Imagined Empires
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.
Imagined Empires
* * *
A HISTORY OF REVOLT IN EGYPT
Zeinab Abul-Magd
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abul-Magd, Zeinab, 1976
Imagined empires : a history of revolt in Egypt / Zeinab Abul-Magd.
pagescm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-27552-2 (cloth : acid-free paper) —
ISBN 978-0-520-27553-9 (paper : acid-free paper)
eISBN 9780520956537
1. Egypt—Politics and government. 2. Peasants—Political activity—Egypt—History. 3. Working class—Political activity—Egypt—History. 4. Government, Resistance to—Egypt—History. 5. Revolutions—Egypt—History. 6. Imperialism—History. 7. Egypt—Colonial influence. 8. Elite (Social sciences)—Egypt—History. I. Title.
DT82.A675 2013
962’.3—dc232013003749
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Imagined Empires, Real Rebels
1 • Ottomans, Plague, and Rebellion (1500–1800)
2 • The French, Plague Encore, and Jihad (1798–1801)
3 • The Pasha’s Settlers, Bulls, and Bandits (1805–1848)
4 • A “Communist” Revolution (1848–1882)
5 • Rebellion in the Time of Cholera (1882–1950)
Epilogue: America—The Last Imagined Empire?
Notes
Bibliography
Art Credits
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was supported by my graduate work in Georgetown University’s History Department and by grants from Georgetown’s Graduate School and Oberlin College. Its production would not have been possible without the invaluable and precious support of many colleagues and friends in the United States and Egypt. First of all, the greatest thanks are due to Judith Tucker, my former advisor at Georgetown University. Late Faruk Tabak of Georgetown thoughtfully helped with earlier stages of writing the manuscript. Many thanks are due to Timothy Mitchell, Khaled Fahmy, and Peter Gran, who were very generous with their time and ideas in discussing earlier versions of the book. Many graduate colleagues have been of indispensable help throughout the years of researching and writing, especially Dina Khalifa, Dina Shehata, Nadya Sabiti, Sara Scalenghe, Mohamed Said Ezz El-Din, Aurelie Perrier, and many others at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
I would also like to thank all the great historians and researchers at the National Archives of Egypt whom I met and had fruitful discussions with, especially Emad Hilal, Magdi Guirguis, Nelly Hanna, Gennifer Derr, Shana Minkin, Alan Mikhail, Lisa Pollard, and Will Hanley. At Oberlin College, I have found much support from many colleagues, including Frances Hasso and Sam White. Furthermore, I have to advance many thanks to Max Strasser and Avi Asher-Schapiro, my wonderful students who copyedited the manuscript. Finally, in Upper Egypt, the dear region about which this book was written, I would like to thank all the revolutionary youth of the south and my parents.
FIGURE 1. Nineteenth-century map of Egypt that shows Qina Province (Keneh) located in the south/Upper Egypt (see arrow).
INTRODUCTION
* * *
Imagined Empires, Real Rebels
Empire is almighty. It is an all-encompassing political entity capable of penetrating places big and small, near and far, and establishing full hegemony. The semidivine omnipotence of empire is made manifest not only in its ability to control the high politics of the metropolis but also in its penetration of the daily life of peoples in the remotest places—in the periphery of the periphery of the empire. Wherever it appears, empire is competent, fast, and successful in achieving its goals and altering people’s lives. But that is a myth. Omnipotent empire was imagined. Although empire managed to extend into the farthest places on earth, it failed in that which it thought itself to be most competent, instead leaving behind environmental devastation and revolt. The history of Qina Province, a small place deep in the south of Egypt, over the last five hundred years proves this case.
On the eve of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, I visited the southern half of the country, Upper Egypt, in order to conduct field research for this book. In the farmlands bordering a small town in Qina Province, I noticed an enormous cylindrical, silver building that looked alien to its surroundings. When I inquired about its contents, I learned that this was a silo for the wheat from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The controversial American food aid to Egypt, which many analysts believe to be a tool of imperial hegemony through the establishment of grain dependency, had made its way to the farthest reaches of Upper Egypt. I also learned that the “informal empire” made an appearance in the province in many other ways.1 For almost twenty years before the 2011 revolution, deposed President Hosni Mubarak’s economic reform program—which followed the neoliberal “Washington Consensus”—deeply hurt the large number of sugarcane cultivators in Qina. The former legal codes of landholding, promulgated by the Arab socialist regime of the 1960s, were reversed by a new code of private property, Law 96 of 1992. Peasants were evicted from land that the state had returned to the elite families of the pre-1952 colonial era.2
Under Mubarak’s overthrown regime, the US presence in Upper Egypt was conspicuously strong, yet failing. Its failure throughout Egypt was a major reason for the eruption of the 2011 revolution. American market reforms, confidently advocated as the most efficient way toward economic development, did not yield results in Upper Egypt, even two decades after their application. The southern provinces, including Qina, were and still are known, to be the most underdeveloped regions throughout the country’s modern history. The UN Development Programme’s annual reports on Arab human development place Upper Egypt at the bottom of the ladder of human development, and several World Bank reports allude to the same fact.3 On the eve of the 2011 revolution, protests against the failed empire spread across the south, especially in Qina Province. The southern provinces were the most rebellious among Egypt’s regions against the central government in Cairo, which applied the dysfunctional US policies of market reform.
Gangs of bandits known as matarid al-jabal, who take refuge in the mountains surrounding the Nile in the south, have grown to symbolize ruthless crime as well as audacious resistance against the state and its failed free market policies. Many popular TV series and movies present a cr
iminal, yet romantic, image of these bandits. They even make their appearance on Facebook: an opposition group of youth, resenting the authoritarian regime that subjugated itself to American domination, named itself after a memorable proclamation by a legendary southern bandit, ‘Izzat ‘Ali Hanafi. The story of ‘Izzat, whose execution filled the newspapers while I was conducting my archival research in 2006, was made into the most popular Egyptian movie two years later. In a key scene in the film, the angry, outlawed protagonist, or ‘Izzat, says, “From today, there is no government. I am the government.” (Min el naharda mafish hakuma. Ana el hakuma.) This fierce political statement immediately grew popular among youth across Egypt and was quickly adopted as the name of the Facebook opposition group.4 Eventually, the south, the north, and Cairo all rose to overthrow the US-friendly, neoliberal regime on 25 January 2011.
Over the last five centuries, many other informal and formal empires have made disturbing appearances in Qina Province and have similarly failed. They were all “imagined empires” that confidently went south and stumbled in applying imperial policies in which they claimed to be, or were under the illusion of being, the most efficient. The failure of these empires generated environmental destruction while altering established systems of land and river management and leaving behind sweeping epidemic diseases. More importantly, they provoked massive subaltern revolts championed by peasants, women, laborers, and ever-ruthless bandits. This book looks at five world empires that showed up in Qina Province: the Ottoman (1500–1800), the French (1798–1801), Muhammad ‘Ali’s (1805–48), the “informal” British (1848–82), and finally the formal British (1882–1950) empires. This book relates a microhistory of the villages and small towns of the province that goes beyond this little-known place to investigate the global history of imperialism and nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against empire.5
This book goes south to Qina Province in order to explore the ignored history of Upper Egypt and to deconstruct established myths about early modern and modern world empires.6 The book’s five chapters, each about one empire that manifested in Qina, investigate the modes of imperial hegemony, the discursive images that empires advocate about themselves, and the empires’ failure to fulfill such images because of their inability to control local resources and subjugate Qina’s peoples. Many of these empires claimed to introduce “modernity” to the colonized peoples of Qina, particularly through market forces, but their form of modernity only dispossessed peasants, repressed laborers, and further subjugated women. With the indispensable assistance of co-opted local elites of the south, imperial modernity and its market economy disrupted existing systems of landownership, irrigation, trade, and more and left behind immense waves of the plague and cholera. Qina’s lower classes, who were harmed—sometimes killed—by imperial incompetence, devised their own modes of both daily-life resistance and massive uprisings against the empire, in which audacious bandits assumed leadership roles. At the end of this book, the epilogue raises questions about an imagined US Empire and its failed market economy in the south, which partially resulted in Qina’s participation in the 2011 revolution.
WHY QINA PROVINCE?
During the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, the small towns and villages of Qina were engaged in many actions of protest, including sit-ins, marches, and strikes. The province’s inhabitants were building on a long tradition of expressing discontent and rebelling. For many centuries, Qina Province was the vibrant capital of an autonomous state in Upper Egypt, and it witnessed many great revolts. Its numerous villages, Nile cities, and Red Sea ports were thriving centers of commercial agriculture, long-distance trade, and manufacturing activities. Egypt’s passage to modernity under consecutive empires terminated the independent state in Upper Egypt, peripheralized the south within the Egyptian centralized government and economy, and relegated its seat, Qina, to utter marginalization.
The historiography of imperialism in Egypt has long focused only on Cairo and the Delta in the north, ignoring Upper Egypt and its revolutions. Narratives of imperial hegemony and local resistance have been written from the point of view of the north, and the voice of the south has gone unheard. The domination of nationalistic, elite, and Cairo-centered approaches in Egyptian history has rendered the narratives of subalterns in a place like Qina Province irrelevant in the larger tale of the country. Upper Egypt does have a different story to tell about its relation with empire—imagined empires. Qina, a seemingly remote and insignificant province, stands out as an alternative case to study, and its uprisings reveal many myths of imperialism.
In 1819, a French traveler by the name of Edouard de Montulé, observed that “after Alexandria, Damietta, Rosetta and Cairo, [the city of Qina] is probably the most important city in Egypt.”7 De Montulé was so impressed by the luxurious life in the city—graceful white buildings, bazaars, restaurants, and bakeries—that he declared it comparable to Paris.8 About two decades before this date, Vivant Denon, a French Egyptologist who accompanied Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops to Upper Egypt, described a vivid scene of Qina’s regional market, with goods from Arabia, East Africa, North Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. In 1799, Denon stated,
We left Kous [Qus], and arrived at Keneh [Qina], where we found a number of merchants of all nations. By encountering the natives of very foreign countries, remote distances seem closer. When we begin to reckon the days required for the journey, and the necessary means of affecting it, the space to be passed over ceases to be immense. The Red Sea, Gidda, Mecca, seemed like neighboring places to the town where we were; and India itself was but a short way beyond them. In the opposite direction the oases were actually no more than three days’ journey off us, and ceased to appear to our imagination as an undiscovered country. . . . The journey to Darfur may be accomplished in forty days, a hundred more are required to reach Tombuctoo. A merchant whom I found in Keneh . . . had often been in Darfur, where the caravans arrive from Tombuctoo. . . . Here we also found many Turkish, Meccan and Moorish merchants, come to exchange coffee and Indian cottons for corn.9
Qina Province had maintained this prosperity for hundreds of years before these two accounts were written. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, historians from the Ayyubid (1171–1250) and Mamluk (1250–1517) periods described scenes of busy trade and pilgrimage routes, advanced educational institutions, and flourishing sugarcane cultivation and sugar industry in and around Qina. Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) described Qina Province’s city of Qus as “full of markets, with extensive facilities and services, full of peoples because of the abundance of the imported and exported commodities brought by Yemeni, Indian, and Abyssinian merchants and pilgrims because it was the stopping place of all, the forum of friends, and the meeting point of the pilgrims of North Africa, Egypt and Alexandria.”10 A recent historian, W.J. Fischel asserts that “Qus, next to Cairo, was the most important commercial center of Egypt at this period.”11 According to Abu al-Fadl al-‘Umari (1301–49), this city had large commercial complexes and numerous inns for the accommodation of international merchants, in addition to luxurious houses, schools of higher education, public bathes, gardens, vast farms, and more. Qina Province was home to various kinds of craftsmen, merchants, large landowners, shari‘a scholars, and wealthy Muslims and Christian Copts.12
Qina Province owed its rise to prominence to being an integral part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy. Before the advent of a modern European “world system,” the Indian Ocean world economy incorporated the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean and served as the engine for Afro-Asian trade. European trade was on the periphery of this global system and was mainly a recipient of its commodities.13 Upper Egypt, especially Qina and its Red Sea ports, was a central meeting point in a regional market that incorporated places such as Hijaz, Yemen, India, Sudan, Abyssinia, and Morocco, and the Upper Egyptian market was an essential trade circle in the vast Indian Ocean market. The economic prosperity of Upper Egypt allo
wed the formation of an autonomous state in the south, whose capital was always a Nile port city within Qina Province. During the Mamluk period, an Arab tribe, the Hawwara, controlled landownership, long-distance trade, and the sugar industries in Upper Egypt, and it founded a powerful dynasty in the south.14
When the Ottoman Empire invaded Egypt in 1517, it did not conquer the south. Rather, it made peace treaties with the region’s ruling elite, leaving the native dynasty in power in return for an annual tribute. During the three centuries of Ottoman imperial rule in Egypt, the country was divided between a military Mamluk regime in the north, whose capital was Cairo, and a civil tribal regime in the south, whose capital was Qina. The southern regime reported directly to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul and maintained administrative autonomy. Later attempts by the Ottomans to annex the south to the northern regime only brought about rebellion and plague. On the eve of the nineteenth century, the French mounted a campaign to “liberate” Egypt from the Mamluk despots of the Ottoman Empire, but they only did so in Cairo and the north. The French failed to control the south and faced a fierce war of Jihad led by native Arab tribes and Hijazi volunteers. This conflict led to a new wave of the plague, and eventually the French had to install the same Mamluk tyrants—the ancien régime—to rule over the autonomous state of Upper Egypt.
When Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (r. 1805–48) came to power in Egypt, he attempted to subjugate Upper Egypt and unify the north and south under a centralized government, ruled from his seat in Cairo. After six long years of vicious wars to conquer the south, Upper Egypt became the “first colony” in Muhammad ‘Ali’s expanding empire. He used the resources of Qina and the other provinces of Upper Egypt to support his military expansion and conquest of new territories outside Egypt. Shortly afterward, between 1820 and 1824, a series of unprecedented massive revolts erupted in Qina Province to overthrow the pasha’s government. Muhammad ‘Ali crushed these revolts and subsequently marginalized the south within his unified state and empire.15
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