Another mitigating factor was the culture itself. Slavery and the rights of man were the subject of fierce debates in Western Europe at the time, but the same was not true in Egypt or anywhere else in the Near East and Africa. The slave trade across the Sahara continued as it had for centuries, and though African and Arab slavery may have lacked the brutality of human bondage in the United States and the Caribbean, it was still a mercenary business that treated individuals as property to be bought, sold, and used. One of the more popular destinations for Western tourists in Cairo in these years was the slave market, where men, women, and children, often from Nubia and sub-Saharan Africa, were displayed and auctioned. Compared with the slave trade, the corvée was milquetoast.
And after thousands of years, the corvée was accepted by many Egyptians as part of life. It may not have been an appealing activity, but neither was death, and both were unavoidable. The average Egyptian fellah was far more afraid of being conscripted into the army than of serving on the corvée. Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim had been particularly vicious in rounding up fellahin for military service, and men had been known to cut off their own fingers (so that they could not shoot) or toes (so that they could not march) in order to avoid serving as soldiers in the pasha’s army. Though the fellahin sometimes resisted the corvée, they knew that they would soon be allowed to return to their villages.1
At its height, the corvée raised by Said for the Suez Canal involved more than sixty thousand fellahin. The goal was to have at least twenty thousand workers, but that meant that the actual number was significantly greater. It was common for critics at the time to describe the process as twenty thousand going, twenty thousand coming, and twenty thousand actually working. That made the system seem neater than it actually was. In truth, the circle was more fluid. At any given time, there was a constant flow of recruitment, transportation, work, and departure. Though laborers were often moved in large masses, it was not a simple case of transporting tens of thousands en bloc. That would have been more complicated, and potentially more dangerous. Though fellahin rarely revolted against the corvée, it was safer for several dozen soldiers to guard several hundred fellahin on their journey from the Nile to the isthmus than for several hundred to guard ten or twenty thousand.
Corvée labor in 1861 was concentrated on the Sweet Water Canal and between Port Said and Kantara, just south of Lake Manzala and just north of Lake Balah. Once in the canal zone, the fellahin required few soldiers to guard them. At least sixty miles of arid desert separated them from their homes, and Bedouin tribes that roamed the desert east of the Nile and west of Suez were not friendly. For most of the fellahin, prudence dictated serving for the few months required and digging where they were told. They were fed, and the money they would be paid once their tour of duty was finished might be useful at home. The real risk was to agriculture along the Nile. Rulers traditionally had to balance the need for the corvée with the demands of tending the fields. The able-bodied men of the corvée also grew and harvested the crops. At the time of the Suez Canal, many of these were cash crops mandated by the viceroy, and no allowances were made for cotton lost because there weren’t enough men to harvest it. The fellahin were somehow expected to do both.
Adding to the difficulty were the work conditions. The Canal Company sometimes provided rudimentary shelter in the form of tents or blankets. But the fellahin were frequently left to sleep in the open near where they were digging. During the summer, that was not a problem: the desert was pleasantly cool at night. But at other times of the year, the open sands were frigid, and without proper shelter workers could succumb to hypothermia. Though Europeans assumed that the fellahin understood how to live in the desert, that was simply not true. Most of them lived in Nile villages that had a constant supply of water, abundant date and palm trees, and were sheltered from the winds by the cliffs that lined the river. The fellahin were no more adept at desert living than the average inhabitant of Paris was adept at winemaking.
There is no consistent evidence about how much violence the workers were subjected to, but the Canal Company’s public pronouncements that they were well treated only made sense in relative terms. Compared with the way soldiers in Muhammad Ali’s army were disciplined, or with the way slaves were handled, the fellahin did not fare badly. Compared with daily life in their villages, the corvée was a poor substitute.
The outrage that greeted the Canal Company’s use of the corvée was one part moral indignation and one part double standard. British railroad projects in Egypt had used forced labor, and yet few in England objected. Stephenson’s Cairo-to-Suez rail line was completed largely by corvée; had he not died in 1859, he might not have escaped the same criticism that befell Lesseps. The other double standard was that British and French factory-workers and miners were not much better treated than the fellahin, and the British habit of impressing sailors into the navy early in the nineteenth century was hardly more civil than Muhammad Ali’s methods for raising an army. Even though European critics professed to be shocked at the practices prevalent in Egypt, they were less attentive to the motes in their own eyes.
With thousands of fellahin digging by hand, the Sweet Water Canal quickly reached the isthmus, and in February 1862 it arrived at Lake Timsah. A branch was extended north toward the El-Guisr plateau, and a wider branch turned south toward the port of Suez. The Sweet Water Canal had involved the excavation of 1.1 million cubic meters, which was barely more than 1 percent of the total amount that needed to be removed for the actual canal linking the two seas. As a result of the completion of the Sweet Water Canal, the isthmus finally had a consistent supply of fresh water, and that made it possible to employ far larger numbers of workers. The Sweet Water Canal was also used to transport materials, food, and tools to the work zone between Kantara and Lake Timsah, where another contingent of the corvée was carving out the narrow rigole de service (service canal). Lesseps dearly wanted the rigole finished by the late spring, but he fell short. It took some time to develop an effective system of using the thousands of fellahin and supplying them with food and water, and at the same time, Mougel was being phased out and Voisin was assuming more responsibility. The digging went smoothly, but completion of the rigole took many more months.
Without the fellahin, the construction of the Suez Canal would not have been possible. Lesseps and Said were not about to dig through the desert themselves, nor were those twenty-one thousand French shareholders. Yet, vital though the fellahin were, in contemporary accounts of the canal’s creation and in many books since, they are discussed en masse, as if they had one corporate identity and no individuality. This was not merely European prejudice. The Turkish-Egyptian ruling classes were just as apt to dismiss the fellahin as ignorant, illiterate peasants with minds as empty as the Sahara. The peasants of the Nile had developed a reputation for passivity that some ascribed to the climate, others to history, and it is true that Egypt’s past is unusually free of peasant uprisings. But, although the fellahin may have been less aggressive than comparable populations in other parts of the world, there was more to their existence than waking, eating, working, and sleeping. That should be self-evident, yet judging from the way they have often been depicted, it is not.
Crops and floods were the central concerns of the fellahin. That had been true for thousands of years. Agriculture depended on the rising and falling of the Nile, but the Nile was irregular. Though it always flooded, it rarely did so in a consistent pattern. That could wreak havoc on the towns along its banks. To offset the destructive potential of these floods, Egyptians had spent centuries trying to master the Nile, but the contest had so far been a draw. Some years, in some places, the waters flowed through the eddies and channels around the villages and into the fields. Other times, in other places, the river crested quickly, flooded homes, and inundated crops. But because there was always water and the soil was fertile, food was rarely a problem. Even if tax revenues could be erratic, Egypt had been known as the breadbasket of the M
editerranean since the time of the Romans, and it had never failed to live up to that reputation.
It was common for visiting Europeans in this period to describe life in rural Egypt as static. Some aspects of it were, yet life had evolved over the centuries. Though the realities of the Nile and crops may have been similar for the slaves who toiled for the pharaohs and for the fellahin who worked the lands of Muhammad Ali, daily life had developed different cadences. Islam arrived in Egypt in the seventh century, and not until the tenth century were Muslims a majority of the population. A core of Coptic Christians remained in Egypt, constituting a significant minority along a stretch of the Nile north of Luxor and in Cairo itself, where a handful of churches predated even the oldest of the grand mosques. Islam itself was not an unchanging monolith. By the time of the Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century, the country had been ruled by a succession of Arab, Kurdish, and Turkish dynasties, each of which imported its own variant of Islam. In the countryside, meanwhile, the fellahin created a folk religion that had little to do with the faith guarded by the theologians of al-Azhar University in Cairo and fought over by rival Muslim rulers.
Much of the time, Egyptian villages governed themselves. Until the reforms of Muhammad Ali, the fellahin had little contact with the central government. Life was arranged around a lattice of relationships, and the only officials were the imam of the local mosque, the government-appointed tax farmer, and the shaikh of the village Sufi order. And of these, the most consequential was the Sufi shaikh. More than the prayer leader of the mosque, more than any official of the government, after the sixteenth century the Sufi orders were the centripetal force that kept society from spinning out of control.
Sufism emerged gradually in the Muslim world. Beginning in the eighth century, Sufi mystics stressed a direct, individual connection with God. In time, these mystics drew followers, and these followers began to codify the lessons learned from their masters. Eventually, much as monastic orders coalesced in Europe, Sufi orders formed, and were named after their putative founding teacher. As the Muslim world fragmented into numerous warring states and competing sects, Sufi orders filled the vacuum. After the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century eviscerated Baghdad and other centers of Muslim civilization, Sufism assumed a dominant place in the lives of millions.
In Egypt especially, the Sufi orders were intimately woven into society. By the time of Napoleon’s invasion, the local Sufi shaikh performed weddings and funerals, adjudicated disputes, offered counsel and advice, doled out loans, and provided spiritual guidance to the inhabitants of the village. Holidays often revolved around the birthdays of notable shaikhs. At Tanta, the largest settlement in the delta, thousands gathered every October for a week-long festival in honor of Shaikh Ahmad Badawi, who had lived in the thirteenth century and whose tomb and shrine became the geographic center of the Badawiyya order. During the celebrations, animals were slaughtered, prostitutes took a working holiday, different social classes mingled, prayers were said, and people consumed an abundance of sugar-coated nuts called hubb al-Aziz (“seeds of the beloved Prophet”).
Badawi’s shrine at Tanta was known throughout Egypt, but the country was dotted with local shrines of Sufi saints. These were often surrounded by a small complex of buildings that included not just the grave of the saint but a structure large enough for the brotherhood of the order to congregate and for living quarters for the administrators. The complexes also had lands attached to them, and the income from these fields supported the brotherhood.
One of Muhammad Ali’s many reforms was to seize the land of these local brotherhoods and appropriate them for himself, much as Henry VIII took possession of the Catholic monasteries of England when he severed his connections with the Vatican. But, unlike the British monarch, Muhammad Ali did not care about theology. Though the pasha was not shy about using violence, even he had to tread delicately when he dispossessed the Sufi lodges of their land. He altered the tax system so that revenue flowed directly into his treasury, but for the most part, he did not interfere with local customs. When he made the Sufi shaikhs into paid servants of the state, he did the same for the religious scholars in Cairo. But he did not dictate what they taught or preached. A balance was reached. In return for a steady income from the state, the shaikhs supported Muhammad Ali and his immediate successors. The Sufi lodges remained as vital as ever, even though they had lost some of their autonomy.
Europeans who arrived in Egypt in these years were fascinated with the Sufis. Egyptian folk religion was a cacophonous amalgam of rites. Some were a product of centuries of Sufi practice. The goal of mystics everywhere has been to find the path to God, and different Sufi orders discovered different paths. Some used chanting and breathing; believers would recite the name of God or verses of the Koran as a form of meditation. Others danced. The most famous of the dancing Sufis followed the teachings of the great master Rumi and became known in the West as the whirling dervishes. The orders that encouraged dancing, singing, and chanting were sometimes known as the “ecstatic orders,” as opposed to the “sober orders” that abhorred such activities. Most Egyptian Sufis were part of the first group. Ahmad Badawi had been known to shout continuously for days, working himself into a trance. He also fasted, and once stood staring into the sun until his eyes turned bright red. But whether emulating Badawi through the visceral ecstasy of chants or copying other masters by pursuing the solitary life of hermits, all Sufis strove to remove the barriers that separated individuals from Allah.
In the Egyptian countryside, Sufism merged with local practices and traditions that had existed long before Islam or Christianity had appeared. Very few fellahin could read or write. The Koran was entirely a vocal experience for them. They heard it chanted on Fridays at the local mosque, and during the daily call to prayer. But they didn’t always understand the Arabic of the Koran, because the language they spoke was an Egyptian dialect that differed significantly from classical Arabic. Instead, their Islam was a mishmash of fertility rites and prayers for floods and good harvests, of weddings and funerals, and of seasonal festivals to honor the birthdays of the Prophet and the saints.
Over time, these festivals and practices had been clothed in Sufi rituals, and their origin in pre-Islamic times was forgotten. Though saint worship was censured in the Koran, men and women would go to the local shrine to touch a piece of cloth that had belonged to the Sufi master or to kiss the screen in front of the tomb, in the hopes that the gesture would impart some of the saint’s baraka, or “blessing.” Shaikhs gained influence and prestige from their ability to perform miracles and magic. Sometimes, these miracles took the form of a barren woman becoming pregnant, a sick child infected with worms from the Nile and about to go blind regaining sight, or a man with several daughters being graced with a son. But the magic could also be more prosaic. At festivals, shaikhs or younger men in the brotherhood achieved a frenzied state after singing, chanting, and smoking a water pipe laced with hashish. Then they would dash across a pit of hot coals, or swallow swords and eat flames. Crowds would gather, as crowds always do whenever anyone does something extreme, and cheer or jeer depending on the outcome.
These practices drew the attention of Europeans who wrote about life in Egypt, and they attracted the animosity of Muslim scholars and judges. The learned muftis of Cairo viewed the folk religion of the Nile as un-Islamic and bathed in superstition. They had tried over the centuries to force Sufis to reform their practices and bring them in line with the textual, legalistic Islam of al-Azhar. Judges like Jabarti, who wrote so scathingly of the French invasion, were even more hostile to the village shaikh. But in this tug of war, neither side had scored a decisive victory, and Egyptian society was marked by an unresolved tension between Islam as it was understood by the fellahin and Islam as it was interpreted by religious scholars.
But, however much the fellahin were shaped by an ecstatic, magical Sufism, however much they were steeped in notions of a mysterious God and the equally mysterious Ko
ran, Islam was not especially rigid or doctrinal for them. It was simply part of the landscape, sharing time and space with daily mundaneness. Lucy Duff-Gordon, who lived in Egypt during these years, wrote perceptively about village life. “The best houses have neither paint, whitewash, plaster, bricks or windows—nor any visible roofs. They don’t give one the notion of human dwelling at all at first, but soon the eye gets used to the absence of all that constitutes a house in Europe, the impression of wretchedness wears off, and one sees how picturesque they are with palm trees and tall pigeon houses and here and there a dome over a saint’s tomb.”
Islam was part of personal identity, but not in a self-conscious way. A fellah was a son, a man, a father, a husband, a farmer, a Muslim, or a daughter, sister, wife, and mother. God was everywhere, or nowhere. Shaikhs were loved, and sometimes feared. Rulers were distant, and best avoided. Diet was simple, but rich with dates and eggs, bread, butter, and milk. The Bedouins of the deserts may have used camels, but most of the fellahin stuck to the mule or donkey as the draft animal of choice. Women were married by their fathers and families; wives obeyed their husbands; children obeyed their parents; and everyone obeyed the government.2
Parting the Desert Page 22