Conclusion

The social transformations whose manifestation in Egypt is the subject of these chapters are familiar to historians whose work looks at any aspect of colonialism in virtually any place in the world. Colonies around the globe were intended to be or were transformed into commodity producers for European manufacturers. As is well documented in India, Africa, and large swaths of Asia, extractive processes brought with them colonial states and their administrative and bureaucratic infrastructures, which required large cadres of functionaries in order to operate: teachers, translators, accountants, clerks, engineers, and lawyers. Accordingly, the colonial power or powers set up educational institutions or sent some of the locals to the metropole to acquire the skills required to carry out these necessary administrative and technical tasks. In case after case, over time these groups developed a consciousness defined by a bourgeois political outlook replete with nationalist aspirations.1

As we have seen throughout these pages, however, a number of factors made Egypt’s situation distinctive. First, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the regime of Egypt’s own ruler, the Ottoman-appointed governor Mehmet ’Ali, was the agent of many of the alterations that were so often imposed through colonialism in other places.² Seeking to build a patrimonial state for his family, ’Ali introduced a series of administrative, bureaucratic, and economic reforms and polices that began the process of remaking Egypt. He built a large modernized army, took the first steps toward a modern bureaucratic state, and opened new educational institutions. The group of technocrats that emerged later from the new state schools or from similar Ottoman institutions in the Levant eventually evolved into the urban ’afandiya, the main protagonists of this book. The entire project was underwritten through the introduction and massive cultivation of long-staple cotton grown for export. Second, even after the waning of Mehmet ’Ali’s regime, Egypt was never an official colony of any particular European state. While it is true that Great Britain governed Egypt after 1882, a number of European states had an indirect role in Egyptian affairs that affected the formulation and implementation of the Western authority’s decisions. After Britain’s occupation of the country in July 1882, British officials were compelled to maneuver through a complicated field of political authority and the contradictory interests of other European states on a regular basis. This complexity was especially true of the period before the settlement of the Entente Cordiale in 1904.³

Complicating this situation still further was the fact that Egypt continued to be, at least nominally, a part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914. The Porte was usually quiescent regarding British suzerainty over its so-called province. This façade of legality lent the British occupation an air of legitimacy. Whitehall found this masquerade of Ottoman sovereignty, flimsy as it was, important enough to maintain even at the cost of some freedom of movement for their “agent and consul general” (the official title of the ranking Briton in Egypt, and the country’s de facto ruler). Ottoman authorization, even if perfunctory, was required for any number of official acts. The Porte “officially” promulgated all edicts, even those requested by British officials. In addition, until the British declared Husayn Kamil Sultan of Egypt in 1914 in response to the Ottoman Empire’s entering World War I on the side of the Central Powers, Istanbul officially approved the ascension of each khedive.

Political and administrative details aside, Egypt remained within the orbit of the Ottoman cultural world. Throughout the period there continued to be frequent and fairly easy movement between Cairo and Istanbul. It is true that from the time that Arabic became the official Egyptian language of state in the middle of the nineteenth century there was less emphasis on teaching and learning Turkish; by the second decade of the twentieth century few if any members of the middle-class intelligentsia—the focus of this study—were competent in Turkish. The diminution of Turkish as a bureaucratic language certainly circumscribed the influence of Ottoman Turkish culture among Egypt’s new professional classes. Nevertheless, in the period between 1870 and 1900, there continued to be cross-fertilization of political thought among Istanbul, Cairo, Aleppo, Beirut and other Ottoman cities.⁴ Ottoman constitutionalism, the Young Turk movement, and the pan-Islamic ideas associated with Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II were all influential and counted large numbers of followers among Egyptians. In addition, the Ottoman claim to the caliphate, however suspect on historical grounds, continued to carry moral and political weight with many Muslims in Egypt.

The extent to which Ottoman prestige in Egypt was a result of this religious consideration is a question that few historians have investigated with any precision. Indeed, researchers have tended to either ignore or downplay the Ottoman connection in Egyptian history from the time of Khedive Isma’il (1863–1879) and after. An exception to this is Ehud Toledano’s seminal study on mid-century Egypt, which represents a model for future work on this question.⁵ The minimization of the Ottoman connection may be a product of Arab nationalist traditions in the historiography that migrated from Arabic into other languages as well. These tend at their most extreme to view the entire Ottoman period as either a dark interregnum for Arab supremacy in the Muslim world or merely as a prelude to the modern Arab awakening. But there is also another possibility. Perhaps historians have been uncertain about the best way to assess the religious dimensions of the relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire because they usually emphasize the emergence of supposedly secular protonationalist political ideologies and collective notions of belonging in this period of Egyptian history.

These doubts may also be reflected in the absence of work investigating the ways in which the currents of Islamic reform so important at the time permeated the putatively secular nascent public sphere. This is not to say that the contributions of Islamic reformers to modern Egyptian cultural history are ignored. A voluminous amount of work on modern Islamic history and the Arab literary renaissance, al-Nahda, acknowledges the presence of Muslim jurists or those educated in Islamic institutions among the important voices within the emergent discourses of politics and society. Nevertheless, almost without exception this writing dwells on separating the “religious” content of these figures’ contributions from their “secular” work. The present book maintains that this approach is a side effect of contemporary historiography and not a reflection of the reality of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptian cultural life. In these pages I have tried to take the words of my subjects as they wrote them.

References to Islam abounded in almost all forms of cultural production at the time. Amna Hijazi, for example, claims that part of the reason for the popularity of the ‘Urabi movement was that its leaders used rhetoric that combined the idea of “Egypt for the Egyptians” and “Jihad in the way of God.” Charles Wendell rightly argues that the “sentiment of community based on religion” was stronger than “ethnic affinity” and nationalism in the twentieth century and that the “old terms umma and watan seemed to offer vistas of . . . almost boundariless freedom.”⁶ Egyptians were reworking these old terms, and a religious sense of community helped to recast them in a context in which a new kind of “boundariless freedom” became operative .⁷ This reinterpretation was not merely rhetorical flourish or the use of popular idioms. Rather, these references to religion index a history and sets of sociocultural organizing principles and understandings of community not fully captured by the terms secularism or nationalism. These chapters have argued that many of the journalists, social critics, and political agitators attempting to redraw the cultural, political, and moral boundaries of Egypt came to advocate forms of protonationalist thought that were informed in various ways by the moral vision and notions of community that Islamic modernists had distilled from Islamic traditions. The political consciousness and the sense of social mission, so prominent in the public sphere, owed much to the influence of the nineteenth-century Islamic reform movement associated with the Iranian Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh.⁸ These figures and their many protégés and followers were extremely prominent in the social and cultural spaces of nineteenth-century Egypt—the press, the capitalist publishing industry, the literary salons, the welfare and learned associations and voluntary societies, the Masonic lodges and the theatre—in which new kinds of urban (’afandi/bourgeois) sensibilities were articulated.

Commentary about Egyptian “retardation” or “backwardness” began to appear in the Egyptian Arabic press, reform literature, and agricultural writing with the birth of these new fields of endeavor in the 1870s. The autocritique became one of the primary modes of expression for Egyptian publics and indeed in modern cosmopolitan Arab culture. The logic informing much of the analysis of the debilitating effects of backwardness and ignorance drew heavily on the thought of al-‘Afghani and his disciples. As we have seen, al-‘Afghani recast the Islamic notions of neglect [tafrit] and excess [ifrat] as elements of a blueprint for evaluating all social, cultural, and political phenomena, issues, and questions. He presented the two concepts as a schema to index the extent to which Muslims adhered to their traditions. For al-‘Afghani the default position was moderation. He drew connections between societal health, economic strength, and moral probity, saying, “When we see some kind of deadly germ [jurthuma] in society [al-‘ijtima‘a al-insani], we must try to reform [islah] society by spreading the ways to earn a living [awa’ish] . . . to divide hardship [equally among members of society] and to maintain moderation in our desires [shahawat].”⁹ Excess implied the rejection of all things Islamic and Eastern and the uncritical adoption of all things Western. The further implication of ifrat was that one was not fulfilling the individual and collective responsibilities and duties of a Muslim. Tafrit or neglect, on the other hand, signified a stubborn obstinacy to hold on to received notions and customs regardless of their appropriateness for the era or their conformity to Islamic law. On this point al-‘Afghani was suggesting that there was an overzealous attachment to practices, rituals, and beliefs that may have no place in Islam at all. Al-‘Afghani contrasted the rationality of the moderate position with the antirational extremes of excess and neglect. Only the rational person can see that Islam is appropriate for every time and place. For this reason Islam enjoins the believer to use his or her reason and judgment to insure that her practice of the religion is appropriate for its context. The ideal path was moderation or balance between these two extremes.

Through the presence of al-‘Afghani and his acolytes in the press and the field of commercial publishing, the neglect-moderation-excess paradigm soon became a template used to frame all public issues. It was woven into the fabric of social, political, and agricultural reform discourses as commentators wrote and spoke of neglect on the part of the peasants or excess on the part of the rich. Even when the pattern was not invoked explicitly, its traces are detectable because much of critical public discourse took the same general form. For example, the ’afandiya intelligentsia generally portrayed themselves as taking the moderate, balanced, or most often the “civilized [mutamaddun]” position, while they described the peasantry’s putative unwillingness to accept change as an example of their general “backwardness” and the elite’s supposed desire to adopt all things Western as a form of “blind imitation.” All these representations had equivalents in the discourses of Islamic reform. Accordingly, peasant “neglect” in holding on to ancient and outmoded practices was depicted as “backwardness” manifested in superstition and ignorance, in ways that closely resembled the Islamic modernists’ critiques of popular religion. Condemnations of the elite’s blind imitation of the West evoked the blind imitation and empty formalism for which Islamic reformers criticized the authoritative institutions of Islamic law and education. In this way, the neglect-moderation-excess formulation joined the categories “civilized” and “properly Islamic.” Because Egyptians crafted their ideas about a “civilized” society and a reformed self according to the neglect-moderation-excess framework, it subsequently became a crucial element in the deliberation of social and political questions for decades. For the ’afandiya, the neglect-moderation-excess equation was not only a lens through which to view all problems in agriculture, commerce, public health, and politics, but also a ready organizing logic for responses to every moral or political question of the time. But the pattern offered even more than that: it also served as a tool in delineating the cartography of social relations in Egypt. As the ’afandiya represented peasants as “neglectful,” the wealthy as “excessive,” and themselves as “moderate,” they embedded this formulation into the very core of modern Egyptian identity.

The multivalent nature of the neglect-moderation-excess framework ensured that no single political faction of the intellectual classes could monopolize it. Both pro- and anti-British voices in public life framed a variety of questions according to its logic. To be sure, over time the neglect-moderation-excess equation evolved with changing political circumstances. Thus by the turn of the twentieth century, “excessive” Westernizers were all too willing to jettison “Egyptian” rather than “Eastern” customs and habits. Twenty years earlier these customs would have been described as “Eastern” rather than “Egyptian.” Nevertheless, neglect-moderation-excess served as the template that structured much of public discussion and disputation throughout the entire period.

Representations of the fallah were subject to the complicated calculus of the fallah-as-backward and the fallah-as-Egyptian. For example, one writer reached the somewhat typical, if seemingly paradoxical, conclusion in an agricultural journal in 1893 that “Six thousand years of fallah experience can still aid the cultivator as long as that experience accords with the knowledge of American and European cultivators.”¹⁰ Representations of the “neglectfully” conservative peasant and the peasant-asreservoir of Egyptian authenticity seemed to be at odds with one another. Reconciling these apparently contradictory representations fell to the “moderate,” civilized ’afandiya who knew best how to adapt to the new era while maintaining what was essential in Egyptian identity. The fallah, who had acquired his stock of agricultural knowledge and techniques from “his grandfather,” remained resistant to the “new techniques of this era.”¹¹ Therefore, any pain resulting from the imposition of new agricultural methods would be worthwhile for the sake of all Egyptians.¹²

Imposing such methods was presumably a task that only the ’afandiya were qualified to undertake. Knowledge of “this era” required a new openness to Western organizational techniques and technologies. The urgency with which many ’afandiya outlined this need indicates that the concern with outmoded agricultural practices and insufficient scientific knowledge had to do with more than simply producing higher yields of cotton. This writer argued that, “advancing politics” occurs only through “strengthening financial affairs,” and this desideratum could be obtained only through “agriculture, commerce, and manufacturing.”¹³ Not only because Egypt’s potential industrial capacity was limited by political circumstances, but also because the country had an ideal climate and fine soil, it could most easily “reap its rewards” through agriculture.¹⁴ Thus the desire to introduce new agricultural techniques and methods was tied to building a new kind of polity with a new political agent at the helm, the civilized urban ’afandi.

This development points to an irony we have glimpsed throughout these pages. As the literate classes attempted to turn the new sociopolitical order imposed by Britain’s de facto colonial rule to their advantage, they aided its refashioning of Egypt. Their attempts to maneuver within the emergent economic and political structures facilitated the colonial project’s goal of remaking the conditions that shaped Egyptians’ lives.¹⁵ As we have seen, through the ’afandiya’s conscious strategies and political agitation (including anticolonial activism) and by its representations of other social groups, in particular peasants and women, the new class assumed a commanding position within Egypt’s emergent social landscape. By deploying new historicist logic they wove a voiceless “new fallah” into the fabric of national identity in the years between 1900 and 1919. In realizing their political and social goals, however, the ’afandiya were ultimately a critical instrument for the success of a Western power’s constituting a new type of society in Egypt. Their achievements provided the foundations for “the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise” that have defined Egyptians’ lives in the most profound sense for the last one hundred and twenty years.¹⁶

All these observations raise some thorny questions about agency and history. In Elizabeth Thompson’s innovative work on Syria and Lebanon, she writes that under French rule, the Syrians and Lebanese were “colonial citizens,” not “passive subjects,” because they “actively engaged in the definition of their civil status” through the “colonial civic order.”¹⁷ They were agents in defining their own political-legal subjectivity. Likewise, Ussama Makdisi writes in his fine book on late-Ottoman Lebanon that the relationship between colonizer and colonized is better understood as an “arena of exchange” rather than as a “dichotomy.” Makdisi argues that in regulating different facets of the colonial encounter, the imperial power presented “the indigenous inhabitants” with avenues for “reinterpreting their own history, their own communal self-definition, and ultimately, their own rigid social order.”¹⁸ While this encounter was “never equal,” the colonized were nonetheless agents in their own self-fashioning.

But this line of argumentation raises the question of the ultimate agency of that political, legal, and moral subjectivity. Were not the modern subjectivities produced by the “indigenous inhabitants” described in these books subsumed into the project of secular Western political modernity? If so, is it not then legitimate to question the significance of this agency if it did little more than produce local variations of a universal model of Western modernity? Chakrabarty offers a provisional resolution in his challenge to historians of the colonial and postcolonial world. He urges us to “create conjoined and disjunctive genealogies for European categories of political modernity” as we examine the “fragmentary histories of human belonging that never constitute a one or a whole.”¹⁹ This book has tried to respond to this challenge by showing how modern (bourgeois) social and political categories could not capture the Egyptian peasant; the peasant was nether civilized nor citizen nor yet reformed Muslim. Representations of peasants as pseudo ’afandis in the first two decades of the twentieth century are most telling illustrations of the frustration of the modern projects of nation, state, and religious reform in their attempts to translate the life-worlds of the fallah into political modernity. The ultimate irony was that the project itself betrayed its own limitations. In the end it seemed that the peasants of Egypt could become subject to the project of political modernity and become civilized and modern only if they were no longer peasants.

Finally, the preceding pages constitute a cultural and intellectual history, or perhaps more aptly, a social and cultural history. This book has shown how discourses on peasants, on civilizing, and on reform were tied to the interests of specific social groups. In contrast to much of the cultural and intellectual history of modern Egypt, this book has eschewed framing a discussion of the period’s cultural and social development as an episode in a battle between civilizational worldviews—religious or traditional forces lined up against secular or modern ones. Even some very sophisticated intellectual and cultural historians have treated Egyptian history as an epic conflict in which religious or traditional forces are arrayed against secular or modern forces.²⁰ These pages call into question such an analytical framework by showing that “secular modern” thought and “Islamic” modernism both emerged from the same intellectual and cultural antecedents. In fact these chapters suggest that both of these putatively rival worldviews are products of the same historical movements and therefore, however one may label them, they have far more in common than is often recognized.²¹

This observation in turn raises difficult questions for the historian of the postcolonial world. This book has attempted to situate the peasant question and its attendant ramifications within its historical context, without resorting to some of the customary narratives of Egyptian history such as national awakening, modernization, or the coming of the West. One of the primary assumptions informing these pages is that these frameworks distort or lead to misreadings of the profound influence of the period’s religious and social reform projects on the evolution of modern Egyptian political and social identity. The tendency is to simplify the complex admixture of historical and intellectual factors out of which these projects evolved.

Even more importantly, as Chakrabarty reminds us, these narratives also often ignore or “anthropologize” remnants and fragments of other forms of historicity with their own traditions of knowledge and life-worlds. ²² Those unruly elements must somehow be translated into the universal story of the nation or the spread of capitalist modernity lest they unsettle the unity of these other stories. In response to Chakrabarty’s challenge to historians of the postcolonial world to provincialize Europe, this study has tried to take account of other forms of cultural expression that may not fit into conventional narratives of the “Nahda” or of the drama of the so-called Nationalist Period. Accordingly, these pages attempted to include remnants and traces of other kinds of agendas that were not and could not be subsumed into the project of the nation. To whatever extent it has succeeded, this success is perhaps accidental. So I present these chapters as one possible way to describe the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. If I have been successful they raise more questions than they can answer.