Imagined Empires (6 page)

Finally, the nomadic Arab tribes were another important social group whose consent was indispensable for the political stability of Hammam's regime. Hammam requested that the ‘Ababida—the most important tribal group in Qina Province—settle in villages and towns in order to put a halt to highway robbery. After a quarter of a century spent plundering, Shaykh Nimr, the tribal chief of the ‘Ababida, finally settled in the city of Daraw and became a friend and trading partner of Hammam. Bruce narrates, “For the first twenty seven-years of his life, he [Nimr] never had seen the Nile, unless
upon some plundering party; that he had been constantly at war with the people of the cultivated part of Egypt, and reduced them often to the state of starving; but now . . . he was old, a friend to Shekh Hamam, and was resident near the Nile.” The two leaders formed a company for Red Sea trade. Hammam and Nimr's caravans carried cargos of wheat from Qina through Qusayr to Jeddah, and, of course, their caravans were the safest of all that passed through the desert between Qina and Qusayr.
⁷⁰

Hammam respected the shari‘a court and abided by its rules in political and economic life. He used the court to register administrative matters, such as notarizing and collecting grain taxes from villages, as well as to register his private businesses. Hammam sometimes attended the court himself, but in most cases he sent legal agents with signed letters to the judge.
⁷¹
His deputies in large towns attended, on his behalf, cases regarding different types of tax registration, business transactions, and social matters. The local administrators of Hammam's government functioned through the court, as village and town notable shaykhs always attended court sessions that dealt with the economic and social life of the inhabitants of the province, which included buying and selling houses, shops, mills, and land; marriage and divorce; mortgage; and charitable endowment.
⁷²
Under Hammam, the shari‘a court in Qina was a place of adjudication for Copts and Muslims alike. Copts registered their transactions in the court and sometimes had Muslim village shaykhs as witnesses.
⁷³
Hammam treated elite Copts with whom he had business as his legal equals in the court, since he exchanged properties with them and registered these transactions in order to maintain contractual rights for his minority citizens.
⁷⁴

Hammam also relied on an Arab tribal code of ethics to resolve communal and individual disputes in his public council.
⁷⁵
In 1757, the people of two villages, Nimsa and Misariyya, violently assaulted each other and subsequently appealed to Hammam's council to resolve the dispute. Hammam concluded a peace accord between the two parties and mandated that the people of the two villages should first pay their dues to the treasury. If one side killed someone from the other side, the latter would be entitled to revenge and allowed to kill four persons and receive ten bags of blood money. Hammam forbade villagers from crossing the water canal that separated the two villages and decreed that transgressors would be mercilessly punished. On Sunday, which was the local market day, the two parties should mind their own affairs in the market and commit no transgressions against each other; otherwise, severe punishment would be inflicted on transgressors. The
Hawwara deputy tax farmers in the two villages were in charge with executing punishments. The notable shaykhs of each village accepted the accord and consented to its stipulations, and the document was registered in the shari‘a court.
⁷⁶

Copts also frequented Hammam's council to resolve their disputes. In 1759, two Coptic brothers, Manqaryus and Sidarus, sons of Shunuda the goldsmith, quarreled with another Copt by the name of Habash Mikha'il over their shares in a house that the brothers had inherited from their mother, Ghazal, daughter of Jirjis the priest. Ghazal had inherited a share of the house of her father, who had bought it almost seventy years earlier and registered as his property in the shari‘a court. The disputing parties presented the case before Hammam, who ruled that Manqaryus and Sidarus should retain their property rights to the house, a ruling that the two brothers brought to the shari‘a judge to notarize.
⁷⁷

Hammam co-opted into his regime one elite Upper Egyptian group in particular: the Ashraf notables, who were Arabs claiming a Prophetic lineage. In his administration, some Ashraf families monopolized the judgeships of the shari‘a courts of Qina Province. The shari‘a scholars from the Habatir family were the only holders of this position in Isna Court throughout the eighteenth century and eventually transformed the position into a hereditary office maintained within the family. They continued to monopolize this post for part of the nineteenth century under Muhammad ‘Ali. In 1692, Qadi Ahmad ‘Ali Habatir was the official judge
(khalifat al-shar‘)
in Isna Court, and the position remained in his family, passing eventually to his great-grandson in 1839. Because of their elite status, the Habatir family enjoyed immense wealth and owned many different types of businesses and assets, including many houses and tracts of land.
⁷⁸

Hammam exerted considerable authority over Cairo's regime. The Ottoman governor pasha was forced to submit to Hammam's demands, even at the expense of the Mamluk elite. In one incident, Hammam mortgaged the lands of a village to a Mamluk officer, stipulating that he (Hammam) would relinquish his property rights to this village after a certain deadline. Hammam did not pay back the loan in time and yet refused to give up the village. He sent an emissary to the Ottoman governor in Cairo demanding that the governor not issue any decrees acknowledging the officer's right to the mortgaged lands. Hammam threatened that, should the governor issue such a decree, no more grain or cash provisions would be sent to Cairo. The Mamluk officer never managed to seize the village.
⁷⁹

Meanwhile, Hammam also built political alliances with rebellious Mamluk factions in Cairo and collaborated with them to overthrow the Ottoman governor. Oppositional Mamluk officers and their soldiers who took refuge in Hammam's court were Arabized—that is, adopted Arabic language and customs—and became part of Hammam's army.
⁸⁰
Hammam chose an alliance with the Qasimiyya Mamluk faction. A prominent member of this faction, Salih Bey al-Qasimi, the head of the Pilgrimage Department, was a close friend of Hammam and acted as his business proxy in Cairo. Salih Bey was a large tax farmer in northern Upper Egypt, outside of Hammam's territory, and his soldiers stayed for prolonged periods with the Hawwaras' army and learned the clan's high code of ethics. During the annual pilgrimage season, Hammam sent his friend in Cairo a gift of three hundred camels and various other provisions for the caravan going to Arabia via the port of Suez. Salih Bey later fled Cairo in the wake of political tension and took refuge in Hammam's realm, where the pair planned a successful military coup against Cairo's Ottoman governor.
⁸¹

The coup went as follows: In the mid-1760s, Hammam supported the most radical action against the sultan when he backed the insurgency of ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, the governor of Cairo. This coup was the product of an alliance between ‘Ali Bey, the Qasimiyya faction, and Hammam. ‘Ali Bey fled Cairo to the south, where Hammam gave him both refuge and logistical support for his separatist plans. Hammam at this time was also sheltering Qasimiyya rebels, including his friend Salih Bey, and integrated them in his own army. He then blocked grain and cash provisions from reaching Cairo and Istanbul. Upon receiving ‘Ali Bey, Hammam mediated between the two groups of rebels to create a unified front. Hammam's military and financial support was crucial for ‘Ali Bey's success in eventually deposing the pasha and taking full control over Cairo and the entire northern regime in 1768.
⁸²

ONE STATE, PLAGUE, AND REBELLION ENCORE

By supporting the coup of Mamluk officer ‘Ali Bey al-Kabir, the legendary Hammam committed a fatal mistake. The coup soon resulted in his tragic death and the downfall of the Hawwara regime. The two-state system consequently collapsed as well, but the Ottoman Empire immediately intervened and installed a Cairo-based unified regime that ruled over all of Egypt. Thus,
the empire made a second appearance in the south, but it would not be much time before plague and rebellion followed once again.

No sooner had ‘Ali Bey established an independent state in the north than he perceived Hammam's power as an overt threat. He accused Hammam of sheltering other Mamluk dissidents and supporting them against Cairo. In 1769, ‘Ali Bey sent forces to Upper Egypt to exterminate the Mamluk rebels and undermine Hammam's authority. ‘Ali Bey's army formed a secret alliance with an ambitious cousin of Hammam, Isma‘il ‘Abd Allah, who fought with the Mamluk troops. In the wake of the betrayal and with his unexpected defeat, Hammam withdrew from Farshut and fled southward to the village of Qammula. Later in that year and in this very village, Hammam died in his bed, at the age of sixty, out of deep grief. His sons were carried to Cairo and publicly displayed in the streets. The Hawwara were further humiliated when ‘Ali Bey seized most of their tax farms. Some Hawwara leaders maintained large tax farms, but the tribal dynasty was overthrown and the clan never returned to power.
⁸³

The independent state of ‘Ali Bey lasted only a few years before the Ottoman army restored full control over Egypt in 1773. The sultan then placed the whole country, including Upper Egypt, under a new Mamluk regime in Cairo. Istanbul abolished the two-state arrangement, after three centuries of existence, and allowed the Mamluk military elite in Cairo to establish authority over the tax farms, trade, and administrative system of the south. Thus, a new one-state system was born in Egypt, ending the six-century autonomy of Upper Egypt that survived from the Mamluk through Ottoman period.
⁸⁴

Replacing the Hawwara regime shattered the social contract that existed between the tribe and the subalterns of Upper Egypt. The south experienced political chaos and repression under the new Mamluk government, and discontented groups undertook various forms of resistance. Only four years after Hammam passed away, groups of Arab peasants challenged the authority of the state and the remaining Hawwara tax farmers by refusing to pay the land tax. The peasants of the Busayla village ceased paying both cash and grain tax. Shaykhs of other villages intermediated between Busayla and the tax farmer and threatened that the state would punish them by destroying their houses.
⁸⁵
At the same time, Mamluk officers decreased the payments that the ‘Ababida Bedouins received for protecting villages and trade routes. The tribe immediately reacted by attacking travelers and plundering villages and later launched a war against the Mamluk government. It was almost
impossible for the Mamluk officers to subdue the ‘Ababida dissidents, who were highly skilled warriors. After every defeat the rebels managed to quickly reassemble themselves in a few days and return to fight the new imperial regime even more fiercely.
⁸⁶

Between 1784 and 1792, the plague struck Egypt again. This time the disease made it to the south—for the first time in five centuries. Before, as a contemporary French physician asserted, the plague had been an environmental phenomena “almost unknown” in Upper Egypt.
⁸⁷
Ever since the great plague of the 1300s that had swept all of Egypt, the endemic had not returned to Upper Egypt, thanks to the efficient government of the independent Hawwara. As noted earlier, European observers of the period reported that the healthier and hotter air of Upper Egypt made it difficult for the plague to travel south, whereas Cairo and the Mediterranean coast remained more susceptible.
⁸⁸
However, a British report from 1800 showed that the late-1700s plague had actually originated in Upper Egypt, killing thousands in one season. According to Colonel Wilson, “The Plague has long been supposed to have been brought from Turkey in the ships charged with old clothes, which constantly came to Alexandria from a market. But the plague has generated annually in Egypt during the last four years (although no such communication has been possible), and even chiefly commenced in Upper Egypt. . . . In Upper Egypt [last year], sixty thousand of the inhabitants perished. . . . There whole villages were swept away.”
⁸⁹
Thus, for Upper Egypt, the epidemic was without a doubt an “imperial” plague. It broke out precisely because of the new political order.

Among European physicians and travelers of this period, two theories arose to explain why the plague infiltrated the south. Both implicate the empire. First, Colonel Wilson insisted that this latest wave of the epidemic originated in Upper Egypt because of internal causes and local conditions.
⁹⁰
Other European experts generally linked the outbreak to the overflow of the Nile and mismanagement of water. They asserted that a good system of irrigation, drainage, digging canals and sluices, and building dams would make it possible to prevent the plague.
⁹¹
In fact, Arabic and European sources alike show that the new Mamluk regime neglected water management and agricultural organization in Upper Egypt, as they were busy disputing over who would be in power. The Ottoman pasha in Cairo was too weak to eradicate internal Mamluk military contests. During this period, Mamluks feuded over Upper Egyptian grain and carried out military campaigns on southern soil, causing food shortages and price hikes. In Qina the new regime left
canals to dry, and the once thriving capital and center of commercial agriculture was reduced to an unimportant provincial town.
⁹²

The second medical theory of the plague's origins attributed the epidemic to external causes emanating from the larger imperial system. This approach suggests that the “globalization” of the Ottoman Empire, which incorporated Upper Egypt only in the last few years of the eighteenth century, coupled with the new one-state system the empire installed caused the plague that reached the south. Clot Bey, a French physician who practiced in Egypt in the early nineteenth century, suggested that the plague had no connection to the overflow of the Nile or to poverty. He argued that these two internal conditions had existed in Upper Egypt in the past, and yet the plague had not visited the south.
⁹³
Many other European physicians and observers affirmed that the plague was carried by ships coming from Istanbul and other parts of the Ottoman Empire to Alexandria and from there spread to the rest of Egypt. Guillaume Antoine Olivier, a contemporary French traveler, recounted,