Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  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.20

  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.21 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.22 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.”23 Security was without question the main concern of peasants. When the Hawwara failed to deliver security, the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty was threatened.24 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.”25

  The second group with which the Hawwara established a social contract were the Copts, the native Orthodox Christians of Egypt, especially the educated accountants among them. Replicating the model followed by Cairo-based Islamic empires ever since the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, the Hawwaras’ administration relied on Coptic expertise to run the financial system in Upper Egypt. The Hawwara hired Coptic mu‘allims to manage the registers of their tax farms and private commercial businesses as well.26 Nevertheless, the Coptic financial clerks were sometimes subject to persecution when their influence and fortune grew beyond the limits that the Hawwara permitted.27

  Finally, unsettled Arab tribes, or the ‘Urban, were another important social group with whom a political pact was necessary in order to ensure the stability of the Hawwara regime. The ‘Ababida were the main tribe roaming Qina Province. They attacked villages and towns during daylight, robbed people in market places, and freed prisoners from jail.28 Despite their criminal actions, the ‘Ababida and their shaykhs, as many European observers who were acquainted with them witnessed, were not naturally immoral people. They committed these crimes mostly as rebellious responses to state injustice. The tribe’s shaykhs were fine men known for their generosity and hospitality; they kept their word and fulfilled their promises, as contemporary European visitors noted. The Hawwara co-opted the ‘Ababida through peace agreements and placed the ‘Ababida in charge of security matters. The ‘Ababida were tasked with protecting certain villages and defending the Qusayr port’s trade routes against the raids of other Arab tribes.29

  Hawwara tax farmers organized their relationship with peasants within the rules of Islamic law. They leased land to peasants through sharecropping contracts, according to which the tenant was obliged to pay the land’s tax and hand in a share of the crops to the tax farmer. In addition, Qina’s peasants held usufruct rights (furugh wa nuzul) to the land and could pass them down to their heirs. They exercised the rights to buy and sell agricultural land, which took the form of obtaining or relinquishing usufruct rights. They also enjoyed the right to mortgage their landholdings. In addition, peasants rented plots from Hawwara notables who held usufruct rights to large farms. The lease periods in these cases were as short as one year and as long as nine years. Justice was carried out in shari‘a courts in order to minimize the exploitation of peasants.30 Like their fellow Muslims, the Coptic peasants of Upper Egypt enjoyed usufruct rights, in accordance with Islamic law, and rented land from the tax farmers. Transactions in landholding occurred without discrimination between Copts and Muslims.31

  The shari‘a courts of Upper Egypt, the primary place of adjudication in the Hawwara legal system, reflected the south’s autonomy. The provincial courts of Grand Cairo and the Delta were part of the state apparatus, and their judges often acted as part of the state bureaucracy. They adopted the Hanafi school of jurisprudence as the official legal framework, published the sultan’s decrees (fermans) and other important administrative laws, and recorded grand military victories and political events in the empire. Among the duties of the provincial judge in the Delta was solving disputes among Mamluk tax farmers and investigating cases of negligence in land cultivation.32 In contrast, the courts of Qina Province were entirely independent of Cairo. The registers of the city of Isna’s court, for instance, had no first page (preamble, or dibaja) referring to an official affiliation of this court with the Ottoman regime in the north. They did not publish any Ottoman decrees, as they were not obliged to apply them, and did not record any Ottoman or Mamluk events, since these were irrelevant to political matters in the province.33

  Four main schools of Islamic law dominated courts of the Muslim world at this time, and the Hawwara adopted one that differed from both Istanbul and Cairo. Whereas Istanbul adopted the Hanafi school as its official legal framework, and the Shafi‘i school was dominant in northern Egypt, the Hawwara adopted the Maliki school because it was already used in southern courts and prevalent among Upper Egyptian scholars when the tribe came to power. Opinions from the Shafi‘i school were still used in Qina’s courts, for instance, but to a minor degree. Besides Islamic law, the Hawwara applied ‘urf, or the code of local traditions. ‘Urf in Upper Egypt referred to the Arab tribal code of ethics and collective government and was practiced in the Arab public councils, or majalis al-‘arab. ‘Urf was also officially considered in local shari‘a courts.34

  The Hawwara built their own system of regional relations around Qina’s trade routes. The traditional method of forming external alliances took place through intermarriage between dynasties, an act in which Hawwara family members participated with other ruling families in their Arab trade network. Hawwara family members married the daughters of the sharif of Mecca and became in-laws of the Hijaz ruling elite. The Meccan wives owned properties in Hijaz that their Hawwara husbands managed on their behalves. Interestingly enough, Hawwara influence in North Africa was so extensive that for a period the tribe ruled Cyrenaica, the western Libyan province. In the eighteenth century, the Hawwara ruler carried the title of the commander of Upper Egypt and Cyrenaica, or amir al-Sa‘id wa-Barqa.35

  The Hawwara built political alliances with specific Mamluk factions in the northern regime as well. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cairo had two primary Mamluk factions: the Faqqariyya and the Qasimiyya, who sought power and competed to form a strategic alliance with the Hawwara. Obtaining the governorship of Girga, in northern Upper Egypt, was crucial in th
e Faqqariyya-Qasimiyya rivalry because of both the economic resources of the south and the potential political benefits of an alliance with the Hawwara. Mamluk rebels opposing the imperial Ottoman regime traditionally escaped to Upper Egypt, where they received logistic support from the Hawwara and launched wars against their incumbent rivals in Cairo.36

  FROM PLAGUE TO REBELLION

  On the eve of the eighteenth century, the two-state system in Egypt faced a severe crisis. As war erupted across Egypt, both regimes almost collapsed. While Cairo’s Mamluk factions fought each other in a dispute over power, the Hawwara sought further independence by withholding their taxes from Cairo. The empire desperately attempted to contain the collapse using its best military strategies. The political turmoil invited massive environmental devastation: the poor throughout Egypt suffered food shortages and high prices, and the plague broke out immediately afterward, both in Cairo and in the north. The empire’s failure to restore political stability in the two regimes only contributed to the spread of the epidemic. Moreover, the empire’s attempt to make its presence felt in Upper Egypt took place at the expense of the subalterns: it sabotaged their first considerable uprising against the Hawwara.

  In 1695, an Ottoman chronicler reported that the two incumbent Mamluk factions of the military regime in Cairo—the Qasimiyya and the Faqqariyya—intensified their competition over revenue and control of the Girga office. Their conflict was not new. It had erupted during several other major incidents through the previous decades when dissident factions revolted against the Ottoman governor pasha.37 Capitalizing on political turmoil in the north to further their autonomy, the Hawwara stopped sending their grain tax to the pasha in Cairo. Ahmad al-Damurdashi, an eighteenth-century officer and chronicler, relayed that the “Hawwara had sized the villages producing the kushufiya [lands assigned to the Ottoman governor in Cairo] revenues by obtaining taqasit [title deeds] and turning them into iltizams [tax farms] . . . and . . . were not concerned about the governor Pasha because they had agents among the notables of Cairo who purchased the jiraya [allowances in-kind] for 30 nisf feddan an ardabb. . . . The imperial granaries do not receive a single ardabb from the Hawwara.”38 Consequently, an economic crisis broke out not just in the north but across all Egypt. Commodity prices increased fourfold and some food staples, such as wheat, barely, and beans, disappeared from the markets. The crisis intensified in the next year, with low Nile inundation and a subsequently dire harvest.39

  Amid the conflict, the plague broke out in Cairo. The Egyptian chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti recounts that bodies of the impoverished dead were collected from the streets, washed in state public baths, and buried en masse.40 It was an “imperial” plague, resulting from the empire’s incompetence in maintaining the stability of the two-state system. According to the basic sultanic law regulating Egypt’s administration, the Qanunname, a main duty of each state was agricultural organization, or ensuring the control of irrigation and drainage during the annual floods. Some contemporary European observers argued that the reason behind the sudden appearance of the plague was mismanagement of the Nile water after the flood, neglect of stagnant swamps, and low Nile inundation. This wave of the epidemic erupted during military conflict and a time of low Nile flood, when the two regimes neglected water control. Although this outbreak of the plague did not make it to Upper Egypt—as the region’s dry air and hot weather mostly made it immune41—the impoverished population of the south was migrating to Cairo and sweeping its hungry streets, only to die there in the epidemic.42

  Two years after this tragedy, in order to subjugate the southern regime of the Hawwara, Sultan Mustafa Khan issued a decree to send a Mamluk army equipped with the latest military technology from Cairo to Upper Egypt. The Supreme Council, or al-Diwan al-‘Ali, of the governor pasha assembled to read the sultan’s letter that commanded thus: “To Husayn Pasha. As soon as this noble receipt reaches you, you are to announce a general call for arms . . . proceed to Girga and destroy the Hawwara tax farmers of Upper Egypt who sized the kushufiya villages [the tax farms of the pasha]. Take note and do not disobey.”43 The Mamluk officers obeyed. ‘Abd al-Rahman Bey promised to recover the villages seized by the Hawwara, in return for which he would be appointed the governor of Girga for three years. He made sure to have an official deed registering this promise. He equipped his army with two cannons, ammunition, an artilleryman, and a ferman granting amnesty. More importantly, he formed an alliance with a dissident faction from the northern Hawwara against the tax farmers of the southern Hawwara who controlled the tribal regime.

  In response, the southern Hawwara were ready with an army of peasants and Nubians. After a long fight, they lost the battle. The Mamluks occupied their capital town in Qina Province, Farshut, and the Mamluk soldiers plundered their properties and took their women. They looted the Hawwaras’ oil mills’ machinery, flour mills’ grounding stones, slaves, horses, and camels in Farshut and sent the spoils north by boat. Many of the peasants of Upper Egypt died in the battle, but the ruling Hawwara tax farmers were unharmed.

  It was time for the southern peasants, who resented the destruction that the Hawwara regime had inflicted on them, to rebel. The peasant leadership, of Arab tribal origin, visited the defeated leaders of the Hawwara in Farshut, saying, “We are people of farming. More than half of us died [because of the war]. We no longer want to fight and disobey the sultanate.”44 In response, the tribal ruling elite took their families and precious belongings and escaped through the western mountains with the goal of departing farther west. The next morning, peasant leaders walked from Farshut to meet with ‘Abd al-Rahman Bey in his camp in order to serve him breakfast and show submission to his new order. They relayed to him what happened between them and the Hawwara and assured him again that they were the subjects, or ra‘iyya, of the sultan. Then they pledged allegiance to Cairo and Istanbul. The bey appointed Mamluk tax farmers to replace the Hawwara in all of their former villages. News of the bey’s victory and the Hawwaras’ escape was relayed immediately to the sultan in Istanbul.45

  However, after supporting the subalterns in the beginning, the Ottoman imperial center sabotaged their rebellion. It did not take the Hawwara long to return and restore their full control over Upper Egypt. “In every place, money . . . buys men prestige and glory. . . . It is the tongue for he who wants to be eloquent . . . and the weapon for he who wants to fight,” read a poem recited by an Ottoman official during negotiations to reinstall the tribe.46 The Hawwara purchased their regime back from the sultan and his proxy administration in Cairo. After the Hawwaras’ departure to the mountains, they had taken refuge with an Arab tribal leader, al-‘Ayd, who gave his home to their families and saved their remaining properties. They asked the Arab leader to find them a merchant going Cairo to carry a message to their allies among the incumbent Mamluk officers there. He found a suitable merchant and they rented a boat to carry him—and their important message—north. Upon receiving the message, the officers—the sultan’s appointed bureaucrats—inquired about the amount of money that Hawwara leaders might have to assist in buying back their landholdings and restoring authority over the southern villages.47

  As soon as the Hawwara received the response, they left for Cairo, bearing shipments of wheat to the Mamluk minister of mint. They arrived secretly at night and after dining spent the night at the minister’s palace. An allied officer said, “Ask them if they have enough money to arrange to things.” The Hawwara leaders responded, “Whatever you request is available. Just get us back our villages.” The officer was so pleased by this response that he recited the abovementioned poem stating that money could buy everything. In a long session over a heavy meal and coffee, they agreed to plot against ‘Abd al-Rahman Bey, have the pasha remove him from his position as the governor of Girga, and give the Hawwara back their tax farms. The plot succeeded and the newly appointed governor of Girga became a close ally of the Hawwara.48

  AFTER REBELLION: A SOUTHERN “REPUBLIC”
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br />   Two decades after the onset of this environmental crisis and peasants’ rebellion against the tribal regime, a republic was born in Upper Egypt. Upper Egypt was still an autonomous state governed by the returning Hawwara, but it was now based on a new social contract between the Hawwara and the subaltern classes of the south, to appease the latter. This republic emerged because of internal social conflicts and dynamics, in which the distant empire played no role aside from receiving annual tribute. Furthermore, the republic had its own political and social institutions, divorced from the imperial system. It was the state of Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam Ibn Yusuf.

  Hammam was a legendary leader who founded a state that lasted for forty years, from the 1720s until 1769. He was born in Farshut around 1709 to a Hawwara ruler and was raised to inherit his father’s position. Hammam unified Upper Egypt under one tax farmer, himself. Between the 1720s and 1730s he added extensive lands to his already vast inheritance and became practically the sole tax farmer in the entirety of Upper Egypt from Asyut to Aswan. His lands were officially lifetime tax farms that he could pass to his heirs or, in legal terms, were akin to private property purchased from the sultan.49 With his independent position, he bypassed Cairo and established direct relations with Istanbul. James Bruce, a contemporary British traveler who had the pleasure to attend Hammam’s court, observed, “This Shekh was a man of immense riches, and, little by little, had united in his own person, all the separate districts of Upper Egypt, each of which formerly had its particular prince [from the Hawwara leaders]. But his interest was great at Constantinople, where he applied directly for what he wanted, insomuch as to give a jealousy to the Beys of Cairo. He had in farm from the Grand Signior [the sultan] almost the whole country, between Siout and Syene [Asyut and Aswan].”50