Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  Finally, the revolt erupted. From Salimiyya, Ahmad al-Tayyib declared his messianic revelations and preached rebellion. In addition to the thousands of dispossessed villagers, al-Tayyib managed to mobilize falatiyya from their secret hiding places in the mountains. Like the 1820 revolt, this one deployed religious rhetoric and took on a spiritual tone, yet its aims went beyond alleviating high taxation or overthrowing Isma‘il Pasha in Cairo. Rebels developed an angry discourse against the propertied class and foreign commercial domination, which is why Lady Duff-Gordon, the English eyewitness, suggested it was a “communist” uprising.

  Unfortunately, Duff-Gordon’s account is the only full record of the revolt available. One must note that the Lady’s friends in Luxor were Turkish bureaucrats, an affluent shari‘a law scholar, and a rich Copt who was a British consular agent, so she received and delivered a rather unsympathetic, and somewhat simplified, account of the revolt. ‘Ali Mubarak, the state’s chronicler of the period, also provided a politically biased and brief account. He characterized Ahmad al-Tayyib as a sinful, subversive man who led people to disobey God. He transgressed shari‘a law, Mubarak suggested, because he disobeyed the “imam” of Muslims, that is, the khedive. He added that God had already punished the inhabitants of the village of Faw, who followed him, for their sins—when Isma‘il Pasha sent soldiers and Turkish officers to kill most of them, destroy their houses, and confiscate their money.70

  The revolt arose, Duff-Gordon recounted, from one incident involving a rich Copt and then spread throughout the province. Because Copts usually worked for Europeans, the poorer population commonly perceived rich Copts in a negative light. The story goes that the Copt in question owned a Muslim slave girl, who read the Qur’an and was pious herself, and he wanted to take her as his concubine. She resisted because shari‘a law forbids a non-Muslim man to own a Muslim woman; and she went to Ahmad al-Tayyib, who offered the Coptic master money for her. “He refused it and insisted on his rights, backed by the government whereupon Ahmad proclaimed the revolt,” wrote Duff-Gordon.71 The rebels then attacked a boat that belonged to Greek merchants, but nobody was hurt, although Duff-Gordon asserted elsewhere that a party of forty rebels plundered the boat and killed the steersman. The state sent Fadl Pasha from Cairo by a fast steamship with an army to crush the rebels. Most people thought that al-Tayyib was killed in the battle, but in fact he managed to flee to the desert to take refuge with the falatiyya.

  Duff-Gordon recorded the public opinion of different social groups about the rebellion. On the one hand, her friend who was the shari‘a law scholar, Shaykh Yusuf, visited Salimiyya and returned critical of the rebels: “Shaykh Yoosuf returned from a visit to Essalimeeyeh last night. He tells me the darweesh, Ahmad et-Teiyib, is not dead; he believed that he is a mad fanatic and a communist. He wants to divide all property equally, and to kill all the Ulama and destroy all theological teaching by learned men, and to preach a sort of revelation or interpretation of the Koran of his own. ‘He would break up your pretty clock,” said Yoosuf, “and give every man a broken wheel out of it; and so with all things.’”72

  On the other hand, villagers were already expressing great discontent because Isma‘il Pasha regulated the price of wheat, bringing about a famine in the province in the same year of the outbreak. Furthermore, Duff-Gordon explained, “only Cairo could do anything, and everything is done to please the Cairene at the expense of the Fellaheen [peasants].”73 In irrigation, the use of steam engines and their coal was only for the rich: “The great folks get steam-engines, but the laborers work with no better implements than their bare hands and a rush basket, and it takes six men to do the work of one who has good tools.”74 Thus, even though some ordinary villagers did not participate in the revolt, because they believed that al-Tayyib was a madman, they supported the rebels’ cause and spoke up about all forms of injustice. As Duff-Gordon recounted,

  One Mohammad, a most respectable, quiet young man, sat before me on the floor the other day, and told me the horrible details he had heard from those who had come up the river. “Thou knowest, O our lady that we are people of peace in this place; and behold, now, if one madman should come, and a few idle fellows go out to the Mountain (desert) with him, Efendeena will send his soldiers to destroy the place, and spoil our poor little girls, and hang us: is that right, O lady? And Ahmad-el-Berberee saw Europeans with hats in the steamer with Efendeena and the soldiers. Truly, in all the world none are miserable like us Arabs. The Turks beat us, and the Europeans hate us and say ‘quite right.’ By God, we had better lay our heads in dust (die), and let the strangers take our land and grow cotton for themselves. As for me, I am tired of this miserable life, and of fearing for my poor girls. Mohammad was really eloquent . . . he threw his meláyeh over his face and sobbed.75

  As a fugitive exiled in the mountains, Ahmad al-Tayyib joined the falatiyya in their hiding places. His followers visited him there to listen to his speeches and receive instructions. Duff-Gordon affirmed that Isma‘il Pasha himself came with steamboats and soldiers to terminate the uprising. The steamers were also supposed to evacuate all Europeans if things got out of control. Al-Tayyib’s brother, Muhammad, and his father’s father-in-law were taken prisoner. The pasha confiscated the properties of all suspected rebels, including innocent villagers. A village shaykh assisted the government in capturing the rebels. In 1865, Fadl Pasha, a Turk, perpetrated a massacre where he “had the men laid down by ten at a time, and chopped with the pioneers’ axes.” The Fadl Pasha murdered at least sixteen hundred men, women, and children. Upon crushing the revolt, every man, woman, or child related to Ahmad al-Tayyib by blood was taken in chains and jailed in the city of Qina.76

  NO LAND FOR WOMEN

  The revolt was crushed, and market modernity readily resumed undoing the lives of Qina Province’s subalterns. It was women’s turn. European Orientalists argued that modernization would improve the lives of oppressed women in “traditional” patriarchal societies, but this was not the case with new legal codes of private property. In 1869, Isma‘il Pasha promulgated a new landownership law that deprived women of the right to inherit land, a right that shari‘a law had granted them for centuries. This law was an imitation of the contemporary British inheritance codes. Western legal modernity in the nineteenth century was paternalistic in nature, and when it made it to Qina’s villages, this law severely hurt thousands of women who owned modest properties, sometimes as small as a fraction of an acre. After losing their parcels, women expressed resentment against their male relatives by various means.

  With increasing British domination in northern Egypt and the consequent expansion of cotton cultivation, the Delta families involved in commercial agriculture ascended politically. They constituted the main political unit in a growing paternalist regime. Through the alleged political liberalization process, the male heads of plantation-owning families not only constituted the incumbents of the regime but also became the lawmakers in modern legislative institutions, namely the Council of Rules and the Parliament.77 These men pressured the state to issue laws depriving women of land inheritance rights in Egypt. Copying the British code of primogeniture enshrined in the “family settlement” law,78 the male landed elite of Egypt helped to promulgate a series of similar laws between the 1850s and the early 1880s. Isma‘il Pasha’s law of 1869 was the most oppressive to women.

  The legal system had begun to turn against women from the time of Sa‘id Pasha. During the first year of Sa‘id’s reign, before the pasha’s 1858 land code was issued, women enjoyed full rights to land inheritance according to shari‘a as well as state civil laws. Many women from Qina Province were able to dispute attempts to disinherit them, and the state courts supported their claims. For instance, a woman named Fatima took control of the five acres her deceased husband had left to her, their three daughters, and son. She leased the land to farmers who cultivated it and paid its taxes to the government. When a cousin of her children attempted to assert his control over the parcel, s
he submitted a petition against him to the general inspector of Upper Egypt. The inspector supported her right to keep the land, provided that it was cultivated and its taxes were paid, and Fatima complied. In similar cases, the local officials always consulted the applied civil land code, which obliged them to grant land to widows.79 Only a few months before the 1858 law was issued, Si‘da, a widow from the village of Samhud, asserted her rights and those of her two daughters and son to the land of her deceased husband, in a case she won against two male villagers. She went to the shari‘a court with her son to sue the two farmers who attempted to build a waterwheel on her land. The dispute was resolved and the family retained its property.80

  The 1858 code began to dismantle this system of justice, as it allowed women to inherit land but deprived them of the right to control their plots. The Council of Rules (Majlis al-Ahkam), which issued the law, functioned both as the Supreme Court and legislature, and its members were males from local elite families, high-ranking Turkish bureaucrats, army and police officers, the state mufti, and eminent shari‘a law scholars. From Qina Province, for example, Ahmad Bey Muhammad—a member of an upper-class landed family in the village of Abu Manna‘ and an army general—maintained a seat on the council. Provincial councils, composed of village shaykhs and mayors, were founded later in the Delta and Upper Egypt to adjudicate local disputes and refer unresolved cases to the council in its role as Supreme Court. In most cases, the promulgation of new codes or changes to existing ones took place in response to unresolved provincial cases, which allowed local male elites to enact their interests in the process of law making.81

  Copying British inheritance laws, the Sa‘id’s 1858 code ruled that the land of a deceased father should be registered only under the name of the eldest male in the family who lived in the household. The law was intended to keep properties under the control of older men and prevent the division of land among heirs. It allowed women to benefit from land inheritance but deprived them of having land registered under their names. The eldest male (arshad al-‘a’ila) was responsible for farming the land, sustaining the family, and paying the tax. He was required to keep listings of the assigned land shares of the family members, male and female, and their respective revenues. The code also compelled women who already had agricultural land titles to change the status of their properties in accordance with the new law, even if they had fulfilled their tax obligations.82

  Finally, in 1869, the newly founded Parliament of Isma‘il Pasha issued a law that completely deprived women of inheritance rights to agricultural land. In fact, the modern legislature was little more than an institution created to consolidate the power of plantation-owning families and entrench a paternalist regime. This Parliament was called the Council of Consultation of Representatives (Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab), and its members were high-ranking bureaucrats and village notables, almost all of whom were the males of elite propertied families. Qina Province’s members of Parliament, for example, included Shaykh Muhammad Abu Sihli, a large landowner of two thousand acres of sugarcane in Farshut. Abu Sihli also served as the mayor of the villages of Salimiyya and Abu Manna‘ and the president of the provincial council. Another member from Qina, Mahmud ‘Abd Allah, was the mayor of Dishna and owned sugarcane fields, a sugar mill, and a big palace in his home village. The interests of the male elite influenced the law-making process in this legislature.83

  Some parliament members proposed a law to allow women to inherit only real estate and other properties, rendering the male members of the family the only heirs entitled to inherit agricultural land. The rest of the Parliament did not take long to discuss this law. After brief consideration, all the members who commented on the proposal and voted for the code. The rationale behind it was twofold: agricultural property in a family should be kept intact and women were not capable of farming. The Parliament members argued that this law would enhance the economic and social status of the patriarch of the family and work best for his welfare. An heiress, the eldest female member of the family, was allowed to control the land only if no male heirs were alive, and the law compelled her to appoint a male agent, such as her husband, as the farm manager. The pasha approved the proposal and promulgated this law the same year, in 1869.84

  For many years following, the eldest male of the family that lived in the same household (fi ma‘isha wahida) took control of land, whether he was a brother, uncle, cousin, nephew, or an in-law. It was a traditional social practice for extended families to live in one household, and the 1869 law further subjugated women in these households to male relatives. Some women in the villages of Qina Province refused to comply, but taking their cases to court only affirmed the authority of the male landholder over them. Women who tried to claim their rights faced violent attacks by their male relatives, who sometimes escalated to shooting at them. While she and her sister were sleeping in their late father’s house, for example, the nephews of Sitt al-Ahl bint ‘Awad shot her because she had established control over the inheritance of the family.85

  During these dark years, mysterious cases of deaths of female peasants surfaced with unprecedented frequency in the province. Although these cases were recorded in state files as honor killing crimes, their high frequency suggests that other causes were behind them, which probably had to do with disputes over land inheritance. The state usually registered honor killings as accidents of women catching fire or drowning in a local canal, in order to close the case without investigation and leave the killers unpunished, respecting local customs that did not consider these murders crimes. During this period, in recurrent cases, dead bodies of women were found floating in canals or burnt inside their houses, and the family insisted that the deaths were accidental.86 These women were probably killed by their male relatives in land conflicts, and their families made them appear to the state as honor killings to evade punishment.87

  A manifest goal of Western modernity was to rescue native women from patriarchal oppression in their societies, especially if they were Muslims. Obviously, the women of Upper Egypt would argue the opposite. The market did not deliver what it claimed it came for.

  BITTER SUGAR

  When he expanded his numerous sugarcane plantations and founded several modern sugar refineries in Qina, Khedive Isma‘il introduced more market measures to the province. By the 1870s, Isma‘il had turned whole villages in Qina into the private sugarcane farms of the royal family, in order to secure for himself a place in a transforming global market. Thousands of Qina’s peasants worked on those plantations, and the sugar factories attached to them employed thousands of other landless workers. The stories of daily suffering and discontent of those subalterns exposes new faces of the market reality.

  After the end of the American Civil War, cotton exports in Egypt experienced a period of bust but still constituted half of the country’s revenue. To compensate for losses in the cotton market, Khedive Isma‘il envisioned making sugar for Upper Egypt what cotton was for the Delta, or making the economy of the south market-oriented based on commercial agriculture in sugar.88 While Isma‘il left the majority of cotton fields in the Delta to the local elite families of large landowners, the khedive established a monopoly over the sugarcane fields in the south—especially in Qina Province, where this crop was most concentrated. The plantations of the royal family annexed more thousands of acres to their existing properties in the province and constructed modern sugar mills on them. As a result, public works in Qina were in the service of the khedive’s sugar.

  Small landowning peasants lost more of their parcels to the khedive’s plantations, called the Daira Saniyya, and many villages in the province became almost the private property of the royal family. For instance, Naj‘ Hammadi had 32,000 acres of the Daira land, some of which were leased out and the rest of which employed seasonal labor. The area of Farshut, meanwhile, had 12,000 acres farmed mainly by seasonal labor.89 In 1870, the khedive’s mother annexed a total of 3,531 acres in five villages in the province to the Daira plantations,
and the peasants of these villages were forced to surrender their fields to the government. In the official papers, the state claimed that the farmers and shaykhs of those villages submitted a petition to the state to relinquish their property rights to Isma‘il’s mother, who in turn agreed to purchase the land. Some peasants accepted the prices that the Mother Pasha offered them, and others requested that she replace these plots with others elsewhere. Bishara ‘Ubayd, a Copt who was an agent of the French consul and owner of several plantations, rented hundreds of acres of this land through an auction, after he outbid the shaykhs and mayors of those villages.90

  The khedive annexed the peasants’ land through legal strategies. He reissued a decree that his predecessor had promulgated about the small properties of runaway peasants (mutasahhibs). In 1865, that law had affirmed that mutasahhibs who left their lands for more than three years would lose their right to it; either heirs would take it or the state would declare it public property. In many cases the state confiscated the land from the legal heirs, declared it public property, and then annexed it to the khedive’s plantations.91 In addition, to consolidate the plantations in closer areas, the Daira exchanged fields with other large landowners. For example, Bishara ‘Ubayd gave up 950 acres of his fields in Armant in return for replacing them with land in another village.92

  Qina Province had several large-scale modern sugar factories, which were designed and run by French experts. The French factories (fabriqas), operated with steam engines and were fueled with coal, and the state recruited the province’s villagers to construct them. The factories operated twenty-four hours a day, and the laborers worked according to a shift system and were harshly punished if they showed any negligence or were suspected of theft in the sugar mills.93 The modern factories of the khedive hurt the traditional sugar industry of the province, which used deep and wide melting pots. The older sugar mills could not compete and gradually disappeared. The modern mills relied on the traditional sector only for supplying pottery containers (ballas) for the storage of molasses.94