Hast thou resolved on strangling me, O God?
Loosen the noose! (Peasant song, ca. 1900)1
In Winifred S. Blackman, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt (with a new introduction by Salima Ikram) (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000 [1927]), 171.
In spite of many competing views on peasants, their politics, and the state in 19th-century Egypt, the historiography contains certain striking continuities in its understanding of peasant–state political relations. Historians influenced by Marxism, modernization theory, and nationalism alike have usually seen state and peasantry as sharply distinct and conflicting. Peasants have often been depicted as locked in a struggle against the penetration of state agency into a previously autonomous rural domain.
2 The subtitle of one of the most important studies of 19th- and 20th-century peasant politics was “The Struggle Against the State”: Nathan J. Brown, Peasant Politics in Modern Egypt: The Struggle Against the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). Similar assumptions run through many of the contributions to Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury, ed., Peasant and Politics in the Modern Middle East (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), and guide the depiction of peasant resistance surveyed in Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44–70.
Whether seen as a force for benevolent modernization or for the predatory extraction of conscripts and taxes, the state has regularly been viewed as self-propelled and sui generis, reforming or invading the world of an either passive, silently subversive, or violently revolutionary peasantry. The figure of the tradition-bound, submissive, or apathetic peasant simply marks out a terrain for state agency, albeit an agency obstructed by peasant hostility, irrationality, or resentment.
3 The reforming projects of Jacob Landau's benevolent state were hindered by the “appalling apathy of the people”: Jacob M. Landau, Parliaments and Parties in Egypt (Tel Aviv: Israel Publishing House, 1953), 50. Robert Tignor's modernizing colonial state was confronted with peasants who were congenitally incapable of recognizing the benefits of central government: Robert L. Tignor, Modernization and British Colonial Rule in Egypt, 1882–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 142. In spite of revisionism, ideas about the passivity or the tradition-bound culture of the peasantry can only die hard: see Nathan Brown's discussion of this in “The Ignorance and Inscrutability of the Egyptian Peasantry,” Peasant and Politics, 203–21. Beyond the Middle East, Teodor Shanin even incorporates the notion of a “traditional culture” into his very definition of the peasant: Teodor Shanin, ed., Peasants and Peasant Societies: Selected Readings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 15.
The silently subversive peasant, further, who uses James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” merely undermines in antagonistic and wordless fashion projects emanating from above.
4 James C. Scott defined “weapons of the weak” as “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on” in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), xvi. Khaled Fahmy's predatory state was met in part with weapons of the weak by conscripts, among others: Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha's Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76–111. Marsot makes reference to arson, as well as to nonpayment of taxes by peasants through unregistered cultivation, cultivation on waqf land, or cultivation on land registered as unirrigated: Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 8.
The revolutionary peasant, finally, becomes the self-generating locus of the nationalist or socialist modern and seeks the violent overthrow of the predatory state, transforming the latter into only the negative—albeit treacherous—terrain on which the positive historical agency of peasants and their allies can work.
5 Latifa Salim's oppressive feudal state was confronted by the growing powers of a nationalist revolution among the peasantry: Latifa Muhammad Salim, al-Quwa al-ijtima
iyya fi al-thawra al-
urabiyya (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1981). This theme is familiar in Maoism and Third Worldism—For example, Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (preface by Jean-Paul Sartre), trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 11, 61. Social brigandage and millenarian uprisings have received less attention regarding 19th-century Egypt but also depict peasants in violent antagonism to state discourses and agencies. Brigandage, social and otherwise, may have been increasingly common in the late 1870s, as famine and taxes drove peasants to abandon their villages and join bands up to sixty strong, who were said to “infest” the banks of the Nile in Upper Egypt: See Borg to Vivian no. 42, 29 December 1877, PRO 141/112. On another occasion, British Consul Ralph Borg explained “several burglaries and robberies” in terms of “the present condition of the Fellaheen”: Borg to Lascelles, no. 26, 29 July 1879, PRO 141/129. Elsewhere, Borg mentioned “bands of 50 to 60 men” composed of fellahin who joined forces with “all others who have suffered from taxation.”: Borg to Vivian, no. 3, 3 March 1879, FO 141/128. For Cole's account, see Juan R. I. Cole, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's
Urabi Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 86. A Sufi leader from India, Ahmad al-Tayyib, arrived in Upper Egypt in the 1860s claiming to be a mahdist savior, awakened millenarian hopes, and organized a full-scale rebellion against Isma
il's government: see Colquhoun to Russell, no. 27, 5 March 1865; no. 32, 11 March 1865; and no. 41, 24 March 1865; all in PRO 78/1871. See also Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 88. The rebellion was based around Asyut and involved, according to Colquhoun, about 1,000 fellahin. It was crushed by force over about ten days.
In short, the existing historiography, while varying the historical role, value, and meaning of peasant and state, preserves both as radically distinct, self-creating, and self-defining collective agents involved in zero-sum and often violent antagonism.
My aim in this article is to suggest the possibility of more complex, differentiated, and mutually constitutive political relationships between peasants and the state during the two decades before the
Urabi rebellion of 1881–82. Contrary to the claims of some in subaltern studies, there are sources closer to peasant discourse and practice than those written exclusively by elites and state officials. Reem Saad and others have made effective use of oral accounts.
6 Reem Saad, “State, Landlord, Parliament and Peasant: The Story of the 1992 Tenancy Law in Egypt,” in Agriculture in Egypt: From Pharaonic to Modern Times, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Eugene Rogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 387–404.
Social historians have mined censuses, land registers, court records, petitions, family archives, and even memoirs.
7 Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Fahmy, All the Pasha's Men; Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Donald Quataert and Yüksel Duman, ed., “A Coal Miner's Life during the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Labor and Working- Class History 60 (2001): 153–79; Judith Tucker, Women in 19th Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Here I make use of a little studied group of handwritten peasant petitions preserved in the Egyptian National Archives along with related government correspondence. Such sources can provide new insight into peasant–state relations on the eve of colonial rule.
8 Some petitions and reports have been cited—for example, by Cole in his pioneering Colonialism and Revolution—but rarely studied. Beshara Doumani used petitions in Rediscovering Palestine, as did Julia A. Clancy-Smith in Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1914) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
They evoke not passivity, silent subversion, or outright revolution but, surprisingly, sophisticated engagement and negotiation with state practice and discourse. Peasant discourse, constructed in collaboration with professional petition writers, was not tradition-bound,
9 Vatikiotis's Egyptian peasants are tradition-bound in that, although they suffer tyranny, they are faulted for being incapable of constructing a political response based on modern political notions. Vatikiotis wrote, “That all peasants suffered…is…certain. But whether their resentment was couched in the political conception of national rebellion is another matter. As one Egyptian writer suggested, they rebelled frequently against oppression, tyranny, injustice (ẓulm); not for liberty or freedom:” P. J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 160.
grovelling,
10 Nathan Brown's peasants are seen as obsequious (Brown, Peasant Politics, 173) and as suffering from a personalistic view of politics (ibid., 166).
or immature;
11 Guha's South Asian peasant movements show a “somewhat inchoate and naïve state of consciousness” and “still a rather hesitant, inchoate and disjointed perception.” Peasant insurgency is sometimes dismissed by Guha as simply an “uncouth and naïve precursor” of “victorious bourgeois-democracy.” Peasant rebels are constrained by the “dye of a traditional culture,” which was “yet to wash off the peasant consciousness”: Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 10–11, 28, 50, 170. Such thinking measures protest according to a Eurocentric, developmentalist Marxist model. Such depictions owe much to Marx's dismissal of the “idiocy of rural life.” For this phrase, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 224–25. Marx was highly scathing about forms of peasant protest. That of 1848 was described as “clumsily cunning…a cleverly stupid anachronism, a world-historic piece of buffoonery”: Shanin, Peasant Societies, 229.
nor was it authentic, nationalist, and revolutionary. Instead, peasants made strategic use of the figure of the just ruler and lodged sometimes assertive appeals to the rule of law and new and old rights in a dangerous and power-laden context.
12 I will argue that the “naive-monarchism” shown by the peasantry was not so naive but, rather, self-consciously performed and constructed. This echoes James C. Scott's “not-so-naive interpretation of naive monarchism” among the peasantry in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 96–103.
Instead of the complete erasure implied in the claim that the “subaltern cannot speak,” peasants arguably did convey elements of their moral economy through their petitions, especially by manipulating the meaning of and adding content to officially sanctioned discourse.
13 Others have noted this form of resistance. Sumit Sarkar noted that E. P. Thompson's work on England had “revealed the many ways in which plebeian groups had been able to appropriate and use in their own partly autonomous ways, gentry conceptions of order and deference.” See Sumit Sarkar, “Orientalism Revisited: Saidian Frameworks in the Writing of Modern Indian History,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Vinayak Chaturvedi (London: Verso, 2000), 252.
Far from either ignoring state agencies, like Marx's “potatoes in a sack,” or simply seeking to overthrow them, à la Fanon, peasants tried, sometimes successfully, to draw provincial authorities, ministers, and the khedive into disputes.
14 “Khedive” was a title in use for the rulers of the semiautonomous Ottoman province of Egypt from the first half of the 19th century but became the official title of Isma
il in 1863 as an expression of his independence vis-à-vis Istanbul.
They also called for and participated in newly established official elections for village headmen. Such a picture of engagement and negotiation with state practice and discourse contrasts with images of avoidance on the one side and violent unrest on the other, and suggests new ways of thinking about state–peasant relations in 19th-century Egypt.
INEQUALITY AND THE HETEROGENEOUS STATE
Sugata Bose has written that “[i]n a sense the peasants of Eastern India lived in a ‘global village’ from at least the 1820s, occupying the lower rungs of an elaborate, interconnected hierarchical structure based on an international division of labour.”15
Sugata Bose, Peasant Labor and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63.
Much the same could be said of peasants in Egypt—especially following the cotton boom of the early 1860s, when prices rose as American cotton disappeared from the world market because of the Civil War. As Roger Owen has noted, each village became linked “directly to the world market, forcing it to live and breathe according to the dictates of producers and consumers, bankers and politicians far away.”
16 Roger Owen, “A Long Look at Nearly Two Centuries of Long Staple Cotton,” in Bowman and Rogan, Agriculture in Egypt, 363.
From 1805 onward, with the dynasty-building projects of an Ottoman provincial governor in Egypt, Mehmet Ali (1805–48), and his successors, and the abolition of an intermediary strata of rural tax farmers in 1814, peasants encountered more directly an increasingly centralized government and new and altered demands in taxation, conscription, and forced labor. Grandiose plans for Egypt's “progress” and “civilization,” prosecuted by Khedive Isma
il, grandson of Mehmet Ali and Egypt's ruler during 1863–79, laid a heavy hand on the rural surplus and multiplied the direct contacts between salaried bureaucracy and rural population.
17 F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
World economic integration and state building did not mean, however, that in rural areas one can speak of a monolithic state interacting antagonistically and in a zero-sum way with a homogeneous, collective peasantry by the early 1880s. First, social and economic change did not create a united peasant class. Social stratification by wealth in the countryside had deep roots, as Kenneth Cuno has shown, but the extension of market relations during the 19th century, especially after the dismantling of Mehmet Ali's monopolies in the 1840s, Said Pasha's Land Law of 1858, and the cotton boom of the early 1860s, increased inequality at the village level while heightening the salience of property relations in the making of local hierarchy. Large landholdings increased in number and wealth, while landlessness and agricultural wage labor expanded. Security of tenure and rent may have decreased for many while debt and dependence grew.18
See, for example, Roger Owen, “The Development of Agricultural Production in Nineteenth Century Egypt: Capitalism of What Type?” in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in Economic and Social History, ed. A. L. Udovitch (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1981): 521–46.
A British colonial official described a wealthy farmer in the 1870s, a certain Ali Bey, as a large landed proprietor who owned a cotton gin and a pumping engine. He made frequent visits to the exchange in Alexandria. He inhabited a European-style house outside the village, decorated in a costly European style. He wore a fez—a mark of prestige since the early 19th century. On one occasion the train waited for the Ali Bey's guest, on account of the former's local clout.
19 D. Mackenzie Wallace, Egypt and the Egyptian Question (London: Macmillan, 1883), 211–13.
If peasants are those providing for most of their consumption needs by working the land in family-based, small-scale units of production on the basis of low levels of specialization with vocational, kin-based training and under conditions of social subordination,
20 Definitions of peasants are rightly recognized as problematic: they can do little more than indicate a bundle of factors often associated with peasants. The definition given here is based on, but not identical to, those given by Shanin in Peasant Societies, 14–15, and John Waterbury in “Peasants Defy Categorization (As Well as Landlords and the State),” in Peasant and Politics, 2.
then this Ali Bey may no longer have been a peasant, although the wealthier or Turco-Circassian inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria probably saw him as such. However, given that the rural inhabitants ranged from Ali Bey's status through fine gradations of landholding to landlessness and destitution, the point is to underline the importance of stratification and rural hierarchy in the world in which peasants lived and the difficulty of imagining a homogeneous Egyptian peasantry.
Second, state centralization during the 19th century did not abolish the presence of rural intermediaries, often working peasants themselves, who officially discharged administrative and fiscal functions on behalf of the government. Village mayors (
umda/
umad) occupied a post that likely emerged during the first half of the 19th century, in the wake of the abolition of rural tax farming in 1814.
21 The origin of the
umda remains unclear. Gabriel Baer suggests that the post appeared around midcentury: Gabriel Baer, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 30–61. Marsot notes a reference to the
umda as early as 1823: Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali, 115. See also Cuno, Pasha's Peasants, 167–68.
Mayors were usually drawn from the wealthier proprietors in the village or group of villages and stood at the top of the local hierarchy.
22 Cuno, Pasha's Peasants, 177.
In general, the mayor had ultimate responsibility in a village or in several villages for conscription, taxation, forced labor, and ensuring cultivation. He also exercised an “undefined patriarchal authority” over all.
23 Wallace, Egyptian Question, 208; Baer, Social History, 30–61; Marsot, Muhammad Ali, 115–16.
He was often a moneylender or guarantor of loans. Crucially enough, although discharging important official duties, the mayor was paid no salary by the government. He therefore used his local powers over land and government matters to command the labor, resources, and services of villagers. He was at once part of the state and part of the local society and economy.
The same was true of the village headman (shaykh/mashāyikh al-balad), who in general was of lower status and wealth than the mayor and tended to be subordinate to him.24
The latter generalization holds true for the source material used in this article. Marsot suggests that the term originally designated the “more important” of the shaykhs: Marsot, Muhammad Ali, 115. Further, the
Umda Law of 1895 defined the shaykh as subordinate to the
umda: Baer, Social History, 31. However, it should be cautioned that numerous relatively humble
umdas have been noted—for example, Baer, Social History, 31.
D. Mackenzie Wallace states that villages generally had from three to six headmen, although in large villages there were as many as eighteen to twenty.
25 Wallace, Egyptian Question, 214.
Headmen preserved order, ensured taxation, furnished the required men for forced labor and conscription, decided disputes, and were supposed to “defend their constituents against all exaction and injustice.”
26 They were often closer to the day-to-day affairs of the rural inhabitants than the mayor. Although government officials in one sense, they were at the same time small proprietors, not always owning more than their family could cultivate (about 5
feddāns). They were not paid a salary by the state but obtained income through local influence, which gave them priority in irrigation, cheap labor for their land, and access to levies.
The point, in short, is that neither the peasantry nor the state constituted a homogeneous, collective entity. Peasants were always socially positioned. The state was embodied in heterogeneous institutions that ranged from the village headman, the mayor, and, more distantly, the provincial offices (mudīriyya), the ministers, and the khedive. As we shall see, peasants did not relate to these often heterogeneous agencies in the same way, and these relations cannot always be characterized as those of violent opposition on the one side or quiet avoidance or passivity on the other. An anecdote related by the well-known Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti, one of the few stories in which peasant voice is reported directly, captures this point. When tax farming was abolished in 1814, it was said that the “rabble” among the peasants “insolently” declared to tax farmers who sought to extract their customary labor services, “What is left to you in the country? Your days have finished, and we have become the Pasha's peasants.” This short report reveals how peasants welcomed one part of the state, the pasha, and rejected another—tax farmers.27
From the chronicles of al-Jabarti, cited in Cuno, Pasha's Peasants, 5.
A homologous gesture, which sought neither to destroy nor simply to escape the state, resounds through the petitions of the 1860s and 1870s. Its possibility forms the basis for the engagement and negotiation discussed later.
ORGANIZING PETITIONS
One of the few legitimate ways for peasants to engage the higher echelons of the state was through the petition, an accepted element of Ottoman statecraft. Petitions from the populace had long served the ruling order by facilitating the sultan's control of intermediaries who fleeced the treasury or damaged cultivation by oppressing the population. Mehmet Ali's dynasty building in Egypt centralized state power and built up a bureaucracy but continued to admit petitions on similar grounds as his predecessors. Regulations issued in 1830 state that any peasant or village shaykh could present a petition to “al-a
tab al-saniyya”—that is, the Sublime Thresholds—about any case, “since the Thresholds are the refuge of the poor and the sanctuary of the weak.”
28 Text of the Qanun al-muntakhabat (issued in January–February 1830/Sha
ban 1245), in Filib Jallad, Qamus al-idara wa-l-qada
(Alexandria: n.p., 1891), 3:1327. “Throughout his [Mehmet Ali's] many trips round the countryside,” Marsot writes, “any fallah with a petition was allowed to present it”: Marsot, Muhammad Ali, 109–10. Marsot speaks of many petitions and complaints, the usual targets being local
umad and mashāyikh al-balad: Marsot, Muhammad Ali, 113.
The same regulations codified punishments for village shaykhs and officials found guilty of tax fraud, injury to persons, or damage to property. Said Pasha's penal code of 1851 punished shaykhs found guilty of forcing fellahin to work without compensation. State-building increased the bureaucracy's ability to handle and process petitions. By 1859, the department that became the Interior Ministry in the 1860s was already receiving and acting on petitions and complaints from Egyptian subjects. “Riaz Pasha,” wrote Wallace, “who was then Minister of Interior, though always reluctant to weaken his administrative authority by accepting complaints against Mudirs or Sub-governors, was no friend of Sheikhs and Omdehs, and was ever ready to punish a village tyrant who went beyond the reasonable limits of moderate extortion.”
29 Wallace mentions a mayor who was exiled for tyrannical behavior: Wallace, Egyptian Question, 227, 260–63.
Thus, the central state increasingly served as a regulator of intermediaries in the countryside, and its growing presence arguably presented a political opportunity to peasants with local grievances. Numerous petitions were submitted throughout the 1860s and 1870s to the government. In July 1869, one newspaper went so far as to report that “the Egyptian fallah has begun to emerge from the silence of slavery which he has been mired in for centuries and started to supplicate [the powers that be] with complaints, something not yet seen in Egypt.”
30 Cited in Rifa
t Sa
id, al-Asas al-ijtima
iyya li-l-thawra al-
urabiyya (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1994), 69–70. (I have not been able to trace the newspaper cited—apparently, Brujriyya al-Misriyya).
Little is known about the petition writers, although such figures were a familiar part of the urban scene in the region in the late 19th century. There was a guild of petition writers (ṭā
ifat ardhaljiyya) in Cairo with thirty-five members, according to the census of 1868.
31 Dar al-Watha
iq al-Qawmiyya (Egyptian National Archives; hereafter, DWQ) Sijillat Muhafizat Misr (Cairo Governorate): Ta
dad Nufus (Census) 1868/1285, 84/1/lam.
Scribes had to achieve a level of literacy unattainable by the mass of the population, although scribal socioeconomic backgrounds were highly variable, reflected in the fact that scripts varied from the best copperplate to relatively irregular. All wrote on stamped government paper, at three piasters per sheet. Protocol, official discourse, its limits, and new regulations and rights could be articulated to villagers up and down the country via petition writers. These linkages were probably reinforced by the gradual appearance of print media, the extension of the railway, and increasingly frequent peasant journeys to market following the cotton boom. Weekly markets held in local towns likely provided the space where petitioners gathered, found a petition writer, decided the wording, and put their seals on the petition.
32 Peasants thereby transformed their right to present petitions as individuals into something more assertive—the right of a group working collectively to present a grievance that affected more than one person. As Van Voss noted, “[T]he right to petition could easily develop into a crystallization point for other popular rights,” such as the right to assemble to draw up, discuss, and sign the petition, or to present the petition themselves: Lex Heerma Van Voss, ed. “Introduction to ‘Petitions in Social History,’” International Review of Social History 46, supp. 9 (2001): 3. Tawfiq al-Hakim's country prosecutor describes how, during the interwar period, “the ordinary peasant goes off to market every Thursday…[and] hires one of the public letter-writers to draw up a ‘statement’ or a ‘petition’ against the village squire or
umdah”: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Maze of Justice: Diary of a Country Prosecutor (London: Saqi Books, 1989), 124–25.
Petition writing against intermediaries was risky. Notables had significant local powers. As one peasant questioned by Wallace claimed, “[A]n Omdeh has the whole village in his hands, and can do as he likes.”33
Wallace, Egyptian Question, 209.
Although, arguably, this is too simplistic, it is true that spaces for group petitioning were not strongly institutionalized and autonomous. Group complaints can hardly have been kept secret locally, and mayors and headmen wielded a formidable range of sanctions to curtail protest that extended from control over rents, water, and working conditions to forced labor, coercion, and outright dispossession.
34 Peasants, for example, were beaten “in an awful manner” as they were dragooned as forced labor to load wheat from government warehouses onto ships in Upper Egypt: Mustafa Agha
Ayyad to Borg, 16 July 1879; enclosure in Borg to Lascelles no. 28, 30 July 1879, in FO 141/129.
A confidant of British Consul Ralph Borg wrote in 1878 that the shaykh “may have taken five men [for the corvée] from one landed proprietor's workpeople, while another may have supplied none. One man is paralysed and his crops suffer, another is left in place, because he holds the sheikh's favour…. Ten to one if the fellah complains, the Government will not listen to him, [and] he will only find it warmer when he returns to his village.”
35 Correspondent to Borg, 13 May 1878, FO 141/120. The correspondent was possibly Alexander Dingli, a British subject resident in Aswan.
The same correspondent cautioned, however, that the shaykh's behavior in turn was heavily determined by his insecure position vis-à-vis the government: “No honor is attached to his position, pays he gets none…continual summonses to the Moudirieh, very often in fear & trembling…never knowing under what pretext he may next appear.”
36 Ibid. State building, in turn, was itself a particular response to (and was increasingly penetrated by) European imperialism. Schölch made the same point when cautioning against British insistence that the real tyrants in the country were the village shaykhs. “In fact, their position was unenviable, as they had to see to it that full satisfaction was given to the increasingly intolerable and insatiable demands of Isma
il”: Alexander Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians! The Socio-Political Crisis in Egypt 1878–82 (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), 35.
In spite of the dangers, peasants attempted to engage the bureaucracy, ministers, and the khedive through organizing petitions. I have examined original sources relating to four cases where groups of fellahin from Lower Egypt mustered petitions to the ministries and the khedive during the two decades prior to the
Urabi rebellion. In all cases, men from a number of extended families, together with a number of individuals, worked together to protest against their mayor or headman/men in disputes over election, taxation, or cultivation. The richest evidence is culled from a series of petitions and a detailed report (of several thousand words), all submitted to the Interior Ministry during 1873 by the fellahin of Nashil district in Gharbiyya Province, along with related government correspondence.
37 “Report from fifty-eight Fellahin of hissat Badawi al-Dalu
” (hereafter, “Report from Fellahin”), April 1873/Safar 1290, Nizarat al-Dakhiliyya (Ministry of the Interior), Mukatibat
Arabi (Arabic correspondence) (hereafter, ND-MA), box 10, DWQ. Yusuf al-Ma
dawi and forty-seven Companions to the khedive, April 1873/Safar 1290; Ibrahim Radi and fifteen Companions to the khedive, April 1873/Safar 1290; Fellahin to the Khedive, 4 April 1873/6 Safar 1290; Inspector for Lower Egypt to the Interior Minister, 27 April 1873/29 Safar 1290, all in ND-MA, box 10, DWQ.
No fewer than fifty-eight fellahin put their seals to the report. The peasants of Nashil district, who seem mostly to have controlled their own land to varying degrees, were complaining about various exploitative practices in cultivation and taxation associated with their headmen, who, they claimed, were appointed against their wishes in place of one Badawi al-Dalu
, whom they favored as their headman and claimed to have elected. A similar although less detailed set of complaints was lodged by the fellahin of the village of Fanma in the district of Faraskur, Daqahliyya Province; during the spring of 1880, fifty-three male small holders put their seals to a petition to the interior minister against the tyranny of the mayor of their district (nahiyya), who had appointed certain treacherous and unjust village headmen against the petitioners' wishes and in place of the headman they favored.
38 Ahmad Sayyid and fifty-two Companions to the Interior Minister, June 1880/Sha
ban 1297, ND-MA, box 25, DWQ. The
Abduh and Shaddad families's seals were the most prominent among those at the bottom of the petition, but numerous individuals—such as one Ahmad Sami—signed up without other family members.
In the third case, during the summer of 1880, thirty-four now landless cultivators from the village of Kafr Akhsha, near the town of Tala, Minufiyya Province, protested in three petitions to the interior ministry against their village headman,
Abd al-Qadir Hashim, whom they accused of taking away their small holdings and forcing them to work in “captivity and slavery” on the very land they used to own.
39Amir Zayyid and thirty-three Companions to the Interior Minister;
Amir Zayyid and thirty-two Companions to the Interior Minister;
Amir Zayyid and thirty-two Companions to the Interior Minister, all dated July 1880/Sha
ban 1297 and in ND-MA, box 35, DWQ. Note that these cultivators sent three petitions in fairly close succession.
Finally, during the summer of 1879, fourteen evicted peasants from Ajira district in Daqahliyya Province petitioned the khedive against the injustice of their mayor in dispossessing them of their lands and banishing them from their village.
40 Muhammad al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the Khedive, June 1879/Jumada II, ND-MA, box 30, DWQ. Group petitions by peasants have been noted by other historians, but rarely studied in detail. In February 1879, one Egyptian newspaper reported that the inhabitants of Fayum had gone to the Ministry of Finance to present a petition and complain about heavy taxation. Four peasants petitioning similarly in Qena were thrown into prison: Salim, al-Quwa al-ijtima
iyya, 53–54.
There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that these petitions were not simply bought by powerful provincial notables, and that peasants signed their names to complaints in which they neither believed nor cared, for and against local leaders who had fallen out of favor, or the reverse, with local powerbrokers.
41 Nathan Brown found that a later series of published petitions purporting to come from peasants had in fact been written by notables: Nathan J. Brown, “The Gentry's New Clothes: Peasants and Notables in Egyptian Politics,” Middle Eastern Studies 26, 2 (1990): 145–60. Lord Cromer (Egypt's de facto ruler, 1883–1907) had little faith in the authenticity of petitions he received. The fellahin of Nashil may have been alluding to such practices when they mentioned the existence of “some weak individuals enticed into dissimulation by the powerful”: “Report from Fellahin.”
Certainly, bogus petitions of this kind existed, and a sufficiently elaborate fraud might have escaped government officials at the time, as well as the later historian. Even in these cases, of course, peasant petitions and desires must have been seen as politically relevant; otherwise, there would have been no need to mobilize them. But the detail and context of these petitions, the attitude of the government and investigators, the humble and wayward scribal scripts, and the palpable sense of peasant moral economy indicate a different model of relations between claimants and notables. Case details indicate that the peasants of Nashil and Fanma had the support of certain local headmen who wished to be reinstated. These were not mayors but less wealthy headmen who controlled only small amounts of land and—at least, in the case of Badawi al-Dalu
of Nashil—were ultimately no match for their stronger opponents. Claimant headman–peasant relations in this case were more likely a matter of alliance than of simple purchase or coercion. Relatively lowly figures did not have the resources to buy scores of cultivators. Badawi al-Dalu
, moreover, had repeatedly won village elections, as we shall see. Similar alliances between headmen and peasants, at times involving shaykhly representation of villagers at great risk to themselves, have been noted by contemporaries and historians.
42 For example, in 1878 a group of village headmen reportedly coordinated to inform the government that taxes were too high. British Consul Ralph Borg's correspondent wondered at “how it was possible for these men to have gathered together such a stock of audacity.” The shaykhs were either murdered or imprisoned, a potent reminder of the fate of those who transgressed accepted behaviour but also an indication of how headmen could attempt to represent the interests of their constituencies to the government at great risk to themselves: Correspondent to Borg, 13 May 1878, FO 141/120. Indeed, Baron de Malortie wrote, “In every instance the Sheikh represents the interests of a large party of his village, and is virtually a representative of the people, though naturally wealth has a great deal to do with the matter”: Baron de Malortie, Egypt: Native Rulers and Foreign Interference (London: William Ridgway, 1882), 214, n. 739. In January 1879, it was reported that hundreds of shaykhs, each representing a village, went to Cairo, gathering in front of the ministries in groups, bringing petitions demanding diminution in taxes and announcing that they could not go on as they were: Salim, al-Quwa al-ijtima
iyya, 53. Juan Cole, argued that “elected village headmen played an important role in mobilizing resources during the 1882 revolution”: Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 65.
As for the peasants of Kafr Akhsha, they sought the recovery of their land rather than the reinstatement of any particular headman. Their petitions thus appear to have been drawn up without local support, except that they did have an ally in the provincial administration—a certain Fahmy Pasha, of unknown position, who was transferred from the province during the case, much to their detriment. The evicted peasants of Ajira appear to have been more isolated, a fact perhaps reflected in their more desperate position and language. Neither patron nor ally is mentioned at any point in their case. In short, it is probable that these petitions were more than simply the bogus products of powerful notable schemes.
MAKING CLAIMS
In all these petitions and reports, peasants performed their complete loyalty to ministers, the khedive, and his justice. By and large, they used an officially authorized language of complaint in a heavily power-laden context, where a wrong word could cost them their case, their livelihoods, and even their lives.43
Peasants who, according to the Ottoman authorities after a rebellion in Mount Lebanon in the 1820s, were “easier [to crush] than the spider's web” hardly had the luxury to do otherwise: cited in Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 48.
In other words, social interests expressed were not preconstituted in some authentic peasant space. However, as I also try to show, although elite languages helped constitute even the nature of the demands lodged by peasants, these languages were simultaneously filled out, colored, and defined by the concrete projects of peasants themselves.
44 It is possible, in other words, that “the petition may borrow the language of the ruling classes to defend subaltern ways of living”: Van Voss, “Introduction,” 7.
The encounter between the petitioner and ruler, although heavily asymmetrical, was also dialogic in that peasants manipulated, contested, and partially redefined official terms. Collaboration with petition writers was a part of this inevitably “fallen” construction, not simply an inauthentic and repressive new layer of representation.
45 The skill with which petitioners presented their case in other parts of the colonized world has been commented on, even by colonial officials. As a member of the British Board of Trade remarked of Indian weavers' petitions in 1798, “I confess I did not imagine them capable of such a superior production”: Potukuchi Swarnalatha, “Revolt, Testimony, Petition: Artisanal Protests in Colonial Andhra,” International Review of Social History, 117. As Van Voss has written, “Whatever influences the way in which demands are voiced, demands have to be voiced as that is the point of a petition”: Van Voss, “Introduction,” 7.
Glorious Ruler and Loyal Subject
Naive minds think that the office of kingship lodges in the king himself…. As a matter of fact, the office of kingship is an interrelation between people. The king is king only because the interests and prejudices of millions of people are refracted through his person.
Leon Trotsky46
Leon Trotsky, “What is National Socialism? [1934],” in idem, Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front (London: Bookmarks, 1989), 259.
Lex Heerma Van Voss has noted that the ‘useful myth’ of the good person heading the state is common “at both the writing and the reading ends of the petitioning process.”
47 Van Voss, “Introduction,” 5.
Petitioning in Egypt was no exception. Petitions were addressed to the khedive or his ministers, who were depicted as the embodiment of justice and order and acclaimed as merciful, compassionate, benevolent, glorious, mighty, and worthy of a long life. Such high-flown praise was not just the flattery of simple-minded and fawning peasants. These salutations in part simply reflected the demands of protocol and applied not just to peasants but also to merchants and even—one might say, especially—to highstatus officials addressing the khedive.
48 See, for example, Rafi
i,
Asr Isma
il, 98.
At another level, however, they performatively affirmed peasant loyalty to the khedive and ensured that all social transgressions were seen as stemming from corrupt intermediaries of one kind or another. This trope was so powerful that peasants were able to use it to criticize all but the highest reaches of government. The cultivators of Kafr Akhsha, for example, were bold enough to claim that “the government is not well known for [delivering] justice other than [where] Your Highness [intervenes]”
49Amir Zayyid and thirty-three Companions to the Interior Minister.
—a sweeping criticism, by implication, of the host of mayors,
nāẓirs, inspectors, and even provincial governors who stood between minister and peasant. In other words, the discourse of the “Glorious Ruler” sought to project the notion of an alliance between the khedive or minister and his flock. The discourse reiterated also the public myths enunciating and reaffirming the bargain between ruler and ruled, in which subordinate and powerful alike held stakes. By emphasizing the justice of the rulers, peasants raised the standard of ruling conduct against which they judged errant mayors and headmen and thus brought local exploitation into sharp relief. In this way, such eulogizing linked up directly to the meaning and possibilities of the claim-making process. The fellahin were not saying—to draw an example from another context—that “[t]he king is wise and good. Therefore let us do what he wants.” Instead, they said, “The king is wise and good. Therefore he must want what we want.”
50 This appropriate formula comes from Morgan's analysis of 17th-century England. Although taken from a different context, it captures exactly a strategy behind eulogizing the ruler. As Morgan clarifies, “[D]ivinity, when assumed by mortals (or imposed upon them) can prove more constricting than subjection. Indeed, the attribution of divinity to the king had probably always been motivated in some measure by the desire to limit him to actions becoming a god. In the 1620s the Commons exalted him to a height where he could scarcely move without fracturing his divinity, and out of subjection to him they fashioned maneuvers to direct his government”, Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 21, 29–30.
Peasants and their literate collaborators understood this well and even varied their salutations depending on the kinds of claims they were making, as we shall see. In fact, the figure and myth of the “Glorious Ruler,” far from being the sign of some immature and prepolitical consciousness, stood at the center of, and was intimately linked to, demands for effective justice.
Conversely, petitioners depicted themselves as loyal and often humble subjects committed to justice and order, the cultivation of the land, and the remission of taxes. By reiterating their commitment to these widely known elements in official discourse, they aimed to suture their social interests with the rulers against tyrannical and rapacious intermediaries, who, through what was depicted as malevolence or narrow ambition, disrupted cultivation and embezzled government revenues. The fellahin of Nashil district in Gharbiyya, therefore, emphasized that they worked hard to cultivate the land, demonstrating that they were loyally discharging their obligations as fellahin. They averred that, whereas their companions went to the village (balad) “to supervise the necessary agricultural works…the summer's sowing and the bean harvest,” their antagonists, the tyrannical shaykhs, Dawud al-
Asi and his brothers, “go to the village by night and spread calumnies about our companions.”
51 “Radi and fifteen Companions to the Khedive.”
In other words, it was claimed, the plaintiffs worked hard in cultivation while their opponents spent their time in idle slander. This was not mere moralizing; it had long-standing legal and customary weight. Usufruct had long been granted on the basis of continuing cultivation and could be taken away when cultivation was abandoned. The Land Law of 1858 had not necessarily radically transformed this situation on the ground. Peasants thereby established their claims to the land and their loyalty as subjects of the khedive at one and the same time.
Cultivation and Taxation
By emphasizing cultivation and taxation, however, peasants were not merely slavishly showing their loyalty to the ruling order and its concerns or simply doing what was necessary to gain an audience. They were also, among other things, in a more active way trying to persuade the government to intervene on the one side while pressing their own concerns and interests on the other. There was no surer way to attract government intervention than to note that cultivation was in danger of being disrupted or, especially during the fiscally pressured years of the 1870s, to assert that tax revenues were being embezzled by shaykhs. A group of some forty-eight peasants from Nashil continued to insist, as the urgency of their complaints mounted, that because of the injustices of Dawud al-
Asi and his henchmen, “our work has ceased even though this is the [labor-intensive] time of [reaping] the winter harvest and [sowing] the summer crops.”
52 “Al-Ma
dawi and forty-seven Companions to the Khedive.”
These fellahin were not only articulating what one can assume were their own interests in cultivating the land at an important time of the year. They were also attempting to draw in the authorities by explaining that local exploiters were disrupting cultivation at this important time.
As for taxation, the repetition and insistence by petitioners on the importance of the remission of dues to the government is certainly striking. The fellahin of Ajira district in Daqahliyya, who denounced their shaykh for “an increase in outrages and [for] eating the dues (ḥuqūq) of the government,”
53 “Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the Khedive.”
actually calculated and informed the khedive precisely how much the treasury stood to lose unless it acted—in this case, the reportedly huge sum of 2,200 Egyptian pounds.
54 By contrast, cultivators were at pains to emphasize how their allies struggled to ensure just and orderly taxation. The fellahin of Nashil, for example, were careful to note that their favored headman, Badawi al-Dalu
, executed government works with dispatch and effectively collected taxes.
55 “Fellahin to the Khedive.” Note that this petition exists only as a copy; on the copy, the names and number of fellahin is not recorded. The scribe signs the petition “Fellahin of Nashil district, Gharbiyya.”
Such peasant solicitousness over taxes drew in state intervention, because it chimed with ruling concerns. But peasants also used their expressed concern for the just shares (
ḥuqūq) of the government to secure a right to a share of the products of their own labor vis-à-vis the claims of local surplus takers. Over and over again, peasants inserted a claim to their own dues immediately after demonstrating their concern for government dues. Hence, the cultivators of Ajira spoke of “an increase in outrages [by a local shaykh] and devouring the dues of the government
and the people.”
56 “Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the khedive”: emphasis added.
The peasants noted that the offending shaykh had illegally seized 600 Egyptian pounds from the people. Peasants thus smuggled a claim to their own just share (
ḥaqq) into their petition under the cover provided by an expressed concern for the dues of the government.
57 In this article I translate the word ḥaqq/ḥuquq as “dues” or “just shares.” In both cases I mean the different, enforceable claims that people in their unequal statuses as men, women, elites (dhawat), subjects (ra
aya), guild members, peasants, and others made to goods, services, and justice. Here I am following Khaled Fahmy's work, which argues that what informed Egypt's inhabitants' understanding of the law and the legal system was a notion of justice based on inequality. Fahmy notes that, like all premodern systems of law, shari
a as well as the “siyasa” system of justice applied in khedivial Egypt treated people unequally. Both in terms of legislation and in the actual implementation of law in courts, people were thought to have unequal rights and responsibilities—in rights and privileges and in duties and responsibilities: see Khaled Fahmy, “al-
Adl wa-l-qanun wa-l-dawla al-haditha fi muntasaf al-qarn al-tasi ashr,” al-Ruzname 1 (2003): 397–445; and idem, “Justice, Law and Pain in Khedival Egypt,” in Egypt and Its Laws, ed. Nathalie Bernard-Maugiron, Baudouin Dupret, and Wael Rady (London: Kluwer Law International, 2002).
Here cultivators tried to establish to their advantage a symmetry between two different sorts of claims. The government's claim (
ḥaqq) to the agricultural surplus pertained to the sustenance of the political apparatus of government, the khedive's power, and justice, and was authoritative, entrenched, and rarely directly disputed. Local claims to the surplus, however, pertained to the local terms of employment, credit, labor, and land distribution, as well as taxation, and were constantly fluctuating and disputed. To gain their “due” in this
local context, peasants harnessed it to their concern for the “dues” of the government, an admirable discursive ruse institutionalized in the language of the petitions that I have seen. There was arguably a subtext to the insistence on taxation, stemming from the power of institutional disruption that tax-paying peasants undoubtedly possessed at a time of state-building and a growing fiscal crisis. Peasants were enunciating a bargain, albeit one that was asymmetrical and difficult to make binding: in return for the payment of government taxes, loyal subjects expected local justice through government intervention. At a tacit level, the fellahin were saying, “[W]e give you your ‘due’ and in return you give us ours.” Overall, through these means, and in a power-laden context, peasants made distinct claims to what they believed were their just shares of local resources, claims that inserted peasant moral economy into official discourse.
The Comfort and Prosperity of the People
The peasants of Nashil roundly asserted that “the desire of his honour the khedive is the comfort and prosperity of the people.”58
“Al-Ma
dawi and forty-seven Companions to the khedive.”
Such a statement was absolutely consonant with official discourse, which endowed the khedive with such a virtue as a matter of principle and practicality, but it simultaneously gave humble subjects a chance to define what their comfort and prosperity would actually involve. At one level, it becomes peasants' duty to explain, seeing as it is the khedive's desire. Here, therefore, was a certain discursive space in which fellahin interests and concerns had room for articulation. The domain of obedience certainly encompassed cultivation, tax remission, and order, but within the strict limits set by these terms, peasant claim making had some room for definition and maneuver. Fellahin were not slow to use this space, for all its limited worth. That peasants were bold enough to explain to the “mighty” khedive what his wishes were already points in this direction.
Peasants especially had room to discuss and define the virtues and vices of their shaykhs. These were the intermediaries about whom the government had considerable suspicion, and against whom the people could speak. In Fanma, cultivators explained the virtues of a good shaykh: “we consented to a shaykh…[and under his leadership we enjoy] complete comfort. And [in addition] his execution of village affairs is praiseworthy.”
59 “Ahmad Sayyid to the Interior Minister.”
In Nashil, the good shaykh “investigates the conditions and the means of subsistence of the people, and feels compassion [toward them] in this regard.”
60 “Fellahin to the Khedive.”
Badawi al-Dalu
, the shaykh they favored, was also reportedly “righteous of principles” and “praiseworthy of character.” He ensured order in the village and conditions not just of “probity” but also of “comfort” for the people.
61 In this context, when the villagers attempted to justify the correctness of the election procedure of al-Dalu
, they did not simply cite the approval of an important local official, the inspector (mufattish) of Kufr al-Shaykh. They also insisted that it meant the “comfort of the people.”
62 In other words, in this discourse just practice was not simply secured by the say-so of this or that government official, even a relatively elevated inspector, but was also explicitly measured by the comfort of the cultivators. In this way, petitioners were able to insert their own notions of the good shaykh into their petitions. As should be clear, their approbatory discourse was always intertwined with gestures toward ruling concerns. Hence, the cultivators of Nashil urged that under al-Dalu
the condition of the crops and state of “tillage” were improved.
63 At the same time, however, insisting that the khedive sought the peasants' “comfort and prosperity” opened the door to the peasants' references to the “interests of the people” (
maṣāliḥ al-ahālī)—a phrase used more than once in the petitions submitted by the fellahin of Nashil. In this context, the peasants tried to define prosperity as not simply some overall and undifferentiated level of production, but as the flourishing of themselves and their families. The state of local tillage mattered in this respect also.
64 The denunciation of tyrannical shaykhs worked to define what was and was not acceptable—where humble petitioners had the ear of the authorities. The terms in which different transgressions were described give a sense of a hierarchy of iniquity—that did not necessarily coincide with ruling concerns but that petitioners nevertheless attempted to impress on authorities. Here, in particular, elements of a peasant moral economy emerged.
To begin with some of the lesser wrongs: Dawud al-
Asi and his companions in Nashil were accused of procuring, to the exclusion of others, a group of flood-protection workers,
65 a practice that peasants were willing to articulate to the authorities as unfair without any specific license from on high to do so. More urgently, al-
Asi and others were denounced for unfair appropriation, “the theft of laborer's wealth for invented reasons.”
66 Whether such “theft”—perhaps of labor time, wages, or dues, or regarding credit—mattered to the authorities or not, the fellahin were still concerned about pointing it out, about asserting in some measure their standards of what constituted theft.
Where land seizures accompanied forced proletarianization, denunciations of the culprits by fellahin were more intense—even though such unjust practices may not have been of direct interest to the powers-that-be. Such grievances were articulated, for example, against the
umda in Kafr Akhsha. The petitioners explained that the mayor had taken over their land and that, having been dispossessed, they were now forced to work on his account in what they called “captivity and slavery.”
67 “
Amir Zayyid and thirty-two Companions to the Interior Minister.”
One cannot simply derive this complaint from ruling concerns, of course, because as long as cultivation continued, the powers-that-be might not be interested in the details of how production was achieved. Indeed, they may have seen this kind of practice as an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of “progress” or, worse, as a result of the laziness and incompetence of the peasants. The provincial notables and prominent mayors in the Consultative Chamber of Representatives, as the frequent beneficiaries of forced proletarianization, were hardly automatic advocates of their tenants' rights and concerns. To intensify matters, the petitioners spoke of “the capture of our women” and the “captivity of our women” by the
umda.
68 Not only had the peasants' land been taken from them; so had their honor. They spoke of their forced proletarianization and dishonoring as their “destruction” but asserted that “it will not be possible to destroy [
idām] all of us for the satisfaction of one person [nafs waḥida].”
69 “
Amir Zayyid and thirty-three Companions to the Interior Minister.”
Presumably such destruction was seen as impossible because of the peasants' own determination to see wrongs righted, on the one hand, and, on the other, because of the anticipated just intervention of the khedive. Again, peasants are adding content and meaning to official discourse and inserting grievances that are not so closely woven into the strict terms of the bargain between ruler and ruled.
If cultivators articulated an even blacker shade of injustice, it came with the complete dispossession of peasants from land, home, and livelihoods. In Ajira, the fellahin complained of “extreme injustice” at the hands of their mayor, who took what he “did not deserve” and engaged in “treachery, pillage, and plunder,” leaving them in the “greatest distress and tyranny.”70
“Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the khedive.”
They had been ordered to leave the district and reported more than once, as if to emphasize their incredulity and distress, that they were now “scattered in the country, we and our children.” Here, the fellahin were no longer able to pursue their primary calling—that of cultivation—and had no means of subsistence for themselves or their families. The language used here, which emphasizes the severity of the injustices involved, was not the simple cipher of ruling concerns. The ruling political economy of cultivation and tax remission was not necessarily threatened by the dispossession and eviction of the peasantry. Nor was the mass of the peasantry a direct or publicly prominent political force at the seat of government. In this context, the peasants could always be blamed for their predicament. Hence, the particular coloring of injustice, here as elsewhere, was arguably a measure of peasant perceptions of the severity and texture of the injustice they had undergone.
More interesting, perhaps, peasants had some room for maneuver in defining the content and nature of khedivial justice itself. The khedivial virtues or desires that peasants chose to mention and emphasize were related directly to the claims they sought to advance. An important example is the petitions of the peasants of Ajira, who did not just mention the khedive's justice and might but repeatedly referred to his “compassion.” They did so specifically because, having lost their land and employment, they sought khedivial charity to enable them and their families to subsist. They requested “the support given to obscure people by khedivial charity.”71
The dependency and weakness conveyed in the term “obscure” was designed to activate the strongly patrimonial and paternalistic norms embedded in the usable myths of how the ruler was supposed to behave. More important, the khedive's status as “compassionate” here was not simply a myth perpetrated on a duped populace from above but an active acclamation from below, mobilized as part of a claim for welfare provision under given political and economic conditions.
PARTICIPATING IN ELECTIONS
We have already seen how peasants asserted claims to just shares in disputes with local exploiters over cultivation and taxation. As far as the petitions and other evidence indicate, they were also not slow to assert new kinds of claims regarding electoral procedures for village headmen instituted in 1866. Here one sees none of the apathy toward new forms of democratic practice that various historians have posited.72
Landau, Parliaments and Parties, 50. Tignor, Modernization, 142. Regarding the later, post-1882 period, Nathan Brown claimed that there was “little evidence to contradict” British evaluations that “Egyptian peasants had no interest in voting”: Brown, Peasant Politics, 149.
And rather than avoidance or violence, we see engagement with a new form of electoral practice secured by the emerging bureaucracy.
Alongside the establishment of the Consultative Chamber of Representatives in 1866, and in the service of state-building, legislation provided that village headmen were to be elected by those under their control, appointments being confirmed by the Interior Ministry. Article 7 of the Basic Law stipulated that village shaykhs were to be elected by those in their locality:
In as much as there are shaykhs appointed according to the wish [raghba] of the inhabitants [al-ahālī] in every village [balad], then naturally [these shaykhs] are the electors [of the members of the assembly] on behalf of the inhabitants of that village. [These shaykhs] are their [the inhabitants'] representatives [na
ibūn] for the election of the member [of the assembly] in each district [qism].
73 Al-La
iha al-asasiyya li-majlis shura al-nawwab (The Basic Laws of the Consultative Assembly of Representatives), 22 October 1866, reproduced in
Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi
i,
Asr Isma
il, 2 vols. (Cairo: Dar al-Ma
arif, 1982 [1932]), 315.
This article is initially puzzling, because the idea suggested—that up and down Egypt shaykhs were already being elected by villagers in 1866—is not attested in the primary or secondary literature, which unanimously asserts that under Mehmet Ali and until the late 1860s (the exact date is not clear) village shaykhs were either appointed by the government or drawn on a hereditary basis from the leading families in the locality.
74 Baer, Social History, 32–34. See also Marsot, Muhammad Ali, 115.
It cannot be entirely ruled out that the phrase in Article 7 “the wish of the inhabitants” was merely a way of referring to the preferences of leading, indigenous families as opposed to those of Turco-Circassian government officials and thus is compatible in meaning with the idea of the hereditary selection of village shaykhs. However, it is more likely that this clause meant that legislators intended some new election procedures. For example, Nubar Pasha, a leading diplomat and politician under Isma
il, asserted to the French foreign minister in 1866 that “Isma
il had re-established the old right of the village communities to elect their own shaykhs.”
75 Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians! 15.
If Article 7 therefore effectively established a new political principle, the election of village shaykhs (and not
umdas) by the male, adult inhabitants of the village, then such a move is at least explicable in the first instance as a logical corollary of the constitutionalism that was supposed to be the basis of the new assembly. As Juan Cole suggests, this move was designed to give “an elective base to the chamber of deputies.”
76 Cole notes that “communal councils” in each district (qism) elected by villagers and designed to check local abuse existed from the time of Mehmet Ali and thus acted as a precursor to the new legislation: Cole, Colonialism and Revolution, 65. But Cole refers to 1865, which seems to be an error, and states that the members of the chamber were “appointed from among prominent village headmen and merchant guildsmasters.” In fact, the representatives in the assembly were mostly elected by village headmen and mayors; they were not appointed (except in-as-much as their election was confirmed), and there were only one or two village headmen (shaykhs) in the elected assembly. The overwhelming majority of representatives were mayors (
umdas): see al-Rafi
i,
Asr Isma
il, 2:165–67, where assembly members are listed with their titles. The assembly itself was designed to contain the rising, Egyptian-born provincial notables by granting them a place in Egypt's political system without actually conferring on them any real power—it was intended as a purely consultative body. As Landau put it, the assembly was “a more effective way of gaining control of the village notables”: Landau, Parliaments and Parties, 8. As Schölch has persuasively argued, the assembly started to become a real political force only after the debt crisis of 1876: Alexander Schölch, “Constitutional Development in Nineteenth Century Egypt—A Reconsideration,” Middle Eastern Studies 10 (1974): 3–14.
Once convened, the assembly, doing the bidding of the khedive, endorsed the elective principle at the local level.
77 The assembly was firmly subordinated to the khedive prior to 1876: see Schölch, “Constitutional Development.”
During the third session of the assembly (which ran from January to March 1869), Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi
i reports: “[i]t was decided that the appointment [tanṣīb] of the shaykhs of the villages [mashāyikh al-balad] and their number be according to the wish of the inhabitants [bi-raghbat al-ahālī]. [And] that none of them would be dismissed unless they are proved to have committed a misdemeanour [junḥa].”
78 Al-Rafi
i,
Asr Isma
il, 2:121.
This decision both reinforced Article 7 of the Basic Law, giving cultivators the right to elect their village shaykhs, and gave an important measure of independence to such shaykhs, who now could be dismissed neither by local notables nor by the government without legal process.
By passing measures mandating that peasants had the right to elect their shaykhs, the central administration was aiming to stamp out losses to the Treasury and the disruption of cultivation brought about by local oppression. As Khedive Isma
il put it in the speech from the throne that opened the third session of the assembly, a basic aim of his tax-and-spend administration was taxation “without inconvenience [muḍāyaqa] to the government or trouble [mashaqqa] for the inhabitants [ahālī].”
79 Said Pasha had already taken some measures in an attempt to “root out corruption” in the villages.
80 Baer, Social History, 55.
Granting the elective principle in respect of such local headmen would hold them to account to the populace locally and diminish these local leaders' ability to exploit those under their control, thus reducing corruption at the expense of the Treasury and inhabitants alike.
81 The same problem, it is important to note, presented itself to the government in respect to the shaykhs of the guilds, who were accused of treachery to the goverment and injuring the rights of the people. The electoral principle was applied to the heads of guilds, quarters, and neighborhoods in the cities in 1869 for the same reasons. Qarar al-Majlis al-Khususi, 22 October 1869/16 Rajab 1286, in Manshurat Sadira min al-Nazarat, 1876–1880 (Part 2), 305.
Historians have tended to ignore or downplay the significance of these grassroots elections, the first of their kind in the modern history of Egypt. Gabriel Baer, whose extensive research on Egypt's village shaykh is a standard resource, is dismissive. His general thesis is misleading: “Throughout the period under discussion [1800–1950] holders of this office [the village shaykhs] were appointed by the authorities and not elected by the villagers.”82
Baer, Social History, 32.
Baer also tells us, however—in a passage that, if it does not contradict his argument, then certainly dismisses shaykhly elections—that
Under Isma
il (1863–1879), the period when the village notables reached the peak of their economic, social and political power, the government's appointment of village headmen became nothing more than a formal stamp of approval on what constituted, according to the impression of contemporary observers, virtual election by their fellow villagers; but even then the government succeeded in retaining the power of decision as to who would be village shaykh in newly established settlements.
83
Baer appears to borrow the ambiguous phrase “virtual election” more or less intact from a book that gave only the most cursory mention to this new practice. “[T]hough virtually elected by his fellows,” wrote J. C. M. McCoan in passing in 1877, “[the village shaykh] is formally appointed by the Government.”
84 J. C. M. McCoan, Egypt as It Is (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1877), 115.
But there were other “contemporary observers” who had committed more than a vague-sounding “impression” to paper. Wallace, for example, noted more unambiguously that village shaykhs are “elected by the people and…are responsible each for his own constituents,” and gave a description of the election procedure.
85 “The election procedure is very simple. The constituents assemble in an open space near the village, in the presence of the Sub-governor, and divide themselves into groups according to the candidate whom they wish to see appointed. The candidate who has the largest group is declared elected, unless the Sub-governor happens to object, in which case the election is repeated”: Wallace, Egyptian Question, 215.
A number of others mentioned the elections.
86 Sheldon Amos, “The New Egyptian Constitution,” Contemporary Review 43 (1883): 911; Baron de Malortie, Foreign Interference, 120; 214, n. 739.
Nevertheless, Baer and many others have tended to pass over the whole episode of elections, which were abolished by the British, and their significance.
It remains unclear precisely what elections involved on the ground and how widespread they became. Nor is it certain who could actually vote. Women were almost certainly excluded; whether property or status qualifications also limited the suffrage is not clear. Some observers spoke of elections whereby villagers were told by local officials to congregate in different areas depending on which candidate for the shaykhate they supported. The candidate with the largest group of supporters was then appointed. Other elections apparently involved ballot papers—which were stamped with villagers' seals—with votes then counted and identities verified by more powerful local mayors or officials employed by the provincial offices.87
“
Amir Zayyid and thirty-three Companions to the Interior Minister.”
Especially in the first case, there is little suggestion of a secret ballot, which could have shielded indebted, land-poor, and dependent agriculturalists who cast the “wrong” vote from the subsequent sanction of powerful figures. In a number of cases, in spite of the new legislation, posts continued to be inherited, and no elections took place. Al-Shirbasi and al-Gharib, for example, took over the shaykhate of Fanma without any kind of election.88
“Ammad Sayyid to the Interior Minister.”
The Ajira petitions also reveal a case in which an office passed from father to son with no mention of any election—although the fellahin there were able raise this as a grievance in a way previously unthinkable.
89 “Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the Khedive.”
In some cases, elections were held only after a number of petitions had been written by fellahin demanding them.
90 In other words, elections do not appear to have been automatic. In another example, the results of an election were nullified by the subsequent politicking of those who stood to lose their positions.
91 Ya
li Afandi and Mahmud Afandi Lutfi appear to have caused the end of the election (targhib), after striking a deal with the general inspector in Nashil: ibid.
It is clear, to pick another case, that the peasants of Ajira did not trust the Daqahliyya provincial offices to run either the election or the surrounding investigation because of their previous experience and because there appear to have been figures in the offices connected with the mayor about whom they were complaining.
92 “Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the Khedive.”
The cultivators of Kafr Akhsha likewise seem to have used their good connections with one Fahmy Pasha, whose official position is unclear, to pursue their grievances, and after his transfer from the province they were left highly vulnerable.
93 “
Amir Zayyid and thirty-three Companions to the Interior Minister.”
The election results in Nashil were ultimately ignored by the inspector for Lower Egypt on the grounds that elections were taking up too much time and creating too much “trouble” at a time that peasants should be busy working at the summer crops. The political economy of labor-repressive agriculture certainly presented a formidable barrier to cultivators seeking electoral rights, and the peasants' emphasis on the importance of cultivation here backfired miserably.
94 “Inspector for Lower Egypt to the Interior Minister, 27 April 1873/29 Safar 1290, ND-MA, box 10,” DWQ. This point illustrates the well-known argument of Barrington Moore, Jr., on the antidemocratic impact of coercion-intensive agriculture in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, (London: Allen Lane, 1967 [1966]).
In short, elections did not mean that lowly peasants suddenly entered a golden age of local democracy.
Nevertheless, the interesting point for my purposes is that even in such a restricted situation, peasants appear to have seized the limited opportunities available and laid claim to the legislation of 1866 and 1869 and associated electoral practices and discourse. Just as guild members demanded elections for their guild leaders in the cities,95
See John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 67–103.
peasant cultivators—at least, in the few cases that I have been able to examine in detail—also demanded elections in the countryside as a means of escaping local oppression. One empowering feature of the 1869 legislation was that villagers were legally free to nominate their own headman. Hence, where a group felt oppressed by a local headman, it could nominate and elect its own local leader to escape this oppression. Peasants appear to have exercised this right extensively, such that, by the early 1880s, it was said that a shaykh could represent but half a dozen families. As a British observer noted, “There have been instances of twenty Sheikhs in one village, so that administration became perfectly impossible.”
96 The words of Wallace, who appears not to have valued democratic practice over administration, as cited in Schölch, Egypt for the Egyptians! 319–20. The empowering nature of this right should not be exaggerated: the multiplication of shaykhs may have had the negative effect of increasing the relative power of the mayor in the locality vis-à-vis each individual shaykh.
The fellahin of Nashil started demanding an election (targhīb) at some point in late 1872 or early 1873. The peasants working under Badawi al-Dalu
claimed that they faced treachery from the shaykhs of the district Dawud al-
Asi, Muhammad al-
Asi and Ibrahim
Abd al-Jawwad. At length, the inspector of Kufr al-Shaykh mounted an investigation, and the Provincial Offices finally agreed to hold an election (targhīb al-ahālī), which was duly conducted in the presence of all the necessary officials. Badawi al-Dalu
was elected shaykh, and the offending shaykhs were removed from their posts. The petitioners announced that “the people felt justice and their condition was good.” Interestingly, Badawi al-Dalu
, following his accession, initiated a limited land redistribution, which worked in favor of his supporters.
After much fierce politicking by those who had lost out in this election, and several more elections that only reaffirmed the original result, the peasants of Nashil (as noted earlier) lost out when the inspector for Lower Egypt ruled that no more elections should be held and everything should return to the status quo ante. This was a defeat for the fellahin of Nashil and for the fragile practice of popular consent and accompanying land redistribution. But one can at least note that none of those opposed to the election results argued against the importance of popular consent or of electoral practice itself. Quite the reverse. The argument of the al-
Asis and
Abd al-Jawwad, who were apparently in cahoots with some recently arrived “Christians”—it is not clear whether this refers to Copts or Europeans—was that al-Dalu
had won the election through “trickery of the people.” In other words, there was no direct objection to the principle of popular choice. The argument instead was that the people had been tricked, in some unspecified way, by allegedly conniving shaykhs.
97 Here the discourse tapped a long-standing Ottoman notion of a wayward but essentially guileless “flock” being led astray by conniving and scheming would-be power brokers of one kind or another. This attitude of course evacuated all agency from popular groups: see Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, 45. The arguments of the inspector for Lower Egypt simply emphasized the importance of having labor in the fields (rather than engaged in politics) and avoided, rather than directly addressed, the question of popular choice.
Peasants demanded elections and the implementation of recently promulgated regulations, but such demands were extended and deployed in the broader sense, whereby cultivators urged that officials act according to the law and in line with the new regulations that were being issued by the centralizing state. Peasants were bold enough to apply this stricture not only to local shaykhs, but also to provincial governors and to more highly placed figures in the government. In Ajira, for instance, the cultivators argued that the local administration had engaged in “meddling and trickery and the use of methods to which the system of justice does not consent.”98
“Al-Mahmud and thirteen Companions to the Khedive.”
Here an abstract “system of justice,” rather than the personal and kingly intervention of the khedive, is invoked as a remedy to injustice. This was a far cry from the claim of humble and obscure people wishing for charity from an all-powerful and compassionate khedive.
Electoral practice partly authorized numerous references to consent and the “wish [raghba] of the people” in petitioners' language. In Nashil, cultivators sought to justify the claim of al-Dalu
to the shaykhate by insisting, among other things, that it was “agreed by the people.”
99 In Fanma, the peasants not only complained about the lack of probity and the injustice of their shaykhs; they also declared that “no one had
wanted them to be shaykhs.”
100 “Ammad Sayyid to the Interior Minister,” emphasis added.
The cultivators clearly considered it possible to make an appeal to the importance of their own desires, even in the power-laden context of a petition. In the same petitions, cultivators went as far as to discredit the votes of their opponents for one al-Thamany Khalif on the basis that they were amassed through family connections. The actual “desire of the people,” they declared, was for Muhammad Ismail.
101 Here was an imaginary of popular will above and beyond the ties of extended family. Perhaps local hierarchies—some of which were instantiated in the extended family—were becoming increasingly oppressive to small holders where market relations and state intervention meant fiscal pressures, stratification, forced proletarianization, and dispossession.
Finally, there are two unusual references to equality in the report from the fellahin of Nashil. In denouncing the injustice of their antagonists, the Nashil plaintiffs claimed that shaykhly machinations had resulted in there being “no equality among the people” (a
dam al-musāwā bayn al-ahālī). Likewise, to commend their favored shaykh, Badawi al-Dalu
, they asserted that he had ensured “equal treatment among us” (musawatuna ma
ba
duna).
102 These assertions may have referred to tax distribution or the land redistribution (noted earlier) associated with Badawi al-Dalu
. Whatever the case, the use of this term is distinctive, because the language of equality was no natural or automatic part of complaints about injustice, which were more commonly denounced as tyranny (ẓulm or istibdād). Given that claims to just shares (ḥuqūq) in the petitions were based on the notion of unequal status, rights, and responsibilities of persons, then why would the fellahin of Nashil demand equality? The suggestion here is that peasants made new claims to voting rights, the interests and desires of the people, the system of justice, new government regulations, and even, on rare occasions, equality in the service of older notions of justice and just shares (ḥuqūq). Where the forms of protection due to them as peasants (but not, say, as juridically equal national citizens) were violated, peasants lodged protests. In the process, they made use of newly authorized institutions and discourses, from elections to notions of equality. In Ajira, for example, peasants demanded an election, a new practice, to remove a father and son (regarded as local tyrants) “for the sake of our comfort”—an old, established appeal. Theoretical contradictions between all the elements of the claim-making discourse may not have been strictly relevant in the heat of political bargaining. In the service of the old, new notions and practices were appropriated, especially in a context of exploitative social change.
CONCLUSION
The original sources used in this article give a highly unusual glimpse of both peasant voice, albeit constructed in a particular way, and peasant political practice. My main examples, restricted as they are to four locations in Lower Egypt and involving 150–200 peasants, cannot form the basis for grand generalizations. Nevertheless, these sources are sufficient to illustrate a certain peasant politics of engagement and negotiation with state institutions, a politics that receives little play in the literature on peasants in Egypt, and even in the larger scholarly literature, which often depicts rural cultivators' politics in terms of passivity, everyday avoidance, or violent revolutionary action. These sources also suggest that, rather than seeing state and peasant society in terms of a monologic and zero-sum antagonism, one can perceive a more fractured and differentiated set of relationships that involve some dialogic forms, especially at a time of state centralization.
I have argued that there is little suggestion in these sources of dull-witted and groveling peasants who are instinctively deferential to a glorious ruler; lovers of despots by habit and tradition; mired in an immature, primitive, or prepolitical consciousness; and unable to “represent themselves.” Instead, peasants made tactical use of the figure of the just ruler in a dangerous and power-laden context. They adopted a language that gave them permission to speak, drew in state intervention, and allowed them to (re)define in some measure the meaning of justice, even while ostensibly sticking to the terms of officially acceptable discourse. For example, when peasants insisted that the khedive sought the comfort and prosperity of the people, they had a chance to define that comfort and prosperity. When peasants colored the meaning of and added content to officially sanctioned discourse, some elements of peasant moral economy arguably showed through, among them the particularly strong indictment by petitioners of absolute dispossession from land and livelihoods. The categorical assertion that the “subaltern cannot speak,” a claim based on an endlessly frustrated search for authentic popular voice, is therefore contested here.103
See Rosalin O'Hanlon's critique of this problematic quest in “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Mapping Subaltern Studies: 72–115. Gyan Prakash makes the same point. “[T]he subalternist search for a humanist subject-agent frequently ended up with the discovery of the failure of subaltern agency”: Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” in Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: a reader. ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 124.
As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam put it, there are no “immaculate sites of resistance.”
104 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 11.
Usable source material constructed at least partially by subaltern groups does exist: peasants had a hand in the writing of the petitions that they organized. Peasant discourse as a fallen, tactical construction, like other discourse, is not simply erased—neither from the politics of time, nor from the historical record.
Far from shunning state agencies, then, or simply seeking their destruction in violent unrest or revolution, peasants tried again and again, sometimes successfully, to draw provincial authorities, ministers, and the khedive into their disputes with local village headmen and mayors. The petitions I have seen indicate that peasants welcomed newly established, official elections for village headmen, called for them tenaciously, and participated in them where possible. Such elections found their constitutional logic in a newly created organ linked to the executive, the Consultative Assembly of Representatives, and were guaranteed by the mechanisms of the centralizing bureaucracy. In appealing to them, peasants were seeking more state intervention, not less, and were appealing to the power of the centralized legal–administrative order to resolve local disputes and soften the exploitation generated by the village hierarchy and by political, economic, and social change. In this context, peasants were quick to appropriate, in the service of older notions of right and justice, new constitutionalist discourses, and lodged new and sometimes assertive appeals to elections, the rule of law, popular choice, rights, and even, in one case, equality. An older moral economy drew on newly authorized concepts to bolster its largely preexisting claims, which were then subtly transformed by this process of appropriation. Peasant moral economy was no barrier to such appropriation, then; in fact, it helped drive it forward. New concepts were battened onto preexisting norms. “Tradition” did not hold back “modernity,” as in elitist modernization theory. Instead, in the form of long-standing notions of right and justice, it was an active element in the appropriation of new concepts and institutions.
These sources illustrate, therefore, how peasant politics was not necessarily just a struggle against the state. The state, it is suggested, had a more complex presence in the lives of Egypt's peasantry, itself fractured in multiple ways. At one level, the state was the source of predatory exactions and local oppression, but at another level, the higher echelons of the bureaucracy and executive were at once a referee and locus of claim making.105
The latter argument is made regarding workers in John T. Chalcraft, “The Coal Heavers of Port Sa
id: State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914,” International Labor and Working Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 110–124.
Further research may even confirm what can only be suggested here: peasant protest, even in the service of older notions of justice, may have worked—through its engagement with the government and new discourses—to entrench, legitimate, and extend the bureaucratic construction of the 19th-century Egyptian state. If so, then new ways of understanding how popular politics played a role in Egyptian state formation may start to become apparent, and Egypt's history from below will take another small step forward.
Author's note: I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable and detailed feedback provided by Joel Beinin, Laleh Khalili, Zachary Lockman, and Yaseen Noorani. Likewise, I am deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers at IJMES who were both rigorous and, in one case, extraordinarily helpful. The Elie Kedourie Fund at the British Academy funded the research undertaken in summer 2001 at the Egyptian National Archives and the Public Record Office (PRO), London.
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