Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

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Egypt’s regions against the central government in Cairo, which applied the dysfunctional US policies of market reform.

      Gangs of bandits known as matarid al-jabal, who take refuge in the mountains surrounding the Nile in the south, have grown to symbolize ruthless crime as well as audacious resistance against the state and its failed free market policies. Many popular TV series and movies present a criminal, yet romantic, image of these bandits. They even make their appearance on Facebook: an opposition group of youth, resenting the authoritarian regime that subjugated itself to American domination, named itself after a memorable proclamation by a legendary southern bandit, ‘Izzat ‘Ali Hanafi. The story of ‘Izzat, whose execution filled the newspapers while I was conducting my archival research in 2006, was made into the most popular Egyptian movie two years later. In a key scene in the film, the angry, outlawed protagonist, or ‘Izzat, says, “From today, there is no government. I am the government.” (Min el naharda mafish hakuma. Ana el hakuma.) This fierce political statement immediately grew popular among youth across Egypt and was quickly adopted as the name of the Facebook opposition group.4 Eventually, the south, the north, and Cairo all rose to overthrow the US-friendly, neoliberal regime on 25 January 2011.

      Over the last five centuries, many other informal and formal empires have made disturbing appearances in Qina Province and have similarly failed. They were all “imagined empires” that confidently went south and stumbled in applying imperial policies in which they claimed to be, or were under the illusion of being, the most efficient. The failure of these empires generated environmental destruction while altering established systems of land and river management and leaving behind sweeping epidemic diseases. More importantly, they provoked massive subaltern revolts championed by peasants, women, laborers, and ever-ruthless bandits. This book looks at five world empires that showed up in Qina Province: the Ottoman (1500–1800), the French (1798–1801), Muhammad ‘Ali’s (1805–48), the “informal” British (1848–82), and finally the formal British (1882–1950) empires. This book relates a microhistory of the villages and small towns of the province that goes beyond this little-known place to investigate the global history of imperialism and nonelite, nonnationalist rebellion against empire.5

      This book goes south to Qina Province in order to explore the ignored history of Upper Egypt and to deconstruct established myths about early modern and modern world empires.6 The book’s five chapters, each about one empire that manifested in Qina, investigate the modes of imperial hegemony, the discursive images that empires advocate about themselves, and the empires’ failure to fulfill such images because of their inability to control local resources and subjugate Qina’s peoples. Many of these empires claimed to introduce “modernity” to the colonized peoples of Qina, particularly through market forces, but their form of modernity only dispossessed peasants, repressed laborers, and further subjugated women. With the indispensable assistance of co-opted local elites of the south, imperial modernity and its market economy disrupted existing systems of landownership, irrigation, trade, and more and left behind immense waves of the plague and cholera. Qina’s lower classes, who were harmed—sometimes killed—by imperial incompetence, devised their own modes of both daily-life resistance and massive uprisings against the empire, in which audacious bandits assumed leadership roles. At the end of this book, the epilogue raises questions about an imagined US Empire and its failed market economy in the south, which partially resulted in Qina’s participation in the 2011 revolution.

      WHY QINA PROVINCE?

      During the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, the small towns and villages of Qina were engaged in many actions of protest, including sit-ins, marches, and strikes. The province’s inhabitants were building on a long tradition of expressing discontent and rebelling. For many centuries, Qina Province was the vibrant capital of an autonomous state in Upper Egypt, and it witnessed many great revolts. Its numerous villages, Nile cities, and Red Sea ports were thriving centers of commercial agriculture, long-distance trade, and manufacturing activities. Egypt’s passage to modernity under consecutive empires terminated the independent state in Upper Egypt, peripheralized the south within the Egyptian centralized government and economy, and relegated its seat, Qina, to utter marginalization.

      The historiography of imperialism in Egypt has long focused only on Cairo and the Delta in the north, ignoring Upper Egypt and its revolutions. Narratives of imperial hegemony and local resistance have been written from the point of view of the north, and the voice of the south has gone unheard. The domination of nationalistic, elite, and Cairo-centered approaches in Egyptian history has rendered the narratives of subalterns in a place like Qina Province irrelevant in the larger tale of the country. Upper Egypt does have a different story to tell about its relation with empire—imagined empires. Qina, a seemingly remote and insignificant province, stands out as an alternative case to study, and its uprisings reveal many myths of imperialism.

      In 1819, a French traveler by the name of Edouard de Montulé, observed that “after Alexandria, Damietta, Rosetta and Cairo, [the city of Qina] is probably the most important city in Egypt.”7 De Montulé was so impressed by the luxurious life in the city—graceful white buildings, bazaars, restaurants, and bakeries—that he declared it comparable to Paris.8 About two decades before this date, Vivant Denon, a French Egyptologist who accompanied Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops to Upper Egypt, described a vivid scene of Qina’s regional market, with goods from Arabia, East Africa, North Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. In 1799, Denon stated,

      We left Kous [Qus], and arrived at Keneh [Qina], where we found a number of merchants of all nations. By encountering the natives of very foreign countries, remote distances seem closer. When we begin to reckon the days required for the journey, and the necessary means of affecting it, the space to be passed over ceases to be immense. The Red Sea, Gidda, Mecca, seemed like neighboring places to the town where we were; and India itself was but a short way beyond them. In the opposite direction the oases were actually no more than three days’ journey off us, and ceased to appear to our imagination as an undiscovered country. . . . The journey to Darfur may be accomplished in forty days, a hundred more are required to reach Tombuctoo. A merchant whom I found in Keneh . . . had often been in Darfur, where the caravans arrive from Tombuctoo. . . . Here we also found many Turkish, Meccan and Moorish merchants, come to exchange coffee and Indian cottons for corn.9

      

      Qina Province had maintained this prosperity for hundreds of years before these two accounts were written. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, historians from the Ayyubid (1171–1250) and Mamluk (1250–1517) periods described scenes of busy trade and pilgrimage routes, advanced educational institutions, and flourishing sugarcane cultivation and sugar industry in and around Qina. Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217) described Qina Province’s city of Qus as “full of markets, with extensive facilities and services, full of peoples because of the abundance of the imported and exported commodities brought by Yemeni, Indian, and Abyssinian merchants and pilgrims because it was the stopping place of all, the forum of friends, and the meeting point of the pilgrims of North Africa, Egypt and Alexandria.”10 A recent historian, W.J. Fischel asserts that “Qus, next to Cairo, was the most important commercial center of Egypt at this period.”11 According to Abu al-Fadl al-‘Umari (1301–49), this city had large commercial complexes and numerous inns for the accommodation of international merchants, in addition to luxurious houses, schools of higher education, public bathes, gardens, vast farms, and more. Qina Province was home to various kinds of craftsmen, merchants, large landowners, shari‘a scholars, and wealthy Muslims and Christian Copts.12

      Qina Province owed its rise to prominence to being an integral part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy. Before the advent of a modern European “world system,” the Indian Ocean world economy incorporated the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean and served as the engine for Afro-Asian trade. European trade was on the periphery of this global system and was mainly a recipient of its commodities.13 Upper Egypt, especially Qina and its Red Sea ports, was a central meeting point in a regional market that incorporated places such as Hijaz, Yemen, India, Sudan, Abyssinia, and Morocco, and the Upper Egyptian market was an essential trade circle in the vast Indian Ocean market. The economic prosperity of Upper Egypt allowed the formation of

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