Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  Impressed European observers reported how the pasha’s huge and ever-growing capital gained from southern harvests, especially grain, inspired him to invest in “modern” reforms. These are the same famous military, administrative, agricultural, and industrial reforms that made the pasha a celebrated figure in Egyptian and world history. “The next step of accumulating this capital was to invest it in projects that would increase the acreage of land under cultivation and increase production as well as introduce new money-making crops,” a French consul reported.19 Before the decade ended, Muhammad ‘Ali universalized the abolition of tax farming; consolidated his agricultural monopolies; constructed new canals, dikes, embankments, and so on; modernized the army; founded textile factories and imported in European expertise; sent students for education in Europe; and, above all, introduced long-staple cotton to Lower Egypt.20

  Furthermore, the pasha appropriated Qina’s regional Red Sea market and established monopolies over its commerce. Along with Upper Egypt, the conquered areas of the Sudan, Hijaz, and Yemen formed one uniform market, and capturing them put the pasha in control of the Red Sea trade routes and ports that had helped sustain the Cairene economy for centuries. Qina’s Qusayr port, on the Red Sea, was the first of those important trade centers, and Ibrahim also used it as a point of logistical support during his military campaign. Muhammad ‘Ali appointed Ibrahim as the governor of the new southern colonies, along with Upper Egypt, a move that helped maintain the commercial unity of this market for a time. Dreaming of conquering the rest of this traditional market in East Africa, the pasha named Ibrahim the governor of Abyssinia without actually invading the area.21 Muhammad ‘Ali did not waste time in establishing monopolies over Yemeni coffee and other commodities of Indian Ocean trade that came from the ports of Mocha and Jeddah through Qusayr to Qina Province. He also monopolized the Sudanese slave trade and East African commodities that came to the province both through its Nile ports of Isna and Farshut and the overland caravan routes.22

  Moreover, by controlling the Red Sea market, Muhammad ‘Ali appropriated Qina’s textile trade in East Africa and Arabia, which had functioned for hundreds of years based on the exportation of large quantities of textiles produced by the province’s women and Coptic weavers.23 Muhammad ‘Ali founded three modern textile factories in Qina Province, in the towns of Isna, Qina, and Farshut, and he commanded the provinces of Upper Egypt to expand cotton cultivation. To further monopolize the industry, in 1820 the pasha issued a decree banning the operation of any private weaving and textile mills in Egypt, leaving no room for the female and Coptic textile weavers of Qina to carry on their traditional profession. Muhammad ‘Ali even paid his Sudanese soldiers partly in cotton clothes, in order to consolidate state control of the market.24 The pasha’s three factories in the province were successful and worried British textile merchants operating in East Africa and Arabia. Lamenting the inability of British textiles to compete with Qina’s garments, John Bowring’s report stated, “The cotton manufactory at Keneh is on a large scale, and carried on in a building erected for the purpose. There are nearly 1,000 persons employed in it . . . . [The produced pieces] are very readily disposed of, and, in fact, this species of goods is to be found in the bazaars of all towns in Egypt . . . . Though there would seem to be no difficulty in the fabric, it would appear we have not succeeded in imitating the articles in England, and that the native article is much preferred.”25

  In order to ease the transfer of these resources to Cairo, Ibrahim developed a new system of administration immediately following the conquest that was applied for the first time in the pasha’s government—and was afterward extended to the Delta. Ibrahim reversed the Ottoman laissez-faire political economy and instituted heavy state interventionism. He started out by surveying the land of Upper Egypt, using the expertise of local Coptic accountants, and then he modified the tax tables accordingly. He abolished tax farming and confiscated land from large Arab tax farmers, including the remaining leaders of the Hawwara dynasty, rendering them powerless and humiliated. He also confiscated the sizable, previously untaxed farms endowed for religious establishments, the waqf lands, from local shari‘a law scholars.26

  In Qina Province, Ibrahim distributed seeds to every peasant in the beginning of every season and forced them to farm an assigned parcel of land, which sometimes exceeded the capacity of what the peasant and his family could till. To this end, the government built numerous state storehouses to distribute seeds to villages and later to store the collected harvest.27 Ibrahim also established a system to punish those who left any of this assigned land uncultivated or did not pay tax revenues. “If you leave any wasteland this year, I will collect four times as much tax from it,” Ibrahim swore in one of his firm decrees.28 Some peasants did not work because they simply did not have enough cattle to help them farm the land, or so they told Ibrahim. Thus, Ibrahim extended state funds for the purchase of animals; but in order to first ensure that the peasants had told him the truth, he imprisoned and tortured them.29

  At the end of a long decade of subjugation and exploitation of the first colony, three revolts finally erupted in Qina Province and spread across Upper Egypt. These revolts emerged from various villages in the province between 1820 and 1824. Uprisings were rare under the harsh regime of Muhammad ‘Ali, and those of Qina were the only massive rebellions that Egypt witnessed during his reign, aside from two minor insurrections of Arab tribes in the Delta.30 When the first revolt broke out, Ibrahim had already resettled in Cairo, where he lived as a great imperialist, owning several affluently decorated palaces with vast gardens and mills serving his court and wives.31 But even in Ibrahim’s absence, Qina was still enduring the coercion of several other Turkish governors who followed him. The three widespread revolts have captured the attention of many historians who seek to analyze their causes and social composition. Some perceive them as a rural insurgency of peasants attributed to overtaxation, corvée labor, and army conscription. Others insist that they were workers’ revolts that erupted when Qina’s textile weavers and merchants lost their market to the pasha’s modern factories.32

  In the first and by far largest uprising, Ahmad al-Salah, an Arab shaykh, mobilized about forty thousand angry peasants in an attempt to overthrow the government of Muhammad ‘Ali. Luckily, the tragic events of this revolt were meticulously recorded by a British eyewitness, J.A. St. John, who happened to be in Qina during the outbreak while he was traveling up the Nile. Al-Salah called himself al-Mahdi, or the long-awaited messiah, and preached to villagers, who soon elected him their commander. Despite al-Salah’s religious rhetoric, he was originally a merchant with no shari‘a training except for acquired mysticism. He was one of the many long-distance merchants hurt by the pasha’s monopolies over Red Sea commerce, and he started his political career when, returning from Mecca with shipments, he refused to pay taxes to the pasha’s duty officers at the port of Qusayr.33 Al-Salah came from the village of Salimiyya, whose peasants eked out a living with subsistence farming of wheat and beans. His movement spread quickly and, when the number of rebels expanded to tens of thousands, he proclaimed a coup d’état. Elite Arab shaykhs in towns soon joined, and the pasha’s Turkish governor fled the province after surviving an attempt on his life.34

  Al-Salah installed himself as the governor of Qina and Qus. He claimed that the Ottoman sultan had delegated this holy mission to him, saying that “he had an order from God and the Grand Signor to dethrone Muhammad Ali Pasha,” according to St. John’s account.35 Al-Salah immediately seized the government treasury and storehouses and established a new administration for a separatist state. His original plan was to expand his government down the Nile to encompass all of Upper Egypt as far as the province of Asyut. As for the majority of his followers, the wretched villagers of Qina, St. John recounted that they apparently were not fooled by al-Salah’s alleged spiritual revelations, but heavy taxes pressed them to join the rebels.36

  In spite of al-Salah’s messianic prete
nsions, he appeared to be a skilled statesman who knew how to build internal alliances and accommodate existing foreign relations. He maintained religious rhetoric while carefully limiting the side effects that religious fanaticism might generate. When some of his zealous followers proposed decapitating the Coptic population of the province, he promptly halted the action against the native Christians. Aware of Ottoman foreign relations, al-Salah neither preached nor led aggressive actions against Europeans in the province, especially the British, who were then the sultan’s allies against the French. When a group of rebels held a meeting in the village of Armant to plan the murder of the Englishmen in the area, al-Salah condemned and stopped the action, as recounted by St. John:

  During his audience, some of the Prophet’s more zealous followers handed in a requisition to be allowed to decapitate all the Copts, to which the saint answered by an exhortation to general forbearance, urging the propriety of not injuring any one unless compelled. “If you are attacked,” said he, “you may kill, but not otherwise.” . . . He solemnly declared “that the English were his friends, and that he was their friend, and would protect them.” Nay, more, he swore by the Koran and the sword, “that if any one robbed an Englishman, even of the cord of a camel or an ass, he would restore them a camel or an ass in its place.” . . . Two men came from Erment, where there had been a large public meeting, in which it had been proposed to murder the Englishmen. The Prophet however, severely rebuked the person who advised the sanguinary proceeding; and so far from giving it any countenance, sent us a letter assuring us of his friendship, and promising us protection.37

  Barely two months had passed with al-Salah in power when Muhammad ‘Ali sent a large body of troops with gunpowder cannons to Qina to crush the rebellion. It had already been a hard year for the pasha, with an outbreak of the plague in Cairo and conflict with separatists in Greece; however, he still managed to send a great number of soldiers to the south from his newly modernized army. Under the command of Ahmad Pasha, a young Turk no less aggressive than Ibrahim, the troops advanced to Qina, terrorizing the inhabitants of villages and forcing women, children, and men to flee their homes and seek refuge in the Pharaonic temples or in the nearby mountains. Ahmad Pasha tried to persuade the rebels to return to their villages by promising to exempt peasants from the next year’s taxes. As persuasion failed, a bloody war began.

  Through many battles and rounds of victory and defeat, Ahmad Pasha and the troops burned entire villages, destroyed houses, and displaced thousands of women and children. In one village, they put “every soul they met—man, woman and child—to the sword.”38 Interestingly, there were natives of these very villages among the disciplined soldiers of the pasha’s modern army. Finding themselves ordered to kill their own fathers or kin, many of them decided to desert and join the rebels.39 The village of Qammula was turned into a symbolic place of resistance: it was where the former independent ruler and last Arab dynast of Upper Egypt, Shaykh al-Arab Hammam, had died from grief and had been buried after his defeat by the Mamluks of Cairo a few decades prior. One morning, al-Salah recruited thousands of his followers and advanced to Qammula, where he fiercely attacked one of the pasha’s garrisons, achieving a great victory over Cairo’s soldiers. But this was only one victory among repeated defeats. Although al-Salah still claimed to be fighting with support from the angels and the Prophet Muhammad, his followers questioned his heavenly powers. Realizing his inability to expand north to the province of Asyut—his original plan—he told his followers that he had not received the orders to do so; it is not clear whether these orders were expected to come from God or the sultan.40

  Finally, the followers of al-Salah were ruthlessly crushed. Concluding the mission, Ahmad Pasha offered a handsome price for the life of every mutineer. Volunteer Bedouins searched the mountains for fugitive rebels; they came back with heads and received the handsome reward. St. John recounted a disturbing scene of Ahmad Pasha buying the heads of the decapitated insurgents: “The Bedouins in his service scoured the mountains, with considerable success, in search of victims, whose heads were brought down and sold according to the tariff established by the youthful Ahmad.” As for al-Salah, he fled to the Qusayr port and from there to Hijaz, where nobody heard from him again.41 The leaders of the two successive uprisings also carried the name of Ahmad, and these new rebels were brutally crushed in the same manner. By 1824, Muhammad ‘Ali’s Upper Egypt was free of armed rebels and was ready for a new era of colonization à la European style.

  SETTLERS AND BULLS FOR HEGEMONY

  Upon putting down the rebellions, Muhammad ‘Ali sent an urgent decree to all the Turkish governors of the districts and subdistricts of Upper Egypt. “It is imperative,” read the promulgation, “to organize the lands that will be cultivated this year. Bring what they need from machines and cattle, erect waterwheels and everything else. . . . [I have] appointed a special official to work with you [the governors] on this matter. . . . Lands should be assigned in accordance with the number of their inhabitants, and village shaykhs should be urged to serve the crops and erect waterwheels, and registers should be kept .”42 This was the first decree of its kind to reach Qina Province. To adjust to the realities of southern discontent, the pasha changed his methods of internal colonialism, applying European models that were particularly used in the Americas. He colonized by sending settlers and creating plantations; imposing heavy central planning and government intervention in the economy; and maintaining close control of the environment and energy sources. He also created modern institutions of hegemony to allow the political participation of the subjugated populace, though the south nonetheless endured taxation without representation.

  An ever-increasing influx of Turkish settlers from Cairo arrived in Qina Province to assume positions as government bureaucrats and, more important, to establish state and private plantations. Their plantations followed a model similar to what European empires devised in the Americas: they forcefully enclosed large plots—hundreds or thousands of acres—cultivating them with one cash crop, especially grain or sugar, and employing slaves or forced local labor to till them. To establish their social prestige and separate themselves from the natives, Turkish settlers carried the titles of agha and bey, referring to their status within the bureaucratic hierarchy as governors of provinces, directors of districts, or managers of subdistricts. Their sweeping presence in Qina altered the socioeconomic composition of a province historically inhabited by Arab tribes and native Copts, as these Turks purchased large houses in the urban centers of the province and brought their families from Cairo to take up residence in them. On a daily basis, they sent meticulous reports to Muhammad ‘Ali about all incidents, big or small, on every plantation they ran. Back in Cairo, the pasha responded to these reports personally, with equally detailed orders dictating how to handle both important and minute affairs on the plantations and in the province at large.43

  FIGURE 5. An Upper Egyptian village street.

  To allow these state and private plantations to take form, Muhammad ‘Ali introduced fundamental legal reforms in the landownership system. He issued a civil laws that introduced three new types of agricultural properties: ab‘adiyya, ‘uhda, and çiftlik. The ab‘adiyyas were private plantations—originally vacant arable land that the pasha granted for reclamation to bureaucrats, army officers, and co-opted local elite and that was fully or partially exempt from taxation for a number of years. In 1836, the pasha legally transformed these holdings into semiprivate properties that the owners were then allowed to pass down to their heirs and white slaves. By 1842, he fully converted them to private properties. The ‘uhdas were state-owned plantations—originally the confiscated land of runaway peasants who fled their plots after failing to pay overdue taxes or to escape army conscription or corvée labor. The state seized whole villages from fleeing villagers, transformed them into plantations, and assigned their management to Turkish bureaucrats. The plantation manager was obliged to pay the state overdue as well as ne
w taxes. The çiftliks were royal plantations—privately owned by Muhammad ‘Ali and his family, exempt from taxes, and administered by Turkish bureaucrats. The pasha annexed vast lands from villages that failed to pay overdue taxes and added them to his swiftly expanding collection of personal properties.44

  These legal reforms were introduced in the Delta and Upper Egypt alike. Whereas they did not bring fundamental social change to the Delta, as that region was already accustomed to the intensive presence of Turkish landholders from the Ottoman period, they did alter the face of life in Upper Egypt. The south witnessed for the first time the rise of a foreign white elite. In Qina Province, numerous Turkish aghas expanded private, state, and royal landholdings every year.45 In 1837, when ‘Ali Agha, the director of the subdistrict of Farshut, received an ab‘adiyya plantation in one village, he turned a part of it into a family endowment untaxed by the state, with full ownership accruing to the family. The revenue of the plantation would be passed down to his offspring forever and, after they died, to the offspring of the agah’s freed black slaves.46 After accumulating substantial capital, Turkish settlers started expanding their plots by purchasing small and big parcels from the local farmers, in addition to purchasing cattle and machinery.47 Given the hot weather of Qina Province, many of the new elite administered their duties from luxury Nile boats furnished as dwellings. Nonetheless, Turkish settlers were not able to move within the province without armed guards—black slaves and Turks—to protect them against potential attacks from the native inhabitants, which apparently happened frequently.48