17 - 23 May 2001
Issue No.534
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 |
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When crafts were industry
André Raymond talked about crafts in 18th century Cairo. Amina Elbendary attended
For most Cairenes today, traditional Egyptian arts and crafts are just that: remnants of an historic tradition revered chiefly for their "authentic" and folkloric values. Indeed, this dichotomy between industry and craftsmanship has become so ingrained in cultural discourse that it is hard for us to imagine a time when craft was industry, when handmade objects were valued for their functional and artistic merits.
This view is supported by interpretations of Egypt's (indeed the entire Arab world's) economic history, which stigmatise the state of indigenous craftsmanship prior to the introduction of Western-styl industry. A dominant school of historiography looks on almost all centuries of Ottoman rule as ones of backwardness and decline, and this naturally impacts on their judgments of Ottoman economic history.
The revision of such conceptions of early modern production by historians east and west was discussed in a seminar by André Raymond, the eminent French historian and professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence -- an authority on the history of Cairo. Speaking at the Suq Al-Fustat (newly constructed at the site of the medieval markets of Fustat) he explained how his own work has also been revised -- by himself as well as by young historians like Pascale Ghazaleh. Contrary to his earlier work published in the 1960s, he now sees in 18th century Cairene crafts a thriving economic enterprise.
Raymond explained that the common, disparaging view of late Ottoman crafts, is largely due to historian relying mainly on European sources. European travellers and colonial officials were hard on traditional crafts, which they saw as simplistic and naive. This view is also clear in the articles of the famous Description de l'Egypte.
But the bias is also indigenous: Ottoman arts and crafts are generally considered less refined than those of the preceding Mamluk period to which they are constantly compared. Another source of bias is due to a (mis)reading of late 15th/early 16th century Egyptian historian Ibn Iyas. In describing the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 Ibn Iyas mentions that the Turks moved all the skilled craftsmen of Cairo to the imperial capital, Istanbul. This has given rise to a long-held misconception that crafts were destroyed: even Al-Jabarti, writing in the 19th century, claimed that 50 crafts totally disappeared as a result of this talent drain. However, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, a careful reading of the following chapters of Ibn Iyas betrays that within a few years of the Ottoman conquest these craftsmen were returning to Cairo.
Even in the absence of accurate statistics for the Ottoman period, accounts by travellers such as Chelebi, as well as the Description, suggest it is safe to conjecture that craftsmen constituted a sizeable percentage of the working population (20 to 40 per cent). Even more interesting is the realisation that craftsmen were not discredited or disparaged. In fact, historical writings abound with examples of respectable men -- officers as well as ulama -- who worked in the crafts.
So what went wrong?
Well, according to Professor Raymond there were internal, indigenous factors that limited the development of crafts in Egypt. For one there was an extraordinary and irrational division of labour that did not differentiate between production and marketing, so that craftsmen were usually the sellers of their products and often worked only by commission. Workshops were usually small, rarely employing more than 10, and the tools used were simple and inexpensive, with the exception of oil presses and sugar refineries.
According to court registers and inheritance records textile workers constituted around a third of all Egyptian craftsmen. Cairo was famous for its silk textiles but textile production was so important for both domestic and regional markets that there were workshops in the provinces, including Mahalla and Assiut. Sugar refining was another important craft in late Ottoman Egypt and had been so since Fatimid and Mamluk times. In fact the main refinery was located close to Qasaba street, demonstrating its central importance to Cairene economic life.
Woodcrafts, advanced at the time, were important in construction and furniture. The exquisite wooden mashrabiyas of surviving houses are testimony to that.
Glass industries, on the other hand, were obviously in decline, and failed to meeting market demand, as evidenced by an increase in imports of Italian glass.
The impressions Raymond drew of 18th century Cairene crafts are ambiguous; some crafts fared better than others. What is clear, however, is that Egypt was facing several crises by the late 18th century. Political instability, struggles for power, famine and epidemics took their toll on indigenous production.
But there were also external factors. Competition with European goods was a major reason for the decline of crafts, especially textiles and sugar, as imperial powers expanded sugar cane plantations in their colonies and built sugar refineries. Ottoman markets, the regional outlet for Egyptian crafts, were flooded with European products. The policies of the British occupation destroyed what remained of indigenous production. Hence most traditional crafts failed to modernise and disappeared. The few that survive do so on folkloric merits.
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