umma and impeded it from becoming civilized. In the discourses of reform and renewal, the crux of Egypt’s struggle to overcome its backwardness lay in the elimination of

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the factors leading to uncivilized behaviors, religious practices, and ways of life. The civilized [mutamaddun] were defined in accordance with notions of refinement, education, moral probity, piety, and energy. The fallah, lacking these virtues, was perforce uncivilized and a source of backwardness. The worth of the mutamaddun’s cultural sophistication, disciplined reason, and thoughtful religious practice was assured by his contrast with the backward and superstitious fallah. In this way the backwardness of the fallah was an important dimension of the articulation of the civilized ’afandi subject. Fallah backwardness was corroborated in a number of different ways. The upheaval and distress caused by Egypt’s incorporation into the European-dominated global economic and political system produced discourses of fallah misery, indebtedness, and oppression. These discourses were propagated and maintained by Egyptian journalists, polemicists, and activists as well as by such colonial administrators and Europeans sympathetic to the Egyptian cause as Wilfrid Blunt. Another source for the Egyptian social imaginary taking shape was the literary images of the fallah that were popular at the time. Yusuf Shirbini’s seventeenth-century bawdy satire, Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh qasid abi shaduf, poked fun at the habits and customs of peasants in order to mock the formalism and pretentiousness of urban scholars.134 Its humor played upon distinctions between urban literati and uncouth peasants that served to reinforce the perceived divide between country and city—the caustic ridicule of Shirbini’s pen spared neither side.135 It is perhaps no coincidence that Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf enjoyed a revival in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when Egyptians were shaping modern conceptions of political subjectivity and Egyptian identity. The book was published or reprinted in 1858, 1872, 1878, 1889, 1892, 1894, and 1904 by some of the premier publishing houses in Cairo. For example, the 1858 edition was put out by the government press in Bulaq, Dar alTaba‘a al-‘Amara, under the direction of ’Ali ’Afandi (later Bey) Jawda.136 Indeed, by the late 1870s the name “Abu Shaduf” had become eponymous for the Egyptian peasant in the press. In Yaqub Sannu‘’s widely read journal, Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, he used the name “Abu Shaduf” to refer to various peasant characters. Likewise, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim used the name on occasion when writing about some of his fictive peasants, and he even placed Shirbini’s book on a shelf in one of his stories—a detail that he presumably expected his readership to notice. This and other references, combined with the numerous editions published at the time, suggest that the reading public was very likely familiar with Shirbini’s work, and we can assume that Shirbini’s farcical descriptions of fallahin were very much part of the literate classes’ imagination of the peasant.

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One question for the historian at this point, however, is estimating the size of the literate population. What was the extent of literacy in nineteenth-century Egypt? In 1897, Jurji Zaydan, the publisher of alHilal, asserted that “in 1882 there were no more than five thousand subscribers to Egyptian newspapers; now they have exceeded twenty thousand. As for readers, they may reach two hundred thousand because the copy of the newspaper is usually read by ten or tens of people.”137 Ami Ayalon—citing Martin Hartmann, Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid, and others— argues that even by the end of the nineteenth century literacy was still the purview of a “tiny minority.”138 Sabry Hafez quotes a figure of 554,930 literate Egyptians out of a population of 5,803,381 in 1881, although he cites no source for these figures.139 Meanwhile, Juan Cole estimates that Egypt’s daily newspapers enjoyed a circulation of around two thousand. Because of the nature of extended families, he surmises that the actual readership might have been closer to six thousand. There were twelve or so legal newspapers in 1881; Cole calculates that the total newspaper readership ranged toward seventy-two thousand “at the very least.”140 Based on Egyptian government educational statistics, however, we can presume that the reading public, although small, was growing at a fairly rapid rate. In 1875 there were some 4,817 mostly primary schools educating 140,977 students. By 1878 those numbers had grown to 5,562 schools with 167,185 students.141 With increasing literacy and the emergence of capitalist print media it was inevitable that a kind of agglomeration and cross-fertilization of discourses began to develop within the architecture of literate culture. For example, journalists inspired by the Islamic reform ideas of al-‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, and Hamza Fathallah detailed the peasantry’s ignorance and backwardness in their public comportment, in their methods of child rearing, and in their practice of Islam. In so doing the journalists almost certainly drew on Shirbini. At the same time, just as we should not lose sight of the fact that these commentators mined an extant cultural archive that included such works as Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf, the reformers who inspired them did not create Islamic modernism out of whole cloth; they too exploited traditions of thought already in circulation. For instance, al-‘Afghani borrowed heavily from one of the most influential intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Egypt, Rifa‘a Rafi‘ alTahtawi. Al-Tahtawi came from Upper Egypt, was educated at al-Azhar, and then mastered French when he traveled to France as the prayer leader of the first Egyptian student mission there in 1826. On his return to Egypt he was appointed head of the government’s School of Languages. Al-Tahtawi later became both an educational reformer and an important cultural figure. One can detect traces of such medieval Muslim luminaries

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as Abu al-Hasan ’Ali al-Mawardi (972–1058), Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Miskawayh (932–1030), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), and even Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in al-Tahtawi’s writings. Juan Cole credits alTahtawi with the “revival of practical philosophy in Arab Islam.” His work reaffirmed that within the “Islamic philosophical tradition economics and politics were seen to be extensions of ethics.”142 The ethical tradition personified in this genealogy is just as clear in the writings of al‘Afghani, whose work also exhibited the influence of such figures as al-Mawardi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun.143 In al-Tahtawi’s widely read and influential 1869 work, Manahij al’Albab al-Misriya fi Mabahij al-’Adab al-Asriya, which borrowed extensively from al-Mawardi, he identified the three sources of wealth as agriculture, craft production and manufacturing [sina‘a], and commerce [al-tijara]. He concluded that “agriculture is most important” because it touches the greatest number of people.144 Al-Tahtawi’s Manahij al’Albab shared a number of ethical components with medieval writings in Islamic ethics, but the work’s sense of “public-ness” would have been unintelligible even to his teachers. For example, al-Tahtawi’s mentor Hasan al-Attar (1766–1835) was an important scholar, reformer, and eventually rector of al-Azhar and was named the first editor of the Egyptian government’s official journal, al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriya, in 1828.145 Nevertheless, despite al-Attar’s important position in that early manifestation of the modern press, he never considered the question of public interest in the same way as his student some forty years later. In Manahij al-’Albab al-Tahtawi displaced familiar themes in Islamic pedagogic literature by attaching them to notions of public interest as a religious duty. He declared that the “success” and “public benefit” [manafi‘ al-‘umumiya] of any endeavor is measured according to the extent to which it positively affects the social collective [‘umum al-jam‘iya].146 Al-Tahtawi asserted that only through cooperation [ta‘awun] could Muslims be true believers, for “all creatures need community [jamaliya],” and without cooperation human beings cannot “achieve virtue [‘iffa], succor [najda], generosity [sakha’], and justice [‘adala].”147 In effect, he called for a kind of activist civic ethic, suggesting that Islam commands Muslims to act for the public good. He reminded his readers that virtue, the condition to which all believers aspire, is not defined by the absence of evil, but rather by “acts and actions that deepen human collaboration and tranquility” [‘af‘al wa ‘a‘mal tu’hir ‘andi musharakat al-nas wa musakanitihum].148 Accumulating wealth for its own sake yields no public benefit [almunafa‘a al-‘umumiya]. These same themes dominated al-‘Afghani’s work and through his acolytes made their way into the press and public discourse of the time.

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Following al-Tahtawi’s lead in such areas as advocating for women’s education, al-‘Afghani also was a strong advocate for modernizing the Arabic language. Both figures translated concepts fundamental to political modernity into Arabic and in so doing helped introduce them to the Arab and Muslim worlds. After al-Tahtawi’s time in Paris, the concepts of patria and “nation” found their way into his writing. Al-’Afghani, fascinated by the didactic function the press might fulfill, built on alTahtawi’s work by becoming one of the first writers to articulate notions of “public-ness” and “public opinion” in Arabic. Al-Tahtawi’s writing was also an important source for al-‘Afghani and his followers in the press as they contemplated the conditions of Eastern society and the state of Muslims around the world. For example, besides borrowing al-Tahtawi’s articulation of the notions of excess and neglect (ifrat wa tafrit), al‘Afghani nearly quoted verbatim al-Tahtawi’s Manahij al-’Albab in defending the integrity of Eastern culture. Adapting al-Tahtawi’s “new clothes” metaphor from the same work, al-‘Afghani declared that if one imitates the habits and mores of others from a position of weakness, one is forced to “wear new clothes” from the other’s culture.149 This metaphor became a standard trope of Islamic reform thought and other commentary; it can be seen in a range of writers from Abdallah al-Nadim to Rashid Rida. An even more fundamental metaphor that became part of nearly every piece of writing and made its way into many of al-‘Afghani’s speeches was al-Tahtawi’s organicist metaphor of society as a single body [jism]. Al-‘Afghani added a new kind of historical sensibility and his view of societal mission to the metaphor of the social body. Thus al-‘Afghani declared that it is not sufficient for people to simply perform tasks as individuals; rather, people should “see themselves as members” of a larger whole and understand that the only true measure of an act’s worthiness is whether it is a “benefit” to the entirety of society.150 In order for this social body to thrive, all of its organs must understand their roles as mere parts in the elaboration of a larger purpose: the realization of a civilized and politically unified society within an Islamic framework. This noble goal entailed a common understanding of the meaning of the past and a shared vision of the future. Many public commentators inspired by al-‘Afghani and drawing on the cultural archive of nineteenth-century Egypt—including Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf—argued that this route to enlightenment was closed off to peasants because of their illiteracy. The fallahin became almost instinctually averse to change and wary of deviation from established rhythms through centuries of unbroken agricultural routine and by blindly imitating the harmful ways of their forebears. Peasants were said to be inert and

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indolent, aspiring only to do as their fathers and grandfathers had done. Ultimately, these “poor souls” took refuge in the superstition, ignorance, and sacrilege that al-Nadim chronicled in a piece on the behavior of worshippers at the Sayyid Badawi Mawlid in Tanta.151 In this way discourses of religious reform and agricultural improvement intersected in the figure of the “backward,” isolated fallah. Al-Nadim and Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid, the Coptic founder and publisher of the newspaper al-Watan and its editor from 1877 until 1900, were among those whose reflections on the material conditions and educational level of the peasants reflected a new kind of moral equation. According to this view, the peasants had been subjected to an unremittingly harsh existence since time immemorial; consequently they were unable to make use of their reason and lacked the will and drive to improve their living or working conditions. As a result, they were constitutionally unable to even consider experimenting with new irrigation methods to replace the inefficient and arduous shaduf—a primitive manual lever device that required strenuous effort to raise water from an irrigation canal to the level of the field and that became the basis of the name “Abu Shaduf” in Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf. Thus the peasants had to be compelled to try new agricultural methods. Consequently, they neither produced nor realized as much profit as they could, and their resultant material deprivation impeded any effort to liberate them from their benighted state. Peasant backwardness and ignorance were in part a result of their lack of modern knowledge of agriculture. This scrutiny of the fallah’s putative lack of modern agricultural skills dovetailed with the moral critique evolving from Shirbini and al-Nadim as well as from the Muslim reformers’ condemnation of the peasants’ “corruptions” of Islamic practice and belief. Inefficient peasant farming techniques were read as emblematic of the backwardness retarding the entire Muslim East.152 And the fallahin’s “innate aversion to change” corresponded to the “blind imitation” [taqlid] that al-‘Afghani and others declared that Muslims would have to overcome collectively in order to live a virtuous Muslim life. Finally, peasant religious practices became synonymous with superstition and deviant syncretism [bida‘].153 Questions about agriculture, moral reform, and the future of Egypt and the East converged in the writings of public intellectuals, especially with regard to their views of the peasants. We can see this convergence in such important figures as al-Nadim and ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Musa Kastali, and Sayyid Wafa’ Muhammad (publishers of al-Kawkab al-Misri); ‘Alkasan Sarafiyan (publisher of al-Mufid); and the Syrians in al-‘Afghani’s circle—Adib Ishaq and Salim Naqqash, who jointly published and edited a number of such important newspapers as al-Tijara, Misr, al-‘Asr

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al-Jadid, and al-Mahrusa. Almost without exception these writers identified the fallah as an impediment to the collective security and unity of a society threatened from inside and out. Externally, Egyptian society faced the power of the Europeans and their local agents; internally, the collective ideational and economic health was undermined by material decline and moral decay. Exposés of peasant life confirmed the fallah’s abject moral state as well as his ignorance of contemporary agricultural knowledge and techniques. Ignorance and depravity posed obstacles in equal measure to achieving a collective state of well-being.154 This conclusion generated commentaries on the state of the peasantry in step with the intellectual, economic, and political ethos of the time. One result of this attention was the synthesis of a number of different theoretical elements to produce a new field of knowledge about the fallah. In constituting this field, journalists, activists, social critics, self-styled reformers, and commentators of every stripe invoked the classical tradition of Islam in novel ways. While their references to the Qur’an, the hadith literature, and other important texts were not necessarily revolutionary or even new in many cases, the kinds of questions that they deliberated through referencing the classical tradition were without precedent in Egypt and indeed in the Muslim world. Within the new arenas of public exchange, inquiries into ethics and jurisprudence were displaced onto such issues as the impact of “fallah superstitions” on agricultural production; inquiries into ways in which Muslim society might be revitalized in order to throw off European dominance; or proposed strategies for protecting local culture and Islam against the fascination with and attraction to European customs, languages, and social mores on the part of some Egyptians. The traditions of Islamic thought that had inspired first al-Tahtawi and then al-‘Afghani belonged to a kind of moral inquiry in which economics and politics were not separated from other disciplines in ways familiar to the modern reader. Truth and knowledge were recognized as such within a life conceived as a project oriented toward Muslim virtue and piety. Therefore, nineteenth-century reformers were likely to consider questions of individual piety and moral probity, the health and well-being of society, and the economic and political future of the umma and the East within a single moral-political matrix. Nevertheless, it was increasingly apparent toward the turn of the twentieth century that many were beginning to understand the umma in unprecedented ways. In particular, more and more writers imputed an economic character to the umma, so that its productive capacity came to define part of its essence. Through the mechanism of the new public sphere and the modality of the public discussion with its displaced Islamic ethical framework, the notion of productive capacity then became

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necessary for building a Muslim society and living a Muslim life. In other words, the extent to which a society was successful and efficient vis-à-vis modern economic production became a criterion for whether or not one could live a virtuous life in that society. conclusion The most remarkable and far-reaching impact of the evolving configuration of reformers and literate urbanites occurred within new discursive public spaces. By 1880 few literate Egyptians would have disagreed that the task of “civilizing [tamaddun]” Egyptians, building a strong economic infrastructure, and expanding agricultural production were mutually dependent. This consensus was expressed in a variety of ways. Some of the words used to express this idea and that of progress were altaraqqi, al-‘umran, and al-taqaddum, in addition to al-tahsin and alislah. The linguistic pluralism at that time reflects the fact that the meanings of these terms were evolving and beginning to acquire their modern definitions.155 As we have seen above, the imperative to become “civilized” derived from a particular vision of a healthy community of Muslims. Peasant productivity and the efficient operation of the apparatus of the modern state became indicators of the moral health of society. One newspaper, describing the relationship between the fallah and the larger society, remarked that “the public benefit [al-sawalih al-‘amma] issues from peasant success” because as agricultural productivity increases, so too does the material prosperity and virtue of society. How? Through the “amount of tax and customs revenue” the government collects, which it redirects to “widen the circle of knowledge and strengthen the foundations of development [‘umran].”156 It was soon common for reformers to suggest that as part of a project to reinvigorate the umma spiritually and economically, the fallahin must be tutored to utilize new and more efficient and productive agricultural practices. This reeducation was not a task solely for agronomists or organizations like the Egyptian Agricultural Society. Al-Kawkab al-Misri argued that “peasant youth [al-asghar min al-abna’ al-fallahin]” are lazy due to the spiritual and material poverty in which they are reared. Therefore they will embrace change only when “we could instill in them a love for the homeland [hubb al-watan]” and lead them to see it as part of their duty as Muslims. The writer explains that only then would they appreciate the benefit that would accrue to them and to society as a whole. Consequently, the fallah must be the beneficiary of concentrated “civilizing efforts [al-musayi al-madaniya],” and those interested in the “land’s

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[al-bilad]” future agricultural success must guide the peasants to change their age-old agricultural techniques.157 Part of this guidance entailed teaching peasants the values of cooperation and unity. Then they might understand that if they pooled even their meager resources they could buy a steam pump for irrigation.158 This equipment would “liberate them from the toil and exhaustion” of working the “ancient watering device [i.e., the shaduf] which requires so great an expenditure of energy and produces so little benefit.”159 The shaduf, the device that had become an eponym of the peasant producer, was also a symbol of the difficulty of the peasants’ existence and a cause of peasant backwardness. Writing and thinking about the fallah occurred within the context of the waning of local elites’ control over Egypt’s government, economy, and society. Egypt and the entire Muslim world had become subject to European economic might and military prowess. In the period leading up to the ‘Urabi revolt and in its immediate aftermath, there was a general consensus that increased agricultural productivity, education, and moral refinement were imperative to overcome the predicament facing the East. Such journalists as al-Nadim, Ishaq, Naqqash, and Sannu‘, and later ’Ali Yusuf, Zaki ‘Awad, and Ahmad Zayyat, proclaimed it their duty to inform the public on these matters. In the chapters that follow, we will examine the ways in which they went about doing precisely that.

chapter two

People, Peasants, and Intellectuals

; introduction Through the 1870s and 1880s references to the fallah and the countryside took many forms. The scrutiny accorded the fallah in press reports about village life and in agricultural manuals’ discussions of technique and method did more than expose rural Egypt’s social ills and production deficiencies to urban readers. The increased attention paid to the countryside not only gave rise to new knowledge about Egyptian agriculture and the peasantry but also induced journalists, social commentators, and writers in new genres of literature to theorize about the conjuncture of Egyptian society, community, and political economy. This chapter presents a critical reading of the press and other kinds of popular literature in the late 1870s and early 1880s in order to provide insight into literate urbanites’ meditations on these matters. It will explore the ways in which notions of “civilized behavior” and “civilization” shaped definitions of social or moral affinity and political organization and association. It will explicate the importance of this new genre of writing to the elaboration and understanding of modern forms of Egyptian political and social subjectivity. Finally, it will examine the ways in which this type of writing validated a transition in the understanding of Egypt that was occurring at the time. As we will see through the writings of the journalists Yaqub Sannu‘ and al-Nadim, literate urbanites were for the first time beginning to think of Egypt as an integral social body with shared goals and a common destiny rather than simply as a physical place. The centrality of Egyptian agricultural production to an emergent understanding of collective identity among the urban intelligentsia necessarily entailed consideration of the relationship between the fallah and agriculture, even if in an imaginative way. Readers in Cairo or Tanta or Alexandria were informed about corrupt tax collectors and thuggish village

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headmen tormenting the rural poor. They read about irrigation engineers diverting water to newly formed estates away from peasant lands, and they were dismayed to learn that large landholders used the newly established Mixed Courts to cheat peasants out of their paltry few acres. While some newspapers and journals offered up long descriptions of peasant poverty and suffering, others held up the fallah as paragons of decency and virtue. As we will see, some writers even described them in heroic terms as opponents of tyranny. The point here is that newspapers and journals and other sorts of popular writing became the medium through which literate Egypt itself came to represent its peasant majority. the miserable fallah Accounts of fallah life, whether intentionally or unintentionally, underscored the importance of the fallah’s bodies to the economic transformation of Egypt. One subject of much of the writing on the countryside was the misery of the fallah—a struggling and besieged character exploited by external forces that he could not withstand (or even understand) due to his own moral failings. This gendered subaltern whose “backwardness” abrogated the possibility of any form of agency or autonomy was beset by unscrupulous moneylenders and lawyers, bankrupted by heavy taxes, and victimized by the whims of nature and the vicissitudes of the Nile’s annual inundation. The elaboration of this subject became a site in which Egyptians began to formulate modern gendered constructs of personhood and community on the “filthy” and “broken” bodies of the fallah. In the writing of this period, theorizing about the miseries of the fallah—how he became miserable and how one might “cure” his condition—gave rise to classificatory schemata that came to be used to identify and define social groups. This social template then came to play (and continues to play) a crucial role in modern identity formation in Egypt. An examination of writing about the fallah in the 1870s and 1880s evinces a unique conjuncture of contrasting modes of conceptualizing the self and society. Such analysis also allows us to consider the initial introduction of a new form of power in Egypt. While the state continued to compel obedience through force to an overwhelming degree, self-described reformers (and after 1882 colonial officials as well) came to recognize that another kind of power was necessary in this new era. Consequently, they targeted the “backward” and “superstitious” conditions in which Egyptians lived and through which they defined themselves. The reformers thought that only by reconstructing the conditions of ordinary Egyptians’ lives could they be “civilized” and “refined.” A curious feature of this

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period was the amount of speculation devoted to projects that could bring new ways of life into practice while disabling the old ways. David Scott has described a similar phenomenon with regard to the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms introduced in colonial Sri Lanka in the 1830s. He shows that these reforms were designed by colonial officials to “intervene on the level of . . . ‘society itself.’ ” 1 Critiquing Jürgen Habermas’s writing on the public sphere, Scott argues that modern power “works not in spite of but through the construction of the space of free social exchange, and through the construction of a subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free will autonomous agency.”2 Scott’s argument is instructive when applied to Egypt. There were, however, significant differences between colonial Sri Lanka and Egypt. The most obvious difference is that Egypt was never an official colony of Great Britain; its de jure ruler continued to be the Ottoman-appointed khedive. Second, reform itself was one of the most important and engaging questions among many Egyptian literate groups. As the British consolidated their rule in Egypt and implemented projects designed to create new living conditions, many of these projects were often inspired, and even partially authored by, Egyptian social and religious reformers. How one defines agency becomes pivotal to one’s historical interpretation.3 Inducing change in what was perceived as an improving direction was eventually accomplished by disciplinary powers enabled through reforms championed by Europeans and Egypt’s Turco-Egyptian ruling classes as well as its emergent urban intellectual classes—such reforms as the creation of the Mixed Courts and the introduction of French law into Egypt. In discussing the approach to legal reform taken by Husayn Fakhri Pasha, the Egyptian minister of justice in the early 1880s, Talal Asad observes that “[f]or all his talk about making the law conform to the prevailing conditions of society, he [knew] that European law [would] help to create the modern conditions to which Islamic law must then adapt itself.”4. Khedive Isma’il and his close advisor Nubar Nubarian were strong advocates of legal reform. They hoped that these reforms would rationalize a complex web of legal jurisdictions and facilitate agricultural growth by encouraging foreign investment. Their view dovetailed with that of the British free-trade liberals who sought to remove any hindrances to the movement of capital into Egypt. On the other side, opposition to legal reform existed among British conservatives as well as among some other Europeans who would no doubt have been content to set up a harsh extractive regime. The first few years of British rule after 1882 represented something of a compromise between the liberal position of some of Egypt’s creditors and that of those Europeans resident in Egypt who enjoyed the privileges of the capitulatory regime. Indeed, it was not until the

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twentieth century that a colonial regime resembling that of India was fully established in Egypt. Within this changing context, notions of personhood and community emanating from Islamic traditions of legal argumentation, political contingency, and the effects of economic and social transformation were juxtaposed against—and came to be modified by—parallel notions derived from European traditions and historical contexts. Modern European liberal and utilitarian thought as well as the secular legacies of the English Civil War and the French Revolution produced individual subjectivities defined in part by a productive and rational outlook. And it was this subjectivity that was translated into Egyptians’ cultural vernacular through their extant Islamic vocabulary and instilled in them in new kinds of public spaces. The normative liberal subject entered the calculus of social thought in Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s through new legal institutions and state bureaucracies and through the new technologies and practices of public discussion.5 Perhaps no other question has received more attention among historians of modern social thought in the Middle East than the dissemination and reception of modern liberal and utilitarian thought and the related issue of secularization. The capitalist print media, voluntary associations, and salon culture together formed an arena in which the merits of other ways of understanding the self and society and of organizing one’s relationship to the world were inculcated into the literate classes. Through an examination of some of these forums of public discussion, one can chart the emergence and growth of a new model of public morality and the installation of a new kind of desiring, productive, and industrious individual subjectivity always seeking to improve society and the self through reform. Therefore, I consider the appeals that began to be made in this era to al-ray al-‘amm [public opinion] in a different light. Rather than viewing such appeals as an exercise of freedom of thought through open exchange, I regard them as part of a disciplinary regime which aimed to introduce new ways of being in the world.6 reform Discourses of reform animated the peasant question for the journalists and social activists discussed in the following pages. These reformers identified and postulated solutions to the ills plaguing rural life; they viewed reform as part of an all-encompassing moral, social, and political mission aimed at individual and collective renewal. We can see from the specific problems they identified as well from the way they framed these problems that their concern with the misery of the

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fallah did not arise merely from feelings of charity or pity. References to the economic importance of agriculture and the ramifications stemming from the increasing involvement of European non-Muslims in the economic and political affairs of Egypt and the East were more common in their calculations than the poor health conditions or the hard toil imposed by fallah life. The reformers made explicit linkages between what they called the weakness of the East and the degraded moral state of the fallah as manifested in their superstitions and in their corrupted practice of Islam. At the same time such Christians writing in the Egyptian-Arabic press as Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid and Adib Ishaq used nearly identical terms to describe peasant life. It is difficult to say whether this convergence merely reflected traditional urban sensibilities about rustic uncouthness among all confessional groups, or whether it indicated the authority of Islamic reform discourse such that Christians were obliged to speak in the same terms. Why were peasant religious practices “superstitious” to both Muslim and Christian writers? How did “superstition” become “backward” in the sense of “nonmodern”? How do the answers to these questions relate to the idea of civilizing? A partial response is that these writers commonly observed that peasant isolation from “civilization” had led to the spread of “ignorance” among the fallah. And this isolation in turn was to blame for the societal decline that had opened the door to foreign domination. Remedying the maladies of ignorance and isolation— i.e. reforming the fallah—was deemed to be crucial for the well-being of the entire social aggregate. If left unchecked, reformers argued, these problems would relegate the entire social/political amalgamation to further decline and lead to an even greater distortion of true Islam. Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century the idea of reform gained increasing authority and influence, and a complex of ideas we might call “reform thought” became a vehicle for launching a new synthesis in social thinking. The works of such self-described reformers as al‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, al-Nadim, and Sannu‘ were important for bringing new kinds of social constructs into use. Their work was instrumental in disseminating the idea that Egyptians are a “people.” In reform thought, Egypt was increasingly understood as an integral social whole with an ideational and material essence sharing a common destiny, and delimited by its political economy as much as by language, custom, and religion. This complex of ideas was a turning point in the development of modern social and political thought in Egypt.7 While the concept of an Egyptian nation was eventually distilled from the idea of an integral Egyptian people, in the late 1870s and early 1880s the idea of an “Egyptian” people was still animated by, and signified within, a tradition far removed from the one that had produced nations and nationalism in nineteenth-century

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Europe. According to most of those championing reform at the time, the moral condition and the health of the individual was seen as analogous to the collective sociopolitical state of society. This view stemmed primarily from the appropriation of organicist metaphors of the sort outlined in the previous chapter. But how did one cure society’s ills? What did one need to know in order to undertake such a task? Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani suggested that one must possess a combination of skill and wisdom in order to fully comprehend the nature of society and to know how to remedy its maladies. He called the reformer a “doctor of the spirit [tabib al-ruh]” who, like a medical doctor, mastered a range of sciences necessary to treat society’s ills. The “doctor of the body” [al-tabib al-badani] mastered the minutiae of chemistry, anatomy, and biology in order to successfully diagnose and treat a patient. “Doctors of the spirit” needed to know the history of their umma and have knowledge of its “people” ([al-ibna’], literally, its sons). But in order to treat the ills of that umma properly, the reformer also needed to know the history of other “ummas and about why they advanced or declined throughout all of history.”8 In addition, just as the “doctor of the body” knows what treatments benefit or harm the organs and limbs of the body, the “doctor of the spirit” must master the knowledge of that which benefits or injures the morals [al-akhlaq] of the umma.9 Who were these “doctors of the spirit” empowered to treat society’s illnesses? Al-‘Afghani differentiated between two groups: religious figures (‘ulama’) and writers (ashab al-qalam). The ‘ulama’ should provide guidance through their sermons and their general concern with proper Muslim practice while writers should inform their readers of events around the world and warn them of the dangers of neglecting society’s afflictions. By writers, al-‘Afghani meant journalists and editorialists—among whom it became quite common to write about “treating illnesses” affecting the “body” of society. For these writers it was understood that regaining political sovereignty and reestablishing a measure of financial autonomy were inseparable from the mission to eliminate superstition, heterodox religious practice, and un-Islamic accretions among the fallahin. The writers attributed these failings to the “chronic disease” that caused stagnation in the umma.10 The seemingly disparate goals of religious and economic reform were part of a single project of societal renewal that was increasingly depicted as centered on the lives and bodies of the fallahin. yaqub sannu‘ On March 21, 1877, the playwright, theatre producer, littérateur, political gadfly, and protégé of al-‘Afghani, Yaqub Sannu‘ (1839–1912), published

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the first edition of his literary journal, Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’ (The Man With Blue Glasses).11 Abu Nazzara was one of the most important journals of its time; much of its fame emanated from its cutting political satire. Sannu‘ claimed to have produced two hundred and fifty thousand copies weekly. Some contemporaries estimated the weekly circulation to be as high as fifty thousand. Given the limited scope of literacy in Egypt at the time, however, it seems more likely that the historian Ibrahim ‘Abduh’s estimate of about two thousand copies per issue is closer to the truth. It is worth repeating Juan Cole’s suggestion that newspapers were passed among family members, so that Abu Nazzara’s readership may well have been much higher than the subscription rates. In any case, the journal was published in Egypt in 1877 and 1878, and, after Sannu‘ was deported for defaming the khedive in June 1878, in Paris until 1907. Sannu‘ was born in Cairo to an Italian Jewish immigrant and a Cairene woman. His father was an advisor to Ahmad Pasha Yegen, a nephew of Mehmet ’Ali, and he enjoyed Italian protégé status under the capitulatory regime. The elder Sannu‘’s prominent position and consular protection placed him within the upper echelons of Cairene Jewish society and gave him access to the highest court circles. Ahmad Pasha took a liking to his subordinate’s son; he funded the young Sannu‘’s studies in Livorno during the 1850s. Upon returning to Cairo, Sannu‘ became a tutor to the children of some of Cairo’s elite families. Eventually he received a position in one of the most prestigious modern educational institutions, the Polytechnic Institute in Giza. The Polytechnic had been established in the early nineteenth century as part of Mehmet ’Ali’s modernization program. It was meant to educate students who would then move on for more advanced training in civil and military engineering. Although the school was reorganized several times during the nineteenth century, the languages of instruction remained English and French. Sannu‘, whose interests had always tended towards the literary, became interested in the theatre during the late 1860s and 1870s. He began to translate European dramatists’ works into Arabic and soon thereafter began to write his own plays.12 His fame grew quickly in the early 1870s after he had established the first Arabic-language theatre company in Cairo to perform his works. Within a year he had performed his operettas in front of large audiences of Egypt’s elite, including Khedive Isma’il himself. In fact, Sannu‘’s theatrical productions were initially approved and underwritten by Isma’il. In his autobiography Sannu‘ reported that the khedive often referred to him as the Molière of Egypt. The political tenor of the playwright’s work and his biting mockery of Isma’il’s coterie of foreign advisors, however, soon brought the opprobrium of the khedive upon him. As a result, Isma’il banished Sannu‘ from the Egyptian theatre.

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Al-‘Afghani made a strong impression on Sannu‘, who took up with the expanding journalist circles around the older man. According to Irene Gendzier, al-‘Afghani urged Sannu‘ to use the theatre as “an instrument of public education.”13 After al-‘Afghani’s banishment, he urged Sannu‘ to enlist his talents in the “cause of reform,” and to continue his social and political criticism in the new field of journalism. Accordingly, Sannu‘ launched the weekly Abu Nazzara Zarqa’. The publication was notable for its extensive use of colloquial Arabic. Sannu‘ was the first of the nineteenth-century journalists to make use of colloquial Arabic. He and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim stood out among their peers, as they took great care to differentiate the spoken accents of their characters, ranging from Sa‘idi and Delta peasants to Greeks, Italians, and Levantine Arabs.14 Sannu‘’s use of colloquial speech, especially in the harsh and mocking tone he employed, however, was not universally appreciated. Even his mentor al‘Afghani objected to Sannu‘’s use of “expressions that neither the rabble nor the educated should use.”15 His acerbic tongue soon brought disapproval from Isma’il once again. As a result, Sannu‘ was exiled on June 22, 1878, after publishing only fifteen issues of Abu Nazzara in Egypt. While Sannu‘ continued to publish the journal for over a quarter century in Paris, over time its influence and importance in Egypt waned, especially after he began to publish it completely in French in an effort to bring the “Egyptian question” before a European audience. ‘abdallah al-nadim ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s father was a Delta peasant who moved to Alexandria to work in Mehmet ’Ali’s shipworks.16 The shipyards were closed, however, as part of the treaty signed by ’Ali after his defeat at the hands of a European and Ottoman force in the Levant. Looking for a way to support his family, the elder al-Nadim opened a bakery in his adopted city. The young ‘Abdallah’s initial educational experiences were typical for a youth whose parents hoped their son would become a Muslim cleric. He attended the local Qu’ran school and then spent five years at Alexandria’s Sheikh Ibrahim Basha madrasa (also known as the al-Jami‘ al-Anwar). Al-Nadim encountered difficulties with some of his teachers at the madrasa, however, and left school to pursue his literary interests outside the clerical world. Al-Nadim quit Alexandria and traveled widely throughout Lower Egypt as he pursued a number of different vocations. His wandering habits were such that they prompted the historian Jacques Berque to refer to al-Nadim as a “bohemian.”17 He first worked as a telegraph operator

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in the town of Binha; some time later he worked as a telegraph operator in the villa of Khedive Isma’il’s mother in Cairo. He then roamed the countryside as an adibiya or itinerant poet. For a time he was employed as an agent for the agricultural estate of one Tawinji Bey. Al-Nadim also served as the tutor of the son of a large landowner and as the proprietor of a fabric shop in the city of al-Mansura. Along the way he attended literary salons in al-Mansura, Alexandria, and Cairo while in the capital on business. It was at these gatherings that he became acquainted with a number of important littérateurs of the time, such as Shaykh Ahmad Qahbi, the sometime editor of al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriya, and other lesser-known but important figures, including ‘Abdallah Fakri, Sayyid ’Ali Abu al-Nasr, Muhammad Safwat al-Sa‘ati, and Shaykh Ahmad Zarqani.18 In Cairo, al-Nadim frequented the salons of Shaykh Ahmad Wahba and ‘Urabi’s future prime minister, Mahmud Sami al-Barudi. He also attended the gatherings of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, in which the topics of politics and reform held sway.19 Al-‘Afghani’s circle met at the Maqha alBusta or the Post Office Café in ‘Attaba Square. The café itself and its social-intellectual gatherings became legendary for those interested in the development of Egyptian thought. Unfortunately, the municipal authorities in Cairo failed to recognize the historical significance of the place; the building that had housed the famous café was unceremoniously razed in the late 1990s despite protests from historians and others interested in preserving Egypt’s modern history. Be that as it may, al-Nadim, like many of those around al-‘Afghani, joined one of the several Masonic lodges operating in Egypt. In addition, as was the custom of the progressive urban intellectuals of the time, he joined a number of voluntary associations; he later went on to help found the Islamic Welfare Society (al-jam‘iya alkhayriya al-islamiya), which he claimed was the first Muslim welfare society of its kind in Egypt.20 Among the society’s other activities, it operated a school whose mission, according to ’Ali Hadidi, was to “spread education among the umma’s children in order to create a generation with proper learning, appropriate social upbringing, and healthy sense of patria [wataniya] in order to revitalize the country [bilad].”21 According to Hadidi, al-‘Afghani created the idea of “public opinion” in modern Egyptian Arabic (see Chapter 1, p. 42).22 Thus it is not surprising that al-‘Afghani pushed his protégés to influence and shape public opinion in newspapers and through public speaking. As a result, a number of his followers became journalists. In so doing they embraced al‘Afghani’s assertion that newspapers were necessary to achieve societal prosperity by “informing us of worthy events and corruption,” and helping people to establish goals collectively.23 By most accounts Al-Nadim was a faithful disciple of his mentor, and because he was a powerful

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speaker and versifier in the classical style, al-‘Afghani urged him to become a public voice for reform. Al-Nadim’s prodigious talent allowed him to play an important role in the development of Arabic-language journalism and in the emergence of modern literary Arabic.24 He began his career in journalism as an editor of the journals Misr and al-Tijara, both of which were published by two of al-’Afghani’s Syrian Christian disciples, Adib Ishaq and Salim Naqqash.25 Then, in 1881 al-Nadim launched his own weekly, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit [What Makes Us Laugh Makes Us Cry], of which he produced nineteen issues between June 6 and October 23, 1881. Although alTankit wa al-Tabkit was short-lived, it quickly attained great popularity and secured al-Nadim’s position as one of the most influential figures in the new subfield of Arabic letters—journalism. Al-Nadim claimed to have printed three thousand copies of the first issue with only five copies returned.26 As the political climate became increasingly turbulent, al-Nadim and al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit became associated with the political agitation spearheaded by Ahmad ‘Urabi and Sami Barudi. In late 1881, al-Nadim moved from Alexandria to Cairo at ‘Urabi’s behest and changed al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s name to al-Ta’if [The Circuit], which subsequently became the semiofficial organ of the 1882 rebellion. After the defeat of the rebels and throughout the first ten years of British occupation, al-Nadim managed to evade capture after having been sentenced to death in absentia. He was finally apprehended in 1891 and briefly exiled. After Khedive Abbas II commuted his sentence, he returned to Egypt in 1892. Al-Nadim then began publishing al-Ustadh, a journal that soon became very influential; with it he reestablished his place among Egyptian intellectuals. Al-Nadim soon ran afoul of the occupation authorities who came to consider the journal’s editorial orientation subversive. They closed it in 1892 and exiled al-Nadim permanently in 1893 for “religious fanaticism.” He spent his remaining years as a pensioner in Istanbul. There he was appointed to an administrative position in the Porte’s publication office. It was said that in his last years in Istanbul he spent many hours with Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, who was all but a prisoner under Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit consisted of short, fictional literary pieces and occasional news items. The journal was not intended to be a source of hard news; instead the news items were vessels that enclosed social and political commentary and criticism. Similar to Sannu‘’s Abu Nazzara, the nineteen issues contain a number of articles in which fallah characters play important roles. Based upon the accents that both Sannu‘ and alNadim conferred on their peasants, most of the fallahin characters in

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Abu Nazzara and al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit came from the Nile Delta region. A unique feature of al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, however, was its descriptions of the prosaic lives of Delta peasants, with elaborate literary passages about their dress, their homes, and their manners. Al-Nadim created scenes that reenacted everyday life with the peasants working, speaking, and interacting with their families and others. On the other hand, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s peasant subjects were incapable of understanding the forces that controlled their existence. AlNadim portrayed his peasants as not yet having attained the political and social consciousness necessary to recognize that the ultimate source of their difficulties stemmed from forces beyond their villages and indeed beyond Egypt. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s unfortunate fallahin existed in a timeless, unchanging continuum of ignorance and superstition. Typically, commentary on peasants’ lives and the moral lessons contained in each article was provided either by an omniscient narrator or by another character usually described as a nabih [plural, nubaha]. In alTankit wa al-Tabkit and in the press of the late 1870s and early 1880s in general, the term nabih signified the educated, civic-minded, and wise urban intellectual. By the mid- 1880s, however, nabih gave way to the word mutamaddun, which, as explained in Chapter 1, was taken from the same root from which such terms as “city,” “civil,” and “civilian” were derived. While the word mutamaddun was used in Egypt prior to the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was often steeped in sarcasm and used derisively to describe urbanites obsessed with the latest fads, who affected European ways in order to appear sophisticated. This negative connotation increasingly faded during the course of the 1880s. In al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa alTabkit, the nabih was usually an absentee landlord or a male of significant means on a short sojourn in the countryside to check on business or to settle debts with some of the locals. 27 The nabih of al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit was an enlightened, educated, refined, and civilized urbanite; he makes at least one appearance in every issue of the journal. Al-Nadim clearly meant this figure as a surrogate for himself in his literary pieces. The characteristic markers of the nabih were inculcated at the new sites of urban sociability such as “literate gatherings” and “salons made up of nubaha [majalis al-nubaha].”28 The “good taste [al-adhwaq al-salima]” exhibited by the nabih became manifest in the desire to defend the “language, customs [awa’id] and love of the homeland.”29 More importantly, these personal qualities set the nabih apart from the fallah and were presented in gendered terms. Al-Nadim described the heroic nabih in patriarchal terms driven to safeguard society’s patrimony from the [feminized] dangers of ignorance, superstition and passivity. His noble masculine character engendered in him the sense of responsibility to preserve the

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“legacy of our fathers” and to ensure that the “works of our brothers” benefit all.30 In contrast to the superstitious and languorous fallah, the defining characteristic of the nabih was the consciousness of his patriarchal “duty” to look after, and to provide for, the entirety of the umma. In practical terms, he single-mindedly sifted through the economic and political complexities of the time and distilled from them solutions to the essential questions facing the umma as a whole. Al-Nadim intended his readers to identify with the nabih, whose cogent analyses of the fallah’s problems were frequently embedded within a consideration of wider political and economic contexts. This knowledge was gleaned from many sources, but a primary one was the press. AlNadim—perhaps with the economic viability of his journalistic venture in mind—reminded his readers that perusing a newspaper is among the honorable individual’s duties [al-furud al-ayniya]. Al-Nadim also added that while reading aloud in a group is indeed a worthy enterprise, each reader should have his own personal copy of the newspaper.31 sannu‘’s abu nazzara al-zarqa’ and al-nadim’s al-tankit wa al-tabkit While Sannu‘’s and al-Nadim’s journals were similar insofar as they often contained fictive situations and dialogue, they differed from one another in several crucial ways. Abu Nazzara’s farcical and unrealistic content was clearly intended to be read symbolically and metaphorically.32 There was a strong sense of the absurd in Abu Nazzara. For example, in some stories characters were given such preposterous names as “Bludgeon Bey” or “Crocodile-Hide Whip Agha,” while in other stories, the fallah characters belligerently confronted an impotent and cowering khedive and his ineffectual aides. The fallah characters in Abu Nazzara were sometimes meant to personify native intelligence, savvy, and political sense.33 Sannu‘ presented fallahin who were more sharp-witted than the estate owners they worked for and more politically adroit than the khedive and others among the ruling elite. In a highly symbolic short play titled al-Wad almariq wa abu shaduf al-hadiq [The Dim Kid and the Clever Abu Shaduf], Sannu‘ recasts the stereotypical Abu Shaduf as an insolent and politically subversive antagonist of Egypt’s rulers and the regime that supports them.34 In this piece Abu Shaduf, the fallah character, speaks impudently and contemptuously to government functionaries; his speech is filled with double entendres and insults hurled at slow-witted officials. Sannu‘ accentuated the commonsense wisdom of the fallah by carefully recreating the Turkish or English accents, malapropisms, and basic

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grammatical errors in the speech of foreigners speaking Arabic, for comedic effect. Because the peasant in Sannu‘’s work was a vehicle for launching political criticisms, he pointed his sharpest barbs not at the superstitious and ignorant fallah but rather at Egypt’s rulers and their foreign allies. In contrast to Sannu‘’s peasants, al-Nadim’s fallah characters exemplified ignorance, stupidity, backwardness, isolation, and superstition. He elicited humor from depictions of peasant superstitions and naiveté. Nevertheless, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s fallah was more than just a comedic device or a symbol of ignorance. Al-Nadim’s satirical treatment of the country folk was an analysis of the problems facing the countryside; but as we will see below it also belonged to another kind of social criticism. Although the Arabic-language newspapers devoted attention to such “rural issues” as peasant indebtedness, the increasing foreign control of agricultural financing and production, arbitrary government regulations, oppressive officials, and the burdens of the tax system, al-Tankit wa alTabkit was unique among them for tackling these issues from a literary perspective. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s opening editorial promised “conversational” writing for which the reader need not refer to the “Firuzabadi Dictionary or historical references,” or require an “exegesis by a shaykh.”35 AlNadim assured his readers that the “language [of the journal] will be familiar to all.”36 Like Abu Nazzara, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit became legendary for using colloquial Arabic to express direct speech. Al-Nadim’s writing utilized a variety of approaches to accents and dialects; he communicated much about his characters through their manner of speaking and the words they chose. For example, the fallah and foreigner characters alike spoke in rough colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Those whose opinions carried weight or represented the voice of moral authority, such as the ubiquitous nabih, however, spoke in a dialectal form much closer to a type of classical Arabic associated with Islamic traditions and close to what is today commonly referred to by philologists and linguists as Modern Standard Arabic.37 In addition, al-Nadim reproduced the accents of foreigners speaking Arabic with great care and precision.38 Sannu‘ too reveled in recreating the accents of native and nonnative Arabic speakers, and he was adept at writing dialogues which highlighted subtle differences in regional dialects. An example may be found in one article from 1880 revolving around an imagined conversation between an educated Egyptian, ’Ali ’Afandi, and an Englishman, Mr. Paul. In the course of the discussion Sannu‘ mercilessly ridiculed the broken Arabic spoken by the Englishman, whose error-filled discourse is overshadowed only by his hubris and stupidity.39

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Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s use of the term fallah is complicated. For alNadim and the others writing in his journal, such as the Azhari Hamza Fathallah (publisher of the influential journal al-Burhan), Ahmad Samir (al-Nadim’s collaborator and later his biographer), and Mustafa Mahar (the inspector of the regions north of Cairo, the al-Wajh al-Bahri), fallah often indicated someone other than a subsistence cultivator in the countryside. The writers sometimes referred to ‘umdas and village headmen as fallahin, although in several cases these are clearly men with no small amount of property. At other times al-Nadim refers to those with more property as zari‘ [agriculturist] or muzari‘ [cultivator]. Nevertheless, it is clear in al-Nadim’s use of fallah that he intended a person leading a particular kind of life. This figure’s life was characterized by a consciousness devoid of a sense of a social aggregate larger than a family or a branch of a family. The fallah also operated within a political vision limited to only the most local and often most trivial of affairs. While the press in general, and al-Nadim and Sannu‘ in particular, brought the peasant into the emergent public sphere in the 1870s and 1880s, Egyptian letters had not previously ignored the fallah. As discussed in Chapter 1, from the time Yusuf Shirbini penned his parody, Hazz alQuhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf 40 in the 1680s, Arabic readers encountered literary images of the fallah.41 There is little doubt that some of the attitudes expressed in al-Shirbini’s work were reflected in the social imagination of the nineteenth-century literate classes.42 Shirbini’s work was sufficiently well known for both Sannu‘ and alNadim to allude to the book in their respective journals with the intention of evoking imagery associated with the village and its “rustic” inhabitants. Al-Nadim mentioned Hazz al-Quhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf in an article titled “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘ [The Needs of the Ignorant Are in the Hands of Greedy Cheats],” which disparaged a peasant for seeking a foreign lawyer’s help in seizing control of his brother’s half of their inheritance.43 The story’s narrator, describing the foreign lawyer’s office, remarks that the lone bookshelf contains only two texts: Abu Shaduf and another chronicling the exploits of the mythic hero al‘Antar.44 The mention of these books would have signaled to the reader that the malevolent lawyer had studied the culture of the peasant in order to be better equipped to fleece him.45 This detail in turn would have reminded the reform-minded urban intellectuals of the danger of the telling and/or performing of these tales. Al-Nadim often complained about the impropriety of the café culture in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, and these epics were often performed publicly in cafés and bars by unsavory performers to whom Pierre Cachia refers as professional “balladmongers.” Al-Nadim

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condemned the practice of popular balladeers reciting the heroic stories of ‘Antar and also Zughby. Al-Nadim called these practices a form of unIslamic accretion. He characterized the epic figures themselves as brigands, and ‘Antar as a “black slave”—therefore hardly worthy of anyone’s consideration, let alone veneration. uses of the fallah Al-Nadim’s pieces were sprinkled with peasant characters suffering directly from the economic difficulties of the 1870s, and he used these characters as a platform from which to chart a course of reform for the peasant population. Success in relieving the peasants’ suffering, he often wrote, could be achieved only by addressing the country dwellers’ moral shortcomings. Al-Nadim was confident that any “civilized” person who observed peasants’ corrupt behaviors at religious festivals and who was familiar with their belief in magic and diviners would conclude that the fallah’s defects emanated from their collective moral degradation.46 He traced this degeneration to the peasants’ unrefined and inadequate upbringing and their lack of education, which in turn produced ignorance, backwardness, and naiveté.47 As we have already seen, al-Nadim was not alone in warning that the peasantry’s lowly condition represented a growing danger to the entire social aggregate. Writing about peasants broadcast a general sense of alarm about what were depicted as growing problems in the countryside. In this atmosphere of apprehension, al-Nadim proclaimed that only concerted efforts by the civilized to address these (newly identified) problems would enable the umma to forestall the disaster that awaited it. By way of contrast, Sannu‘ read the rural crisis as primarily political. Except for personal attacks on the moral probity and even the sanity of Egypt’s rulers, his Abu Nazzara did not evoke the same sense of a moral chaos as did al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit. While Sannu‘ detailed many of the same problems facing the village found in al-Nadim’s work and emphasized the fact that these problems were worsened by the peasants’ fatalism and cowardice, he pinned the blame for them elsewhere. The indebtedness and hardship suffered by peasants was caused by the incompetent rule of Khedive Tawfiq and the corrupt behavior of state officials. Even if Sannu‘ did not invoke the specter of a moral crisis, his work nevertheless supplied evidence of the high level of anxiety found within much of the writing in the public venues of the time. This sense of crisis, in particular that which revolved around the state of the miserable fallah, doubtless reflected the political instability and the

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social upheavals of the period. But the miserable fallah was also proffered to support al-Nadim’s, Sannu‘’s and the rest of their activist cohort’s positions on any number of social, political, and economic questions. They used the suffering of the unhappy fallah as a barometer to measure their compatriots’ level of commitment: Was one moved by fallah misery? Would one advocate for and be willing to participate in reforms necessary to redirect Egyptian society? But this genre of worry is also an enormous archive from which to glean important insights into emergent views about community and the self. A look at the deployment of the miserable fallah reveals the fault lines in the social transformations under way at the time. As we will see below, concerns about the state of the umma and its people were articulated through the subjectivity of the miserable fallah. The wretched state of the fallah was seen as an example of the umma’s imbalance. The importance of balance in individual morality and in the umma was a central feature of the writings of al-‘Afghani, who borrowed the concept from the traditions of Islamic ethics and translated it into the language of late nineteenth-century political discourse.48 In the context of the political and social instability of the 1870s and 1880s, the question of moral balance took on a whole new set of meanings. The notion that the health of the societal body depends upon the health of all of its limbs and that these limbs are most healthy in a balanced state became a leitmotif among al-‘Afghani and his followers.49 This perception in turn enabled a series of novel social and political critiques. For instance, it became possible to argue that the fallah’s lowly state of existence was not merely due to the isolated acts of intemperate individuals, errors of judgment or faulty government policies. Instead, the condition of the miserable fallah became an expression of general societal imbalance. Because the inherent balance of a body is a measure of its conformity to nature, the existence of the miserable fallah was evidence of chaos in the natural order of things. This idea, drawn from Islamic ethics, was transformed into an instrument to indict political authority and challenge the legitimacy of its institutions—many of which were new, including the Mixed Courts. In these depictions of fallah suffering, the imposition of high taxes and the poor stewardship of agricultural lands were perceived as creating an unnatural imbalance in society. Incompetence and arbitrary rule were transformed into violations of nature. This kind of thinking exposed the contours of the workings of power in the old regime in stark fashion. Local officials’ incompetence, inefficiency, and unmitigated cruelty were not only tyrannical but also a contravention of nature itself. ‘Umdas, shaykhs (village headmen whose position as quasi-government officials was increasingly codified by the end of the nineteenth century),50 the local agricultural

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inspector, irrigation engineers, and other officials favored the rich. For example, the irrigation engineers were accused of supplying more water to the estate owners, and land surveyors inevitably drew boundaries more agreeable to the wealthy at the expense of the peasants and others less well off. Because corruption, petty and otherwise, was seen as contributing to societal imbalance, it was also categorized as contrary to the natural order. There were also plentiful references to local officials’ ineptitude, epitomized in a piece in al-Mahrusa that highlighted the case of an agricultural official lacking the most elementary knowledge of soil chemistry and plant biology.51 The article cast doubt on local officials’ knowledge of the cotton weevil, and called on the government to set up a research committee to look into new scientific developments and to train local officials better. Salim Taqla and his brother Bishara, Syrian Christians who went on to publish al-Ahram, one of the better known and still extant dailies, called attention in their newspaper al-Waqt to the incompetent and arbitrary nature of the new land classifications, all the while criticizing the actions of government land inspectors. In Al-Kawkab al-Misri, the owner of a medium-sized plot of land complains about his unfair treatment at the hands of the local survey committee and provincial officials who were in the employ of an adjacent rich landowner.52 Reflections on the miserable fallah in the press were also often a vehicle for criticism of Britain’s (and other foreign powers’) increasing political and economic role in Egypt. Newspapers and journals were filled with reports of the alacrity with which the Mixed Courts seized peasants’ land and auctioned it at discounted rates to favored buyers, with the collusion of foreign moneylenders and lawyers. Second only to the foreign lawyers and moneylenders in al-Nadim’s rogues’ gallery were barmen and grocers selling spirits and other intoxicating substances to the peasants. All of these offenses now fell under the rubric of upsetting the natural balance of society. Consequently, the mission of reformers as described by such influential figures as al-Nadim was the restoration of the umma to its natural balance. On the surface, it is perhaps an ironic twist that the British were unwitting accomplices to the assault launched by al-Nadim, Sannu‘, and other reformers on the political power structure. The British were in no way interested in the political and economic reforms that would have devolved much more control to local governing institutions at the expense of European oversight; in fact, preventing such reform became British policy and was one reason for the eventual invasion and occupation of Egypt. Nevertheless, the British too gave prominence to the miserable fallah. Their descriptions of peasant existence dovetailed with those of alNadim and others. Cromer, for example, wrote that “[e]very writer on

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Egyptian affairs has touched . . . the sufferings which the [peasant] has undergone at the hands of a long succession of despotic rulers.”53 Cromer was correct in this regard; most writers generally did not forego the opportunity to describe the unmitigated suffering and misery of the fallah.54 Henry Villiers-Stuart’s account of his travels in Egypt in 1883 as a Member of Parliament is filled with descriptions of peasant poverty and suffering at the hands of local tyrants.55 Relieving the suffering of the fallah later became one of the chief justifications offered by the British for their intervention in Egypt. For example, Cromer claimed that “[t]here cannot . . . be a shadow of doubt that the fellah [sic] has gained enormously owing to the efforts made on his behalf by the Englishman.”56 British writers described the state of Egyptian affairs as disorder contrary to nature.57 There were, however, significant differences in the ways in which the British and al-Nadim or Sannu‘ contemplated the natural order. Order for the British occupier was epitomized in a pared-down but efficient bureaucracy and a productive debt-servicing agricultural unit. For al-Nadim, on the other hand, order was a state of moral balance, a path between extremes. He hoped that the natural order would slowly disable and then displace the old regime in Egypt.58 But restoring the balance of the natural order to the social aggregate was contingent on refining and civilizing the individual limbs of the societal body. In the pro-British Arabic-language press in Cairo, one can find positive reviews of British actions toward the peasantry in their colonies and negative assessments of efforts to protect peasants from rapacious moneylenders in the Ottoman territories as early as 1884. The Armenian Alkasan Sarafiyan’s al-Zaman ran a number of articles critical of the Ottoman government’s inaction against moneylenders in the summer of 1884. It contrasted their actions with those of the British who, just after securing the former Ottoman island of Cyprus as a result of the Porte’s defeat by the Russians in 1878, undertook effective reforms to curb the power of the local moneylenders. These kinds of articles in al-Zaman led the Ottoman government to accuse the journal of “transgress[ing] all standards of propriety” and to pressure the British to close the newspaper two years later. Pro-British writers punctuated their admiration for the Union Jack with the descriptions of the miserable peasant. Yaqub Sarruf claimed that the British came to Egypt to save the fallahin from the harsh and arbitrary rule of the Egyptian government, its venal officials, and its heartless tax collectors. That he took this position is not surprising, as he was one of three Syrian Christian publishers of the staunchly pro-British daily al-Muqattam from 1889.59 Previously, he and Faris Nimr, another of the triumvirate (the third was Shahin Makariyus), published the middle-of-the-road monthly review al-Muqtataf. This review consisted of articles on a variety of issues

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with a special focus on modern science. The Taqla brothers, who eventually broke with ‘Urabi in the period preceding the 1882 rebellion, increasingly supported the British in their publications as well. Representative of the pro-British sentiment was an article appearing in al-Zaman, that praised the British for their assault on usurious money lending in Cyprus. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, the article claimed, moneylenders had had their way with peasants; however, the British, upon gaining control of Cyprus from the Ottomans, undermined the usurers’ power. The piece assured its readers that the English intended to do the same in Egypt.60 That ridding Egypt of moneylenders was an issue that might elicit sympathy for the occupying army is a testament to anxieties over the fallah’s deplorable condition. Occupying a place at the confluence of political economy, society, and moral reform, the miserable fallah subject was transformed into a strategic site in which journalists and others addressed nearly every social and political issue of the time. In highlighting the fallah’s misery and desperation, the writers compared unseemly peasant mores to the attitudes and ways of life of the educated progressive-minded urbanite. Even as they depicted the fallahin as personifying all that was uncivilized, however, they used peasant suffering as a means to highlight the imbalances and injustices of the current regime. The peasants became a useful integral component of the vision of community beginning to take shape in the writings of such influential thinkers as al-Nadim and Sannu‘. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, for example, remarked that without the fallah the civilized urbanite [mutamaddun] will die, “for he cannot work the land from which he eats, nor can he weave the fabric in which he is clothed.”61 In this assertion al-Nadim paired the peasant-as-agricultural-producer subject with the organicist metaphors dominating social thought at the time. The result was a new kind of social truth. The conviction that the peasant and the civilized urbanite belong to the same productive unit, and that each is a distinct though essential part of a single moral entity—a people—gained increasing currency beginning around 1880. The linking of agricultural production to the notion of a people was an important maneuver in the initial remapping of the social geography of modern Egyptian society. This connection provided the fundamental discursive groundwork for constituting the modern form of state power that Michel Foucault called “governmentality.”62 In the twentieth century, therefore, managing a population made up of a “people” became the essential raison d’être of much state policy. Constituting and then preserving and defending an integral “people” was a central tenet of both religious and social reform movements in nineteenth-century Egypt. We can see this notion of “people” in both the ubiquitous body metaphor present in social

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criticism and the emphasis that al-Nadim and others placed on Eastern political and cultural solidarity. Another area where we can glimpse traces of the process was the prominence that reformers accorded girls’ education. As has been shown elsewhere, reformers such as Rashid Rida called for the education of girls in the strongest language, emphasizing their role in childrearing.63 The reformers argued that as future mothers and “educators,” these girls had a direct role in shaping the “people.” In effect, they instrumentalized the family unit by transforming it into a unit of production in the construction of a people. The family was fundamentally reconceptualized by the likes of ‘Abduh and Qasim Amin. Their thought was very much in line with that of their colonial masters in this regard; they hoped to “help eradicate bad habits among the natives.”64 Accordingly, such social theorists as al-Nadim suggested that an efficacious strategy to transform this people would be to train girls to be proper mothers. This new linkage became apparent in the ways in which such traditional concepts describing the social and political society as watan, umma, bilad, or qutr were linked with agricultural production. While watan is now best translated as “nation,” at the close of the nineteenth century the best translation of it would have been patria or “homeland.” Bilad is a term that referred literally to a collection of towns. Sometimes bilad designated a country in the sense of a sovereign political entity; at other times it simply signified the countryside. Qutr is roughly translated as the “Egyptian region [of the Ottoman lands].” The term has fallen out of use except in what has become quaint Arab nationalist rhetoric, in which specific Arab countries are referred to as “aqtar [plural of qutr] or regions” rather than as nation-states. For example, al-Tankit wa alTabkit urged its readership to offer advice [nasiha] to the fallah about how to distinguish between “what has value and what is worthless” because he is “ignorant of the rights of his watan.”65 Here is an interesting slippage, as the kind of advice [nasiha] that al-Nadim urged his readers to offer the fallah about the rights of the homeland [watan] has roots running deep into Islamic tradition. In contrast to al-‘Afghani’s portrayal of reformers as “doctors of the spirit,” however, al-Nadim referred to them as “those who provide guidance [murshidin]” and “those who give advice [nusaha’].” The murshid is the Sufi figure who guides the novice in the mystical tradition of Islam. The nasih [plural, Nusaha’] or the “advice giver” is a pious Muslim who fulfills the religious duty to advise those engaging in the incorrect practice of Islam or in improper or moral behavior to return to the Right Path [al-sirat al-mustaqim]. According to some interpretations of Islamic law, Muslims are enjoined to give unsolicited advice that would assist other Muslims to return to the righteous path [alsirat al-mustaqim]. Al-Nadim unself-consciously draws on this authority

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as he reminds his readers that advice giving is a duty for them because the essence of “religion is nasiha.” In al-Nadim’s formulation, knowledge of the “rights of the homeland” is accorded religious value; therefore, it is a duty enjoined on Muslims to advise their “ignorant” coreligionists on the importance of the idea of al-watan. The fallah required guidance [irshad] to learn to “protect his individual rights, so that he can undertake his duties in serving, preserving and protecting his watan.” Al-Nadim chose the word irshad or guidance which, not coincidentally, resonates in Islamic traditions as well. The use of this term adds more weight and authority to his argument. It also points to another change occurring at the time. Whereas in the past those who might have been expected to guide those who strayed would have been Muslim jurists [fuqaha] or scholars [‘ulama’], in this period of widening literacy and education the social, political, and cultural roles of these traditional figures were attenuated. According to al-Nadim, the peasants are essential to the entire community because they are the source of its material lifeblood through their production of agricultural commodities; however, their sociopolitical isolation and their general backwardness, combined with the fact that they “know nothing of the watan except their own field,” endangers the whole.66 Therefore it falls upon the leading enlightened group in society, the progressive or reform-minded, civilized urbanites, to formulate ways to redeem the fallah—or in the language of the time, to “cure this limb of its disease.” Representations of peasants that highlighted their condition of unnatural imbalance or disease were important in the development of emergent social categories. “Diseased” peasants required “doctors of the spirit” to heal them. Treatment consisted of “reform,” and the civilized urbanites for whom al-Nadim was a spokesman were those most qualified to administer the cure. The qualities that equipped them for this task were the same that designated them as civilized. They were aware of their rights and duties; they recognized the importance of agricultural production (and the fallah as producers) to the social whole; they understood the value of service to the watan [homeland]; and they had the proper knowledge with which to “defend their religion [‘ilm yajadal bi-hi ‘an aldin].”67 In short, the civilized understood; they had internalized and lived their lives in accordance with a moral vision marked by a strong-willed loyalty to watan and umma. By the same token, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit delineated fallah subjectivity as ignorant and uncivilized. Illiteracy and the lack of a refined upbringing and education obviated any possibility that the peasants would cultivate the rational and sober approach to life of the civilized urbanite. For the fallah the entire world consisted of nothing more than whatever

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fell randomly into his field of vision; indeed, he “knows nothing of the continent except his hamlet” and “knows nothing of the homeland [watan] except his field.” And his fatalism and ignorance enfeebled him to such an extent that he simply acquiesced when bogus court rulings “threw him off” the meager parcel of land that his father had worked before him and on which he depended for his livelihood and bread.68 Here al-Nadim articulated an uneasiness among many in the middle classes that the values of the ’afandiya and fallahin might be at odds. It may be possible to trace this discomfort back to the so-called Period of Abandonment [fatrat al-insihab] of the mid-nineteenth century. At that time Egyptian peasants abandoned their land in large numbers to avoid paying the heavy taxes imposed by the state. As a result, some ’afandis believed that without the proper upbringing, the fallah would lack the proper fervor to uphold the honor and integrity of the umma. Because peasant ignorance of the outside world was perceived as uncivilized, it was diagnosed as a disorder harmful to the health of the entire social body. As such, al-Nadim suggested it would require broad and concentrated efforts to battle it. In his estimation the civilized were keenly aware and deeply committed to improving the well-being of the community that was threatened from within and without.69 The two extremes to which the community was alternately attracted and which therefore brought imbalance and ill health to the umma were the peasants’ depraved condition—facilitated by their deficient upbringing [tarbiya]—and the presence and allure of foreigners. Al-Nadim warned “city people [’ahl almudun]” that if instead of “carry[ing] out their duty” to guide the fallah they indulged themselves in the pleasures of urban life, “foreigners [gharab]” would “kindle in [the fallah] animosity to his own kind [jinsahu],” to “pillage from his brother” and to “defy his master.”70 Jins was yet another term in transition at the time. It is now used to classify people according to sex and race. In the 1870s, however, its meaning was closer to “ethnicity,” as the modern Western concept of race was still not in currency. Yet “ethnicity” is also an inadequate translation because jins was an empty category—it did not refer specifically to language, customs, mores, way of life, or any other attribute with which to differentiate one jins from another. Therefore, the best translation is akin to our use of the word “kind” to refer to a group of uncertain provenance and imprecise meaning to which one belongs. Foreigners “corrupt [the fallah’s] morality” inducing “ignorant loathing of the homeland [watan].”71 Therefore, it was the duty of every “intelligent civilized person [‘aqal mutamaddun]” to work to insure the fallahin received the best upbringing [tarbiya] in order to predispose them to “virtue rather than ignorance.”72 Once refined and civilized they would be sure to follow the moderate path, “taking care

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to maintain the path between the extremes of ifrat and tafrit . . . and not ignore religious advice [nasiha] and not be deaf to spiritual counsel [mau‘iza]”73 in order to restore and protect the social/moral community [umma].74 An oft-cited tale from al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s first issue spoke to the danger posed by the combination of foreign cultural influence and the fallah’s uncivilized way of life. “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” published in Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit on July 6, 1881, sketched a fallahin family’s daily life in some detail.75 The piece brought together two major themes defining the world of the peasant for ’afandi intellectuals—the authority of the moneylender in the countryside and the uncivilized and backward customs and mores of the fallahin. Al-Nadim specifically derided the cultural and social isolation of the fallahin. He also decried the dull but arduous agricultural routine that depleted the peasants’ physical energy and mental acuity and ruled out any benefit that the peasants might otherwise receive from useful education. The names of both the father of the fallah family and the son were drawn from characters in al-Shirbini’s work. Mu‘ayyat, the patriarch in the tale, allows his son, Zi‘ayt, to “play in the dirt and sleep in the mud.”76 Zi‘ayt grows into a healthy lad and performs the useful work of “putting the water buffalo to pasture or bringing them to the [canals] to work the waterwheel.”77 One day the local trader [tajir] who, as in many other accounts of rural life, functions as the local moneylender, passes by and counsels Zi‘ayt’s father to the effect that that “if you send your son to school to learn he will become somebody [sar insan].”78 Taking his advice, the fallah sends his boy off to school, where he excels in his studies. Soon the government, impressed by the boy’s aptitude, “sends him off to [complete his studies] in Europe.”79 Al-Nadim leads the reader into assuming that education and travel to Europe will civilize the fallah boy and rescue him from the “numbness [al-mukhaddar] . . . [and] lowness [al-hadid]” of ignorance and the isolation of the countryside. The story takes a counterintuitive turn, however; instead of showing the value of European technical education and knowledge, it demonstrates the importance of a firm moral foundation in securing the cultural underpinnings of the Egyptian community. The significance of moral education and proper upbringing [tarbiya] was a theme that al-Nadim returned to again and again; he often included sections specially written and prepared for “students” and for “boys and girls.” This particular story of the fallah sent abroad to study resonated with the sense of a cultural and moral divide between country and city that was part of the literate imagination of the time. The reader of al-Nadim’s story follows the boy back to his village after four years abroad. His father, swept up in joy, runs to his son and embraces

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him emotionally, kissing him with the all the excitement a father might exhibit after four years of complete separation from his son. With a combination of disgust and embarrassment the boy pushes the father away and exclaims “My God! You Muslims! Your habit of hugging is repulsive!” Recoiling, the father replies sheepishly, “How are we supposed to greet each other, my son?” The son retorts pedantically, “You say, ‘bonne arrivée,’ we shake hands one time and that is it.” This exchange takes a turn towards the absurd as the father, not recognizing the French expression his son inserted into his greeting, confuses it with an Arabic phrase meaning ‘I am not from the countryside [mish rifi].’ Perplexed, the father asks, “My son, I should say ‘I am not from the countryside?’[a-huwa ya ibni anna bi-‘ul ma-nish rifi]?” The irony of the French expression being mistaken for the phrase “I am not from the countryside” would not have been lost on the reader. The remainder of the story continues apace with linguistic nonsequiturs born from misunderstanding and miscommunication. During his four years away from the village the boy has forgotten much of his mother tongue. The Europeanized Zi‘ayt can no longer remember basic Arabic vocabulary; for example, he confuses the word for “pepper [filfil]” with the word for a cat’s “mewing [nawnaw].” After several instances of linguistic and cultural dissonance, the boy’s father, in exasperation, turns towards the narrator, a wise nabih, and laments that his son has forgotten his own language.80 The nabih explains that the boy’s upbringing [tarbiya] lacked refinement [tahdhib]; consequently any higher education he received would be erected upon a weak foundation, and as a result would benefit neither the boy nor the “homeland [al-watan].”81 Lacking proper upbringing [tarbiya], the boy lost his moral and cultural bearings as a result of his schooling abroad. Maintaining Arabic as the lingua franca and the formal instrument of education and knowledge was a constant theme in the thought of alNadim and Sannu‘. In this story, however, the question of language takes on a metaphorical sense as the nabih explains that the “child will no longer feel at ease with those who speak his mother tongue,” but neither “will he be able to imitate those foreigners whose language he now speaks.” Zi‘ayt’s dilemma is that he has fallen into a liminal state; although well educated by nineteenth-century standards, he lacks such civilized qualities as the love of homeland [watan] and knowledge of his religion [qawa’id al-din]. Zi‘ayt the fallah suffers from the disease of excess; he has gone too far in the direction of adopting European culture. His unbalanced, immoderate state is unnatural; because he has not been properly civilized or refined, he is incapable of returning to his “original nature” [tabiatuhu al-awwal]; nor is he able to transform himself into a foreigner. Zi‘ayt has transgressed the boundary of identity [jinsiya], and

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the best he can hope for is to frantically “hop” [yaqfaza qafazan] from one incomplete identity to the other.82 In this story one clearly recognizes the influence of al-‘Afghani and his notion of the middle path between excess (ifrat) and negligence and passive fatalism (tafrit). Al-‘Afghani and his followers often drew on this metaphor when speaking of the virtues of moderation on any number of questions. One can find al-‘Afghani’s writing replete with such statements as “truth [al-haqq] is the middle path between excess and negligence [ifrat wa tafrit].”83 The extremes between which the civilized person had to balance were the fashionable but meaningless cachet represented by European culture and language, and the backward social practices, customs, superstition, and pastiche of heterodoxy, accretions, and error that so many Muslims mistook for Islam. For example, in one piece, “al-Qatamir,” alNadim describes the strange phenomenon of an unnamed village’s residents writing a “magic word” (al-qatamir) on the walls of their houses and shops to ward off evil. Al-Nadim uses this story to make the point that absurd superstition was part of the general daily experience in Egypt.84 Thus the discourse of reform was elaborated in terms of a balance between excess [ifrat] and neglect [tafrit]—blind imitation of all new things European or unthinking adherence to the superstitions of the past; overindulgence in the comforts of city life versus the near-total absence of wholesome sustenance in the countryside. The story of Zi‘ayt showed that becoming civilized required more than simply acquiring technical knowledge. Instead, a balance—sometimes described as moderation [‘atidal]—must be struck between blindly accepting all that comes from abroad [ifrat] and not rejecting scientific advancements beneficial to society by unquestioningly adhering to settled practice [tafrit]. Al-Nadim makes numerous references to village preachers giving sermons filled with absolute nonsense or steadfastly dismissing all European knowledge and learning as “heresy [bida‘]” from Islam. Had Zi‘ayt been properly brought up [tahdhib] as a child, he would have appreciated “the truth of his language . . . the value of his umma’s honor . . . [and] the benefit of safeguarding the customs of the people [al-’ahl].”85 To sharpen the point still further, al-Nadim laments that many of “our sons go off to Europe and [fail to] preserve their religion, customs, and language.” Upon returning they decline to use “their knowledge to advance the land [bilad] and its people.”86 In the end, the returnees fall victim to the danger of excess in pursuing the chimera of civilization, confusing imitation of Europeans with becoming truly civilized.87 “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj” was a cautionary tale meant for the members of Egypt’s new urban technocratic and professional classes. Al-Nadim built the narrative around a fallah who would have been considered by many

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to be utterly impervious to the cosmopolitan currents of the city or the attractions and influence of European culture. With a plot line that was fundamentally counterintuitive to al-Nadim’s readers—with the fallah becoming “Europeanized”—the incongruity of this unlikely scenario highlighted the danger that al-Nadim tried to convey. Even a person reared within the opaque assemblage of rural custom and habit can become beset by existential disorder and moral confusion—all due to the error of excess [ifrat] in accepting all things foreign. Yaqub Sannu‘ too placed his fallah characters in incongruous positions of authority or otherwise inverted common notions about them as miserable, fatalistic, and unconcerned with the world outside their villages. In the short allegorical play al-Wad al-Ahbal wa Abu Shaduf al-Hiqn, Sannu‘ depicted two peasants from Upper Egypt named Abu Shaduf and his son Abu Qas‘a. The two characters challenge political authority, insult the khedive, and even kill one of his top deputies.88 Sannu‘ identifies Abu Shaduf, his son, and a Christian official named Falta’us through their accents as Sa‘idi; that is, as natives of Upper Egypt. Sannu‘ chose, perhaps purposefully, to make the active, principled, and determined fallahin Sa‘idis in order to intensify the discrepancy between the audience’s perceptions of reality and the characters in the play. The treatment of peasants in Upper Egypt was said to be the most severe in all of Egypt. Sa‘idi peasants were reputedly the most passive and resigned to their miserable fate. This view of Upper Egyptians was quite pronounced in some of the reports about the famine of 1878 and 1879, in which 10,000 persons were said to have starved to death in southern Egypt. Sannu‘ compounded the farcical nature of the piece in the way he genders his characters. The heroically masculine Abu Shaduf is a principled, active, and intrepid fallah who defies Egypt’s rulers by fighting for the rights of the faceless, downtrodden peasant masses. Meanwhile, the effete and effeminized urbanites [mutamaddun], overly concerned with the most trivial aspects of contemporary life, passive and cowardly, with hearts like “those of women,” sit idly by. The meaning of the term mutamaddun is difficult to capture precisely in English because it evoked two entirely different types of meaning in Sannu‘’s period. In some instances it referred to someone becoming civilized or achieving the status of tamaddun, i.e., civilized. At other times the term connoted either mistakenly believing that one has acquired this quality or feigning its acquisition. Be that as it may, these mutamaddun in Sannu‘’s play have lost themselves to frivolity and the single-minded pursuit of the trivial or sensual pleasures of contemporary city life.89 Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit too catalogued a variety of such conduct, ranging from obsession with sumptuous food to imitation of the mannerisms of foreigners to elicit homosexuality in the

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new social spaces of modern Cairo. Sannu‘ and al-Nadim both identified this side of urban life as feminine and criticized it for its consumerism and for what they saw as its disregard for questions of politics and reform. Most odious to them, however, was that these effeminate professionals and technocrats abdicated their responsibility to move society in an improving direction. They did not participate in any facet of public culture associated with reform and progressivism nor did they share in efforts to spread the new ideas of community and individual and collective duty. The urban effete did not join political or literary gatherings [mahfal]; moreover, they failed to read the newspapers—bearers of so much important information—aloud to the illiterate. Even worse, in many cases they did not even subscribe to or read newspapers at all. Instead, they preferred the company of foreigners in bars and cafés and social clubs; they spent countless hours gossiping and wasting money on superficial and ostentatious luxuries. Al-Nadim contrasted the manly nabih to the ersatz civilized and effeminate urbanites. Sannu‘, at least in the piece above, proffered an idealized masculine fallah to counter the “women-like” intelligentsia, who would never deign to take a hand in shaping the society in which they lived. The feminine Cairene [awlad masr] men who, “like women,” lacked “heart,” would not become involved in Egyptian public affairs. By contrast, the active and intrepid fallahin, Abu Shaduf and his son Abu Qas’a, moved by the vision of a better future, risked their lives in order to reform the present. As Abu Shaduf challenges the khedive’s officials in the play, he turns toward a sympathetic Coptic official, also from the Sa‘id, and tells him, “I’ll risk death [in order to speak my mind]; don’t fear for me, buddy.”90 Sannu‘ presented these two heroic fallahin engaging in a battle of wits and swordplay against the country’s despotic ruling elite. Abu Nazzara’s two noble and heroic fallahin, Abu Shaduf and Abu Qas‘a, play the same role as the nabih characters in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit. Indeed, except for his double entendre–laced taunts of the khedive, Abu Shaduf’s personal qualities and his sociopolitical outlook corresponded with that of alTankit wa al-Tabkit’s nabih. In Abu Nazzara, Sannu‘ anticipated a trope of the 1890s in which wise peasant characters are portrayed as familiar with and comfortable in the new urban social spaces; they cultivate dispositions, a social vision, and even basic mannerisms nearly identical to those of the progressive urban intellectuals to whom Sannu‘ attempted to appeal. The fictive peasant could speak only through the gendered voice of the urban intelligentsia. At the same time, Sannu‘ described the mass of peasants in ways found in other contemporary writing. The peasants were miserable because they were saddled with crushing debt, exploited by a range of government officials from provincial chiefs to village headmen,

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and beaten or otherwise humiliated by nearly everyone above them in the sociopolitical hierarchy. Hence Sannu‘ used the device of inversion in his description of Abu Shaduf to ultimately rehabilitate the position of civilized urbanites as the legitimate social arbiters. Abu Shaduf’s transgression of the fallah’s role is ultimately domesticated and recovered as Sannu‘ assiduously civilized this heroic fallah. That Abu Shaduf is depicted as literate distinguished him from the mass of fallahin and brought him closer to Sannu‘’s readership. In fact, Sannu‘ questioned whether Egypt’s rulers possessed the skills of literacy. In “al-Wad al-Ahbal,” one member of the khedive’s fictive coterie, Kurbaj Agha, feigns his ability to read by “moving his lips as if he is reading” a directive sent from Cairo and then commands an Egyptian clerk to read it to the other officials nearby.91 Sannu‘ even cast doubt on the ability of the khedive himself to read and write. When Abu Shaduf hears of a dispatch with instructions to local officials allegedly authored by Tawfiq, he laughs contemptuously and blurts out incredulously, “What! That idiot kid wrote a letter?” Abu Shaduf, as a symbol of active masculinity, looms above the “effeminate [ma’ih]” Tawfiq and the ‘women-like’ ’afandi men of Cairo who fear to take on the regime. At the same time he stands apart from the other fallahin who, despite bankruptcy and misery, “muzzle their secrets” in resignation and worry.92 An active subject desirous of an improved future was gendered as normatively masculine. Both the passive men of Cairo’s privileged literate classes and the passive, ignorant, and superstitious fallahin were depicted as ineffectual and as such were feminized. Abu Shaduf, however, possesses the same qualities that Sannu‘, al-Nadim, and others had already designated as civilized. Paradoxically, by describing the heroic fallah in these terms, Sannu‘ called his very fallah-ness into question. His “manliness [gad‘a],” “masculinity [maru’a],” and “eloquence [fasih]” prepare him to challenge the rulers and consciously risk death in order to speak openly of the “coming day of revenge for the oppressed.”93 For Sannu‘ and al-Nadim, the civilized nabih, the reformer, or the heroic fallah demonstrated their civilized masculinity. This performance was meant to work for reform of the umma—the political and moral community—in order to achieve an improved future. Firmly integrated into an emergent vision of community, the performance of civilized-ness was inscribed with the notion of a people with a single, unified consciousness and sharing a collective fate. Read in this way, Sannu‘ proffered Abu Shaduf as a stand-in for the civilized reformer; consequently, he and his son Abu Qas‘a are portrayed as sanguine about a better future for the Egyptian people.

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Sannu‘’s readers would have been familiar with the subject of the miserable fallah, who was a ubiquitous figure in writing about the countryside and about Egypt’s debt in general. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the average reader would have recognized that Abu Shaduf’s social vision was utterly at odds with the image of the parochial and ignorant fatalism and the wretched misery that defined fallah existence. In contradistinction to Abu Shaduf himself, the denizens of his village, the miserable fallahin, only had substance en masse; they lacked individual character. In the parable-like story from al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit titled, “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘,” al-Nadim examined the peasants’ lack of sophistication and their putative ignorance.94 The piece revolves around a typical exchange between a foreign moneylender and an “agriculturalist” [zari‘]” from one of the more affluent village families.95 That the story refers not to a fallah but a zari‘ is significant, as the borrower in this story clearly owns a fairly large amount of land. In addition, although the zari‘ seems to have some basic writing skills, the article marks the borrower or zari‘ as essentially uneducated, “ignorant,” and a “miserable wretch,” unable to perform simple mathematical calculations. The zari‘, like the fallah and other “ignorant” rustics depicted in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, speaks only colloquial Arabic and seems capable only of idiotic or absurd utterances. Given this characterization, the typical reader probably would not have differentiated between this particular character and a fallah. The zari‘ in the story is a symbol of the moral suspicion defining the countryside. Examining the nuances of the terms zari‘, muzari‘, and fallah undoubtedly opens another portal into the socioeconomic distinctions forming in Egypt at the time, since these terms appear in other writing and the differences between them, however subtle, were presumably manifest to readers. The evolution of these terms through the 1880s and 1890s coincided with the growing acceptance of the idea of “Egypt” as a distinct moral entity dependent on the efficient production of agricultural commodities for its material survival. The intended moral uncertainty is borne out in the gendering of the zari‘ character. The gullible cultivator personifies the feminized, uncivilized qualities of naiveté and unworldliness. Indeed, al-Nadim often wove his stories around such characters. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit is replete with tales of the artless and the unschooled beguiled, duped, or swindled by some miscreant or cynical opportunist. For example, the reader may consider “Taghfila wa jahala,” a story in which a countrywoman, unhappy about the husband chosen for her, pretends to be possessed by demons so that he will divorce her.96 This particular piece also displaced this gendered analysis onto a much wider field. In the article, al-Nadim delved

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into questions about the subjugation of the East in general and the crushing debt accumulated by Egypt’s rulers in particular. He presented these issues in the same gendered terms that determined the parameters for appraising civilized and uncivilized customs, habits, and the peasants’ ways of life. By applying these criteria to Egypt’s rulers, he extended this gendered framework into the realm of political critique. Consequently, gendered language was employed to legitimize or delegitimize political actions, actors, and ideologies.97 “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘” contains a number of parallels between the agriculturalist and Egypt’s then ruler, Khedive Isma’il. It is quite likely that in the prominence of the zari‘, his large amount of property relative to the others in the village, and his desire to borrow a huge sum (for a simple cultivator), readers might have recognized features of their own ruler. The cultivator visits the moneylender—whose accent identifies him as a Levantine Arab—seeking one hundred Egyptian pounds. Levantine Arabs had come to Egypt during the early nineteenth century to work for Mehmet ’Ali’s government. Later, they became rural agents for Alexandrian merchants and eventually entered into business on their own as moneylenders and landowners. There was also an influx of Syrians who became journalists and popular writers, including the Shumayyil, Taqla, and Naqqash brothers, Adib Ishaq, and later Rashid Rida. Therefore, this sort of character would have been familiar to al-Nadim’s readers. After a short exchange, the moneylender informs the cultivator that the rate of interest for such a loan will be one hundred and twenty percent per year, to which the petitioner gives his immediate and unconditional assent. Subsequent to this initial agreement the moneylender befuddles his gullible petitioner with a stream of nonsense calculations delivered in a confident tone that convinces the dim fallah that the onerous conditions attached to the loans are customary. These comments might well have been expected to elicit an association with the larger political context, as Isma’il was criticized (after his deposition) by the Egyptian press for securing large loans and for bowing to the European bankers’ demands of tendering not only his own lands, but also state property and future tax receipts as collateral. The story’s foreign moneylender, in a role analogous to that of Egypt’s European creditors, feels no compunction in exploiting the fallah’s bloated pride, stubbornness, and ignorance to stave off any but the most desultory challenges to his computations, and therefore, his authority. For example, as the moneylender and the cultivator register the promissory note [kimbiyala] for the loan, the moneylender asks the cultivator “to deduct twenty from fifty.” After a pause intended to manifest the prospective borrower’s inability to add and subtract, the moneylender supplies his own answer, “Seventy.” Then, as if probing to discover the

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extent of the peasant’s credulousness and ignorance, the moneylender notifies his victim that “You now owe me one hundred pounds with twenty additional” in interest payments alone.98 Al-Nadim’s portrait of the individual cultivator [zari‘] was applicable to a much broader context of criticism and reform. The piece touched on and rehearsed a number of themes expounded by al-‘Afghani and taken up by his followers throughout the reform press at the time. It was common to find accounts of European bankers and investment companies enjoying increasing influence and control over Egypt’s productive capacities and infrastructure through Isma’il’s reign in the 1860s and 1870s.99 For example, the Casse de la Dette Publique, with its European oversight of Egyptian finances, was established in 1876. Europeans serving in the Casse controlled the government purse strings and instituted a civil list for Isma’il and the royal family. Large numbers of Europeans came to hold important administrative and management positions at various levels of government through the interventions of the Casse. Of course, alNadim used the comportment of the cultivator in his story and his desire to pursue only his self-interest as an illustration in miniature of the kind of ignorance, naiveté, and gullibility that had led to Egypt’s backwardness, disunity, and loss of independence. He argued repeatedly that an “umma could be reformed only if it became refined [tahdhibat] and civilized [ta’ddibat] . . . and every individual learned his duties and for what one must strive in order to improve his country [tahsin biladuhu].”100 In “Muhtaj jahil”, the zari‘ returns six months after contracting the loan to submit part of his harvest as a repayment installment. “Buying” crops in advance at heavily discounted rates—instead of charging interest for lending money—was typical of Muslim moneylenders.101 As the moneylender registers the payment in kind in his ledger, he recites aloud, “Twenty Egyptian lira worth of cotton and ten worth of wheat, eighty lira of sesame and twenty of fava beans and ten lira worth of barley.”102 Finding these business practices almost as mystifying as basic arithmetic, the cultivator passively observes the moneylender scribbling into the lined pages of his book. Blame for the cultivator’s defenselessness in the face of the moneylender’s aggression falls upon the zari‘ himself; he lacks the moral character and the commercial aptitude to challenge the moneylender, and as a result loses the ability to control his fate. Here one can see the ways in which excellence of moral character and sagacity or commercial aptitude were indispensable and indeed indivisible for the health of the social aggregate. The interconnections among the moral, productive, and administrative spheres were drawn quite forcefully in the pages of al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit. For example, al-Nadim cautioned

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that effective administrative reform could occur only if Egyptians “purified [their] morals that have been corrupted by superstition [takhrif].” Similarly, developing a sound commercial economy that could compete with foreigners would occur only within a framework of proper religious training and practice. 103 Elsewhere al-Nadim excoriated Egyptian merchants who sat lazily waiting for the ‘idhan in order to close up shop and go to the mosque. He implored them to “wake from this inebriation [sakra]” and study the ways in which “other nations [umum]” have “advanced [taqadamat].”104 In the article “Muhtaj jahil,” the Egyptian cultivator becomes confused in the face of the moneylender’s obfuscations. Suddenly he blurts out in a thick Delta accent that he cannot add the figures. The moneylender informs him that “forty lira” remain to be paid, but “first deduct them from the other one hundred and twenty, which is how much?” Again, the cultivator answers with embarrassed silence while the moneylender interjects that “Ninety pounds still remain plus the twenty pounds of interest on the original loan.”105 Then the moneylender, looking up from his “calculations,” adds quickly, almost to himself, “You owe one hundred and fifteen with an additional thirty, and this comes to one hundred and sixty, plus the forty for interest, therefore, the grand total equals two hundred and twenty and a half as was written on the original promissory note [kimbiyala].”106 Much in this account accords with complaints common in the press about rural moneylenders [tujjar or murabin] secretly altering figures on promissory notes [kimbiyala] after the loans had been disbursed. In this case, the peasant, completely unaware of the swindle, but driven by self-conscious pride to demonstrate his perspicacity in business, demands of the moneylender, from where did “that [last] half guinea [in your calculation] come from?”107 Finally, the moneylender’s intention becomes clear as he manipulates the fallah into tumbling all over himself in desperate paroxysms to repay the loan. Lacking the money to pay off the balance of his loan, the peasant offers to sell the moneylender fifty faddans of land for ten guineas per faddan in lieu of cash payment, and asks anxiously, “Then what would remain, a lira or two?” For any remaining balance, he promises, “I will also include a water buffalo. That should basically even us out, right?”108 Most readers of al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit would have recognized immediately that a price of ten Egyptian pounds per faddan for even moderately good agricultural land was considerably below market value. Such land would have brought at least three times that in an open sale. At this point al-Nadim inserts the nabih, the civilized, masculine voice of moral authority, to identify and explicate the issues at stake. He details the moral failures that led to the “loss of independence” for the cultivator

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in the story and the backwardness of the umma in general. The ensemble of superstition and the “beliefs of the peasants [mu‘taqadat al-fallahin]” led to the loss of independence as well as economic and moral decline for Egypt.109 Indeed, throughout al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, al-Nadim and the journal’s other contributors continually linked the backward state of the East, the umma, the country [bilad] or Egypt [misr] with acceptance of superstitions [takharif] that “women inculcated into their children.” Hence a statement such as these “corrupt beliefs of women . . . extinguished the light of knowledge” and were an obstacle to civilizing [tamaddun] were fairly common.110 Take for example Mustafa Mahar, who was an important figure in Egypt’s regional administration, a friend of al-Nadim’s and an occasional contributor to al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit. In one of Mahar’s submissions he argued that “civilizing [tamaddun]” could occur only through the “learning [‘ulum] and knowledge [ma‘arif] acquired only through the serious work of the learned [‘ulama’]” and only if the “superstitions” of women were avoided.111 Echoing these sentiments, al-Nadim fulminated against the “ignorant,” the “stupid,” and the “idiots” who ascribed the power of divination to a countrywoman who “has no knowledge [of religion] . . . or how to approach God . . . and she cannot understand the meaning of divinity [al-uluhiya] or the nature of God [al-rubuhiya].”112 The only way to “save ourselves from this [trap] is to put an end to superstition . . . [and] to educate [ta’dib] the ignorant.”113 These superstitious women “frighten the umma away from the learned men [‘ulama’]” leaving “the umma at the lowest level of knowledge” and subject to the “beliefs of women.”114 On the more general level, this genre of commentary underlined the importance of the nabih’s civilized qualities, but it also highlights the way in which superstition and ignorance itself were not only marked as uncivilized but also gendered as feminine. Both led to moral ambiguity, religious syncretism, and political impotence and decay. Turning back to the story of the moneylender and the cultivator, the nabih character declares to the moneylender, “You took this wretch’s harvest, he became indebted to you and then you falsify the figures to steal [his land] from him. You owe him eighty-one lira! How can you do this?”115 In response the moneylender nonchalantly remarks that the “cultivator is a donkey, and if I don’t do this how would I become rich after five years?”116 Significantly, al-Nadim did not locate the source of the peasant’s troubles in the moneylender’s unprincipled and greedy quest for profit; rather in the ensuing paragraphs it is clear that the desire for profit is not the issue. Al-Nadim portrays capitalist competition and the pursuit of profit as an unremarkable facet of commerce.117 In fact he offers a critique in the gendered language of passivity against Egyptian merchants for their

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indolence and apathy in the face of foreign competition and the search for profit. Similarly, in this story he aims his criticism at the zari‘’s inaction and passivity in the face of the moneylender’s aggressive commercial practices. In the story, it is the fallah’s gullibility and stubbornness that undermines his economic viability, rendering him increasingly unable to control his own fate, and therefore more and more impotent. The zari‘’s situation in the story paralleled that of Egypt. Just as with the zari‘, Egypt was dependent on foreigners who would eventually destroy its capacity to provide for itself, thus leaving it in a state of abject dependency. Contemporary readers might very well have recognized a reflection of Egypt’s recent history buried in the zari‘’s story. Al-Nadim’s “Muhtaj jahil” conveyed the idea that individual or collective “ignorance” in any manifestation—economic, political, social, religious, or cultural— endangers the entire community because it leads to inaction. reform and the construction of a “people” One of the most remarkable sociocultural developments of the 1870s and 1880s was the many voluntary and scientific associations that sprang up.118 Masonic lodges were a part of this movement; the lodges offered fora in which networks of individuals involved in organized social and political activities could come together.119 The lodges and other voluntary organizations engaged in a wide array of activities. For example, the Khedival Geographic Society, established in 1875, published a number of books and supported scientific research in addition to offering a full program of public lectures. Al-Nadim himself was a founding member of the Young Egypt Society in 1876 in Alexandria. The society was known for its lectures and a short-lived newspaper. Then as a member of the Islamic Welfare Society, al-Nadim was well known for his efforts in opening a school with a number of places set aside for children of the poor. AlNadim also organized several theatre productions with political themes that were performed publicly, casting students from the school. Journalists applauded the welfare and scientific associations and enthusiastically endorsed them as both outlets for political and social discussion as well as fora for organizing and implementing ideas for reform. For example, al-Mufid proclaimed that literacy alone was insufficient for “education”; rather, those seeking wisdom required the intervention of voluntary and “learned associations” to develop their rational faculties more fully.120 The piece praised associations that arranged to have people read to the poor; it also advised these associations to set up night schools to provide the knowledge to “open the door of understanding [to the poor]”;

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otherwise, “simply reading books will have no benefit.” The author, described as “one of the founders of the night schools” designed to reach out to the “general population,” called on lawyers with a sense of “patriotic [watani] duty” to take up pro bono work for the poor. Newspaper reviews and advertisements of the time reveal that a number of these associations organized public lectures on a variety of topics, ranging from philosophical expositions of logic to sociomoral explications of the “decline of the East” to astronomy lectures about the predictability of solar eclipses. By the mid-1880s regular meetings attended by both the “fair sex and the active one [al-jins al-latif wa al-nashit]” were being held in Cairo and other urban centers. Faris Nimr, one of the publishers of alMuqtataf and al-Muqattam, helped establish the Society of Moderation in 1866, whose mission it was to widen the scope of “knowledge and wisdom and enlightening people’s ideas.” The organization met every Thursday for lectures on such scientific topics as the orbits of the planets, solar and lunar eclipses, and the nature of life on earth. Some of these associations coordinated donation campaigns for such projects as hospitals, working capital funds for peasants, and establishing schools.121 These associations represented a new site of urban sociability within which new conceptions of the individual’s relation to society began to crystallize. The burgeoning class of urban literati who comprised the bulk of their membership also attended literary salons and lectures or became members of one of the Masonic lodges in Egypt, and they encouraged the like-minded to do the same. In general they viewed themselves as orienting their collective projects, activities, and philanthropic enterprises toward a notion resembling the modern conception of a “public.” They placed newspaper advertisements, wrote letters, and contributed journal articles as part of their effort to publicize these endeavors and to mobilize the like-minded. Participation in these sorts of activities marked one as civilized; therefore, being “civilized” was enacted partly through activities oriented towards the nascent idea of publicity. For centuries in Egypt and throughout much of the Muslim world, those aiming to provide general benefit did so on an ad hoc basis by building public water fountains (asbala) or mosques, or by endowing scholarships to students at al-Azhar or some other Islamic madrasa.122 A benefactor would finance such an undertaking either through a subsidy or by establishing a pious endowment [waqf]. A sponsor would set up a foundation to fund a pious endowment that engaged in some charitable endeavor or provide some public service such as the maintenance of wells. Waqfs were also used to sidestep Islamic inheritance rules whose strict prescriptions often led to the fracturing of a family’s property. Waqfs thus became a target for governments throughout the Islamic world because of

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their nature as permanent tax shelters.123 Thus, in Egypt as elsewhere, the central government circumscribed the ability of its subjects to establish waqfs over the course of the nineteenth century. As a result, the voluntary associations stepped into the breach and provided opportunities for new forms of public works inscribed with new conceptions of social value and individual duty.124 Mine Ener has described a parallel development to the disabling of waqfs that she calls the “centralization of charity” in Egypt during the course of the nineteenth century. She argues that by the end of the nineteenth century “private associations—organizations with distinctive agendas and programs—arrived on the field of poor relief.”125 Rather than setting up individual projects, an association’s members contributed collectively to the creation or maintenance or strengthening of new kinds of institutions, or to fund such projects as alternative banking organizations for small-scale peasant borrowers, poor relief, night schools for working people, or conventional day schools for youth with a curriculum owing much to European learning.126 Meanwhile such journals as al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit addressed a particular kind of reading subject by appealing to the reader’s sense of “publicness.” This appeal is evidenced by al-Nadim’s insistence that his readers need not refer to specialized dictionaries or seek the assistance of clerics to read al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit. He intended to speak directly to literate general audiences comprising the newly literate professional and technocratic middle strata rather than specialists in Islamic law or the language arts or history. Thus, when al-Nadim was asked, “How can al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit be a true newspaper if it is filled with tales?” he replied that the journal “presents serious issues in a humorous framework.” His ultimate concern was to make “serious issues” relevant to an imagined public.127 Concern with the peasant question was an important barometer of public-ness in this regard because the extent to which one was moved by portrayals of the fallah’s moral destitution and enslavement by superstition was a gauge of whether one was civilized, or in al-Nadim’s terms, worthy of the appellation “nabih.” To be civilized meant to act decisively and in public—that is, to write for the press, to join and participate in the activities of voluntary associations, or to provide pro bono professional services in an effort to redress problems in society through reform. As we have seen, there was general agreement among the intelligentsia that the central problem in need of attention was the plight of the miserable and ignorant fallah. The peasant question and the discourse of reform were not only inseparable from each other but they were also built into the contours of civilized [nabih/mutamaddun] masculine urban identity. This identity formed around a group that eventually became the Egyptian middle class.

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We can identify all of these elements in an article from al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit titled “Dars al-tahdhib bayna al-Nadim wa tilmidh.” The piece examined the relationships constituting a representative government, the state, its rulers, and the various groupings comprising a “people [ahl].”128 In this piece heavy with symbolic language—no doubt to avoid the khedive’s censors and the anger of his European ministers— al-Nadim referred to Egyptian society as a “school [madrasa],” the rulers as its “teachers [asatidha],” and the people as “students [talaba]” or “people of the school [ahl al-madrasa].” The “assembly [mahfal]” was the representative branch of government that should undertake the task of advising [shura] the rulers in all matters of governance. The article consists of a dialogue in which a fictive student poses questions to alNadim who, cast in the role of the teacher, imparts a lesson putatively about administering a school, but which is in truth a barely concealed exegesis of the nature of representative government and the importance of choosing the appropriate representatives for the community. In that vein al-Nadim warns that any representative body composed exclusively of the rich will have “ill consequences” for the political/social/moral collective and for the majority of its people. For the function of the government is to “protect” and “defend the honor” of the “[social collective]” and its administration by “assisting the [rulers]” in organizing and “eliminating obstacles hindering the [social collective’s] improvement.” He insisted, rather, that the “civilized [nubaha’]” should take the “burden of governing and administering” from the current rulers in order to eliminate the obstacles standing in the way of societal advancement [taqaddum] and administration [intizam]. The Egyptian “school,” observed al-Nadim, consists of “the intelligent, the dull-witted [al-balid], the stupid [al-ghabi], the civilized [alnabih], the rich [al-ghani], the poor [al-faqir], the prince [al-amir], and the pauper [al-haqir].” A representative assembly deprived of the intelligent [adhkiya’], however, will not advance the interests of society.129 It is instructive to note that al-Nadim referred to society as “the school,” the current ruling elite as “the teachers [al-asatidha] and the representative assembly as the “gathering [mahfal]” throughout the piece. The article concisely concretized the urban intelligentsia’s abstract vision of Egypt’s present and future. It also offered a glimpse of the emergence of a different kind of politics being shaped by the nascent public sphere. Al-Nadim spelled out the didactic function of the public sphere as he described it in terms of a tool that the social collective should use to inculcate a particular sociomoral vision in its members. Those most able to imbibe this lesson—the intellectuals—should take a leading role in governing society through the mahfal. It is not coincidental in this regard that mahfal was

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the same word used for the Masonic lodges and voluntary associations that the new professional intellectuals joined in large numbers. Perplexed when confronted with al-Nadim’s social diagram, the student asks his “teacher” according to what criteria should society choose representatives to “undertake the difficult task of . . . serving in the school administration” if not the criteria of status and wealth? In response al-Nadim catalogues a list of fields of knowledge in which members of the representative assembly must be competent. He suggests that those advising the leaders should be “sophisticated and well-trained with regard to the politics of [other nations], knowledgeable about the specific [politicaleconomic] conditions and [economic] prospects of [other nations] and the aims of each towards each other.”130 Furthermore, the representatives must be conversant with the “tendencies and ambitions of the other [nations’] leaders,” and they must demonstrate knowledge of the “situation of their own people [qawm].” 131 Finally, “knowledge of many different languages” supports the sum of their talents in all these other fields of expertise.132 Nevertheless, according to al-Nadim, attaining mastery of particular skills or gaining knowledge of political and administrative practices does not suffice for those in leadership positions. Many of “those with the [appropriate] experience [khibra]” and “knowledge [diraiya]” of politics are incapable of working for the benefit of the social collective because they are looking out merely for their own self-interest. The “civilized [nubaha’]” must act to guide those in the countryside so that they too will believe in the “school” and instill in them a desire to serve the social aggregate. The presence of the civilized in the representative assembly counterbalances others whose sole interest is self-aggrandizement and who, if left unchecked, would “bring great harm” to society.133 The assembly [mahfal] should therefore contain the “civilized [nubaha’],” who are by disposition not only “dedicated [ilitzam]” to the “betterment [tahsin]” of the social collective but also as “freethinkers” eagerly seek creative solutions to the many ills plaguing society.134 The civilized [nubaha’] have received the proper education and possess the appropriate administrative and technical skills to “capably manage the [government].” But even more importantly, their motivations stem from their concern for the “well-being [manfa‘a]” of society and not from a quest for personal profit or desire for political power. The civilized serving in the government do not “terrorize” or “instill fear” into the people; instead they seek to protect the “country [bilad]” and “defend the honor of [its] ruler.”135 Because many of the rich had attained their wealth through “robbing and terrorizing the fallah,” the most qualified “group [al-jama‘]” to “represent”

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society are the literate urbanites engaged in professional, educational, or journalistic endeavors.136 Al-Nadim also deplores the condition of that large segment of society “raised in the countryside on superstition and nonsense [al-takhrif wa al-hadhayan],” who, as a direct result of their background and cultural milieu, do not understand the “value of the representative assembly” and are “blind to the paths of advancement” as well as ignorant of the meaning of “truly free elections.”137 The masculine civilized urbanite is the effective force in society. Active and determined masculinity faces stagnated passivity of various types. The civilized urbanite battles to reform Egyptian society in the face of the turgid apathy born of fallah ignorance. Likewise, the civilized urbanite must struggle to overcome the wealthy’s torpid indifference to societal ills that is a symptom of their singular pursuit of self-interest. The civilized [nubaha’] must “present themselves as the representatives of the “school” because of their enlightened moral and political outlook.138 They should guide the ignorant so that even the most benighted could share in the social and moral vision in which the power of representative government is manifest. Only the civilized could “lead the [ignorant] along the right path” and away from the fear and terror of the past.139 Eventually, the properly tutored initiates’ belief in “society” will be manifest through their active participation in the process of choosing representatives.140 Public-ness and the peasant question came together in both the discourse of reform and such discursive practices associated with it as the spread of voluntary associations and the opening of schools. Reform was translated into not only a mission of tutoring, guidance and protection, but also the task of providing a model for peasants to emulate. Thus alNadim described “public” fora as sites for instilling values and cultivating the proper dispositions. For example, in “Dars al-tahdhib bayna alNadim wa tilmidh,” he held that the fallah, while ignorant, should not be excluded from the “public assembly [mahfal].” He argued that they would benefit and learn from “mixing [ikhtilat]” with “the civilized [nubaha’], the intelligent [adhkiya’], the princes, the rich, the religious scholars, the craftsmen [sina’a], and the notables [ayan]” who comprise the assembly. In addition, both al-Nadim and Yaqub Sannu‘ understood and advocated something akin to what we might call public-ness. One can infer from their writing that they envisioned an arena in which those with the requisite knowledge and disposition could come together and meditate on social, political, and moral questions (such as the problems encountered by the rural poor) and then attempt to redress them by suggesting appropriate reforms. Sannu‘, for instance, in 1880 created a sketch of

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public-ness as a site of free exchange in an article called “Maydan alHurriya” in his Abu Nazzara. The piece gives an account of an “honorable gathering” of an association whose members convene to mourn the deaths of “our brothers and fathers” resulting from “despotic rule.”141 Sannu‘ explains that the group meets “twice a month in a place near one of the [major] squares of Cairo.” The manner in which the meeting is described was quite clearly meant to evoke the gatherings, well known to literate Cairenes, of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and his disciples, including Sannu‘. The group met regularly at the Matatia (sometimes called the alBusta) Café in ‘Attaba Square—a major square not far from the royal palace in Cairo. Indeed, the Café al-Busta appears in several of Sannu‘’s anecdotes. This fictive group consists of “determined, strong-willed, and loftyminded youth [al-shuban al-mutamassikin bil-‘aza’im al-qawiya wa alnufus al-abiya]” along with “our best and brightest [fuhul] ‘ulama’ and the most intelligent students of worthy knowledge [talabat al-‘ilm al-sharif aladhkiya’].” The leader, whose words and tone are obviously calibrated to evoke Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, appeals to the group’s “sense of honor” and “masculine honor [muru’ra]” and designates its members as the “redeemers of their lands.” Once again gender distinctions are an important facet in delineating honorable and “worthy” reformers. Here too Sannu‘ draws a distinction between active and passive subjectivity, the heroic and knowledgeable masculine versus the superstitious and cowardly feminine. Success is guaranteed only if the virile redeemers act in a determined and decisive manner. Feminized social elements are passive, enervated, and prefer “tranquility” to the tumult of advocacy and reform—in sum, the feminized are weak. The leader—again clearly evoking al-‘Afghani—avers that only by undertaking determined and concerted action to change the course of events can the members of the group prove worthy of the title of reformer. He enjoins them to meet head on “those destroying [muhalif] our land [watan]” and those “leading us to disaster [tawasatu al-ghawa’il].”142 Sannu‘ details this point in gendered terms as he argues that success issues not from “cowardice [jabn],” “weakness [khur]” or inaction, but rather from its opposite, because the “love of security [al-salama] diverts the will from lofty goals” and “tempts the person with inactivity.”143 Sannu‘’s “Maydan” was yet another staging of the normative vision of civilized urbanites’ masculinized public lives. In the story, the members of this association differentiate themselves through public declaration of their concern with the condition of the umma and their determination to work for reform. Then, even as he rebuked those who ignored or rejected the ideal of the common good, Sannu‘ underscored the virtue of public sociability. Another character in the story condemns those “people [al-anas]”

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who “sold [their] brothers’ blood,” “revealed [their] secrets,” and brought about the “loss of life simply for their own personal gain [manfa‘at alkhasa].”144 Sannu‘ confirmed the importance of “public thinking” for his readers in a rousing scene in which the group, inspired by the al-‘Afghanilike figure, stands and chants in unison, “By God, we are not here for personal gain!”145 This ecumenical picture of publicity is completed as each member of the gathering is said to have “taken out his own holy book and swore an oath” to work to “rescue the umma from hardship [inqadh alumma min al-‘ana’].” The members conclude the meeting by chanting, “Long live our free association!”146 Then the khatab, or spokesman of the group, stands to give a detailed report about the “oppression and death wrought on the land by the “most despicable riffraff [aradhil al-nas wa awbashuha].” So tyrannical were the actions of these miscreants that the Nile was filled with so many corpses that the people along the length of the river were fearful of drinking the water.147 The oppressors forced the peasants into dire economic circumstances. The “fallah, his wife, and his children” work “day and night” in order to “put food on the table,” but never did they enjoy the fruits of their labors. Instead, they fell behind in their tax payments while government officials squeezed them until their tax arrears inevitably landed the patriarch in prison. In jail, the fallah suffered terrible beatings and deprivation as part of a plan to force his wife into selling her jewelry, her clothes, and any other meager possessions she and her husband might own to pay the back taxes. In order to win her husband’s release, the wife was compelled to bribe the jailers, the government accountant and various other officials. Desperate to avoid such a fate again the following year the fallah “sells his crop in advance” and borrows money from the local moneylenders at usurious rates of interest. Then, finished with his tale of unremitting suffering, the speaker demands of his audience, “What are you waiting for?” This exemplar of the masculine, civilized urbanite establishes the fact of his refinement, worldly wisdom, and integrity by encouraging “his brothers” to set a “fire to consume the oppressors.”148 Using language infused with traditional Islamic imagery, the spokesman calls on his “rightly guided brothers [ikhwani al-rushd] to “listen to his advice [al-nasiha]” and show that they are truly civilized by “refus[ing] to obey . . . the oppressors” and working to throw them out of “your country [baladakum].”149 On one level al-Nadim’s and Sannu‘’s work spoke to the important political issues of the time. Al-Nadim addressed the question of representative government and Sannu‘ the British occupation. Al-Nadim’s “Dars altahdhib” and Sannu‘’s “Maydan” were also in line with a growing trend in the writing of the time that the general or “public” [‘amm] good de-

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pended in part upon the well-being of the fallahin and reform of the circumstances of their lives. conclusion Through the 1870s and 1880s, the writing that was published in newspapers and the debates that were held in the many salons of Cairo, Alexandria, and such provincial cities as Tanta, al-Mansura, and Shabin al-Kawm began to tie the fate of “Egypt” to agriculture. In newspapers and other kinds of intellectual production, it became quite common for writers to ruminate about the nature of the political, social, and economic characteristics of the “Egyptian umma” or the “Egyptian watan.” Was Egypt Ottoman? Muslim? Arab? Should it be independent or remain under at least nominal Ottoman suzerainty? What sort of relation did it have to Europe? There were also elaborate public discussions conducted in the press about various aspects of communal and collective identity and on the political, social, and economic significance of “Egypt.” Other discussions and debates were aimed at defining such concepts as patriotism [wataniya], the public good [khayr ‘umumi], the public interest [maslaha al-‘amma], the umma, and defining what we might call Egyptian-ness. Among the kinds of questions that circulated in the press about the watan [homeland] were: Is the watan a moral, linguistic, religious, or cultural community? Is it a geographic entity? Is it a polity delimited by the reach of bureaucratic, administrative, and political institutions? Is it merely an abstract idea as yet unimaginable to those living in the “uncivilized” East? How is it that a “people [’ahl, ’ahali, nas]” are bound to a watan? In addition, the idea of reform and the necessity of it became inexorable parts of public deliberation. It is remarkable that Isma’il, Nubar, the British and French officials who eventually oversaw Egypt’s finances, the entire spectrum of opinion in the press, the antikhedive revolutionaries, and almost every social and corporate group in Egypt embraced some conception of reform. Perhaps as a direct result of this convergence, reform thought itself became one of the most important nodes in which a notion of an Egyptian “people” was theorized and constructed. The theories of reform adumbrated by such figures as al-‘Afghani, alNadim, Sannu‘ and Adib Ishaq rested on the assumption that society is an integrated whole animated by a single moral orientation. Referencing these discussions, they crafted a sociopolitical vision in which the idea of a “reformed people” was an ineluctable component. The absence of reform would thus nullify the entire social enterprise. Thus the mission of

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the reformers was to lay the groundwork for enlightening, educating, and training the “ignorant.” At the same time, the reformers increasingly regarded those sowing, plowing, and reaping the fields, Egypt’s fallahin, as an integral component of the “people.” The peasantry’s inclusion in this new social/moral category of “people,” however, occurred only as a group of miserable, ignorant, or benighted fallah. Al-Nadim urged the “civilized [‘uqala’]” to educate the fallah by using language and concepts “not remote from his ability to comprehend.” Here al-Nadim employed the term ‘uqala’ in a way that closely corresponded to his use of the term nubaha’, which I have translated as “civilized” throughout these pages. In al-Nadim’s view the social-political collective required the fallahin to become conversant with current events and the vicissitudes of financial markets; the peasants must embrace contemporary agricultural innovations and imbibe the lessons of “true Islam.” Enlightenment would help them reorient their measures of value toward a conception of “benefit” for the “social whole.” This reorientation in turn would have repercussions along many different registers, such as the transformation of certain kinds of desire. Nevertheless, the texts discussed in this chapter did not establish the idea of a public good as a political and social-moral truth. Rather, they reflect the ways in which this idea was beginning to be understood and broadcast to literate Egyptians. And because the imaginary dialogues in Sannu‘’s and al-Nadim’s writings revolved around ideas of a collective political fate and a notion of public good, they provide us with valuable insight into the general literate milieu of the time. These insights are the primary reason why these texts are so important for the historian to examine. For example, notions of self-interest and personal success came to be regarded as almost deviant vices; as manifestations of an “uncivilized” life. Accordingly, an enlightened fallah would immediately recognize the importance of the army in “protecting” a hierarchy of the “homeland [watan], individual [al-nafs], and people [al-jins].” This newly enlightened peasant, formerly “frightened [nafuran]”of military service, would be the “first to join [its] ranks.”150 These words were an important statement in the politically volatile summer of 1881, as the army was a potent symbol of Egyptian unity and strength. It was also seen as the protector of the collective will articulated by and embodied in such public figures as al-Nadim—who was eventually dubbed the “spokesman for the ‘Urabists.” The phrase “joining the army” to some degree signified voluntarily joining “society.” It meant that one embraced the goals of the collective political and moral community [“body”] and claimed for oneself its collective self-image and identity. A “new spirit” would emerge in the fallah, “civilized” through military service and through his interactions with

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the “discerning and wise.” He would come to view his individual fate through the health, strength, and independence of the country [bilad]. The civilized fallah would work for “advancement [taqaddum]” and “strive to improve agriculture and better his own situation,” thereby signaling the appearance of an individual resembling the “intellectuals [‘uqala’] remembered in history.”151 The aggregate of these “civilized” reformed subjects is a “people”; the “fallahin become part of our people and our country becomes a garden of honor.”152 Such journals as al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit and Abu Nazzara brought rural Egypt into the literate imagination of the late 1870s and early 1880s. This literary trend occurred at a time when the importance of the countryside and the lives of its inhabitants took on increasing importance for those concerned with Egypt’s agricultural productive capabilities and its future as a viable polity. Sannu‘’s and al-Nadim’s writings reflected the anxiety engendered by the sense of the difference between country and city. This anxiety was made clear in the symbols they invoked and in the way their writings recalled agricultural work routines or drew attention to the putative simplicity, stupidity, or ignorance of the peasantry. For example, Sannu‘ evoked Shirbini’s seventeenth-century parody, Hazz alQuhuf fi sharh qasid abi shaduf, by the simple expedient of taking Shirbini’s names for some of his fallah characters in “Abu Shaduf.” AlNadim too inserted references in his writing to Shirbini’s work on peasant mores, habits, and customs. Timeless agricultural routine described peasant life, according to these portrayals of the countryside. As such, rural life required no further elaboration or detail, for to whatever degree it evolved, in essence it changed imperceptibly from day to day or even from century to century. Of course similar sentiments about peasant lives fill the pages of al-Shirbini’s work of two centuries earlier, but they took on new significance in the 1870s and 1880s. Whereas in the past the contrasts between city and country had focused on physical location, this form of comparison changed toward the end of the nineteenth century. A new genre of difference began to be adumbrated through the delineation of ’afandi and fallah according to notions of “civilization.” Civilizing was the defining process of the era for the literate urban classes and such writing as that in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit demonstrates this clearly. The ’afandiya identified themselves as civilized. Thus, through a new kind of cultural distinction this emergent social grouping with its own project of implementing a particular social imaginary separated itself from the peasantry. The ’afandi combined received notions of the uncouth and unrefined peasant with their understanding of the meaning of “civilized,” and produced a peasant subject which was the antithesis of their own class.

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Another feature of this period that this chapter explored is the slippages between the discourse of civilizing and the increasingly ubiquitous discourse of reform. A common inference was that a reformed society is a civilized society, and therefore that the ultimate goal of reform is to civilize society. The urban literate strata, represented here by the likes of al-Nadim and Sannu‘, who were calling for reform, saw those whose lives needed to be reformed as yet uncivilized. It is not surprising, therefore, that the problems faced by the peasant were understood as part and parcel of the social and political reform issues circulating in public discussion. Al-Nadim described the “uncivilized” peasants of Egypt as oblivious to the wider world in which they lived and unaware of the existence of the sociopolitical body to which they belonged. Their ignorance rendered them incapable of comprehending that their bodies, their labor, and the crops that they sowed and reaped were integral components of that collective body. Borrowing organicist metaphors popularized by al-‘Afghani, al-Nadim likened the “ignorant” peasants to diseased organs requiring the intervention of qualified “doctors of the spirit” in order to be reformed or remedied.153 Al-‘Afghani often used these kinds of terms in analyzing social ills. His writings are peppered with references to amputating the unproductive “organ [‘udw]” from the social body or to the notion that “outside” influences disturb the balance of the social body in ways similar to disease’s effect on the homeostasis of the human body. Al‘Afghani spoke of ignorance as a disease to be “cured” by the medicine of education. Interestingly, he even described those voluntary associations consisting of those guided by truth as the “heart” of society seeking to strengthen the rest of the body. The notion of reform was important in thinking about a new kind of moral community. It opened the way for an understanding of a people distinct in language, culture, and custom and living in a bounded geographical space and sharing a collective fate. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit’s peasants were depicted as passive, as alNadim highlighted their fatalism and ignorance in his prose. His descriptions defined and circumscribed the peasant subject of subsequent writing. Sannu‘’s peasants too were an undifferentiated mass set apart from society by a long history of oppression. Readers of these journals observed both male and female fallahin, their interactions and their dealings with a whole cast of archetypal rural figures, including other fallahin, ‘umdas and sheikhs, muzar‘in, nabih, foreign lawyers, and moneylenders. Sannu‘’s Abu Nazzara and al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit were the first of the modern journals to bring the lives of the fallah majority into the perception of the mostly urban literate publics. They mark a period of transition in which the urban intellectual classes began to see their fate as tied to that of the great mass of people with whom they shared the fertile

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strip of land along the Nile. In 1881, al-Nadim observed that the “urbanite [mutamaddun] needed the peasant and lives off the peasant.” By 1890 this idea was widely accepted, and by the first decade of the twentieth century it had become an essential component of developing political projects aimed at establishing a new kind of polity marked by a wholly unprecedented political subject—the Egyptian.

chapter three

Five Peasant Characters in Search of Bourgeois Identity or ’Afandis in Gallabiyas

; introduction This chapter examines social, political, and economic developments in Egypt in the early 1890s. Here I maintain that this period prepared the ground for the ways in which questions in national life were posed and resolved through most of the twentieth century. With the rupture of the social equilibrium brought by economic transformation and British occupation, this period saw the parameters clearly established for the emergence of full-fledged Egyptian nationalism and a new social formation carrying its banner after the turn of the century. During these years the ascendant Egyptian urban intelligentsia sought to impose its own protobourgeois social, political, and moral imaginary on Egypt. We can trace a line from the early 1890s to the period just after the turn of the century when the gendered, classed, and civilized ’afandi became the dominant figure of the Egyptian social landscape. In the nationalist iconography embodied in the work of such historians as ‘Abd al-Rahman Rafi‘, the ’afandi became a paradigmatic, antioccupation symbol of the nation and the leading Egyptian bourgeois figure of the first half of the twentieth century.1 We can find historical cognates for some of these developments throughout the colonized world, especially in colonized Muslim societies. Egypt’s position as a commodity producer for Europe and a market for manufactured goods was certainly not unique in the colonized world. There were, however, circumstances specific to Egypt. For example, the jumble of European nations directly involved in Egyptian affairs from the 1870s until World War I constrained the actions of British colonial officials and was a perpetual source of consternation for Lord Cromer, the

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British agent and consul-general.2 This situation was unique to Egypt. A curious corollary to this anomalous situation was that Egypt continued to be at least nominally a part of the Ottoman political structure until 1914. Regardless of the precariousness of its political connection to the Ottoman sultan, Egypt was a singularly important component of the Ottoman cultural world, as evidenced by much of the writing of this period. Until the first decade of the twentieth century many of the same trends that circulated in literate Ottoman circles, such as constitutionalism and panIslamism, were likewise found within the Egyptian cultural orbit.3 As we have seen throughout these pages, Islamic traditions were also a factor in the development of the attitudes of this new social, moral, and political hegemony. Many of those redrawing the cultural boundaries of Egypt did so according to their understanding of Islamic ideals of ethics and community. Likewise, we have already seen the influence of ideas made popular by such Islamic reformers as al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh. The previous two chapters have described the ways in which the reformers helped shape, directly and indirectly, the instruments that articulated the new bourgeois sensibilities—the press, the capitalist publishing industry, the associational and voluntary societies (including the Masonic lodges), and the like. In addition, the figure of the fallah was central to the mapping of Egypt’s social cartography. As was noted previously, the peasants, Egypt’s countryside, and agriculture were important components in the elaboration of bourgeois social spaces and corporate identity. The peasants were identified as the fulcrum on which Egypt’s future was balanced. Not only did they comprise the bulk of the population, they were also the country’s main agricultural producers. That the British represented themselves as having invaded Egypt in part to protect the fallah also contributed to the importance accorded the peasantry in Egyptians’ political and social calculations. Received notions of the peasant as backward, superstitious, and unchanging were engrained in the popular imagination through poetry, songs, and traditional forms of entertainment dovetailing with the depictions and observations of peasants made by European officials and visitors.4 Throughout the 1870s and 1880s Egyptian ’afandi writers as well as British colonial administrators and travelers remarked on the fact that the peasants’ lives—their methods of cultivation, implements, habits, and routines—had not changed for thousands of years. Consequently, the peasant represented stagnation or an absence of dynamism to both Europeans and Egyptian ’afandis. Such attitudes had the effect of virtually transforming the peasants into a part of the landscape—as much a part of Egypt as the land and equally timeless. Newspapers and other publications likened them to the soil, the palm trees, the irrigation canals, and the yearly Nile floods. The

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peasant became yet another element in Egypt’s natural environment—a permanent immovable object. These qualities of permanence and immovability were infused into the ubiquitous civilizational critiques of Muslims and the East. For Egyptian social and religious reformers and agriculture officials, the peasants were the underlying cause of Egypt’s decline [inhitat] and stagnation [taqahqur]. As a result, in the mind of the Egyptian and foreign urbanite alike the peasant was an inert entity requiring reform, revitalization, fundamental change, and civilizing in order for Egypt to become a civilized land. This attitude began to change during the 1890s. With the urban intellectuals’ growing self-confidence as agents of change and masters of the future, they began to represent the peasant as the timeless repository of Egyptian-ness and linked that repository to their own political and social positions. The peasants became an essential means for these classes to legitimate their aspirations and lend authority to their positions in the emerging social hierarchy. Ultimately, the political and social truths produced by the intelligentsia acquired a measure of authority when bound in some way to the “permanence” of the peasant. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the 1890s fictive peasant characters began to appear in both high- and lowbrow literature, newspapers, and elsewhere. These literary peasants were strong advocates of ’afandi protonationalist, anti-British positions. While they were not the first peasant characters to appear in print or popular entertainment, they were a distinctive feature of the modern history of Egypt. They were the first peasants depicted speaking, and in some cases writing, in proper Arabic in authoritative tones about issues of importance. The remainder of this chapter makes use of five peasant characters as indices of the social and political changes occurring in the Egypt during the 1890s. The urban intelligentsia, here represented by ‘Abdallah alNadim, ’Ali Yusuf, and Zaki ‘Awad, explicated power relations through its descriptions of the peasants. As social relations changed over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, representations of power relations also changed. By looking at the ways that the literate classes enacted power relations through their representations of the fallah, we can trace the ways in which changing social relations were being reconstituted in their minds. context and setting In the early 1890s a series of articles attributed to a certain Fallah Maryuti appeared in ’Ali Yusuf’s (1863–1916) daily, al-Mu’ayyad.5

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Yusuf was an important figure. Born near the Upper Egyptian town of Jirja, he came to Cairo like many other ambitious provincials to study at al-Azhar. He entered the burgeoning field of journalism soon after his arrival. Yusuf’s first endeavor was the weekly literary journal, al-’Adab, begun in 1887. In 1889 he started his second and much more successful venture, al-Mu’ayyad. Eventually the paper became the most widely read daily in Egypt. Yusuf initially opposed the British; in its early years his paper carried pieces by such nationalist leaders as Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad Farid.6 Over time, as Yusuf became more closely allied with the khedive and as the khedive drew closer to the British occupiers, Yusuf moderated his political views and advocated rapprochement with the British. The Fallah Maryuti articles, prominently positioned on the front pages of al-Mu’ayyad, were almost certainly authored by Yusuf himself. They portrayed a purposeful and contemplative fallah speaking the sophisticated, educated Arabic of the literate class—or the newspaper editor. In his characterization, Yusuf eschewed any pretense of capturing an authentic fallah voice by making no attempt to recreate either the speech patterns or dialect of the peasant. The Maryuti columns were remarkable in that a fallah was used to convey important ideas, and his words were given an authority that the educated urban readership had to heed. The Fallah Maryuti articles exemplified a change in the deployment of the figure of the fallah in the social discourse of 1890s. Conversations between peasant characters and others were found in such publications as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s influential weekly, al-Ustadh, and Zaki ‘Awad’s lengthy pamphlet, al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya: al-juz’ al‘awwal al-fallah al-misri.7 Throughout the nearly year-long run of alUstadh, which al-Nadim published in Cairo from August 24, 1892, until June 13, 1893, he wrote a number of articles formatted as “conversations.” These conversations were written as dialogues with little or no narration or interpretative passages; they were meant to be read aloud to nonliterate members of society. Al-Nadim had used this same format earlier with al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit in the 1870s, but it became a much more prominent feature of his later journal. A typical example of a conversation can be found in one piece in which a peasant woman, transformed by her years of living in the city, becomes a tutor, guide, and mentor for an unschooled countrywoman preparing to relocate to the city with her husband. The article is in effect a pedagogic dialogue. While these texts were meant to entertain readers, we can also read them as meditations on the idea of an Egyptian community and the fallah’s relationship to it. Al-Mu’ayyad’s Maryuti and Zaki ‘Awad’s fictive peasants provide insights on agriculture, government administration, the living conditions of agricultural producers, and Egypt’s economic situation.

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These texts also give an indication of the literate urbanites’ perception of the internal and external threats to their social and political projects. I therefore propose to use them to chart the evolving calculus of community of this period. The fifteen or twenty years on either side of 1900 were a transition period in which a different kind of collective future for Egypt began to be enunciated in the public discourse by the emergent middle classes, especially in the capitalist print media. Fully recovered from the disruptions caused by the ‘Urabi revolt and the beginnings of British occupation, the print media entered upon a period of rapid expansion. The period saw an exponential increase in the number of newspapers and journals, especially between 1896 and 1908, when the restrictive press law that had been passed in the period preceding the ‘Urabi revolt in 1881 was relaxed.8 Indeed, in the nine years prior to the relaxation of the laws in 1895, an average of 3.2 new newspapers and journals were granted publishing licenses each year. From 1895, when the 1881 publishing laws were loosened further by the British authorities, to 1909 the number of new licenses jumped to 14.4 per year. After the laws were reinstituted during the post-Dinshway9 period of nationalist agitation in the years between 1910 and 1919, the average number of licenses once more declined, falling to 3.6 new licenses per year. A new generation of journalists and political and social activists, many of whom had come of age under British occupation, established newspapers, founded voluntary associations dedicated to religious and social reform issues, and organized a public life of discourse. These associations and the increasing number of literary salons were sites for the performance of literate urban sociability as well as a conduit for political discussion and activism. This moment was decisive for the emergence of Egyptian political modernity. The defeat of the antikhedive ‘Urabists in 1882 and the subsequent British occupation, together with the increasing impotence of the Ottoman state, formed the backdrop against which an embryonic form of Egyptian bourgeois nationalism took shape. Ten years after the crushing of the rebellion, a new generation of Egyptians unencumbered by the memories and shame of defeat—such men as the journalists and publicists ’Ali Yusuf, Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Jawish, as well as the future nationalist leaders Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908)10 and Muhammad Farid (1868–1919)—rose to prominence. A brief glance at some of these figures gives some idea of the contours of their generation. For example, Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid was known by many as the Ustadh al-Jil (Teacher of a Generation), and was one of the best-known personages of his time.11 He was a lawyer, journalist, activist, and polemicist and a staunch Egyptian nationalist. Born into a medium-

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sized landholding family in Daqahliya province in the delta, Lufti alSayyid spent a year in Europe, where he befriended Muhammad ‘Abduh. Back in Egypt he established and then edited the celebrated daily al-Jarida between the years 1907 and 1914. He held several important government posts later in life including head of the National Library and rector of Cairo University. Mustafa Kamil was a lawyer, editor, and political activist who was the most prominent opponent of the British occupation. Born in Cairo, Kamil was educated in Egypt and France. Kamil was instrumental in forming the National Party [Hizb al-Watani] and started the party’s newspaper, al-Liwa’, in 1900. Until the 1904 Fashoda incident he hoped to use the French as a wedge against the British. In the aftermath of the Entente Cordiale of 1904, Kamil looked to the Ottoman sultans for assistance. Although he came to be known as a nationalist, his political positions were more pan-Islamic and pro-Ottoman than strictly Egyptian nationalist. Muhammad Farid was a nationalist leader and confidant of Mustafa Kamil. Farid was born in Cairo to a prominent Turkish family. He succeeded Kamil as the head of the National Party on the latter’s death. Although he too sought the help of the Ottomans in displacing the British, he was more wary of the Porte than Kamil had been. Farid was eventually exiled and died in Germany.12 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish was an educator and pan-Islamic activist.13 He studied and taught in England briefly. In Egypt, he eventually took over the editorship of Mustafa Kamil’s al-Liwa’ on the latter’s death. Jawish was known for a fiery style of oratory and was extremely critical of the British occupation. Many accused him of anti-Christian bias for some of the attacks he launched on Christian government officials and journalists. As these four men reflected on the meaning of moral and political community their musings, like those of their predecessors of the 1870s, were shaped by ideas of popular sovereignty, equality and representative government, and what we now might recognize as political subjectivity. Not all the important cultural figures of the time, however, belonged to the post-‘Urabi generation. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim was one personage from the days of the 1882 revolt who again became extremely influential as a writer, journalist, and activist in the early 1890s. After the British occupation, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he lived under the threat of a death sentence for some time. Al-Nadim eluded the British authorities for nearly ten years, first staying with a village headman in Qulyubiya province and then moving to Gharabiya province. He traveled around the Egyptian Delta under the alias Shaykh Yusuf al-Madani or a Yemeni scholar named ’Ali Yamani. During al-Nadim’s time in hiding he began what he hoped would be a memoir of the ‘Urabi revolt. Instead the book turned into a series of

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dialogues about religion, politics, and the customs of East and West, between himself and a Frenchman who is said to have helped him elude the authorities. Al-Nadim called himself al-Sharqi, or the man from the East, while the Frenchman was referred to as al-Gharbi, the man from the West. Al-Nadim claimed that the dialogues in the book were based on actual conversations. The book was originally published in 1892 under the title of Kana wa yakun.14 While in hiding, and later in exile, alNadim was said to have been influenced by Sufism and to have adopted the green turban worn by those descended from the family of the Prophet Muhammad as well as the robes and quftan of a Muslim scholar. Upon al-Nadim’s arrest and conviction in 1891, he was deported to Jaffa on the coast of Palestine. He was allowed to return to Egypt shortly after Khedive Tawfiq’s death in January 1892. This permission was granted because the new khedive, Abbas II, was engaged in a power struggle with Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer), who ruled over the British quasi-colony. Abbas hoped that public figures with nationalist sympathies would arouse popular passions against the British occupiers. Upon al-Nadim’s return he, along with his brother ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Nadim, published a weekly periodical called al-Ustadh. The journal soon became one of the most popular and influential periodicals in Egypt, and its opposition to the British was clear to all who read it. Al-Nadim was a link between the days of ‘Urabi and the new generation of antioccupation Egyptians, especially Mustafa Kamil.15 Lord Cromer grew apprehensive about al-Nadim’s power over this generation, his links to the revolt of 1882, and his calls for educational and social reform. He forced Khedive Abbas’s hand and obliged him to deport alNadim a second time, this time permanently, with the charge of “inciting religious fanaticism [al-ta‘assub al-dini].” Al-Nadim was sent to Jaffa in June 1893; he then moved on to Istanbul, where he lived out the remaining three years of his life and died at the age of fifty-one. By the end of the 1880s, the role and functions of the Mixed Courts and the newer National Courts had been regularized and had become part of the quotidian fabric of Egyptian life. The National Courts, launched in 1883, were called the al-Mahkama al-’ahliya. This new court system was set up as a criminal court for cases involving only Egyptians. The British referred to the al-Mahkama al-’ahliya as the Native Tribunals. These courts and the centralized police apparatus that went with them, as well as a more routinized bureaucracy, marked the conceptual borders of Egypt.16 The policing apparatus of these institutions was far more effective in urban areas. For instance, Captain Martin Fenwick, the commandant of the Cairo police, reported very low crime rates for the year 1884, with only eleven murders or attempted murders in a city of nearly four

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hundred thousand.17 At the same time, the courts and the police force became sites of struggle between the British and the Egyptians. For example, Fenwick’s report about crime in Cairo was contemporaneous with the establishment of the infamous Commissions of Brigandage that were being set up to battle rural crime. Run by local officials with their own agendas, the commissions had become notorious as an arena for the unfolding of local power struggles. Rural officials were given nearly unlimited power by the decree of 1884; they then used the commissions to settle old scores or carry out vendettas against rivals. It became widely known, for example, that spurious confessions were extracted through the liberal use of torture and that whole families were imprisoned. These were some of the reasons the commissions were eventually disbanded in 1888. There is another reason, however; Nathan Brown has shown that the Egyptians invented or exaggerated the rural crime problem and pushed for the commissions as a means of establishing their own sphere of autonomy within the British-dominated government.18 In contesting the British for control of these institutions and the power that could be exercised through them, the Egyptians tacitly acknowledged the value of the mechanisms of state. This acknowledgment further solidified for them the connection between the idea of Egyptian-ness and the emergent state. Their new understanding was underscored in the way they contrasted this budding centralized state apparatus with the arbitrary and tyrannical rule of the khedival state and its thugs, sycophants, and corruption. The Egyptian intelligentsia understood the newer and more efficient institutions as an important part of state-building, which for them was a step in the process of civilizing and furthering their sociopolitical mission of establishing themselves as the dominant force in Egypt. In contrast to the British occupiers, however, the Egyptian intellectuals and activists were convinced that Egyptian-ness was an important component of civilizing. Thus even by the mid-1880s, only a few years after the beginning of the British occupation, opposition began to build against the British on the grounds that their presence was an obstacle to Egypt’s civilizing process. But these prominent public cultural figures did not spend their time in abstract theorizing about identity or focusing on the apparatus of state to the exclusion of other concerns. ’Ali Yusuf, the Taqla brothers, Faris Nimr, and Yaqub Sarruf, along with others, depicted Egypt through the lens of economic practices related to agricultural production and the institutions associated with it. Those familiar with the historiography of this period of Egyptian history (in Western languages and in Arabic) might be surprised to find Yusuf, Nimr, and Sarruf classified as a single group. They were in fact bitter rivals; Yusuf’s al-Mu’ayyad was the nemesis of Nimr and Sarruf’s al-Muqattam, which soon became the bête noire

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of Egyptian nationalists for its support of British policies. Even in the early 2000s, the mention of Nimr and Sarruf’s journal (or their third partner Shahin Makariyus) elicits impassioned denunciations from nationalist historians for its collusion with the British occupiers and its betrayal of the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, these figures—and, I would argue, all those who were active in the public sphere—fulfilled one of the necessary conditions for constituting “Egypt” as a moral and political project that coincided with the social imaginary of the urban literati. These writers and journalists provided narrative substance for the idea of “Egypt.” Despite their many political differences they all, perhaps even inadvertently, produced similar prescriptive accounts of a future to which their educated compatriots aspired. Much of the writing produced by these cultural leaders focused on such matters as monetized exchange, money lending, and tenant farming. It included critical discussions of problems in the banking system, the Mixed Courts, the police and the gendarmerie, and the system of village shaykhs and ‘umdas. In addition, the press’s evolving competence and sophistication in reporting on the international political economy and Egyptian agriculture gave even more confidence to those who believed that agriculture was the key to Egypt’s future.19 Therefore, it should come as no surprise to the reader that in addition to the publications of the Royal Agricultural Association, a number of farming journals appeared in Cairo as well as in several provincial towns. All these factors helped to strengthen the idea that Egypt had a discrete historical and moral essence marked by some combination of religion, custom, language, and destiny. Reasoning from the supposition that Egypt was blessed with fine soil and abundant water and was well appointed for bountiful agricultural production, the vigor of Egypt-ness was associated with the ability of its people to efficiently produce crops for export.20 We can gauge the growth of these phenomena by looking at new trends in public discourse. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, for the first time fictive fallahin characters spoke intelligently about international politics and economic matters. They lectured the so-called polite classes about the harsh conditions of life in the countryside and explained why easing the burden on the fallahin was imperative for the collective future of all Egyptians. In a parallel development, for the first time writers consciously aimed their work—especially their didactic work—at a peasant audience by working in a simplified form of colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Agricultural works were an important part of this trend. For example, in Mahmud ‘Atiya’s preface to his 1888 work, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah fi al-‘aradi wa al-zira‘a al-misriya, he noted that in order to bring the “greatest benefit to the Egyptian fallah,” he would

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use “colloquial words and agricultural expressions familiar to the . . . fallahin . . . because the Egyptian fallah does not understand [technical terms and scientific language].”21 The late 1880s was also the period that saw rhyming prose fall out of favor and disappear as a mode of serious nonliterary communication. Reporting the news strengthened the notion of temporal currency, and texts that were no longer supposed to be fixed in memory created a disposability new to Arabic letters. This characteristic of news reporting raised questions about the criteria for evaluating literary production and challenged some of the fundamental assumptions regarding the value of Arabic. For example, Westerners and some Arabic speakers themselves began to question whether the Arabic language was an appropriate medium for scientific learning and study. In addition, what were once valued literary skills, such as dexterity in expressing nuances of meaning and control of an immense and precise vocabulary, were transformed into “ambiguity” and “unnecessary obfuscation.”22 Psychological profiles were extrapolated from these linguistic observations, which were then fashioned into personality sketches. Thus Arabic speakers were said to dissimilate and to be prone to vacillation. To such Westerners as Cromer, Arabic speakers seemed either incapable or unwilling to speak directly and truthfully.23 The new fashion of writing and thinking about the countryside was free of the purposeful humor and mocking flourishes that marked the earlier endeavors of Sannu‘ and al-Nadim. This change reflected a shift in the marketing of print media, as popular literature became more widely available, thus alleviating the need for newspapers to fill this niche. On the other hand, newspapers aimed at a broader public, including traditionally nonliterate groups, as subsidies to newspapers fell off after the British occupation. As a result, journalists and editors became more conscious of their ventures as commercial enterprises and sought ways to build a profitable readership base.24 Another new feature of public discourse was the appearance of media critics who condemned specific writers, editors, and newspapers for their shoddy and tendentious journalism and crude language used purely to increase popularity and sales. As was described in Chapter 2, in the late 1870s and early 1880s Egyptian newspapers were hailed as deliverers of knowledge and civilization, even serving a function analogous to the Friday sermons of the early Muslim community. By the mid-1880s, however, the reputation of the press had become cloudier. One could find elaborate arguments deploring the negative influence of particular journalists over public opinion [al-ra’y al-‘amm] or condemnations of the frivolous and trivial content of some newspapers. For example, a piece in the newspaper al-Zaman echoes the sentiments of many when the paper spoke in ominous terms in May 1884 about the dominance of public opinion by

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Syrians. Al-Watan pleaded with newspaper editors to curb their obsession with building their readerships at the expense of the cause of reform. Others criticized newspaper editors for obscuring “important matters” by personal attacks on their rivals.25 The conviction that agriculture was vital to notions of economic integration and community spurred such figures as ‘Awad and Yusuf to contemplate the fallah’s relationship to the social whole. They alluded to the fallahin in ways that demonstrated the peasants’ necessity to the integral Egyptian community; the fallah-as-agricultural-laborer was essential to emergent conceptions of community. Of course, the notion that the peasants could not join a civilized society until they were “purified” or “reformed” of their backwardness still enjoyed wide circulation. The persistence of this notion notwithstanding, the following pages will detail the new phenomenon of writers enunciating their vision of the community’s future in part through images of the fallah speaking authoritatively to the ’afandiya. In many ways the writers anticipated by ten or fifteen years the question that political activists would ask in the prelude to the 1919 revolution: How could a social and economic entity defined by agriculture exclude the bulk of its agricultural producers from political projects aimed at independence? Thus this new type of writing did not occur in a vacuum. It developed alongside the changing material conditions in British-occupied Egypt and its deepening integration in the world economy as a producer of export cotton. Along with this new prosperity came new types of administrative and juridical systems with their own forms of knowledge, which also served to buttress the vision of an integral Egyptian community. New moral and legal subjectivities entailed their own criteria of truth and encompassed their own social and moral values. There were also specific cultural expectations attached to these forms of knowledge. Many of the technocrats staffing low-level posts in the government adopted European aesthetic standards in dress and office décor. This development led to an entire subgenre of criticism impugning “people trying to be foreigners [mutafarnujin].” While this sort of criticism had existed earlier, the tone of the opprobrium now changed. By the 1890s this “foreigner-aping” behavior was imbued with suspicion and negativity now associated with the British occupiers. Being Westernized began to be equated with sympathy for the British. Therefore, those adopting ’afandi or Western styles of dress became increasingly obliged to demonstrate their loyalty to Egypt or the East in other ways. This transition may explain in part why ‘Abdallah al-Nadim eschewed Western-style dress for the turban, long robes, and quftan, and adopted the title “Shaykh.” He also began to refer to himself as “Idrisi,” or a descendent of the Prophet Muhammad.

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Nevertheless, even many of the most enthusiastic promoters of these new forms of knowledge and the most ardent supporters of the British held notions of social unity derived in part from Islamic models of moral community (umma). This fact partially explains the increasingly less precise ways in which Egyptians used the term umma at the time. It is also reflected in the shift in terminology for Egypt in popular use. Terms defining community from the 1870s and early 1880s, such as milla (millet in Turkish) and qutr, gave way in the late 1880s and 1890s to bilad but even more commonly to umma. And as we have seen, umma was a term that still carried an unmistakably Islamic resonance. Through the 1890s newspaper editorialists argued that room must be found within a conception of Egypt for the producers whose labor was the lifeblood of the umma. This position led to a different approach in deploying the moral and ethical traditions of Islam that modified the notion of an umma. Maximizing the potential economic and productive capacities of the country came to be numbered among the virtues that an Islamic community must cultivate. In effect, the local footprints of the global capitalist system—the output of Egyptian agriculture— were now understood and acknowledged as indispensable to defining an Islamic community. This modification explains why the new class of “progressive” and “enlightened” urban ’afandi writers regarded civilizing the fallahin as the first step in providing a place for them in the moral community. Civilized peasants would become better workers because they would understand that their duty as Muslims and their responsibility to the Islamic moral community, the umma, were one and the same. The civilization of the peasants would in turn facilitate agricultural efficiency and expansion, enabling Egypt to reach its productive potential; as such, it would have fulfilled one of the conditions of its Islamic destiny. In this calculus, the peasant laborer is deemed a better Muslim for helping the umma satisfy its collective religious duty [fard al-kifaya]. The instability in words and concepts describing community and the relation of self to the sociopolitical collective reminds us once again of the transitional nature of this entire period. In addition, as these new forms of knowledge production functioned within this milieu, their intellectual products were melded to moral and religious meanings authorized by traditions of Islamic discourse and practice. Consequently, as a part of the authoritative foundation of these administrative and scientific branches of knowledge, Islamic moral sensibility continued to be an essential—if not always acknowledged—variable of social discourse and political bargaining in the modern context. We can glimpse this slippage between religious values and scientific sensibilities playing out as the press examined economic questions through an Islamic moral filter. One finds numerous examples of writers describing a

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future in which the “virtue” and “honor” of a cohesive, inclusive form of community would be manifest in economic success and political independence. These notions were not neutral. In the context of the time it is abundantly clear that “virtue” was still attached to Islamic traditions of practice and thought. These themes surfaced together in the general conception of Egypt’s immaturity (sadhaja), which became a mainstay of contemporary popular political and social analysis. Immaturity was deemed a state that Egypt and the East must transcend in order to throw off the yoke of occupation and achieve autonomy and prosperity. The land’s immaturity was traced to its backwardness [takhalluf], a term that was synonymous with a range of peasant customs and agricultural practices before the ‘Urabi revolt. The conclusion that many derived was that one reason for Egypt’s continuing immaturity was the backwardness that still defined the peasants’ lives. Importantly, embedded in these readings of backwardness from the 1890s was a new interpretation that differentiated them from the writings of the 1870s and 1880s. This new element was a view that regarded peasant and literate urbanite as members together of a singular moral and social formation. Some of the nuances of the changing discourse of backwardness are worth a moment’s reflection. What had been ways of describing peasant religious accretions, superstitions, or even religious deviancy now became generalized to all of Egypt. For the first time in the late 1880s and through the 1890s, Egypt’s educated classes came under censure for their role in perpetuating Egyptian backwardness. Once again the ideas made popular by al‘Afghani and ‘Abduh reechoed as educated Egyptians were accused of blind imitation [taqlid] by according an unwarranted cachet to European cultures and languages. While the language of these fulminations conjured up critiques of consumerism dating back to the 1870s and 1880s and found in such places as al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, through the 1880s they pointed toward a connection between Westernization [tafarnuja] and consumerism that had been only obliquely spelled out previously. In 1881 ‘Abdallah al-Nadim used the term “civilizing” [tamaddun] in a mocking fashion by equating it with a form of empty and ultimately destructive consumerism. Over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, however, new terms were coined to signify the implicit connection between consumerism and the cultural dangers represented by Westernization. For example, the term tafarnuja came to refer specifically to adopting European manners, mores, and languages. It also implied a vapid consumerism obsessed with style and animated by a never-ending quest for the latest fashions. There is also a wider context here that requires an accounting. This new mode of critical sociopolitical or cultural analysis, in which Egyptians (and Arabs and Muslims in general) began to ask themselves, why are we

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backward? became very prevalent. The culmination is perhaps best seen in Muhammad ‘Umar’s now-famous 1902 book, Hadir al-misriyin aw sirr ta’akhiruhu [The Descent of the Egyptians or the Secret of Their Backwardness]. It is hard not to see in this trend the influence of a number of works translated from French and other European languages. First was François Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’Empire romain jusqu’à la révolution française (1846), translated into Arabic in 1877. According to Albert Hourani, Guizot’s book was instrumental in laying the foundation for subsequent “civilizational” critiques. Then in 1899, translations of Edmond Demolins’ À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons appeared that had been prepared by Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul (a judge and the brother of the future nationalist leader, Saad Zaghlul) as Sirr taqaddum al-inkiliz al-saksuniyin. Gustave Le Bon’s later work on national traits and crowd psychology, translated by Zaghlul as well, also gave impetus to this trend.26 Discussions of Egypt’s backwardness in the 1880s and 1890s owed much to arguments made in the 1870s. The focus on backwardness reproduced the familiar dialectic of excess and neglect [ifrat wa tafrit] that lay at the heart of al-‘Afghani’s intervention, as we saw in the previous chapters. Excess and neglect lay at the opposite ends of a spectrum through which individual and societal action, beliefs and moral outlooks, were all evaluated. It was a matter of excess [ifrat] when Egyptians blindly imitated Europeans and a matter of neglect [tafrit] when Egyptians passively and unthinkingly copied their own ancestors. Now, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, both extremes were manifestations of backwardness and proof of Egypt’s “immaturity.” By the same token, activists and writers of all types pursued with vigor the development of various media to instruct the fallah in new agricultural and organizational techniques and skills.27 Zaki ‘Awad, who was a minor littérateur in comparison with Yusuf and al-Nadim (he published a weekly, al-‘Alim al-Misri, with Butrus Mikha’il in 1893 in addition to a number of short works of fiction) wrote al-Nafahat al-Zakiya fi alNahda al-Misriya [Intelligent Breezes of Egypt’s Renaissance]. This work placed an imaginary fallah in a carefully crafted gathering containing the archetypal characters that so often populated the writing of the urban literati—reformers, younger women, female students, and bureaucrats. Moreover, those attending this assembly demonstrated their civilized character by coming together to discuss Egypt’s present and future in a salonlike setting. ‘Awad described the archetypal fallah among them as one “who speaks with power from within himself.”28 The manner in which the fallah addresses the “polite company [ghanadir] of landowners and proprietors of warehouses [al-shawadir]”

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recapitulates the convergence of the economic, moral/ethical, and social outlines of society.29 ‘Awad depicts his fallah as identifying the sources of peasant complaints and outlining the factors leading to mounting debt while the members of this public, sharing a principled commitment to civilized gatherings and public deliberation, are depicted as giving their undivided attention to the “refined” fallah. Even while his words seem to silence the audience, their obvious truth carries the day and forces the public to reconsider its views of the countryside, the peasantry, the government, and the present economic state of Egypt. Such portrayals of fallah agency signaled a turning point in Egyptian cultural history. As we see below, such texts as ‘Awad’s as well as Yusuf’s Maryuti columns suggested a set of cultural affinities and a moral and theoretical baseline common to the regular consumers of capitalist print media and some of those in moral and material positions of inferiority. Through this period and into the twentieth century, these commonalities came to define what I have been referring to as Egyptianness. They were deployed to chart a continuum of backwardness and civilized status. The texts that we take up in this chapter tell us much about the ways in which the internal moral borders of Egypt were being constituted. In a sense, the moral and theoretical perspective they delineated was analogous to the emergent understanding of the physical contiguity of Egypt-as-place. Just as the geographical entity called Egypt was defined to a large extent by a relationship of distance between its agricultural land and the Nile, moral Egyptian-ness was defined by a relationship of distance between an individual and a set of ideas and principles. The further one moved away from these principles, the less Egyptian a person was, just as the further away one moved from the Nile valley and its fertile soil, the further one was from the heart of Egypt. Thus, just as the physical Egypt could grow by reclaiming (islah) land and widening the area under cultivation, the moral distance between the uncivilized and the true Egyptian could be reduced by an engaged and civilized intellectual class actively seeking to reform (islah) the uncivilized in order to instill the community’s principles and concerns. The aim was to bring uncivilized persons under cultivation in the same way as newly reclaimed soil. The lives of the public and the enlightened fallahin in these pieces were conceived within the framework of a community oriented toward a future defined by a sense of common destiny. Characterizations of fallahin who could speak to important issues and articulate intelligent, even crucial, insights into Egypt’s condition gave ammunition to those who later argued that the fate of urban ’afandi and rural fallah were inextricably linked. In the 1890s, the literate urbanites’ preoccupation with agriculture, their

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anxieties about the moral state of the countryside, and their growing perception of Egypt as an integral economic entity intersected and produced among such reformers as ‘Awad, al-Nadim, and ’Ali Yusuf a conviction of the ineluctable importance of the fallah to the entire socioeconomic equation and, therefore, to the future of Egypt. What follows is an examination of a sampling of emblematic texts describing the process of reevaluating the fallah among social and political reformers and activists. I have chosen writers whose work is representative of this trend in order to demonstrate the imperative felt by some intellectuals to include the fallah in their theorizing about community and to show how this impelled them in their search for the thoughtful peasant. bihayna and sitt al-balad ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and his brother, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Nadim, began publishing al-Ustadh in August 1892. As with al-Nadim’s earlier journal, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, and the work he penned while a fugitive, Kana wa yakun, al-Ustadh contained a large number of articles written as dialogues. One regular column that appeared in al-Ustadh was “Madrasat al-banat [Girls’ School].” These columns adumbrated normative gendered identities for girls and young women. They were written in colloquial Egyptian dialect and were meant to be read aloud as pedagogical texts. The articles covered a wide range of subjects from the dangers of adopting Western ways and advice on recognizing the signs of a husband’s drug abuse to warnings against the dangers of alcohol and detailed instructions on household and kitchen management. In one installment a female character that al-Nadim called Countrywoman [Sitt al-Balad] seeks guidance from Bihayna, another illiterate countrywoman who had moved out of the countryside and become a townswoman [Sitt al-Bandar].30 Bihayna had moved to the city as her husband’s fortunes improved. She explained to Countrywoman how she carefully studied and then imitated the women of the city to become like them. If the Countrywoman also intended to become a city woman and discard her fallaha roots, she would have to cultivate a wholly different kind of disposition from that of a peasant woman. The circumstances under which she was obliged to move reinforced this point. The Countrywoman had been divorced by her first husband, a fallah, and was recently remarried, to an army lieutenant. Her new husband intended to bring her into the city. As we see below, al-Nadim developed a particular kind of gendered subjectivity to describe the civilized [mutamaddun] townswoman that the Countrywoman should aspire to become.

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Al-Nadim broke with the past in creating these characters in order to show that a fallah could indeed burst out of the undifferentiated mass of fallahin and become civilized [mutamaddun]. As we see throughout this chapter, it became increasingly common to portray fictive peasants becoming part of civilized society. The price of admission was their disavowal of those characteristics that had formerly defined their moral and socioeconomic status as fallahin. Bihayna, the townswoman, personified the journey from fallaha to civilized woman by acquiring the accoutrements of city life. She emigrated to the town [bandar], schooled herself in the habits of other city women, and, by training her body and adopting new customs, she “became a woman like them.”31 Bihayna’s journey entailed a transformation in consciousness as much as it signaled a change of physical location, but it also implied a rise in socioeconomic status. The Countrywoman, for instance, saw her fortunes improve as her peasant husband was replaced by her new army officer husband. Her tutor Bihayna instructs the Countrywoman in the minutiae of the tasks and duties specific to “civilized” city life. In Bihayna’s detailed lessons, one sees al-Nadim’s desire to police the gender and class boundaries of the country gentry, who were now beginning to move into Egypt’s cities in rising numbers as the new professional classes. In describing a form of “civilized” domesticity, al-Nadim erased any distinction between “ ’afandi” and “civilized.” The Townswoman, Bihayna, counsels her pupil to envelop herself in a “civilized” form of domesticity in order to attend to her ’afandi (i.e., her new husband). Civilized domesticity prescribes that the Countrywoman cultivate a new kind of innocent but knowing “disposition [sajiya],” evidenced by her presenting a “smiling” and “innocuous” [sahiya] face to her husband when he enters the house from outside.32 The home is defined as a refuge from the harshness of the external world. Therefore, because the wife’s ’afandi might enter the house “angry about something from outside [za‘lan min haga barra],” the tone and volume of her voice, the smell of her breath, and the ways in which she addresses her ’afandi are considered matters of utmost importance. Bihayna instructs the Countrywoman in the particulars of this gendered civilized disposition, tutoring her in the intricacies of a woman’s proper comportment about the home, which included if, when, and how she should sit in her husband’s presence.33 Al-Nadim’s article drew stark contrasts between urban and rural life. He portrayed the differences in Bihayna’s staged lessons along a number of different registers: gender, socioeconomic status, and a view of public versus private domestic space. Bihayna cautions the Countrywoman to remain always vigilant of the disparities in behaviors and expectations between rural and urban folk. Al-Nadim also highlighted these differences

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as he fractured the measurement of time between the city and country. This temporal rupture results in a slippage between temporal and geographic distinctions between the country and the city. Bihayna advises her charge that the “men of today are unlike men of the past [ragalat al-yum mush zai ragalat al-zaman].”34 Bihayna speaks of “today’s men” as urbanites, many of whom lack “dignity” and “walk along the streets with their eyes trained” on the strangers’ windows, whereas men of the past are country-dwelling fallahin, pious and submissive to communally accepted prescriptions of behavior and manners. Raymond Williams has argued that in European literature, “the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future . . . The pull of the idea of the country is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways. The pull of the city is towards progress, modernization, development.”35 Williams then argues that the persistence of such concepts across the world augurs for reading them as a “history repeated” across the globe. If so, along with him we can ask, “What kinds of experience do the[se] ideas appear to interpret, and why do certain forms occur or recur at this period or at that?” The answer may lie in the concept of a universal experience of modernity.36 Be that as it may, in al-Nadim’s narrative this temporal fissure underscores the sense that civilized city life required new kinds of interventions to insure proper public behavior. Because of the tumult of city life, its public could not be regulated by the consensus of settled practice as rural life had been. Instead, gendered distinctions of public comportment and private concealment were necessary to maintain the honor of urban society.37 The Egyptian city woman of the 1890s, serving her civilized ’afandi husband and responsible for building a protective refuge within the domestic space of the home, was excluded from the public-ness enjoined upon literate, civilized “men of today.” Thus Bihayna indicates that the Countrywoman’s successful civilizing depended on her recognizing that city habits, customs, and mores belonged to a wholly different order of life from those of the countryside. This installment of “Girls’ School [Madrasat al-banat]” also charted the dangers of the city along a gendered axis. Bihayna taught her country counterpart that the civilized woman views contemporary men not as the “God-fearing men of the past,” but rather a type of male who walks along the streets interacting with strangers in shameless ways.38 While acknowledging the city’s promise of social advancement and economic comfort, Bihayna warns the Countrywoman that the ill-mannered men of the street endanger the domestic space because, through their unseemly actions, they may incite a jealous husband to threaten the stability of the home by divorce or by “beating [the woman] to death.”39 To avert these

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horrors, the civilized woman must subject even the most quotidian of her daily activities and practices to close scrutiny and a new sort of evaluation. Bihayna imparts precise instructions, for example, about procedures for opening windows and window shades and for hanging laundry. These measures of self-surveillance are necessary in order to prevent outsiders from peering inside the house. Domestic and social disaster might follow should one of these “new types of men” boast that he had caught the eye of a woman or spied her leg or some other part of her body normally covered from view to all except her husband.40 The recognition of and vigilance toward the dangers of city life all but necessitated reconceptualizing the social grammar of rural life. Indeed, the Countrywoman would have to become cognizant of the ways in which the practices and life worlds of rural women were now gendered. Bihayna heaps contempt upon and questions the virtue of peasant culture for its inability to police gender boundaries. For example, she notes that it is “acceptable in the countryside” for women to smoke cigarettes, although in doing so they “resemble a man more than a woman.”41 Her judgment is both aesthetic and moralistic. Bihayna explains that a “real woman is well dressed and pretty and has sweet breath.”42 But smoking “makes [the woman’s] breath smell like a man’s.” Worse, the woman who “coughs from smoking like an old biddy” or “appears before a man smelling like tobacco smoke” or has a “cigarette stuck in her mouth” is “low class [wa al-nabi innaha qillat qiyma].”43 Some women, she says, “live just like that [khadu ‘ala kida]” and can “never give up [smoking],” but they would be unable to find suitable husbands in the city. Bihayna implies that as a result they would be obliged to contravene the limits of moral probity in order to support themselves and “may our Lord forgive them for that.”44 Likewise, according to Bihayna, the Countrywoman and her peasant friends do “not know filth from cleanliness” because they “lacked proper upbringing [‘adam tarbiyatukum].” Therefore, in the countryside no one looks askance at a woman who smokes, uses rough language, possesses coarse habits, mixes freely with men and other women, and allows nonrelatives into her home. It is the avoidance of these sorts of suspect behaviors that distinguishes the civilized urban woman from the uncivilized countrywoman. In al-Nadim’s model of civilized domesticity, men might smoke, use bad language, and visit one another at home. The specter of women doing such things, however, was incompatible with the new gendered ideal of domestic urban virtue. Women were the guardians of the domestic space and as such they were subject to a new kind of disciplinary regime—they should endeavor to adopt civilized values and conform to new social ideals, particularly the ideal of a civilized urban domesticity. While the

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peasant woman’s worth might be fairly measured from her work in the fields alongside her husband and children and her competency in animal husbandry with the beasts who slept alongside the children inside her dank peasant hovel, this standard of worth was inapplicable to the new breed of city women. The civilized woman was evaluated in relation to her success in protecting the honor of the home as well as her cultivation of civilized virtues. The civilized and “citified” fallaha protected the home from the external threats of the city and the internal threats represented by the atavistic countryside through such prosaic acts as turning away strangers at her door and preventing mischievous, iniquitous eyes from seeing her body. zaki ‘awad and the lecturing fallah Zaki ‘Awad’s inexpensively produced pamphlet, al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya, is set in an imaginary salon comprising representatives of civilized Egypt’s leading classes.45 The assembly has convened to discuss the state of Egypt: its prospects for a more successful future, the status of economic reforms, the condition of agriculture, and the state of the fallahin. Similarly to al-Nadim’s dialogue between Bihayna and Sitt al-Balad, the piece distinguishes between Egyptians of today and those of yesterday by situating them along a continuum according to a register of civilized/uncivilized and urban/rural. ‘Awad notes that civilized Egyptians’ “minds have become sophisticated [tathaqqafit],” and their “ideas have been transformed and enlightened [taghayirit].”46 Most significantly, their “ways of life had changed” and their “customs are now different and dissimilar” from what they were before.47 The uniqueness of this era is captured most succinctly in the flourishing of a new kind of Egyptian. This new moral/political subject is endowed with the ability to “distinguish that which is useful from that which is harmful, and that which is good from that which is evil.”48 The new Egyptian is defined not by a particular knowledge or skill, however, but rather by a new kind of social consciousness inexorably connected to the project of constructing a new understanding of Egypt as a sociopolitical community. This consciousness is oriented toward preserving the idea of the emergent political/moral entity so that those civilized by it could distinguish “sincere friends from sworn enemies” on the world stage.49 For ‘Awad’s salon participants, societal well-being, seamless social unity, and the improvement of Egypt’s market agriculture are part of a single comprehensive moral and political vision—interdependent goals

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that can only be achieved together. ‘Awad’s exegesis of the new fallah focuses on a range of practices and desires associated with these goals. One of the reform-minded speakers at the salon lauds the new fallahin who embrace an expansive social vision and who “ask political questions and [are] concerned with the general state of society (bil-ahwal al-‘umumiya).”50 These new fallahin read the “news of the Liverpool markets” and are tireless in “their exertions to increase the yields [of their land],” whereas “yesterday’s fallahin” were “uninterested in the world” except for “their cotton, their harvest, their soil, their beasts, their plow, and their waterwheel (saqiya).”51 Yesterday’s fallahin are the opposite of the literate urbanite. The new fallah’s interest in the general state of society as well as awareness of and concern with foreign commodity markets confirms the authority of ‘Awad’s urban readers’ understanding of Egypt’s position in terms of the global political economy. Accordingly, the fallah’s organic integration into the state is one of the primary loci of social and political unity within the community. There are no competing social interests on display; merely a vision of an integral social body working in unison and concord towards a single goal. Speaker after speaker in ‘Awad’s salon portrays positive working relationships between the new fallahin and the local embodiments of the state, government officials, engineers in the countryside—everyone seemingly working arm in arm. As part of the new socially concerned and economically aware fallah’s desire to “realize the wishes of the government,” he works in concert with the “local mudir” (the chief official of a province, charged with maintaining general order. Under the British the mudir managed the frequent disputes between the police and the prosecutor’s office),52 seeking the latest information about “regulatory changes and new [administrative] appointments.”53 All the participants in ‘Awad’s staged conversation recognize the importance of market agriculture in their deliberations about the nature of the Egyptian political community they wish to see. Speeches by the salon’s reform-minded intelligentsia reverberate with self-congratulation as they boast of their success in building a community through reforms designed to produce the appropriate sociopolitical consciousness among the fallahin. Such reforms as “the equitable distribution of water throughout the irrigation system” have brought great benefit to the fallahin, instilling in them a capitalist market calculus that engenders the desire to increase production and therefore their profits.54 As a result, “today’s fallahin” keep abreast of overseas commodity markets and coordinate their efforts with government officials to increase agricultural production. The newly civic-minded fallah conscientiously pays his taxes, thus obviating the violence of past tax extraction regimes. This new civic political logic will

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lead to appropriate behavior through the civilized disposition of the fallahin. No longer will the brutality of the whip enforce its tyranny [zulm] over the countryside. This approach testifies to the changes in political thinking among the intelligentsia represented by ‘Awad’s fictional characters. In calling for political change, they give an accounting of ways to maintain the political and social order without the system of absolute rule by the old social order—to which they present themselves as an alternative. They refer to the state’s ability to use well-considered policies to encourage or discourage particular behaviors and instill new ways of viewing the collective sociopolitical order. They argue that as the state has repudiated the whip [kurbaj] to obtain tax payments, it has “strengthened the bonds of community.”55 The act of voluntarily paying taxes is a tacit acceptance by the peasants of their duty and responsibility to the sociopolitical collective.56 This new order would lay the groundwork for the development of a truly civilized consciousness. The “value of reforms” are such that they will pave the way for the fallahin’s more profound and thorough imbrication into the new type of community. Each of the speakers in ‘Awad’s staged salon echoes these and similar points, delivering laudatory comments about themselves and the efficacy of the reforms they champion. This is the celebratory atmosphere of the mutual admiration society at the point when a “fallah attendee” from the “village of Shandul” joins the conversation. The shandul was an irrigation tool used by peasants. By using this term ‘Awad almost certainly intended to mark the attendee as a peasant engaged in commercial agriculture. The writer describes the dignified comportment of the fallah in the same way one might describe an aging parliamentarian. As he slowly stands to speak, the fallah removes his libda [felt cap] and za‘but [peasant woolen robe]. In contrast to the educated members of the salon who speak in classical Arabic, the fallah speaks in a modified form of colloquial Arabic. Nevertheless, silence falls upon this fictive gathering as the fallah reports on day-to-day life in the countryside to the “polite people [ghanadir], townspeople, landowners and proprietors of warehouses” assembled around him.57 At first, his remarks seem to confirm the triumphal attitude of the progressive intelligentsia assembled around him as he sketches a picture of the improving circumstances of the fallah. He recounts the fact that substantial profits from the cotton-boom years had enabled the peasants to buy jewelry for their wives and afforded them the opportunity to set aside emergency funds to protect them against both the “natural eventualities of time” and the “treachery of betrayal” by moneylenders and tax collectors.58 The salon’s members listen as the fallah’s command of administrative detail and

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knowledge of both the local and global economic factors and political variables at play in Egyptian agriculture demonstrate his knowledge and lend him an air of authority. They are pleased by his informed and thoughtful self-confidence and his awareness of the reforms that had brought an end to obligatory bribes to officials. And they are heartened as he applauds the Egyptian-born provincial governors, their subordinates, and the inspectors, who, he notes, respond so quickly to fallah petitions and complaints. Through ‘Awad’s evocative prose, the reader can almost imagine the gathering proudly nodding in silent approval. But soon the tone of the account shifts; the fallah’s earlier remarks about rural prosperity and efficacious reforms are suddenly awash in irony. Just after effusively praising the “townspeople [abna’ al-banadir]” for the “reforms you brought us,” the fallah pauses saying, “You seem to have missed something important that you need to understand.”59 Then he chides his audience of self-described reformers and intellectuals, asking, “Why did you not answer [our] telegraphed [complaints]” and the “long petitions we sent you?”60 ‘Awad, having led the reader to identify with the self-satisfied literate urbanites, then challenges the depth and sincerity of their commitment to building a new society by accusing them of not actively working to improve the conditions of the fallah. The Shanduli fallah also questions the worth of any reforms this group might undertake. The genteel peasant reproaches them, saying “We beseeched you” to “study our condition,” to “lessen our tax burden” and to “investigate the oppressive conduct” of provincial governors. “Yes,” he tells them, “you are right to be proud of the reforms you have enacted,” but then proceeds to cast grave doubt on the worth of such reforms and their advocates who were silent in the face of the fallahin’s complaints about conditions in the countryside.61 The Shanduli fallah who launches this stinging indictment is described as a powerful figure whose voice commands authority and whose words “mesmerized the hearts” of the audience. At this point in the text, ‘Awad introduces a female student as a conspicuous symbol of the new Egypt’s civilized ethos. Rising to speak, she explains, “You have heard with your own ears and seen with your own eyes just what this cultivator [muzar‘i] described.”62 That the female student uses the term muzar‘i instead of fallah was important for two reasons. First, the term evoked contemporary notions of scientific agriculture and consequently served to elevate the fallah character himself to the status of a reliable informant. The implication is that the Shanduli cultivator is not a mere peasant existing outside contemporary institutions and the practices of market agricultural production, but rather an expert with technical and scientific knowledge interested in developing Egyptian agriculture as a whole. Second, replacing the

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word fallah with muzar‘i also diminishes the connotation of a socioeconomic status hierarchy built into the term fallah. In other words, the use of muzar‘i serves to erase the incipient dimension of class distinctions from discussions of Egyptians and the meaning of Egyptian-ness. ‘Awad’s female student cites the fallah’s words “as absolute proof” and “radiant evidence” that the “apparent advancement” in transportation, security, and communication did very little in practice to address the problems of the “miserable fallahin.”63 This earnest and precocious voice takes on the role of the group’s conscience. Galvanized by the evidence given by the fallah, she begs her reform-minded colleagues not to ignore the lived reality of the fallahin. Indeed, she advises the gathering to use the fallah’s very words to guide them to “complete reform.”64 The Shanduli fallah and the female student, two voices from the social margins, decry the failure of the reformers to move reform from the realm of the theoretical to practical application. The fallah also criticizes the reformers for their insincerity. Reform as a component of the project of building a civilized society had to take concrete steps to achieve a vision of community. ‘Awad’s book seems to attribute the inadequacy of these reforms not to obstacles put in the way by the fallahin, for the idealized Shanduli fallah clearly supports the goals and methods of reform. Instead, ‘Awad pins the blame on the reform-minded intelligentsia itself for its failure to develop an effective alternative to the authoritarianism of the old regime and the heavy-handedness of the British occupation. For ‘Awad (and his civilized salon), improvements in transportation and infrastructure were the changes that had had the most positive effects on the lives of the fallahin. His discussion suggests that the prosaic rhythms of economic production and social reproduction, along with the power of institutional forces, were just as important as moral affinity in conscripting the fallahin into the project of building an Egyptian community. At the same time, he depicts the economic abstraction of markets and the remote institutions of government and finance as drawing the fallahin into the unifying matrix of “public interest [nafa‘ lil-‘umum].”65 Thus, fallah existence is most clearly described in relation to agricultural commodity production. From here we can say that this leads to the more general point that the characters represented in this dramatic staging understood Egypt as a moral-political entity that was also undergirded by commodity production. The emergent literate urban intelligentsia of the 1890s viewed Egypt primarily as an economically bounded entity. Egypt was defined by its capacity to produce agricultural commodities, and peasants were one of the primary components in that production process. The definition of the social category of fallah was therefore bound up with the moral and political idea

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of Egyptian-ness. In fact, one can see in ‘Awad’s text that the entire social world was overlaid with moral-political categories delineated according to the dialectical relationship between civilized and uncivilized. For this reason, this odd little book, depicting an imaginary salon, serves as an excellent portal into the process of societal mapping that was under way at the time. By looking at ‘Awad’s book closely, we gain insight into the ways in which such social categories as “intellectual,” “peasant,” and “woman” were being fashioned at the time according to such moral criteria as “civilized,” “beneficial,” “moderate,” “honorable,” and “virtuous,” in line with newly gendered social definitions of “masculine” and “feminine.” We can see this duality in the way the text employs the fallah-asobject-of-reform. The foundational logic of reform had been built around both a view of the fallah’s abject misery and the conviction of his centrality to the public good and well-being of society as a whole. On the surface, the reform-minded urban progressives in ‘Awad’s text appear to sympathize with the hardships the peasants endure. Nevertheless, the discussion in the salon points to something other than altruism at work. When the last speaker remarks that only by relieving fallah suffering could the civilized salon participants hope to raise up the community [umma] to the “highest level of advancement” and “move further along the path of civilization and development [al-madaniya wa al-‘umran],” he is underscoring the idea that the social category of fallah is a necessary component in any political calculus.66 Development and advancement, therefore, depend upon reforming the fallahin. ‘Awad’s text was part of a larger trend of the late 1880s and 1890s in which popular writing (newspapers, journals, and inexpensive or simply written books and humor pamphlets) addressed the conditions in which the fallah lived. A reading of these kinds of literature shows how the idea of reform as a transformative instrument was part of the general cultural intercourse of this period. Clearly, many readers held to the notion that reform would help instill in the fallahin the proper set of social and moral principles to guide them and impel them to assist the new breed of progressive urban intellectual in remaking the world. Ultimately, the fallahin would “exert efforts” in the “service of humanity [khidma lil-insaniya]” and seek to “carry out . . . the patriotic aims.”67 al-mu’ayyad’s “real sphinx” Zaki ‘Awad’s Shanduli fallah was only one of many depictions of thoughtful and informed peasants found in the popular media of the time. ’Ali Yusuf’s daily, al-Mu’ayyad, published a number of articles in which peasant characters held forth on the state of the countryside and the

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umma in general. One such piece, titled “The Real Sphinx of Egypt [Abu al-haul al-haqiqi],” was published on May 9, 1893.68 This article differed from ‘Awad’s and al-Nadim’s fictional pieces in that the fallah in the piece actually speaks to formal political issues. The fallah in “The Real Sphinx” speaks of Egyptian unity in confronting the British occupation, and decries the paucity of avenues for political expression in the absence of a representative body. He concludes that that Egyptians have no “representative body [majlis nuwwab]” in which to make known the “people’s requests [talibat al-’ahali]” and through which to defend their rights. The fallah states that the British claim “we are not ready for such a body, but how do they know? They do not even know our language.”69 Yusuf’s ostensible purpose in writing “The Real Sphinx” was to respond to an article published in the New York Herald on April 27, 1893, titled “The Sphinx of Modern Egypt.” The Herald article was part of a series on British Egypt. The Herald’s series created a “great stir in Egypt” because the reporters interviewed a range of public figures about their views on the possibility of British evacuation.70 Thus such figures as Butrus Ghali, the Egyptian cabinet official, countered the prooccupation voices in the pages of the American newspaper. Yusuf translated much of the original article into Arabic, although his article also included a postscript of a “real conversation” between himself and the fallah. Yusuf began his piece with praise for the Herald’s series on Egypt for its accuracy in reporting the words of Egyptian and European “ministers, religious authorities [‘ulama’], businessmen [tujjar], and notables [ayan].”71 No doubt this praise was also a not-too-subtle jab at the British censors who would not have allowed him to publish such work locally in Arabic. Nevertheless, he disagreed with the Herald’s contention that there existed a deep moral and political divide between city and country in Egypt. He called into question the idea propagated by Britain’s Indian–trained cadres that urban Egypt’s small elite and rural Egypt’s massive peasantry shared neither political views nor a social consciousness. It should come as no surprise that British perceptions of the Indian peasantry closely resembled their views of the Egyptian fallah, given that many of the British officials gained colonial administrative experience under the Raj in India. For instance, John Scott, who served as the chief British legal official in Egypt—Judicial Advisor to the khedive—moved back and forth between India and Egypt, as did a host of other officials. Partha Chatterjee writes that the British thought the Indian peasant “simple, ignorant, exploited by landlords, traders, and moneylenders, respectful of authority [and] grateful to those in power who cared for and protected them.”72 In Egypt, Lord Cromer, one of the British administrators with previous experience in India, wrote that the “Egyptian fellah” appreciated “very highly the benefits which have been conferred on him.

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Ignorant though he be, he is wise enough to know that he is now better off than he was prior to the British occupation.”73 Faris Nimr, Yaqub Sarruf, and Shahin Makariyus of al-Muqattam—Yusuf’s great rivals—were the strongest supporters of the British occupation of Egypt and were among those that argued that the peasants too supported it.74 As one of the most prominent Egyptian journalists opposed to the occupation, Yusuf challenged this claim of fallahin sympathy for the British. Accordingly, he peppered his accounts of life in the countryside in the post–1882 era with descriptions of the effects of rising tax debt and rapacious moneylenders, incompetent or corrupt irrigation engineers, and village watchmen [ghaffar] preying upon the gullible and powerless fallahin. Nevertheless, he concurred with the paper’s observation that because “seven-eighths of Egyptians are peasants,” in order to claim knowledge of Egyptians’ views, one must eschew querying the attitudes of the tiny educated elite in the cities, and instead make contact with peasants and survey their opinions. In so doing, Yusuf gave voice to a position that became an essential part of nationalist discourse some twenty-five years later. In “The Real Sphinx,” Yusuf introduced a fallah who differs significantly from the powerless, bewildered, and passive subject found in much of the foreign-language and Arabic press, in fiction, and elsewhere in the popular imagination of the time. Here is a fallah who is neatly dressed, literate, and possessed of a calm demeanor. The “fallah Hasan” tenders sophisticated opinions about the propaganda distributed by the British occupation forces, is clearly well versed in the current political scene, and understands the art of making political claims. To underscore his authority, Hasan speaks in the combination of colloquial and classical Arabic that was fast becoming the lingua franca of the urban ’afandi public.75 Throughout the 1890s and especially after the turn of the twentieth century, Egypt’s educated and politicized professional urban classes increasingly claimed the privilege of representing Egypt—especially its peasants. Such public figures as Yusuf, Mustafa Kamil, Muhammad Farid, and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Jawish either declared that they were articulating the opinions and voicing the desires of the fallahin, or implying that they were doing so when they spoke for all Egyptians. These writers were soon followed by such fiction writers as Mahmud Haqqi, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Muhammad Muwaylihi (1858–1930), who represented the fallah for the literate classes by inserting them into the most modern forms of European-derived literature, the short story and the novel. Haykal even used the pen name “An Egyptian Peasant [Fallah Misri]” when he published his novel Zaynab in 1908. Muwaylihi is known for his Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, aw fatra min al-zaman, a novel in which peasant characters interact with various figures from the countryside.76

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In “The Real Sphinx,” Yusuf maintains that the peasants’ views of the British are identical to those of urbanites, but that foreigners “only rarely spoke to the fallah” and “most of the time” peasants “do not tell the truth.”77 Only their fellow Egyptians, therefore, are competent to glean and report the views of the enigmatic fallahin. Again echoing ‘Awad and others, Yusuf intimates that peasant and urbanite comprise a single integral group, namely Egyptians. Hasan addresses Yusuf’s narrator as “Khawaja” throughout the piece. While in contemporary usage Khawaja has come to signify a Westerner, especially someone of high social standing or a professional, in 1894 the term meant “teacher” or “sir” and referred to a person of a higher social status from the city who dressed in the contemporary urban fashion—the ’afandi style. Such a person wore trousers and a suit and topped off the outfit with a tarbush. Hence, although Yusuf clearly differentiates between the social class and cultural milieu of Hasan and himself, he nonetheless emphasizes his conviction that as Egyptians they have more in common than not. He suggests that through his conversations with the fallah Hasan (the “real Sphinx of Egypt”), he has elicited a far more accurate reading of the peasants’ political sentiments than the Herald or any other foreigner could ever do. “Of course,” Yusuf wrote, “the peasants do not have their own newspapers,” nor did they have salons or any other kind of polite gathering in which to gauge the attitudes of the fallah population. There was, therefore, no ideational infrastructure by which . . . we can know [fallah] ideas, they have no associations in which they might exchange ideas with one another, there are no general elections by which their opinions [and preferences] become manifest. The fallah has absolutely no means by which to give voice to his ideas.78

Therefore, in order to gain knowledge of the fallah’s thoughts and accurately gauge his opinions, Yusuf writes, “One must sit with [him] at length,” and eventually “truth would emerge” through conversation.79 But only a person intimately familiar with fallah ways could gain “his confidence” and trust.80 Yusuf agreed with the New York Herald that one might call the fallah the Sphinx, but not because he withheld “his secrets and [hid] his concealed truths” from all; rather, the Sphinx-like fallah remained abstruse only to the foreigner, who would be unable to elicit his genuine opinions. “The Real Sphinx,” marked a shift in the perception of the fallahin in the protobourgeois domain of formal politics in the 1890s. For the first time, an Egyptian newspaper represented the fallahin as having a political consciousness presumably on par with that of its readers. Although Yusuf’s fallah articulates these views in naive fashion, they were nevertheless of a

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sort important to reconceptualizing Egypt as a political community. This had not been the case fifteen years earlier, when the peasants were represented as objects of humor and mockery, uncomprehending victims of moneylenders, or simply as a superstitious and backward lot. Even Sannu‘’s Abu Shaduf was more of a lampoon or satire than a portrait of a real peasant. Sannu‘ employed the figure of the fallah for the shock value of a lowly person insulting the khedive and other Egyptian notables. In this sense, Sannu‘’s depictions of peasants were intended to evoke only knowing laughter. Whereas Yusuf argues that although “no one [could] deny that [the fallah] has wishes buried in his chest,” the absence of literate practices to make them known meant that it devolved on the urban ’afandi intellectuals to search for revelations of the fallah’s “opinions and preferences.” “The Real Sphinx” recounts the discovery of one such portal to these unfiltered opinions. Through Yusuf’s chance meeting with a fallah of the type that “deserved to be listened to,” he is able to demonstrate the political unity of Egyptians.81 Significantly, Yusuf’s interlocutor is not an ordinary fallah of the sort “one sees from the windows of the train, squatting in his field with disheveled clothes.”82 This fallah, Hasan, had memorized the Qur’an and achieved literacy through attending a school run by al-Azhar.83 Hasan is conscious of the impact of geopolitical issues on both his own daily existence and on the life of his community, but his isolation in the countryside precludes him from putting his opinions into circulation. Over the course of the conversation Hasan rebuts the “erroneous belief” that the Egyptian fallahin support the British occupation. Along the way he proffers thoughtful and knowledgeable commentary on the full range of political, social, and economic issues of import to the literate urbanite classes. Hasan, who identifies himself as an “Egyptian [Misri]”, dismisses British claims about supposed improvements wrought by the occupation for the peasant population. As “born and bred Egyptians [ma‘ashir al-misriyin],” he explains, the fallahin understand the requirements of Egyptian agriculture as well as or better than the British. Moreover, they can maintain the agricultural infrastructure—irrigation and drainage canals, roads, and waterwheels—for much less money than the British require to do the same work. “We perform everything necessary to maintain the irrigation system now, and we do it for less than the British could,” Hasan says.84 Yusuf shows that Hasan has made rational evaluations of agricultural information according to cost-benefit analysis. His insights on governmental administration, education, and financial matters unrelated to agriculture further demonstrate this point. Echoing the chorus of Egyptian critics who railed against incompetent British supervision of government officials and the police, Hasan concludes that the “police are immoral and their commanding officers are always idle.”85 In the area of education, he

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criticizes the British who, with the assistance of Yaqub Artin Basha (1842–1919), the undersecretary for education, have “ruined the schools . . . and left them in a state of disarray . . . so that now the medical school has only about thirty students in it.”86 The efficiency of government administration in general has suffered at the hands of the British. Hasan queries Yusuf: “Did you know that . . . there are more than one hundred ninety-four English employees in the Egyptian government?”87 He adds that “the harm they do is disproportionate to their small numbers because they are given free rein” to do as they please.88 Hasan further relates that British employees in the service of the Egyptian government earn more money than their Egyptian counterparts, though many are no more qualified and no more competent or indeed even less so than the locals. Hasan sums up the disease afflicting Egyptian government with the observation that the British consider “everything the Egyptian employees do mistaken while they consider everything [the British employees] do correct and appropriate.”89 ’Ali Yusuf’s fallah demonstrates a working knowledge of and familiarity with the political issues circulating in the cafés and salons of Cairo; he offers articulate critiques, knows the names of ministers, and fully grasps the day-to-day workings of the government. Hasan’s stock of knowledge clearly ranges far beyond agriculture. He notes that there are “thousands and thousands of fallahin accumulating useful knowledge that helps them manage their affairs . . . [and] I belong to a group that is studying scientific books.”90 By equipping Hasan with fluency about the political concerns of the literate urbanite, Yusuf created a shared space of opinion between ’afandi and fallah. Together they were all Egyptians and perforce held the same political beliefs. Yusuf observes that Hasan the fallah expresses opinions “that do not deviate in essence from those of the Egyptian notables [‘afadil al-misriyin].”91 “The Real Sphinx of Egypt” made it clear that fallah and “khawaja [in this case, educated urbanite]” thought alike because they were Egyptians. The fallah, “although naive, summed up the essence of the political situation and diagnosed the disease [Egypt] presently faces.”92 Hasan, like his khawaja brothers in the city, recognized that the aim of British propaganda was to criticize everything Egyptian as wrong and praise everything British as correct.93 al-fallah al-maryuti: al-mu’ayyad’s peasant correspondent For a time in the early 1890s, a regular feature in al-Mu’ayyad was “lilFallah Maryuti,” a column putatively attributed to a fallah from the village

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of Maryut in Buhayra province.94 Yusuf almost certainly penned the articles himself, as they clearly expressed his well-known views of the Egyptian political scene, especially with regard to newspapers he considered to be collaborating with the British. The Fallah Maryuti columns covered a wide spectrum of issues, although there was a general focus on agricultural questions and criticisms of the rural administration. Like the fallah in “The Real Sphinx,” Maryuti creates the impression that urbanite and peasant occupied the same moral, philosophical, and indeed, political terrain. In part, ’Ali Yusuf accomplished this by eschewing dialect-infused idioms and imitating coarse rural accents when reporting direct speech. Maryuti speaks, or strictly speaking he “writes,” in the developing form of educated Arabic of the literate urbanite.95 By expressing himself in the vernacular of public discourse, this imaginary classical Arabic or fusha-speaking fallah nourishes the illusion that there existed a broad public-ness to intellectual life, by apparently opening it up to diverse social elements and erasing those distinctions at the same time.96 If this were so, it would confer authority on any political claims made in the press or other new areas of public sociability that increasingly defined the life of the literate urbanite. Here was an example that fallahin and intelligentsia had developed a new kind of political and moral mutuality. In these columns, Yusuf employed a complicated rhetorical strategy to legitimize the moral and political vision of the emergent middle classes and the intelligentsia. His Maryuti articulates an understanding of Egyptianness by differentiating true Egyptian views from those of the British or their local allies. While it is true that the figure of the fallah had not yet been transformed into the repository of cultural authenticity that it was beginning to become in the second decade of the twentieth century, Maryuti’s indissoluble bond to the land confers a kind of authority on his opinions and illustrates the new tendency in political writing of the 1890s to associate the timeless peasant figure with Egypt itself. Indelibly linked to the land of Egypt through his being and his vocation, Maryuti personifies immutable, permanent Egyptian-ness. This sense of permanence confers authority on his words, ideas, and opinions, making them seem as much a part of Egypt’s nature as the soil and the Nile. Al-Mu’ayyad’s Maryuti columns were unprecedented in the Egyptian Arabic-language print media because of the authoritative discursive position they accord the fallah character. Unlike previous works in which peasants appeared, there is no mediation by an objective narrator, nor are there quotation marks to set off the fallah’s words from those of his ’afandi interlocutors. The columns do not purport to represent conversations of the fallahin among themselves, nor chats between fallahin and

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urban ’afandis or foreigners. Rather, for the first time, a fallah is depicted as addressing the literate public directly in writing about issues of public importance. The Maryuti articles also mark the point at which the Egyptian protobourgeoisie casts its lot with a particular segment of the press. The nationalist agitation of the first two decades of the twentieth century, in which the press and the new publishing houses played such a central role, can be traced back to this moment.97 This trend reached its culmination when the future nationalist Mustafa Kamil began to publish his fiery al-Liwa’ in 1900 and Ahmad Lufti Sayyid began to publish his nationalist paper, al-Jarida, in 1907. In the Maryuti articles, Yusuf proffers his fallah correspondent as a herald and populist champion for Egypt who self-consciously wields the pen to communicate with the undifferentiated aggregate of Egyptians. The columns reflect the general tendency among journalists to claim that they spoke directly to the public. By the 1890s it was typical for newspapers to represent themselves as speaking for the collective will of the umma, milla98, watan, or bilad. An article appearing in the May 8, 1891, issue of the Alexandria-based journal al-Haqiqa, called “Fi wajib al-jara’id,” declared that newspapers should not be an expression of personal interest but rather should seek to “refine” society and to “protect the public interest [maslaha al-‘amma] and the well-being of the country [bilad].”99 The article was written by two Syrian Jews, Jurj Marza and Faraj Mazrahi. Likewise, Maryuti argues openly with accounts from other newspapers and criticizes officials by name as part of his stated mission to enlighten those misled by prooccupation newspapers. His ferociousness and candidness were intended to inspire reform-minded and progressive newspaper readers to reflect on the critiques of a mere humble fallah. The columnist’s frequent and harsh attacks on the “occupation newspapers” often fingered them as collaborators and in the process burnished alMu’ayyad’s “patriotic [watani]” credentials.100 For instance, in an article critical of the cadastral survey [fakk al-zaman] of 1894, Maryuti rebuked the “occupation newspapers” for insisting that the fallahin were prosperous enough to pay higher tax assessments.101 Even worse, he said that these misguided collaborators maintained that the peasants possessed sufficient resources to “buy back” land seized by government surveyors because it had allegedly encroached on neighboring estates. After a cadastral survey reassessment of property lines, a person who was found to have impinged on another’s land had a specified period in which to “buy back” the land. In practice this arrangement often meant that the offender had to repurchase land that his family had been farming for generations. The cadastral surveys and tax assessment committees were a common source of complaint in the press and in liter-

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ature on the countryside. It was often said that the survey committees were corrupt and drew property lines either more favorable to themselves or to the wealthy and connected. Chiding the authors of such accounts, Maryuti demanded to know, “If the fallahin are so well off, where is all of this wealth?” Have “they not seen the accounts” showing that “ninety percent of fallahin land is mortgaged?”102 The implication of these statements was that if even a fallah in the countryside could become well informed from reading newspapers, then surely an educated urbanite could do the same. In this sense, the Maryuti columns were quite radical insofar as they placed one of the supreme archetypes of the socially marginalized, the fallah, in an authoritative position as the spokesman of Egypt—or at least that Egypt imagined by the protobourgeoisie. Selim shows how the “representation of the fallah was tied in a fluid and fluctuating relationship to an equally original conception of the middle-class and its intelligentsia” beginning in the nineteenth century. The binary representation of the fallah as both the voice of “emergent national authenticity” and a “potentially radical critique” of nationalism accounts for the inherent instability of the discursive relationship between the fallah and the urban bourgeois nationalists.103 Throughout this chapter we have seen how the quintessential outsider, the fallah, was discursively brought into the project of building Egypt as a political and moral community. This incorporation was a necessary step in creating the myth of a unified identity.104 It also was part of a long process that stretches perhaps as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, when such Egyptians as Rifa‘a Rafi‘ alTahtawi began to ask: What is Egypt? Who is an Egyptian? What is Egyptian-ness? What do Egyptians want? The Maryuti columns are an archive of the evolving nature of the answers that literate urbanites gave to these questions. For this reason, the articles are an excellent window through which to observe the epistemic and conceptual changes occurring in Egyptian sociopolitical geography at the time. As Maryuti undermined and dismissed the depictions of agricultural production, living and working conditions in the countryside, and the situation of the fallahin that were found in pro-British newspapers, he enunciated a vision and a political project that were becoming increasingly discernable. Yusuf’s peasant appeared at the moment when the urban protobourgeoisie came to insist on their right to represent Egypt. We should be careful not to underestimate the importance of this observation. In the 1890s, for the first time, a clear nationalist sense about a collective political and moral entity to which we-as-Egyptians belonged began to coalesce among many in the elite literate circles of the cities of Egypt. In typical nationalist fashion, the members of these circles maintained that

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Egypt was once again establishing its voice and reclaiming its eternal birthright of autonomy and independence, and that all Egyptians, peasant and urbanite, shared a common identity and were united in their resolve to realize their collective goals and claim their rights.105 We can see from the expression of these goals and these rights as articulated by Maryuti that the urban intelligentsia for whom he spoke held fast to ideals that are strikingly bourgeois in their nature. What did Maryuti want? The “peasant” columnist frequently called for an equitable tax system, rule by a single, rational legal system, and an honest and efficient government. He leveled some of his most severe criticisms of the present state of affairs at the question of the tax burden of the fallahin. In the political calculus of the time, this position amounted to an attack on the legal regime underwritten by the European powers that treated European merchants and their local protégés so well. Maryuti dismissed those who “pretended that the fallah” had grown prosperous and content during the years of British rule. In his September 9, 1894, column, Maryuti questioned the humanitarian motives of the British occupiers with regard to ending the slave trade. This column appeared at the time that a celebrated case involving the illegal sale of six Sudanese female slaves was winding its way through the Egyptian courts.106 Maryuti wondered why, if the British were so keen on saving these female slaves and in ending the slave trade, they did not examine the fact that “millions of the residents [sukan]” of Egypt were treated like slaves? He declared that if the peasants had indeed achieved freedom within their difficult circumstances, as these “ignorant or dishonest” commentators claimed, “[h]ow gladly [they] would return to the [old days of the] kurbaj and the corvée.”107 The only freedom open to the peasant under the present legal and economic regime, he concluded, was the freedom to be poor and to be bankrupt.108 In direct contradiction to claims made by the British, Maryuti argued that “improvements in the irrigation system and the banning of the kurbaj” had not signaled the spread of freedom for the fallahin.109 They still toiled for “ten piasters a day and lie on a pillow of dirt and sleep under the open sky,” he said.110 Large Egyptian landowners used liberal arguments against the British to advocate for the end of the corvée. They used these arguments not out of regard for Locke or Montesquieu but to support their own exploitative bonded-labor system. Egyptian landowner “reformers” used liberal arguments against the British and the corvée in order to maintain a labor regime on the estates that was more or less feudal in nature. They had no concern with or sympathy for the plight of the peasants, but rather an interest in maintaining the size of the local labor force.111 The corvée had absorbed much of the labor force on a yearly

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basis, adversely affecting many wealthy landowners. The pro-British press had grossly underestimated the pauperizing effects of heavy taxation on the rural population. In the July 27, 1894, issue of al-Mu’ayyad, Yusuf described in great detail the kinds of taxes and extralegal “fees” required of the rural poor, ranging from the tobacco tax to bribes for the military recruiting commissions, the secret police, irrigation guards, and ghafirs. Maryuti accused Britain’s supporters of intentionally “concealing the truth,” wryly noting that if they had to eat the sorts of foods peasants had come to depend on, they would understand that “our pockets are empty.” From eating such unhealthy and unclean food, they would know why “we look towards the future with heavy hearts.”112 Maryuti’s columns also reinforced the notion of Egyptian unity. Villager and urbanite were joined together by the knowledge that their taxes supported the state. The fallahin, however, loathed the heavy taxes levied to pay for large public works projects that brought benefit only to foreign engineers, contractors, construction companies, and implicitly those large landowners of the old regime allied with the British. Not merely harmless boondoggles, such projects caused “severe political consequences.” The fallahin scrambled to meet the demand of the voracious tax collectors by borrowing money and falling deep into debt. This imposed necessity resulted in the fallahin’s loss of their meager land holdings. Even fallah bankruptcy benefited foreigners, who held much of the peasant debt.113 Impoverishment and landlessness were disastrous to a government whose tax base, and therefore its ability to provide services and support an army, would continue to shrink because it was unable to tax the foreigners residing in its domains.114 Much of the authority of Maryuti’s columns derived from the expert knowledge of agriculture that the fallah claimed.115 Like Hasan, the Real Sphinx of Egypt, Maryuti frequently emphasized the fallah’s practical experience with agriculture that neither foreign nor Egyptian officials in government agriculture-related positions could match. For example, he attacked the canal-digging projects undertaken by the British because of their faulty engineering. He pointed to the fact that British engineers with “extensive funding” from the Egyptian government had extended irrigation canal systems without constructing the necessary drainage canals, thus undermining the whole project “at great expense” to the fallah. Worse, these officials, especially the foreigners, were highly paid; Maryuti noted that British and Egyptian officials’ “high salaries come from the sweat and the toil” of the fallahin. Maryuti held up many agriculture policies to scorn, and was critical of government officials because they had no “knowledge of the conditions” of the fallah even though they worked in the countryside. Lacking this basic knowledge, “they could not

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differentiate a faddan worth ten piasters [qirsh] from one worth one pound, and [they] invent illusory notions about unfertile land being brought under cultivation.”116 Even worse, these officials were not only unacquainted with the particulars of Egyptian agriculture, they had no background in either the science or the business of agriculture.117 For example, government policies for fighting the cotton weevil had been disastrous. Many officials as well as those “writing in newspapers” had proposed futile, even potentially harmful, methods to combat the pest. Government officials who followed the advice of the ignorant, Maryuti said, foolishly and irresponsibly obliged the “fallahin to remove all infected leaves” from the cotton plants. However, “every fallah” knew that not only was this course of action useless, it was costly in terms of labor and in the eventual yield of the plants. Moreover, the fallahin were aware that the worm larvae were always present in the soil, and therefore “in one voice” demanded that the irrigation agency [maslahat al-rayy] hold off releasing more water into the affected area’s canals.118 This approach would allow time for the soil to dry out and become a less fertile breeding ground for the worms. It would also confine the worms to areas already affected. Exasperated with the shortsightedness of government officials, Maryuti concluded that if the irrigation agency continued its policies and procedures, it “would destroy all [Egyptian] agriculture.”119 Therefore, Maryuti reasoned, the combination of the fallah’s superior practical know-how and the technical deficiencies among government officials should persuade the readership that fallah input was indispensable on important agricultural questions. He argued that the future of Egypt as an agricultural producer depended on the fallahin; in a tone of mild reproach he reminded his readers that without the fallahin, “you would not exist.”120 The Maryuti columns, like all the writings in this genre, gave the impression that there was a vision of a sociopolitical framework shared by ’afandi and fallahin. Just as in ‘Awad’s work, the fallahin in Maryuti’s columns were a part of this calculus by dint of their routine participation in agricultural production. Their work necessarily entailed manifold forms of interaction with the state within the complex of financial and administrative practices associated with export agriculture. A combination of these interactions and the hopes and desires of a sovereign Egyptian future informed the fallah Maryuti’s perspective on Egypt’s present situation. Meanwhile, the way in which the readership of al-Mu’ayyad came to grips with this project was not through working the cotton fields or clearing irrigation canals but rather through the discursive public spaces opened up by newspapers and other kinds of popular print media, as well as the salon culture and associational life of the period.121 Maryuti said

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that “the hand pushing the plow and that which controls the pen are the same . . . the reason of one is not more abundant nor more virtuous than the other.”122 The columns underscored the sense that, although dissimilar in many respects, the practical experience of the fallah and the literate intercourse of the ’afandi enabled both groups to develop common desires and shared notions about Egypt’s future. In one column the “peasant” correspondent stated that “our projects [mushru‘atna] [were] both political—about clauses and paragraphs [in the law] that produce bad results . . . and related to the society of peasants [ma‘shar al-fallahin].”123 The truth of the present predicament was “known by all.” As a result, the entire general public [‘ammat al-nas] could see the “truth with their own two eyes” far more clearly than the writers in the pro-British “occupation newspapers.”124 This sense of a shared project is strengthened by Maryuti’s implication that he and his fallahin brethren were dependent on the intervention of the ’afandi reformers for salvation. In fact, the Maryuti columns suggested that the various social groups were mutually dependent on one another as well as that the peasants were capable of making demands upon the administrative apparatus of the state and its political institutions. This suggestion was not only a tacit recognition of the power of these structures but also seemed to corroborate the peasants’ desire to coordinate their productive (and reproductive) endeavors with other social formations and with the state as well. In other words, the fallah did not reject the reach and authority of the political and administrative systems of the state. On the contrary, Maryuti objected to the poor functioning of those institutions and instead demanded a rationalization of state functions and a strengthened application of the laws, state regulations, and government oversight—he was calling for the bourgeois rule of law. Maryuti was in favor of the rule of law and his columns indicated that the urban intelligentsia was the group most capable of providing it for him. Accordingly, he demanded of al-Mu’ayyad’s readers: “Where are you activists for freedom” who stand aside as the fallahin are treated so badly that “slavery would be preferable?”125 He then outlined a list of exploitative and cruel acts perpetrated on the fallahin by local officials and such government employees as local recruiters for canal maintenance work crews. The miserable fallahin worked “day and night and then are forced” to dredge canals, and even after toiling in that backbreaking and dangerous pursuit, the local official [al-muhafiz] bullied them into tending his fields.126 The village headmen would “insult, beat, and humiliate the fallahin by imprisoning” them for minor offenses or as retribution for personal disputes.127 They obliged the fallahin to perform such menial public tasks as spraying water on the pavements of public byways or sweeping the

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streets.128 Ultimately, the village headmen, shaykhs, and local officials conspired to steal the land of the fallahin through both legal means (foreclosure) and by abusing the power of their offices. Yusuf depicts the fallahin as situated in a peculiar place of knowledge and impotence. They were subject to the new reach of the state and its taxation apparatus as well as the financial practices that saddled them with debt. The same unfavorable conditions, however, afforded them a unique perspective on law, society and government. The futility of complaining “to [government officials] who do not lament [their] hardship, and do not investigate [their] grievances” was clear to them.129 Likewise, the fallahin resented the high positions granted to British officials who viewed them as morally “unable to differentiate benefit from harm.”130 In countering this derision, the Maryuti columns presented a fallah who challenged depictions of the fallahin as “ignorant” moral failures. Maryuti, ’Ali Yusuf’s archetype of the newly conscious fallah, developed no-nonsense critiques of poorly functioning and unresponsive ministries as well as corrupt societal institutions. As with the members of the emergent ’afandi classes, he wanted rational government, the rule of law, and equality before the law. Maryuti maintained that the fallahin “pushing plows” and the intelligentsia “pushing pens” were equal; both came “from the same creator.”131 Nevertheless, the real-world guarantor of equality was not obtained from the divine order. Rather, the fallahin could not overcome the inequalities endemic in the social order without the mundane intervention and protection of the law. Even if in many cases “he who guides the plow” was the most rational person in the situation, “the heads of ministries do not respond” to his protests.132 Law is the basis of justice, but only a determined and unified relationship between peasant and ’afandi can support equality in “laws and regulations [la’iha wa manshurat ‘umurna al-dakhiliya].”133 As a result, Maryuti demanded to know where the “laws and regulations [were] to protect the fallah?” 134 He asked, “Is it not about time that those entrusted with the affairs of the people [al-‘abid]” should craft such laws? Current laws, complained Maryuti, “inflict and codify injustice rather than promoting justice.”135 conclusion One cannot help noticing the self-referential nature of the fallah world in Maryuti’s columns. “Maryuti the fallah” appears to possess a cultural and literary repertoire of language, sensibility, and political orientation similar to—if not identical to—the prototypical ’afandi reformerintellectual personified by the likes of Yusuf himself. This fact points to

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one of the great paradoxes of the Maryuti columns and indeed all of the cultural sites in which the fallah appeared during this period. While the modalities of public discussion seemed to create opportunities for unprecedented interaction among diverse social elements, increasingly defined as Egyptian, they define a narrow set of technical competencies necessary for admittance. When Maryuti declares to his fellow fallahin, “You are the Egyptian umma,” he means that their low social status and position as agricultural producers have subjected them to the confusion of laws and regulations.136 They are the umma only insofar as they suffer from the arbitrariness of the state’s laws. They are hailed as state subjects by their imbrication into its practices and institutions. Peasants suffered from the most obvious forms of oppression and hardship predicated in large part on their interaction with government officials and the institutions of commerce and politics. Al-Mu’ayyad’s fallahin were only the Egyptian umma because of the evils imposed on them by the vagaries of the state and the forces of market agriculture. Their identity is therefore an outcome of their situation, which makes them very different from the self-fashioning intelligentsia; in this sense they are inert. In contrast, the Egyptian consciousness of the urban literati emerged from a combination of reflection, contemplation, and experience. Their consciousness was born of active endeavor. Maryuti and ‘Awad’s Hasan were both passive. Yusuf and ‘Awad depicted the fallahin as “conscripted” into a new sense of community by virtue of their role in production. They both describe Egyptian agriculture as dependent upon fallah labor, and they underscore the centrality of agriculture to conceptions of Egyptian community. But they both also depict these conceptions as coalescing in the public spaces managed simultaneously by the ’afandi literati. The peasant spokesmen and spokeswomen presented in this chapter appear to be ’afandis in gallabiyas more than anything else. This chapter has explored the presentation of five peasant characters from texts written in the early and mid-1890s. Each represents specific desires about the increasingly self-conscious social formation to which their urban creators belonged. Often depicted as unchanging for thousands of years, this new literary representation of a changing fallah was sure to intrigue readers. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that these writers chose to depict fallahin who were “not of the type” that one saw everyday. These were the new fallahin, who gave voice to the desires, fears, hopes, and dreams of the new urban intelligentsia. Al-Nadim’s Bihayna and his Sitt al-Balad, or Countrywoman, were reminiscent of fallah characters in 1870s reform texts that called for the “civilizing” of the peasants. In 1892, however, not only are the peasants depicted as women, but the peasant woman herself instructs another fallaha

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in the ways of urban civilization. In some sense Bihayna and Sitt al-Balad trace the faint outlines of a protobourgeois cult of female domesticity. Their dialogue describes the value of self-discipline and the importance of cultivating the “civilized” disposition of the pious and modest urban housewife. We might view ‘Awad’s salon-attending Shanduli peasant as a descendent of Sannu‘’s Abu Shaduf of the 1870s; both are named after irrigation instruments. Although ‘Awad did not present the Shanduli fallah in the same humorous light as Sannu‘’s character, he fulfills a similar role in revealing the hubris and conceit typical of elements of the literate classes. On the other hand, the Shanduli fallah also exemplifies the civic duty and responsibility necessary in the new age. Therefore, he advocates the rule of law and a rational rearrangement of government functions. ’Ali Yusuf’s New Sphinx presages the Egyptian nationalist who would at least pay lip service to the idea of mobilizing, if not incorporating, the fallah in support of his political projects. Finally, Yusuf’s Maryuti ties all of these themes together. By “writing” in the newspaper, the “peasant” correspondent claims the authoritative voice of the literate urbanite. But Maryuti also claims another kind of authority related to the permanence of the land; he is the embodiment of timeless Egypt. Like the soil and the trees, Maryuti’s wisdom and depth of knowledge about Egypt are part of nature and as such carry the value of unassailable truth.

chapter four

Scientific Agriculture: Cultivators, Agriculturalists, or Peasants?

; introduction As we have seen in Chapter 3, the fallah question moved to the center of public discourse in the 1880s and 1890s, in the aftermath of the defeat of the ‘Urabists and the British occupation of Egypt. The peasant was now a moral subject as well as an object of reform, and a producing subject as well as an agricultural worker. The present chapter further elaborates the ways in which the moral and ideational analysis of the fallah as subject participated in the intense scrutiny given agricultural production at the end of the nineteenth century through an examination of agricultural texts and writing on agriculture. We will see that both agricultural production and the fallahin themselves were crucial elements in the development of collective forms of identity developed by the emergent Egyptian middle class through the 1880s and 1890s. This complicated equation brings into question some of the basic assumptions purveyed by the histories of Egyptian intellectual and cultural life that this study challenges. The present chapter casts further doubt on the so-called opposition between secular and religious worldviews that still marks much of the scholarship on the era. Recent scholars are beginning to show that the notion that a group of religious traditionalists who feared modernity opposed change at any cost is a chimera.1 Following the same course, this chapter questions the assumption that Egyptian intellectual and cultural fields were divided by the proponents of modernity facing off against the “forces of tradition.” Similarly, this chapter explodes the view, presented by many at the time and then uncritically echoed by later historians, that a group of pro-British Egyptian Westernizers sought to replace the complex structure of Muslim or Eastern culture with a new

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template that would transform every aspect of daily life, production, and consumption. These unfortunate trends in historical analysis stem from anachronistic readings of the period’s cultural history that have long been a staple of historiography.2 As a corrective, the present pages examine the sociocultural concerns of this period in view of the state of knowledge as it existed rather than as a prehistory of later developments or contemporary debates in Egyptian and Middle Eastern societies. I take this approach not out of fealty to a particular method of inquiry or mode of narration but rather because it makes more sense as historiography. If we seek only to install this period as the foundation of such later elaborations of political subjectivity as nationalist ideas of citizenship, we run the risk of missing the “persistence of alien agendas” in the discourses of moral and political subjectivity and collective identity.3 This is not merely an academic question, for these agendas were and continue to be refracted through public discussion in Egypt and are therefore important questions for the historian to investigate. This chapter, following the general methodology laid out in the introduction, outlines the state of social relations in Egypt through an examination of the peasant question. In so doing we can acknowledge some of the paths not taken in the unfolding of history, and avoid the tendency to regard the outcomes of historical processes and struggles as inevitable or predetermined. While genealogy guides the narrative structure of this chapter to a larger degree than the previous chapters, I do recognize that there are other histories not enclosed in the prehistory of nationalism, such as the al-Nahda, Nasserism, the emergence of Islamic activism, or the infitah. The diverse questions, concerns, and philosophies that went into the making of the peasant question allow an exploration of the reasons why the course of events and interventions by particular individuals produced or circumscribed the eventual outcome. As the social question receiving the most attention at the time and consequently through which power relations were most starkly represented, the peasant question is an excellent site in which to map the changing social relations of the period. I do this as I have done throughout this work by looking at representations of peasants in public discourse. Of course, it is true that this period close to the beginning of the twentieth century also saw the beginnings of the Egyptian labor movement. The struggle between the laborers and the factory or workshop owners and transport companies soon became an important sociopolitical question as well. This is especially true after the turn of the century.4 The present chapter uses the peasant question as point of entry into Egypt’s changing social relations; in it we will see how the peasant question

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sometimes absorbed competing concerns into itself. The results of this examination refute much of the commonly accepted wisdom on peasants in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Long before the deployment of romantic images of the fallah in nationalist rhetoric or the novels of the twentieth century, the peasants had garnered a substantial amount of attention on all matters social, economic, and political. In writing about Egyptian agriculture and the fallahin, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, Ahmad Samir, Yusuf Shith, Shaykh Hamza Fathallah, and a host of other Egyptian intellectuals articulated desires for a new kind of collective future with themselves and their fellow travelers at the helm of a new kind of polity. fallahin as egyptians and egyptians as fallahin The reemergence of journalism several years after the defeat of the ‘Urabists, as well as the stirrings of frustration with the consolidation of British rule, provided the backdrop for new discussions about the meaning of Egyptian-ness. At the time the British were placing their nationals in Egyptian government positions, such as Colin Scott Moncrieff as Under Secretary of the Public Works Ministry or Auckland Colvin as Financial Advisor, thereby displacing local officials. Every Egyptian minister was assigned a British “advisor” who was the effective authority in that area of competence.5 By the mid-1880s, for this and other reasons Egyptians were beginning to register resentment of the British occupiers. For instance, in the face of the seeming inaction of the occupation authorities during the 1883 cholera epidemic, the press—even in its subjugated condition in the post-‘Urabi era—found room to criticize the British.6 They castigated the occupiers for their inability or unwillingness to take any positive public health measures during an epidemic in which as many as 40,000 people are said to have perished. An article by Ahmad Samir that appeared in al-Burhan on August 2, 1883, was representative of Egyptian elite opinion toward the British on this and other matters.7 In it Samir raised suspicions about the actions and intentions of British officials in Egypt as he indirectly accused them of planting stories in the London Times that Egyptian health officials were incompetent. Their hope, he concluded, was that British nationals would be appointed in place of the Egyptians. He then went on to charge the British with inaction and argued that the number of victims could have been lower had quicker and more organized action been taken when cholera arrived in Dumyat.8 The British had been on the receiving end of criticism for their handling of

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public health issues even before the occupation. During the 1881 cholera epidemic, British officials working for the Egyptian health ministry as a result of the Public Debt Administration agreement9 came under fire for facilitating the spread of the disease in Alexandria. Their poor organization of quarantine camps drove many infected people to escape into the general population, precipitating a wider spread of the disease. Likewise Hasan Husni al-Turani’s piece, “Khayr al-‘amal akhlasahu,” from the August 16, 1883, edition of al-Burhan, outlined a number of steps that the government (i.e. the British) should take in trying to control the epidemic that heretofore they had failed to do. Al-Burhan, despite the connections between such individuals as its future editor Ahmad Samir and Shaykh Hamza Fathallah, its editor until 1884, and such prominent ‘Urabists as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, took a cautious approach towards the antiTawfiq movement.10 The British were also criticized in general for apparently failing to have a long-term plan in place at the beginning of the occupation. Indeed, such decisions as the disbanding of the Egyptian army had been made in an ad hoc manner. There were also domestic political factors adding to the indecisiveness of British rule that multiplied local frustrations against it.11 British political opinion vacillated between old-line Tory support of the occupation and free-market Liberals who supported a quick end to a direct British role in Egypt.12 One event symbolic of the new concern with Egyptian-ness was Salim Naqqash’s publication of his eight-volume history of the ‘Urabi rebellion, Misr lil-Misriyin [Egypt for the Egyptians], in 1884. The book was widely noticed and was therefore significant in raising the profile of ongoing discussions about the meaning of Egyptian-ness.13 Its importance was immediately recognized by contemporary observers. For example, a review in the newspaper al-Bayan on September 5, 1884, hailed the book as an “important” contribution in both “content and style” to the history of the uprising. The reviewer predicted that the book would “become very well known” in the future and advised the “worthy” reader to purchase it.14 It probably should come as no surprise that the book was reviewed favorably in al-Bayan, as a number of figures directly or indirectly associated with the ‘Urabi uprising were associated with the journal, including Nadim’s biographer Ahmad Samir and Hamza Fathallah. Yusuf Shith published al-Bayan in Cairo, and like so many others he was involved in a number of journalistic ventures. For example, when the Alexandrian Islamic reform journal al-Burhan moved to Cairo in 1884, Shith became its manager and hired Ahmad Samir as its editor. At about the same time an article appeared in the newspaper al-Zaman that sought to clarify what “Egyptian” meant by comparing the terms

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Egyptian and fallah.15 This piece is representative of the ways in which writing on the countryside and agriculture articulated this interest. Discussions of the peasantry, their situation and condition, and advice columns about agriculture—even on seemingly technical matters—became sites for delineating the essential qualities of Egyptian-ness. It was during this period that the urban intelligentsia producing and consuming newspapers and the other products of print capitalism conferred upon itself the responsibility of defining Egyptian-ness and in so doing staked out a privileged position in the concept’s future elaboration. The al-Zaman article explained that over the course of history, Egypt’s non-Egyptian rulers had regarded the terms Egyptian and fallah as synonyms. But the writer explained that although all fallahin had in common the fact that they lived in such a fertile land, there existed considerable diversity in the “mentality and in the condition [al-sha’in wa al-‘aql]” among them. He then projected this variety onto all Egyptians. Since they were “descended from the peasantry [sulalat al-fallahin],” modern Egyptians too represented a variety of experiences and mentalities.16 In many ways this kind of writing anticipated the romanticism embedded in descriptions of the fallahin after the turn of the century, but it also presented a new kind of social blueprint for Egypt.17 Typical of the post–1906 (post-Dinshway)18 romanticization of the peasants was Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid’s “Banatuna wa ummahatuna,” from his newspaper alJarida on March 22, 1909. The article paints a romanticized picture of the peasants’ marital relationships, uncorrupted by the centuries of “Turkish rule” that had undermined “authentic” Egyptian traditions in the cities. In fact, over the entire next decade, from 1884 to 1894, a new kind of hierarchical social taxonomy was incorporated into Egyptians’ ubiquitous meditations on their past. In addition, the figure of the fallah increasingly served as a mirror to reflect the social and political issues of the day. Notions of the historical peasant were unpacked to explicate the reshaping of social relations and to legitimize the ascendant position of the urban intellectual classes. For example, the piece from al-Zaman alluded to the multiplicity of the historical experience of the fallahin and their ability to exploit Egypt’s soil efficiently, but it inscribed this vision with a particular view of Egyptian social relations. Al-Zaman praised the fallahin for being “more blessed . . . closer to God” and possessing “better morals” than the guardians of the old regime, the traditional urban-based Ottoman elite. The article pointed out that the peasants neither drank alcoholic beverages nor engaged in the sins of excess. The idea of excess as used here once more evoked the social and moral calculus outlined by al-‘Afghani in the 1870s that was subsequently adopted by reformers associated with the emergent urban middle classes.

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Following him, the article lays out a blueprint for a society comprising three distinct social and moral constellations: neglect [tafrit]; moderation [eventually called ‘atidal]; and excess [ifrat]. The Ottoman urban elite was guilty of “excess [ifrat]” as they were eager to replace Muslim customs and traditions with Western tastes and mores. At the other end of the spectrum were the “neglectful” peasants who, because they were completely absorbed in agricultural routine, remained utterly ignorant of the world outside the village. They blindly imitated the ways of their fathers and grandfathers and were indifferent to and uninterested in anything beyond “abundant rain and a cloudless sky.”19 They led simple, unchanging lives and had no desire for “baklawa” or any of the “sumptuous” foods that were inexorably bound up with a vision of urban wealth and its new ways of wasteful consumerism. The peasant was essentially part of the landscape, and like that landscape immutable and unchanging. Between the “neglectful peasantry” and the “excessive elite” were the civilized [mutamaddun/nubaha] middle classes, deeply rooted in their own culture, way of life, and religion. As such, they alone were in a position to appropriate new ideas without fear of falling between two cultures. According to this formula, their fealty to Egyptian culture and their knowledge of the useful practices and know-how of this era made them the new Egypt’s natural leaders. The article argued that “there is no difference between those people that wear pants and jackets and those that wear wool cloaks and walk barefoot in markets.”20 Fallah, dhawat [the traditional elite], and the new civilized classes were all Egyptians. This recognition signaled a significant change from the past, when to the denizens of the Nile valley the term Egypt (misr in formal Arabic or masr in local dialects) had referred almost exclusively to Cairo. Then “Egyptians [misriyin/masriyin]” were merely the inhabitants of Cairo, or more specifically, the urban Ottoman elite. Nevertheless, all “Egyptians are not the same in their way of life nor in their reason [la innahum jami‘in daraja wahida min al-sha’in wa al‘aql].” Egyptians now comprised three different social and moral categories: the peasants, the dhawat, and the new middle classes. Throughout the last two decades of the nineteenth century, writers in the press and the literate media in general crafted “Egyptian” into a new sociopolitical category. Agriculture provided this new social knowledge with a kind of political and historical conceptual coherence because Egypt was “one of the most fertile countries [bilad] in the world and one of the most suitable for agriculture.”21 Accordingly, Egyptian-ness and agriculture came together in a myriad of ways and brought the peasantry into a newly prominent position in political and social computations. Peasants-as-laborers became as indispensable for Egyptian agricultural

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production as peasants-as-Egyptians became for Egypt’s future. We can read the article in al-Zaman, therefore, to gauge the extent to which the term Egyptian came to include peasant in the new social calculus of the urban intelligentsia. Like many writers at the time, the author of the piece in al-Zaman sketched the social contours of a new Egypt through a historical exegesis of peasant suffering and oppression. By identifying the fallah’s tormentors of the past and investigating the circumstances of their present misery, al-Zaman proffered lessons about Egypt’s present and future and about its social relations. Throughout Egypt’s history peasants had experienced nothing but “humiliation,” “oppression,” “lies,” and “contempt.”22 Egypt’s rulers had always enjoyed a life of “opulence,” and in order to do so had always exploited the fallahin mercilessly to produce surplus.23 Likewise, the country’s moneyed classes [‘uzama] were interested in the fallahin only insofar as the peasants could provide them with more wealth. Of the same quality as these historical injustices on the part of the traditional ruling elite was the lack of concern shown by the contemporary urban intelligentsia toward the hardships of peasant life. This unconcern was a moral failing on their part precisely because they aspired to a better future. Their disregard showed up in the lack of coverage of Egyptian affairs generally and of the peasantry specifically in that singular institution of the new classes, the newspaper. The al-Zaman article indicted the urban intellectual classes for filling Egypt’s many newspapers with articles about “events in foreign lands with little value [al-‘umur al-kharajiya alqalila al-jadwa]” to Egypt and the peasantry. As a result one encounters nothing in newspapers of the time addressing the “necessary reforms that the country and the fallahin require [alaslihat al-wajiba allati la rayba fi ihtiyaj al-bilad wa al-fallahin].”24 Inaction on the part of Egyptian writers and their readers demonstrated that they either ignored, or only pretended to be concerned with, the fate of the “country and the peasantry [al-bilad wa al-fallahin].” The writer then added, “I do not believe anyone was ignorant” of how the fallahin were enslaved by “papers” (i.e., promissory notes, deeds, and other official documents) of the Mixed Courts and other government ministries and agencies.25 Of course, even before the ‘Urabi revolt these documents, which had become increasingly important in the everyday life of Egypt’s population and were central to the functioning of the new Europeanbacked court systems, had been the objects of severe criticism in the press. Confirming the peasants’ subordinate place in Egypt’s post-‘Urabi social landscape, the writer decried the silence of the press on the plight of these Egyptians suffering under the weight of Egypt’s debt. The journalists, the

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personification of Egypt’s nascent self-consciousness, had concerned themselves only with news of foreign affairs. Discussions of the fallahin played an important role in establishing parameters for defining the modern Egyptian political subject. One can identify portents of this sort of Egyptian-ness in the works of Yaqub Sannu‘ in the 1870s and al-Tahtawi’s writings from the 1850s and 1860s. Nevertheless, it was the political and economic realities of the 1880s and 1890s that shaped these later elaborations of Egyptian-ness. The British occupation and the auctioning of government and royal family lands to private bidders—increasingly foreigners and foreign-owned landholding companies—accelerated changes in Egypt’s landholding patterns, which in turn had powerful repercussions on social relations.26 We can detect the traces of these developments in the representations of power relations in Egypt’s social structure at the time. Most indicative of this transition is that, as we have already seen in the works of ’Ali Yusuf, ‘Abdallah alNadim, and Zaki ‘Awad, by the 1890s few readers disagreed with the proposition that one could scarcely speak of Egyptians, Egypt, and Egyptian-ness without taking some account of the peasantry. The resultant representations of peasants in the press highlighted Egyptian middleclass perceptions of the changing social landscape. The journalists’ incorporation of the fallah into their deliberations on Egyptian-ness reflected the changing political and economic realities of British occupation and the dominance of export agriculture. Because Egyptian-ness was related to a geographically and morally delineated space, it would be bound up with agricultural production—at least for the foreseeable future. Few doubted that as long as the British occupation lasted, Egypt would continue to be an agricultural land. One of the proponents of this conviction was the Syrian Arab nationalist writer Shakib ‘Arslan, writing in Ayub ‘Awn’s al-Zira‘a [Agriculture].27 ‘Arslan noted that the “the Nile Valley is an agricultural land [balad]” and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The Syrian ‘Awn had probably known ‘Arslan in Syria before coming to Egypt. He began publishing alZira‘a, the fourth agricultural journal to emerge in Egypt, as a weekly on April 23, 1891. ‘Awn hoped to “raise up” agriculture and other productive activities in Egypt by “enlightening the fallahin” in order that they might increase the size of their yields and sell them at the highest prices and maximum profits. According to Filip Di Tirazi, the journal was noteworthy for providing free legal services to peasants in court and in their dealings with various government agencies. ‘Awn received funding for his journal from Prince Husayn Kamil, the grandson of Isma‘il, the khedive deposed in 1879, and from William Wallace, the English head of the Giza Agricultural School. Al-Zira‘a acted as the mouthpiece of the Giza

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Agricultural School for a time, especially before ‘Awn’s death in 1894. Under Askandar Karkur, the journal took a more critical stance toward the school and toward Egyptian agriculture in general.28 Despite the interest in agriculture attested by the appearance of a number of journals dedicated to covering the subject, there were frequent complaints about Egypt’s lack of industrial production throughout the period. Such sentiments, however, were often expressed in a perfunctory, almost resigned tone. Paradoxically, calls for industrialization were often found in writing on agriculture or in agricultural journals, and they were almost always part of an appeal to strengthen Egypt’s agricultural production.29 Thus a writer expressing a common sentiment in the newspaper al-Fallah noted that both the “advanced and the backward devote much attention” to thinking about agriculture because both groups agree that “Egypt is an agricultural land and if its agriculture fails to expand disaster will follow.”30 Al-Fallah was another example of an Alexandrian newspaper transferred to Cairo as the capital became the undisputed cultural and intellectual center of Egypt during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Al-Fallah was published by two Alexandrian brothers of Christian extraction, Salim and ‘Ilyas Hamawi. Salim, like so many other journalists we have encountered throughout these pages, had previous experience in publishing a number of different newspapers and journals. He had a role in publishing the weeklies al-‘Iskandariya from 1878 to 1882 and Rawdat al-‘Iskandariya from 1882 to 1885. His brother ‘Ilyas subsequently moved to Cairo and rechristened Rawdat al-‘Iskandariya as al-Fallah. The nascent middle classes dominated the discursive projects of constructing the economic, political, and historical agency of “Egypt” and outlining the socioeconomic category of “Egyptian.” Both projects represented an attempt on their part to establish a dominant position for themselves in a future Egypt. As the middle classes delineated Egyptian values in the press, they demarcated new boundaries that were used increasingly to forge partitioned social categories. Thus, in addition to a literal reading of their writing, we can uncover the marks of their political aspirations. For them “Egypt,” for all intents and purposes, was the interest incarnate of the middle classes themselves, and “independence” was a metaphor for the dominant social position they sought. Even metaphors ultimately need causality, however, and the responsibility for Egypt’s predicament of impotence in the face of European power was laid at the feet of the fallah. Even if the peasants were not directly responsible for this misfortune—because of the Mixed Courts, the peasants’ lack of familiarity with the rules of commodity price fluctuations, and their relative ignorance of financial practices—they would still have to be the site of

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any intervention aimed at rectifying agricultural problems and thus insuring the viability of Egypt as a morally and politically independent entity. In September 1888, al-‘Alam advocated for more widespread training of Egyptian peasants. It quoted the British Under Secretary of State for Public Works, William Garstin, as saying that “[t]he advancement of agriculture in Europe occurred only with the help of science [‘ilm] spread among peasants themselves.”31 The desire for agricultural development was essential to the burgeoning political aspirations of the post-‘Urabi protobourgeois intellectuals. Moreover, because agriculture was the lynchpin for all their political and economic projects, it fell to them to identify anything that might hinder Egyptian agricultural expansion. From the mid-1880s through the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most common themes in Egyptian writing on politics and society was the assertion that only through agricultural expansion could Egypt hope to achieve civilization and any measure of independence.32 While it is true that such newspapers as al-Zira‘a and such writers as Muhammad Bayrum al-Khamas, the publisher of al‘Alam, proffered regular and detailed accounts of the futility and inefficiency of peasant farming methods, such were hardly the only kinds of criticisms leveled at the fallahin. The fallah and his approach to agriculture were seen as central to Egypt’s future. According to most commentators, peasant methods, techniques, and general “ignorance” were the cause of Egypt’s agricultural retardation and the ongoing British occupation.33 The project of strengthening Egyptian agriculture then depended on education in the sciences directly related to agriculture—biology, horticulture, entomology, chemistry, and geology—and on transforming the traditional methods of “peasant cultivation [fallahatuhum].”34 The importance accorded to updating agricultural methods was due in part to the awareness of the fallahin’s primary role in working Egypt’s fields, but this awareness was not the only reason. In the late 1880s and through the 1890s, the irretrievably superstitious and ignorant peasant, who elicited at once pity and contempt, began to acquire new meaning. The process by which the fallah was transformed into the repository of Egyptian authenticity began to unfold. The intermediate phase in this transition was expressed as a fear of “losing the fallah” to debt. Laden with debt, the peasant would find himself in front of the Mixed Courts and his land and possessions would be bought by foreigners. The fallah would continue to farm land that was formerly his, but only as a renter or laborer. Now dependent on foreigners for his wages, the fallah eventually would come to identify with them and switch his allegiance from “Egypt” to the “foreigners.”35 On the surface, this line of argument resembled sentiments expressed in such periodicals

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as al-Kawkab al-Misri, Misr, al-Tijara, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, and al-‘Asr al-Jadid in the late 1870s. The protobourgeois intellectuals of the 1880s and 1890s, however, attached the problem of peasant debt and the question of peasant fidelity to a new view of the collective sociopolitical fate of a new kind of Egypt.36 Preserving the Egyptian character of agriculture was important because it was the basis of “civilized life [al-hayat almadaniya].”37 Agriculture was the “soul [al-ruh]” that animated the “social body [al-jasad al-mujmu‘i].”38 The peasants were an indelible feature of Egypt due to their timeless connection to the land. The statement that the Egyptian fallah had worked the land dating back six thousand years to pharaonic times became ubiquitous by the 1890s. At the turn of the century it was conventional wisdom turned into a cliché. A romantic element was added to this primeval relationship during the first decades of the twentieth century. It was no coincidence that Egypt and fallah were components of the same public conversations about Egyptian identity. On the other hand, over the last twenty years of the nineteenth century one can detect an increasing emphasis in the agricultural literature and the press on “reforming” the fallah’s farming methods and irrigation practices. Europeans hired by the Egyptian government had advocated large-scale training programs because of what they described as “peasant ignorance and carelessness” as early as the late 1860s. According to Roger Owen, the British occupation authorities carried out an “intensive campaign of public instruction” to convince the peasants of the advantages of new farming techniques from the 1880s up to the second decade of the twentieth century.39 By the turn of the century there was also rising concern about reduced cotton yields. A number of commentators blamed the declining productivity on increasing soil salinization caused by poor drainage and such shortsighted practices as the peasants’ hoarding water for summer irrigation.40 In the press, an intricate calculus for managing these problematic issues of peasant-as-archetypal-Egyptian and peasant-as-impediment developed through the 1880s and 1890s. Of course, it was not until after 1906 and the Dinshway incident that nationalist discourse transformed the peasant by valorizing and romanticizing the countryside. In the 1880s, journalists and other writers placed the blame for the shortcomings of Egyptian agriculture squarely on the fallahin. They also, however, described the peasants as “Egyptians,” a locution that signaled that as a group the fallahin were ultimately redeemable. In the early 1890s, when ’Ali Yusuf’s Fallah Maryuti wandered through the pages of al-Mu’ayyad, writers concerned with agriculture began to speak of the “store of agricultural knowledge” possessed by Egyptian peasants. Even if their methods were “backward,” defective,

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and unscientific, over many centuries the peasants had accumulated a wealth of knowledge about the specific requirements of Egyptian agriculture. Al-Zira‘a arranged fallah, Egyptian-ness and agriculture into a formula in which “the Egyptian fallah is an expert, not a manager . . . he needs to learn the new kinds of organizational knowledge.”41 Al-Zira‘a often focused on the “organizational” deficit of Egyptian agriculture, with particular regard to irrigation and harvesting. Similarly, other journalists in such papers as al-Zaman, al-Fallah, and al-‘Alam al-Misri lauded the fallah’s individual virtue or praised his simple way of life. The fact remained, however, that for them Egypt’s viability depended upon peasant agriculture. The imperative to improve the fallah’s farming techniques was a constant refrain in the general press, agricultural journals, and agricultural societies that became more prominent after the British occupation. Such agricultural journals as al-Zira‘a (1891), al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya (1894), and al-Fallaha al-Misriyya began to appear in the early 1890s. Even during the 1880s, however, many newspapers and journals had begun to devote special sections to agriculture, such as one that appeared in 1887 in ’Ali Yusuf’s al-’Adab, a self-described cultural magazine. By the 1890s, almost every single periodical published in Egypt had some regular features or columns devoted to agricultural news, developments, or education. For these writers, the peasants’ ignorance of modern agricultural science and the economic inefficiency resulting from it imperiled Egypt’s future as a coherent sociopolitical unit.42 Al-Fallah put it quite succinctly on January 31, 1887, declaring that “general well-being was attached to [peasant] agriculture.” Most criticism found in such journals as al-Zira‘a or in such books as al-‘Atiya’s Kitab kamal al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah made reference to the fallah’s “conservatism” and “inefficiency.” Both of these hindrances were described as easily overcome with proper agricultural training and education. Thus, the middle-class writers concluded that Egyptians must step up and perform the “patriotic [watani] duty” of educating their peasants.43 There was no end to articles in the press that endorsed educational programs for peasants in order to equip them with agricultural methods “appropriate for this era” and reorient them toward a beneficial relationship with contemporary market forces and trade.44 By 1887 a network of ideas linking government, agriculture, the peasants, and the larger Egyptian society circulated more widely in the press. An article entitled “Al-muzari‘un” was representative of the way many journalists thought about Egypt and Egyptians at the time.45 It argued that agriculture guaranteed the solvency of the government and the stability of the society through combining a discussion about the incompetence of irrigation engineers and a condemnation of the tax structure with observations

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about the British policy of selling foreclosed land to pay off tax debts.46 The writer argued that “happiness in the land [bilad]” was measured through the “comfort of the people” and ensured by a government caring for the “well-being of the people.” The logic of the piece was simple. The tax policies of the occupation government impoverished the fallah and led to bankruptcy and foreclosure, and this process in turn jeopardized Egypt’s future by undermining the government’s financial stability. Journalists and technocrats linked peasant agriculture directly to the stability of the government, and therefore to the future of Egypt. An agricultural thesis written by an Egyptian student, Kamel Gali, at the Institut Agricole de Beauvais in 1889 traced the source of these problems back to the fallah’s psychology. The peasant, he wrote, “is fatalistic and lives day to day; he is not troubled by what comes the next day.” He recklessly accumulates debt and then becomes angry when bankruptcy claims his land and his possessions.47 Despite Gali’s psychological analysis, most observers concentrated on two areas: agricultural productivity and the taxpaying ability of the peasant producers. A familiar refrain in the general press and writing on agriculture lamented the “many faddans” lost to “foreigners,” and the “many [reputable] families” destroyed by the edicts of the Mixed Courts.48 A journalist from al-Fallah appealed to “our great nobles, local and regional governors [mudiriyin wa muhafazin]” who “know better than I what is good for the country [bilad].” Undertake “a government review” of tax rates and assessments, he wrote, as “some landowners have sought [one] for four years.” This recommendation was not a matter of “personal interest” but rather for the good of “the homeland [watan].”49 fallah, muzar‘i, and zari‘ Over the course of the 1880s and 1890s, the use of the terms fallah, or peasant, and muzar‘i, or cultivator, changed in Egyptian writing. In contrast to works published in the 1870s and early 1880s, when the terms were sometimes used interchangeably, writers in the 1880s and 1890s increasingly sketched out socioeconomic distinctions through their usage of the two terms. An 1887 article in al-Fallah attacking the institution of the corvée noted that the hardship caused by the difficult work fell upon the fallah.50 The manner in which the article framed the issue provides insight into the importance of the fallah in the sociopolitical calculations of the ascendant urban intelligentsia. The corvée represented the arbitrary rule of the old regime; the severe rebukes found in the press of the time were one way in which the ascendant middle classes distinguished themselves from some of their social and political rivals. The main beneficiaries of the corvée were the traditional ruling elite, the foreigners, and the local

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village headmen. The medium and small landowners had neither the economies of scale nor the social position to take advantage of the corvée in the same way. In order to satisfy their social and political ambitions, the new urban intellectual classes would have to outmaneuver these other groups. Attacks on what was often portrayed as the arbitrary and unfair tax system and the hardship imposed by corvée labor defined the discursive space in which these urban intellectuals established themselves. By looking at the ways the intellectuals classed and declassed the fallah in their representations of society, we can learn a great deal about how they positioned themselves at this early stage of development in modern Egypt’s social geography. As we have seen, by the 1880s writers in newspapers and elsewhere included the fallahin within the general category of the “people [’ahl].” An 1887 review of the first edition of Mahmud ‘Atiya’s well-known agricultural handbook, Kamal al-najah lil-muzar‘i wa al-fallah, praised the book for using simple language familiar to the “people of agriculture [’ahl al-zira‘a], both rich and poor and prince and pauper,” and declared that “the book renders a service to the homeland [al-watan] and its people [’ahl].”51 Distinctions between fallah and muzar‘i highlighted the changing conceptions of Egypt and the relation of the individual to the country. In the introduction of his book, Mahmud ‘Atiya explained that he hoped to create a work “useful for landowners [li-ashab al-ard] and those working [the land] [mushtaghalin bi-ha]52 The title of ‘Atiya’s book, Kamal alnajah lil-muzar‘i wa al-fallah [Guide to Complete Success for the Cultivator and the Fallah] distinguishes between two classes of people involved in agriculture: muzar‘i and fallah. But ‘Atiya was not alone in this usage; it had become quite common in the agricultural press of the 1880s. Throughout the book ‘Atiya addressed himself to the “large landowners [ashab al-‘atayan]” who controlled significant tracts of land. These large landowners distributed between “three and four faddans” to each of their experienced “workers” [‘umal and anfar], stable hands [kalafin], and night watchmen [khafara].53 In Kamal al-najah, as in much of the agricultural writing of the time, a typical muzar‘i was depicted as possessing enough land to conduct agricultural experiments “with new kinds of seeds” and other techniques.54 ‘Atiya listed such experimentation as among the “duties” of the landowner who should always be seeking ways to “increase the yield” of his fields.55 Muzar‘in were commercial farmers, and by all accounts concentrated on market crops, especially cotton.56 In this view of agriculture, the fallah simply disappeared. ‘Atiya spoke of “cultivators” and of “workers.” In so doing he elided the culturally subordinate status now inextricably linked with the figure of the fallah and discursively replaced peasants toiling in the fields with workers performing tasks.

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This last point becomes amplified when we note that the size of one’s landholdings and the economic wherewithal it implied were not the only factors that set the muzar‘i apart from the fallah. Like so much written at the time, ‘Atiya’s work assumed a moral and civilizational gap between the two categories. The muzar‘i was interested in developing new agricultural techniques and learning about more efficient methods of planting and the optimum use of irrigation and fertilizers. As we have seen, by the 1890s it had become fairly common to decry the fact that although the Egyptian fallah possessed “agriculture wisdom,” his methods were backward as a result of his simply imitating the practices of the innumerable generations before him. Indeed, embarking upon agricultural experimentation evinced a degree of moral virtue. The virtuous cultivator oriented himself at once toward market production and nurtured a right-minded sociopolitical awareness. For example, an article in al-Zira‘a called “Al-muzar‘i al-misri wa hajatuhu” was typical insofar as it assumed that “increasing crop yields” meant “increasing exports.” Such a development would bode only well for Egypt. The literate media conflated the needs of the “cultivators” and the needs of the “homeland” in general and expressed this conflation through a valorization of export agricultural production. The influential agricultural journal al-Zira‘a, for instance, proclaimed that muzar‘in undertaking agricultural experimentation were guided by a sense of “duty.” This duty comprised a number of different elements, including increasing the basic material wealth of the “homeland [watan].”57 The simple notion of duty, however, carried significant meaning beyond the question of production and efficiency of method. Embedded in it, too, were new conceptions of community and a claim for the social and moral authority of a specific class—the urban intelligentsia. The figure of the civilized urbanite embodied the same kind of interest and energy that animated the desire for agricultural improvement. In essence, the “worthy” muzar‘i shared the same understanding of Egypt adumbrated by the protobourgeois urban classes who were reading and writing newspapers and circulating in the new urban spaces—salons, clubs, Masonic lodges, learned and professional associations, and the like.58 Likewise the failure to accept this duty marked one as “unworthy.” Al-‘Ajyal declared that Egypt is a pure agricultural country [bilad] . . . but unfortunately the people [al’ahali] here are the most uninterested in agriculture . . . the rich and the wealthy prefer to put their money in banks or to build palaces and villas and to live off the rent . . . although the profits [in agriculture] are superior . . . it is an obvious mistake [for Egyptians] not to use their natural powers to reap benefit and advantage.59

In the search for agricultural efficiency and improvement, certain kinds of knowledge production—the purview of the urban middle classes—

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were important for Egypt’s “success.” A writer in al-Zira‘a captured this idea with the observation that the muzar‘i experimenting with new agricultural methods and the “opinion makers [arbab al-iqlam wa al-‘ara’]” publishing “scientific principles related to agriculture” in newspapers, agriculture manuals, and journals exhibited the same virtues that were oriented toward identical social and political projects.60 This piece in al-Zira‘a underscored the necessity for littérateurs and muzar‘i to forge a common identity. Therefore, quite apart from merely seeking to increase personal profit from the land, the muzar‘in were involved in a project of much greater scope. Similarly to the literate urban classes, they were building a collective political and social future. As such, part of their duty lay in inculcating “scientific principles” of agriculture among the fallahin. The peasants in turn would then receive their moral education and direction from the literate urbanites. Together, the muzar‘i and the arbab al-‘iqlam wa al-‘ara’ would bring about the emergence of the “new fallah.” The “old” fallahin were incapable of “organizing agriculture” according to rational economic principles. They needed to develop this ability, however, even “before learning agriculture” and before they could benefit from “the enlightening ideas of the muzar‘in.” This piece (most likely written by ‘Awn) described in great detail the peasants’ store of agriculture knowledge but also emphatically underscored the importance of teaching the fallahin to understand the value of new techniques and new scientific principles in agriculture.61 According to this view, the peasants’ poverty resulted directly from their lack of sound economic information.62 Al-Zira‘a continually contrasted the muzari‘’s keenness for experimentation and efforts at innovation with the fallah’s passivity and stagnation. By 1890, perceptions of what constituted “good agricultural methods” included a well-considered economic outlook and a proper moral orientation for those engaged in farming. At the same time, with increasing frequency one read reports inveighing against the putative ancient provenance of fallah agriculture. Al-Zira‘a, echoing many others, declared that the fallah still used the “techniques of [their] grandfathers that dated back to the time of the pharaohs.”63 For “six thousand years they used canals” to irrigate their “fields so they could grow fava beans, maize [dhurra], and wheat.”64 This approach eventually led to a complete absence of any innovative spirit and even a conscious refusal to accept any modification or alteration in their agricultural methods or their lives. The fallahin began to deflect calls for them to change by pointing to the success, over “many generations,” of their “well-established practices.”65 In short, the fallahin, having kept their methods of cultivation unaltered for six thousand years, were uninterested in acquiring any new agricultural knowledge.66

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This kind of thinking about the peasants and agriculture altered the meaning of the term fallah while adding new signification to the word Egyptian. Fallah increasingly took on the meaning of what we might consider the modern socioeconomic category of “peasant”: the idea of a single extended family working their own land or the land of others as renters. As such, the fallah was understood as standing outside the modern economic production and consumption matrix and as lacking the political or moral initiative necessary to take part in lifting the entire society. The term fallah no longer stood as an ethnic signifier for Egyptian; the signification of fallah-as-Egyptian was eclipsed by that of fallah as a synonym of low status. In the process, Egyptian became a stand-alone sociopolitical and moral category, with the literate urban classes as its guardians. This transformation was enacted in part through the deployment of the idea of universal laws applicable to all fields of thought and endeavor. In the 1890s this became an instrument for constructing normative categories across the whole spectrum of Egyptian experience. For example, many of those writing in the agricultural press and on agriculture in general spoke of agricultural methods and what we might call socialization processes or moral refinement as being both guided by and adhering to the same laws. The implication was that there are universal rules that one can use to read or decode all fields of endeavor, thought, and morality. This notion of “law” was applied in novel ways that subjected morality and sociopolitical identity to the same evaluative criteria. In this sense, “law” unified disparate discourses and conceptual fields by enabling a writer to make analogies across various fields of knowledge. This development is important in retracing the ways in which intellectuals came to view forms of moral and scientific knowledge as distinct from one another.67 Nevertheless, the limits of the categories of knowledge were not completely exhausted by the extension of the concept of law. For example, although as we have seen, some writers argued that an agricultural method could be evaluated according to its “scientific” soundness, these judgments themselves were still contained within an Islamic moral universe. Consequently, reluctance to undertake scientific agricultural innovation ran “counter to Islam” and represented a failing on the part of the fallahin. This failing was seen as a kind of sickness caused by “ignorance of the laws [nawamis] of agriculture and its scientific principles.”68 Islamic reformers such as al-‘Afghani had introduced the idea in the 1870s that the societal “body” was maintained by balance and that neglect or excess [al-tafrit wa al-ifrat] of collective Muslim duties led to societal “disease.”69 Thus the notion of the “sickness” of the fallahin highlighted their moral shortcomings. It followed, therefore, that by eliminating the fallahin’s resistance to new agricultural techniques Muslim society could

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overcome “ignorance.” Inseparable from this idea of ignorance were perceptions of material and spiritual weakness and the vulnerability of Egypt, and indeed the entire Muslim East. Inculcating these forms of knowledge would go a long way to eliminating the fallah’s ignorance and therefore the indolence and laziness which “flows in the veins from the heat of the African sun.”70 The coming of the “new fallah,” it was believed, would signal the dawn of a new day in Egypt. scientific agriculture, productivity, and collective duty Egyptian newspapers at the close of the nineteenth century took it upon themselves to provide evidence of the need to adopt a new scientific orientation for agriculture. Beginning in the mid-1880s, an increasing number of agricultural journals and commentators on agriculture expressed concerns about the misuse of land, problems in confronting the cotton worm, or the unnecessary spread of disease among farm animals.71 These problems had negative effects on agricultural productivity. In essence, decreasing productivity showed that poor husbandry techniques and a lack of knowledge of modern chemistry and veterinary science undermined the capacity to cultivate commodity crops for export, and therefore threatened Egypt’s collective health. It is significant, however, that as public discourse increasingly began to focus on productivity, the British were boasting of their having doubled Egypt’s cotton output in their ten years of occupation. This concern was not merely a product of fantasies driven by antiBritish politics, for even as cotton productivity had indeed doubled by 1892, it also had leveled off by the mid-1890s. Be that as it may, productivity became an important criterion for assessing the scientific rigor of Egyptian agricultural methods.72 Even more importantly, the social benefits that accrued from preserving or increasing productivity took on the complexion of an irrefutable and transcendent value that overflowed into and across other domains of experience, endeavor, and knowledge. Ultimately, assessments of the moral condition of Egypt, its collective future, and even its right to political independence came to be linked to the success of its agricultural productivity. By referring to “Egyptian peasants or cultivators,” one was also simultaneously recalling the nascent politicomoral project that was Egypt at the time. That the collapsing of questions of morality, politics, and science into agriculture was a prosaic truth might be seen in al-Zira‘a’s masthead; the journal described itself as an “Agricultural, Industrial, Commercial, and Economic Magazine [majalla].” Indeed, most of its discussions of these questions made little sense outside

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the moral and political matrix discussed throughout these pages. In arguing that “Egyptian cultivators [al-muzar‘in al-misriyin] need to . . . increase crop yields . . . [in order] to increase exports,” al-Zira‘a was simultaneously pleading for an improvement in the collective moral health of Egypt and the strengthening of its political future. There was general agreement that scientific agriculture was beneficial to the social collective. The understanding of “benefit” as an abstract social good, however, owed much of its substance to the Sunni Islamic notions of fard al-kifaiya [collective moral duty] and fard al-‘ayn [individual moral duty], even as these two concepts were in the process of being recast by contemporary Islamic reformers. The term fard refers to a textually prescribed obligation for Muslims. Fard al-‘ayn refers to acts or practices that all Muslims are enjoined to perform. Fard al-kifaiya refers to a duty enjoined upon the community of Muslims [al-umma] that is obligatory until a sufficient number of Muslims satisfy the obligation, thus releasing all others from it.73 Following traditional ideas of Islamic jurisprudence, journalists, social critics and reformers emphasized that individual piety depends on the extent to which communal virtue and corporate observance are in conformity with Islamic prescriptions.74 Their writing reflected the traditional view outlined in Islamic jurisprudence, namely that if the Muslim community fails to comply with its collective duties, every member of that society is considered to be in violation of the divine command. In short, one’s general comportment and specific acts are worthy only to the extent that they bring the community as a whole closer to fulfilling the Islamic good of conformity to God’s law. Such nineteenthcentury reformers as al-‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, and Rashid Rida, however, supplemented this traditional understanding with their apprehensions about colonial domination and the dangers represented by the economic, military, and (perhaps most pernicious of all) cultural power of the West. Consequently, the reformers broadened the definition of “Muslim” ideals. Now they viewed such tasks as studying science, acquiring technological skills and equipment, achieving productive efficiency, and demonstrating personal industriousness as duties imposed on Muslims by their religion. Muslim reformers reinterpreted the duties imposed on individual Muslims and the community in light of these new concerns and according to the needs of new kinds of political and economic projects. In the eyes of these reformers, the principle of fard al-kifaiya now included such matters as building an industrial economy, instituting a modern banking system, and educating a civilized Muslim people. Accordingly, this redefinition of fard al-kifaiya to include, among other things, adopting new technologies and agricultural methods entered into the canon of social concepts. It became a kind of prosaic truth that “good” Muslims em-

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braced scientific principles and self-consciously took up the project of reinvigorating “Eastern” culture, mores, customs, and habits. Journalists’ and reformers’ writing indicated that for them the benefits provided by science were of a piece with believers living virtuously according to God’s law. In this guise, fard al-kifaiya was implicated with the aspirations of the literate classes to produce a new kind of moral and political community populated by a specific kind of pious subject ruled over and guided by them—the reformed, civilized urban intelligentsia. Scientific agriculture, on the other hand, seemed oriented toward a purely economic goal: to produce a sphere of efficient and productive agriculture. The new meanings attached to productivity, however, created a significant overlap between these two seemingly disparate projects. The image of scientific agriculture carried out for the sake of increased productivity was imbued with Islamic value because it was an integral component of building a successful, observant, and pious Muslim community. Scientific agriculture fell within the scope of individual and collective Muslim duty. On the other hand, many of those authoring books and writing in newspapers and journals of the time had an almost instrumental understanding of science. It seemed that for them scientific knowledge was scientific only insofar as it facilitated the construction of a Muslim community. “True science” was only that which could be harnessed and exploited for communal benefit. Providentialism—the belief that events are predestined by God—marked much of Egyptian writing on agriculture and peasants through the 1880s and 1890s. Even such science-oriented journals as al-Zira‘a circumscribed the role of science as final arbiter of meaning because it was understood that science is subject to a greater truth. A cursory glance at the pages of agricultural journals shows how widespread was the idea of providentialism. It was not a coincidence that Hasan Husni al-Turani, who was accused of “religious extremism” by some British officials for his pan-Islamist and pro-Ottoman views, established an agricultural journal called al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya. That al-Turani viewed agriculture as part of a pan-Islamic political vision was not exceptional. One can see oblique hints of this connection in many places; for example, Habib Faris al-Lubnani, the editor of Kanz al-Zira‘a, an agricultural journal, stated in the first issue of January 15, 1891, that the “mission” of the enterprise was to “serve our beloved land [qutr] . . . because agriculture is among the most important material treasures with which God endowed the earth . . . and made the basis of life.” Otherwise put, science was not a purely empirical value-free endeavor. And just as it had moral or religious value it could, and indeed was even supposed to, also advance “patriotic [watani] interests.” Al-Zira‘a, for example, ran regular articles ostensibly on agriculture but that dealt with

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all kinds of political questions from “watani agriculture [patriotic/national agriculture]” to the dangers of socialism.75 Agricultural writing in this period argued that “political advance” depended on agriculture.76 In other words, science, and specifically scientific agriculture, was not an end in itself in either a political or a moral sense. It garnered importance, and indeed meaning, from its new role in the redefined idea of Islamic duty and therefore from its part in building an Egyptian community. Mary Poovey has narrated the fall of providentialism and the emergence of the concept of the modern objective and unattached fact in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England.77 Albert Hourani recognized in the later editions of his Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age that the kinds of parallel processes that occurred in the Arabic-speaking world were not hegemonic in the way they had been in Europe.78 The intelligentsia that ascribed and controlled meaning in nineteenthcentury Egypt, however, tried to subordinate science to their political and social projects. Some of these intellectuals were local practitioners of science such as physicians, engineers, agronomists, and teachers. Yet there were some professionals who did not concur with the notion that science should be epistemologically subordinate to religious knowledge. Their secular views represented a threat to that portion of the intelligentsia that was trying to secure a dominant position for itself in a new kind of Egypt where agricultural development and applied science were “Islamic” duties. For example, the Shumayyil brothers, Shibli and Amin, who were expatriate Syrian Christians living in Cairo, were forceful advocates of a more recognizably secular position. Shibli was a physician trained at the Syrian Protestant College—later the American University of Beirut—and an ardent advocate of Darwinian theories. He came to Egypt from Beirut because his beliefs led him afoul of his American missionary teachers. Shibli published and edited a medical journal called al-Shifa’ [The Cure] between 1886 and 1891. His strong secularist views are evident in all of his writings. For example, in the opening editorial of al-Shifa’ on February 15, 1886, he wrote that “the rise of nations [al-umum] and their decline, their advancement and their backwardness [taqahqur], their strength and their weakness can be determined by examining the state of science/knowledge [‘ilm] . . . woe unto the people [al-qawm] ruled over by those who denigrate their scientists or learned ones [‘ulama’] . . . soon such a people will disappear.” Shibli was one of the strongest and most unapologetic advocates of adopting European secular models for society and politics in the Arab world. After the turn of the twentieth century he worked to establish a socialist party in Cairo. All of these developments raise an interesting point about the connection between epistemology and political positions. Many of those who

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supported the secular and supposedly value-free vision of science being touted by such European figures as Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin and a proponent of eugenics, tended to look more favorably upon the British occupation. At the same time, critics of British rule tended to view the applied sciences as intimately tied to social and political enterprises. It is worth noting that this latter group, personified by the likes of the Shumayyils, carried the day on a variety of such issues as designing the curriculum of the Giza Agricultural School.79 At the same time, agricultural writers indicated that the science of agriculture would replace the ancient art of fallaha or peasant agriculture.80 For example, one frequent contributor to al-Zira‘a, Yusuf Habish, (some sources give his name as Habayish) who was known by the title of Shaykh and wrote an Arabic-French dictionary in 1891, explained that the “fallah is not interested in the science [‘ilm] of growing cotton” nor in the “experiments of scientists” to find the most productive approaches to agriculture.81 The “expert,” engineer, and scientist would, if they did not completely replace the fallah, certainly aid or more precisely guide him in adopting “the most recent advances in agricultural knowledge.”82 Unsurprisingly, such journals as al-Zira‘a, al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya and Kanz alZira‘a played a prominent role in these debates, offering practical advice about the kinds of knowledge and techniques even the common field worker should master. For example, an article titled “Talimat zira‘iya mufida [“Useful Agricultural Instructions”],” in the September 28, 1893, edition of al-Zira‘a, gave precise instructions for picking cotton and choosing seeds. The piece was emblematic of one of the most consistent refrains in the agricultural and general press—that the fallahin had to adopt scientific agricultural methods. Specifically, this piece made the case against using children to perform such agricultural tasks as picking cotton and pruning the plants by contending that their lack of experience and basic ignorance of agriculture led them to “damage the stalks of the plants.”83 The article implied that the fallahin required specialized training and knowledge to carry out even the most prosaic of agricultural tasks they had performed for generations. In this changed view of agriculture, a fallah could carry out his productive activities efficiently only by having regular access to expert information and tutorials.84 Such agricultural journals as al-Zira‘a commonly framed discussions of scientific methods as “disagreement over the extent to which people must adhere to respected, inherited ways,” the value of which had been proved by experience, and those who “suggest these [established] ways can be improved upon.”85 In contrast to “traditional [taqalid]” agriculture, “scientific” agriculture was in a state of continual transformation because “science makes new discoveries of nature’s truths” on a daily basis.

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Moreover, every generation makes its own contributions to scientific knowledge, which subsequent generations should then adopt.86 Amplifying this contrast were comparisons between contemporary European farming methods and productivity and their Egyptian counterparts. Agricultural writers placed Egypt’s “backward [ta’akhkhur]” and “old ways” in stark relief against the scientific, innovative, and constantly improving methods of evolving European agriculture.87 More was at stake in this writing than the types of water-lifting devices that the peasants should employ or the schedule for fertilizing cotton fields. Indeed, evolving views about agriculture mirrored the changing contours of social relations, and these changes in turn were reflected in the discourses of agricultural and social reform. A typical piece in alZira‘a described the Egyptian peasant as “conservative,” steadfastly and stubbornly adhering to “old principles.”88 The peasants were said to resist “new [agricultural] techniques” and to prefer the methods of their “grandfathers dating back to the time of the pharaohs.”89 The writer goes on to say that because this approach to agriculture was “deeply rooted in peasants’ minds [rasikhan fi idhhan],” they were constitutionally unable to change. Egypt needed to change, however, in order to overcome its backwardness, and the unchanging fallahin were subsequently cast as one of the main factors in that backwardness.90 There emerged an inexorable association between the “enervated peasant” and the mindless performance of ancient, ossified, and inefficient agricultural routines. This same article included a dialogue between an Egyptian “peasant” and a French “cultivator.” At the outset, the Egyptian remarks, “I continue to rely on the agricultural calendar . . . and the advice of the local official [ruznama] . . . why should I abandon the ways of my grandfathers?”91 In reply, the French cultivator answers, “Were your grandfathers knowledgeable about biology and chemistry and geology?” Science, he points out, “helped us surpass your agricultural production even though your land and climate” are so much more favorable for agriculture.92 Only “our science allows us to outstrip you.” No reply comes from the Egyptian peasant. This piece is typical in the way it wove the political aspirations of the proto–middle classes into the interstices of the question of agricultural development. Tying “conservatism,” agricultural stagnation, and political subordination together, the author concluded that the “conservative” peasant “retarded [akhir]” Egyptian agriculture in the same way that adhering to “political traditions . . . retarded [akhkhara]” Egypt politically.93 Egyptian peasants should, therefore, be weaned from their “conservatism” and be “open to [ahrar] new methods in agriculture.”94 At the same time, the principles of scientific agriculture championed by the urban intelligentsia pointed in new directions and bespoke new energies. Watani [local] journalists, social critics, and technocrats were the conduits of these new

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approaches and as such were the torchbearers illuminating a new path for all of Egypt. In the inaugural editorial of al-Zira‘a, ‘Awn outlined the role of newspapers and technical experts [’ahl al-khibra] in disseminating new agricultural ideas and guiding the fallah. For him newspapers were the essential link in passing important information to interested parties in Egypt, and through them to the peasantry. ‘Awn proclaimed that “newspapers have to bring [European agricultural methods] . . . to the attention of [the Egyptian] government and the ruling elite [kubara’].”95 According to Ayub ‘Awn in his al-Zira‘a, the 1890s were ripe for a period of “wholesale change [inqilab, literally “revolution”].”96 He compared it to the 1820s under Mehmet ’Ali, who put in place policies that proved eventually beneficial even though they initially caused great distress among the fallahin. According to ‘Awn, the fact that the peasants continued to follow the path carved by Mehmet Ali’s reforms after the compulsion was lifted demonstrates that the fallahin too realized the benefits of these policies. Thus, he concludes, peasant “conservatism” stands in the way, for the peasants tend to resist innovation and change unless compelled to accept it.97 This was indeed the case with the Egyptian peasants under the rule of Mehmet ’Ali. The newly installed ruler used the apparatus of state to impose new methods, techniques, and crops by means of violence and harsh threats. Regardless of the pain that might be inflicted by the introduction of new agricultural methods, ‘Awn felt the eventual benefits were worth it.98 To accomplish this goal, the fallah should look to the “children of this age” who succeed by virtue of new advances in agriculture. Knowledge of this era required a new acceptance of Western organizational techniques and technologies.99 The urgency with which this need was outlined underscored the fact that the concern with outmoded agricultural practices and knowledge was aimed at more than producing higher yields of cotton. Introducing new farming techniques and methods was tied to building a new politics. Indeed, as al-Zira‘a explained, “advancing politics” occurs only through “strengthening financial affairs,” and this strengthening occurs only through “agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing.”100 But because Egypt’s potential industrial capacity was circumscribed by political considerations, and because it had ideal agricultural conditions, Egypt could “reap its rewards” only through agriculture.101 the giza agricultural school How would Egypt reap these rewards? Increasing agricultural production depended on improving farming methods and expanding the sum of agricultural knowledge. There was therefore much interest in the revitalized

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School of Agriculture in Giza in the early 1890s. The school was officially called Madrasat al-Zira‘a al-Misriya but known in English as the Egyptian Agricultural Institute. Many simply referred to it as the Giza Agricultural School or the Agricultural Institute. The school was selfconsciously constructed on an English model. The language of instruction was English and the books and other materials were also in English. Each course was divided into units with examinations at the end of each unit. Many writers and journalists were interested in the curriculum and organization of the school—a site in which political, cultural, and social issues intersected.102 Here was another locus in which such figures as ‘Abdallah Nadim, Hasan Husni al-Turani, and ’Ali Yusuf addressed the changing social relations of Egypt and the colonial situation. Reports about the School of Agriculture and its mission raised a number of complex issues that have been investigated throughout this chapter. While ‘Abdallah al-Nadim deemed the fallahin competent to judge the appropriate time to “plant cotton, wheat, and vegetables,” he also noted that there was “much written [information]” from “scientific analysis of the soil, water, and plant life” that was “unavailable to the ignorant.”103Accordingly, al-Nadim agreed with the editors of al-Zira‘a and other journals that the agricultural school in Giza was absolutely necessary for the dissemination of contemporary agricultural information. Echoing the two major agricultural journals, al-Zira‘a and al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya, al-Nadim endorsed the notion that the school’s students should travel around Egypt, investigate the state of affairs in the countryside, and compile a “book detailing the agricultural conditions in each village.” He surmised that if this book were then used by tax collectors, it could ensure the accuracy of the tax assessments, which would be calculated according to the true quality of the agricultural land.104 Along the way, the students could “guide” and “educate” the fallahin on ways to increase the yield of their lands and thereby increase their wealth. In turn, the students would return to the school with fruitful experiences of Egyptian agriculture as it was actually practiced, together with a new understanding of obstacles to teaching the fallahin new methods of crop plantation and irrigation. Because of the importance accorded the school, a variety of opinions existed on any question related to it. In al-‘Ustadh, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim praised the school for the diversity among its student body, which he described as being comprised of many different “types of people [jinsiyat].” He looked, however, with great consternation on the pedagogy of the school. Specifically, he objected to the use of English as the language of instruction.105 Al-Nadim questioned why Arabic should not be the language of instruction for those ostensibly being trained to inform Egyptians of the newest agricultural developments and teach them how to put them into

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practice. Arguing that the mission of the school was to train a cadre of experts in order to bring heretofore unavailable but useful knowledge to the fallah, he asserted that the students at the school should read the “agricultural sciences in Arabic, the language of the fallah.”106 Students schooled in English, he said, would be unable to teach contemporary agricultural knowledge in terms comprehensible to the agricultural producers themselves. And if the project of the school included “educating the fallah,” it was incumbent on the students to learn “the language of the fallah” as well as the “technical [agricultural] terms used by the fallah.”107 But because the entirety of the scientific curriculum was written in English, the students would be unable to convey the lessons of modern agriculture to the mass of illiterate peasants laboring in Egypt’s fields. Al-Nadim’s misgivings about English as the language of instruction were not limited to concerns about communicating with the fallahin. There was also an anticolonial subtext for his objections. For him, the language issue underscored the threat to local culture posed by the increasing dominance of European, especially English-language, culture in Egypt. We have already seen how al-Nadim’s earlier work in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit focused on this question, and this concern grew even more central to the project of al-Ustadh. The question of the language of instruction at the agricultural institute coincided with the controversy surrounding William Wilcox’s infamous suggestion that Egyptians should adapt their colloquial language into the official written language of the land.108 Wilcox’s article, which was actually the text of a speech he delivered at the Klub al-‘Azbakiya in November of 1892, appeared in the monthly al-Azhar (published by Wilcox along with Hasan Rifqi, Ibrahim Mustafa, and ‘Ahmad al-Azhari, also known as ‘Ahmad al-Sa‘id Na‘man) in January 1893. Almost every paper and journal in Egypt replied to it. Al-Zira‘a’s response was written by ‘Abdallah Hasib, who praised Wilcox’s work in the Ministry of Public Works, where he was one of the chief irrigation engineers. Hasib explained that the differences between European and “Eastern” history are such that the former cannot act as a model for the latter. In addition, a little over two years earlier, al-Muqtataf had published an article calling for Arabic to be written in the Latin (or Roman) alphabet—a proposal that many saw as prooccupation.109 Because of such incidents as these, there was wide-ranging suspicion and resentment; it was said that the English occupiers were intent on replacing Arabic with English not only at the Agricultural Institute, but also throughout the entire education system and in government agencies as well.110 Thus it was not surprising that al-Nadim took a decidedly jaundiced view of the agriculture school’s curriculum. Like al-Ustadh, al-Zira‘a argued that the school’s mission should be to introduce agricultural “knowledge of this era.” Several al-Zira‘a articles, however, focused more

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closely on the leadership role that the school’s students and graduates (and by extension the social group to which they belonged) might play in contemporary and future Egypt. As in its other discussions of the subject, alZira‘a made a careful distinction between the “cultivators” trained by the school and the fallahin whom they would then tutor in the ways of modern agriculture. Egypt’s future was dependent on its cultivators’ success in carrying out this task. The pages of such journals as al-Zira‘a and al-Ustadh spelled out the curriculum and pedagogical approach in use at the Giza school.111 By 1908 the Agriculture School had its own books written and published locally. In that year the Egyptian government published the two-volume English-language Textbook of Egyptian Agriculture. In one article titled, “Manhaj al- ta‘lim fi madrast al- zira‘a [“Pedagogy at the Agricultural School”],” al-Zira‘a detailed the teaching philosophy and methodologies, describing the finer points of the curriculum for the entire three-year program—including a close examination of the syllabus, number of contact hours on each subject, and the methods of instruction employed in the classroom itself. Al-Zira‘a remarked that the school followed a methodology “borrowed from the great English agricultural schools,” and would also use the same textbooks used in England at the time. Hasan Husni al-Turani called in al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya for the reinvigoration of what he referred to as the Egyptian Agricultural Institute [alMajm‘a al-Zira‘i al-Misri] because it was in the best interests of society [musalih al-mujtim‘a].112 Al-Turani hoped that the institution would be constructed along the lines of the Khedival Geographic Society. He also echoed the recommendation made by al-Nadim in al-Ustadh and by the editors of al-Zira‘a for students at the agricultural institute to travel throughout Egypt. Like the other writers, he had clear political reasons for this suggestion. First, al-Turani hoped too that the students would use Arabic as their primary language in their studies of agriculture. Second, he thought that the students could gather useful information during their sojourns in the countryside. For instance, he suggested they could “look into local agricultural conditions” and gather statistics on such matters as the amount of land “held by locals [watani] and foreigners.” It is worth noting here that al-Turani himself might have been considered a foreigner by some observers.113 For him, the term foreigner clearly referred not to nonEgyptians but to nonsubjects of the Ottoman Empire. For al-Turani the Giza institute and its graduates could play important sociocultural and political roles in Egypt. His al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya depicted the school’s mission in explicitly political terms and asked: Who better to confront the specific problems facing Egypt’s countryside than the graduates of the Egyptian agricultural institute? Al-Turani envisioned the institute’s mission

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as twofold. First, the school would be part of a technical, administrative, legal, and moral bulwark against the problem of land passing from the “hands of the sons of the land [‘ibna’ al-bilad]” to “foreigners.” Second, if Egyptian land was to remain in Egyptian hands, the school had to be the center of national agricultural reform and innovation. Therefore, al-Turani described the school’s mission as serving “Egyptian [watani] interests.”114 As such, he proposed that the institute develop a presence beyond its buildings in Giza by opening local branches throughout Egypt. I have here translated watani as “Egyptian” rather than as “local” or “patriotic,” because al-Turani’s piece contrasted “foreigners” with watani. Al-Turani clearly intended some combination of the words “local” and “Egyptian.” Since he was a committed pro-Ottomanist, it is doubtful that he was an advocate of Egyptian nationalism and independence. Instead, we can consider his use of the term watani as an expression of the inchoate political and social concepts circulating in Egypt in 1893. Clearly, by “Egyptian [watani] interests,” al-Turani was not referring to the interests of the peasant sharecropper. He explained that the school’s student body should be drawn from the sons of “large planters [zarrar‘], princes, the wealthy [al-akabr], notables [al-‘ayan], village headmen [‘umud] and shaykhs, and from the ranks of cultivators [muzar‘in],” because they were most likely to benefit from the work of the institute.115 Al-Turani did not separate the scientific and sociopolitical functions of the school. In his view, the school was “not only a scientific institute . . . [but] it should examine the agricultural economy in all its aspects.”116 Experiments in and analysis of biology and agronomy should be conducted with practical political goals in mind. More abstract theoretical researches in these other fields, he argued, should be undertaken only after “societal advancement [al-‘irtiqa’ al-madani] was secured.”117 AlTurani’s piece shows how “scientific method” and a particular view of “Egyptian [watani]” interests overlapped in the minds of many observers at the time. One simply could not describe one without the other. Al-Zira‘a’s relationship to the agricultural school was on its surface somewhat more fraught than that of any other commercial organ of the time. According to Di Tirazi, the journal was the “mouthpiece” for the school. Indeed, its pages are a testimony to that relationship, with an assortment of articles from the purely informational to the congratulatory. In Al-Zira‘a, one finds many references to the school’s offerings devoid of substantial editorial content or criticism. In contrast to al-Nadim, the journal found nothing remarkable or objectionable in the fact that the school was headed by an Englishman, “Mr. Wallace” (William Wallace was the head of the Public Works Department), nor that English was the language of instruction.118 Yet despite or perhaps because of this relationship,

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al-Zira‘a’s first publisher and editor, Yaqub ‘Awn, and its second, ‘Askandar Karkur, ascribed cultural, political, and social values to the school similar to those found in the writings of al-Turani and al-Nadim. Like them, alZira‘a praised the school for equipping the sons of the rural gentry (village headmen—‘umud—and shayhks) with new agricultural knowledge and techniques. It was not a coincidence that many of those staffing government offices or performing midlevel engineering tasks hailed from the same rural subgroup. That this social group should wield the power of the new agricultural knowledge paralleled their position in the new social landscape of Egypt. Owing to their intimate understanding of agriculture, the countryside, and the peasantry, these staff members were the group best positioned to disseminate the latest agricultural techniques and advice, just as their social position between the fallahin and the elite of the old regime (and eventually the British) decreed that they should take the leading roles in a new kind of Egypt. Al-Zira‘a praised the school and hailed its accomplishments, anticipating its potential impact on Egyptian agriculture. Likewise, the journal applauded Riyad Basha’s statement that the school would serve as a conduit for “introducing new agricultural methods” to Egyptians. In a short piece titled “Madrasat al-zira‘a al-misriya [“The Egyptian Agricultural School”],” the editors sang the praises of the railroad authority for allowing the agricultural school’s students to ride the trains for half fare.119 Al-Zira‘a hoped this increased mobility would facilitate the students’ influence over the “agricultural conditions” throughout Egypt.120 The students could more easily move from “hamlet to hamlet [balda ‘ila balda] observing agricultural conditions” and generally spreading the good effects of their education—laying the groundwork for a new Egypt. Zaki ‘Awad, in an article titled “Al-jara’id fi bilad al-fallahin,” in the weekly al-‘Alam al-Misri that he edited along with Butrus Mikha’il in 1893 and 1894, also discussed the connection between the new agricultural knowledge and the urban intelligentsia’s privileged social position.121 The narrative of the story follows an absentee landowner of a medium-sized holding on a trip to the countryside. Along the way he visits the home of his local agent (who is also the village headman), whom he refers to as “a cultivator.” While there he notices the man’s son, home on holiday from “the school” in Giza, perusing a pile of newspapers and reading short passages to his father. The boy’s father explains to his urban visitor that when his son was away he “still love[d] to hear the news” of Cairo although he is illiterate. Fortunately, government “officials [almuwazzafin]” pass through the village often and read to him from the Cairo newspapers.122

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The old “cultivator” appreciates the newspapers because “their writers and those that write letters to them are teachers.”123 Therefore, he explains, he benefits greatly from the many newspapers that contain extensive discussions of history. The father follows the sections in ‘Awad’s al‘Alam al-Misri that detail the debauched behavior of those “imitating foreigners,” drinking wine and gambling.”124 Meanwhile, the true future leaders of Egypt, such as his son, “seek knowledge” in the many “night schools” and “literary debates” occurring in the capital.125 In the New Egypt, the sons of “ ‘umdas” and “large cultivators” will create a reformed and civilized populace, rational and representative government, and efficient, productive agriculture. conclusion In the mission statement of the first issue of al-Ustadh, ‘Abdallah alNadim’s brother and collaborator, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Nadim, said, “We will discuss the craft of politics from a scientific [‘ilmi] point of view in all of its constituent elements: history, morals [akhlaq], customs [‘adat], and the practical management of the state [tadbir al-mamalik].”126 In an article from the same issue, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim himself elaborated upon this theme.127 He wrote that “God gives every community [umma] and group [ta’ifa] morals and customs . . . and inspires them to adhere to their natural dispositions [khaliq].”128 A community, however, could also gain advantage from interacting with strangers. Al-Nadim remarked on the positive effects of cultural mixing [ikhtilat] “between East and West” coincident to “commercial exchange, travel [siyaha], and settlement [istitan].” Such mixing, he suggested, would naturally entail “change and the adoption of new customs.”129 Despite the benefits of adapting old practices and adopting the new, however, there remained potential pitfalls, in the opinion of these writers. A problem arises when the “weak [among these groups or communities] imitate the strong [among them]” and come to regard the other’s “natural disposition [khuluq]” as if it were their own, deeming everything good within themselves as “ugly.” Adapting one’s mores and habits or embracing those of others must be a rational and thoughtful process of evaluating one’s own customs as well as those of the outsiders. This measured evaluation is the only way to “preserve the good” in one’s “patriotism [wataniya], identity [jinsiya], language, and religion.”130 Preservation of the good is most important, for he who substitutes any of these four characteristics for another’s surrenders to that other. If one “gives one’s language up for another’s,” he will tend to adopt that other people’s

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“morals . . . and kills within himself” the “habits of his own people” as “he becomes like a foreigner among his own people [qawm].”131 Al-Nadim’s views on assimilating the practices of other peoples and learning foreign languages (even those of “more powerful ummas”) were consonant with his attitude toward agricultural knowledge. Both revealed traces of the problematic of the urgent need for change in order to preserve and strengthen that which was authentic. But what was authentic? In his early writings, al-Nadim might have responded to that question with such expressions as “local [watani]” or perhaps “Eastern [sharqi].” In the 1890s, however, his unequivocal response would have been “Egyptian [misri].” Who was Egyptian? What made one Egyptian? What was Egyptian-ness? How could this Egyptian-ness be preserved? These questions lay at the heart of explorations seeking those who were most qualified to assimilate the knowledge of “this era” that came from Westerners without losing their way and rejecting what “God had given” their umma. For al-Nadim, as for most of the other writers discussed in this chapter, the true Egyptians were those who belonged to the protobourgeoisie or urban intelligentsia. During this period, the crystallization and emergence of this group’s self-consciousness might be the single most profound phenomenon in terms of historical consequences. In the 1870s, the problematic of East and West was framed primarily as a question of religion and to some extent language by al-’Afghani and al-Nadim, Hamza Fathallah, and others. But through the 1890s and early 1900s it became increasingly a matter of patria [wataniya] and cultural identity [jinsiya]. After the turn of the twentieth century, “Egyptian” took on new meaning, and a certain kind of ’afandi subject began to stand for the nation in Arabic public discourse. Corresponding to this transition was the notion that contemporary agricultural knowledge contained much that would be beneficial to Egyptian peasants and agricultural production. Egypt had always been an agricultural land, however, and the knowledge of raising crops was “deeply rooted” in every male, female, and child among the fallahin. AlNadim remarked that “Everyone knows women in the countryside do the same agricultural work [fallaha] as men and that children and women share all the tasks with men, and therefore the knowledge of agriculture [‘ilm al-Zira‘a] is deeply rooted [muqarran rasikhan] in all of their minds.”132 Such deeply rooted and established knowledge would be the foundation of a new and more productive approach to agriculture. AlNadim was careful not to condemn the Egyptian peasant’s store of received wisdom even as he endorsed disseminating “new” information that would influence the ways in which peasant farmers carried out even the most prosaic agricultural tasks.

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Increasing the productive capacity and competence of the fallah would ultimately lead to their happiness by enabling them to overcome the economic hardship and political subjugation in which they lived. In the same way, if Egyptians as a whole assimilated some of the West’s learning while maintaining the core of their “natural disposition [khuluq],” they would achieve happiness and independence of a kind never before seen in Egypt. This chapter has examined the ways in which the political aspirations of the urban intelligentsia were expressed through the convergence of agricultural knowledge, cultural authenticity, and political independence. Some of what was written about peasants in the 1880s and 1890s foreshadowed the emergence of the peasant as the symbol of the nation after the turn of the century. The peasant eventually came to stand for deeprooted Egyptian values and cultural authenticity which, although requiring some adaptations, were essentially immutable. “Egypt” and “peasant” were spoken of in the same terms—gritty and steadfast, with a dignity that could be restored only by acquiring new learning and realizing independence. As we have seen, this dream was feasible only because the civilized, reformed urban middle classes led the way.

chapter five

The New Peasant, Colonial Identity, and the Modern State

; introduction The previous chapters have outlined the relationship between the development of the public sphere in Egypt, Egypt’s incorporation into the European-dominated world economic system, and the emphasis on defining Egypt, Egyptians, and Egyptian-ness on the part of the local intelligentsia. Between the years 1875 and 1900, Egypt’s literate public came to conceive of Egypt less as a geographical entity and more as a biography of a people. The present chapter carries this investigation into the period between 1900 and 1919. Over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century, this phenomenon gained momentum. Modern social categories and political concepts became further integrated into the daily experience of Egyptians.1 As Egyptians assimilated new concepts of the individual, the society, and the history of their community, they came increasingly to accept the inevitability of the political and moral project that considered Egypt a single people with a discrete identity and sharing a common fate. The period saw the definition of that people sharpened as the aspects of social affinity formerly attached to religious bonds became amalgamated into new ideas about Eastern and Egyptian identity. During this period these collective identities acquired more recognizably modern forms as Egypt took the form of a nation and Egyptian-ness became nationalism.

becoming civilized, becoming egyptian Notions of civilizing were central to the project of fashioning Egyptianness or “Eastern-ness.” Imaginative writing about peasants, such as the

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articles by al-Nadim in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit or ’Ali Yusuf’s Maryuti columns, had set up the countryside as “uncivilized” by the turn of the twentieth century. In the changed circumstances of the post-1900 era, when defining Egyptian-ness took on increased urgency, and Easternness, Western-ness, and modernity began to mix and merge in debates about the future, whatever was premodern was cast as something radically different from the longed-for status of civilization.2 Calls for reform became even stronger after the turn of the century, when its advocates self-consciously outlined their vision of an ideal future by explicating a normative vision of what “Egypt” and “Egyptians” should become. An article reprinted from the Baku-based periodical Kasibi in alUmma in April 1906 by Ahmad Bek Ajayif (Aghayev) captured this heightened sense of urgency.3 Al-Umma, published in Cairo between 1905 and about 1910, was a vociferous critic of the British, especially in the wake of the Dinshway incident and trial. Its detailed reports of the trial were distinctive in that they painted a precise portrait of the proceedings replete with psychological sketches of the protagonists, and an attention to such small details as the exact length of each testimony and the times of adjournment. The publishers of the paper were Hashim ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Muwani and Muhammad Sharbatli. Aghayev’s reprinted piece offered a prescriptive framework for the “civilized [mutamaddun]” future to which Muslims should aspire. But even as the author unfolded his vision, he asked, when will Muslims become civilized? Aghayev himself was an interesting character. He was an Azerbaijani Shi’i and a prominent public intellectual in Baku during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He became an advocate for the protonationalist Turkist or Turanian movement even though he viewed Iran as his homeland. After World War I he found his way to Turkey, where he was known by the Turkish rendering of his name, Ahmet Agaoglu, and where he had a role in writing the 1924 constitution.4 A cacophony of diverse opinions about the meaning of Egyptian-ness emanated from the champions of administrative, agricultural, political, social, and religious reform in the period after 1890. While these opinion leaders certainly did not phrase it this way, it is clear that they aimed to create the conditions for the emergence of a particular kind of moral and political subject. This theoretical subject bore some resemblance to the literate, civilized, and masculine nabih found in al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit in the 1870s. The later discourses of reform, however, incorporated new features into this ideal subject to enable “ethical autonomy and aesthetic self-invention.”5 The reform ethos was related to and partially constituted by the project of conceptualizing and creating an “Egyptian people.” This process of definition was reflected in the unsettled usage of such terms as ’ahl, ’ahali, and misri, as well as fallah, milla,

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qutr, bilad, balad, and others. Over the course of time, however, each of these words became coded in specific ways while other terms fell into infrequent use. For example, such terms as ’ahl and ’ahali were more or less displaced by the term sha‘ab in reference to the “people” of Egypt. This shift in word usage is a complex issue that cannot be resolved without a more thorough examination of the changing political contexts. This chapter elucidates the social imaginary within which this subject would become more coherent.6 The term civilized brought an assortment of notions, traditions, attitudes, and sensibilities gathered from Islamic, European, and Ottoman sources under a single rubric. A cursory glimpse at Egyptian writing from the first decade and a half of the twentieth century makes clear that being civilized meant more than successfully negotiating the intricacies of a market society or reading well enough to peruse newspapers. Other criteria were deemed to be equally important, such as being a good Muslim. Qualities exhibited by the gendered civilized subject, including accepting individual responsibility for the moral state of the social whole, were derived from Islamic sensibilities. Traces of this notion can be found even in the theories about liberal subjectivity central to such secular reformers as Faris Nimr, Yaqub Sarruf, Shahin Makariyus, and Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid.7 At the same time an image of the urbane and literate sophisticate associated with being civilized was distilled in part from European and Ottoman concepts of cosmopolitan gentlemanliness.8 Of course one might expect that writers in this period who were trying to make sense of and adapt to social, economic, and political upheavals would draw from their own cultural resources, including their understanding of the past. One consequence of evaluating the present in light of accumulated tradition, however, was the emergence of new significations for many extant concepts and practices. But as we have already seen, and as we shall see below, this process of cultural adaptation was accompanied by the consolidation of new forms of identity, as various representations of pan-Islamism, Eastern-ness and Egyptian-ness increasingly vied with one another for supremacy for a decade or more. This struggle was complicated even more by the emergence of pan-Arabism in the early part of the twentieth century.9 Becoming Egyptian meant, among other things, cultivating the desire to rid Egypt of foreigners. But this position was not the simple black-andwhite oppositional proposition nationalist historians have sometimes claimed. Popular histories in Egypt have tended to encapsulate the entire history of the period in terms of opposition to or support of the British occupation. While we should not discount the importance of anti-British agitation in the formation of modern Egyptian identity, we should also

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recognize the ambiguous position of many of the so-called national heroes vis-à-vis the British-dominated government. To name only a few, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul both served as state prosecutors; Muhammad ‘Abduh was an ally of Lord Cromer and was later appointed the mufti of British-dominated Egypt; and of course the prosecutor in the infamous Dinshway case was none other than the former ‘Urabist, later nationalist, lawyer, Ibrahim Hilbawi. There were a number of interrelated elements that require a brief survey. Antiforeign agitation included notions of anti-imperialism that were heightened after the Russian Empire was defeated by the Japanese in 1905. This anti-imperialism was covered with a religious sheen, as some writers cited Islamic legal traditions to criticize Egyptians for allowing themselves to be ruled by non-Muslims.10 The power of the fusion of anti-imperialist thinking with Islam-derived reasoning was such that even Mi’kha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid’s Coptic newspaper, al-Watan, implied that Christians could not govern Egypt when it criticized the British occupation and its suzerainty over Egypt’s administration. Another fertile field for many activist writers urging Egyptians to throw off European dominance was the “glorious past of Islam.”11 Such Islamic reformers as al-‘Afghani had reminded Muslims of their past since the 1870s, but in the period following 1900, “Islamic history” was redeployed as it became associated less with a prophetic mission on earth and more with a narrative of civilization. There is some irony in this reinterpretation, of course, as the sort of history the reformers described, which motivated them and vitalized their movement, was one beholden to Western social models and historical methods.12 The presence of various kinds of Islamic traditions and practices also helped to invigorate and sustain certain aspects of the emergent Egyptian collective identity. For example, over time the carrying of the mahmil (the ornate litter on which the kiswah or covering of the Ka‘ba in Mecca is carried), traditionally produced in Egypt and sent to Mecca yearly, was an event that was marked with increasingly protonationalist overtones and implications. The attention lavished on the packing and shipping of the mahmil throughout the press lent the proceedings an air of national celebration, and this excitement became even more pronounced over the course of British occupation. These accounts transformed the event into a moment of civic pride in which Egyptians, rather than simply Muslims, should delight. Then there was the significance of the Ottoman connection, which should not be discounted. Although the ties between Egypt and Istanbul had been largely symbolic for many decades, even these tenuous connections carried a great amount of ideational power. References to the “Sultan” or to “Istanbul” or to the Ottoman state [al-dawla] continued to be

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authoritative. Not until Britain’s formal designation of Egypt as a protectorate during World War I did the historic ties become less of a factor in public deliberation and their capacity to inspire and mobilize Egyptians begin to fade. As others have argued, a form of Egyptian nationalism filled the void left by the disintegration of Egypt’s Ottoman identity.13 The reasons for this substitution are not difficult to discern; many of the intellectuals agitating in Egypt around the turn of the century had had no experience of life in Egypt before the British occupation and domination.14 For these post-‘Urabi intellectuals, whom we might call the Dinshway generation, Ottoman rule meant almost nothing on a practical political level. This was especially true after the Taba affair of 1906, when it became quite clear that the Ottoman sultan would not—and indeed could not—challenge the British position in Egypt.15 One group of Egyptians, however, became interested in removing all European influence from Egypt in order to improve their own social and economic position.16 Some of these men belonged to the same social groups that had made up the ‘Urabi coalition of the 1870s: medium-sized landholders and the educated, urbanized professional classes. The medium-sized landowners were increasingly squeezed in their competition with European capital both by economies of scale and by the increasingly disproportionate tax burdens imposed on them. Their European competitors (and locals enjoying the status of European protégés) paid little if any tax due to the protection of the Capitulations. Adding to the landowners’ problems was the deteriorating quality of cotton yields and the flat or decreasing prices of commodities. References to the decline in the quality of Egyptian cotton abounded in this period. Occasional complaints began to appear as early as the 1880s, but by the late 1890s they were fairly common. At the outset the problem of deteriorating quality was depicted as an illustration of the need for peasant agricultural training. But after the turn of the century the issue was reframed to fit the political reality beginning to be perceived among the urban intellectuals. For example, Khalil Fawzi’s weekly al-Insan, published in Damanhur in 1907, argued passionately for protecting Egypt’s share of the world market in cotton. The journal made a sophisticated argument about the structure and functioning of world commodity markets and infused the question with a sense of Egyptian political and economic unity. One article published in April 1907 praised the Egyptian Agricultural Society for its efforts to improve the entirety of Egyptian agriculture and its implicit recognition of the importance of building an Egyptian society.17 Egyptian-born urban professionals often traced their lineage to the same stratum of the rural gentry (i.e. the medium-sized landowners) that was being undermined by competition from European capital. These professionals too were resentful of the

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British presence because their route to advancement in the rapidly expanding government bureaucracy was blocked by the many Europeans employed throughout the apparatus of state. The continual criticism of the government’s irrigation engineers, which began in the 1880s and reached a crescendo by the turn of the century, was in part inspired by these frustrations. Consequently, the issue was often framed in terms of “foreigners not understanding Egypt’s needs.”18 Differentiating Egyptians from Europeans was a preliminary step in establishing an agenda for removing foreign control of Egypt. But a case then had to be made for selecting the specific traits that characterized foreignness. Not only was this definition a sensitive issue at the time, it was not as obvious a task as it might seem, given the long history of Ottoman rule with its multiethnic and multidenominational mosaic of bureaucrats, officials, shaykhs, and local governors—including the royal family of Egypt. As we will see below, almost simultaneous with efforts to define foreignness, the notions of “Egyptian [misri]” and “Eastern [sharqi]” also came under scrutiny by such figures as Mustafa Kamil and Ahmad Lufti alSayyid.19 Then through the first two decades of the twentieth century, efforts to differentiate between misri and sharqi became even more pronounced, especially in the wake of the Dinshway affair. Eventually, Egyptian came to be more closely associated with the “sons of the Nile Valley” and less with “Eastern-ness.” A series of articles examining some of these issues appeared in the antiBritish journal al-Umma in the spring and summer of 1906—the weeks and months leading up to the Dinshway incident.20 One installment that explored the question of identity, “ ’Ila ‘ay tariq nahnu musawwaqun? [“On What Path Are We Being Led?”],” belonged to that large body of writing ascribing a kind of unitary essence to an “Egyptian” people by virtue of commonalities expressed through agriculture, religion [din], language, and a new awareness of history. Indeed, the press in the capital and in Alexandria connected agricultural issues with the fate of Egypt as a single social, moral, and political unit. For the regional press, however, this view was the cornerstone of their orientation and the basis of their raison d’être. An example of this emphasis on agriculture is a newspaper called al-Sayha, a weekly from Tanta owned by Mahmud al-Shadhali and published from 1903 to 1912. Al-Sayha devoted an inordinate amount of space in its columns to exploring the relationships among Egyptian agriculture, Egyptian development, and the future of Egypt.21 At first glance al-Umma’s “On What Path Are We Being Led?” seems to reveal little that had not been said for decades. One can find sentiments ostensibly similar in wording, if not in meaning, dating back to the period of the ‘Urabi revolt. Closer inspection, however, provides important

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insights into the transitional nature of the historical moment and the ways in which the concepts of “homeland [watan]” and “[Muslim] community [umma]” were shifting. The civilizational critique in the article—of a kind that had become popular only around the turn of the century— reflected newer arguments about Egyptian identity. The stated intention of the article in al-Umma was to show why “Easterners” were or could be “Egyptians,” while maintaining that “Westerners” could not be. On one level, the piece appeared to define a form of Egyptian-ness that included the ruling elite, composed of individuals whose varied origins spanned the vast Ottoman domains. The writer claimed that Egypt’s rulers, even if originally from elsewhere, should still be considered part of the local community. For the British consider their royal family to be English even though it was well known that the “English kings . . . have German roots.” Similarly, Egyptians disregard the Albanian roots of their royal family and see the khedive as Egyptian.22 Al-Umma concluded that Egypt’s “present and past ministers are [and were] Egyptian because they were either born here or came here when they were very young.”23 There are several aspects of the article’s line of reasoning that merit consideration. As al-Umma differentiated “Eastern-ness” from “Westernness,” it assumed “East” and “West” to be stable social and even moral categories. While the vocabulary the writer used was familiar, it had taken on different nuances and meanings than had been previously associated with those words. Accordingly, the article raised a whole new series of questions that continued to circulate in public discussion for the first several decades of the twentieth century. Was the “East” an “ ’umma”? What is a “watan”? How does the idea of “jins [race/ethnicity]” figure into the calculus of identity? And what is the relationship between the categories of “Easterner” and “Egyptian”? The article declared that the individual is shaped in the watan. This formation occurs not as the outcome of some innate process related to one’s biological “lineage [‘asl],” but rather as the result of one’s efforts to adhere to local custom and law. Therefore, “wataniya [patriotism]” is in effect a performative category: One demonstrates one’s wataniya as a result of what one does and how one lives one’s life. The desire of Egyptians to conform to the laws and mores of their “land [watan]” is what makes them Egyptians, and the same can be said of the inhabitants of any “kingdom or state [dawla].”24 Thus the article’s author concludes that Egypt’s rulers, much like the monarchs of Europe whose ancestors often came from elsewhere, can still be considered Egyptians even though they are descended from nonlocals. At the same time, however, the article argued that “Easterners” possess certain characteristics—apart from religion and language—which distin-

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guish them from “Westerners.” This claim collapsed the categories of “Easterner” and “Ottoman” together, and this fusion in turn created a sociopolitical synthesis in which Armenians, Kurds, and Egyptians are both Ottoman and Eastern at the same time. What is this unifying quality? The writer points to a somewhat indistinct notion of “affinity [nisba]” found among all “Ottomans.”25 Ottoman affinity meant that Turks, Armenians, or Kurds could become Egyptians if domiciled in Egypt, even as they preserved their own discrete “attributes [sifatuhum].”26 “Egyptianness” and “Eastern-ness” were mutually compatible because of this “affinity.” In contrast, the adjectives “Western” and “Eastern” entailed specific ways of life and of organizing one’s priorities in the world—materialistic, consumerist, and hedonistic versus religious, social-minded and chaste; thus they were not in accord. Westerners had no affinity with Easterners, and were therefore foreigners by definition. Nevertheless, those identities associated with an individual’s “country [watan]” (such as Egyptian, Armenian, or Kurd) were depicted as subordinate to the overarching category of “Ottoman universality [al-Jama‘a al-kulliya],” which made the “people of each land [bilad] into one.”27 But even as the article hailed Ottoman universalism, the vagaries of its exegesis of watan, umma, and ethnicity indicated that an incipient exclusivist nationalism was beginning to eclipse the idea of Ottomanism.28 The nature of the “affinity” providing the basis of the union among Ottoman peoples was not made very clear. The article did not explicate in any specific sense what held together “Damascene [Dimashqi] (Christian or Muslim), Egyptian, Tarabulsi and peoples from “any Ottoman jins [race/ ethnicity].” Likewise, the writer did not attempt to spell out those characteristics that held the Scots, the English, or the Germans within the category of “Western.” Portents of nationalism in its fully modern form are clearly at work within this article. Ultimately, the conceptual tools employed by romantic nationalism could not capture “Ottoman” universalism. The writer selfconsciously avoided placing too much emphasis on religious authority, ethnicity, national origin, and language to sustain the meaning of “Ottomanism.” In addition, unlike nearly all modern nationalisms the article made no reference to a myth of origin or a mythological ancestor to undergird the narrative. Nor did the writer make the case for Ottoman universalism by putting forth a claim based on shared historical experiences or the consciousness-raising modern struggle of “Ottomans.” Finally, there were no references to the symbolic power and moral authority of the Porte’s recently revived claims to the caliphate. The absence of religion as a determining factor in identity is significant here. Almost certainly part of the explanation for this omission lies in the

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fact that the British administrators, public figures in Britain, and the foreign press had attacked Egyptians for “religious extremism,” especially in the wake of the Dinshway affair that had begun to unfold days before.29 The ramifications of the Dinshway incident were perceived as far-reaching and unhappy omens of the future of the British presence in Egypt. For example, the trial and its aftermath were covered with palpable apprehension in the New York Times; the paper reported in ominous tones on the speech before Parliament of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, on growing “fanaticism” in Egypt. A few days later the Times highlighted the issue of religious fanaticism even more strongly with an article titled “The Dread of a ‘Holy War.’ ”30 Charges of religious extremism by the British authorities toward journalists they felt unsympathetic to their cause, such as ’Ali Yusuf and Rashid Rida, became commonplace in the first decade of the twentieth century. Accusations of religious extremism were often enough to suspend or revoke a newspaper’s publishing license. In the tense atmosphere after Dinshway, suppression of newspapers became a real danger, particularly after 1908, when the draconian Press Law of 1881 was reintroduced. In that atmosphere the writer of the al-Umma article would quite likely have been wary about inserting any discussion of religion into criticisms of the occupation. That notwithstanding, the article gives some indication that the contemplation of collective identity was increasingly separated from religion. The rulers of the Ottoman state had revived the title of caliph in the eighteenth century; moreover, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II (1842–1918), who ruled from 1876 until 1909, had increasingly associated himself and the Ottoman state with the defense of Islam. Istanbul’s supporters and the panIslamists in the public sphere often pointed to this role as appropriate for the Ottoman sultans. But the Ottoman claims to be defenders of Islam sat in tension with the nascent forms of modern secular nationalism developing in Egypt. Al-Umma’s examination of Eastern-ness, Egyptian-ness and other forms of ethnic and regional particularism within the Ottoman lands in effect reinforced the legitimacy of “Egyptian” as a new political category. By arguing that Ottoman subjects could become Egyptian, the article gave greater salience to the category “Egyptian.” Ironically, what began as an attempt to demonstrate the vitality of Ottoman universalism ultimately affirmed the efficacy of a new kind of political calculus that was increasingly at odds with the new Ottomanism. The al-Umma article is emblematic of a new development—that of a world divided between East and West. This binary pattern came to supplant the older notion of a world divided into “civilized [mutamaddun]” and “backward [mutakhallaf]” countries. Writings and speeches by figures as diverse as Rashid Rida, Salama Musa, and Muhammad Husayn

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Haykal began to incorporate this new view of East and West.31 It became common for writers to distinguish Western and Eastern civilization, morals, and laws from one another.32 Many of those employing this distinction cited such Europeans as Gustave Le Bon, Edmond Demolins, and François Guizot, who were widely read and well known in Egypt. By the 1870s many Egyptians embraced European historicism, according to which Islamic civilization had enjoyed a medieval golden age when it served as the conduit of the knowledge that eventually enabled the West to become dominant in the modern age. Thus in differentiating between East and West, Egyptian writers came to accept their European counterparts’ sociohistorical mapping. Of course there was also a political strategy underlying this approach: Egyptians who were writing for the Egyptian press sought to exclude Westerners (Europeans, especially the British) from “Egyptian-ness” by inserting claims about “Eastern-ness” in their work. It was part of the effort to subvert British claims to legitimacy in Egypt.33 On the other hand, the simple acknowledgment of “Egyptian” as a legitimate political category undermined Ottomanism. The assumptions embedded in the East/West civilizational critique played an important part in obliterating the ideology of Ottomanism in Egypt because the critique was increasingly wielded to exclude non-Egyptian Ottomans. Adapting European historicist ideas to their work did not prevent many of those writing in Arabic for Egyptian readers from attacking the British occupation and European colonization in general. How were the pitfalls of European control described? A number of diverse elements were put together to indict the system of European dominance. Criticisms of “Christian” control of Muslim Egypt were commonplace. Rashid Rida and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish argued that only Muslims had the right to rule other Muslims.34 The proofs they adduced for this position were derived from Islamic law and were then embedded in modern Egyptian identity. This process, together with such other events as the assassination of Prime Minister Butrus Ghali, a Coptic Christian, on February 20, 1910, set the stage for the ferocious and divisive debates of the 1920s. These debates involved ’Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, Taha Husayn, the religious establishment, and Islamic reformers. The well-known disputations over secularism, the sanctity of religious texts, and the role of religion in Egyptian society seemed to ignore the nationalist coloration of so much of the political violence of the time. For example, Ghali’s assassin claimed that he had acted out of rage due to Ghali’s role in the Dinshway trial and his positions on several other nationalist causes, including his support for the Sudanese Condominium agreement.35 Egyptian observers also resented European dominance for its implication that Egyptians were too “immature” to rule themselves.36 Historians

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of South Asia have found almost the identical situation, as Indian nationalists bristled at British suggestions that they were incapable of governing themselves and consciously sought to undermine them.37 In Egypt, this perception clearly did not accord well with the notion that Egyptians were “civilized” and refined; it also contradicted the pharaonic narrative of Egyptian civilization that was coming into vogue at the time. A number of elements engendered new versions of Egyptian history, including the translation and publication of the works of Gustave Le Bon, such as La civilization des Arabes (1884) and Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (1895), which were both well known and widely commented on in Egypt. Another factor was the work of archeologists unlocking the secrets of pharaonic society.38 There were those such as Lufti al-Sayyid, who asked how Egypt, once the cradle of learning, refinement, and civilization for the entire world, had fallen into such a desperate state that it was now dominated by non-Muslim outsiders. A “refined” and “civilized [mutamaddun]” country was by definition autonomous. British occupation seemed to confirm the veracity of the statement that Egypt was too immature for self-government. The financier Talat Harb contributed an article to Lufti al-Sayyid’s al-Jarida touching on this theme on October 1, 1907. Harb related the question of Egyptian independence to economic development. He argued that true independence was impossible without some kind of local manufacturing base because “we do not even make matches with which to light our stoves.” We can gauge the sensitivity, and therefore the importance, of such questions by the interest paid to them in public discussion. Aspirations to realize a political vision of “Egyptian” autonomy and independence taken up in the period from 1895 to 1910 by the likes of Mustafa Kamil, Muhammad Farid, ’Ali Yusuf, and others recalled the projects of social and moral renewal dating back to the 1870s. Like al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh, these later writers argued that Egypt would achieve its goal of independence only through reform. Autonomy and independence were now a necessary precondition of “civilized [mutamaddun]” status, and Egypt could not be civilized as long it remained under British control.39 Another part of these arguments was that even Europeans working for the Egyptian government worked with their own country’s interests in mind rather than Egypt’s. For the Egyptian critics, the large numbers of Europeans working for the Egyptian government implied that the government itself was not fully loyal to Egypt. Indeed, even writers who did not question British intentions described Europeans as ignorant of local conditions and customs, and many wrote about their complete ignorance of agriculture. The outline of the typical argument was that regardless of the Europeans’ level of sympathy with Egypt, they could not serve the country as well as

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Egyptians, who better understood not only the needs of agriculture but also the nature and the disposition of the Egyptian peasant. The historian Partha Chatterjee speaks about a parallel feeling among the urban intelligentsia in India, namely that they best understood their peasants and therefore, were not only the most deserving rulers, but also would be the most efficacious.40 Similarly, Egyptians were the only ones who could most effectively rule over their own land. Running parallel to this line of argumentation was the reform narrative with its roots in the last third of the nineteenth century, predicting that until such time as the Egyptians were refined and civilized, they would be unable to attain political independence and reclaim their moral position as a civilized country. gendered fallahin, gendered ’afandiya From the 1870s to the 1890s, the Egyptian public sphere abounded with references to the physical geography of Egypt: its beauty and above all else its fitness for agriculture. Toward 1900 and through the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a new sort of theorizing about Egypt, especially its people, displaced the previous emphasis on the physical attributes of the place—fertile soil, abundant water, and bright sun. Routine descriptions of the physical features of Egypt that had formerly been found so often in the press gradually receded; Egypt increasingly took on the quality of an idea. Toward the turn of the century there were more and more frequent references to Egypt’s collective or unitary aspiration to “civilization [tamaddun].” A new rush of imaginative writing on the countryside paralleled the emergence of the idea of Egypt and of a single people with a unitary fate. One particular kind of new literature, the village novel, evoked some of the same rustic images and sensibilities displayed in the early work of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim or found in the pages of the newspapers Misr and alWatan in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The new novel’s roots lay in even earlier writing, such as Hazz al-Quhuf.41 Mahmud al-Haqqi’s ‘Adhra’ Dinshway [The Maiden of Dinshway], published in 1906, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab: Muna’ir ‘Akhlaq Rifiya [Zaynab: Scenes of Village Morals], which appeared in 1914, gave expression to these new ideas of Egypt that gained such currency in the wake of the 1906 Dinshway incident.42 Muhammad Husayn Haykal later remarked that something recognizable as “Egyptian thought” emerged only after World War I, and in a form not dissimilar to what he had “depicted in the pages of Zaynab” a few years earlier. The village novels explicated the parallels between rural and urban socialization and drew out symbolic ties between

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fallah and ’afandi in ways that implied a form of identity transcending regional and indeed incipient class differences. Al-Haqqi described the nightly socializing of the fallahin in terms that were clearly designed to evoke the experiences of literate urbanites in their social spaces and show the parallels between both worlds. He viewed these nightly informal gatherings as the equivalent of a “club [nadi]” in the city for several reasons. First, similarly to their urban counterparts the fallahin discussed “important matters.” Second, those gathered together belonged to a single social “stratum” or “class [tabaqa]”; they shared “similar ideas [min fikr wahid]”; they all lived in close proximity to one another; and they all worked in the “same trade [mihna],” i.e. agriculture.43 Al-Haqqi implied that the village gatherings were superior to and more progressive than their urban equivalent with respect to gender roles. Al-Haqqi praised the fallahin’s intrinsic democratic attitudes, which were most clearly demonstrated in the equality between men and women. Women enjoyed high social standing among the fallahin and “debated equally with men just as the respected author of Women’s Liberation had hoped.”44 The reference here is to Qasim Amin’s 1899 work, Tahrir al-Mar’a [The Liberation of Women]. Al-Haqqi affirmed Qasim ‘Amin’s contention that rural women had already attained a measure of liberation from the “stultifying conditions of near-imprisonment” in the home that continued to elude urban women of the middle classes. In so doing al-Haqqi endorsed the view that peasant and urbanite were moving along the same trajectory of reform, and furthermore that in at least one respect the countryside outpaced the city. Looking back on this period some fifty years later, Haykal wrote that “the elite [dhawat] . . . and others that claimed the right to rule Egypt looked at us, Egyptians [jama‘at al-misriyin] and peasants [jama’a alfallahin] with disrespect.”45 He added that he consciously wrote Zaynab to place the story of the fallah in the foreground, and this decision meant in part to demonstrate their dignity and present the fallahin as civilized. Consequently, he subtitled Zaynab as “Scenes of Village Morals.” In Zaynab the relations between fallahin and gentry were marked by a sense of mutuality in the recognition of a shared endeavor; that peasant and Egyptian were cut from the same cloth. In the first edition of Zaynab, Haykal underscored this point by using the pseudonym “Fallah Misri [An Egyptian Peasant].” The literal and figurative social proximity of the fallah and the gentry in this book was unlike any previous depiction of rural social relations in Egyptian letters.46 Peasant women subjects figured prominently in these works. AlHaqqi’s Maiden of Dinshway and Haykal’s Zaynab were named after female characters. The lives of Zaynab and the young maiden of Dinshway were adumbrated as models of freedom and equality for the future of ur-

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ban women.47 These characters did more than disrupt the category of peasant woman; their paradigmatic status served to erase the conceptual distinctions between city and country populations in general. That it did so in a particularly gendered fashion once again reminds us of the importance of gender considerations in the formation of modern Egyptian identity and political subjectivity.48 Indeed, there is a powerful case to be made, as Elizabeth Thompson does in her work on Lebanon and Syria, that foregrounding gender analysis helps “elucidate the linkages between the home and the political arena” that are “often obscured by lenses of state building, class, ethnicity.”49 Idealized rural femininity and masculinity, as depicted by ‘Amin, Haykal, and Hamdi, were found in the pages of newspapers from al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani to ’Ali Yusuf’s al-Mu’ayyad to the organ of Kamil’s National Party (Hizb al-Watani) Muhammad Farid Wajdi’s al-Dustur. Wajdi, one of the former editors of Mustafa Kamil’s al-Liwa’, published al-Dustur in Cairo beginning in 1907 and his paper commented often on ideal womanhood.50 ’Ali Yusuf published a series of Qasim ‘Amin’s articles, some of which contained the idealized femininity developed in his other books, Tahrir al-mar’a [The Liberation of Women, 1899] and al-Mar’a al-jadida [The New Woman, 1900].51 All of this represented a new kind of development in the evolution of Egyptian identity, which dating back to the 1870s had previously revolved around the literate male ’afandi, nabih, or mutamaddun. Political thinking now had to make substantial allowances for “the fallah,” and it proclaimed “the fallaha,” the gendered women peasant, as the living embodiment of its ideal for all women. The female peasant [al-fallaha] was active inside and outside the home. She worked alongside her husband in the fields and participated in all agricultural tasks.52 Her labor could substitute for her husband’s whenever the demands of the economy or state intervened. For example, should her husband be called away for “watch duty [ghafara]” or the corvée, she could competently conduct the family’s business in his absence. She raised the children, welcomed all her husband’s guests, and enjoyed some measure of equality with him. Her labor and her health were both elements of the same equation. The peasant woman was physically healthy “because she [was] not imprisoned in the house all the time with her muscles trained only by moving from room to room.”53 In contrast to the fallaha, the city woman, confined in the house with “nothing to do except arrange furniture,” became enfeebled and mentally impaired because she did not “exercise her body or her mind.”54 Rural womanhood was active, healthy, social, and productive while urban femininity was languid, feeble, isolated, and frivolous. In an unprecedented reversal, the village novel’s treatment of the peasant woman (a treatment found in a fair amount of other writing on the coun-

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tryside as well) throughout the first decades of the twentieth century transformed the countryside into a model for all Egypt. Despite the lack of education, problems in childrearing, and the persistent hold of superstition and ignorance on the rural population, this writing implied that Egypt would find its path to “civilization [tamaddun]” considerably smoother if it were able to recreate elements of the idealized rural social structure on a larger scale. Indeed, there existed more than a little doubt as to whether education or at least the ability to read might in itself present problems for the “impressionable” urban girls. The Tanta-based weekly al-Hurriya, which was one of the least ephemeral of the provincial newspapers, as it published continuously from 1902 until 1934, included a piece entitled “Intishar alradha’il wa al-madaniya al-kadhiba [The Spread of Sins and False Civilization],” which drew a psychological portrait of “the virgin girl.”55 Mahmud Fahmy, the editor and almost certainly the author, explained that if a young woman reads “love stories and the obscene” books easily available in the city, she loses “something of her chastity.” These books may arouse the latent emotions of the “virgin” and entice her to “leave her crib of chastity and purity.” Contrasting this view of the countryside with that implicit in the discussion between ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s fictive peasant women, Bihayna and Sitt al-Balad, in 1892, allows us to gauge the extent of the historical shift in perceptions of the countryside. To recall al-Nadim’s dialogue, we saw Bihayna, the peasant-turned-city-woman, advise Sitt al-Balad, the relocated countrywoman, to emulate and imitate city women in order to become a woman of “today.” By 1907, however, ‘Amin, Haykal and others designated the gendered social relations of the village as a model for the entire society. The difference between the feminine subjectivity articulated by al-Nadim in 1881 and that presented by these twentieth century writers illustrates the advent of a new kind of sociopolitical orientation and a new way of representing it through the fallahin. Al-Nadim had spoken to a world in which “civilizing” Egypt meant that the fallahin should either remain on the margins of society, albeit in a “reformed” state, or at most become passive, silent imitators of urbanites. In contrast, the twentieth century saw the accession of protonationalist discourses about Egyptian identity. Essential to these discourses was the notion of a people, which meant that fallah and ’afandi were integrated into a single whole. Representations of the fallahin as part of this indissoluble union in a sense inaugurated their subaltern status in the career of the modern Egyptian nation-state. Unity did not guarantee equality; rather it delegitimated any political claims made on the basis of social or economic differences. Such questions were presented as threatening to the “people” at a time of existential danger brought on by the British occupation and the power of the West.

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Gendered subjectivities were not exclusive to the peasants. Urban (masculine) youth was also a focus of inquiry and concern. The motif of the spoiled and fine-mannered, even dainty, urban feminized male youth was common as far back as 1881 in writing that explored the reasons for Egypt’s “unfortunate” state. After the turn of the century, however, the attention lavished on this subject became more widespread and took on a much more urgent tone. The popular press associated a host of social, cultural, and political dangers with the idle, middle-class urban youth. This misguided figure socialized with foreigners in clubs and bars where he drank alcohol, gambled, and engaged in “abominable” sexual relationships and acts. In addition, he adopted the public comportment and private morals of Europeans, and in so doing came to “despise” his own “people [jins],” language, and religion.56 The profligacy of this gendered figure threatened Egyptian political and social “reform” projects. Numerous writers invoked gendered language in writing about the figure of the literate urban youth. These educated, well-mannered, but idle young men were depicted as subverting the natural order by taking on feminine characteristics. Of course this accusation was not particularly new; in 1881 al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit commented on the habits and mores of spoiled, hedonistic urban youth whose activities were sometimes suspected of including homosexual acts.57 New, however, was the emphasis on the implicit connection between these immoral behaviors and foreign occupation. For these misguided youth valued nothing except trivial pleasures and wearing fancy clothes; and they were preoccupied with their beauty and their appearance. Moreover, they were desperate to obtain the approval of those around them, especially foreign authority figures. Thus they were as much a danger to Egypt as were the foreigners employed by the government. A typical piece of this sort of criticism is taken from al-Istanah, a “literary-political weekly,” published in Cairo by Husayn Taymur and edited by Muhammad al-Sadiq ‘Umran. The article opens with the incendiary comment that “Egyptian civilizing [madaniya]” leads to “feminized childhood [khunutha tufula].”58 It also compares “Egyptian civilizing” to “Eastern civilizing,” maintaining that while “Egyptian civilizing” led to feminized childishness, “Eastern civilizing [madaniya]” leads only to destructive and counterproductive “wild masculinity [rajuliya wahashiya].” The “civilized male Egyptian [misri madani]” is taught nothing of value by his parents except to “love food,” wear splendid clothes [labas althiyab al-nadra], “enjoy a life of pleasures,” and “weep when distant from [his mother and father].”59 For this effete youth, value and respect emanate not from acquiring knowledge or producing wealth but rather from “washing twice a day.” In addition, the misri madani transgresses sexual

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proscriptions as he calls on “his servant and his transvestite dancers [khawwal] . . . for whatever suits his fancy.”60 This “civilized” Egyptian’s violation of the natural order leads him to “commit abominable acts [‘irtikab al-qaba’ih].” The idle layabout, spending his time in cafés and clubs, no longer even resembles a man. As a result of his upbringing, he has replaced manly “virtue” with feminine “meekness.”61 In his preoccupation with maintaining “his radiant face shining with beauty” and dissipating his energy in pursuit of pleasure, fine clothes, and almost constant stimulation, he “competes with women” in such feminine pursuits.62 This type of Egyptian is influenced by new “ugly habits” adopted from “foreigners.” The article represents an opinion voiced more often than ever before after 1900, especially in that portion of the press opposed to the British occupation.63 An example of this school of thought is ‘Abd al-Hamid Farid’s Cairo weekly, Kashaf al-Khabaya’, which was filled with such views,64 as were ‘Ibrahim Adham’s and al-Sayyid Sa‘id’s al-Sa‘id and Abd al-Rahman al-Dhahabi’s al-Hijra.65 “Western civilizing [tamaddun] . . . causes one to stray toward pleasures and forbidden acts [munkurat] in the name of civilizing [tamaddun] and civilization [hadara].”66 As a result the virtue of the “Egyptian umma” is “deluged under a sea” of corruption.67 Inventories of these immoral “habits” included mindless consumerism and hedonism bordering on the verge of self-destruction. The famous littérateur and social commentator, Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, also weighed in on the “decadent behavior” of Egypt’s urban youth in an article outlining the some of the pitfalls of “civilization [madaniya]”.68 Those who “spend their lives in drinking or in love affairs [gharam]” lead an aimless life with little hope for the future that might very well even lead to suicide.69 Images of debauched young men sitting in cafés wasting their time and drinking alcohol, or going in search of “forbidden” pleasures, were an omnipresent feature of literature examining the problems facing Egypt as a social entity. An article published in al-Umma in 1905 singled out two iconic characters of the early twentieth-century press for criticism: Cairenes “who inherited [their] money” (i.e., the children of wealthy landowners), who were often referred to as Ibna’ al-dhawat; and the “clerk [muwazif] . . . who owns next to nothing.” An educated urban professional, who was likely the scion of country gentry, sits in a bar with the youthful member of the elite, while the obsequious Greek proprietor runs to serve them, shouting in a sarcastic manner, “Yes, Bey, what can I do for you?”70 The writer laments that “we see many” like these miserable “locals [wataniyin],” who gather every day in such establishments because they are under the illusion that their empty pursuits are a form of civilization. But, he continued, “Foreigners laugh at us while devouring our money.”71 These Egyptian barflies are so deluded that they fail to recognize that the

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European proprietor treats them only with feigned respect. The article paints these two paradigmatic figures, the urban notable and the urban professional or ’afandi, as equally deleterious to the present and future of Egypt. Despite the fact that the professional’s children are “hungry and thirsty” because of his low salary, he “buys [fancy] clothes on installment.”72 Meanwhile, the notable does not invest his money but rather spends it lavishly at the “garish clubs” he frequents. the new fallah: from citified to civilized Earlier we charted the way in which Egyptians understood changing social relations by the manner in which they interpolated peasant characters into representations of power. And this outline allowed us to draw some preliminary conclusions about the elaboration and presentation of new kinds of political claims in the 1880s and 1890s. Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, as descriptions of Egypt became more abstract, so too did the characteristics attributed to Egyptians. We can trace this development by looking at how received notions about the fallah’s timeless roots in the countryside gave way to descriptions of shared religion, language, and culture common to all Egyptians. There were increasing indications of this trend through the 1890s; it became even more pronounced after the turn of the century. A look at a work such as ‘Amin Sayyid Ahmad al-Zayyat’s humorous Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid [Civilizing of the New Fallah], published in 1902, affords an opportunity to analyze this phenomenon more closely.73 Al-Zayyat himself was a fairly standard representative of the literate class, an editor, publisher, and writer. In addition to the New Fallah, alZayyat penned a number of other works of popular literature: books, short stories, and pamphlets in which he combined humor, colloquial language, and provocative situations to mock peasants and the newly urbanized lower classes.74 He also briefly published a weekly in Cairo called alZar. The weekly was published around 1908, although there remain only a few issues still available to the researcher at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo. A zar was a ritualistic exorcism mostly practiced by women. Zars seemed to have gained popularity in Egypt’s cities during the nineteenth century and were discussed with great apprehension by Egyptian men. They viewed the zar as dangerous, most likely because it blurred carefully policed “natural” social and gender boundaries. It was said to threaten the home and society, and was linked with a number of social ills, ranging from selfishness and avarice to drug use and illicit sexual activity.75 The zar came under considerable scrutiny and opprobrium in the press of the

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time, and the phenomenon itself apparently fascinated al-Zayyat. AlZayyat was typical of those who condemned the “superstition” of the zar and thought it harmful because of the ways in which it contravened social and religious norms. Women transgressed gender boundaries in the zar by assuming the role of a male shaykh within a gathering consisting exclusively of women. Because of the role played by women, especially “darkskinned” women, in this ritual, the many sensational exposés in the press and elsewhere were perhaps almost inevitably cast in gendered and raced terms. A typical article expressed dismay over the fact that the “black slave girl [jariya sawda’]” was accorded such high status and power simply for acting as the “shaykh” of the ceremony.76 Al-Zayyat wrote another short collection of anecdotes and satires that were supposed to expose the zar as merely part of a scheme perpetrated by women against their menfolk.77 Despite the implications of al-Zayyat’s approach, he was little interested in serious social commentary; instead he produced strictly lowbrow humor meant to entertain, amuse, and titillate a literate, although not necessarily highly educated, audience. Nevertheless, we can look at Civilizing of the New Fallah as a barometer of changes that had occurred in thinking about the fallah and about her or his position in Egyptian society. The book comprises a number of sketches, anecdotes, and tableaux, some several pages in length and others a paragraph or less. Much of the material deals with the urban poor, although they are marked as recent arrivals from the countryside. Much of the book was written in colloquial Arabic, probably for comedic proposes and to mock the speech of the fallah and the other lower classes. Al-Zayyat’s work is an excellent window through which we can observe the shift that had occurred over the previous decades in writing and thinking about fallahin. Al-Zayyat’s stories, anecdotes, and jokes poke fun at the fallah’s ignorance in ways that resemble ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s writing in the 1870s, and like al-Nadim’s early work they resonate with Shirbini’s seventeenth-century parody of country life. But unlike the earlier texts that became part of literate culture in the 1870s through the 1890s, al-Zayyat’s work demonstrated little sympathy for the fallah. Indeed, in reading Civilizing of the New Fallah one senses that the fallah must have evoked new kinds of fear within al-Zayyat’s literate urban milieu. With the migration of the rural population into the cities to escape the corvée and the growing landlessness, or to search for work in Egypt’s nascent industries, the country was indeed moving into the city.78 Nevertheless, similarly to the writing of the 1880s and 1890s, al-Zayyat’s representations of peasants abstracted and even masked the socioeconomic component of peasant identity. While much of the earlier writing achieved this abstraction through discourses of reform and civilizational

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critiques of backwardness, Civilizing of the New Fallah accomplished the same feat by inserting the fallah into something akin to a nation. After the turn of the century, the absence of sympathy for the plight of the fallah illustrated the collapsing of the physical and conceptual boundaries between peasants and literate urbanites. By 1907 it was possible for someone writing in an informal, popular style to heap the same kinds of criticism upon an arriviste fallah that was already associated with the urban intellectual strata—in effect marking the dissolution of the almost metaphysical boundary between fallah and urbanite. In short, now that the fallah was represented in terms similar to the new strata of literate urbanites; the fallah was no longer the absolute other. The introductory poem after which the entire collection was named describes the poverty and misery of a fallah’s life, in which “most of his meals were rough cheese [mish] and radishes,” and whose worry “was compounded by disaster and misfortune.”79 However, in the recent past this formerly miserable fallah attained unprecedented wealth by growing cotton and suddenly found himself able to purchase “Kashmir scarves and gold watch chains,” even though he knows not what to do with such items. Eventually, the ridiculous nouveau riche fallah manages to obtain a government appointment in some provincial office “with a regular salary.”80 Soon this comical figure, who formerly ate only uncooked simple food, demands to feast on “elegant foods” and in general seeks to “imitate the Beys.”81 Civilizing of the New Fallah’s poetic overture heralds the entry of a new kind of rustic character into the modern, urban Egyptian imaginary. It inserts the “new fallah” into what had become a standard narrative of criticism for the urban intelligentsia for over a quarter-century. From the days of al-‘Afghani in the 1870s and alNadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit in 1881, consumerism and faddism had not just been objects of scorn but had been associated with the gravest problems facing Egyptian society. The consumerism and faddishness of the urban intelligentsia and professional classes had been depicted as forms of ignorance born out of a misunderstanding of the meaning of civilization. Reformers and social critics alike labeled such behaviors as extremely detrimental to the present and the future of the Egyptian community, and declared that they represented a serious obstacle to the East’s attaining the status of “civilization [tamaddun].” Empty consumerism was both a byproduct and result of Egyptians imitating foreigners. After the turn of the century it was common for newspapers to argue that copying foreigners led to forms of bida‘ or heresy.82 Aping the customs, habits, ways of life, and mores of the West had compelled Muslims and Easterners alike to give up their own religion, culture, and ways of life. Such writers as al-Zayyat accused social climbers and their counterparts from

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the countryside of being most likely to imitate foreigners. By the sheer volume and omnipresence of these kinds of thoughts in the press and in other writings of the time, we can assume that they were familiar to alZayyat’s readers. Therefore, his observation that few among the peasantsturned-gentry “are pious [and] pray” would have evoked to his readers the ambitious rural arriviste dressed in an ill-fitting “ ’afandi” suit and driven by a desire to impress foreigners.83 Al-Zayyat registered the threat embodied in the recently citified peasant with respect to external cultural dangers: Europeans enticed the gullible and unsophisticated peasant into empty materialism and irreligion under the guise of “being civilized [tamaddun].” Read carefully, al-Zayyat’s representation of his citified peasant character offers clues about the changes in notions of community among Egypt’s professional classes. We can triangulate between these clues and shifts in Egypt’s political economy to describe the resultant transformations in social relations as well as the ways in which these transformations were part of the emergence of another stage of political modernity. Civilizing of the New Fallah resembled many popular works of fiction and theatre (and eventually film) in its mockery of the rural population for their simple roots and uncouth manners. Nevertheless, the book’s pointed criticism of the newly citified peasant erased the physical distance between countryside and city. It broke down the conceptual distance between fallah and ’afandi in the name of a people and, almost simultaneously, in the name of the Egyptian nation. Representations of the fallahin, whether mocking or romanticizing, increasingly incorporated universalistic social and moral sensibilities. No longer an isolated subaltern functioning on the margins of an emerging plantation system, the peasant was either a dolt or a reservoir of authenticity, but unlike the old ’afandi, he belonged to the larger social collective. Nevertheless, the uneasiness alZayyat expressed about the peasant characters magnified the position of his omniscient narrator (i.e., the sober, literate ’afandi) as the figure most appropriate to assume a leadership role in Egypt. Al-Zayyat’s representation of this “new” peasant also reveals something of the homogenizing nature of the protobourgeoisie’s discourse of nation. That al-Zayyat deemed the fallah guilty of the same transgressions for which social commentators and religious reformers had long condemned the middle-strata ’afandiya signaled that the fallah had indeed became an identifiable part of Egypt. Likewise, criticism for committing excess and violating social norms helped solidify the new fallah’s Egyptian identity, because becoming part of Egypt entailed a specific kind of moral trajectory. For the new fallah, like the old ’afandi, must overcome his impiety and indiscretions in order to become an upstanding and re-

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spected member of the Egyptian community. No specific interventions were required for the new fallah, however. The same approach and methods appropriate to reform the urban middle classes—moral guidance, learning to love the “homeland [watan]” and “patriotism [wataniya]”, rejecting consumerism, and recognizing the error of blindly imitating foreigners—were prescribed to redeem the new fallah. All signs of fallah difference were erased by the discourse of moral reform. Al-Zayyat’s text underscored the conviction that the new fallah was a product of the same global forces that were creating the cultural figure known as the ’afandi. Capitalist export agriculture and the penetration of international markets enabled European tastes, fashions, and habits to produce locally parallel effects; thus the markets became a conduit for the movement of European ideas of the individual, laws, and society into Egypt. One way in which this transition is perceptible is the way in which alZayyat threaded “fallah-ness” into a new kind of historical narrative. We can gauge the entry into currency of a modern understanding of Egypt as a moral and political entity reflected in such texts as al-Zayyat’s that distinguished the new fallah from the old.84 The figure of the new fallah differed from received notions of the old fallah insofar as it could be integrated into emergent visions of Egypt as a unitary historical subject. Al-Zayyat’s book presented the old fallah as passive and unchanging over the endless millennia of Egyptian history. Even if its reasoning overlapped only occasionally with the bulk of the period’s technical writing, Civilizing of the New Fallah echoed the agricultural experts’ conclusions about peasant farming. Al-Zayyat derided the old fallah for employing the primitive tools and unthinkingly following the ancient farming techniques of his ancestors. Worse, his basic knowledge of agriculture was restricted by his ignorance, obstinacy, and illiteracy.85 Civilizing of the New Fallah articulated several parallels between the new fallah and Egypt. First, it led readers to infer that the new fallah, like Egypt itself, benefited from the opportunities inherent in export market agriculture. Second, just as Egypt could transform itself through agricultural productivity, the new fallah could be remade through reform and could refashion himself through capitalist exchange. Third, a parable of national renewal and the idea of individual and collective self-fashioning lay just below the surface of al-Zayyat’s tale of fallah transformation. Just as the exponential growth in export agriculture in late nineteenth-century Egypt produced the notions of both the ’afandi and new fallah, it also paved the way for the emergence of a new understanding of Egypt. For all of al-Zayyat’s mockery, ultimately, his book insinuated that just as Egypt could harness its agricultural potential to transform itself, the old fallah too could be supplanted by the new fallah.

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In some respects the sort of fallah characters found in the writings of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and ’Ali Yusuf in the 1880s and 1890s anticipated the kind of fallah who emerges in the pages of al-Zayyat’s 1902 book. There were, however, significant differences between the capacity for self-fashioning demonstrated by the fictive peasants in the earlier writings and those found in Civilizing of the New Fallah. We saw in the case of alNadim’s Sitt al-Balad (the peasant woman who came under the tutelage of the already urbanized Bihayna) that peasant women became “town [bandar]” women through imitation. Sitt al-Balad required comprehensive guidance from her tutor Bihayna, who in turn trained her to give up her autonomy and to watch herself. In the city Sitt al-Balad would not allow visitors into her home, gave up going about the streets alone, and abstained from smoking. She had to consciously discard nearly every aspect of her rural upbringing and lifestyle, and replace them with the habits, customs, and ways of life of the city woman. In other words, the countrywoman became a townswoman through an external process of imitation and an internal regime of self-discipline and self-effacement. In 1892, the peasant woman and the city woman belonged to entirely distinct castes; Sitt al-Balad could move into the urban caste only by leaving the category of fallaha or peasant woman behind. Al-Zayyat’s version of this story, written only a little more than ten years later, differed significantly from al-Nadim’s morality tale. The new fallah remade himself through his agricultural activities and success. In addition, Civilizing of the New Fallah depicted the peasant’s newly acquired and obviously affected manners, tastes, and moral sense as comical, but even as it did so its social sensibilities evidenced an ethos much more akin to modern liberalism than to al-Nadim’s earlier caste-based vision of society. Certainly, al-Zayyat ridiculed the peasant for his absurd and haphazard adoption of “civilized” habits and way of life. In contrast to Sitt al-Balad’s unquestioning imitation of the townsfolk, however, alZayyat narrated a story in which the uncivilized aspire to civilization on their own terms. His was a universal moral tale of the all-encompassing community of Egyptians whose subject, although still the literate urbanite, held out the possibility that anyone could become civilized. The fallah in the tale, resembling any ambitious technocrat of the time, has obtained a government position “with a salary” and acquired all the accoutrements of civilized urban life.86 Civilizing of the New Fallah poses the question: Where else might civilizing lead? The new fallah was following the same trajectory as the literate urbanite; thus that path was transformed into a natural progression and not a product of complex social, cultural, and economic forces in which the new middle class had deftly positioned itself. The distinctive socioeconomic position of the fallah was again

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erased, but this time through a putatively universalist narrative. The new fallah could become an “Egyptian” in the same way that anyone among the urban class could become an Egyptian. The new fallah need not study urbanites nor imitate their bodily movements and social mores. He or she did not need to emulate their way of life. Rather the urban ’afandi lifestyle would naturally emerge out of the new fallah’s involvement in capitalist agriculture and its attendant consumption patterns. This new fallah did not belong to a different caste, so there was no need to cleanse himself of atavistic rural traits, as had been the case with al-Nadim’s Sitt-al-Balad. Egypt’s changed circumstances (i.e., potentially unlimited wealth derived from agriculture) opened up the ground on which Egyptians were formed—peasant and ’afandi. Al-Zayyat and his new fallah shared a new kind of social and moral space. Ultimately, the fallah no longer needed to imitate city dwellers and become citified. The very idea of citifying, in which the rural population alone would cast off its way of life in favor of that of the urban sophisticate, belonged to the past. It reflected a society that had understood itself to be divided by caste differences. In the ’afandi imaginary the distinction between city and country began to dissolve, and with it went the castelike notions that had guided the social imagination. After the turn of the century literate ’afandis no longer sketched out a social vision in which the peasants would have to imitate the urban population in order to become civilized. In the new Egypt, all aspired to the same ideals; consequently civilization and civilized-ness were universal performative categories. The writers of this period understood that a single regime of schooling, refinement, religious practice, and knowledge made the new fallah and the urban intellectual equally Egyptian. Egypt was producing “new fallahin” who shared the same aspirations and hopes of their urban ’afandi compatriots because they had the same moral and political biography in common. The same economic, political, and cultural forces shaped both the new fallah and the urban intellectual, and together these two groups constituted “Egypt.” the modern state in national and colonial identity A fairly typical article “al-dhaka’ al-misri [The Egyptian Intellect]” that appeared in al-Umma in 1905 accused the British of shortchanging the educational system in Egypt.87 The writer, Muhammad Ghalib al-Bajuri, concluded that this development was hardly surprising as the foreigners entrusted with the homeland’s [watan] affairs were not concerned with its

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long-term interests. Al-Bajuri argued that these foreigners were quite naturally predisposed towards helping their own countries “advance [taqaddum].” Indeed, those foreign lands “had advanced beyond others due to serious efforts undertaken by their own men . . . in serving [their country] and even sacrificing their lives for it.”88 Thus he reasoned that the road to “civilization [tamaddun]” required that Egyptians similarly gain control of the administrative management and governmental affairs of their own land.89 The article, written in July 1906, only days after the Dinshway trial and during a period of great political agitation, was hardly remarkable for its anti-British and its protonationalist sentiments. Al-Bajuri railed against the British occupation and Egyptians’ almost complete exclusion from the operation of their own government. This indignity was compounded because even those qualified for advancement by having obtained the “highest educational certificates” were relegated to lowly positions and consequently were little more than a “tool in the hand of the foreigner.”90 He mocked the self-congratulatory but contradictory British attitudes toward the occupation and their Egyptian subjects. Al-Bajuri noted scornfully that they boasted that their Egyptian charges received the highest honors in Europe’s finest schools but refused to cede any real power to them in managing their own affairs.91 Al-Bajuri also described Egypt’s conditions in gendered terms. Under the British occupation, Egyptians had been feminized; they had been rendered passive and without the capacity or even the will to act. As long as domination by outsiders continued, he argued, there would be “no men in Egypt.” Because al-Bajuri’s article was fairly typical, it may be understood as an accurate record of attitudes toward British rule among Egypt’s educated professional classes. There are, however, other themes that we can extrapolate from the text. Because the writer’s sentiments so clearly demonstrated his recognition of the legal and political framework enjoined by imperial expansion and Western-dominated economic institutions and practices, his article represents an opportunity to reflect on forms of colonial power emerging at the time.92 Colonial or imperial regimes sought ways of consolidating their rule, facilitating their exploitation of local human and natural resources, and carrying out some form of a civilizing mission. These kinds of projects necessitated profound and fundamental changes among the colonized; more succinctly, the colonial policy was aimed at achieving a “systemic re-definition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived.”93 In the words of Lord Cromer, the British-led “reform” project sought to “graft . . . European civilization” on a “backward Eastern Government and society.” This effort would be accomplished by “mould[ing]” the Egyptian “into something really useful.”94

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From this vantage point a number of questions come to mind in reading al-Bajuri. He excoriated the English for excluding Egyptians from positions of authority. We can therefore with good reason read his criticism in light of the rise of nationalist sentiment or class consciousness. We might also, however, look at this same phenomenon as the “introduction of a new game of politics that the colonial would (eventually) be obliged to play if [he or she] were to be counted as political.”95 Al-Bajuri’s protonationalist sentiments were a testament to the fact that Egyptians were compelled to accept and even become advocates of the modern state, to understand the self-regulating liberal moral self as natural, and to embrace the juridical categories and legal institutions associated with both.96 For the Egyptians of this period, the political ideologies of Ottomanism, pan-Islamism, nationalism, and Arabism all shared similar assumptions about the nature of political subjects, and had in common a view of the modern state as the effective force in society. They shared these assumptions in part because the colonial power obliged them to do so. A new kind of political discourse emerged out of the anticolonial, protonationalist thought and rhetoric in the two decades between 1890 and 1910. The renaissance of Arabic letters [al-Nahda] that occurred at the same time spurred a self-conscious effort on the part of many literate Egyptians to reexamine their cultural inheritance and their history according to a mélange of local and imported ideas and values. At the same time, fundamental institutional and social change continued as Egypt’s status as a commodity producer in the European-dominated world economy became further enhanced. Together these developments produced the conditions for the formation of a new kind of political subject.97 Previous chapters have recounted the emergence and evolution of the iconic cultural figures and political subjects of the 1870s and 1880s: the nabih and the mutamaddun. Through the 1890s the city-based, self-disciplined, and pious nabih/mutamaddun slowly evolved into an “Egyptian” with a worldly view of politics and a comprehensive vision of the country’s collective future. As a result, language acquired a more recognizable nationalist meaning while customs, mores, and ways of life were increasingly identified as expressive of Egyptian-ness or Eastern-ness. Part of this “Egyptianization” process was a narrative of threat from the outside and the need to protect Egypt’s essential spiritual inside.98 After the turn of the century such texts as al-Bajuri’s “Al-dhaka’ al-misri” and al-Zayyat’s Civilizing of the New Fallah marked another stage in the transition to political modernity, as Egypt’s collective fate was seen as tied to the strength of the state and other bureaucratic institutions, and as politics itself was expressed through these institutions. Al-Zayyat, for example, subsumed both the new fallah of his imagination and his ’afandi narrator (and by

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extension his ’afandi readers) into a single social and moral grouping— the Egyptian people. Some writings on the events of the Dinshway trial lay these new trends out in stark relief. The incident and its aftermath produced a sense of urgency to disseminate new kinds of political thinking. A few days after the pronouncement and execution of the sentences, Muhammad Shakir wrote a series of articles in al-Umma decrying the harsh treatment of the “ignorant” peasants and the extreme sentences meted out for the “crime.”99 In one of the earliest such instances in modern Egyptian writing, Shakir based his article on the inner thoughts of a fallah as he stood manacled and chained in front of the court.100 This interior monologue was combined with the fact that Shakir described himself (and by extension his ’afandi readership) as belonging to the same jins [race or people] as the shackled peasant.101 While jins has now come to signify race and sometimes ethnicity, in the early twentieth century its meaning was rather indistinct. Shakir’s use of the term is instructive about the ways in which changes in collective identity were understood. Like many words expressing aspects of communal ties and kinship, the term jins experienced a transformation of sorts. Egyptians were forging a new vocabulary in newspapers, books, and legal treatises capable of better articulating legal and political concepts associated with the modern state.102 A look at Shakir’s text reveals the fluidity of the evolving nomenclature of the time. His use of the term jins infused it with new meaning because he situated it in a single equation with the word British. In his writing the idea of “British” became an example of jins and in this way he displaced a degree of what the twenty-first century sensibility recognizes as “nationality” onto the latter term. Reconfigured as nationality, jins also became gendered as it superseded previous categories delineating social bonds and Egypt’s collective identity. A jins of any kind was a masculine domain; thus possession of “Egyptian jins” set one apart from the “British.” Through the word’s newly acquired power to differentiate between national groups, jins was endowed with a quality akin to the contemporary juridical meaning of “citizenship.” But because the term was gendered masculine, the relationship of women to the category of “citizen” was fraught with a host of contradictions. Moreover, Shakir’s article sheds light on a particularly problematic moment in the elaboration of the modern notion of a national people. As the vast array of writing on nationalism has made explicit over the last twenty years, the idea of a “people” is a prerequisite for the appearance and growth of the modern state. It is also a crucial element in the crystallization of modern forms of nationalism.103 Even as Egypt’s polite, literate

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urbanites continued to portray the peasants as ignorant and benighted in their writings, they seemed to reject the notion of an absolute difference between themselves and the villagers. There was some measure of consensus that the fallahin of Dinshway were ignorant and probably guilty of some kind of violation of the law. Both “pro” and “con” positions assumed that the locals were isolated, ignorant, and backward. But even those observers who were convinced of the peasants’ guilt thought the trial had been unfair and the penalties draconian—out of all proportion to whatever offenses had been committed. Nevertheless, there were also such other voices as Mahmud al-Haqqi’s in’Adhra Dinshway, in which he depicted the peasants as having acted completely within their rights. Al-Haqqi described the death of the British captain (from heat stroke) as an accident and the result of bad luck. Following this same line of thought was a series of articles by al-Umma’s publisher, Hashim ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Muwani, to counter pro-British voices in the press. In the articles alMuwani described the fallahin as “calm, quiet and moderate” and guilty of no crime in this case.104 While the assessment of the fallahin as ignorant accorded with urban sensibilities from the 1870s, there is at least one significant difference after 1900. Literate urbanites now considered themselves and the fallahin as parts of a single social, moral, and political orientation that was coming to be called “Egyptian.” A commonplace expression of the recognition of “benighted peasants” as members of the larger sociopolitical whole appeared in al-Hurriya.105 The article was yet another exposition of the vulnerability of peasants to moneylenders. It struck a sympathetic note in defense of the plight of what it called the “increasingly indebted” fallahin, declaring that although they were “ignorant,” they “should not be punished for their ignorance.”106 The peasants, as an integral component of “Egypt,” deserved laws that would “lessen the threat” posed by usurious interest rates charged by “foreign” moneylenders.107 Even though the peasants did not “read newspapers where discussions of their problems appear[ed]” and did not “attend meetings in which speeches about their condition” were given, they were still a vital constituency among the “people [’ahl].”108 Admission into the universal category of the Egyptian “people [’ahl]” did not depend on education, social status, or one’s role in production or consumption. Rather than viewing this idea of a people [’ahl] as “opening” a civic space for wider participation and deliberation, however, it is more accurate to see this “opening” as a strategy of a modernizing power regime to produce morally autonomous individuals.109 Such subjectivity was, and is, necessary for the orderly functioning of modern law, market relations, and the state. As a result the logic prevailed in which the individual fully expects and accepts as natural that these forces will intervene in and even

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produce the ground on which his or her life is lived. Accordingly, attention to the peasants’ plight in 1906 differed from the general tone of the writings of the previous generation. After the turn of the century, authors largely abandoned the tone of charitable sympathy found in the press of the 1870s and 1880s. Instead, al-Hurriya argued that as a legitimate constituency the peasantry had a right to expect the state to intervene on their behalf to look after their well-being. A look at some of the writing on the Dinshway incident and its aftermath might further elucidate this question. First of all, a brief description of the incident itself may be helpful. On June 13, 1906, a group of British officers on their way to their barracks in the Egyptian Delta town of Shibin Al-Kawm stopped in the village of Dinshway to hunt pigeons raised by the villagers for food. Their visit, unfortunately, resulted in one of the most infamous incidents during the British occupation of Egypt. After the soldiers had accidentally wounded a woman in the village and set the threshing floor of a barn on fire, an altercation ensued between the soldiers and the villagers. One of the soldiers was a veteran of the Boer War named Captain Paul. Paul managed to escape the gauntlet of blows raining down on the group but had been struck in the head during the melee. He collapsed and then died of sunstroke while on his way back to the barracks seeking help. Lord Cromer was incensed and convened a special tribunal in Shibin al-Kawm. Fifty-two villagers were convicted; four of them, Hasan Ali Mahfuz, Yusuf Hasan Salim, Sayyid Issa Salim, and Mahmud Darwish Zahran were executed by hanging in front of their families in Dinshway on June 28, 1906. Dozens more were whipped in front of the other villagers and their families. The incident caused outrage in Britain as well as in Egypt. Cromer was forced into retirement the following year, and those remaining in prison were granted amnesty soon afterward. It is difficult to overestimate the importance that Egyptian nationalists assigned to this incident; Dinshway set off a firestorm of protest in Egypt at the time that festered for years. The resentment and anger it caused and the agitation that grew out of it continued for the rest of the decade and into the World War I years, culminating in the 1919 revolution. As a result, the British were forced to concede a limited form of “independence” to Egypt in 1922. Dinshway has sometimes been regarded as a singular moment of crystallization in Egyptian nationalist thought, and indeed this may very well be true. But if we choose to frame the period in this way, we may overlook the fact that both pro-British and anti-British politics furthered the colonial project of remaking the ground on which Egyptian moral and political subjectivity was formed. At this point we shall look at some of the writing about the event to explore the ways in which the place of the

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fallahin in the social and political calculus had been shifting for some time. One newspaper, al-Mu‘tasam, ran an editorial rejecting the claim made in the English-language Daily Gazette that the behavior exhibited by the peasants of Dinshway was the direct result of French machinations.110 The writer, most likely al-Mu‘tasam’s publisher and editor, Ahmad al-Majdi, argued that the “movement against the English” was headed by “the people of Dinshway” themselves and by urban intellectuals “sitting in the cafés of Alexandria.”111 This assertion was made in response to the Gazette, which claimed that French nationals living in Egypt incited the peasants against the English. We can examine the exchange between al-Mu‘tasam and the Daily Gazette for what seem to be two opposing views of “Egyptian” agency; this analysis will in turn tell us much about subaltern politics as well. The English paper, as quoted in al-Mu‘tasam, credited only the “high officials who drink this spirit [i.e., the desire for independence] from the French.”112 Thus, they are the only ones with the capacity to incite ordinary, “ignorant” Egyptians. The implication was that only a small elite exercised autonomous political will, and that even this group took its cues and inspiration from Europeans. According to British officials and local pro-British apologists, one of the primary factors for the occupation was that Egyptians were not yet ready to rule themselves because they had yet to master the intricacies of modern politics and administration. Lord Cromer stated that “Egyptians . . . were little more than ciphers.” Their incapacity for self-government had many causes, not the least of which was “religious prejudice.” The Egyptian “holds fast to the faith of Islam . . . which takes . . . the place of patriotism.” Worse, Islam “crystallizes religion and law into one inseparable and immutable whole,” which renders Egyptian society incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern world.113 If the great mass of Egyptians, the peasants, were seen as having been able to develop endogenous political ideologies and then having acted in accordance with them, such a perspective would have given the lie to the British officials’ contentions that Egypt was still “immature” and enveloped in “backwardness.” On the other hand, al-Mu‘tasam’s rejoinder depicted “café-attending” intellectuals of Alexandria and the fallahin of Dinshway standing together in opposition to the British occupation. Undergirding this sociopolitical aggregation of urbanites and rural inhabitants was a view of Egypt as a single moral-political entity, an insult to whose integrity and honor caused affront equally to all. Al-Mu‘tasam’s al-Majdi termed the Gazette’s denial of Egyptian agency in resistance to the British an “injury” which must be treated “with vigor in order to erase it from the souls of Egyptians.”114 Al-Majdi reasoned that regardless

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of the motivations of Dinshway’s peasants in lashing out at the British officers, the important fact is that they did so. Their deed was then entered into the ledger of “resistance” against the occupation, and thereby subsumed into the career of the Egyptian national political community. The acts of Dinshway’s peasants became an expression of Egypt’s “historical” consciousness. Al-Majdi’s article shows once again how Egyptian-ness was increasingly articulated through the lens of a “people” and manifested through an almost ineffable sense of a collective historical trajectory and mission. And just as the present was reconfigured by a vision of a unitary Egyptian political will and agency, so too was the methodology and understanding of history reformed to secure Egypt’s future destiny. from dinshway to the 1919 revolution To the Egyptian urban intelligentsia, Dinshway represented all that was wrong with British occupation. According to them it showed the extent to which the British ruled with a heavy hand, and it underscored the fact that they employed Egyptians only to further their own aims. During the infamous special tribunal, while British judges and prosecutors oversaw the proceedings, Egyptians participated as both prosecutors and judges. The former ‘Urabist and future Wafd and Constitutional Liberal Party leader, Ibrahim Hilbawi, was the chief prosecutor; Butrus Ghali, the former foreign minister and future prime minister, represented the khedive. At the conclusion of the trial it was Ghali who provided legal confirmation of the death sentences and whippings administered by the British. The news coverage of the trial in the last two weeks of June 1906 was sensational and unlike anything seen previously in the Egyptian press. AlUmma’s reports included full transcripts of the trial and very precise observations of the time of day for each twist and turn of the trial. One could draw a very clear mental picture of the proceedings simply from reading the many columns devoted to the trial in the paper. Al-Umma was no exception in this regard, however, as all the Egyptian papers were filled with accounts of the incident and the trial. There was also a deluge of pamphlets; moreover, Yahya Haqqi’s novella about the Dinshway incident appeared in serialized form over the course of the next few months and was published as a book the following year. While the pro-British press saw either a French-inspired conspiracy or the harbinger of a popular anti-British uprising, the antioccupation press valorized the fallahin of the village and spoke of them as “my brothers” or “our brothers.” While such sentiments had been expressed before, the circumstances of their

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utterance had now changed. It stands to reason, therefore, that the significance of such sentiments vis-à-vis the peasantry had now changed as well. Perhaps Dinshway could have been the moment when the ’afandiya took seriously the peasants’ active role in making Egypt’s future. However, notwithstanding the many statements of fraternalism and solidarity between ’afandi journalists or activists and the peasants of Dinshway, no new political alliance emerged in the aftermath of the incident. Instead, such statements should be read merely as part of the campaign for British evacuation—for which many observers, such as Mustafa Kamil, the Egyptian nationalist and pan-Islamic activist, and his National Party, were increasingly beginning to agitate. The period between 1906 and 1919 saw very powerful currents of nationalist thought as well as campaigning for change by Kamil, his party, its second chairman, Muhammad Farid, and journalists throughout the press. The “victimized fallah” played an important role in nearly every articulation of nationalist sentiment. But within the powerful discourses of nationalist protest, organizing, and mobilization over the course of the next thirteen years, the written representations of the peasants remained relatively unchanged. Indeed, the Egyptian peasant continued to appear in print and in speeches as either a hapless victim or a cipher within an oppressed and voiceless undifferentiated mass. Representations of ignorance and naiveté continued to render the countryside as a place without politics and without any internal social dynamic for change. Historians of Egypt have always marked the protests following the Dinshway incident as the beginning of the modern Egyptian nationalist movement. The incident became enshrined in the nationalist consciousness and was continually cited through the 1919 revolution and afterward as an example of the tyranny of British occupation. Mustafa Kamil often referred to it in his speeches before his death in February 1908. For example, in one speech in Alexandria in October 1907, Kamil spoke of Dinshway as a “humiliation for all Egyptians,” bemoaning the harsh treatment of the “people (’ahali)” in the village.115 His successor, Muhammad Farid, also made Dinshway a standard part of his speeches as well. Yahya Haqqi’s book, mentioned earlier, memorialized the events, while the coverage of the trial filled all the anti-British newspapers. In addition, the newspapers commemorated the event in some way on its anniversary every July, even such organs of the prooccupation press as al-Muqattam, the Englishlanguage Egyptian Gazette, and the French-language L’Égypte. For instance, on the third anniversary of Dinshway in July 1909, Muhammad Sayyid al-Salmuni’s Dimyuti weekly, al-Qanbila, which was extremely critical of the British occupation, argued that that “Dinshway was the greatest blow against the Nile Valley . . . it was an explosion across the

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Egyptian sky and its echo resounded throughout the world.”116 A little less than two weeks later, Amin and Najib Haddad’s Alexandrian weekly, Lisan al-Arab, mocked the agitation associated with the incident and argued that too much was made of this rather minor affair that had involved simple criminal behavior. As the Haddad brothers noted, “Amnesty was granted to the remaining prisoners . . . the English know they were mistaken . . . and Lord Cromer was removed.” They then asked: If all of these “efforts by the English do not atone for Dinshway, what do we want the British to do?”117 Despite all the controversy about the meaning of the event and its peasant victims, Egyptian writing about the countryside continued apace. In print, the peasants remained relatively unchanged between 1906 and the revolution of 1919. For example, less than a year after Dinshway an article from al-Insan spoke about the peasantry in ways that had become customary over the previous ten years.118 This particular article is also interesting because it narrates a historicist version of the decline of Islam as part of its cautionary tale to warn of the dangers of neglecting the education of the peasantry. It called on reformers to try to “change the behavior” of the peasants in order to “avoid further decline” because the uneducated “common cultivators (muzari‘ amma)” are the “death of the umma.” The writer went on to advise those interested in reforming Egypt that they must convince the “city folks [ibna’ al-Mudin]” that this moral reformation of the peasantry was a worthy project to undertake.119 There were also some new wrinkles in the writing on the countryside during this period. For example, there began to appear more and more references to the countryside as a place of leisure and relaxation away from the pressures of the city. But these pieces often contained many of the same critiques and observations that had previously colored accounts of rural life and the countryside. One such piece in al-Qanbila spoke about going to the countryside to rest and view the greenery.120 The writer described his desire to relax in a place away from the city and while there to check on the general condition of the fallahin. His idyllic retreat into nature was soon ruined, however, as he discovered the “disasters of the fallahin” there. Yet again conjuring up the incompetent and corrupt irrigation engineers, the writer remarked that the canals are empty while all the water goes to the rich and to others who can pay bribes to the engineers. Another sojourner writing in the same paper a few months later found a complete lack of security in the countryside, where the peasants confronted not only the vicissitudes of nature and the incompetent irrigation engineers, but also criminal gangs that roamed the countryside stealing crops and livestock.121 Only through correcting the failed government polices of policing the countryside could this “plague” be lifted. Yet another visitor to the coun-

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tryside complained about the ignorant peasants neglecting their duty to the Egyptian collective by growing cotton instead of vegetables.122 Thus Egypt experienced a wheat shortage even as it exported the precious grain. The article then veers into a critique of the ignorance of the peasants, who could earn just as much income from growing less labor-intensive vegetables as they do from the arduous toil entailed by cotton cultivation. Should they turn to raising vegetables, they would also not be subject to the wide fluctuations in the international cotton market. There is an additional dimension of this piece that became more pronounced in writing on the countryside and in the press in general. Even as the writer criticizes the peasants and their propensity to grow cotton, he chides the upper classes for their selfishness. He suggests that it would be beneficial for the government to force the peasants to grow wheat, to refrain from growing cotton, and to ban the export of wheat. But then he concludes that that such a policy would be impossible to implement because some “big shot would say that such a move limits personal freedom.”123 The Egyptian elite became a direct target more frequently than ever with the emergence of nationalist agitation. It was clear after Dinshway that even indirect criticisms of the government were often thinly veiled attacks on the comfortable relationship between powerful Egyptians and the British occupiers. Criticism of the water irrigation authority continued, but there were now more critical complaints directed at the “government [hukuma]” that had not appeared before. Much of this literature linked the presence of the British with the position of the upper classes. Resentment regarding the business as well as the political connections between the British and Egypt’s large landowning class found expression not only in print and in political speeches but also in such acts as the assassination of Butrus Ghali in 1910. Muhammad Hussein Haykal’s 1913 novel, Zaynab, which portrays the lives of Egyptian villagers, is often described as inaugurating a new era in Arabic letters because it is usually considered the first true modern novel written in Arabic. Literary concerns aside, the portraits presented in the book represent a vision of the social world very much in accord with that developed by the ’afandi middle classes. Haykal mocks the urban intelligentsia for its inaction in the face of occupation by the British and collaboration from the Egyptian elite. In one vignette from the novel, Haykal sketches middle-class urbanites as more concerned with arguing over the fine points of politics than with taking effective action against the British. He remarks bitterly that they sit there arguing over the politics of their particular parties while the “British remain in the country and the khedive remains in power.”124 The empty bickering of the middle classes does not lead to any practical political change. Instead, only through

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unity can the literate classes effect change, just as the peasants cannot overcome “tyranny” until they stand up together. The difference between the two groups is that the literate have the requisite knowledge while the “poor workers” still need to be taught these lessons. But the unity called for by Haykel shows how the literature of the time erased the existing sociopolitical world. Zaynab subsumed all social distinctions into the idea of an Egyptian people as a single entity confronting a combination of the British outsiders and outmoded domestic social tradition.125 The landowner’s son, Hamid, heartbroken and looking for true love, runs off to the city and its libertine ways, while the dutiful peasant’s wife who married according to her parent’s wishes perishes of a broken heart as her true beloved, Ibrahim, is conscripted and sent to the furthest reaches of Sudan. Each case serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of love and acceptance of tradition. Hamid also serves as a case history of the idleness of the ruling class as he spends his time daydreaming of love and then is seduced by the licentious attractions of the city. Even as the novel places its characters together in an idyllic social world, none of the characters in Zaynab is able to transcend the social distinctions among elite, ’afandi, and peasant. The lines not only remain intact; if anything, they are strengthened. The peasants in the book appear very similar to those found in other literature of the time and discussed throughout these pages. They are consumed by their work with little concern for the world outside their village. The outside world touches them only in the guise of an oppressive “foreign ruler [mutahakkam ajnabi],” who conscripts Ibrahim, the foreman of the work crew, into an army whose ultimate purpose is only to further the oppression of his own “people [’ahl]” and his umma.126 Ibrahim’s loss of freedom through his sudden conscription into the army is devastating. His only crime—one that he will likely pay for with his life—is that he is a poor man and there is nothing he can do to prevent the “rich and powerful [al-‘aqwiya wa al-‘aghniya]” from disposing of his life as they wish.127 He would have to be patient until “the poor workers [al-fuqara al‘umal]” band together to defend themselves and take their “revenge [al-ta’r] on all their tyrannical rulers.”128 The implication here, as in much of the literature in the post-Dinshway period, is that the homegrown elite and the foreign rulers are working in tandem, exploiting the voiceless peasant masses for their own benefit. Perhaps it is not surprising that there was substantial criticism of the government and by extension the Egyptian notable class between 1906 and 1919. Nevertheless, no efforts were undertaken to bring the mass of the peasantry into the fold of the nationalist project. Indeed, the urban intelligentsia continued to project themselves as the group most able to lead

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Egypt into the future. Perhaps this certainty was shaken by the widespread and disruptive violence and nationwide agitation of the 1919 rebellion. As Lisa Pollard has suggested, the events of 1919 caused considerable worry among both the ’afandi classes and the nationalists among the elite.129 There is no doubt that the rebellion forced them to reconsider their representations of the peasants. Without doubt, the widespread destruction in the countryside caused many observers to pause and reconsider. The rural population increasingly came to represent a new form of danger—one that could overwhelm the urban-based nationalist project. This reconsideration was presaged in the press coverage of the revolution itself. Pollard describes the way in which the “marches led by the middleclass nationalists” were contrasted with the “disorderly bands of ‘rabble’ and ‘riffraff’ ” in the iconography of the revolution. The middle classes Pollard describes concluded that the “rabble” may have contributed to “making Egypt ungovernable for the British, but they did not help give birth to the nation.”130 Soon, the fact that so many of the new nationalist leaders were themselves members of the class that had profited handsomely under the British became no obstacle to supporting them. The ’afandi classes sought a nationalist compromise with the ruling strata. Such an agreement was preferable to any other alternative and protected their project from the danger represented from below. This shift in perception of the peasantry perhaps explains why the ’afandi classes threw in their lot with the Pashas and Beys of the Wafd and the other political parties. The middle classes remained quiet after 1919 until the events of 1952 brought them to the fore once again. conclusion In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the conceptual links between agriculture, the Egyptian peasants, and notions of Egypt and “Egyptian-ness” were cemented throughout the burgeoning public sphere. The archive that this period has bequeathed to us reveals the protobourgeois social imaginary taking shape. Traces of the new sociopolitical calculus can be found across the spectrum of the period’s cultural production, ranging from political editorials and popular humor to didactic works about the value of the study of history to novels. An exploration of this diverse range of texts illustrates the fact that new ideas about Egypt’s past, present, and future were articulated through representations of the nature of an Egyptian people. These discussions were a conduit for modern historicism to enter into the process of Egyptian identity formation. Echoes of something recognizable as

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Egyptian nationalism infused a new understanding of history. The subject of this history was a timeless Egyptian people, while the Egyptian state was recast as the vehicle through which Egypt would achieve its sovereign destiny. The colonial state, defined by a complex bureaucratic apparatus, a modern juridical regime, and a concern with society’s material wellbeing, linked together these discourses of politics, society, and history. The representations of the peasants by the emergent middle classes as demonstrated in the public sphere were efforts to impose an image of the social world that “most conform(ed) to the interest of this social formation.” In so doing it reduced their “subjective intention to objective truth.”131 These representations negated social relations and reproduced a countryside without politics and without any kind of separate agenda; moreover, they collapsed all possible expressions of political conviction in the countryside either into the nationalist project or into criminality. Bourdieu calls this process an “antagonistic act of construction,” whereby the nascent bourgeoisie takes for itself the command of political articulation.132 This antagonistic act is precisely what took place in Egypt between 1875 and 1919.

Conclusion

; The social transformations whose manifestation in Egypt is the subject of these chapters are familiar to historians whose work looks at any aspect of colonialism in virtually any place in the world. Colonies around the globe were intended to be or were transformed into commodity producers for European manufacturers. As is well documented in India, Africa, and large swaths of Asia, extractive processes brought with them colonial states and their administrative and bureaucratic infrastructures, which required large cadres of functionaries in order to operate: teachers, translators, accountants, clerks, engineers, and lawyers. Accordingly, the colonial power or powers set up educational institutions or sent some of the locals to the metropole to acquire the skills required to carry out these necessary administrative and technical tasks. In case after case, over time these groups developed a consciousness defined by a bourgeois political outlook replete with nationalist aspirations.1 As we have seen throughout these pages, however, a number of factors made Egypt’s situation distinctive. First, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the regime of Egypt’s own ruler, the Ottoman-appointed governor Mehmet ’Ali, was the agent of many of the alterations that were so often imposed through colonialism in other places.2 Seeking to build a patrimonial state for his family, ’Ali introduced a series of administrative, bureaucratic, and economic reforms and polices that began the process of remaking Egypt. He built a large modernized army, took the first steps toward a modern bureaucratic state, and opened new educational institutions. The group of technocrats that emerged later from the new state schools or from similar Ottoman institutions in the Levant eventually evolved into the urban ’afandiya, the main protagonists of this book. The entire project was underwritten through the introduction and massive

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cultivation of long-staple cotton grown for export. Second, even after the waning of Mehmet ’Ali’s regime, Egypt was never an official colony of any particular European state. While it is true that Great Britain governed Egypt after 1882, a number of European states had an indirect role in Egyptian affairs that affected the formulation and implementation of the Western authority’s decisions. After Britain’s occupation of the country in July 1882, British officials were compelled to maneuver through a complicated field of political authority and the contradictory interests of other European states on a regular basis. This complexity was especially true of the period before the settlement of the Entente Cordiale in 1904.3 Complicating this situation still further was the fact that Egypt continued to be, at least nominally, a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914. The Porte was usually quiescent regarding British suzerainty over its socalled province. This façade of legality lent the British occupation an air of legitimacy. Whitehall found this masquerade of Ottoman sovereignty, flimsy as it was, important enough to maintain even at the cost of some freedom of movement for their “agent and consul general” (the official title of the ranking Briton in Egypt, and the country’s de facto ruler). Ottoman authorization, even if perfunctory, was required for any number of official acts. The Porte “officially” promulgated all edicts, even those requested by British officials. In addition, until the British declared Husayn Kamil Sultan of Egypt in 1914 in response to the Ottoman Empire’s entering World War I on the side of the Central Powers, Istanbul officially approved the ascension of each khedive. Political and administrative details aside, Egypt remained within the orbit of the Ottoman cultural world. Throughout the period there continued to be frequent and fairly easy movement between Cairo and Istanbul. It is true that from the time that Arabic became the official Egyptian language of state in the middle of the nineteenth century there was less emphasis on teaching and learning Turkish; by the second decade of the twentieth century few if any members of the middle-class intelligentsia— the focus of this study—were competent in Turkish. The diminution of Turkish as a bureaucratic language certainly circumscribed the influence of Ottoman Turkish culture among Egypt’s new professional classes. Nevertheless, in the period between 1870 and 1900, there continued to be cross-fertilization of political thought among Istanbul, Cairo, Aleppo, Beirut and other Ottoman cities.4 Ottoman constitutionalism, the Young Turk movement, and the pan-Islamic ideas associated with Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II were all influential and counted large numbers of followers among Egyptians. In addition, the Ottoman claim to the caliphate, however suspect on historical grounds, continued to carry moral and political weight with many Muslims in Egypt.

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The extent to which Ottoman prestige in Egypt was a result of this religious consideration is a question that few historians have investigated with any precision. Indeed, researchers have tended to either ignore or downplay the Ottoman connection in Egyptian history from the time of Khedive Isma’il (1863–1879) and after. An exception to this is Ehud Toledano’s seminal study on mid-century Egypt, which represents a model for future work on this question.5 The minimization of the Ottoman connection may be a product of Arab nationalist traditions in the historiography that migrated from Arabic into other languages as well. These tend at their most extreme to view the entire Ottoman period as either a dark interregnum for Arab supremacy in the Muslim world or merely as a prelude to the modern Arab awakening. But there is also another possibility. Perhaps historians have been uncertain about the best way to assess the religious dimensions of the relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire because they usually emphasize the emergence of supposedly secular protonationalist political ideologies and collective notions of belonging in this period of Egyptian history. These doubts may also be reflected in the absence of work investigating the ways in which the currents of Islamic reform so important at the time permeated the putatively secular nascent public sphere. This is not to say that the contributions of Islamic reformers to modern Egyptian cultural history are ignored. A voluminous amount of work on modern Islamic history and the Arab literary renaissance, al-Nahda, acknowledges the presence of Muslim jurists or those educated in Islamic institutions among the important voices within the emergent discourses of politics and society. Nevertheless, almost without exception this writing dwells on separating the “religious” content of these figures’ contributions from their “secular” work. The present book maintains that this approach is a side effect of contemporary historiography and not a reflection of the reality of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptian cultural life. In these pages I have tried to take the words of my subjects as they wrote them. References to Islam abounded in almost all forms of cultural production at the time. Amna Hijazi, for example, claims that part of the reason for the popularity of the ‘Urabi movement was that its leaders used rhetoric that combined the idea of “Egypt for the Egyptians” and “Jihad in the way of God.” Charles Wendell rightly argues that the “sentiment of community based on religion” was stronger than “ethnic affinity” and nationalism in the twentieth century and that the “old terms umma and watan seemed to offer vistas of . . . almost boundariless freedom.”6 Egyptians were reworking these old terms, and a religious sense of community helped to recast them in a context in which a new kind of “boundariless

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freedom” became operative.7 This reinterpretation was not merely rhetorical flourish or the use of popular idioms. Rather, these references to religion index a history and sets of sociocultural organizing principles and understandings of community not fully captured by the terms secularism or nationalism. These chapters have argued that many of the journalists, social critics, and political agitators attempting to redraw the cultural, political, and moral boundaries of Egypt came to advocate forms of protonationalist thought that were informed in various ways by the moral vision and notions of community that Islamic modernists had distilled from Islamic traditions. The political consciousness and the sense of social mission, so prominent in the public sphere, owed much to the influence of the nineteenth-century Islamic reform movement associated with the Iranian Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh.8 These figures and their many protégés and followers were extremely prominent in the social and cultural spaces of nineteenth-century Egypt—the press, the capitalist publishing industry, the literary salons, the welfare and learned associations and voluntary societies, the Masonic lodges and the theatre—in which new kinds of urban (’afandi/bourgeois) sensibilities were articulated. Commentary about Egyptian “retardation” or “backwardness” began to appear in the Egyptian Arabic press, reform literature, and agricultural writing with the birth of these new fields of endeavor in the 1870s. The autocritique became one of the primary modes of expression for Egyptian publics and indeed in modern cosmopolitan Arab culture. The logic informing much of the analysis of the debilitating effects of backwardness and ignorance drew heavily on the thought of al-‘Afghani and his disciples. As we have seen, al-‘Afghani recast the Islamic notions of neglect [tafrit] and excess [ifrat] as elements of a blueprint for evaluating all social, cultural, and political phenomena, issues, and questions. He presented the two concepts as a schema to index the extent to which Muslims adhered to their traditions. For al-‘Afghani the default position was moderation. He drew connections between societal health, economic strength, and moral probity, saying, “When we see some kind of deadly germ [jurthuma] in society [al-‘ijtima‘a al-insani], we must try to reform [islah] society by spreading the ways to earn a living [awa’ish] . . . to divide hardship [equally among members of society] and to maintain moderation in our desires [shahawat].”9 Excess implied the rejection of all things Islamic and Eastern and the uncritical adoption of all things Western. The further implication of ifrat was that one was not fulfilling the individual and collective responsibilities and duties of a Muslim. Tafrit or neglect, on the other hand, signified a stubborn obstinacy to hold on to received notions and customs regardless of their appropriateness for the

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era or their conformity to Islamic law. On this point al-‘Afghani was suggesting that there was an overzealous attachment to practices, rituals, and beliefs that may have no place in Islam at all. Al-‘Afghani contrasted the rationality of the moderate position with the antirational extremes of excess and neglect. Only the rational person can see that Islam is appropriate for every time and place. For this reason Islam enjoins the believer to use his or her reason and judgment to insure that her practice of the religion is appropriate for its context. The ideal path was moderation or balance between these two extremes. Through the presence of al-‘Afghani and his acolytes in the press and the field of commercial publishing, the neglect-moderation-excess paradigm soon became a template used to frame all public issues. It was woven into the fabric of social, political, and agricultural reform discourses as commentators wrote and spoke of neglect on the part of the peasants or excess on the part of the rich. Even when the pattern was not invoked explicitly, its traces are detectable because much of critical public discourse took the same general form. For example, the ’afandiya intelligentsia generally portrayed themselves as taking the moderate, balanced, or most often the “civilized [mutamaddun]” position, while they described the peasantry’s putative unwillingness to accept change as an example of their general “backwardness” and the elite’s supposed desire to adopt all things Western as a form of “blind imitation.” All these representations had equivalents in the discourses of Islamic reform. Accordingly, peasant “neglect” in holding on to ancient and outmoded practices was depicted as “backwardness” manifested in superstition and ignorance, in ways that closely resembled the Islamic modernists’ critiques of popular religion. Condemnations of the elite’s blind imitation of the West evoked the blind imitation and empty formalism for which Islamic reformers criticized the authoritative institutions of Islamic law and education. In this way, the neglect-moderation-excess formulation joined the categories “civilized” and “properly Islamic.” Because Egyptians crafted their ideas about a “civilized” society and a reformed self according to the neglect-moderationexcess framework, it subsequently became a crucial element in the deliberation of social and political questions for decades. For the ’afandiya, the neglect-moderation-excess equation was not only a lens through which to view all problems in agriculture, commerce, public health, and politics, but also a ready organizing logic for responses to every moral or political question of the time. But the pattern offered even more than that: it also served as a tool in delineating the cartography of social relations in Egypt. As the ’afandiya represented peasants as “neglectful,” the wealthy as “excessive,” and themselves as “moderate,” they embedded this formulation into the very core of modern Egyptian identity.

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The multivalent nature of the neglect-moderation-excess framework ensured that no single political faction of the intellectual classes could monopolize it. Both pro- and anti-British voices in public life framed a variety of questions according to its logic. To be sure, over time the neglectmoderation-excess equation evolved with changing political circumstances. Thus by the turn of the twentieth century, “excessive” Westernizers were all too willing to jettison “Egyptian” rather than “Eastern” customs and habits. Twenty years earlier these customs would have been described as “Eastern” rather than “Egyptian.” Nevertheless, neglect-moderation-excess served as the template that structured much of public discussion and disputation throughout the entire period. Representations of the fallah were subject to the complicated calculus of the fallah-as-backward and the fallah-as-Egyptian. For example, one writer reached the somewhat typical, if seemingly paradoxical, conclusion in an agricultural journal in 1893 that “Six thousand years of fallah experience can still aid the cultivator as long as that experience accords with the knowledge of American and European cultivators.”10 Representations of the “neglectfully” conservative peasant and the peasant-asreservoir of Egyptian authenticity seemed to be at odds with one another. Reconciling these apparently contradictory representations fell to the “moderate,” civilized ’afandiya who knew best how to adapt to the new era while maintaining what was essential in Egyptian identity. The fallah, who had acquired his stock of agricultural knowledge and techniques from “his grandfather,” remained resistant to the “new techniques of this era.”11 Therefore, any pain resulting from the imposition of new agricultural methods would be worthwhile for the sake of all Egyptians.12 Imposing such methods was presumably a task that only the ’afandiya were qualified to undertake. Knowledge of “this era” required a new openness to Western organizational techniques and technologies. The urgency with which many ’afandiya outlined this need indicates that the concern with outmoded agricultural practices and insufficient scientific knowledge had to do with more than simply producing higher yields of cotton. This writer argued that, “advancing politics” occurs only through “strengthening financial affairs,” and this desideratum could be obtained only through “agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing.”13 Not only because Egypt’s potential industrial capacity was limited by political circumstances, but also because the country had an ideal climate and fine soil, it could most easily “reap its rewards” through agriculture.14 Thus the desire to introduce new agricultural techniques and methods was tied to building a new kind of polity with a new political agent at the helm, the civilized urban ’afandi.

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This development points to an irony we have glimpsed throughout these pages. As the literate classes attempted to turn the new sociopolitical order imposed by Britain’s de facto colonial rule to their advantage, they aided its refashioning of Egypt. Their attempts to maneuver within the emergent economic and political structures facilitated the colonial project’s goal of remaking the conditions that shaped Egyptians’ lives.15 As we have seen, through the ’afandiya’s conscious strategies and political agitation (including anticolonial activism) and by its representations of other social groups, in particular peasants and women, the new class assumed a commanding position within Egypt’s emergent social landscape. By deploying new historicist logic they wove a voiceless “new fallah” into the fabric of national identity in the years between 1900 and 1919. In realizing their political and social goals, however, the ’afandiya were ultimately a critical instrument for the success of a Western power’s constituting a new type of society in Egypt. Their achievements provided the foundations for “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise” that have defined Egyptians’ lives in the most profound sense for the last one hundred and twenty years.16 All these observations raise some thorny questions about agency and history. In Elizabeth Thompson’s innovative work on Syria and Lebanon, she writes that under French rule, the Syrians and Lebanese were “colonial citizens,” not “passive subjects,” because they “actively engaged in the definition of their civil status” through the “colonial civic order.”17 They were agents in defining their own political-legal subjectivity. Likewise, Ussama Makdisi writes in his fine book on late-Ottoman Lebanon that the relationship between colonizer and colonized is better understood as an “arena of exchange” rather than as a “dichotomy.” Makdisi argues that in regulating different facets of the colonial encounter, the imperial power presented “the indigenous inhabitants” with avenues for “reinterpreting their own history, their own communal self-definition, and ultimately, their own rigid social order.”18 While this encounter was “never equal,” the colonized were nonetheless agents in their own self-fashioning. But this line of argumentation raises the question of the ultimate agency of that political, legal, and moral subjectivity. Were not the modern subjectivities produced by the “indigenous inhabitants” described in these books subsumed into the project of secular Western political modernity? If so, is it not then legitimate to question the significance of this agency if it did little more than produce local variations of a universal model of Western modernity? Chakrabarty offers a provisional resolution in his challenge to historians of the colonial and postcolonial world. He urges us to “create conjoined and disjunctive genealogies for European categories of political modernity” as we examine the “frag-

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mentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole.”19 This book has tried to respond to this challenge by showing how modern (bourgeois) social and political categories could not capture the Egyptian peasant; the peasant was nether civilized nor citizen nor yet reformed Muslim. Representations of peasants as pseudo ’afandis in the first two decades of the twentieth century are most telling illustrations of the frustration of the modern projects of nation, state, and religious reform in their attempts to translate the life-worlds of the fallah into political modernity. The ultimate irony was that the project itself betrayed its own limitations. In the end it seemed that the peasants of Egypt could become subject to the project of political modernity and become civilized and modern only if they were no longer peasants. Finally, the preceding pages constitute a cultural and intellectual history, or perhaps more aptly, a social and cultural history. This book has shown how discourses on peasants, on civilizing, and on reform were tied to the interests of specific social groups. In contrast to much of the cultural and intellectual history of modern Egypt, this book has eschewed framing a discussion of the period’s cultural and social development as an episode in a battle between civilizational worldviews—religious or traditional forces lined up against secular or modern ones. Even some very sophisticated intellectual and cultural historians have treated Egyptian history as an epic conflict in which religious or traditional forces are arrayed against secular or modern forces.20 These pages call into question such an analytical framework by showing that “secular modern” thought and “Islamic” modernism both emerged from the same intellectual and cultural antecedents. In fact these chapters suggest that both of these putatively rival worldviews are products of the same historical movements and therefore, however one may label them, they have far more in common than is often recognized.21 This observation in turn raises difficult questions for the historian of the postcolonial world. This book has attempted to situate the peasant question and its attendant ramifications within its historical context, without resorting to some of the customary narratives of Egyptian history such as national awakening, modernization, or the coming of the West. One of the primary assumptions informing these pages is that these frameworks distort or lead to misreadings of the profound influence of the period’s religious and social reform projects on the evolution of modern Egyptian political and social identity. The tendency is to simplify the complex admixture of historical and intellectual factors out of which these projects evolved. Even more importantly, as Chakrabarty reminds us, these narratives also often ignore or “anthropologize” remnants and fragments of other

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forms of historicity with their own traditions of knowledge and lifeworlds.22 Those unruly elements must somehow be translated into the universal story of the nation or the spread of capitalist modernity lest they unsettle the unity of these other stories. In response to Chakrabarty’s challenge to historians of the postcolonial world to provincialize Europe, this study has tried to take account of other forms of cultural expression that may not fit into conventional narratives of the “Nahda” or of the drama of the so-called Nationalist Period. Accordingly, these pages attempted to include remnants and traces of other kinds of agendas that were not and could not be subsumed into the project of the nation. To whatever extent it has succeeded, this success is perhaps accidental. So I present these chapters as one possible way to describe the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. If I have been successful they raise more questions than they can answer.

Reference Matter

Notes

notes to introduction 1. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. 2. See Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments and his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 3. Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 59. In making this point Selim acknowledges her debt to Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments for her thinking on this question. 4. Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary, 19–48. 5. For example, on land tenure see al-Wakil, Mulkiya al-‘aradi al-zira’iya fi misr khilal al-qarn al-tasi’ ‘ashr; Hamid and al-Dasuqi, Kibar al-mullak wa fallahin fi misr 1837–1952; Ghalwash, “Peasant Land Tenure in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt”; Barakat, Tatawwur al-milkiya al-zira’iya fi misr wa atharuha ‘ala al-haraka al-siyasiya; Hamid, “ ’Istiqrar al-mulikiya al-fardiya lil-’ard alzira’iya”; Baer, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt. On economic transformation and incorporation into the world system, see Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy; Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule. On the institutions of nineteenth-century Egypt both before and after the ‘Urabi revolt, see Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East; Tollefson, Policing Islam; Brown, “The Ignorance and Inscrutability of the Egyptian Peasantry,” “Law and Imperialism,” “Brigands and State Building,” “Peasants and Notables in Egyptian Politics,” and Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt; Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives. On the courts and legal changes, see Hoyle, The Mixed Courts of Egypt; Cannon, Politics of Law and the Court in Nineteenth-Century Egypt; and Brinton, The Mixed Courts of Egypt. On the press, publishing, and intellectual developments, see Hijazi, al-Wataniya al-Misriya fi al-‘asr al-hadith; Jaddane, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith; and Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. 6. Luckily over the past few years there has been some attempt to fill this lacuna in work on Egypt and on Syria/Lebanon in the work of Lisa Pollard and Elizabeth Thompson. In Nurturing the Nation, Pollard shows how the “moral politics of colonialism” came to influence Egyptian identity formation through the institutions of the modernizing state and the reform-oriented press and new

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media. Thompson demonstrates in her work on colonial and postcolonial Syria and Lebanon that the modernizing state was able to effect changes in the cultural worlds of its subjects through the “colonial civic order.” See her Colonial Citizens. 7. Selim, citing Badawi, discusses the connections between the medieval shadow-play genre and writing about peasants in the nineteenth century. In this regard she notes that a “distinct and fully developed popular, local dramatic tradition . . . certainly existed in Egypt in the late nineteenth century . . . as part of an innovative and resonant modern dialogue with an established popular tradition” (The Novel and the Rural Imaginary, 27). See also Badawi, Early Arabic Drama. 8. On the emergence of the ’afandi classes and their material culture see Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class.” 9. Eve Troutt Powell’s recent contribution looks at a similar phenomenon. In A Different Shade of Colonialism, Powell elucidates the role of the raced-other on the production of modern Egyptian identity. See also Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class”; Pollard, Nurturing the Nation. 10. A particularly interesting example of this genre is “Mata tamaddun almuslimun [When Will Muslims Become Civilized]?” by Ahmad Bek Ajayif, published in the newspaper al-Umma, 26 April 1906,1. The article, which was initially published in the Islamic newspaper Kasaba in Baku, posed the question, “Will Muslims accept the European civilizing process [madaniya] in the future or will they establish a new Islamic civilizing process [madaniya]?” This kind of thinking was at times a subset of the literature contrasting the “backwardness” of the East with the development or advancement of the West. notes to chapter 1 1. Throughout the following pages I use the English words “peasant,” “peasants,” and “peasantry” interchangeably with their Arabic equivalents fallah and fallahin. 2. See Dallal, “Appropriating the Past,” 325–358. 3. Dipesh Chakrabarty defines political modernity as the “rule by modern instructions of state, bureaucracy and capitalism.” Provincializing Europe, 4. 4. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, eds., Powers of the Secular Modern, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006, 12–30 and 206–242. 5. See Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 191–220. 6. Mehmet ’Ali ruled Egypt between 1805 and 1848. One can find innumerable books on his life and regime. Some of the more noteworthy recent works are Dayqah, Dawlat muhammad ‘ali wa-al-garb; Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men; Fargette, Méhémet ’Ali; Lawson, Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism; and Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali. 7. See Hitta, Tarikh misr al-iqtisadi fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr; the same author’s Tarikh al-zira‘a al-misriya fi ‘ahd muhammad ‘ali al-Kabir; and Rivlin, Agricultural Policy of Muhammad Ali. 8. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants.

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9. Fahmy explores the experience of conscripted peasants in the army as well as their efforts to avoid conscription. See also Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 140–141; Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 124–126. 10. Ghalwash, “Peasant Land Tenure in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt,” 171–175. 11. Ghalwash, “Peasant Land Tenure,” 31–78. 12. See Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 309. 13. See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 184. 14. Baer, History of Landownership in Egypt, 34; Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians, 117. 15. Pollard, Nurturing the Nation; see especially Chapter 3. 16. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 187, 193, and 212. 17. See Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt, 35. 18. See Hoyle, Mixed Courts of Egypt, 9; Brinton, Mixed Courts of Egypt, 25. 19. See Hoyle, Mixed Courts, 42. 20. See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants. 21. Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya al-zira‘iya fi misr wa atharuha ‘ala alharaka al-siyasiya, 291. 22. A faddan is equal to 1.038 acres. 23. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 40–41, 100–109; Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 294; Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 161–162. 24. See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 187–188; Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives,104–105. 25. See Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani min al-qarn al tasi‘ ‘ashr 1848–1891, 149. 26. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 103–109, on this practice during the 1860s and 1870s. 27. “Min al-Zari‘,”Al-Kawkab al-Misri, 26 June 1879, 4. 28. Ibid. 29. See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 62. 30. Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 187. Barakat discusses the negative reaction of these Egyptians toward Syrians in the nineteenth century in Tatawwur almilikiya. See also Brinton, Mixed Courts, 18. On the statistics of immigration to Egypt with a particular emphasis on Syrian Christians, see Philipp, “Demographic Patterns of Syrian Immigration to Egypt in the Nineteenth Century,” 171–195. 31. See Zayn al-Din, Al-Zira‘a al-misriya fi ‘ahd al-ihtilal al-biritani, 151–184. 32. See Baer, History of Landownership, 68–70, 102–110; al-Nadim, ed., Sulafat al-Nadim, 127; Brinton, Mixed Courts, 70. 33. See Cannon, Politics of Law and the Court, 41–45. See also Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, 149–155; Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 190–199. 34. Baer, History of Landownership, 67. 35. See Baer, History of Landownership, 10–12. 36. Shalabi enumerates some ninety taxes to which Egyptians were subject in Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, 215; see also Villiers-Stuart, Egypt after the War, 275–276.

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37. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 38–39. On the Suez Canal, see also Sayyid Husayn Jallal, Qanat al-Suwis wa al-atma’ al-istamariya al-dawliya; Karabell, Parting the Desert; and Burchell, Building the Suez Canal. 38. See Baer, History of Landownership, 28–29; see also Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants,180. 39. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 108–110. 40. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 264–265; see also Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 233, and al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriya, 22 August 1871. See also ‘Azabawi, ‘Ummud wa mushayikh al-qura wa dawruhum fi al-mujtama‘ al-misri fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr, 68–88; Baer, History of Landownership, 55. 41. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 57–59 and 208–209. Fairly typical examples of such complaints and observations may be found in “Hal al-fallah,” Misr, 7 November 1879, 4, and “Hal al-fallah,” al-Tijara, 3 November 1879, 1–2. On the corruption of tax collectors, see “Sayarifat al-‘ariyaf,” al-Tijara, 5 November 1879, 3. 42. “Fallahin misr—fallahu misr,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 17 October 1879, 3; see also Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, 216. 43. See “Sayarifat al-‘ariyaf” in al-Tijara, 5 November 1879, 3; “Hal alfallah,” Misr, 7 November 1879, 4; “Fallahin misr—fallahu misr,” al-Kawkab alMisri, 17 October 1879, 3. Villiers-Stuart wrote that fallahin who requested receipts for the taxes they paid were beaten; Egypt after the War, 439. 44. “Hal al-fallah,” Misr, 7 November 1879, 4. 45. “Fallahin misr—fallahu misr,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 17 October 1879, 3. 46. Al-Tijara, 5 May 1879, 4. 47. The agreement was finalized in 1875 and the courts began formal operations in 1876. See Hoyle, Mixed Courts; Cannon, Politics of Law and the Court; and Brinton, Mixed Courts. 48. Brinton, Mixed Courts, 6. 49. Hoyle, Mixed Courts, 6. 50. See Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 123–133. Baer noted that the company [Kom al-Akhdar] became insolvent in 1888. History of Landownership, 68. 51. Cannon, Politics of Law and the Court, 83. 52. Brinton, Mixed Courts, 70; Hoyle, Mixed Courts, 14. 53. Egyptian peasants, however, were almost certainly accustomed to government officials, merchants, agents, and moneylenders speaking languages other than Arabic. The Egyptian countryside had been crisscrossed for millennia by armies and traders from around the Mediterranean and Africa. Under the Ottoman Mamluks, Turkish became the bureaucratic language for centuries. 54. See Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 55–70. The quotation comes from page 66. 55. Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 69. 56. The standard work on the modern history of cotton cultivation in Egypt remains Owen’s Cotton and the Egyptian Economy. 57. According to ‘Abd al-Fattah Jalal, al-Nadim almost single-handedly brought the “peasant question” into the consciousness of the writers, activists,

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and other public intellectuals, including Mustafa Kamil, the nationalist leader of the early twentieth century. See al-Nadim, ed. Sulafat al-Nadim, 143–148. 58. See the issues of al-Waqt for 12, 15, 25, 28, and 29 May 1880 (pages 1–2) for a series on the methods of jute growing and the profit potential of jute cultivation; see also the 21 March 1880 issue of Nashrat al-Jam‘iya al-Zira‘iya alMisriya for an article on the benefits of steam engines for increasing the efficiency of summer irrigation, (6). On 8 May 1884, an article, “Dudat al-qutn,” appeared in al-Zaman describing the conditions that favored the spread of the cotton weevil and methods of containing it (3). 59. For typical pieces detailing the peasants’ toil, filthy living conditions, poor food and clothing, and exploitation at the hands of government officials, see “Fallahin misr–fallahu misr,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 17 October 1879, 3; the untitled lead article in al-Watan, 10 April 1880,1; and “Hal al-fallah,” al-Mufid, 23 January 1882, 1–2. Before 1880 al-Tijara and al-Waqt reported commodity and share prices for markets in Alexandria, Cairo, London, and Paris. 60. La’ihat Idarat al-Jam‘iya al-Zira‘iya al-Misriya [Administrative Proposal for the Egyptian Agricultural Association], 1880. 61. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 3: 20–21. See ‘Abdallah alNadim’s review of al-Mufid in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 16 October 1881, 303. 62. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya 2: 224–226; and Jayyid, al-Sihafa al-misriya wa thawrat 1919 [The Egyptian Press and the 1919 Revolution], 18. 63. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya 1, 22–23; Hartmann, Arabic Press of Egypt, 32, 73. 64. Nathan Brown has argued, concerning a slightly later period, that much of the concern for peasant cultivators found in the Egyptian press is best understood as an expression of the worries of what he terms the agricultural middle class. As he puts it, the agricultural middle class in the early twentieth century used “its position to cast its problems as the problems of the countryside as a whole” [146]. This point is certainly applicable to the 1870s and 1880s as well. See his “Peasants and Notables in Egyptian Politics,” 146–160. 65. “Hal al-fallah,” al-Mufid, 23 January 1882, 1–2. 66. “Al-fallah,” al-Mufid, 26 January 1882, 4. 67. For example, see Eder, Managing Egypt’s Poor; Ghalwash, “Peasant Land Tenure”; and Brown, “Peasants and Notables.” 68. Villiers-Stuart, Egypt after the War. See also Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 148–151; Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians, 73. See also Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 324–326; Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, 108; AlNadim, Sulafat al-Nadim, 191–193. 69. “Madha sina‘ Muhammad Ali in al-Bustani, ed., Al-Urwa al-Wuthqa wa al-thawra al-tahriryya al-kubra lil-Jamal al-Din al-’Afghani wa Shaykh Muhammad Abduh, 12–13. 70. This was a commonsense accepted truth by the 1890s. In 1896 the Cairo daily al-Ikhlas, edited by a Christian, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Masih, compared the debt, foreclosures, and formation of large holdings to the “old days” when the “Turks” were granted large tracts of land by Mehmet ’Ali; see “Wayl al-fallah

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min al-matami‘,” Al-Ikhlas, 12 February 1896, 3. In 1897 the newspaper alFallah described the “despotism” and “injustice, tyranny” of the 1890s as equivalent to the “time of abandonment” associated with Mehmet ’Ali; see ”Al-‘Umda wa al-fallah,” Al-Fallah, 8 October 1897, 1. 71. Jayyid, al-Sihafa al-misriya wa thawrat 1919, 157. See also Di Tirazi, 3: 18 and al-Tanahi al-Kitab al-matbu‘at bi-misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr: tarikh wa tahlil 1996, 112–115. 72. For example, see “Akhabar dakhaliya,” Misr, 23 October 1878, 4; “AlFallah,” al-Mufid, 26 January 1882, 4; and “Halat al-fallahin,” al-Zaman, 27 July 1884, 1. 73. “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘” [“The Needs of the Ignorant are in the Hands of Greedy Cheats”], Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 July 1881, 11–12. See also “Hal al-fallah,” al-Mufid, 23 January 1882, 1–2. 74. For example, in “Fallahu misr” in Wafa Muhammad’s al-Kawkab alMisri, 17 October 1879, 3, concluded that no difference existed between the current situation and “the era of Sa’id [viceroy of Egypt from 1854 to 1863].” 75. Villiers-Stuart reported that Muslim moneylenders (“usurers”) do not lend money at usurious rates; instead, they purchase the crops of the borrower before they are harvested at a “discount between 33%–50%.” Villiers-Stuart, Egypt after the War, 275. 76. Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 48–49. 77. Almost every book written about the countryside or peasants echoes these sentiments. See Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, for a typical example. In English see Baer’s classic work, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, 274. Critchfield’s Shahhat: An Egyptian Peasant is more literary in its presentation of these ideas. Perhaps the definitive work in this genre is Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, first published in French in 1938. For critiques of these views of the peasants, see Mitchell’s work on Critchfield in “The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant,” 129–150; and his “Nobody Listens to a Poor Man,” in Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, 153–178. 78. The Greeks were—and still are—often singled out for particular opprobrium. A fairly recent example is ‘Ashmawi’s al-Yunaniyun fi Misr. The book catalogs the putative excesses of the Greek grocery store owners. They are accused of lending money at usurious rates and “corrupting” Egyptians by encouraging depravity through the sale of alcohol. 79. The chief British official in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, claimed that the Syrians treated the borrowers with more severity than other moneylenders Modern Egypt, 1:196–203); Also see Philipp, “Demographic Patterns of Syrian Immigration,” 184–189, on this point. 80. Al-Zaman ran a series of articles through June and July 1884 with the title “Halat al-fallahin.” The citation comes from an article published on 28 June 1884, 1. 81. “Hal al-fallah,”al-Mufid, 23 January 1882, 1–2. 82. See Barakat, Tatawwur al-milikiya, 397–398. 83. Al-Kawkab al-Misri, 17 October 1879, 3. See also “zulm al-musha’ikh lilahali” al-Waqt, 3 June 1880, 2–3, for the same sentiments.

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84. “Al-Tajir al-himar wa al-fallah al-makkar,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 17 July 1881, 99. 85. See Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt’s Urabi Movement,122–132; Jayyid, al-Sihafa al-misriya wa thawrat 1919, 167–71; 203–07; and 237–41. 86. See Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” See also Scott, Conscripts of Modernity. 87. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 210–215. 88. “Wasiya wataniya.” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 16 October 1881, 294–296. 89. Ibid. 90. Jaddane, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith, 20–22. 91. “Al-Ma‘arif,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 3 June 1881, 1. 92. Al-Kawkab al-Misri,1 August 1879, 1–2. 93. Ibid. 94. On al-‘Afghani’s life, see Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism. 95. For al-‘Afghani’s ideas in this regard, see the translation of his speeches in Keddie, Islamic Response, 102–108. Al-‘Afghani denied claims by those who called his ideas secularist. See his rebuttal of this thesis in “Commentary on the Commentator” in Keddie, Islamic Response, 123–129. 96. Al-Kawkab al-Misri, 1 August 1879, 1–2. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ghanim, al-Iqtisad al-siyasi, 4. 100. Nizam al-Shura. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 83. 101. One can cite a wide variety of these articles, such as “Al-‘adl wa al-huquq,” (Al-Mahrusa, 27 April 1886, 3), which reiterated a popular theme by highlighting the importance of qualified lawyers with the necessary educational preparation and the essential skills to “ensure the rule of equality.” Jaridat al-Fallah (14 June 1887, 1) in “Khidma wataniya,” promised to produce a list of lawyers, accountants and translators who “charge a low price . . . and who provide services to the poor.” 102. The quote comes from “Al-Insaniya,” al-Mufid, 26 December 1881, 1. Nearly identical statements appeared in “Amani,” Misr, 7 November 1879, 2; and “Tabi‘at islah al-Azhar,” al-Mufid, 16 February 1882, 4. 103. See Hadidi, “ ‘Abdallah al-Nadim Adiban,” in Buhuth nadwat al-ihtifal bi-Dhikra murur mi’yat ‘amm ‘ala wafat ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, 165–176. See also ‘Imara, Tayyarat al-Yuqza al-islamiya al-haditha, 138. 104. Wahid, ‘Adib Ishaq: ‘ashiq al-hurriya, 32. 105. Blunt wrote a well-known memoir of the ‘Urabi uprising called Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. 106. See Keddie, Islamic Response, 181–187, for al-‘Afghani’s response to Ernest Renan’s accusations that Islam and science are incompatible. 107. See Wahid, Adib Ishaq: ‘ashiq al-hurriya. See also Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 89. 108. A review of Bab al-Funun can be found in al-‘Umda, 14 May 1896, 4. See al-Nadim, ed., Sulafat al-Nadim, 3–23.

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109. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 2–23. 110. See Asad, Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, for a sense of the importance Muslims place on the Qur’an and the hadith. See also Sells, Approaching the Qur’an. Wadud’s Qur’an and Woman offers a critical perspective. See also Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought for an examination of the ways that readings of the hadith have changed over time. 111. Hallaq shows that the contemporary understanding of taqlid as “blind imitation” is a recent phenomenon. See his Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law, 86–120; and “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” 3–41. 112. See Gesink, “ ‘Chaos on the Earth,’ ” 710–733. 113. “Haqiqat al-insan wa haqiqat al-watan,” Misr, 30 December 1877, 1. Al‘Afghani expresses the same ideas in “Al-‘illa al-haqiqa li-sa‘adat al-insan,” in the same issue of Misr, 4. See also “Tarbiya,” Misr, 5 June 1879, 2; and “Hakim alsharq,” Misr, 24 May 1879, 1–2. 114. “Hakim al-sharq,” Misr, 24 May 1879, 1–2. 115. On this point see Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 38–98. 116. See Keddie’s translations of al-‘Afghani’s work in Islamic Response, especially 152–167. 117. Lockman, Contending Visions, 38–98. 118. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 2–23 and 237–255. 119. This approach to the notion of tradition draws heavily from Asad and MacIntyre. See MacIntyre, After Virtue; Whose Justice, Which Rationality?; and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. 120. “Inna allah yab’ath li-hadhihi al-umma ‘ala ra’s kull mi’at sana man yujaddid laha amr diniha,” Abu Da’ud Sulayman ibn al-As‘hath al-Sijistani, Sunan Abi Dawud, Book 37 (4278). 121. See Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 188; Shalabi, Al-Rif al-misri fi nisf al-thani, 217; Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians, 60–61; Barakat, Tatawwur almilikiya, 395–397. 122. “Dars tahdhib tahawwur bi-hi tilmidh Ma‘ al-Nadim,” Al-Tankit wa alTabkit, 18 December 1881, 53–56. 123. Ibid. 124. “Alsun al-khutaba’ tahii’ wa tamit,” Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 25 September 1881, 235–241. 125. See for example, “Al-taqaddum,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 19 May 1881, 1; “Al-Jara’id,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 5 June 1879, 5. 126. “Haqiqat al-insan wa haqiqat al-watan,” Misr, 14 January 1878, 1. Arguments that echo al-‘Afghani’s points can also be found in “Al-‘ilm,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 8 October 1880, 1; “Al-Ma‘arif,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 2 June 1881, 1; “Al-Thana’ al-haqiqi,” al-Mufid, 27 February 1882, 3; and “al-Huquq alfuqara” al-Mufid, 17 April 1882, 4. 127. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 222. 128. Fortunately, the question of slippages in the meaning of “public interest” as it took shape in modern Arabic political discourse is presently the subject of a research project by Dyala Hamzah of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales being conducted at the Freie Universität Berlin.

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129. See Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt. 130. See Cromer, Modern Egypt and Abbas II. See also Colvin, Making of Modern Egypt and Milner, England in Egypt. On this question also see Roger Owen, “Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience.” 131. See Cromer, Modern Egypt, 2: 148. The influential public commentator and journalist Edward Dicey wrote a typical piece of this genre. See Dicey, “England’s Intervention in Egypt,” 161–174. 132. This was how Cromer described the goals of British occupation in his memoir Modern Egypt, 2: 229. 133. Many of these notions had a long history and many have analogues in other peasant societies. On pre-nineteenth-century Egypt, see Baer, Fellah and Townsman; and al-Rahim, al-Rif al-misri fi al-qarn al-thaman ‘ashar. On the topic of city/country dynamics, see Williams, Country and the City. 134. See van Gelder, “The Nodding Noddles,” in Ostle, ed., Marginal Voices in Literature and Society. 135. Baer has a very useful context-providing discussion of the work in Fellah and Townsman, 3–38. Davies’s “Seventeenth Century Egyptian Arabic” discusses some of the linguistic features of the piece. Davies has also recently put together a new Arabic edition based on several manuscripts; see Davies, ed., Yusuf alShirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf bi-sharh qasid Abi Shaduf, 2007, Vol. 1. Davies has also produced an English translation of this edition, Yusuf al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded (Kitab Hazz al-Quhuf biSharh Qasid Abi Shaduf ), Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2007, Vol II. 136. See al-Tanahi, al-Kitab al-matbu‘at bi-misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr: tarikh wa tahlil , 94. The 1889 edition was produced by al-Maktaba al-Mahmudiya under the supervision of Muhmud ’Ali Sabih. See al-Tanahi, al-Kitab al-matbu‘at bimisr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr: tarikh wa tahlil, 1984, 49–50. 137. Cited in Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 84. 138. Ayalon, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East, 15. 139. Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 66. 140. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East, 123–124. 141. Mabadi fi-ma yata‘alaq bi-diyar al-tarikh min al-ahsa,’ 41. 142. Cole, “Rifa’a al-Tahtawi and the Revival of Practical Philosophy,” 29–46. 143. See for example “Sina‘a,” Misr, 5 June 1879. The piece is the text from a speech al-‘Afghani gave in Alexandria in which he echoed al-Ghazali by holding up moderation as the path to goodness. His “al-Din wa al-siyasa,” (Al-‘Asr alJadid, 15 April 1880) is a critical engagement with Ibn Khaldun’s notion of group solidarity [asabiya]. 144. Peter Gran’s controversial biography of al-Attar’s is considered by many to be definitive. See Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism. 145. Al-Tahtawi, Manahij al-’albab., 309. 146. Manahij al-’albab, 249. According to Cole, al-Tahtawi proffered “two reasons for writing the Manahij: the need to clarify Egypt’s aims and purposes, and the necessity of doing away” with those “members” of society that do not benefit it.” Cole, “Rifa’a al-Tahtawi,” 31.

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147. He cites a number of Qur’anic verses and a hadith of Abu Talha. See al-Tahtawi, 269. 148. Al-Tahtawi, Manahij al-’albab, 267. 149. See Manahij al-’albab, 16–18. 150. “Al-Sina‘a.” Misr, 5 June 1879. 151. “Al-Mawlid al-ahmadi,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 25 September 1881, 241–244. 152. See al-Nadim’s fictive exchange with a “student” in “Dars tahdhib tahawwur bi-hi tilmidh ma‘ al-Nadim,”Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 July 1881, 53–56. 153. “Al-Mawlid al-ahmadi,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 25 September 1881, 241–244. 154. “Dars tahdhib tahawwur bi-hi tilmidh ma‘ al-Nadim,”Al-Tankit wa alTabkit, 3 July 1881, 53–56. 155. See Jadaane, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al‘arabi al-hadith, 11–24. 156. “Al-fallah misr,” al-Kawkab al-Misri, 18 November 1880. 157. Ibid. 158. See Villiers-Stuart for price comparison between steam engines and a saqiya or waterwheel. Villiers-Stuart, Egypt after the War, 75. 159. Al-Kawkab al-Misri, 18 November 1880. notes to chapter 2 1. Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 207. 2. Ibid., 200. 3. See Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization” and Formations of the Secular. 4. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 215. 5. The standard book in English remains Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age. Cole provides a sophisticated description of the way in which some of these ideas became part of the political calculus of the time in Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East. Other commonly cited works are those of Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt and Kerr, Islamic Reform. Some of the better works in Arabic are Jadanne, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith and Abdel-Malek, Nahdat misr. Arabic readers often begin with Ahmad Amin’s Zu’ama’ al-islah. 6. See Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” and Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 7. These notions also had repercussions across the entire Arabic-speaking world. See Hourani, Arabic Thought, 161–221. 8. “Al-Tarbiya,” al-Tijara, 23 November 1878, 2. 9. Ibid. 10. “Al-Amani,” al-‘Asr al-Jadid, 8 January 1880, 1. 11. For a biographical sketch focusing on the period before 1900, see Gendzier, The Practical Visions of Ya’qub Sannu‘. In Arabic, see Awad, Tarikh al-

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fikr al-misri al-hadith, 267–332. Some of the standard references on Sannu‘’s life continue to be ‘Abduh ‘ A‘lam al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 91–98 and Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 2: 281–286. 12. Gendzier, Practical Visions, 31–41. 13. Ibid. 31. 14. The use of colloquial Arabic was not as unusual in premodern Arabic writing as had once been believed. For example, Shirbini’s seventeenth-century Hazz alquhuf fi sharh qasid Abi Shaduf is filled with colloquial expressions to such an extent that some scholars, such as Davies, consider it an important source of information on the dialects of the time. Shirbini was well aware of what he was doing, as he stated that he intended to “provide an exposition of the language of the countryside [lughat al-ariyaf ].” Davies, “Seventeenth-Century Egyptian Arabic,” 10–11. In addition, Cachia points out that the dialogues contained in the thirteenth-century littérateur Ibn Danyal’s works “reflected everyday usage” when “character and situation demanded.” Cachia, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt, 80.. 15. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 2: 284; see also “al-Tarbiya,” al-Tijara, 23 November 1878, 2. 16. For works on al-Nadim’s life see Delanoue, “Abd Allah Nadim (1845–1896),” 161–174. In Arabic see Buhuth nadwat al-ihtifal bi-dhikra’ marur mi’at ‘am ‘ala’ wafat ‘Abd Allah al-Nadim; Hadidi, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim: Khatib al-wataniya; Amin, Zu‘ama’ al-Islah, 202–248; and ‘Abduh, ‘Alam al-sihafa al‘arabiya, 125–130. 17. See Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, 109 and 116. 18. See ‘Abduh, Tarikh al-waqai’i‘ al-misriya. 19. Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 115. On Masonic lodges in Egypt, see Wissa, “Freemasonry in Egypt 1798–1921,” 143–161. See also KudsiZadeh, “Afghani and Freemasonry in Egypt,” 25–35; Cannon, “Nineteenthcentury Arabic Writings on Women and Society,” 463–484. 20. See “Mata yastaqim al-zill wa al-‘awd a‘waj ayuha al-muharirun alqa’imun bi-tahthib al-nufus” [“When Will the Shadow Be Given Light and the Twisted Straightened? Oh, You Free Men Undertaking the Refinement of Souls],” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 17 July 1881, 91–94. 21. Hadidi, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, 85–86. 22. Ibid. 165–176. 23. “Al-sina‘a.” Misr, 5 June 1879, 3–4. 24. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 113–129, for a discussion of al-Nadim’s contribution to development of modern literary Arabic prose. Also see Hamza, ’Adab al-maqala al-sihafiya fi misr, 2: 349–440; and Awad, The Literature of Ideas in Egypt, 335–433. 25. Al-Dasuqi, Nash’at al-nathr al-hadith wa tatawwurhu , 91. 26. See Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 123–124. Al-Dasuqi, Nashat alNathr (91–97), describes al-Nadim’s popularity and his importance in the evolution of modern Arabic prose. 27. See “al-‘Arabi al-tafarnuj,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 7–8; and “Nihayat al-bilada,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 July 1881, 56–58. 28. “Tabsira,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 15.

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29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. “Jara’id al-ikhbar madaris al-afkar,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 11 June 1881, 21–22. 32. This notwithstanding, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit did publish articles that were meant to be read symbolically. For example, see “Majlis tibi ‘ala mussab bilafranji,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 4–6. On the surface the piece is a discussion about the dangers of the spread of syphilis, but in the article the spread of the venereal disease symbolized the increasing depth and poisonous results of foreign domination of Egyptians. See also Amin al-‘Alim’s thoughts on this article and al-Nadim’s use of symbols in his writing in “Maqawimat al-mu‘asira fi fikr ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, 261–280. 33. Selim takes up some of these same themes with respect to al-Nadim and Sannu‘ in her The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt. 34. “Al-Wad al-mariq wa abu shaduf al-hadiq,” Abu Nazzara, 15 April 1880, 130–143. 35. This is a reference to the widely used dictionary, al-Qamus al-muhit, compiled by the famous medieval lexicographer, Muhammad ibn Ya‘qub Firuzabadi (1329–1414). 36. This quote is in the opening editorial in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 3 . This may also be an indirect reference to Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf; see Davies, “Seventeenth-Century Egyptian Arabic,” 9–10. 37. Verbs were fully conjugated and the rules of subject-verb agreement and of pronoun-subject agreement that are normally not followed in colloquial speech were adhered to strictly. 38. The ‘alif and ‘ayn are used interchangeably by these foreigners, as are the aspirated H and the non-aspirated H. At times the kha is substituted for the hah and vice versa. 39. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, 20 February 1880, 79. 40. Van Gelder offers three alternatives to translating the first part of the title “Hazz al-Quhuf,” since the second part of title is easily translated as A Commentary on the Ode of Abu Shaduf: 1) The Nodding Noddles; 2) Jolting the Yokels; 3) Brandishing the Broad Branches. 41. Davies argues that al-Shirbini may have intended to mock the urban ‘ulama’ class’s mores and habits more than he meant to ridicule the fallah. See Davies, “Seventeenth-Century Egyptian Arabic,” 1–51. 42. As we saw in Chapter 1, Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf was reprinted a number of times in the late nineteenth century—first in 1858 and then in 1872, 1878, 1889, 1892, 1894, and 1904); also see Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East. 43. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11–12. 44. For the history and description of some of these heroic ballads, see Cachia’s Popular Narrative Ballads. For one rendition of tales of this sort, see Sells, Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes. 45. See “takhrifa al-junun fanun [In Superstition Lunacy is an Art],” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 10–11.

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46. See “al-Takhrifa,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 11 June 1881, 27–29. See also “Sultanat al-takhrif,” in which a simple countrywoman said to have baraka [a blessing] becomes the absurd object of worship for the fallahin in the town of Dasuq (al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 157–159). 47. See “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 7–8; and “AlWilaya al-khurafiya,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 11 September 1881, 211–215, in which a peasant fleeing the corvée is transformed into a local saint through an unlikely series of events. See a partial translation of “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” in Awad, Literature of Ideas in Egypt: Part I, 84–86. Awad translated the title as “On Gallicized Egyptians”. 48. The conception of health as a balance between extremes is recurrent throughout Islamic ethical literature, see, for example, Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, 22–23. 49. Ibid. Al-‘Afghani wrote that the “biological sciences seek to discover that which maintains balance between its components.” And so too should those concerned with the state of the umma search for the “middle [al-wast]” between extremes because the middle is the key to human happiness. “Al-Tarbiya,” Misr, 26 November 1878, 1. 50. See ‘Azabawi, ‘Ummud wa mushayikh al-qura wa dawruhum fi almujtama‘ al-misri fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr. 51. “Lamhat zira’a,”Al-Mahrusa, 30 July, 1886, 1. Al-Mahrusa was another of the many publications of Adib Ishaq and Salim Naqqash. 52. See “al-rif bi-hurufiha,” al-Waqt, 21 March 1880, 2–3; and “min zari‘,”alKawkab al-Misri, 26 June 1879, 5. 53. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 1:192; See also Milner, England in Egypt, 314–317. 54. See Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 281; and Elgood, The Transit of Egypt, 81, 204–05. 55. See Villiers-Stuart, Egypt after the War. 56. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 1:194. See also Elgood, The Transit of Egypt, 139. 57. See Wallach, Egypt and the Egyptian Question, 108–138. 58. “Dars al-tahdhibi bayna al-Nadim wa tilmidh,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 9 October 1881, 267–272. 59. See Abu-‘Arja, al-Muqattam: Jaridat al-ihtilal al-biritani fi misr, 34. 60. “halat al-fallahin” Al-Zaman, 27 July 1884, 1 61. “La inta inta wa la al-Mithil mithil,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 155 . 62. See “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect, 87–104 63. Omnia El Shakry has examined childrearing in the context of governmentality in detail. See her “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play,” 126–170. For an elaboration of this and related themes over a longer period, see Shakry’s The Great Social Laboratory. 64. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 233; see also Ahmad, Women and Gender in Islam. 65. “La inta inta wa la al-Mithil mithil ayuha al-mutamaddun,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 156. For an interesting contemporary look at the

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question of nasiha, see Asad, “The Limits of Religious Criticism in the Middle East” in Genealogies of Religion, 200–236. 66. “La inta inta wa la al-Mithil mithil,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 156. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Al-Nadim used the words umma, bilad, and Misr to signify the political and moral community of Egypt seemingly interchangeably. 70. “La inta inta wa la al-Mithil mithil,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 157. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. Mitchell discusses the evolution of the term tarbiya at the end of the nineteenth century in his Colonising Egypt, 88–90. 73. “Wasiyat Nadim li-ahad ibna’ihi,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 21 August 1881, 180. 74. Ibid., 181. 75. “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 7–8. 76. Ibid., 7 77. Ibid., 7 78. Ibid., 7 79. Ibid.,7. 80. Ibid., 8. 81. Ibid., 8. 82. Ibid., 8. 83. “Haqiqat al-insan wa haqiqat al-watn” Misr, 30 December 1877,1. 84. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 21 August 1881, 181–183. 85. “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 8. 86. Ibid., 8. 87. Ibid., 8. 88. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, 15 April 1880, 130–143. 89. See “ ‘Ada qabiha al-fina’uha,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 July 1881, 58–59; “Ghafilat al-taqlid,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 13–15; “Nihayat al-bilada,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 July 1881, 56–58; and “Ra’ayt fawq ma sam‘at,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 October 1881, 263. 90. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, 15 April 1880, 130. 91. Ibid.,133. 92. Ibid., 131. 93. Ibid.,142–143. 94. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11–12. 95. Ibid. 96. “Taghfila wa jahala,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 162. 97. In her Nurturing the Nation Pollard shows that the British too viewed the politics of Egypt and what they described as the spendthrift ways of Egypt’s rulers through a similarly gendered lens. 98. “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11. 99. Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 179–226; and Owen, The Middle East

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in the World Economy, 122–152. Villiers-Stuart provides a partial list of such officials and their salaries in Egypt after the War, 461–464. 100. “Al-Najm dhu al-dhanib,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 10 July 1881, 70–73. See also “Hurr al-kalam wa kalam al-hurr,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 3 July 1881, 51–53. 101. See Cuno, Pasha’s Peasants, 55–58. Villiers-Stuart, who was traveling the Delta in 1882, observed the same practice, noting that Muslim moneylenders did not “lend money at usurious rates; instead they purchase crops at a discount of 33%-50%.” Villers-Stuart, Egypt after the War, 275. 102. “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11. 103. “Al-Najm dhu al-dhanib,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 10 July 1881, 70–73. 104. “Al-Tijara al-ba’ira,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 21 August 1881, 171–172. 105. “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. “Amatak min islamtak lil-jihala,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 21 August 1881, 173–175. 110. See “Talmidh al-‘aja’iz,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 4 September 1881, 193–194. 111. See “Hadith khurafa,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 4 September 1881, 197–199. 112. “Sultanat al-takhrif,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 157–159. 113. Ibid., 157. 114. Ibid., 159. 115. “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 6 June 1881, 11. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. A partial list of these voluntary societies and their activities can be found in Nusayr, Harakat nashr al-kutub fi misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr, 424–433. 119. Landau, “Prolegomena to a Study of Secret Societies in Modern Egypt,” 135–186; see also his “Muslim Opposition to Freemasonry.” Dumont, “The Freemasons in the Ottoman Empire”; Rich, “Masonry and the Middle East,”; Wissa, “Freemasonry in Egypt 1798–1921”; Cannon, “Nineteenth-century Arabic Writings on Women and Society”; Kudsi-Zadeh, “The Emergence of Political Journalism in Egypt.” 120. Al-Mufid, “Al-Huquq wa-al-fuqara’,” 17 April 1882, 4. 121. Ibid.; see also “haqiqat al-insan wa haqiqat al-want,” Misr, 30 December 1877, 1; and “Jami‘yat al-‘atidal fi Misr,” al-Mahrusa, 16 June 1886, 1. 122. Ener charts these changes over the course of the nineteenth century in her Managing Egypt’s Poor. 123. See Singer, “Charity’s Legacies;” Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor, 3–10. 124. For a description of the ways in which the Egyptian state redefined and circumscribed the institution of the waqf, see Ghanim, al-‘Awqaf wa al-siyasa fi misr. 125. Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor, 135.

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126. Established institutions were not immune from the pressures generated by Egypt’s new intellectuals. As early as April 1882, a reformer writing in al-Mufid called for the reform of the teaching methods at al-Azhar, the venerable center of Islamic learning. See “Al-Huquq wa-al-fuqara’,” al-Mufid, 17 April 1882, 4 127. See “ ’i‘tira’at ‘ala al-Tankit.” Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 26 June 1881, 35. See also al-Dasuqi, Nash’at al-nathr al-hadith wa tatawwurhu, 92–93; and Hamza,’Adab al-maqala al-sihafiya fi misr, 349–440. 128. Al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 9 October 1881, 267–272. 129. Ibid., 268. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 269. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., 270. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid., 271. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 272. 141. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, 20 February 1880, 65–74. 142. Ibid., 68. 143. Ibid. 144. Ibid., 67 145. Ibid., 68 146. Ibid., 70. 147. Ibid., 71. 148. Ibid., 72. 149. Ibid. 150. “La inta inta wa la al-mithil Mithil ayuha al-mutamaddun,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 15 August 1881, 155–157. 151. Ibid., 155. 152. Ibid., 157. 153. See, for example, “al-Sina‘a,” Misr, 5 June 1879, 3; “Al-Watan al-arabi,” al-‘Asr al-Jadid, 12 February 1880, 2; and “Al-Amani,” al-‘Asr al-Jadid, 8 January 1880, 1. notes to chapter 3 1. See Gorman, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth-Century Egypt. 2. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 48–94. 3. See Karpat, The Politicization of Islam; and Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt. 4. Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt. 5. On Yusuf, see Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 230–231; Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 3: 30–31 and 37–40; ‘Abduh,

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A‘lam al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 130–137; Salih, al-Shaykh ’Ali Yusuf wa jaridat al-mu’ayyad; Jadane, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al‘arabi al-hadith, 174–179; and al-Kumi, Al-sihafa al-islamiya fi misr fi al-qarn altasi‘ ‘ashr, 44–61. 6. See below for sketches of these figures’ lives. 7. ‘Awad, Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya: al-juz’ al-‘awwal alfallah al-misri. 8. Fihris al-dawriyat al-‘arabiya allati taqtaniha al-dar [Index of ArabicLangauge Periodicals Acquired by the National Library]. The full text of the law can be found in ‘Aziz, Al-Sihafa al-misriya wa mawqifuha min al-ihtilal al-injilizi, 339–343. 9. Dinshway is the village where an infamous encounter occurred between a group of British soldiers hunting pigeons and a group of Egyptian peasants. The violent incident and the British reaction became fodder for Egyptian nationalist agitation. See Chapter 5. 10. See, for example, al-Rafi‘i, Mustafa Kamil ba‘ath al-nahda al-wataniya. 11. For a detailed exegesis of his political positions, see Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, especially Chapters 1 through 5; Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image, 200–293. 12. His memoirs have been translated by Goldschmidt as The Memoirs and Diaries of Muhammad Farid. 13. On his life, see Goldschmidt Jr., Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 96–97; al-Jindi, ‘Abd al-Aziz Jawish min ruwwad al-tarbiya wa al-sihafa wa al-ijtima’. 14. A more recent edition of the book is al-Nadim, Kana wa yakun, eds. Ramadan and al-Jama‘i. 15. See al-Jama‘i. “Durus al-Wataniya allati akhadha mustafa kamil min alnadim.” 16. This development was not a simple linear narrative. For example, Tollefson shows that every attempt to reorganize the police was fraught with difficulty. He carefully catalogues the story of Clifford Lloyd, who served as the magistrate in Ireland who helped to dismantle the Land League and reorganize the administrative districts prior to being called to Egypt. Due to opposition from many corners Lloyd was forced to resign and left Egypt within six months of his arrival in 1884. See Tollefson, Policing Islam, 11–18. 17. Ibid., 25–52. 18. See Brown, “Brigands and State Building,” 258–281. 19. See Zayn al-Din, Al-Zira‘a al-misriya fi ‘ahd al-ihtilal al-biritani; and Jayyid, Tatawwur al-khabr fi al-sihafa al-misriya, 245–270. 20. Zayn al-Din describes in great detail the efforts undertaken during the years of British occupation to expand Egypt’s agricultural capacities; see Al-Zira‘a al-misriya fi ‘ahd al-ihtilal al-biritani. See also Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy; Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule, 214–248. 21. ‘Atiya, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah fi al-‘aradi wa al-zira‘a al-misriya, 3.

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22. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse; Hamza, ’Adab almaqala al-sihafiya fi misr; and Jayyid, Tatawwur al-khabr fi al-sihafa al-misriya. 23. See Cromer, Modern Egypt. 24. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse. 25. “Tadhir,” al-Zaman, 10 May 1884, 1; “Rasala li-ahad al-‘udaba’ tahta hadha al-‘anwan ‘ihtiyajat al-bilad’,” Jaridat al-Fallah, 10 January 1887, 4; alWatan, 23 March 1889, 1–2; and “Fi wajib al-jara’id,” al-Haqiqa, 8 May 1891, 1. 26. See Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 128–160; El Shakry, Great Social Laboratory. 27. See ‘Atiya, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘. 28. ‘Awad, Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya, 14. 29. Ibid. 30. Al-Ustadh, 6 December 1892, 369–375. 31. Ibid., 370. 32. Ibid., 371. Sahiya is a difficult word to translate. A Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic translates the word as “someone who is deceptively innocent-looking.” 33. Ibid., 372. 34. Ibid., 373. 35. Williams, The Country and the City, 297. 36. Ibid., 289–290. 37. Al-Ustadh, 6 December 1892, 369–375. 38. Ibid., 373. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 374. 41. Ibid., 372. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 374. 45. ‘Awad, Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya. 46. Ibid., 2. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Ibid., 7. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. See Tollefson, Policing Islam, 25–53 and 85–110; see also Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 264; and Lloyd, Egypt Sinc Cromer, 76–78 and 81–82. 53. ‘Awad, Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya, 7. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. The kurbaj or kirbaj was a whip with a number of lashes, usually fashioned from crocodile hides. It was the preferred instrument of tax collectors to help them persuade hesitant peasants to forward their levies. It was also infamous because village headmen and others used it liberally in “recruitment” for the army and the corvée. See Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt.

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56. ‘Awad, Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahda al-misriya, 11. 57. Ibid., 14. 58. Ibid., 14–15. 59. Ibid., 16. 60. Ibid., 16. 61. Ibid., 16. 62. Ibid., 17. 63. Ibid., 17. 64. Ibid., 17. 65. Ibid., 12. 66. Ibid., 19. 67. Ibid., 19. 68. “Abu al-haul al-haqiqi fi misr,” al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1893, 1. 69. Ibid. 70. “The Sphinx of Modern Egypt,” New York Herald, 27 April 1893, 5. 71. “Abu al-haul al-haqiqi fi misr,” al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1893, 1. 72. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 158–159. 73. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 194. 74. See Abu-‘Arja, al-Muqattam: Jaridat al-ihtilal al-biritani fi misr, 123–170, for a look at al-Muqattam’s role as propagandist for the British. In regard to the putative benefits of occupation for the peasants and peasant support for the British, see al-Muqattam, 6 October 1889; 3 November 1893, 1; and 10 January 1894, 4. 75. This new combination of classical Arabic and modern syntactical structure and grammar developed over the course of the twentieth century into what has become to be known as Modern Standard Arabic. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, 82–105. 76. Muwaylihi, Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, aw fatra min al-zaman. Roger Allen translated the work as A Period of Time: A Study and Translation of Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi. See Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt. 77. “Abu al-haul al-haqiqi fi misr,” al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1893, 1. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. On the traditional education system, see Heyworth-Dunne, An Introduction to the History of Education in Modern Egypt, 395–406. 84. “Abu al-haul al-haqiqi fi misr,” al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1893, 1. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. On the life of Artin Basha, see Goldschmidt Jr., Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 25–26. 87. “Abu al-haul al-haqiqi fi misr,” al-Mu’ayyad, 9 May 1893, 1. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid.

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90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. The column appeared from 1893 to 1895. 95. See Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, on the sociological implications of the development of modern literary Arabic. See also Badr, Tatawwur al-riwaya al-‘arabiya al-haditha; Sa‘id, Tarikh al-da‘wah ‘ila al-‘ammiya waathariha fi misr and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim bayna al-fusha wa al-‘ammiya. 96. On the emergence of national languages, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67–82. With specific reference to Arabic and the Nahda or Literary Awakening in Arabic, see Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse; Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, 56, 99–100, 118, 299–300; and Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 340–344. 97. See Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 193–222. 98. The term milla traditionally referred to a religious community with a legal identity. This usage was perhaps most prominent under the Ottoman Millet system that recognized various religious sects and confessions as legal entities. 99. On the publishing scene in Alexandria see Kendall, “Between Politics and Literature,” 330–343. See also Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East, 145–154, for a discussion of newspaper circulation, and 159–165 for a discussion of the relationship between newspapers and their readers. On al-Haqiqa, see ‘Uthman, Tarikh al-sihafa al-iskandariya 1873–1899. 100. See Abu-‘Arja, Al-Muqattam, 53–92, 1. 101. “Al-Buhayra li-fallah Maryuti,” al-Mu’ayyad, 11 July 1894, 1. 102. Ibid. See also “Lil-fallah Maryuti,” al-Mu’ayyad, 23 August 1894. 103. Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 58–59. 104. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 105. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, 3–22. 106. On the case of these particular women see Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism, 1–8. 107. Al-Mu’ayyad, 11 July 1894, 1. 108. Ibid. 109. Al-Mu’ayyad, 23 August 1894, 1. 110. Al-Mu’ayyad, 11 July 1894, 1. 111. Brown, “Who Abolished the Corvée and Why?” 116–137. 112. Al-Mu’ayyad, 11 July 1894, 1. 113. Ibid. 114. Al-Mu’ayyad, 27 July 1894, 1. 115. See al-Mu’ayyad, 23 August 1894, 1. 116. Al-Mu’ayyad, 8 August 1894, 1. 117. Ibid. 118. Al-Mu’ayyad, 15 July 1894, 1. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. See Schulze, “Mass Culture and Islamic Cultural Production in the

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Nineteenth-Century Middle East,” 189–224. See also Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse. 122. Al-Mu’ayyad, 9 September 1894, 1. 123. Al-Mu’ayyad, 15 September 1894, 1. 124. Al-Mu’ayyad, 23 August 1894, 1. 125. Al-Mu’ayyad, 9 September 1894, 1. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. notes to chapter 4 1. For example, see Falk Gesink, “ ‘Chaos on the Earth,’ ” on the misreading of nineteenth-century “traditionalists,” and Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought, on the reinterpretation of the Sunna among modern Muslim thinkers. 2. A classic example is Kedourie’s Afghani and ‘Abduh. See Asad’s review, “Politics and Religion in Islamic Reform: A Critique of Kedourie’s al-’Afghani and Abduh,” 12–22. 3. See the introduction to Poovey, History of the Modern Fact. 4. On the labor movement in Egypt, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile; Said, Tarikh al-haraka al-shuyu‘iya al-misriya; and Goldberg, Tinker, Tailor, and Textile Worker. 5. See Cromer, Modern Egypt, 280–300; also Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 293–320. 6. On the epidemic and on British health policy in Egypt, see Tignor, “Public Health Administration in Egypt under British Rule 1882–1914.” 7. Samir was ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s former collaborator in al-Tankit wa alTabkit and his eventual biographer. 8. See Kuhnke, Lives at Risk, 101–110. 9. Under the Public Debt Administration agreement of 1876 European advisors were placed in all ministries of the Egyptian government. These “advisors” were the de facto administrators of their ministries. 10. “Al-Salama wa al-waba’,” al-Burhan, 2 August 1883, 1. 11. See ‘Uthman, Tarikh al-sihafa al-iskandariya, 163–171, for a summary of the internal British politics and a sketch of the difficult times faced by the city of Alexandria in the early days of the occupation. On the difficulties for the British in the early years of occupation, see also Vatikiotis, The History of Egypt from

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Muhammad Ali to Sadat, 169–177; Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 48–93; Colvin, The Making of Modern Egypt, 238–246; Cromer, Modern Egypt, 349–381. 12. For a discussion of some of the political factors involved in the British occupation of Egypt, see Daly, “The British Occupation, 1882–1922”; Owen, “Egypt and Europe,” 111–124. 13. Volumes 4 through 8 are readily available and were recently republished in Cairo in 1998. 14. On the history of the Alexandrian press of the time, see ‘Uthman, Tarikh al-sihafa al-iskandariya, 110–152. 15. “Al-fallahin,” al-Zaman, 18 July 1884, 1. 16. Ibid. 17. Louis Awad translated this piece in his The Literature of Ideas in Egypt, 113–114. 18. On the Dinshway incident and its subsequent importance in the production of Egyptian nationalism see Chapter 5, 311–351. 19. “Al-Fallahin,” al-Zaman, 18 July 1884, 1. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. See al-Wakil, Mulkiya al-‘aradi al-zira‘iya fi misr khilal al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr, 665–685, on government landholdings and disposal of the royal family’s holdings. See Baer, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt, 68–70, on foreigners purchasing land and the tendencies of landholding companies. 27. For a detailed look at the life of Arslan please see William L. Cleveland Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. 28. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, 3: 81–83. 29. See “Amani iqtisadiya sina‘iya,” al-Zira‘a, 23 July 1891, 193–197; “al‘Umda wa al-‘umud,” al-‘Umda, 3 December 189, 26. 30. “Al-Fallahin,” al-Zaman, 18 July 1884, 1. 31. “Dirasa zira‘ iya fi tatbiq qanun al-ta‘ wid,” al- ‘Alam, 6 September 1888, 1. 32. See “Al-Bank al-‘aqari al-misri,” al-Zira ‘a, 8 May 1892, 70–80; “AlSa‘adat al-fallah al-misri wa shaqawahu,” al-Zira ‘a, 24 August 1894; “Al-Ta‘lim al-zira ‘a,” Al-Muqtataf, 1 October 1893, 4; and“Al-‘Umda wa al-‘umud,” al‘Umda, 10 December 1896, 2. 33. See “Al-Bank al-‘aqari al-misri,” al-Zira ‘a, 8 May 1892, 79–80; “Dirasa zira ‘iya fi tatbiq qanun al-ta‘ wid,” al-A‘ lam, 6 September 1888, 1; “Al-Zira‘a fi misr,” And al-Fallah, 25 February 1887, 1–2. 34. “Al-Zira ‘a fi misr,” Al-Fallah, 25 February 1887, 1–2. 35. This scenario as well as a number of variations was very common; one can find it in a variety of newspapers. See, for example, al-Zaman, 18 July 1884, 1 and 12 September 1884, 1; “Fi zawal al-sukhra.” Al-Fallah, 21 February 1887, 1–2

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and “Zira‘a fi misr,” 25 February 1887, 1–2; “Al-musha’ikh al-bilad.” Al-Watan, 27 January 1889, 3; “Tharwat al-fallah aw tajir al-qutn,” al-Nil, 15 February 1893, 1–2 and 3 March 1893, 1–2; “Al-qanun ightisab al-aradi,” al-Zira‘a, 10 February 1891; “Musa ‘adat al-fallah,” al-Fayum, 20 December 1894, 3. Common derivations circulated via the innumerable articles, speeches, and general agitation for some kind of public lending institution for small landholders. 36. This idea was germinating in the mid-1880s. See “Hafz tharwat al-fallah,” al-Zaman, 12 September 1884, 1. 37. “Al-Fallahin,” al-Zaman, 18 July 1884, 1. 38. “Al-Zira ‘a fi misr,” al-Fallah, 25 February 1887, 1–2. 39. Owen, Cotton and the Egyptian Economy, 140 and 215–218. 40. See al-‘Atiya, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah fi al-aradi wa al-zira‘a al-misriya, 24–25. 41. “Al-Bank al-‘aqari al-misri,” al-Zira‘a, 8 May 1892, 79–80. See also “Tanta fi ‘abril 26,” al-Zira‘a, 28 April 1892. Al-‘Ajyal spelled out a specific platform for educational reform and education in “al-Zira‘a fi misr,” 20 November 1897, 1. 42. Al-Fallah in an article entitled “al-Muzari‘un” declared on January 31, 1887, that the “general well-being was attached to [peasant] agriculture,” 2. See also (untitled) Al-Watan, 2 October 1889, 1; “Sakan al-fallah.” al-Zira‘a, 4 June 1891, 105; and “Al-ajmal al-Zira‘a.” al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya, 4 Rabie Thani, 1312H [22 October 1893]. 43. Al-Zira‘a, 6 September 1891, 288–292. 44. For example, see al-Zira‘a, 15 February 1892, 539–540; al-Surur, 24 February 1894, 1; and al- ‘Alam al-Misri, 16 March 1894, 2. 45. “Al-Muzari‘un,” Al-Fallah, 31 January 1887, 2. 46. Ibid. 47. Gali, Essai sur l’agriculture de l’Égypte, 122–124. 48. “Al-Muzari‘un,”Al-Fallah, 31 January 1887, 2. 49. Ibid. 50. “Bashiri fi ziwal al-sukhra,” al-Fallah, 21 February 1887, 3. 51. “ ‘Alan: al-Najah lil- muzari‘ wa al-fallah,” al-Sadiq, 10 August 1887, 2. 52. The quote comes from the second and substantially reworked edition (alQahira: ’Ali Ahmad Sukr, 1902), 1. 53. ‘Atiya, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah fi al-aradi wa al-zira‘a al-misriya, 36. 54. “Taqalidna al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 7 October 1892, 258–262. 55. ‘Atiya, Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari‘ wa al-fallah fi al-aradi wa al-zira‘a al-misriya, 35–36. 56. Ibid. See also al-Fallah, 31 January 1887, 2; 21 February 1887, 3; 25 February 1887, 1–2; (untitled) al-Watan, 27 November 1889, 1–2; and “al-fallah almisri.” al-Zira‘a, 18 March 1892, 587–589. 57. “Taqalidna al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 7 October 1892, 258–262. 58. Ibid. 59. “Al-Zira‘a fi misr,” al-‘Ajyal, 20 November 1897, 1. 60. “Taqalidna al-Zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 7 October 1892, 258–262.

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61. “Lil-mudir al-jarida,”Al-Zira‘a, 28 April 1892. 62. Ibid. 63. “Al-muhafizun wa al-ahrar fi al-Zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 June 1892. 64. “Taqalidna al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 7 October 1892, 258–262. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. For works that discuss the construction of categories of knowledge over time, see El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory; Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient; El-Haj, Facts on the Ground; Poovey, The Financial System in Nineteenth-Century Britain; also Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact; Hacking, The Taming of Chance; and Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking. 68. “ ’Afat al-Zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 19 August 1891, 225–228. 69. See Chapters 2 and 3 and the Conclusion on the concepts of al-tafrit wa alifrat. 70. “Lil-mudir al-jarida,” al-Zira‘a, 28 April 1892. 71. For example, see “Asbab al-ta‘un al-baqra,” al-Zaman, 2 April 1884, 3. This article tried to explain, in self-consciously simple language, the reasons for a devastating outbreak of cow typhus. “Lamha zira‘’iya,” al-Mahrusa, 20 July 1886, 1, questioned the traditional methods used by fallahin of eradicating the cotton worm; and “Al-isti‘ana bil-sabakh fi al-Zira‘a,” al-Sadiq, 1 December 1886, 1, described how the misuse of fertilizer and the ignorance of the “laws” of crop rotation adversely affected agriculture. 72. “Al-muzar ‘i al-misri wa hajatuhu,” al-Zira‘a, 9 July 1891, 177–178. 73. For standard definitions of fard al-‘ayn and fard al-kifaiya, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, ed. Lewis et al., 2: 790. 74. On the day-to-day application of the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, see Weiss, The Search for God’s Law. 75. “Al-Jam‘iya al-huriya al-islamiya,” Al-Zira‘a, 28 November 1895, 761; and “Mas’ila iqtisadiya ijtima‘iya,” Al-Zira‘a, 9 June 1891, 129–134. 76. “Amani iqtisadi,” al-Zira‘a, 4 June 1891. 97–100. 77. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. 78. See the 1983 edition of Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939, viii-x. 79. ‘Abdallah Al-Nadim complained bitterly that the agricultural school did not use Arabic-language textbooks when it was set up in Giza. See Zayn al-Din, Al-Zira‘a al-misriya fi ‘ahd al-ihtilal al-biritani, 185–217. 80. See “al-Zira‘a fi misr,” al-Fallah, 25 February 1887, 1–2; “Dirasa al-zira‘iya tatbiq qanun al-‘awid,” al-‘Alam, 6 September 1888, 3; (untitled), al-Watan, 18 April 1891, 1; “Al-Muhafizun wa al-ahrar fi al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 June 1892; “Taqalidna al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 7 October 1892, 258–262; and “Al-‘Umda wa al‘umud,” al-‘Umda, 10 December 1896. 81. “Zira‘at al-qutn,” al-Zira‘a, 23 April 1891. “Amani iqtisadi,” al-Zira‘a, 4 June 1891, 97–100, makes the same point, but adds that part of the problem is the absence of media with which to communicate new developments to fallahin. 82. “Al-fallah al-misri,” al-Zira‘a, 18 March 1892, 587–589. 83. “Ta‘limat zira‘iya mufida,” al-Zira‘a, 28 September 1893.

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84. On this point see El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory; and Mitchell, The Rule of Experts. 85. “Al-muhafizun wa al-‘ahrar fi al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 June 1892. 86. Ibid. 87. For articles that compare Egyptian to European farming methods and (mostly) French peasants see “ ‘As‘ad hal al-fallah,” al-Zira‘a, 19 November 1891, 457–458; “Al-sa‘adat al-fallah al-misri wa shaqawahu,” al-Zira‘a, 24 August 1894; and “Al-‘Umda wa al-‘umud,” al-‘Umda, 10 December 1896. 88. “Al-fallah al-misri,” al-Zira‘a, 18 March 1892, 587–589. 89. “Amani iqtisadi,” al-Zira‘a, 4 June 1891, 97–100. 90. “Al-zira‘a fi misr,” al-Ustadh, 21 February 1893, 627–630. 91. “Al-muhafizun wa al-‘ahrar fi al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 June 1892. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. “Al-zira‘a al-misriya wa turuq tahsinha,” al-Zira‘a, 28 February 1893, 525–526. 95. ‘As ‘ad hal al-fallah,” Al-Zira‘a, 19 November 1891, 457–458. See also “Zaqaziq,” al-‘Akhlas, 1 August 1895, 3, which reasoned that “newspapers are supposed to serve the people, for they are the voice [lisan al-’hal] of the people [’ahali].” 96. “Li-mudir al-jarida,” al-Zira‘a, 28 April 1892. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. “Amani iqtisadi,” al-Zira‘a, 4 June 1891, 97–100. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. See “Manhaj al-ta‘lim fi madrasa al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 February 1893, 482–484. 103. “Al-Zira‘a fi misr,” al-Ustadh, 21 February 1893, 627–630. 104. Ibid., 627. 105. Ibid., 628. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 630. 108. See al-Kumi, Al-sihafa al-islamiya fi misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr, 39. “Wilkuks wa jaridatuhu,” al-Zira‘a, 26 December 1892, 405–410. 109. Al-Muqtataf, 15 January 1889, 7. 110. See Shafiq, Mudhakirati fi nisf qarn, 2: 88–92. 111. See also “Al-Zira‘a fi misr,” al-Ustadh, 21 February 1893, 627–630; Foaden et al., eds., Textbook of Egyptian Agriculture. 112. “Ijmal zira‘a,” al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya, Rabi‘ Thani 11, 1311H [22 October 1893]. 113. See Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya I 224–227, for additional biographical notes. 114. “Ijmal zira‘a,” al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya, Rabi‘ Thani 11, 1311H [22 October 1893]. 115. Ibid.

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116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. “Manhaj al-ta‘lim fi madrasat al-zira‘a,” al-Zira‘a, 12 February 1893, 483. 119. “Madrasat al-zira‘a al-misriya,” al-Zira‘a, 25 December 1892. Also see “al-Mistir Wilim Walas [Mister William Wallace],” al-Zira‘a, 6 June 1891. 120. “Madrasat al-zira‘a al-misriya,” al-Zira‘a, 25 December 1892. 121. “Al-jara’id fi bilad al-fallahin,” al-‘Alam al-Misri, 9 September 1892, 1. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid. 126. “Al-Muqaddima,” al-Ustadh, 24 August 1892, 2–3. 127. “Fasl fi akhlaq wa ‘adat,” al-Ustadh, 24 August 1892, 11–15. 128. Ibid.,11. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid.,12. 131. Ibid.,14. 132. Ibid.,15. notes to chapter 5 1. See El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory. 2. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 13. 3. Al-Umma, 25 July 1906,1. 4. “Mata tamaddun al-muslimun [When Will Muslims Become Civilized]?” alUmma, 26 April 1906,1. On Aghayev’s life see Shissler, Turkish Identity between Two Empires: Ahmet Agaoglu and the New Turkey. 5. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 225. 6. Ibid., 17. 7. See ‘Arja al-Muqattam: Jaridat al-ihtilal al-biritani fi misr. On Lufti alSayyid and the idea of modernity in Egypt, see Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt. See also Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt’s Liberal Experiment; Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image. 8. See Shafiq, Mudhakirati fi nisf qarn. 9. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs. For a critique of this work that weighs the importance of Benedict Anderson’s work for scholars of the Middle East, see Smith, “Imagined Identities, Imagined Nationalisms.” 10. See “Khatr al-tamaddun al-gharbi,” al-Umma, 8 March 1906, 2. The article concluded by asking provocatively, “Do [you] not see the danger of Christians ruling over you? Is drinking alcohol to be counted among the morals of civilization?” 11. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabsand Redefining the Egyptian Nation. See also Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image. For a look at how Muslim reformers recast Islamic traditions, see Dallal, “Appropriating the Past.” On the appropriation of ancient Egypt in the service of modern politics, see Reid, Whose Pharaohs?; Colla, “Hooked on Pharonics.”

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12. See DiCapua, “Jabarti of the Twentieth Century” and Crabbs, Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. This paradox is at the center of Chakrabarty’s, Provincializing Europe. 13. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs. 14. There were some prominent exceptions to this generalization, including Muhammad ‘Abduh, Sa‘ad Zaghlul, and Ibrahim Hilbawi. 15. See Warburg, “The Sinai Peninsula Borders, 1906–47.” See also Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, 7–10. 16. A number of scholars have looked at the sociological dimension of this question. See most recently Falk Gesink, “ ‘Chaos on the Earth’.” See also Schulze, “Mass Culture and Islamic Cultural Production”; Crecelius, “Non-Ideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization.” 17. “Al-jam‘iya al-zira‘iya fi mudiriyat al-jiza,” al-Insan, 23 April 1907, 3. 18. A typical article of that sort appeared in al-Sayyid Muhammad alSalamuni’s Dumyat-based al-Qanbila in January 1909. See ‘Abd al-Hamid alRadini, al-Qanbila, 9 January 1909. Al-Salamuni was an important figure in the small but vibrant Dumyat-based journalism scene. He had earlier published another Dumyati weekly called al-Nasr. 19. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs, 3–22. 20. “ ’Ili ‘ay tariq nahnu musawwaqun?” al-Umma, 4 July 1906,1. 21. Typical of this genre in al-Sayha are “Limadha taqaddum al-gharbiyun wa ta’akhir al-sharqiyun [Why Do Westerners Progress while Easterners Remain Backward]?” al-Sayha, 14 September 1903, 1–2; “Al-Khatr al-‘azim al-zira‘a [The Supreme Danger in Agriculture],” al-Sayha, 10 November 1905, 1. 22. “ ’Ili ‘ay tariq nahnu musawwaqun?” al-Umma, 4 July 1906,1. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. The concept of Ottomanism itself dates only to the late nineteenth century. See Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. 29. “Great Britain Warned of Peril in Egypt,” New York Times, 6 July 1906. 30. “The Dread of a ‘Holy War’,” New York Times, 10 July 1906. 31. On Rida, see Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age and Kerr, Islamic Reform. Salama Musa’s memoirs, Tarbiyat Salama Musa, were translated by Shuman in 1961. On Haykal, see Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal. 32. See, for example, “Intishar al-radha’il wa al-madaniya al-kadhib,” alHurriya, 12 April 1907, 1; “Madaniya al-sharq wa al-madaniya al-misriya,” alIstana, 25 May 1906,1. 33. See Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. 34. See Rida, Al-Khilafa. On Jawish, see Nasr, Misr wa harakat al-jami‘a al‘islamiya. 35. See Seikaly, “Prime Minister and Assassin: Butrus Ghali and Wardani.”

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36. On the extent of these patriarchal attitudes carrying over to British administration of Egypt, see Owen, “The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on British Policy in Egypt 1883–1907.” 37. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 38. Concern with preserving Egypt’s archaeological heritage began in the 1880s. This trend became even more pronounced after the turn of the century. See Reid, Whose Pharaohs? 39. See Kazziha, “The Jaridah-Ummah Group and Egyptian Politics.” 40. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. 41. On the village novel, see Selim, Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt; Moosa, The Origins of Arabic Fiction; Elad, The Village Novel in Modern Egyptian Literature; Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse. 42. ‘Adhra’ Dinshway, like many books at the time, was originally serialized in a newspaper—in Muhammad al-Hahayawi‘s daily al-Minbar. The book was translated by El-Gabalawy in Three Pioneering Egyptian Novels as “The Maiden of Dinshway” in 1986. For a discussion of al-Haqqi and ‘Adhra’ Dinshway, see Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class.” Grinsted translated Zaynab under the title of Zainab: The First Egyptian Novel in 1989. 43. Al-Haqqi, ‘Adhra’ Dinshway, 13. 44. “Kalimat ‘an al-mar’a al-qaruwiya al-yum,” al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani, 6 September 1906, 2. Al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani was a Tanta weekly published in 1902 by Muhammad Tawfiq al-Azhari. 45. Haykal, Zaynab, 8. 46. See Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt; Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction; Elad, The Village Novel in Modern Egyptian Literature; Hafez, Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse. 47. Qasim ‘Amin argued in his Liberation of Women that the only way for Egypt to progress was to educate girls and to loosen some of the social restrictions on middle-class urban women from which peasant women had already escaped. 48. On a range of perspectives on this question in general and in the Middle Eastern context see Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Joseph, ed., Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East; Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women; Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation; Kandiyoti, ed., Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives; Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State. 49. Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 7. 50. For example, see “al-jami‘iya difa‘ ‘an al-mar’a,” Al-Dustur, 6 January 1908, 2; “hamiyat al-nisa’ Al-Dustur, 13 January 1908, 2; “hamiyat taraqqiat almar’a” Al-Dustur, 4 February 1908, 3; “mail al-mar’a ila al-zina” Al-Dustur, 8 February 1908. On Wajdi, see Di Tirazi, Tarikh al-sihafa, I:189, fn. 4; Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 224. 51. Qasim ‘amin: al-‘amal al-kamila, ed. ‘Imara, 419–554, Al-Tahrir al-mar’a [The Liberation of Women] and al-Mar’a al-jadida. Some of these were later collected into a single book titled Asbab wa Nata’ij wa akhlaq wa muwa’iz [Reasons and Results and Morals and Spiritual Exhortations]. Both of ‘Amin’s books on women have been translated by Peterson, the first as The Liberation of Women, and the second as The New Woman.

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52. “Kalimat ‘an al-mar’a al-qaruwiya al-yum,” al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani, 6 September 1906, 2. 53. Ibid. 54. “Al-jami‘iya difa‘ ‘an al-mar’a,” Al-Dustur, 6 January 1908, 2. 55. Al-Hurriya,12 April 1907, 1. 56. See, for example, “Intishar al-radha’il wa al-madaniya al-kadhiba,” alHurriya, 12 April 1907, 1; “Bida‘ al-madaniya,” al-Umma, 5 October 1905, 2; “Sa’iat al-madaniya: al-‘intihar,” al-Dustur, 24 January 1908, 1. 57. For a sampling, see “ ‘Arabi tafarnuj,” 6 June 1881, 7–10; “Huff ‘tala’ alnahar,” 19 June 1881, 22–24; “Jahil kadhab,” 18 September 1881, 228–229; “Al-Mawlid al-Ahmadi,” 25 September 1881, 241–244. 58. “Madaniyat al-sharq wa al-madaniya al-misriya aw al-farq baynahuma,” Al-Istanah, 25 May 1906, 1. Al-Istanah was printed at Matba‘t al-Islam and owned by Ahmad Shadhali al-‘Azhari. Al-‘Azhari published his own journal alIslam; he had previously edited William Wilcox’s al-Azhar. Evidently, al-‘Azhari resigned in the fray over Wilcox’s infamous call for Egyptians to replace classical Arabic with colloquial Arabic in all forms of communication, including writing. See Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 225; al-Kumi, Alsihafa al-islamiya fi misr fi al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashr, 38–41; and Sa‘id, Tarikh alda‘wah ‘ila al-‘ammiya wa-athariha fi misr. 59. “Madaniyat al-sharq wa al-madaniya al-misriya aw al-farq baynahuma,” Al-Istanah, 25 May 1906, 1. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. For example, see “ ‘Alim misr wa wahiduha,” al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani, 23 June 1903, 1–2; “ ’Adab al-amma,” al-Hurriya, 24 November 1907, 1. 64. See “Da’im al-madaniya,” 20 March 1906, 1; “Dasa’is al-‘ada’ ” and”alTafarnuj wa sa’iatuha,” 20 March 1906, 2. 65. “Taqaddum al-dawla” al-Sa‘id, 8 October 1905, 1; “ ’Ikhtilat al-umma bighayruha, al-Sa‘id, 8 October 1905, 2; “al-Taqaddum al-hadith,” al-Hijra, 30 March 1905, 1. 66. “Khatr al-tamaddun al-gharbi,” al-‘Umma, 8 March 1906, 2. 67. “ ’Intishar al-radha’il wa al-madaniya,” al-Hurriya, 12 April 1907, 1. 68. “Sa’iat al-madaniya: al-intihar,” al-Dustur, 24 January 1908,1. There are a great number of books on al-Aqqad in Arabic. In English, see Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics; Goldschmidt, Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, 24–25. 69. “Sa’iat al-madaniya: al-intihar,” al-Dustur, 24 January 1908,1. 70. “Bida‘ al-madaniya,” al-Umma, 5 October 1905, 2. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Al-Zayyat, Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid. 74. Among the books to his credit are: Al-Samir fi al-hawadit wa-al-fawazir; Kitab nuzhat al-‘ashiq al-hayran fi al-anashid wa al-aghani al-mutriba al-hisan; and Waq‘iat hall wa-nawadir wa-mujun Hafiz Najib al-Muhtal wa-ma ‘atahu min al-nasb wa-al-ihtiyal.

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75. An early description of a zar in English can be found in McPherson, Bimbashi McPherson, 239–246.The account was written by McPherson, an Englishman, in 1920 when he was serving as the head of the Egyptian government’s secret police. 76. “Hadith khurafa,” al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, 4 September 1881. 77. Al-Zayyat described the contents in 1902 as “a literary, humorous ditty representing everything the zar shaykhs do that would embarrass any human being.” 78. See Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile; see also Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East; Sa’id, Tarikh al-haraka alistirakiya fi misr. 79. Al-Zayyat, Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid, 2–3. 80. Ibid., 4. 81. Ibid., 4. 82. “Bida‘ ‘al-madaniya,” al-Umma, 5 October 1905, 2. 83. Al-Zayyat, Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid, 5. 84. See Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs. 85. Al-Zayyat, Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid,16. 86. Ibid., 4. 87. “Al-dhaka’ al-misri,” al-‘Umma, 25 July 1905, 1–2. 88. Ibid., 1. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Ibid. 92. See Scott, “Colonial Governmentality”. 93. Ibid., 205 (italics in original). 94. Cromer, Modern Egypt, 1:5 and 1:131. 95. See Scott, “Colonial Governmentality,” 208. 96. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 205–256. 97. Talal Asad outlines the role of legal reform in constructing autonomous, self-regulating subjects through educating populations into a new public morality. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 280. 98. This is reminiscent of arguments developed by Partha Chatterjee in his work on colonial and post-colonial political discourses. See his The Nation and Its Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 99. “Mudama‘ al-aqlam al-wataniyi fi al-haditha al-dinshawiya,” al-Umma, 1 July 1906, 1. 100. Ibid. About a year later, in his famous work ‘Adhra’ Dinshway, Mahmud al-Haqqi was credited with developing the first inner monologue in a work of fiction in modern Arabic letters; see El-Gabalawy’s introduction to his translation of the work in his Three Pioneering Egyptian Novels, 5–48. Also on the novel, see Elkhadem, History of the Egyptian Novel. For a discussion of al-Haqqi and ‘Adhra’ Dinshway in relation to the development of notions of socioeconomic class, see Lockman, “Imagining the Working Class,” 157–190. 101. “Mudama‘ al-aqlam al-wataniyi fi al-haditha al-dinshawiya,” al-Umma, 1 July 1906, 1.

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102. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 212–213. Asad quotes the Egyptian judge and writer, Tariq al-Bishri, commenting on the imposition of new meanings on words as an outcome of Egyptian “mimicry” of Europeans resulting from “European coercion and the Egyptian elites’ infatuation with European ways.” 103. While some have questioned some of the elitist and liberal assumptions underlying his 1983 work, Benedict Anderson wrote about the importance of a collective imaginary created through print capitalism. In contrast, Chatterjee’s work describing the inner “spiritual” domain of the nation demonstrates the power of nationalist discourses to discipline subaltern groups through its “spiritual” inner domain. Marx has exploded the “illiberal” origins of nationalism in Europe and challenges the liberal “civic” model of inclusive nationalism that is part of a European “hagiography.” See Marx, Faith in Nation. 104. The articles on 20 July, 24 July, 26 July, 27 July, and 28 July 1906 all appeared on page one of al-Umma under the title “Haditha Dinshway.” 105. “Al-Riba’ wa al-murabiyun fi bilad al-dawla,” al-Huriya, 18 February 1906, 2. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 205–256, and “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” Following Asad, Marx, and others, we should pause before we simply take this “opening” as an example of inclusive liberalism. 110. “Rudd fariya,” Al-Mu‘tasam, 2 August 1906, 1. Al-Mu‘tasam was a Cairo weekly published between 1898 and 1907. Its editor, Ahmad al-Majadi, described the paper as “a political, historical and critical weekly.” Al-Majadi was the publisher of two other short-lived weeklies: al-Islah (1903–1904) and al-Fa’iz (1907–1909). 111. Ibid. 112. “Rudd fariya,” al-Mu‘tasam, 2 August 1906, 1. 113. Cromer, 1908, Modern Egypt, II:132–133, 135. Just as was the case in India this was a source of great resentment among Egyptian nationalists. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 114. “Rudd fariya,” al-Mu‘tasam, 2 August 1906, 1. 115. Quoted in al-Rafi‘i, Mustafa Kamil ba‘ath al-nahda al-wataniya, 534. 116. Al-Qanbila, 2 July 1909, 1–2. 117. Lisan al-Arab, 14 July 1909, 1–2. 118. “Limadha,” al-Insan, 11 June 1907, 1. 119. Ibid. 120. “Al-Murasalat,” al-Qanbila, 15 January 1909, 4. 121. “Al-‘umud mumathalin al-hukuma,”al-Qanbila, 25 June 1909, 1. 122. “Al-Hala al-zira‘iya fi bilad,” al-Ra‘d, 19 February 1909, 1. 123. Ibid. 124. Haykal, Zaynab, 153.

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125. Lisa Pollard has discussed this same phenomenon with regard to women and their specific agenda for change that was sidelined in the events preceding and during the unfolding of the 1919 revolution. See Pollard, Nurturing The Nation. 126. Haykal, Zaynab, 234–235. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. On the 1919 rebellion, see Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution; Lockman and Beinin, Workers on the Nile; Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, 166–211; Aqqad, Saad Zughlul: Za’im al-Thawra; al-Rafi’i, Thawrat 1919. 130. Pollard, Nurturing the Nation, 211. 131. Pierre Bourdieu “Une classe object,” 2–5. 132. Ibid., 4. notes to conclusion 1. See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, on this process in India. On the general phenomenon, see Anderson, Imagined Communities. 2. See Pollard, Nurturing the Nation; Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt 3. On the Entente Cordiale, see Rolo, Entente Cordiale. Chapter 1 includes an explanation of the capitulatory regime and about the British-French rivalry as a major factor in Egyptian affairs from the early 1870s until the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. 4. See Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East on Aleppo; Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut on Beirut. 5. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt. 6. Wendell, Evolution of the Egyptian National Image, 18. 7. See Hijazi, al-Wataniya al-Misriya fi al-‘asr al-hadith, 504; Wendell, Evolution of the Egyptian National Image, 18–22. 8. On al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh, see Jadanne, Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith; Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism; Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age; Kerr, Islamic Reform. 9. Al-’Afghani, “al-Mawt wa al-Faqa,” al-‘Asr al-Jadid, 29 April 1880. 10. “Al-zira’a al-misriya wa turuq tahsanha,” al-Zira’a, 28 February 1893. 11. “Amana iqtisad,” al-Zira’a, 4 June 1891. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 1–24. 16. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. 17. Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 6. 18. Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, 7–9. 19. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 255. 20. See Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East; Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs and Redefining the Egyptian Nation; Schulze, “Mass Culture and Islamic Cultural Production;” Awad, Tarikh al-fikr al-misri al-

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261

hadith; Smith, Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt; Wendell, Evolution of the Egyptian National Image; Binder, In a Moment of Enthusiasm; Crecelius, “Non-Ideological Responses of the Egyptian Ulama to Modernization”; Ziadeh, Lawyers, the Rule of Law and Liberalism in Modern Egypt; Gendzier, The Practical Visions of Ya’qub Sanu’; Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh; Kerr, Islamic Reform; Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Communit. 21. My argument here converges with Massad’s Colonial Effects and even Makdisi’s The Culture of Sectarianism: Community to some extent. Both writers argue against the strict bracketing of tradition and modernity in the study of the cultural history of the Middle East. 22. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 255.

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Index

‘Abduh, Muhammad, 35, 42–48, 183, 220 Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa journal (The Man with Blue Glasses), 31, 54, 68, 71–72, 73–76, 105 Abu Shaduf character: Abu Nazzara alZarqa journal (The Man with Blue Glasses), 73; al-Wad al-Ahbal wa Abu Shaduf al-Hiqn (Sannu’), 87–88, 89; literary representations of peasants and, 75, 90, 105, 136, 147 ‘Adhra’ Dinshway [The Maiden of Dinshway] (Haqqi), 191, 192–193, 207, 256n42, 258n100 Advice [nasiha], 81–82 ’Afandiya. See Middle classes ‘Afghani, Jamal al-Din al-, 35, 55–56, 57, 237n143 ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 70–71; Islamic reform movement and, 39–40, 42–48, 220–221; moral balance and, 77, 86, 241n49; public-ness and, 101; social health and, 67, 106; Yaqub Sannu’ and, 69 Aghayev (Ajayif), Ahmad Bek, 181 Agricultural books and journals, 116–117, 155–156, 159, 161, 167, 169, 174–175 Agricultural experimentation, 162–163 Agriculturalist [zari‘], 90–95, 160–165 Agricultural production: British occupation and, 136; economy and, 17–18, 19–20, 115–116, 128–130; evolving language and, 160–165; Fallah Maryuti character and, 142–143; Giza Agricultural School and, 171–177; government corruption and,

78; Islamic ethics and, 56, 60–61, 165–171; land tenure, 21–25; national identity formation and, 11, 62–63, 80–81, 82, 103, 104, 105, 118, 122–123, 146, 150–160, 222; natural disasters, 48; newspapers and, 31–32, 212–213; peasants and, 4, 15, 201; scientific agriculture and, 165–171, 233n58, 252n71; social formation and, 109–110, 177–179; social relations and, 148–150; technological advances and, 58 Al-Ahram newspaper, 78 Ajayif, Ahmad Bek, 230n10 Al-’Ajyal newspaper, 162 Al-Alam newspaper, 157 Al-’Alam al-Misri newspaper, 176–177 Amin, Qasim, 183, 192, 193, 256n47 Anderson, Benedict, 254n9, 259n103 Anti-colonialism, 8, 12–13 Aqqad, Abbas Mahmud al-, 196 À Quoi tient la supériorité des AnglosSaxons (Demolins), 121 Arabic language, 68, 117, 205, 218, 232n53; education and, 85–86, 172–173, 252n79; Jamal al-Din al’Afghani and, 57; middle classes and, 39, 134; modern Arabic, 247n75, 248n95; newspapers and, 31, 69, 73–74; peasant characters and, 111, 138. See also colloquial language Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Hourani), 168 “Arabi tafarnuj” (Al-Nadim), 84–86 Archeology, 256n38 Army, the. See Military service ‘Arslan, Shakib, 155

284

Index

Asad, Talal, 50, 64, 258n97 Al-’Asr al-Jadid newspaper, 41, 48 Assembly [mahfal], 98, 99, 100 Assembly of Consultative Representatives [Majlis Shura al Nuwwab], 25–26 ‘Atiya, Mahmud, 116–117, 161, 162 Attar, Hasan al-, 56 ‘Awad, Zaki, 111, 121–122, 155, 171; Giza Agricultural School and, 176–177; peasant characters and, 127–132, 146, 147 ‘Awn, Ayub, 155–156 Ayalon, Ami, 55 ‘Azhari, Ahmad Shadhali al-, 257n58 Al-Azhar madrasa, 43, 44 “Backwardness”: agricultural production and, 157; Dinshway incident and, 207; “immaturity,” of Egyptian society and, 120–121; Islamic reform movement and, 220–221; literary representations of peasants and, 63, 90–95; moral faults of peasants and, 76; peasants and, 35–37, 53–54, 118, 201; political formation and, 209–210; religious practices and, 66 Badawi, M. M., 230n7 Baer, Gabriel, 18, 229n5 Bajuri, Muhammad Ghalib al-, 203–204, 205 Balance, importance of, 77, 83–84, 85, 86–87, 164–165, 220–221, 241n49 Ballads and balladeers, 75–76, 240n44 Balta-Liman Agreement, 23 Bankruptcy, 21, 29 Banks, peasants and, 37 Barakat, ’Ali, 18, 29, 229n5 Baring, Evelyn, 42, 44, 53, 114, 204; Dinshway incident and, 208, 209; European influences on Egypt and, 108–109; peasants and, 78–79, 133–134 Barudi, Sami, 71 Basha, Haydar, 32 Basha, Riyad, 176 Basha, Yaqub Artin, 137 Behavior, standards of, 124–127, 193–195 Bihayna character, 123–127, 146–147, 194, 202

Bishri, Tariq al-, 259n102 Blind imitation [taqlid], 44, 46, 58, 153 Blunt, Wilfrid, 42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 216 Bourgeois, the. See Middle classes Bribes. See corruption Brinton, Jasper Yeates, 229n5 British occupation, 2, 34, 42, 213, 249–250n11; agricultural production and, 142–143, 158, 159–160, 165; colonialism and, 218, 256n36; conceptions of Egyptian life and, 52–53; Dinshway incident and, 211–212; education and, 203–204; Fallah Maryuti character and, 141, 145; journalism and, 32–33, 150–151; middle classes and, 184–185; national identity formation and, 189, 189–190; nationalism and, 182–183; peasants and, 78–79, 133–137; political power structure and, 114–115; pro-British newspapers, 79–80, 111, 116, 139, 142, 210, 247n74; reform movements and, 64–65; religious extremism and, 188; secularism and, 169; social relations and, 148–149. See also foreigners; pro-British newspapers Brown, Nathan, 21–22, 115, 229n5, 233n64 Al-Burhan newspaper, 150, 151 Cadastral surveys, 139–140 Café culture, 75–76, 101 Capitalism, 7, 41, 94–95 Capitulations, the, 22–23, 25, 184 Casse de la Dette Publique. See Public Debt Administration “Caste”. See Social classes Censorship, 188 Chakrabarty, Dipish, 5, 223–224, 224–225 Change, fear of, 46, 57–58 Charitable works, 96–97 Chatterjee, Partha, 5, 133, 191, 258n98, 259n103 Christians, government and, 254n10 Circulation, of newspapers, 55, 68, 73, 117 Citizenship, 44, 207–208 Civic engagement, colonialism and, 223–224

Index “Civilization,” 17, 53, 66, 120, 230n10; ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 104; agricultural production and, 60–61; forms of government and, 99–100; gender norms and, 89, 100, 195–196; literary representations of peasants and, 63–64, 93–94, 146–147; middle classes and, 38, 39–41, 221; national identity formation and, 115, 122, 180–191; peasants and, 118, 197–203; reform movements and, 106; rural/urban divide and, 49–51, 105, 127, 194; social health and, 82, 119; voluntary associations and, 96, 97 Civilized persons [mutamaddun/nabih], 40–41, 51, 54, 181–182; al-Tankit wa al Tabkit newspaper and, 72–73; colloquial language and, 74; effeminacy of, 87–88; national identity formation and, 205; social mobility and, 123–124; voluntary associations and, 97 Civilizing of the New Fallah (Zayyat), 197, 198–199, 200–203, 205–206 Cole, Juan, 55, 56, 68, 229n5 Colebrooke-Cameron reforms, 64 Collective moral duty [fard al-kifaiya], 166, 167 Collective responsibility, 56, 57, 61, 88; agricultural production and, 165–171; Islam and, 44, 50, 51, 73, 182; public discourse and, 100–102, 104–105; the wealthy and, 99–100 Colloquial language: agricultural works and, 116–117; Giza Agricultural School and, 173; literary representations of peasants and, 111, 129, 134; newspapers and, 69, 73–74, 257n58; use of, 239n14, 240n37 Colonialism: civic engagement and, 223–224; commodity production and, 217; Giza Agricultural School and, 173; national identity formation and, 7, 108–109, 189–190; nationalism and, 204–206; reform movements and, 63–65. See also British occupation Commercial agriculture, 18–19, 21–22, 161–162. See also Agricultural production Commercial estates, land tenure and, 21–22

285

Commissions of Brigandage, 115 Commodity production, 29–30, 108, 131–132, 217. See also Agricultural production Conscription, 214, 231n9 Conservatism, 170, 222 Consular protection, 22–23, 25, 68 Consumerism, 120, 199–200 Corruption, 115, 134, 196; literary representations of peasants and, 62–63, 76, 102; reform movements and, 77–78, 144–145; taxation and, 26–28, 139–140, 142 Corvée system, 19, 26, 29, 141–142, 160–161 Cotton production, 15, 20, 24, 143, 165, 184, 213. See also Agricultural production Country [bilad], 81, 242n69 Country [watan], 103, 175, 186 Countryside, relaxation in, 212–213 Crime and punishment, 114–115, 208–209, 246n55 Cromer, Earl of. See Baring, Evelyn Cultivator [muzari‘], 130–131, 160–165, 175 Cultural authenticity, 138, 157, 177–178, 179, 222 Cultural expectations, European influences and, 118–119 Cultural identity, 182, 183, 205–206 Cuno, Ken, 18–19 Cynicism [al-ifrat], 45 Daily Gazette newspaper, 209 “Dars al-tahdhib bayna al-Nadim wa tilmidh” (al-Nadim), 98–100 Dasuqi, ‘Abd al-Aziz al-, 229n5 Davies, Humphrey Taman, 240n41 Debt: agricultural production and, 19, 157–158; legal system and, 28–29, 154; literary representations of peasants and, 90–95; national debt, 20–21, 26, 92; peasants and, 35–37, 233–234n70; taxation and, 21, 27, 140, 142 Demolins, Edmond, 121, 189 Dhahabi, Abd al-Rahman al-, 196 Dialogues, articles in the form of, 111, 113–114, 138–139 Dicey, Edward, 237n131 Dinshway incident, 181, 183, 188, 206–207, 208–213, 245n9

286

Index

Discursive position, of peasant characters, 138–139 Di Tirazi, Filip, 33, 155–156, 175 Domesticity, 124, 125–127, 147, 193–194 Dual Control government, 48 Al-Dustur newspaper, 193 Eastern identity, national identity formation and, 186–187 East/West divide, 188–189 Economy, the, 2–3, 16, 54, 229n5; agricultural production and, 4, 157–160; economic education and, 41; land tenure, 21–25; literary representations of peasants and, 63; market economy, 17–21; national identity formation and, 7, 115–116; reform movements and, 59–60, 66, 119–120. See also Market economy Education, 68, 69, 244n126; agricultural production and, 158, 159, 169; British occupation and, 136–137, 203–204; Giza Agricultural School, 155–156, 169, 171–177, 252n79; Islamic reform movement and, 39, 40, 41, 45, 51; moral education and, 84–85; voluntary associations and, 95–96; for women and girls, 81, 256n47 Educational literature, 121–122 Egyptian [Misr], 153, 164, 242n69 Egyptian Agricultural Institute. See Giza Agricultural School Egyptian national identity. See National identity formation Egyptian social development, 224–225 Elites, 153, 154, 213. See also Urban intelligentsia El Shakry, Omnia, 241n63 Employment, 69–70 English language, 172–173 Ethnicity/“kind” [jins], 83, 206 European influences, 61, 92, 108–109, 218; cultural expectations and, 118–119; evolving language and, 259n102; moral balance and, 85, 86–87; on peasants, 84–85 Excess [ifrat], 121, 153, 220–222 Exorcisms [zars], 197–198, 258n75 Exports. See Imports and exports Faddans, 231n22 Fallah. See Peasants

Fallah, use of term, 75, 160–165 Fallah Maryuti character, 110–111, 137–145, 158–159 Al-Fallah newspaper, 156, 159 Family unit, social cohesion and, 81 Farid, ‘Abd al-Hamid, 196 Farid, Muhammad, 112, 113, 134, 190, 211 Fathallah, Hamza, 32, 43, 75 Fawzi, Khalil, 184 Al-Fayum newspaper, 52 Feminine characteristics. See Gendered language Fenwick, Martin, 114, 115 Fiction, 6, 84–86, 90–95, 110, 134–135. See also Peasant characters Foreigners, 135, 174, 234n78; adopting the habits of, 118–119; in Egyptian government, 190–191; Giza Agricultural School and, 175; land ownership and, 25, 155, 157–158, 160; moneylending and, 36, 91, 92, 234n78, 234n79; national identity formation and, 184, 185; reform movements and, 78, 83; standards of behavior and, 195, 196–197. See also British occupation Foreign investment, 22, 24–25, 28, 34, 64–65 Free trade, legal reforms and, 64 Al-Fustat newspaper, 32–33 Gali, Kamal, 160 Gender, 40–41, 72–73, 125–127, 191–194, 195–197 Gendered language, 87–88, 94, 101, 123, 206; al-Tankit wa al Tabkit newspaper, 90–91; British occupation and, 204; “civilization” and, 93–95; early 20th century and, 191–197; ideals of Muslim citizenship and, 87–88, 89 Ghali, Butrus, 133, 189, 210 Ghalwash, Maha Ahmad, 23, 229n5 Ghanim, Khalil, 41 Ghazali, Abu Hamid al-, 56, 237n143 Giza Agricultural School, 155–156, 169, 171–177, 252n79 Government: agricultural production and, 159–160; British occupation and, 136–137, 150, 185, 249n9; Christians and, 254n10; colonialism and, 217; corruption and, 26–28; Dual Control

Index government, 48; education about, 41; employment in, 204; foreigners in, 190–191; forms of, 229n5; legislative bodies, 25–26, 133; literacy and, 89; local government, 26–27, 33, 115, 144–145; national debt, 20–21; national identity formation and, 98–100; public policy and, 129; reform movements and, 45, 77–78, 144–145, 212–213, 217–218; representative government, 98–100; selfgovernance, 189–190, 191, 204, 209; urban intelligensia and, 33–34. See also legal system; political formation; taxation Governmentality, 80 Gran, Peter, 237n144 Great Britain, 7, 20–21. See also British occupation Greeks, 234n78 Guidance [irshad], 82 Guizot, François, 121, 189 Habermas, Jürgen, 64 Habish, Yusef, 169 Haddad, Amin and Najib, 212 Hadir al-misriyin aw sirr ta’akhiruhu [The Descent of the Egyptians or the Secret of Their Backwardness] (‘Umar), 121 Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham, aw fatra min al-zaman (Muwaylihi), 134 Hafez, Sabry, 55 Hamawi, Salim, 156 Hamid, Ra’uf Abbas, 18, 229n5 Hamzah, Dyala, 236n128 Al-Haqiqa newspaper, 139 Haqqi, Mahmud, 134, 191, 192–193, 207, 210, 258n100 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 134, 188–189, 191, 192–193, 213–214 Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh qasid abi shaduf (Shirbini), 54, 75, 105 Health, concept of, 241n48. See also Social health Health Commission, 27–28 Hijazi, Amna, 219, 229n5 Al-Hijra newspaper, 196 Al-Hilal newspaper, 55 Hilbawi, Ibrahim, 183, 210 Hirschkind, Charles, 230n4 Histoire de la civilisation en Europe dupuis la chute de l’Empire romain

287

jusqu’à la révolution français (Guizot), 121 Historicism, 47–48, 67, 189, 212, 215–216 History, study of, 148–149, 189–190, 224–225 Homeland [wutan], 81 Hourani, Albert, 121, 168, 229n5 Hoyle, Mark, 229n5 Humor and satire, 54, 73–74, 136, 197, 198, 200–203 Hunter, F. Robert, 229n5 Al-Hurriya newspaper, 207, 208 Iconography, nationalist, 108 Ideals, of Muslim citizenship, 40–41, 181–182 Identity formation, social classes and, 85–86, 97, 145–146. See also National identity formation Ignorance. See “Backwardness” “Immaturity,” of Egyptian society, 120 Immigration to cities, 198–199 Imports and exports, 17–18, 20, 162. See also Agricultural production; Commodity production India, 5–6, 53, 133–134, 191 Individualism, 38, 65, 207–208 Individual moral duty [fard al-’ayn], 166 Industrialization, 156, 171 Inheritance laws, 96–97 Innocent-looking [sahiya], 246n32 Innovation. See scientific agriculture Al-Insan newspaper, 184 Interest rates, 37, 234n75. See also Moneylending Investments, land ownership and, 22, 24, 25. See also Foreign investment Al-Iqtisad al-Siyasi: Fann Tadbir almanzil [Political Economy: The Art of Domestic Organization] (Ghanim), 41 Irrigation, 58, 61, 141, 143 Ishaq, Adib, 43, 48, 58, 66 Islam: “civilization” and, 53; ideals, of Muslim citizenship and, 51; Islamic reform movement and, 45, 46; national identity formation and, 13; newspapers and, 48–49; peasants and, 3; Western thought and, 46, 47 Islamic moral community [umma]: evolving language and, 242n69; inclusion of peasants in, 146; meaning of,

288

Index

Islamic moral community (continued) 119–120; national identity formation and, 103, 186; newspapers and, 139; reform movements and, 132 Islamic reform movement, 1, 7–9; ‘Abduh and Al-’Afghani, 42–48; “backwardness” and, 220–221; “civilization” and, 50; collective responsibility and, 166–167; journalism and, 35, 55, 56; middle classes and, 39–41; national identity formation and, 11, 219–220; peasants and, 8–9, 15–17, 58, 59, 66 Islamic society, defining, 59–60 Islamic texts, 44, 47–48, 59 Islamic traditions, 236n110; collective responsibility and, 166; cultural identity and, 183; European influences and, 86; moral community [umma] and, 119; reform movements and, 65, 81–82; scientific agriculture and, 164–165; social formation and, 109 Islamic Welfare Society, 70 Isma’il, Khedive, 2, 3, 20, 21; debt and, 91; land tenure and, 23–24; legal reforms and, 64; Yaqub Sannu’ and, 68–69 Al-Istanah newspaper, 195–196 Jaddane, Fahmy, 39, 229n5 Jalal, ‘Abd al-Fattah, 232–233n57 Jami’yat al-’atidal Society, 96 Al-Jarida newspaper, 152 Jawish, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-, 112, 113, 134, 189 Journalism. See newspapers Kamal al-najah lil-muzar‘i wa al-fallah (‘Atiya), 161 Kamil, Mustafa, 112, 113, 134, 139, 190, 211 Kana wa yakun (al-Nadim), 114 Karkur, Askandar, 156, 176 Kashaf al-Khabaya’ newspaper, 196 Kastali, Musa, 35, 58 Al-Kawkab al-Misri newspaper, 35 Kharajiya land, taxation and, 26 Khedival Geographic Society, 95, 174 Kitab kamil al-najah lil-muzari’ wa alfallah fi al-’aradi wa al-zira’a almisriya (‘Atiya), 116–117 Labor force, 141–142, 161 Labor movement, 149

Land, abandonment of, 35, 83, 233–234n70. See also Redistribution of land Land Laws, 29 Land ownership: corvée system and, 160–161; foreigners and, 155, 157–158, 160; market economy and, 22; middle classes and, 34; redistribution of land and, 23–24; social classes and, 33, 34; taxation and, 21; terms for peasantry and, 161–162 Land tenure, 21–25, 28–29, 229n5 Language, evolving, 81, 242n69, 242n72; foreigners and, 135, 259n102; ideals of Muslim citizenship and, 50–51, 72, 181–182; Islamic reform movement and, 60; misr, development of term and, 153; national identity formation and, 90, 185, 186–187, 206; religious identity and, 219–220; terms for peasantry and, 130–131, 160–165; umma (moral community) and, 119–120. See also Arabic language Languages. See Arabic language; Turkish language Law, rule of. See Rule of law Lawyers, 235n101 Leadership, 99, 156–157, 173–174 Le Bon, Gustave, 121, 189, 190 Lecturing Fallah character, 127–132 Legal system, 11, 15, 19, 28–29, 141, 154, 229n5; the Capitulations and, 22–23; Dinshway incident and, 210; middle classes and, 38–39; Mixed Courts and, 16, 28–29, 78, 232n47; National Courts and, 48, 114–115; reform movements and, 64–65, 258n97 Legislative bodies, 25–26, 133 Liberalism, 65, 259n103, 259n109 Liberation of Women, The (Amin), 192, 193 Literacy, 55, 68, 89; Giza Agricultural School and, 173; peasants and, 50, 57–58, 136, 176–177; rural/urban divide and, 194 Literary representations of peasants: ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 84–87, 90–95; agricultural production and, 62–65, 170–171; changes in, 6–9, 212–215; contradictory, 222; gendered language and, 191–194; humor

Index and satire, 54; middle classes and, 30–37; national identity formation and, 116–117, 122; newspapers and, 71–72, 73–76, 105, 106–107; social formation and, 10–13, 17, 109–110; Yaqub Sannu’ and, 30–31, 87–90. See also Peasant characters Literary salons, 38, 70, 112, 127–132 Literary styles, Arabic language and, 117 Literature, educational, 41, 121–122 Al-Liwa’ newspaper, 113 Lloyd, Clifford, 245n16 Local government, 26–27, 33, 115, 144–145 Lubnani, Habib Faris al-, 167 Madani, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-, 32 Mahar, Mustafa, 75, 94 Majdi, Ahmad al-, 209–210 Makariyus, Shahin, 79, 182 Makdisi, Usama, 223, 261n21 Manahij al-’Albab al-Misriya fi Mabahij al-’Adab al Asriya (al-Tahtawi), 56 Al-Manar journal, 43 Market economy, 17–21, 22, 64; agricultural production and, 129–130, 184; literary representations of peasants and, 90–95; the “new peasant” and, 201, 202–203; peasants and, 35–36, 128–129, 131, 163 Marx, Anthony W., 259n103 Masculine characteristics. See Gendered language Masonic lodges, 38, 70, 95 Massad, Joseph A., 261n21 “Maydan al-Hurriya” (Sannu’), 101–102 Media critics, 117–118 Media representations. See Literary representations of peasants Mehmet ’Ali, 17–18, 23, 35, 171, 217–218, 230n6 Metaphors, 67, 98–100, 106, 156 Middle classes: British occupation and, 184–185, 215; “civilization” and, 124, 221; colonialism and, 217; conceptions of peasantry and, 29–37, 51–60, 135–136; gendered language and, 195–197; ideals of Muslim citizenship and, 50–51; identity formation and, 97; Mehmet ’Ali and, 217–218; national identity formation and, 5, 6, 8, 9–10, 13; national lead-

289

ership and, 153, 156–157; the “new peasant” and, 200–201, 203; newspapers and, 139; public discourse and, 37–41; shared identity with peasants, 137, 138, 143–144, 145–146, 192, 211, 214; social formation and, 108, 140, 222–223; speaking for the peasantry and, 134–135. See also Urban intelligentsia Military service, 104–105. See also Corvée system Misr lil-Misriyin [Egypt for the Egyptians] (Naqqash), 43, 151 Misr newspaper, 41, 43, 71 Mixed Courts, 16, 28–29, 78, 232n47 Moderation, political, 45 Moderation [‘atidal], 153, 237n143 Modernism, 4–5, 13, 16, 17, 57, 148–149, 223–224. See also Islamic reform movement; Political modernity Monetization, 16, 18, 20, 21, 35–36 Moneylending, 20, 37, 79, 80, 84, 234n75; foreigners and, 234n78, 234n79; literary representations of peasants and, 90–95, 102; peasants and, 35–36, 207 Monopolies. See State monopolies Moral balance. See Balance, importance of Moral education, 84–85 Moral faults, 76, 83–84, 93–94, 104, 164–165, 199–203 Moral reforms. See Islamic reform movement Moral virtues, 162–163, 164 Mortgages, 28–29 Mosque preachers, newspapers and, 48–49 Al-Mu’ayyad newspaper, 110–111, 132–137, 137–145 Al-Mu’tasam newspaper, 209–210 Mubarak, ’Ali, 19, 33 Al-Mufid newspaper, 32, 34, 37 Al-Muqattam newspaper, 79, 115–116, 247n74 Al-Muqtataf newspaper, 79–80 Muslim Brotherhood, 43 Muslims. See Islam; Islamic reform movement “Muhtaj jahil fi id muhtal tami‘” (alNadim), 90–95 Muwani, Hashim ‘Abd al-Fattah al-, 181, 207 Muwaylihi, Muhammad, 134

290

Index

Nadim, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-, 123–127, 177 Nadim, ‘Abdallah al-, 12, 69–73, 113–114; “civilization” and, 53, 104, 106; evolving language and, 51, 242n69; gender norms and, 194; Giza Agricultural School and, 172–173, 252n79; Islamic reform movement and, 43; Islamic traditions and, 81–82; legal system and, 38–39; literary representations of peasants and, 17, 90–95, 106–107, 155; middle classes and, 40–41; moral balance and, 79, 86–87; national identity formation and, 98–100, 177–178; the “new peasant” and, 202; newspapers and, 30, 31, 32, 48–49, 69, 73–76, 111, 177; peasant characters and, 123–127; peasants and, 37, 58, 76, 80, 232–233n57; social mobility and, 38; voluntary associations and, 95; Yusef Shirbini and, 54 Al-Nafahat al-zakiya fi al-nahad almisriya [Intelligent Breezes of Egypt’s Renaissance] (‘Awad), 111, 121–122, 127–132 Al-Najah newspaper, 32 Naqqash, Salim, 43, 48, 58, 151 National Courts [al-Mahkama alAhaliya], 48, 114–115 National debt, 20–21, 26, 92 National identity formation, 1–4, 90, 168; ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 98–100; agricultural production and, 80–81, 118, 150–160, 161–162, 177–179; colonialism and, 8, 108–109; early 20th century and, 180–191, 215–216; economic development and, 115–116, 131–132, 162; literary representations of peasants and, 10–13, 122, 140–141, 142; middle classes and, 5, 9–10, 30, 38–39; nation-states and, 115, 203–210; the “new peasant” and, 199–203; newspapers and, 52, 103, 116; peasants and, 1, 6–9, 110, 137, 138; reform movements and, 66–67, 66–67, 95–103; social relations and, 72–73, 120–121, 127–128, 145–146 Nationalism, 4, 108, 139, 181, 216; Arabic language and, 57; British occupation and, 182–183; colonialism and, 204–206; Dinshway incident

and, 208–209, 210, 211; literary representations of peasants and, 140–141; Ottoman Empire and, 184, 187; peasants and, 134, 214–215; political modernity and, 112; reform movements and, 66–67; religious identity and, 187–188; social identity and, 12–13; study of history and, 149 Nationality, Egyptian-ness and, 186, 206 National Party [Hizb al-Watani], 113, 211 Nation-states, 115, 203–210, 203–210, 216, 223 Neglect [tafrit], 45, 57, 86, 121, 153, 220–222 “New clothes” metaphor, 57 “New era,” newspapers and, 48–50 New peasant, the, 197–203, 223 Newspapers, 229n5; ‘Abdallah alNadim and, 71–73; agricultural production and, 158–160, 165–171; circulation of, 55, 68, 73, 117; depictions of peasants and, 58–59, 62, 106–107; Dinshway incident and, 210–212; gender ideals and, 193; Islamic reform movement and, 43, 55, 56; Jamal al-Din al-’Afghani and, 42; land ownership and, 34; media critics and, 117–118; middle classes and, 30, 31–34, 139; national identity formation and, 11–12, 103, 150–160; “new era” and, 48–50; peasants and, 34–35, 154–155, 233n64; political views of, 32–33; pro-British newspapers, 79–80, 111, 116, 139, 142, 210, 211, 247n74; provincial newspapers, 52; public discourse and, 112, 139; public purpose of, 48–49; rural gentry and, 176–177; umma (moral community) and, 139; use of symbolism and, 240n32; voluntary associations and, 95–96; Western, 188; Yaqub Sannu’ and, 69 New Woman, The (Amin), 193 New York Herald, 133 Al-Nil newspaper, 33 Nimr, Faris, 79, 96, 115–116, 182 1919 Rebellion, 12–13, 34, 215 Nubarian, Nubar, 28, 64 Nurturing the Nation (Pollard), 229–230n6

Index Ottoman Empire, 2–3, 10, 21, 48, 79, 109; British occupation and, 218; the Capitulations and, 22–23; cultural identity and, 183–184, 187; national identity formation and, 175, 189; nationalist politics and, 113; religious identity and, 188, 218–219 Owen, Roger, 18, 158, 229n5 Pan-Arabism, 182, 218 Peasant characters, 110, 111–112, 116–117, 202; Abu Shaduf, 73, 75, 87–88, 89, 90, 105; Bihayna, 123–127; Fallah Maryuti, 137–145; the Lecturing Fallah, 127–132; the Real Sphinx, 132–137; Sitt al-Balad, 123–127 Peasants: agricultural production and, 60–61, 153–154, 156–160, 169, 178–179; “backwardness” and, 221; British occupation and, 133–134; conservatism and, 170; cultivators [muzari‘], 130–131; educational literature and, 121–122; evolving conceptions of, 135–136, 138, 158–159; exploitation of, 90–95, 102, 154, 233n59; foreign influences and, 84–86; forms of government and, 99–100; Islamic reform movement and, 15–16, 17; land tenure and, 23–24, 29; language and, 74, 160–165; middle classes and, 29–37, 51–60, 137, 138, 143–144, 145–146; national identity formation and, 1, 3, 5, 6–10, 104–105, 118, 122–123, 150–160; nationalism and, 12, 211; the new peasant and, 197–203, 223; newspapers and, 31–32, 34–35; political formation and, 224; public discourse and, 100, 102–103; reform movements and, 65–67, 76–95; rural/urban divide and, 50; social mobility and, 123–124; umma (moral community) and, 119; urban intelligensia and, 88; village novels and, 191–194. See also Literary representations of peasants People [‘ahl], 98, 103, 161, 207. See also National identity formation Period of Abandonment. See Land, abandonment of Pharaonic narrative, 190 Pious Endowments [waqfs], 96–97

291

Police forces, 114–115, 136, 245n16 Political activities: agricultural journals and, 167–168; Giza Agricultural School and, 174–175; Islamic reform movement and, 42–43, 59 Political commentary, 32–33, 133–137, 135–136, 140–141 Political formation, 4–5, 12, 15, 16–17; agricultural production and, 170–171, 179; “backwardness” and, 209–210; British occupation and, 205; literary representations of peasants and, 62, 63; national identity formation and, 2–3; peasants and, 224 Political modernity, 44, 46, 112, 230n3 Political power structure, 3, 78–79, 91, 110, 114–115, 144, 155 Political system, 54, 109. See also Government Pollard, Lisa, 215, 229–230n6, 229–230n6, 242n97, 260n125 Polytechnic Institute (Giza), 68 Populism, peasant characters and, 139 Powell, Eve Troutt, 230n9 Power relations. See Political power structure Press Law (1881), 188 Pro-British newspapers, 79–80, 111, 139, 142; al-Muqattam newspaper, 116, 247n74; Dinshway incident and, 210, 211 Productivity, scientific agriculture and, 165–171 Professional classes. See Middle classes Progress [taqaddum], 39, 47, 127–132 Protobourgeois class. See Middle classes Providentialism, 167–168 Provincial newspapers, 52 Public Debt Administration, 21, 92, 249n9 Public discourse: intellectual life and, 138; Islamic reform movement and, 1, 37–41, 59–60, 103–104, 220, 221–222; literary representations of peasants and, 10–13, 145–146; newspapers and, 37, 48–50, 97, 112, 139; peasants and, 102–103; social classes and, 30, 100; urban intelligentsia and, 2, 16–17; voluntary associations and, 95–96; women and girls, 125; Yaqub Sannu’ and, 100–102 Public health, 150–151

292

Index

Public interest, the, 50, 56, 60–61, 103, 139, 236n128 Public-ness. See Public discourse Public opinion, 42, 57, 65, 70 Public works projects, 142 Publishing industry, 54, 229n5 Al-Qanbila newspaper, 211–212, 212–213 Rafi’, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 108 Al-Rawdat al Madaris journal, 32 Real Sphinx character, 132–137, 147 Rebellions: 1882 rebellion, 26; 1919 rebellion, 12–13, 34; ‘Urabi rebellion, 32–33, 42, 43, 71, 113, 114, 219 Redistribution of land, 23, 23–24, 26, 78, 83. See also Land, abandonment of Reform movements: ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 71–73; “civilization” and, 106; early 20th century and, 181; education and, 244n126; historicism and, 212; inadequacy of, 129–130, 131; Islamic traditions and, 109; literary representations of peasants and, 63–64, 144; motivations of urban progressives and, 132; national identity formation and, 95–103; newspapers and, 154–155; peasants and, 65–67, 76–95, 201; public discourse and, 103–104; rural/urban divide and, 50; self-governance and, 190–191. See also Islamic reform movement Regions [qutr], 81 Religious communities, 248n98 Religious discourse, reform movements and, 66 Religious duties, 51, 56, 60–61, 81–82 Religious figures [‘ulama’], 67 Religious identity, 187–188, 189, 209, 218–219, 224 Religious practices, 58, 66, 76 Religious worldview, social relations and, 148 Representative government, 98–100 Rhyming prose, literary styles and, 117 Rida, Rashid, 43, 45–46, 81, 188, 189 Romanticism, 152, 158 Rule of law, 145, 164 Rural identity, peasants and, 3–4 Rural life, newspaper depictions of, 52

Rural/urban divide, 48–51; “civilization” and, 105, 127; literary representations of peasants and, 62–63; the “new peasant” and, 198–200, 202; New York Herald and, 133; social relations and, 124–125, 131–132; village novels and, 191–194 Sa’id, al-Sayyid, 196 Al-Sa’id newspaper, 196 Salmuni, Muhammad Sayyid al-, 211–212, 255n18 Samir, Ahmad, 43, 53, 75, 150–151 Sannu’, Yaqub, 12, 67–69; Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa journal (The Man with Blue Glasses) and, 73–76; evolving conceptions of peasants and, 136; literary representations of peasants and, 17, 30–31, 76, 87–90, 106–107, 155; public-ness and, 100–102; Yusef Shirbini and, 54 Sarafiyan, Alkasan, 33, 36–37, 58, 79 Sarruf, Yaqub, 79, 115–116, 182 Satire. See Humor and satire Al-Sayha newspaper, 185 Sayyid, Ahmad Lufti-al, 43, 55, 112–113, 139, 152, 190 Sayyid, Mikha’il ‘Abd al-, 58, 66 School, metaphor of, 98–100 Scientific agriculture: agricultural production and, 158, 233n58, 252n71; collective responsibility and, 165–171; Giza Agricultural School and, 171–177; Islamic traditions and, 164–165; peasants and, 157, 222. See also Agricultural production Scientific associations, 95, 96 Scott, David, 64, 230n4 Scott, John, 133 Secularism: Egyptian social development and, 224; national identity formation and, 13, 189, 219, 220; reform movements and, 65; social relations and, 148; urban intelligentsia and, 168–169 Self-governance, 189–190, 191, 204, 209 Self-interest, as moral fault, 104 Selim, Amah, 6, 140, 230n7 Sermons [khutba], 48–49 Shadhali, Mahmud al, 185 Shakir, Muhammad, 206–207 Shalabi, ’Ali, 24 Shamsi, Hasan, 32

Index Shanduli peasant character, 127–132, 147 Sharbatli, Muhammad, 181 Sharecropping, 22 Shaykhs al-balad. See Local government Shirbini, Yusef, 54, 75, 105, 240n41 Shith, Yusef, 151 Shumayyil, Amin, 41, 168 Sitt al-Balad character, 123–127, 146–147, 194, 202 Slave trade, 141 Smallholders, commercial agriculture and, 22 Social body, metaphor of, 57 Social categories, defining of, 132 Social classes: common Egyptian identity and, 135; Giza Agricultural School and, 175, 176; land ownership and, 23; literary representations of peasants and, 63, 90; middle class leadership and, 153; peasants and, 130–131, 202–203; political power and, 9; social relations and, 12; urban intelligentsia and, 33–34; village novels and, 192, 214 Social criticism, 74 Social exchange, 16–17, 38 Social formation, 1, 62, 103–104, 108, 177–179, 222–223. See also National identity formation Social health, 67, 77, 82, 83, 106, 164–165, 165–171 Social identity, 12–13, 140 Social mobility, 38, 123–124 Social relations: agricultural production and, 148–150, 170; forms of government and, 98–100; Giza Agricultural School and, 172; Islamic reform movement and, 15; national identity formation and, 127–128, 215–216; peasants and, 129; rural/urban divide and, 124–125, 131–132; social classes and, 12; voluntary associations and, 95, 96 Social subjectivities, construction of, 62, 64, 65 Social transformations, 29–30, 76–95 Sri Lanka, 64 Stagnation, society and, 109–110 State monopolies, 17–18, 19, 23, 35 Students, literary representations of, 130–131. See also Education Suez Canal, 2, 20, 26

293

Superstition, 66, 86, 94, 197–198 Symbolism, use of, 240n32 Syrians, 25, 231n30 System of Consultative Rule, The [Nizam al-Shura] (Shumayyil), 41 Al-Tafrih newspaper, 52 “Taghfila wa jahala” (al-Nadim), 90–91 Tahtawi, Rifa ‘a Rafi’ al-, 32, 55–56, 57, 155, 237n146 Al-Tankit wa al Tabkit newspaper, 30, 31, 37, 97; ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and, 71–72; foreign influences and, 84–86; literary representations of peasants and, 73–76, 82–83, 90–95, 105 Taqla, Bishara, 78, 115 Taqla, Salim, 78, 115 Tariffs, 19, 23 Tawfiq, Khedive, 20, 32, 89 Taxation, 19, 25–28, 139–140, 231n36; agricultural production and, 159–160; the Capitulations and, 25, 184; endowments [waqfs] and, 97; Fallah Maryuti character and, 141, 142; Giza Agricultural School and, 172; monetization and, 20, 21; peasants and, 16, 35, 128, 129 Tax collectors, 27, 35–36, 246n55 Tax farming system, 17 Teacher/sir [khawaja], 135 Technological advances, 48–49, 58, 222, 238n158. See also Scientific agriculture Textbook of Egyptian Agriculture, 174 Thaquib, Mustafa, 32, 34 Theater, 43, 68, 230n7 “The Real Sphinx of Egypt” [Abu alhaul al-haqiqi], 133–137 Thompson, Elizabeth, 193, 223, 229–230n6 Al-Tijara newspaper, 24, 27–28, 31, 41, 42, 43, 58, 71, 158, 233n59 Tignor, Robert, 229n5 Toledano, Ehud, 219 Tollefson, Harold, 229n5, 245n16 Trade. See Imports and exports Transportation, 131, 176 Travel literature, 20–21 Treaty of London, 23 Turani, Hasan Husni al-, 33, 151, 167, 174–175 Turkish language, 218, 232n53

294

Index

‘Umar, Muhammad, 121 Umma (moral community). See Islamic moral community [umma] Al-Umma newspaper, 181, 185–189, 196–197, 203–204, 206–207, 210 ‘Urabi Rebellion, 32–33, 42, 43, 71, 113, 114, 219 Urban intelligentsia: agricultural production and, 122–123, 179; interest in peasant issues and, 154–155, 198–199; literary representations of peasants and, 62–63, 150; modernism and, 2; motivations of, 132; national identity formation and, 4, 9–10, 98–100, 178; nationalism and, 108; newspapers and, 49; peasants and, 80, 88, 152, 162; political formation and, 3, 12; public discourse and, 16–17; secularism and, 168–169; selfcongratulatory tone of, 129–130; terms for peasantry and, 160–161. See also Middle classes Urbanites, shared identity with peasants and, 207 Urban living. See Rural/urban divide Al-Urwa al- Wuthqa journal, 35 Al-Ustadh newspaper, 30, 71, 111, 123–127, 172–173, 177 Usus al-Taqaddm ‘ind mufakkari alislam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith (Jaddane), 39 Village novels, 6, 191–194 Villiers-Stuart, Henry, 79, 234n75 Voluntary associations, 65, 95–96, 97, 100, 101, 106, 112 Al-Wad al-Ahbal wa Abu Shaduf alHiqn (Sannu’), 87–88, 89 Al-Wad al-mariq wa abu shaduf alhadiq [The Dim Kid and the Clever Abu Shaduf], 73 Wafa Muhammad, al-Sayyid, 35, 58 Wafd Party, 34 Wages, of tax collectors, 27 Wajdi, Muhammad Farid, 193 Wakil, Hamdi al-, 229n5 Wallace, William, 155, 175 Al-Waqt newspaper, 78

Al-Watan newspaper, 183 Wealth, sources of, 56 Wealthy, the, 99–100, 199–200 Wendell, Charles, 219 Westernization, 120, 148–149, 166–167, 177–178, 179, 186–187, 221–222 Western thought, 44, 45, 46, 47, 59, 64 Wilcox, William, 173, 257n58 Williams, Raymond, 125 Women and girls: agricultural production and, 178; childrearing, 241n63; exorcisms [zars] and, 197–198; peasant characters and, 123–127, 146–147; social restrictions on, 256n47; village novels and, 192–194 Word choices, reform movements and, 81–82. See also Language, evolving World War I, 218 Writers, reform movements and, 67 Young Egypt Society, 95 Youth, urban, 195–196 Yusuf, ’Ali: agricultural production and, 115; Giza Agricultural School and, 172; literary representations of peasants and, 155; the “new peasant” and, 202; peasant characters and, 110–111, 132–137, 137–145, 145–146; political modernity and, 112; self-governance and, 190; social mobility and, 38 Zaghlul, Ahmad Fathi, 121, 183 Zaghlul, Sa’ad, 34, 43 Al-Zaman newspaper, 33, 79, 80, 151–152, 154 Al-Zar newspaper, 197–198 Zaydan, Jurji, 33, 55 Zaynab (Haykal), 134, 191, 192–193, 213–214 Zayyat, ‘Amin Sayyid Ahmad al-, 197–198, 197–203, 205–206 Al-Zira’a newspaper: agricultural production and, 155–156, 159, 162; Giza Agricultural School and, 173–174, 175–176; political views of, 167–168; scientific agriculture and, 165–166, 169, 171