Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

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who were roaming the road. He assigned the duty of securing the Qusayr route to the ‘Ulayqat tribe.58

      In addition, East African trade expanded in Farshut. Farshut was the final destination of darb al-jallaba (road of the importers) caravans coming from the Sinnar kingdom of the Sudan that carried slaves, ivory, and more. Again, one of the primary destinations of this precious cargo was Istanbul. Hammam made Farshut—his hometown—the seat of his state in Qina Province, and he monopolized much of the East African trade that passed through the city.59 Farshut also played a major role in establishing Qina’s position as a famous sugarcane and sugar producer.60 Its sugar was an effective competitor with colonial American sugar in Istanbul, the Levant, and elsewhere in the East. Henry Light, a captain of the British royal artillery, noted that Farshut was the area “where the greatest quantity of sugar is made” and added that “the Levant chiefly derives its sugar from it [Farshut]. In no part of the East, which I visited, was colonial sugar to be found; that for the use of the seraglio at Constantinople comes from Fairshoot [Farshut], and is refined with extraordinary care.”61 Hammam monopolized both the sugar industry in Farshut and the entire agricultural production of Upper Egypt. He owned twelve thousand bulls solely for purposes of sugarcane cultivation. In order to sustain this commercial power, he employed numerous plowing machines, waterwheels, flour mills, cows, and oxen and built countless storehouses filled with commercial crops.62

      Hammam gained a respected image in both Egyptian and European records because of the just government he founded in Upper Egypt. He established a power-sharing structure built on a new social contract with many of the region’s subaltern and elite groups. The ultimate goal of this order was to sustain agricultural production, secure the movement of trade, and ensure political stability. In a continuation of the Hawwara government system, Hammam’s contract incorporated peasants producing the commercial crops, educated Copts managing the finances of the state, and Bedouins protecting southern trade routes and carrying goods on their camels. Each of these groups played a vital role in maintaining the stability of Hammam’s regime.

      Hammam held a public council (called hukuma, or government) for villagers, town dwellers, and Bedouins to discuss socioeconomic occurrences and solve disputes through collective consultation. The council, organized at Hammam’s immense ranch in Farshut, held daily, well-attended sessions. Attendees casually came and left the council as they pleased and were served breakfast and lunch from the kitchen of their affluent ruler’s residence.63 In this council, peasants saw Hammam as a respected authority to whom they could appeal regarding disputes over usufruct rights, either between individual peasants or whole villages. The verdicts he issued in his council had the power of legal documents and were taken to the shari‘a court to be notarized and applied by the judge.64

      The second group with which Hammam founded a social contract was elite Copts, especially educated accountants. Hammam’s government was composed of many departments, each of which had its own Coptic auditors working day and night. After spending the day and two-thirds of the night meeting with the people who frequented his public council, Hammam spent the third part of the night with his Coptic bureaucrats dealing with state finances and attending to administrative affairs.65 Hammam’s Coptic secretaries acted as his deputies in villages, collecting the grain tax from peasants and shipping it to Cairo.66 For example, he tasked the brothers Bulus and Jirjis, sons of Manqaryus, with collecting the grain taxes and sending them north. The same brothers also managed, as his agents, his financial transactions.67

      Coptic peasants in particular experienced a golden age under the rule of Hammam, as both eighteenth-century Arabic and foreign sources affirm. During the time of the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt (1798–1801), French scientists and officers asserted that they encountered pleasant memories of Hammam among wealthy and poor Copts of Qina Province three decades after his death. Copts told the French that they missed the days of security and justice under Hammam.68 A Coptic notable who accompanied the returning French forces to France compiled a treatise on freeing Egypt from the Ottomans and founding an independent republic. The new government that he and his French supporters envisioned was to be “just . . . and national, like that of Sheikh Hammam in Upper Egypt.”69

      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

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