Imagined Empires (14 page)

To maximize the taxed agricultural produce, the colonial regime distributed some of these cattle to peasants for use in plowing the plots that the government forcibly assigned to them. The Turkish director of the Department of Sudanese Cattle in Qina Province sold the cattle at subsidized prices to the province's farmers, who received them only after state approval and signing of receipt—probably to inspect them afterward and ensure that they followed the state orders in employing the cattle. At the different stations where the cattle stopped in their long journey, the sick and weak ones were sold off to local communities after making sure that the animals were incapable of serving at the local factories and plantations or continuing on the road to serve in other provinces. Prices varied according to size and health. Impoverished peasants of Qina Province, in turn, sold these cheaply purchased bulls and cows to make some money, which infuriated Muhammad ‘Ali. He sent a memorandum to the assistant collector of cattle of the towns of Qus and Isna, in which he firmly insisted that “those cattle are brought from the Sudan for the development [
i‘mar
] of the countries and
welfare of the populace [
rafahiyyat al-ahali
]
.
We found out that the people buy the cattle from the government and sell them in the markets, and this is against laws and regulations. You must prohibit the people from doing so.”
⁶²

With Turkish settlers and central planning, Muhammad ‘Ali introduced his modern institutions of hegemony to the internal colony—yet also kept it peripheralized. In the 1820s, Muhammad ‘Ali revised his rhetoric and system of government to adopt modern European methods that manipulated his subjects rather than directly repressing them. In his orders and memorandums, the pasha propagated his own imperial interests as the “greater good.” Instead of addressing his population as inferior subjects, using the old Ottoman term
ra‘iyya,
he adopted the new respectful and compassionate term
al-ahali,
meaning “the populace” or “citizens” in a French sense, and declared that the goal of his policies was the “welfare of the populace,” or
rafahiyyat al-ahali.
⁶³
More important, the pasha founded three separate state institutions: a legislative council, a modernized bureaucracy, and a reformed shari‘a court system.
⁶⁴
In Upper Egypt, these government bodies marginalized the internal colony: they produced a situation of taxation without representation. In other words, the peasants and laborers of the south were overtaxed and submitted their dues in-kind and in cash to hundreds of colossal state storehouses (
shuna
s) that were spread out in almost every village and town, but they enjoyed no representation in the pasha's modern institutions—in dramatic contradistinction to the north.

Muhammad ‘Ali founded the Council of Consultation (Majlis al-Mashura) in 1824 and delegated law-making authority to it, but the council was also extensively involved in administrative affairs. Its members were mainly Turkish officials, and the pasha expanded it in 1829 and appointed village shaykhs, thus opening the door for native representation in his legislature.
⁶⁵
Qina Province was not represented in this council; neither were any of the Upper Egyptian provinces south of Asyut. Whereas all of the Delta provinces were handsomely represented, Muhammad ‘Ali did not grant a single seat to any of the shaykhs of Upper Egyptian villages.
⁶⁶
Nonetheless, the council frequently intervened in every aspect of Qina's economic life, such as organizing land cultivation, digging canals, building dikes, erecting state storehouses, hiring laborers, managing state-owned factories, and placing limitations on private grain merchants. Due to the lack of Upper Egyptian representation in Cairo, the number of public works that the central government decided to undertake in the south noticeably decreased. The council had to summon a few southern shaykhs to draft the section on Upper Egypt in
the principle statute it issued for agricultural organization,
La‘ihat Zira‘at al-Fallah
. In this code of seminal importance, the conditions in the Delta set the norm while Upper Egypt was defined as the remote exception.
⁶⁷

The second institution of the pasha's hegemony was a modernized bureaucracy. The Syasatname, or the comprehensive law that the Council of Consultation drafted for the pasha to promulgate in 1837, crystallized the structure and function of this new administrative system. Muhammad ‘Ali again asserted that this law aimed to improve “the prosperity of the country and the welfare of the people and the provinces.”
⁶⁸
The bureaucracy in Qina Province was highly centralized: all ranked officials were Turks appointed from Cairo. While the general inspector of Upper Egypt undertook basic supervising duties, the provincial governor and district and subdistrict directors were in charge of detailed executive affairs. Officials at all levels in Qina reported directly to Muhammad ‘Ali, who closely followed their work.
⁶⁹
When the pasha applied a new, yet limited policy to incorporate native Egyptians into the high-ranking bureaucratic offices, native Upper Egyptians were excluded from the process. The pasha promoted several notable shaykhs from villages in the Delta to the position of district director and then further to provincial governor. Qina's shaykhs were not considered for minor or major offices within the centralized government, and, once again, the province was excluded from representation.
⁷⁰

The third institution of the pasha's hegemony was the reformed court system. Muhammad ‘Ali integrated Qina's shari‘a courts into the state apparatus and made them a part of the administration. The judges of the province's local courts were officially appointed by the state, and their
sijill
registers were used to notarize official transactions between bureaucrats, village shaykhs, and Coptic accountants, on the one hand, and peasants, factory workers, camel drivers, and Nile boat captains, on the other—in accordance with both shari‘a law and civil legislation.
⁷¹
Qina's local scholarly community of shari‘a jurists was excluded from participating in these developments, unless they changed the school of law they adhered to. The majority of Qina's shari‘a law scholars belonged to the Maliki school of law, but Muhammad ‘Ali decided to make the Hanafi school the official and only shari‘a law applied in the province's courts. The state worked on gradually transforming the legal system until, in 1839, the Turkish governor of the province sent a letter to the Maliki jurisconsult
(mufti),
in Isna indicating that it was now state policy that legal opinions
(fatwas)
only be issued by the official Hanafi
muftis
sitting inside the court when both litigants and defendants were present before the judge. By this
decree, the pasha prohibited informal legal practices from taking place outside his state courts and restricted the application of laws other than his own Hanafi codes in the province, which further marginalized Qina's majority of Maliki scholars.
⁷²

BACK TO REBELLION

Settlers, taxation, and peripheralization did not go without resistance in the southern colony. After Qina Province's three revolts of the early 1820s were crushed, no other massive rebellion took place in Upper Egypt for as long as the pasha was alive. Horrific news of the modernized imperial army of Muhammad ‘Ali—with disciplined soldiers and gunpowder weaponry—defeating troops in faraway lands in Europe, Asia, and Africa certainly served to deter any separatist thoughts in the south. However, rebellion escalated in many other forms; it turned into daily-life resistance championed by oppressed women and men. Peasants fled plantations and corvée work sites, escaped taxes, and deserted the plots that the state forced them to till. Workers in government factories were no different, as many of them ran away from their production lines and fled taxes. Other types of laborers who were forcibly employed and highly taxed, including camel drivers and Nile boat captains, similarly sought to escape government tasks and taxes. The colonial regime was forced to coin a new term to describe all of these runaways:
mutasahhib
s. Out of these fugitives finally emerged the largest and fiercest resistance in the province: the bandits (
falatiyya
) who opted to avenge their losses by violent means, upsetting the security and political stability of the south.

Before resorting to violence, the peasants of Qina sometimes resisted the colonial administration simply by deliberately neglecting the pasha's orders, and when interrogated they fabricated excuses.
⁷³
But when fed up, they vandalized government buildings and bloodily attacked Turkish bureaucrats and other government employees. For instance, a group of villagers from the town of Farshut assaulted the postman transporting some treasury funds; they cut his bag and stole the money that was in it. At receiving the news, Muhammad ‘Ali was furious, as this was not the first time that news of such offenses reached his ears.
⁷⁴
In another incident, a revolt almost broke out when a large group of villagers not only refused to pay their dues to the treasury but also attempted to kill a Turkish bureaucrat. In 1836, after rejecting the collection of the imposed tax, the peasants of Ballas attacked the state
official as he tried to gather corvée laborers for public works projects in the canals. Upon learning about the insurgency, the pasha immediately sent troops to the village and they captured the shaykhs who had plotted with the peasants against the government.
⁷⁵

In 1844, the peasants of the village of Ruzayqat, where a vast royal plantation existed, destroyed the dam that diverted irrigation water to the plantation, away from their own thirsty lands.
⁷⁶
Three years later, the situation dramatically escalated again in the same village, when the farmers murdered many Turkish bureaucrats and soldiers and injured others. The entire village of Ruzayqat united in this act against the bureaucrats, and even the shaykhs helped hide the murderers.
⁷⁷
In the same year, a less violent incident took place on another plantation, again in the village of Ballas. Two laborers by the names of Ahmad and Isma‘il attacked the tax collector of a state-owned plantation, managed by a Turk, Mustafa Bey. They succeeded in taking back the eight hundred piasters that the tax collector had levied earlier.
⁷⁸

Highway robbery evolved into a common act of resistance in Qina Province, creating a serious security dilemma for the imperial regime. Gangs of highway robbers were often the product of an alliance between two oppressed groups: peasants and Bedouins from settled Arab tribes. Some Bedouin communities sheltered rebellious farmers who fled their home villages to escape taxes or army conscription and built special dwellings for them. These gangs frequently targeted government officials and buildings, Coptic treasury clerks, and wealthy Muslims and Copts.
⁷⁹
Coming from three different villages, Farraj Ahmad, Muhammad Rayyan, and Muhammad ‘Awad joined forces to form a gang that attacked travelers on roads. They committed various crimes, from theft to murder, until they were finally arrested and brought to court. Personally concerned about this high-profile security case, the Turkish general inspector of Upper Egypt had the gang swear an oath on the Holy Qur'an to quit criminal actions and repent. He warned them that shari‘a punishment awaited them should they break the oath and return to their sins; he threatened them with crucifixion, lashing, or amputation of their hands and legs.
⁸⁰

Women often used legal channels of resistance against corrupt Turkish bureaucrats and oppressive village shaykhs. They raised petitions (
‘ardhala
s) or took their cases to court. Umm Muhammad, of the village of Hamidiyya, volunteered on behalf of the inhabitants of her village to petition against the local shaykhs, who had attacked the peasants with the collusion of a resident bureaucrat. With the dispute simmering and escalating to a crisis in the village,
Umm Muhammad hurried to address a petition to the general inspector of Upper Egypt, where she informed him in detail about the shaykhs' and bureaucrat's coercive actions and requested an investigation. The inspector responded by issuing orders to examine the incident and identify the transgressing parties, but apparently the case did not reach a satisfying closure.
⁸¹
A woman from Nagada, by the name of Amina, raised a petition against Shaykh Hasan, who had seized the palm trees that she had inherited from her mother. Her petition was passed down to the Turkish district chief and the shari‘a judge, and the two requested that Amina bring certain documents to prove her claim. She had to travel to Qus, crossing the Nile by boat with her son, to bring the required documents with the signets of many shari‘a authorities. Eventually, she failed to submit the demanded evidence and lost her palm trees to the shaykh, who was well connected within the bureaucracy.
⁸²

Running away from one's village in order to escape plantation work, overdue taxes, factory production lines, corvée labor, or army conscription became one of the most common acts of resistance in Qina Province during this period. Such flight, known as
tasahhub,
was not new in either Qina or Egypt as a whole, but it noticeably increased with the growing colonial repression in the south. Entire families of peasants carried their animals and small properties, fleeing to hide in other remote villages as fugitives of the government. One of the main tasks of village shaykhs was to keep registers of the original inhabitants of each village, monitor the arrival of mysterious strangers, report them, and, if they were runaways, send them back to their home villages to pay their taxes or conclude their duties. The wives and children of escaped peasants were first carried back by force to their original villages, in order to pressure the hiding breadwinner to return. The governor of Qina Province also kept detailed registers that included the names of runaways, dates of their flight, reasons for deserting the village, and suggestions for resolving the problem.
⁸³