Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  For the officers of the French expedition, who occupied Egypt by the end of 1790s, Hammam’s state was a model to follow in creating a “national” and “just” government in Egypt comparable to the French Republic.51 For Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, the nineteenth-century Egyptian intellectual and translator of French civil law, Hammam’s state was no less modern than the republican system that he studied in France. He called it jumhuriyya iltizamiyya, or a tax farming republic.52 Al-Jabarti, the eighteenth century Cairene chronicler, attributed similarly legendary characteristics to the Hammam: “The honorable Excellency; the magnificent refuge; the noble and royal in origin; the shelter of the poor and princes; the station and comforter of travelers and caravans; the commander; the most affluent and generous whose generosity covered the near and the far; the honor of the state; and the grand ruler of Upper Egypt. . . . He encompassed in his mind the knowledge of all the matters of Upper Egypt.”53

  Bruce visited the town of Farshut and met with Hammam in the late 1760s. The Scottish man was impressed by the refined manners of this ruler: “We waited upon Shekh Hamam; who was a big, tall handsome man, I apprehended not far from sixty. He was dressed in a large fox-skin pelisse over the rest of his cloaths, and had a yellow India shawl wrapped about his head, like a turban. He received me with great politeness and condescension, made me sit down by him, and asked me more about Cairo than about Europe.”54 Richard Pococke, another British voyager, was similarly impressed by Hammam’s manners upon meeting him. Pococke was accompanied by an Armenian interpreter and an Aleppine merchant doing business in Upper Egypt. When they arrived in Farshut, Hammam’s secretary escorted them to Hammam’s court. “The Sheikh was sitting in the corner of his room by a pan of coals,” noted Pococke. “He rose both when I came and when I left him; his dress was after the Arab manner.” Hammam asked the traveler many questions “with a good-natured smile.”55

  Hammam’s state was a continuation of the reversed core/periphery case in the empire. He established monopolies over most Upper Egyptian trade and commercial agriculture and increased the dependency of the consumerist imperial core in Istanbul on its capitalist periphery. Hammam’s monopolies emerged when Qina’s market in the Indian Ocean system reached its highest point of maturity in the eighteenth century. In fact, it is not a historical accident that the “republic” of Hammam arose in this century when its economic foundations existed outside of the alleged Ottoman world economy. The city of Qina and the other towns of the province, including Qus, Farshut, and Nagada, gradually became some of the most important centers in Egypt for international trade. As historian Fred Lawson illustrates,

  Several Upper Egyptian cities served as bases for this trading network at the turn of the century. Arguably the most significant of these was Qina, a major transshipment point on the Nile river. . . . The older merchant center at Qus was also active in the Red Sea grain and cloth trade during the 1790s, while Farshut and Nagada maintained trading relations with the Hijaz. . . . Any mention of the Sudan requires consideration of the second major commercial network of which Qina province was a part during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—the trade between Sinnar, Dar Fur, and Abyssinia to the south with Cairo and Europe to the north. This network extended over a vast expanse of territory and handled a variety of commodities.56

  Trade in coffee, which was often destined for Istanbul, expanded tremendously in Qina’s Red Sea port of Qusayr, especially as the volume of trade in the Suez port shrank because of less favorable navigation conditions. Ten to twenty ships visited Qusayr every month, while Suez received no more than sixty ships during the whole year.57 Hammam established a monopoly over Qusayr, where he seized an old castle and used it as a lodge for his guests. His own businesses carried wheat from Qina through Qusayr to the port of Jeddah in Arabia. He secured and protected the trade route between the Red Sea and Qina by winning the loyalties of particular Arab tribes, the Bedouin highway raiders, who were roaming the road. He assigned the duty of securing the Qusayr route to the ‘Ulayqat tribe.58

  In addition, East African trade expanded in Farshut. Farshut was the final destination of darb al-jallaba (road of the importers) caravans coming from the Sinnar kingdom of the Sudan that carried slaves, ivory, and more. Again, one of the primary destinations of this precious cargo was Istanbul. Hammam made Farshut—his hometown—the seat of his state in Qina Province, and he monopolized much of the East African trade that passed through the city.59 Farshut also played a major role in establishing Qina’s position as a famous sugarcane and sugar producer.60 Its sugar was an effective competitor with colonial American sugar in Istanbul, the Levant, and elsewhere in the East. Henry Light, a captain of the British royal artillery, noted that Farshut was the area “where the greatest quantity of sugar is made” and added that “the Levant chiefly derives its sugar from it [Farshut]. In no part of the East, which I visited, was colonial sugar to be found; that for the use of the seraglio at Constantinople comes from Fairshoot [Farshut], and is refined with extraordinary care.”61 Hammam monopolized both the sugar industry in Farshut and the entire agricultural production of Upper Egypt. He owned twelve thousand bulls solely for purposes of sugarcane cultivation. In order to sustain this commercial power, he employed numerous plowing machines, waterwheels, flour mills, cows, and oxen and built countless storehouses filled with commercial crops.62

  Hammam gained a respected image in both Egyptian and European records because of the just government he founded in Upper Egypt. He established a power-sharing structure built on a new social contract with many of the region’s subaltern and elite groups. The ultimate goal of this order was to sustain agricultural production, secure the movement of trade, and ensure political stability. In a continuation of the Hawwara government system, Hammam’s contract incorporated peasants producing the commercial crops, educated Copts managing the finances of the state, and Bedouins protecting southern trade routes and carrying goods on their camels. Each of these groups played a vital role in maintaining the stability of Hammam’s regime.

  Hammam held a public council (called hukuma, or government) for villagers, town dwellers, and Bedouins to discuss socioeconomic occurrences and solve disputes through collective consultation. The council, organized at Hammam’s immense ranch in Farshut, held daily, well-attended sessions. Attendees casually came and left the council as they pleased and were served breakfast and lunch from the kitchen of their affluent ruler’s residence.63 In this council, peasants saw Hammam as a respected authority to whom they could appeal regarding disputes over usufruct rights, either between individual peasants or whole villages. The verdicts he issued in his council had the power of legal documents and were taken to the shari‘a court to be notarized and applied by the judge.64

  The second group with which Hammam founded a social contract was elite Copts, especially educated accountants. Hammam’s government was composed of many departments, each of which had its own Coptic auditors working day and night. After spending the day and two-thirds of the night meeting with the people who frequented his public council, Hammam spent the third part of the night with his Coptic bureaucrats dealing with state finances and attending to administrative affairs.65 Hammam’s Coptic secretaries acted as his deputies in villages, collecting the grain tax from peasants and shipping it to Cairo.66 For example, he tasked the brothers Bulus and Jirjis, sons of Manqaryus, with collecting the grain taxes and sending them north. The same brothers also managed, as his agents, his financial transactions.67

  Coptic peasants in particular experienced a golden age under the rule of Hammam, as both eighteenth-century Arabic and foreign sources affirm. During the time of the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt (1798–1801), French scientists and officers asserted that they encountered pleasant memories of Hammam among wealthy and poor Copts of Qina Province three decades after his death. Copts told the French that they missed the days of security and justice under Hammam.68 A Coptic notable who accompanied the returning French forces to France compiled a
treatise on freeing Egypt from the Ottomans and founding an independent republic. The new government that he and his French supporters envisioned was to be “just . . . and national, like that of Sheikh Hammam in Upper Egypt.”69

  Finally, the nomadic Arab tribes were another important social group whose consent was indispensable for the political stability of Hammam’s regime. Hammam requested that the ‘Ababida—the most important tribal group in Qina Province—settle in villages and towns in order to put a halt to highway robbery. After a quarter of a century spent plundering, Shaykh Nimr, the tribal chief of the ‘Ababida, finally settled in the city of Daraw and became a friend and trading partner of Hammam. Bruce narrates, “For the first twenty seven-years of his life, he [Nimr] never had seen the Nile, unless upon some plundering party; that he had been constantly at war with the people of the cultivated part of Egypt, and reduced them often to the state of starving; but now . . . he was old, a friend to Shekh Hamam, and was resident near the Nile.” The two leaders formed a company for Red Sea trade. Hammam and Nimr’s caravans carried cargos of wheat from Qina through Qusayr to Jeddah, and, of course, their caravans were the safest of all that passed through the desert between Qina and Qusayr.70

  Hammam respected the shari‘a court and abided by its rules in political and economic life. He used the court to register administrative matters, such as notarizing and collecting grain taxes from villages, as well as to register his private businesses. Hammam sometimes attended the court himself, but in most cases he sent legal agents with signed letters to the judge.71 His deputies in large towns attended, on his behalf, cases regarding different types of tax registration, business transactions, and social matters. The local administrators of Hammam’s government functioned through the court, as village and town notable shaykhs always attended court sessions that dealt with the economic and social life of the inhabitants of the province, which included buying and selling houses, shops, mills, and land; marriage and divorce; mortgage; and charitable endowment.72 Under Hammam, the shari‘a court in Qina was a place of adjudication for Copts and Muslims alike. Copts registered their transactions in the court and sometimes had Muslim village shaykhs as witnesses.73 Hammam treated elite Copts with whom he had business as his legal equals in the court, since he exchanged properties with them and registered these transactions in order to maintain contractual rights for his minority citizens.74

  Hammam also relied on an Arab tribal code of ethics to resolve communal and individual disputes in his public council.75 In 1757, the people of two villages, Nimsa and Misariyya, violently assaulted each other and subsequently appealed to Hammam’s council to resolve the dispute. Hammam concluded a peace accord between the two parties and mandated that the people of the two villages should first pay their dues to the treasury. If one side killed someone from the other side, the latter would be entitled to revenge and allowed to kill four persons and receive ten bags of blood money. Hammam forbade villagers from crossing the water canal that separated the two villages and decreed that transgressors would be mercilessly punished. On Sunday, which was the local market day, the two parties should mind their own affairs in the market and commit no transgressions against each other; otherwise, severe punishment would be inflicted on transgressors. The Hawwara deputy tax farmers in the two villages were in charge with executing punishments. The notable shaykhs of each village accepted the accord and consented to its stipulations, and the document was registered in the shari‘a court.76

  Copts also frequented Hammam’s council to resolve their disputes. In 1759, two Coptic brothers, Manqaryus and Sidarus, sons of Shunuda the goldsmith, quarreled with another Copt by the name of Habash Mikha’il over their shares in a house that the brothers had inherited from their mother, Ghazal, daughter of Jirjis the priest. Ghazal had inherited a share of the house of her father, who had bought it almost seventy years earlier and registered as his property in the shari‘a court. The disputing parties presented the case before Hammam, who ruled that Manqaryus and Sidarus should retain their property rights to the house, a ruling that the two brothers brought to the shari‘a judge to notarize.77

  Hammam co-opted into his regime one elite Upper Egyptian group in particular: the Ashraf notables, who were Arabs claiming a Prophetic lineage. In his administration, some Ashraf families monopolized the judgeships of the shari‘a courts of Qina Province. The shari‘a scholars from the Habatir family were the only holders of this position in Isna Court throughout the eighteenth century and eventually transformed the position into a hereditary office maintained within the family. They continued to monopolize this post for part of the nineteenth century under Muhammad ‘Ali. In 1692, Qadi Ahmad ‘Ali Habatir was the official judge (khalifat al-shar‘) in Isna Court, and the position remained in his family, passing eventually to his great-grandson in 1839. Because of their elite status, the Habatir family enjoyed immense wealth and owned many different types of businesses and assets, including many houses and tracts of land.78

  Hammam exerted considerable authority over Cairo’s regime. The Ottoman governor pasha was forced to submit to Hammam’s demands, even at the expense of the Mamluk elite. In one incident, Hammam mortgaged the lands of a village to a Mamluk officer, stipulating that he (Hammam) would relinquish his property rights to this village after a certain deadline. Hammam did not pay back the loan in time and yet refused to give up the village. He sent an emissary to the Ottoman governor in Cairo demanding that the governor not issue any decrees acknowledging the officer’s right to the mortgaged lands. Hammam threatened that, should the governor issue such a decree, no more grain or cash provisions would be sent to Cairo. The Mamluk officer never managed to seize the village.79

  Meanwhile, Hammam also built political alliances with rebellious Mamluk factions in Cairo and collaborated with them to overthrow the Ottoman governor. Oppositional Mamluk officers and their soldiers who took refuge in Hammam’s court were Arabized—that is, adopted Arabic language and customs—and became part of Hammam’s army.80 Hammam chose an alliance with the Qasimiyya Mamluk faction. A prominent member of this faction, Salih Bey al-Qasimi, the head of the Pilgrimage Department, was a close friend of Hammam and acted as his business proxy in Cairo. Salih Bey was a large tax farmer in northern Upper Egypt, outside of Hammam’s territory, and his soldiers stayed for prolonged periods with the Hawwaras’ army and learned the clan’s high code of ethics. During the annual pilgrimage season, Hammam sent his friend in Cairo a gift of three hundred camels and various other provisions for the caravan going to Arabia via the port of Suez. Salih Bey later fled Cairo in the wake of political tension and took refuge in Hammam’s realm, where the pair planned a successful military coup against Cairo’s Ottoman governor.81

  The coup went as follows: In the mid-1760s, Hammam supported the most radical action against the sultan when he backed the insurgency of ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, the governor of Cairo. This coup was the product of an alliance between ‘Ali Bey, the Qasimiyya faction, and Hammam. ‘Ali Bey fled Cairo to the south, where Hammam gave him both refuge and logistical support for his separatist plans. Hammam at this time was also sheltering Qasimiyya rebels, including his friend Salih Bey, and integrated them in his own army. He then blocked grain and cash provisions from reaching Cairo and Istanbul. Upon receiving ‘Ali Bey, Hammam mediated between the two groups of rebels to create a unified front. Hammam’s military and financial support was crucial for ‘Ali Bey’s success in eventually deposing the pasha and taking full control over Cairo and the entire northern regime in 1768.82

  ONE STATE, PLAGUE, AND REBELLION ENCORE

  By supporting the coup of Mamluk officer ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, the legendary Hammam committed a fatal mistake. The coup soon resulted in his tragic death and the downfall of the Hawwara regime. The two-state system consequently collapsed as well, but the Ottoman Empire immediately intervened and installed a Cairo-based unified regime that ruled over all of Egypt. Thus, the empire made a second appearance in the south, but it would not be much time
before plague and rebellion followed once again.

  No sooner had ‘Ali Bey established an independent state in the north than he perceived Hammam’s power as an overt threat. He accused Hammam of sheltering other Mamluk dissidents and supporting them against Cairo. In 1769, ‘Ali Bey sent forces to Upper Egypt to exterminate the Mamluk rebels and undermine Hammam’s authority. ‘Ali Bey’s army formed a secret alliance with an ambitious cousin of Hammam, Isma‘il ‘Abd Allah, who fought with the Mamluk troops. In the wake of the betrayal and with his unexpected defeat, Hammam withdrew from Farshut and fled southward to the village of Qammula. Later in that year and in this very village, Hammam died in his bed, at the age of sixty, out of deep grief. His sons were carried to Cairo and publicly displayed in the streets. The Hawwara were further humiliated when ‘Ali Bey seized most of their tax farms. Some Hawwara leaders maintained large tax farms, but the tribal dynasty was overthrown and the clan never returned to power.83

  The independent state of ‘Ali Bey lasted only a few years before the Ottoman army restored full control over Egypt in 1773. The sultan then placed the whole country, including Upper Egypt, under a new Mamluk regime in Cairo. Istanbul abolished the two-state arrangement, after three centuries of existence, and allowed the Mamluk military elite in Cairo to establish authority over the tax farms, trade, and administrative system of the south. Thus, a new one-state system was born in Egypt, ending the six-century autonomy of Upper Egypt that survived from the Mamluk through Ottoman period.84