Read an Excerpt
Imagined Empires
A History of Revolt in Egypt
By Zeinab Abul-Magd UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95653-7
CHAPTER 1
Ottomans, Plague, and Rebellion
1500–1800
In the 1760s, the Ottoman sultan received a report on the state of affairs in Egypt that revealed unpleasant news. Egypt, one of the shiniest jewels in the empire's crown, was not one intact province under the sultan's full hegemony. The eminent officer who compiled the report described the existence of an autonomous state in the south. Seemingly enjoying no access to this state, the Ottoman officer gave brief and incomplete information about its government. According to the report, the autonomous regime in Upper Egypt was ruled by its own Arab tribal regime that did pay an annual tax to the sultan, but Cairo's Ottoman governor exercised no authority over it. About one of its legendary leaders, the report stated,
The Arab named Shaykh Hammam is resident in ... the province of Upper Egypt. He always has in his side four thousand Arab troops, and he controls by right of inheritance most of the villages of Upper Egypt. They [Hammam and his sons] never come to Cairo.... They always pay in full all the money and grains required for the treasury from their village, and they never oppose the tax collection. They themselves appoint and send twenty governors annually to the towns and provinces under their authority, and they collect approximately several thousand purses every year.
Stories about this mysterious independent state recorded by other Ottoman officers reveal more surprises. Interestingly, the peasants who inhabited southern Egypt exercised a degree of leverage over their government to the extent that, on occasions of discontent, they could demand that the ruling elite pack up and leave. Highly impressed with this state, contemporary French observers and, later, Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth century called it a republic. In one incident, in 1695, the ruling Hawwara tribe formed an alliance with separatist military factions in Cairo and went to war against the Ottoman governor. Amid the conflict, plague broke out and was exacerbated due to severe food shortages throughout Egypt. The discontented peasants of Qina, the capital of the southern state, asked their Hawwara leaders to take their belongings and families and leave. "We are people of plowing and harvesting, and more than half of us died. We will no longer fight and disobey the sultanate," said the farmers. The leaders of the tribe departed for the eastern mountains bordering the Nile, but they came back shortly afterward—despite local resentment—with the support of the Ottoman sultan and restored their regime.
The existence of this state without a doubt comes as surprising news to many historians of the Ottoman Empire. Ottomanists traditionally have viewed Egypt as a unified province, controlled centrally by Cairo's military elite and the efficient imperial bureaucracy in Istanbul. Recent theoretical trends add that the imperial "core" in Istanbul made Egypt, along with other provinces in eastern Europe and the Arab lands, into a dependent "periphery." The entire new province was thus incorporated into a hegemonic Ottoman "world economy" that prevailed in the Mediterranean. For Upper Egypt—a whole half of Egypt, in fact the richer half then—this is a mere myth. For three continuous centuries, ever since Sultan Selim's conquest of Cairo in 1517, an autonomous regime formed in the south under a local dynasty. Moreover, the south was a key part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy, the global hegemonic system of that period, of which the Ottoman Empire itself was a known dependent.
This chapter argues that the Ottoman was an imagined empire in Upper Egypt. In the south of the country the core/periphery relationship was reversed: the consumerist imperial core was dependent on a capitalist periphery. Furthermore, when the empire attempted to make an actual appearance in the south, its presence only brought about environmental crises, including the onset of the plague, and eventually triggered subaltern rebellion. This chapter follows the formation of government and economic systems that existed under the independent tribal regime of the south. This state reached its maturity in the eighteenth century, under the government of the legendary Hammam that almost amounted to an early "republic"—as contemporary French observers asserted. Whenever the Ottoman Empire attempted to manifest itself in the south, the chapter demonstrates, its appearance only disturbed the political stability and disrupted an existing social contract between this state and its subjects, which generated subaltern rebellion that the empire then helped to crush. More importantly, the empire's appearance in the south killed people, as it carried with it an "imperial plague" all the way from Istanbul.
ONE SULTAN, TWO STATES: WILAYAT AL-SA'ID
Shortly after Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt, a "two-state" system was born in the new province. The official rulers of Egypt were the Mamluk officers of Turco-Circassian origin who took over Cairo's citadel after the Crusades in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, one fierce Arab tribe, the Hawwara, established de facto control over Upper Egypt beginning in 1380, when, after prolonged wars against the Mamluks, the tribe dominated agricultural properties, trade, and industries in the south. The sultan subscribed to the existing status quo as he concluded peace treaties with the Hawwara and was content to receive the tributes and generous gifts that the tribe sent to Istanbul annually. Meanwhile, the sultan kept the loyal officers of the former Mamluk elite in power in the north but under the authority of an appointed governor pasha sent from Istanbul. Thus, two separate states immediately took shape out of this postconquest arrangement: a settler, military regime in the north; and a native, tribal regime in the south.
Soon afterward, this two-state system was written into law. In 1525, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued the first book of imperial decrees to organize Egypt, Qanunname-i Misir, he regulated the administrative independence of Upper Egypt from Cairo. Wilayat al-Sa'id, or the province of Upper Egypt, was the official name the sultan used to refer to the southern state. According to the new imperial law, the appointed Ottoman pasha, Egypt's governor, in Cairo enjoyed no authority over the southern state's tribal rulers beyond tax collection, and he was not even authorized to punish them if they did not pay. The sultan reserved this right only for himself, and the Hawwara were to report directly to Istanbul. The imperial decree also laid out the Hawwaras' main administrative duties as rulers, including land reclamation, organizing irrigation, collecting taxes, sending annual gifts to the sultan, and crushing rebels from other Arab tribes.
Another imperial law would consolidate the autonomous power of the Hawwara: the landownership code. After conquering Egypt, Istanbul introduced tax farms, or iltizams, as a system of both landholding and tax collection. Each tax farmer won his piece of land, which could amount to several villages, through public auctions. The farmer would keep the land for a period of only three years, during which he maintained its cultivation through local tenants. At the end of each year, the tax farmer collected the land's fixed annual tax, sent it to the Ottoman governor in Cairo, and kept the remainder of the revenue for himself. In the northern military regime, Mamluk officers were the tax farmers of the Delta villages. Hawwara tribal leaders were by far the largest, and at times the sole, tax farmers of the south. More importantly, as a sign of their independence, they maintained lifetime, hereditary rights to their landholdings. On the eve of the seventeenth century, they controlled about 65 percent of the land in Upper Egypt, and the Ottoman governor in Cairo collected revenue from the rest. From the second half of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, Stanford Shaw recounts, the Hawwaras' "rule was formalized by their appointments as hereditary multazims." In the mid-1700s, one Hawwara ruler, Shaykh Hammam, was the sole tax farmer in the entirety of Upper Egypt, from Asyut, through Qina, to Aswan.
Aspiring to limit Hawwara power, the Ottoman pasha in Cairo appointed a governor—a Mamluk officer—in northern Upper Egypt. The city of Girga, closer to Cairo, was made into the seat for this new governor. Official records often referred to Upper Egypt as the province of Girga, or Wilayat Girga, in hope that the city's governor would impose control over the south. Nonetheless, the Hawwara not only established hegemony over incoming governors, they also controlled the very process of appointment in Cairo. When the Hawwara did not approve of a candidate, they blocked the grain tax intended for Istanbul. The Ottoman pasha and the Mamluk elite in Cairo were always forced to concede to the Hawwara. In one incident, in 1696, the Hawwara vetoed the candidacy of Mustafa Bey by threatening to forgo sending grain to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Hijaz, which would damage the sultan's image as the caliph of Muslims. Cairo's council thereafter excluded this candidate. Furthermore, when the Hawwara did not approve of a governor already in office, they simply terminated his tenure by ending his life. In general, the Mamluk governor of Girga stayed in power for an average of only one to three years. Around 1659, one governor, known for his despotic policies, managed to stay for five and a half years; however, his tenure ended abruptly with his murder. His successor faced a similar fate.
The secret behind the rise of the Hawwaras' regime, from the Mamluk through Ottoman times, was the geographic importance of their seat of power: Qina Province, deep in the south of Upper Egypt. The capitalist commercial, agricultural, and industrial wealth of this province constituted the necessary material foundations for an independent state, as it allowed the Hawwara to rise first as an entrepreneurial and then as a political elite. Qina Province was an integral part of the Indian Ocean world economy, the old global system that encompassed the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, East Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. As Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu Lughod, and many theorists of world economy assert, this was the hegemonic economic system from the rise of Islam until the nineteenth century, after which it was disrupted and replaced by a modern European-led system. Through the Red Sea ports of 'Aydhab and Qusayr, the towns of the province (including Qus, Isna, Qina, and Farshut) were connected to Arabian and Yemeni ports and received important global commodities such as spices and coffee. The same towns also received East African trade, either via Nile sailboats or overland caravans, including luxury goods such as gold and slaves. These towns then served as Nile ports that reexported oriental and African commodities north to Cairo and on to the Mediterranean.
Within the Indian Ocean world system, Qina Province was itself a major center of commercial agriculture. As a sugarcane, grain, and cotton producer, the province exported its own refined sugar and abundant grain to the north and sold its textiles to the regional market in East Africa. The Hawwara tribe had monopolized agriculture production in the province since the Mamluk period, and the capital the tribe accumulated allowed them to grow into a dynasty. In fact, the Hawwara initially rose to power as the owners of sugarcane plantations and sugar refineries, when sugarcane was the most important cash crop in Qina Province, especially in the area of Farshut. The Mamluk sultans granted Hawwara notables large lands in Upper Egypt as fiefs, or iqta's, and the Hawwara soon transformed them into lucrative sugar plantations. Upper Egyptian sugar was consumed domestically and exported to Middle Eastern and European countries, including, Italy, southern France, Catalonia, Flanders, England, and Germany.
Evidently, there was a reversed core/periphery relationship between Istanbul and Qina, where the imperial core was actually dependant on the capitalist periphery to provide both sustenance and luxury consumption. After the conquest, the imperial granaries in Istanbul relied primarily on the Upper Egyptian grain tax, especially on wheat, to sustain its immense annual needs. As Shaw asserts, "most of the muqata'at [districts] of Upper Egypt were obliged to deliver their land taxes entirely in grain, and it was these grain payments which provided the entire supply used by the Imperial Treasury to maintain those depending on it for sustenance." In addition, it was the grain of Upper Egypt that the sultan—the caliph of Muslims—relied on to feed the inhabitants and pilgrims of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina each year. Grain from the south was shipped from Qina to the Red Sea port of Qusayr, unloaded at the port of Jeddah in Arabia, and shipped from there to Mecca and Medina.
Furthermore, the sugar of Upper Egypt, especially from Farshut in Qina Province, arrived in Istanbul and Anatolia by land and sea in ever-increasing quantities in order to sustain the needs of the major Ottoman cities, as Shaw also points out. Istanbul annually requested and received hundreds of qantars of Upper Egyptian sugar. The empire also received its essential provisions of Yemeni coffee and African commodities, including gold and slaves, from the Upper Egyptian Red Sea and Nile trade routes. Yemeni coffee came from the port of Mocha to Qusayr and Qina and from there was shipped north. A large portion of the gold and African slaves imported by Istanbul arrived via Upper Egyptian trade routes from the Sudan and Abyssinia.
The stability of the southern regime was based on a social contract between the ruling tribe and different subaltern groups in Upper Egypt. Peasants were the most important social group to which the Hawwara granted political agency; it was upon their grain and sugarcane that the dynasty built its capitalist fortune and subsequent hegemony. The peasants of Upper Egypt were largely either from Arab tribal descent or were Coptic Christians. Arab peasants enjoyed considerable leverage based on tribal networks, making it difficult for rulers to control them. Arab peasants did not deal with the ruling elite in individual terms; rather, the entire clan of a village dealt collectively with their respective tax farmers. This tribal arrangement provided those peasants with considerable power vis-à-vis the Hawwara. Collective bargaining often forced the Hawwara to acquiesce to peasant demands.
This virtual social contract stipulated that Arab peasants would cultivate the land and pay dues to Hawwara tax farmers. In return, the Hawwara were obliged to provide security by protecting the villages against raids from unsettled Arab tribes. The Hawwara generally managed these tribal attacks more successfully than Mamluk tax farmers in the Delta. Shaw affirms, "Their [Upper Egyptian peasants] lot was never as hard as that of the cultivators in Lower Egypt, for their masters were much better able to protect them from raids of other Arab tribes than was the central government." Security was without question the main concern of peasants. When the Hawwara failed to deliver security, the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty was threatened. Whereas the relationship between Mamluk tax farmers and the peasants of Lower Egypt was notoriously oppressive, Upper Egyptian peasants enjoyed a more dignified experience. Shaw writes that "the administration of this tribe [Hawwara] was equitable and beneficent; cultivation was maintained and the welfare of the peasants promoted far better than in Lower Egypt."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Imagined Empires by Zeinab Abul-Magd. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
