Imagined Empires (23 page)

The committee of Luxor—a town highly frequented by European tourists and residents and with a large population of elite Copts
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—chose select places along the Nile where they worked on protecting water purity. The committee issued several warnings with preventive procedures to secure clean water, particularly where hotels and houses of wealthy Copts were located. For instance, a 1902 decision prohibited steamships and commercial boats from anchoring in the area between a particular waterwheel and the house of Monsieur Ensenger, as hotels took their water from this area. The decree did not allow common townspeople in Luxor to draw water there, forcing them to use an area south of the waterwheel. It also prohibited them from washing clothes or bathing animals near the designated hotel area, and those inhabitants who did not comply were subject to a fine of between 50 and 100 piasters.
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In the time of cholera, the province suffered from severe food shortages, and consequent malnutrition further deteriorated health conditions. The plague broke out as well. Because the Delta and Cairo were busy cultivating cotton, they relied on Upper Egypt for provision of wheat and other staple crops. Thus, the peasants of the south had to pay their tax in grain delivered to the state storehouses in each province. Ironically, when the Parliament was discussing this policy of in-kind tax, it presented it as a relief policy for Upper Egyptians, because Upper Egyptians were unable to submit their dues in cash like the rich Delta.
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In reality, the peoples of Qina were kept from consuming their wheat in order to sustain the rich north.

Lack of wheat killed many people during these dark times. It was such a rare and expensive commodity that every year during harvest, landless beggars asked charitable farmers for wheat.
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Sulayman Radwan was part of a gang of thirteen thieves who seasonally robbed peasants of their harvest. One night, his murdered son was found beside the bridge of a village with traces of wheat inside his pockets and shoes. Inspectors found other amounts of wheat buried in fields adjacent to the crime site, and the owners of these fields knew nothing about it—it was probably wheat he had stolen from other fields. More fresh wheat was also found in his house, although he had not grown any that year.
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Hungry thieves raided peasants' houses during this time, demanding bread. When a gang of fifteen robbers attacked the house of a peasant on his farm to demand bread, the peasant asserted that the bread he had could barely feed him and his son. He brought out all the bread he had, and some of the thieves ate while others did not get a share. Those who remained hungry shot the poor peasant, left him for dead, and fled to the mountains, where they hid.
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The plague infected all of Egypt, but British officials affirmed that it was most widespread in the starving south. A 1907 report of the British consul-general stated, “[Of recent years the disease has appeared mostly in Upper Egypt, where it commonly assumes the pneumonic form. This form is especially dangerous on account of the rapidity with which it spreads, its infectious nature, and the high mortality (approximately 100 per cent) attending it. . . . In 1905 there were reported from Upper Egypt only 3 cases of the plague, occurring in 2 localities; in 1906 there were 412 cases in 26 localities; and in 1907 838 cases in 71 localities.”
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Another report a year later again emphasized that Upper Egypt was a special case. The plague affected the whole country, but “when . . . Upper Egypt was invaded, it [the plague] assumed the very infectious and fatal pneumonic form.”
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THE RETURN OF BANDITS

Facing peripheralization, misery, and uncured maladies, Qina Province's subalterns had to revolt against the empire and the nation-state. The lower classes of Qina devised their own mode of nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against the colonial regime and the local ruling class. It was a constant, daily resistance championed by female and male peasants and laborers, and its implacable masterminds were audacious bandits.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the northern elite embarked on a project to forge another “imagined community” in Egypt. The Cairene bourgeoisie were vehemently active in struggling for independence from British occupation, as they advanced a discourse on a national identity and mobilized the masses to serve their goal. They published numerous newspapers and founded political parties, banks, and companies, all under the slogan of national independence from Western economic domination. Cairene bourgeois women joined these political parties, founded charitable associations, and published women's magazines serving the same goal.
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Despite the absolute marginalization of the south, Cairo's nationalistic discourse insisted on incorporating Qina's peoples into this fabricated nation. The co-opted local elite of the south introduced the northern rhetoric to the province, and many of Qina's corrupt abovementioned parliamentarians acted as the nation's advocates. If education was a main tool deployed in elite invention and diffusion of a national identity, as postcolonial theorists affirm,
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the local elite of Qina followed the rules. Many boys' schools were founded in the province to help disseminate the Cairene narrative.
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Qina's subaltern women and men could not possibly identify with these patriotic discourses or struggles. For them, the hegemonic north and corrupt local elite afflicted them with poverty and killed them with recurring epidemics. Thus, they embarked on their own liberating struggles against the colonizer and the nationalistic elite alike. The living memory, both distant and recent, of the province's massive revolt against former empires invigorated the new wave of resistance. Historical pockets of unrest in places such as Salimiyya, Armant, and Samhud, where numerous widespread and small revolts had erupted in the past, once more became vibrant centers of uprising. New places of relentless unrest joined them, especially in Dishna and Naj‘ Hammadi, where foreign companies worked.
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Everyday resistance in Qina included attacking village shaykhs and mayors, refusing to pay taxes, or sabotaging public works. In 1885, in the village
of Busayla, Zaynab Husayn, a widow, and her two younger brothers, Taha and Ali, attacked Shaykh ‘Abd al-Jalil, beating him and breaking two of his teeth. When he was in the hospital for treatment for more than ten days, Umm Muhammad, the female maternal cousin of Zaynab, went to his house, attacked his wife, and took a pair of silver bracelets and a golden earring from her. Zaynab and her brothers completely denied the incident, asserting that the shaykh's teeth were already loose from drinking alcohol and this was not the first time he had fabricated a false accusation against innocent people concerning his teeth. Evidently convicted, Zaynab and her brothers were sentenced to thirty days in jail and fined eighty piasters, equal to what the shaykh spent on treatment in the hospital. The shaykh could not prove the charges against Umm Muhammad and had to withdraw his lawsuit against her.
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Landless peasants vandalized state projects, probably because they were primarily established for the benefit of the local elite. Some angry peasants cut the irrigation dikes that the Department of Public Works was constructing.
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Peasants usually kept weapons to use in attacking state symbols, but they hid them from the village authorities, sometimes by burying them underground in their houses.
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In one incident, angry farmers used those weapons against contractors who used cheap labor from the province in public works. In 1889, the dissatisfied inhabitants of the village of Bayadiyya, whose houses lined the two banks of a canal under construction, collectively took up arms and attacked the contractors and laborers working on the canal. The contractors were attempting to pave a road cutting through the houses of the peasants, in order for their workers to pass and dispose of dirt. The farmers of the village quickly gathered in a crowd with their arms and shot at the workers, who ran away.
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In the time of cholera, the
shaqi
s (outlaws) were the group most prolifically rebellious against the empire in Qina. The
shaqi
s inherited the place of the
falatiyya
bandits who had disturbed previous imperial regimes throughout the nineteenth century, and their operations brought back to life the stirring memory of the late legendary bandits of the province. Like the
falatiyya,
the
shaqi
s bandits were also fed by fugitive peasants and workers escaping heavy taxes and corvée labor. They similarly took to the mountains of the province to hide and launch their operations from, and they adopted the same clever tactics and strategies as their forbears.
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The new bandits revived one of the traditions of their predecessors: attacking the houses of Parliament members who illegitimately represented them.
Tay‘ Salama—the abovementioned parliamentarian from Qina who kept his seat for more than twenty years against the people's will—was a favorite target of the new bandits. Salama was more than just a corrupt local figure. He was also a voice of northern nationalism and importer of patriotic myths to the south. He was involved in disseminating the nationalist rhetoric through education, as he funded modern boys' schools with religious endowments. The endowment deeds vowed that the goal of these schools was primarily to serve the “nation” and improve the status of “the sons of the fatherland” (
abna' al-watan
)
.
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One night, a gang broke into the barn attached to Salama's house and stole four cows and their infant offspring. Barely a year passed before his house was the target of another raid, when four more cows were stolen from the same barn. Gangs and individual bandits who attacked him were mostly from the village of Qammula, whose mayor was Salama himself.
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In 1885, on one of the hot August days in the market of the town of Qus, ‘Awwad, a local peasant, sold about two thousand liters of wheat for a decent price. While heading back home with his son Mahmud, twelve armed men robbed them of the money and other possessions and hit ‘Awwad on the head, leaving him seriously injured near a waterwheel. When his son reported the crime, investigations revealed that the attackers were a gang of bandits who had been causing political disturbances for a long time. A few years earlier, this gang had been bigger—consisting of some twenty-five members—and one of its important operations had involved cutting four agricultural bridges in the village of Hajza. They had also stolen tax money, about 33,979 piasters, that had been collected from the same village in 1883. Many of these bandits had already been convicted of other crimes and had served sentences in Qina or Alexandria jails.
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The bandits of the province attacked every symbol of the state and the colonial administration. In 1889, they raided a police patrol in the town of Farshut. After exchanging fire, two soldiers were injured and the bandits made off with their weapons. The authorities were never able to apprehend them.
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In addition to these targets, the bandits also attacked the contractors working for the government and stole from the construction sites of public projects. Also in 1889, a gang of more than fourteen shot at the contractors and workers on the canal project in the village of Bayadiyya, stole a large amount of money, and left.
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Once, the village guard in Salimiyya caught two bandits on the village's arched bridge, apparently as they were attempting to vandalize it. The captured men tried to bribe the police officer with one pound, to set them free, but it did not work.
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Several women in the province joined the world of banditry. Wasfa and Walqan, both from the village of Qammula Middle, formed a gang with a third woman; her husband, Isma‘il the bandit; and another man. Interestingly, the three women were more than seventy years old and had never committed a crime before forming the gang. One night in 1883, Wasfa and Walqan took three donkeys and accompanied the two male bandits to a salt source that the state had enclosed in the mountains of a neighboring village. While they were loading the donkeys with the stolen goods, the guard saw them and attempted to arrest them, but one of the male bandits hit him with a gun. The gang managed to escape, leaving the guard injured. Soon after, the police arrested them in possession of about 1,000 liters of salt, along with guns and other weapons. Investigations revealed that one of the donkeys was the property of Wasfa; and the third female bandit, who had accompanied them, had sent another. The three women confessed to the crime. Because of their old age and lack of previous criminal charges, they were sentenced to less than one year in jail.
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Deficiencies in the colonial law of the newly instituted modern civil court system in Upper Egypt left the bandits fortunate enough to evade punishment and expand their operations. The new civil codes had no articles for convicting outlaws based only on their infamy (
mashhurin bil-shaqawa
)
,
which the old law had recognized as legal evidence. Thus, many bandits were released after their arrest for lack of hard, documented evidence. Dissatisfied state officials in Upper Egypt, whose efforts to capture the bandits were wasted when the law allowed their release, called for changing the code. For example, Bakhit Hasanayn of Qina raided a place at night before the formation of the first civil court in Upper Egypt. The police arrested and imprisoned Bakhit, but he managed to run away. After many attempts and armed battles between him and the police force, the authorities finally captured him again, this time after the civil court was formed. Bakhit, luckily, stood before a modern judge. No documented evidence supported the charges, so the judge was forced to set him free. On his way back from the court to his home village, he insisted on passing by the district governor, who was sitting in his office. Bakhit taunted the governor: “You had captured me and the government let me go” (Inta masaktini wa al-hukuma sayyabitni).
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