The Egyptian Peasant 9781617975004, 9789774248719

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The Egyptian Peasant

The Egyptian Peasant Henry Habib Ayrout, S. J.

Translated and introduced by John Alden Williams Introduction by Morroe Berger Photographs by Margo Veillon

The American University in Cairo Press

Copyright © 2005 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt 420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018 www.aucpress.com First published in France in 1938 as Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs First English translation published in Cairo in 1945 This English translation with revisions by the author first published by Beacon Press in 1963 This edition published by arrangement with the Association of Upper Egypt for Education and Development All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Dar el Kutub No. 8827/04 ISBN 977 424 871 6 Printed in Egypt

Contents Foreword List of Maps and Illustrations Introduction by Morroe Berger Introduction: On Understanding the Fellah

vii xv xvii xxiii

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

1 7 13 31 55 75 99 113 117 129

Changelessness Egypt, an Agricultural Country Landowners and Government The Fellah at Work The Physical Fellah The Village and the Peasant Group The Fellah’s Home and Family Traditions of the Soil The Psychology of the Fellah The Distress of the Fellah

Epilogue: Progress

133

A Critical Bibliography

137

Glossary of Arabic Terms

143

Contents

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Foreword by John Alden Williams

The author of this book was a distinguished member of a group who contributed greatly to the modernization of Egypt, but have not always received their due. These were Syrian Arab Catholics of the Greek rite, usually of merchant or artisan background. They were brought into the country from the time of Muhammad ‘Ali in the nineteenth century for their fluency in Arabic and for the education they had received in church-sponsored schools in their homeland. This generally included proficiency in French, and their energy, their ambition, and their ability to move with comparative ease in two civilizations made them threshold figures of great value in the Egyptian government’s efforts to make the country both modern and free. While it was the period of European colonialism that gave them importance in Egypt, their talents were usually employed for Egypt’s gain. The Ayrouts, originally from Yabroud and Damascus, began arriving in Egypt in the eighteenth century. Others followed when Muhammad ‘Ali destroyed the Mamluks’ control of the country in 1811. Henry’s paternal grandfather Yusuf became court jeweler to Khedive Tawfiq (1879–92); his father Habib graduated from the school of the Fr
eres Chretiens in Cairo in 1900 and became a civil engineer in France before returning to Egypt to work with the state railway system and the Port of Alexandria. In January, 1904 he married Josephine Dahhan of Alexandria. They soon moved to a luxurious villa in Heliopolis, the new city in the desert which he had helped to plan and build as an associate of the Belgian developer Baron Empain. By 1920, Habib and Josephine had three sons and four

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daughters. Their second son was born in 1907, given the English name Henry, and educated in the French Jesuit schools. Henry was to cause a crisis in this affectionate family. He wanted to become a Jesuit priest, but his health was not robust. His parents were devoted Catholics, but they feared for him, and they were strongly opposed to his plan. Hence when he was nineteen, he fled the country in a cassock on a ship bound for France, with a passport furnished to him by the Jesuits, and entered the seminary. There he wrote to his parents, begging their pardon that his duty and love to God had caused him to fail in his love and duty to them. They traveled to France to embrace him and give him their pardon, and he stayed there in his studies, except for a year to do fieldwork in Egypt for his doctoral dissertation, and some shorter visits. He came home in 1938 to be ordained a priest by the Greek Catholic patriarch Cyril IX in Cairo on June 19. By a special papal indult, he was the first eastern Jesuit to be permitted to celebrate mass in the Greek, or Byzantine, rite of his ancestors. His deep desire for this is very revealing of the man. Though he was a devoted member of the Society of Jesus, the French Jesuits naturally followed the Roman rite. Henry was very attached to his eastern and Egyptian roots, and he would always be sensitive to any French or Latin encroachment on them. Also in 1938, the first edition of this book, titled Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs, appeared in Paris.1 It was the fruit of his doctoral dissertation in sociology for the University of Lyon, and he was to rework and rewrite it several times. The title was directly inspired by Edward William Lane’s classic, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, written between 1833 and 1835. As a trained sociologist, well aware of the plight of the Egyptian fellahin, or peasants, he was deeply affected by it. Much of his life’s work would be among these people. His many letters to his family in his student years are affectionate and moving. He begs them to stop sending him dainties and luxuries, so that he may experience poverty; he tells them of his daily pursuits, and that his superiors force him to take rest for his health’s sake and refuse to permit him the asceticism he desires in Lent; he reports carefully on the progress of his brother Max, six years his junior, who as of 1928 was studying in France He proudly recounts how “His Majesty”—King Fuad of Egypt—in a public address in Paris, has said that the material and moral prosperity of Egypt require moral and religious regeneration, and that none perform this task better than the Jesuits. He regrets that he is unable to be in Egypt to cooperate in that invaluable work.

1. Henry Habib Ayrout, Moeurs et coutumes des fellahs, Paris: Payot, 1938.

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His desire was near fulfillment. In 1940, following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he was ordered to return to Cairo, and was there entrusted with supervising the network of village schools that Jesuits and Franciscans had established for the education of the Coptic Christian fellahin. These schools were located mainly in Upper Egypt. They had been heavily dependent on aid from France and Italy, which was no longer available. The 33-year-old Jesuit turned for help to his own class, the prosperous Syrian and European Christian bourgeoisie who lived in Egypt’s cities, who for the most part had never even entered the wretched, impoverished, and diseased villages of the south, where most of the Copts lived. “Turned for help” is perhaps euphemistic—he demanded their help, financial and practical, as a duty to God and to humanity. He engaged them in fundraising drives, and he took their wives and daughters to the countryside and enlisted them in child care, in education, and in the free clinics established in the villages. He founded the Association for the Free Schools of Upper Egypt to assure the necessary financing. People who knew him will attest that when he fixed one with his probing, insistent eyes, he was a man almost impossible to refuse: ascetic, impassioned, wholly convinced of the rightness of what he asked, and totally devoted to the village poor, among whom he circulated, traveling in third-class train carriages and on donkeys. He asked no one for more than he gave of himself; he seemed indefatigable, and his health appeared robust. “That hypnotist, P
ere Ayrout,” some called him. Inevitably, he ran into entrenched interests and he made enemies; but he made more friends and followers. He had the common touch, he was an astute observer of human nature, and he was eloquent: he knew how to speak persuasively to the richest and to the poorest, he had charisma, and he had a gift for friendship. The Orthodox Copts at first distrusted him, fearing that he intended to convert their flocks to the Coptic Catholic Church, in union with Rome. Yet although he kept to his own Byzantine rite, he was to emerge as a great champion of the Coptic Church, Orthodox or Catholic, as the inheritor of Egypt’s rich Christian legacy. At the time, in many Upper Egyptian villages, the only schools available were those of the Association. He sought, usually successfully, to convince the Coptic Orthodox hierarchs that he was there to serve them too, that their people could only benefit from access to the Association’s schools, and that they should emulate his work, rather than undermine it. He accepted some Muslim pupils who sought to come to the schools as well, even though the curriculum included religious instruction (Muslims were released from attendance at mass, but there was no separate religious instruction for them until the era of President

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Abdel Nasser, after 1954). Any kind of proselytism was, however, scrupulously avoided. Finding acceptable teachers to live and work among the impoverished and ignorant villagers was always a struggle. This led to assistance to future instructors to study in teachers’ training schools in Upper Egypt (it was better for the teachers to avoid the seductions of education in Cairo or Alexandria, which might lure them from the villages). The teachers in the existing schools needed moral and material encouragement; they were poor, their salaries tiny, and they were often tempted to leave their students inadequately supervised and untaught during much of the day while they sought some other employment. Despite the shortage of money, ways were found to augment their income, and to this were added periodic inspections, a yearly retreat, and a teachers’ bulletin. He found help in the idealism of youth. Troops of young women, white kerchiefs on their heads, were taken from the cities to Upper Egypt, not only to assist the work, but to see how much still needed to be done and to be inspired (their parents in the city moaned that they would be exposed to the endemic diseases and find nothing clean to eat). Women who could not leave the city could help in the work of cutting out and sewing gallabiyas to give to the village children. By 1950, there were 122 schools, most of them built of red brick in the largely mudbrick villages, where over 11,000 peasant children received free education. The schools were constantly visited and inspected by Fr Ayrout and his close associates, and they were designed on simple, practical lines by his architect brothers, who contributed their work freely to the cause. The Association’s headquarters on 26 July Street in Cairo was a building constructed and donated by Henry’s father. The Press gave delighted coverage to the work. In 1950 he led a company of fellah children to Rome, for the Holy Year. The Vatican assisted his efforts. Of course, his efforts were not simply to provide one-way education for the children of the fellahin. Some young city people went on to study law and social work at university, in order to give him expert assistance. He was educating the Christian middle class of Egypt’s cities on the realities of the countryside, and the responsibilities that they had for Egypt’s less fortunate. He was also fostering social consciousness, a sense of responsibility, and a love of country. My first personal encounter with Fr Ayrout came when I was a graduate student at Princeton University in 1954. While on a visit to the United States sponsored by the Fulbright Foundation, Fr Ayrout came to give a lecture in the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures. I had read his book in a 1945 English translation by an Englishman, Hilary Wayment. I found it remarkable, and was preparing to be in Egypt during the next year as a Fulbright Student.

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Part of my project was to include living at the UNESCO Center for Fundamental Education (social work) for the Arab States, located at Sirs al-Layyan in the Delta. My goal was to observe what happened when social planners met with traditional village society. He warmly assured me that I would be welcome to come with him to Upper Egypt, and to see at first hand the life of the poorest villages. “You will find no comforts with us, but you will find friends. We will take all of the time that you give us. You will see the Egypt that very few know,” he assured me. He spoke a forceful, expressive English, ungrammatical, and full of neologisms. I was assured by French people and Arabic classicists later in Egypt that his French and his Arabic were much the same. When I arrived in Cairo in November, he proved a most generous and welcoming mentor. He took me on repeated visits to Upper Egypt, where we usually stayed in the houses of some of the Coptic landowners who were his friends. My Arabic made rapid strides. In Cairo, he introduced me to several of his well-to-do friends, hospitable people who were excellent company and helpful commentators on society. When in Cairo, he lived in central Zamalek, in the study-house with an oriental chapel that Habib Ayrout had given to the Jesuits as a residence for their men of the eastern rites, the Athanasium. The English edition of his book was out of print, and many people wanted it. The Egyptian publisher refused to relinquish any rights to the translation, expecting to make a good profit, and the only way to republish the work in English was to do a new translation, and bring it out in England or the United States. Fr Ayrout had revised the French text. I offered to make a new translation; he quickly accepted. For Easter Week in 1955, he proposed that I make a retreat with him at a rural estate in the Fayyum oasis. There would be many liturgies (always in the Byzantine rite), but I would have free time for concentrated work. For his own part, this man who had to be constantly talking to others, living a focused and intense life, needed to be alone and to meditate. We would see each other only at meals, at prayers, and for an evening walk. It was a good arrangement, and my translation of the book was completed that spring. It would not be published, however, until 19632 —there was little interest at the time in the United States in the lives of Egyptian peasants. Fr Ayrout was a generous fund of information about fellah life, the eastern churches, and social history, and he would take time in his busy life to do remarkably kind and thoughtful things. He had great charm and diplomacy, a warm laugh, and also a famous temper, seldom in evidence. He drove himself so 2. The Egyptian Peasant (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

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mercilessly that it rarely occurred to him that he asked a great deal of others. As a Jesuit of that time, while highly communicative, he was schooled to be reserved. He kept his own counsel, lived very simply, and was a man of prayer. The rural people felt his affection for them, and returned it. People who knew him were in awe of him. I was certainly no exception, but his friendship was a great gift. One of his fondest dreams had been for an industrial school in Upper Egypt, where village boys could learn useful trades such as bricklaying, plastering, electrical wiring, plumbing, carpentry, and car repair, to improve their own lives and those of Egypt’s peasants. It was fulfilled that year at Abu Qurqas, a village with a large Christian population near Minya. The building was paid for by the Ford Foundation, and turned over to the Italian order of Don Bosco. There was a festive opening in January 1955, attended by the press, and with a solemn mass and blessing by the Coptic Catholic Patriarch. The time seemed ripe for such a school. Egypt’s revolution of 1952 meant that the country was in an optimistic ferment, looking forward to better times, and to the building of the High Dam, which would provide electrification and irrigation for the countryside. Unfortunately, the trade school was not a success in later years. It was difficult to persuade teachers of the trades to live in the isolated area, machinery when broken was difficult to mend, and it required more money to maintain than was easily available. The Association finally turned it over to an order of nuns. It became a boarding and day school for village girls, where they also learned home economics, and it proved useful in that way. He took this defeat in stride: “Man proposes, God disposes.” Since I came back to work in Egypt from 1957 to 1959, and visited almost yearly thereafter, I saw him, usually briefly, many times. The times were changing. By October 1956 Britain, France, and Israel had launched a tripartite attack on Egypt, in retaliation for its nationalization of the Suez Canal, British (including the sizable Maltese community), French, and Jewish nationals were deported. Egypt was now a nationalist country, and non-Egyptian communities like the Greeks, Armenians, and Syrians were having their businesses and property nationalized under Nasserist socialism. Many of the talented and able people who had been Fr Ayrout’s coworkers felt unappreciated and were leaving the country, despite all his efforts to dissuade them. The government, however, was building schools and dispensaries in the villages, and this was to the good. Fr Ayrout’s optimism was indomitable, but he had to relinquish direction of the village schools to a younger Jesuit. President Nasser commended him for his efforts for Egypt. He traveled in Europe; he brought foreign sisters to work in the villages. As the number of foreign Jesuits was reduced,

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he was appointed rector of the Jesuit College in Faggala in 1962, the finest secondary school for boys in the country, which had been sequestrated as a ‘foreign’ institution. His direction as an Egyptian national was acceptable. He now emerged as an Egyptian churchman working tirelessly for greater unity among the Christians of Egypt, and all Africa, but his health was increasingly fragile. In 1968, he was able to realize a dream: a visit to the Christians of the sources of the Nile, Sudan, and Ethiopia, where he was received by the emperor and was able to make an eight-day retreat at the monastery of Debre Bizen, high in the mountains, “the most beautiful experience of spirituality and asceticism in my life.”3 He stayed in Africa for seven months, visiting Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, observing, talking, making contacts with African Christians, lecturing in the universities, and visiting monasteries and mission schools. On 1 April 1969, he began a two-month series of lectures at Columbia University, residing at the Jesuits’ New York residence. On the night of the 5th, Holy Saturday, he sang the Resurrection mass at the Greek Catholic church in Brooklyn. On the morning of the 10th, he went to the Jesuit chapel to say his mass, and waited on his knees while the priest before him finished his. Suddenly he collapsed. It was the end: a massive heart attack. The Ford Foundation flew his body back to Egypt and his funeral took place at the Jesuit church of the College. He was buried in the Jesuit crypt at the Church of the Holy Family in Exile at Matariya, near the Tree of the Virgin, a Christian shrine in Egypt since the Middle Ages. Other Arab countries have fellahin. The peasants among whom Fr Ayrout lived and worked shared traits with peasant peoples everywhere, but they were the products of the Egyptian land, as the land was their product, and he drew attention to the continuity of their lives with the life depicted in Egyptian tombs of agricultural laborers since the third millennium BCE. In his words, editing Herodotus, “Egypt is the gift of the fellahin.”4 The land reform of 1952 that Fr Ayrout hailed as the revolutionary regime’s greatest gift to the fellahin made many of them small proprietors, yet today a new landlord class seems to be emerging. There is some concern for family planning. Perhaps his observation that few fellahin had the sense of belonging to the nation is less stark today. Electrification, television, and the chance for many Egyptian workers to find temporary employment in the Gulf, have all had a modernizing impact on the fellahin he knew. Life is changing in the villages, even in Upper 3. Jeannette Debono Ayrout: Une famille orientale: La chronique des Ayrout (Paris, 2001), 237. 4. Ibid., 234.

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Egypt. What he wrote was the best, the invaluable, picture of the enduring life of the Egyptian peasant before the changes began. What surprises us is that still much of it holds true today. It holds a unique place in the literature on rural Egyptian life. Henry Habib Ayrout had recognized that the Egyptian fellah was at once Egypt’s greatest resource and its greatest problem. In sometimes poetic language, he had held the mirror up to the perennial tillers of the land in all their original humanity, with honest and loving detail.

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List of Maps and Illustrations Figure 1.1 The Nile bank, 3 Figure 2.1 Map, the Nile Valley, 10 Figure 3.1 Cairo, 15 Figure 3.2 Map, Egypt, 29 Figure 4.1 The fellah using his hoe, 32 Figure 4.2 Plowing with ox and gamusa, 34 Figure 4.3 The mud-colored buffalo, 36 Figure 4.4 The shadoof, 38 Figure 4.5 The saqiya, 40 Figure 4.6 Family labor, 52 Figure 5.1 A fellah, 57 Figure 5.2 A fellaha, 59 Figure 5.3 Fellahin women carrying their water supplies, 68 Figure 5.4 Making bread, 74 Figure 6.1 A peasant village, 78 Figure 6.2 The bell tower of the Coptic church, 78 Figure 6.3 Jugs of water left in desert areas for pilgrims, 80 Figure 6.4 A cemetery, 83 Figure 6.5 Threshing grain, 83 Figure 6.6 Dovecots, 85 Figure 6.7 Peasants listening to a storyteller, 89 Figure 6.8 Market day, 92 Figure 7.1 Making mud bricks, 101 Figure 7.2 Fellahin children, 108

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Introduction by Morroe Berger In 1960, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic incidentally focused attention upon the Egyptian peasant in a speech explaining his reasons for nationalizing the press. Devoted to sensational trivialities, he said, the press ignored the “true” Egypt. Where might that be found? The president pointed to a village near Alexandria, Kafr el Battikh, or “Water-melonville.” Taking the president at his word, a New York Times reporter went to Watermelonville and found a situation confirming what the reader will find in Father Ayrout’s sensitive portrayal first written more than a generation earlier. This similarity, I think, immediately answers an important question: How “up-to-date” is Father Ayrout’s description? In all its essentials, the picture still fits the subject. Father Ayrout has himself made some revisions in the original manuscript. Nor should this stability of the Egyptian countryside surprise anyone. During thousands of years, Father Ayrout says, the peasants “have changed their masters, their religion, their language, and their crops, but not their way of life.” From a more recent perspective, too, things have not changed very much. The number of rural health centers and the salaries of the doctors and nurses are today not what they were when Father Ayrout wrote, but the more important things he describes remain the same: the centers are still inadequately manned and the staff still underpaid. Father Ayrout’s method of inquiry has enabled him to preserve the relevance of his study. In the first place, though he knows the value of statistics, he is more interested in analyzing and reporting the meaning of a mode of existence to those who follow it—I might say, in this case, to its victims. And a meaning, of course, changes much more slowly than a frequency distribution. Second, he is interested in the Egyptian peasant, though he knows that peasants everywhere have much in common. Ignazio Silone, in his beautiful novel about the Italian peasant, Fontamara, remarks that “all poor farmers are alike in every country. They are men who cause the earth to bear fruit; they suffer from hunger; and whether they are

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called fellahs, peons, muzhiks or cafoni, they form their own nation, their own race and their own church all over the world, even though no two are exactly alike.” “Even though no two are exactly alike”—here is the point for Father Ayrout. He succeeds in showing us not only what it means to be a peasant but more exactly what it means to be a fellah, an Egyptian peasant. He is less interested in generalizations about peasant life than in making you feel with your fingertips and sense with your soul the material and spiritual condition of the Egyptian peasant. So Father Ayrout writes both as an advocate and an observer, with sympathy and detachment. And he writes about every aspect of the peasant’s life, from his relation to the central government down to the squabbles over a foot of land and a bit of water, from his religious conceptions and rites down to the kind of underclothes he wears. This approach to human behavior—sympathetic and all- embracing—stems from a peculiarly French tradition of human geography, ethnography and sociology. In America, we have a different tradition—the cultural sciences, the social sciences, and now the “behavioral” sciences. Our prevailing method is to cover a range of human behavior in statistically expressed frequencies or in “models” from which the path of return to the things abstracted is never found. Father Ayrout seeks to do something else again, to describe a range of behavior by selecting certain features at its core and then making us understand those elements intimately. Americans, moreover, may find Father Ayrout’s approach “romantic.” Traditional rites and customs in the Egyptian village, he says, “are a mysterious correlation of nature and man.” The “soil,” he says, explains the “changelessness” of peasant life. We are not accustomed any more to such characterizations, yet I wonder if our more prosaic and apparently scientific language brings us any closer to an explanation. Regarding the improvement of farming methods, Father Ayrout says not only that the peasant will not mechanize but adds that he should not. Why not? His reason seems utterly “romantic”: “for to mechanize agriculture will destroy the organic relation which has grown up between the people and the land . . . ” But he adds another reason based upon a quite realistic calculation of Egypt’s economic and demographic situation. Mechanization, he says, will also “overthrow a way of life which has grown up as the only one suitable for an abundant population on a limited soil.” Mechanization has nevertheless proceeded. Aside from irrigation and drainage, where mechanization had already been highly developed of necessity, the number of farm machines has probably increased about fifteen times in the last quarter-century. Thus, increase, though considerable, has been made on a very

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small foundation, for in 1935 there were in all of Egypt only a thousand farm machines.* Productivity per farm worker has increased as a result of increasing use of machinery and the expansion of crop area worked by a stable labor force. It is reliably estimated that average per capita productivity has increased by about a third since the period before World War II. The cropped area has increased, productivity has increased, volume of agricultural production has increased—but the peasant seems no better off materially. For he has had to feed a rapidly increasing population, one which grows about five times as fast as the cultivated area. This man-land ratio is of course a fundamental problem in Egypt. It has not changed much since Ayrout first referred to it, though the regime that overthrew the monarchy has made a considerable effort, beginning with the land reform of 1952, to change it. Father Ayrout correctly evaluates this effort when he says in his epilogue that it has been genuine, has thus far hardly affected the situation, and must be continued. The 1952 land reform, he asserts, nevertheless, “represents the finest gift of the new regime to the long-neglected peasants.” He gives figures for land distribution in 1948, four years before the reform. During the half-century before 1948, fragmentation of holdings proceeded steadily; the number of holdings of five acres or less quadrupled as the total area they occupied only doubled. The Egyptian land reform of 1952 limited individual ownership to 200 acres, compensated owners for the excess in government bonds at 3 per cent interest and redeemable in thirty years, and distributed the land in plots of two to five acres to peasants who were to pay the cost over thirty years at 3 per cent interest. Modifications of the law in 1958 and 1961 reduced the maximum to one hundred acres, fixed compensation for seizure of the excess at 11/2 per cent interest over forty years, and reduced by half the amount of money new owners still owed the government for their plots as well as the interest rate on this debt. Thus, about 750,000 acres have been made available for distribution, of which perhaps 500,000 have already been resold to about 200,000 peasant owners. Thus less than a tenth of Egypt’s cultivated land has been distributed in this way and the number of new owners is only about 7 per cent of all owners. Since most new *These and the following statistics are taken from official reports presented in (1) U.A.R. Statistical Department, Statistical Pocket Year-book, 1957, Government Printing Office, Cairo, 1958; (2) “Land Tenure in Egypt,” National Bank of Egypt, Economic Bulletin, 1957, X: 46–48; and (3) “Post-War Agricultural Developments in the Egyptian Region,” Central Bank of Egypt, Economic Review, 1961, I: 205–220.

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owners have been sold very small plots (nearer the minimum of two acres than the maximum of five), fragmentation has continued unabated. The government, however, has sought to mitigate its harmful effects by requiring all new owners to join cooperatives. The agrarian reform also affected tenants, sharecroppers and farm laborers. Maximum rents were fixed, and the portion of a crop going to a landlord was established at one half of the value of crop after deduction of all expenses, including the cropper’s. Tenants were protected further by a provision that land leases must be in writing and for a period of at least three years. Minimum wages were established for agricultural workers and their right to form trade unions was asserted. What has been the effect? The owners of large estates have lost income and power. Some of the income has gone to the new owners and to tenants but the “lost” power has gone to the regime. The agricultural workers have gained little because their oversupply has made it difficult to enforce the minimum wage. Though the new owners and tenants have enjoyed a real advance in standard of living, the effect of the whole agrarian reform upon the agricultural economy and the peasant’s way of life has been rather small. Thus far, then, the “Arab socialism” proclaimed in 1961 has not affected the countryside very much, nor have its tenets been applied there nearly so much as to the urban economy. Indeed, President Nasser has assured the peasant that “Arab socialism” does not mean an end to private ownership of land or that the small plots will be taken from their new owners. In June 1962, however, awareness of the “population problem” reached new proportions in Egypt as “Arab socialism” was widely discussed. President Nasser approved “family planning.” It is increasingly realized that if advances in the economy have to be shared among a rapidly growing population, then economic growth will be accompanied by only a stationary or even declining level of existence for most people. With all the government’s plans for land reclamation and even including the million and a quarter cultivable acres expected to result from the completion of the new high dam at Aswan, the per capita share of cultivable land will remain stationary. This share has been decreasing as a result of the fact, noted above, that population has increased much more rapidly than cultivated area. In 1937 the per capita share was about a third of an acre, in 1950 little more than a quarter, and by 1960 it had declined to less than a quarter. The plans for adding cultivable land envisage, for 1970, that the per capita share will be only maintained.

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Since Father Ayrout wrote his first account of the peasant’s life, there has been, as we have seen, a considerable effort on the part of the government to end the long years of neglect. There has been land reform, an expansion of rural health centers, land reclamation, the beginning of the new high dam at Aswan, the experiment in Liberation Province to establish cooperative farm communities, expansion of education, new forms of rural representation in the national political system, and now a renewed concern about “family planning.” International agencies have also entered the scene. UNESCO has at Sirs el Layyan, near Cairo, an Arab States Fundamental Education Center, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN has a program, and various forms of technical assistance have been provided by American governmental and private agencies. All these efforts are pointed toward the great task Father Ayrout indicates: “The reconstruction of the Egyptian villages demands the re-education of their inhabitants, and first of all women . . . . We must work from the inside out.” As one who has long been involved in such efforts in the villages, he knows that they can sometimes be overorganized and underproductive. Success in this kind of exacting work, he warns, “requires more understanding, personal care and love than committees, speeches and official decrees.” We hear a great deal nowadays about the peasant’s growing political interests and nationalist feelings, his sense of the new possibilities of life and his desire for change. These attitudes, Father Ayrout shows, have hardly begun to develop in Egypt, though he observes that “the suppression of feudalism has opened the way for the peasant to participate in the future in real social democracy.” Since 1952 the government has sought to awaken ambition and expectation among the peasants and to draw them into the political life of the nation through various devices, the latest of which is the National Congress of Popular Forces. The peasants, along with other occupational and social groups, are represented in the Congress, though not in their proportion to the total population or labor force. (In the economically advanced societies of the West, where agriculture is usually prosperous, the countryside exercises greater political power than its proportion of the population warrants. In the poorer lands of Asia, the urban sector has the advantage.) As Father Ayrout says of the peasant, “Though he is more truly Egyptian than many political figures, he is still not conscious of belonging to a nation. That explains why in the different nationalist movements the fellahin have taken no part. Occasionally their enthusiasm has been stirred, as in the Revolution of 1952, but they themselves have remained spectators.” Many observers will argue that this is no longer the case, yet there is not much evidence of change. Several recent studies of the Egyptian village have revealed a slowly increasing awareness of what

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is happening in the cities and capitals, but not a disposition to do anything. This apathy has nothing to do with innate intelligence or morality, of which the peasant has his reasonable share; it is the result of a long memory and healthy skepticism. Father Ayrout’s portrait, therefore, still stands. Yet certain economic and political changes already made may one day produce a new social arrangement and new attitudes in the Egyptian countryside. So long as change is inchoate, this book retains its currency. And if the fellah truly changes, you will have here the most reliable and poignant account of the life he left behind. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY April 1962

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Introduction: On Understanding the Fellah Like grammatical particles which tie together a sentence and give it stability, or like the strips of leading which retain and hold together a stained-glass window, a country’s peasantry gives the nation its peculiar character. It provides the humble but indispensable support on which economic and social systems rely. In producing more than it consumes, it maintains society in health and ensures a sound regularity to the state finances. But the peasantry, though a class, is made up of separate individuals, of men. Enslaved as they may be to soil and climate, long suffering and slow, hidebound and unprogressive as they may appear to us, these people above all deserve the name of men. We have too long confused the producer with his product and the worker with the fruits of his labor. We have sated ourselves with the harvest without even seeing the man who made it grow. We have not noticed the distress which he himself could not put into words, and perhaps only dimly felt. And today, with amazement, we see the awakening of the peasant, and realize what a dead weight of ignorance has been allowed to accumulate, both in official circles and in society at large, about the man of the soil. In developing the themes of rusticism and natural beauty and thus confounding the peasant with his background, poets and artists since Virgil have conspired to draw a veil of illusion over the realities of peasant life. They have drawn lovely pictures, to be sure, but they have also accustomed us to see in country life only its picturesque and pretty sides, and to find in one aspect the whole reality. “The sower’s splendid gesture” has hidden from us the sower himself. This literary deformation is particularly the case in Egypt. I have followed year by year the number of books which have been published about this country abroad. For contemporary writers, following a long tradition, continue to find Egypt a mine of interest. Since 1926, for example, hundreds of foreign novels and

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travel books have appeared, not to mention the vast mass of newspaper, magazine and periodical articles appearing in Egypt and elsewhere. Yet all this huge mass of print, interesting as it is from many points of view, confines itself largely to elegant background, against which the fellah is merely dubbed in. He is not completely forgotten, he earns a few lines here, a page there. But he is seen from a distance, and in any case scarcely stands out from his background, the soil. These books tell us much about night life and the palaces of Cairo and Alexandria, perhaps a bit less about the Pyramids, the museums and temples, the mosques and bazaars, somewhat more, recently, about the economic, political and social situation, but very little about the man who is the cornerstone of Egyptian society—the fellah. Nor have scientific writers on Egypt been much less neglectful. The men of letters look at the landscape, the scientists at the land, and the peasant remains secondary to both. This applies to the agriculturalists, the economists and even the geographers who have added so much to our knowledge of the land itself. They mention the fellah, but as a detail subordinate to their main preoccupations. He is considered in relation to manuring, harvesting or irrigation, landownership, taxation or the yield per acre. There seemed room thus for a study of the Egyptian peasant as a human being, a study in which these other matters would be considered as they affect him, and not as he affects them. Geography will have its place here, but it will be human geography. Homo additus naturae. And man comes first. Human geography, as Vidal de la Blache understood it, is a science including explanation as well as description, and bordering on psychology and sociology. Thus without ever separating the tiller from the soil which sustains him and feeds him—for that would be a mutilation—we shall make our study center on him. We shall limit our work to the fellah in the strict sense, that is to say the small farmer and farm laborer, without touching on the Nile boatmen or the village artisans and craftsmen. They are also fellahin in origin, but specialization has given them a different way of life, which merits separate study. We shall not speak of the past except where necessary, for as we shall see, the present includes the past here. For explanation of the measures, weights, money values, and local terms, the reader is referred to the Glossary at the end of the book. The bibliography does not claim to be exhaustive. We have mentioned only those books which actually assisted us on specific points, usually Egyptian books and periodicals, since even where they are not sufficiently concise or scientific,

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they see Egypt from within and the information they give, though leaving room for critical discrimination, is superior because firsthand. But our conclusions rest primarily on personal observations made over a number of years in various provinces of the Nile Valley, through which we still continually travel, on personal intercourse with people of all classes, and on reflection upon the things we have seen and heard. Thus this work we now present is the result of our experience and our meditation, and this makes us all the more conscious of its deficiencies. We hope, however, that it will help to raise the question of the fellah in all its seriousness, and thus contribute to a deeper comprehension of this most ancient country.

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Chapter 1 Changelessness

The fellahin, that is to say the rural proletariat of Egypt, whose life is the subject of these chapters, represent something more than a mere class. As a uniform, autochthonous mass, constituting more than three quarters of the total population, they may be rightly called the people of Egypt. This people, which probably produced the first civilization (or in any case a civilization of great originality which lasted for thirty centuries), offer no less original powers of survival and persistence. They have changed their masters, their religion, their language and their crops, but not their way of life. From the beginnings of the Old Kingdom to the climax of the Ptolemaic period the Egyptian people preserved and maintained themselves. Possessed in turn by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, French and English, they remained unchanged. Even today the fellahin play no part in the Egyptian renaissance or the movement for progress. At first they were pagans carrying totemism to the point of zoolatry; then, for six centuries, they were Christians attaining often the perfection of asceticism or martyrdom. They made few difficulties about accepting Islam, and yet thirteen centuries of Islam have done little to change their religious psychology. A receptive people, yet unyielding; patient, yet resistant. Although they dwell at the crossroads of international traffic, in a country which has been the scene of

Changelessness

1

some of history’s most decisive events, they remain as tranquil and stable as the bottom of a deep sea whose surface waves are lashed with storms. The map of the world has been changed a hundred times by human events, and with it the map of Egypt. But fundamentals have not changed; the fellahin have not changed. They have borne the strain of changes and have not flinched. Violent and repeated shocks have swept away whole nations, as attested by the ruins of North Africa or Chaldea, standing deserted in fields inhabited by alien peoples. But the fellahin have stood their ground. The history of Egypt includes more than its share of wars and revolutions, but the people have taken no part in them. Only once, between 725 A.D. and 830 A.D., are we told of risings in the countryside. Crushed by the taxation of their Arab conquerors, the fellahin abandoned their homes and settled elsewhere. These evasive movements became almost general, but the repression was so terrible that the Copts decided on open revolt. Six times they rose, but without unity or plan. Six times they were savagely put down. They are not the stuff of which rebels are made. And even in revolt, the mass of the people remained unaffected. They are as impervious and enduring as the granite of their temples, and once the form is fixed, they are as slow to change as were the forms of that art. The glances of their daily life which we get from Pharaonic tombs or from Coptic legends, from the Arab historians or the Napoleonic expeditions, from the earlier English explorers or the travelers of our own day, seem to form one single sequence. One has the impression that all these scenes, separated by centuries, only repeat and confirm each other. This is not simply an impression. We see the same agricultural implements— plow, water wheel, winnowing fork, sickle and straw basket; the same way of treating the body—tattooing, circumcision, the use of kohl and henna, plucking of hair; the continuance of many marriage and funeral customs. Following the pages of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Maqrizi, Vansleb, Pere Sicard and Volney, we find still the same fellah. No revolution, no evolution. And here is the heart of the problem. How can we explain this physical stability, this psychological and social changelessness, this enduring, extraordinary sameness in a race of men? The answer is in the soil—just as one might explain the uniformity of Egyptian art which has been inspired by assimilation to the environment. The level ridges and steep cliffs on the edge of the Arabian and Libyan deserts have inspired the long, low, massive outlines of the Pharaonic temples as well as the level cornice which finishes them. The papyrus, lotus and reeds which grew along the Nile were stylized in the pillars and capitals we call papyriform, lotiform or proto-Doric.

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Changelessness

For ages past, an intimate bond has been established in the Nile Valley between nature and the human mind, and the successive masters of Egypt have used all their powers to draw this bond even tighter. The fellah found himself between the soil and the masters of the soil, between the anvil and the hammers. Yet by the nature of his life, he remained nearer to it than to them, and their hammer blows beat him still closer to the soil. This union is so real that the fellah’s masters not only own the soil but also own the fellah. Hence the fellahin owe their astonishing stability and uniformity to their association with the soil of Egypt, an element no less stable and uniform. Between these two there has grown up a bond both firm and elastic; a balanced self-sufficient interdependence which neither crises nor governments can disturb. Here, in the words of Sully Prudhomme, is found: “that stern and immemorial wedlock of a people and a land which have made each other.” This unbroken contact of people and land has brought about a continual process, a play of action and reaction, likeness and difference, which strengthens the indissoluble union of the two. On the one hand there is nature, the physical environment in its broad sense—climate, sunshine and above all the water and sediment of the Nile, its flora and the surrounding deserts. On the other hand, we have man, the fellahin—walled in by their habits as well as their villages, dense and gregarious, but isolated and unorganized—closer to the soil which they understand than to the state of which they know nothing. But at all costs, let us avoid here even the appearance of determinism. The fellah is no more the product of the Egyptian countryside than the Egyptian countryside is the product of the fellah. The question is not one of inevitability or of any determining influence. Man is free, and this freedom is to be defined as “power of self-determination.” Man is free, and agriculture remains contingent upon his will. There are infinite possibilities, among which the will of man—not of the fellah, to be sure, but of his master—chooses this or that, according to circumstances. At one time, the vine was grown on Egyptian soil. Grapes make wine, and the Koranic prohibition destroyed the vineyards. Not long ago, vast areas were planted with tobacco, but the government forbade this. Maize [Indian corn], of American origin, and cotton, introduced in the nineteenth century, are now among the chief crops. Tomorrow a new crop may cover the field. No law of necessity, whether of climate or soil, determines finally even the agriculture of Egypt, much less, then, human life. At the same time the climate and vegetation exert their characteristic influence on those who live in and on it. In the case of town dwellers and industrial workers the bond between man and nature is much looser; the impress of the physical environment is softened

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Figure 1.1 The Nile bank after the receding flood.

and neutralized by the stronger social, civil and political influences. This renders these groups much less stable, but more progressive. The peasant, on the other hand, is molded directly by the soil. Without our subscribing to any environmental determinism, it will become clear that the monotony, uniformity and productivity of the Nile Valley have their exact counterpart in the characteristics of the fellah community. The two are not parallel, but correlative. They meet and crystallize in the manner of life, which is at once a social and a geographical phenomenon. It will also become clear that the water and mud of the Nile enter into, and in a large part explain, the whole life of the fellah, his work and his home, his body and his temperament, and lend him both

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Changelessness

their qualities and their defects. It is because the fellah is “buried” in this mud that it has become so fertile. Egypt, gift of the Nile, is no less the gift of the fellah. It is because this soil is incarnated in the fellah that he himself is enduring, but also so material and so stagnant. Progress therefore can only come from some form of release, of emergence, from education, in its original sense of drawing out potentialities. The duty of society is to liberate his spirit from its stifling covering of mud, to cleanse him of the defects of the soil, while leaving him its good qualities. The initiative can never come from him, numbed and powerless, but only from the classes which overshadow him, from the elite, who with their riches of mind and money can vitalize him. In this dough the leaven of intelligence and charity must work. The following chapters will illustrate in more detail these general remarks and lead us by the logic of facts to the human conclusion we have sketched here.

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Chapter 2 Egypt, an Agricultural Country Industrialization is a common topic in Egypt today. Since World War II, progress has been as widespread as it has been rapid. An industrial proletariat has emerged, with its legislation and its problems. Yet, properly speaking, Egypt is not an industrial country. It is, and will be for some time to come, agricultural, because of its structure and resources. By reason of its flat surface, its rich damp loam, the river and the dry warm climate, the Nile Valley is geographically suited for intensive and extensive agriculture, and its soil can bear crop after crop without failing. Were it not for the fertilizing Nile, Egypt would present nothing but a wide expanse of sterile sand and stone. Like her neighbors, Libya and Arabia, she would be only a poor land of nomads and shepherds. Though the Nile does not rise in Egypt, this country enjoys the maturity and fullness of the great river. It passes through her boundaries, after a journey of 3,000 miles, with a rich load of silt drawn from the most varied types of soil. Year after year it is renewed, and its rise and fall is Egypt’s pulse. Ever since the last phase of the quaternary, the silt has been brought down from the south and deposited by the Nile in alluvial strata, over the flat edges of its bed, spreading out in widening layers at its mouth and pushing back the sea. Over the limestone and granite rocks and sand a layer of black earth from 30 to 90 feet deep has been created. Unlike the soil of most agricultural countries, the composition of this deposit is substantially the same everywhere. It is an amalgam of fine particles carried

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down by the Blue Nile and White Nile, consisting of coarse and colloidal clay, with an admixture of salts. Its high mineral content (see table) has an important influence on the life of the fellah. Once deposited, this soil is continually enriched and irrigated by the Hood of the Nile or by canalization, but always under the control of man. The very ancient system of basin irrigation, still in use in over a million feddans,* consists of discharging the water at flood time through channels onto great basin areas of land, hawds, which are surrounded by dikes. The water slowly drains away, saturating the land and depositing a layer of the fine silt with which it was laden before flowing into the basins. Each feddan thus receives some 1,700,000 gallons of water and eight to nine tons of silt. Immediately after the water has drained off, around November, the crops are sown. They are then left to ripen until harvest-time without any need for further irrigation. The field then is left fallow until the next flood. Often, however, these basin farmers make use of underground water by means of pumps, wishing to produce a summer as well as a winter crop. In fact, pumps are now so common in these districts that they have modified the system of cultivation. MINERAL CONTENT OF THE NILE IN FOUR CITIES IN LOWER AND UPPER EGYPT Lower Egypt

Potash Soda Limestone Magnesia Manganese oxide Iron & aluminum oxide Phosphate acid Carbonic acid Chlorine Organic matter Insoluble & sand Nitrogen

Upper Egypt

Tanta

Mansura

Atsa

Matai

.55% .58 3.30 2.88 .22 23.66 .20 .67 .09 7.97 60.28 .07

.56% .70 3.20 2.66 .45 24.90 .23 .85 .03 7.76 58.58 .07

.63% .72 5.53 2.75 .24 20.23 .22 3.03 .11 7.38 59.16 .05

.76% .74 4.47 2.09 .26 24.39 .28 1.10 .10 7.78 57.23 .09

*[The feddan is the unit of land measurement, corresponding closely to an acre. It is divided into 24 kirats. Ed. note.]

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Egypt, an Agricultural Country

Figure 2.1 The Nile Valley

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9

Lower Egypt Tanta

Mansura

Upper Egypt Atsa

Matai

Perennial irrigation is the system now in use, since 1840, in all the Delta and in the greater part of Upper Egypt. It has been made possible by some remarkable works of engineering, the most notable of which is the Aswan Dam. The Nile no longer completely floods the land. Its water is stored in reservoirs and distributed by barrages into a network of canals which it fills throughout the year. The system works thus: (1) At high Nile, from August to October, the fields are not submerged but only irrigated, and bear the fall crop, or nili. (2) From November to April the waters are falling; the land, still moist, receives enough water for the winter crop, or shatawi. (3) At low Nile, April to July, the reservoirs are opened to allow irrigation, which gives the summer crop, or sayfi. To yield its fruits, the land needs not only water but also air. This is carried out by the wide cracks made by the sun on the fallow land, which is thus freed of excess salts and mellowed by allowing the air to penetrate the earth deeply. Thus Nile and sun together prepare, cultivate and determine the fellah’s physical environment—the living Egypt. And without transition, quite abruptly, the desert starts exactly where the Nile water does not reach the soil. The usual coloring of maps, which shows Egypt as a thin green strip across a great yellowish space, corresponds exactly with reality. From the height of the Great Pyramid in the suburbs of Cairo, or from the hills of the Said, or southern region, one is struck, whichever way one turns, by the razor-edge of demarcation where human labor stops. The flat valley of the Nile stretches 950 miles between the Arabian and Libyan desert, less than a mile wide at Wadi Haifa, 3 miles at Idfu, about 8 miles at Luxor and Aswan, and 15 at Beni Suef, where a branch goes westward. At Cairo it spreads out like a fan to form a coastline of 160 miles at the north of the Delta. In all, there are 12,000 square miles of good land, lying in the midst of 400,000 square miles of sterile sands. Thus only 3 per cent of the total area is the living and productive Egypt. The Nile has given it its shape. Like a giant lotus, its roots are planted in the heart of Africa, in the mountains of Abyssinia and the great lakes of the Congo. From Khartoum the sap rises along a thin stem, which pushes into Egypt at Wadi Haifa and shows green at Aswan. Near Beni Suef, it bears a single leaf, the Faiyum; it flowers at Cairo, and spreads in a great head of blossom on the Rosetta and

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Egypt, an Agricultural Country

Damietta branches, until it touches the Mediterranean across a fringe of lakes— Maryut, Idqu, Burullus, Manzala—bordering the mouth of the river from west to east. Separated by its two deserts from the distant political frontiers, the Nile Valley is agricultural. It has one color, the green of perpetual crops, which spread over an unvarying countryside, dotted with towns and humble villages. A man in a maize field can see neither the Nile nor the network of canals and drains, neither the railroad nor the low, huddling houses. He will see only fields, rather like the flat fields of Holland or the great plains of the Soviet Union or the United States, but of course under a clear and rainless sky. Whether one travels from Cairo to the north or to the south, everywhere one is struck by the same agricultural aspect. But if the traveler leaves the Nile, toward Suez or the Coptic monasteries of Wadi Natrun, the desert engulfs him. He is in a different country. On the west he will find the oases of Siwa, Kharga, Dakhla, and Farafra, with their Bedouins and their bazaars. On the east, along the Red Sea, he will come across oil camps and phosphate mines, and the families of Upper Egyptian fellahin who have gone there to work. In this strange naked Egypt he will find nothing but these displaced men to remind him of the valley, al-wadi, which for him and for ninetenths of the Egyptians means Egypt.

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Chapter 3 Landowners and Government

Let us observe first the social situation of Egypt in regard to the agricultural situation which prevailed before the Revolution of 1952, with reference to the oligarchy, the parliament, the great landowners and the administration of their lands. In Egyptian state and society, the fellah has always constituted the mass, the raw material, the bedrock on which both are based. This double structure must be understood in order to approach more closely the fellah and his life. The facade of contemporary Egypt is of a modern and composite style and is represented by the three chief cities with their striking and many-sided activities. There is Cairo, with its universities (30,000 students), its museums, its scientific institutes, its international congresses, its lecture courses, its luxurious homes. Alexandria can boast of its flourishing harbor, the Cotton Exchange, its foreign institutions, its fashionable beaches, its esplanade. There is Port Said, with the Canal, the pathway to the Indies, and its trade. On this triptych, various social groups stand side by side, concealing the fundamental Egypt just as mosaics cover the gray cement to which they adhere. For just as one used to speak of “All the Russias” or “The Germanics,” so we can speak, from a social point of view, of an Egypt in the plural. Here, practically,

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there is no real Egyptian society, culturally or historically, but only a bobbing assemblage of the most varied types, with no real correspondence to the country itself. Nor for that matter is there a true peasant community, but only a homogeneous mass of peasants tied to the soil and bounded by their villages. As much from the social as the geographical standpoint, there is an Upper and a Lower Egypt. In such an inorganic diversity, the societies of the town touch and overlap each other without co-ordination or penetration and without even understanding each other. The townspeople know of the countryside what they glimpse from the windows of a train or car, and scarcely know that a beautiful agricultural Figure 3.1 A street scene in Cairo.

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museum exists to introduce them to rural life. The fellahin, isolated in their villages, know of the town what they learn from the ‘umda [a village official], the Greek grocer and from manufactured articles. In Cairo and Alexandria, the focuspoints of the rich class, the different elements of the town brush edges. Each is centered in its own self-sufficient life; each has its own mentality and its own Egypt. The wealthy native element, Copt and Muslim, has its own circles which overlap only from time to time; even in the past, the sphere of the rich landowners was not that of government officials, and the religious faculty group of Al-Azhar does not mix with the lay society of the academic universities. At festivities and receptions, usually all-male groups will be seen, the women making up other groups of their own. There used to be the group around the Palace, and the independent group of the princes. Then there are the important “foreign” settlements; they are Egyptianized and often citizens. In spite of that common denominator, each retains its distinguishing features. There are the Lebanese, the Syrians and the Palestinians, an active and enterprising people; there are the powerful Jews, influential financiers; there were the English rallying ‘round their club. There were the French and Belgians of the great compagnies (streetcars, water, banks, Suez Canal administration); the Italians who are traders and contractors; and there are the Greeks, the most numerous and the closest to the Egyptian people. All these essentially urban groups with their own qualities and capital are the economic, financial, political and cultural leaven of Egypt. They are not her social leaven, however, because they do not mix with the dough enough to raise it. From the outside and at a distance, and through numerous intermediaries, they knead the dough and take from it what it has to give. Parliament was established in 1923, at the time of the proclamation of an independent Egypt, with a Belgian-inspired constitution. The nation was represented by 319 deputies and 172 senators in two houses. They were divided into seven parties, without any definite political programs, and were mostly landowners and important provincial figures. Bribe or lash were the two methods usually used to secure the fellah’s vote, according to the means available to the candidate and the party. Sometimes the fellah problem was discussed in the House. Here are some extracts of debates from the days of the parliaments: The Hon. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al Sufyani (in a loud voice): You would not realize the wretchedness of the fellah unless you look at him. (Shouts) “Go to, Go to . . .

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President of the Assembly: That’s a nice show. Go ahead, be disorderly. The public will admire that. (Silence is slowly resumed.) Hon. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al Sufyani: I can cite a thousand depressing cases. One fellah has not eaten for three days—I saw that myself. Another has to carry his crop on his shoulders himself to the depot of the Agricultural Credit Agency. Unless he greases the palm of some obscure clerk he has to sort the bags himself or go away as he came. The fellah is suffering; the fellah is being cheated. Let the government take notice: deception of the people can bring about heavy repercussions. (6/16/44) ‘Ali al Shishini Bey: We should have started improving the wretched social and sanitary conditions of the rural areas long ago. But we will fall short of our aim if we only improve one-sidedly. My opinion is that the root of the evil is the disequilibrium between the social classes. Imperialism and foreign occupation have devised a way to build up a wretched majority living side by side with a prosperous minority. The aim of the imperialists is to drive both the rich and the poor from the struggle for independence, the former looking only for their pleasures while the latter try to shake off their wretchedness. Their low social situation is due to poverty, which brings ignorance and disease with it. It is therefore our duty to struggle against poverty because it is the cause of the disequilibrium. Since agriculture is the basis of the national economy, we must regulate the intercourse between tenants and lessors on a basis which will give the tenants a decent life and good health, since they are clearly leading an unimaginably miserable existence. Should we be successful in our efforts, we will give encouragement at the same time to trade and industry, for the fellah, once well off, will turn to Egyptian staple goods for his necessities, whereas the rich spend recklessly on imported fancy articles. The funds required for this struggle against poverty, can be obtained in several ways: taxation on fancy goods, and increased and progressive taxes on the rich. The rich man who pays as much as £E 100* per year can pay an extra £E 10 without suffering. Travelling abroad should be limited and subject to restrictions as to the amount of time and money to be spent, with exceptions for only necessary health, trade and educational travel. (2/17/47) After thirty years, the Parliament of this agricultural country—under whatsoever party—had done virtually nothing for land reform and passed no workable *[The Egyptian pound is currently worth $2.40 (official rate). It is divided, into 100 piastres. Ed. note.]

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legislation for the fellah’s welfare. Minimum wages, limitation of property, limitation of splitting inheritance, imposing social services upon landowners, were some of the many schemes which lay untouched in the files. Ashmawi Pasha wrote: “How can we allow the Fellah, the chief creator of the agricultural wealth of the country, upon which the industrial wealth depends, to be deprived of the protection of social legislation? How can we permit that the worker’s legislation of Egypt includes not one law to encourage the element which makes the vast majority of the population?” (Al-Masri 1/3/49) The enormous economic and political pyramid of Egypt presses down upon the fellah with all its weight. The ignorance and solitude of this man and his ties to the soil prevent him from attempting to shake off this crushing burden, and it is this burden which shapes all his life. Official publications in the days of the monarchy used to claim that Egypt was a country of small landowners. Two and a half million fellahin out of six million cultivators owned land, and the proportion sounded very good. However, less than 10 per cent of these landowners owned two and a half feddans, which is the average holding necessary to maintain a peasant family satisfactorily. The small holding was continually subdivided by the different heirs to the same land. In the course of forty years the area owned by small owners increased by 83 percent while the number of small holders increased by 355 per cent. All in all, these two and a half million landowners possessed less than half the cultivated area. For while they owned less than two million feddans, more than another two million feddans were held by 12,559, and sixty-one owners controlled more than 300,000 of these. Thus 50 per cent of the cultivated area was owned by 2 per cent of the landowners. The greatest landowner was the King. Fu’ad I owned eight hundred feddans at his accession in 1917. By the time of his death in 1936 he had acquired another twenty thousand. This does not include the revenues of forty-five thousand feddans of waqf land entrusted to him. When Farouk abdicated in 1952, the Royal domain had spread to over 100,000 feddans, and the domain of limited companies accounted for 150,000 feddans. Egypt was not exactly a nation of small holders. The great estates were to be found especially in Upper Egypt and in the newly reclaimed areas of the Delta. They were not always under the same ownership; some changed ownership frequently, without, however, any change in their methods of working. The large landowners ran and, insofar as they own land, still run their estates indirectly, by means of their directing agencies and overseers, just as did the great

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companies, such as the Kom Ombo and Buhayra Sugar companies, the large banks, the waqfs and the state domain. The da’ira (directing agency) is the town office for administration and accountancy. It makes orders and purchases, arranges advances and sales, and pays the taxes. The nazir (overseer) is the owner’s real executive, on whom the whole system depends. Obsequious to his master, inexorable with the fellah, it is his business to put all possible pressure on the agricultural machinery, that is, the fellahin, to increase production. To use an expression of the fellah, he is like the saw, which cuts going and coming. He controls plowing, manuring, sowing and harvesting by the roughest kind of rule. The landowners rely more readily on his experience than on the collaboration of agricultural engineers, who have not yet been able to take the place in Egyptian rural life for which they have been prepared. In the greatest estates the management is more varied. The different services are grouped in a taftish, or inspectorate, installed in the ‘izba. The ‘izba is inseparable from any large property. It constitutes a hamlet for the workers which is the estate owner’s property. Only about a hundred years old, the system was legally established as late as 1913, and modified in 1933. “No ‘izba may be established on any estate without the consent of the Provincial Council, which shall take into consideration the extent of the land belonging to the petitioner’s estate, its distance from the village, and the number of cultivators to be lodged.” For the law is still in effect which forbids “the building in any manner, by whomsoever, of dwellings upon cultivated land outside the recognized village area.” Before the Revolution there were more than fifteen thousand ‘izbas. Their importance and the number of their inhabitants were proportionate to the area of the estate. Some have grown into full-sized villages, but most depended administratively on the village from which they sprang. Here not only the houses, but the implements and machinery—whether the water wheel or the pumping engine, the nurag or the threshing machine—together with the storehouses and usually the animals belonged to the owner. If the estate was cultivated directly, the fellahin were day laborers; if not, they were usually sharecroppers. In either case, they were in a sense bound to the land, and unless evicted, remained with it in spite of changes of ownership. If the landowner mortgaged his land and did not pay the interest, the bank foreclosed. Very often, the holdings of the fellahin were seized with their master’s property. But who discriminated? They might have paid the Bey his dues and in no way be responsible for his debts; but that did not concern the creditors. They

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foreclosed. Occasionally it was necessary to put the ordinarily passive and obedient peasants down with police force. Strangely enough, in such cases, the landowner was almost always not on the scene. Even when the landowner was of fellah origin—and the number of native Egyptian landlords was increasing greatly—he took no interest in the ‘izba except as a source of income. Like the old absentee abbots with their benefices, he went as seldom and stayed as short a time as possible. He knew his laborers through the cash his nazir sent him. Of their families, their needs as human beings and members of society, he was sublimely ignorant. For the big landowner had been westernized. He lived in Cairo and Alexandria and spent the summer in Lebanon or Europe, where he was always noted for his prodigality. It happened often that in one evening he would fling away money enough to have kept his fellahin alive for a year. Their poverty and his luxury seem equally natural to him, even today. Between him and the land there is no tangible link, no tradition which attracts him to any village. For there is no landed aristocracy in Egypt, only an aristocracy of wealth; and wealth prefers city life. An eyewitness related to me that the late King Fu’ad, the father of Farouk, while visiting the provinces once stopped to look at the songs and dances which some fellahin had improvised for him along the route. A courtly minister, astonished at this condescension, observed: “Your Majesty is very generous to waste ten minutes like this.” Contempt for the fellah has become so deeply rooted in the mind of the townsman that the very word has become the worst of insults. Call anyone “fellah” and it is as if you had called him “lout,” “scum “or even worse. The rich assume a striking indifference to the fellahin. To them, they are only “things” in which there is no point in interesting oneself and which it is considered good form to ignore. Faced with the simplest queries about them, the rich often display an ignorance which shows quite clearly that such questions have never occurred to them and arouse no curiosity at all. Others among the better type deplore the dullness and hidebound habits of the fellah, but will attempt nothing to help him which will lessen their own incomes. This helps maintain the extremes. However, there is a rural middle class, consisting of medium landowners. Gain-loving, conservative and unpretentious, they live in the country and keep a close eye on the yield of their feddans. On occasions of feasting and mourning they are liberal with their poorer neighbors. From this class are drawn the pupils of the provincial secondary schools, the students of the religious institutes dependent on Al-Azhar, many of the government employees and police officers. It has produced contemporary Egypt’s most notable men.

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But these patriarchal families are becoming fewer. One reason is the growth of their wealth and ambition. The second generation makes its way to higher levels and settles in Cairo or Alexandria. The “boom” of 1919–1920 did much to initiate this trend or encourage it, but apart from this the westernizing education of the young and the taste for European things produce a distaste for country life. Cairo and Alexandria, during the last quarter of a century, have developed greatly in size and in amenities. With each year a new influx of prosperous provincials come from the chief towns and villages of all the provinces; villas and new blocks of Hats spring up everywhere and shops dealing in luxury articles prosper greatly. A second reason for the decline of the rural middle class is the splitting up of inheritance, for their families are large. In Islamic sacred law, applicable to all Muslims, the sons each receive two parts to the daughter’s one. Hence it is by no means unusual to find the grandson of the possessor of forty feddans inheriting only one, so that he is no better off than any other fellah. Thus the middle class has tended to join either the rich or the poor. Splinter-holdings do not always result from inheritance, but also from the acquisition of tiny plots as money becomes available. The fellah is so land-hungry that he buys land, more often than not at an exorbitant price, a few kirats at a time. In order to purchase these he must usually go into debt. Because of the dense population and the high demand for land, lots are sold to the highest bidder, and sometimes by auction. An example may illustrate what goes on. Four feddans are on sale for 800 pounds. Twelve fellahin band together to buy them at that price and divide them among themselves. A prosperous man of the neighborhood gets wind of the transaction. He arrives a few hours before the sale and sits down at a cafe in full view of everybody. He boasts openly that he will buy the lot at no matter what price. The fellahin, threatened with disappointment, beseech him humbly to withdraw, and offer money as compensation. He lets them plead, bargains, pockets the money and leaves the village, very content with the success of the stratagem, which he will repeat when an occasion is offered. The fellahin, who have given him 50 pounds for nothing, are content, too, thinking they have made a good bargain. There is a huge gulf between town and country, an ancient, unpassable division. In a private letter written three centuries before Christ, one can read the words: “Don’t mistake me for an Egyptian fellah.” Then as now, the representatives of the town condescended to repair to the village only to collect the rents or levy the taxes. It is said that the Arab General ‘Amr Ibn al-‘As, on reporting to the Caliph in Medina, wrote: “The inhabitants of Egypt are like bees, working continually, not for themselves but for others.”

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The source of Egypt’s wealth is the yield of the soil, produced by the fellah’s labors. But we must examine the ownership of the soil, for the laws of land tenure are one of the most important features of the structure of an agricultural country. In Egypt, the cultivable land area—about 600,000 feddans—is divided into state lands (miri), entailed estates (waqfs) and private property (mulk). In 1813, having seized upon the possessions of the Mamluks, Muhammad ‘Ali divided their estates into village districts and distributed them to the villagers to farm. Each cultivator thus received 3 to 5 feddans in usufruct. Until 1840, he was required to deliver his cotton crop to the state at a price inferior to the market price. He could sell his cereals where he wished, but had to pay a duty of 18 piastres an ardab.* According to Moslem law the Sovereign—formerly the Sultan, the Commander of the Faithful, but now his emancipated vassal—held as proprietor, in God’s name, all lands which had been acquired by conquest. Estates granted by former monarchs to private individuals or to tax-paying farmers, and also waqf property, remained outside of his control. Again, enormous areas of uncultivated land were exempt (until 1858) from taxation, excluded from the survey, and allotted with all the rights of ownership to rich or powerful notables who were in a position to bring them under cultivation. This was the origin of the great landed properties. Small holdings came into being by a slow process which began with the subdivision of land. In 1846, a fellah enjoying the usufruct of land was authorized to part with it by deed, still retaining the right to acquire it again. In the same way, after eviction for arrears in taxes, the fellah could take back his field by paying off his debts. Later on—not by any right of inheritance, but only by government concession—the children of the usufructuary were allowed to take over their fathers’ fields. In 1871, Isma‘il Pasha, hard-pressed by debts, offered full ownership of the land to tenants who could pay six years’ taxes in advance. This law was only partly successful and was abrogated in 1880, but the principle that the fellah could become a landowner had been established, and the government endorsed it by selling each year small parcels from its estates to cultivators. Meanwhile, the arbitrary rates and methods of taxation had given rise to widespread corruption. From 1878 to 1880, the High Commission for Inquiry into Property Taxation had discovered large-scale abuses in every province. Since agricultural production was at stake, some method of equalization had to be devised *[An ardab is the standard measurement for grain, containing about 200 quarts. An ardab of wheat equals about 330 lbs.; maize, about 310 lbs.; and barley, about 265 lbs. Ed. note.]

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at once. A new survey was therefore found necessary; that of Muhammad ‘Ali’s time was too legalistic in its divisions. In 1892, the Survey Department, under the direction of English engineers, undertook the immense task of demarcation. After due consideration of roads, canals and natural boundaries, the land of each village area (zimam, consisting of an average of 2,000 feddans), was divided into sections (hawds) of 50 to 100 feddans of equal value and quality, with a variation of not more than 50 per cent, and marked by iron boundary pegs. The cadastral plan of the village was drawn to scale of 1 to 25,000 for agricultural land, then plot- byplot on the scale of 1 to 2,500. Each hawd was defined with its serial number and taxable value. The housing sites of the village were shown as a whole and exempted from taxation. The survey register annexed to the plan showed the place of each hawd, with its area in feddans and kirats, the exact tax, and the owner’s name. The work was not completed until 1907, but by 1899 the government had found sufficient data to establish a general rate of taxation, which was fixed at 29.64 per cent of the land output, determined by the mean rentable values. The scale was fixed for 30 years, then to be revised each tenth year. This average, based upon the estimates of Egyptian committees, takes into account the nature of the soil, the salt, sand and water content, the distance from the Nile, but still more, factors of human geography such as difficulties of irrigation, level of cotton production, the proximity to a town or village, the length of time it has been under cultivation, the available labor, communications, police and the balance of supply and demand. Twenty-two categories of different values were determined. The Act of 1949 grants a deduction of £E 4 to small landowners whose taxes are twenty pounds per year or less. Those whose tax should be £E 4 are completely exempt, those with a tax of £E 15 pay £E 11, etc. Special rebates are granted when crops have suffered owing to lack of water, or where irrigation involved considerable expense. The date of payment is fixed as well as the amount. It varies according to the times of the main harvest for each province, and payment is made by installment, so that at the end of the year the whole amount due for the 24 kirats of each feddan is paid in full. For example, in Qalyubiya province two parts are payable in January, three in March, three in April, eight in October and eight in November, but in Aswan twelve are payable in September and twelve in October. Thus the bulk is between September and November, when the cotton is being gathered. The tax is collected at the owner’s house by a sarraf, or fiscal agent, and the demand note countersigned serves as a receipt. When payments are in arrears, as often happens, the government obtains payment by distraint and forced sale. From 1927 to 1937, 44,000 fellahin lost their land in this way. In January 1937,

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732 seizures were listed, almost all of quite small holdings. While these years were poor economically and show an unusual number of seizures, seizures though rare are still made. The recent practice has been to show much more patience than formerly, and except in times of economic crisis, the rate of taxation has been quite just. It merely presupposes a taxpayer whose financial arrangements are never unsound and who knows how to manage his income. The fellah can rarely qualify. The state is also the chief landowner in Egypt. Apart from the estates included in Muhammad ‘Ali’s survey but not bought by the peasants, it acquired in 1878 the property of the khadival family to pay part of the enormous debts of Isma‘il. It has also enlarged its domains by reclaiming new areas in the district of the lakes and along the desert edge. These domains are exempted from taxation and are in part unproductive. They also include large building areas in towns and their suburbs. The state manages directly some 420,000 feddans of agricultural land and for years has brought under cultivation thousands of acres of marshy or dry land each year, selling the greater part of it to small cultivators. Some of this land is distributed to graduates of the agricultural school and peasants with small holdings, or it is given fallow to agricultural societies or conferred upon retired government officials in lieu of a pension. The new regime also projected an enormous reclamation project in the desert on the western side of the Delta, where the new province of Tahrir was marked for distribution to landless fellahin, graduates of the college of agriculture and veterans of the army as soon as it was brought under cultivation. This work was suspended before completion, however, since it was found that such large-scale reclamation with present water supply was not altogether economically sound. After the Muslim conquest, many landowners laid all or parts of their estates under entail (waqfs). That is to say that, through a kind of religious donation or dedication to God, they made them inalienable in law. This they did partly for religious motives, but also in order to put their wealth out of the reach of confiscation by rulers or dissipation by their heirs. There are waqf khayri, whose revenues are consigned to Mosques, schools, cemeteries and other pious foundations; but more often these foundations are waqf ahli, whose revenues are earmarked for the descendants of the founder. If the family dies out, they revert to religious uses. Since God is the landowner, the beneficiaries are allowed to use the revenue, but have no power to dispose of the property. The system has even been adopted by the Eastern Christians. It thus came about that nearly 10 per cent of the total cultivated area was withdrawn from the market, and the percentage was constantly increasing. The Ministry of Waqfs administers these bequests and tries to insure

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the execution of the founder’s will. But it is obvious that these properties in mortmain, without a human owner, were the least productive in the country. Fortunately, the agrarian reform suppressed the waqf ahli, and some 592,000 feddans were thus released. Yet it must be said that because of the poor management and lack of interest of the old overseers and intermediaries, who were interested primarily in showing enough profit each year to pay their salaries, the fellahin living on waqf lands often had a better life. One of the most important features of the new Egypt which grew out of the Revolution led by the army has been the agrarian reform. The old regime was overthrown at the end of July 1952; and in September, at the Nayruz, or Coptic New Year (a coincidence stressed in a speech by the leader of the Revolution), at a meeting at which the author was present, the new law was proclaimed. What one or two deputies had already tried to introduce (with no success) became a sudden reality, and brought a profound change to the economic and social structure of the country. These are the principal points of the reform decree: The possession of cultivated land is limited to two hundred feddans per proprietor, plus another one hundred if he has children. Any additional land in his possession is expropriated to be distributed to the peasants. Thus 656,000 feddans (of which 200,000 used to belong to the royal family) which were in the possession of only 1,758 land-owners, cease to be administrated as parts of the great estates, and are to be distributed to raise the living standard of some 200,000 fellah families. The completion of this operation is expected to take five years. The expropriated property will be compensated for on the basis that the yearly rent of the land is fixed at seven times the taxes; the proprietor will be reimbursed ten times the yearly rent, plus the price of the machinery, trees, installations and other improvements in state bonds at 3 per cent interest. The land thus obtained is then sold in parcels of from two to five feddans apiece to fellahin of the locality, beginning with the most needy, at the same price plus 15 per cent service charge to pay for the implementation of the reform. This is to be paid off in a period of thirty years, in equal payments with 3 per cent interest. The land may not be resold except by government permission. The aim is not only to limit great landholding, but also to limit the indefinite fragmentation of the land, of which we have seen the bad results. For holdings less than five feddans, the heirs are required to designate the one to whom the ownership will pass. If an amicable settlement is impossible, the court is instructed to give the preference to the one who actually cultivates the

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land. If there are several of these, the land will go to the one with the largest family. Here, care is taken to protect the large family and to keep it on the land. The relations between the tenant and the overseer, so often unjust and inhumane, have been regulated, in that land may only be rented to the actual cultivator. Thus will disappear the whole class of commercial intermediaries who reduced the income of the cultivators. The lease usually is for at least three years so as to allow the cultivator a complete cycle of exploitation. It was inevitable that the inception of the law would be attended by dire prophecies and considerable skepticism. But its application, rather than being retarded or sabotaged, continues to be implemented more quickly than was foreseen. It represents the finest gift of the new regime to the long-neglected peasants. American and Italian experts were called in at the beginning and drew the attention of the reformers to the importance of cooperatives to protect the spirit of the law, and the necessity as well as the difficulty of forming devoted and competent leaders. The basic problems of legislation and distribution have been solved one by one, without altering the main lines of the reform. Some other difficulties have arisen, but the fellahin, though benefited, have been slow to adjust to the new situation, according to El-Sayyid Marei, the director of the agrarian reform. Again, the two to five feddans distributed to the cultivator have in some cases been widely separated from each other, or irrigation or drainage have proved very difficult. Some people claim that the reform has primarily benefited the already relatively comfortable peasants, and that the fixing by law of the salaries of day laborers is illusory, because the proprietors and even the state, by fixing unusually long half-days and paying half a day’s wage rather than the full day’s wage, are evading the spirit of the law. There exist, as we know, a hundred ways to twist laws, and the period of transition is not yet finished. More time will be necessary to form minds devoted to their rights and to their duties. But it remains true that this reform, occurring without violence and with little resistance (one owner resisted and was imprisoned), has already borne some excellent fruits. The land, which was divided into smaller plots, has, contrary to many predictions, borne more not less crops than before, as can be shown statistically. The great landed fortunes have been plowed into industries which will augment the national income, and the suppression of feudalism has opened the way for the peasant to participate in real, social democracy.

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By its control of land, and still more of water, the government is supreme over capital, labor and the peasant class. Being master of the irrigation system, it assumes for the fellah all the importance and power of the Nile. The more the state regulates the water, the more the land and its owners must depend upon it. Since Egypt is essentially agricultural, it follows that almost every organization of government in the long run gives orders to the fellah. In industry and in the town, public services are entrusted to private enterprise; but in agriculture, on the contrary, the government assumes functions which in other countries are often carried on by private persons. The result is that the peasant looks to the government as the Providence which manages and regulates all things, while government traditionally regards the fellah as a helpless child who must be ordered about to protect him from his own ignorance. Thus the Ministry of Public Works controls the irrigation of all cultivated land, establishes the order of rotation in each crop zone, watches over the dikes and canals and mobilizes the fellahin when the Nile is about to flood. The Ministry of Agriculture controls the acreage and the selection of cotton, wheat and rice, and has sole authority to sell seed and to levy men to fight the bollworm and locust. The Ministry of Finance collects the land tax through the sarrafs in each district, issues orders for seizure, buys cotton to balance the home market, and through the Agricultural Credit Agency, attempts to systematize the finances of the fellah. The ministries of Education and Public Health oblige the fellah to improve his mind and body. The Ministry of Justice, through the district courts and after endless delays, either condemns or acquits him when he stands accused. The Ministry of War conscripts him or collects the exemption fine. The Ministry of the Interior, acting in the common interest, supports the whole network of regulations and insures order and public security through its police. The Ministry of Social Affairs, through its village social centres and the more recent Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, has begun to assume more and more importance in the life of the fellah. The government in its present form is little more than one century old. The transmission and execution of laws, orders, decrees and by-laws is carried out by an immense army of more than 300,000 officials, who in return for their services absorb nearly one-third of the revenues of the state. “The long continuance of the bureaucracy,” said Makram ‘Ubayd Pasha, onetime Minister of Finance, in

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Figure 3.2 Egypt.

presenting his budget to Parliament, “has been the cause for the lasting poverty of the fellah, in spite of the progress and prosperity of the country.” The overwhelming weight of this machine is concentrated, for the fellah, in the hands of his mudir, ma’mur and of his ‘umda. We shall examine the function of each of these officials. Politically, Egypt is divided into 24 sections: There are five urban areas called governorates (muhafazat). These are Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta, Port Said and

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Suez. There are four frontier districts: the Red Sea; Sinai; the Western Desert, including the oases of Siwa, Bahariya and Farafra; and the Southern Desert, with the oases of Dakhla and Kharga. Finally, there are the fifteen agricultural provinces called mudiriyas. Six of these provinces are the most populous and best irrigated. These are the provinces of Beheira, Gharbiya, Fu’adiya, Daqahliya, Minufiya and Qalyubiya, spread like a fan over the Delta, each with from 320,000 to one million inhabitants. The eight southern provinces of Upper Egypt are strung along the Nile; they are the provinces of Giza, Beni Suef, Faiyum, Minya, Asyut, Girga, Qena and Aswan. At the head of each mudiriya is a high official called the mudir. He is directly responsible to the Ministry of the Interior, and is frequently transferred. If he distinguishes himself he is moved nearer the capital or even becomes a minister. On the other hand, if he falls out of favor, he is moved farther south. The province of Minya, for example, which is considered a favorable post, changed mudirs 25 times between 1907 and 1947. The mudir resides in one of the most attractive towns, which serves as his capital, and is the representative of the central power. As he is more in touch with great men than small, he has no direct knowledge of the fellahin, who moreover cannot come into direct contact with him. They hear him spoken of, pay the taxes due him, and catch glimpses of him on official visits. They consider him as a higher being. To them he seems all-powerful. Outside the chief town, the mudir’s authority is exercised by the ma’mur. Each mudiriya is divided into markaz (police districts) of from three to seven in number, except for Gharbiya, the most populous, which has twelve. The ma’mur, a kind of constable, controls a police force distributed among the principal villages of the markaz. He is an executive with wide powers. To the fellah they seem almost unlimited, and he accords the man who exercises them a corresponding respect. He is the fellah’s king. The story is related of a fellah who met Khadive ‘Abbas: “May God preserve you, and make you our ma’mur.” Yet even the ma’mur does not know the fellahin, their affairs or their families, except through the ‘umda. And what the fellah knows of politics and the administration, he knows through the ‘umda, who for him is the repository of the law. In each of the nearly 4,300 villages of Egypt the ‘umda governs. He is nominated from among the leading inhabitants of the village which he rules and of which he often owns a part. In fact, he is not eligible for the post, according to a law of 1895, unless he owns at least ten feddans. His appointment is usually

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preceded by bitter rivalries, which may turn into open brawls, and is followed by enmities which sometimes end in death. Since 1947, the only eligible candidates have been those who know how to read and write and who pay at least £E 10 in taxes yearly. The ‘umda receives no salary for his work and he is expected to spend considerable amounts of money to keep up his prestige. But apart from this prestige, he receives other privileges: exemption from taxation of five feddans; exemption from forced labor and from military service for himself and his family; and a telephone—often the only one in the village. In many cases the post has become in fact, if not by right, the privilege of one family. Besides, he knows how to take care of himself and to defend his prestige, for he is only responsible to the ma’mur and in charge of from 15 to 25 ghafirs (night watchmen), who are under his orders. His principal function is to assure order in the village and its dependent areas, more than it is to watch over cleanliness and sanitation, for which he is rarely more solicitous than his subordinates. He reports crimes, by denunciation, which are committed in his village, assists the tax collector, takes care of the levying of men requisitioned for corvee, controls the carrying of arms, reports the outbreak of disease among men or animals, and records births and deaths. If the village is large enough he is assisted by shaykhs, with whom he deliberates before giving decisions. A schoolboy, the son of an ‘umda in Upper Egypt, wrote the following composition on his father’s work: “There are 25 ghafirs under my father’s orders, they guard the village from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., except two who watch our house. When he wants to judge the people he sits in the muntazah (outer garden) with the shaykhs. The two disputants come, and each explains his case. Then he judges them and tries to reconcile them. If they do not like his judgment, he locks them up in the jail until the next day and sends them to the markaz with two of the ghafirs.” The ‘umda can imprison for 24 hours and impose a fine of 25 piastres. There is no town hall in the village; the ‘umda’s house serves this purpose. All day long he receives petitioners or travelers, unless he is going the rounds with some official or inspecting his own fields. He pays frequent visits to the chief town of the district, either for business or pleasure. This uncontrolled system, although it offered some advantages to the government, has been full of drawbacks for the fellah, delivered over to a master who knows as little of municipal government as of civic justice (with a few exceptions, which we are the first to praise). It is full of inconveniences for public security: many crimes can thus be easily concealed, or even foisted off on the innocent, by

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such an autocracy. Village feuds usually owe their origins and persistence to the rivalries which surround this office. At Nahiyat al-Barud, in the markaz of Abu Tig, a new ‘umda was to be nominated. Among the candidates, two—Shaykh Ahmad Abu Zayd and Shaykh Ahmad Farghali—were outstanding. One had been dismissed from the post by official action; the other, ‘umda in 1931, had been ousted by the Nassim Pasha ministry. Both were much feared in the district, and each had a large band of supporters. The committee for counting the votes and deciding the election was formed of the ma’mur, representatives from neighboring villages and the ma’zun of the village. The latter, however, being a relative of one of the candidates, was challenged by the other. The markaz authorities then let it be known that the ma’zun of another village would sit in his place. But on the day of the election, which was to be decided by a show of hands, the first ma’zun was found to be still on the committee. His enemies’ supporters objected, while his own party upheld him, and the two factions came to blows. They made use of whatever weapons came to hand, and a savage fight ensued. Before the police could intervene, three men had been killed and a number of others wounded. The authorities arrested both candidates, and the mudir of Asyut gave orders that elections at Nahiyat alBarud and neighboring villages be suspended until order had been re-established. After several attempts to reform the ‘umda system, the policy of the new regime is to leave the present incumbents in power, replacing them at death or dismissal (for the office is considered to be for life) with a village council. In this way the system will die out gradually. In the presence of his superiors, whether landowners or officials, the fellah adopts an attitude of reverential awe, servility and mistrust. He puts up with any ill treatment from them, and they, in turn, treat him contemptuously, regarding their behavior as necessary. A rich landowner of my acquaintance—an excellent man, at heart—once declared to me, “The fellah can only be driven with the lash.” A police officer who, when I entered his office, was raining blows on a man up for trial, replied to my expressions of amazement, “You have to treat the peasants like that. They are only brutes.” We are not as yet discussing the fellah’s psychology, but it must be said in conclusion to this chapter that although he is much sought after as a producer and taxpayer, he is still unknown as a man.

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Chapter 4 The Fellah at Work

The preceding chapters have tried to picture the physical and social environment of the Egyptian peasantry—the data and the approach. We now can attack it directly, considering the fellah himself. First of all comes his work, from which he derives his name. The Arabic word fellah, which has passed into modern languages, is the intensive adjective of the verb falaha, which means to labor, toil or till the earth. As the reader must have observed by now, the fellah as “economic man” means toil. He is looked upon primarily, if not exclusively, as labor, as agricultural machinery. The fellah’s work, even more than his physical and mental make-up or his habitat, is determined by the double environment we have been considering. It seems in fact the mere consequence of limits and conditions which society and the soil impose upon him. It will thus lead us to the consideration of the fellah as a human being, for it is he who in reciprocation carries on the work of the soil and adapts it to human needs. We have here a clear case of reciprocal action. The black soil is not only fertile but demanding, from one year’s end to another. The fellah, who is not obliged by the Koran to rest one day weekly,

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works all year round and takes holiday only on the great feasts, about ten days of each year. The sun shines at least eleven hours a day, and in May, June and July nearer fifteen. The fellah spends the greater part of this time in the fields, and for some kinds of work stays up all night. He is exposed to the elements at a mean temperature of 80˚ F in summer and 53˚ F in winter, and he works barefooted, and often bareheaded. His labor is all muscular, and besides his hands he uses only a few primitive tools which, due to the nature of the Egyptian soil and the number of laborers, are quite adequate. The fas is a big hoe, heavy and solid, with a short handle, its front part broad enough to use as a spade. This the fellah uses with great dexterity for a hundred different tasks—to turn and break the soil, to dig furrows and to till the earth. Even the poorest of laborers has a fas; it is the indispensable addition to his own strong arm. It can be said that every field in Egypt is tilled by hand, even when worked with a plow, for the Egyptian plow is more of a tool than a machine, although it weighs nearly ninety pounds and is carried to and from the field on the back of a donkey. It is the Arab plow (al-mihrath), without wheels or breast, which is used in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and North Africa. It consists of a wooden frame with a flat ogival plowshare about ten inches long and a shaft about eleven feet long, to which the draft animals are attached by a straight yoke pressing not on the forehead, as in Europe, but on the withers. The animals may be two buffalo, cows, a buffalo and a donkey, or any two animals hired for the occasion. Sometimes even a camel and a donkey are used together. The plowman drives the share into the earth by pressing on the single handle, and follows the animals, guiding them by voice, for he uses no bridle, although sometimes he uses a kind of whip of twisted palm leaves. He can plow one-third to one-half a feddan a day. If the cattle are well fed, he can plow as much as three-quarters of a feddan per day. The time employed in plowing a field is from ten to twenty-five days a year. Except in the districts under basin irrigation this can be done at any season. In the concluding chapter of their Study of Egyptian Agricultural Methods, Audebeau and Mosseri write: “The Egyptian plough is the typical instrument for areas where the soil has only to be scratched in order to bury the seed and allow it to germinate before the top layer of soil dries. This plough is also appropriate when, as a result of limited water supply, care must be taken to preserve the moisture of the soil. None of the imported ploughs tested so far has proved really superior to the local plough, when mechanical, agricultural and economic factors are taken into consideration.”

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The Fellah at Work

Figure 4.1 The fellah uses his fas (hoe) with great dexterity for a hundred different tasks.

The native plow is the result of a double adaptation: the nature of the soil and the financial means of the fellah—it costs little more than two pounds. Its mechanism is so simple that contact between man and soil is very close. To smooth the tops of the furrows and break up the clods of earth left by it, the fellah uses the zahhafa. This is simply a rough beam of wood, or the trunk of a palm, about twelve feet long, on which he stands while it is pulled by the draft animals. This very primitive tool thus acts as both a roller and a harrow, and is also used sometimes to cover the seeds sown by hand. About four feddans a day can be treated by the zahhafa.

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To level the land, which must be as level as possible for irrigation, the fellah uses the kasabiya, a sort of box-like implement open in front, and held by means of two handles, which he raises to scrape off the mounds and fill up the hollows with the earth thus picked up. We have mentioned the buffalo and the donkey, and shall do so more than once, for they are the fellah’s faithful auxiliaries, well adapted to his needs and to Egyptian conditions. The mud-colored buffalo is the poor man’s cow, stronger than an ox and extremely disease-resistant. It consumes more fodder than any other draft animal. Because of its great usefulness, the fellah takes better care of it than he does of himself, although this is not saying much. When properly fed, it gives as much milk as the native cow. In winter and spring it should graze on a meadow of about half a feddan of Egyptian clover. (The size of the meadow will vary according to the richness of the soil.) In summer it requires daily about 25 pounds of fodder, consisting of straw, cottonseed cake and bean stalks. The food consumed is worth about 15 pounds a year. Providing the moist diet of winter (about 87 per cent water) is not changed too abruptly to the dry summer diet, the buffalo will give around 3,000 pounds of milk per year. (Note that milk is sold by weight.) This milk is richer than cow’s milk, containing around 10 per cent of fat as against 3.5 per cent of fat in cow’s milk, and is very important in the diet of the fellah. The meat of the buffalo, too, is not inferior to beef. All of these advantages should give an impetus to buffalo raising and make dairy farming profitable in Egypt, but the fellah does not go in for cattle-rearing; it is not in his interest to feed the buffalo very well, as it can tackle the work of village and turning the water wheel on a modicum of fodder. The buffalo costs him about the equivalent of $125. The Egyptian donkey, too, is a hardy animal. It is economical and far from exacting in matters of diet. The tough little work beasts common in the north can carry about two hundred pounds. Those usually found in the south are the larger variety used by the tourists when they visit the antiquities; they are taller by half a foot or more, stronger and handsomer. They cost around fifty dollars, usually. The camel is used for carrying fodder and fuel and for harvest work, but camels and mules, being less adaptable, are relatively little used by the agriculturalist. Once prepared, the soil must be watered and fertilized. The fellah does not have to wait idly, anxiously scanning the sky for clouds, like the peasant of Jordan.

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The Fellah at Work

Figure 4.2 A fellah plowing with ox and gamusa.

The water is there beside him in the river or the canal, but it must be raised and distributed. Until he has irrigated his furrows, the fellah knows no rest. Like the veins and arteries of an enormous body, a network of 15,000 miles of canals distributes the Nile waters judiciously to all the crops, and 8,000 miles of other canals drain the surplus back into the canal, or into the lakes. At the time of the gafaf, in January, when the canals are cleaned, double gangs are to be seen in the canals, one on the banks, the other in the beds. Pulling up with their hands the clods of mud and weeds, those below throw them to those on the bank, who catch them and fling them yet further aside.

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In order that this canal system may do its work and the waters reach the field, the fellah has to make a network of runnels which will bring the water to the crops. He is ceaselessly occupied with cleaning and maintaining these smaller channels. When the time comes for the field to be watered—five days out of ten in flood time and six days out of eighteen at low Nile—the fellah stays in the fields night after night in order to lose none of the precious ration. When the water level is high, he need only watch it flow through the runnels and clear away any obstacles. But when it is at low level, as is the case for 50 to 200 days a year (varying with the different regions), he must raise it. Here again he has only the simplest apparatus, as old as Egypt. The most convenient thing would be a pump, such as can be seen on the large estates but never on small holdings. Since the fellahin are numerous and conservative, poor in money and rich in time, this convenience does not commend itself to them. They have long ago solved the water problem in a way proportionate to their means, and they feel no need to desert their old system for one which may be better, but is new and untried. When the water is only a couple of feet below the surface of the field, one or two men crouch at the water’s edge, turning and turning the crank handle of a wooden cylinder, which reaches from water level to the mouth of the runnel. The water rises spirally inside the cylinder, which is about eighteen inches in diameter. This is the tambur or Archimedean screw, hooped with iron like a barrel, and about six or nine feet in length, depending on whether it is to be turned by one or two men. The spiral inside is fixed between the inside wall and an iron axis, one end of which is bent into a crank, while the other turns on a stake fixed under water. By this method enough water for two or three acres can be raised in a day of twelve hours, but it is heavy and clumsy to work. Since it requires the continual use of the forearm, it is very tiring. But the fellah is used to being tired. To raise water from a depth of more than three feet, the fellah uses a method as primitive as it is simple. He plants in the earth two posts about five feet high and a yard apart. When wood is scarce, these stakes are made of cane or maize stalks bound together and plastered over with mud. They are joined at the top by a horizontal bar. At the middle of this bar is balanced a wooden lever, more or less straight, about ten feet long. The short arm bears a heavy stone or a great lump of dried mud, and at the other end of the longer arm hang two or three yards of rope, or a rod, to which is fastened a vessel, a leather bag, a bucket or an old kerosene can. This lever is placed on the same axis as

36

The Fellah at Work

The mud-colored buffalo (gamusa) is a milk-giving animal of great usefulness to the fellah. It is usually cared for by the women and children.

Figure 4.3.

the channel which will carry the water to the field. When everything is ready, the fellah stands half-way up the bank where he has scooped a foothold, and pulls the pole down until the bucket dips into the water and fills itself. A slight upward push, and the counterweight brings it just above the runnel, into which it is emptied. The variety of movement should help to lessen the tedium, yet the fellah finds this work more grueling than any other, as is also attested by the words of his melancholy chanting.

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The water may also be taken from a well or pool, and at the end of a twelvehour day two fellahin may succeed in watering about one-eighth of an acre of prepared field. By working alternately in two- or three-hour shifts, one apparatus can water as much as one feddan. This system is widespread among the poor peasantry of the East and Far East, particularly the Arabs, but its origins are Egyptian, as can be seen on some of the oldest bas-reliefs. Moreover, the shadoof, as it is called, is used more widely in Egypt than in any other place. The shadoof can be used alone or, as in the regions of Qena and Dandara, in sets of three and four in different stages, where the water is at an unusually low level. But when it is very low, the saqiya or water wheel is more often used. The saqiya, though clumsy and primitive, is really a machine. Usually it is made from acacia or sycamore wood and driven not by manpower but by beasts. A big horizontal wheel, turned anti-clockwise by an ox or buffalo, engages with its crude cogs a vertical wheel carrying a belt of pots or cans. These move, mouth downward, into the water to fill, and then tip their water out in the channel on coming to the top of the wheel. Both the saqiya and the Archimedean screw have been in use in Egypt since Ptolemaic times, at least. Since the saqiya costs between $50 and $100, according to the depth of the water, and the diameter of the vertical wheel necessary, it is very often the common property of several families. Each family brings its own beasts in its turn to turn the wheel, and the work never stops. It takes about twenty-four hours to irrigate one feddan in this way, and about five feddans can be supplied by one wheel. With its variations, such as the tabut and tambusha, the saqiya can be found by the thousands in Egypt. Under the name of nuria it is used by peasants in Syria, North Africa, Spain, Italy and Greece. As can be seen, irrigation makes heavy demands on the fellah’s energy and endurance. Yet he is not satisfied with the strict minimum, and often gives the soil too much water. He does not understand that too copious watering raises the underground water level, and that when this reaches four feet below the surface it stifles the roots and turns the plants yellow. Since his great fear is drought, when his turn comes to give the field water he gives as much as he can in the time allotted, for drought causes bad harvest and hunger. Innumerable troubles and anxieties plague the fellah in his efforts to get the water he needs for his little plot. The irrigation overseers in the provinces and the ghafirs, whose duty it is to see to the opening of sluices, often disregard the orders and regulations aimed at providing a just supply. Bribes, favoritism, injustice and even spite are not uncommon

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The Fellah at Work

Figure 4.4.

To raise water from a depth of more than three feet, the fellah uses a simple and primitive method—the shadoof.

and are rarely punished. Disagreements over watering often end in brawls and feuds, and sometimes even in murder. Watering is not enough; the fellah knows only too well that the soil needs other nourishment. With the help of his wife and children he does his best to find, at as little expense as possible, as much animal and chemical fertilizer as he can. Pigeon droppings, silt and plant matter grubbed from the canals, village debris and age-old dust, above all soil impregnated with stable dung (sibakh baladi) but rarely human excrement, all contribute their nitrogen to his field. The mounds, or kums, of dead cities are quarries for the fellah’s fertilizer. This sibakh kufri, as it is

The Fellah at Work

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called, is found in good and bad qualities all over Egypt, but nowadays mostly bad. In the cliffs of Upper Egypt there is also a kind of sand (marug) and a clay (tafla), which furnish a poor fertilizer and need much labor to bring to the fields, but all these do not suffice, and the soil needs artificial remedies. Despite the fellah’s ironbound conservatism, his sympathy with the soil has helped him understand its needs. Good sibakh kufri having become almost unobtainable since the first years of this century, he has begun to buy chemical fertilizers (simad). Before the war, Egypt imported more than half a million tons of natural nitrate from Chili, the earliest source, as well as synthetic nitrates from Germany and England. These can be used on all except leguminous plants such as barsim [clover-like fodder], fenugreek, beans and lentils, which need phosphates. The distribution of simad is very efficiently organized by the Agricultural Credit Agency (which sells it by the sack and on credit) and the big import firms. There are about 2,000 depots scattered over the country. The chief users are the large landowners and the state domains, which advance their tenants the quantity they need against a share in the crop. The small landowners have to resort to the cooperatives or (what is sometimes the same thing) to unscrupulous intermediaries. A hundred pound sack, delivered in the village, costs from two to six dollars according to the nature of the manure. Grain crops require the most expensive manure, while the cheapest kind is the best thing for barsim. Then comes the work of leavening the soil. Twenty times a day or more, the donkey laden with hampers on bags trots to the field, driven by the fellah’s son. There are no carts or barrows for this. The farmer lays down the fertilizer and packs it by hand around the plants which need encouragement. Although he objected strenuously to chemical fertilizers two or three decades ago, he now resorts habitually to them, but he has yet to learn how to use them properly. Too often he uses them too sparingly or too generously, and does not take into account what he did the previous year. On the other hand, he knows relatively little about insecticides for fighting pests. For example, a district where bean culture is important was attacked by bean aphids. The larger landowners were well aware of the procedure of using insecticides. Their yield per feddan rose to five ardabs, while it was only one and a half on the land of the ignorant fellahin. The fellah’s work must continue from before seeding time to harvest. The days are gone when he could sow the crop in the hawd and return after a few months to gather it. The struggle for life on his small plot has become continuous

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The Fellah at Work

Figure 4.5.

When the water level is very low, the fellah employs a saqiya, or water wheel.

and unrelenting. Since the introduction of cotton and the establishment of perennial irrigation, the fellah has no slack season. The crops follow a system of rotation covering a period of two to three years. Taking cotton first, the succession will run about as follows:

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TRIANNUAL CROP ON THREE FEDDANS

November December January

A Barsim

February March April May June July August September October

B Cereals (wheat, barley)

Cotton

C

Leguminous (beans, fenugreek, barsim) Rice

Maize

A’s crop is then planted on C, C’s on B, B’s on A, et cetera. Complete rotation occurs every three years.

This calendar of crop rotation is observed with but little variation everywhere in the country, but according to the needs of the farmer. Although it has been translated into Gregorian months, the fellahin keep to the Coptic calendar, which is based on the Nile flood and goes back to Pharaonic times. It begins with the month of Tut (September) in which the Nile reaches its highest level, and divides the solar year into twelve months. There is a series of Arabic proverbs, deriving from Coptic, which assign to each month its proper task. Wheat, in ancient times the main crop, is frequently mentioned, but the newfangled cotton not at all. The same calendar regulates the Coptic ecclesiastical year, for the importation of Christianity did not change the existing system. The reckoning begins from 284 A.D., the first year of Diocletian’s reign, called “The Year of the Martyrs” (although in actual fact the great persecutions took place in 304 A.D.). The Muslims, on the other hand, start with the Hijra, or Emigration of the Prophet to Madina (622 A.D.), and count in lunar months. Since 1874, Egypt has officially used the Gregorian Calendar, which is gradually spreading everywhere. The government has not kept the ancient Egyptian

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The Fellah at Work

names for the months, nor has it substituted translations of the Roman names. It has simply taken over popular adaptations as follows: Yanayir, Fibrayir, Maris, Abril, Mayo, Yunyu, Yulyo, Ughustus, etc. This is the only calendar used by the Ministry of Agriculture and is understood by the majority of the fellahin even though they use the Coptic months in their personal dealings. It is convenient to describe at this point the principal contemporary crops, which are those at which the fellahin work: cotton, the main source of the country’s wealth; maize and wheat, which provide the daily bread; and barsim, the cattle’s fodder. Of the rest we shall only say a word in passing. Cotton was not unknown to the ancient Egyptians; some’ textiles of Pharaonic times seem to be woven of it, and Pliny mentions its use. Its development in Egypt for large-scale purposes took place only in the mid-nineteenth century after the experiments of Jumel. Perennial irrigation, introduced about the same time, the increase in population, and the advantageous opening in the English textile market, soon made cotton the country’s principal crop. The world crisis of 1930, which led to a slump in the cotton market, compelled the Egyptian government to reduce it to a quarter of the total cultivated area, and its production continues to be closely directed by the authorities. It still remains the staple crop of modern Egypt, indeed one can almost speak of Egypt as a one-crop agricultural economy. It is planted in every mudiriya from Beheira to Aswan. In order to avoid mixing of species which would lower the quality and ruin the reputation of the long staple cotton, the Ministry of Agriculture controls all seed from the time of ginning. The fellah must buy his seed well in advance, usually from agents of the Agricultural Credit Bank or ginning firms. When the field has been prepared and divided into furrows, he pushes the seeds, six to ten at a time according to the variety, into small holes set about eight inches apart on the southern edge of the furrow, and made with a dibble which he uses as a measuring stick as well. About a fortnight later, he puts new seeds, which he waters by hand, near the hole if the plants have not yet peeped through. After six weeks he thins the clusters, leaving the two best seedlings in each hill. Meanwhile he irrigates the stand every fifteen to twenty-five days from May to June, and every twelve to fifteen days in July. The fellah then must control the flow of water through each furrow. After the watering, he roots out the weeds, and picks from each plant the top bud, so as to discourage it from going to stem. Thus the thousands of square miles of cotton fields are not so much farmed as gardened. Like gardening, cotton cultivation demands abundant labor. It therefore tends to produce a dense population, unless machinery makes up the shortage, as in the

The Fellah at Work

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United States. It is not difficult to obtain the extra labor, since the action of the work routine is not in itself strenuous. Women and children are as good as men here and participate in the family’s earnings. This fact has greatly helped to make cotton growing so successful in Egypt. After the brief flowering, which begins around July, the pod enlarges, bursts, and the fibers develop for picking. Twice between the end of August and early October the whole village, under the harrying orders of the overseers, sets to work picking the cotton. There are recognized chanters of work songs, to whose rhythms the white tufts of cotton are deftly stripped off. None may be missed, but not a single leaf must go with them. When the pocket formed by raising the lap of the gallabiya [tunic] is filled, the worker goes to empty it in a clearing in the field, and then resumes his place. From the clearing an endless file of fellahin carry the cotton to the shuna, or storeyard, of the owner or the bank. Thence, some time later, it goes by donkey or camel to the ginning and pressing factory, where thousands of fellahin, usually children, hired by an entrepreneur, load and unload the ginning machines in an atmosphere of stifling dust. After the third picking only the dried stems are left. These are bound into bundles and stacked on the rooftops of the villages to be used as fuel. After cotton the most important crop is maize or Indian corn, a cereal of American origin, which is planted on more than a million and a half feddans. Although popularized before cotton, and already well-established in the Mamluk period, its introduction and general adoption are fairly recent. Sylvestre de Sacy wrote in 1810: “Dura, a large species of millet, is one of the commonest crops in Upper and Lower Egypt, and the people live in great part on dura-bread.” Dura is the Arabic name of millet. The Ministry of Agriculture calls it shamiya or Syrian millet, to distinguish it from dura raf‘ia, or iwayga, millet of the old Nubian variety. All through Africa, wherever there is rich soil and sufficient water, millet is giving way to maize, which is easy to cultivate, quick bearing and favorable to a second crop. This is particularly the case in Egypt. In fact, dura raf‘ia is now planted only in the south, where the basin system of irrigation is still prevalent and diminishes with the advance of perennial irrigation. Maize has conquered the Nile Valley because it has proved so suitable to the needs of the fellah and to the soil. The fellah sows it broadcast in July, fertilizes it generously, and waters it seven times. Thirteen to fifteen weeks later, the stalks are higher than a man and laden with heavy ears. The workers, mainly women and children, harvest it by piling the stalks in heaps and then stripping them of their ears. The yield may be ten or twelve ardabs per feddan, but the average for the country is about seven and a half.

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Then the stalks are intertwined to make a sort of circular hedge around the heaps of ears. In this open enclosure the men work day and night stripping the ears and breaking out the yellowish grain, which they put into baskets and take home. The stalks and cobs are also carried home on donkey back to serve as fuel or to reinforce the roof. Nothing may be wasted. Wheat, on the other hand, has been since antiquity one of Egypt’s main crops. It was wheat which made Egypt the granary of the Roman Empire. But it does not have so important a place as formerly. Like maize, wheat is planted on about a million and a half feddans. Almost all of it is consumed in Egypt by the middle class and the townspeople. Owing to its low percentage of gluten, and the high content of starch, it is barely exportable, and besides does not meet all the home demands. Europeans and upper-class Egyptians prefer to use imported flour. The fellah sows the wheat in November. He is assiduous in manuring and watering it up to the gafaf period, and then waters it only once or twice more before the harvest. He harvests in April, with a primitive sickle or by hand. The crop is bound into sheaves and carried by donkey or camel to the communal threshing floor, where it is spread out. The poorest of the fellahin beat their grain with their staves (nabbut). More often, several families share a nurag. This is a heavy sort of sled, made of wood. It moves on three or four axles armed with eleven solid disks for breaking the straw. The driver sits on the box and guides the buffalo in a circle over the ears, which are broken by the disks, while another worker throws fresh stalks under the paths. Winnowing is done, as in most Mediterranean countries, by tossing the chaff and grain into the air in the direction of the wind. For this the fellahin use a twoor four-pronged fork, the mizrat. Lastly the grain is sifted in large sieves by the women, and put into sacks, jars or baskets, ready for sale or home use. Chopped straw mixed with beans and beanstalks, cotton seeds and barley are given to the cattle or buffalo in summer, but in winter they live on barsim, an Egyptian species of clover. It is cultivated everywhere, forms a fifth of the total acreage, and nourishes the ground as well, by adding nitrogen to the soil. It provides excellent forage, grows quickly, and requires a minimum of attention. The fellahin sow it between September and November, often after maize, cotton or rice, and before taking away the old stalks, which protect the seedlings. After fifty days it can be cut; it then is cut about four more times, in intervals of thirty-five days. The cattle graze on it as it grows. Two-thirds of a feddan will nourish an ox, half a feddan a buffalo, and a quarter of a feddan a donkey, for the growing season.

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Many other foodstuffs are produced from the soil of Egypt by the labor of the fellah. Rice was brought from India under the Caliphs, and is cultivated in the wellwatered regions of the northern Delta. It occupies about 630,000 feddans, but its acreage depends on the height of the Nile flood and is controlled by the government. It is of good quality and is also exported. Broadbeans, which provide fodder for animals from June to December, are boiled and dressed with oil or butter, when they are of good quality, and provide a nourishing and highly popular national dish. Onions and sugar cane are raised in great quantity in Upper Egypt. There are also barley, lentils and dates, not to mention vegetables and fruits, the cultivation of which is increasing. There is a developing export trade of citrus fruits. The fellah keeps a narrow strip of his field for his own use. Here, without using fertilizers, he plants the vegetables of the seasons: okra in winter, ful in spring, and mulukhiya in summer. These will be mentioned later in the chapter on the fellah’s diet. Apart from occupying so little space, they are not cultivated with any special care, or given treatment very different from the main crop in the field. Egypt is becoming a land of more variety of crops, but this diversity has not involved any sort of specialization for the fellah. He remains a rural manual laborer, whose work is dull and uniform, yet not so routine as to limit his activity to identical production-line gestures. The fellah can still be adapted to any new crop. He will not introduce a novelty himself, but will accept it if imposed on him by authority, the more readily if it proves to pay better than other crops. This has been noticeable in the case of the reintroduction of flax. Mechanical innovations, however, are a different matter. The preceding pages have already made it clear that there is scarcely any question of carts and wagons, let alone tractors, reapers, binders and threshing machines. The fellah has never used them, and it is unlikely that he ever will. He is too poor, and in any case feels no need of intermediaries between him and the soil. A few large estates are using exotic machinery (or were until landholdings were limited during the revolution), but this is an exception. On the whole the fellahin ignore machinery. This may be due to habit or ignorance; but the explanation may lie also in the instinct of selfpreservation. Again, in Egypt, their labor is cheaper for the landowner than imported machinery, so at the moment the interests of both classes coincide. But the day will come when the cultivators are not content with so little, and when the machine is less expensive. Manual labor should keep its leading place, however, for to mechanize agriculture will destroy the organic relation which has

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The Fellah at Work

grown up between the people and the land, and overthrow a way of life which has grown up as the only one suitable for an abundant population on a limited soil. And the fellah devotes all his energies to this soil. He gives himself without reserve, even passionately, if it is his own. But that is not usually the case. Here man belongs to the land, not the land to him. This is a main cause of his lethargy and his poverty. None of the conditions which surround his relation to the soil make for freedom. Forced labor was suppressed in 1893, but it is legally applied in cases of “public utility.” Then the fellah may still be requisitioned by authority, torn from his field and his village, and sent where his hands are needed. It may be, for example, that the Nile flood threatens a catastrophe. On such an occasion hundreds and thousands of fellahin are set to work day and night under the rod of officials and overseers to raise the embankments, build dikes, check leaks, and guard the barrages. Let a dike be near breaking; they run in a compact mass to the point of danger, each with his basket and his fas. They heighten the dike and buttress it with a great rampart of earth, reeds, palm trunks, and when necessary, with maize stalks and sugar cane. In 1934 the fellahin saved the country by their efforts. The government set aside £E 150,000 to fight the danger; it was used to buy materials and pay bonuses and traveling expenses for officials. As for the fellahin, they did not get a piastre for their labor, or any allowance for their enforced absence from their fields. Egyptian law states that any Egyptian may be mobilized to check the danger, but it is applied only to the fellahin. However, no one may be now employed without receiving salary. Another example: the cotton is sick. Each year an army of men, women and children flock from other districts to the fields under attack. They carry bread for a month and sleep in the open air. Each day from six to twelve and from two to six, they must bend over the cotton plants, search them row by row, plant by plant, leaf by leaf. Each infected leaf must be delicately plucked off and put in the lap of the gallabiya. If a single diseased leaf escapes notice the overseer behind will see it and bring his stick down on the back of the culprit. For this work the workers are paid, however, and go voluntarily. In 1936 (under the law of 1910, which states that males between nine and twenty-five years old who are accustomed to agricultural labor may be levied), a million young fellahin were mobilized to save 435,735 feddans attacked by the pink cotton worm, which destroys the bolls and reproduces itself five times a year. The Royal Agricultural Society has promised 20,000 pounds to whoever finds a remedy for this new plague of Egypt. Meanwhile, insecticides, which are being

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more and more used, seem to promise good results, and may reduce such requisitions. A fourth case remains to be noted: it is usual, if not obligatory, for a fellah who wishes to keep in the good graces of his ‘umda to work for him several days without pay. Day laborers are recruited en masse by a rayyis or foreman to dig a canal, mend a road, or gather in a crop. Each man brings his own fas, and the crew carries out the required task under close surveillance, like a chain gang, often far from home. This drafting of men hired by a rayyis into localities where they are needed is called tarhila. It is found especially in Upper Egypt, where there is less cotton and more large estates. It is also used within the state domains under direct cultivation. When day laborers are not attached to the estate they are subject to unemployment and want, except when large works make their help necessary. The more fortunate are engaged by the year, somewhat like the obbligati of Italy. These men receive regular payment, partly in kind and partly in cash. For example, the owner lets a feddan to a fellah on credit. The wages for the days spent at work for the owner are deducted from the rent of the feddan. At the end of the year the fellah is either a debtor or creditor, according to the total number of days he has worked for the owner. Another alternative is to pay the fellah five piastres per day’s work and add to this the yield of the maize for one feddan. As a day laborer the fellah works on large properties. On a small property of five feddans he is a sharecropper and a partner with the owner. The latter pays the taxes and the irrigation dues and furnishes the implements, beasts, seed and fertilizer. The fellah, as head of the family, provides labor for all the crops, from plowing to harvest. For this he receives a fifth or a quarter of the yield. He may also bear half the expenses. In this case he will receive half the crop. The agreement is nearly always verbal and varies in many details. This system is free from any risk; the owner has secured the maximum of work, and the fellah his food. It cannot, however, be very profitable to the fellah, for even with the help of all his family and by laboring continuously he cannot manage to work more than five feddans. At the end of the year he has only the produce of one or one and a quarter feddans, if all goes well. But it is not uncommon to see the fellah a debtor to his owner at the end of the year. Being short of money before harvest, he goes to the owner for an advance in order to buy a gallabiya or to pay the expenses of a circumcision or funeral. These loans, on interest, often exceed his share in the partnership, so that when accounts come to be

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The Fellah at Work

settled, not only does he receive nothing, but in addition his work is pledged for the following year. As a tenant farmer, the fellah is more of a contractor, but bound by no written lease. He rents a field for the agricultural year, at £E 12 to £E 30 per feddan, according to the district. Because of the great demand, the land is nearly always let at very high prices. The owner pays the taxes and receives a fixed income, usually from the cotton crop. If the price of this crop does not suffice, he will take the grain crops as well. Tenant farming is still very prevalent, and before the revolution, over 40 per cent of the fellahin worked under such an arrangement. Let us take as example a fellah of the rich district of Mit Ghamr. He rents two feddans for the agricultural year. On one he plants cotton, the crop with the longest growing season. All of the money from this must go to the owner as rent. The other feddan is planted half in barsim and half in wheat. The barsim goes to the buffalo. The income from the wheat will pay the loans he contracted for seed. At the nili crop he will sow maize or rice, on the one feddan. It is from the yield of this crop that the fellah and his family will eat. What is left over is sold, and the money will probably go toward the rent. In the meantime, the buffalo has calved. The calf is worth ten pounds, and this ten pounds is the fellah’s net profit at the end of the year. That is, if all goes well. But all may not have gone well. In the old days if the crop was poor, or there was a blight, or the market dropped, the tenant still had to pay the full rent. The result was that he had to sell the buffalo, and that is ruin. Sometimes the catastrophe was so general that the government had to cancel part of the debt by decree. A fellah who had just had his buffalo seized was asked, “But why do you persist in renting, since you only lose?” “Because farming is the work I learned from my fathers, and I can’t do anything else.” “But why rent land at such high prices?” “Because the landowners have conspired to keep the prices up, and the fellahin don’t know how to get them down.” Then he added, “Since they have taken everything we had, we will steal.” Fortunately the worst features of this system have been done away with by the land reform. Since the rent has been fixed in every case at seven times the taxes, it amounts often to a great reduction of the old rents. It is now usually possible for the tenant to remain solvent. We have seen that nearly three million fellahin own a small patch of land each. Of these, 1,980,098 fellahin own 818,524 feddans, or an average of about .4 feddans each (figures for 1948). This is scarcely enough for a family for employment

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or for support. Nevertheless, among the rural proletariat these are a privileged group. It is every fellah’s ideal to own a bit of land, just as it is to marry, to have children, and to own a buffalo. The owner of a small field has the same things to buy as a tenant: seed, manure, animals and implements. Nowadays these are usually obtained through the cooperatives established by the 1952 agrarian reform law. Where these societies are operative, there is an improvement over the situation which formerly prevailed. Because of a law that small holdings could not be seized by banks, the banks refused to give credit to small holders. This threw the fellah into the hands of moneylenders, who lent at 30 per cent or even 50 per cent, in spite of the law forbidding rates higher than 10 per cent. For the fellah must have credit. And often as not, by his own ignorance, he did not know how to make the loan pay. Then he was engulfed deeper and deeper with debt by the harsh terms of the moneylender, and had either to sell the buffalo or hand over all the fruits of his labor, in order to pay the interest. Nevertheless, as owner of a field, he is at least, in name, the owner of its crop, especially the cotton, which was snatched away from the other categories of laborers. The small landowner may sell a cantar* or two of this precious crop for his own profit. However, he must usually supplement his income either by renting more land, or by working as a hired laborer. Like the fields, which are separated only by a ridge or a runnel, there are no sharp divisions in the kinds of farming arrangement we have described. Each farm overlaps the next, and there are few fellahin who do not pass from one to the other or belong at the same time to two of them. Perhaps a basic similarity in their lives is necessitated by the continual presence of the following common limitations. Poverty. Because he knows nothing of either foresight or economy, and even more because he is weak, isolated and ignorant, the strong and the rich take the fruits of his labors. The bank, the moneylender, the ‘umda, the landowner or the authorities gather in most if not all of what he has sweated to produce. He himself, to use one of his own sayings, “remains poor as a needle, which clothes others but remains itself unclad.” Dependence. He can neither plant what he wishes or when he wishes. As a day laborer he works under the strictest supervision. As a tenant farmer or sharecropper he plants according to the owner’s plan, or the exigencies of his contract. Even as a landowner he is dependent with regard to dates, seeds and choice of crops on

*[The cantar is a measurement for cotton, corresponding to about ninety-five English pounds. Ed. note.]

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the orders of the Ministry of Agriculture. He has little liberty or initiative one way or the other. The minimum standard. However bad his affairs may be, he has at least some sort of food from day to day. One does not really starve to death in the country, for even under the worst conditions the natural resources of the land remain. Family labor. One must never lose sight of the help given to the fellah by his family. The wife, the children, the buffalo and the donkey are the cultivator’s Figure 4.6.

Family labor. His wife, children, buffalo and donkey are the fellah’s capital.

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capital, and they constitute the normal rural unit. The head of the family works full time on the land. His wife lends a hand at seed time and harvest, rears poultry at home, and makes butter and cheese for sale. The children look after the animals, take them to the field or to water, watch the saqiya, and collect dung and fertilizer. For five or six weeks a year they may work for wages at cotton picking, fighting the cotton worm, or at the gin. The buffalo draws the plow, turns the saqiya, treads out the grain, produces fertilizer (mud soaked in urine), fuel (cakes of dung and straw), and milk, cheese and butter, as well as a calf which is sold for cash. The donkey transports manure, crops and the fellah himself. Such a rural unit is sufficient, without outside help, to cultivate five feddans. An ordinary fellah family will make about £E 3 per month, enough to keep it from dying. One might argue that the fellah is sober, has few needs, that his wardrobe is simple, that his health is fair in spite of everything, that he is not starving, and can even spend a few piastres at the next feast, that, as men’s affairs go, his is a balanced economy. But is it an economy befitting a man? “I have a family of six persons,” a fellah told me. “Each of us needs a qilla of maize monthly (6  25 piastres = £E 1.50), and a qilla of wheat for the whole family (50 piastres), and grinding expense at the mill (15 piastres). Total, £E 2.15. This is for our daily food, but we must have at least two substantial meals a month. Here are the details:

2 rotls [pounds] meat Cooking butter Vegetables Onions Kerosene for fuel

.16 piastres .05 .05 .02 .02 .30  2 = .60

and we go without cheese, rice and sweetmeats. Out of our £E 3 monthly income, we spend £E 2.75 on indispensable food.” Or let us take the rather solid family economy of Abu Zayd Salim. After his discharge from military service, he was fortunate to marry Na‘ima Masr, who had worked for middle-class people and had learned sewing and dressmaking. She has bought a sewing machine, selling her thin gold dowry bracelets to pay the first installment. She has become the dressmaker for the peasant women of Barnasht,

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and is a real financial aid. She owes fifteen pounds on the machine, which she will pay in ten installments. She takes orders and works all day, in spite of the four children, one of whom is paralyzed, so as to help liberate her husband from dependency on his father. Abu Zayd has rented a feddan for £E 36, and spends all his time working in the fields. Their annual income is £E 60, or five pounds a month. Their expenses are as follows:

Payment of the sewing machine Six qillas of maize for bread Two kadahs of rice Two rotls of meat (They eat about one rotl in fifteen days.) One rotl of fat One rotl of butter Two kadahs of lentils Fifteen eggs Four okes of potatoes Four rotls of onions Radishes, greens and other vegetables Tea and sugar

£E 1.50 1.50 .11 .24 .12 .14 .14 .05 .10 .04 .08 .70 £E 4.62

Notable here is the importance of tea and sugar, as well as the lack of variety among the vegetables. Thus they have about 28 piastres a month left for clothes, medicine and savings. Yet they do not complain. Bound to the soil like the buffalo to the saqiya, the fellah repeats the same gestures as the months wear by, and hoards piastre after piastre in a pot buried in the earth. If no extraordinary expenses befall his delicately rigged budget (and there are always weddings, funerals, circumcisions and dowries to throw him into debt), he may at last see his deeply rooted hope fulfilled, and be able to buy something—some yards of cloth, a cow or buffalo, or even a bit of land. It is this alluring possibility, always just around the corner, which helps him continue year after year the same round of work.

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Chapter 5 The Physical Fellah

We have seen that the fellah’s work consists entirely of bodily labor, and brings all the body into play. Let us now consider the laborer himself, and examine the fellah from the physical point of view—his race, type, clothing, habits and so on. We shall find once again that water, soil and sun explain and often even determine the constitution of the fellah. Nevertheless, in spite of all that material dependence, the liberty of man manifests itself in individualism and failures to adapt totally. But this element is subject in turn to another factor—conformity to tradition, and this in the end produces the same result—stability. To what race does the modern fellah belong, and what is his genealogy and origin? Any amount of research has been done on these questions, and any number of theories evolved. To go back no further than the eighteenth century, Volney, for example, declared the Egyptians were of Negro origin. Vivant Denon gave them a Caucasian origin; Poinsinet de Sivry followed Pliny and believed they were descendants of the Celts. For Winkelmann, a Chinese immigration explained the matter, and Moreau de Jonnes would put the cradle of the Egyptian race as far away as Polynesia. Ethnologists of the nineteenth century, with more knowledge and more plausibility, sought a key to the problem nearer Egypt, in Asia or Africa. The theory of African origin is upheld by Hartmann, then by Flinders Petrie and Maspero, who class the

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Egyptians with the Ethiopians. Chantre, after anthropometric research covering thousands of types past and present, concluded that the Egyptians, though not absolutely native to their present soil, are essentially African, of Libyan extraction, and that if there was any Asiatic infiltration, it had little influence on the race. Schweinfurth, relying on botanical evidence, believed southern Arabia to be the source of the Egyptian race, while Amelineau, de Rouge, and (more authoritatively) J. de Morgan, who supported his theory with comparative studies of language, art, customs and physical characteristics, believed Chaldea to be a more likely source. The theory now in favor, perhaps because it is less simple, may be nearer the truth. It can be summed up thus: In prehistoric times Asiatic invaders, related perhaps to the Arabs and Babylonians, entered the Nile Valley and intermingled with the people established there, a composite of a native stock with Libyan and Ethiopic elements. This theory is a synthesis of the two earlier hypotheses, and has the advantage of taking into account facts which support both of them while allowing the inclusion of Semitic and Hamitic stocks which people North Africa, a great part of the Middle East, and the shores of the Mediterranean, and shows, where it borders on the black races, certain affinities with the Ethiopians. Thus the Egyptian is definitely Homo mediterraneus. The study of profiles in ancient frescoes and the representations and skeletons discovered in a variety of excavations oblige us nonetheless to recognize three original types: the Semites, long skulled and of medium height; the Mediterraneans, short skulled, with short straight noses; and the Libyans, snub nosed and short skulled. But the climate and agricultural life have worn away the differences between indigenous and foreign elements and created a specifically Egyptian stock which is as indivisible as the valley of the Nile itself. However this may be, and although we may not know precisely from where the ancient Egyptians came, we can be quite sure that the present inhabitants of the country—at least the fellahin, and it is with them that we are concerned— are the descendants of the people of dynastic times, from whom they are descended almost without break or intermixture, despite the passage of fifty centuries and conquest after conquest of the Valley. The conditions of servitude and contempt in which the native fellah population has been held by foreign conquerors since the decline of the Pharaohs have helped preserve the race in its villages. Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French and English have all followed the same policy here. They have laid hands on the riches of Egypt, and taken power in order to do so, but have neither associated with nor supplanted the fellahin

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who produce the wealth. There has however been some penetration of nomads and Negroes from near areas. After the Moslem conquest in the seventh century, numbers of Arabs settled in Egypt, not only in the towns, but also in the country. As conquerors they were able to impose on the native inhabitants their language, their religion, some of their customs with regard to women and their ruthlessness in vengeance. But the original inhabitants, a hundred times more numerous in the countryside, with stronger and more fertile women, and their unchanging way of life, marked the Arab element with their own stamp. In settling on the black soil, the Arabs accepted the life of its cultivators. This is noticeable in the villages of the Upper Delta, where the Arab immigration was heavy, due to the especially rich soil, as well as in recently settled hamlets on the fringe of the cultivation where even now assimilation is going on. After three or four generations the graft can no longer be distinguished from the stock, or has proved too different to survive. Those Arabs who have remained nomadic, and live by the transport of cotton on camelback, by pasturing their flocks or by robbery and murder—those in fact known in Egypt as Bedouin—differ markedly from the fellahin by their finer features and their more excitable temperament. Another fusion has taken place in the south between fellahin and Negroes, and because of the greater difference between these two elements the mixture is more easily noticeable, but the Egyptian facial type is dominant, the other recessive. This absorption of neighboring and therefore somewhat similar elements, who had moreover a less plentiful food supply, by a settled people of greater numbers seems a logical process. Had the invaders or immigrants arrived in millions, or come from Europe, they might have perhaps succeeded in imposing their own type, despite the influence of climate and the way of life. But the deserts of the east and west, the narrowness of the pass to the south, as well as the density of the original population and the unusual character of the valley, have kept the country free from mass immigration. All these geographical and historical factors have preserved the Egyptian type among the fellahin, who have kept a facial appearance distinguishing them among the countless mixtures of the Near East. It has been said that the Copts are the purest representatives of the ancient stock. This is true in the cities and towns, where the Copts were the original inhabitants, and were kept in isolation by their religion, while the Muslims are descended from Turks, Arabs and converted Copts, who have married women from any and every country. Racial and physical differences here are very clear. In the country, however, aside from certain Delta areas, the theory does not apply. The fellahin who have remained Christian and those who have become Muslim are one and the same stock. If the former for religious reasons have kept the race

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Figure 5.1. The fellah’s features on the whole are rugged but not ill-favored . . .

pure by marrying only from among Christians, tradition and isolation from other elements have made the others no less exclusive. The antipathy between fellahin and Bedouin makes marriages between them extremely rare, and a union with any outsider who may chance or condescend to live in the village is considered scandalous in the extreme. Thus it is possible to generalize in describing the type. The fellah is a sturdily built man, though rarely stout. His skull and face are broad, his forehead narrow, his eyes dark and hair dark and curling. He has rather prominent cheekbones, a thick nose, full but seldom protruding lips and a heavy jaw. His features on the whole are rugged but not ill-favored, and are neither very .

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sensitive nor expressive. His thick wrists, ankles and neck distinguish him from the supple Bedouin. His back is rounded, his shoulders not so much sloping as bent toward the chest and his hips are narrow. He has rather large flattish feet and is rarely tall, his average height being about 5 feet, 6 inches. The women are similar but more in proportion. They have preserved the purity of the original type better than the men, however. These are the features of a single race and of a single type. As with all living things, varieties are not wanting, but they are never startlingly different from the norm. For example, the cranial index (about 75) is one point higher in Lower Egypt. There is more tendency to Negroidism as Nubia is approached. Maqrizi and ‘Abd al-Latif had already noted this in the fourteenth century, and any traveler who gets as far south as Aswan can see it for himself. The Saidi, or Upper Egyptian, who lives in a drier and hotter climate, is taller, more bronzed, vigorous and muscular than the fellah of the Delta. “It is very rare that one encounters persons with a light or ruddy complexion; the children are in general spare, deformed, and lack freshness of complexion. Most of the men begin to improve in looks after the age of twenty. The inhabitants of the Said have a slenderer body, a drier temperament, and a darker complexion,” wrote ‘Abd al-Latif in his account of Egypt. The fellah is not a hairy type of man. He wears his hair cut short, except when in mourning for a male of his household, but he likes to wear a mustache as a sign of virility. In childhood his head is clean-shaven, apart from the ritual tuft. When he becomes old and venerable he lets his beard grow. The women’s hair is too much neglected to be plentiful. Their meager locks are tied with russet or black strings, and are always hidden under a veil or gathered into a kerchief. Since antiquity, depilation has been practiced by both sexes. It is carried out either with a razor or with a paste of sugar and alum. Like all peoples who keep tradition unbroken from primitive times, the fellahin mark their skin with ritual, esthetic and hygienic designs, handed down from immemorial ages. Incision and all forms of coloration are intended not only for ornament, but also as charms and prophylactics. Girls have the lobes of both ears pierced, and sometimes the side of one nostril. The perforations are kept open with string until the ring is inserted. In some areas, boys have their right ears pierced. All boys, Copt as well as Muslim, are circumcised by the barber of the village with great ceremony. The girls have the clitoris excised. Not to submit to this mutilation would be an obstacle to marriage.

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Figure 5.2. The women have preserved the purity of the original type better than

the men . . .

Unlike the Nubians (Berberines) the fellahin do not gash their cheeks, but they color themselves, especially by tattooing, one of the main distinguishing marks of the fellahin, applied to men and women alike in adolescence. In the middle of the forehead or chin, on the temples or the back of the hand, appear dots and geometrical patterns; on the chest, back or forearm there may be rough designs, such as a sword or tree or name; and for the Copts a cross with perhaps the date of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This tattooing is rarely found lower than the waist, and is never obscene.

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The work is done by a specialist, usually a Bedouin of the same sex as the patient. The operation takes place in the open, often at a street corner on market day. The method is very primitive and causes painful swellings. The tattooer traces the lines of the pattern selected on a chosen spot of skin, with a style made of several needles bound together, or with a pricking stamp. Then he colors the bleeding pattern with lamp-black mixed in oil or spirit. An indelible greenish tint is thus obtained. The use of henna (Lawsonia inermis) to dye the hair, hands, feet or perhaps only the nails, is a characteristically Egyptian affectation. It dates back to the Twentieth Dynasty, and Islam seems to have appropriated it. The application of henna is a delicate affair. A poultice made with the powdered leaves has to be applied hot and kept on the area from three to twenty-four hours, depending on the quality. An orange-red or brown tint is thus obtained which lasts about two weeks. Widows tint their hair with henna to appear young and attract a second husband, young women use it to clean their heads and kill lice, to keep their hair from falling out, and to make themselves pretty. The shaven heads of children are reddened with henna as a hygienic measure. The hands, feet and fingernails of the women are colored so at marriage, and several times a year, at the great festivals. Kohl is used to line the eyelashes and brows with black, and make the eyes look larger; its function is to beautify and protect them. There is scarcely a woman who does not use this inexpensive cosmetic, both for herself and her children. On a holiday or when she is tired, she applies it neatly with a little stick dipped into the phial of black. Circumcision is a therapeutic, tattooing a sacrification, henna a poultice, kohl an eye-salve; for these esthetic devices also serve as preventives and curatives. At the same time they also have magical significance; circumcision is an act of consecration, tattooing symbolizes and acts as a talisman; henna is a commemorative, kohl wards off the evil eye. Thus a luxury is never devoid of meaning or utility, and the same trait or practice has meaning in several aspects of life. The adults rarely bathe for pleasure or for cleanliness. The men have enough contact with water at work, or in the practice of their religion. The ritual ablutions (wudu,) of hands, feet, face, ears, nose and genitals assure a minimum cleanliness. The children splash about naked in the canals or river when they have the time, or when it is necessary to water the stock. The women go into the water in their underdresses, in groups, to wash the dirty clothes and themselves at the same time. They use clay, or a piece of wood or occasionally soap. In many villages the

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women never get a thorough bath except at marriage, and once a year at the Great Bairam. The clothing of the fellahin is one of Egypt’s distinguishing features; the fellah’s dress differs from that of the peasantry in most Muslim lands. There is nothing fanciful or elaborate about it; no complications, sequins or embroidery such as distinguish the village dress of Syria and Palestine. The men wear on their heads the simplest covering; a mere skullcap which gives little protection from the sun. The brownish felt cap, or libda, is so distinctive of the poor fellah of the south that it has furnished him with a title. He is called Abu Libda, the fellow with the cap, and figures in many popular tales and anecdotes. Sometimes, especially in the north, and with boys almost always, the skullcap is made of white calico or knitted wool in its natural colors, white or brown. It is then called taqiya. If the fellah is better off, or more pious, or on special occasions, he winds a strip of white or brown cloth around the cap as a turban. This serves as much better protection against the sun and is especially common in the south. It is due to Muslim influence, although it is found among the Christian fellahin quite as much. A good libda is deep, and should come nearly to the ears. The gallabiya is the principal garment. It is a tunic of solid blue or white, made of cotton. It looks very much like an old- fashioned nightshirt, with no waist, closed up to the breast, and reaching to the ankles. The sleeves are long and the cut fairly full. The short opening at the chest reveals a vest of richer, striped material, with many close-set tiny buttons. It takes about six yards to make a gallabiya for an adult, and the cloth costs about 8 piastres a yard. The tailor takes 10 or 12 piastres for making it up. When at work, the fellah tucks up his gallabiya above his knees, or girds it in at the waist, or he may take it off, roll it up and put it aside to serve later as a pillow for his siesta. He then appears dressed in white with a huge pair of drawers held around his waist by a cord and reaching to his knees. His shirt is covered by the vest, but lower down it flaps over the drawers. When it is too hot, he takes off waistcoat and shirt, and goes about barebacked. His feet, too, are bare. However, he usually has a rough pair of leather slippers which cover his feet to the ankles but are open at the heels. He puts them on for feasts, or after performing his ablutions. These slippers are locally made, and are yellow in Lower Egypt, brown in Upper Egypt. The boys are naked under their gallabiyas, which are shorter and lighter in color than the men’s. Small girls wear a more complicated dress with waist and bodice. They are often dressed in bright colors or in multicolored prints. Their

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hair is tied up in a muslin kerchief, knotted at the corners. Sometimes for a veil they wear a pretty face towel or bright cotton shawl from the market. The women cover their heads when they go out, and if they meet a man, they cover the lower part of their faces with a long black veil, glossy or dull, which reaches to the feet and gives them a very graceful outline. In the Qena district this veil or shawl (malaya) is dark brown. The women’s dresses, now that cotton prints have invaded the market, are often brightly colored, but are not waisted, and usually end in a flounce which trails in the dust. The underclothes consist of a red, pink or varicolored petticoat and wide, colored drawers. The fellaha usually does her own rather clumsy sewing, but the cloth is usually bought. It is only very recently that some home weaving is being done, as part of the government program to encourage cottage industry. The stuffs used for the fellah’s clothing come mostly from Japan, India and Italy. Imports from other countries are becoming more insignificant as the Egyptian weaving industry develops. The indigo and black dyes are produced in the country, and all the clothes are made up in Egypt. Gallabiyas and dresses are made to measure; shirts, drawers, waistcoats and caps are ready-made. Jewish commission agents usually undertake to supply the larger villages with the necessary quantities of material or ready-made clothes. The goods are sold just before the great feasts. The old wool spinners and local weavers supply only a small part of the total needs. The dullness of the women’s attire is relieved by striking ornaments. Round the neck they wear strings of big yellow or blue beads, on their wrists a number of bracelets made of glass, silver or gold; these in the latter case are the family bank account, and come often as part of the dowry. On their ankles is the khulkhal, a massive ankle ring of bronze or silver, which is the wedding band, and must always be worn by a married woman. Everything else may be sold, but never this. If there is bereavement in the family, the earrings, necklaces and bracelets are laid aside for mourning; the fellaha removes the khulkhal only upon the death of her lord and master. She never uses socks or stockings, but sometimes wears sandals or slippers like the men. This strikingly simple clothing shows a long development and a supple adaptability to climate and to practical needs. The fellah’s loose, simple clothes permit him to breathe easily and to move freely. They keep the outlines of the human forms in harmony with the countryside. On the other hand, the headgear and the women’s clothes are dark colored and hot, and absorb the sun’s heat. The length hinders walking and stirs up dust. However, the inconvenience is outweighed by

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the advantages, and the habits which retain such a costume are a crystallized form of wisdom. Neither his labor nor his clothes cut the fellah off from nature. The absorption into his environment gives him an abundance of earthy, physical virility. His robust and hardy constitution is in harmony with nature. For his sleep he needs no mattress, no comfort. He bears the most brutal incisions in his flesh without a cry. Colds, headaches, mosquitoes, flies, lice, fleas and the vilest odors do not trouble him at all; his appetite is always sound. Moreover he has a very delicate sense of hearing which allows him to perceive the slightest sound. Very often, unfortunately, nature turns treacherously upon him and infects his unsuspecting body with diseases which feed on him and undermine him. These are endemic diseases rooted in the fellah class. Let us say nothing of tuberculosis and hereditary syphilis, which are the fellah’s constant companions. More dangerous are bilharziasis, ancylostomiasis and malaria which affect over 80 per cent of the population in certain mudiriyas. These arise from lack of hygiene and too narrow contact between man and soil. Most immediately noticeable are the eye diseases. Although the rich greens of the valley are restful to the eyes, the dazzling, burning sun, the thick dust which no rain ever lays, the storms of sand from the nearby desert, the dung, the flies and dirty fingers all combine from babyhood to inflame and infect the eyes, if not to blind them. It is impossible to pass through a village without being struck by the numbers of blind and one-eyed people—6 per cent of the total population, by statistics, and reality goes beyond this figure. There is no counting the bleary or bloodshot looks, the eyes dimmed by glaucoma or trachoma. Another scourge is bilharziasis. This is a form of hematorrhea caused by a parasite which is absorbed into the system by the skin. The fellahin make their ritual ablutions several times a day, in any sort of water, and work barefooted on the damp earth or in the mud of the runnels and drains. The larvae of this parasite, peculiar to Egypt, grow up and are transmitted in water and sodden ground, in the village ponds, and since the introduction of perennial irrigation, in the standing water of runnels and badly levelled canals. Bilharziasis is not in itself a serious disease. But, beginning with the passing of blood in the urine, it often develops into complications such as the stone, fistula and ulceration of the penis. Cancer of the urinary organs often develops. The infection may reach the kidneys, the liver and even the eyes. And it lasts for eighteen to twenty years. About 90 per cent of the male fellah population contract it sooner or later, and become accustomed to passing blood in the urine and feeling continually below par. Bilharziasis is transmitted through urine and water; ancylostomiasis through earth and excrement.

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Like bilharziasis, it is a collective disease, a permanent epidemic, and is introduced into the system by the hookworm which passes through the skin. Ancylostomiasis is less widespread than bilharziasis, but more dangerous, as it consumes the red blood corpuscules. As the fellahin seldom make use of human excrement, and have never learned the use of latrines, they relieve themselves anywhere. If they are already infected, every place they use is a source of danger to their fellows, who go about barefooted, or throw themselves carelessly down on the ground. The larvae can move several feet in the dark; they then settle in damp soil, from whence they pass through the skin and bloodstream to the intestines. One sees countless men and women in their best years, twenty-five to forty, stricken with this disease, discolored, puffy, lifeless-looking from its ravages. Neither their natural hardiness, their youth nor the treatment they receive has been able to save them. Malaria is spread by the ricefields and the birkas, or ponds of surface seepage, and affects some 65 per cent of the fellahin. In some villages of the eastern Delta 90 per cent of the population is affected. What makes these three diseases so alarming is not so much their inherent seriousness as their constantly widening extent, and the way the fellahin so unconsciously and efficiently perpetuate and propagate them in their work and manner of life. What is being done for this ailing people? In 1948 the Minister of Social Affairs stated: “In Cairo alone, there are 2,000 doctors, as many as there are in the rest of Egypt. Eighty per cent of all the hospital beds are in the cities; the rest in the country.” The Minister of Public Health: “We have about 4,500 doctors in Egypt, of whom 1,400 are in government service. If we had 1,200 more, we would have an average of one doctor per 5,000 inhabitants. We have 21,000 hospital beds, one for 800 inhabitants, where in England the average is one for every ten persons.” To this information we might add that, of the 1,400 government doctors, only 600 are divided among 4,000 villages. These doctors are poorly accommodated and receive a low salary. Their sole aim, usually, is to get as much money as they can outside their salary, and to leave the village as soon as possible. There are some of them who are not ashamed to exploit the sickness of the fellahin in the most cynical fashion. It happened that I found myself not long ago among a group of doctors in the health department inspector’s office of a mudiriya. One of these doctors had just received an appointment for a distant village and was very affected by the news. A colleague was endeavoring to cheer him. “Don’t worry. You’ll be perfectly all right in that village; I stayed there two years

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myself, and I was better off than I would be in town.” (Who could fail to be moved at such admirable social spirit?) “These dogs of fellahin,” he resumed, “if you know how to handle them, you can get a hundred a month out of them!” In another village, the doctor would not sign a declaration for a natural death or hand over the burial certificate before he was paid £E 5. The deceased’s relatives had no choice but to pay. Another will never travel to the neighboring village, though he has charge of it, until he has made sure the patients are numerous enough to subscribe communal fees in a lump sum to be paid beforehand. Another doctor used the ambulance of his clinic whenever he went to the cinema in the neighboring small town. Another entrusted his practice to an untrained assistant and settled in town; he came out to check things occasionally, once or twice a week. A certain Salib Sami worked with an irrigation pump in a field near Nukhayla. He was once gravely injured, and relatives carried him to a nearby hut. The doctor was sent for, and refused to attend the patient unless he was paid £E 5 in advance. In spite of their efforts, the poor fellahin could collect only half the fee; the doctor did not go. Salib died. These doctors, married or single, can say in their defense that their salary is too low—about £E 20 per month—that country life is unbearable, unless one has a special talent for it, and that life in the medical centers, lost out in the fields, is too lonely and isolated. The doctor at Malamis has been transferred to another village. The doctor at Azayza, 3 kilometers away, has been instructed to take care of Malamis, but he has not been given a car for this purpose. The result is that he will not go to Malamis, and its medical center will cease to function. The ignorance and, still more, the poverty of the fellah make it difficult to take care of him. Medical stations and centers do exist, especially in Lower Egypt, and the price of most of the medicaments at the government centers is well within the reach of most of the fellahin. But the fellah goes to the doctor only when he is very ill, because it means the loss of a day’s wages, the bus fare to the hospital, as well as the price of the medicine. If the medicine is not to be found in the range of pharmaceuticals of the clinic, he must buy it commercially, for what is to him a great price. When he reaches the hospital there is already such a crowd of patients that he must go before his turn if he is to get home that night, and so he must tip the doorkeeper. Finally he is face to face with the doctor, who takes two minutes to hear his symptoms and write a prescription, without examination. He is in a hurry

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to finish the line of patients in order to go to his little private clinic and attend to his more interesting private practice, where he also sends some of his hospital patients. At first he may have honestly tried to be a good doctor, and to reconcile quality and quantity, but soon enough he comes to act as do his colleagues, to hand over the prescription after one or two questions, singling out for attention only those who come recommended, or are obviously very ill indeed. Dr. Muhammad Khalil ‘Abd al-Khaliq, first a professor of parasitology at the Faculty of Medicine, then Under Secretary of State for Public Health, explains thus the failures of the public hospitals, which are being increased yearly in order to reach more villages: the doctors are overworked. It should be mentioned that they take much more pains with surgical work, because this adds to their renown and attracts patients to their private practice. This hurried work and the excess of patients is also to be deplored in eye treatment but the consequences are not so grave, as the nature of the illness is more immediately discernible. Another difficulty is the lack of basic knowledge of the fellah. When ill, he will take the remains of the medicine which helped his neighbor in his illness, or will send one of his relatives to the clinic to describe his symptoms and bring him the medicine. But the state is making a considerable effort to help the fellah. Beside the hospitals of the mudirya and the markaz, which only help those who live nearby, rural health centers are opened. The country is divided into 850 sectors of 15,000 inhabitants each, with over 200 health centers in all. They stand by themselves, making lovely patches of white in the green fields, centrally located for the four or five villages who depend on them. They almost invariably consist of a small hospital with several beds, a dispensary, a laundry for the village women, drinkable water, a villa for the doctor and a nurses’ house. The whole cost is about £E 18,000. Unfortunately some of these new and fully equipped centers are still closed for lack of doctors. If we enter a typical center in full swing, we find directing a young doctor, one of our friends, perhaps, just starting his career. He is paid 16 pounds a month, and also has to work in the neighboring center, which has no doctor. The day begins with the care of mothers and children. With much paper work, 250 cases have been followed from conception until twenty-four months after birth. The doctor points out that in this particular area, most of the mothers are syphilitic. We are then led to the dispensary, through which file sixty patients. Once this is over, the doctor goes the rounds of the district in order to register the births and deaths.

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The water installations, such as showers and washing machines, have met with no enthusiasm and are almost untouched. A fellaha finds it decidedly odd to walk two kilometers in order simply to bring clean water, do her laundry, or wash her body in a modern shower. The center has a staff of 22 persons—the doctor, the nurse, eight male nursing assistants and five female assistants, two laboratory aides, a mechanic for the water pumps, a gardener, a watchman, a cook and a clerk. The salaries total £E 150 per month. If the fellahin still go to the barber for treatment, though they die of it, it is usually because he is the only practitioner available, just as the usurious moneylender was the only source of loans. The proof is given when mobile medical units arrive at the village. Then the fellahin flock for care and willingly submit to any treatment. The traveling hospital at Tahta is an example. The Ministry of Public Health rented a piece of land for six months. Tents were set up. Everything was very neat. Before the opening, due publicity was given in the surrounding areas, and there was a ceremonial opening to draw a crowd. One doctor and six assistants treated free of charge all comers. The attendance was eighty per day, of whom an average of twenty five suffered from ancylostomiasis and only three from bilharziasis. (Tahta is in Upper Egypt.) Unfortunately, the fine efforts of the Ministry of Public Health are drowned in the flood of needs. The Ministry gets little help from private individuals, and is hindered by the ingrained habits of the fellahin, who reinfect themselves as soon as cured. Thus these plagues remain as deep-rooted as ever in the peasant class. If only they would at least pay some attention to all the advice and directions for hygiene they are given. But the answer is that even if they understood the value of preventive medicine they could hardly hope to escape, because the conditions under which they live conspire against them. Water is the first problem—not now for irrigation, but for human consumption. Egypt is a hot country, and the fellah’s work makes him sweat. Thus the fellahin drink considerable water during the day. Where the owner of the ‘izba has installed a pump, they can get their water from an artesian well. If the village is lucky enough to be on the bank of the river, they will get their water from the Nile itself, which is silty but fresh running and relatively unpolluted. More often, they can only drink the brackish and stagnant water of the irrigation canals. Here men and animals cleanse and relieve themselves; vegetables, clothes and crockery are washed, and carrion is thrown; and here the women come to get the “drinking water.” They carry it home gracefully

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Each evening the fellaha must renew her water supply, carrying it home gracefully on her head in large pottery jars which hold about six gallons. Figure 5.3.

on their heads in the evening, in large pottery water jars, to fill the great clay pot or zir, which stands in the corner of the house. Each fellaha must bring back about six gallons for the next day’s use. This water is added to what already remains in the zir, so that the bottom is never dry and never cleaned. The water stands all night, so that much of the dirt settles. It also cools, due to evaporation through the porous clay. As for the drops which filter through the bottom, and might be used to fill the drinking pots with pure water for the morning, they run to waste in puddles, where they are drunk by the fowls.

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Recently, following the institution of the Ministry of Rural Affairs, pumping stations have been put in for supplying pure water to villages, and the government has also put in numbers of wells in the villages, tapping deep and unpolluted water levels. At present, most of the villages of Lower Egypt are supplied. Man has always found it necessary to add something to water to give it some flavor, and the fellah is no exception. Wine he does not drink, since it is forbidden by the dominant religion; he is in any case too poor to pay for it, and his head could hardly stand it. Coffee was introduced into Egypt at the end of the fifteenth century by the Darwishes of Yemen, and the preferred coffee is still that of Yemen or East Africa, It is considered a great luxury by the fellah, and he drinks much less of it than city people. However, he loves to sip a tiny cup of it, made in the Turkish fashion, while playing backgammon with his friends in a cafe on market day. Since World War I, exaggerated tea drinking, after a fashion introduced from Tripoli, has superseded coffee drinking. It has spread from male gatherings even into the homes. Fellah families have become accustomed to drinking tea several times a day and in considerable quantity. Not only the adults, but tiny children come to crave tea. The fellah takes his teapot with him to the field. The poorest spend at least 30 piastres a month on tea and sugar. When they have not enough money to buy it, they lie on the ground and will not work. “In one village,” says Msgr. Khuzam, late Patriarch of the Catholics of the Coptic Rite, “I asked what had happened to the animals, which are the fellah’s capital. ‘There are none,’ they told me. ‘They have been sold to buy tea.’ Tea has become as necessary to them as bread.” By boiling it until it turns black and sweetening it heavily, a thick, syrupy liquid is obtained, rich in tannin and alkaloids, which sooner or later ruins the stomach and the nerves, weakens the body, and debases the character. But it is comforting, and makes one feel good. This black tea has become the drug of the fellah. Imports have tripled in a few years. The government has on occasion raised the duty to three times its original figure, to make it less accessible to the fellah. But the evil has not diminished, for those who have acquired the habit will do without necessary food, and starve their families rather than give it up. On the contrary, the increased tax has only helped hurt the finances and the health of the fellah. Merchants mix tea leaves, scavenged from hotels, cafes and ships, with sawdust, dried poplar and mulukhiya leaves and bean husks, and sell the mixture, colored and baked, to the wretched fellahin.

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However paradoxical it may sound, there is a relation between the growth of this toxic habit and the development of perennial irrigation. It has been proved that this invention, which has doubled Egypt’s wealth, has also encouraged bilharziasis and ancylostomiasis. These diseases weaken the fellah and reduce his power to work. He notices them with alarm as a decrease in his virility, and seeks relief in the stimulation nearest at hand. As the men, who spend their lives in the mud and water, are more affected than the women, they are also more addicted to the “black tea.” Nor can we neglect Coca-Cola here, which in less than two years, thanks to its huge organization, managed to flood the most inaccessible and needy villages of Upper Egypt. Offered to the helpless and credulous fellahin as a remarkable therapeutic and stimulant, it has already begun to supplant tea and coffee, and imposed itself as a new disastrous necessity on the fellah’s strained budget. The world-famous Egyptian cigarettes are made from Syrian, Turkish and Greek tobaccos. The cultivation of tobaccos, introduced to Egypt at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was forbidden by the decree of June 25, 1890. The aim was twofold at the time: to combat the traffic in hashish, and to gratify tobacco- exporting Turkey, then the nominal sovereign power. Today, the import duties of £E 17 million are the most profitable source of state revenue. They also testify to the huge consumption of tobacco in Egypt. The fellahin love tobacco, but they buy the lowest grade of cigarettes, 20 for 5 piastres. As a rule, the fellahin have three meals a day: the futur, at sunrise, before departing for the fields; then about midday, the ghada, brought to them in the fields by the women or children; and the ‘asha, about dusk, eaten at home with the family. It is the chief meal, and consists of warm cooked food, vegetables stewed with cooking butter—though the Copts often use oil—over a primus stove or in the household oven. The fire is fed with dried branches of cotton plants, maize stalks and gillas (briquettes of straw, earth and dung). As the fellahin do not go in for cattle rearing, and meat is expensive, they cannot eat much of it. They may have mutton or beef at most once a week, and at least on the two great festivals, or when an injured or ailing animal must be slaughtered. This means an orgy, at which everyone puts away tremendous helpings of meat. Now and then some rich man, for a vow or a wedding or a funeral, kills an ox or a buffalo and distributes the meat, according to the Islamic custom; then the poorest can have a feast for nothing. When the village stands on the banks of the Nile, a great canal or a lake, the boys go fishing, using human excrement as bait. The small fish they catch are cooked in oil or clarified cooking butter (samn). But most families are limited to

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vegetables. Onions (basal), turnips (lift), green peppers (filfil), cucumbers (khiyar), and tomatoes (’uta) are eaten raw. Cooked vegetables are bamiya or okra, and mulukhiya (Torchorus olitorious, a mucilaginous leaf known to the ancient Egyptians), both of which the fellahin like immensely. Broadbeans (ful) are the national dish. Then there are green squash (kusa), lentils and rice. The latter are very often mixed, one part to two, to make kushri. This is one of their best recipes. For dessert, when they have the chance, they eat dates, or bite huge mouthfuls from slices of watermelon. They also chew sugar cane, or gnaw on roasted corn on the cob. Locality and the time of the year may give a certain variety, but there is never a wide choice. The ordinary meal is a dish of vegetables, to which is added a piece of mish, the coarse, sour cheese made of goat’s or buffalo’s milk, and preserved in brine, which is eaten from one end of Egypt to the other. As condiments the fellahin use herbs, vinegar, crude salt from Damietta and molasses boiled down from the juice of the sugar cane. They do not use the expensive manufactured sugar except in tea and coffee. On the occasion of a wedding, circumcision or mawlid, they buy a coarse kind of cake, and red and green hard candies, which they enjoy as thoroughly as do their children. The staple food of the fellah is maize bread, which provides 80 per cent of his calories and half his proteins. A grown man will eat more than three pounds of it a day. It has been found that this whole-grain corn bread contains six times as much magnesium (Mg0 1.988, Ca0 0.284, K20 2.886) as baker’s bread. The maize is not pounded or rubbed in a mortar with millet, as is the custom with the black peoples of Africa, but ground like wheat between two millstones, after the universal Mediterranean and Near Eastern custom. The mill consists of two Hat stone wheels about two feet wide and three inches thick. The lower one is fixed, while the upper one turns on a pivot. It is pierced with a central eyelet, into which the grain to be ground is poured. A wooden pin is set upright near the edge of the wheel, in a hole, and serves as a handle for turning the quern. This grinding, like all the other processes of bread-making, is done by the women, if there is no donkey- or gasoline motor-driven mill in the village. The fine-ground flour, with the addition of a little fenugreek, millet, wheat or beans, yeast and water, is kneaded on a piece of wood into round, flat cakes about ten inches across. The dough, cooked in the household oven, produces a golden brown bread with a fairly agreeable taste, made of two soft crusts with no crumb. There are no public bakeries except in the towns, but every family bakes its own

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Figure 5.4. A young fellaha kneads her dough into round, flat cakes for bread.

bread two or three times a week. The size of the loaf varies somewhat; in Lower Egypt it is perhaps five inches across, and thicker. This maize bread is called bettaw after the Pharaonic word for bread, ptaw. The ordinary food of the fellah, then, consists of bread, which he makes from maize of his own growing; vegetables from the edge of the field, or others of poor quality bought by his wife from the market; cheese from the buffalo, when it has not been necessary to sell the milk; and occasionally eggs, meat and fish. Briefly, he eats the cheapest products he can obtain. His diet is certainly neither varied nor abundant. Does this mean that he is underfed? That is certainly the usual view. On the other hand, some authorities

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find that the foods and even the water of the fellah’s diet give him all the necessary minerals and, normally, of calories.1 The fellah’s labors, hardiness and physical strength seem to confirm this opinion. Yet the proportion between the quantities of cereals and meats for which we have figures and the numbers of the population would prove that he is underfed. Still, there are numbers of animals slaughtered in the villages which escape the statistics of the government slaughterhouses, and the fellah does not eat only cereals. His diet tends to become more varied with the introduction of new vegetables, foods and eggs. If he is undernourished, it is because he is sick. He would not be malnourished if he could get rid of the parasites which infect him. Yet the high proportion of recruits for military service who are rejected, and the havoc caused by malaria, intermittent fever and endemic disease would lead us to say that this is due to the lack of proteins, fats and calories in his diet. Thus he is sick because underfed. It is apparent that his sickness and his undernourishment are related. We have perhaps a vicious circle. In any case, the fellah is a weakened man. In a recent inquiry, twenty contractors employing thousands of fellahin for canal-draining declared that thirty years ago the fellah could carry 180 cubic feet of earth a day; today this figure has fallen to 120 cubic feet a day, and that is a maximum. Thus like the tongue in Aesop’s fable, the black soil is at once the best and worst of things, giving both strength and weakness. The mineral content of its crops strengthen the men who eat them; the germs and parasites which infect the sodden earth weaken the men who till it and live from it. But a certain balance has been set up by the interplay of forces, and in spite of everything, the fellahin are a sturdy stock. That is why we firmly believe that lack of cleanliness, sickness, death rates, in short, all the physical misery we have surveyed, and will touch again, is still not the deepest distress of the fellah.

1. Prof. P. Schrumpf-Pierron, “La teneur en mineraux de la nourriture du fellah,” Bulletin de l’ Institut de ’Egypte, Cairo, 1932, pp. 153–175. Wilson, “Food Problem in Egypt.” Journal of Egyptian Medical Association, June 1939. Dr. Elie Nassif, “L’Egypte est-elle surpeuplee?”

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Chapter 6 The Village and the Peasant Group

The fellah should really be referred to in the plural, for he lives as the member of a group, if not of a crowd. In the fields, as tenant or owner, he toils with his family; as a day laborer he works in a gang. Within the limited confines of the village, he lives and works more in the open than in his house. Nowhere is there privacy. The women fetch water in groups, children swarm everywhere; the daily life is collective and communal. The village or its quarter, not the house, makes up the entity, a community more important in many ways than the family or clan. It happened that the author once drew on the blackboard of one of our village schools the outline of a hut, as a test of observation, and asked: “Now, my children, what must we add to make a real home?” “A door!” “Windows!” “Stairs!” they began to call. We thought the house complete, and were ready to erase it, when a little girl cried: “No, it needs something more.” “And what is that?” “The neighbors!” (al-giran.) If we wish to know the peasant community, we must examine the village. Seen from the outside, among the fields, or against the pale backdrop of the desert

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cliffs, it is a huddled earthy mass, compact and shapeless, crowned with bundles of brushwood. One or two whitewashed buildings, more important than the others—perhaps a large dovecot or the house of a village notable—stand out from the confusion. Palms, acacias or sycamores rise above the mass, cooling it and veiling some of its ugliness. In the bright Egyptian sunshine, these clusters of trees among the houses are a striking sight, and Brunhes devoted a whole page to the description in his Geographie Humaine. It is not for us to imitate him, for this magic veil conceals a reality which most observers do not see, and it is this human reality which we must find. As the villages date from before the period of flood control, few are actually on the Nile banks. Most stand back, at a distance from a hundred yards to half a mile away. In Upper Egypt, where the valley is narrow, they often border the desert. Others stand huddled on a kum (about 150 villages have this word prefixed to their names) or tall: the ruins of an ancient settlement, an artificial mound or raised dike. Where there has been no flood danger, the village may stand on the level of the fields, barely visible, but always huddled and compact. A village may be placed anywhere. There is always water, and the soil scarcely varies. The geographer has difficulty explaining why the village sites are chosen. History could enlighten us, but who will ever know the history of Egypt’s four thousand villages? The congestion, however, can be explained. Not a square inch of land is to be wasted, especially if it is rich and well watered. In order to give the fields the largest possible cultivable area, the unproductive space covered by human dwellings is reduced to a minimum. As we have seen, up to the nineteenth century the land and its cultivators belonged to the state and a few landowners. The fellahin had no reason to live on farms, the more so as they were exposed to the raids of brigands and plundering Arabs. With the nineteenth century the village became the official unit for taxes, recruiting, judicial inquiries and the survey, so that it was essential for the villagers to remain within it. Thus the government would not—and will not even today—allow them to settle outside the village area. These older motives are now reinforced by certain new factors, such as the increase of population, the high price of land and lack of space. The 1907 survey fixed the village boundaries once and for all. A village may contain anything from a few hundred to several thousand inhabitants—15,000 is not an uncommon number—but it will always seem no more than a large family, and a number of people who would form a small town elsewhere remain in Egypt essentially a village devoted to agricultural production, with none of the variegated occupations and services which would make for town

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Figure 6.1. A peasant village—a huddled, earthy mass, compact and shapeless,

crowned with bundles of brushwood.

life. Nothing is more like one Egyptian village than another Egyptian village; another example of the monotonous uniformity we have so often had cause to mention. But there is a difference between the villages of Upper and Lower Egypt, as there is between the fellahin of the two regions. Villages in the south on the border of the desert extend along the margin of the desert and the town, so as neither to be far from the fertile soil, nor yet to take anything from it; villages in the north huddle in a tight compact mass in the cultivation. The likeness, however, is

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far more striking. Show an old Egyptian photographs of villages and ask him: “Said or Delta?” The answer will be the wrong one half the time. The same people living the same life have built the same kind of villages. Even where the fellahin build a suburb for themselves on the outskirts of the town, it bears exactly the same appearance, untouched by its proximity to modern life. Villages can be classified according to importance. The district centers (markaz)—the marketing places or centers of pilgrimage—are large villages or even small towns where they have other occupations and institutions, such as banks, courts, police station, railway center, shop area, hospital, as well as a club for the white- collar class. The detached but still dependent hamlets, such as the ‘izbas of the big landowners, and the sedentary Bedouin settlements, nag, on the edge of the desert, are at the other end of the scale. The standard of living is everywhere practically the same, and to study one average village is to know the rest. Let us take a village at random and look, before we enter it, for any signs of communal life which can be seen from its outskirts. The village is silhouetted, if not characterized, when the minaret of the mosque or the bell tower of the Coptic church rise above it. However, often enough, even if those buildings are present, they fail to give a special character to the village, being as poor and mean as their surroundings. Ninety per cent of the fellahin are Muslim. There are over two million Copts, of whom 60,000 are Uniat Catholics. They live together with the Muslims in the villages, each following his own faith. The Muslim fellahin, among whom women and children are not counted, observe faithfully the five fundamental precepts of the Koran: belief in one God, prayer, fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage. In their ignorance, this much at least they know. Of their belief in God more will be said later on. Prayers are said after ablutions in the evening and several times on Friday. When they hear the call of the muezzin, they leave the women and children in the fields, and go off to the mosque, or often to a cleared space used as such—a square of beaten earth at the water’s edge, surrounded by a low wall. Here they pray together, or at least go through the prescribed prostrations. Squatting on the ground or on a mat, they listen to the preacher (khatib), as he reads from the Koran. The Christian fellahin attend the very long Coptic Mass, on Sundays, but here worship is something more of a family affair, as women and children take part in the prayers and chants. Nevertheless, women and men are segregated in the church, and separated often by a screen. The Muslims do not understand the classical Arabic of the Koran, and the Christians no longer understand their old language, the Coptic of the Mass. From

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The village is silhouetted, if not characterized, when the minaret of the mosque or, as pictured here, the bell tower of the Coptic church rise above it. Figure 6.2.

one end of Egypt to the other, the common language is the so-called “vulgartongue,” i.e., Egyptian colloquial Arabic. It is a dialect differing greatly from those of Syria, Iraq and Morocco. There is no distinct dialect in this or that province of Egypt, but only differing synonyms. In Middle Egypt there is a more drawling accent; and whereas in most of Egypt the letter jim is “ga,” in Upper Egypt it is the letter qaf which is so sounded while the jim remains “ja.”

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Ramadan is strictly kept by the Muslims, as Lent is by the Copts. The former fast from sunrise to sunset for a month, allowing not even smoke or water to pass their lips; the latter for over two hundred days a year eat nothing from midnight to midday, and abstain from meat and fats. The fellahin neglect the duty of almsgiving no less. Within the limits of their means, they fulfill it generously and ungrudgingly, not in money, but in kind. They make gifts to the blind, to ministers of religion and to those poorer than themselves, and this in addition to regular and compulsory presents. On the other hand, few fellahin can make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and when they do, it is usually at the price of heroic suffering. Yet it is an ardently desired fulfillment, and on coming to a bit of money, the fellah will very often spend it on the pilgrimage, even before buying land. The happy pilgrim, on his return after six to eight months absence, bringing with him the blessings of the holy places to the village, is welcomed like one coming back from the dead. His pious achievement has marked him from the rest, and his children share his renown. He will henceforth always be addressed by the title of Hagg, and his pilgrimage is commemorated on the wall of his house. The front is whitewashed, and the crude outlines of men, carriages and ships are painted, with his name and the date. The same customs are observed by the Copts who have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and thus earned the title Muqaddas, or sanctified. More frequented and more popular than the mosque, because there are no distinctions as to age or sex, is the tomb of the patron saint of the village, who is called wali, shayka or sidi so and so. The monument stands often outside the built-up village area, close to a wall or canal and shaded by trees, themselves the objects of veneration because of their association with the holy spot. It is usually a square building, topped by a dome, or qubba, and whitewashed all over. The saint’s body does not always lie within. There may be only a commemorative cenotaph, palm- leaves, candles, bits of hair, shreds of cloth and early produce offerings. The caretaker of the sanctuary is maintained by the community, or by the income of a pious foundation or waqf. The post is sometimes hereditary. The mawlid, or anniversary of the holy man, is a day of great rejoicing in the village. All the villagers repair to the tomb and fulfill the traditional rituals, which usually consist of dances, circuits of the tomb and incantations. Far from the living stand the resting places of the dead. They are always on a piece of wasteland, unfit for cultivation—in the desert near the cultivation, on the debris of an abandoned village, or kum, too high for irrigation, or on the sand below the cliffs. Sometimes as at Minya, the cemetery lies on the other side of the

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Figure 6.3. The pilgrimage to Mecca. When pilgrims must walk through desert

areas, they run across jugs of life-giving water, left by unknown hands.

Nile. The village of the dead is made up of separate tombs packed close together, in no special order. They may be regular cemented blocks with pillars at head and foot, or simple mounds covered with white pebbles, or marked with two rough stones or a couple of vertical palm branches which are renewed each year. There are inscriptions and no flowers, but every family knows where its dead are buried, and comes to visit them on the first day of the Great Bairam, when the whole village goes to the cemetery to honor the dead by feasting and making holiday over

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their tombs. On that day the village is as deserted as it is in October, when everyone is in the cotton fields. It is not yet time for us to enter the village. In all the artistic studies of Egyptian villages there is a pool which reflects the dull mass of houses with their coronet of palms. In reality this pool is a large greenish pond of stagnant water, as poisonous as it is esthetically pleasing. Nearly every village has one, by necessity. To build houses, make bricks, engineer a watercourse or strengthen a dike, the local material is used, that is to say, the closest available earth. Thus, holes have Figure 6.4.

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Far from the living stand the resting places of the dead, always on a piece of wasteland unfit for cultivation.

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been created and dug deeper and deeper, and have then filled with foul-smelling water. There are the birkas, or village ponds, which serve as drinking troughs for animals, swimming pools for children and ducks, and sometimes as sources of water for the housewife. The government has had about a hundred of these hotbeds of disease filled in, not without opposition from the fellahin, whose customs and habits have thus been disturbed. A decree of 1892 forbids “the creation of new ponds or the enlarging of those already existing.” More than 10,000 cubic meters of earth were required to fill eighteen such ponds. Usually near the birka, and still outside the village, is the qurn, or winnowing and threshing floor. It is a flat patch of ground, covered with cow dung and dust, which has been leveled and trodden flat. The size is proportionate to the number of families using it. The qurn is common property and cannot be appropriated. Usually about ten groups at a time can work on it, until all have winnowed their grain. It also serves as a public square for meeting, though often an adjacent bit of wasteland supplements it for this purpose. Not far away is a great rubbish pile of dirt, dung and carrion. This heap would soon overtop the houses if the dogs and birds of prey did not visit it continually, and the fellahin did not take manure from it; and it would be an even greater menace to public health than the birka, if the sun did not help disinfect it. Still outside the village, especially in the Faiyum and Middle Egypt, there may be square towers, as high as thirty feet, banded in black and white. Their heavy bases and massive structure give them the appearance of forts, but they are in fact dovecots. One may see them assailed at sunset by from fifteen to twenty thousand pigeons coming in to roost after feeding in the fields. The construction of these cots requires a large outlay and is a specialized trade, beyond the means of our fellahs, to be undertaken only by the ‘umda or a fairly prosperous landowner. In the south a dovecot is often built on the corner of a housetop, thus raising the skyline of the village; but as a rule these houses with dovecots, whether built or independent, are not part of the village nucleus. They stand apart, and can be distinguished by their extra story, their more pretentious appearance and their gardens. Such are houses of bigger landowners, village notables or a successful merchant. Within easy reach of the village, on the side toward the fields, are the depots, or shunas, for the harvests; the offices and dwellings of employees and officials, perhaps; and the elementary school. We may now enter the village. In a clean and accessible corner, better cared for than all the other houses, is sometimes a madyafa, or guesthouse, with two or three chambers, kept up by the ‘umda for the use of the government officials and

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Figure 6.5. Threshing the grain on the qurn, or winnowing and threshing floor.

chance travelers. The building belongs usually to the government. There are government resthouses in about one village in ten. Let us penetrate at once to the heart of the village. What we have seen until now has given us no idea what to expect. All is dust and disorder. There is no plan or system, and not one straight line. The only thing which would be familiar to a city dweller is the congestion. The streets are alleys are so narrow that three can scarcely walk abreast—sometimes less than two yards wide. There is little hope of driving through and scarcely of riding on a donkey. Where there is more movement, however, there is of necessity a little more room, as in front of the ‘umda’s

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house or the mosque or school, and in some places by the little line of tiny shops for the tailor, grocer, potter and weaver. In some villages there are no shops, so that one can buy only from an occasional peddler. In many places the system of barter is in use, or ears of corn are used to buy, for instance, salt and vegetables. The main road scarcely ever goes through the village as in Europe. The hamlet is a compact mass standing aside from the road, canal or river, which wheeled vehicles can scarcely enter. This is one reason why so few foreigners, missionaries and even well-to-do Egyptians—except the notables and the moneylender— know anything about its inner life. To get a picture of this we must first describe the leading characters. We have met the ‘umda and the sarraf, who link the fellah to the government, and the nazir, the fellah’s link with the landowner. Another connection with the civilized world is provided by the baqqal, often a Greek, who performs the functions of grocer, druggist, cafe and innkeeper, purveyor of forbidden alcohol, moneylender and banker. He has no objection to living right in the village, among the fellahin if not with them, and on them if not for them. He has brought with him into this closed world the phonograph or battery radio and the games of the West. He robs the fellahin and helps them get narcotics, but he is unfailingly obliging. Though his rates are exorbitant, he lends money without asking too many questions, he sells on credit, and when he buys he pays cash. His resourcefulness and enterprise are respected by the fellahin. Besides the ‘umda there are also the a‘yan, the heads of families of means who also reside in the village and its environs. They are eligibles who have missed becoming the ‘umda, or perhaps his adjunct, the Shaykh al-Balad, but they have considerable influence in village affairs, and know how to paralyze the activities of the ‘umda and their adversaries in power. Frequently they are called Shaykh, as a title of respect. It is in their rivalries and alliances with the ‘umda and each other that the political life of the village takes place. Many of the fellahin are their poor relations, or their clients, giving them support in return for patrons- age and protection, and participating in their quarrels, often with bloody results. Other less important but more popular figures stand out from the mass, by virtue of some well-defined social functions long sanctified by custom. First comes the muzayin or barber-surgeon. He is a busy man. Once a month he shaves the fellahin and crops their hair. Squatting in front of the customer, who also squats, he takes a dish of water between his knees and an old razor between finger and thumb, and quickly tidies up the face and head. An aching tooth? He will pull it out. Cupping, scarification, purge? No difficulty at all. He is responsible for public health, and therefore treats the fellahin and reports the

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Figure 6.6. Dovecots for the guano and the squabs often border the village. They

are usually more attractive and better constructed than the peasant’s homes.

frequent deaths to the ‘umda. He also officiates at circumcisions, and on the eve of this operation, or at a wedding, haircutting takes on something of ritual significance. He surrounds it with ceremony, and thus dignifies his art. For his varied services he is paid either in kind at the harvest or in small change. The magician or sorcerer, called shaykh or his female counterpart, called shaykha, with his charms, his formulae, his perfumed sachets and incense and his magic cures, would be a serious rival to the muzayin, if his customers were not chiefly women. He may live in the village or merely pass through. It is to him that

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the country women have recourse in order to cast out afarit (devils) or secure the help of the jinns, to cast spells, counteract the evil eye, move hearts and insure conception or the birth of a male child. It would be in vain to try to persuade them that this “holy man” is only a quack or a charlatan. The more incomprehensible his magic mumble, the more firmly they believe in him. In fact, there are instances in which trickery does not wholly suffice to explain his results. A whole book might be written about village magic, and its affinity with the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian magic of ancient Egypt.1 This affinity is confirmed by the faith of the fellahin in everything that represents itself as ancient, primitive, qadim. For many of their beliefs, they cannot offer any other reason. Why is a Coptic monk preferred as a sorcerer? Why does the touching of ancient statues make a woman conceive? Why does the written charm from the sorcerer, burned in a pot of incense, make wish become reality? Because it is qadim. Because it holds in itself the power of the past. The function of women mourners is also an ancient tradition. As soon as a fellah dies it is announced to the village by loud cries. The common bier is fetched from its place near the qurn outside the village. The body is washed inside the house, while outside rises the wailing of the mourning women. In their cries they boast of the beauty and fine qualities of the departed, they reproach God for taking him, they speak to the dead man, to his wife and children, they cry out to Death himself. Their complaints seem natural and improvised. In reality they are no more so than are the tears of the professional mourners, wrapped in great veils (malayas), especially for this ceremony, their faces painted black or blue as a sign of mourning, their heads daubed with mud. Leading the women in the ghastly saraband, they rise, beating their hands together, striking their faces, swaying about and falling back exhausted, now hurrying, now slackening their cries. Here the women play the dominant role. The men are present both at the funeral, which takes place soon after death—usually on the same day—and at the later visit of sympathy for death is a part of village life. But they participate only by their presence. In silence they follow the bier, clasp the hand of the nearest relative, remain seated for a long time in the dead man’s house, then make their way home again. Other occasions, less frequent but more joyful, bring the fellahin together for music and storytelling. The man who brings them together is the sha‘ir, a reciter, storyteller and singer all in one. He is himself a fellah, but he is a highly specialized 1. Abbas Bayoumi, “Survivances Egyptieunes,” pp. 279–287, Bulletin of Geographical Society, April 1937. Includes a comparison of magical texts.

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case. His voice has singled him out for the musician’s life, but he also accompanies himself on the rababa, a single-stringed violin with a penetrating tone. He sings the praises of Muhammad or Jesus, describing the Prophet’s appearance in naive, highly colored language. More often, he relates the exploits of Abu Zayd al-Hilali and his companions, the physical charms of Abu Zayd’s wife, Aliya, the bravery of ‘Antar, and the pleasures of the flesh. Many of their improbable stories contain a core of historical truth, upon which the fantasy has been allowed to work, and some of the tales recall those to which the peasants listened under the pharaohs.1 Transported to a world of marvels, the peasants listen with rapture, greeting every point with “Allah!” “Allah!” or beating time in rhythmic applause to the songs which are woven into the tales. When enthusiasm reaches its height, caps are torn off and flung into the air. Then the story must be told again. For important occasions such as a wedding, the reception of a public figure, or the eve of a mawlid, a band of musicians is added to the gathering. The artists are untrained, their tunes simple and obvious, and their orchestration monotonous, if not discordant. They either improvise variations to a well-known refrain, or play old songs from memory. Their instruments are the mizmar, a shrill-toned bagpipe; the reed pipe, zummara, simple or doubled, together with the urghul and salamiya, which one plucks with fingers. The rhythms are supported and carried by the beats of the tabl, a large tambourine, or the darabakka, a finger drum made by stretching a piece of donkey skin over a funnel of baked clay, about a foot in diameter at the mouth. All these instruments are of local make, and there can be no festivity without their sounds. The crowd is even denser when other attractions find a place on the program. There may be jugglers, performing monkeys snake charmers or a sham duel between two fellahin, who whirl their staves (nabbut) this way and that in attack and defense. Belly dancers, puppet shows and pantomimers (khawwal) are also still to be found, although the class of entertainers which furnished the last three has begun to diminish greatly. The entertainments are held on the qurn, or near the shaykh’s tomb, if it is his mawlid. They attain a grand scale at the district pilgrimages which yearly attract tens of thousands of fellahin to commemorate if not to pray to the holy “patron” on the presumed site of his life or death. There is Sayidna al-Badawi at Tanta, Sidi Farghali at Abu Tig, Shaykh Yusuf Abu al-Haggag at Luxor, Galal al-Din al-Asyuti, ‘Abd al Rahim al-Qinnawi, and Shaykh

1. Muhammad Ghallab, Les Survivances de l’Egypte Antique dans le Folklore Egyptien Moderne, Bose et Riou, Lyons, 1929.

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Figure 6.7. Transported to a world of marvels, the peasants listen to the story-

teller with rapture, greeting every point with “Allah!” “Allah!”

“Umbarak” at Asyut, for the Muslims. The Copts feast Sitti Damyana (Lady Damiana), Abu Sayfayn and Agladios al-‘Azab, Mari Girgis (St. George) and others. As at Sham al-Nasim (literally, “smell the freshness,” the spring festival, which falls on the Monday of Coptic Easter), the faithful of both religions often mingle in the same pilgrimage, for instance to Dayr-al-‘Adhra, on the cliffs on the east side of the Nile, by Samalut. The week after Coptic Ascension Day, 60,000 pilgrims from as far away as Aswan and Alexandria gather here to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is venerated by Muslims as well as Christians. The

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ceremonies last several days. Processions pass in no particular order, with banners floating in the wind. Arab riders make a show of their horsemanship; children ride swings and merry-go-rounds; there are a thousand booths in the open air, for the sale of sugar dolls, sweet sesame, roast chick peas, melon seeds and peanuts. The crowd laughs and sings in carnival excitement, spending in a day the savings of a year, and living only for the moment. For instance at the mawlid of Al-Farghali, huge masses of humanity cumber the trains and autobuses from the south and north, filling the roads for miles. These are the pilgrims going to Abu Tig, an important district of the province of Asyut, to venerate Sidi Farghali and receive his baraka, or blessing. One is used to density of population in Egypt, and to seeing crowded trains and autobuses with clusters of people hanging from windows and platforms. But when a third-class coach can contain nearly a thousand souls, with three hundred more on the roof, and when—in spite of the shoving and shouting and the blows given and received, and the presence of innumerable bundles of all sizes and shapes in the car as well—not one person is killed or suffocated, it is impossible not to be amazed a little at the hardiness and physical resistance of the people of Egypt. When the trains arrive, a thick river of human poverty and sweat pours into the town. This is an essentially rural affair; there are few citified people in Western clothes, or effendis, but thousands and thousands of fellahin. This sudden yearly overflow, which raises the population from 20,000 to 70,000, is met with no welcome organization and no measures for the public health. Only the booths for the sale of colored sweets and the lamps of al-Farghali have multiplied; the mosque is illuminated. As to comfort, each must shift for himself. The streets are trodden by an untiring swarm; the lanes are paved with sleeping figures. At 10 P.M., in the mosque, hardy young men are performing a ritual dance to bewitching rhythms. Here there is a traveling theater, given over to gross buffoonery, there some soldiers from a neighboring garrison buy pictures of a fine looking woman holding a baby; it is the Blessed Virgin. It is 11 P.M. Here in the dark lanes, men and children are lying on the ground in a tangled mass. Further on, camels sleep with their necks stretched high; still further along, the women are squatting together, wrapped in their black veils. An old woman rises in the darkness to cover the sleepers, lest they should catch cold. Snores and sighs alternate, out of the deep silence. Friday, June 9. The great day has dawned. This is the climax and close of the mawlid, with the great procession, which starts from the mosque and circles the town. More than a kilometer long, it unfolds like a multicolored ribbon through the streets.

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At the head are the Farghaliya, the descendants of Shaykh al-Farghali. They are easily recognized by their green turbans and the palm leaves they carry. There are more than a hundred of them, poor but glorious. Men stripped to the waist brandish swords, jump, dance, writhe and often wound themselves; they have gathered together from the neighboring villages in a large group. Arab horsemen from the eastern and western deserts circle on beautiful steeds. Then come the different guilds, the apprentices and their masters carrying the symbols of their trades. Advancing in a double line, they repeat hoarsely “Allahu Hayy!” “God is living!” When their leaders meet, they embrace. The camel of al-Farghali, caparisoned in green and gold, carries an ark or palanquin shaped like the tomb of the saint. The camel is kept idle and fed all year, to finally receive this honor. It is followed by fifty-seven other camels, representing, though in poorer fashion, each of the fifty-seven walis venerated in the region; hermits, recluses and even children. One can recognize the type of wali from the shape of the turban. The adorning of the camel, whether rich or poor according to the means of the village, is always clumsy and gaudy, for we are dealing with manifestations of peasant piety. The important village of Nukhayla, perhaps, is not represented this year, as the consequence of a brawl and murder which took place there. From the windows and balconies small loaves of bread are rained on the procession; these are either heaped on the palanquins or picked up by the dancing swordsmen. Finally the official party appears, if the government this year is in a mood to authorize and protect these traditional observances. There are the ghafirs, or watchmen, dressed in black, a detachment of foot soldiers, and mounted majestically and anachronistically on a horse, the representative delegated by the central government. Anachronistically, not because of his Western suit which is out of place on horseback and in this African scene, but because these ceremonials which his presence legitimizes are beyond his control, the government’s control and even beyond the Islam’s control. They spring as naturally and as agelessly as wheat from the Nile soil. Even before the Christian era, far back to the time of the Pharaohs, they existed, wild, colorful and noisy as they are today. They spring from an instinctive necessity for a local saint, for a god of the nome. The poor devotees who accept so many hardships to take home with them a little holy khalta (some grain mixed with earth) to make vows and to give alms, do not pray as you or as I do of course, but they have faith which al-Farghali can stimulate. Their faith in God—“La ilaha ilia Allah” (there is no god but God)— remains unclouded, and there is the miracle.

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Figure 6.8.

Market day. Buyers appear from all the neighboring villages, and then all is a noisy, confused hustle of men, cattle and goods.

These people return home exhausted but satisfied. Once again they have been able to fulfill this form of worship for which their whole being yearns, and which parts them from the soil for a few days to live in community. The market too is crowded. It is a piece of wasteland, sometimes enclosed, outside larger villages. The Egyptian Market Company has established 123 country markets, which can be recognized by their iron railings, in such towns as Mahalla, Shibin al-Kum and Imbaba, in Lower Egypt, or Tahta and Tema in Upper Egypt. A toll of one or two piastres is taken from each seller. Market is held

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every week, from dawn to midday, usually. The sellers make their way to it in long files, choose a spot to lay out their wares, and squat down behind them to wait for their customers. Buyers appear from all the neighboring villages, and then all is a noisy, confused hustle of men, cattle and goods. Piece goods and hardware are sold by professional merchants who come from the chief town or make the round of village markets. These merchants get their stock from city wholesalers. But vegetables, poultry, butter and eggs are sold by the fellah himself, or rather by the fellah’s wife, who is adept at bargaining. When he is forced to sell his buffalo or goat, it is to this market he brings it. The buyers are other fellahin, who need manufactured goods or foods which they do not raise themselves. For three piastres they can replace a worn out basket or a broken water jug. Twelve piastres buys a big pair of drawers, and twenty a shirt. A gallabiya may be had for sixty piastres, and a malaya for seventy. Better qualities are available for the ‘umda and the prosperous villager; a fellah wearing a 200-piastre gallabiya, or his wife wearing a malaya at the same price can look very smart. There are also the provisions that cannot be gotten every day—beef, mutton, kerosene for the lamps and Primus, linseed oil, tea, coffee, sugar, mirrors, combs, soap, etc. Farm produce, such as chickens, eggs, butter, rice and lentils, can be purchased by the local middle class or by buyers for the city. Cereals and cotton are bought by middlemen or agents of the big firms. Prices differ greatly in the last case, according to the grade of the staple, the rate of exchange and the need of the fellah. Some small tradesmen buy cotton by the pound from gleaners, and sell it by the cantar. Sometimes transactions are made by barter. At last business is over. Before sundown, after interminable bargaining everyone returns home with his purchases or money. At the least, everyone has enjoyed a whole day of display, noise, gossip and hustle. When there is pilgrimage or market, the traffic is dense along the country roads from earliest morning. Here again one can see the tendency of the fellahin to crowd together, to move only in congested groups. If they have to cross the Nile or a large canal, they throng so closely on the ferry or raft that accidents are inevitable. When they set out on foot or on donkeyback, laden with astonishing bundles, it looks like an evacuation. When the distance is greater they take the trumbil (automobile) or halazuna, an old Ford converted into a small bus. Forty of them push their way into a space meant only for twenty, and they take it very ill if police regulations are enforced. One of the reasons for a certain cabinet minister’s great unpopularity in the countryside was his insistence on enforcing safety

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regulations. When they must travel by train, they will often arrive several hours before the train is due, squat on the platform, and scramble all together into one carriage, even if there is plenty of room in others. In general then, the fellahin like to be together, out of doors, and in crowds. They are intensely gregarious. But does this mean that they are socially disposed? Is there any strong organic relation between the members of the peasant group? Let us consider the village as a whole. With its land, it forms a whole, outside which even its neighbors are alien and dangerous. It lives its own self-centred life, regulated by customs, manners and prohibitions handed down from the past, immemorial laws which govern the acts and pleasures of every inhabitant. The fellah finds the same difficulty in widening his outlook in space as in imagining himself in the future and practicing foresight, His village is all in all, for it is the here and now. It is his country and the limit of his patriotism. When a fellah is asked about his nationality, he replies, “I am from Manfalut” or “I am from the village of Abu Qurqas.” Occasionally, a little more widely, he will say “I am from the province of Manufiya or Asyut.” Rarely if ever does he say: “I am an Egyptian.” Though he is more truly Egyptian than many political figures, he is still not conscious of belonging to a nation. That explains why in the different nationalist movements, the fellahin have taken no part. Occasionally their enthusiasm has been stirred, as in the Revolution of 1952, but they themselves have remained spectators. Motherland, liberty, politics, are words which belong to the outer world. The same unconsciousness and the same love of the home village explains the dislike of the fellahin for military service. The Egyptian Army is recruited from among the fellahin. In fact, until recently, the law was applied in its vigor only to them. A man fit for military service can be summoned from the age of 19 to 30. He is liable for three years of active service and nine years of reservist status. There is also a reserve corps with a nine-month active-service period. To ensure rejection he may put out one of his eyes, or cut off a couple of fingers, or he may go into debt to buy an exemption, or try to register as a student. If he can, he will hide or escape. As many as 35 per cent of the recruits called up in the past have shirked their service, though to be sure, things have changed somewhat since the revolution, led by the army. If there is no way out, and he must leave home to go into the army, the family gives itself over to lamentations and receives condolences as for a death. Partir c’est mourir. “Everything in the countryside grieves and protests—ox, plow, saqiya, buffalo and all.” (Guindi)

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For the recruit will be sadly missed on the land. It is not so surprising that in the past fellahin have even taken on the staggering debt of a hundred pounds to avoid service. This is not to say that they make bad soldiers. Often they already know how to handle a gun, and the victorious armies of Muhammad ‘Ali and Ibrahim Pasha were composed of fellahin. The glory of those days was not resuscitated in the Palestine debacle, it is true, but poor equipment and lack of morale played their part here. Foreign observers have usually agreed that the fellah can be trained into an excellent fighting man. When he leaves the army the fellah has lost his uncouthness and becomes a gentleman. The fellahin are not unaware of the changes that have taken place in the young men who return, and this realization also is helping break down the resistance to recruitment. Yet when the fellah is in barracks, or when he has left for the town to make a little money, he never forgets his village, and homesickness shows in the stolid face. He tries at least to keep up contact with home and to retain some of its habits. The letters which these illiterate peasants dictate home are always the same: “Please tell me how the crops are. Give my best wishes to So-and-So and Soand-So . . . .” When the vital interests of a village are threatened, everyone feels deeply that he is one of a community: men, women and children all grouped together into a single force. The drama of Abu Shadi is an example. In order to better the draining, the irrigation department had decided to cut off a canal which for thirty years had provided the whole district with water. The entire population rose against the laborers, against the police, even against the military, to prevent the diversion of the water. They held out against all these forces for several days. The women stood in the front line to urge on the men, the children gathered fresh supplies of missiles, and regular strategy was improvised. When a usurer, a landowner or a nazir has carried his exactions too far, and is murdered with public approval, the finest sleuth cannot discover the murderer, so close is the conspiracy of silence. If a neighboring village, or even some of its inhabitants, has insulted or injured the next, the inhabitants of the latter will show a united front to avenge the insult with stones, clubs or guns. Many of the fellahin own or know how to use firearms, although their possession is forbidden. Thanks to the determined intervention of the police, however, village wars are becoming scarce, though private vendetta is still as frequent and as violent as ever. For this is one of the contradictions of village life. Everyone knows everyone else in the village, and no one would ever be allowed to die of hunger. Men help each other readily in the fields, and women help each other in housework. The

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solidarity shown by the fellahin when working for a common interest, and not under orders or outside interference, can be striking, if it is rare. But where land, a woman, or the ‘umda-ship is concerned, rival parties will spring up and the feud will be kept alive from generation to generation. Everyone in the village must then take sides, and neutrality is despised. The antagonism, though usually latent, will show itself suddenly over some triviality, such as the trespassing of an animal, and suddenly life counts for nothing, and death makes holiday. This is especially true in villages where there is Arab Bedouin blood in the fellahin. Thus life is lived in constant insecurity. To feel this, one must spend the night in a fellah home. As soon as night falls, precautions are taken against the possible foe or robber. The cattle and the camel, if there is one, are brought inside and shut in the house. The family draws in upon itself behind the great barred door. The head of the house must often stay outside watching the field or the water channels, to see that they are not damaged by an enemy. As it grows darker, the dogs begin to bark, and gunshots are heard. The gunshots come not only from the village watchmen, trying to reassure themselves and everyone else, but also from fellahin who are armed in defiance of the law. Race hatred, between Arab and fellah, though lulled by common lives and common interests, never completely disappears, and furnishes the explanation of many a village drama. The Arab scorns agricultural tradition and the fellah. This scorn goes back to the earliest times. Mention of rural life, always present in the Gospels, is absent in the Koran, and for the conquering Arabs the countryside remained for long the abode of infidels and taxpayers. Here is an example, but with a happy ending. In the region of Dahna, between Qena and Girga, the Hawaras and the fellahin regarded each other with profound hatred. A meeting, a careless word, would give way to bloodshed, and the spite existing between the two stocks led in 1947 to a small-scale war. Buying the latest firearms, the belligerents would fight pitched battles. The mudir obtained a truce, which was soon broken as the result of some small incident. However, by dint of diplomacy and great firmness he was able to definitely reconcile the two camps. To formally ratify their peace, the chiefs of both sides went to Cairo, and vowed to live peaceably forever. At this time they also gave up their arms, which amounted to two machine guns and 804 rifles! Thus the village, united against the world, is divided against itself, and confidence and mistrust live side by side.

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The passion of the fellahin for the soil unites them when it is threatened, and divides them as they own or covet it. The ideas of nation, patriotism, are foreign to the fellah, but the idea of cooperation, of public interest and of community life are no less so. The Egyptian village is not a community in the social sense, not an organism, but a mass. Similarity in the mode of life, and propinquity do not necessarily create deep human relations. A certain spiritual life is needed, or at least the influence of spiritual personalities, to make social relations possible. But the fellah does not develop as a spiritual personality. Absorbed in the soil and oppressed by those above him, he lives collectively but not socially. Although living in a herd, he remains at bottom isolated and solitary. This absence of coordination between homogenous elements has helped to maintain the Egyptian village and the peasant society in much the same state for fifty centuries. And for fifty centuries, governments have encouraged this formlessness, because it greatly strengthens their authority.

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Chapter 7 The Fellah’s Home and Family

On returning from the East in 1932, Christian de Caters wrote as follows: “I have seen the poorest villages of La Manche in Spain, the hovels of the Cape Verde Islanders, and the reed huts of the Lundas, a savage tribe in the depths of Angola, but nowhere have I received a stronger impression of misery than in Egypt.” On the other hand, Luzach, in Le Delta du Nil (Cairo, 1935), finds that the fellah’s home is not far behind the stone or mud huts with thatched roofs which are still common in many parts of Central and Western Europe, and in any case far superior to the miserable huts of the peasants of Tunisia and Algeria. Whom shall we believe? It all depends upon the point of view and the standard of reference. Such comparisons are in any case misleading, especially since the cases compared are not parallel. For our purpose an opinion is not so useful as an actual description of the fellah’s home and his life in it. This will show us how far the home is suited not merely to the fellah, but to the land on which he lives and works. We have seen the public parts of the village. Let us look now at the dwellings of the fellahin, without concerning ourselves with the houses of the notables or the ‘umda. There are certain exceptions which we will only mention, such as the stone houses found along the edge of the Upper Egyptian desert fringe. The nearness of

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the cliffs here makes transportation of the stone easy. Fired brick houses, without pointing, are quite common in Lower Egypt. These evince a slightly higher standard of living. Regularly designed mass housing prevails in many ‘izbas. In some places, as on state domains and a few individual landowners’ or compagnies’ estates, these are really interesting experiments in model housing. In addition there are the shapeless shacks made by newcomers and semi-nomads out of rags, tin cans, palm leaves, maize stalks and mud; and field shelters—huts built of reeds or maize stalks, sometimes plastered with mud, and set in the fields for use during the heavy winter work season. But the typical fellah house, representing 92 per cent of the total, is made of earth. It is a dwelling with neither charm nor age, but still one more sign of the persistent uniformity of the Egyptian peasantry. Passing through one of the narrow alleys, after penetrating into the confused mass of the village, we find pressing from both sides the narrow closed facades of grey adobe, the houses standing wall to wall. They may be from fifteen to thirty feet wide, and about ten feet high, or eighteen to twenty feet high if there is an upper story. The quarter is old, and the village older still, but the house will be comparatively new. The materials and methods of construction make the building impermanent. In Lower Egypt, constant repairs are necessitated by flood and rains. Moreover, there is always the danger of fire, after which the houses are reconstructed. The dwelling of the fellah, like his work and the fellah himself, derives its character from the soil, the manner of his life, and the social environment. He is housed by the same earth which feeds him, and here it is true that matter determines form. The staple building material is a mixture of the valley soil, chopped straw from the fellah’s standard crops, and Nile water. This may be smeared on both sides of a framework of maize stalks, palm leaves or reeds, to make the mud walls of the poorest type of house. But more often it is poured into wooden molds to make raw bricks (tub akhdar)1 which are dried in the sun and used for building. The mortar is the same simple mixture as is the plaster which finishes and protects the walls. To be strong enough a wall so constructed must be from twelve to eighteen inches thick. A fellah with money to spare will build on a foundation of kiln-baked 1. The word tub is of most ancient origin, Tb in Pharaonic times, it was taken into Arabic as al-tab. From Arabic it passed into Spanish, as adobe, and from Spain it was carried to the New World. From the southwestern area of the United States, adobe has become a common English word.

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bricks (tub ahma) or limestone rubble. This keeps out the dampness which creeps up from the soil and undermines the walls. The walls have few openings, partly to ensure further stability, and partly to protect the interior from glare and heat during the day and from the cold and dangers of the night. The doorway is about six feet high and three feet wide and is separated from the street by a shallow threshold. One or two tiny loopholes at eye level, measuring about twelve inches in height, are the only other openings to the street, and even these are stuffed up in winter. This limitation of window space is also due to the high price of wood. Lying in the sparsely wooded belt of desert country which stretches from the Atlantic to India, Egypt is poorly supplied with wood. The palms, sycamores and acacias that give shade are too precious to be cut down, and in any case would not provide all the beams, windows and doors desirable. To be sure, the trunks of palm trees are used for roof beams, but sparingly, for a date palm brings its owner over a pound a year income on its fruit, fibre and branches. Wood, imported from Finland, Sweden and the U.S.S.R., used in the cities is certainly beyond the means of the average fellah. The result is that sometimes the doorway contains no door, and the loophole windows may have neither glass nor woodwork. Though wood is dispensed with as far as possible, for the roof it is essential. In Upper Egypt, where it never rains, houses without roofs can be seen, but this is a localized exception. There is not enough comfort in the fellah’s house to draw him into it. It is a storeroom and sleeping place. Yet this dwelling, which lacks so much, is so well adapted to its tenants that they will transform or deform into its image any better appointed house built for them in a model village or ‘izba. His house—floors, walls, roof—by its very squatness is a part of the earth. This was particularly brought home to the author during the recent flood at Qena. Where the water had passed, nothing distinguishable remained, only mud upon mud. A house in the ‘izba belongs to the owner; one in the village, to the fellah. House and site together will not amount to much more than fifty pounds. There is no rent or tax. On the ‘izba, the house is part of the share-contract. In the village, it is the domain of the head of the family. In this homestead the fellah is finally not a serf, but a master. Each house contains a large family, including very often, besides the father and mother, four or five children, a grandmother or grandfather, who have great authority, a married son or two, and some relatives on a long stay. When a fellah wishes to get married, if he is of age, he deals directly or through his family with the girl’s father, and pays the bride-price. As in most

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Figure 7.1.

The staple building material is mud brick, which is poured into wooden molds and dried in the sun.

Islamic countries the preferred bride is the daughter of the paternal, then the maternal, uncle. His mother, however, if he is under twenty, will usually try to find the ideal bride from among her relatives or neighbors. It will nearly always be in the same village, or at least in the same district. The girl will be fourteen or fifteen, but by no means ignorant of the facts of life. The law of 1923 fixed sixteen as the age of marriage, but both families concerned often connive to break it. The betrothal is celebrated by proxy; it is a contract of marriage (aqd). The bride-price (mahr) which the man must offer varies between £E 15 and £50. He

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pays two-thirds down and binds himself to pay the rest by a document drawn up by the ma’zun. With this money the girl’s parents go to the market town to buy her a trousseau, consisting of a red wedding dress, two shifts, a couple of bracelets—gold if possible—and the furniture: a water jug, two copper pots (halla), a basin (tisht), a round table (tabliya) and a brightly painted wooden chest, sometimes coated with zinc. If the mahr is large enough, they will buy also a mattress stuffed with cotton or straw, one or two pillows and a quilt (lihaf). On the wedding day—the day the bride quits her father’s house for that of her husband—all these things are loaded onto a camel hired for the occasion, or put in a cart, and paraded around the village. The young girls go before and after, singing and clapping their hands, while the villagers admire the treasures as they pass. Then perhaps the wedding feast is carried with ceremony in great trays from the house of the bride to the groom’s. Finally it is the bride’s turn. A crowd of women and children press into the room to admire her. The older women have bathed her the night before, and her hands and feet have been reddened with henna. In order to share her luck, her married friends have pinched her thighs. The procession is ready to begin. The bride is hidden by red or white veils, and rides on a camel or in an old motor car. Two or three women relatives are with her. The men fire shots into the air—an Arab custom—and songs from the women alternate with shrill tremolo cries of joy (zagharit) which sound very much like a war whoop. The bridegroom too has been prepared. He has had a bath in the house of his best friend. His best clothes have been brought, and the muzayin has come to groom him and put henna on his hands. At last he is ready. His male friends ring him around with candles or torches, and a torchlight procession begins. Often the groom holds a white handkerchief to his face, and is expected to show a boyish reluctance to accompany his friends. He is dressed in a fine gallabiya and turban, often wears a dagger or sword, and carries a staff. The crowd strikes up songs of love and pleasure, or mawawil, which mingle with gunshots. Meanwhile the women throw pinches of salt over the party. When the family house is reached, the bridegroom’s friends drag him in. The little bride is already waiting among the relatives of both families. They are going to test her virginity in the most primitive manner. Blood flows—she cries out in pain, and her cry is re-echoed by the zagharits of the crowd. Honor is safe. The feast begins and lasts until morning. It is always noisy, but always the men are separated from the women, for each have their own way of rejoicing. Colored sweets and sticky pastries or sometimes meat are handed around. On this day there can be no thought of economy. Late at night, or in some regions after an interval of a day or two, the marriage is

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consummated, without much secrecy. The young man will spend a week without going to work.1 The household is thus begun, and—at least in the beginning —will be dependent upon the parents. If the wife is clever, obeys her mother-in-law, and bears male children, he will not take another bride, especially if he cannot afford the expenses of another wedding. The Copts do not divorce, at least among the fellahin. It is of course entirely legal for the Muslim to have four wives, and divorce is only the pronouncing of a legal formula. But the fellah makes little use of this Koranic liberty. In the last thirty years considerable decline has been noted in divorce and polygamy. Nothing could be easier than the repeating of the repudiation, or talaq, for divorce. But since one must pay maintenance for several months to the divorced wife, return the goods she has brought, and pay a new dowry, the fellah keeps to one wife. There are other factors: the statistics for the rural population show that there are almost as many men as women. As everyone marries, the inference is obvious. It may be too that Muslim customs have been counteracted to some extent by natural law and by the influence of the Coptic family. In 1943, for instance, at a conference for the study of Egyptian family problems, ‘Abd alHamid ‘Abd al-Haqq Pasha, the then Minister of Social Affairs, declared: “In the towns and villages where Muslims and Copts live side by side, the divorce statistics are very low. This is due to the fact that the Muslims are struck by the harmony prevailing in the Christian homes. For instance, in my village, where threefourths of the population is Copt, there has not been one divorce in over twenty years; this is also the situation in the mudiriyas of Asyut and Minya, where the number of divorces is insignificant.” In any case, years of work and suffering together, children and a wife’s good care create a very strong bond. Can one speak of love? Marriage for the fellah is more a matter of sexual indulgence and reproduction. Their temperament, especially that of the women, is very ardent and sensual. The fellah’s wife usually enjoys better health than her husband, who is weakened by bilharziasis and expends much of his energy on the land. She is younger, and despite Islam, has had considerable freedom in her own affairs since the most ancient times. Village custom demands, on pain of death, that she be physically a 1. In all these customs there are minor local variations. In parts of Upper Egypt, the wedding takes place in the bride’s house, and the residence of the couple is matrilocal until the first child has been born, when they return to the groom’s family.

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virgin when she marries, but mentally she has ceased to be so long before. Since childhood she has been aware of her parents’ intercourse, which is quite open due to lack of privacy. The conversation of the women, at which the girls are usually present, turns constantly on these subjects—not viciously, perhaps, but certainly without restraint. They tell each other of charms, techniques and stratagems to please and hold the men. The men, who are more reserved, and by their way of life utterly materialistic, understand only sexual love. They revel in it, each with his own wife, held to faithfulness less by virtue than by the law of the village. Adultery leads immediately to bloodshed, and prostitutes, even if they were available, would be beyond their means. The fire of passion is short-lived. At thirty a fellah women is no longer attractive, but she has become bound to her husband by the children she has borne him. Both desire children above all else. To the wife they mean prestige and security, for barrenness is a disgrace and the chief cause of polygamy and divorce.1 To the father they mean helpers and successors, who will allow him to rest and give orders. Families are therefore large. The average number of children is five and this presupposes eight to ten births. The older they grow, the more important their mother becomes. Another thing that binds the husband to his wife is her wisdom and authority, often greater than his own. A fellah proverb says: Man is a river, and woman is a dike. She also aids her husband in the fields. But unlike the ‘Alawite peasant woman, for example, she does not do heavy labor. More often she is busy at home; there is enough to do, for she mills and bakes, rears and tends the buffalo and the goat, looks after the poultry, prepares manure and fuel, sews, washes and delouses herself in public. She may come and go, within the limits set by tradition. She is not hidden from the menfolk, like townswomen, or the wives of the rural middle class. She must carry food to her husband in the fields, then return home with the gamusa dung, and fetch water several times. She must go to market to sell eggs, butter and poultry, and buy staples. Tradition and necessity soften the severity of Islamic custom. The wife retains ownership of the furniture she brought on her wedding day, her gold or silver bangles, and the money for what she raises and sells. Thus she can save and even lend to her husband, which gives her a certain authority. If he maltreats her, she can appeal to her relatives, or even return to her father’s house,

1. Seventy-five per cent of all divorces are between childless couples.

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imposing her own condition for return—the gift of a dress or earrings. She is more independent of her husband than he of her. Once, as men were levied to fight the flood, I heard a woman lamenting. “Don’t worry,” I said. “They have taken your husband, but he will come back.” “It’s not for my husband I’m weeping, but for my lost buffalo! Find me my buffalo!” She retains her freedom and authority as long as she is wise enough not to infringe the traditions, for then the men take the upper hand. She will often die rather than let herself be examined by the doctor. She may go out and gossip with other women as she likes, but woe to her if she is found in the company of a man, or even alone in some unwonted place. If she goes wrong thus, her husband may accuse her to her family. Then her father, brother or cousin must kill her. Such “crimes of honor” are commended, and if not established by Islam, are still frequent and are treated indulgently by the courts. But the severity of the punishment is out of proportion not only to the crime, but to the woman’s education. The following is one of a hundred examples: Mahmud Ahmad ‘Abdallah was leaving his village near Nag Hamadi to go to the fields as usual, when he was told that his sister, a woman of thirty-five, had been seduced. He returned at once to the village and went straight to his sister’s house. Without uttering a word, he raised the fas he had with him and split open the poor woman’s skull. The crime becoming known, he submitted to arrest without any difficulty. He himself turned over the weapon with which he had murdered his sister to the police, and after giving a full confession, declared that he had done it to avenge the family honor. The wife can, with management, become the real ruler of the household, but woe to any woman who displays her authority or slights her husband, by interrupting him while he is talking, or with his friends, or by failing to keep behind him while walking to market. He never calls her by name, but addresses her as Ya mar’a (woman), Ya bint (girl) or Ya Umm Ahmad (mother of Ahmad, their son). He shows his supremacy by treating her scornfully and showing no sign of affection. The older he becomes, the more he demands and values this respect. “My wife has borne me ten children,” one fellah told the author. “Ten children, and not one of them squints or is blind. With them beside me I feel honored and respected. Thanks to their mother, their feet have never trod the path of shame. She wipes their noses and keeps their faces clean. She teaches them to kiss my hand when I come back from the field, to rise when I come in, to serve me and be attentive to my wants, and never to smoke in my presence.” The fellaha, who may bear children at any time from fourteen to forty-five, gives birth in the simplest fashion, sitting, like the women of Pharaonic times.

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The umbilical cord is cut with a piece of wood. A few hours after bearing the child she is at work again. Mishaps are rare. But the birth is preceded and followed by a thousand practices to bring the child fullness of health and happiness. The magic rites are far more important in the average family than any hygienic precautions. The mother is firmly persuaded that whatever she looks at attentively or desires ardently will affect the child. So she avoids funerals and the sight of the dead, and gazes at portraits of handsome men, usually clipped from magazines and pinned to the wall. She must eat what she likes. If she is thwarted, the child will be seriously affected. Immediately after birth, the baby is laid in the basket which will serve as his cradle (which never is hung up, as in other Near Eastern countries). He is not washed for seven days. The first bath has a ritual significance of purification. It is usually given by a midwife, and water is poured from a pot (‘ibriq) especially kept for this purpose, with different ornamentation for a boy or girl. The mother is technically impure for thirty or forty days after, depending on whether the child is a boy or girl. These Moslem customs are also found in Morocco. If at the time of birth the father is working in the fields, and the child is a son, a friend will run to tell him the good news, for which he may claim a gift. This recalls Jeremiah: “Cursed be the man who took the tidings to my father, saying to him ‘a son is born,’ and filling him with joy” (Jer. 20:15). As soon as the child is born, a blue bead is hung around his neck to turn away the evil eye. For the same reason the son, of whom his parents are so proud, is often dressed like a girl until he is weaned. His mother suckles him for about two years whenever he cries, thus causing gastric troubles. This is the length of time favored by the ancient Egyptians, by the black peoples of Africa, and by the Koranic precept. “Divorced women shall give suck to their children for two full years” (Sura II, 233). The peasant women think that by weaning late they will delay another pregnancy as well. When the time comes for her to go out—and it comes very soon—she carries the infant astride her shoulder, which does not prevent her from carrying a pot full of water or other burden on her head. While she is working in the fields she puts the baby on the ground, near the path which leads into the field, in the shadow of the corn. The baby does not always have something on which to lie, but rolls in the furrows, puts earth in his mouth, sleeps, and gets used to it all. If it cries too loud, any passing mother will give it her breast.

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The child stays at home until his fifth year. He soon gets used to the company of the animals there. Before long he can take care of them and can take the donkey to the field, or the buffalo to the canal, where he climbs on its back and sets it to turning the saqiya. He learns how to shout and chase thieving birds with rocks, how to pick and even how to plant cotton. He does not lack companions. During the day, when the men are toiling in the fields and the women are busy in the house or by the canal, the whole village belongs to the children. They are the first ones the visitor sees. They paddle naked in the pond and learn to swim. They have bulging bellies, because they eat everything they find. They play in the dust, spinning an onion or a clay pot, hopping on one leg, holding a foot in their hand, or shooting with a beanflip (nibla) at date clusters or birds. When they are older, they play at siga, a kind of checker game with small bits of stone or clay which have to be moved into forty-nine holes made in the sand. At about seven the young fellah is circumcised and thus introduced into the world of men. At this age he goes to the compulsory elementary school present in most villages, for his parents are obliged to send him under a fine of twenty piastres, and fifty for a second offense. The Constitution of 1923 decreed that education should be compulsory, but this law has only been enforced since 1935. Schools are being established everywhere. Sites are found in the villages and teachers appointed. Places that have never seen a teacher before are given a complete staff. There are more than 3,000 schools, with 20,000 instructors and a million pupils. However, since the children are absent during the morning, and the parents want them to help in the work, the number of absentees is very great. In spite of this very considerable effort, the number of illiterates in the villages reaches as high as 85 per cent. (In 1950, in one village of 27,000, one postman was sufficient to deliver the mail—about thirty letters and ten papers or magazines.) The parents, resigned to other matters, sometimes regard this interference with their children as intolerable tyranny, and have been known to attack teachers and schools. Education is almost useless to them, with their limitations of opportunity and living standard; at least they are slow to perceive any advantage. The comparative failure of education so far in the villages has been blamed on the stupidity of the fellah children. The author’s experience with fellah children could never allow him to admit such an explanation. Others find the cause in the apathy of the teachers, who are ill-trained, dislike their work, and merely collect their salaries. This is considerably nearer the truth. A few years ago, hoping to increase interest in the work, a minister trebled their salaries. As yet, however,

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During the day, when the men are toiling in the fields and the women are busy in the house or by the canal, the whole village belongs to the children.

Figure 7.2.

little improvement is to be seen, except in the young teachers graduated from the new government teacher training schools. Other reasons are the lack of adaptation of the syllabus, the learning by rote, and the too literary language. At any rate, children continue to leave school after the five years customary, not knowing how to read and write. To this we can add the constant resistance of the parents. On the other hand, the age-old system of the kuttab is still practiced, in which a blind shaykh, squatting on the ground or in his house, gathers a few children around him and teaches them the Koran. The system is not onerous. Two or three hours a day, six months a year, and in three years, assisted by his stick, the

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children will learn by memory a number of suras [chapters] from the Koran. For his pains the teacher or faqih will receive a few loaves of bread or a couple of piastres per week for each pupil. The Catholic Association for Free Village Schools in Upper Egypt also maintains over a hundred schools, in the more abandoned localities, through which it works for social reforms as well as educating over 11,000 fellah children, Coptic and Muslim. Nowadays education is compulsory even for girls, but they take their classes in the afternoon. In the morning they help their mothers with their work. When the fellaha goes to fetch water, the girl-child goes too, trying very hard to balance on her little head the miniature water jar she has been given. They help gather the dung and bird droppings, learn to make fuel cakes (gillas) of dung and chopped straw. They also have dolls to play with, but when very young they spend their playtime with the boys. From about the age of eight, they begin to gradually draw more and more apart from the boys, who in their turn also consider mixed play “shameful.” Also from the age of eight, occasionally, until they get married, they work in the house of a hanim, or woman of the middle class, as a maid. These children, then, are ignorant and to all appearances, neglected. They live in a herd, and seem to “just grow.” But it would be very wrong to infer from this that they are of no concern to their parents, and belong to the community at large. On the contrary, their parents love them passionately, and far more than they love each other. Children are never sold here, and there is no need for orphanages. Parental sensitivity is a frequent cause of trouble, among both men and women. If a teacher hits or abuses their child, they are in arms immediately to remove him from school and take brutal vengeance. This does not stop them, however, from relying heavily on blows and insults to educate their children themselves, because they believe firmly in the efficacy of the method. The children are also very attached to both their parents. Their attachment seems however to be rooted in social and religious reasons, in fear and respect which the whole society inculcates in them, rather than in any deep affection. Yet the love of the son for the mother, even when he is grown up and married, is the most notable attachment in the fellah family. If he is lacking in respect for her, the village is shocked. “Paradise lies under your mother’s feet.” She will be mistress of his household until the day she dies, and she takes the name of the son, as Umm ‘Ali, ‘Ali’s mother. This relationship is the most solid bond in the family, since ancestry counts for little, compared to the Chinese family, for instance. The enlarged family exists

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as a clan, opposed to other clans, perhaps, but there is no real solidarity among its members. Real family solidarity always disappears after three removes, or shades off into relationships unrecognizable as family ties. Just as the house is not a complete unit by itself, neither is the family which lives in it. There is no real “home,” because there is no real home life. There is no real “family,” because there is no real family life. The family is a group for working the soil. It bears children to work the soil. Domestic life is regulated by traditions, which bind it to the soil. The housing of the peasant is much discussed by reformers, but often without the resolution of the starting point: Is the fellah to be fitted to the house, or the house to the fellah? A convenient method, but one which is almost never followed, for solving the problem of the fellah’s housing, would be to find out what is convenient for him, what he likes, and not merely what suits our own sense of symmetry or esthetics. The model house must be related to his usual dwelling place. It must not be another world, the geography and climate of which are unknown to the fellah. It must represent progress, but not a leap into the unknown. It should, as Gide says, “follow its own bent, but upwards.” Thus to achieve the peasant house as it should be, we should try to see it as it is. The customs, life and manners of the peasant should be looked at attentively, patiently and sympathetically. Then we can account for the failure of many attempts to improve village housing. At A, in Upper Egypt, concrete has been used. The resulting heat has made it necessary for the peasant to leave his fine dwelling place and build a hut of straw and mud on the roof. At B, the windows are spacious and large, and thus exposed to cold, heat and burglars. The inhabitants therefore stop them up with bricks. At C, the use of the roof has been overlooked, and it has been made sloping. Therefore the fellah will build it level with mud and ashes. At D, the stairs are outside the house. Security has been overlooked. The result is that the fellahin destroy the stairs and build up steps of mud from inside the house. At E, the builders have decided, for the sake of health, to permit no mixing of people and animals; there is an outer cattle pen. But this does not offer enough security against robbery and disease. Therefore the peasants rebel and drive them into the bedroom. At F, a model village, the way between the houses and the storage plot for firewood, where each family has its allotted place, has been made fairly long, for fear of fire. The idea itself is quite sound, but it is not shared by the housekeeper, who finds it too far, and carries her fuel away to stack on the roof.

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In some places the water system is not well planned. The fellahin who do not live next to the pump will go to the nearby canal. In others, the toilets are too much inside the house; they will not be used. Here, there is no oven; the fellah will add one. Elsewhere, there is the uniformity of an institution. Being close to nature, the fellah will prefer a rustic lair to a geometric jail. Moreover, one must not only build a house, but keep it in good repair, and there is no measure taken for this. Certainly, the fellah, uninstructed as he is, cannot keep the place in repair. The government or the progressive landowner may feel that they have fulfilled their duty in creating a model village. But they find that the hardest step still is to come. For it is mere illusion to think that by making an up-to-date house one can change an age-old way of life. The fellah, being of a childlike disposition, cannot be presented a model house without being taught, in a kindly way, the “directions” which go with it, the way of using the new device, and how it is better than his house. This pedagogy is more important than the material realization. This is to say that no model village can be realized or kept presentable unless the architectural enterprise is linked with teaching, education and instruction; in short one should work with the fellahin. The reconstruction of the Egyptian village demands the re-education of its inhabitants, and first of all of women. We must work from the inside out.

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Chapter 8 Traditions of the Soil

There are in every group traditions, rites and ceremonies which are handed down from generation to generation without being either questioned or understood. Among the fellahin, they naturally relate to the soil. The union of the fellah and the soil was clear enough when we were considering the work, life and home of the fellah. We should do well to prepare ourselves for a study of the fellah psychology (Chapter IX) by considering some of these traditional rites and customs which are to be met at every turn of his life. They are not merely superstitions, though it would be as difficult for the peasant as for us to explain their origins and meanings. One thing they seem to have in common is a mysterious correlation of nature and man. Unconsciously or subconsciously, in repeating these rites the fellah shows an instinctive feeling of belonging to the soil. It is a feeling which has contributed not a little to the stagnation of the Egyptian countryside. The fellahin have a great respect for water, water which comes from the Nile. They avoid filtering it, so as not to take the life out of it. They bring it to be blessed or prayed over by passing men of religion, and offer it as a familiar and much appreciated drink. All water is good, like the Nile from which it comes. The festival of the Bride of the Nile, or cutting of the dam, takes place in Cairo when the flood is at its height.1 The fellah has no part in it, but he feels much 1. The festival occurs about the middle of August. The dam of the now filled-in canal at Fumm alKhalig in Cairo used to be cut with great ceremony, and a doll—in ancient times a live woman—is thrown into the flood. These festivities are still held, culminating in a firework display attended by the

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more than any townsman that the Nile is real and alive. The river is always in his sight, either in the foreground, or as a thread in the distance. He turns to it more often than to his fellow men. He does not pray to it, as did his ancestors, but he visits it continually. The Nile is his blood. There is the same intimate bond between the Nile and fellahin as between the sea and the fishermen of Brittany. They even call it al-Bahr, the sea. At high Nile they believe women to be more healthy and more fertile, and men more potent; marriages are often celebrated during this season. If a child is sick or ill, his mother takes him to the Nile at this time and makes him throw sweets and dates into the silt-laden waters with the words, “Oh Nile, let my strength grow as your depth.” A dying fellah is given a final draught of its living waters before drawing his last breath. The land and the river are present in the liturgy of the Coptic church. The deacon: “Let us pray for the rise of the waters of the river in their season, that Christ our God may bless them and cause them to rise to due height and gladden the face of the land. May He bless us, give health to the animals and forgive us our sins.” The priest: “Vouchsafe, O Lord, by Thy grace to cause the waters to rise to their proper height. Gladden the face of the land, direct our labors that the crop may be multiplied. Prepare the land for the sowing and the harvest and regulate our lives in a fitting manner.” “The water level is low,” a fellah told me, “but I will carry it to my house however exhausting it may be, for if my cow had to drink the filtered water she would surely sicken and die.” The silt of the Nile also has its part in the rites of life and death. A fellaha, when her time comes, may crawl to the brink of the river and take up a handful of moist earth to swallow at the time of delivery so as to have a successful birth. When the muzayin cuts the child’s hair for the first time, the hair ceremoniously clipped is not Hung to the winds, but carefully rolled into a ball of earth. Mourning women daub their breasts, heads and arms with mud as a sign of grief. The body is shrouded and buried without coffin or clothes. The fellahin bury in the earth the jar containing their savings, and the charms which they wish to take effect. Every birth affects the soil; the afterbirth is buried inside the house, and the umbilical cord is wrapped in a little bag with a few grains of corn and dug into the father’s field.

governor and other notables, and constitute a public holiday. (For a description of the earlier celebrating. consult E. E. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Modern Library.)

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The fruits of the earth are still more closely involved in the peasant magic. The analogies between vegetable life and the peasant’s own very physical existence make them believe in an interplay of fertility between the two. The ceremonies of the seventh day, when the child is washed and given a name, are carried out with the following rites. Three rush baskets filled with different kinds of grain are brought into the room. One contains the sieve in which the infant is lying. When the time comes for the bath, the midwife shakes the sieve, as if to sift both child and corn. Then she puts the grain back in the basket, wraps the child, and sprinkles a few grains upon it. The word fitama, used for the weaning of children, is also used for the tenth and last watering of the maize. Sweet cakes are given to the workers that day, as to the mother, for it is the last day of suckling. Harvest is always accompanied by symbolic acts. Before reaping begins, the best ears are taken and plaited into a kind of doll, the “Bride of the Corn,” which is hung up in the house to bring good luck during the next year. Similarly, to bind the chain of life, the biggest grains are mixed with the seed for the next sowing, and a few fine loaves are slipped into the heap on the threshing floor to be winnowed and sieved. The Catholic Coptic Patriarch Msgr. Khuzam, reporting on a pastoral visit in 1937, wrote as follows: “On entering their houses, they brought me water, bread and corn to bless. They drank some of the water, and used the rest to sprinkle themselves, their cattle and their houses. The corn they flung into the fields. As for the bread, I was made to break it and eat a little of it. The rest they kept among their stores that God might bless what they had laid by.” The joy of harvest shines also on those who have not sown, but whose work in the village has benefited the whole community. It is traditional to allot the first fruit to the storyteller, the barber, the Koran-chanter, and imam (prayer leader) of the mosque, the schoolmaster, the carpenter. After these have claimed their sheaves, the poor come to glean. Cotton picking however gives rise to no sort of ceremony. This may be because cotton was only relatively recently introduced, or it may be because it is only grown for money, and not for daily bread. The symbolism surrounding the also relatively recent Indian corn would lead one to favor the latter reason. The date palm, however, is as old as Egyptian agriculture, and figures at all times in the life of the people. They turn to the tree for shade and for roofing, for bed and crops, ropes, brushes and sweets. We have seen the branches adorning the bride’s canopy and the tombs of the dead.

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The day after his wedding the bridegroom strips a palm rib, splits it at the point, and goes to touch his friends with it for good luck. To strike a man with a green palm branch brings blessing. Palm branches are the fellah’s flowers; there can be no procession for festival or mourning without them. The pollen of a male date palm immersed in water and swallowed is a charm against childlessness, but to swallow one, two or three date stones prevents pregnancy for as many years. Magic and medicine are confused in the traditional use of the products of the earth as preventives and cures. The startling pharmacopeia of the fellahin can be put down to experience, but chiefly to superstition. They have taken what was at hand and used it—for the bowels an infusion of palm or maize leaves, for the eyes charred cotton or onion juice, for broken bones acacia gum, for swellings and rheumatism hemp bandages. The treatment clearly depends on what vegetables’ substances they have in reach, and its effect depends, in good part, on simple credulity. These unquestioned and irresistible traditions of the fellah are largely superstitions. Miss Blackman gives the greater part of her book1 to describing superstition in its thousand forms, as if the entire life of the fellahin was passed in this sub-rational zone of behavior. It is probable that too much weight is laid on fellah superstitions. They are recorded with a certain condescension, and in spite of all that has been recorded, one could still fill many gaps. However, there is little point in adding to the collection, since there is nothing original or surprising in it. Most of these customs go back beyond Christianity to Pharaonic times and are only illustrations of the changelessness which was the subject of our first chapter. However these paralyzing practices accentuate the isolation of the fellah. To a way of life which already weighs him to the ground, the fellah adds the burden of these observances. In his ignorance, he venerates the veiled mystery of the past, and has thus created a close network which seems inviolable to him. While the network comforts and sustains him, it also stifles his liberty and initiative and dulls his spirit until he can no longer distinguish between the truth and the parasite. But, however vast the structure might be, it does not constitute the fellah’s whole psychology. It is another of the pressures he has to bear. Like the pressures of the soil and of living men, it warps him greatly, but it is no more able than they are to destroy his soul.

1. Winifred Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt, Harrap, 1927.

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Chapter 9 The Psychology of the Fellah

The peasant masses live on their own resources, without any contribution to speak of from outside. This is at once their strength and their weakness. A fellah is born whereas a worker is made. The constant influence of the fellah’s environment cannot fail to mold not only his body but his soul as well. We now know the nature of the Nile Valley, and of the social pyramid and its pressures. The demands of both enslave the fellah. His life is all dependence— dependence upon the soil and material events, on the living and on the dead. Like a child under age, the fellah has little choice but to always obey. Within this outline, the main features of his character may be sketched. However difficult and given to false generalization studies of collective psychology are prone to be, we can nevertheless trace with considerable accuracy the essential lines of the fellah’s mind and character. Common factors, race, religion, social position, manner of life and limitation of choice, all of which we have considered in the preceding pages, entitle us to write in the singular of the fellah’s soul. It would be easy, but unjust, to judge him on single points, as his masters do. “The fellah is lazy. All bodily effort is an effort to him. He prefers to live without any bettering of his condition rather than incommode himself.”

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“The fellah is almost never grateful. However good his masters may be to him, he never shows them the least consideration, He swears devotion to them when they are there, and is active and hardworking, but as soon as their backs are turned, he slackens and loses all initiative.” “The fellahin are a cowardly, cringing lot.” “They are stupid and evil people.” “They will take any opportunity to cheat you.” Other landowners and bailiffs take a better view. They say, “Under their noisy exterior, the fellahin are a quiet, gentle people. They are satisfied with their lot, but rarely grateful. They have no interest aside from the soil.” “The fellah is always happy and grateful. He is a hard and loyal worker.” These opinions, taken at random from Upper and Lower Egypt, are flatly contradictory. They do not make up a portrait of the fellah. In spite of the good intentions of those who gave them, they all arise from a misunderstanding of the fellah and are in both senses of the word partial. The living, human reality is more complex. It is too simple to resolve these apparent contradictions by saying man is born good, and society makes him bad, or to take one side or other according to one’s sympathy or lack of sympathy for the subject, or according to one’s own philosophy and outlook, or one’s own optimism or pessimism. We must consider them all as a whole—for they are all true. Like a view in the old stereoscope, image does not appear in depth unless both pictures are seen together, with a real combination of elements. The foregoing chapters have shown us that the fellah’s intelligence is collective rather than personal and more static than dynamic. His wisdom and experience have crystallized into pithy sayings and proverbs, which are ready coin for every situation in his life and absolve him from personal thinking. The fellah preserves and repeats, but does not originate or create. What improvements and inventions have been introduced into agriculture, health and housing are imposed upon him from outside. By dint of accepting, receiving, repeating and enduring, his intelligence has become atrophied and passive. And because it is kept in leading strings, it is not stimulated to innovate, for that would mean running risks and disturbing the torpor which protects him from unnecessary suffering. What one knows is better than what one does not know. This lack of personality and initiative furnishes in its turn an explanation for the want of sensitivity or artistic creativity among the fellahin, except among the children who often draw, model and carve scenes from the life around them with wonderful feeling and spontaneity. They are uncultivated in this direction, not because they are unlettered but because they neither think nor strive.

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In their costumes, their villages and in their fields, they provide subjects for the art of the others but they remain unconscious of their own beauty. Still, their love of the soil, their sense of rhythm, and their fondness for songs, color and stories should make their artistic education easy. Much more developed is their aptitude for calculating figures, copying and for repetition. The author has met illiterate fellahin who could do very complicated arithmetical problems in their heads, and catch a trained accountant right where he had made a mistake, whether by accident or design. Others reproduce models with the utmost faithfulness and accuracy, and retain for an astonishing amount of time the memory of a remark, a visit or an object they have been shown. A certain Tawadrus of Birba knows the latitude and longitude of all world capitals. Learning the whole Koran by heart without knowing how to read or write a word is rather common. But though their memories are excellent, their understanding is slow. Yet in childhood, they are quick enough to understand. Here is an excellent example: Priest: “Why did the devil tempt Eve and not Adam?” Little Samira (8 years old): “Because a man will listen to a woman, and a woman will listen to anything.” In fact, up until about the age of fifteen, when they begin to get dull, the fellahin children seem keener than children of the West. Their early physical development and the effect of the climate might explain this. But what could explain the apathy which overcomes them afterward and keeps them, in spite of everything, a backward race? And why do the children of city parents in Egypt not respond to their climate and heredity similarly? Undernourishment has been suggested as a cause. But if this were so their physical development should suffer also, and the adult fellah has a strong constitution. Some sociologists would put it down to masturbation, which is fairly common in the Islamic East, but this vice seems to dominate in the cities, for country people are much less morbid. It has also been attributed to the climate, like a plant forced too fast, which withers. But there are plenty of fellahin who have left the village, and once out of it, have produced in the second generation good doctors, capable engineers and officials and businessmen as good as those of other countries. It can only be the social environment which limits the intelligence of the young fellah, that is to say, the crass ignorance and dislike of innovation which surrounds him from birth, and the routine of a life which bows him to the earth and condemns him to everlasting repetition. This is what arrests the development

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of his mind. Intelligence is developed by new gain and achievements, and these have been unknown in the very old, very conservative world of the Egyptian peasant. The women are more keen witted than the men. Sir William Willcocks, whose great achievements in irrigation by no means prevented him from studying the fellahin, explained the difference thus: “A bad government, when passively accepted by men, who are naturally active, will sooner or later demoralize them. The same government, passively submitted to by women, who are naturally passive, will tend to develop their intelligence. That is why the fellah women are not only more intelligent but more trustworthy than the men.” This reasoning is open to discussion. That it is trying to explain a fact—the traditional feminism of Egypt—is quite clear. The fellaha is also more cunning than her husband, which is saying a good deal. Like all weak people the fellah practices cunning to the point of duplicity. He knows how to conceal his joy, his suffering or his crime, and his inexpressive features are a great help. In his ruses and dodges, when he leaves it to time to decide, when he agrees without any intention of acting upon his word, when he uses ambiguous or evasive language, or purposely misunderstands—he shows great adaptibility, which is indeed a sort of intelligence, but intelligence at the level of instinct. The fellah seems lacking in logic. In reality his ideas run parallel, and he judges by his own standards. Ask a fellah how far it is to a certain village, and he may reply: “A two-piastre bus-ride.” Mustafa will never understand why the busfare in the first class should be more than the busfare in the second class, since both classes run at the same speed. Ahmad will not hear of a fixed fare, since the financial standing for all the passengers is not equal. He has a large family, and another man has just been released from prison. The conductor must understand such a state of affairs, and endless wrangling ensues. “Have you taken the medicine I gave you, Muhammad?” “It was not possible, Sister. The spoon is too large to enter the bottle.” The ‘umda understands this mentality very well. “Go to your father, my lad, and tell him that the Bey (his creditor) is waiting here for him. If your father should not be there, tell him to come all the same, for the Bey knows very well that he is there.” And the father, his ruse disarmed, comes along with no delay. The truth is that the fellah does not think outside the immediate present; he is fettered to the moment. No time and place except the present have much effect on his mind, because they have none on his senses. He is like a primitive or a

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child; his intellect is controlled by the things he is feeling and doing. He looks for causes and effects not in the rational, but in the visible order. Life is a succession of todays. And this is why he seems to us illogical. This mental trait, which is maintained by his lack of education, is the cause of his improvidence. The whole year through he will deny himself even necessities; then the Feast comes, and he will spend everything. The whole family enjoys one or two days of excitement—new clothes, rich food, sights and color. Then he goes back to his old life poorer than ever. A fellah has a few pounds, earned or borrowed. His field urgently needs attention. Will he buy the necessary tools or good manure to increase the yield? No, he will go further into debt to make a first payment on an adjoining lot, to own a bit more, to seem less a smallholder. And when the time comes to pay? He will see about it, then . . . The housewife never trims her lamp until it is already dark. The plowman never greases his plow until he is ready to begin work. He pays his debts when forced to, buys seed on the eve of sowing, sends for the doctor when there is no more hope. He is improvidence incarnate. Maqrizi noted this shortsightedness in the fourteenth century. “One side of the Egyptian character is never to take thought of the future. The Egyptians never store up provisions like the inhabitants of other countries. Another of their characteristics is the lack of reflection. Our Shaykh, Ibn Khaldun, used to say: ‘The Egyptians act as if there were to be no day of reckoning.’” It is a fact that they do not think or act except as the occasion demands, according to the pressures of the moment. Their reactions are determined by immediate sensation. Thus they are both credulous and mistrustful, individualistic and gregarious, miserly and thriftless, long suffering and fiery tempered. They show a confidence which amounts to the most disconcerting credulity in sacred things and persons who might, they think, help them to fulfill their desire for children, revenge or health. Their superstitions, the great prestige enjoyed by ministers of the cult, and the success of pious-seeming charlatans are all signs of this unbelievable credulity. At the same time, they mistrust each other habitually, even within the same family. They distrust their master even if he treats them handsomely. They are like children too often stinted and deceived, who suspect everyone of being jealous of the little they have. This is the root of their strong belief in the evil eye, which is cast, they believe, by the envious. This fear and distrust, justified by long ages of extortions and betrayals, makes the fellah selfish and unable to see anything except as it is of personal benefit. When he saves money, he does it with great secrecy. If he makes a good bargain,

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he takes care not to mention it, so closely does misfortune dog prosperity. But when matters of profit, land and women—the usual causes of hatred and division—are not at stake, his need for a life in common becomes paramount. We have seen how gregarious are the fellahin in their work, their rejoicing and their mourning. When there is danger to face, this sociability is converted into group solidarity. On more ordinary occasions, it results in good humor and childlike display. The more the fellah has saved up in the secret hiding-place of his home, the more likely he is to be carried away by the sight of the crowd at a holiday feast and squander it—as much for show as for enjoyment, like a child who cannot resist the temptation of a shop window. He is lighthearted, because neither the past nor the future touch him. He enjoys to the full the moment: Carpe diem. When interrupted by an imperative, he replies, ‘‘tomorrow” (bukra), driving what he has to do out of the range of his consciousness, holding as long as he can to the present. Even when he has to obey at once he replies, “hadir,” (presently), or “tayyib” (very well), without any intention of bestirring himself. Everything in its time. Since he hopes for no improvement, why should he upset himself? His refuge is his torpor, his kayf (his “how”). Kayf is a word of profound significance, meaning a kind of waking passivity, of doing, saying and thinking nothing. It is a state of perfect patience, taught by the soil. To wait without movement, to keep the mind half asleep, to drown activity in private fantasy, in his humming which lulls his work and all his movements, in a mental languor which softens all human shocks and contacts—that is kayf, the fellah’s most characteristic attitude, a semi-consciousness which abates suffering. “I am going to the next village, and will be gone for three hours,” one of our social assistants told a group of women. When she returned she found them in exactly the same attitudes. “But what have you done all this time?” “Nothing . . . we waited . . . This explains why the fellah is so fond of singing. He will listen enrapt for hours on end, even if the wording is common and the chanter poor. He will go to the station several hours early to catch a train, but may equally well prove several hours late for an appointment. Punctuality, precision, haste—these are all matters beyond him. Why should he set limits to the present or hustle it away? Because he lives in the present, he is neither in a hurry, nor ambitious, nor curious. He is mild and peaceful because he is patient, and patient because he is subject to men and events, and for these very reasons he has become like the Nile,

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indifferent rather than idle. He feels no need for constant activity. His mind is passive and fatalistic; he accepts things as they are. At times however, some fact breaks through the confusion of his mind, through this mist which protects him from excess of knowledge or action—as from suicide—and goads him into activity. Then again he acts on the impulse of the moment, without discrimination or sense of proportion, without considering the importance of what has happened or the consequence of what he is doing. A neighbor takes some of his harvest, or a duck or chicken; someone tampers with his irrigation water or fails to keep his buffalo off his field; his son is bullied by another boy, or his wife insulted by the wife of another man; a friend delays too long in returning a few borrowed piastres, or looks too long at his wife; then this same fellah who is so patient under the injustice and exactions of his masters shows himself irascible indeed. The occurrence may be trifling, but at the moment it strikes him as intolerable and stings him to revenge. He reacts violently, and infects the others with the same passion. Human life at such a time counts for little. The following item from Al-Ahram, while involving large numbers, is an illustration. TWO SLAIN,

37 WOUNDED, 100 ARRESTED, ALL BECAUSE OF A CHICKEN! Akhmim (Upper Egypt) 27 April 1955. Muhammad ‘Ali Muhram Khalifa, of the village of al-Kula owned a qurn for wheat-threshing, and it happened that a chicken belonging to a man of the Isma‘il family wandered onto it. The owner of the qurn spoke harshly to the chicken’s owner, and words were exchanged. The relatives of the two men heard the argument and came running singly and in groups carrying whatever they could pick up in the way of clubs, fas and knives. The two parties began a shocking struggle, while blood flowed, children cried, and women shrieked. However, so many were involved that a definite outcome was rendered difficult for some time, if not impossible. Meanwhile, would-be peacemakers stood apart viewing the battle with mingled pity and terror, unable to interfere. The hatred seething in the combatants found expression in loud cries and harsh blows. The clash resulted in the deaths of two men, Muhammad Ahmad Abu alHasan of the Isma‘il family, and Surur Rashwan of the Khalifa family, and because of the ill-starred chicken thirty- seven men fell wounded, most of them seriously. Police forces raced to the scene from Akhmim headed by Captain Muhammad al-Bayli, the mudir of Girga, with the ma’mur of the markaz. More than one

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hundred witnesses and participants were arrested for questioning as to the origin of the enmity, while investigations began on the spot. The seriously injured were removed to the markaz hospital for treatment. In Upper Egypt, when men quarrel, they try to attack each other with whatever they can lay hands on. The fellahin of the Said are like a volcano that will erupt when least expected. But more often, the revenge (tha’r) is cunningly dissembled and carried out after endless precautions. The enemy is set upon from behind, in the maize field, or if the owner is not attacked, his crop is burnt, his corn scattered through the fields, or his buffalo poisoned. Though the fellah will put up with a multitude of injustices from his masters, he is not afraid to stand up to them when it concerns a woman, for women and land are the points on which he is most touchy. Here there is no question of strong and weak, rich and poor. The landowners know this, and will not take their pleasure of the village women. More than one landowner has been killed at his own door for having seduced a village girl. Murder and revenge among the fellahin arise more from a quick temper and wounded pride than from ill-nature; they are signs of hot blood. Of their crimes, 80 per cent are committed for revenge, and 18 per cent are thefts. As Sir Thomas Wentworth Russell remarks: “Egypt is a land of much crime, without being essentially a criminal country.”1 Their outbursts do not last for long, and are succeeded by resignation, which, being habitual, is a much more noticeable characteristic. This has been strikingly demonstrated after the very rare rebellions of fellahin against large landowners such as took place in 1951 in Mansura. The following fellah sayings, constantly repeated, are significant. “Patience demolishes mountains.” “Nothing is lost with patience.” “Patience is beautiful.” “A patient man sees freedom.” “Greed is a humiliation, but satisfaction with one’s lot is a full purse.” “When God created all things,” says Ka‘b al-Ahbar, the traditionist, according to Maqrizi, “He gave to each a companion. ‘I shall go to Syria,’ said Reason. ‘And I shall go with you,’ said Rebellion. Poverty said, ‘I am going to the desert.’ ‘I’ll come along too,’ said Health. Abundance said, ‘I am going to Egypt,’ and ‘I will accompany you,’ said Resignation.” 1. Sir Thomas Wentworth Russell, Egyptian Service, 1902–1946, p. 31.

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Such is the fellah’s resignation, but it is carried to the extent of servility and degradation, imposed not so much by poverty as by the unceasing pressure of his master and his society. The fellah acts like a child or a brute, because he is never treated as if he were anything else. He knows the hard exterior of the ruling class, no more. It is often claimed by that class that the fellahin cannot understand an authority which is humane and appeals to their better instincts. That is true, but it is true because in the past they have been brought up to nothing but blows, fines, curses, insults and intimidation, which have finally rendered them insensible. The writer himself, before he understood the meaning of human dignity, used the same harshness toward them, so natural and inevitable did it seem. That the fellah’s sense of justice is rotten, that he lacks frankness, confidence and zeal is true, but it is because no one has done anything to teach him those qualities or to give him moral encouragement. It is also true that his work is done without pleasure, devotion or style, that he has little taste for taking pride in his work, that he lacks initiative and inventiveness. But these defects are due to his servitude and isolation. In the words of alQulali, his mind is “walled in between ignorance and tyranny.”2 The soil and the care of the soil render the fellah patient, long suffering and tough. It has imprinted in him its own earthiness. Even in love, he is entirely physical, and yet he is not immoral. He knows from childhood that he comes from his mother’s womb. His language when he is angry shows how much he knows of sexual matters. Even girls playing with dolls enact scenes of complete realism. But this calm animal shamelessness is not alarming and has nothing to do with obscenity. Fundamental morality is not affected by it. Moreover, everyone in the village is watching everyone else, and this, together with the conservatism and instinctive modesty of the fellah makes offenses against morality actually much fewer than elsewhere. “Moral crimes among the fellahin constitute only a small proportion of the total.”3 In fact, poverty and tradition accustom the fellah to mortification of the flesh from his childhood. A soft bed, social life, the pleasures of the table, light company—these are things of which he knows nothing. Their absence helps enforce his morality. So do the precepts of Islam, it might be added; but the fellahin are very ignorant of their religion, and the village shaykhs and imams do little enough

2. Muhammad al-Qulali, “Essai sur les causes de la criminalite en Egypte,” Librairie de Droit et de Jurisprudence, Paris, 1929, 380 pages. 3. Ibid.

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to enlighten them. It is more probable that among them natural morality keeps its original force. The fellahin are moral because they believe in God. They are material, but not materialistic. They believe wholeheartedly in the intervention and providence of God. They make no plan and undertake nothing without adding the words “In sha’ Allah”—if God wills. The author once listened to the following conversation in which a Greek merchant said to a fellah: “Are you going to bring me your cotton tomorrow?” “Yes, ya Khawaga,4 in sha’ Allah.” “Five cantars, not less, you understand.” “Yes, in sha’ Allah.’ “Can you find camels to transport it?” “Yes, in sha’ Allah.” “I must have it before noon.” “In sha’ Allah, ya Khawaga.” “Never mind in sha’ Allah. We are talking business, and I want a definite answer.” “Never mind in sha’ Allah, never mind the cotton, ya Khawaga. Good-by.”

“God will provide,” “God spreads his benefits,” “God brings the harvest,” “God is with the patient,” “To everyone the fate God gives him,” “Verily we are from God, and to God we shall return,” “God is there,” “The day is God’s and he provides,” “Man proposes, God disposes,” “God cuts the cold to the size of the blanket.” Such are the propositions of peasant theology. They encourage fatalism and deepen resignation, but they are rich with all the splendor of filial obedience to the Divine Will. The fellah knows that God is the Prime Mover and First Cause of all existence. Despite the poverty of his intellect and his ignorance of formal religious matters, his concept of God is admirably pure: He is the Omnipotent, the Just, the Good. All these attributes are united in the word the peasant usually uses for God, Rabbuna—Our Lord. It is enough to hear a fellah pronounce this word to know his faith. The superstitions which enmesh his soul have never corrupted the essence of this faith. The fellahin are much more given to prayer and ascetic practices than other people, for they are by nature believers. They have always been powerfully 4. Khawaga is the usual term for foreigners in Egypt, but in Upper Egypt also for Coptic merchants. Its use implies a certain respect, but an emphasis on the “otherness” of the person addressed.

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attracted by holiness (baraka), the supernatural, saintliness, or even the counterfeit of these things. The Catholics among the fellahin, whom the writer knows intimately, can be splendidly religious in their lives, even to the point of heroism. Those of their priests who are fellahin live among them and for them with a devotion and selfabnegation of which missionaries from other countries are rarely capable. It should not be forgotten that the first monks of Christianity, the monks of the Thebaid, were fellahin.

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Chapter 10 The Distress of the Fellah

In comparison with the fellah’s miserable lot a century ago or under the Mamelukes, his present situation is an undoubted improvement. He can no longer be killed like a dog, plundered at will, or commandeered as a slave. In comparison with the woes of the Negro, the Indian or the Chinese peasant, the fellah might even seem more fortunate. He is undernourished, but he does not starve. He has clothing, and at holidays a few piastres to spend. True, but there are two sorts of misery: physical distress due to insufficient resources, to a lack of the conditions necessary for the maintenance of physical health; and there is intellectual and moral misery, which means ignorance and a lack of human dignity, so necessary to the life of man. Without any doubt, physical poverty and distress have a more immediate effect on the worker, precisely because they are more noticeable and arouse more pity—hence all these efforts to improve the fellah’s house, his health and his finances. Hence also the habitual tone of his complaints and his expressed needs, as well as the speeches made about him. “We do not suffer from different evils that can be dealt with separately, but from one main evil, that is, the lowering of the standard of living of the inhabitants of the villages to such a point as to wound all human feelings and stain the reputation of our country. The people of Egypt are not composed only of the 200,000 odd who are well off, but of millions of souls.” (‘Ali Shamsi)

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But with this low standard of living we must also include moral distress, which, since it affects the very sources of human life, has the heaviest consequences for the individual and the group. With such poverty, the fellah is oversupplied. His ignorance and backwardness, his churlishness and servility, which compare so strikingly with the refinement of the upper classes, are more tragic than his lack of means. That he does not feel the depth of this great misery is no reason why one should consider it less degrading, It is no less an offense to the dignity of the human creature. On the contrary, when he feels it fully, his deliverance will be on its way. The real evils, then, are the fellah’s lack of sensitivity, of education and culture, the gracelessness of his life, and the incomprehension, if not scorn and indifference, of those who might help him. All too often, official measures are thought out in offices quite remote from the fellahin and put into practice by officials equally remote in attitude. Although the Ministry of Social Affairs, through its fellah department, and the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs have done some excellent work, their reforms depend upon active young social workers to carry them through and apply them. The lack of young intellectuals willing to dedicate their careers to social work makes for more difficulties in rural reform than lack of appropriations. This misery, compounded of poverty, ignorance and disease, has its roots in a divorce. In fact, a separation more striking than that between the white desert and the black soil, or between the Delta and the Said, has occurred between the upper and the lower classes, between the city and the countryside, between them and us. When forced by necessity, they migrate to the towns—five hundred thousand in the course of ten years—to increase the number of destitutes. But they still remain fellahin. It is enough to cast a glimpse at the fellah colonies in Cairo to see that they are simply villages, grouped according to their place of origin in odd quarters of the capital. The inhabitants stay among themselves and meet in certain cafes. As much as possible, they retain their village ways. Most often, only men migrate, leaving behind in the village their wives and children, hoping to return and perhaps buy land. They find work as building laborers taken on for the day by a rayyis; they are better paid but always in danger of unemployment; they are badly accommodated and helpless. It may be years before they return home, some poorer than ever, others with the money to buy the plot they have coveted so passionately. Some turn to crime

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and finish in the prisons. Many settle in town and work as unskilled laborers, road menders, porters, servants or hawkers fastening on to the quarters. They form a parasitic mass which is never absorbed by the city. Sometimes a few fight their way through and develop into big tradesmen, contractors or brokers. They are then most eager to profit from the quarter from which they came. Rather than help their former fellow unfortunates to rise, they trample them. When townspeople happen to go to the countryside, it is on business or on holidays; never do they enter a fellah’s house, or try to see behind the abstraction of debtor, taxpayer, voter or patient the face of a man. Schoolmasters and landowners admit that much depends on their attitude toward the fellah to make him either progressive or indifferent and sullen. A few take a real interest in their positions. The Egyptian press mentions the situation of the fellah with more and more editorials, and is aided in this by the production of films which unfold, often courageously, some aspect of the problems of the villages. But can we not speak of the “treason of the intellectual class?” The elite has torn itself away from the mass; it has kept for itself, for politics, literature or for Europe, its intellect and civilization, its education and its money. It has been lacking in devotion; some say it has been “unpatriotic.” From afar, intermittently, it has no doubt praised with emotion the earthy qualities of the fellahin as producers, but without doing anything noteworthy for them. The fellah, like a neglected child that grows without thinking or learning anything, has remained rooted to the ground. The earth has stopped him from sinking further, but it is not its function to raise him up. One may wonder if the fellah does not rank below the peasantry of other civilized countries, at least from the spiritual and cultural point of view. Nowhere is such social resignation, such political deficiency to be found, nor above all the strange self-denial which causes the fellah to despise his work and way of life. The dim but powerful consciousness of being the living body of the nation, of helping in the national task, the feelings that elevate and sustain other agricultural communities are lacking in the fellah. The blame is not his, but civilization’s, which for centuries has oppressed him. The problem then is to arouse and stir life within this man and this people. One of the saddest aspects is the fear which inhabits him. His entire social life is regulated and controlled by endemic fear. The little window behind which he crouches, the single, solid door, the beasts kept in the house, the gun he carries in his hand, the watches through the night in the fields, the number of watchdogs, the superstitions, the mistrust and defiance with which he greets interest or

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kindness—all are expressions of this fear, fear of all toward all, fear of the nameless evil or the unknown enemy, fear of his superiors and fear for his rights. It is our duty to liberate him. This is the duty of the upper classes and those who profit from the fellah, above all the landowners, the agricultural engineers, and tradesmen and government officials. These leading figures must not have only economic, administrative and political intercourse with the fellah, but man-to man contact. Only such contacts can raise a man. The author has witnessed how comforting the visits of city people or notables can be when these visitors display only a little open-heartedness and solicitude, when the villagers feel that these ladies and gentlemen from big towns come only for the reason that they are interested in them. Such is the duty of teachers and ministers of religion by their very function, for they enter most deeply into the life of the village. Whoever assists them shows the most intelligent form of nationalism.1 The wives and daughters of landowners are in the same way especially called to this task. A young girl of good family who was spending holidays in the country was able by herself to gather the women of the ‘izba in a group and tell them each evening stories to educate them and raise their standard of living. This is true and efficient feminism. In short, the problem is to undertake and achieve the task of education which requires more understanding, personal care and love than committees, speeches and official decrees. The only thing that can awaken without exciting, help without weakening, raise without uprooting, is a social and spiritual mystique which must begin in the educated class.

1. “The permanent validity of the Church’s social teaching . . . rests on one basic principle: individual human beings are the foundation, the cause and the end of every social institution. That is necessarily so, for men are by nature social beings. This fact must be recognized, as also the fact that they are raised in the plan of Providence to an order of reality which is above nature . . . . But today, more than ever, it is essential that this doctrine be known, assimilated, and put into effect in the form and manner that the different situations allow and demand. It is a difficult task indeed, yet a most noble one. To the performance of it we call, not only Our own sons and brothers scattered throughout the world, but also all men of good will everywhere.”—Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra.

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Epilogue: Progress

We have mentioned here, in earlier editions, a multiplicity of projects undertaken to ameliorate the life of the fellah. But in over twenty years of elementary efforts, extremely little had been actually accomplished. Either the projects were on a petty scale, or the next ministry changed the program or, being unsuitable importations from abroad, designed more to please officials who had traveled in Europe than to answer to the real needs of the peasants’ existence, they resulted in total failure. The Egyptian Revolution, bringing to power a new class of men, has effected changes in every sphere of life. It has changed the faces of Cairo and Alexandria, and contributed greatly to the creation of a sensible and orderly urban life. And at the same time, it has not forgotten the listless, paralyzed provincial towns and the villages. The writer must state here that it is not at all his intention to close this book with a panegyric or a cheering section. But it is equally not his intention to leave unmentioned some of the more hopeful recent developments in the fellah’s life. Today, gradually, like a warming radiation from Cairo, the influence of a new regime is being felt even in the furthest reaches of Upper Egypt. The Agrarian Reform undertaken in September 1952 did not succeed in fixing the wages of agricultural workers. It has also not set in order the system of cooperatives (about 200 in 1954, with only 74,000 members). But by expropriating 565,000 feddans, or some 9 per cent of all the cultivated lands, it has already made landowners of 200,000 families of cultivators—about 1,200,000 individuals, the same who tilled the land for others in the past—and it has led the absentee

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landlords to live on what is left of their estates, in order to themselves supervise cultivation and increase the income. The division of the estates has not decreased the total returns, contrary to some predictions. We may note, for instance, that there has been a 15 per cent increase in production in the sugar cane fields, after parceling. In the past, these were the fields least divided into smaller areas, so the figure is the more significant. But it is chiefly in directly fixing land rents by law (at seven times the taxes) that the peasant laborer has been given a slight but incontestable security. The margin between supply and demand, which was always manipulated to the profit of the landowner and the brokers, is now going to the laborer himself. To be sure, the level of the individual annual income, along with that of India, is still the world’s lowest—about £E 39. But it was only £E 33 before the land reform. And since there were over 8 million peasants on 6 million feddans, their position could not be very radically altered overnight. In addition to these changes in law, an all-powerful organization born of the Revolution, the Permanent Council for Public Services, has yoked itself to the immense burden of the fellah’s misery and aims to promote his progress. Reserarches, reports, surveys, ten-year plans and especially coordination of the work of the various ministries are forthcoming. As for the actual changes taking place in the village, where there was once one hospital bed per thousand of the population, there are now three. This and other changes are made possible by the institution of Combined Rural Units. Eight hundred fifty-four units are planned, each to provide for the needs of 50,000 people. As of now, some 200 have been built and an additional 200 each year are planned. They are almost all the same—simple, functional white buildings situated in the green fields. Each contains a small hospital of ten beds, plus an operating room, a dispensary, a mother-and-child-care clinic, public baths and a laundry where the women can do their washing. These are for health. There is also the social center, with an auditorium for 150 (300, with a little squeezing), a reading library and an exhibit room. There is a school with twelve classrooms, divided into blocks of two classrooms each, each with sanitary facilities. This is for education. There is also a kindergarten-nursery for 100 babies of working mothers. There are five villas as well for married personnel, and a home with rooms for twenty-four unmarried people, for very few of the personnel would know how to live in a village. The goals of these bases are to combat, prevent and foresee the peasants’ distress; to double production in the allotted zone; to improve the product of

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artisans and cultivators; to control and improve seed and animal stock; and to encourage cottage industry. To these ends, some forty persons specializing in different areas are at work in each center. After receiving their diplomas and degrees at the University of Higher Training School, these “missionaries” (as a former Minister of Social Welfare, Dr. ‘Abbas ‘Ammar, dubbed them), are given a seventy-five-day training course in those centers longest established. These units cost the state between 32,000 and 50,000 pounds, and the maintenance of the center, with the employees, comes to about 11,000 pounds a year. This formula completes and neatly unites the functions of the old rural health centers, numbering about 200, the social centers (about 171 functioning), and the agricultural stations, which began to be set up after World War II. The most welcome evidence of the new concern, however, is not so much the generous expenditure of funds for social projects, as the wholly new care being taken to produce competent administrators and devoted workers. There is a striking effort made in the courses and the materials given to them, to make their tasks seem less heroic and less unpleasant. Visits by doctors to villages are arranged and numbers of registered midwives are being graduated from the child-care clinics, where they must undergo a twelve-month apprenticeship. It is hoped that they will replace the more than 8,000 traditional day‘as and shaykhas who until now have presided over childbirth in the village. Greater still than the care for the fellah’s baby, or assisting the mother to escape puerperal fever, is the care taken to instruct the growing child. For despite thirty years of compulsory-free-education legislation, and the fact that in the last twenty-five years the number of children enrolled has quintupled (332,000 in 1931, 1,500,000 in 1956), only 41.8 per cent of the boys of the age-span involved (6 to 12 years) go to school. The proportion for girls is still less—25 per cent. Despite the very real advances of the last five years (over 1,000 new schools), there are only some 35,223 primary school classes, and 56,000 would be necessary to accommodate the present school child population. At the present rate of expansion, this goal should be attained by 1964. And in the meantime, 20,000 new teachers will have to be trained. Are women playing a role in this revival of education? Yes, but more slowly. Of 28,000 teachers in the primary schools, 11,500 are women. On the secondary level, there are 2,500 women teachers as compared to 12,000 men. The difference in ratio is more striking in the provinces, of course. But despite this impressive change for the better, we must acknowledge that more progress is made for the fellah than is made with him, and his real progress remains slow. The element of

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paternalism remains strong; the progress in the manufacture of children’s toys is always more astonishing than the progress in children. And does the fellah associate himself with these efforts? Does he respond as a man? Has he entered into this movement, whose goal is his awakening? Slowly, but yes. Though his habitat, the village, has not changed much, today he is far more curious about things in the city, in the country as a whole. It is no longer very rare to find fellahin with battery-radios, even though there may not be another stick of furniture in the house. At any rate, he may have access to one; newspapers are found; the gossip of the village is more cosmoplitan. There seems also to be more going and coming between the isolated villages themselves. More and more, old taxis and rattling autobuses make the journey between villages removed from access to rail. Because he is better treated, and because the people have a growing pride in their army, the young fellah is more amenable to military service, and he returns more aware and more confident. Small indications, to be sure—but it is only in the last five or ten years that even these began in this people, curbed and oppressed for millenniums. For good or bad, the events of the last years have begun a movement whose end is not to be seen, whose processes are not to be arrested, and which more than ever demand understanding and human commitment, if it is not to destroy those who are associated with it. To be ultimately successful, it must be at once humane, rural and Egyptian, taking its meaning and its directions from the earth of Egypt and her Nile: twin symbols of patience, of discipline and fecundity.

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A Critical Bibliography

I have indicated below, with some recommendations, a few of the books which concern the fellah at various periods, which I have found useful.

ANCIENT PERIOD Hartmann, Fernande, L’Agriculture dans l’Ancien Egypte (thesis). Paris, 1923. Herodotus, History. The material in the second volume is indispensable to anyone who wishes to see the fellah of that time anywhere but on a tomb basrelief. Montet, Pierre, Sc
enes de la vie privee dans les tombeaux egyptiens de l’Ancien Empire, Strasbourg, fasc. XXIV des Publ. de la Fac. des Lettres, 1925. Concerns popular life. Rouillard, Germaine, La vie rurale dans l’empire byzantin. Paris, Maisonneuve, 1953, 205 pp. A posthumous work, contains an excellent chapter. Wilkinson, S. Gardener, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians. New edition revised and corrected by S. Burch, London, Murray, 1878, 3 vols. of 500 pages each. See particularly chapters dealing with private life, agriculture and popular festivals. (Chapters IV, XI and XV).

THE FELLAH ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Bayle, St. John, Village Life in Egypt with Sketches of the Said. London, Chapman, 1852, 2 vols. of 296 pages each. A little of everything. Some good remarks.

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Chabrol de Volvic, Essai sur les moeurs des habitants modernes de l’Egypte. See Vol. VI, 342 pages. Description de l’Egypte. The observations and researches undertaken by the Napoleonic Expedition, Paris, Panckoucke, 1821–1829, 26 vols. Girard, M. P. S., Memoire sur l’Agriculture, l’Industrie et le Commerce de l’Egypte. Vol. II of the series Etat Moderne. See the 200-odd pages concerning agriculture. Klunzinger. Upper Egypt, Its People and Its Products. A Descriptive Account of the Manners, Customs, Superstitions and Occupation of the People of the Nile Valley. London, Blackie, 1878, 408 pages. Translation from the German, prefaced by Schweinfurth. Lane, S. W., Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Written in Egypt, 1833–1835. Although indispensable to the social historian, both this and the above-mentioned Essai sur les moeurs des habitants modernes de l’Egypte confine themselves largely to town life.

THE FELLAH TODAY Here I have listed in chronological order some studies which have appeared and which I have personally read. Where they exist only in the Arabic, I have put them at the end of this list. These works are of very uneven value. Ghaly, Kamel, Essai sur l’agriculture de l’Egypte. Paris, Jouve, 1889, 355 pp. The author is a Copt and became a priest. A few pages on the fellahin (pp. 122– 126). “The Egyptian people is like the grain of sesame: it is crushed as long as it can yield oil.” Piot Bey (J. B.), “Causerie ethnographique sur le Fellah.” Cairo, Bulletin de la Soc. de Geographie d’Egypte, 1899, pp. 203–248. Nahas Bey (Y^usuf), Situation economique et sociale du fellah egyptien. Paris (thesis), 1901. Legrain, Georges, Fellah de Karnak (Haute Egypte). Societe d’Economie sociale, Paris, 1902, 3rd series, fasc. V of Ouvriers des deux mondes, pp. 289–336. An excellent monograph along the line of Le Play. Beauge, Charles, “Notes sur l’Egypte. Le Fellah.” Bull, de Geogr. Hist. et Descrip., Paris, 1906, pp. 388–415. An almost complete, if unacknowledged, reproduction of Piot Bey. Chamberet, Raoul de, Enqu^ete sur la condition du fellah egyptien, au triple point de vue de la vie agricole, de l’education, de l’hygiene et de l’assistance publique. Challamel, Paris, 1909. 206 pages. Consideration of English policy, with some references and comparisons to Tunisia.

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Mieville, Walter F., “The Fellah’s Yoke-Mate.” London, Fortnightly Review, June 1909. Sabbatin, F., Au Pays du Fellah, un coup d’oeil retrospectif. Cairo, Imp. Messina, no date, 72 pages. El Nagg^ar, Mustafa Sadd^q, Essai sur le Fellah et le travail namue en Egypte. Lyon Poncet, 1913, 100 pages. A study of the Province of Men^uf^ya. Willcocks, S. William, “Le fellah et sa femme sur les terres incultes d’Egypte.” Cairo, Bull. Soc. Geog. d’Egypte, June 1917, pp. 167–188. Some interesting remarks on the fellaha and on the corvee. Blackman, Winifred, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. London, Harrap, 1927, 330 pages. The author reports on what she has seen during a stay of five years in the vicinity of Asy^ut, particularly in the way of folklore and superstitions. Winkler, Hans, Alexander, Bauern zwischen Wasser und W€uste. Volkskundliches aus dem Dorfe Kiman in Oberaegypten. Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1934, 214 pages. Monograph of an Upper Egyptian village whose inhabitants, formerly nomads, have sedentarized and become fellahin. , Aegyptische Volkskunde. Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1936, 509 pages. An excellent manual of rural ethnography. Nagy, Dr. Iwan Edgar, Die Landwirtschaft im Heutigen Aegypten und ihre Entwicklungsmoeglichkeiten. Scholle Verlag, Vienna, 1936, 163 photos. A study of present-day agriculture by the former director of the Egyptian agricultural museum. Ludwig, Emil, The Nile. Paris, 1937. This interesting popularization is a history of Egypt seen in its environment. The fresh point of view is a little colored by prejudgment and error, however. Knittel, John, Doktor Ibrahim el Hakim. Leipzig, Tauchnitz, 1937, 360 pages. The efforts of a doctor to save his people. Tawf^q al-Hak^m, Journal d’un substitut de campagne. Cairo, 1939, 154 pages, translated by L. Wiet. Caustic scenes of injustice in the provinces. Alfort, Dr. Cecil, One Hour of Justice. The black book of Egyptian hospitals and a fellahin charter. London, Dorothy Crisp, 1946, 311 pp. A strong criticism of the British as well as the Egyptians as regards the medical care of the people. The author, who was a professor in the Faculty of Medicine, sent in his resignation in resounding manner after his denunciation of the abuses he had noted. Russell, Sir Thomas Wentworth, Egyptian Service (1902–1946). London, Murray, 1949, 300 pages. Pertinent remarks on the ills of the fellahin. Fromont, Pierre, L’Agriculture egyptienne et ses problemes. Paris Editions, Domat Montchretien, 142 pp. A course of lectures on rural economy given at the

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Faculty of Law in 1953–54. A clear presentation of technical, economic and social problems. ‘Ammar, Hamed, Growing Up in an Egyptian Village, Silwa, Province of Aswan. London, Routledge & Kegan, 1954. A good social and ethnographical study of the author’s native village. El Mouelhy, Ibrahim, Le paysan d’Egypte
a travers l’histoire. Le Caire, Imprimerie “La Patrie” 1954, 122 pp. New and interesting documents. Wuilloud, Henri, Dix jours en Egypt. 99 pp. , Nouvelles impressions d’Egypte. 102 pp. Notes of a qualified agriculturist who advised on the planting of the vine in Egypt.

ARABIC WORKS Mustafa ‘Al^ al-Halb^aw^, F^ al-R^f al-Misr^ (In the Egyptian Countryside). Cairo, 1928, 200 pages. The testimony of a provincial. A few sharp statements in the midst of much declamation. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zaynab, Akhl^aq wa Man^azir R^fiyya (The Egyptian Countryside). Cairo, Al-Hilal, 1930. Fair literary work. Ibnat al-Sh^ati (pseudonym of ‘A‘isha ‘Abd al-Rahm^an), Al-Rif al-Misr^. Cairo, 1935, 248 pages. , Q^ad^yat al-Fall^ah (The Case of the Fellah). Courageous and wellinformed defense of the fellahin by a woman teacher. Gh^al^ Bey (Mirrit), Siy^asat al-Mustaqbil (The Policy of the Future). Cairo, 1928. , Al-Islah al-Zir^a‘i (Agrarian Reform). Cairo, 1945, 97 pages. Precise and clear-seeing works which propose sane and just solutions. H^afiz Af^f^ Pasha, ‘Ala H^amish al-Siy^asa (On the Margin of Politics). Cairo, 1938. The eminent statesman is one of the first to underline the gravity of the social problem. Muhammad Z^ak^ ‘Abd al-Q^adir, Suwwar min al-R^f (Pictures from the Countryside). Cairo, 1949, 138 pages, Foreword by Haykal Pasha. Twenty-one sketches which reveal the peasant mind. Asma Hal^m, Thaman Ayy^am f^-al-Sa‘id (Eight Days in Upper Egypt). Cairo, 1944, 22 pages. Report on disease among the fellahin. S^adiq Sa‘d, Mushkil^at al Fall^ah (Problems of the Fellah). Cairo, 1955, 80 pages. Proposes limitation of large estates.

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Gallini Pasha, F^ Sab^l al-Isl^ah. Cairo, 1946, 193 pages. Over half of the book dedicated to a eulogy of the author, a great landed proprietor. Pages 48–57 on state of villages. Muhammad Dh^u-al-Faq^ar Bey, Al-Milkiyya al-Zir^a‘^ya (Landed Property). Cairo, 1946, 30 pages. Influence of organization on standard of living. Yield can be tripled. Mahm^ud Hafn^awi Pasha. Bayn Daq^q al-‘Ala wa An^at al-Naw^a’ir. Cairo, alKit^ab, November 1946. Calls for mechanization of agriculture. Muhammad al-Ghall^ab, Dr. and Shaykh, Mushkil^at al-Fall^ah (Peasant Problems). Cairo, Al-Kit^ab, November 1946. Calls for return to regionalism and resident landlords. Mahm^ud K^amil, Al-‘Amal li Misr (Action for Egypt). Cairo, 1947, 216 pages. Proposes progressive taxation and reclaim of desert land. Ibrahim ‘Azir, Dr., Al-R^f wa-Mushkil^atuhu (The Rural Area and Its Problems). Cairo, 1947, 220 pages. A courageous book calling for change of the ‘umda system. Muhammad Riy^ad al-Shanw^ani, Isl^ah al-Q^ura al-Misr^ya (Village Reform in Egypt). Cairo, 1948, 145 pages. A program well studied but too theoretical.

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Glossary of Arabic Terms

‘Af^ar^t al-Azhar al-Bahr al-gir^an al-mihr^ath al-w^ad^ ‘Aqd Ardab Asha A’yan B^amiya Baqq^al Baraka Bars^m Basal Bettaw Bint Birka Bukra D^a‘ira Darabakka

devils (sing., ‘ifr^t) the Koranic University of Cairo the sea; used for the Nile in Egypt. neighbors plow the Valley contract of marriage (betrothal) standard measurement for grain, containing about 200 quarts evening meal notables, heads of prominent families. okra grocer blessing a clover-like Egyptian fodder onions maize (corn) bread girl village pond tomorrow directing agency of a large estate a fingerdrum

Glossary of Arabic Terms

143

D^ ura D^ ura raf^‘a Faq^h F^as Fedd^an Fell^ah (a); lah^n (pl.) Filfil Fit^ama F^ ul F^ ut^ ur Gafaf Gall^abiya Gam^ usa Gh^ada Ghaf^r Gilla H^adir H^agg Halaz^ una Halla H^anim Hash^sh Hawd Ibr^q Im^am Iwayga ‘Izba Kad^ah Kas^ab^ya Kayf

Khalta Khat^b

144

millet. Maize is called “Syrian Millet” millet, of the old Nubian variety “lawyer,” hence Koran teacher hoe the Egyptian unit of land measure, corresponding closely to an acre, divided into 24 Kirats. fel- the Egyptian peasant (s) pepper weaning (of children) broadbeans morning meal, breakfast season when canals are cleaned tunic, the principal garment of the fellah buffalo noon meal watchman in the village briquette of straw, earth and dung used as fuel presently; hence “yes” one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca automobile converted into a small bus copper pot woman of the middle class Cannabis Indica, narcotic hemp (related to marijuana) basin areas of land, surrounded by dikes to catch flood water of Nile for agriculture water pot prayer leader in the mosque ancient millet; see d^ura rafi‘a an estate a volume measure (literally, “a heap”) a farm tool used by the fellah for leveling the land a term describing the emotional state of the fellah—a kind of waking passivity, of saying, doing and thinking nothing grain mixed with earth, carried home from saint’s tomb, used for blessing Mosque preacher

Glossary of Arabic Terms

Khaww^al Khiy^ar Khulkh^al Kir^at K^ um K usa Kushr^ Kutt^ab Libda Lift Lih^af Madyafa Mahr Mal^aya Ma’m^ ur Mar’a Markaz Mar^ ug Maw^aw^l Mawlid Ma’z^ un M^ri Mish Mizm^ar Mizrat Mud^r Mud^r^ya Muezzin Muh^afaz^at

mummers,(dancers, also: effeminates cucumbers a massive ankle ring, the wedding band of the fellaha, removed only upon the death of her husband one of the 24 sections of a feddan mound of an ancient city, often used by the fellah as source for fertilizer green squash, zucchini a dish of lentils and rice traditional school for teaching the Koran to children by note the felt skullcap worn by the fellah of southern Egypt turnips quilt guesthouse bride-price, dowry paid to the bride the long dark garment of the fellaha, reaching from head to feet but not covering the face a government official who controls the police force in the particular markaz to which he is appointed woman police districts, sections into which each mud^r^ya, or province, is divided a sand found in the cliffs of Upper Egypt, used for fertilizer songs of love and pleasure anniversary feast of a saint a religious functionary who performs weddings, witnesses divorces, etc. state lands, into which part of Egypt’s cultivable land is divided sour cheese, made from goat’s, cow’s or buffalo’s milk bagpipe a 2- or 4-pronged fork used for winnowing governor of a province province crier who announces the hour of prayer urban governorates

Glossary of Arabic Terms

145

Mulk Mul^ ukh^ya Muntazah Muqaddas Muzayin

Nabb^ ut N^ag Nayr^ uz N^azir Nibla N^ili Nome Nur^ag Nuria Oke Qadim Qilla Qubba Qurn Rab^aba Rabbuna Rayyis Rotl Sal^am^ya Samn S^aqiya Sarr^af Sayfi

private property a mucilaginous leafy summer vegetable planted by the fellah outer garden “sanctified,” a Copt who has made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem barber-surgeon; the muzayin also reports deaths, prepares the groom for his wedding, and circumcises children heavy staff, often used as a club Bedouin settlement Coptic New Year overseer of an estate a beanflip used by fellahin children for shooting at birds, fruit trees, etc. fall crop, at the time of high Nile, from August to October province of Ancient Egypt heavy wooden sledge with disks, driven over grain (except maize) to thresh it see s^aqiya weight of approximately 23/4pounds or 1,248 grams ancient, and thus to the fellah, anything holding the magical power of the past “a measure of” (literally, “a scanty”), about 11/2 pecks the domed monument of a Muslim saint winnowing and threshing floor a single-stringed violin the term the fellah uses for God; “Our Lord” foreman, boss weight: a little less than a pound a musical instrument clarified butter, used for cookery water wheel tax collector or money lender the summer crop, at the time of low Nile, from April to July

Shadoof

146

Glossary of Arabic Terms

Sh^a‘ir Sh^amiya Shatawi Shaykh Shuna Sib^akh baladi Sib^akh khfri S^d^ S^ga Sim^ad Tabl Tabl^ya Tab^ ut Tafla Taft^sh Talaq Tall Tamb^ ur Tamb^asha Taq^ya Tarh^la Tayyib Tha’r Tisht Trumb^l T^ ub ahmar T^ ub akhdar ‘Umda Umm Ahmad Urghul

a device used for raising water, especially for irrigating the land; see also s^aqiya a storyteller and singer “Syrian”: see d^ura the winter crop, from November to April a title of respect storeyard fertilizer obtained from animal excrements fertilizer obtained from the k^ums, or mounds one of the terms for the patron saint of a village a children’s game, somewhat like checkers or draughts chemical fertilizer a large tambourine a low round table see s^aqiya a clay obtained from the cliffs of Upper Egypt, used by the fellah for fertilizer an inspectorate in which the services of an estate are grouped the formula which must be spoken for a divorce the ruins of an ancient settlement. See also k^um. the Archimedean screw used for raising water for irrigation see s^aqiya the knitted skullcap worn by the fellah of northern Egypt a term used for the hiring of work gangs of fellahin as day laborers “very well” revenge basin hired automobile kiln-baked bricks raw bricks; adobe the village headman; a selected fellah official “Ahmad’s mother”—the fellaha mother is known by her first-born son a musical instrument

Glossary of Arabic Terms

147

^ Uta W^al^ Waqf Waqf ahli Waqf khayri Wud^a Zaghar^t Zahh^afa Zim^am Zir Zumm^ara

148

tomato one of the terms for the patron saint of a village religiously entailed estate entailed estates whose revenues are earmarked for the descendants of the founder entailed estates whose revenues are consigned to mosques, schools, cemeteries and other pious foundations ritual ablutions of Islam ululating cries of joy an implement for leveling furrows and clods of earth raised by plowing land area of each village, about 2,000 feddans clay water-storage vessel reed pipe; a musical instrument

Glossary of Arabic Terms