Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

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      In the 1760s, the Ottoman sultan received a report on the state of affairs in Egypt that revealed unpleasant news. Egypt, one of the shiniest jewels in the empire’s crown, was not one intact province under the sultan’s full hegemony. The eminent officer who compiled the report described the existence of an autonomous state in the south. Seemingly enjoying no access to this state, the Ottoman officer gave brief and incomplete information about its government. According to the report, the autonomous regime in Upper Egypt was ruled by its own Arab tribal regime that did pay an annual tax to the sultan, but Cairo’s Ottoman governor exercised no authority over it. About one of its legendary leaders, the report stated,

      The Arab named Shaykh Hammam is resident in . . . the province of Upper Egypt. He always has in his side four thousand Arab troops, and he controls by right of inheritance most of the villages of Upper Egypt. They [Hammam and his sons] never come to Cairo. . . . They always pay in full all the money and grains required for the treasury from their village, and they never oppose the tax collection. They themselves appoint and send twenty governors annually to the towns and provinces under their authority, and they collect approximately several thousand purses every year.1

      Stories about this mysterious independent state recorded by other Ottoman officers reveal more surprises. Interestingly, the peasants who inhabited southern Egypt exercised a degree of leverage over their government to the extent that, on occasions of discontent, they could demand that the ruling elite pack up and leave. Highly impressed with this state, contemporary French observers and, later, Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth century called it a republic.2 In one incident, in 1695, the ruling Hawwara tribe formed an alliance with separatist military factions in Cairo and went to war against the Ottoman governor. Amid the conflict, plague broke out and was exacerbated due to severe food shortages throughout Egypt. The discontented peasants of Qina, the capital of the southern state, asked their Hawwara leaders to take their belongings and families and leave. “We are people of plowing and harvesting, and more than half of us died. We will no longer fight and disobey the sultanate,” said the farmers. The leaders of the tribe departed for the eastern mountains bordering the Nile, but they came back shortly afterward—despite local resentment—with the support of the Ottoman sultan and restored their regime.3

      The existence of this state without a doubt comes as surprising news to many historians of the Ottoman Empire. Ottomanists traditionally have viewed Egypt as a unified province, controlled centrally by Cairo’s military elite and the efficient imperial bureaucracy in Istanbul. Recent theoretical trends add that the imperial “core” in Istanbul made Egypt, along with other provinces in eastern Europe and the Arab lands, into a dependent “periphery.” The entire new province was thus incorporated into a hegemonic Ottoman “world economy” that prevailed in the Mediterranean.4 For Upper Egypt—a whole half of Egypt, in fact the richer half then—this is a mere myth. For three continuous centuries, ever since Sultan Selim’s conquest of Cairo in 1517, an autonomous regime formed in the south under a local dynasty. Moreover, the south was a key part of what many world historians call the Indian Ocean world economy, the global hegemonic system of that period, of which the Ottoman Empire itself was a known dependent.5

      This chapter argues that the Ottoman was an imagined empire in Upper Egypt. In the south of the country the core/periphery relationship was reversed: the consumerist imperial core was dependent on a capitalist periphery. Furthermore, when the empire attempted to make an actual appearance in the south, its presence only brought about environmental crises, including the onset of the plague, and eventually triggered subaltern rebellion. This chapter follows the formation of government and economic systems that existed under the independent tribal regime of the south. This state reached its maturity in the eighteenth century, under the government of the legendary Hammam that almost amounted to an early “republic”—as contemporary French observers asserted. Whenever the Ottoman Empire attempted to manifest itself in the south, the chapter demonstrates, its appearance only disturbed the political stability and disrupted an existing social contract between this state and its subjects, which generated subaltern rebellion that the empire then helped to crush. More importantly, the empire’s appearance in the south killed people, as it carried with it an “imperial plague” all the way from Istanbul.

      ONE SULTAN, TWO STATES: WILAYAT AL-SA‘ID

      Shortly after Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt, a “two-state” system was born in the new province. The official rulers of Egypt were the Mamluk officers of Turco-Circassian origin who took over Cairo’s citadel after the Crusades in the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, one fierce Arab tribe, the Hawwara, established de facto control over Upper Egypt beginning in 1380, when, after prolonged wars against the Mamluks, the tribe dominated agricultural properties, trade, and industries in the south. The sultan subscribed to the existing status quo as he concluded peace treaties with the Hawwara and was content to receive the tributes and generous gifts that the tribe sent to Istanbul annually. Meanwhile, the sultan kept the loyal officers of the former Mamluk elite in power in the north but under the authority of an appointed governor pasha sent from Istanbul.6 Thus, two separate states immediately took shape out of this postconquest arrangement: a settler, military regime in the north; and a native, tribal regime in the south.

      Soon afterward, this two-state system was written into law. In 1525, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued the first book of imperial decrees to organize Egypt, Qanunname-i Misir, he regulated the administrative independence of Upper Egypt from Cairo. Wilayat al-Sa‘id, or the province of Upper Egypt, was the official name the sultan used to refer to the southern state. According to the new imperial law, the appointed Ottoman pasha, Egypt’s governor, in Cairo enjoyed no authority over the southern state’s tribal rulers beyond tax collection, and he was not even authorized to punish them if they did not pay. The sultan reserved this right only for himself, and the Hawwara were to report directly to Istanbul. The imperial decree also laid out the Hawwaras’ main administrative duties as rulers, including land reclamation, organizing irrigation, collecting taxes, sending annual gifts to the sultan, and crushing rebels from other Arab tribes.7

      Another imperial law would consolidate the autonomous power of the Hawwara: the landownership code. After conquering Egypt, Istanbul introduced tax farms, or iltizams, as a system of both landholding and tax collection. Each tax farmer won his piece of land, which could amount to several villages, through public auctions. The farmer would keep the land for a period of only three years, during which he maintained its cultivation through local tenants. At the end of each year, the tax farmer collected the land’s fixed annual tax, sent it to the Ottoman governor in Cairo, and kept the remainder of the revenue for himself. In the northern military regime, Mamluk officers were the tax farmers of the Delta villages.8 Hawwara tribal leaders were by far the largest, and at times the sole, tax farmers of the south. More importantly, as a sign of their independence, they maintained lifetime, hereditary rights to their landholdings. On the eve of the seventeenth century, they controlled about 65 percent of the land in Upper Egypt, and the Ottoman governor in Cairo collected revenue from the rest.9 From the second half of the seventeenth century and through the eighteenth, Stanford Shaw recounts, the Hawwaras’ “rule was formalized by their appointments as hereditary multazims.”10 In the mid-1700s, one Hawwara ruler, Shaykh Hammam, was the sole tax farmer in the entirety of Upper Egypt, from Asyut, through Qina, to Aswan.11

      FIGURE 2. A twelfth-century trade route between Qina Province and its Red Sea port of ‘Aydhab.

      

      Aspiring to limit Hawwara power, the Ottoman pasha in Cairo appointed a governor—a Mamluk officer—in northern Upper Egypt. The city of Girga, closer to Cairo, was made into the seat for this new governor. Official records often referred to Upper Egypt as the province of Girga, or Wilayat Girga, in hope that the city’s governor would impose control over the south. Nonetheless, the Hawwara not only established hegemony over incoming governors, they also controlled the very process of appointment in Cairo. When the Hawwara did not approve of a candidate, they blocked the grain tax intended for Istanbul. The Ottoman pasha and the Mamluk

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