CHAPTER FIVE

The New Peasant, Colonial Identity, and the Modern State

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapters have outlined the relationship between the development of the public sphere in Egypt, Egypt’s incorporation into the European-dominated world economic system, and the emphasis on defining Egypt, Egyptians, and Egyptian-ness on the part of the local intelligentsia. Between the years 1875 and 1900, Egypt’s literate public came to conceive of Egypt less as a geographical entity and more as a biography of a people. The present chapter carries this investigation into the period between 1900 and 1919.

Over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century, this phenomenon gained momentum. Modern social categories and political concepts became further integrated into the daily experience of Egyptians. 1 As Egyptians assimilated new concepts of the individual, the society, and the history of their community, they came increasingly to accept the inevitability of the political and moral project that considered Egypt a single people with a discrete identity and sharing a common fate. The period saw the definition of that people sharpened as the aspects of social affinity formerly attached to religious bonds became amalgamated into new ideas about Eastern and Egyptian identity. During this period these collective identities acquired more recognizably modern forms as Egypt took the form of a nation and Egyptian-ness became nationalism.

BECOMING CIVILIZED, BECOMING EGYPTIAN

Notions of civilizing were central to the project of fashioning Egyptian-ness or “Eastern-ness.” Imaginative writing about peasants, such as the articles by al-Nadim in al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit or ’Ali Yusuf’s Maryuti columns, had set up the countryside as “uncivilized” by the turn of the twentieth century. In the changed circumstances of the post-1900 era, when defining Egyptian-ness took on increased urgency, and Eastern-ness, Western-ness, and modernity began to mix and merge in debates about the future, whatever was premodern was cast as something radically different from the longed-for status of civilization.2 Calls for reform became even stronger after the turn of the century, when its advocates self-consciously outlined their vision of an ideal future by explicating a normative vision of what “Egypt” and “Egyptians” should become.

An article reprinted from the Baku-based periodical Kasibi in al-Umma in April 1906 by Ahmad Bek Ajayif (Aghayev) captured this heightened sense of urgency.³ Al-Umma, published in Cairo between 1905 and about 1910, was a vociferous critic of the British, especially in the wake of the Dinshway incident and trial. Its detailed reports of the trial were distinctive in that they painted a precise portrait of the proceedings replete with psychological sketches of the protagonists, and an attention to such small details as the exact length of each testimony and the times of adjournment. The publishers of the paper were Hashim ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Muwani and Muhammad Sharbatli. Aghayev’s reprinted piece offered a prescriptive framework for the “civilized [mutamaddun]” future to which Muslims should aspire. But even as the author unfolded his vision, he asked, when will Muslims become civilized?

Aghayev himself was an interesting character. He was an Azerbaijani Shi’i and a prominent public intellectual in Baku during the first two decades of the twentieth century. He became an advocate for the protonationalist Turkist or Turanian movement even though he viewed Iran as his homeland. After World War I he found his way to Turkey, where he was known by the Turkish rendering of his name, Ahmet Agaoglu, and where he had a role in writing the 1924 constitution.⁴

A cacophony of diverse opinions about the meaning of Egyptian-ness emanated from the champions of administrative, agricultural, political, social, and religious reform in the period after 1890. While these opinion leaders certainly did not phrase it this way, it is clear that they aimed to create the conditions for the emergence of a particular kind of moral and political subject. This theoretical subject bore some resemblance to the literate, civilized, and masculine nabih found in al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit in the 1870s. The later discourses of reform, however, incorporated new features into this ideal subject to enable “ethical autonomy and aesthetic self-invention.”⁵ The reform ethos was related to and partially constituted by the project of conceptualizing and creating an “Egyptian people.” This process of definition was reflected in the unsettled usage of such terms as ’ahl, ’ahali, and misri, as well as fallah, milla, qutr, bilad, balad, and others. Over the course of time, however, each of these words became coded in specific ways while other terms fell into infrequent use. For example, such terms as ’ahl and ’ahali were more or less displaced by the term sha‘ab in reference to the “people” of Egypt. This shift in word usage is a complex issue that cannot be resolved without a more thorough examination of the changing political contexts. This chapter elucidates the social imaginary within which this subject would become more coherent.⁶

The term civilized brought an assortment of notions, traditions, attitudes, and sensibilities gathered from Islamic, European, and Ottoman sources under a single rubric. A cursory glimpse at Egyptian writing from the first decade and a half of the twentieth century makes clear that being civilized meant more than successfully negotiating the intricacies of a market society or reading well enough to peruse newspapers. Other criteria were deemed to be equally important, such as being a good Muslim. Qualities exhibited by the gendered civilized subject, including accepting individual responsibility for the moral state of the social whole, were derived from Islamic sensibilities. Traces of this notion can be found even in the theories about liberal subjectivity central to such secular reformers as Faris Nimr, Yaqub Sarruf, Shahin Makariyus, and Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid.⁷ At the same time an image of the urbane and literate sophisticate associated with being civilized was distilled in part from European and Ottoman concepts of cosmopolitan gentlemanliness.⁸

Of course one might expect that writers in this period who were trying to make sense of and adapt to social, economic, and political upheavals would draw from their own cultural resources, including their understanding of the past. One consequence of evaluating the present in light of accumulated tradition, however, was the emergence of new significations for many extant concepts and practices. But as we have already seen, and as we shall see below, this process of cultural adaptation was accompanied by the consolidation of new forms of identity, as various representations of pan-Islamism, Eastern-ness and Egyptian-ness increasingly vied with one another for supremacy for a decade or more. This struggle was complicated even more by the emergence of pan-Arabism in the early part of the twentieth century.⁹

Becoming Egyptian meant, among other things, cultivating the desire to rid Egypt of foreigners. But this position was not the simple black-andwhite oppositional proposition nationalist historians have sometimes claimed. Popular histories in Egypt have tended to encapsulate the entire history of the period in terms of opposition to or support of the British occupation. While we should not discount the importance of anti-British agitation in the formation of modern Egyptian identity, we should also recognize the ambiguous position of many of the so-called national heroes vis-à-vis the British-dominated government. To name only a few, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul both served as state prosecutors; Muhammad ‘Abduh was an ally of Lord Cromer and was later appointed the mufti of British-dominated Egypt; and of course the prosecutor in the infamous Dinshway case was none other than the former ‘Urabist, later nationalist, lawyer, Ibrahim Hilbawi. There were a number of interrelated elements that require a brief survey. Antiforeign agitation included notions of anti-imperialism that were heightened after the Russian Empire was defeated by the Japanese in 1905. This anti-imperialism was covered with a religious sheen, as some writers cited Islamic legal traditions to criticize Egyptians for allowing themselves to be ruled by non-Muslims.¹⁰ The power of the fusion of anti-imperialist thinking with Islam-derived reasoning was such that even Mi’kha’il ‘Abd al-Sayyid’s Coptic newspaper, al-Watan, implied that Christians could not govern Egypt when it criticized the British occupation and its suzerainty over Egypt’s administration. Another fertile field for many activist writers urging Egyptians to throw off European dominance was the “glorious past of Islam.”¹¹ Such Islamic reformers as al-‘Afghani had reminded Muslims of their past since the 1870s, but in the period following 1900, “Islamic history” was redeployed as it became associated less with a prophetic mission on earth and more with a narrative of civilization. There is some irony in this reinterpretation, of course, as the sort of history the reformers described, which motivated them and vitalized their movement, was one beholden to Western social models and historical methods.¹²

The presence of various kinds of Islamic traditions and practices also helped to invigorate and sustain certain aspects of the emergent Egyptian collective identity. For example, over time the carrying of the mahmil (the ornate litter on which the kiswah or covering of the Ka‘ba in Mecca is carried), traditionally produced in Egypt and sent to Mecca yearly, was an event that was marked with increasingly protonationalist overtones and implications. The attention lavished on the packing and shipping of the mahmil throughout the press lent the proceedings an air of national celebration, and this excitement became even more pronounced over the course of British occupation. These accounts transformed the event into a moment of civic pride in which Egyptians, rather than simply Muslims, should delight.

Then there was the significance of the Ottoman connection, which should not be discounted. Although the ties between Egypt and Istanbul had been largely symbolic for many decades, even these tenuous connections carried a great amount of ideational power. References to the “Sultan” or to “Istanbul” or to the Ottoman state [al-dawla] continued to be authoritative. Not until Britain’s formal designation of Egypt as a protectorate during World War I did the historic ties become less of a factor in public deliberation and their capacity to inspire and mobilize Egyptians begin to fade. As others have argued, a form of Egyptian nationalism filled the void left by the disintegration of Egypt’s Ottoman identity.¹³ The reasons for this substitution are not difficult to discern; many of the intellectuals agitating in Egypt around the turn of the century had had no experience of life in Egypt before the British occupation and domination. ¹⁴ For these post-‘Urabi intellectuals, whom we might call the Dinshway generation, Ottoman rule meant almost nothing on a practical political level. This was especially true after the Taba affair of 1906, when it became quite clear that the Ottoman sultan would not—and indeed could not—challenge the British position in Egypt.¹⁵

One group of Egyptians, however, became interested in removing all European influence from Egypt in order to improve their own social and economic position.¹⁶ Some of these men belonged to the same social groups that had made up the ‘Urabi coalition of the 1870s: medium-sized landholders and the educated, urbanized professional classes. The medium-sized landowners were increasingly squeezed in their competition with European capital both by economies of scale and by the increasingly disproportionate tax burdens imposed on them. Their European competitors (and locals enjoying the status of European protégés) paid little if any tax due to the protection of the Capitulations. Adding to the landowners’ problems was the deteriorating quality of cotton yields and the flat or decreasing prices of commodities. References to the decline in the quality of Egyptian cotton abounded in this period. Occasional complaints began to appear as early as the 1880s, but by the late 1890s they were fairly common. At the outset the problem of deteriorating quality was depicted as an illustration of the need for peasant agricultural training. But after the turn of the century the issue was reframed to fit the political reality beginning to be perceived among the urban intellectuals. For example, Khalil Fawzi’s weekly al-Insan, published in Damanhur in 1907, argued passionately for protecting Egypt’s share of the world market in cotton. The journal made a sophisticated argument about the structure and functioning of world commodity markets and infused the question with a sense of Egyptian political and economic unity. One article published in April 1907 praised the Egyptian Agricultural Society for its efforts to improve the entirety of Egyptian agriculture and its implicit recognition of the importance of building an Egyptian society.¹⁷ Egyptian-born urban professionals often traced their lineage to the same stratum of the rural gentry (i.e. the medium-sized landowners) that was being undermined by competition from European capital. These professionals too were resentful of the British presence because their route to advancement in the rapidly expanding government bureaucracy was blocked by the many Europeans employed throughout the apparatus of state. The continual criticism of the government’s irrigation engineers, which began in the 1880s and reached a crescendo by the turn of the century, was in part inspired by these frustrations. Consequently, the issue was often framed in terms of “foreigners not understanding Egypt’s needs.”¹⁸

Differentiating Egyptians from Europeans was a preliminary step in establishing an agenda for removing foreign control of Egypt. But a case then had to be made for selecting the specific traits that characterized foreignness. Not only was this definition a sensitive issue at the time, it was not as obvious a task as it might seem, given the long history of Ottoman rule with its multiethnic and multidenominational mosaic of bureaucrats, officials, shaykhs, and local governors—including the royal family of Egypt. As we will see below, almost simultaneous with efforts to define foreignness, the notions of “Egyptian [misri]” and “Eastern [sharqi]” also came under scrutiny by such figures as Mustafa Kamil and Ahmad Lufti al-Sayyid. ¹⁹ Then through the first two decades of the twentieth century, efforts to differentiate between misri and sharqi became even more pronounced, especially in the wake of the Dinshway affair. Eventually, Egyptian came to be more closely associated with the “sons of the Nile Valley” and less with “Eastern-ness.”

A series of articles examining some of these issues appeared in the anti-British journal al-Umma in the spring and summer of 1906—the weeks and months leading up to the Dinshway incident.²⁰ One installment that explored the question of identity, “ ’Ila ‘ay tariq nahnu musawwaqun? [“On What Path Are We Being Led?”],” belonged to that large body of writing ascribing a kind of unitary essence to an “Egyptian” people by virtue of commonalities expressed through agriculture, religion [din], language, and a new awareness of history. Indeed, the press in the capital and in Alexandria connected agricultural issues with the fate of Egypt as a single social, moral, and political unit. For the regional press, however, this view was the cornerstone of their orientation and the basis of their raison d’être. An example of this emphasis on agriculture is a newspaper called al-Sayha, a weekly from Tanta owned by Mahmud al-Shadhali and published from 1903 to 1912. Al-Sayha devoted an inordinate amount of space in its columns to exploring the relationships among Egyptian agriculture, Egyptian development, and the future of Egypt.²¹

At first glance al-Umma’s “On What Path Are We Being Led?” seems to reveal little that had not been said for decades. One can find sentiments ostensibly similar in wording, if not in meaning, dating back to the period of the ‘Urabi revolt. Closer inspection, however, provides important insights into the transitional nature of the historical moment and the ways in which the concepts of “homeland [watan]” and “[Muslim] community [umma]” were shifting. The civilizational critique in the article—of a kind that had become popular only around the turn of the century—reflected newer arguments about Egyptian identity. The stated intention of the article in al-Umma was to show why “Easterners” were or could be “Egyptians,” while maintaining that “Westerners” could not be. On one level, the piece appeared to define a form of Egyptian-ness that included the ruling elite, composed of individuals whose varied origins spanned the vast Ottoman domains. The writer claimed that Egypt’s rulers, even if originally from elsewhere, should still be considered part of the local community. For the British consider their royal family to be English even though it was well known that the “English kings ... have German roots.” Similarly, Egyptians disregard the Albanian roots of their royal family and see the khedive as Egyptian.²² Al-Umma concluded that Egypt’s “present and past ministers are [and were] Egyptian because they were either born here or came here when they were very young.”²³

There are several aspects of the article’s line of reasoning that merit consideration. As al-Umma differentiated “Eastern-ness” from “Western-ness,” it assumed “East” and “West” to be stable social and even moral categories. While the vocabulary the writer used was familiar, it had taken on different nuances and meanings than had been previously associated with those words. Accordingly, the article raised a whole new series of questions that continued to circulate in public discussion for the first several decades of the twentieth century. Was the “East” an “ ’umma”? What is a “watan”? How does the idea of “jins [race/ethnicity]” figure into the calculus of identity? And what is the relationship between the categories of “Easterner” and “Egyptian”?

The article declared that the individual is shaped in the watan. This formation occurs not as the outcome of some innate process related to one’s biological “lineage [‘asl],” but rather as the result of one’s efforts to adhere to local custom and law. Therefore, “wataniya [patriotism]” is in effect a performative category: One demonstrates one’s wataniya as a result of what one does and how one lives one’s life. The desire of Egyptians to conform to the laws and mores of their “land [watan]” is what makes them Egyptians, and the same can be said of the inhabitants of any “kingdom or state [dawla].”²⁴ Thus the article’s author concludes that Egypt’s rulers, much like the monarchs of Europe whose ancestors often came from elsewhere, can still be considered Egyptians even though they are descended from nonlocals.

At the same time, however, the article argued that “Easterners” possess certain characteristics—apart from religion and language—which distinguish them from “Westerners.” This claim collapsed the categories of “Easterner” and “Ottoman” together, and this fusion in turn created a sociopolitical synthesis in which Armenians, Kurds, and Egyptians are both Ottoman and Eastern at the same time. What is this unifying quality? The writer points to a somewhat indistinct notion of “affinity [nisba]” found among all “Ottomans.”²⁵ Ottoman affinity meant that Turks, Armenians, or Kurds could become Egyptians if domiciled in Egypt, even as they preserved their own discrete “attributes [sifatuhum].”²⁶ “Egyptian-ness” and “Eastern-ness” were mutually compatible because of this “affinity.” In contrast, the adjectives “Western” and “Eastern” entailed specific ways of life and of organizing one’s priorities in the world—materialistic, consumerist, and hedonistic versus religious, social-minded and chaste; thus they were not in accord. Westerners had no affinity with Easterners, and were therefore foreigners by definition. Nevertheless, those identities associated with an individual’s “country [watan]” (such as Egyptian, Armenian, or Kurd) were depicted as subordinate to the overarching category of “Ottoman universality [al-Jama‘a al-kulliya],” which made the “people of each land [bilad] into one.”²⁷

But even as the article hailed Ottoman universalism, the vagaries of its exegesis of watan, umma, and ethnicity indicated that an incipient exclusivist nationalism was beginning to eclipse the idea of Ottomanism.²⁸ The nature of the “affinity” providing the basis of the union among Ottoman peoples was not made very clear. The article did not explicate in any specific sense what held together “Damascene [Dimashqi] (Christian or Muslim), Egyptian, Tarabulsi and peoples from “any Ottoman jins [race/ ethnicity].” Likewise, the writer did not attempt to spell out those characteristics that held the Scots, the English, or the Germans within the category of “Western.”

Portents of nationalism in its fully modern form are clearly at work within this article. Ultimately, the conceptual tools employed by romantic nationalism could not capture “Ottoman” universalism. The writer self-consciously avoided placing too much emphasis on religious authority, ethnicity, national origin, and language to sustain the meaning of “Ottomanism.” In addition, unlike nearly all modern nationalisms the article made no reference to a myth of origin or a mythological ancestor to undergird the narrative. Nor did the writer make the case for Ottoman universalism by putting forth a claim based on shared historical experiences or the consciousness-raising modern struggle of “Ottomans.” Finally, there were no references to the symbolic power and moral authority of the Porte’s recently revived claims to the caliphate.

The absence of religion as a determining factor in identity is significant here. Almost certainly part of the explanation for this omission lies in the fact that the British administrators, public figures in Britain, and the foreign press had attacked Egyptians for “religious extremism,” especially in the wake of the Dinshway affair that had begun to unfold days before. ²⁹ The ramifications of the Dinshway incident were perceived as far-reaching and unhappy omens of the future of the British presence in Egypt. For example, the trial and its aftermath were covered with palpable apprehension in the New York Times; the paper reported in ominous tones on the speech before Parliament of Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, on growing “fanaticism” in Egypt. A few days later the Times highlighted the issue of religious fanaticism even more strongly with an article titled “The Dread of a ‘Holy War.’ ”³⁰ Charges of religious extremism by the British authorities toward journalists they felt unsympathetic to their cause, such as ’Ali Yusuf and Rashid Rida, became commonplace in the first decade of the twentieth century. Accusations of religious extremism were often enough to suspend or revoke a newspaper’s publishing license. In the tense atmosphere after Dinshway, suppression of newspapers became a real danger, particularly after 1908, when the draconian Press Law of 1881 was reintroduced. In that atmosphere the writer of the al-Umma article would quite likely have been wary about inserting any discussion of religion into criticisms of the occupation. That notwithstanding, the article gives some indication that the contemplation of collective identity was increasingly separated from religion. The rulers of the Ottoman state had revived the title of caliph in the eighteenth century; moreover, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II (1842–1918), who ruled from 1876 until 1909, had increasingly associated himself and the Ottoman state with the defense of Islam. Istanbul’s supporters and the pan-Islamists in the public sphere often pointed to this role as appropriate for the Ottoman sultans. But the Ottoman claims to be defenders of Islam sat in tension with the nascent forms of modern secular nationalism developing in Egypt. Al-Umma’s examination of Eastern-ness, Egyptian-ness and other forms of ethnic and regional particularism within the Ottoman lands in effect reinforced the legitimacy of “Egyptian” as a new political category. By arguing that Ottoman subjects could become Egyptian, the article gave greater salience to the category “Egyptian.” Ironically, what began as an attempt to demonstrate the vitality of Ottoman universalism ultimately affirmed the efficacy of a new kind of political calculus that was increasingly at odds with the new Ottomanism.

The al-Umma article is emblematic of a new development—that of a world divided between East and West. This binary pattern came to supplant the older notion of a world divided into “civilized [mutamaddun]” and “backward [mutakhallaf]” countries. Writings and speeches by figures as diverse as Rashid Rida, Salama Musa, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal began to incorporate this new view of East and West.³¹ It became common for writers to distinguish Western and Eastern civilization, morals, and laws from one another.³² Many of those employing this distinction cited such Europeans as Gustave Le Bon, Edmond Demolins, and François Guizot, who were widely read and well known in Egypt. By the 1870s many Egyptians embraced European historicism, according to which Islamic civilization had enjoyed a medieval golden age when it served as the conduit of the knowledge that eventually enabled the West to become dominant in the modern age. Thus in differentiating between East and West, Egyptian writers came to accept their European counterparts’ sociohistorical mapping. Of course there was also a political strategy underlying this approach: Egyptians who were writing for the Egyptian press sought to exclude Westerners (Europeans, especially the British) from “Egyptian-ness” by inserting claims about “Eastern-ness” in their work. It was part of the effort to subvert British claims to legitimacy in Egypt.³³ On the other hand, the simple acknowledgment of “Egyptian” as a legitimate political category undermined Ottomanism. The assumptions embedded in the East/West civilizational critique played an important part in obliterating the ideology of Ottomanism in Egypt because the critique was increasingly wielded to exclude non-Egyptian Ottomans.

Adapting European historicist ideas to their work did not prevent many of those writing in Arabic for Egyptian readers from attacking the British occupation and European colonization in general. How were the pitfalls of European control described? A number of diverse elements were put together to indict the system of European dominance. Criticisms of “Christian” control of Muslim Egypt were commonplace. Rashid Rida and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Jawish argued that only Muslims had the right to rule other Muslims.³⁴ The proofs they adduced for this position were derived from Islamic law and were then embedded in modern Egyptian identity. This process, together with such other events as the assassination of Prime Minister Butrus Ghali, a Coptic Christian, on February 20, 1910, set the stage for the ferocious and divisive debates of the 1920s. These debates involved ’Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, Taha Husayn, the religious establishment, and Islamic reformers. The well-known disputations over secularism, the sanctity of religious texts, and the role of religion in Egyptian society seemed to ignore the nationalist coloration of so much of the political violence of the time. For example, Ghali’s assassin claimed that he had acted out of rage due to Ghali’s role in the Dinshway trial and his positions on several other nationalist causes, including his support for the Sudanese Condominium agreement.³⁵

Egyptian observers also resented European dominance for its implication that Egyptians were too “immature” to rule themselves.³⁶ Historians of South Asia have found almost the identical situation, as Indian nationalists bristled at British suggestions that they were incapable of governing themselves and consciously sought to undermine them.³⁷ In Egypt, this perception clearly did not accord well with the notion that Egyptians were “civilized” and refined; it also contradicted the pharaonic narrative of Egyptian civilization that was coming into vogue at the time. A number of elements engendered new versions of Egyptian history, including the translation and publication of the works of Gustave Le Bon, such as La civilization des Arabes (1884) and Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (1895), which were both well known and widely commented on in Egypt. Another factor was the work of archeologists unlocking the secrets of pharaonic society.³⁸ There were those such as Lufti al-Sayyid, who asked how Egypt, once the cradle of learning, refinement, and civilization for the entire world, had fallen into such a desperate state that it was now dominated by non-Muslim outsiders. A “refined” and “civilized [mutamaddun]” country was by definition autonomous. British occupation seemed to confirm the veracity of the statement that Egypt was too immature for self-government. The financier Talat Harb contributed an article to Lufti al-Sayyid’s al-Jarida touching on this theme on October 1, 1907. Harb related the question of Egyptian independence to economic development. He argued that true independence was impossible without some kind of local manufacturing base because “we do not even make matches with which to light our stoves.”

We can gauge the sensitivity, and therefore the importance, of such questions by the interest paid to them in public discussion. Aspirations to realize a political vision of “Egyptian” autonomy and independence taken up in the period from 1895 to 1910 by the likes of Mustafa Kamil, Muhammad Farid, ’Ali Yusuf, and others recalled the projects of social and moral renewal dating back to the 1870s. Like al-‘Afghani and ‘Abduh, these later writers argued that Egypt would achieve its goal of independence only through reform. Autonomy and independence were now a necessary precondition of “civilized [mutamaddun]” status, and Egypt could not be civilized as long it remained under British control.³⁹ Another part of these arguments was that even Europeans working for the Egyptian government worked with their own country’s interests in mind rather than Egypt’s. For the Egyptian critics, the large numbers of Europeans working for the Egyptian government implied that the government itself was not fully loyal to Egypt. Indeed, even writers who did not question British intentions described Europeans as ignorant of local conditions and customs, and many wrote about their complete ignorance of agriculture. The outline of the typical argument was that regardless of the Europeans’ level of sympathy with Egypt, they could not serve the country as well as Egyptians, who better understood not only the needs of agriculture but also the nature and the disposition of the Egyptian peasant. The historian Partha Chatterjee speaks about a parallel feeling among the urban intelligentsia in India, namely that they best understood their peasants and therefore, were not only the most deserving rulers, but also would be the most efficacious.⁴⁰ Similarly, Egyptians were the only ones who could most effectively rule over their own land. Running parallel to this line of argumentation was the reform narrative with its roots in the last third of the nineteenth century, predicting that until such time as the Egyptians were refined and civilized, they would be unable to attain political independence and reclaim their moral position as a civilized country.

GENDERED FALLAHIN, GENDERED ’AFANDIYA

From the 1870s to the 1890s, the Egyptian public sphere abounded with references to the physical geography of Egypt: its beauty and above all else its fitness for agriculture. Toward 1900 and through the first decade of the twentieth century, however, a new sort of theorizing about Egypt, especially its people, displaced the previous emphasis on the physical attributes of the place—fertile soil, abundant water, and bright sun. Routine descriptions of the physical features of Egypt that had formerly been found so often in the press gradually receded; Egypt increasingly took on the quality of an idea. Toward the turn of the century there were more and more frequent references to Egypt’s collective or unitary aspiration to “civilization [tamaddun].”

A new rush of imaginative writing on the countryside paralleled the emergence of the idea of Egypt and of a single people with a unitary fate. One particular kind of new literature, the village novel, evoked some of the same rustic images and sensibilities displayed in the early work of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim or found in the pages of the newspapers Misr and al-Watan in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The new novel’s roots lay in even earlier writing, such as Hazz al-Quhuf.41 Mahmud al-Haqqi’s ‘Adhra’ Dinshway [The Maiden of Dinshway], published in 1906, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab: Muna’ir ‘Akhlaq Rifiya [Zaynab: Scenes of Village Morals], which appeared in 1914, gave expression to these new ideas of Egypt that gained such currency in the wake of the 1906 Dinshway incident.⁴² Muhammad Husayn Haykal later remarked that something recognizable as “Egyptian thought” emerged only after World War I, and in a form not dissimilar to what he had “depicted in the pages of Zaynab” a few years earlier. The village novels explicated the parallels between rural and urban socialization and drew out symbolic ties between fallah and ’afandi in ways that implied a form of identity transcending regional and indeed incipient class differences.

Al-Haqqi described the nightly socializing of the fallahin in terms that were clearly designed to evoke the experiences of literate urbanites in their social spaces and show the parallels between both worlds. He viewed these nightly informal gatherings as the equivalent of a “club [nadi]” in the city for several reasons. First, similarly to their urban counterparts the fallahin discussed “important matters.” Second, those gathered together belonged to a single social “stratum” or “class [tabaqa]”; they shared “similar ideas [min fikr wahid]”; they all lived in close proximity to one another; and they all worked in the “same trade [mihna],” i.e. agriculture.⁴³ Al-Haqqi implied that the village gatherings were superior to and more progressive than their urban equivalent with respect to gender roles. Al-Haqqi praised the fallahin’s intrinsic democratic attitudes, which were most clearly demonstrated in the equality between men and women. Women enjoyed high social standing among the fallahin and “debated equally with men just as the respected author of Women’s Liberation had hoped.”⁴⁴ The reference here is to Qasim Amin’s 1899 work, Tahrir al-Mar’a [The Liberation of Women]. Al-Haqqi affirmed Qasim ‘Amin’s contention that rural women had already attained a measure of liberation from the “stultifying conditions of near-imprisonment” in the home that continued to elude urban women of the middle classes. In so doing al-Haqqi endorsed the view that peasant and urbanite were moving along the same trajectory of reform, and furthermore that in at least one respect the countryside outpaced the city.

Looking back on this period some fifty years later, Haykal wrote that “the elite [dhawat] . . . and others that claimed the right to rule Egypt looked at us, Egyptians [jama‘at al-misriyin] and peasants [jama’a al-fallahin ] with disrespect.”⁴⁵ He added that he consciously wrote Zaynab to place the story of the fallah in the foreground, and this decision meant in part to demonstrate their dignity and present the fallahin as civilized. Consequently, he subtitled Zaynab as “Scenes of Village Morals.” In Zaynab the relations between fallahin and gentry were marked by a sense of mutuality in the recognition of a shared endeavor; that peasant and Egyptian were cut from the same cloth. In the first edition of Zaynab, Haykal underscored this point by using the pseudonym “Fallah Misri [An Egyptian Peasant].” The literal and figurative social proximity of the fallah and the gentry in this book was unlike any previous depiction of rural social relations in Egyptian letters.⁴⁶

Peasant women subjects figured prominently in these works. Al-Haqqi’s Maiden of Dinshway and Haykal’s Zaynab were named after female characters. The lives of Zaynab and the young maiden of Dinshway were adumbrated as models of freedom and equality for the future of urban women.⁴⁷ These characters did more than disrupt the category of peasant woman; their paradigmatic status served to erase the conceptual distinctions between city and country populations in general. That it did so in a particularly gendered fashion once again reminds us of the importance of gender considerations in the formation of modern Egyptian identity and political subjectivity.⁴⁸ Indeed, there is a powerful case to be made, as Elizabeth Thompson does in her work on Lebanon and Syria, that foregrounding gender analysis helps “elucidate the linkages between the home and the political arena” that are “often obscured by lenses of state building, class, ethnicity.”⁴⁹ Idealized rural femininity and masculinity, as depicted by ‘Amin, Haykal, and Hamdi, were found in the pages of newspapers from al-Ra’id al-‘Uthmani to ’Ali Yusuf’s al-Mu’ayyad to the organ of Kamil’s National Party (Hizb al-Watani) Muhammad Farid Wajdi’s al-Dustur. Wajdi, one of the former editors of Mustafa Kamil’s al-Liwa’, published al-Dustur in Cairo beginning in 1907 and his paper commented often on ideal womanhood.⁵⁰ ’Ali Yusuf published a series of Qasim ‘Amin’s articles, some of which contained the idealized femininity developed in his other books, Tahrir al-mar’a [The Liberation of Women, 1899] and al-Mar’a al-jadida [The New Woman, 1900].⁵¹

All of this represented a new kind of development in the evolution of Egyptian identity, which dating back to the 1870s had previously revolved around the literate male ’afandi, nabih, or mutamaddun. Political thinking now had to make substantial allowances for “the fallah,” and it proclaimed “the fallaha,” the gendered women peasant, as the living embodiment of its ideal for all women. The female peasant [al-fallaha] was active inside and outside the home. She worked alongside her husband in the fields and participated in all agricultural tasks.⁵² Her labor could substitute for her husband’s whenever the demands of the economy or state intervened. For example, should her husband be called away for “watch duty [ghafara]” or the corvée, she could competently conduct the family’s business in his absence. She raised the children, welcomed all her husband’s guests, and enjoyed some measure of equality with him. Her labor and her health were both elements of the same equation. The peasant woman was physically healthy “because she [was] not imprisoned in the house all the time with her muscles trained only by moving from room to room.”⁵³ In contrast to the fallaha, the city woman, confined in the house with “nothing to do except arrange furniture,” became enfeebled and mentally impaired because she did not “exercise her body or her mind.”⁵⁴ Rural womanhood was active, healthy, social, and productive while urban femininity was languid, feeble, isolated, and frivolous.

In an unprecedented reversal, the village novel’s treatment of the peasant woman (a treatment found in a fair amount of other writing on the countryside as well) throughout the first decades of the twentieth century transformed the countryside into a model for all Egypt. Despite the lack of education, problems in childrearing, and the persistent hold of superstition and ignorance on the rural population, this writing implied that Egypt would find its path to “civilization [tamaddun]” considerably smoother if it were able to recreate elements of the idealized rural social structure on a larger scale. Indeed, there existed more than a little doubt as to whether education or at least the ability to read might in itself present problems for the “impressionable” urban girls. The Tanta-based weekly al-Hurriya, which was one of the least ephemeral of the provincial newspapers, as it published continuously from 1902 until 1934, included a piece entitled “Intishar alradha’il wa al-madaniya al-kadhiba [The Spread of Sins and False Civilization],” which drew a psychological portrait of “the virgin girl.”⁵⁵ Mahmud Fahmy, the editor and almost certainly the author, explained that if a young woman reads “love stories and the obscene” books easily available in the city, she loses “something of her chastity.” These books may arouse the latent emotions of the “virgin” and entice her to “leave her crib of chastity and purity.” Contrasting this view of the countryside with that implicit in the discussion between ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s fictive peasant women, Bihayna and Sitt al-Balad, in 1892, allows us to gauge the extent of the historical shift in perceptions of the countryside. To recall al-Nadim’s dialogue, we saw Bihayna, the peasant-turned-city-woman, advise Sitt al-Balad, the relocated countrywoman, to emulate and imitate city women in order to become a woman of “today.” By 1907, however, ‘Amin, Haykal and others designated the gendered social relations of the village as a model for the entire society. The difference between the feminine subjectivity articulated by al-Nadim in 1881 and that presented by these twentieth century writers illustrates the advent of a new kind of sociopolitical orientation and a new way of representing it through the fallahin. Al-Nadim had spoken to a world in which “civilizing” Egypt meant that the fallahin should either remain on the margins of society, albeit in a “reformed” state, or at most become passive, silent imitators of urbanites. In contrast, the twentieth century saw the accession of protonationalist discourses about Egyptian identity. Essential to these discourses was the notion of a people, which meant that fallah and ’afandi were integrated into a single whole.

Representations of the fallahin as part of this indissoluble union in a sense inaugurated their subaltern status in the career of the modern Egyptian nation-state. Unity did not guarantee equality; rather it delegitimated any political claims made on the basis of social or economic differences. Such questions were presented as threatening to the “people” at a time of existential danger brought on by the British occupation and the power of the West.

Gendered subjectivities were not exclusive to the peasants. Urban (masculine) youth was also a focus of inquiry and concern. The motif of the spoiled and fine-mannered, even dainty, urban feminized male youth was common as far back as 1881 in writing that explored the reasons for Egypt’s “unfortunate” state. After the turn of the century, however, the attention lavished on this subject became more widespread and took on a much more urgent tone. The popular press associated a host of social, cultural, and political dangers with the idle, middle-class urban youth. This misguided figure socialized with foreigners in clubs and bars where he drank alcohol, gambled, and engaged in “abominable” sexual relationships and acts. In addition, he adopted the public comportment and private morals of Europeans, and in so doing came to “despise” his own “people [jins],” language, and religion.⁵⁶ The profligacy of this gendered figure threatened Egyptian political and social “reform” projects. Numerous writers invoked gendered language in writing about the figure of the literate urban youth. These educated, well-mannered, but idle young men were depicted as subverting the natural order by taking on feminine characteristics. Of course this accusation was not particularly new; in 1881 al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit commented on the habits and mores of spoiled, hedonistic urban youth whose activities were sometimes suspected of including homosexual acts.⁵⁷ New, however, was the emphasis on the implicit connection between these immoral behaviors and foreign occupation. For these misguided youth valued nothing except trivial pleasures and wearing fancy clothes; and they were preoccupied with their beauty and their appearance. Moreover, they were desperate to obtain the approval of those around them, especially foreign authority figures. Thus they were as much a danger to Egypt as were the foreigners employed by the government.

A typical piece of this sort of criticism is taken from al-Istanah, a “literary-political weekly,” published in Cairo by Husayn Taymur and edited by Muhammad al-Sadiq ‘Umran. The article opens with the incendiary comment that “Egyptian civilizing [madaniya]” leads to “feminized childhood [khunutha tufula].”⁵⁸ It also compares “Egyptian civilizing” to “Eastern civilizing,” maintaining that while “Egyptian civilizing” led to feminized childishness, “Eastern civilizing [madaniya]” leads only to destructive and counterproductive “wild masculinity [rajuliya wahashiya].” The “civilized male Egyptian [misri madani]” is taught nothing of value by his parents except to “love food,” wear splendid clothes [labas althiyab al-nadra], “enjoy a life of pleasures,” and “weep when distant from [his mother and father].”⁵⁹ For this effete youth, value and respect emanate not from acquiring knowledge or producing wealth but rather from “washing twice a day.” In addition, the misri madani transgresses sexual proscriptions as he calls on “his servant and his transvestite dancers [khawwal] . . . for whatever suits his fancy.”⁶⁰ This “civilized” Egyptian’s violation of the natural order leads him to “commit abominable acts [‘irtikab al-qaba’ih].” The idle layabout, spending his time in cafés and clubs, no longer even resembles a man. As a result of his upbringing, he has replaced manly “virtue” with feminine “meekness.”⁶¹ In his preoccupation with maintaining “his radiant face shining with beauty” and dissipating his energy in pursuit of pleasure, fine clothes, and almost constant stimulation, he “competes with women” in such feminine pursuits.⁶² This type of Egyptian is influenced by new “ugly habits” adopted from “foreigners.”

The article represents an opinion voiced more often than ever before after 1900, especially in that portion of the press opposed to the British occupation. ⁶³ An example of this school of thought is ‘Abd al-Hamid Farid’s Cairo weekly, Kashaf al-Khabaya’, which was filled with such views,⁶⁴ as were ‘Ibrahim Adham’s and al-Sayyid Sa‘id’s al-Sa‘id and Abd al-Rahman al-Dhahabi’s al-Hijra.⁶⁵ “Western civilizing [tamaddun] . . . causes one to stray toward pleasures and forbidden acts [munkurat] in the name of civilizing [tamaddun] and civilization [hadara].”⁶⁶ As a result the virtue of the “Egyptian umma” is “deluged under a sea” of corruption.⁶⁷ Inventories of these immoral “habits” included mindless consumerism and hedonism bordering on the verge of self-destruction. The famous littérateur and social commentator, Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, also weighed in on the “decadent behavior” of Egypt’s urban youth in an article outlining the some of the pitfalls of “civilization [madaniya]”.⁶⁸ Those who “spend their lives in drinking or in love affairs [gharam]” lead an aimless life with little hope for the future that might very well even lead to suicide.⁶⁹ Images of debauched young men sitting in cafés wasting their time and drinking alcohol, or going in search of “forbidden” pleasures, were an omnipresent feature of literature examining the problems facing Egypt as a social entity.

An article published in al-Umma in 1905 singled out two iconic characters of the early twentieth-century press for criticism: Cairenes “who inherited [their] money” (i.e., the children of wealthy landowners), who were often referred to as Ibna’ al-dhawat; and the “clerk [muwazif] . . . who owns next to nothing.” An educated urban professional, who was likely the scion of country gentry, sits in a bar with the youthful member of the elite, while the obsequious Greek proprietor runs to serve them, shouting in a sarcastic manner, “Yes, Bey, what can I do for you?”⁷⁰ The writer laments that “we see many” like these miserable “locals [wataniyin],” who gather every day in such establishments because they are under the illusion that their empty pursuits are a form of civilization. But, he continued, “Foreigners laugh at us while devouring our money.”⁷¹ These Egyptian barflies are so deluded that they fail to recognize that the European proprietor treats them only with feigned respect. The article paints these two paradigmatic figures, the urban notable and the urban professional or ’afandi, as equally deleterious to the present and future of Egypt. Despite the fact that the professional’s children are “hungry and thirsty” because of his low salary, he “buys [fancy] clothes on installment.” ⁷² Meanwhile, the notable does not invest his money but rather spends it lavishly at the “garish clubs” he frequents.

THE NEW FALLAH: FROM CITIFIED TO CIVILIZED

Earlier we charted the way in which Egyptians understood changing social relations by the manner in which they interpolated peasant characters into representations of power. And this outline allowed us to draw some preliminary conclusions about the elaboration and presentation of new kinds of political claims in the 1880s and 1890s. Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, as descriptions of Egypt became more abstract, so too did the characteristics attributed to Egyptians. We can trace this development by looking at how received notions about the fallah’s timeless roots in the countryside gave way to descriptions of shared religion, language, and culture common to all Egyptians. There were increasing indications of this trend through the 1890s; it became even more pronounced after the turn of the century. A look at a work such as ‘Amin Sayyid Ahmad al-Zayyat’s humorous Tamaddun al-fallah al-jadid [Civilizing of the New Fallah], published in 1902, affords an opportunity to analyze this phenomenon more closely.73

Al-Zayyat himself was a fairly standard representative of the literate class, an editor, publisher, and writer. In addition to the New Fallah, al-Zayyat penned a number of other works of popular literature: books, short stories, and pamphlets in which he combined humor, colloquial language, and provocative situations to mock peasants and the newly urbanized lower classes.⁷⁴ He also briefly published a weekly in Cairo called al-Zar . The weekly was published around 1908, although there remain only a few issues still available to the researcher at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo. A zar was a ritualistic exorcism mostly practiced by women. Zars seemed to have gained popularity in Egypt’s cities during the nineteenth century and were discussed with great apprehension by Egyptian men. They viewed the zar as dangerous, most likely because it blurred carefully policed “natural” social and gender boundaries. It was said to threaten the home and society, and was linked with a number of social ills, ranging from selfishness and avarice to drug use and illicit sexual activity.⁷⁵ The zar came under considerable scrutiny and opprobrium in the press of the time, and the phenomenon itself apparently fascinated al-Zayyat. Al-Zayyat was typical of those who condemned the “superstition” of the zar and thought it harmful because of the ways in which it contravened social and religious norms. Women transgressed gender boundaries in the zar by assuming the role of a male shaykh within a gathering consisting exclusively of women. Because of the role played by women, especially “darkskinned” women, in this ritual, the many sensational exposés in the press and elsewhere were perhaps almost inevitably cast in gendered and raced terms. A typical article expressed dismay over the fact that the “black slave girl [jariya sawda’]” was accorded such high status and power simply for acting as the “shaykh” of the ceremony.⁷⁶ Al-Zayyat wrote another short collection of anecdotes and satires that were supposed to expose the zar as merely part of a scheme perpetrated by women against their menfolk.⁷⁷

Despite the implications of al-Zayyat’s approach, he was little interested in serious social commentary; instead he produced strictly lowbrow humor meant to entertain, amuse, and titillate a literate, although not necessarily highly educated, audience. Nevertheless, we can look at Civilizing of the New Fallah as a barometer of changes that had occurred in thinking about the fallah and about her or his position in Egyptian society. The book comprises a number of sketches, anecdotes, and tableaux, some several pages in length and others a paragraph or less. Much of the material deals with the urban poor, although they are marked as recent arrivals from the countryside. Much of the book was written in colloquial Arabic, probably for comedic proposes and to mock the speech of the fallah and the other lower classes.

Al-Zayyat’s work is an excellent window through which we can observe the shift that had occurred over the previous decades in writing and thinking about fallahin. Al-Zayyat’s stories, anecdotes, and jokes poke fun at the fallah’s ignorance in ways that resemble ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s writing in the 1870s, and like al-Nadim’s early work they resonate with Shirbini’s seventeenth-century parody of country life. But unlike the earlier texts that became part of literate culture in the 1870s through the 1890s, al-Zayyat’s work demonstrated little sympathy for the fallah. Indeed, in reading Civilizing of the New Fallah one senses that the fallah must have evoked new kinds of fear within al-Zayyat’s literate urban milieu. With the migration of the rural population into the cities to escape the corvée and the growing landlessness, or to search for work in Egypt’s nascent industries, the country was indeed moving into the city.⁷⁸ Nevertheless, similarly to the writing of the 1880s and 1890s, al-Zayyat’s representations of peasants abstracted and even masked the socioeconomic component of peasant identity. While much of the earlier writing achieved this abstraction through discourses of reform and civilizational critiques of backwardness, Civilizing of the New Fallah accomplished the same feat by inserting the fallah into something akin to a nation.

After the turn of the century, the absence of sympathy for the plight of the fallah illustrated the collapsing of the physical and conceptual boundaries between peasants and literate urbanites. By 1907 it was possible for someone writing in an informal, popular style to heap the same kinds of criticism upon an arriviste fallah that was already associated with the urban intellectual strata—in effect marking the dissolution of the almost metaphysical boundary between fallah and urbanite. In short, now that the fallah was represented in terms similar to the new strata of literate urbanites; the fallah was no longer the absolute other.

The introductory poem after which the entire collection was named describes the poverty and misery of a fallah’s life, in which “most of his meals were rough cheese [mish] and radishes,” and whose worry “was compounded by disaster and misfortune.”⁷⁹ However, in the recent past this formerly miserable fallah attained unprecedented wealth by growing cotton and suddenly found himself able to purchase “Kashmir scarves and gold watch chains,” even though he knows not what to do with such items. Eventually, the ridiculous nouveau riche fallah manages to obtain a government appointment in some provincial office “with a regular salary.”⁸⁰ Soon this comical figure, who formerly ate only uncooked simple food, demands to feast on “elegant foods” and in general seeks to “imitate the Beys.”⁸¹ Civilizing of the New Fallah’s poetic overture heralds the entry of a new kind of rustic character into the modern, urban Egyptian imaginary. It inserts the “new fallah” into what had become a standard narrative of criticism for the urban intelligentsia for over a quarter-century. From the days of al-‘Afghani in the 1870s and al-Nadim’s al-Tankit wa al-Tabkit in 1881, consumerism and faddism had not just been objects of scorn but had been associated with the gravest problems facing Egyptian society. The consumerism and faddishness of the urban intelligentsia and professional classes had been depicted as forms of ignorance born out of a misunderstanding of the meaning of civilization. Reformers and social critics alike labeled such behaviors as extremely detrimental to the present and the future of the Egyptian community, and declared that they represented a serious obstacle to the East’s attaining the status of “civilization [tamaddun].” Empty consumerism was both a byproduct and result of Egyptians imitating foreigners. After the turn of the century it was common for newspapers to argue that copying foreigners led to forms of bida‘ or heresy.⁸² Aping the customs, habits, ways of life, and mores of the West had compelled Muslims and Easterners alike to give up their own religion, culture, and ways of life. Such writers as al-Zayyat accused social climbers and their counterparts from the countryside of being most likely to imitate foreigners. By the sheer volume and omnipresence of these kinds of thoughts in the press and in other writings of the time, we can assume that they were familiar to al-Zayyat’s readers. Therefore, his observation that few among the peasantsturned-gentry “are pious [and] pray” would have evoked to his readers the ambitious rural arriviste dressed in an ill-fitting “’afandi” suit and driven by a desire to impress foreigners.⁸³

Al-Zayyat registered the threat embodied in the recently citified peasant with respect to external cultural dangers: Europeans enticed the gullible and unsophisticated peasant into empty materialism and irreligion under the guise of “being civilized [tamaddun].” Read carefully, al-Zayyat’s representation of his citified peasant character offers clues about the changes in notions of community among Egypt’s professional classes. We can triangulate between these clues and shifts in Egypt’s political economy to describe the resultant transformations in social relations as well as the ways in which these transformations were part of the emergence of another stage of political modernity.

Civilizing of the New Fallah resembled many popular works of fiction and theatre (and eventually film) in its mockery of the rural population for their simple roots and uncouth manners. Nevertheless, the book’s pointed criticism of the newly citified peasant erased the physical distance between countryside and city. It broke down the conceptual distance between fallah and ’afandi in the name of a people and, almost simultaneously, in the name of the Egyptian nation. Representations of the fallahin, whether mocking or romanticizing, increasingly incorporated universalistic social and moral sensibilities. No longer an isolated subaltern functioning on the margins of an emerging plantation system, the peasant was either a dolt or a reservoir of authenticity, but unlike the old ’afandi, he belonged to the larger social collective. Nevertheless, the uneasiness al-Zayyat expressed about the peasant characters magnified the position of his omniscient narrator (i.e., the sober, literate ’afandi) as the figure most appropriate to assume a leadership role in Egypt.

Al-Zayyat’s representation of this “new” peasant also reveals something of the homogenizing nature of the protobourgeoisie’s discourse of nation. That al-Zayyat deemed the fallah guilty of the same transgressions for which social commentators and religious reformers had long condemned the middle-strata ’afandiya signaled that the fallah had indeed became an identifiable part of Egypt. Likewise, criticism for committing excess and violating social norms helped solidify the new fallah’s Egyptian identity, because becoming part of Egypt entailed a specific kind of moral trajectory. For the new fallah, like the old ’afandi, must overcome his impiety and indiscretions in order to become an upstanding and respected member of the Egyptian community. No specific interventions were required for the new fallah, however. The same approach and methods appropriate to reform the urban middle classes—moral guidance, learning to love the “homeland [watan]” and “patriotism [wataniya]”, rejecting consumerism, and recognizing the error of blindly imitating foreigners—were prescribed to redeem the new fallah. All signs of fallah difference were erased by the discourse of moral reform. Al-Zayyat’s text underscored the conviction that the new fallah was a product of the same global forces that were creating the cultural figure known as the ’afandi. Capitalist export agriculture and the penetration of international markets enabled European tastes, fashions, and habits to produce locally parallel effects; thus the markets became a conduit for the movement of European ideas of the individual, laws, and society into Egypt.

One way in which this transition is perceptible is the way in which al-Zayyat threaded “fallah-ness” into a new kind of historical narrative. We can gauge the entry into currency of a modern understanding of Egypt as a moral and political entity reflected in such texts as al-Zayyat’s that distinguished the new fallah from the old.⁸⁴ The figure of the new fallah differed from received notions of the old fallah insofar as it could be integrated into emergent visions of Egypt as a unitary historical subject. Al-Zayyat’s book presented the old fallah as passive and unchanging over the endless millennia of Egyptian history. Even if its reasoning overlapped only occasionally with the bulk of the period’s technical writing, Civilizing of the New Fallah echoed the agricultural experts’ conclusions about peasant farming. Al-Zayyat derided the old fallah for employing the primitive tools and unthinkingly following the ancient farming techniques of his ancestors. Worse, his basic knowledge of agriculture was restricted by his ignorance, obstinacy, and illiteracy.⁸⁵

Civilizing of the New Fallah articulated several parallels between the new fallah and Egypt. First, it led readers to infer that the new fallah, like Egypt itself, benefited from the opportunities inherent in export market agriculture. Second, just as Egypt could transform itself through agricultural productivity, the new fallah could be remade through reform and could refashion himself through capitalist exchange. Third, a parable of national renewal and the idea of individual and collective self-fashioning lay just below the surface of al-Zayyat’s tale of fallah transformation. Just as the exponential growth in export agriculture in late nineteenth-century Egypt produced the notions of both the ’afandi and new fallah, it also paved the way for the emergence of a new understanding of Egypt. For all of al-Zayyat’s mockery, ultimately, his book insinuated that just as Egypt could harness its agricultural potential to transform itself, the old fallah too could be supplanted by the new fallah.

In some respects the sort of fallah characters found in the writings of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and ’Ali Yusuf in the 1880s and 1890s anticipated the kind of fallah who emerges in the pages of al-Zayyat’s 1902 book. There were, however, significant differences between the capacity for self-fashioning demonstrated by the fictive peasants in the earlier writings and those found in Civilizing of the New Fallah. We saw in the case of al-Nadim’s Sitt al-Balad (the peasant woman who came under the tutelage of the already urbanized Bihayna) that peasant women became “town [bandar]” women through imitation. Sitt al-Balad required comprehensive guidance from her tutor Bihayna, who in turn trained her to give up her autonomy and to watch herself. In the city Sitt al-Balad would not allow visitors into her home, gave up going about the streets alone, and abstained from smoking. She had to consciously discard nearly every aspect of her rural upbringing and lifestyle, and replace them with the habits, customs, and ways of life of the city woman. In other words, the countrywoman became a townswoman through an external process of imitation and an internal regime of self-discipline and self-effacement. In 1892, the peasant woman and the city woman belonged to entirely distinct castes; Sitt al-Balad could move into the urban caste only by leaving the category of fallaha or peasant woman behind.

Al-Zayyat’s version of this story, written only a little more than ten years later, differed significantly from al-Nadim’s morality tale. The new fallah remade himself through his agricultural activities and success. In addition, Civilizing of the New Fallah depicted the peasant’s newly acquired and obviously affected manners, tastes, and moral sense as comical, but even as it did so its social sensibilities evidenced an ethos much more akin to modern liberalism than to al-Nadim’s earlier caste-based vision of society. Certainly, al-Zayyat ridiculed the peasant for his absurd and haphazard adoption of “civilized” habits and way of life. In contrast to Sitt al-Balad’s unquestioning imitation of the townsfolk, however, al-Zayyat narrated a story in which the uncivilized aspire to civilization on their own terms. His was a universal moral tale of the all-encompassing community of Egyptians whose subject, although still the literate urbanite, held out the possibility that anyone could become civilized. The fallah in the tale, resembling any ambitious technocrat of the time, has obtained a government position “with a salary” and acquired all the accoutrements of civilized urban life.⁸⁶ Civilizing of the New Fallah poses the question: Where else might civilizing lead? The new fallah was following the same trajectory as the literate urbanite; thus that path was transformed into a natural progression and not a product of complex social, cultural, and economic forces in which the new middle class had deftly positioned itself. The distinctive socioeconomic position of the fallah was again erased, but this time through a putatively universalist narrative. The new fallah could become an “Egyptian” in the same way that anyone among the urban class could become an Egyptian. The new fallah need not study urbanites nor imitate their bodily movements and social mores. He or she did not need to emulate their way of life. Rather the urban ’afandi lifestyle would naturally emerge out of the new fallah’s involvement in capitalist agriculture and its attendant consumption patterns.

This new fallah did not belong to a different caste, so there was no need to cleanse himself of atavistic rural traits, as had been the case with al-Nadim’s Sitt-al-Balad. Egypt’s changed circumstances (i.e., potentially unlimited wealth derived from agriculture) opened up the ground on which Egyptians were formed—peasant and ’afandi. Al-Zayyat and his new fallah shared a new kind of social and moral space. Ultimately, the fallah no longer needed to imitate city dwellers and become citified. The very idea of citifying, in which the rural population alone would cast off its way of life in favor of that of the urban sophisticate, belonged to the past. It reflected a society that had understood itself to be divided by caste differences.

In the ’afandi imaginary the distinction between city and country began to dissolve, and with it went the castelike notions that had guided the social imagination. After the turn of the century literate ’afandis no longer sketched out a social vision in which the peasants would have to imitate the urban population in order to become civilized. In the new Egypt, all aspired to the same ideals; consequently civilization and civilized-ness were universal performative categories. The writers of this period understood that a single regime of schooling, refinement, religious practice, and knowledge made the new fallah and the urban intellectual equally Egyptian . Egypt was producing “new fallahin” who shared the same aspirations and hopes of their urban ’afandi compatriots because they had the same moral and political biography in common. The same economic, political, and cultural forces shaped both the new fallah and the urban intellectual, and together these two groups constituted “Egypt.”

THE MODERN STATE IN NATIONAL AND COLONIAL IDENTITY

A fairly typical article “al-dhaka’ al-misri [The Egyptian Intellect]” that appeared in al-Umma in 1905 accused the British of shortchanging the educational system in Egypt.87 The writer, Muhammad Ghalib al-Bajuri, concluded that this development was hardly surprising as the foreigners entrusted with the homeland’s [watan] affairs were not concerned with its long-term interests. Al-Bajuri argued that these foreigners were quite naturally predisposed towards helping their own countries “advance [taqaddum ].” Indeed, those foreign lands “had advanced beyond others due to serious efforts undertaken by their own men... in serving [their country] and even sacrificing their lives for it.”⁸⁸ Thus he reasoned that the road to “civilization [tamaddun]” required that Egyptians similarly gain control of the administrative management and governmental affairs of their own land.⁸⁹

The article, written in July 1906, only days after the Dinshway trial and during a period of great political agitation, was hardly remarkable for its anti-British and its protonationalist sentiments. Al-Bajuri railed against the British occupation and Egyptians’ almost complete exclusion from the operation of their own government. This indignity was compounded because even those qualified for advancement by having obtained the “highest educational certificates” were relegated to lowly positions and consequently were little more than a “tool in the hand of the foreigner.”⁹⁰ He mocked the self-congratulatory but contradictory British attitudes toward the occupation and their Egyptian subjects. Al-Bajuri noted scornfully that they boasted that their Egyptian charges received the highest honors in Europe’s finest schools but refused to cede any real power to them in managing their own affairs.⁹¹ Al-Bajuri also described Egypt’s conditions in gendered terms. Under the British occupation, Egyptians had been feminized; they had been rendered passive and without the capacity or even the will to act. As long as domination by outsiders continued, he argued, there would be “no men in Egypt.”

Because al-Bajuri’s article was fairly typical, it may be understood as an accurate record of attitudes toward British rule among Egypt’s educated professional classes. There are, however, other themes that we can extrapolate from the text. Because the writer’s sentiments so clearly demonstrated his recognition of the legal and political framework enjoined by imperial expansion and Western-dominated economic institutions and practices, his article represents an opportunity to reflect on forms of colonial power emerging at the time.⁹² Colonial or imperial regimes sought ways of consolidating their rule, facilitating their exploitation of local human and natural resources, and carrying out some form of a civilizing mission. These kinds of projects necessitated profound and fundamental changes among the colonized; more succinctly, the colonial policy was aimed at achieving a “systemic re-definition and transformation of the terrain on which the life of the colonized was lived.”⁹³ In the words of Lord Cromer, the British-led “reform” project sought to “graft... European civilization” on a “backward Eastern Government and society.” This effort would be accomplished by “mould[ing]” the Egyptian “into something really useful.”⁹⁴

From this vantage point a number of questions come to mind in reading al-Bajuri. He excoriated the English for excluding Egyptians from positions of authority. We can therefore with good reason read his criticism in light of the rise of nationalist sentiment or class consciousness. We might also, however, look at this same phenomenon as the “introduction of a new game of politics that the colonial would (eventually) be obliged to play if [he or she] were to be counted as political.”⁹⁵ Al-Bajuri’s protonationalist sentiments were a testament to the fact that Egyptians were compelled to accept and even become advocates of the modern state, to understand the self-regulating liberal moral self as natural, and to embrace the juridical categories and legal institutions associated with both.⁹⁶ For the Egyptians of this period, the political ideologies of Ottomanism, pan-Islamism, nationalism, and Arabism all shared similar assumptions about the nature of political subjects, and had in common a view of the modern state as the effective force in society. They shared these assumptions in part because the colonial power obliged them to do so.

A new kind of political discourse emerged out of the anticolonial, protonationalist thought and rhetoric in the two decades between 1890 and 1910. The renaissance of Arabic letters [al-Nahda] that occurred at the same time spurred a self-conscious effort on the part of many literate Egyptians to reexamine their cultural inheritance and their history according to a mélange of local and imported ideas and values. At the same time, fundamental institutional and social change continued as Egypt’s status as a commodity producer in the European-dominated world economy became further enhanced. Together these developments produced the conditions for the formation of a new kind of political subject.⁹⁷ Previous chapters have recounted the emergence and evolution of the iconic cultural figures and political subjects of the 1870s and 1880s: the nabih and the mutamaddun. Through the 1890s the city-based, self-disciplined, and pious nabih/mutamaddun slowly evolved into an “Egyptian” with a worldly view of politics and a comprehensive vision of the country’s collective future. As a result, language acquired a more recognizable nationalist meaning while customs, mores, and ways of life were increasingly identified as expressive of Egyptian-ness or Eastern-ness. Part of this “Egyptianization” process was a narrative of threat from the outside and the need to protect Egypt’s essential spiritual inside.⁹⁸ After the turn of the century such texts as al-Bajuri’s “Al-dhaka’ al-misri” and al-Zayyat’s Civilizing of the New Fallah marked another stage in the transition to political modernity, as Egypt’s collective fate was seen as tied to the strength of the state and other bureaucratic institutions, and as politics itself was expressed through these institutions. Al-Zayyat, for example, subsumed both the new fallah of his imagination and his ’afandi narrator (and by extension his ’afandi readers) into a single social and moral grouping—the Egyptian people.

Some writings on the events of the Dinshway trial lay these new trends out in stark relief. The incident and its aftermath produced a sense of urgency to disseminate new kinds of political thinking. A few days after the pronouncement and execution of the sentences, Muhammad Shakir wrote a series of articles in al-Umma decrying the harsh treatment of the “ignorant” peasants and the extreme sentences meted out for the “crime.”⁹⁹ In one of the earliest such instances in modern Egyptian writing, Shakir based his article on the inner thoughts of a fallah as he stood manacled and chained in front of the court.¹⁰⁰ This interior monologue was combined with the fact that Shakir described himself (and by extension his ’afandi readership) as belonging to the same jins [race or people] as the shackled peasant.¹⁰¹ While jins has now come to signify race and sometimes ethnicity, in the early twentieth century its meaning was rather indistinct.

Shakir’s use of the term is instructive about the ways in which changes in collective identity were understood. Like many words expressing aspects of communal ties and kinship, the term jins experienced a transformation of sorts. Egyptians were forging a new vocabulary in newspapers, books, and legal treatises capable of better articulating legal and political concepts associated with the modern state.¹⁰² A look at Shakir’s text reveals the fluidity of the evolving nomenclature of the time. His use of the term jins infused it with new meaning because he situated it in a single equation with the word British. In his writing the idea of “British” became an example of jins and in this way he displaced a degree of what the twenty-first century sensibility recognizes as “nationality” onto the latter term. Reconfigured as nationality, jins also became gendered as it superseded previous categories delineating social bonds and Egypt’s collective identity. A jins of any kind was a masculine domain; thus possession of “Egyptian jins” set one apart from the “British.” Through the word’s newly acquired power to differentiate between national groups, jins was endowed with a quality akin to the contemporary juridical meaning of “citizenship.” But because the term was gendered masculine, the relationship of women to the category of “citizen” was fraught with a host of contradictions.

Moreover, Shakir’s article sheds light on a particularly problematic moment in the elaboration of the modern notion of a national people. As the vast array of writing on nationalism has made explicit over the last twenty years, the idea of a “people” is a prerequisite for the appearance and growth of the modern state. It is also a crucial element in the crystallization of modern forms of nationalism.¹⁰³ Even as Egypt’s polite, literate urbanites continued to portray the peasants as ignorant and benighted in their writings, they seemed to reject the notion of an absolute difference between themselves and the villagers. There was some measure of consensus that the fallahin of Dinshway were ignorant and probably guilty of some kind of violation of the law. Both “pro” and “con” positions assumed that the locals were isolated, ignorant, and backward. But even those observers who were convinced of the peasants’ guilt thought the trial had been unfair and the penalties draconian—out of all proportion to whatever offenses had been committed. Nevertheless, there were also such other voices as Mahmud al-Haqqi’s in’Adhra Dinshway, in which he depicted the peasants as having acted completely within their rights. Al-Haqqi described the death of the British captain (from heat stroke) as an accident and the result of bad luck. Following this same line of thought was a series of articles by al-Umma’s publisher, Hashim ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Muwani, to counter pro-British voices in the press. In the articles al-Muwani described the fallahin as “calm, quiet and moderate” and guilty of no crime in this case.¹⁰⁴ While the assessment of the fallahin as ignorant accorded with urban sensibilities from the 1870s, there is at least one significant difference after 1900. Literate urbanites now considered themselves and the fallahin as parts of a single social, moral, and political orientation that was coming to be called “Egyptian.” A commonplace expression of the recognition of “benighted peasants” as members of the larger sociopolitical whole appeared in al-Hurriya.¹⁰⁵ The article was yet another exposition of the vulnerability of peasants to moneylenders. It struck a sympathetic note in defense of the plight of what it called the “increasingly indebted” fallahin, declaring that although they were “ignorant,” they “should not be punished for their ignorance.”¹⁰⁶ The peasants, as an integral component of “Egypt,” deserved laws that would “lessen the threat” posed by usurious interest rates charged by “foreign” moneylenders.¹⁰⁷ Even though the peasants did not “read newspapers where discussions of their problems appear[ed]” and did not “attend meetings in which speeches about their condition” were given, they were still a vital constituency among the “people [’ahl].”¹⁰⁸ Admission into the universal category of the Egyptian “people [’ahl]” did not depend on education, social status, or one’s role in production or consumption.

Rather than viewing this idea of a people [’ahl] as “opening” a civic space for wider participation and deliberation, however, it is more accurate to see this “opening” as a strategy of a modernizing power regime to produce morally autonomous individuals.¹⁰⁹ Such subjectivity was, and is, necessary for the orderly functioning of modern law, market relations, and the state. As a result the logic prevailed in which the individual fully expects and accepts as natural that these forces will intervene in and even produce the ground on which his or her life is lived. Accordingly, attention to the peasants’ plight in 1906 differed from the general tone of the writings of the previous generation. After the turn of the century, authors largely abandoned the tone of charitable sympathy found in the press of the 1870s and 1880s. Instead, al-Hurriya argued that as a legitimate constituency the peasantry had a right to expect the state to intervene on their behalf to look after their well-being.

A look at some of the writing on the Dinshway incident and its aftermath might further elucidate this question. First of all, a brief description of the incident itself may be helpful. On June 13, 1906, a group of British officers on their way to their barracks in the Egyptian Delta town of Shibin Al-Kawm stopped in the village of Dinshway to hunt pigeons raised by the villagers for food. Their visit, unfortunately, resulted in one of the most infamous incidents during the British occupation of Egypt. After the soldiers had accidentally wounded a woman in the village and set the threshing floor of a barn on fire, an altercation ensued between the soldiers and the villagers. One of the soldiers was a veteran of the Boer War named Captain Paul. Paul managed to escape the gauntlet of blows raining down on the group but had been struck in the head during the melee. He collapsed and then died of sunstroke while on his way back to the barracks seeking help. Lord Cromer was incensed and convened a special tribunal in Shibin al-Kawm. Fifty-two villagers were convicted; four of them, Hasan Ali Mahfuz, Yusuf Hasan Salim, Sayyid Issa Salim, and Mahmud Darwish Zahran were executed by hanging in front of their families in Dinshway on June 28, 1906. Dozens more were whipped in front of the other villagers and their families. The incident caused outrage in Britain as well as in Egypt. Cromer was forced into retirement the following year, and those remaining in prison were granted amnesty soon afterward. It is difficult to overestimate the importance that Egyptian nationalists assigned to this incident; Dinshway set off a firestorm of protest in Egypt at the time that festered for years. The resentment and anger it caused and the agitation that grew out of it continued for the rest of the decade and into the World War I years, culminating in the 1919 revolution. As a result, the British were forced to concede a limited form of “independence” to Egypt in 1922.

Dinshway has sometimes been regarded as a singular moment of crystallization in Egyptian nationalist thought, and indeed this may very well be true. But if we choose to frame the period in this way, we may overlook the fact that both pro-British and anti-British politics furthered the colonial project of remaking the ground on which Egyptian moral and political subjectivity was formed. At this point we shall look at some of the writing about the event to explore the ways in which the place of the fallahin in the social and political calculus had been shifting for some time. One newspaper, al-Mu‘tasam, ran an editorial rejecting the claim made in the English-language Daily Gazette that the behavior exhibited by the peasants of Dinshway was the direct result of French machinations. ¹¹⁰ The writer, most likely al-Mu‘tasam’s publisher and editor, Ahmad al-Majdi, argued that the “movement against the English” was headed by “the people of Dinshway” themselves and by urban intellectuals “sitting in the cafés of Alexandria.”¹¹¹ This assertion was made in response to the Gazette, which claimed that French nationals living in Egypt incited the peasants against the English.

We can examine the exchange between al-Mu‘tasam and the Daily Gazette for what seem to be two opposing views of “Egyptian” agency; this analysis will in turn tell us much about subaltern politics as well. The English paper, as quoted in al-Mu‘tasam, credited only the “high officials who drink this spirit [i.e., the desire for independence] from the French.”¹¹² Thus, they are the only ones with the capacity to incite ordinary, “ignorant” Egyptians. The implication was that only a small elite exercised autonomous political will, and that even this group took its cues and inspiration from Europeans. According to British officials and local pro-British apologists, one of the primary factors for the occupation was that Egyptians were not yet ready to rule themselves because they had yet to master the intricacies of modern politics and administration. Lord Cromer stated that “Egyptians... were little more than ciphers.” Their incapacity for self-government had many causes, not the least of which was “religious prejudice.” The Egyptian “holds fast to the faith of Islam... which takes ... the place of patriotism.” Worse, Islam “crystallizes religion and law into one inseparable and immutable whole,” which renders Egyptian society incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern world.¹¹³

If the great mass of Egyptians, the peasants, were seen as having been able to develop endogenous political ideologies and then having acted in accordance with them, such a perspective would have given the lie to the British officials’ contentions that Egypt was still “immature” and enveloped in “backwardness.” On the other hand, al-Mu‘tasam’s rejoinder depicted “café-attending” intellectuals of Alexandria and the fallahin of Dinshway standing together in opposition to the British occupation. Undergirding this sociopolitical aggregation of urbanites and rural inhabitants was a view of Egypt as a single moral-political entity, an insult to whose integrity and honor caused affront equally to all. Al-Mu‘tasam’s al-Majdi termed the Gazette’s denial of Egyptian agency in resistance to the British an “injury” which must be treated “with vigor in order to erase it from the souls of Egyptians.”¹¹⁴ Al-Majdi reasoned that regardless of the motivations of Dinshway’s peasants in lashing out at the British officers, the important fact is that they did so. Their deed was then entered into the ledger of “resistance” against the occupation, and thereby subsumed into the career of the Egyptian national political community. The acts of Dinshway’s peasants became an expression of Egypt’s “historical” consciousness.

Al-Majdi’s article shows once again how Egyptian-ness was increasingly articulated through the lens of a “people” and manifested through an almost ineffable sense of a collective historical trajectory and mission. And just as the present was reconfigured by a vision of a unitary Egyptian political will and agency, so too was the methodology and understanding of history reformed to secure Egypt’s future destiny.

FROM DINSHWAY TO THE 1919 REVOLUTION

To the Egyptian urban intelligentsia, Dinshway represented all that was wrong with British occupation. According to them it showed the extent to which the British ruled with a heavy hand, and it underscored the fact that they employed Egyptians only to further their own aims. During the infamous special tribunal, while British judges and prosecutors oversaw the proceedings, Egyptians participated as both prosecutors and judges. The former ‘Urabist and future Wafd and Constitutional Liberal Party leader, Ibrahim Hilbawi, was the chief prosecutor; Butrus Ghali, the former foreign minister and future prime minister, represented the khedive. At the conclusion of the trial it was Ghali who provided legal confirmation of the death sentences and whippings administered by the British.

The news coverage of the trial in the last two weeks of June 1906 was sensational and unlike anything seen previously in the Egyptian press. Al-Umma ’s reports included full transcripts of the trial and very precise observations of the time of day for each twist and turn of the trial. One could draw a very clear mental picture of the proceedings simply from reading the many columns devoted to the trial in the paper. Al-Umma was no exception in this regard, however, as all the Egyptian papers were filled with accounts of the incident and the trial. There was also a deluge of pamphlets; moreover, Yahya Haqqi’s novella about the Dinshway incident appeared in serialized form over the course of the next few months and was published as a book the following year. While the pro-British press saw either a French-inspired conspiracy or the harbinger of a popular anti-British uprising, the antioccupation press valorized the fallahin of the village and spoke of them as “my brothers” or “our brothers.” While such sentiments had been expressed before, the circumstances of their utterance had now changed. It stands to reason, therefore, that the significance of such sentiments vis-à-vis the peasantry had now changed as well. Perhaps Dinshway could have been the moment when the ’afandiya took seriously the peasants’ active role in making Egypt’s future.

However, notwithstanding the many statements of fraternalism and solidarity between ’afandi journalists or activists and the peasants of Dinshway, no new political alliance emerged in the aftermath of the incident. Instead, such statements should be read merely as part of the campaign for British evacuation—for which many observers, such as Mustafa Kamil, the Egyptian nationalist and pan-Islamic activist, and his National Party, were increasingly beginning to agitate. The period between 1906 and 1919 saw very powerful currents of nationalist thought as well as campaigning for change by Kamil, his party, its second chairman, Muhammad Farid, and journalists throughout the press. The “victimized fallah” played an important role in nearly every articulation of nationalist sentiment. But within the powerful discourses of nationalist protest, organizing, and mobilization over the course of the next thirteen years, the written representations of the peasants remained relatively unchanged. Indeed, the Egyptian peasant continued to appear in print and in speeches as either a hapless victim or a cipher within an oppressed and voiceless undifferentiated mass. Representations of ignorance and naiveté continued to render the countryside as a place without politics and without any internal social dynamic for change.

Historians of Egypt have always marked the protests following the Dinshway incident as the beginning of the modern Egyptian nationalist movement. The incident became enshrined in the nationalist consciousness and was continually cited through the 1919 revolution and afterward as an example of the tyranny of British occupation. Mustafa Kamil often referred to it in his speeches before his death in February 1908. For example, in one speech in Alexandria in October 1907, Kamil spoke of Dinshway as a “humiliation for all Egyptians,” bemoaning the harsh treatment of the “people (’ahali)” in the village.115 His successor, Muhammad Farid, also made Dinshway a standard part of his speeches as well. Yahya Haqqi’s book, mentioned earlier, memorialized the events, while the coverage of the trial filled all the anti-British newspapers. In addition, the newspapers commemorated the event in some way on its anniversary every July, even such organs of the prooccupation press as al-Muqattam, the English-language Egyptian Gazette, and the French-language L’Égypte. For instance, on the third anniversary of Dinshway in July 1909, Muhammad Sayyid al-Salmuni’s Dimyuti weekly, al-Qanbila, which was extremely critical of the British occupation, argued that that “Dinshway was the greatest blow against the Nile Valley ... it was an explosion across the Egyptian sky and its echo resounded throughout the world.”¹¹⁶ A little less than two weeks later, Amin and Najib Haddad’s Alexandrian weekly, Lisan al-Arab, mocked the agitation associated with the incident and argued that too much was made of this rather minor affair that had involved simple criminal behavior. As the Haddad brothers noted, “Amnesty was granted to the remaining prisoners ... the English know they were mistaken ... and Lord Cromer was removed.” They then asked: If all of these “efforts by the English do not atone for Dinshway, what do we want the British to do?”¹¹⁷

Despite all the controversy about the meaning of the event and its peasant victims, Egyptian writing about the countryside continued apace. In print, the peasants remained relatively unchanged between 1906 and the revolution of 1919. For example, less than a year after Dinshway an article from al-Insan spoke about the peasantry in ways that had become customary over the previous ten years.¹¹⁸ This particular article is also interesting because it narrates a historicist version of the decline of Islam as part of its cautionary tale to warn of the dangers of neglecting the education of the peasantry. It called on reformers to try to “change the behavior” of the peasants in order to “avoid further decline” because the uneducated “common cultivators (muzari‘ amma)” are the “death of the umma.” The writer went on to advise those interested in reforming Egypt that they must convince the “city folks [ibna’ al-Mudin]” that this moral reformation of the peasantry was a worthy project to undertake.¹¹⁹

There were also some new wrinkles in the writing on the countryside during this period. For example, there began to appear more and more references to the countryside as a place of leisure and relaxation away from the pressures of the city. But these pieces often contained many of the same critiques and observations that had previously colored accounts of rural life and the countryside. One such piece in al-Qanbila spoke about going to the countryside to rest and view the greenery.¹²⁰ The writer described his desire to relax in a place away from the city and while there to check on the general condition of the fallahin. His idyllic retreat into nature was soon ruined, however, as he discovered the “disasters of the fallahin” there. Yet again conjuring up the incompetent and corrupt irrigation engineers, the writer remarked that the canals are empty while all the water goes to the rich and to others who can pay bribes to the engineers. Another sojourner writing in the same paper a few months later found a complete lack of security in the countryside, where the peasants confronted not only the vicissitudes of nature and the incompetent irrigation engineers, but also criminal gangs that roamed the countryside stealing crops and livestock.¹²¹ Only through correcting the failed government polices of policing the countryside could this “plague” be lifted. Yet another visitor to the countryside complained about the ignorant peasants neglecting their duty to the Egyptian collective by growing cotton instead of vegetables.¹²² Thus Egypt experienced a wheat shortage even as it exported the precious grain. The article then veers into a critique of the ignorance of the peasants, who could earn just as much income from growing less labor-intensive vegetables as they do from the arduous toil entailed by cotton cultivation. Should they turn to raising vegetables, they would also not be subject to the wide fluctuations in the international cotton market.

There is an additional dimension of this piece that became more pronounced in writing on the countryside and in the press in general. Even as the writer criticizes the peasants and their propensity to grow cotton, he chides the upper classes for their selfishness. He suggests that it would be beneficial for the government to force the peasants to grow wheat, to refrain from growing cotton, and to ban the export of wheat. But then he concludes that that such a policy would be impossible to implement because some “big shot would say that such a move limits personal freedom.” ¹²³ The Egyptian elite became a direct target more frequently than ever with the emergence of nationalist agitation. It was clear after Dinshway that even indirect criticisms of the government were often thinly veiled attacks on the comfortable relationship between powerful Egyptians and the British occupiers. Criticism of the water irrigation authority continued, but there were now more critical complaints directed at the “government [hukuma]” that had not appeared before. Much of this literature linked the presence of the British with the position of the upper classes. Resentment regarding the business as well as the political connections between the British and Egypt’s large landowning class found expression not only in print and in political speeches but also in such acts as the assassination of Butrus Ghali in 1910.

Muhammad Hussein Haykal’s 1913 novel, Zaynab, which portrays the lives of Egyptian villagers, is often described as inaugurating a new era in Arabic letters because it is usually considered the first true modern novel written in Arabic. Literary concerns aside, the portraits presented in the book represent a vision of the social world very much in accord with that developed by the ’afandi middle classes. Haykal mocks the urban intelligentsia for its inaction in the face of occupation by the British and collaboration from the Egyptian elite. In one vignette from the novel, Haykal sketches middle-class urbanites as more concerned with arguing over the fine points of politics than with taking effective action against the British. He remarks bitterly that they sit there arguing over the politics of their particular parties while the “British remain in the country and the khedive remains in power.”¹²⁴ The empty bickering of the middle classes does not lead to any practical political change. Instead, only through unity can the literate classes effect change, just as the peasants cannot overcome “tyranny” until they stand up together. The difference between the two groups is that the literate have the requisite knowledge while the “poor workers” still need to be taught these lessons. But the unity called for by Haykel shows how the literature of the time erased the existing sociopolitical world. Zaynab subsumed all social distinctions into the idea of an Egyptian people as a single entity confronting a combination of the British outsiders and outmoded domestic social tradition.¹²⁵ The landowner’s son, Hamid, heartbroken and looking for true love, runs off to the city and its libertine ways, while the dutiful peasant’s wife who married according to her parent’s wishes perishes of a broken heart as her true beloved, Ibrahim, is conscripted and sent to the furthest reaches of Sudan. Each case serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of love and acceptance of tradition. Hamid also serves as a case history of the idleness of the ruling class as he spends his time daydreaming of love and then is seduced by the licentious attractions of the city. Even as the novel places its characters together in an idyllic social world, none of the characters in Zaynab is able to transcend the social distinctions among elite, ’afandi, and peasant. The lines not only remain intact; if anything, they are strengthened.

The peasants in the book appear very similar to those found in other literature of the time and discussed throughout these pages. They are consumed by their work with little concern for the world outside their village. The outside world touches them only in the guise of an oppressive “foreign ruler [mutahakkam ajnabi],” who conscripts Ibrahim, the foreman of the work crew, into an army whose ultimate purpose is only to further the oppression of his own “people [’ahl]” and his umma.¹²⁶ Ibrahim’s loss of freedom through his sudden conscription into the army is devastating. His only crime—one that he will likely pay for with his life—is that he is a poor man and there is nothing he can do to prevent the “rich and powerful [al-‘aqwiya wa al-‘aghniya]” from disposing of his life as they wish.¹²⁷ He would have to be patient until “the poor workers [al-fuqara al‘umal]” band together to defend themselves and take their “revenge [al-ta’r] on all their tyrannical rulers.”¹²⁸

The implication here, as in much of the literature in the post-Dinshway period, is that the homegrown elite and the foreign rulers are working in tandem, exploiting the voiceless peasant masses for their own benefit. Perhaps it is not surprising that there was substantial criticism of the government and by extension the Egyptian notable class between 1906 and 1919. Nevertheless, no efforts were undertaken to bring the mass of the peasantry into the fold of the nationalist project. Indeed, the urban intelligentsia continued to project themselves as the group most able to lead Egypt into the future. Perhaps this certainty was shaken by the widespread and disruptive violence and nationwide agitation of the 1919 rebellion. As Lisa Pollard has suggested, the events of 1919 caused considerable worry among both the ’afandi classes and the nationalists among the elite.¹²⁹ There is no doubt that the rebellion forced them to reconsider their representations of the peasants. Without doubt, the widespread destruction in the countryside caused many observers to pause and reconsider. The rural population increasingly came to represent a new form of danger—one that could overwhelm the urban-based nationalist project. This reconsideration was presaged in the press coverage of the revolution itself. Pollard describes the way in which the “marches led by the middle-class nationalists” were contrasted with the “disorderly bands of ‘rabble’ and ‘riffraff’” in the iconography of the revolution. The middle classes Pollard describes concluded that the “rabble” may have contributed to “making Egypt ungovernable for the British, but they did not help give birth to the nation.”¹³⁰ Soon, the fact that so many of the new nationalist leaders were themselves members of the class that had profited handsomely under the British became no obstacle to supporting them. The ’afandi classes sought a nationalist compromise with the ruling strata. Such an agreement was preferable to any other alternative and protected their project from the danger represented from below. This shift in perception of the peasantry perhaps explains why the ’afandi classes threw in their lot with the Pashas and Beys of the Wafd and the other political parties. The middle classes remained quiet after 1919 until the events of 1952 brought them to the fore once again.

CONCLUSION

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the conceptual links between agriculture, the Egyptian peasants, and notions of Egypt and “Egyptian-ness” were cemented throughout the burgeoning public sphere. The archive that this period has bequeathed to us reveals the protobourgeois social imaginary taking shape. Traces of the new sociopolitical calculus can be found across the spectrum of the period’s cultural production, ranging from political editorials and popular humor to didactic works about the value of the study of history to novels.

An exploration of this diverse range of texts illustrates the fact that new ideas about Egypt’s past, present, and future were articulated through representations of the nature of an Egyptian people. These discussions were a conduit for modern historicism to enter into the process of Egyptian identity formation. Echoes of something recognizable as Egyptian nationalism infused a new understanding of history. The subject of this history was a timeless Egyptian people, while the Egyptian state was recast as the vehicle through which Egypt would achieve its sovereign destiny. The colonial state, defined by a complex bureaucratic apparatus, a modern juridical regime, and a concern with society’s material well-being, linked together these discourses of politics, society, and history.

The representations of the peasants by the emergent middle classes as demonstrated in the public sphere were efforts to impose an image of the social world that “most conform(ed) to the interest of this social formation.” In so doing it reduced their “subjective intention to objective truth.”131 These representations negated social relations and reproduced a countryside without politics and without any kind of separate agenda; moreover, they collapsed all possible expressions of political conviction in the countryside either into the nationalist project or into criminality. Bourdieu calls this process an “antagonistic act of construction,” whereby the nascent bourgeoisie takes for itself the command of political articulation.¹³² This antagonistic act is precisely what took place in Egypt between 1875 and 1919.