Imagined Empires

by Zeinab Abul-Magd

  18. Peter Gran, “Upper Egypt in Modern History: ‘A Southern Question’?,” in Nicholas Hopkins and Reem Saad (eds.), Upper Egypt: Identity and Change (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004), 81.

  19. See Martina Rieker, “The Sa‘id and the City: Subaltern Spaces in the Making of Modern Egypt,” PhD dissertation, Temple University, 1997.

  20. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii, xv (emphasis in original).

  21. Ibid., xiv.

  22. Giovanni Arrighi, “The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism,” Review, Summer 1990, 366.

  23. Ibid., 365–408. Also see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 2002).

  24. Arrighi, “Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism,” 399.

  25. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 3 (New York: Academic Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1978); and Samir Amin, Imperialism and Unequal Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

  26. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

  27. See Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (New York: Penguin, 1979); and The Birth of the Clinic (London: Routledge, 1989). See also, for example, a postcolonial study that applies Foucault’s work to the study of the empire: Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

  28. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 4.

  29. See Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 20.

  30. See, for instance, the collection of articles in Huri İslamoğu-İnan, The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Joel Benin, Workers and Peasants in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  31. For example, see Omnia Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002); and Leila Abu Lughod, Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

  32. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–15.

  33. See Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies Reader, 28–37.

  34. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Vinayak Ghaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), 1.

  35. Quoted in David Arnold, “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India,” in Ghaturvedi, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, 34–35.

  36. Eric Hobsbawm authored an interesting account of social bandits in south Italy, arguing for the progressive nature of their actions. Hobsbawm’s approach greatly inspires this book. See Eric Hobsbawm, Social Bandits and Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Free Press, 1960).

  37. The National Archives of Egypt, or Dar al-Watha’iq al-Qawmiyya, are undertaking an extensive project to create digital databases for millions of unknown, uncataloged documents. Researchers in this project informed me about thousands of documents, particularly concerning Qina Province, that were never discovered or touched before, which this book heavily relies on. Great thanks are due Emad Helal, a senior historian and supervisor in this digitization project.

  38. For Qina Province in the Ottoman period, the court of Isna is the only court whose records are accessible in the National Archives of Egypt. Despite references to them in Isna Court documents, court records of other towns and villages in the province are not present.

  39. This book uses these archival sources with an awareness of their limitations and biases as products of specific political contexts. Many of these documents, such as petitions, rulings of the Supreme Court, or parliamentary minutes, sometimes were recorded in a way that reflected the power structure in state and society. These records must be contextualized and, in some cases, perceived as state discourses rather than simple bearers of facts. Furthermore, this study is selective about the documents it considers as references to actions of political rebellion. While archival records deliver tens of thousands of stories that could fall in a vague area between regular crimes and political resistance, this study includes only highly politicized cases for analysis as subaltern actions of revenge. Specific criteria in making these selections include choosing only crimes targeting state bureaucrats, state buildings, government money, or the propertied politicians. The criteria also include selecting for certain characteristics of the person who committed the action, focusing on peasants, laborers, or women whose lives were hurt in one way or another by the regime.

  CHAPTER 1: OTTOMANS, PLAGUE, AND REBELLION

  1. Ahmad Pasha Cezzar, Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century: The Nizamname-i Misir (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 44 (Turkish transliteration replaced with Arabic transliteration).

  2. See George A. Haddad, “A Project of the Independence of Egypt, 1801,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (2) (April–June 1970): 174. Prominent Egyptian intellectual Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (d. 1873) referred to the Ottoman-era southern Egyptian state as a jumhuriyya. See Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1987), 21.

  3. These events were observed by the contemporary historian and Mamluk officer Ahmad al-Damurdashi (d. ca. 1755) in Al-Durra al-Musana fi ’Akhbar al-Kinana, Abd al-Rahim Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rahim (ed.) (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ma‘had al-Faransi, 1989), 40–60 (the quotation is from this source); the plague is discussed on 40–41. Also, late eighteenth-century historian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (d. 1822) accounted for these events in ‘Aja’ib al-Athar fi-l-Tarajim wa-l-Akhbar (Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1997), 1:136–39.

  4. On these recent theoretical arguments see, Suraiya Faroqhi, Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 14–15; and Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 93–98.

  5. On the three-century state see, Salah Ahmad Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyy, 923/1213–1517/1898 (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1984). On the Indian Ocean world economy and the place of the Ottoman Empire in it, see Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

  6. Stanford Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1798 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 14; Layla ‘Abd al-Latif Ahmad, Al-’Idara fi Misr fi-l-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani (Cairo: Maṭ-ba'at Jami‘at ‘Ayn Shams, 1978), 39.

  7. Ahmad Fou’ad Mitwalli (ed.), “Qanun Misr (Qanun-name Misr),” in al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-Athar, 1:557–59.

  8. The iltizam system was applied throughout the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire after 1617. See Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29–30, 48–50; and Ariel Salzman, “An Ancien Regime Revisited: ‘Privatization’ and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics and Society, 21 (4) (1993): 393–423.

  9. Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 102–8; Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 141,144; Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 14, 79.

  10. Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 14.

  11. Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse e
t la Haute Égypte (Paris: Imprimerie de P. Didot l’aine, 1802), 255–56; Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 102–8; Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution, 141, 144; Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 14, 79; James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 (Edinburgh: Printed by J. Ruthven, for G.G.J. and J. Robinson, London, 1790), 1:100.

  12. Muhammad Ibn Abd Allah al-Amir al-Maliki, “Risala fi man Tawalla al-Sa‘id min al-’Umara al-Jarakisa,” 5–7, unpublished manuscript, Manuscript No. 6686, al-Azhar Library, Cairo; Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, 168–69.

  13. See K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002); Janet Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Frank, ReOrient.

  14. About Qina Province’s trade in the Mamluk period, see Taqyy al-Din al-Maqrizi, Al-Mawa‘iz wa-l-’I‘tibar bi Dhikr al-Khitat wa-l-’Athar (Cairo: Maktabat al-Thaqafa al-Diniyya, 1987), 1:202–3; Muhammad ‘Abdu al-Hajjaji, Qus fi-l-Tarikh al ’Islami (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1982); Abu al-Fadl al-’Idfawi, Al-Tali‘ al-Sa‘id al-Jami‘ li Asma’ Nujaba’ al-Sa‘ id (Cairo: al-Dar al-Misriyya lil-Ta’lif wa-al-Tarjama, 1966); and Jean-Claude Garcin, Un centre musulman de la Haute-Égypte médiévale: Qús (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1976).

  15. Fred Lawson, The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism during the Muhammad Ali Period (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 58–61; Fred Lawson, “Rural Revolt and Provincial Society in Egypt, 1820–1824,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (2) (May 1981): 132–33; Nabil al-Sayyid al-Tukhi, Sa‘id Misr fi ‘Ahd al-Hamla al-Faransiyya, 1798–1801 (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1997), 61.

  16. Muhammad al-Maraghi al-Jirjawi, Tarikh Wilayyat al-Sa‘id fi al-‘Asrayn al-Mamluki wa-l-‘Uthmani al-Musamma bi Nur al-‘Uyun bi-Dhikr Jirja fi ‘Ahd Thalathat Qurun (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahda, 1997), 107. Ahmad, al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 32. About sugar cultivation in Farshut see, Ahmad al-Hitta, Tarikh Misr al-Iqtisadi (Alexandria: Matba ‘at al-Misri, 1967), 8, 16, 111; and Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyy, 263.

  17. Abu Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 232.

  18. Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 78.

  19. Cezzar, Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century, 41.

  20. Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, 263; Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution, 138–39.

  21. Copts are the native Orthodox Christians. The distinction between “Arabs” and “Copts” here applies only to this period, relying on the contemporary literature. Later developments and historical interpretations render the line drawn between the two groups inaccurate.

  22. Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 55.

  23. Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 24–25.

  24. al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al-Musana, 45–49.

  25. Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution, 141.

  26. Richard Pococke, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries (London: Printed for the author, by W. Bowyer, 1743–45), 1:89; Shari‘a Court Records of Isna (hereafter Isna Court), Sijill 1, Case 59, p. 48, 12 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, and Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 66, p. 54, 8 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, both in National Archives of Egypt, Cairo (hereafter NAE).

  27. Pococke, Description of the East, 1:68–69, 77.

  28. Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, 159–72.

  29. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:146–49.

  30. For example, Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 7, Case 70, 12 Rajab 1173, p. 37; Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 14, Part 2, Case 63, p. 42, 1177; Sijill Ishhadat 15, Part 1, Case 129, p. 87, 1178; Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 17, Part 1, Case 1, p. 1, 9 Shawwal 1179; and Qina Court, Portfolio No. 1, Dhu al-Hijja 1180, all records found in Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, appendix 22, 446–47. Some historians mistakenly claim that the land between Asyut and Aswan was communal, or masha‘, and peasants enjoyed no usufruct rights to it and the Arab shaykhs and large tax farmers distributed different plots each year. This differed from the ’athariyya land known in Lower and Middle Egypt. The ’athariyya is enclosed by borders that divided the land of one peasant from that of another. These borders did not change from year to year, as the same peasant kept the same holding each year, unless transactions took place among peasants. Al-Hitta, Tarikh Misr al-’Iqtisadi, 5–6. Nonetheless, court records of Isna and Qina show that the same system of landholding was applied in Upper Egypt as in the Delta.

  31. Muhammad ‘Afifi, Al-’Aqbat fi Misr fi al-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma lil-Kitab, 1992), 152–53; Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 53, Case 317, p. 143, 10 Ramadan 1216; Sijill Ishhadat 52, Case 294, p. 146, 7 Sha‘ban 1215, both in NAE.

  32. Ahmad, Al-’Idara fi Misr fi-l-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani, 273–91.

  33. See Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat, 1172–1215, NAE.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Isna Court, Portfolio 3, 25 Jumada al-Awwal 1221, records found in Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, appendix 4, 407.

  36. See al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al-Musana, 51; and Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 26–29.

  37. Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, 193–203.

  38. al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al-Musana fi ’Akhbar al-Kinana, 41. The translation is courtesy of Daniel Crecelius and ‘Abd al-Wahhab Bakr, trans., Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicle of Egypt, 1688–1755 (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1991), 81.

  39. al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al-Musana fi ’Akhbar al-Kinana, 40–41.

  40. al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-Athar, 1:139.

  41. Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt During the Years 1833, 34, and 35 (London: Charles Knight and Co., 1837), 1:3.

  42. al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al- Musana, 40–41.

  43. al-Damurdashi, Al-Durra al-Musana, 41. The translation is courtesy of Crecelius and Bakr, Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicles of Egypt, 82.

  44. Ibid.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid., 49–60. The translation is courtesy of Crecelius and Bakr, Al-Damurdashi’s Chronicles of Egypt, 94.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte, 2:255–56; Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 102–8; Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution, 141, 144; Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:100; Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization, 14, 79.

  50. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:117–18.

  51. Haddad, “Project of the Independence of Egypt, 1801,” 174.

  52. Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahd Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 21.

  53. al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-’Athar, 2:349–50.

  54. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:117–18 (quotations preserve historical spellings).

  55. Pococke, Description of the East, 1:84–85.

  56. Lawson, Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism, 59.

  57. Shaw translation notes in Huseyn Efendi, Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution, 138–39.

  58. A French report observed this in 1753. See also Terence Walz, Trade between Egypt and Bilad As-Sudan (Cairo: Institute Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1978), 10; and Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:151, 195–96, 200. About Hammam’s control over Qusayr, see Cezzar, Ottoman Egypt in the
Eighteenth Century, 44.

  59. Walz, Trade between Egypt and Bilad As-Sudan, 1–39. A third route passed through the western oasis.

  60. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:116–118.

  61. Henry Light, Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Holy Lands, Mount Lebanon and Cyprus in the Year 1814 (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1818), 48. About Farshut’s sugar, also see Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:116–18.

  62. al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-’Athar, 2:350.

  63. Ibid.; Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte, 255–56.

  64. Qina Court, Portfolio 2, no date, cited in Haridi, Dawr al-Sa‘id fi Misr al-‘Uthmaniyya, appendix 13, 422.

  65. al-Jabarti, ‘Aja’ib al-’Athar, 2:350.

  66. Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 15, Part 1, 1178; Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 59, p. 48, 12 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170; Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 66, p. 54., 8 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, all in NAE.

  67. Pococke, Description of the East, 1:89; Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 59, p. 48, 12 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, and Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 66, p. 54, 8 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, both in NAE; Ahmad, Al-Sa‘id fi ‘Ahad Shaykh al-‘Arab Hammam, 113.

  68. ‘Afifi, Al-’Aqbat fi Misr fi al-‘Asr al-‘Uthmani, 102.

  69. Haddad, “Project of the Independence of Egypt, 1801,” 174.

  70. Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 1:147 (quotation), 151.

  71. For example, Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 15, Part 1, 1178; Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 59, p. 48, 12 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170; Isna Court, Sijill 1, Case 66, p. 54, 8 Rabi‘ Akhir 1170, all in NAE.

  72. For example, Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 6, Case 224, p. 121, 21 Jumada al-Awwal 1172; from the same sijill and the same year, Case 58, p. 36; Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 15, Part 1, Case 94, p. 78, 12 Muharram 1178, all in NAE.

  73. Isna Court, Sijills Ishhadat 1–80, 1170–1231, NAE.

  74. Isna Court, Sijill Ishhadat 6, Case 224, p. 121, 21 Jumada al-Awwal 1172, NAE.