Imagined Empires (18 page)

The governor of Isna Province, the notorious ‘Abd al-Ghafur Effendi, faced aggressive resistance from peasants. The peasants of a village where one
of his plantations was located attacked his land to prevent the seasonal laborers he brought from other villages from farming it, and some of them damaged the crops. After Abd al-Ghafur died, the peasants of Karnak seized back their lands from his plantation and even refused to sign a lease and pay rent or enter into a sharecropping agreement. Moreover, they refused to pay the remaining taxes. The manager of the plantation had to ask for the help of the chief of the district of Qus to deal with this situation.
⁶⁴
In another case, peasants let their cattle and sheep graze on Bishara ‘Ubayd's land in order to ruin his harvest. He lost the produce of eight acres this way in the village of Faw.
⁶⁵

The coal and sulfur mines produced severe discontent among Qina's families. Many workers did not come back from the mines, and their families never heard from them again. They either died of fatigue in the mines or got lost in the desert while attempting to run away. One way these families reacted was by filing lawsuits against the guild or village shaykhs who had recruited the workers. The brother of Ahmad Isma‘il, from the village of Kalahin, disappeared after he was drafted to work in the sulfur mine. Ahmad heard rumors about the death of his missing brother, so he sued his village shaykh in the Supreme Court in Cairo. The shaykh argued that this worker in fact had run away only two days after his arrival at the mine, and an intensive search for him had not yielded results.
⁶⁶

The four state-owned gunpowder factories in the towns of Qina Province did not escape the wave of revenge, not only for their connection with the sulfur mine but also for oppressing workers. To make things worse, the gunpowder factory of Karnak was close to the plantation of Abd al-Ghafur Effendi. The angry landless peasants surrounded the factory, and some of them were made wage laborers at the factory. The workers frequently ran away, but the government always brought them back if they had not gone far and forced them to continue working. The government's promises to pay their belated wages or even actually make payments did not always succeed in encouraging the workers to stay: many found a way to run off again despite all the efforts of the factory manager to monitor them. The factory was also the target of other forms of villagers' revenge. The cousin and land partner of the factory's chief donkey driver—who ran a group of five other drivers—embezzled thousands of piasters, among other things. The donkey driver was arrested and jailed until his cousin returned what he had taken.
⁶⁷

On the eve of the revolt in 1864, the village of Salimiyya was simmering with political unrest. The village was already one of the growing centers of the
falatiyya
gangs that attacked the watchmen of the village.
⁶⁸
The peasants of Salimiyya, who were losing hundreds of acres to high-bidding bureaucrats in frequent auctions, tried legal channels to redeem their properties without success. Murad ‘Abd al-Rahim owned only one acre of sugarcane, which apparently was not enough to sustain his family. He had to find a job as a construction worker on the irrigation steam engines of a state-owned plantation. One day, after he was late to work because he was finishing harvesting and pressing his sugarcane, the Turkish manager of the plantation, ‘Abd Allah Agha, ruthlessly beat him. On his way back, Murad ran into two other farmers from his village who were drafting a complaint against the same Turkish manager, protesting his numerous crimes. When the state held a public auction to rent out some of the plantation's land, this manager collaborated with other partners to seize a medium-size piece of land in the village, winning it through fraud. The manager also supported many other village shaykhs in their efforts to seize lands and harvests from peasants. In addition, he beat some peasants, stopped their waterwheels to damage their crops, and put them in jail. Although Murad himself had nothing to do with any of these cases, he decided to put his signet on the complaint to take his own revenge.
⁶⁹

Finally, the revolt erupted. From Salimiyya, Ahmad al-Tayyib declared his messianic revelations and preached rebellion. In addition to the thousands of dispossessed villagers, al-Tayyib managed to mobilize
falatiyya
from their secret hiding places in the mountains. Like the 1820 revolt, this one deployed religious rhetoric and took on a spiritual tone, yet its aims went beyond alleviating high taxation or overthrowing Isma‘il Pasha in Cairo. Rebels developed an angry discourse against the propertied class and foreign commercial domination, which is why Lady Duff-Gordon, the English eyewitness, suggested it was a “communist” uprising.

Unfortunately, Duff-Gordon's account is the only full record of the revolt available. One must note that the Lady's friends in Luxor were Turkish bureaucrats, an affluent shari‘a law scholar, and a rich Copt who was a British consular agent, so she received and delivered a rather unsympathetic, and somewhat simplified, account of the revolt. ‘Ali Mubarak, the state's chronicler of the period, also provided a politically biased and brief account. He characterized Ahmad al-Tayyib as a sinful, subversive man who led people to disobey God. He transgressed shari‘a law, Mubarak suggested, because he disobeyed the “imam” of Muslims, that is, the khedive. He added that God had already punished the inhabitants of the village of Faw, who followed
him, for their sins—when Isma‘il Pasha sent soldiers and Turkish officers to kill most of them, destroy their houses, and confiscate their money.
⁷⁰

The revolt arose, Duff-Gordon recounted, from one incident involving a rich Copt and then spread throughout the province. Because Copts usually worked for Europeans, the poorer population commonly perceived rich Copts in a negative light. The story goes that the Copt in question owned a Muslim slave girl, who read the Qur'an and was pious herself, and he wanted to take her as his concubine. She resisted because shari‘a law forbids a non-Muslim man to own a Muslim woman; and she went to Ahmad al-Tayyib, who offered the Coptic master money for her. “He refused it and insisted on his rights, backed by the government whereupon Ahmad proclaimed the revolt,” wrote Duff-Gordon.
⁷¹
The rebels then attacked a boat that belonged to Greek merchants, but nobody was hurt, although Duff-Gordon asserted elsewhere that a party of forty rebels plundered the boat and killed the steersman. The state sent Fadl Pasha from Cairo by a fast steamship with an army to crush the rebels. Most people thought that al-Tayyib was killed in the battle, but in fact he managed to flee to the desert to take refuge with the
falatiyya.

Duff-Gordon recorded the public opinion of different social groups about the rebellion. On the one hand, her friend who was the shari‘a law scholar, Shaykh Yusuf, visited Salimiyya and returned critical of the rebels: “Shaykh Yoosuf returned from a visit to Essalimeeyeh last night. He tells me the darweesh, Ahmad et-Teiyib, is not dead; he believed that he is a mad fanatic and a communist. He wants to divide all property equally, and to kill all the Ulama and destroy all theological teaching by learned men, and to preach a sort of revelation or interpretation of the Koran of his own. ‘He would break up your pretty clock,” said Yoosuf, “and give every man a broken wheel out of it; and so with all things.'”
⁷²

On the other hand, villagers were already expressing great discontent because Isma‘il Pasha regulated the price of wheat, bringing about a famine in the province in the same year of the outbreak. Furthermore, Duff-Gordon explained, “only Cairo could do anything, and everything is done to please the Cairene at the expense of the Fellaheen [peasants].”
⁷³
In irrigation, the use of steam engines and their coal was only for the rich: “The great folks get steam-engines, but the laborers work with no better implements than their bare hands and a rush basket, and it takes six men to do the work of one who has good tools.”
⁷⁴
Thus, even though some ordinary villagers did not participate in the revolt, because they believed that al-Tayyib was a madman,
they supported the rebels' cause and spoke up about all forms of injustice. As Duff-Gordon recounted,

One Mohammad, a most respectable, quiet young man, sat before me on the floor the other day, and told me the horrible details he had heard from those who had come up the river. “Thou knowest, O our lady that we are people of peace in this place; and behold, now, if one madman should come, and a few idle fellows go out to the Mountain (desert) with him, Efendeena will send his soldiers to destroy the place, and spoil our poor little girls, and hang us: is that right, O lady? And Ahmad-el-Berberee saw Europeans with hats in the steamer with Efendeena and the soldiers. Truly, in all the world none are miserable like us Arabs. The Turks beat us, and the Europeans hate us and say ‘quite right.' By God, we had better lay our heads in dust (die), and let the strangers take our land and grow cotton for themselves. As for me, I am tired of this miserable life, and of fearing for my poor girls. Mohammad was really eloquent . . . he threw his meláyeh over his face and sobbed.
⁷⁵

As a fugitive exiled in the mountains, Ahmad al-Tayyib joined the
falatiyya
in their hiding places. His followers visited him there to listen to his speeches and receive instructions. Duff-Gordon affirmed that Isma‘il Pasha himself came with steamboats and soldiers to terminate the uprising. The steamers were also supposed to evacuate all Europeans if things got out of control. Al-Tayyib's brother, Muhammad, and his father's father-in-law were taken prisoner. The pasha confiscated the properties of all suspected rebels, including innocent villagers. A village shaykh assisted the government in capturing the rebels. In 1865, Fadl Pasha, a Turk, perpetrated a massacre where he “had the men laid down by ten at a time, and
chopped
with the pioneers' axes.” The Fadl Pasha murdered at least sixteen hundred men, women, and children. Upon crushing the revolt, every man, woman, or child related to Ahmad al-Tayyib by blood was taken in chains and jailed in the city of Qina.
⁷⁶

NO LAND FOR WOMEN

The revolt was crushed, and market modernity readily resumed undoing the lives of Qina Province's subalterns. It was women's turn. European Orientalists argued that modernization would improve the lives of oppressed women in “traditional” patriarchal societies, but this was not the case with new legal codes of private property. In 1869, Isma‘il Pasha promulgated a new
landownership law that deprived women of the right to inherit land, a right that shari‘a law had granted them for centuries. This law was an imitation of the contemporary British inheritance codes. Western legal modernity in the nineteenth century was paternalistic in nature, and when it made it to Qina's villages, this law severely hurt thousands of women who owned modest properties, sometimes as small as a fraction of an acre. After losing their parcels, women expressed resentment against their male relatives by various means.

With increasing British domination in northern Egypt and the consequent expansion of cotton cultivation, the Delta families involved in commercial agriculture ascended politically. They constituted the main political unit in a growing paternalist regime. Through the alleged political liberalization process, the male heads of plantation-owning families not only constituted the incumbents of the regime but also became the lawmakers in modern legislative institutions, namely the Council of Rules and the Parliament.
⁷⁷
These men pressured the state to issue laws depriving women of land inheritance rights in Egypt. Copying the British code of primogeniture enshrined in the “family settlement” law,
⁷⁸
the male landed elite of Egypt helped to promulgate a series of similar laws between the 1850s and the early 1880s. Isma‘il Pasha's law of 1869 was the most oppressive to women.

The legal system had begun to turn against women from the time of Sa‘id Pasha. During the first year of Sa‘id's reign, before the pasha's 1858 land code was issued, women enjoyed full rights to land inheritance according to shari‘a as well as state civil laws. Many women from Qina Province were able to dispute attempts to disinherit them, and the state courts supported their claims. For instance, a woman named Fatima took control of the five acres her deceased husband had left to her, their three daughters, and son. She leased the land to farmers who cultivated it and paid its taxes to the government. When a cousin of her children attempted to assert his control over the parcel, she submitted a petition against him to the general inspector of Upper Egypt. The inspector supported her right to keep the land, provided that it was cultivated and its taxes were paid, and Fatima complied. In similar cases, the local officials always consulted the applied civil land code, which obliged them to grant land to widows.
⁷⁹
Only a few months before the 1858 law was issued, Si‘da, a widow from the village of Samhud, asserted her rights and those of her two daughters and son to the land of her deceased husband, in a case she won against two male villagers. She went to the shari‘a court with her son to sue the two farmers who attempted to build a waterwheel on her land. The dispute was resolved and the family retained its property.
⁸⁰

The 1858 code began to dismantle this system of justice, as it allowed women to inherit land but deprived them of the right to control their plots. The Council of Rules (Majlis al-Ahkam), which issued the law, functioned both as the Supreme Court and legislature, and its members were males from local elite families, high-ranking Turkish bureaucrats, army and police officers, the state
mufti,
and eminent shari‘a law scholars. From Qina Province, for example, Ahmad Bey Muhammad—a member of an upper-class landed family in the village of Abu Manna‘ and an army general—maintained a seat on the council. Provincial councils, composed of village shaykhs and mayors, were founded later in the Delta and Upper Egypt to adjudicate local disputes and refer unresolved cases to the council in its role as Supreme Court. In most cases, the promulgation of new codes or changes to existing ones took place in response to unresolved provincial cases, which allowed local male elites to enact their interests in the process of law making.
⁸¹