It was a supreme duty of the State to observe and record social conditions and their development, to diagnose social diseases and defects and to study the methods of treatment; to plan, in light of these observations and studies, a comprehensive and permanent policy of social rehabilitation with a view to uplifting the poor classes, raising the standard of living of the individual as well as the family, and finally assuring the biggest share of social justice to the people.
—Ahmad Husayn, Social Welfare in Egypt
By 1939, when the king of Egypt established the Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) to “uplift Egyptians and to provide the people with the biggest share of social justice,” the Egyptian charitable organizations (jamʿiyyāt khayriyya) that the ministry would supervise already offered an impressive array of services to their target communities.Footnote 1 Their kitchens gave daily alimentation to the hungry and served holiday meals to the needy. The largest and best-funded organizations offered general and specialized medical care in clinics and hospitals. Smaller and less affluent organizations provided nominal financial assistance to the needy. Some groups paid burial expenses. Benevolent associations of various sizes offered elementary and vocational education. Some organizations had occupational workshops, the products of which were sold to the needy at low prices. Those associations with the means to build small libraries provided space for study and discussion. Patrons used the meeting halls of the charities they sponsored to rub shoulders with one another and to hold fundraising theatrical and musical galas.Footnote 2
King Faruq (r. 1936–52), who signed MOSA into existence, and Prime Minister ʿAli Mahir (r. 1935, 1939–40) intended MOSA to affirm the state as the main provider of such services and to be the primary patron of the poor.Footnote 3 In an era of nationalist state creation, Faruq's support for MOSA positioned him as a paterfamilias providing welfare services in exchange for his citizens’ loyalty.Footnote 4
Faruq and Mahir also designed MOSA to bring all existing nonstate benevolent organizations under state control.Footnote 5 Both men had grown leery of the agendas of charitable associations. In 1936, during his brief first term as prime minister, Mahir established the short-lived High Council of Social Reform, a role of which was to supervise the increasingly political activities of those organizations.Footnote 6 In March 1938, Faruq issued a decree separating charitable societies from political parties and from paramilitary organizations; he was working, as had Mahir, to separate party politics from charity.Footnote 7 Yet Faruq and Mahir's vision for strengthening the Egyptian monarchy was threatened by something other than rival politicians and weapons: namely, the reform agendas of a growing number of charitable organizations both large and small. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, both provided charity and made an explicit call for the reform of Egyptian society along Islamic lines.Footnote 8 Smaller, lower-profile societies sought to reform their target communities through classes and lectures. Events held in those societies’ libraries and lecture halls aimed not only to entertain and educate their audiences but also to transform their behavior, shape their morals, and structure their free time.Footnote 9 Some associations had playing fields on which they offered courses in physical training and sponsored sporting competitions.Footnote 10 Certain organizations suggested that these activities were designed to improve the intellectual and physical condition of the poor; others made direct reference to intellectual development and physical fitness as part of a project to reform Egypt and to cure national problems like poverty, disease, and illiteracy.Footnote 11 As charitable organizations increasingly linked providing for the poor with reforming Egyptian society, and as the “politics of benevolence,” to borrow Mine Ener's term, came to include transforming the social order, Faruq and Mahir created the new ministry and took the helm of social reform.Footnote 12
The establishment of MOSA therefore not only represented a new chapter in the Egyptian state's encroachment into the provision of charity, but also called for a redefinition of the relationship between the government and the people and a refashioning of the roles of civil society benevolent institutions. In earlier decades of the 20th century, the Egyptian state had depended upon the services provided by charitable associations.Footnote 13 During the 1919 uprisings against the British and in the years following Egypt's semi-independence in 1923, government officials applauded the associations’ commitment to securing and building an independent nation.Footnote 14 After 1939 the state stopped short of allowing charitable associations free rein to build the bodies and minds of Egyptian citizens. The creation of MOSA heralded an era in which such citizenship would be defined by association with the state, and not with civil society.
This article traces the transformation of the relationship between charitable organizations and the state in Egypt from the late 19th century, when those organizations were founded, through 1945, when Faruq's government gave MOSA the authority to define and to limit their activities.Footnote 15 The article joins the work of scholars who have illustrated the Egyptian state's increasing acknowledgement, over the course of the 20th century, that the provision of social welfare was a requisite of governing.Footnote 16 It departs from earlier work by arguing that the establishment of MOSA not only represents the assertion of state hegemony into the arena of social welfare but also illustrates the indebtedness of the new ministry to the structures and practices of private charitable giving that had developed over the course of the 20th century. Indeed, the new ministry's blueprints for success at welfare provision came from the very organizations it sought to emulate and to control. MOSA's rural centers and urban clubs, schools and clinics, sporting fields, kitchens, and libraries replicated the services that voluntary associations had been offering since the late 19th century. The poor could thereafter seek assistance directly from the ministry or from a state-supervised but privately funded charitable organization. Regardless of the patron, the assistance was similar.
BEGINNINGS
A new type of organization, the jamʿiyya (society or association), began to emerge in Egypt in the middle decades of the 19th century. The jamʿiyya combined elements of guild and Sufi lodge practices with new forms of affiliation, augmenting the functions of traditional associations. By the end of the 19th century, the jamʿiyya provided Egyptians with novel ways of organizing, mobilizing, and forming group identity. Many of these early associations in Egypt were what sociologist Robert Putnam calls “bonding” societies: inward-looking communities organized to develop ties of solidarity among their membership and to create mutual obligations, common rules, and ritual practices.Footnote 17 Membership in the literary and scientific societies that saw their rise in the mid-19th century offered a means of acquiring or displaying erudition, of demonstrating status, of practicing a newly acquired language, and of forging ties with scholarly communities abroad.Footnote 18 Participation in secret political societies brought together men with common cause against the autocratic rule of Khedive Ismaʿil (r. 1863–79).Footnote 19 Freemasonry provided social clubs and meeting spaces where solidarity was fostered among members who could speak freely with one another.Footnote 20 Elite women created associations to cultivate their literary and scientific interests and to work for women's rights.Footnote 21 Members of expatriate communities in Egypt sought in associational life the comforts of shared languages and religious and cultural idioms.Footnote 22 Labor associations, which emerged in the early 20th century, developed bonds among workers, protected workers’ interests, and worked to secure strong relationships between laborers and their employers.Footnote 23 By the time of MOSA's establishment in 1939, such “bonding” societies brought together people seeking intellectual compatibility, autonomy in work relationships, community in exile, political fellow travelers, and women's rights.
Other associations with 19th-century roots typified “bridging” organizations, in which membership brought service to a greater community.Footnote 24 Communities of expatriates as well as native-born Egyptians drew on the structures of emerging literary and political associations to create organizations that combined “bonding” community interests with charitable practices. From the mid-19th century, associations of Greeks and Italians in Alexandria, for example, organized to foster community relationships with one another and to care for the greater community of expatriate Greeks and Italians.Footnote 25 When the Egyptian ʿAbd Allah al-Nadim (1845–96) established the Islamic Benevolent Society (al-Jamʿiyya al-Khayriyya al-Islamiyya) in Alexandria in 1879, he combined the associational practices he had experienced during his years as a mason and as a member of a secret political society with his concern for feeding and educating the poor. Al-Nadim's new organization united members of the Muslim elite in community service, and the association built schools and orphanages.Footnote 26 Similarly, in 1880, the Egyptian statesman Yusuf Wahba (1852–1934) established the Tawfiq Coptic Benevolent Society (al-Jamʿiyya al-Khayriyya al-Qibtiyya al-Tawfiqiyya). In addition to feeding and clothing the poor, the society sponsored boys’ and girls’ schools in Cairo.Footnote 27 A year later, diplomat and cabinet member Butrus Ghali (1849–1910) founded the Coptic Benevolent Society (al-Jamʿiyya al-Khayriyya al-Qibtiyya), which provided the poor with educational scholarships, clothing, and medical assistance.Footnote 28 In 1892, financier and intellectual Muhammad Talaʿat Harb (1867–1914), Islamic reformer Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), lawyer Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908), and future politician Saʿad Zaghlul (1859–1927) opened a branch of the Islamic Benevolent Society in Cairo. That same year, the Muhammad ʿAli vocational school, the ʿAbbas orphanage, and elementary schools for boys and girls were built by al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa (Indissolvable Bond) Society in Alexandria.Footnote 29
In Cairo and Alexandria, elites in the Jewish community established charitable organizations to help both indigenous and immigrant Jews. Charities in Alexandria provided needy young women with dowries, granted interest-free loans, and gave alms and hospitality to immigrants and travelers. The 1880s saw the establishment of a similar Jewish dowry fund in Cairo, a home for the aged poor, and a society for dispensing charity anonymously.Footnote 30 The Qattawi, Mosseri, de Menasce, and Suarès families, critical participants in Egypt's economic and infrastructural development from the second half of the 19th century, were particularly active in serving the lower classes of Egypt's Jewish communities. While Jews in Egypt drew on traditions of welfare and self-help from other parts of the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean, their development of charitable organizations in the 1880s and 1890s also mirrored local practices.Footnote 31 By the outbreak of World War I, there were at least twenty Islamic benevolent societies, a dozen Coptic societies, and an equal number of Jewish societies in both Cairo and Alexandria.Footnote 32
While the 19th century witnessed the emergence of new charitable associations in Egypt, the practice of charity was certainly not new. Even as Muhammad ʿAli (r. 1805–48) and his sons and grandsons worked to modernize Cairo by widening streets, demolishing some popular quarters, and building European-style neighborhoods, Cairo's landscape remained a testimony to the gifts of wealthy individuals, families, and religious communities. Their piety and largesse had contributed to Egypt's social order over the centuries. The soup kitchens of prominent households, the many waqf-funded fountains and schools, the Sufi lodges wherein the poor took refuge, and the Mamluk- and Ottoman-sponsored mosques, bridges, waterworks (sabīl-kuttabs), and hospitals were visible evidence of generosity and piety. The more monumental of those institutions, those built by the Mamluk sultans, were also indications of the power once associated with the charitable activities of dynastic rule, evidence of rulers’ piety, and signs of their responsibility as patrimonial sovereigns.Footnote 33
As Mine Ener's work illustrates, the centralization efforts of 19th-century rulers weakened traditional forms of provision for the poor.Footnote 34 Guild members found it more difficult to provide mutual assistance.Footnote 35 The shelters through which Sufi brotherhoods had provided asylum to the poor were put under state supervision, thereby cutting off the poor from a traditional source of charity.Footnote 36 The autonomy of the waqfs, endowments that had provided health care and education services over the centuries, was reduced as the result of 19th-century reforms such as Muhammad ʿAli's creation of an administration to supervise waqf endowments in 1835.Footnote 37
At the same time that his policies weakened traditional sources of assistance to the poor, Muhammad ʿAli made himself and his state institutions their primary benefactor. He began the practice of state-sponsored welfare by building a handful of hospitals and asylums. Egypt's poor increasingly turned to such institutions over the course of the century as traditional sources of immediate aid—neighborhoods, religious communities, and families—failed to meet their needs. The poor similarly positioned themselves as clients to Egypt's viceroys and khedives, petitioning for their aid in times of need.Footnote 38 By the late 19th century, Egypt's rulers and their governing institutions had thereby “claimed the mantle of guardianship of the weak and vulnerable” in a manner similar to Sultan Abdülhamit (r. 1876–1909).Footnote 39 The sultan used charity to secure loyalty to his regime. Largesse allowed Abdülhamit, much as it did the Egyptian viceroys and khedives, to centralize his authority, assert his patronage, and increase his popularity during a time when new elites and new demands for constitutional politics challenged sultanic rule.Footnote 40
Had bankruptcy not worked against them, the Egyptian khedives might have succeeded in making their state the most effective guardian of Egypt's poor. On the eve of the British occupation in 1882, however, the government's increasingly strained finances had taken their toll on its ability to provide welfare services. The Mosque of Ahmad ibn Tulun, for example, which Muhammad ʿAli appropriated for use as a poorhouse from the 1840s, was emptied of its residents and reverted back to its traditional purpose by 1880, when state funds were no longer adequate for its maintenance.Footnote 41 After the occupation, British determination to improve the state's finances at the expense of social welfare meant the scant dedication of resources for education, public health, and charity.Footnote 42 While the British claimed to be horrified by the condition of Egypt's poor, they did not fund assistance programs.Footnote 43 British officials encouraged private groups to care for the poor, granting much leeway to the initiatives of foreign communities, missionaries, the wives of colonial officials, and, increasingly, the Egyptian elite.Footnote 44
In the relative absence of strong state benefactors, the Egyptians who funded and participated in private charitable organizations beginning in the 1880s provided the poor with food, shelter, and education, effectively compensating for the paucity of state-run institutions.Footnote 45 This paucity was particularly acute in Cairo and Alexandria in the last decades of the 19th century, as the numbers of the urban poor increased.Footnote 46 An influx of workers, petty traders, and unemployed people into Cairo intensified the need for traditional and vocational education. Increased urban crowding increased poor health. Waves of cholera and plague between 1883 and 1905 were met with few resources.Footnote 47
To cite Jaques Berque: “The age needed organizers, as the previous age had had its swashbucklers.”Footnote 48 Those organizers came from a variety of ranks. The khedives and their family members joined charitable organizations so as to continue their role as advocates of the poor. Similarly, participation in charity allowed Egypt's wealthy landowning class to demonstrate its elite status.Footnote 49 In associational activities, Egypt's growing professional (effendi) class rubbed shoulders with Egypt's elites. Women from the elite classes were a formidable presence in philanthropy.Footnote 50 Royal and notable women, funded by the patronage of royals and aristocrats—including Khedive ʿAbbas (r. 1892–1914), his wife, and his mother—established Mabarrat Muhammad ʿAli, a dispensary for poor women in Cairo in 1908.Footnote 51 That same year, several dozen elite women formed the Society of Compassion for Children (Jamʿiyyat al-Shafaqa bi-l-Atfal).Footnote 52 In 1912, the royal family sponsored the establishment of the Egyptian Red Crescent (Jamʿiyyat al-Hilal al-Ahmar), which opened hospitals and clinics in Cairo and Alexandria.Footnote 53
Additionally, societies dedicated to apparently noncharitable goals, such as the Society for the Promotion of Tourism (Association egyptienne pour favoriser le tourism), founded in 1909, and the Oriental Music Society (Jamʿiyyat al-Musiqiyya al-Sharqiyya), founded in 1910, provided more than their names suggested. The former, for example, declared itself to be a society to encourage tourism and to develop relations between Egypt and foreign countries, and to demonstrate what the group called “Egypt's advantages and attractions.” The society had three commissions, one of which was dedicated to hygiene, with the aim of improving the condition of the poor through the development of public services. While the ultimate goal of the society might well have been to clean the country up for foreign tourists, a byproduct was attention to the needs of its poor.Footnote 54
Political parties provided services that were similar to charitable associations. After its establishment in 1907, the National Party (al-Hizb al-Watani) provided courses in literacy and vocational training. Party member Wafiq Rifaʿat applauded the jamʿiyyāt for joining his fellow party members in helping Egyptians. He credited the Islamic Benevolent Society for enrolling over 2,000 students in 1908, al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa Society for providing night school classes in Arabic, and the Coptic societies in Cairo for opening vocational schools in the neighborhoods of Faggala and Bulaq.Footnote 55
By the time of MOSA's establishment, cities and villages across Egypt were marked by fresh evidence of private charity.Footnote 56 Schools provided vocational and elementary education, moral instruction, and hygiene. Dispensaries, clinics, and hospitals provided basic health care. From their meeting spaces, philanthropists distributed clothing, both as a regular practice and in celebration of feast days. Some provided financial assistance to those in crisis. Kitchens provided daily meals and holiday feasts. Orphanages and asylums for adults offered shelter. Through a version of what one scholar has called “civic Ottomanism,” Egyptians organized to take care of their own.Footnote 57
THE STATE AND ITS SOCIETIES
Anthropologist Sarah ben Nefissa has suggested that Egyptian state control of the jamʿiyyāt began with the establishment of MOSA. Her investigations into the interactions between the government and civil society beginning with Egypt's 1885 Civil Code include an examination of the document's sixteen articles pertaining to societies. Her reading of the civil code for clues about how the state defined its relationship with the growing number of voluntary associations suggests that, prior to MOSA, the state's primary goal was to define the rights and limitations of associational life. Ben Nefissa claims that the civil code simply defined the new organizations (“the jamʿiyya . . . comprises a group of individuals, naturally and legally constituted, with goals that do not include the making of profit”), and guaranteed that they would be ruled by majority vote. She found no evidence of a state asserting control over associational life.Footnote 58
And yet the civil code required any jamʿiyya wishing to receive financial assistance from the state to submit an annual report, detailing its membership, mission statement, structure, funding, procedures, and activities to the Egyptian Council of Ministers. Whatever secrecy or opacity that had surrounded the activities of earlier societies was eliminated as the state began collecting these reports.Footnote 59 Such nascent state surveillance of civil society would increase with the establishment of MOSA, but was not new to the late 1930s.
Societies willing to offer full accounts of their activities were rewarded with land, tax breaks, and subventions.Footnote 60 Societies were eligible to purchase state land at reduced prices, for example, if the land was earmarked for charitable purposes.Footnote 61 Land used by an organization to build a school or a workshop or to produce goods that could fund further charity was also tax exempt.Footnote 62 Such arrangements made it possible for many of the organizations to engage in building projects, and by 1911 Cairo alone had witnessed the construction of eleven hospitals and nine clinics by benevolent societies.Footnote 63 Some societies built elementary schools; others built workshops for vocational and industrial education. The products of those workshops were in turn sold by the societies to raise money for further projects.Footnote 64
Institutions founded by philanthropic societies lessened the state's need to provide similar ones.Footnote 65 In an era during which Egypt was under British occupation, the state provided a modicum of social welfare to its subjects via the hospitals, schools, and asylums built or sponsored by the jamʿiyyāt. This fact was not lost on the government ministers who read the societies’ annual reports or who received the societies’ requests for subventions. The Council of Ministers responded to one subvention request: “With a view toward contributing to the development of the city of Cairo, and to give greater assistance to the creation of charitable establishments, the Ministry of the Interior has made money available to give the necessary credit.”Footnote 66 The Council of Ministers was indeed generous to societies in its granting of subventions.Footnote 67
The relationship between the Council of Ministers and newly organized philanthropists—the khedive and his family, large landowners, members of the professional classes—resulted in a condominium of social welfare. A constrained state provided what it could, and the jamʿiyyāt performed charitable acts. The visible result of the mutually dependent relationship between the government and associational life was what Preeti Chopra calls a shared landscape of state building, in which the efforts of societies were visible and for which a seemingly hamstrung Egyptian state was partially responsible.Footnote 68 It was not in the interest of the members of the colonial administration, for whom providing human services to Egyptians was not a priority, to interfere in this mutually dependent relationship.
QUESTIONABLE SERVICES: FROM CHARITY TO REFORM
The cooperative provision of charity continued in the years leading up to and following Egypt's semi-independence from Britain in 1922. The numbers of jamʿiyyāt grew and their projects continued to shape the landscape of Egypt's major urban centers and provinces. New hospitals, orphanages, schools, and workshops attested to the power of organizations to “make things happen”—in the words of the 19th-century scholar and statesman Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi (1801–73).Footnote 69 New organizations appeared. The Society of Islamic Benevolence (Jamʿiyyat al-Musawah al-Islamiyya), for example, began its work in Cairo in 1920.Footnote 70 So did the Society for Devotion to Mankind (Jamʿiyyat al-Birr li-l-Insan).Footnote 71 A women's group, The New Woman Society (Jamʿiyyat al-Marʾa al-Jadida), set up a center for vocational education in the Cairo neighborhood of Munira.Footnote 72 Societies expanded their offerings: an ever-increasing number of associations, for example, added primary and secondary schools to their elementary and vocational educational offerings. The annual reports of several groups boasted that their graduates had continued on to a university education.Footnote 73 Other societies specialized in medical attention for their constituencies. The larger and more prosperous societies opened general and special hospitals. Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa, for example, opened a hernia hospital for urban workers and the fellahin.Footnote 74
During the 1920s, however, the cooperative relationship between the state and Egyptian associational life began to change. The societies’ power to mobilize resources, organize populations, and demonstrate political allegiances had been evident in the 1919 uprisings against colonial rule. Associations had pooled their resources in support of the Wafd, participated in boycotts, and marched in protests.Footnote 75 After the establishment of the semi-independent state and the growth of Egyptian political party life, politicians began to seek alliances with the jamʿiyyāt in order to co-opt the votes of their membership. With a seat in parliament or a ministerial position assured, however, certain politicians passed laws to rein the associations in.
For example, “Ziwar's Law” of 1924—named for Egypt's premier Ahmad Ziwar (1864–1924)—virtually abolished Egyptians’ freedom of association, and was designed to prevent associations from allying with the political parties of Ziwar's opponents. While the 1923 constitution had guaranteed Egyptians the freedom of association, “Ziwar's Law” remained in place through the end of the 1920s.Footnote 76 Using a slightly different strategy to weaken the power base of his opponents, Muhammad Mahmud (1877–1941), prime minister between 1928 and 1929, increased state funding to associations based in the countryside. The Mahmud administration also passed the 1928 Law of Egyptian Cooperatives, which placed the cooperative societies under the supervision of a government council.Footnote 77 Prime Minister Ismaʿil Sidqi (1875–1950, r. 1930–33) amended the 1923 constitution to provide the government with the means to stifle political dissent as part of his “assault on civil society.”Footnote 78 Government assistance and subventions to the associations continued apace in this period; elected officials, however, appeared to fear the associations even as they continued to rely upon them.
After 1923, the relationship between the state and charitable organizations also shifted as the goals of the associations changed. Such changes were reflected in the language used by the associations to describe their mission. At the turn of the 20th century, benevolent societies claimed to provide charitable services (khidamāt khayriyya) to the poor. In the years leading up to the 1919 uprisings, some associations announced that their services were both charitable and social (ijtimaʿiyya), offered in service to Egyptian society. Sometimes such social services were linked with the Egyptian nationalist movement. Nationalist ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Nazmi's “Freedom Orphanage Project” (Maljaʾ al-Hurriyya), for example, connected caring for needy Egyptians to the independence movement.Footnote 79 The administrative board of Jamʿiyyat al-ʿUrwa al-Wuthqa similarly saw the association's contributions as national. In a petition for a government subvention, society president Muhammad Pasha Hidayya included a message to the Council of Ministers about the importance of charity to the nation:
In one year's time, our hospital can cure 300 hernia cases. And if we do the math, each cured worker or peasant can gain a minimum of 15 piasters a day. The amount those 300 cured workers would earn amounts to 16,000 L.E., an important sum for the national economy. Given that we're only requesting an additional annual subvention of 500 L.E., the state makes a good return on its investment.Footnote 80
The language of some charitable organizations changed once again in the 1930s. Many Egyptian intellectuals during the 1920s had dedicated themselves to studying Egypt's problems, particularly disease, poverty, and illiteracy.Footnote 81 In the 1930s, an increasing number of rank-and-file jamʿiyya members focused their attention on fixing those problems. “Service” therefore began to be replaced by the idea that what one was doing in a jamʿiyya was reforming the social order.
By the mid-1930s, reform agendas had become common currency among parties and organizations wishing to shape and structure Egypt to their liking. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, established in 1928, advocated for the reform of Egyptian society along Islamic lines. Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) intended his association to push for more and better education and social services for Muslim Egyptians.Footnote 82 The Muslim Youth Association, also established in 1928, emphasized improvement of the individual through religious instruction and sports activities.Footnote 83 Similarly, a group of Western-educated Egyptians started the Scouts Society in 1929, proposing the creation of camps for the treating of Egypt's social problems.Footnote 84 Likewise, the president of the Society for Social Development (Jamʿiyyat al-Taqwim al-Ijtimaʿi) described his group as “affect[ing] every aspect of life . . . we hope this society to be a . . . source of help to people . . . but we hope also to reform and raise the conditions of our country.”Footnote 85
Reform goals emerged even from associations whose common interests appeared, on the surface, to have nothing to do with reform. This was true of the Society of Art Amateurs in Alexandria, which was established in the mid-1930s and sponsored a school of fine arts and a clubhouse for art amateurs. A letter sent by the group to King Faruq revealed that the organization's interests were not limited to art: it also aimed to reform the Egyptian educational system, care for the homeless, open sports clubs around the country, create young people's volunteer corps, open syndicates for all kinds of workers, and carry out other acts of reform nationwide.Footnote 86
Political parties defined themselves through their social reform agendas. During the 1920s, social reform had been of limited importance to Wafdist and non-Wafdist governments, as political parties concentrated “instead on the three-way power struggle among the palace, the Wafd and the British.”Footnote 87 By the mid-1930s, new parties and the newly politicized Muslim Brotherhood began advancing agendas to address foreign domination of the Egyptian economy, Egyptians’ unemployment, and chronic state inattention to health and educational concerns. Ahmad Husayn (1911–82) established the Young Egypt Party (Misr al-Fatat) in 1933 as an alternative to what he characterized as the Wafd's impotence. Husayn advanced a highly militarized party structure dedicated to reforming Egyptian society and to providing public education, health care, and social security. By 1934, the Muslim Brotherhood had an increasingly organized apparatus for providing education and financial assistance.Footnote 88 The Wafd, in turn, developed its own social reform agenda.Footnote 89 During its 1935 party congress, Wafd members outlined a program of social reform that included improved health care and educational programs in Egypt's villages and a more equalized taxation schedule. In 1936, a newly elected Wafd government transformed the Department of Public Health into a ministry.Footnote 90
In 1936, in an atmosphere in which politicians used reform as a means of defining and advancing their agendas and of gaining followers, Prime Minister ʿAli Mahir established the High Council for Social Reform. Mahir's project was as short lived as was his premiership. Nonetheless, it promoted the idea that improving Egyptians’ lives should rest in government hands.Footnote 91 Mahir also intended for the High Council for Social Reform, which served as MOSA's predecessor, to supervise Egypt's private charitable associations.Footnote 92
Mahir's vision for MOSA stemmed from his own experience in a jamʿiyya, the Egyptian Association for Social Studies (EASS) (Jamaʿiyya Misriyya li-l-Dirasat al-Ijtimaʿiyya), which he established in 1937 with Dr. Ahmad Husayn (1902–84). While a professor at Fuʾad I University (later Cairo University) in the early 1930s, Husayn had started a student association dedicated to the reform of rural life in Egypt. That group set up summer projects that the EASS would later use as a model, designed to fix the problems of the fellahin. EASS then opened social centers in two villages, following a practice of creating “model villages” in the countryside that stretched back to Muhammad ʿAli's rule.Footnote 93 The centers, which provided the same educational and medical services that the jamʿiyyāt had long provided, were successful enough to serve as Mahir and Husayn's blueprint for MOSA.Footnote 94
A second project of the EASS was the 1937 establishment of a school for social work in Cairo. Mahir and Husayn argued that charity and reform needed to be professionalized and managed by the state. The school therefore produced ranks of scientists who would attend to solving Egypt's pressing social problems. Its curriculum consisted of teaching and systematizing those topics which the jamʿiyyāt specialized in—health, hunger, literacy, and workers’ needs.Footnote 95 The two men encouraged the school's graduates to seek employment as social workers in hospitals, factories, youth clubs, and rural centers.Footnote 96
On the eve of Mahir's term as prime minister, he had a design for a ministry that would advance the activities of the jamʿiyyāt by imitating them and placing them under government supervision. King Faruq championed a similar agenda, and endorsed Mahir's plan to make the state the premier patron of the poor.
THE MINISTRY OF SOCIAL AFFAIRS
The year 1939 was a turbulent one in Egypt. The outbreak of World War II brought British soldiers to Egyptian soil in great numbers and disruptions to Egyptian life. While the war-based British industry created opportunities for some, increased British presence and further interference in Egyptian affairs bred new waves of resentment. Enthusiasm for alternatives to the Wafd grew in both urban and rural areas as Wafdist governments proved incapable of responding to Egyptians’ economic and political frustrations. As prime minister, Mahir worked both to bolster the power of the king and to advance a social welfare agenda in Egypt. Mahir's reform programs were steeped in his experiences with the EASS, but they were also designed to confront the Wafd. Despite his preferences for autocracy, Mahir's demonstrations of favor for reform-based groups like Young Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood gained him a modicum of popularity. His reputation was also bolstered by his dedication to social welfare, which he demonstrated through the establishment of MOSA.Footnote 97
Prior to Mahir's bid to create the new ministry, Faruq had already begun to assert his authority over Egypt's political arena and its civil society by issuing the royal proclamation of 8 March 1938. The proclamation abolished paramilitary societies, dissolved all remaining connections between political parties and the jamʿiyyāt, and forbade the associations from affiliating with political parties in the future.Footnote 98 Party politics and the practices of charity were to be separated.
With the establishment of MOSA the following year, charity would be more rigidly yoked to the state. In a political arena in which loyalty and popularity were gained through social reform programs, Mahir and Faruq advanced MOSA in order to cement popular allegiance to the palace. Faruq toured the country to visit charitable organizations shortly after the establishment of MOSA, asserting himself and his new ministry as the primary benefactors of the poor and as the patrons of civil society.Footnote 99 Both Mahir and the king seemed to understand that asserting increased control over social reform was a matter of political survival.Footnote 100 The Decree Law of 20 August 1939 that brought the new ministry into existence stated:
Whereas the evolution of society . . . has made it of necessity that social welfare be given the utmost attention and care, to preclude the danger of leaving matters to chance remedies and conflicting currents and trends . . . all this requires the creation of a Ministry to undertake such matters, to collect and co-ordinate them.Footnote 101
Indeed, the decree that brought MOSA into existence placed the state in charge of a number of services, including care for orphans and assistance to the poor and the elderly. The ministry placed moral instruction and social welfare among its responsibilities, along with labor questions, social services (“public lectures of an educational nature”), child welfare, and sports.Footnote 102 MOSA soon listed among its projects the opening of night schools, sports facilities, and help centers for the unemployed.Footnote 103
MOSA's mission statement suggested that making the state the central administrator of social services was the new ministry's main concern. Article 1 of the 1939 decree created a ministry and placed “charitable work of every description” under its supervision.Footnote 104 But the new ministry also intended to provide welfare, and for that it adopted the blueprints of the jamʿiyyāt themselves. MOSA's inaugural activities included opening and supervising orphanages, soup kitchens, and institutes of social reform. MOSA endeavored to teach Egyptians to manage their free time, to plan athletic activities for youth, and to cure social problems. The ministry opened social clubs and youth clubs throughout Egypt, and supervised the social and sporting centers that had already been established by the voluntary associations.Footnote 105 The ministry aimed to create an army of Egyptians to take up responsibility for their fellow compatriots.Footnote 106 The division referred to by MOSA as its “fellah department” opened rural social centers offering education, training, and cultural and athletic activities.Footnote 107
MOSA appeared to see itself as a jamʿiyya par excellence, working in cooperation with its new charges while supervising their activities. The new ministry claimed to protect the jamʿiyyāt from their own members’ potential for corruption, just as the government of Muhammad Mahmud had done with the cooperative societies in the 1920s.Footnote 108 Accordingly, by the early 1940s, the School of Social Work's graduates began staffing the Ministry of Social Affairs, and a new figure appeared in Egyptian society: the social worker. Specialists were dispatched from the school to the ministry and then released back into the jamʿiyyāt, working as counselors, trainers, and supervisors of association members. The dean of the School of Social Work sat on the administrative councils of several societies.Footnote 109
The ministry also presented itself as a mechanism for assuring that the jamʿiyyāt would remain financially solvent:
Private organizations make numerous contributions to social work. The establishment of a link between the Ministry and these organizations is important . . . It is not in the policy of the Ministry to take the place of any organization of any type. Rather, its policy is to cooperate with the organizations . . . and to strengthen them . . . and to help them financially.Footnote 110
Hence, the ministry continued to fund the societies through subventions that were often more generous than those of previous decades. The number of reform-oriented societies under MOSA's supervision increased throughout the 1940s, due to start-up assistance provided by the ministry.Footnote 111 MOSA worked for the establishment of supplementary taxes to distribute to charitable organizations, and oversaw the distributions of those taxes.Footnote 112 By replicating the programs and activities of the larger and more successful organizations, the ministry acknowledged that it was indebted to the jamʿiyyāt and that it had co-opted their functions.
The initial relationship between the ministry and the jamʿiyyāt was not an antagonistic one. Sometimes associations used MOSA as an advocate in disputes between their members or between members and other ministries. A 1940 letter from the administrative council of the Society for Preaching and Propagating Islam (Jamʿiyyat al-Waʿz wa-l-Daʿwa al-Islamiyya), for example, asked the ministry to interfere in what the society saw as a pressing social problem. A practice of the Ministry of Agriculture at the time was to take land from its holdings and divide it among the graduates of the College of Agriculture. Land grants allowed graduates to farm state land, profit from it, and, eventually, purchase it in installments. According to the members of this jamʿiyya, relatives of politicians were buying the land from the Ministry of Agriculture at a pittance and then renting it back to the agricultural school graduates at high prices. The society's administrative council thus urged MOSA to intervene:
We see that if the Ministry of Social Affairs intervened in this and made sure that this land was in fact given to graduates, their condition would improve, and so would that of Egyptian society. Since one of the goals of the Ministry is lowering the number of the unemployed, here is an opportunity.Footnote 113
While the jamʿiyyāt might have hoped to continue to use MOSA as an advocate, the ministry rather quickly succeeded in passing laws that increasingly brought the groups under state control. In its initial mission statement, MOSA claimed to “support charitable projects as they are provided by beneficent and social organizations.”Footnote 114 By the end of World War II, however, new laws such as Law 49 of 1945 extended the power of the state to define benevolent and social societies and to classify the kinds of activities that those societies could and could not perform. The law also gave MOSA the right to inspect the finances of societies and to accept or reject a society's request for funding. MOSA acquired the right to guide societies, inspect their records, and access the names of those who attended their council meetings. The law required societies to register with MOSA and to provide their headquarters’ street address. MOSA took on the right to dissolve any society found to be in transgression of the law.Footnote 115 The state continued to benefit from the services provided by the jamʿiyyāt, but became less charitable toward those organizations as MOSA's surveillance powers increased.
CONCLUSION
In late 19th- and early 20th-century Egypt, members of Egyptian service societies cared for the poor and provided services that were beyond the state's reach. During the British occupation, the state depended on the voluntary charitable contributions of its subjects. After 1923, Egyptians of various social classes practiced citizenship by providing for the needy. Once Egypt was semi-independent, however, the benevolent acts of subjects were not immediately translated into the rights of citizens to contribute to the nation. Politicians and state functionaries became increasingly wary of the power of charitable associations to “make things happen.”Footnote 116 By the mid-1930s, both volunteers and political parties linked charitable practices with reforming Egyptians. It was then that a new king and a reform-minded prime minister responded by asserting the state as the reformer and service provider par excellence. The volunteers to whom the Egyptian poor turned for assistance would henceforth be under state supervision. The establishment of MOSA therefore was both an acknowledgement of the contributions of Egyptian volunteers and a curtailment of their rights as citizens.
At same time, however, the Egyptians who turned to MOSA's urban and rural help centers found state-run agencies and the social workers they employed to be markedly familiar. Imitation was both the best form of flattery and the best means of providing services. MOSA did not replace the practices and provisions of charitable societies; rather, it began a process of creating a welfare state whose services resembled those of the jamʿiyyāt to a large extent. That process would intensify under the administration of Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir (r. 1954–70). A generation after its founding, the ministry therefore acknowledged that services provided by the jamʿiyyāt had shaped the state's new Social Security Law (1952), stating that social security now extended to all Egyptians what the jamʿiyyāt had long provided at the community level.Footnote 117
While it might be tempting to see the establishment of the new ministry as the triumph of politicians, MOSA's creation also illustrates state formation as a dialectical process.Footnote 118 As Liat Kozma has shown for khedival Egypt, the state was not a “coherent entity that mastermind[ed] a coherent set of reforms.” Rather, it was constituted by “multiple interactions between institutions and individuals”—in this case, negotiations between heads of state, charitable societies, and the ordinary Egyptians for whose needs they provided.Footnote 119 While interactions between governmental institutions and charitable organizations would become increasingly less cooperative as the 20th century advanced, MOSA's establishment is a culmination of the interdependence that had characterized the relationship between the state and Egyptian associational life from the late 19th century. As Aysa el-Meehy's work on popular committees in Egypt after the 2011 uprisings has suggested, the state is both a collection of institutions and a set of practices, engaged in by official and voluntary actors alike.Footnote 120 Officials like Mahir knew firsthand of the power of service societies, as did Egypt's newest fleet of experts, the social workers who learned to serve the state by working first among volunteers.
This dialectal relationship did not escape the attention of MOSA officials. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of its establishment, the ministry published a book about its brief history: Twenty-Five Years of the Ministry of Social Affairs. Indeed, by 1964, MOSA's institutional memory included an acknowledgment of the ministry's roots in late-19th-century associational life. The book's authors recognized that the services provided by the ministry and, later, by ʿAbd al-Nasir's state, had first been offered by volunteers. The Egyptian state, the book suggests, became charitable by gradually subsuming the nation's associational life and by using service societies as a blueprint for providing welfare to all Egyptians.Footnote 121
