Imagined Empires - Zeinab Abul-Magd

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Justice was carried out in shari‘a courts in order to minimize the exploitation of peasants.30 Like their fellow Muslims, the Coptic peasants of Upper Egypt enjoyed usufruct rights, in accordance with Islamic law, and rented land from the tax farmers. Transactions in landholding occurred without discrimination between Copts and Muslims.31

      The shari‘a courts of Upper Egypt, the primary place of adjudication in the Hawwara legal system, reflected the south’s autonomy. The provincial courts of Grand Cairo and the Delta were part of the state apparatus, and their judges often acted as part of the state bureaucracy. They adopted the Hanafi school of jurisprudence as the official legal framework, published the sultan’s decrees (fermans) and other important administrative laws, and recorded grand military victories and political events in the empire. Among the duties of the provincial judge in the Delta was solving disputes among Mamluk tax farmers and investigating cases of negligence in land cultivation.32 In contrast, the courts of Qina Province were entirely independent of Cairo. The registers of the city of Isna’s court, for instance, had no first page (preamble, or dibaja) referring to an official affiliation of this court with the Ottoman regime in the north. They did not publish any Ottoman decrees, as they were not obliged to apply them, and did not record any Ottoman or Mamluk events, since these were irrelevant to political matters in the province.33

      Four main schools of Islamic law dominated courts of the Muslim world at this time, and the Hawwara adopted one that differed from both Istanbul and Cairo. Whereas Istanbul adopted the Hanafi school as its official legal framework, and the Shafi‘i school was dominant in northern Egypt, the Hawwara adopted the Maliki school because it was already used in southern courts and prevalent among Upper Egyptian scholars when the tribe came to power. Opinions from the Shafi‘i school were still used in Qina’s courts, for instance, but to a minor degree. Besides Islamic law, the Hawwara applied ‘urf, or the code of local traditions. ‘Urf in Upper Egypt referred to the Arab tribal code of ethics and collective government and was practiced in the Arab public councils, or majalis al-‘arab. ‘Urf was also officially considered in local shari‘a courts.34

      The Hawwara built their own system of regional relations around Qina’s trade routes. The traditional method of forming external alliances took place through intermarriage between dynasties, an act in which Hawwara family members participated with other ruling families in their Arab trade network. Hawwara family members married the daughters of the sharif of Mecca and became in-laws of the Hijaz ruling elite. The Meccan wives owned properties in Hijaz that their Hawwara husbands managed on their behalves. Interestingly enough, Hawwara influence in North Africa was so extensive that for a period the tribe ruled Cyrenaica, the western Libyan province. In the eighteenth century, the Hawwara ruler carried the title of the commander of Upper Egypt and Cyrenaica, or amir al-Sa‘id wa-Barqa.35

      The Hawwara built political alliances with specific Mamluk factions in the northern regime as well. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cairo had two primary Mamluk factions: the Faqqariyya and the Qasimiyya, who sought power and competed to form a strategic alliance with the Hawwara. Obtaining the governorship of Girga, in northern Upper Egypt, was crucial in the Faqqariyya-Qasimiyya rivalry because of both the economic resources of the south and the potential political benefits of an alliance with the Hawwara. Mamluk rebels opposing the imperial Ottoman regime traditionally escaped to Upper Egypt, where they received logistic support from the Hawwara and launched wars against their incumbent rivals in Cairo.36

      FROM PLAGUE TO REBELLION

      On the eve of the eighteenth century, the two-state system in Egypt faced a severe crisis. As war erupted across Egypt, both regimes almost collapsed. While Cairo’s Mamluk factions fought each other in a dispute over power, the Hawwara sought further independence by withholding their taxes from Cairo. The empire desperately attempted to contain the collapse using its best military strategies. The political turmoil invited massive environmental devastation: the poor throughout Egypt suffered food shortages and high prices, and the plague broke out immediately afterward, both in Cairo and in the north. The empire’s failure to restore political stability in the two regimes only contributed to the spread of the epidemic. Moreover, the empire’s attempt to make its presence felt in Upper Egypt took place at the expense of the subalterns: it sabotaged their first considerable uprising against the Hawwara.

      In 1695, an Ottoman chronicler reported that the two incumbent Mamluk factions of the military regime in Cairo—the Qasimiyya and the Faqqariyya—intensified their competition over revenue and control of the Girga office. Their conflict was not new. It had erupted during several other major incidents through the previous decades when dissident factions revolted against the Ottoman governor pasha.37 Capitalizing on political turmoil in the north to further their autonomy, the Hawwara stopped sending their grain tax to the pasha in Cairo. Ahmad al-Damurdashi, an eighteenth-century officer and chronicler, relayed that the “Hawwara had sized the villages producing the kushufiya [lands assigned to the Ottoman governor in Cairo] revenues by obtaining taqasit [title deeds] and turning them into iltizams [tax farms] . . . and . . . were not concerned about the governor Pasha because they had agents among the notables of Cairo who purchased the jiraya [allowances in-kind] for 30 nisf feddan an ardabb. . . . The imperial granaries do not receive a single ardabb from the Hawwara.”38 Consequently, an economic crisis broke out not just in the north but across all Egypt. Commodity prices increased fourfold and some food staples, such as wheat, barely, and beans, disappeared from the markets. The crisis intensified in the next year, with low Nile inundation and a subsequently dire harvest.39

      Amid the conflict, the plague broke out in Cairo. The Egyptian chronicler ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti recounts that bodies of the impoverished dead were collected from the streets, washed in state public baths, and buried en masse.40 It was an “imperial” plague, resulting from the empire’s incompetence in maintaining the stability of the two-state system. According to the basic sultanic law regulating Egypt’s administration, the Qanunname, a main duty of each state was agricultural organization, or ensuring the control of irrigation and drainage during the annual floods. Some contemporary European observers argued that the reason behind the sudden appearance of the plague was mismanagement of the Nile water after the flood, neglect of stagnant swamps, and low Nile inundation. This wave of the epidemic erupted during military conflict and a time of low Nile flood, when the two regimes neglected water control. Although this outbreak of the plague did not make it to Upper Egypt—as the region’s dry air and hot weather mostly made it immune41—the impoverished population of the south was migrating to Cairo and sweeping its hungry streets, only to die there in the epidemic.42

      Two years after this tragedy, in order to subjugate the southern regime of the Hawwara, Sultan Mustafa Khan issued a decree to send a Mamluk army equipped with the latest military technology from Cairo to Upper Egypt. The Supreme Council, or al-Diwan al-‘Ali, of the governor pasha assembled to read the sultan’s letter that commanded thus: “To Husayn Pasha. As soon as this noble receipt reaches you, you are to announce a general call for arms . . . proceed to Girga and destroy the Hawwara tax farmers of Upper Egypt who sized the kushufiya villages [the tax farms of the pasha]. Take note and do not disobey.”43 The Mamluk officers obeyed. ‘Abd al-Rahman Bey promised to recover the villages seized by the Hawwara, in return for which he would be appointed the governor of Girga for three years. He made sure to have an official deed registering this promise. He equipped his army with two cannons, ammunition, an artilleryman, and a ferman granting amnesty. More importantly, he formed an alliance with a dissident faction from the northern Hawwara against the tax farmers of the southern Hawwara who controlled the tribal regime.

      In response, the southern Hawwara were ready with an army of peasants and Nubians. After a long fight, they lost the battle. The Mamluks occupied their capital town in Qina Province, Farshut, and the Mamluk soldiers plundered their properties and took their women. They looted the Hawwaras’ oil mills’ machinery, flour mills’ grounding stones, slaves, horses, and camels in Farshut and sent the spoils north by boat. Many of the peasants of Upper Egypt died in the battle, but the ruling Hawwara tax farmers were unharmed.

      It was time for the southern peasants, who resented the destruction that the Hawwara regime had inflicted on them, to rebel. The peasant

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