Michael Ezekiel Gasper is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University.

The Power of Representation

Publics, Peasants, and Islam in EgyptBy Michael Ezekiel Gasper

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5888-8

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………ixNote on Transliteration……………………………………………………………………….xiIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………11. The Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question……………………………………………152. People, Peasants, and Intellectuals………………………………………………………….623. Five Peasant Characters in Search of Bourgeois Identity or ‘Afandis in Gallabiyas…………………1084. Scientific Agriculture: Cultivators, Agriculturalists, or Peasants?……………………………..1485. The New Peasant, Colonial Identity, and the Modern State……………………………………….180Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………..217Notes……………………………………………………………………………………….229Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………263Index……………………………………………………………………………………….283

Chapter One

The Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

* * *

This chapter presents a general outline of the major historical questions of nineteenth-century Egypt in order to frame the argument of the entire book and link the concrete historical events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unexpected ways. The reader should note that the expansion of cotton production in the wake of the blockade of the Southern states during the American Civil War and the introduction of a new European-inspired legal regime in Egypt resulted in greater interest on the part of various social and political constituencies in the peasants and the conditions under which they produced and consumed.

The emergence of the Islamic modernist movement is an essential component of this story. This chapter accordingly lays out the case for the centrality of Islamic modernism in the unfolding of Egyptian cultural history. I maintain that Islamic modernism played a decisive role in the cultural products of the new media in Egypt as well as in the wider Muslim world. Islamic modernism linked the discourses of moral reform and the imperative to build a modern Muslim society with questions of political sovereignty and public interest. It also provided new models of familial and societal relationships and personal comportment while outlining the proper desires and aspirations for “civilized” Muslims. These new models had a direct impact on the social contours of modern Egypt in general and on the place eventually occupied by the peasant majority in the new social geography in particular.

INTRODUCTION

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, intellectuals, journalists, political activists, and self-described reformers debated the causes and consequences of the abject state of Egyptian peasants. Discussions were dominated by such questions as the disproportionate tax burden borne by the fallahin, the post-cottonboom economic crash, the monetization of the Egyptian economy, and the repercussions of the newly established Mixed Courts on the peasants’ holdings. These issues formed the backdrop of the political and social reform projects in which some of these figures became involved.

At the same time religious reformers and social and political activists worked to achieve what they considered a complete societal transformation or revitalization. To a large extent their concerns crystallized around a narrative of Muslim decline. One finds a veritable host of contemporary accounts of the ways in which Muslim society fell into its present “wretched” and “moribund” state. Muslim society had lost its dynamism as its sense of purpose and shared endeavor waned. Superstition and a slavish, unthinking imitation of the past handicapped Muslims in all their worldly and spiritual pursuits.

I will proceed to discuss the economic and political milieu that produced the new urban intellectual classes of writers, activists, and reformers in the nineteenth century. These groups were responsible for the vitality of public discussion around this historical narrative of decline; they also played an important role in the functioning of the modernizing state apparatus. The history of the Egyptian public sphere and the increasingly wide dissemination of opinions and ideas are inseparable from the emergence of these new social groupings in Egypt. An examination of their writing offers a unique window into the period’s history. I suggest throughout the following chapters that we read their words as self-reflexive meditations on both themselves and on Egypt as a collective social and political project. Their public writing was instrumental in laying the foundations of Egyptian political modernity. Their observations about various kinds of issues and their public deliberations, as well as the controversies they entered into, were essential to the development of new concepts of citizenship; notions of political rights; and questions about democracy, equality, and morality.

At the same time, in order to explicate the revolutionary nature of change occurring at that time the historian must examine the history of the incipient public sphere through more than simply cataloging debates and identifying the partisans of particular arguments or policies. Indeed, our exploration of the public sphere is not exhausted by such work; it merely serves as an introduction. These pages propose accordingly that we look at the public sphere also as a site for the deployment of a form of power that was experienced as free social exchange. This form of power worked through the spaces of novel forms of social exchange. Through literate Egyptians’ participation in these new spaces of interaction and exchange, they were impelled to possess desires and to describe their interests in ways that facilitated the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. These desires and interests were brought together and assigned positive value under the rubric of “civilization.” In effect, being “civilized” came to mean to aspire to political modernity. Likewise, through acting publicly, participants were encouraged to reject wants and to avoid pursuits that were contrary to the projects of modernity. Such wants and pursuits were understood as “ignorance,” “superstition,” “backwardness,” and “blind imitation” or “languidness.” As we will see, these terms came to represent the attitudes and behaviors of the peasantry. Thus, through our study of the practice of public discussion we will see how the “backward peasant” and the “civilized urbanite” subjects were constructed and authorized, in part, through this new form of power.

The following pages chart the early stages of the emergence of the modern Egyptian political subject by looking at the treatment of the fallah question during its formative period. Specifically, such representations of peasants as those found in the work of the satirists ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Yaqub Sannu’ generated new knowledge and fresh information about peasants on the one hand; at the same time, they created the ground on which a new gendered and civilized urban figure operated. These texts valorized this figure as the living embodiment of the future of Egypt-as-moral-community while proffering a peasant subject as an obstacle to achieving that future. As we will see in the subsequent discussion, a composite portrait of the civilized urbanite was presented as the ideal Egyptian political and moral subject.

MONOPOLY, MARKETS, AND THE GROWTH OF EXPORT AGRICULTURE

Markets

By the close of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mehmet ‘Ali, a Mamluk who had come to Egypt with the Ottoman forces sent to confront the French after their 1798 invasion, had consolidated his position as the supreme ruler of Egypt. He accomplished this feat by replacing the inefficient tax-farming [iltizam] system with a system of government monopolies; in the process he rid himself of potential rivals among the often mutinous tax-farmers. As is well documented, ‘Ali’s tight grip over trade enabled him to secure direct control over most of the agricultural production and distribution within Egypt and gave him complete mastery over the lucrative export trade. In essence he became the only export merchant in all of Egypt.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1820s, the monopoly system of ‘Ali’s regime progressively extended its control over an array of crops, particularly those cultivated for export, such as cotton and wheat. Producers were obliged to sell their harvests at fixed prices to government storehouses. These storehouses eventually stopped paying the agricultural producers in cash and instead paid them with coupons. The resultant decrease in money circulation, together with government monopolies applied to an ever wider array of crops, severely damaged market farming but proved to be a boon to Mehmet ‘Ali’s efforts to regulate production. Through these controls he obliged peasants to grow only certain kinds of crops, such as those that could be exported-primarily wheat and rice, and then after 1820, cotton.

That said, it is important to note that even during this period of government monopoly Egyptian market agriculture continued. The weekly and thrice-monthly markets for livestock, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and dairy products found in many provincial towns were still held, if on a smaller scale. The command economy of the early nineteenth century did not completely supplant an ancient and complex commercial market system. Market agriculture for export, especially in wheat, had been an important part of Egypt’s commercial activity for centuries. In contrast to historians who maintain that Egyptian commercial agriculture emerged after the end of the monopoly system, Ken Cuno has argued that market farming returned and rebounded in the 1840s. Indeed, Cuno’s work challenges many of the assumptions about nineteenth-century Egyptian economic history found in the work of such scholars as Charles Issawi, Gabriel Baer, ‘Ali Barakat, Ra’uf Abbas, and Roger Owen. Cuno argues that the commercial and financial framework supporting agriculture that historians associate with the late nineteenth century was in operation long before this period. He found evidence of widespread commercial agriculture, a monetized economy, moneylenders traveling throughout rural Egypt, and de facto inheritable property rights among even small peasant landowners centuries earlier than historians had previously thought. He does concur with other historians, however, that the nineteenth century was a unique period for a number of reasons-not the least of which were the scale of export production brought about by the introduction of long-staple cotton and the transformation of trade patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. Cuno sums up his contribution by stating that historians should revise the thesis that the appearance of the West introduced something unprecedented into Egypt that transformed the mode and relations of production, and that they should instead regard the emergence of Western-centered markets as simply a corollary of the reemergence of “market relations and commercial agriculture” in Egypt.

Low government purchase prices paid by the monopoly system drove up the numbers of peasants and rural notables falling into debt. The results of these pressures were predictable. Peasants abandoned the land in large numbers to escape their mounting debt, the imposition of military conscription, and the increasingly onerous corve. The abandoned lands were then “reassigned” to those seemingly able to pay the arrears and cultivate the properties. Those families receiving these grants, if unable to pay the arrears and farm the new land, were not immune from the harsh treatment meted out to even the humblest debtors. The family of the great educator and geographer, ‘Ali Mubarak (1824-1893), is a case in point. His relatives from the village of Birnibal al-Jadid enjoyed the prestige brought by education and their position as the local prayer leaders and shari’a court judges. After receiving a grant of abandoned land, but failing to meet the demands of the local tax collector, the members of Mubarak’s family were subject to beatings and imprisonment “just like the peasants”; in the end they too abandoned their village.

It was not until years after the end of Mehmet ‘Ali’s rule and the demise of his monopoly system that the Egyptian cash economy fully recovered and agriculture became reoriented more fully to capital-driven market production. During the years of transition back to a cash economy, however, continuing shortages of cash obliged the poorest cultivators to continue to sell their crops to government storehouses. They could pay their taxes in kind at the government depots; the value they received for their produce, however, fell far below the prices that could be obtained in the open market. Moreover, the promissory notes the cultivators received in exchange were only redeemable in payment for the following year’s taxes. As a result, the legacy of Mehmet ‘Ali’s monopoly continued to affect the humblest cultivators through the 1840s. The persistence of its after effects had dire consequences for the productive capacities of Egyptian agriculture, driving Egypt’s rulers in the late 1840s up until the early 1860s to take positive steps to protect small cultivators. For example, the 1847 land law provided a framework for adjudicating disputes arising out of confusion between customary or Islamic law on the one hand and government decrees on the other. Adjudication was necessary as the peasants reclaimed lands abandoned during the Mehmet ‘Ali period. Even some peasants unable to reclaim all of their land were assured of a livelihood through smaller grants of land. The government also forbade European merchants from dealing directly with peasants, to protect them from debt. And later it eliminated the octroi or internal tariff on goods brought to the cities from the countryside.

As a result of the early nineteenth-century expansion of trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, Egyptian commercial agriculture quickly developed and surpassed its pre-Mehmet ‘Ali levels when it was revived in the 1840s. The expansion of market agriculture was fueled by such export crops as wheat and cotton. Although long-staple cotton had been grown in large amounts from the 1820s, it became increasingly cultivated over the course of the early nineteenth century. Cotton provided more than 50 percent of Egypt’s exports before the huge expansion of cotton cultivation caused by the American Civil War’s disruption of Southern cotton production. Because of Egypt’s emphasis on export agriculture, especially cotton, by 1900 the country had become a net importer of cereals to feed its rising population. With the excellent potential for high profits, large numbers of cultivators, even many small and medium landholders, turned to growing cotton. Market agriculture became increasingly oriented toward the export rather than the local market.

Mehmet ‘Ali’s fourth surviving son, Sa’id (1822-1863), ruled as a viceroy or wali between 1854 and 1863. The Ottoman title conferred on Egypt’s ruler was wali [or vali; usually translated as “governor”] until Mehmet ‘Ali’s nephew Isma’il (ruled from 1863 to 1879) paid the Porte [the name by which as the Ottoman government was known] a substantial sum to have the title “Khedive” made official in the early 1860s. Sa’id was said to be something of a Francophile-at least in comparison with his nephew Abbas (1812-1854), whom he followed. Perhaps this preference for the French is the reason for his granting the concession to build the Suez Canal to his friend Ferdinand de Lesseps. Sa’id encouraged the revitalization of market relations in local production by returning Lower and Middle Egypt to paying taxes in coin rather than in kind, as had become customary during the Mehmet ‘Ali era. Sa’id’s order immediately benefited moneylenders and spurred some agents of Alexandrian merchants into entering the moneylending business because some cultivators, especially cotton growers whose production required large amounts of cash for irrigation and labor, found themselves short on ready cash when the tax collectors arrived. This trend toward monetization quickened throughout the second half of the nineteenth century until Khedive Tawfiq (1879-1892) decreed in 1880 that even in regions where the economy was not fully monetized, such as Upper Egypt, taxes should be collected in coin.

The economic backdrop of Tawfiq’s order was the unraveling of Egypt’s finances due to massive foreign debt accumulated over the previous twenty-five years. The buildup of debt stemmed from such huge public works projects as the Suez Canal and from the sudden collapse in cotton prices that occurred after the end of the American Civil War; the British, perhaps unfairly, also blamed the profligacy of Egypt’s rulers. British views of the Egyptian royal family were influenced by travel literature, some of it clearly fantastical. One can observe this influence in many of the opinions voiced in official British documents of the time.

(Continues…)

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