Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  In the time of cholera, the shaqis (outlaws) were the group most prolifically rebellious against the empire in Qina. The shaqis inherited the place of the falatiyya bandits who had disturbed previous imperial regimes throughout the nineteenth century, and their operations brought back to life the stirring memory of the late legendary bandits of the province. Like the falatiyya, the shaqis bandits were also fed by fugitive peasants and workers escaping heavy taxes and corvée labor. They similarly took to the mountains of the province to hide and launch their operations from, and they adopted the same clever tactics and strategies as their forbears.80

  The new bandits revived one of the traditions of their predecessors: attacking the houses of Parliament members who illegitimately represented them. Tay‘ Salama—the abovementioned parliamentarian from Qina who kept his seat for more than twenty years against the people’s will—was a favorite target of the new bandits. Salama was more than just a corrupt local figure. He was also a voice of northern nationalism and importer of patriotic myths to the south. He was involved in disseminating the nationalist rhetoric through education, as he funded modern boys’ schools with religious endowments. The endowment deeds vowed that the goal of these schools was primarily to serve the “nation” and improve the status of “the sons of the fatherland” (abna’ al-watan).81 One night, a gang broke into the barn attached to Salama’s house and stole four cows and their infant offspring. Barely a year passed before his house was the target of another raid, when four more cows were stolen from the same barn. Gangs and individual bandits who attacked him were mostly from the village of Qammula, whose mayor was Salama himself.82

  In 1885, on one of the hot August days in the market of the town of Qus, ‘Awwad, a local peasant, sold about two thousand liters of wheat for a decent price. While heading back home with his son Mahmud, twelve armed men robbed them of the money and other possessions and hit ‘Awwad on the head, leaving him seriously injured near a waterwheel. When his son reported the crime, investigations revealed that the attackers were a gang of bandits who had been causing political disturbances for a long time. A few years earlier, this gang had been bigger—consisting of some twenty-five members—and one of its important operations had involved cutting four agricultural bridges in the village of Hajza. They had also stolen tax money, about 33,979 piasters, that had been collected from the same village in 1883. Many of these bandits had already been convicted of other crimes and had served sentences in Qina or Alexandria jails.83

  The bandits of the province attacked every symbol of the state and the colonial administration. In 1889, they raided a police patrol in the town of Farshut. After exchanging fire, two soldiers were injured and the bandits made off with their weapons. The authorities were never able to apprehend them.84 In addition to these targets, the bandits also attacked the contractors working for the government and stole from the construction sites of public projects. Also in 1889, a gang of more than fourteen shot at the contractors and workers on the canal project in the village of Bayadiyya, stole a large amount of money, and left.85 Once, the village guard in Salimiyya caught two bandits on the village’s arched bridge, apparently as they were attempting to vandalize it. The captured men tried to bribe the police officer with one pound, to set them free, but it did not work.86

  Several women in the province joined the world of banditry. Wasfa and Walqan, both from the village of Qammula Middle, formed a gang with a third woman; her husband, Isma‘il the bandit; and another man. Interestingly, the three women were more than seventy years old and had never committed a crime before forming the gang. One night in 1883, Wasfa and Walqan took three donkeys and accompanied the two male bandits to a salt source that the state had enclosed in the mountains of a neighboring village. While they were loading the donkeys with the stolen goods, the guard saw them and attempted to arrest them, but one of the male bandits hit him with a gun. The gang managed to escape, leaving the guard injured. Soon after, the police arrested them in possession of about 1,000 liters of salt, along with guns and other weapons. Investigations revealed that one of the donkeys was the property of Wasfa; and the third female bandit, who had accompanied them, had sent another. The three women confessed to the crime. Because of their old age and lack of previous criminal charges, they were sentenced to less than one year in jail.87

  Deficiencies in the colonial law of the newly instituted modern civil court system in Upper Egypt left the bandits fortunate enough to evade punishment and expand their operations. The new civil codes had no articles for convicting outlaws based only on their infamy (mashhurin bil-shaqawa), which the old law had recognized as legal evidence. Thus, many bandits were released after their arrest for lack of hard, documented evidence. Dissatisfied state officials in Upper Egypt, whose efforts to capture the bandits were wasted when the law allowed their release, called for changing the code. For example, Bakhit Hasanayn of Qina raided a place at night before the formation of the first civil court in Upper Egypt. The police arrested and imprisoned Bakhit, but he managed to run away. After many attempts and armed battles between him and the police force, the authorities finally captured him again, this time after the civil court was formed. Bakhit, luckily, stood before a modern judge. No documented evidence supported the charges, so the judge was forced to set him free. On his way back from the court to his home village, he insisted on passing by the district governor, who was sitting in his office. Bakhit taunted the governor: “You had captured me and the government let me go” (Inta masaktini wa al-hukuma sayyabitni).88

  In the 1890s, the bandit Ziyad al-Shaqi became a national legend, even though the nationalist cause was the furthest thing from his mind. News of his thrilling exploits in Qina Province and throughout Upper Egypt was met with great attention in Cairo. The press played a major role in creating and perpetuating his legend. Cairo newspapers reported so many different—sometimes contradictory—accounts of his story that the truth was almost lost in the telling. Ziyad and his brother apparently led a gang of mountain dwellers that committed “horrifying major sins in Qina that the pen would fail to depict,” as one state official put it.89 The general police inspector himself, Justun Pasha, came from Cairo to execute a plan to capture Ziyad. Information about the operation was leaked to Ziyad, and so he fled with his fellows to the mountains in a neighboring province. The bandits hid in the mountains, but many undercover guards were vigilant day and night, awaiting their appearance. One evening, the gang went to fetch water from a village well and managed to return safely. Furious at their audacity, the next day Justun Pasha led two large forces to launch an assault on the mountains. After a fierce battle in which he was leading the gang from the very front, Ziyad fell to the bullets of the police. Justun Pasha victoriously carried Ziyad back to Qina, where he was interrogated and the gang confessed to all of its crimes.90

  After the end of World War I, the Egyptian nation’s project took a new trajectory. When the famous 1919 uprising took place in Cairo, under the leadership of the bourgeois men and women of the Wafd Party and the mobilized masses of the educated middle class, the British Empire granted the Kingdom of Egypt conditional independence. The Wafd was the delegation of upper-class Egyptians who went to the Versailles conference in Paris at the end of the war to negotiate national liberation. The colonial administration withdrew from many areas yet still maintained military occupation, and the Wafd Party formed a new cabinet and elected Parliament. The nation was officially born then, in the opinion of the northern bourgeoisie and conventional historiography of Egypt.

  For the discontented subalterns of Qina Province, the romantic nationalism of the Cairene bourgeoisie was far from reality. The members of the Wafd Party running for parliamentary elections in the province were not received with the expected sentiments of patriotism. In 1949, Makram Pasha ‘Ubayd, the leader of the party in Qina, visited the province as part of his election campaign, but his visit ended in a bloody way. When he arrived at the train station, one local clan campaigning for him received
him and drove him through town to collect voters’ support. A large fight erupted between his entourage and the angry supporters of a rival candidate from a local notable family. The expanding fight reached the town’s market, where several of the pasha’s opponents were shot dead. The correspondent of the newspaper Al-Ahram was himself injured in the battle, and the story made it to Cairo’s press; this embarrassed the Wafd Party, which claimed to be the only legitimate representative of the “Egyptians.”91

  As their vandalism and assaults on state officials and properties increased, the bandits earned a new name from the national government: matarid al-jabal, or the fugitives of the mountains. Between the 1920s and 1940s, the most legendary bandit in Egyptian history appeared in Qina Province to disturb state security in the entirety of the south. Both true and mythical news of al-Khutt’s exploits reached the king and the Wafd cabinet in Cairo, and he became the namesake of every other vicious bandit that appeared in Upper Egypt after him, up until today. In a private talk with ‘Aziz Abaza Pasha—the chief police commander of Asyut Province in Upper Egypt, a Wafd Party member, and originally a native of the Delta—King Faruq of Egypt alluded to the pasha that he knew of al-Khutt and had ordered his execution. The pasha immediately formed a highly skilled police crew and called it Team Death, ordering its members to get him al-Khutt’s head, or he would take theirs.92

  One day, as the legend goes, ‘Aziz Abaza Pasha went to a movie theater after he had become exhausted with looking for al-Khutt. He was trying to light a cigarette when he realized he had no matches, but a man sitting next to him kindly lit it. The next morning, the pasha received a letter, signed by al-Khutt, thanking him for the nice time they had spent together at the movies. Al-Khutt, née Muhammad Muhammad Mansur, was the blond, blue-eyed grandson of a famous shari‘a law scholar who memorized the Qur’an in the village of Drunka. His criminal career started early in his teenage years when he shot the son of a village shaykh, after this shaykh prevented him from grazing his sheep in a field and slapped him on the face. After killing nineteen other members of the same shaykh’s family, al-Khutt ran away to the mountains with all of his brothers and formed the most fearless gang that the south ever witnessed. The police vigorously searched for him, but his tricks and wit always saved his life. When al-Khutt was finally captured and shot in 1947, a memorial photo was taken of his dead body lying on the ground among the many proud officers who murdered him.93

  British capitalism had many success stories in different places in the modern world, where it unified local markets and assisted the birth of nation-states. But Upper Egypt has an alternative story to tell. It is a story of incompetent imperial capitalism and a nation that was never truly born. Colonial attempts at collaborating with Cairo’s bourgeoisie to create a unified market in Egypt through carrying British capitalism to the south utterly failed and ended with bailout crises. Moreover, as the British generated environmental catastrophes—the most apparent of which was the cholera epidemic—daily-life resistance of the subaltern classes in the south mounted and attempts at forging a nation were consequently aborted. Upper Egypt stands as but one case that testifies to the stumbling existence of world history’s imagined empires.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  America—The Last Imagined Empire?

  On the eve of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the US administration was acting as another empire, a sole global hegemon, in the south and north of Egypt and most of the world. After the end of the Cold War, many theorists asserted that America functioned as an “informal,” “postmodern” empire that penetrated its dependencies with minimal to no military interference and invented nuanced discursive tools of soft hegemony in a globalized realm of action. In Egypt and elsewhere, American imperialism aimed to take place through the neoliberal dictum of the so-called Washington Consensus, or by pressuring satellite regimes to transform their economies from remaining socialisms to free markets. The United States assumed its market model to be like a holy scripture: applicable to all times and places. Once more, the empire’s market failed, in the south and north of Egypt alike, and this failure created immense social disparities that are directly responsible for the outbreak of the 2011 revolution that Qina Province joined.

  Like the other five world empires of the last five hundred years examined in this book, the United States extended its reach into the farthest places in Upper Egypt—Qina Province—and disturbed the order of things. As with every previous empire, Upper Egypt and Qina Province have a unique story to tell about myths of and rebellion against empire. This is a different narrative about US penetration and hegemony and how the province’s youth and subalterns created their own Tahrir Squares and protested in the south.

  During the early 1990s, the United States advocated one path toward economic development in former socialist countries: transformation to the market economy. During the 1960s, many postcolonial states in the Third World, including Egypt, opted for socialist systems, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the triumphant American capitalist model attempted to reshape these states. US neoliberal economic principles were advanced in underdeveloped countries worldwide, through programs of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Transition to the market was supposed to go hand in hand with transition to democracy, or from single-party systems to pluralism. The United States designed a specific checklist for former socialist governments to follow, to withdraw from the economy and consequently achieve economic development. The principle items on this checklist were privatizing the public sector; eliminating farmers’ subsidies; reversing populist land-reform laws in order to free rents (i.e., raise the ceiling on rents) and to return agricultural plots that socialist states had seized and distributed to small peasants to old elites; instituting deregulation; and other measures. Experts dispatched from Washington, DC, to former socialist states were very busy during these years, supervising the transition to the market in various places.

  In 1992, the United States pressured Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt to liberalize the economy in return for debt rescheduling, aid, and strategic alliance. Mubarak ostensibly agreed. In Cairo, the Parliament and the government closely followed the checklist: they changed the socialist constitution and laws inherited from the Nasser period, privatized the public sector or sold the state-owned enterprises to the private sector, and eliminated subsides given to peasants, among other measures. Meanwhile, far away in Upper Egypt, the appointed governors eliminated farmers’ subsidies but maintained state enterprises under their control. The ruling echelon also formed clientelist relations with a rising elite of corrupt business tycoons, and they collaborated to exploit the peoples of the south. The World Bank’s reports that praised the successful transition barely noticed the state monopolies in Upper Egypt. At the same time, the provincial governors allowed the US Agency for International Development programs in the south to open offices and fund local NGOs that encouraged peasants to engage in insignificant experiments with market-oriented activities. USAID’s “market missionaries” proclaimed they were having a significant impact, but as far as Upper Egyptian peasants were concerned their work had a trivial effect.

  Such economic ambiguity between state control and the free market added to the impoverishment of Qina Province and pushed its youth to join fellow Facebook activists in Cairo in revolting against both the repressive state and the failed empire on the eve of the 2011 revolution. For example, while USAID was sharing cheerful “success stories” of Upper Egyptian peasants who embraced market ethics, the sugarcane cultivators of Qina Province were protesting against the monopolies of the state-owned sugar factory over their harvest. The US Empire probably suffered another crisis of images similar to what the French Empire experienced in the late 1700s. American financial and business experts thought they could go anywhere on earth, quickly learn its language and understand its conditions, and then competently develop that place to make it better according to a US neoliberal viewpoint. In 1798, Napoléon Bonapar
te’s campaign arrived in Egypt and assumed it would be able to proficiently exploit local resources and bring about progress. But Napoléon was manipulated and deceived by cunning, dark natives. In the 1990s and first decade after the year 2000, one could detect another crisis of images in how the American administration dealt with the authoritarian regime of Egypt.

  In what follows, this epilogue first engages in a discussion with the recent theoretical stances concerning the US Empire and its market. Then it moves to the situation in Qina Province a few years before the 2011 revolution, tracing how the province joined the Tahrir protesters to fight against the consequences of the failures of neoliberalism.

  Early in the 1990s, when many viewed the United States as an imperial force on the rise upon the fall of the Soviet Union, Immanuel Wallerstein affirmed instead that it was already declining. Wallerstein, the founder of the world-system theory, explained that this empire had grown due to “God’s blessings,” and God was apparently was taking his blessings back:

  God, it seems, has distributed his blessings to the United States thrice: in the present, in the past, and in the future. . . . The problem with God’s blessings is that they have a price. And the price we are willing to pay is always a call upon our righteousness. Each blessing has been accompanied by its contradiction. And it is always obvious that those who received the blessing were those who paid the price. As we move from today into tomorrow, it is time once again to count our blessings, assess our sins, and behold our reckoning sheet.1

  Again, in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq, Wallerstein noted the US inability to act strongly on the global stage and recommended that the country’s power not be overestimated: “We have entered a chaotic world. It has to do with the crisis of capitalism. . . . The United States government drifted in a situation that it is trying to manage all over the place and that it will be incapable of managing. This is neither good nor bad, but we should not overestimate these people nor the strength on which they rely.”2