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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 July 1999 Issue No. 437
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
July was always a month rich in revolution. Two recent books shed new light on key actors in the making of modern EgyptThe missing bust
Awraq Youssef Seddiq (The Papers of Youssef Seddiq), ed. Abdel-Azim Ramadan, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1999. pp308The limits of allegiance
Shahadati lil-Ajyal (My Testimony to the Coming Generations), Helmi El-Said, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, 1999. pp271
Playing the British at their own game
Fayed -- The Unauthorised Biography, Tom Bower. Macmillan, 1998. pp496Discrepancies of doctrine
Two Thousand Years of Coptic Christianity, Otto F A Meinardus, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp344 + 24 b/w photographsFrom Ottomans to Officers
The Cambridge History of Egypt (2 vols.), volume 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M W Daly, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp464Functionalising religion
Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt, Gregory Starrett, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998. pp308Recovered memories
Zaman al-nisaa wal zhakira al-badila (Women's Time and Alternative Memory), eds. Hoda El-Sadda, Somaya Ramadan and Omayma Abu Bakr, Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub, 1998. pp382The illusion of the journey
Travellers in Egypt, eds. Paul Starkey and Janet Starkey, I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 1998. pp318
Soon to appear, Stokely Carmichael's memoirs are themselves a part of history. Al-Ahram Weekly previews the manuscript and talks to the co-author
Rendezvous with history
Michael Thelwell helped Stokely Carmichael write his death-bed memoirs. Visiting Cairo recently, Gamal Nkrumah sounded him out on the political legacy of the Black Power movement
At a glance:Al-Hilal, a monthly magazine, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, July 1999
* Ibdaa' (Creativity), a monthly magazine, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, June 1999
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
From Ottomans to Officers
Reviewed by Fayza Hassan
The Cambridge History of Egypt (2 vols.), volume 2, Modern Egypt from 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M W Daly, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp464
With the second volume of the Cambridge History of Egypt, the lay reader will find him/herself on more familiar ground, as it traces the modern history of the country, from the Ottoman conquest in 1517 to the present day. A number of leading scholars, experts in both the humanities and the social sciences, explore the political, social and economic history of the period, and there is considerable interest to be found in the newly accessible archival material on which they draw.
Michael Winter, who contributed the last chapter of the first volume, carries over his study of the Ottoman occupation to examine the period from 1525 to 1609, This represents approximately the first third of the history of Ottoman Egypt, and, as Winter says, it was a time which had a number of "distinctive characteristics."
Among these was the role of the Turks as patrons of Islam. However, as the author notes, this relationship "did not preclude Egyptian-Turkish tensions." There follows a fascinating study of the ways, both overt and covert, by which the Egyptian people initially resisted their occupier. Winter then goes on to document the subsequent mellowing of the generation following Ibn Iyas, when writers eventually came to praise the Ottoman state, rather than revile it.
A detailed account of the role of the pashas sent from Istanbul, the military revolts, the turbulence of the Arab (Bedouin) tribes and the influence of the sheikhs provides the context for an exposé of the dubious argument that Egyptians came to tolerate the Ottoman occupation because the Turks were regarded as guardians of the faith. The chapter concludes with a description of the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Egypt during the period.
Jane Hathaway contributes an analysis of the momentous changes that affected all the Ottoman provinces during the period stretching from the mid-15th through the late 16th century, critically reexamining the "decline paradigm" that is now increasingly being questioned by Ottomanists.
The next century, during which Egypt continued to drift towards autonomy and began to develop closer ties with Europe under the leadership of aggressive beys, is described by Daniel Crecelius, who gives a particularly vivid account of the incessant outbreaks of violence between competing military households, the ravages caused by the plague and the tyranny of the military establishment. The rest of the chapter deals with the rise of the famous Qazdagli household and the transient resurgence of Egypt under Ali Bey Bulut Kapan and Mohamed Bey Abul-Dahab. But, writes Crecelius, "Egypt knew neither peace nor stability between the death of Mohamed Bey and the consolidation of power of Mohamed Ali."
In the following chapter, Nelly Hanna analyses the cultural patterns which characterised the Ottoman period. "When the state is decentralised, as it was during the Ottoman period, and the structures at the top are weaker, the cultural forms and patterns from below are more likely to emerge," writes Hanna. Diverse forms and expressions of culture were not only disseminated by the official institutions of learning, but also reached the people through a number of informal channels. Moreover, the kuttab, run by pious foundations, were instrumental in allowing the poorer strata of society a non-negligible degree of literacy.
Darrell Dykstra is charged with giving an account of the much-studied period of the French occupation. He focuses particularly on assessing the impact and significance of these years on Egypt's economic and social situation. Noting that the contact was too brief and too violent to leave a lasting Western imprint on the country, Dykstra explains: "The primary and enduring dialogue between Egypt and Europe would come later, beginning especially with the establishment of a new network of relations between Mohamed Ali's state structure and the European world."
Khaled Fahmy then takes over the story: "The period of Mohamed Ali's reign which started in 1805 when he was appointed by the Ottoman sultan as wali of Egypt and ended in 1848 with his deposition as a result of mental illness, offers one of the most interesting epochs of modern history." Fahmy examines the circumstances which allowed Mohamed Ali to rise to power and, during the years 1805-1813, the various ways by which he endeavoured to consolidate his grip on the country. Conspiracy and military expansion, the tools-of-trade of the wali, form the main corpus of this long essay, which includes a colourful account of the battle of Navarino. Fahmy also pays due attention to Mohamed Ali's more constructive achievements, such as medical reform, which, in his words, "seems to have been one of the most successful of the Pasha's policies". Through it, he argues, "the authorities managed to control the devastating plague and cholera epidemics that had ravaged Egypt."
Weighing the good and the evil that the reign of the wali brought to Egypt, Fahmy's verdict is rather harsh: "...In this manner, Mohamed Ali was truly the founder of modern Egypt, an Egypt in which the Egyptians found themselves silenced, exiled, punished and robbed of the fruit of their labour, an Egypt to be ruled as he had wished by his descendants for a hundred years after his death."
Robert Hunter deals with the political history of Egypt between 1848 and 1879 -- that is, from when the country's leadership passed to Mohamed Ali's successors to the formal establishment of foreign control following European economic and political penetration. Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim offers a complementary analysis of the entire period 1805-1885, focusing on Mohamed Ali's empire in the eastern Mediterranean, which was lost by his successors to the European powers. He also devotes part of the chapter to a discussion of Egypt's legacy in the territories it conquered.
"Between September 1881 and September 1882 the Urabi revolution in Egypt tried to roll back Anglo-French financial and political predominance, the Turco-Circassian monopoly on high military posts and the authority of Khedive Tawfiq," writes Donald Malcolm Reid. Giving a detailed account of this painful year, which pitted the ruler of Egypt against his army and allowed the British to take control of the country, he comments: "The Muhamed Ali dynasty survived, at an ultimately fatal price in legitimacy and power. After the catastrophe of 1882, it remained for the revolutionaries of 1919 and 1952 to take up again the cause of 'Egypt for the Egyptians'."
The seventy years of British occupation which followed the events of 1882 is examined by the volume's editor, M W Daly, while Ehud Toledano contributes an analysis of the social and economic changes which occurred in Egypt during the "long nineteenth century". This is followed by Selma Botman's description of Egypt's political landscape in the years 1923-1952. Joel Beinin addresses the social and economic aspects of colonial capitalist Egypt during the same period. Alain Roussillon offers an analysis of the evolution of "modern" Egypt, spanning the 1952 Revolution and beyond, and concluding with a tentative definition of the present political system.
Finally, in an investigative study of the role of modern Egyptian culture in the Arab world, Paul Starkey acknowledges the difficulty of summarising the state of Egyptian culture today; but, he writes, "there is no doubt that the country has to a considerable extent retained the position it has held since the beginning of the nahda as a leader in most fields of modern Arab culture."
This second volume of the Cambridge History of Egypt combines erudite discussion with a concise historical account of a long and complex period. Each of the essays is excellent in its own way, and invariably informative and interesting, though each of the topics broached is in itself worthy of a far longer study. Those seeking entertainment, however, would do well to look elsewhere: this is not a vulgarised review of almost five centuries of history. The scholars gathered together in this volume compromise just enough to ensure clarity: but there is no laxity, and each chapter is packed with information. For the researcher and the serious reader alike, however, there is much to be found here, including a very complete bibliography -- especially useful to those who wish to take their studies of Egyptian history further.
