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Imagined Empires. Zeinab Abul-Magd
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isbn 9780520956537
Автор произведения Zeinab Abul-Magd
Издательство Ingram
The secret behind the rise of the Hawwaras’ regime, from the Mamluk through Ottoman times, was the geographic importance of their seat of power: Qina Province, deep in the south of Upper Egypt. The capitalist commercial, agricultural, and industrial wealth of this province constituted the necessary material foundations for an independent state, as it allowed the Hawwara to rise first as an entrepreneurial and then as a political elite. Qina Province was an integral part of the Indian Ocean world economy, the old global system that encompassed the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, East Africa, and the entirety of the Indian Ocean. As Andre Gunder Frank, Janet Abu Lughod, and many theorists of world economy assert, this was the hegemonic economic system from the rise of Islam until the nineteenth century, after which it was disrupted and replaced by a modern European-led system.13 Through the Red Sea ports of ‘Aydhab and Qusayr, the towns of the province (including Qus, Isna, Qina, and Farshut) were connected to Arabian and Yemeni ports and received important global commodities such as spices and coffee. The same towns also received East African trade, either via Nile sailboats or overland caravans, including luxury goods such as gold and slaves. These towns then served as Nile ports that reexported oriental and African commodities north to Cairo and on to the Mediterranean.14
Within the Indian Ocean world system, Qina Province was itself a major center of commercial agriculture. As a sugarcane, grain, and cotton producer, the province exported its own refined sugar and abundant grain to the north and sold its textiles to the regional market in East Africa.15 The Hawwara tribe had monopolized agriculture production in the province since the Mamluk period, and the capital the tribe accumulated allowed them to grow into a dynasty. In fact, the Hawwara initially rose to power as the owners of sugarcane plantations and sugar refineries, when sugarcane was the most important cash crop in Qina Province, especially in the area of Farshut. The Mamluk sultans granted Hawwara notables large lands in Upper Egypt as fiefs, or iqta‘s, and the Hawwara soon transformed them into lucrative sugar plantations.16 Upper Egyptian sugar was consumed domestically and exported to Middle Eastern and European countries, including, Italy, southern France, Catalonia, Flanders, England, and Germany.17
Evidently, there was a reversed core/periphery relationship between Istanbul and Qina, where the imperial core was actually dependant on the capitalist periphery to provide both sustenance and luxury consumption. After the conquest, the imperial granaries in Istanbul relied primarily on the Upper Egyptian grain tax, especially on wheat, to sustain its immense annual needs. As Shaw asserts, “most of the muqata‘at [districts] of Upper Egypt were obliged to deliver their land taxes entirely in grain, and it was these grain payments which provided the entire supply used by the Imperial Treasury to maintain those depending on it for sustenance.”18 In addition, it was the grain of Upper Egypt that the sultan—the caliph of Muslims—relied on to feed the inhabitants and pilgrims of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina each year. Grain from the south was shipped from Qina to the Red Sea port of Qusayr, unloaded at the port of Jeddah in Arabia, and shipped from there to Mecca and Medina.19
Furthermore, the sugar of Upper Egypt, especially from Farshut in Qina Province, arrived in Istanbul and Anatolia by land and sea in ever-increasing quantities in order to sustain the needs of the major Ottoman cities, as Shaw also points out. Istanbul annually requested and received hundreds of qantars of Upper Egyptian sugar. The empire also received its essential provisions of Yemeni coffee and African commodities, including gold and slaves, from the Upper Egyptian Red Sea and Nile trade routes. Yemeni coffee came from the port of Mocha to Qusayr and Qina and from there was shipped north. A large portion of the gold and African slaves imported by Istanbul arrived via Upper Egyptian trade routes from the Sudan and Abyssinia.20
The stability of the southern regime was based on a social contract between the ruling tribe and different subaltern groups in Upper Egypt. Peasants were the most important social group to which the Hawwara granted political agency; it was upon their grain and sugarcane that the dynasty built its capitalist fortune and subsequent hegemony. The peasants of Upper Egypt were largely either from Arab tribal descent or were Coptic Christians.21 Arab peasants enjoyed considerable leverage based on tribal networks, making it difficult for rulers to control them. Arab peasants did not deal with the ruling elite in individual terms; rather, the entire clan of a village dealt collectively with their respective tax farmers. This tribal arrangement provided those peasants with considerable power vis-à-vis the Hawwara. Collective bargaining often forced the Hawwara to acquiesce to peasant demands.
This virtual social contract stipulated that Arab peasants would cultivate the land and pay dues to Hawwara tax farmers. In return, the Hawwara were obliged to provide security by protecting the villages against raids from unsettled Arab tribes. The Hawwara generally managed these tribal attacks more successfully than Mamluk tax farmers in the Delta.22 Shaw affirms, “Their [Upper Egyptian peasants] lot was never as hard as that of the cultivators in Lower Egypt, for their masters were much better able to protect them from raids of other Arab tribes than was the central government.”23 Security was without question the main concern of peasants. When the Hawwara failed to deliver security, the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty was threatened.24 Whereas the relationship between Mamluk tax farmers and the peasants of Lower Egypt was notoriously oppressive, Upper Egyptian peasants enjoyed a more dignified experience. Shaw writes that “the administration of this tribe [Hawwara] was equitable and beneficent; cultivation was maintained and the welfare of the peasants promoted far better than in Lower Egypt.”25
The second group with which the Hawwara established a social contract were the Copts, the native Orthodox Christians of Egypt, especially the educated accountants among them. Replicating the model followed by Cairo-based Islamic empires ever since the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, the Hawwaras’ administration relied on Coptic expertise to run the financial system in Upper Egypt. The Hawwara hired Coptic mu‘allims to manage the registers of their tax farms and private commercial businesses as well.26 Nevertheless, the Coptic financial clerks were sometimes subject to persecution when their influence and fortune grew beyond the limits that the Hawwara permitted.27
Finally, unsettled Arab tribes, or the ‘Urban, were another important social group with whom a political pact was necessary in order to ensure the stability of the Hawwara regime. The ‘Ababida were the main tribe roaming Qina Province. They attacked villages and towns during daylight, robbed people in market places, and freed prisoners from jail.28 Despite their criminal actions, the ‘Ababida and their shaykhs, as many European observers who were acquainted with them witnessed, were not naturally immoral people. They committed these crimes mostly as rebellious responses to state injustice. The tribe’s shaykhs were fine men known for their generosity and hospitality; they kept their word and fulfilled their promises, as contemporary European visitors noted. The Hawwara co-opted the ‘Ababida through peace agreements and placed the ‘Ababida in charge of security matters. The ‘Ababida were tasked with protecting certain villages and defending the Qusayr port’s trade routes against the raids of other Arab tribes.29
Hawwara tax farmers organized their relationship with peasants within the rules of Islamic law. They leased land to peasants through sharecropping contracts, according to which the tenant was obliged to pay the land’s tax and hand in a share of the crops to the tax farmer. In addition, Qina’s peasants held usufruct rights (furugh wa nuzul) to the land and could pass them down to their heirs. They exercised the rights to buy and sell agricultural land, which took the form of obtaining or relinquishing usufruct rights. They also enjoyed the right to mortgage their landholdings. In addition, peasants rented plots from Hawwara notables who held usufruct rights to large farms. The lease