The new settler elite formed an indispensable alliance with segments of the old native elite, whom the empire co-opted. Among those co-opted groups were local judges hired in shari‘a courts, village shaykhs serving the plantations, merchants whose boats transported the pasha’s monopolized goods, and Coptic merchants and accountants administering provincial finances. The new and old elite quickly intermarried and became business partners. Turkish bureaucrats married the daughters of upper-class Arab families, and rich Arab men married the daughters, sisters, and sometimes divorcées of aghas.49 The settler and native elite founded commercial companies that traded in grain, Sudanese slaves, textiles, and more. Turkish partners entered those companies only by contributing shares to the principle capital or extending credit, or sometimes they were fully involved in the business with their own Nile boats and employees.50 A business contract concluded in Isna’s shari‘a court, in 1836, reveals these new colonial realities in Qina Province. Hijjo Agha, working for the office of the city governor, appointed Shaykh Ibrahim al-Fawi, the chief of the merchants’ guild in the city of Isna, as his legal agent to buy, on his behalf, a share in a commercial boat and its equipment from the company of Khalil Ibrahim the Copt and Hajj Ahmad ‘Isa al-Asyuti. The Turkish bureaucrat, the Copt, and the Arab ended in each owning one-third of the boat, which could carry up to 13,400 liters up and down the Nile.51
The new plantations hired Qina’s peasants as seasonal labor and the plantations also used slaves. Laborers were also rented out to local farmers through sharecropping contracts. The slave trade in the Sudan continued to be a significant commercial sector in Upper Egypt during this period, but now local merchants and Turkish settlers collaborated closely in the buying and selling of slaves in order to secure more laborers for the plantations.52 Many families of enslaved laborers ran away from the plantations to escape oppressive treatment.53 Similarly, seasonal local labor fled the land to escape the repression of a foreign colonial elite. When it was reported that a peasant from the royal plantation of Armant ran away, taking with him his animals and properties, the orders of the Turkish provincial governor were strict: to arrest him with everything he had and send him back to the manager for punishment and probably to resume forced work.54 Ironically, even tenants or sharecroppers deserted their plots and fled to hide in other villages, resenting the high taxes collected from them in-kind and in cash.55 In service of the plantations, village shaykhs collected corvée laborers, who spent months at public work sites away from their home villages. These laborers had to dig canals, construct dikes, and build bridges, and many ran away to escape unpaid, compulsory duties.56
Turkish settlers were not always efficient or rigorous managers of the plantations, which allowed native sharecroppers to take advantage of their overseers at every possible opportunity. One of the largest royal plantations in Qina was in the area of Armant, which mainly produced grain and sugar. The sharecroppers in Armant occasionally bargained with the Turkish administration to increase their percentage of the harvest. Before the beginning of the winter grain season of 1835, realizing the vulnerability of the state in matters concerning grain, the sharecroppers sent a petition to the Turkish governor of the province asking for an increase in their share from one-sixth to one-third of the harvest. Apparently the request took an aggressive form and a crisis mounted inside the plantation between a weak Turkish manager and the sharecroppers. The governor eventually decided to increase their share to one-fourth; nonetheless, two years later, the same sharecroppers refused to pay their dues to the weak manager. Moreover, they proposed to administer the plantation themselves. Information reached the general inspector of Upper Egypt that this manager was inefficient, ignorant of state laws, and, more important, not on good terms with the farmers, who in turn exploited his weakness by refusing to submit the product of their labors and delaying their work. The governor declined the farmers’ proposal to administer the plantation and instead replaced this manager.57
Aside from administering the plantations, the Turkish bureaucrats applied Muhammad ‘Ali’s new colonial system of heavy state intervention in the economy and close control of the environment. They took charge of enforcing the pasha’s new laws and orders pertaining to land assignment to small peasants, water and irrigation organization, industrialization, and allocation of sources of energy. In Qina Province, the Turkish bureaucrats controlled the process of assigning native peasants small plots of land for compulsory cultivation and forced them to till this land and pay its annual dues in-kind and in cash according to a set timetable that matched the harvesting seasons. Bureaucrats hired village shaykhs to keep these farmers working on their plots, collect taxes, and hunt down runaway peasants who deserted their land and fled their villages after failing to pay taxes. In water organization, the bureaucrats were assisted by modern chief engineers (bashmuhandis), who arrived from Cairo to supervise the building of new dams and the digging of new canals, while village shaykhs collected corvée laborers to work for extensive periods on these public projects. In addition, Turkish bureaucrats managed the lucrative state textile, sugar, and gunpowder factories in the province. They applied the pasha’s strict policies in order to regularly provide the factories with animals to run the machines, recruit local workers, undertake occasional maintenance works, and so on, and they brutally punished native supervisors and workers alike for laziness or negligence.58
The creation of the Department of Sudanese Cattle was the epitome of the new colonial realities of heavy central planning in this plantation-based and industrializing economy. The pasha’s regime sought to secure sources of energy for farms and factories, so in 1833 the pasha founded a special department for the importation and distribution of Sudanese bulls, cows, and camels, giving it the name of Maslahat al-Mawashi al-Sudaniyya. One of the main tasks of the appointed Turkish collector of cattle in Halfa, a Sudanese Nile port, was to oversee the transportation of these cattle so none of them would die en route; he received direct orders from the pasha in regard to this important duty. Qina’s Nile ports played a central role in the function of this department: on a weekly basis they were the first to receive the imported cattle, take some of them to local state factories and royal plantations, and send the rest north to be allocated to state-owned enterprises in other provinces. The Department of Sudanese Cattle was large, with an immense budget, and it employed hundreds of laborers in the province every year, including camel drivers, shepherds, guards, foremen, scribes, and more, who worked along with modern veterinarians dispatched from Cairo in the gigantic state barns prepared to receive the cattle. The peasants of Qina were ordered to provide the barns with tons of grass, hay, and fava beans to feed the precious bulls and cows all year long.59
Feeding the bulls of Isna’s textile factory seemed an important personal concern of the pasha. He sent harsh memorandums to the Turkish director of the district urging him to regularly supply the factory with maize and beans for the bulls, and he demanded that receipts of delivery be sent directly to him in Cairo at set dates to ensure the enforcement of his orders. “If you are later than the due date, you know how you will be punished. If I do not receive statements [of delivered hay] with the director’s signet, I will find my way with you,” the pasha swore, alluding to his system of corporal punishment that ranged from lashing to beheading.60 Similarly, Turkish administrators of the royal plantations in Armant and Ruzayqat in Qina Province received extensive correspondence directly from the pasha about the handling, feeding, and use of the Sudanese cattle. Village shaykhs took responsibility for distributing the amount of hay stipulated by the pasha’s decrees to every individual bull or cow in the plantations. Even cattle that died during transport were addressed in the orders of the pasha, with their skin to be used in certain factories in the province.61
To maximize the taxed agricultural produce, the colonial regime distributed some of these cattle to peasants for use in plowing the plots that the government forcibly assigned to them. The Turkish director of the D
epartment of Sudanese Cattle in Qina Province sold the cattle at subsidized prices to the province’s farmers, who received them only after state approval and signing of receipt—probably to inspect them afterward and ensure that they followed the state orders in employing the cattle. At the different stations where the cattle stopped in their long journey, the sick and weak ones were sold off to local communities after making sure that the animals were incapable of serving at the local factories and plantations or continuing on the road to serve in other provinces. Prices varied according to size and health. Impoverished peasants of Qina Province, in turn, sold these cheaply purchased bulls and cows to make some money, which infuriated Muhammad ‘Ali. He sent a memorandum to the assistant collector of cattle of the towns of Qus and Isna, in which he firmly insisted that “those cattle are brought from the Sudan for the development [i‘mar] of the countries and welfare of the populace [rafahiyyat al-ahali]. We found out that the people buy the cattle from the government and sell them in the markets, and this is against laws and regulations. You must prohibit the people from doing so.”62
With Turkish settlers and central planning, Muhammad ‘Ali introduced his modern institutions of hegemony to the internal colony—yet also kept it peripheralized. In the 1820s, Muhammad ‘Ali revised his rhetoric and system of government to adopt modern European methods that manipulated his subjects rather than directly repressing them. In his orders and memorandums, the pasha propagated his own imperial interests as the “greater good.” Instead of addressing his population as inferior subjects, using the old Ottoman term ra‘iyya, he adopted the new respectful and compassionate term al-ahali, meaning “the populace” or “citizens” in a French sense, and declared that the goal of his policies was the “welfare of the populace,” or rafahiyyat al-ahali.63 More important, the pasha founded three separate state institutions: a legislative council, a modernized bureaucracy, and a reformed shari‘a court system.64 In Upper Egypt, these government bodies marginalized the internal colony: they produced a situation of taxation without representation. In other words, the peasants and laborers of the south were overtaxed and submitted their dues in-kind and in cash to hundreds of colossal state storehouses (shunas) that were spread out in almost every village and town, but they enjoyed no representation in the pasha’s modern institutions—in dramatic contradistinction to the north.
Muhammad ‘Ali founded the Council of Consultation (Majlis al-Mashura) in 1824 and delegated law-making authority to it, but the council was also extensively involved in administrative affairs. Its members were mainly Turkish officials, and the pasha expanded it in 1829 and appointed village shaykhs, thus opening the door for native representation in his legislature.65 Qina Province was not represented in this council; neither were any of the Upper Egyptian provinces south of Asyut. Whereas all of the Delta provinces were handsomely represented, Muhammad ‘Ali did not grant a single seat to any of the shaykhs of Upper Egyptian villages.66 Nonetheless, the council frequently intervened in every aspect of Qina’s economic life, such as organizing land cultivation, digging canals, building dikes, erecting state storehouses, hiring laborers, managing state-owned factories, and placing limitations on private grain merchants. Due to the lack of Upper Egyptian representation in Cairo, the number of public works that the central government decided to undertake in the south noticeably decreased. The council had to summon a few southern shaykhs to draft the section on Upper Egypt in the principle statute it issued for agricultural organization, La‘ihat Zira‘at al-Fallah. In this code of seminal importance, the conditions in the Delta set the norm while Upper Egypt was defined as the remote exception.67
The second institution of the pasha’s hegemony was a modernized bureaucracy. The Syasatname, or the comprehensive law that the Council of Consultation drafted for the pasha to promulgate in 1837, crystallized the structure and function of this new administrative system. Muhammad ‘Ali again asserted that this law aimed to improve “the prosperity of the country and the welfare of the people and the provinces.”68 The bureaucracy in Qina Province was highly centralized: all ranked officials were Turks appointed from Cairo. While the general inspector of Upper Egypt undertook basic supervising duties, the provincial governor and district and subdistrict directors were in charge of detailed executive affairs. Officials at all levels in Qina reported directly to Muhammad ‘Ali, who closely followed their work.69 When the pasha applied a new, yet limited policy to incorporate native Egyptians into the high-ranking bureaucratic offices, native Upper Egyptians were excluded from the process. The pasha promoted several notable shaykhs from villages in the Delta to the position of district director and then further to provincial governor. Qina’s shaykhs were not considered for minor or major offices within the centralized government, and, once again, the province was excluded from representation.70
The third institution of the pasha’s hegemony was the reformed court system. Muhammad ‘Ali integrated Qina’s shari‘a courts into the state apparatus and made them a part of the administration. The judges of the province’s local courts were officially appointed by the state, and their sijill registers were used to notarize official transactions between bureaucrats, village shaykhs, and Coptic accountants, on the one hand, and peasants, factory workers, camel drivers, and Nile boat captains, on the other—in accordance with both shari‘a law and civil legislation.71 Qina’s local scholarly community of shari‘a jurists was excluded from participating in these developments, unless they changed the school of law they adhered to. The majority of Qina’s shari‘a law scholars belonged to the Maliki school of law, but Muhammad ‘Ali decided to make the Hanafi school the official and only shari‘a law applied in the province’s courts. The state worked on gradually transforming the legal system until, in 1839, the Turkish governor of the province sent a letter to the Maliki jurisconsult (mufti), in Isna indicating that it was now state policy that legal opinions (fatwas) only be issued by the official Hanafi muftis sitting inside the court when both litigants and defendants were present before the judge. By this decree, the pasha prohibited informal legal practices from taking place outside his state courts and restricted the application of laws other than his own Hanafi codes in the province, which further marginalized Qina’s majority of Maliki scholars.72
BACK TO REBELLION
Settlers, taxation, and peripheralization did not go without resistance in the southern colony. After Qina Province’s three revolts of the early 1820s were crushed, no other massive rebellion took place in Upper Egypt for as long as the pasha was alive. Horrific news of the modernized imperial army of Muhammad ‘Ali—with disciplined soldiers and gunpowder weaponry—defeating troops in faraway lands in Europe, Asia, and Africa certainly served to deter any separatist thoughts in the south. However, rebellion escalated in many other forms; it turned into daily-life resistance championed by oppressed women and men. Peasants fled plantations and corvée work sites, escaped taxes, and deserted the plots that the state forced them to till. Workers in government factories were no different, as many of them ran away from their production lines and fled taxes. Other types of laborers who were forcibly employed and highly taxed, including camel drivers and Nile boat captains, similarly sought to escape government tasks and taxes. The colonial regime was forced to coin a new term to describe all of these runaways: mutasahhibs. Out of these fugitives finally emerged the largest and fiercest resistance in the province: the bandits (falatiyya) who opted to avenge their losses by violent means, upsetting the security and political stability of the south.
Before resorting to violence, the peasants of Qina sometimes resisted the colonial administration simply by deliberately neglecting the pasha’s orders, and when interrogated they fabricated excuses.73 But when fed up, they vandalized government buildings and bloodily attacked Turkish bureaucrats and other government employees. For instance, a group of villagers from the town of Farshut assaulted the postman transporting some treasury funds; they cut his bag and stole the money that was in it. At receiving th
e news, Muhammad ‘Ali was furious, as this was not the first time that news of such offenses reached his ears.74 In another incident, a revolt almost broke out when a large group of villagers not only refused to pay their dues to the treasury but also attempted to kill a Turkish bureaucrat. In 1836, after rejecting the collection of the imposed tax, the peasants of Ballas attacked the state official as he tried to gather corvée laborers for public works projects in the canals. Upon learning about the insurgency, the pasha immediately sent troops to the village and they captured the shaykhs who had plotted with the peasants against the government.75
In 1844, the peasants of the village of Ruzayqat, where a vast royal plantation existed, destroyed the dam that diverted irrigation water to the plantation, away from their own thirsty lands.76 Three years later, the situation dramatically escalated again in the same village, when the farmers murdered many Turkish bureaucrats and soldiers and injured others. The entire village of Ruzayqat united in this act against the bureaucrats, and even the shaykhs helped hide the murderers.77 In the same year, a less violent incident took place on another plantation, again in the village of Ballas. Two laborers by the names of Ahmad and Isma‘il attacked the tax collector of a state-owned plantation, managed by a Turk, Mustafa Bey. They succeeded in taking back the eight hundred piasters that the tax collector had levied earlier.78
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