CHAPTER ONE

The Formation and Emergence of the Peasant Question

This chapter presents a general outline of the major historical questions of nineteenth-century Egypt in order to frame the argument of the entire book and link the concrete historical events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in unexpected ways. The reader should note that the expansion of cotton production in the wake of the blockade of the Southern states during the American Civil War and the introduction of a new European-inspired legal regime in Egypt resulted in greater interest on the part of various social and political constituencies in the peasants and the conditions under which they produced and consumed.

The emergence of the Islamic modernist movement is an essential component of this story. This chapter accordingly lays out the case for the centrality of Islamic modernism in the unfolding of Egyptian cultural history. I maintain that Islamic modernism played a decisive role in the cultural products of the new media in Egypt as well as in the wider Muslim world. Islamic modernism linked the discourses of moral reform and the imperative to build a modern Muslim society with questions of political sovereignty and public interest. It also provided new models of familial and societal relationships and personal comportment while outlining the proper desires and aspirations for “civilized” Muslims. These new models had a direct impact on the social contours of modern Egypt in general and on the place eventually occupied by the peasant majority in the new social geography in particular.

INTRODUCTION

During the late 1870s and early 1880s, intellectuals, journalists, political activists, and self-described reformers debated the causes and consequences of the abject state of Egyptian peasants. Discussions were dominated by such questions as the disproportionate tax burden borne by the fallahin,1 the post–cottonboom economic crash, the monetization of the Egyptian economy, and the repercussions of the newly established Mixed Courts on the peasants’ holdings. These issues formed the backdrop of the political and social reform projects in which some of these figures became involved.

At the same time religious reformers and social and political activists worked to achieve what they considered a complete societal transformation or revitalization. To a large extent their concerns crystallized around a narrative of Muslim decline. One finds a veritable host of contemporary accounts of the ways in which Muslim society fell into its present “wretched” and “moribund” state. Muslim society had lost its dynamism as its sense of purpose and shared endeavor waned. Superstition and a slavish, unthinking imitation of the past handicapped Muslims in all their worldly and spiritual pursuits.²

I will proceed to discuss the economic and political milieu that produced the new urban intellectual classes of writers, activists, and reformers in the nineteenth century. These groups were responsible for the vitality of public discussion around this historical narrative of decline; they also played an important role in the functioning of the modernizing state apparatus. The history of the Egyptian public sphere and the increasingly wide dissemination of opinions and ideas are inseparable from the emergence of these new social groupings in Egypt. An examination of their writing offers a unique window into the period’s history. I suggest throughout the following chapters that we read their words as self-reflexive meditations on both themselves and on Egypt as a collective social and political project. Their public writing was instrumental in laying the foundations of Egyptian political modernity.³ Their observations about various kinds of issues and their public deliberations, as well as the controversies they entered into, were essential to the development of new concepts of citizenship ; notions of political rights; and questions about democracy, equality, and morality.

At the same time, in order to explicate the revolutionary nature of change occurring at that time the historian must examine the history of the incipient public sphere through more than simply cataloging debates and identifying the partisans of particular arguments or policies.⁴ Indeed, our exploration of the public sphere is not exhausted by such work; it merely serves as an introduction. These pages propose accordingly that we look at the public sphere also as a site for the deployment of a form of power that was experienced as free social exchange.⁵ This form of power worked through the spaces of novel forms of social exchange. Through literate Egyptians’ participation in these new spaces of interaction and exchange, they were impelled to possess desires and to describe their interests in ways that facilitated the emergence of political modernity in Egypt. These desires and interests were brought together and assigned positive value under the rubric of “civilization.” In effect, being “civilized” came to mean to aspire to political modernity. Likewise, through acting publicly, participants were encouraged to reject wants and to avoid pursuits that were contrary to the projects of modernity. Such wants and pursuits were understood as “ignorance,” “superstition,” “backwardness,” and “blind imitation” or “languidness.” As we will see, these terms came to represent the attitudes and behaviors of the peasantry. Thus, through our study of the practice of public discussion we will see how the “backward peasant” and the “civilized urbanite” subjects were constructed and authorized, in part, through this new form of power.

The following pages chart the early stages of the emergence of the modern Egyptian political subject by looking at the treatment of the fallah question during its formative period. Specifically, such representations of peasants as those found in the work of the satirists ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Yaqub Sannu‘ generated new knowledge and fresh information about peasants on the one hand; at the same time, they created the ground on which a new gendered and civilized urban figure operated. These texts valorized this figure as the living embodiment of the future of Egypt-asmoral-community while proffering a peasant subject as an obstacle to achieving that future. As we will see in the subsequent discussion, a composite portrait of the civilized urbanite was presented as the ideal Egyptian political and moral subject.

MONOPOLY, MARKWETS, AND THE GROWTH OF EXPORT AGRICULTURE

Markets

By the close of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Mehmet ’Ali,6a Mamluk who had come to Egypt with the Ottoman forces sent to confront the French after their 1798 invasion, had consolidated his position as the supreme ruler of Egypt. He accomplished this feat by replacing the inefficient tax-farming [iltizam] system with a system of government monopolies; in the process he rid himself of potential rivals among the often mutinous tax-farmers. As is well documented, ’Ali’s tight grip over trade enabled him to secure direct control over most of the agricultural production and distribution within Egypt and gave him complete mastery over the lucrative export trade. In essence he became the only export merchant in all of Egypt.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1820s, the monopoly system of ’Ali’s regime progressively extended its control over an array of crops, particularly those cultivated for export, such as cotton and wheat. Producers were obliged to sell their harvests at fixed prices to government storehouses. These storehouses eventually stopped paying the agricultural producers in cash and instead paid them with coupons. The resultant decrease in money circulation, together with government monopolies applied to an ever wider array of crops, severely damaged market farming but proved to be a boon to Mehmet ’Ali’s efforts to regulate production. Through these controls he obliged peasants to grow only certain kinds of crops, such as those that could be exported—primarily wheat and rice, and then after 1820, cotton.⁷

That said, it is important to note that even during this period of government monopoly Egyptian market agriculture continued. The weekly and thrice-monthly markets for livestock, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and dairy products found in many provincial towns were still held, if on a smaller scale. The command economy of the early nineteenth century did not completely supplant an ancient and complex commercial market system. Market agriculture for export, especially in wheat, had been an important part of Egypt’s commercial activity for centuries. In contrast to historians who maintain that Egyptian commercial agriculture emerged after the end of the monopoly system, Ken Cuno has argued that market farming returned and rebounded in the 1840s.⁸ Indeed, Cuno’s work challenges many of the assumptions about nineteenth-century Egyptian economic history found in the work of such scholars as Charles Issawi, Gabriel Baer, ’Ali Barakat, Ra’uf Abbas, and Roger Owen. Cuno argues that the commercial and financial framework supporting agriculture that historians associate with the late nineteenth century was in operation long before this period. He found evidence of widespread commercial agriculture, a monetized economy, moneylenders traveling throughout rural Egypt, and de facto inheritable property rights among even small peasant landowners centuries earlier than historians had previously thought. He does concur with other historians, however, that the nineteenth century was a unique period for a number of reasons—not the least of which were the scale of export production brought about by the introduction of long-staple cotton and the transformation of trade patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. Cuno sums up his contribution by stating that historians should revise the thesis that the appearance of the West introduced something unprecedented into Egypt that transformed the mode and relations of production, and that they should instead regard the emergence of Western-centered markets as simply a corollary of the reemergence of “market relations and commercial agriculture” in Egypt.

Low government purchase prices paid by the monopoly system drove up the numbers of peasants and rural notables falling into debt. The results of these pressures were predictable. Peasants abandoned the land in large numbers to escape their mounting debt, the imposition of military conscription, and the increasingly onerous corvée. The abandoned lands were then “reassigned” to those seemingly able to pay the arrears and cultivate the properties. Those families receiving these grants, if unable to pay the arrears and farm the new land, were not immune from the harsh treatment meted out to even the humblest debtors. The family of the great educator and geographer, ’Ali Mubarak (1824–1893), is a case in point. His relatives from the village of Birnibal al-Jadid enjoyed the prestige brought by education and their position as the local prayer leaders and shari ‘a court judges. After receiving a grant of abandoned land, but failing to meet the demands of the local tax collector, the members of Mubarak’s family were subject to beatings and imprisonment “just like the peasants”; in the end they too abandoned their village.⁹

It was not until years after the end of Mehmet ’Ali’s rule and the demise of his monopoly system that the Egyptian cash economy fully recovered and agriculture became reoriented more fully to capital-driven market production. During the years of transition back to a cash economy, however, continuing shortages of cash obliged the poorest cultivators to continue to sell their crops to government storehouses. They could pay their taxes in kind at the government depots; the value they received for their produce, however, fell far below the prices that could be obtained in the open market. Moreover, the promissory notes the cultivators received in exchange were only redeemable in payment for the following year’s taxes.¹⁰ As a result, the legacy of Mehmet ’Ali’s monopoly continued to affect the humblest cultivators through the 1840s. The persistence of its after effects had dire consequences for the productive capacities of Egyptian agriculture, driving Egypt’s rulers in the late 1840s up until the early 1860s to take positive steps to protect small cultivators. For example, the 1847 land law provided a framework for adjudicating disputes arising out of confusion between customary or Islamic law on the one hand and government decrees on the other. Adjudication was necessary as the peasants reclaimed lands abandoned during the Mehmet ’Ali period. Even some peasants unable to reclaim all of their land were assured of a livelihood through smaller grants of land. The government also forbade European merchants from dealing directly with peasants, to protect them from debt. And later it eliminated the octroi or internal tariff on goods brought to the cities from the countryside.¹¹

As a result of the early nineteenth-century expansion of trade between Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, Egyptian commercial agriculture quickly developed and surpassed its pre–Mehmet ’Ali levels when it was revived in the 1840s. The expansion of market agriculture was fueled by such export crops as wheat and cotton. Although long-staple cotton had been grown in large amounts from the 1820s, it became increasingly cultivated over the course of the early nineteenth century. Cotton provided more than 50 percent of Egypt’s exports before the huge expansion of cotton cultivation caused by the American Civil War’s disruption of Southern cotton production. Because of Egypt’s emphasis on export agriculture, especially cotton, by 1900 the country had become a net importer of cereals to feed its rising population.¹² With the excellent potential for high profits, large numbers of cultivators, even many small and medium landholders, turned to growing cotton. Market agriculture became increasingly oriented toward the export rather than the local market.

Mehmet ’Ali’s fourth surviving son, Sa‘id (1822–1863), ruled as a viceroy or wali between 1854 and 1863. The Ottoman title conferred on Egypt’s ruler was wali [or vāli; usually translated as “governor”] until Mehmet ’Ali’s nephew Isma‘il (ruled from 1863 to 1879) paid the Porte [the name by which as the Ottoman government was known] a substantial sum to have the title “Khedive” made official in the early 1860s. Sa‘id was said to be something of a Francophile—at least in comparison with his nephew Abbas (1812–1854), whom he followed. Perhaps this preference for the French is the reason for his granting the concession to build the Suez Canal to his friend Ferdinand de Lesseps. Sa‘id encouraged the revitalization of market relations in local production by returning Lower and Middle Egypt to paying taxes in coin rather than in kind, as had become customary during the Mehmet ’Ali era. Sa‘id’s order immediately benefited moneylenders and spurred some agents of Alexandrian merchants into entering the moneylending business because some cultivators, especially cotton growers whose production required large amounts of cash for irrigation and labor, found themselves short on ready cash when the tax collectors arrived.¹³ This trend toward monetization quickened throughout the second half of the nineteenth century until Khedive Tawfiq (1879–1892) decreed in 1880 that even in regions where the economy was not fully monetized, such as Upper Egypt, taxes should be collected in coin.¹⁴

The economic backdrop of Tawfiq’s order was the unraveling of Egypt’s finances due to massive foreign debt accumulated over the previous twenty-five years. The buildup of debt stemmed from such huge public works projects as the Suez Canal and from the sudden collapse in cotton prices that occurred after the end of the American Civil War; the British, perhaps unfairly, also blamed the profligacy of Egypt’s rulers. British views of the Egyptian royal family were influenced by travel literature, some of it clearly fantastical. One can observe this influence in many of the opinions voiced in official British documents of the time.¹⁵

By switching to cash payment of taxes, Egypt’s rulers hoped to pay off their government’s mounting debt at a time when European creditors were pushing for the Great Powers to intervene more directly in the financial affairs of the Egyptian government. There was already a precedent for intervention in the case of the Ottoman government. Europeans fearing for their investments in the Ottoman domains forced the sultan to accede to their wishes for financial oversight. Therefore, just as had occurred in Istanbul, a European-supervised Public Debt Administration (Casse de la Dette Publique) was forced on the Egyptian government in Cairo in the wake of its declaration of bankruptcy in 1876. The ruler at the time, Khedive Isma‘il (1830–1895), is one of the most controversial of Egypt’s modern era. Wali, and then later khedive, Isma‘il ruled from 1863 until 1879. He endeavored to develop Egypt’s productive capacities and to achieve greater independence from the Ottoman Empire. He undertook a number of reforms in education and administration and built up Egypt’s infrastructure to make it easier to bring export crops to market and port. The British blamed Egypt’s bankruptcy on what they called Isma‘il’s financial mismanagement. However one reads the history of the period, one can safely say that his heavy-handed style and the financial crisis through which Egypt suffered in the 1870s created an atmosphere conducive to his deposition in 1879, unrest and rebellion through the early 1880s, and ultimately to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In the wake of his acceptance of the Public Debt Administration with the European governments representing Egypt’s largest creditors, Isma‘il was obliged to accept French and British ministers in his cabinet to oversee the country’s finances. On several occasions these new ministers pressured the khedive into collecting taxes early in order to make payments to European bondholders when their coupons on Isma‘il’s huge loans matured. For example, in 1876 and again in 1878, the government collected taxes nine and twelve months early to pay the July 1878 bond coupon.¹⁶ The switch to collecting such assessments in coin allowed government tax collectors to arrive at a village at any time of the year rather than after the harvest season as had been customary. Accordingly, small landholders were often forced to borrow money at exorbitant rates to meet their tax obligations.

Land Tenure

Nathan Brown describes three systems of agricultural production that were functioning in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century. Commercial estates existed in the outer Nile Delta, the outskirts of Cairo, Fayyum, and northern Asyut, and central Aswan. In the inner Delta were smallholdings, while smaller estates existed in Giza, Bani Suwayf, and parts of Asyut. Smallholder commercial agriculture existed mainly in Upper Egypt alongside subsistence farming. Sharecroppers or renters carried out much of the estate-based commercial farming, although some contract labor existed in the outer Delta on many of the largest estates.17 Until the 1860s, the large estates produced most of the cotton for export while small landholders grew less labor-intensive market crops such as wheat.

From the end of the Mehmet ’Ali era in the 1840s and then the Abbas and Sa’id periods in the 1850s, market-based landownership became increasingly prevalent. By the last third of the nineteenth century, the market had reshaped the land tenure structure of rural Egypt. The market economy led to the consolidation of large estates, often at the expense of peasants, that enabled the members of the royal family and those allied with them to transform themselves into a powerful landowning class. Then, as the government was forced by its European creditors to sell off some of its holdings—thus lowering some prices—urban Egyptians of more modest means began to invest in agricultural land. Soon European capital, looking for new opportunities, followed Egyptian merchants and began to invest in land, becoming an increasingly important presence in the countryside. There was one crucial difference, however, between European land purchasers and their local agents and between Egyptian investors: the former group of profit-seeking investors was protected by the legal privileges granted by the Capitulations while the latter was not.

The Capitulations were a series of treaties or contracts between the Ottomans and various states, mostly European powers. When first promulgated during the seventeenth century, a time of Ottoman strength, the treaties were intended to assuage Italian merchants’ fear of doing business within the Ottoman Empire by granting the foreigners immunity from Ottoman law. Over time, with the shift in power toward northern Europe and away from the Ottoman Empire, these treaties had the effect of creating groups of merchants exempt from taxes and local law, therefore beyond the reach of local officials throughout the Ottoman domains. As the western European powers became stronger, they extracted greater and greater concessions from the Porte. The capitulatory powers in the nineteenth century were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.¹⁸ Indeed, the capitulatory powers eventually obliged the Ottoman state to recognize consular protection extended to their nationals and to others able to obtain a consular certificate. Many Levantines and some Egyptians secured this protection. Thus there was a considerable incentive on the part of Egyptian locals to acquire a letter granting protégé status from a foreign consul. Besides the chaos and legal complexity that consular immunity engendered, its net result was that those holding this privilege, whether foreigners or their Egyptian protégés, were exempt from all manner of taxation in Egypt.¹⁹

Even as the Capitulations gained strength, Europeans successfully challenged the trade and tax polices upon which Mehmet ’Ali had built his short-lived empire and that were a source of the unequal land distribution that became accentuated through the rest of the century. The Mehmet ’Ali regime had aimed to maintain agricultural production and a steady flow of tax revenues at any cost. Accordingly, land was “reassigned” whenever a cultivator was either unable to farm it or when tax arrears accrued. The result of these policies was an increasingly uneven distribution of land in the countryside.²⁰ The beneficiaries were often the shaykhs al-balad (village headmen, sometimes rendered as “mayors”), many of whom were assimilated into the ranks of the rural notable class or the ayan. Maha Ghalwash contends that a sense of moral obligation and economic interest compelled the government to try to maintain the economic viability of even the “lower-rung” peasants. After Mehmet ’Ali was defeated in Syria by a joint Ottoman-British-Austrian force in 1840 and 1841, he was compelled to sign the Treaty of London (1841), which bound him to comply with the Ottoman-British Balta-Liman Agreement of 1838. The Balta-Liman Agreement forbade government trading monopolies and set low fixed tariff rates. In order to sidestep these strictures, however, Mehmet ’Ali granted huge tracts of land to members of his extended family and to high Egyptian officials. Since these estates were formed out of the areas producing the greatest percentage of profitable export crops, particularly cotton, the ruling family in effect controlled commercial export agriculture. Many of these estate lands had been seized from peasant cultivators who in theory would receive compensation in the form of “equivalent” land supplied by other members of the royal family. Practice surely deviated from theory, however, as many peasants received lands that were often far from their place of residence, sometimes in “other provinces [mudiriyat]”; or if they were given land nearby it was often uncultivated and therefore required heavy investment to bring under the plow.²¹ Moreover, these exchanges often occurred without the consent or even the knowledge of the peasant proprietors. Ultimately, many of the “compensated” peasants were for all intents and purposes simply dispossessed of their land, and had little choice but to become tenants or laborers on the estates created out of what had been their fields. Khedive Isma‘il was especially rapacious, as he seized thousands of faddans of peasant-owned land and combined it with land classified as uncultivated, although in practice much of it was farmed.²² He reallocated these lands to himself, his family, high state officials, or military officers.²³

The end of the monopoly system and the return of market agriculture encouraged Egyptian merchants in provincial towns to invest in land, especially after a slump in world cotton prices caused land values to decline in the 1840s.²⁴ According to ’Ali Shalabi, Viceroy Sa’id further accelerated this trend when he cancelled tariffs on internal trade.²⁵ Urban investors, mainly Egyptian merchants and local minorities, became an absentee landlord class. During the last third of the nineteenth century, investing in land became even more attractive. After Khedive Isma‘il was forced to give up title on his lands in the midst of the financial crisis that eventually toppled him, land prices declined. This decline accelerated the pace of estate formation. Perhaps even more important was the manner in which these sales were conducted. Government officials were known to provide assistance to favored landowners by such methods as arranging “auctions” so that the land sold well below its market value or by accepting only a single bid on a parcel of land. Other officials also might “resurvey” the local holdings and redraw the property lines in ways more favorable to their powerful landowner-patrons.²⁶

In one such case dating from 1879, detailed in the weekly newspaper al-Kawkab al-Misri (an influential Cairo-based newspaper that appeared between 1879 and 1881 which echoed the reform positions of al-Tijara and al-‘Asr al-Jadid, and was owned and edited by two protégés of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, Musa Kastali and al-Sayyid Wafa Muhammad), an unnamed local landowner, himself probably a descendant of tax-farmers or multazims , lost his twenty faddans to an “appointee of the former Khedive [Isma‘il].”²⁷ This “Pasha,” whom the writer referred to as a well-known member of Egypt’s dhawat [aristocratic elite], used his influence to illegally acquire the parcel of “government [Miri] land” for sale that lay adjacent to his fields. Not content with his three hundred and fifty faddans, the Pasha compelled the local governor to declare that “according to the official land register” his holdings had been illegally trespassed upon and farmed by his neighbors. A conspiracy involving the governor, the governor’s local agents, headmen of the surrounding towns, and the regional superintendent resulted in the redrawing of the boundaries. In the end, the outraged correspondent was not only deprived of his land but was also imprisoned when he protested.²⁸ Even if the story is apocryphal, it reflects a measure of the anxiety felt by the proprietors of medium-sized holdings at a moment characterized by uncertainty brought on by crushing debt, increasing taxes, and an alliance between local officials and large landholders.

Levantine traders, who had begun to arrive in large numbers during Isma‘il’s reign primarily due to their language skills, and other foreigners who had adopted the “time-honored methods of local merchants and money-lenders in dealing with villagers” began to move into the countryside, first as agents for the merchant houses of Alexandria and then as moneylenders.²⁹ In many cases the newcomers adopted the same local trading practices, including various forms of money lending, in which their local competitors had engaged for many years. The appearance of the Syrians beginning in the 1860s caused no small amount of resentment on the part of Egyptian merchants and moneylenders. Opportunities for financial enrichment that brought Syrians in large numbers to Egypt in the 1860s had already begun to attract large numbers of Europeans beginning in the 1850s. The Greeks, numbering some thirty-five thousand by 1875, were the most numerous, followed by fourteen thousand Italians and seven thousand French nationals.³⁰ At first many of the foreigners invested in the speculative land market. Thus by the 1880s, a number of land reclamation companies and mortgage credit agencies began by preparing land for cultivation and then reselling it.³¹ Eventually European agents for these and other trading companies based primarily in Alexandria began to purchase land with the intention of farming it themselves, following the example of Egyptian merchants. These European companies specialized in such reclamation projects as clearing fields or draining swamps.³² According to Gabriel Baer, Europeans indeed started to acquire land in Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s when they recognized the investment potential of agriculture, and when they did so they concentrated their holdings in large estates.³³ By the late 1890s, Europeans owned about 12 percent of the total of cultivated land in Egypt and 23 percent of the large estates responsible for producing export-grade cotton.³⁴

These new investors differed from their Egyptian counterparts in one important respect: in contrast to most Egyptians, Europeans (and a large percentage of the Syrians) enjoyed consular protection through the Capitulations. Because the vast majority of those involved in commercial activity in Egypt enjoyed the immunity conferred by the Capitulations, a large percentage of Egyptian commerce was untaxed.

INSTRUMENTS OF THE STATE: TAX COLLECTION AND THE MIXED COURTS

The transformation of the land tenure regime was not the only factor driving the deepening interest in the countryside and the state of the peasantry. Concern about tax rates, new tax collection practices, and government and private debt animated public discussions at the time. For example, many of the landowners serving in the Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab [Assembly of Consultative Representatives] initially joined the rebellion of 1882 because of the anger they felt at the recent tax policies of the government—especially the repeal of the Muqabala law.35

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, rising financial pressures led successive Egyptian governments to raise taxes.³⁶ Egypt took out its first public loan in 1862 to pay for shares in the de Lesseps Company after Sa‘id’s ill-fated decision to award it a concession to build the Suez Canal.³⁷ In addition to not paying the salaries of state employees and borrowing money from European merchants, Sa‘id’s government raised taxes on kharaj land (the classification that covered much of the land held by small proprietors) from one-quarter to one-third of the total yield in 1856. Recent scholarship has shown that one should not automatically associate all kharajiya with small fallah landholders and all ‘ushriya (theoretically based on paying a tenth of the harvest in taxes, ‘ushr meaning “a tenth” in Arabic) with larger landowners. Some smallholders were able to accumulate large tracts of kharajiya land while inheritance and debt caused the fracturing of some large ‘ushriya holdings. The protagonist of the story cited above from al-Kawkab al-Misri, whose land was taken by the corrupt member of the dhawat, is a case in point. His ‘ushriya holdings amounted to only twenty faddans.³⁸ Many of those possessing large areas of kharajiya land worked with government officials to have their land declared ‘ushriya, thus significantly lowering their tax assessments. Between 1863 and 1877 the amount of kharajiya land remained roughly the same while the amount of ‘ushriya land doubled to nearly one-quarter of the entire cultivated area. Even allowing for land reclamation, this expansion indicates the success of some of these landholders in having their land reclassified as ‘ushriya. In 1864 Isma‘il increased the tax on kharajiya to one-half of the yield, and subsequently introduced a whole series of new taxes between 1867 and 1871.³⁹

At the same time, officials often resorted to simple extortion in order to collect higher payments than those delineated in the official tax rolls. The Majlis Shura al-Nuwwab almost certainly exacerbated this problem when it decreed in 1871 that the committees appraising land values and assessing taxes should include ‘umdas (village headmen) and such local officials as the ma’mur (head of a unit of provincial administration) and the na’ir al-zira‘a (local agricultural inspector). Previously it was not unheard of for ‘umdas and shaykhs al-balad to be charged with these tasks. Since the days of Mehmet ’Ali, the shaykhs al-balad had been at various times responsible for appraising land values, collecting taxes, reallocating land that became vacant in their villages, recruiting for the corvée and military, overseeing the distribution of water, and inspecting the fallahin’s fields. However, after the 1871 decree corrpution substantially increased.⁴⁰ Complaints followed about the arbitrariness of the new assessments and about the integrity of the local officials charged with determining and implementing them. Some in the press charged these committees with ineptitude while others accused them of corruption. Bribery was so ubiquitous that many simply referred to it as another form of taxation.

Tax collectors’ wages were derived from a percentage of the total tax they collected. In addition, in order to obtain and to keep their positions they were compelled to pay bribes to other local officials that came to as much as 25 percent of their income. As tax receipts fell off dramatically during the late 1870s and early 1880s, the tax collectors’ wages fell between 25 and 35 percent. Thus it is not surprising that at the same time accusations appeared of local officials levying their own “taxes” either to compensate for shortfalls in the salaries owed them or simply to supplement their wages. The frustration among Egyptian officials grew as more and more Europeans were hired to serve in the Egyptian administration after 1875. The foreigners were awarded large salaries even while Egyptian-born officials were placed on half pay or dismissed altogether, while more “fortunate” officials simply had their salaries “reduced arbitrarily.”⁴¹ There was suspicion among critics in the press that the central authorities condoned even if they did not encourage this practice. For example, al-Kawkab al-Misri declared that “the finance minister was delighted when some mudirin [provincial governors] levied their own [extra] taxes.”⁴² Complaints were rife about the conflict of interest among some of the tax collectors [sayarif], who remitted tax payments to the state from the same peasants to whom they were loaning the money to pay these taxes.⁴³ These officials profited not only by assessing the fallahin higher taxes than those prescribed by law, but also through their role as moneylenders on the loans taken by peasants struggling to meet their tax burdens. An anonymous writer in the daily Misr examining the condition of the fallah in 1879 found it suspicious that tax collectors, although they were “paid ten Egyptian pounds a month and have large families ... nevertheless, before long own a large house ... and a hundred faddans.”⁴⁴ One observer summed up conditions in the countryside, bemoaning that “the [peasants] lose three-quarters of their crops to ... the khedive [in tax payments], the village headman, the local inspectors, the tax collector and others” in extralegal payments and bribes.⁴⁵

Bribery and corruption were not limited to tax collectors and soon became endemic in most government operations, especially in the countryside. According to contemporary accounts, the performance of even the simplest government services required some kind of extralegal payment or bribe. For example, the newspaper al-Tijara criticized the Health Commission [majlis al-siha] doctors for refusing to register births and deaths until satisfied with the “plunder” they received.⁴⁶ The paper declared sarcastically that “the dead are not dead and the murdered are not murdered” until the contracts of “death incorporated” were completed. In other words, the Health Commission would not issue birth or death certificates until petitioners paid a bribe.

In the 1870s the accumulation of peasant debt took on new significance against the backdrop of the transformation of the Egyptian legal system. In 1875, after nearly ten years of complex and difficult negotiation, the capitulatory powers, with the help of Nubar Nubarian, one of Isma‘il’s closest aides, succeeded in overhauling much of the Egyptian legal apparatus with the ratification of the Mixed Court agreement.⁴⁷ In 1876 the Mixed Courts replaced the Consular Courts in commercial litigation by adjudicating disputes between foreigners of different nationalities as well as lawsuits between Egyptians and foreigners. Isma‘il supported the court reforms because he hoped that by establishing a single legal framework in which commercial interests would operate, he would attract European investment to his large development schemes, such as the Suez Canal. The Mixed Courts helped to limit the chaos that had marked commercial litigation between and among the many competing foreign and Egyptian business interests. Before the inauguration of the Mixed Courts, the Capitulations regime had granted foreign nationals the right to have their cases heard by their own consular courts. The question of jurisdiction was thus a perpetually thorny one, with “suits brought in as many different forums as there were defendants.”⁴⁸ Even worse, appeals of consular court rulings were heard in the home country of the nationals involved rather than in Egypt. Thus appeals of the French consular court’s decisions were heard in Aix-en-Provence, Italian appeals were heard in Ancona, and Greek appeals in Athens.⁴⁹ In the end, Isma‘il and Nubar achieved their aim, as the Mixed Courts simplified questions of jurisdiction and thus facilitated the penetration of foreign capital into the countryside. The first foreign land investment company, Kawm al-Akhdar, was incorporated less than a year after ratification of the agreement.⁵⁰

Establishment of the Mixed Court system was a watershed because it helped to further the expansion of European-style juridical institutions in Egypt. This trend was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that this new legal institution helped make a secular concept of moral autonomy more commonplace in Egyptian society. Nevertheless, we should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of the Mixed Courts on the Egyptian land tenure regime. As a practical matter, the new courts and their legal codes based on French property law did not grant new kinds of authority to the government.⁵¹ Courts in Egypt had foreclosed on property or ordered the seizure and forced sale of land and livestock for debt prior to 1876.⁵² Indeed, thirty years before the signing of the Mixed Court treaty, Sa‘id’s 1847 Land Law stipulated that borrowers could permanently forfeit mortgaged land after a period of fifteen years unless the outstanding debt was satisfied. The 1858 Land Law then shortened the period to five years for a debtor to repay a loan and reclaim his or her land. Therefore, if the Mixed Courts are viewed within the context of nineteenth-century Egyptian history, they are most accurately described as a step in the process of legal transformation that began in the 1840s. Three decades before the launch of the Mixed Courts, debtors faced the possibility of losing their land to creditors. If many Egyptians, especially peasant cultivators, initially found the courts’ formal procedures and use of French somewhat bewildering, they had decades of experience to draw upon to understand the implications of a judgment against them in a case of mortgage debt.⁵³

The economic and legal developments of the 1870s, combined with the legacy of the land laws of the 1840s and 1850s, resulted in the reconfiguration of the socioeconomic geography of Egypt in the wake of the cotton boom of the early 1860s. In the postboom crash during the mid- and late 1860s, the same factors that had traditionally driven peasants to abandon their land, such as rising taxes, decreasing commodity prices, and the burden of the corvée, once again induced many to take flight. In contrast to earlier periods of peasant flight, however, when peasants returned to their lands in the 1870s they came face to face with a new reality: Egyptian land tenure law had been transformed since the previous periods of large-scale peasant flight. Barakat points out the irony in the fact that that the land laws had been putatively drawn up to guarantee the security of private landholding rights but in practice caused the peasants “to lose most of their lands.”⁵⁴ The peasants’ unfortunate encounter with the new reality resulted in large numbers of them becoming permanently landless. ⁵⁵ The Mixed Courts heard many cases involving peasant debt since many of the mortgage holders were foreigners. In accordance with French property law, the time between a declaration of bankruptcy and foreclosure was shortened to a matter of months, thereby accelerating the pace at which a creditor could gain control of mortgaged lands.

THE PEASANT IN THE EARLY ’AFANDI IMAGINATION

An examination of Egyptian cultural production in the late nineteenth century reveals the links between the expanding state, rural and urban social transformations, and Egypt’s position as a commodity producer. We can trace the origins of the intellectual and professional classes that became so pivotal in Egyptian history to this period. To a great extent these classes were an outgrowth of the modernizing state’s growing legal and bureaucratic apparatus, which created the need for literate functionaries. Intellectuals and professionals were part of an urban, literate middle stratum that lay somewhere between the mass of rural (and increasingly urban) poor and the dhawat or aristocratic, often Ottoman, elite.

Due in part to its professional or technical training and education, this professional and technocratic cadre coalesced into a more or less coherent social cluster that became known as the ’afandiya. This stratum developed a distinctive self-consciousness through such new forms of sociability and technology as the literary salon, the learned and welfare societies, and the burgeoning press and capitalist print media. Through the ’afandiya’s circulation in new public social spaces, its members came to conceive of themselves as playing a major role in the shaping of Egypt as a bounded moral-political entity. Moreover, public deliberations about the future of Egypt and the state of its agriculture helped to cement a link in their minds between the potential viability of the moral-political project that was Egypt and the success of peasants in producing crops, especially cotton, for export.56

The press was the site of much of this discussion. In 1881 ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s weekly al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, based in Alexandria, became well known for its literary representations of peasant life and its interest in social and economic conditions in the countryside.⁵⁷ Al-Nadim was a polemicist and perhaps the best-known writer and publisher of his time. He was born in Alexandria under rather humble circumstances. His father operated a small bakery and had previously been employed in Mehmet ’Ali’s shipworks, which were closed after the Egyptian defeat in Syria in 1840. Al-Nadim eventually fell out with his family, who objected to his literary pursuits. He traveled widely throughout Egypt, working in Cairo, al-Mansura, and various places in the Nile Delta region. He spent nearly a decade hiding from the British after the failure of the 1882 revolt. Eventually he was captured, tried, and convicted, but his death sentence was commuted by Khedive Abbas II to a period of exile in Palestine. Al-Nadim returned to Egypt briefly from 1892 through 1894, but the British exiled him again to Istanbul, where he died in 1896. His two newspaper ventures, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit [1881] and al-Ustadh [1892–93], were among the most popular and influential of the period.

Likewise, one finds prominent peasant characters in the work of a contemporary of al-Nadim, Yaqub Sannu‘. (Following other authors in English I have transliterated his name as “Sannu‘” throughout these pages. There are, however, references to his work in many databases under the spelling “Sanua,” usually with the first name James.) Despite the fact that both al-Nadim and Sannu‘ were children of the city—Sannu‘ was born in Cairo and al-Nadim in Alexandria—they shared an interest in the countryside and its inhabitants. They were from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Sannu‘ came from a prominent Jewish family originally from the Italian city of Livorno. He was educated in Europe and his father was an advisor to the royal court. After Sannu‘ completed his education, he returned to Egypt and became a major figure in the Egyptian theatre as a producer and playwright. Later he turned to journalism and political humor as artistic outlets; he established his influential satirical journal Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa [The Man with Blue Glasses] in 1877. Sannu‘ became a vociferous critic of the ruling dynasty and of the British and was exiled permanently in 1879.

Al-Nadim and Sannu‘ were major figures in the early Egyptian press. Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’ was for many years one of the most popular publications in Egypt even after Sannu‘ had to publish it from exile in Paris and its importation into Egypt was prohibited. Similarly, although al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit published only nineteen issues between July 6 and October 23, 1881, the periodical was extremely influential in the development of the modern Arabic-language press. Al-Nadim’s, and to a lesser extent Sannu‘’s, many linguistic and stylistic innovations are still regarded as groundbreaking by linguists and historians. For example, al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit and Abu Nazzara were the first modern publications to report direct speech in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Both al-Nadim and Sannu‘ excelled in reproducing not only regional variations in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but also enjoyed mimicking the accents of nonnative speakers of Arabic. Al-Nadim’s biting sarcasm was rivaled only by the bawdy and profane language of Sannu‘’s Abu Nazzara, among critical journals at the time. Nevertheless, these were not the only Arabic-language periodicals that reported on contemporary rural life in Egypt.

Indeed, one finds articles in such papers as al-Tijara, al-‘Asr al-Jadid, Misr, al-Kawkab al-Misri, al-Waqt, al-Watan and al-Mufid with such titles as “The Egyptian Fallah,” “Judges and the Fallah in Egypt,” or “The Condition of the Fallah.” These items detailing the economic and social conditions in the countryside, the general state of the peasantry, and problems with Egyptian agriculture began to appear in the nascent Egyptian commercial press in the 1870s. Journalists wrote about the land tenure structure and the court system, they reported about rural crime and decried the “inadequacy” of the peasants’ agricultural implements, or they called for a lending institution to assist small peasant cultivators. The press was rife with criticisms of local officials; it chronicled the financial arrangements obtaining between peasants and moneylenders and offered advice on such administrative matters as tax collection and irrigation management. Journalists also put forward preferences for particular agricultural methods and husbandry techniques.⁵⁸ Observations about the situation of the peasants were often found next to stock and commodity market news from Egypt as well as from Liverpool, Paris, and London—to which the Arabic-language press of Cairo and Alexandria devoted considerable space.⁵⁹

Newspaper coverage of Egyptian agriculture reflected the growing interest in export crops and foreign markets. Routine summaries and technical discussions of agricultural developments, harvest forecasts, and reports about pests, especially the cotton weevil, were commonplace items. In 1880, the Egyptian Agricultural Association (later the Royal Agricultural Association), headed by Haydar Basha, began to publish a monthly Arabic-French language journal, Nashrat al-Jama‘iya al-Zira’a al-Misriya, which was devoted exclusively to “expanding and improving agriculture” by fostering communication among “persons working in agriculture.”⁶⁰

In addition to al-Nadim and Sannu‘, a small but increasingly influential group of public commentators began to focus on the condition of the peasant cultivators. There was a range of such figures with a variety of political positions that were to a certain extent reflected in the ways they chose to write about the countryside. While this inchoate grouping shared common cultural values and social habits, it held no determinate political position with regard to the British occupation—as we can see from a few examples of individuals who began to write about peasants and to concern themselves with agriculture and related issues. For example, Hamza Fathallah (1849–1918), the Muslim scholar, littérateur, poet, and newspaper publisher, generally steered clear of the political controversies swirling around him at the time. Fathallah began his writing career in the 1 8 70s with articles for al-Rawdat al-Madaris, the journal started and edited by Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), the Egyptian educator and translator. Fathallah was noted for his pro-Ottoman views and his connections to the khedival court. He spent the last three decades of his life working in the Education Ministry under the British as an inspector of Arabic education. On the other side there was Mustafa Thaqib, the firebrand publisher of two newspapers in Cairo before the ‘Urabi rebellion. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim described Thaqib’s al-Mufid as unparalleled in its capacity to “breathe the spirit of anarchy into the Arab umma.” Not surprisingly Thaqib soon ran afoul of the Khedive Tawfiq, who closed down al-Mufid in 1882. Immediately afterward, Thaqib began publishing a successor journal with Hasan Shamsi, al-Najah, which was also closed down.⁶¹ Two other representative characters of this pro-‘Urabist orientation were the publisher of the short-lived weekly al-Fustat, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Madani, and his assistant and editor, Muhammad ‘Abdallah. During the course of the rebellion in the summer of 1882, al-Fustat devoted nearly the entire paper to the fighting between the ‘Urabist forces and the British. In fact, according to the decidedly anti-‘Urabist early twentieth century chronicler of the Arabic press Filib Di Tirazi, al-Fustat was the paper in which the ‘Urabists communicated their “despicable aims [ma‘rab al-safila].”

Such other writers as Hasan Husni al-Turani (1850–1897) were noted for their pro-British or pro-Ottoman sympathies. Al-Turani had been brought to Egypt from Istanbul by the British with the express purpose of publishing “al-Nil ... in order to support the occupation and to defend its policies.”⁶² Born in Cairo in 1850, the pro-Ottoman al-Turani was a prolific writer of prose and poetry in both Arabic and Turkish and authored a number of books on religious themes. He established a string of newspapers beginning in Istanbul in 1880. At the same time his writing appeared in a number of Egyptian newspapers and journals associated with pro-Ottoman editorial positions such as al-Burhan. On al-Turani’s arrival in Egypt in 1882, he promptly became the editor of the newspaper al-Zaman. Al-Zaman had a colorful history. It was established as a twiceweekly publication in Cairo by the Syrian Armenian Alkasan Sarafiyan in 1882. During the run-up to the rebellion of 1882 al-Zaman ran afoul of the ‘Urabist cabinet and was suspended. It reappeared after the defeat of ‘Urabi and was the first Arabic-language newspaper to support the British. By this time its editor was another Syrian, Mikha’il ‘Awra. Eventually Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) took over the editorship. The paper was closed soon afterward by the khedival government on a request from Mukhtar al-Ghazi for insulting the Ottoman government.⁶³ Al-Turani established a number of newspapers including al-Nil, al-Shams and al-Majalla al-Zira‘iya.

Many who belonged to this literate cadre of journalists and editors, as well as their readers and letter writers, retained direct and indirect connections to middle-stratum landowners. They were often the children or descendants of village headmen or shaykhs, such as ’Ali Mubarak, who rose from his rural beginnings to become one of the most important intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Egypt. Mubarak held a number of government posts, including Minister of Public Works and Minister of Education. The village elite of shaykhs and ‘umdas also produced the likes of Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905), the jurist, Islamic reformer, and Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani’s collaborator. Briefly in exile after the failure of the 1882 revolt, he eventually made peace and cooperated with the British occupation after his return to Egypt. ‘Abduh became an extremely influential figure, not only in the history of Islamic reform thought but also in the development of modern educational and judicial reform in Egypt. He ended his life as the Mufti of Egypt, the highest position that a Muslim jurist could hold.

Still another figure was Saad Zaghlul (1859–1927), who came from a family holding the position of ‘umda in Gharbiya province in the Delta. Zaghlul edited the official Egyptian government journal, al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriya, in 1881 and then became a prominent lawyer. He served as Education Minister and Justice Minster and then was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1913. Zaghlul eventually became the preeminent nationalist leader and a fierce opponent of British occupation. He was arrested by the British as he tried to travel to the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I to submit Egypt’s demands for independence. His arrest and three-year exile precipitated the 1919 Revolution. In the end the British were not only forced to bring Zaghlul back but also to ask him to form a government when his Wafd Party won a large majority in the 1923 elections.

Dislocations in the relations of production in the countryside brought about by the economic changes of the last half of the nineteenth century and new legal arrangements surely affected the ’afandi. Thus it is not surprising that bankruptcy and foreclosure caused palpable disquiet among the ’afandi journalists, many of whom came from landowning families.⁶⁴ Two articles from the January 1882 edition of Thaqib’s al-Mufid, ostensibly addressing problems that the fallahin encountered when seeking credit, reveal a slippage between the journalist’s view of the fallah and the troubled position of his own group. In the first article, the author characterizes “saving the miserable fallah” as a moral “duty” for “pious and good-hearted” locals [watanin]. “How could this not be a duty? ... the fallah is [the locals’] servant”; thus they must be “sympathetic” and “humane to him.” But saving the fallah is not purely a matter of pious good works. The rich must “ameliorate the circumstances of the fallah” in order to “purify the homeland [al-watan] from outsiders” who are a “noose” closing around “our life” as they seek to “own the land.”⁶⁵ Three days later, in a subsequent issue, the same author reiterates the imperative of “saving” the fallah, and again situates this mission within a larger political project. He warns that failure to save the fallah will result in “foreigners” owning “the peasant’s land,” but even more distressing, if left unchecked, the “outsiders will take control of the ’afandi’s home.”⁶⁶

Historians have generally taken these kinds of accounts at face value. More recent scholarship, however, has cast some doubt on the depictions of progressively worsening conditions for Egypt’s rural poor .⁶⁷ Thus, while these texts might not provide objective information on the state of the countryside at the time, we can read them for insights into the ways in which the literate classes began to think about notions of political subjectivity and an Egyptian (as opposed to a Muslim or Eastern) future. This rereading is a vital step in coming to grips with the way in which these notions then became translated into social and political reform projects during the twentieth century.

Beginning in the late 1870s the Egyptian press reported on the “state of the peasantry” by reference to the question of peasant “indebtedness.”⁶⁸ Over the course of the subsequent thirty years, concern with peasant debt was one of the primary sites in which representations of peasants and urban intellectuals alike were forged. Some critics cited the reign of Mehmet ’Ali as initiating an unending period of peasant anguish and the genesis of the debt problem of the later decades of the nineteenth century. For example, al-Urwa al-Wuthqa, the journal that the activists most often associated with the beginning of Islamic reformism, Muhammad ‘Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani, published in Paris after their exile from Egypt in 1884, assailed Mehmet ’Ali’s rule for the hardships it brought on peasants. The activists excoriated Mehmet ’Ali for “kidnapping” children for his schools and the soldiers for his army; for forcing peasants to flee their land for fear of military conscription; and for causing the spread of disease and death in the countryside.⁶⁹ By the 1890s, journalists and polemicists alike identified Mehmet ’Ali’s tax policies and monopoly system as the primary cause of the “time of insihab” or peasant abandonment of land.⁷⁰ Not just due to the clamor created by such antikhedive activists as al-Nadim and Sannu‘, such progovernment journalists as Musa Kastali and al-Sayyid Wafa Muhammad sought to draw attention to what they saw as an unprecedented increase in peasant indebtedness and its dangerous implications for all Egyptians. Kastali came from a well-known Cairene Jewish intellectual family. His family had established the al-Talyaniya publishing house in the 1840s, which was noted for publishing a wide variety of books ranging from Muslim religious treatises to works of popular literature. Kastali’s al-Kawkab al-Misri newspaper, although it was contemporaneous with al-Nadim’s Tankit, was no rival because it rendered “absolute and unceasing support to the Khedive and to members of his government.”⁷¹ Wafa Muhammad was both an Azharite scholar and the superintendent of the khedival library. Because of Muhammad’s links to the khedive, it is not surprising that his al-Kawkab al-Misri was progovernment in the period preceding the ‘Urabi rebellion.

There was a general consensus among the intellectuals that the cause of the problem lay with the ubiquitous and rapacious moneylenders and tax collectors taking advantage of hapless naive peasants.⁷² Al-Nadim decried the “inhuman conditions” under which peasants were forced to borrow money.⁷³ Tax agents were accused of arriving on purpose before harvest time so that the cash-poor peasants were thrown into the arms of moneylenders who charged exorbitant rates of interest.⁷⁴

Accounts of the small landholders’ problems in obtaining credit figured prominently in the press at the time. Nevertheless, historical evidence suggests that peasants had engaged moneylenders for centuries and had interacted on a fairly consistent basis with merchants, tax collectors, multazims, and so on. Far from being ignorant of the ways of a monetized economy and such accompanying commercial and financial practices as money lending, the peasants of the Delta had been involved in cash-market agriculture stretching far back in time. Money lending was an ancient practice, well known in the countryside. Indeed, there is evidence that money lending dates back to the Ptolemaic period. Some money-lending practices prevalent at the time, such as the advance sale of unharvested (and sometimes even unplanted) crops, dated at least to the time of the Fatimids.⁷⁵ In addition, the ancient Greeks introduced the practice of paying taxes in coin, and since both of these practices make sense only in a commercial environment, we can conclude that market farming was an ancient practice in Egypt.⁷⁶ But the view of the isolated, simple, and gullible peasant susceptible to moneylenders’ deceptions and unprepared for the perils of the “new” market economy endures in both Arabic and English-language histories of Egypt.⁷⁷

Discussion of fallah debt almost invariably invoked the figure of the wily Levantine or Greek moneylenders who were clearly distinguished from locals [wataniyun]. Historians writing in Arabic and English have often used the terms of the contemporary press to describe the moneylenders, classifying them according to their putative ethnicity, national origin, or religion.⁷⁸ Certainly, enough evidence exists to be confident that contemporary narrators were not simply embellishing their accounts as they recounted peasants selling everything from their livestock to their wives’ jewelry, and eventually their land, in futile attempts to pay off their accumulating debt. Debt and bankruptcy did ruin large numbers of peasants, and moneylenders unquestionably contributed to peasant indebtedness. Without doubt some moneylenders were Levantine Arabs, Europeans, or persons with European sponsorship, but it is equally true that many ‘umdas, shaykhs and ordinary Egyptian merchants engaged in money lending of one sort or another.⁷⁹

Nevertheless, almost all accounts describe these moneylenders as crafty foreign characters who used guile to “trick” the fallah into borrowing money. The many references to the dishonesty of moneylenders had the effect of conjuring up the fallah as hapless ignoramuses swindled by the fast-talking, gift-giving foreigners based in the cities. Indeed, newspaper accounts often put more emphasis on moneylenders as a cause of fallah debt than on high taxes, falling commodity prices, and the venality of officials and village headmen. For example, the Syrian Armenian Alkasan Sarafiyan, a fierce opponent of the increasing European role in the Egyptian judiciary and administration, described the “simple” fallahin who lived such “isolated” lives in the countryside and were easily “duped [inkhida‘]” by crafty foreign merchants and moneylenders in his newspaper al-Zaman in 1884.⁸⁰ Sarafiyan pinned the blame for fallah indebtedness on peasant naiveté, arguing that the peasants were apprehensive of financial arrangements associated with banks and preferred to deal with the local moneylenders. According to other accounts, however, even if the peasants were able to overcome their fears, these financial institutions found little profit in lending the relatively trivial sums the peasants sought, and would routinely either mistreat the occasional fallah who did venture through their doors or force him into other kinds of exploitative arrangements. For example, according to al-Mufid the peasants could “only borrow money from a bank through an agent,” perhaps only a casual bank customer who would borrow a large sum of money and in turn relend the money in smaller amounts at higher rates of interest to a number of peasants. These agents charged usurious rates of interest and used other “corrupt” means to “swallow up everything” the peasants owned.⁸¹ These sorts of pressures forced small landholders into the arms of the moneylenders. The press carried complaints against the government for ignoring peasant grievances about moneylenders and despotic local officials, and rebuked government officials for taking no heed of the ill consequences of policies drawn up in offices in Cairo or provincial capitals.⁸²

From the late 1870s reformers of all stripes proclaimed it a primary goal to ameliorate the conditions of the peasant. During this period the image of the insular, obtuse, and ignorant creature victimized by the deceptions of the moneylenders, the arbitrary tyranny of government officials, and the petty humiliations of the shaykhs al-balad dominated all accounts of peasant life. Thus one would come across various accounts that would argue that the “peasants’ needs are simple,” and because these folk are patient, they surrender “three-quarters of their crop to ... the khedive ... the shaykh al-qariya, the mufatish, sarraf, and others who take whatever they want,”⁸³ and uncomprehendingly accept their fate. Al-Nadim, in a passage perhaps a bit more evocative than most, but expressing this general attitude, described the peasant in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit:

“The most trustworthy person in this land [balad] is the fallah. He has few clothes, but has many words. His appearance is shabby, but you see that he is generous although his lot is grim. He is shoeless and given to delusions about the world. His legs are bare and saliva drips out of his mouth. He wears rags. His status is low and his body is dirty.”⁸⁴

CIVILIZING, REFORM, AND SUBJECTIVITY

Novel forms of sociability along with the technologies of the capitalist print media distilled an unprecedented type of public-ness and produced a new kind of performative subjectivity. Engaging in public deliberation about the introduction of the Mixed Courts, the 1877 Russo-Ottoman War, and the atmosphere of general political restiveness was an important marker for the urban ’afandi intellectual.85 Social clubs, Masonic lodges, salons, and learned and welfare associations were other important sites of discussion and the performance of early ’afandi subjectivity, in which one demonstrated that one was civilized [mutamaddun]. The civilized [mutamaddun ] ’afandi, through public discussion of prosaic political and social questions, articulated a moral and social vision of the nature of society and the desirable architecture of the polity. In addition to discharging these “duties,” the civilized ’afandi possessed a deep appreciation of Arabic letters and embodied thoughtful, almost sober religiosity.

Traditional accounts of the new forms of public-ness quite rightly emphasize the novelty of free exchange and the radical potential of multiple vertical social interactions. Social class did not impede one’s admission to Masonic lodges or participation in literary salons. Accordingly, the humble beginnings of such figures as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim in the 1870s or ’Ali Yusuf in the 1890s did not bar them from interacting with the most powerful political figures in Egypt and becoming important intellectual presences in their own right. Scholars have also described the importance of the new sites of sociability and the discourse that circulated within them as conduits of new political ideas. Nevertheless, despite its insight and thoroughness, the historiography on the emergence of public-ness in Egypt has not yet exhausted the subject. For in addition to facilitating the spread of ideas, the new forms of exchange were also sites for producing and inculcating new knowledge about modern Egypt. In a sense the press, salons, and social clubs “civilized” the ’afandiya into identifying interests in line with a new sort of social and political vision and “refined” them in the direction of developing desires appropriate for a new way of literate, urban middle-class life. In this sense, these new spaces and modalities of exchange were inextricably linked to the production of new kinds of subjects and provided venues for the performance of these new subjectivities. Likewise, this new terrain of public-ness, performance, and discussion enabled or disabled certain forms of life and modes of collective identity.⁸⁶ For example, the emergent new order impelled solidarities of religion and clan to acquire forms of individuality built around particular notions of self-interest, desire, and the idea of a nation. This move toward individualism made possible the articulation of a new politics of personal rights, freedom, and equality. This trend was a necessary step in the process that enabled Egyptians to learn to formulate interests and to express desires that cohered in the new regime of private landownership and the legal structure that supported it that was taking shape at the time.⁸⁷ It is against this backdrop that we can fully appreciate the importance of al-Nadim’s 1881 declaration that “just laws [al-qawanin al-‘adila]” through which “we know our rights” are the essence of “justice [‘adl]” because they protect “money, property, and land.”⁸⁸ Reconstructing Islamic sensibilities and recasting the Muslim past were integral elements in the overall transformative project that historians have come to call Islamic reform or Islamic modernism. The ramifications of this project reach beyond a narrow discussion of Islamic jurisprudence or ritual, for the ethos of Islamic reform left a very distinct impression on the emergent social formation of the ’afandiya.

The burgeoning self-consciousness of this heterogeneous assemblage of literate intellectuals crystallized around what they saw as their appointed role as agents of change. They came to see it as their duty to put in place the conditions to create a new society based on a vision of enlightened civilization. They were convinced that an epoch unique in history was unfolding in Egypt and that moral reform, technology, and knowledge [ma‘arif] were the instruments to deliver the umma from the “night of inferiority and ignorance [layl al-naqs wa al-jahl]” and the “lowness of backwardness [hadid al-ta’akhar]” and to inaugurate an era of “civilization [tamaddun].”⁸⁹ In contemporary Arabic, the word “progress” in the modern teleological sense is usually translated as taqaddum and “civilization” is rendered as hadara. Fahmy Jaddane, in Usus al-Taqaddum ‘ind mufakkari al-islam fi al-‘alam al-‘arabi al-hadith, his seminal work on modern Arab-Muslim thought, argues that these two terms did not acquire these meanings until the interwar period. Instead, the term tamaddun was used to communicate the idea of “civilization.” Similarly, the original translation from the French “progrès” was taraqqa rather than taqaddum.⁹⁰ A fairly typical expression of this idea in al-Kawkab al-Misri lauded the “armies of justice and knowledge [‘ilm]” marching against the “the evils of ignorance [‘ashrar al-jahl]” and likened their pens to “arrows of virtue [siham al-‘iffa]” in the battle for justice.⁹¹ The piece concludes by exalting “thank God Egypt has overcome the depths of those horrors” through “building virtue [al-istiqama].”⁹²

The civilizing process was both a material and moral project for the literate activist who spoke of his duty to reform Egypt. While the task certainly involved developing practical skills, accumulating theoretical knowledge and know-how, and “revitalizing useful arts” [al-funun almufida ],” renewal could be achieved by only men with a particular kind of (gendered) disposition. Developing and nurturing such a disposition depended upon “true education,” through which students would “cultivate their morals [tahdhib akhlaquhim],” build their self-respect, and foster a “love of the homeland [al-mahabba al-wataniya].”⁹³

These common expressions of the reform ethos of the time clearly reflect the influence of Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani (1838–1897). Al-‘Afghani was and is a controversial figure. Iranian-born, he was known as an Islamic reformer, political activist, and polemicist. He traveled widely throughout the Muslim world and Europe and was involved in a number of political intrigues throughout his travels. At various times he was accused of being a British, Russian, Iranian, or French agent. Eventually, the Ottoman sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid placed al-‘Afghani in close surveillance in Istanbul in what became known as his “Golden Cage,” where he spent the last years of his life.⁹⁴ Al-‘Afghani stressed that all “true” knowledge was oriented towards the same end—living a pious and virtuous Muslim life. He highlighted the importance of inculcating a true Islamic vision in the ordinary Muslim as a part of the same education that provided practical skills and imparted theoretical and scientific knowledge. Indeed, only this sort of complete preparation ensured the moral competency that would equip Muslims to study Western technical and scientific knowledge without “blindly imitating” European social mores and customs. The same rational capacity that would enable Muslims to judiciously absorb and comprehend modern scientific knowledge while preserving their own way of life would provide them with the conceptual tools to recognize and abandon heretical accretions that had corrupted the practice of Islam. These characteristics added up to strength and power; without them Muslim society would be relegated to submission and degradation.⁹⁵ Echoing al‘Afghani, al-Kawkab al-Misri argued that the absence of men with these “honorable, sacred characteristics [al-sajaya al-sharifa al-muqaddasa]” would render society subservient, for no umma could achieve “absolute independence” if it lacked men of this character.⁹⁶ Such was the case prevailing in the contrast between the “civilized and uncivilized countries [duwwal al-mutamaddina wa ghayr al-mutamaddina]” as the “uncivilized” countries, lacking these essential characteristics, were dominated by their “civilized” counterparts.⁹⁷

Public discussions of the time often combined the qualities of strength, independence, and civilization into an idealized ’afandi disposition. These discussions almost always articulated this arrangement in gendered terms. Indeed, in looking back it is hard to conceive of the emergent ethos of reform and renewal apart from the honorable, virtuous, civilized masculine subject that dominated so much of the discussion. Either in his position in government administration or as a writer or agitator, the refined and active ’afandi acted publicly to achieve independence for the umma. This gendered discourse was fundamental to the formation of a new kind of heroic masculine subject—the literate ’afandi who, if properly civilized, could attain the status that ‘Abdallah al-Nadim called nabih—discerning or high-minded, sensible, and perspicacious. The civilized ’afandi acquired “useful” forms of knowledge that guided him to identify beneficial interests and enabled him to have the correct desires and make appropriate choices. An untitled article appearing in al-Kawkab al-Misri on August 1, 1879, tied the “maturity of the umma ... we all seek” to the dissemination of useful knowledge through “versatile men” possessing the technocratic know-how to organize economic and agricultural production and to manage government administration.⁹⁸

Exemplars of these new kinds of “versatile men” took it upon themselves to impart such “useful knowledge” in order to assist others in developing the correct disposition. They wrote and published didactic works to introduce some of these subjects in cheap, readable formats to ready the public for the new era. For example, the newspapers Misr [Egypt] and al-‘Asr al-Jadid [The New Era] serialized Khalil Ghanim’s textbook-like introduction to economics, al-Iqtisad al-Siyasi: fann tadbir al-manzil [Political Economy: The Art of Domestic Organization].Ghanim was a Maronite Christian born in Lebanon who was forced to flee to Europe due to his association with the Ottoman constitutionalists and the Young Turks. There he began to publish newspapers critical of the Ottoman government. In his work Ghanim denounced foreigners’ “protection” of the Ottoman Empire’s Christian populations. In his book on political economy he intended to inform the reader about “this exalted and beneficial science” which is one of the “modern arts” in providing for “happiness to all members of the umma.”⁹⁹ To Ghanim, happiness was found in a life of industriousness and capitalist production.

Amin Shumayyil, a contributor to Misr and ‘Abdallah Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, wrote a book priced to be easily available to the widest readership possible, titled Nizam al-Shura [The System of Consultative Rule].¹⁰⁰ Shumayyil’s book was also serialized in al-Tijara to educate the public about the workings of representative government.¹⁰¹ By way of comparing book prices, Shumayyil’s book sold for one-half a French franc while Maryam Nahhas’s al-hasna’ fi tarajim mashahir al-nisa’ , according to an advertisement in al-Kawkab al-Misri on June 5, 1879, sold for thirty francs. These prices were advertised at a time when per capita income has been estimated to have been a little over five Egyptian pounds per year. Thinking about Egypt’s future was shaped by the desire of the masculine ’afandi subject for perpetual societal improvement. An article in al-Mufid put it this way: “To achieve civilization [tamaddun ] . . . every individual in society” must “develop a virtuous character [malaka] . . . refined through knowledge.” These “civilized” men were oriented towards promoting the “public interest.” ¹⁰² In this formulation public-ness itself came to be gendered insofar as only those exhibiting the necessary (and masculine) attributes of a strong will and independence were authorized to make public utterances and to circulate in public.

AL-‘AFGHANI, ‘ABDUH, ISLAMIC REFORM, AND HISTORY-MAKING

In the late 1870s and early 1880s Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani and Muhammad ‘Abduh were dominant figures among the rapidly crystallizing social formation of reformers and social critics. Through their work and deeds they supported and inspired many of those engaged in the production and consumption of new media and involved in public discussion. Al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh were instrumental in instilling in a generation of intellectuals a sense of optimism and purpose born out of a commitment to improve, reform, and “civilize” Egypt and the Muslim East. For these two writers the press represented an important tool for disseminating useful forms of knowledge, inducing the correct desires, and identifying the interests that would clear the way for constituting a civilized Muslim population. Al‘Afghani was one of the first activist-reformers to see the potential of the press as a tool of agitation and social mobilization, and he is said to have been the first to use the phrase “public opinion” in Arabic.103 He is also said to have provided the startup capital for such reform-oriented newspapers as al-Tijara, al-‘Asr al-Jadid and Misr; and he encouraged both al-Nadim and Sannu‘ in their own journalistic efforts.¹⁰⁴

While it is difficult to exaggerate al-‘Afghani’s and ‘Abduh’s contribution to the Islamic reform movement and its subsequent history, they were also important political figures. In addition to their interventions in questions of Islamic law and their reading of Muslim history, an important part of their legacy was the political role of reformers in later Egyptian history. ‘Abduh and al-‘Afghani were well known to the local ruling elite and to European leaders; they interacted with both groups on a regular basis. One such figure that ‘Abduh counted among his friends and allies was Wilfrid Blunt (1840–1922). Blunt was a wealthy British landowner who sympathized with and became an advocate for the ‘Urabist rebels in Britain.¹⁰⁵ Blunt’s solidarity with the rebels and his friendships with ‘Abduh and Ahmad ‘Urabi himself led him to become a severe critic of the British occupation.

Al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh were also acquainted with such British antagonists as Evelyn Baring (1841–1917) the future first Earl of Cromer and the British agent and consul general (thus de facto ruler of Egypt) from 1883 to 1907. Both al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh had celebrated battles with European intellectuals who attacked the place of Islam in Muslim society.¹⁰⁶

It is therefore not surprising that those making up the coterie surrounding al-’Afghani and ‘Abduh (‘Abduh alone after the 1879 deportation of al-‘Afghani) became important figures in their own right beginning in the 1870s. These intellectuals are loosely referred as reformers in these pages. Some of them, such as Salim Naqqash and Adib Ishaq, are still well known in the early 2000s, while such others as Ahmad Samir have fallen into relative obscurity. Naqqash, a Syrian Christian, was from a family well known in intellectual and theatrical circles in Syria. Upon Naqqash’s arrival in Egypt, he soon became a prominent figure in Alexandria’s active theatre scene, and along with Ahmad Samir, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, and his eventual collaborator Adib Ishaq, a well-known journalist and agitator. With Ishaq, Naqqash translated a number of plays from French into Arabic. The two of them later published several influential newspapers, such as Misr, al-Tijara, and al-‘Asr al-Jadid. Jamal al-Din al-‘Afghani provided some funding for Misr, although it was owned and edited by Naqqash and Ishaq. Naqqash was also noted at the time for writing the first definitive work on the ‘Urabi uprising of 1882—Misr lil-Misriyin [Egypt for the Egyptians], a slogan he boasted of coining. His partner, Ishaq, also a Syrian Christian, was born in Damascus and emigrated to Egypt in 1876. Besides his work with Naqqash in theatre and journalism, Ishaq briefly joined the side of the ‘Urabists in 1882.¹⁰⁷

The Egyptian Ahmad Samir was a confidant and collaborator of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Hamza Fathallah. He contributed articles to a number of newspapers and was an advocate for reform of the al-Azhar madrasa in Cairo. Later he was al-Nadim’s biographer and published his own journal, titled Bab al-Funun.¹⁰⁸

Al-‘Afghani’s and ‘Abduh‘s younger votaries later comprised the intellectual and political elite in Egypt into the twentieth century. For example, Sa‘ad Zaghlul, the eventual prime minister, counted himself among this group. Another example is the Syrian Muslim scholar Rashid Rida (1865–1935), who came to Egypt in the 1890s to study with Muhammad ‘Abduh. He quickly became ‘Abduh’s closest associate and biographer. He later achieved his own degree of notoriety as the publisher of the most acclaimed Islamic reform journal in history, al-Manar, from 1898 until his death in 1935. Rida remains a controversial figure to this day; some have come to see him as ‘Abduh’s “conservative” heir whose legacy was at odds with much of ‘Abduh’s reform project. These assessments are simplistic. Rida is often decried for the thought and sometimes the acts of his followers. He became close to Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, at the end of his life. The Brotherhood is often regarded as the breeding ground of more radical and violent Islamist movements of the period between 1950 and 1990. In any case, for these observers Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid (1872–1963), another of Abduh’s young followers and a future Egyptian nationalist and educator, is the more legitimate disciple of the so-called secular aspects of ‘Abduh’s thought.

Al-‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, and their followers developed their reform agenda through concepts drawn from Islamic traditions of jurisprudence and ethics. At the same time, however, they were very much agents of—to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term—political modernity.¹⁰⁹ Their interventions in debates about history and the formation of correct moral dispositions contributed to the consolidation of the moral and political subjectivity necessitated by the transformations brought by British occupation and its de facto colonialism. Nevertheless, even as the reformers made their interventions, they emphasized or introduced certain elements and concepts that could not be subsumed into colonial or modern projects of subject formation. Traces of premodern forms of collective solidarity (religious, ethnic, and social) and historical temporality (summed up as a sense that history is a divine expression marked by the continual repetition of circular patterns) were preserved by the centrality the reformers accorded to Islamic texts and the traditions built around readings of those texts.¹¹⁰

Al-‘Afghani’s influence was such that both his supporters and opponents embraced his ideas. For example, editorialists and journalists of all stripes came to adopt his views about collective responsibility, a concept that owes as much to definitions of modern citizenship as it does to fard al-kifaya or the notion of Muslims’ collective duty. Following al-‘Afghani, they argued that it is a duty to participate in modern democratic institutions as part of a virtuous Muslim life.

Taking up this notion also entailed adopting al-‘Afghani’s reading of the Islamic tradition, which, he claimed, enjoined Muslims to reject the “blind imitation [taqlid]” of the past and instead allow themselves to be guided by a rational skepticism, accepting knowledge only when there is sufficient evidence of its value. One consequence of al-‘Afghani’s intervention was that the term taqlid took on the contemporary meaning of “blind imitation” and was therefore transformed. A careful reading of medieval and later Islamic sources suggests that this meaning indeed represented a new understanding of the concept.¹¹¹ It may be a coincidence, but more likely it shows al-‘Afghani’s and Abduh’s influence on such Western scholars of the time as Ernest Renan and such colonial officials as Baring, that their descriptions of the recent Muslim past and their understanding of taqlid as “blind imitation” came to be reflected in the thinking of Europeans. Arguing about the meaning and validity of taqlid became a way for reformist shaykhs to attack and marginalize their opponents at the al-Azhar madrasa in Cairo. The reformists argued that blind imitation held Muslims back and that the enemies of reform were a regressive force in Muslim society. Indira Falk Gesink suggests that Orientalist scholars and colonial officials then took the rhetoric of these Muslim polemics literally, understanding neither the context of their utterances nor the aims of their authors.¹¹²

Perhaps al-‘Afghani’s most significant contribution was that he created the basic formula Islamic modernists came to embrace for diagnosing the predicament of Muslims. As al-‘Afghani saw it, there were three principal factors that explained the present decrepit state of the Muslim world. First, Muslims were ignorant of the true nature of Islam. Al-‘Afghani blamed the educational and legal institutions of religious schools and courts as well as preachers and jurisprudents for this situation. Second, centuries of stultifying and despotic rule resulted in Muslim rulers choosing expediency over proper Islamic practice and thereby deviating from the example set by the first generations of Muslim rulers. Third, a combination of extreme arrogance and narrow-mindedness [ta‘assub] drove Muslims to disdain the beneficial ideas and technological advances of non-Muslims. Only proper religious and scientific education, he argued, could ameliorate the stagnation and ignorance that afflicted Muslims. Thus al‘Afghani urged Muslims to rediscover Islam by choosing a reasoned path between an impulse of cynical excess [al-ifrat] that actively rejected settled practice and all social mores and a fatalistic passivity that closed the door to internally-generated change [al-tafrit]. Rida later refashioned these notions into a formula through which the Islamic reform movement became the party of moderation between the partisans of al-ifrat and al-tafrit; between those eager to jettison the entire corpus of tradition and embrace everything that came from the West and between those unquestioningly adhering to precedent and settled practice.

Extremes of cynicism and passivity had extinguished the coherent social dynamism that drove the Muslim community to great cultural and political heights at its peak. Writing in Ishaq’s and Naqqash’s Misr, al‘Afghani defined “excess [al-ifrat]” as that which “challenges everything ... until nothing is stable,” while languid fatalism [tafrit] leads to the worst form of slavery, which causes the “ignorant” to accept all that issues from fortune, chance, and circumstance.¹¹³ A properly educated and refined Muslim would not unquestioningly adhere to the beliefs and practices of those around him even if the others claimed to be Muslims themselves.¹¹⁴ Only through reason could one come to know true Islam. Rida recast the dialectic between “excess [al-ifrat]” and “fatalism [al-tafrit ]” into a wide-ranging cultural vision for the Muslim world. He came to refer to the Islamic reform movement as the “Party of Moderation” between the “fatalists,” the unquestioning adherents of precedent and settled practice, and those practicing “excess,” who were overly attracted to novelty, particularly Western innovation.

The reform ethos that motivated al-‘Afghani, the coterie around him, and his later emulators emerged from a particular understanding of Islam. Although Rida elaborated this ethos most clearly in the early twentieth century in his journal al-Manar, it is clear that even in their earlier incarnations, the groups of intellectuals associated with al-’Afghani viewed Islam as a tradition of practice whose virtues and telos are fixed but whose elaboration is specific to time and place. Following this logic they understood the eternal duty of each individual Muslim, and of the Muslim aggregate or umma as well, to realize the expression of Islam most appropriate to his own historical circumstances. The essential idea underlying this sensibility was that God entrusts human beings with the use of reason [‘aql] in order to discover the meaning of Islam for “every time and place [kull zaman wa makan]” in a practical and sensible manner. Accordingly, each generation accumulates knowledge and experience that succeeding generations are duty bound to evaluate and take account of through their God-given reason [‘aql]. This accumulation also implies that Muslims are enjoined to align those areas of their lives not specifically bound by Islamic prescription with the attitudes and conventions of the era and the place in which they live.

Drawing on elements of discussions occurring among Muslim reformers and on some of the major themes informing their own studies of the East and Islam, Europeans suggested that the “weakness of the East” was a direct consequence of Muslims’ blindly imitating their ancestors and never questioning settled practices.¹¹⁵ European critics contended that Islam was a retrograde force in society because it discouraged its adherents from questioning Islamic prescriptions. As a consequence, Muslim life was marked by a stagnation born of rejection, even fear, of change of any kind. Muslim society was doomed to backwardness until it experienced a reformation along the lines of the changes in European Christianity in the sixteenth century.

Dissenting from his European interlocutors, al-‘Afghani provided a very different narrative to account for the corrosive influence of blind imitation in Muslim society. In contrast to those who concluded that Muslim society could never achieve democracy and equality or enjoy freedom of expression and benefit from scientific learning without abandoning Islam, he argued that these ideals were the hallmarks of early Islamic civilization. Indeed, their presence in the Muslim world predated their appearance in Europe by several centuries. Thus in his view the question at hand was the best way to help Muslims learn to again recognize and embrace these essential Islamic principles. The problem as he saw it was that Muslims had strayed from the truth of their revelation; as a result, the dynamism of the early Muslim community turned to stultifying blind imitation. In the end, un-Islamic political absolutism and intellectual conformism dampened Islam’s inherent democratic spirit and put an end to the scientific and intellectual renaissance it had originally inspired.¹¹⁶

While there were a number of slight variations on these themes circulating among al-‘Afghani’s devotees, they all shared an important conceptual affinity with European accounts of Islam’s backwardness. Egyptian reformers couched their responses to negative depictions of Islam within a sort of historical imagination new to Egypt (and much of the Muslim world) in the 1870s and 1880s. Their European interlocutors, in line with nineteenth-century currents of historical thought, included “Mohammedanism” in an emergent vision of the past. European observers recognized Islam’s contribution to the unfolding of the universal history of humankind (albeit in a derivative mode as merely the conduit for classical learning).¹¹⁷ Crudely put, Europeans willingly inserted something called “Islamic history” into a secular and rational historicist unity—the universal historical experience of humankind. Implicit in their view of the past were evolutionary and progressive notions as well as certainty about the applicability of universal rules of causality. Egyptians did not challenge this historicist understanding of the unity of “human” experience, the validity of the “empty homogeneous” time of modern historical sensibilities, and the upward progress of history’s march; indeed, they readily accepted and employed these same organizing criteria in proffering counternarratives to the Europeans’ largely negative views of Islam.¹¹⁸ For the first time, Muslims writing in the East and working in this new historical idiom began to create something called Islamic history.

Accounts of Islam’s contributions to the universal legacy of humankind written by nineteenth-century religious and social reformers would hardly have sufficed as an “Islamic argument” in the past. Much of the writing of Islamic history tended to be quite distant from Islamic traditions, whose authority derived from the history of argumentation and the discourses of legitimation built up around Islam’s canonical texts.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, while historicist progressivism and causality became essential to the renderings of the Islamic past among Muslims, there remained other kinds of elements unsettling to these new ways of knowing the past. Despite the powerful historicist imperative of the time, Egyptians and others writing in Arabic proffered an account of Islamic history at odds with a purely historicist reading. Even while seeming to embrace the new kind of historical imaginary, Muslims continued to draw on forms of historicity radically different from that which gave coherence to the unity of “human experience.” They still drew on the authority of such Islamic sources as the Qur’an and traditions of the prophet in ways that converged with the new historicism only by coincidence. For example, it became very common at the time for Islamic reformers to describe their movement both as an inevitable historical development from within Islamic civilization and to establish its authority on Islamic tradition by citing a hadith to the effect that “Truly Allah shall send forth for this Community, at the onset of every hundred years, those who will renew its Religion.”¹²⁰

CITY VERSUS COUNTRY

The introduction of the Mixed Courts, the shadows cast by the foreign banks, and the resentments caused by the existence of the Dual Control ministry were all part of a milieu that impelled journalists to announce the arrival of a new era marked not only by challenge and danger but also by potential. One reflection of this general attitude was in the name that al‘Afghani’s Lebanese followers Ishaq and Naqqash chose for their newspaper, considered by many the mouthpiece of the “al-‘Afghani party”—al‘Asr al-Jadid or The New Era. Press reports were replete with declarations that this new era would redefine economic, social, and political relationships, and that new competencies and technical skills would shape the conditions of quotidian life. The 1883 inauguration of the al-Mahkama al-Ahaliya , or what Egyptians called the National Courts and the British the Native Tribunals, further substantiated this statement. Nevertheless, the future of Egypt seemed uncertain, with financial and political crises looming and the growing European hegemony in both government and society continuing apace. The Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Russians in the Crimea in 1877 and the subsequent end of Istanbul’s constitutional experiment sent shock waves through Egypt’s intellectual elite. Close on the heels of these events, a series of natural disasters disrupted agriculture throughout much of Egypt. A low Nile inundation in 1877 followed by a disastrously high flood in 1878 combined with an epidemic of cattle murrain resulted in an extremely poor crop in 1878. A coincidental drop in cotton prices and a corresponding shortfall in tax receipts compounded these agricultural problems. The Dual Control government ignored warnings of imminent starvation and insisted on collecting taxes as usual. Consequently, ten thousand people were said to have starved in Upper Egypt.121

In the midst of this upheaval, the press was the principal conduit of critical ideas and the dissemination of useful knowledge that Egypt’s much-desired future demanded. Journalists often ascribed an Islamic character to the modern technologies of newspaper publication, other print media, and their own field. They depicted these novelties not as innovations but rather as new ways of discharging tasks traditionally carried out within terrain marked as Islamic.

Al-‘Afghani spoke of newspapers as fulfilling a role similar to that of mosque preachers, and al-Nadim equated the newspaper with the Friday sermon as it was originally intended. He explained that the khutba during the time of the “the prophet of God ... [and] under our glorious forefathers [al-salaf al-salih] and the Rightly Guided Caliphs” was intended to enlighten the “people [qawm],” “enable them to know their rights [yu‘arrifahum huquqahum],” and instruct them about “wisdom [al-hukm].”¹²² All of this was done in plain language with the intention to communicate as clearly as possible to the “people [al-nas].” Al-Nadim argued that during the infancy of the umma the Friday sermon was meant to serve a pedagogic function in Muslim society. The preacher or khatib warned of temporal and spiritual danger but also informed the public about political developments as well as recent advances and innovations in various fields of knowledge.¹²³ Continuing with this theme, al-Nadim explained that the current era differed from the past insofar as newspapers could now perform this same service for a literate public. Indeed, he even suggested that if the umma’s people could read, “there would not be the urgent need to reorient the khutba” to carry out its original didactic function that newspapers were now able to perform for the literate.¹²⁴ Likewise, al-Kawkab al-Misri marveled at the speed of communication made possible by newspapers. The writer declared that this swiftness made newspapers a worthy substitute for “preachers” traveling “slowly from town to town.” Editorial pages were replete with elaborate descriptions of the mission of the press.¹²⁵

Just as the journalists perceived the original function of the khutba being displaced by the new technology of capitalist print media, they also came to regard the original object of the sermon—the individual Muslim—in a new light. Or to be more precise, they looked at the literate, newspaper-reading individual Muslim in a new light. The act of newspaper reading and its implied public-ness became an indispensable marker of the new civilized, urban literate subject. Of course, notions of being civilized predate the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and they almost always carried with them some relationship to urbanity. Indeed, the Arabic term used most often at the time to signify “civilized” was tamaddun, which is derived from the same root that furnishes the word “city [madina]” in Arabic. The adjective madani, derived from the same root as “city” and “civilized,” has come to mean “civilian” or “nongovernmental.” In the usage of the 1870s and 1880s, however, it approximated the word “urban.” An interesting remnant of this period’s linguistic evolution is that among rural folk in Egypt today, the word ’afandi has come to denote a person from the city or someone who has adopted the manners and the comportment of the urbanite. Therefore, although the extent of a person’s perceived piety and moral probity were indexes by which to gauge their degree of being civilized, the very idea of being “civilized” often evoked the city.

This period, however, also witnessed something new introduced into the extant dialectic between city and country. Even as the Egyptian press spent much of its energy on explicating international politics, focusing on the comings and goings of local officials, and following the activities of the khedive, it also very self-consciously called for religious, social, and political reform aimed at civilizing the entire society. The urban, publicoriented newspaper readers who produced and embraced this pedagogical vision cultivated new qualities that the “civilized” folk of just a generation earlier would not have recognized. This transition had a pronounced effect on the perceptions of the largely illiterate rural population. Previous distinctions between city and country acquired a new moral and cognitive veneer. Because the new civilizing aimed to produce a literate ’afandi subject, the denizens of the countryside, the fallahin, were now regarded as uncivilized on two accounts: first, they were uninterested in and did not understand the goals of societal reform; and second, their illiteracy precluded them from acquiring the useful forms of knowledge that defined one as civilized. The sharpened divide between country and city was articulated in stark terms as a dichotomy between an “uncivilized” fallah and a “civilized” ’afandi.

Meanwhile, the Islamic reformers focused on developing properly Islamic dispositions among literate Muslims. By so doing they hoped to lay the groundwork for building a truly Muslim polity appropriate for the new era. This disquiet about the short- and long-term future of Egypt and the Muslim East was reflected in the development of the refined, self-conscious, educated, and pious “civilized” ’afandi [mutamaddun] subject in Egyptian culture. Al-‘Afghani underscored the importance of dynamism to the civilized Muslim as he argued that “perfection is only achieved through movement;” the energy of this subject was manifested in active striving to improve the “public interest” by mastering “useful” knowledge and skills that would provide the greatest communal benefit. Civilized Muslims acted in concert with other like-minded Muslims to influence government policy and effect change.¹²⁶ Here it is worth noting that a number of terms in use at the time may be roughly translated as “public interest,” such as al-maslaha al-‘amma, or al-qawwam al‘umumi , or manafi‘ al-‘umumiya. Each of these carried with it, however, diverse repertoires of meaning.¹²⁷ Talal Asad reminds us that in the midst of major social change people are often unclear about the nature of the event that is occurring. Changes taking place in the late nineteenth century engendered new vocabularies that were linked to older ones in complex ways. Nevertheless, in translating these terms as “public interest,” the historian acknowledges the complexity of this formative moment in the development of modern literary Arabic and the significant instability in many linguistic terms at the time.¹²⁸

The convergence in the requisite qualities for the civilized Muslim and that of the urban ’afandi points up the slippage in the elaboration of these two subjects. Through the late 1870s and 1880s writers in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit, Misr, and other later newspapers and books used several terms to describe this ideal subject. Al-Nadim, for example, used the term nabih while others favored mutamaddun, and we can read the two of them as roughly equivalent to “civilized.” Both terms had the effect of subsuming the ideal nabih/mutamaddun into the category of ’afandi, and whatever differences there might be between civilized [nabih/mutamaddun] ’afandis and civilized Muslims practicing their faith “correctly” were collapsed. Civilized Muslims understood the “true” meaning of the phrase that “Islam was appropriate for every time and place.” They knew, for instance, that their religion did not enjoin them to unquestioningly imitate their forefathers. Instead they were commanded to seek out and acquire any new knowledge and learning that would help them uphold the independence and vitality of the Muslim community [umma]. This injunction was an individual and collective duty insofar as maintaining the strength of the umma was a necessary condition for them to live properly Muslim lives. Thus the civilized Muslim, similarly to the civilized ’afandi, was obliged to master the arts of “this era.” He should grasp the complexities of modern finance, maneuvering easily and confidently through the intricacies of mortgages and contract law. Being civilized implied that one knew how to comport oneself in the new kinds of institutions and the new sites of sociability that defined “this era.” It meant that one knew how to act, and therefore, how to hold one’s body in a “civilized” manner in “public,” thereby comporting oneself well in the new courtrooms and banks. The masculine self-assurance and dignity of the civilized Muslim/’afandi guaranteed that he would not be intimidated in the company of strangers speaking foreign languages, and his sober practice of Islam averted any intercourse with superstition. Therefore, new repertoires of practices (sober, antimystical, and opposed to such popular acts of piety as tomb visits); forms of knowledge (modern sciences and foreign languages); and modes of performance (reading newspapers, attending public fora, and holding the body in a dignified way) came under the purview of Islamic duties.

BACKWARD PEASANTS AND CIVILIZED ’AFANDIS

In examining the cultural landscape of Egypt in the 1870s and 1880s one cannot help being astonished by much of what was said at the time about the countryside and the nature of the peasant. Given the substantial and widely acknowledged changes that had occurred in the Egyptian countryside over the previous few generations, not to say the preceding fifteen years, it is remarkable that well-informed Egyptians, most of whom either originated from or still had deep roots in the countryside, held some of the opinions they did. Almost without exception they depicted the countryside as unchanged for millennia and its peasant inhabitants as isolated and unaware of the world outside the village. In addition, one would be mistaken in assuming that the provincial press—presumably closer to the ground of agricultural production and peasant lives—produced accounts diverging from those of the Cairene and Alexandrian press. As for the provincial press, it is somewhat perplexing that despite the robust literary life that had existed in the provincial towns, it was not until the press was nearly twenty years old before newspapers began to be established outside Alexandria and Cairo. One of the first provincial newspapers was al-Fayum, which debuted in 1894 in the town of al-Fayum. It disappeared shortly afterward and then reemerged in 1896. Al-Tafrih appeared in Dumyat in 1896 and in the following eight years, nine newspapers started up in Delta towns. Such as it was, the provincial press too was filled with descriptions of the putative timelessness of the countryside, the unchanging nature of peasants’ lives, and the ceaseless routine of their agricultural work.

We can assume that Egyptian writers were to some degree acquainted with rural life because they had either grown up in the countryside or visited it frequently. One also assumes that they recognized that their depictions of that life did not correspond with reality. The content of such accounts of rural life then presents an interpretive challenge to the historian. Because writing about the peasants, the countryside, and Egyptian agricultural production so often incorporated important and seemingly unrelated questions about the nature of Egypt and its people, these genres offer considerable insight into conceptions of personhood and community in circulation at the time. Indeed, this writing was a site in which the notion of Egypt as a modern political entity was framed and in which the modern Egyptian political subject was conceived. One of the ways that this writing accomplished this task was through sharpening conceptual distinctions between civilized ’afandis and backward peasants by contrasting their cognitive styles and their ways of life.

In the 1870s and 1880s Egyptian reformers began to identify the habits, forms of life, and ways of being in the world that stood in the way of their transformative project of civilizing their society. In this regard they seemed to have much in common with the British colonial officials who ruled Egypt from 1882 to 1919 who also conceived of their mission as bringing civilization to the ancient land.129 There is a certain irony in the fact that the British occupiers spoke about Egyptians as a whole using almost the same terms that Egypt’s new urban intelligentsia used in speaking about the peasantry. Of course, given how much attention historians of colonialism have paid to the question of Orientalism in the last few decades, it is hardly surprising that British officials, often drawn from other areas of the imperial service, saw many parallels between their colonial subjects in Egypt and those in India. Many of the British officials who served in Egypt between 1882 and 1919 had previous colonial experience in India. References to India abound in their memoirs and other writings.¹³⁰ In Egypt, as in India, they saw the “religiosity and extremism” of the East, “primordial” social ties, and an innate aversion to change. Such were the general characteristics of the malaise in which the benighted East found itself, and which enlightened British rule would eliminate. The similarities between the ways in which the British described the East and the ways in which Egypt’s urban literate classes looked at the peasants are striking. Evelyn Baring’s description of the Easterner (“devoid of energy and initiative, stagnant in mind, wanting in curiosity about matters which are new to him, careless of waste of time and patient under suffering”) was almost identical to characterizations of peasants found in the Egyptian press.¹³¹ The British, however, often claimed to have intervened in Egypt in order to protect the peasants from despotic rulers and abject poverty.

Despite the similarities in their framing of the problem, however, the British and their Egyptian interlocutors differed on the meaning of “civilizing.” Such Egyptians as ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Ahmad Samir envisioned throwing off non-Islamic accretions, widening the scope of education, and returning to the dynamism of the Islamic past, whereas the British conceived of their mission as “introducing European civilization into Egypt.”¹³² Both agreed, however, that one of the biggest obstacles to civilizing Egypt was its “backwardness.”

But what was backwardness and where did one find it? A perusal of the Arabic press and other kinds of literature indicates that Egyptians regarded the “ignorant” denizens of the countryside as the embodiment of backwardness. The peasants were illiterate; they possessed no sense of religious-cum-civic duty and seemed to be overwhelmed by the changes sweeping across Egypt—even as they were simultaneously depicted as unaware of these changes. Furthermore, they were isolated and insular, afraid of the new legal and financial institutions that were reaching into the countryside. Peasants knew little about adjacent provinces, to say nothing of the international economic and political forces affecting their lives. Worse still, their social and cultural worlds were defined and circumscribed by superstition and ignorance.¹³³

For literate Egyptians, backwardness—defined by superstition, lassitude, and blind imitation—sapped the vitality of the umma and impeded it from becoming civilized. In the discourses of reform and renewal, the crux of Egypt’s struggle to overcome its backwardness lay in the elimination of the factors leading to uncivilized behaviors, religious practices, and ways of life. The civilized [mutamaddun] were defined in accordance with notions of refinement, education, moral probity, piety, and energy. The fallah, lacking these virtues, was perforce uncivilized and a source of backwardness. The worth of the mutamaddun’s cultural sophistication, disciplined reason, and thoughtful religious practice was assured by his contrast with the backward and superstitious fallah. In this way the backwardness of the fallah was an important dimension of the articulation of the civilized ’afandi subject.

Fallah backwardness was corroborated in a number of different ways. The upheaval and distress caused by Egypt’s incorporation into the European-dominated global economic and political system produced discourses of fallah misery, indebtedness, and oppression. These discourses were propagated and maintained by Egyptian journalists, polemicists, and activists as well as by such colonial administrators and Europeans sympathetic to the Egyptian cause as Wilfrid Blunt.

Another source for the Egyptian social imaginary taking shape was the literary images of the fallah that were popular at the time. Yusuf Shirbini’s seventeenth-century bawdy satire, Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh qasid abi shaduf, poked fun at the habits and customs of peasants in order to mock the formalism and pretentiousness of urban scholars.¹³⁴ Its humor played upon distinctions between urban literati and uncouth peasants that served to reinforce the perceived divide between country and city—the caustic ridicule of Shirbini’s pen spared neither side.¹³⁵ It is perhaps no coincidence that Hazz al-quhuf fi sharh al-qasid abi shaduf enjoyed a revival in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period when Egyptians were shaping modern conceptions of political subjectivity and Egyptian identity. The book was published or reprinted in 1858, 1872, 1878, 1889, 1892, 1894, and 1904 by some of the premier publishing houses in Cairo. For example, the 1858 edition was put out by the government press in Bulaq, Dar al-Taba‘a al-‘Amara, under the direction of ’Ali ’Afandi (later Bey) Jawda.¹³⁶ Indeed, by the late 1870s the name “Abu Shaduf” had become eponymous for the Egyptian peasant in the press. In Yaqub Sannu‘’s widely read journal, Abu Nazzara al-Zarqa’, he used the name “Abu Shaduf” to refer to various peasant characters. Likewise, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim used the name on occasion when writing about some of his fictive peasants, and he even placed Shirbini’s book on a shelf in one of his stories—a detail that he presumably expected his readership to notice. This and other references, combined with the numerous editions published at the time, suggest that the reading public was very likely familiar with Shirbini’s work, and we can assume that Shirbini’s farcical descriptions of fallahin were very much part of the literate classes’ imagination of the peasant.

One question for the historian at this point, however, is estimating the size of the literate population. What was the extent of literacy in nineteenth-century Egypt? In 1897, Jurji Zaydan, the publisher of al-Hilal , asserted that “in 1882 there were no more than five thousand subscribers to Egyptian newspapers; now they have exceeded twenty thousand. As for readers, they may reach two hundred thousand because the copy of the newspaper is usually read by ten or tens of people.”¹³⁷ Ami Ayalon—citing Martin Hartmann, Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid, and others—argues that even by the end of the nineteenth century literacy was still the purview of a “tiny minority.”¹³⁸ Sabry Hafez quotes a figure of 554,930 literate Egyptians out of a population of 5,803,381 in 1881, although he cites no source for these figures.¹³⁹ Meanwhile, Juan Cole estimates that Egypt’s daily newspapers enjoyed a circulation of around two thousand. Because of the nature of extended families, he surmises that the actual readership might have been closer to six thousand. There were twelve or so legal newspapers in 1881; Cole calculates that the total newspaper readership ranged toward seventy-two thousand “at the very least.”¹⁴⁰ Based on Egyptian government educational statistics, however, we can presume that the reading public, although small, was growing at a fairly rapid rate. In 1875 there were some 4,817 mostly primary schools educating 140,977 students. By 1878 those numbers had grown to 5,562 schools with 167,185 students.¹⁴¹

With increasing literacy and the emergence of capitalist print media it was inevitable that a kind of agglomeration and cross-fertilization of discourses began to develop within the architecture of literate culture. For example, journalists inspired by the Islamic reform ideas of al-‘Afghani, ‘Abduh, and Hamza Fathallah detailed the peasantry’s ignorance and backwardness in their public comportment, in their methods of child rearing, and in their practice of Islam. In so doing the journalists almost certainly drew on Shirbini. At the same time, just as we should not lose sight of the fact that these commentators mined an extant cultural archive that included such works as Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf, the reformers who inspired them did not create Islamic modernism out of whole cloth; they too exploited traditions of thought already in circulation.

For instance, al-‘Afghani borrowed heavily from one of the most influential intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Egypt, Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi. Al-Tahtawi came from Upper Egypt, was educated at al-Azhar, and then mastered French when he traveled to France as the prayer leader of the first Egyptian student mission there in 1826. On his return to Egypt he was appointed head of the government’s School of Languages. Al-Tahtawi later became both an educational reformer and an important cultural figure. One can detect traces of such medieval Muslim luminaries as Abu al-Hasan ’Ali al-Mawardi (972–1058), Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Miskawayh (932–1030), Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), and even Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) in al-Tahtawi’s writings. Juan Cole credits al-Tahtawi with the “revival of practical philosophy in Arab Islam.” His work reaffirmed that within the “Islamic philosophical tradition economics and politics were seen to be extensions of ethics.”¹⁴² The ethical tradition personified in this genealogy is just as clear in the writings of al‘Afghani, whose work also exhibited the influence of such figures as al-Mawardi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun.¹⁴³

In al-Tahtawi’s widely read and influential 1869 work, Manahij al’Albab al-Misriya fi Mabahij al-’Adab al-Asriya, which borrowed extensively from al-Mawardi, he identified the three sources of wealth as agriculture, craft production and manufacturing [sina‘a], and commerce [al-tijara]. He concluded that “agriculture is most important” because it touches the greatest number of people.¹⁴⁴ Al-Tahtawi’s Manahij al’Albab shared a number of ethical components with medieval writings in Islamic ethics, but the work’s sense of “public-ness” would have been unintelligible even to his teachers. For example, al-Tahtawi’s mentor Hasan al-Attar (1766–1835) was an important scholar, reformer, and eventually rector of al-Azhar and was named the first editor of the Egyptian government’s official journal, al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriya, in 1828.¹⁴⁵ Nevertheless, despite al-Attar’s important position in that early manifestation of the modern press, he never considered the question of public interest in the same way as his student some forty years later. In Manahij al-’Albab al-Tahtawi displaced familiar themes in Islamic pedagogic literature by attaching them to notions of public interest as a religious duty. He declared that the “success” and “public benefit” [manafi‘ al-‘umumiya] of any endeavor is measured according to the extent to which it positively affects the social collective [‘umum al-jam‘iya].¹⁴⁶ Al-Tahtawi asserted that only through cooperation [ta‘awun] could Muslims be true believers, for “all creatures need community [jamaliya],” and without cooperation human beings cannot “achieve virtue [‘iffa], succor [najda], generosity [sakha’], and justice [‘adala].”¹⁴⁷ In effect, he called for a kind of activist civic ethic, suggesting that Islam commands Muslims to act for the public good. He reminded his readers that virtue, the condition to which all believers aspire, is not defined by the absence of evil, but rather by “acts and actions that deepen human collaboration and tranquility” [‘af‘al wa ‘a‘mal tu’hir ‘andi musharakat al-nas wa musakanitihum].¹⁴⁸ Accumulating wealth for its own sake yields no public benefit [almunafa‘a al-‘umumiya]. These same themes dominated al-‘Afghani’s work and through his acolytes made their way into the press and public discourse of the time.

Following al-Tahtawi’s lead in such areas as advocating for women’s education, al-‘Afghani also was a strong advocate for modernizing the Arabic language. Both figures translated concepts fundamental to political modernity into Arabic and in so doing helped introduce them to the Arab and Muslim worlds. After al-Tahtawi’s time in Paris, the concepts of patria and “nation” found their way into his writing. Al-’Afghani, fascinated by the didactic function the press might fulfill, built on al-Tahtawi’s work by becoming one of the first writers to articulate notions of “public-ness” and “public opinion” in Arabic. Al-Tahtawi’s writing was also an important source for al-‘Afghani and his followers in the press as they contemplated the conditions of Eastern society and the state of Muslims around the world. For example, besides borrowing al-Tahtawi’s articulation of the notions of excess and neglect (ifrat wa tafrit), al‘Afghani nearly quoted verbatim al-Tahtawi’s Manahij al-’Albab in defending the integrity of Eastern culture. Adapting al-Tahtawi’s “new clothes” metaphor from the same work, al-‘Afghani declared that if one imitates the habits and mores of others from a position of weakness, one is forced to “wear new clothes” from the other’s culture.¹⁴⁹ This metaphor became a standard trope of Islamic reform thought and other commentary; it can be seen in a range of writers from Abdallah al-Nadim to Rashid Rida.

An even more fundamental metaphor that became part of nearly every piece of writing and made its way into many of al-‘Afghani’s speeches was al-Tahtawi’s organicist metaphor of society as a single body [jism]. Al-‘Afghani added a new kind of historical sensibility and his view of societal mission to the metaphor of the social body. Thus al-‘Afghani declared that it is not sufficient for people to simply perform tasks as individuals; rather, people should “see themselves as members” of a larger whole and understand that the only true measure of an act’s worthiness is whether it is a “benefit” to the entirety of society.¹⁵⁰ In order for this social body to thrive, all of its organs must understand their roles as mere parts in the elaboration of a larger purpose: the realization of a civilized and politically unified society within an Islamic framework. This noble goal entailed a common understanding of the meaning of the past and a shared vision of the future.

Many public commentators inspired by al-‘Afghani and drawing on the cultural archive of nineteenth-century Egypt—including Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf—argued that this route to enlightenment was closed off to peasants because of their illiteracy. The fallahin became almost instinctually averse to change and wary of deviation from established rhythms through centuries of unbroken agricultural routine and by blindly imitating the harmful ways of their forebears. Peasants were said to be inert and indolent, aspiring only to do as their fathers and grandfathers had done. Ultimately, these “poor souls” took refuge in the superstition, ignorance, and sacrilege that al-Nadim chronicled in a piece on the behavior of worshippers at the Sayyid Badawi Mawlid in Tanta.¹⁵¹ In this way discourses of religious reform and agricultural improvement intersected in the figure of the “backward,” isolated fallah.

Al-Nadim and Mikha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid, the Coptic founder and publisher of the newspaper al-Watan and its editor from 1877 until 1900, were among those whose reflections on the material conditions and educational level of the peasants reflected a new kind of moral equation. According to this view, the peasants had been subjected to an unremittingly harsh existence since time immemorial; consequently they were unable to make use of their reason and lacked the will and drive to improve their living or working conditions. As a result, they were constitutionally unable to even consider experimenting with new irrigation methods to replace the inefficient and arduous shaduf—a primitive manual lever device that required strenuous effort to raise water from an irrigation canal to the level of the field and that became the basis of the name “Abu Shaduf” in Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf. Thus the peasants had to be compelled to try new agricultural methods. Consequently, they neither produced nor realized as much profit as they could, and their resultant material deprivation impeded any effort to liberate them from their benighted state. Peasant backwardness and ignorance were in part a result of their lack of modern knowledge of agriculture. This scrutiny of the fallah’s putative lack of modern agricultural skills dovetailed with the moral critique evolving from Shirbini and al-Nadim as well as from the Muslim reformers’ condemnation of the peasants’ “corruptions” of Islamic practice and belief. Inefficient peasant farming techniques were read as emblematic of the backwardness retarding the entire Muslim East.¹⁵² And the fallahin’s “innate aversion to change” corresponded to the “blind imitation” [taqlid] that al-‘Afghani and others declared that Muslims would have to overcome collectively in order to live a virtuous Muslim life. Finally, peasant religious practices became synonymous with superstition and deviant syncretism [bida‘].¹⁵³

Questions about agriculture, moral reform, and the future of Egypt and the East converged in the writings of public intellectuals, especially with regard to their views of the peasants. We can see this convergence in such important figures as al-Nadim and ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Musa Kastali, and Sayyid Wafa’ Muhammad (publishers of al-Kawkab al-Misri); ‘Alkasan Sarafiyan (publisher of al-Mufid); and the Syrians in al-‘Afghani’s circle—Adib Ishaq and Salim Naqqash, who jointly published and edited a number of such important newspapers as al-Tijara, Misr, al-‘Asr al-Jadid, and al-Mahrusa. Almost without exception these writers identified the fallah as an impediment to the collective security and unity of a society threatened from inside and out. Externally, Egyptian society faced the power of the Europeans and their local agents; internally, the collective ideational and economic health was undermined by material decline and moral decay. Exposés of peasant life confirmed the fallah’s abject moral state as well as his ignorance of contemporary agricultural knowledge and techniques. Ignorance and depravity posed obstacles in equal measure to achieving a collective state of well-being.¹⁵⁴ This conclusion generated commentaries on the state of the peasantry in step with the intellectual, economic, and political ethos of the time. One result of this attention was the synthesis of a number of different theoretical elements to produce a new field of knowledge about the fallah.

In constituting this field, journalists, activists, social critics, self-styled reformers, and commentators of every stripe invoked the classical tradition of Islam in novel ways. While their references to the Qur’an, the hadith literature, and other important texts were not necessarily revolutionary or even new in many cases, the kinds of questions that they deliberated through referencing the classical tradition were without precedent in Egypt and indeed in the Muslim world. Within the new arenas of public exchange, inquiries into ethics and jurisprudence were displaced onto such issues as the impact of “fallah superstitions” on agricultural production; inquiries into ways in which Muslim society might be revitalized in order to throw off European dominance; or proposed strategies for protecting local culture and Islam against the fascination with and attraction to European customs, languages, and social mores on the part of some Egyptians.

The traditions of Islamic thought that had inspired first al-Tahtawi and then al-‘Afghani belonged to a kind of moral inquiry in which economics and politics were not separated from other disciplines in ways familiar to the modern reader. Truth and knowledge were recognized as such within a life conceived as a project oriented toward Muslim virtue and piety. Therefore, nineteenth-century reformers were likely to consider questions of individual piety and moral probity, the health and well-being of society, and the economic and political future of the umma and the East within a single moral-political matrix. Nevertheless, it was increasingly apparent toward the turn of the twentieth century that many were beginning to understand the umma in unprecedented ways. In particular, more and more writers imputed an economic character to the umma, so that its productive capacity came to define part of its essence. Through the mechanism of the new public sphere and the modality of the public discussion with its displaced Islamic ethical framework, the notion of productive capacity then became necessary for building a Muslim society and living a Muslim life. In other words, the extent to which a society was successful and efficient vis-à-vis modern economic production became a criterion for whether or not one could live a virtuous life in that society.

CONCLUSION

The most remarkable and far-reaching impact of the evolving configuration of reformers and literate urbanites occurred within new discursive public spaces. By 1880 few literate Egyptians would have disagreed that the task of “civilizing [tamaddun]” Egyptians, building a strong economic infrastructure, and expanding agricultural production were mutually dependent. This consensus was expressed in a variety of ways. Some of the words used to express this idea and that of progress were al-taraqqi , al-‘umran, and al-taqaddum, in addition to al-tahsin and al-islah . The linguistic pluralism at that time reflects the fact that the meanings of these terms were evolving and beginning to acquire their modern definitions.155 As we have seen above, the imperative to become “civilized” derived from a particular vision of a healthy community of Muslims. Peasant productivity and the efficient operation of the apparatus of the modern state became indicators of the moral health of society. One newspaper, describing the relationship between the fallah and the larger society, remarked that “the public benefit [al-sawalih al-‘amma] issues from peasant success” because as agricultural productivity increases, so too does the material prosperity and virtue of society. How? Through the “amount of tax and customs revenue” the government collects, which it redirects to “widen the circle of knowledge and strengthen the foundations of development [‘umran].”¹⁵⁶

It was soon common for reformers to suggest that as part of a project to reinvigorate the umma spiritually and economically, the fallahin must be tutored to utilize new and more efficient and productive agricultural practices. This reeducation was not a task solely for agronomists or organizations like the Egyptian Agricultural Society. Al-Kawkab al-Misri argued that “peasant youth [al-asghar min al-abna’ al-fallahin]” are lazy due to the spiritual and material poverty in which they are reared. Therefore they will embrace change only when “we could instill in them a love for the homeland [hubb al-watan]” and lead them to see it as part of their duty as Muslims. The writer explains that only then would they appreciate the benefit that would accrue to them and to society as a whole. Consequently, the fallah must be the beneficiary of concentrated “civilizing efforts [al-musayi al-madaniya],” and those interested in the “land’s [al-bilad]” future agricultural success must guide the peasants to change their age-old agricultural techniques.¹⁵⁷ Part of this guidance entailed teaching peasants the values of cooperation and unity. Then they might understand that if they pooled even their meager resources they could buy a steam pump for irrigation.¹⁵⁸ This equipment would “liberate them from the toil and exhaustion” of working the “ancient watering device [i.e., the shaduf] which requires so great an expenditure of energy and produces so little benefit.”¹⁵⁹ The shaduf, the device that had become an eponym of the peasant producer, was also a symbol of the difficulty of the peasants’ existence and a cause of peasant backwardness.

Writing and thinking about the fallah occurred within the context of the waning of local elites’ control over Egypt’s government, economy, and society. Egypt and the entire Muslim world had become subject to European economic might and military prowess. In the period leading up to the ‘Urabi revolt and in its immediate aftermath, there was a general consensus that increased agricultural productivity, education, and moral refinement were imperative to overcome the predicament facing the East. Such journalists as al-Nadim, Ishaq, Naqqash, and Sannu‘, and later ’Ali Yusuf, Zaki ‘Awad, and Ahmad Zayyat, proclaimed it their duty to inform the public on these matters. In the chapters that follow, we will examine the ways in which they went about doing precisely that.