C HRONICLES T HE

THE
CHRONICLES
ECONOMIC
BUSINESS HISTORY RESEARCH CENTRE CHRONICLES
APRIL—JUNE 2006, VOLUME 1 / ISSUE 4
AND
The American University in Cairo
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Editor’s Note
EBHRC CHRONICLES
Editor: Dina Khalifa Hussein
Director, EBHRC:
Prof. Abdelaziz Ezzelarab
Project Officers:
Mostafa Hefny
Mohamed I. Fahmy Menza
Administrative Assistant, EBHRC:
Yasmeen Samir
Young Scholars Contributors:
Zeinab Abul-Magd
Lina Atallah
Wael Ismail
Karim El-Sayed
From our Archives
Documenting Egypt: Between
Glass Houses and Coffee Shops
3
We Don’t Make Them Like We Used to:
Memoirs of Mahmoud Amin Al Aalem,
Vanguard of Egyptian Communists
6
Historical Perspectives
Introduction to the Land
and the People of Egypt
The Spillover of Mohamed Ali’s Modernization
Drive in the Sudan (1820-1885)
Muhammad Tal’at Harb:
A Bourgeois Intellectual
Guest Contributors:
Prof. Ibramin Elnur
Prof. Robert Tignor
2
9
15
18
Layout &Design:
Magda Elsehrawi
History in the Making
Logo:
Nadine Kenawy
Egypt’s Last Effendi: On the Government
Efforts to Privatize Department Stores
22
Things to Note While Reading the Financial Times:
European Economic Nationalism
Taking the Lead
25
*******
About EBHRC
EBHRC Supporting Institutes:
Center for Middle East Studies,
Harvard University
Near East Studies Program,
Princeton University
Middle East Center,
University of Pennsylvania
Middle East Center,
University of Washington
Global Business Center, Business School,
University of Washington
Office of Provost, AUC
Office of Dean of BEC, AUC
Economics Department, AUC
EBHRC Collaborating Scholars:
Prof. Ellis Goldberg,
(University of Washington)
Business Not as Usual
“Please Sir, I Want Some More!”
The Dilemma of Aid, Development
and Rebuilding in Darfur
28
Book Review
Running on Empty: Financial Crisis
and Political Power in Mubarak’s Egypt
31
EBHRC forum
Summary and Program
36
Our Archives
38
Prof. Roger Owen (Harvard)
Prof. Robert Tignor (Princeton University)
Prof. Robert Vitalis
(University of Pennsylvania)
Cover image by Magda Elsehrawi
1
THE
ARTICLES FEATURED IN THE
CHRONICLES
REPRESENT THE OPINION OF THEIR AUTHORS, AND NOT NECESSARILY THAT OF THE
EBHRC
EDITOR’S NOTE
EDITOR’S NOTE...
H
istory is not dead. This is an assertion one of our colleagues made while
trying to portray an idea for this issue's cover page. Historical statues
exchanging places with the modern day man might be one of the
readings of this complex claim. Yet one is left with a belief that history
is one of the best narrators of our contemporary realities.
The ancient Nile River, for instance, is witness to the identity and survival strategies
of its people. Prof. Robert Tignor is working on a brief general history of Egypt. In
this issue, he generously shares with us an early draft of the first chapter of his new
book. Introduction to the Land and People of Egypt takes us back to the origins
of human habitation in the valley of the Nile. Further south, the river takes us to
Sudan, whose proximity to Egypt has flooded it with spill over of good and vice.
Turkiyya (Turkish) in Sudanese colloquial “donates extreme injustice and aggressive attitude,” as Prof. Ibrahim Elnur highlights in his article. Elnur argues that
despite the popular discourse of injustices accrued during Mohamed Ali’s rule in
Sudan, spillover of his modernization drive cannot be negated. As for modern
day Sudan, the dreams of modernization and peace are in tragic disarray.
Lina Atallah gives an account of the war-torn Sudanese province of Darfur.
Repercussions of the conflict translate into a long list of brutal death rates, violence and a dilemma of aid dependency. Atallah raises concerns of the growing culture of dependency on donor agencies and NGOs in what she calls a “distorted economic environment.”
Like historical statues, we generally stand still and observe brutalities of civil wars,
economic and political distortions in the Egyptian and Arab scenes. Nevertheless,
we try, through the pages of this publication, to pin point some of the pitfalls.
From the arrant nature of the current political regime, to the discriminatory global economic trends against the developed world, we collect the debris of the
present’s violent collision with history. This issue includes nine articles that begin in
the early habitation of the Nile valley and end in modern day Egypt and Sudan.
Dina Khalifa Hussein, Project Officer, EBHRC
2
FROM
OUR
ARCHIVES
Documenting
Egypt
Between
Glass Houses
and Coffee Shops...
Dina Khalifa, Project Officer, EBHRC
W
riting history is an exercise fraught with problems that are common
to journalists, historians
and researchers in general. Some witness it as it happens and
others delve into its remains to search for
truth. In the preface of Robert Fisk's Pity
the Nation: Lebanon at War, he explains
why he chose to go to Lebanon during
the civil war. He says he wanted to witness history as it happens. He describes
how at best journalists "sit at the edge of
history like vulcanologisits might clamber
to the lip of a smoking crater, trying to
see over the rim, craning their necks to
peer over the crumbling edge through
the smoke and ash at what happens
within." This is not an easy job, but things
become even more complicated when
the volcano's flames die out. The job
3
then is not to peer over the crumbling
edge, but to dig deep into the earth to
search for what once, long ago, had
happened within. If it is Egyptian earth,
then one has to dig even deeper.
Studying the Middle East in general and
Egypt in particular is complicated. This is
not merely due to its complex history,
but due to what can metaphorically be
called: a documentation deficiency
syndrome. This syndrome became even
more severe in the 20th century, particularly since the state control era. Egypt's
mammoth, inefficient bureaucratic
structure, the state's secrecy policies,
lack of enforceable laws, a lack of freedom of information act, and widespread corruption, are some of the reasons behind the lack of proper documentation of its modern history. This arti-
cle will tell a story of a researcher in his
quest to study Egypt's history, and will
shed light over some challenges and
attempts to write and document it.
Didier Monciaud is a French researcher,
who is interested in the extra-parliamentary politics in Egypt's pre-revolution liberal era. The "history from below," as he
called it is an attempt to write the history of the workers' movements, the
Muslim Brotherhood and the left; a history distinct from the 'elite history'. Since
the history of the elites has been, in
some way, exhausted through years of
studying the Middle East, new
researchers attempt to write a different
history. Histories of the marginalized,
marginal history or history on the margin
are all synonyms of the new approaches used by researchers.
FROM
“... the archival science has almost
died in Egypt, leaving no way out for
researchers but to
consult foreign,
mostly colonial,
imperial archives ...”
It is a common practice to use British
and other foreign archives as sources
for writing about the Middle East. A
classic problematic in this approach is
the fear of writing a colonial literature.
Nevertheless researchers resort to these
archives due to the lack of comprehensive national archives that are
available for researchers. According to
Professor Robert Tignor of Princeton
University, there is a need for historians
to get out of the imperial archives; “we
need to write the history of Egypt from
Egypt itself, not from the British, French
and American archives (1).” He added
that even though the 20th century has
elapsed, there exists almost no book in
any language, in which there is a substantive use of archival Arabic documents on 20th century Egypt. There is a
need here to distinguish between two
different kinds of documents. There are
published materials, such as banks’
annual reports, newspapers, etc. In
addition, there are the ‘confidential’
documents. These are, in the case of a
bank, things like the regular board of
directors meeting minutes. Such ‘confidential’ documents are, as Tignor stated, what historians ought to get into.
“... Egypt has a long
turbulent history,
since Mohamed Ali,
on the issue of
documentation...”
OUR
Egypt has a long turbulent history, since
Mohamed Ali, on the issue of documentation. According to Professor
Khaled Fahmy of New York University,
the government archives were created
in 1822, when Mohamed Ali passed a
decree to establish a Daftar Khanna, to
be used as an archival depository that
the state could go back to. In 1954, a
law was passed to establish a National
Archives, which, as Fahmy mentioned,
still governs to a considerable degree.
The law entrusted the National Archives
to collect material pertaining to
Egyptian history and established a
supreme council to regulate the documentation process. Fahmy argued that
the laws did not assert any legal punishments for government officials who
refuse to abide by the regulations of
handing over the documents to the
National Archives. He added that
through such laws and the constitution,
the state is obligated to guarantee the
right of publication, and freedom of
press. The state is further obliged to protect scientific academic research (articles 48 and 49)- hence a legal basis for
the right to information, even if weak,
does exist.
The right to information constantly
stands in opposition to secrecy policies
by the state. Even though in 1970s, presidential decrees have identified a
grace period between 30-50 years
after which government documents
have to be made public, the laws have
become dormant. Fahmy stated that
some argue that there are no documents deposited in the National
Archives since the 1920s, others argue
that no deposits were made since the
1940s. Therefore, he concludes that the
a rchival science has almost died in
Egypt, leaving no way out for
researchers but to consult foreign,
mostly colonial, imperial archives.
The problem of writing a 'history from
below', by researchers such as
Monciaud, is the lack of even these
colonial archives. Monciaud mentioned that British documents on the
Muslim Brotherhood or the Egyptian left
are not available for researchers. Thus,
the main sources of information are
newspapers, periodicals, memoirs and
oral history. These sources are also not
bias-free.
Oral history has a long convoluted trail
of subjectivity and inter-personal
dynamics that are beyond the scope
of this article. Yet, Monciaud explained
to us how being a French researcher
ARCHIVES
interviewing Egyptians has its special
ramifications. "Who are you? What is
your background? Where are you
from?" These are classical questions
posed by interviewees. Their perception of the researcher has a tremendous effect on the course of the interview. Nevertheless, in a nation with history of oppression and corruption, oral
history might be its way out. People
alone could narrate the contemporary
history of the Middle East.
Chances are slim for re s e a rchers to
inspect state archives, especially when
attempting to write an alternative history of the contemporary Middle East. In
Egypt, the national archives are open
to re s e a rchers wishing to study the
court records of 19th century Egypt for
example. This is not attainable if a
researcher wishes to study the Egyptian
state archives on the 1973 war or even
when studying the sugar industry, or
any topic that the state considers
'strategic.'
“... The Center for
Documentation of
Cultural and Natural
Heritage (CULTNAT)
was established
under the auspices
the current Ministry
of Communication
and Information
Technology.
Located on the
outskirts of the city,
it is headquartered
in the icily
ultramodern and
scantly populated
Smart Village ...”
4
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Thus, Monciaud explained how newspapers and periodicals are one of the
main sources when studying the nonmainstream history of 20th Century
Egypt. He mentioned that Nasser's era
has
wiped
out
multiplicity.
Consequently, even newspapers and
periodicals in the post-revolution era
fell into the tight grip of the state. In
contrast, during the earlier liberal era,
sources were more abundant and
more diverse. Therefore, it seems that
in the Middle East and Egypt in particular, the regime's power has
impacted the past thro u g h
the restriction it imposes
on the freedom of
information vis a vis historical
documents.
Naturally, it impacts the
present that it cre a t e s .
But it also impacts the
future by determining what
it leaves behind in the form
of documents for future
researchers. Facetiously, one
could imagine that a papers h redder is the officials' best
friend.
Egypt's current government claims it
supports projects of documentation. In
line with a global trend that celebrates
things like, E-government, E-commerce and all that is electronic and
digital. Digitizing historical documents
is thus promoted. The Center for
Documentation of Cultural and
Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) was established under the auspices the current
Ministry of Communication and
Information Technology. Its goal is
noble; to fulfill the need to preserve
Egypt's heritage. Located on the outskirts of the city, it is headquartered in
the icily ultramodern and scantly populated Smart Village .The Smart
Village's mission statement claims that
it is created to attract IT investment in
Egypt. A tour inside the CULTNAT
headquarters bedazzles its audience
and no doubt foreign investors as well.
Away from the city, in an IT friendly
environment, CULTNAT aims at documenting the heritage of Egypt. With
assignments from the government and
other public institutions, it works on
p rojects to document things like
Pharaonic monuments and even
Egyptian folklore and makes the results
available on interactive CDs. The
organization even works on preserving
manuscripts and documents available
at the national archives. The problem,
5
however, is that there are no problems
facing CULTNAT. They have no association with problems of documentation
and freedom of information that face
researchers. One would think that a
project like this would face, as has
been the case with
most researchers,
clashes with
a gov-
ernment that employs
secrecy when it comes to
documents. CULTNAT, it seems, have
found an easy solution. They work
mostly on things that are ancient and
proudly evade anything 'classified.'
Their projects are assignments by the
government or affiliated bodies, thus
“... The "history
from below,"
is an attempt to
write the history
of the
workers'
movements, the
Muslim Brotherhood
and the left; a
history distinct
from the
'elite history' ...”
ensuring that there topics are 'government-friendly'.
C U LT N AT thus does not solve the
researchers' quest for documentation.
It may however provide an amusing,
and telling, comparison. In the show
room if its interactive panorama called
CULTORMA, the visitor is mesmerized
by interactive panoramic screens that
display Egypt's history. Inside the
panorama, a click could take you
inside the tombs of the Karnak
temple and tell the history of
the engravings on its walls. In
a futuristic city, where
CULTNAT is located, the
concepts of traditional
documentation and
research are alien.
The CD-ROMs and
interactive
software, which they
provide on their
documentation
p rojects, are very
electronically
advanced,
clean and organized. The
highly developed monitors and
screens present an image of history
that is pretty, if awfully superficial. This
futuristic place stands in contrast with
eager researchers and scholars, who
spend hours studying yellow archaic
documents in warehouses, archivists’
storage rooms, basements and unpopular book vendors. Monciaud had
interesting anecdotes of a Frenchman
climbing up the shelves of an old
bookshop, fetching scarce books. Our
trip to the spacious smart village was a
million years apart from Monciaud’s
ventures into rural Egypt by lousy public transportation, or his never-ending
chats with people in Cairo’s coffee
shops, all in attempt to find a name or
a story for his research.
In CULTNAT’s panorama, you realize
that this mesmerizing project is a very
long way from the real lives of the
Egyptian
people,
away
from
Monciaud's history from below, and
certainly far away from solving Egypt's
documentation dilemma.
END NOTES:
1. Some of the sources of this article are
extracted from a workshop held in May
18,2004 at the American University in Cairo.
The title of the workshops was: “ Towards
Building an Egyptian Business Arc h i v a l
Depository.” This session was part of the First
AUC Forum on Economic and Business
History of Egypt and the Middle Egypt.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
...We Don’t Make
Them Like
We Used to ...
Memoirs of Mahmoud Amin Al Aalem,
Vanguard of Egyptian Communists
Mohamed I. Fahmy Menza, Project Officer, EBHRC
D
Source: Al-Arabi Newspaper,
issue 995, 5th of February,
2006, Page 9
oes
the
name
Mahmoud Amin Al
Aalem ring a bell?
Perhaps not. But for a
man who has spent
over 60 years in the heart of the
Egyptian politics, making friends
and foes with people like Taha
Hussein, Abbas El-Akkad, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat,
among others, closer scrutiny is
surely a worthy endeavor. In fact,
the first time I saw Mahmoud Al
Aalem was on a TV show. I do not
recall what the show was about,
but it was probably one of these
Nile News programs where prominent people are brought on to
testify on historical issues. What I
do remember well, however, was
the engaging manner in which
the man presented himself. That,
in addition to a brief background
of Al Aalem’s capacity as a
prominent intellectual, was pretty
much all what I had in mind
regarding the man, prior to visiting him in the course of the oral
history project of the EBHRC.
Apparently, there was much
more to learn yet.
6
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
“... He views
globalization as an
eventual process of
progress that
mankind has been
undertaking for
centuries, yet what’s
happening in the
world around us
nowadays is
hegemonic
domination, he says,
and not
globalization. And,
with the current
Egyptian regime,
we’re merely a gear
in this machine ...”
THE MAN
When we entered Al Aalem’s house,
simplicity was the overall feature of the
place. Living by himself after the recent
passing away of his wife, he was hospitable and as inviting as can be. Born
into a lower middle class Cairene family at the peak of the Egyptian nationalist movement around the 1919 revolution, Al Aalem’s childhood was an
eventful one to say the least. His father
was a religious leader within the
Jurisprudent Society (Al Game’ya Al
Share’ya) and his mother was a typical
early 20th Century Egyptian housewife,
originally from the Turkish colony of
Crete, South of Greece. He humorously
describes the dynamics of the household to have been quite similar to the
atmosphere of Naguib Mahfouz’s celebrated chronicles of the time -with the
father as the main source of authority in
the house of course. Al Aalem also
speaks of a very early politicization period and his early memories of student
demonstrations opposing the 1936
7
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, which was
viewed as a concession by Mostafa Al
Nahass, Egypt’s Wafdist prime minister
at the time.
Shortly afterwards the turning point in Al
Aalem’s upbringing was to come, associated with two names that might
appear, at first hand, unrelated:
Frederic Nietzsche and Al Halaj. After
being introduced to Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, primarily through the writings of Zaki
Naguib Mahmoud, and briefly after the
Sufi play, The Halaj Tragedy (Ma’ssat Al
Halaj), Mahmoud Al Aalem’s life was to
change forever. In essence Al Aalem
found a lot of resemblance between
the famous “God is Dead” theme of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the phrase
“Nothing in the musket but God” cited
in the Halaj Tragedy. For him, the two
schools of thought, the existential one
encapsulated by Nietzsche and the Sufi
philosophy of Al Halaj, were very
appealing to his liking as they both
emphasized the essentiality of the
human experience and the immense
importance of the role of the individual
in attaining knowledge. Ultimately,
through the love of Neitsche and, subsequently the discipline of philosophy
as a whole, Al Aalem decided to join
the school of philosophy at Cairo
University.
A funny yet significant story is narrated
here by Al Aalem. When he was still a
philosophy student in Cairo University,
his Professor, the acclaimed philosopher Abdelrahman Badawy, had just
issued a book entitled, Existential
Philosophy. Excited about reading a
volume that was written by his teacher,
Al Aalem meets with a friend at a café
in downtown Cairo as they both
decide to go through the book together. Much to their astonishment, the
book ends up being a fiasco. The reason being that, in the eyes of the hardcore existentialists they were, Badawy
betrays the ethos of existentialism by
praising materialism as a worthy
approach. Although it was already 2
o’clock AM, the two enthusiastic students decide to confront their professor
with their disappointment, aided with
the help of a few drinks. They simply
knock on the man’s door, only to be
denied access to the house by the
maid, logically, due to their apparent
drunkenness and inopportune timing.
For Al Aalem and friend, the incident
was yet one more proof of their
teacher's "betrayal" of existentialism.
How could he refuse to convene with
them just because they are drunk? Isn’t
this an existential practice they’re venturing through that is worthy of investigation? In the eyes of the young students, Badawy was not a sincere existentialist anymore.
THE COMMUNIST
Indeed it was not until he read Lenin
whilst working on his M.A, that Al Aalem
became actually fascinated with the
theoretical offering of communism.
Materialism as opposed to the dialectic
and experimental nature of existentialism became the passion and the driving force. Marxism was the name of the
game as he began his teaching career
in epistemology at Cairo University, only
to be fired a few months afterwards
when the Nasser regime initiated the
crackdown campaign on Egyptian
communists, along with some other 30
university professors or so in the mid
1950’s, including Abdelazim Anis and
Louis Awad.
“... Acknowledging
the leading role Al
Aalem had within
the communist
movement, Anwar
Sadat, one of the
strongmen of the
regime at the time,
invited him over to
make him abandon
the Communist Party
and join the
National Union,
predecessor of the
Arab Socialist Union.
Expectedly, Al
Aalem refused and
the consequences
were quite grave ...”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES
Putting his beliefs to practice, Al Aalem
joined the Communist Party and ultimately succeeded in uniting the myriad
communist factions under one flag in
1958. Of course back then the relationship between the communist movement
and the 1952 regime was far from amicable. Although the 1952 regime came
with a socialist agenda, the crackdown
on the labor movement in 1954 and the
refusal to retain the democratic life led
the communist movement to suspect
the actual intentions of the newly
incepted regime. But the Suez crisis of
1956 united everybody behind Nasser,
even the communists, and more or less a
truce was induced between the communist movement and the regime.
The last stroke came with the 1958 union
with Syria. The union came with an overwhelming wave of oppression directed
t o w a rd the communist movement in
Syria and was imposed from above.
There was a sense of dictatorship and
exploitation in the regime's administration of the Syrian component of the
newly formed republic, especially with
the Egyptian Abdel Hakim Amer and the
army there, a move that was not welcomed by the Egyptian communist
movement of course.
Acknowledging the leading role Al
Aalem had within the communist movement, Anwar Sadat, one of the strongmen of the regime at the time, invited
him over to make him abandon the
Communist Party and join the National
Union, predecessor of the Arab Socialist
Union. Expectedly, Al Aalem refused
and the consequences were quite
grave.
IN & OUT OF JAIL
In January 1959, Egypt witnessed a wide
scale operation, targeting the communist movement. All of those associated
with the communist movement were
arrested as political detainees, which,
within the Emergency Law in action at
the time, meant that these people had
no legal rights whatsoever. Over 1000
people, from all walks of life, were
exposed to an elongated scheme of torture, harassment, and abuse for over
five years in the penitentiaries of
Alexandria, Abu Zaabal, and for three
out of the five years in the Oasis (Wahat)
jail. The atrocities practiced by the
prison authorities against those so-called
political detainees were immense. Some
darkly humorous parallels to the
Guantanamo and Abu Gharib mayhems could be made. Indeed
Abdelazim Anis cites some appare n t
similarity with the Nazi torture cells he vis-
ited in 1969(1).
“... Over 1000 people, from all walks of
life, were exposed
to an elongated
scheme of torture,
harassment, and
abuse for over five
years in the
penitentiaries of
Alexandria, Abu
Zaabal, and for
three out of the five
years in the Oasis
(Wahat) jail. ...”
But sometime in the mid 1960’s, and for
a multitude of internal and external factors, Nasser decided to make his peace
with the communist movement, get the
communists out of jail, and may be even
reintegrate some of them in the state
structure. Al Aalem revolved around a
variety of posts being the Chairman of
the Book Authority, then Head of the
Theatre Agency then chairman of the
influential weekly Akhbar Al Yom. When
Nasser died in 1970, there was no way
for him to stay with Sadat as the president of course, given their aforementioned confrontation. After all, and
despite the extreme oppression the
communist movement was exposed to
“... At the dawn of
the 21st Century, is
our Egyptian polity,
if you could call it
that, able to
produce such a rich
human
experience?”
under Nasser, Al Aalem asserts that the
sincerity and loyalty of Nasser to Egypt
can’t be questioned, despite the grave
abuses that took place with him at the
apex. Al Aalem spent most of his subsequent years in France and England
where he taught in Oxford and in Paris
universities for over 10 years before
returning to Egypt after the death of
Sadat in 1981.
EGYPT TODAY
What does Al Aalem think of presentday Egypt? He asserts that he is against
the current Egyptian regime entirely. He
views globalization as an eventual
process of progress that mankind has
been undertaking for centuries, yet
what is happening in the world around
us nowadays is hegemonic domination,
he says, and not globalization. And, with
the current Egyptian regime, we are
merely a gear in this machine.
Upon leaving Al Aalem’s house, the man
graced us with his salutes, ensuring that
we should visit regularly. But as I was
walking out of Al Aalem’s in the beautiful residential area of Garden City and
going through the ugly police blockades
that have been ruining the aesthetic
deceny and benign amiability of the
place for a few years now, I couldn’t
deny a sense of frustration. Regardless of
one's views or political affiliations or what
have you, are we, as a society, producing such people anymore? At the dawn
of the 21st Century, is our Egyptian polity, if you could call it that, able to produce such a rich human experience?
Al Aalem was not a wealthy man who
could be described as an elitist who was
disproportionately exposed to western
cultures and ideas. As a matter of fact
he was rather closer to the poorer echelons - as Egyptian as can be. Localized
and immersed in the hardships of a
nation, he spent his studentship “reading” and debating on cafés. He spent
his pocket money on literary, philosophical and historical masterpieces and
ended up being a vanguard of a political movement he believed in, and for
which he was willing to be imprisoned
and even tortured. Of course he was not
the only one. There was an entire generation that followed that same path of
hardship, sincerity, and, importantly,
devotion to a homeland. The answer, I
am afraid, must be no. We don’t make
such people anymore!
END NOTES:
1. Abdelaziz Anis’s Rassa’il al-Hob wa al-Hozn
wa al-Thawra. Rose al-Youssef. Cairo, 1976.
8
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Introduction
to the
Land
and the People
of
EGYPT
*
Robert Tignor, Professor of History, Princeton University
THE NEED AND THE PURPOSES
One history or many? One people or many?
These are the questions that inform this brief
history of Egypt from the beginning of
human activity in the valley of the Nile
down to the present. My hope is that this
study will fill a gaping hole in historical
writing about this most brilliant country
and thereby serve a need felt by
ordinary tourists and specialist scholars alike.
Egypt desperately wants
for a good general history.
Although few countries have had as
much written about their past, hardly any book gives an overview. The
demand is ever pressing. Tourists
clamor for a general guidebook to
the rich historical narrative of the
country—one that will allow them to
set the country’s magnificent historical monuments in an understandable
narrative context. Even scholars and
experts are eager for a work that will
encapsulate the history of periods
that are not their specialties. Alas, little exists. Guidebooks abound, but
they tend to specialize in certain
periods and particular regions. Most
are short on history. The reasons for this
gap are not hard to
*This piece is an early draft of what is intended to be
Professor Robert Tignor’s general brief history of Egypt, from the begining
of human habitation in the Valley of the Nile, down to the present.
9
Sketch by
courtesy of the
Jeffery W. Veil Website
<people.bu.edu/jwvail/
moore_illustrations.html>
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
discern. In many ways Egypt has too
rich a history, too many distinctive historical periods, each with its own linguistic,
ethnographic,
and
documentary
requirements and each with a voluminous and highly specialized and sophisticated historical literature. As a result
Egyptologists do not converse with
modernists. Nor do Graeco-Roman
scholars find much in common with
Islamists despite the fact that both sets
of scholars treat the same geographical
entity and the same ethno-linguistic
community.
One of the primary goals of this
study, in addition to rendering the long
and pulsating history of Egypt accessible to interested and educated readers, is to determine just how much Egypt
has changed and how much it has
remained the same over the more than
five millennia of its glorious historical
experience. For millennia the rhythms of
Egyptian everyday existence revolved
around the Nile. And they continue to
do so even today though the country
has not experienced annual Nile floods
for more than half a century. Does the
presence of the Nile River and the relatively narrow band of arable land surrounding the Nile give a unity to the history of Egypt that transcends its many
historical periods?
Because of Egypt’s unquestioned geographical and strategic
importance, at the corner of three continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa), the
land has attracted numerous outsiders,
often as invaders. The Hyksos, Greeks,
Romans, Arabs, Mamluk Turks, Ottoman
Turks, and French, and British personages (some would now even add the
Americans) have ruled over the country, importing their languages, their populations, and their ways of life. But how
effectively did they impose their own
cultures on the men and women who
lived alongside the banks of the Nile?
Certainly much changed over the
course of a long and diverse history.
Hieroglyphics passed out of existence,
not to be deciphered until the nineteenth century through the work of
modern linguistic scholars. Much of the
Pharaonic culture that so intrigues
Egypt’s contemporary visitors was
buried under centuries of sand deposits.
It too only came back into prominence
through the efforts of a hardy band of
scholars known as Egyptologists. Egypt
was once the most Christian territory in
all of Christendom. But following the
Arab-Muslim invasion of the seventh
century Christianity gave way to Islam,
though not totally. The Coptic population still constitutes nearly ten percent of
Egypt’s total, and the Coptic language,
with connections to hieroglyphics,
remains a language still in use though
confined to a clerical class. Thus,
change is obvious. But so is continuity.
Monumental architecture, prevalent in
Pharaonic times, can still be seen in the
monuments dedicated to Egypt’s modern leaders. So, too, some would argue
does the cult of an all powerful ruler,
whose task it was in ancient times to
ensure order, known as ma’at, and prosperity and whose responsibilities, under
Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, remain
much the same. Change and continuity, these are the themes of Egypt’s historical narrative, and they will be writ
large in this study.
THE NILE RIVER AND
ITS IMPORTANCE TO EGYPT
Herodotus left many truisms about
ancient Egypt, not the least of which is
that the land was the gift of the Nile.
The Egyptian descriptions in his The
Persians Wars owed much to conversations he held with priests in Memphis,
Heliopolis, and Thebes during his fifth
century travels in the country. The clerics assured him that their land was “the
most ancient of mankind.” Certainly,
Herodotus’s admiration for the people
and the land was unbounded. He
described Egypt as a territory that “possesses so many wonders; nor has any
(other country) that has such a number
of works which defy description. Not
only is the climate different from that of
the rest of the world, and the river unlike
any other rivers, but the people also, in
most of their manners and customs,
exactly reverse the practice of
mankind.” He noted that women went
to markets while men stayed at home to
weave cloth. Only men were priests; yet
instead of growing hair, which was the
practice in Herodotus’s homeland, they
shaved off their hair. Even more perplexing to the Greek scholar was the
fact that Egyptians ate out of doors and
urinated indoors.
Herodotus’s precise words
about the Nile are worth repeating:
“The Egypt to which the Greeks go in
their ships is an acquired country, the
gift of the Nile.” Yet his acute perception of the Nile’s centrality to the people
of Egypt was only partially right.
Certainly, without the Nile’s life-giving
waters, the vast territory of Egypt (37,540
square kilometers today) would have
been little more than desert, interrupted
here and there by life-supporting oases.
Its 7,500,000 acres of arable land, which
today support three crops and constitute one of the world’s richest and most
p roductive agricultural land areas,
would have lain barren. Yet, Herodotus
took the Nile and its generous annual
floods for granted. In reality, the Nile
had not always been so beneficent.
Although a Nile River existed for many
millions of years, it was only 12,500 years
ago that today’s Nile took shape.
Earlier Niles, of which there were many,
either brought too much water or too little. They could not have produced the
way of life that Egyptians have taken for
granted for centuries. They would never
have created the splendid cultures that
have marked Egypt’s long and resplendent history.
The Nile is the longest river in the
world,
slightly
outdistancing the
Amazon. It is fed by innumerable
streams and rivers, but its most remote
source rises in the hills of Rwanda, some
4,238 miles south of its ultimate destination in the Mediterranean Sea. Its tributaries and main branches flow through
eight countries—Rwanda, Burundi,
Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda,
Sudan, and Egypt—encompassing
more than one million square miles, no
less than one-tenth of the whole of the
African continent. Yet, for a river that
traverses such an immense area, the
Nile delivers only a tiny quantity of
water. Compared with the mighty
Amazon River in Central America it
transports a mere trickle, carrying only
two percent of the totals that the
Amazon supplies. Its volume is no more
than that of Germany’s Rhine River,
rarely thought of as one of the large
waterways of the world.
Although the Nile has innumerable tributaries, especially in its distant
locations in central and equatorial
Africa, three branches do most of its
work. First, the Atbara River, descending out of the highlands of Ethiopia,
carries one-seventh of the river’s total
annual volume. A raging torrent during the flood season when monsoon
rains and melting snows in the
Ethiopian highlands fill its channel, it
becomes a dry wadi during the non-
“... scholars and
experts are eager for
a work that will
encapsulate the history of periods that are
not their specialties.
Alas, little exists...”
10
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
“... Does the presence of the Nile
River and the relatively narrow band
of arable land surrounding the Nile
give a unity to the
history of Egypt that
transcends its many
historical periods? ”
flood season. The Blue Nile, also rising in
the highlands of Ethiopia, is the critical
source of Egypt’s agricultural prosperity,
bringing vast quantities of silt-laden
waters from the Ethiopian highlands during the flood season and depositing the
rich soil on top of already fertile top soil in
the Nile valley basin. It carries four-sevenths of the river’s total capacity, much
of it during the flood season. Finally the
White Nile, crashing down out of Lake
Victoria and wending its way northward
through the marsh lands of the southern
Sudan, known as the sudd, joins the Blue
Nile at Khartoum. It carries the remaining
two-sevenths of the Nile waters. It, too, is
critical to Egypt’s annual flood, for it provides a steady source of water year
round, thereby moderating the main Nile
River and keeping the flood waters from
being violent and unpredictable, as they
so often are in other major rivers of the
world.
From Khartoum to the
Mediterranean Sea the Nile flows on,
with the aid of only a single tributary, the
Atbara, and without significant rainfall,
some 1600 miles. Yet it leaves enough
water and rich soil to create in the words
of one scholar “an elongated oasis”
stretching all the way from Aswan to the
Mediterranean Sea.
Before the earth’s crust rose in
central Africa to form the Rift Valley some
six million years ago, the waters of central and equatorial Africa drained
toward the Red Sea and the Congo
basin. An uplifted Rift changed the
direction of rivers and drainage patterns.
Not only did the Rift highlands create the
great lakes of equatorial Africa—
Tanganyika, Albert, Edward, and eventu-
11
ally the largest of them all, Victoria—but
it redirected river systems and drainage
patterns northward toward Egypt and on
to the Mediterranean Sea. Still, the present-day Nile had yet to appear. Several
pre-Niles scoured out channels for themselves within Egypt as they progressed to
the Mediterranean though they were
hardly the beneficent river of the modern era. Sometimes, these early Niles
were fed by waters from equatorial
Africa; other times, during periods of
great aridity, the central African connection was broken. Occasionally the Nile
dried up altogether, leaving Egypt a
desert, devoid of all life. Around 800,000
to 700,000 years ago, during a wet
phase, the waters from Ethiopia again
broke through to Egypt and turned the
Nile river basin into a mighty, though
highly unpredictable river. Then 12,500
years ago, during another wet phase,
the waters of Lake Victoria, fed by the
other lakes of equatorial Africa, spilled
out of its basin and plunged northward
to form the White Nile, which joined with
the Blue Nile at Khartoum to become the
main Nile River on which Egypt’s livelihood soon depended.
Mighty rivers are dangerous
forces of nature. Their floods are often
unpredictable. People who reside within
their flood plains put themselves constantly at risk. Yet, the earliest, complex
societies arose in some of the world’s
great river basins. The peoples residing in
three of these flood plains-- the TigrisEuphrates, the Indus, and the Nile—led
the way in creating the world’s first
urban-based, hierarchical, and complex
societies. The breakthroughs to complex, large-scale cultures occurred
roughly between 7000 and 5000 years
ago. We know little about the Harappan
culture of the Indus River basin; its early
remains were regularly covered up by
annual floods and new settlements.
Mesopotamia and Egypt are better
known, and though the similarities in the
histories of these two centers of
advanced culture, often referred to as
the cradles of civilizations, are notable,
their contrasts are even more striking.
Many of the differences, not surprisingly,
sprang from the rivers that the local populations learned to master.
The modern Nile is a marvelously
beneficent and productive river, especially when compared with the
Euphrates. Its floods are highly predictable. They arrive at the most opportune time for the growing season and
require little hydraulic engineering. The
Nile’s annual flood crested toward the
end of the summer months and left its silted waters on the soil just at the very
moment that Egyptian farmers were
ready to plant their crops. All that was
required, once the waters had drained
back into the main Nile channel, was for
the peasants to broadcast their seeds
and for livestock to trample the seed
under foot.
Compare the challenges that
faced Mesopotamian cultivators who
had to cope with an altogether more
formidable set of problem that required
elaborate arrangements for controlling
raging flood waters and creating complex irrigation works. In the Euphrates
flood plain annual floods came at the
height of the growing season, and,
hence, the banks of the Euphrates had
to be heightened to ensure that water
did not spill on to the fields and destroy
the crops. In addition, Mesopotamian
agriculturalists had to fashion a sophisticated set of irrigation canals to siphon
off the waters of the Euphrates when
they were at their low point but were
most needed on the land. Moreover, the
waters did not flow back easily into the
main river channel, as the Nile did, with
the result that the low-lying lands of the
Mesopotamian delta were always at risk
of salting up and becoming unusable.
He rodotus himself noted how
benign the Nile waters were. No doubt
he exaggerated when he observed that
“at present, it must be confessed, they
(the inhabitants of the Egyptian delta)
obtain the fruits of the field with less tro uble than any people in the world, the
rest of Egypt included, since they have
no need to break up the ground with
the plough, nor to use the hoe, nor
to do any of the work which the re s t
of mankind find necessary if they are
to get a crop. But the husbandman
waits till the river has of its own
a c c o rd spread itself over the fields
and withdrawn again to its bed, and
then sows his plot of ground, and after
sowing, turns his swine into it (the swine
tread in the corn) after which he
“... Egypt desperately wants for a good
general history.
Although few countries have had as
much written about
their past, hardly
any book gives an
overview ”
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
has only to await the harvest.”
The Nile produced another
immeasurable benefit, leading seemingly inexorably to the unity of the land from
the Mediterranean Sea to the first
cataract or rapids at present-day
Aswan. Not only did its currents flow
northward, but also its wind blew in the
opposite direction. Sailors could set their
sails to capture the Mediterranean
breezes as they traveled south; they
could coast under the currents of the
river as they traveled north. Still, unity did
not come easily or quickly. It came
about through hard-won struggles, still
only dimly understood.
THE FIRST EGYPTIANS: WHO
WERE THEY?
The earliest records of human
habitation in the Nile Valley date back
some 400,000 years ago. They consist of
“... The Nile’s annual
flood crested toward
the end of the
summer months and
left its silted waters
on the soil just at the
very moment that
Egyptian farmers
were ready to plant
their crops. All that
was required, once
the waters had
drained back into
the main Nile channel, was for the
peasants to broadcast their seeds and
for livestock to trample the seed under
foot. ”
flaked stone tools that suggest that
Homo erectus dwelled in this area as
these early hominids, predecessors of
modern men and women, moved
t h rough the African continent before
populating other parts of the Eurasian
land mass. Unfortunately, no bones
have been found so our evidence for
early hominid existence in Egypt rests
entirely on the discovery of their tools.
Just when modern men and women—
Homo sapiens--—entered the Nile basin
has yet to be determined. The earliest
settlements known so far date from 7000
years ago. They occurred at Merimde
on the edge of the Western delta and in
the Fayyum region southwest of presentday Cairo. Where these early humans
came from is still an open question.
Some scholars suggest that they arrived
from the Libyan Desert during a drying
out phase when humans flocked into
river basins for sustenance. Others argue
for a northeast origin, believing that
these people entered Egypt from
Southwest Asia migrating across the Sinai
Peninsula.
In their new setting they adapted to the rhythms of the Nile, which they
did without great difficulty. They divided
the arable lands into irrigation basins of
quite varying sizes, ranging from 1000
feddans to 40,000 feddans, in preparation for the annual flood. Cultivators
divided basins from one another by
means of simple earthen walls and then
allowed the waters when they flooded
into the basins to soak into the soil
between forty and sixty days, depositing
silt, before they cut the barriers and permitted the waters to flow on to basins further downriver or drain back into the main
Nile channel. The sight of the flooded
plain at the height of the flood season
was quite magnificent to behold. Harold
Hurst, one of the early British hydraulic
engineers and part of a last generation to
see the Egyptian countryside when it was
still fully flooded, commented that “in the
bright sunlight and the temperate weather of the autumn in Egypt this was a wonderful sight with the desert hills and the
pyramids in the background.” Indeed, all
of Egypt’s arable land lay under water
save for the mounds on which the villages
nestled. People moved from village to village by means of boats.
Ancient Egypt has often been
thought of as a great hydraulic society,
requiring a powerful central govern m e n t
capable of regulating every aspect of
people’s lives. In truth, the irrigation technology was simple; each village, usually
under the control of local notables, took
responsibility for its own irrigation arrangements. This did lead to village rivalries and
disputes, some of which became violent
and produced bitter histories. What the
“... Ancient Egypt
has often been
thought of as a great
hydraulic society,
requiring a powerful
central government
capable of
regulating every
aspect of people’s
lives. In truth,
the irrigation
technology was
simple ”
central government was needed for,
when it finally came into being sometime
around 4000 BCE, was the storage of seed
grain for the next year and emerg e n c y
supplies if the floods were inadequate.
The state also bore responsibility for maintaining Nilometers, which were placed
strategically along the upper reaches of
the river and gave advanced indications
of when the floods would come and how
large they would be. A true canal system
did not come into being until the nineteenth century when Egypt’s rulers,
Muhammad Ali first of all during the first
half of that century and the British after
their occupation of the country in 1882,
constructed a series of barrages and
dams across the Nile that replaced the
basin system of irrigation, largely
unchanged since Pharaonic times, with a
system of perennial irrigation. Whereas in
ancient times basin irrigation had permitted only a single growing season, pere nnial irrigation, which made Nile waters
available the year round, enabled
Egyptian cultivators to take full advantage of the fertility of the soil and the climate to grow two, sometimes three
crops per year. What the modern cultivators had to sacrifice, however, was the
regular deposit of new soil carried in the
flood waters from the Ethiopian highlands. As a result cultivators turned to
larger and larger quantities of fertilizers as
the only way to maintain the fertility and
high productivity of the land.
12
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
The ancient Egyptians were among
those first group of peoples who moved
from being hunters and gatherers to
engage in settled agriculture and husbandry. They were not the first, however.
The consensus seems to be that the
Egyptians learned the techniques of
planting seeds and harvesting crops
either from the peoples of Southwest
Asia, usually regarded as the first settled
agriculturalists in the world, or from the
peoples living to their west in present-day
Libya, who were driven into the Nile River
basin by the growing aridity of the world.
Whichever the case, the Egyptian peasant cultivators embraced the new agricultural techniques with great alacrity.
Cultivators, dependent as they were on
the Nile floods, grew only a single, winter
crop. The main cultigens were wheat,
beans, berseem (Egyptian clover), lentils,
barley, and chick peas. The Egyptians
also possessed domesticated animals,
notably cattle, sheep, and goats. It was
not until the Amarna period of the New
Kingdom around 1200 BCE that the
Egyptians invented the simple water
bag, fulcrum lifting device, known as the
shaduf, that enabled cultivators to raise
spring and summer low-water Nile onto
the lands, and so it was not until this
much later period that Egyptian agriculture featured the cultivation of winter
crops, such as cotton and additional
cereals. Moreover, it was not until the
Ptolemaic period, in the millennium leading up to the Common Era, that the buffalo-driven water wheel, known as the
saqia, and the Archimedean screw
allowed farmers to make more than a
very modest use of the low Nile waters.
Egypt’s vaunted agriculture, based on
two and even in some case, three crops
per year, did not become a reality until
the Pharaonic period had already come
to an end.
It occurred following
Alexander the Great’s conquest of the
country in 332.
But who were these early inhabitants of the Nile River basin, the men and
women who set about to create one of
the most glorious and brilliant achievements in human history? This is a topic
that has intrigued commentators for a
long time and generated no end of
intense and heated controversies. The
question that has roiled scholars and
commentators (and that many persons
wish to avoid answering for that very reason) is whether the ancient Egyptians
were African peoples, that is to say, people with black skins.
Present-day
Egyptians, of course, have olive-colored
skins. Most scholars, if they even gave
any thought to the question of who the
ancient Egyptians were physically and
what they actually looked like, assumed
that they must have looked very much
13
like the present-day Egyptians. The
scholar who put the issue of the racial
identity of these ancient peoples squarely on the agenda of researchers was a
Senegalese writer, Cheikh Anta Diop,
whose books, particularly The African
Origins of Civilization: Myth or Reality,
marshaled linguistic, literary, and artistic
evidence in support of the theory that
the ancient Egyptians were black
Africans. Citing the writings of Herodotus
on Egypt and asserting that the images
on the friezes and paintings of the
ancient Egyptians display unquestioned
black African features, Diop asserted
that “ancient Egypt was a Negro civilization,” adding that “instead of presenting
itself as an insolvent debtor, the Black
world is the very initiator of the ‘Western
Civilization’ flaunted before our eyes
today.”
“... High rises
suddenly replaced
mud huts; a civil
service superseded
the village elders. . .
. Whereas only
chiefdoms had
occasionally
appeared, a king
sat over Egypt....”
Another scholar, Martin Bernal,
took up the same theme in a book with
the captivating title, Black Athena: The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.
While not exploring in detail the issue of
the racial composition of the ancient
Egyptians, Bernal contended that the
Greeks derived much of their cultural
inspiration that they then passed on into
Western Civilization not from Aryan influences but from Egypt and Phoenicia.
The entry of Diop and Bernal into
the sacred domain of the Egyptologists
has spurred a vigorous and informative
set of replies. Here, the consensus seems
so far to be that Diop was wrong in
claiming that Herodotus described the
ancient Egyptians as having black
Africans. Quite the contrary, he and
other classical authorities made a careful distinction between the black-skinned
peoples who lived to the south of the
Egyptians and whom they referred to as
Ethiopians. So, too, did Egyptian craftsmen of the time, who, again according
to Egyptologists, distinguished between
themselves and peoples to the south,
whom they portrayed as in their paintings, sculptures, and mosaics as the
blackest of peoples, while depicting
Indians as less so, and Egyptians as mildly dark.
Of course, as modern scholarship has become more sensitive to issues
of race and physicality and has come to
understand just how intermixed the peoples of the world truly are, how little different genetically the so-called different
races are from one another, and how
race has been such a historically constructed category of identity from the
earliest times, some scholars eschew
racial categorizations altogether. They
balk altogether at efforts to affix racial
labels to groups of peoples, preferring
instead to identify peoples not by their
physical appearance but rather by their
languages. If, in fact, one then uses language as the basis of trying to determine
just who the ancient Egyptians were, the
answer seems clear and unequivocal.
They were a people who spoke and
wrote what the linguistic scholars have
called an Afro-Asiatic or Hamitic-Semitic
language, one of a body of languages
based in North Eastern Africa and
Southwestern Asia that numbered
among its branches Berber and Chadic
as well as ancient Egyptian.
Still, this re t reat into identities,
based on language, seems deeply
unsatisfying. One should not allow racial
prejudices to blind one from trying to
offer physical descriptions of the ancient
Egyptians, and such an attempt can reasonably be made at the present time.
No doubt, new information will come to
light that will allow scholars to be more
precise in their descriptions. What now
appears to have been the case is that
the condition of growing aridity caused
peoples living south, east, and west of
the Nile River basin to flock into this area
where they would be able to grow crops,
herd livestock, and sustain their way of
life. If this is the case, then the peoples
were, indeed, of mixed African, North
African, and Southwest Asian origins.
Moreover, according to one Egyptologist
with training in physical anthro p o l o g y
(Bruce Trigger), there were noticeable
physical differences between the peoples living in Upper Egypt and those living
in the delta in Lower Egypt. The Upper
Egyptians, according to Trigger, were
small, had long narrow skulls, dark wavy
hair, and brown skins while those of the
delta and those who congregated
around the region where present-day
Cairo is located were taller and had
broader skulls.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
PRE-DYNASTIC HISOTRY
Egypt’s dynastic history begins
around 3100 BCE when its first two dynasties came into being and was followed in
rapid and brilliant succession by the third
dynasty (ca. 2686-2620 BCE), which left a
remarkable imprint on human history. In
many respects the Old Kingdom, which
covers the years 2686 to 2160 and the
third through sixth dynasties and is dealt
with in the next chapter, sprang into
being almost overnight. As one scholar
put it: “High rises suddenly replaced
mud huts; a civil service superseded the
village elders. . . . Whereas only chiefdoms had occasionally appeared, a
king sat over Egypt.” Yet, it would be a
mistake to ignore the build-up to the
achievements of the Old Kingdom. The
pre-dynastic history of Egypt is important
and fascinating though still little known.
What seems undisputed is that already
by 5000 BCE the Egyptian portion of Nile
basin, which had originally been only
thinly occupied by fishing and later by
herding peoples, yielded to a series of
largely autonomous villages. Even more
stunning was the emergence of important towns, serving as cult centers for the
worship of local gods, who were propitiated in order to ensure the fecundity of
the land and bring order to the lives of
the peoples. The move to village communities was at this early stage more pronounced in Upper Egypt than in Lower
Egypt, especially in the bigger Upper
Egyptian settlements known as Naqada
and Hierakonpolis. The south or Upper
Egypt sustained its early advance over
the north was sustained, and ultimately
the communities living in the south found
themselves strong enough to unify the
whole of the Nile valley from the first
cataract, just south of present-day
Aswan, to the Mediterranean. Upper
Egyptians, in addition to having
spawned larger village settlements, also
had the advantage of access to the
mineral deposits in the hills of the eastern
desert and in Nubia, south above the first
cataract. No doubt, these resources
also enabled the Upper Egyptians to
fashion a more diversified economy and
polity. Yet, Egypt’s geographical and
cultural duality, so clearly marked out
between the narrow river basin lands of
Upper Egypt and the sprawling delta
lands of Lower Egypt was not extinguished during the unification or after it.
It was to remain a feature of Egyptian history through all time.
Egypt’s pre-dynastic period has
conventionally been divided into historical periods. The first of these, known as
the Badrian period, named after the vil-
lage of el-Badri, its primary location in
Upper Egypt, lasted roughly from 4400 to
4000 BCE. Little is known about these
four centuries save for the fact that the
Badrians were farmers who cultivated
crops and managed herds. They may
have domesticated animals on their
own, but when they came into contact
with the more robust domesticated animals of Southwestern Asia they took
them over. They lived in tents made from
animal skins.
Next came the Naqada period,
from 4000 to 3200 BCE, taking its name
from the site of Naqada in Upper Egypt
where the famous British Egyptologist,
Flinders Petrie, discovered a cemetery in
1892 that contained more than 3000
“... The question that
has roiled scholars
and commentators
(and that many persons wish to avoid
answering for that
very reason) is
whether the ancient
Egyptians were
African peoples, that
is to say, people
with black skins... ”
graves. The burials here were of a quite
rudimentary nature, consisting of simple
mats thrown over the bodies of the
deceased, which in turn were deposited
in pits. Yet, the fact that men and
women were burying their progenitors,
rather than exposing them to the wild
animals, suggests that these early
humans regarded themselves as different, more exalted, than the rest of the
animal world, perhaps even able to survive into an after-life. Even at this early
date, Egyptians buried the dead on the
west bank of the Nile, where the sun set,
presumably in hopes that like the sun, the
dead, too, would arise, ascending into a
new life after death.
By the Naqada II phase, life in
Upper Egypt had become more complex. Social and occupational hierarchies existed. A leisured class emerged.
Its members engaged in hunting activities not in order to support themselves
but as a symbol of their rank and their
prestige. Some of this leisured group promoted long-distance trade as the wellto-do sought to obtain luxury commodities.
Specialized artisans produced
wares for the rest of society, creating
m o re elaborate commodities for the
well-to-do. The wealthy and powerful
were now buried in larger, more elaborate tombs. Their bodies were surrounded by many of the very same objects of
beauty and pleasure that they had
enjoyed during their lives. Upper Egypt
at the time had at least three relatively
large urban conglomerations: Naqada,
known as the gold town; Hierakonpolis,
further south, and Abydos, where the
necropolis of the first kings was located.
Hierakonpolis was the most impressive of
the three, possessing a wall that was 9.5
meters thick in places and inside which
was an enclosed temple where scholars
later found the Narmer palette.
Although a
leading
Egyptologist
(Michael Rice) acknowledges that Egypt
lacked the magnificence that the cities
of Sumer had, still he re g a rd s
Hierakonpolis as a virtual a twin of the
great Mesopotamian city of Uruk, even
suggesting some connection and borrowing between the inhabitants of the
two locations. Perhaps as many as 5000
residents lived within the city walls.
At the end of the Naqada III
period, some time around 3100 BCE
Upper and Lower Egypt were united.
There are indications that the unification
was not entirely peaceful. The major artifact of this era—the famed Narmer
palette, prominently displayed in the
Cairo museum—features a powerful ruling figure, who having caught one of his
enemies—unquestionably a northerner-by the hair holds a mace over his head
as he prepares to slay him. Certainly by
3000 BCE most of the Nile valley from the
Delta to Aswan was united. The early
kings of the first Egyptian dynasty were
being
buried
at
Abydos,
and
Hierakonpolis had become a great cult
center where the god, Horus, was worshipped. Although Egypt’s cities were
not as large as those in Mesopotamia, it
would be wrong to think that Egypt
lacked cities as some scholars once contended. Like the Harrapan culture in the
Indus valley these early urban areas
were covered up by annual Nile floods
and later settlements. Already then, by
the time that the famed third dynasty
arrived on the scene, Egypt was a unified
polity and had already begun to develop a monumental style of royal architecture. It employed elaborate burial procedures for the royalty.
14
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
The
Spillover of
Mohammed Ali's
Modernization Drive
in the Sudan
... (1820-1885)
Egypt-Sudan Map. Courtessy of
<http://www.britishempire.co.uk/images/egyptmap1897.jpg>
Ibrahim Elnur, Associate Professor of Political Science, AUC.
INTRODUCTION
In scholarly works, school textbooks
as well as in the popular narratives
in Sudan and Egypt the two main
motives for Mohammed Ali’s imperial project in Sudan was the acquisition of slaves for the army and
gold (El Zahab wa Elrigal). In addition to this, Mohamed Ali’s attempt
to forge alliance with the northern
Sudan elite was seriously eroded by
excessive taxation that dominated
not only popular discourses about
the “Turkiyya ElZalma”(The unjust
Turkish) role, but also the scholarly
work that focused dispro p o r t i o nately on resistance and injustices
i n c u r red*.
This simplistic re a d i n g
seriously understates Mohammed
Ali’s grand m odernization drive
with serious spillovers in Sudan.
While the commonly held view that
Mohammed Ali motives were
essentially related to the acquisition of Sudanese slaves for his new
a rmy and exploitation of the country’s natural re s o u rces holds some
c redence to the immediate objectives yet they are overstated.
Access to Northern Sudan mediatedslave trade was always possible
without direct control and perh a p s
far m ore cost effective. The
N o r t h e rn Sudan had pre d o m i n a n t l y
a slave mode of production long
b e f o re Mohammed Ali's conquest.
As willis noted, “the whole social
system of northern Sudan grew to
depend on the possession of slaves
without whom no property could
be developed or family maintained”. Bjorkelo (1989) description
of the socio-political structure of
the J a ’ a l i y y i n Kingdom on the eve
of Turkiyya (Sudanese name of
Mohammed Ali’s role in Sudan) is
aptly re p resentative of the whole
n o r t h e rn or riverain Sudan. Bjorkelo
noted that the socio-political struct u re was characterized by a hierarchy of slaves, commoners (peasants and nomads), merc h a n t s ,
nobles and the king ( 1 ). The village
communities were typically made
up of peasant household where diff e rences between households in
t e rms of wealth and status and
power reflected the unequal distribution of land, water wheels, animals and slaves ( 2 ) . It is this sociopolitical structure of northern
Sudan, we will maintain, that is
central to the understanding of the
failed modernization drive of
Mohamed Ali in Sudan.
* To date the term Turkiyya in Sudaneese coloquial donates extreme injustice and and agressive attitude.
15
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Furthermore, it did not take long before
Mohammed Ali realized that the slave
supply promise was not that significant.
According to Sikainga (1998) “by the
late 1830, it became clear to
Mohammed Ali that the use of
Sudanese slaves in the Egyptian army
was a failure. Mohammed Ali attended
to other sources such as gold, gum
Arabic, livestock and ostrich feathers.
The slave trade was left to private merchants, particularly after the White Nile
opened in the late 1830s (3).
ATTEMPTS AT REALIZING THE
PRODUCTIVE POTENTIAL IN
AGRICULTURE
Mohammed Ali’s emphasis on the realization of the productive potential of
agriculture in Sudan became explicit
since the early days of his role. This is
manifested in two occasions. In a document dated February 7th 1825,
Mohamed Ali wrote: "In order, to develop agriculture in `Sinnar’ which we
have conquered with so much
fatigue....we require skilled men for the
task...Do not neglect this or you will bitterly regret it" (4). Similar message was
echoed during his visit to Sudan( 18381839). Addressing northern Sudanese,
the Pasha called on them to “..be diligent and exert your maximum efforts in
tiling and planting. Agriculture contribute positively to pro g ress of your
country and homeland”. Addre s s i n g
the ruler, who was attending the meeting, the Pasha said, “ As for you Pasha,
you have to encourage the locals and
to persuade them day and night that
agriculture and cultivation is the road
to wealth and prosperity (5).” The
Pasha’s modernization package for
agriculture was indeed a comprehensive one. It included the introduction of
new products and varieties, such as,
new crops including sugar cane, cotton and indigo and new variety of
wheat and corn(6) . The indigo factories
in Dongla area experienced some
impressive steady growth of output as
shown table 1:
Indigo Output in Dungula’ Area
1833 10,000 Ugga
1835 21,416 Ugga
1837 50,000 Ugga
Ugga is equivalent to 1.248 kg.
Source: Humeida, Beshir Kuku (1983): Some
Feature from Sudan History During Ismael
Role (in Arabic), Graduate School
Publications, University of Khartoum.
However such impressive growth
proved to be unsustainable. Indigo cul-
tivation with its high water requirement
meant extremely high opportunity cost
that was not compensated by the
prices and the long hours of irrigation.
This led to serious loss of bullocks “..from
the continual fatigue of turning the sa’ giayas and their arrear with the sowing
of their own grain (7).” Mohamed Ali's
visit to Sudan brought an early end to
the forced cultivation of indigo,
"When his highness was passing
through Dungula’ on his way to
Khartoum, all hastened to present
him with petitions praying him to free
them from indigo-growing. He consulted the governor of the province
who confirmed that the people are
suffering thereby, so His Highness took
into consideration that these indigo
establishment did not yield any great
profit and made an end of them and
released people from sowing indigo
any longer. (8)”
The package also included both introduction of new technologies (metalblows); replacement of Sudanese
Sagias (water Wheel) with the technically superior Egyptian one, and a
whole team of technicians including
experienced farmers (9). Educational
plans included the training of Sudanese
agricultural technicians in Cairo specialized Schools (10). Conducive measures were taken to modify the land
tenure system to confirm existing ownership rights and to allow for foreign
ownership through government claim
on non-registered lands that became
automatically state-owned lands.
Efforts to encourage horticulture included tax holidays, which was influential in
encouraging both northern Sudanese
and foreigner to develop fruits production (11). Some of these reforms and productivity enhancing constituted the
structural foundation of the modern
agricultural sector during the British
colonial rule (1898-1956). Ironically,
Mohamed Ali's early experimentation
with new varieties of cotton were basis
upon which the British rule capitalized in
their attempt to compensate for the disrupted cotton trade with America (12).
THE SPILLOVER FROM STATELED INDUSTRIALIZATION OF
MOHAMMED ALI
Early attempts at building modern
manufacturing units during the two
colonial eras (The Turko-Egyptian era,
1820-1880 and the Anglo-Egyptian era,
1898-1956) were sporadic and had an
insignificant impact on the structure of the
economy (13). The earliest of these attempts
during the time of Mohammed Ali was
linked to mineral extraction. In 1830,
Mohammed Ali obtained eight iron
foundries from England to exploit
reportedly rich iron ore deposits in the
White Nile province. Eight English artisans and an Egyptian manager contributed to the establishment of the
foundry. None of them survived
according to Hill; “death crept in to
end a mission which had never had a
chance of success” (14).
A second expedition, led by the
Austrian mineralogist J.Von Russeger in
1838, and third, led by Glamorganshire
mining engineer John Patric in 1847,
equally failed. The two latter expeditions, recommended the improvement
of the indigenous smelting techniques,
“The iron was there but, for want of
transport and skilled labour its working
would not pay (15)." Other attempts,
“... Mohamed Ali's
early experimentation with new varieties of cotton were
basis upon which
the British rule capitalized in their
attempt to compensate for the disrupted cotton trade with
America ...”
aimed at introducing modern mining
techniques, were not successful either. In
contrast, the introduction of sugar cane
plantation and processing, was reportedly successful. During the time of Ahmed
Basha Abu Adlan (1826-1838), a large
sugar cane plantation with a refinery and
arrack (local rum) distillery was managed
by a German foreman (16). Available
records do not explain why this industry
failed to survive and expand. In fact,
sugar continued to be a major import
item throughout the period of Turkish rule
(17). Traditional spinning and weaving was
well established before the advent of the
Turko-Egyptian occupation and textiles
were both exported and imported.
However, the establishment of two mode rn textile mills and a modern cotton ginnery in Kassala proved to be premature
and met little success (18).
16
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
“... Mohamed Ali’s
attempt to forge
alliance with the
northern Sudan elite
was seriously
eroded by
excessive taxation
that dominated not
only popular
discourses about
the “Turkiyya
ElZalma”(The unjust
Turkish) role, but
also the scholarly
work that focused
disproportionately
on resistance and
injustices
incurred ...”
By the end of Turkish colonial rule, nothing
was left of these unsuccessful manufacturing units. The strongest and the most
important impact of the Turkish colonial
rule, was on the handicraft industries. The
need to develop exports and export
transportation led to a substantial
improvement in boat building, tanning,
sagias (bullock-driven water wheels)
and the production of agricultural tools,
using simple production techniques.
During Osman Bey’s term of office in
Sennar in central Sudan, a group of
skilled workers was sent to Sudan to
grow opium, indigo, cotton and to tan
hides, with them came blacksmiths,
masons and carpenters. A strong addition to the ranks of foremen, cultivator
and artisans arrived with the appointment of Khurshid as governor in 1826.
This was in response to Mohamed Ali’s
o rders to the governors of Egyptian
provinces.
The Beleaguered Mahadist State
The armed struggle waged by El
17
Mahadi brought an end to the Turkish
era by 1885. As Barbour (1961), aptly
noted, the Mahadist state “…came
about just at the time of the
Conference of Berlin. When the whole
of the African continent was in the
process of being partitioned into
spheres of interest between Euro p e ,
Sudan became independent of foreign
control (19).”
The beleaguered
Mahadist state (1885-1898), was
obliged to develop many handicraft
industries to meet severe needs such as
these of defense and agriculture. It
attempted to develop the embryonic
metal fabricating industries, it inherited
from the Turkish colonial system. One
interesting aspect of the Mahdist state
policies is the retention of both physical
and human capital inherited from the
Turkish era. Personnel operating, printing unit, small arms manufacturing as
well as accountants and administrators
were employed in position relevant to
their skills voluntary or involuntary and
non-Muslim were actually forced into
Islam(20). Continuous internal and external wars, prevented further development, even of these tiny embryonic
industry (21).
Despite disrupters and discontinuities,
Mohamed Ali’s modernization drive
spillovers in Sudan left its marked
impact. From modern education, to
enhanced farming practices and techniques, embryonic manufacturing units,
and new skills in metal working there
are ample evidences of initial drive. The
Mahadist state turbulent years were
indeed disruptive as far as stable
growth of new modern activities. The
Mahadist state, however, driven by its
pressing needs and endless wars further
accelerated the process of transforming the slavery-dependent mode of
production and accelerated the transformation of slaves into workers. The
incomplete mission of accelerating this
process through wide scale land reform
was driven to its logical ends by the
British colonial authorities keen to maximize agricultural output. Mohamed Ali's
modernization spillovers were certainly
incomplete. Using Marx celebrated
phrase on the incomplete British colonialism of India, Mohamed Ali colonialism of Sudan was incomplete, but certainly ushered transformations that
could no longer be halted.
END NOTES:
1. Bjorkelo, Anders (1989): Prelude to the
Mahadiyya: Peasants and Traders in the
Shendi Region, 1821-1885, Cambridge
University Press, p.4.
2. Ibid.
3. Sikainga, Ahmed Alawad (1996): Slaves
into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in
Colonial Sudan, University of Texas Pre s s ,
Austin, p.12.
4. Mohammed Ali Collection, Egyptian
Museum, LB19MT, No.354, 7th of February,
1825, cited in Hill, (1959, p.73).
5. Gadal, Mohammed Said (1993): Modern
History of Sudan 1820-1955, (in Arabic), Amal
Publishing Company, Cairo, p.75.
6. See: Issawi, C. (1954): Egypt at MidCentury: An Economic Survey; and Gadal
(1993).
7. Hill, R. (1959): Egypt in Sudan: 1820-1881,
Oxford University Press. Oxford, p. 67.
8. Ibid, p.67.
9. Gadal, 1993, Issawi, 1954 and Magar, 1993
10. Magar, Naseem (1993): Misr wa Binaa El
Sudan El Hadeeth, Marakaz Watheeg wa
Tarikh Masr El Muassiraa, El Haiaa' El Amaa'Lill
Kittab
11. See: Humeida, 1983, p. 114.
12. Elnur, Ibrahim (1988): Agro - b a s e d
Industries and the Industrialization Impasse in
the Sudan, D.Phil Thesis, University of Sussex,
January 1988.
13. For a very interesting and well documented survey of studies on the decline of
the local cottage-based industry in the
Gezira region during the 1600-1940 period
see Pollard (1984, pp.168-180).
14. Hill 1959, p. 57
15. Ibid, p.58
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Elnur 1988.
19. Barbour, K. M. (1961): The Republic of
Sudan, University of London Press, London.
20. See for example: Slatin, R. (1986): Fire and
Sword in the Sudan, Edward Arnold, London.
21. Gadal, 1982, pp.133-156.
SERIES
HISTORICALSPEMINAR
ERSPECTIVES
Muhammad
Tal‘at Harb
A Bourgeois Intellectual
Zeinab Abul-Magd, PhD Candidate, Georgetown University.
B
ankers do not exist in a cultural vacuum. They are part
of their intellectual and ideological milieu, and often
times they contribute to the
course of intellectual change. This article is about a banker, Muhammad
Tal‘at Harb, known in the Egyptian
nationalist narrative as the founder of
Bank Misr and a great industrialist, who
was also a prominent intellectual. His
books and speeches contributed to the
formation of cultural life in Egypt and
reflected intellectual change from the
1890s till the 1930s. This article attempts
to trace the development of his
thought. It argues that each stage in
Harb’s social ascent yielded intellectual
change, from being the voice of the
lower classes to be an integral part of
the capitalist elite.
About the formation of intellectuals,
Antonio Gramsci stated: “every social
c l a s s … c reates with itself, organically,
one or more groups of intellectuals who
give it homogeneity and consciousness
of its functions not only in the economic
field but in the social and political field
as well: the capitalist entrepreneur creates with himself the industrial technician, the political economist, the organizer of a new culture, of a new law, etc
(1).” Building on this argument, this article analyzes the published treatises, articles, and speeches of Muhammad
“... this article
analyzes the
published treatises,
articles, and
speeches of
Muhammad Tal‘at
Harb. It argues that
while Harb moved
from one social
class to another in
a long journey of
upward social
mobility..”
Tal‘at Harb. It argues that while Harb
moved from one social class to another
in a long journey of upward social
mobility, his ideological underpinnings
changed accordingly. He began his
career as a middle-class conservative
and ended up as a liberal bourgeois.
The article selects three cultural, political, and economic issues to focus on in
his discourse: Islamic conservatism, Arab
political identity, and the place of small
peasants in the process of economic
progress.
SOCIAL FORMATION
Muhammad Tal‘at Harb experienced
profound ideological change that was
reflected in his published discourse. This
change resulted from his movement
from one social class to the other. Harb
was born in 1867, in Qasr al-Shawq, a
quarter in Cairo, to a father who was an
employee in the government railroad
administration. His father migrated to
Cairo from a small village in al-Sharqiyya
p rovince in Lower Egypt, where he
belonged to a rural lower-class family
that claimed Arab bedouin roots. The
family owned a small landed property,
less than ten faddans, of which the
father’s share came to less than one
faddan. It was a time when small peasants where burdened by heavy loans
from foreign moneylenders, while the
18
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
Turco-Ciracssian elite owned the largest
and finest estates in the country.
Financial difficulties due to land loans
were probably responsible for the
migration of Harb’s immediate family to
the big city, where Harb met many
opportunities for social mobility (2). He
studied law at the Khedival Law School,
and there he intermingled with several
colleagues who later became the leaders of the nationalist movement against
British colonialism. After graduation,
Harb worked at al-da’ira al-saniyya till
1905, at sixty pounds per month (3).
When al-da’ira was liquidated, he took
loans and purchased a mansion (‘izba)
of 180 faddans from the da’ira lands in
al-Minya in Upper Egypt. Thus, he
achieved an essential step in his social
and economic ascent by joining the
large landowning elite. He was appointed to posts at several land companies
and worked with large landholders and
investors afterwards. He also worked as
an agent (wakil) for a number of prominent Egyptian landowners. These new
positions allowed him to establish contacts with prominent Egyptian capitalists
and “Egyptianized” Jewish families that
largely dominated trade and several
sectors of investment - all contacts on
which he would later capitalize in establish Bank Misr. Harb maintained a close
relation with certain Jewish business
“... Muhammad
Tal‘at Harb
experienced
profound ideological change that
was reflected in his
published discourse. This change
resulted from his
movement from
one social class to
the other..”
19
“... On the
economic level,
the early writings
of Harb reflect a
genuine interest in
the state of small
peasants and the
urgency of improving their financial
status in order to
improve the
Egyptian
economy at
large...”
families, prominently the Cattauis, from
whom he learned a great deal about
business and economics (4). In 1910,
Harb formed a finance company along
with prominent businessmen and merchants. He founded Bank Misr, the first
national bank in Egypt, in 1920 and
stayed in charge of it till 1939. Between
1920 and 1939 he purchased a total of
301 faddans in al-Gharbiyya province in
Lower Egypt.
EARLY INTELLECTUAL
DEVELOPMENT
On the cultural and political levels,
Harb’s early writings reflect a deep concern with issues of Islamic culture and
political identity. During the 1890s, the
time when Harb published his first works,
the Egyptian national identity was in formation in resistance to colonialism and
Western hegemony. A fierce intellectual
debate was taking place about what
would compose such an identity. Calls
for an “Islamic identity” were pervasive
among some contemporaries advocating pan Islamism and Islamic reformation under the Ottoman rule (khilafa).
Arab nationalism was at an early stage
of finding its way to Egyptian culture
through Syrian and Lebanese migrants,
who called for the revival of Arabic language and culture. Harb, as a devout,
conservative Muslim with Arab tribal origins, opted for a formula that combined
Islamic conservatism in cultural terms
with Arab nationalism in political terms.
Harb’s articulated his Islamic conservatism in rejecting Western cultural penetration; particularly in the way he dealt
with the question of Muslim women’s liberation. In 1899, Harb wrote Tarbiyat alMar’ah wa al-Hijab (Raising Women
and the Veil) as a response to Qasim
Amin’s controversial works on women’s
veil and other issues (5). He contested
Amin’s thesis on women’s equality to
men and maintained that women are
created to take certain roles within the
family as wives and mothers per se.
Harb affirmed that calling for unveiling
Muslim women is part of the Western
conspiracy against the Muslim world to
weaken it further and to undermine
Islam itself. Harb believed that Muslim
women were targeted as the main tool
to change the Muslim society and have
it adopt all western habits. Missionary
schools are but a place where Western
Christian nuns taught Muslim girls about
Christianity and manipulated their minds
to convert to Christianity. He also asserted that emulating western women was
against Islamic law. Men are superior to
women by nature according to the
Torah and the Bible as well as the
Qur’an and the Sunnah. Harb rejected
Qasim’s views on the veil affirming that
women’s veil should cover her entire
body including the face.
Nevertheless Harb’s Islamic conservatism
on women’s issues did not mean that he
also based his political identity on Islamic
sentiments. His Arab tribal origins had
p robably drawn his national sentiments
t o w a rds Arab nationalism rather than
Ottoman Islamism. Harb glorified early
Arab culture and civilization in writing a
f o u r-volume book on the history of the
Arabs and Islam, titled Tarikh Duwal al‘Arab wa-al-Islam (The History of Arab
States and Islam), in 1898. Harb used his
historical knowledge and eloquence to
a rgue in defense of Islam and the Arabs,
yet he showed no political loyalty to the
Ottomans. He recounted the history of
the Arabs before and after Islam, beginning from Arabian Peninsula and its cult u rebefore Islam. Then he proceeded to
the period when Prophet Muhammad,
his Companions, the Umayads, and the
Abbasids ruled, concluding with the
Ottoman state. He paid close attention
to the place of reason and rationality in
Islamic history. Harb argued that the
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
“... While Harb was
establishing himself
as an entrenched
pillar of the
capitalists’
community, he was
leaving behind
conservative views
on Islamic culture,
beholding more to
Arab nationalism.
His concerns
about small
peasants in
economic progress
nearly vanished. ..”
Arabs and the Muslims lead the West
to its scientific progress. European
interaction with the Arabs during
and after the Crusades and in
Andalusia helped them to transfer
knowledge to the European content. He went so far as to allege
that even religious reformation in
seventeenth-century
Europe
resulted in Christian sects influenced by the more illuminated
teachings of Islam. Throughout
the book there is an implicit
attempt to defend the
Muslims against the orientalist
criticisms(6). On the economic
level, the early writings of Harb
reflect a genuine interest in
the state of small peasants
and the urgency of improving
their financial status in order to
improve the Egyptian economy at large. The rural roots of
Harb affected his early thought
on economic progress in
Egypt. In 1911, Harb published
‘Ilaj Misr al-Iqtisadi wa
Mashru‘ Bank al-Umma
(the Economic Remedy
of Egypt and the
National Bank Project),
an important treatise on the necessity
of founding an Egyptian national bank
(7). It was a product of the first Egyptian
National Conference, a platform held
by landowners and capitalists. The book
revived an old argument about the
blessings of founding a national bank.
The conference’s committee proposed
to establish a national bank in order to
encourage economic enterprises that
would benefit the country and resist the
usurious practices against peasants
that led to great land losses to the foreign moneylenders. Harb took charge
of documenting the idea in an elaborate publication. Although written for
an elite audience, the book illustrated
Harb’s ideological stance with regard
to peasants and the way he envisioned
their central place in economic
progress.
In ‘Ilaj Misr, Harb emphasized that the
main difference between already existing foreign banks and a new national
bank would be in that the latter would
target the majority of small peasants
who endured the usurious practices of
foreign moneylender. Existing banks
w e re mainly commercial enterprises
that benefited a small group of merchants and stockholders, the majority of
whom were either foreigners or large
landowners. A national bank would
b e n ef i t
peasants with the goal of ending foreign misuse of credit and of getting the
lower classes into the habit of investing
money in bank deposits which would
then finance profitable enterprises. He
argued that the wealth and political
power of the British and the French
nations for example were not only
based on the money of large landholders, merchants and industrialists, but
largely on that of its small savers. To
advocate such a public proposal, Harb
followed the state of the Egyptian
economy from mid nineteenth century
to the first decade of the twentieth century, indicating how foreign capital subjugated the Egyptian peasantry
through loans sometimes taken against
the mortgage of their small farms. This
practice largely contributed to a
decline in the state of peasants and the
economy as a whole. Harb quoted
lengthy excerpts from annual British
reports on the state of peasants and the
issue of loans in particular to illustrate his
point throughout the book.
A BOURGEOIS INTELLECTUAL
While Harb was establishing himself as
an entrenched pillar of the capitalists’
community, he was leaving behind
conservative views on Islamic culture,
beholding more to Arab nationalism.
His concerns about small peasants in
economic progress nearly vanished.
During the interwar period, after the
Ottoman Empire collapsed in political terms, Egyptian rhetoric about
national identity took new intonations. Arab nationalism gained a
significant place as a main element of Egyptian identity, as
opposed to pan Islamism, which
lost most of its validity. For
Egyptian capitalists, Arabism
represented a potential bid for
economic profit in a new world
system. Harb did not have to
diverge from his original political sentiments in this re g a rd. In
a public speech delivered on
the occasion of moving Bank
Misr into a new building, in 1927,
Harb asserted that the bank
used Arabic as an official language in its transactions. He
indicated that it was the first
bank to use Arabic officially in
the world. Such a move aimed at
contesting Western allegations that
it was not an appropriate language
Sir Tal’at Harb.
Picture courtesy of
<weekly.ahram.org.eg>
20
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES
for accounting in firms and banks (8).
More importantly, during the same period, Harb was more concerned with the
economic advantages that could be
associated with Arab nationalism. In
one of his articles, published in 1939,
Harb called for Arab economic cooperation. He affirmed that Arabs were one
family that shared the same religion, traditions, and habits. They were historically one unit with abundant human and
material resources that needed to be
exploited. Thus, they should embark on
economic cooperation (9). After
decades of working with foreign and
Egyptianized capitalists, Harb’s early
conservative attitude in Islamic thought
faded away. Bank Misr was the main
s o u rce of capital in intro d u c i n g
Egyptian cinema through the Studio
Misr company (founded in 1925). In the
first Egyptian movies, women certainly
a p p e a red with no hijab in a totally
Westernized setting and lifestyle. For
“... On the cultural
and political levels,
Harb’s early writings
reflect a deep concern with issues of
Islamic culture and
political identity...”
Harb the great banker, resisting economic
and
political
colonialism
became less associated with contesting
threats of cultural We s t e rnization.
Furthermore, Islamic references for Harb
became integral part of his capitalist
discourse. In his speech in the Egyptian
Radio about the Hajj season, he put his
religious sentiments aside and dealt with
the occasion as a merely economic
one. He took the opportunity to advocate for the Misr Maritime Navigation
Company (founded in 1934) that made
the pilgrimage (hajj) journey feasible
and comfortable for upper-class families. He asserted that in this way the
company and the bank did its best to
serve Islam and Muslims (10).
As for his views on peasants, they too
waned over the course of time.
Whereas, in writing about a national
21
bank, Harb put his emphasis on improving the status of peasants through good
credit, the activities of Bank Misr, in practice, had a different focus. Bank Misr
acquired the financial support of the
agrarian bourgeois and native and
Egyptianized capitalists in its establishment. Among its big shareholders were
Yusuf Cattaui, the great capitalist Jew,
and large landholders from al-Minya district, where Harb himself had his landed
estate (11). Harb and the Bank Misr
group capitalized on the interwar
national sentiments, calling for political
independence from the British. They
gained the support of diff e rent segments of Egyptian society, including students coming from rural and urban
background who advocated on behalf
of the bank in the countryside. It is obvious from the Bank Misr group’s ventures
that they had little to do with small
peasants and their credit situation.
“Clearly the bank was pro g ressively
becoming controlled by, and was serving the interests of, the upper class, (12)”
writes a historian of the bank. Most of its
enterprises created between 1920 and
1926 were trading companies, credit
institutions or firms associated with the
export of cotton (13). The industrial
dream of the bank’s capitalists made
attention to peasants’ issues irrelevant.
Similarly, Harb’s discourse on Egyptian
economy paid little attention to small
peasants after the bank was established. In May 1920, Muhammad Tal‘at
Harb “Bik” delivered a public speech on
the occasion of the bank’s inaugural
ceremony, in which he demonstrated
radical shifts in his economic outlook. He
referred again to the British off i c i a l
reports on the Egyptian finances, but
this time to focus on issues related to the
Egyptian capital outflow to foreign
banks and national currency’s dependency on the English Pound Sterling. He
further advocated national economic
independence and the end of foreign
domination on the strategic sectors in
Egypt. Harb criticized the country’s rich,
who persisted in their way and invested
surplus capital in buying more agricultural lands. He called on the bourgeois
elite to subscribe to the bank to invest in
other agricultural, commercial and
industrial ventures that would increase
the wealth of the country (14). About
two decades later, in July 1937, Harb
“Pasha” published an article in alMusawwar magazine on the hopes and
prospects of the pro g ress of the
Egyptian economy, and again, there
was no place for small peasants in his
rhetoric. Rather, he focused on the
increasing number of educated youth
who could contribute to industrialization. He did speak extensively about
agriculture, but mainly on the necessity
of putting good agricultural policies that
would limit agro-imports and mobilize
rural resources in industrial projects (15).
For him the countryside had become a
place for good scenery, where the
Studio Misr Company could film, and
show the world the beauty and wealth
of Egypt (16).
END NOTES:
1. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and
other Writings (New York: International
Publishers, 2000), p.118.
2. Eric Davis, Challenging Colonialism: Bank
Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920-1941
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983),
pp.80-91.
3. Ibid, p.91.
4. Ibid, pp. 93-94.
5. Muhammad Tal‘at Harb, Tarbiyat almar’ah wa al-hijab ( C a i ro: Matba‘at alTaraqqi, 1899).
6. Muhammad Tal‘at Harb, Tarikh duwal al‘Arab wa-al-Islam (Cairo: al-Matba‘a alAmiriyya al-Kubra, 1898).
7. Muhammad Tal‘at Harb, ‘Ilaj Misr al-iqtisa di wa mashru‘ bank al-misriyyin aw bank alumma (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub wa-al-Watha’q
al-Qawmiyya, 2002).
8. Majmu‘at khutab Muhammad Tal ‘at
Harb, vol.1 (Cairo: Matba‘at Misr, 1957), p.
218.
9. Majmu‘at khutab Muhammad Tal ‘at
H a r b, vol.3 (Cairo: Matba‘at Misr, 1957),
pp.95-97.
10. Ibid, pp. 126-132.
11. For a full list of the shareholders refer to
the company founding document: “ Marsum
bi-ta’sis sharika musahima tud‘a ‘Bank Misr’,”
Mulhaq al-Waqa’i‘ al-Misriyya, no. 32, 13 April
1920.
12. Davis, Challenging Colonialism, p.133.
13. Ibid, 144.
14. Majmu‘at khutab, vol.1, pp.45-61.
15. Majmu‘at khutab, vol.3, pp. 84-94.
16. Majmu‘at khutab, vol.1, pp. 203-204.
HISTORY
IN THE
MAKING
EGYPT’S LAST
EFFENDI
On the government efforts to
privatize department stores
Karim El-Sayed, Young Scholar, EBHRC
T
his year, which marks the 150-year
anniversary for Egypt’s biggest department stores chain, might be the most
decisive for its future. The bid made by
a Saudi investor, Jamil Abdulrahman
al-Qanbit, to purchase the Omar Effendi chain
for little over five hundred million Egyptian
pounds seems to be the concluding chapter in
the chain’s history.
Egypt’s largest chain of department stores, with
83 branches all over Egypt- including the chain’s
newest branch in the city of Toshki, was founded
in 1856 and started operations from the iconic
Abdulaziz Street store, which remains the chain’s
largest branch. For about 70 years the store operated under the name Orosdi-Back, until it was
sold by the original owners and underwent a
name change and adopted the more familiar
label Omar Effendi in the 1920s. In her article on
the urban commercial sector in Egypt, “Sharikat
al-Bayt al-Misri: Domesticating Commerce in
Egypt, 1931-1956”, Nancy Reynolds explains that
“a large number of retail and especially dry
goods stores in Egypt were operated in this period by Jewish families … either Sephardi Jews …
or Mizrahi Jews who had been part of the indigenous Jewish communities of Cairo, Tunis,
Damascus or Baghdad for centuries … who were
integrally connected to Egyptian society, and
considered ‘Egyptian’ until such an identity was
politicized and became untenable after the
founding of Israel in 1948”.
Omar Effendi Dep Store, fomerly Orosdi Back & Co. Raoul ran don, architect, 1909. Courtesy of
<http://www.aaanet.org/mes/aprmyn.htm>
22
HISTORY
“... Omar Effendi’s
financial scorecard
for the past three
years reveals
increasing sales
and revenue figures, in addition to
an improvement in
profitability rates...”
With the exception of Sednawi, this was
true of all department stores chains that
existed at the time like Cicurel,
Hannaux, Adès and Chemla, all of
which were nationalized in 1957. To start
with, Omar Effendi was among the
country’s largest department store
chains, Reynolds asserts that even
“when Chemla”, which the writer takes
as a case study, “became known as
one of Cairo’s top department stores,
the business remained modest comp a red with others such as Cicurel,
Sidnawi or Orosdi-Back”, and under
state ownership the chain continued to
grow. In 1961, there were only 20
branches in the chain, this grew to the
p resent number of 83, about 40 of
which are completely owned by the
chain.
Having been caught up in the fever of
the street festivities and week-long celebrations that marked the Heliopolis centennial anniversary, I was almost sure
that similar preparations were underway
for the century-and-half anniversary of
a store which, as long as anyone could
remember, has always been a nationwide household name.
Obviously, however, the government
was more interested in putting an end
to its repeated failure to privatize
department stores -with the first
attempts to sell stillborn back in 1993.
Ever since it came under management
of the Holding Company for Internal
Trade in the early 1990s, Omar Effendi
had been on the selling blocks for four
times. Every time, negotiations and disagreements over the value of the company and its assets never led to a successful closure of the deal. But it
appears that this time, the government
23
IN THE
MAKING
is more serious in its attempts to liquidate
its holdings of all five department stores,
and they hope that finalizing the Omar
Effendi deal will break the spell, even if it
comes at a major cost.
Over the past few weeks, government
and opposition newspapers alike have
been closely attending to what has
been dubbed the “Omar Effendi
Scandal”. Yehia Abdulhadi, head of
Benzione, another state-owned department store chain, and a member of an
ad hoc committee appointed by Hadi
Fahmi, Head of the Holding Company
for Trade, to advise the government on
the value of the chain, filed a complaint
with the Prosecutor General accusing
Fahmi and the Minister of Investment,
Mahmud Mohiddin, of squandering
public funds. According to Abdulhadi,
the committee spent a month until they
reached the conclusion that a fair value
for the Omar Effendi chain is one billion
and one hundred and forty million
Egyptian pounds. The committee members were then pre s s u red by Fahmi,
according to Abdulhadi, to sign release
forms to confirm that the value they
came up with was only advisory and
that applying a different valuation
method would produce the more
a p p ropriate value for the chain,
amounting to four hundred and fifty million Egyptian pounds- less than half of
the original value. An article in il-Arabi
newspaper, dated 5 March 2006, commented that at this market value,
approximately one-eighth of the size of
the country of Kuwait- which is the
aggregate of the surface area of the 83
branches in the chain- will be sold for
half a billion Egyptian pounds!
For almost a year, straight after graduation, I worked in the consultancy service
line of the world’s largest financial services company with their office here in
C a i ro. The primary objective of that
department was the preparation of feasibility studies for new projects as well as
providing clients with recommendations
on the value of companies and units
they wish to acquire. The process of
determining the value of a company
that is still functioning was always difficult, because for non-operational companies the value was simply the market
price for its assets [viz. land, property
and machinery] since this is the technique commonly used for liquidation.
However, it would not be the most
a p p ropriate technique to use if we
assume the company will continue
operations but is merely undergoing a
p rocess of restructuring, or even
change in management, as is the case
with Omar Effendi. Unfortunately, it
“... When is the
government going
to present their
long-awaited comprehensive plan of
the companies
they earmarked for
privatization? Why
is there so much
discretion about
the offers the government receives
for the companies
they put up for
sale? More importantly, where does
the money from
selling those companies go?..”
appears that this was the technique
used by the government committee as
they calculated the market value for
the land and the capital assets of each
branch separately, thereby arriving at
an inflated figure.
A more suitable approach to determine
the value usually considers the company’s profitability and not its assets. This
technique is called the “discounted
cash flow” method and is based on
elaborate mathematical formulae to
arrive at the present-day value of the
company’s projected revenues in the
future [for five or ten years, based on
the industry]. It usually involves multiple
assumptions regarding the company’s
operations in the future and regarding
the inflation and interest rates during the
period under study. My little experience
in this line of service affirms that slightly
changing one of those variables can
produce dramatic changes in the end
HISTORY
result. More significantly, I have learned
that the methodology of the consultancy firm, which is never disclosed, not
even to the clients, determines the
assumptions made for each specific
study; the effects of those on the end
result too should never be underestimated.
The fact that in the case of Omar
Effendi the method used by the private
consultancy firm is more appropriate
than the method used by the ad hoc
committee formed by the Holding
Company, but that does not mean the
value suggested by the firm is necessarily fair. Official statements from the
Holding Company, to justify the six hundred million pound discrepancy
between the two valuations, suggest
that the firm’s figure included provisions
for the new investor to honor Omar
Effendi’s commitments to suppliers and
debtors. Nevertheless, this still does not
explain how it is possible for a chain of
83 stores to be sold for five hundred million Egyptian pounds, when “the value
of the land and buildings occupied by
only three of [its] branches exceeds that
amount”, as opposition parliamentarian
Mustafa Bakri is quoted in an il-Ahram
Weekly article on the second week of
March.
Moreover, it was asserted that the selling
price was reduced as an incentive for
the investor to maintain the same operation and to retain the 6000 employees
of Omar Effendi, but opposition newspapers confirmed that the Saudi
investor only promised to keep one
quarter of that labor force. More significantly, it is quite questionable for a
company to be sold for a price that is
almost equivalent to its annual re venues. Omar Effendi’s financial scorecard for the past three years reveals
increasing sales and revenue figures, in
addition to an improvement in profitability rates.
Whether or not the government
attempts to sell Omar Effendi will be successful this time around, and whether
the selling price will be higher than the
amount suggested by the private consultancy firm are secondary issues here.
There are more fundamental questions
that remain unresolved; I would even
dare to say that they remain unasked.
When is the government going to present their long-awaited comprehensive
plan of the companies they earmarked
for privatization? Why is there so much
discretion about the offers the government receives for the companies they
put up for sale? More importantly,
IN THE
“... a large number
of retail and
especially dry
goods stores in
Egypt were
operated in this
period by Jewish
families … either
Sephardi Jews … or
Mizrahi Jews who
had been part of
the indigenous
Jewish communities
of Cairo, Tunis,
Damascus or
Baghdad for
centuries … who
were integrally
connected to
Egyptian society,
and considered
‘Egyptian’ until such
an identity was
politicized and
became untenable
after the founding
of Israel in 1948..”
w h e re does the money from selling
those companies go?
The relative anonymity awarded to
bloggers has encouraged many
Egyptians to express their resentment of
government actions and decisions, but
MAKING
the discussion threads on some of the
most-frequented blogs reveal how little
people actually know about the government motives from privatization or
even the legality of the whole process. I
think that people have digressed from
the main issue regarding privatization,
and we are currently reduced to debating whether or not the sale value is fair.
Privatization is now an undisputed fact
of life, and the fact that the government holds unilateral authority regarding which companies are sold, and to
whom, does not seem to bother anyone
anymore. Where this is going, and when
it is going to end is no longer an issue of
discussion, we simply deal with each
case as it happens.
In his book Growth Fetish, which criticizes third-way governments of the
developing world for their obsession
with economic growth over more
important development objectives and
indicators, Professor Clive Hamilton
asserts that “a further shibboleth of
modern politics is that governments
cannot run businesses profitably: only
private owners have the incentives to
operate enterprises efficiently. This belief
has provided the rationale for the wave
of privatizations of public assets
throughout the developed and developing worlds since the 1980s … and any
reluctance has been met with dire
threats from international financial institutions, including the IMF and credit-rating agencies … The broad conclusion is
that … publicly owned enterprises perform at least as well as private ones,
and in some cases better … Yet any
resistance to further privatization- let
alone calls to re-nationalize some enterprises to undo some of the damage
caused by privatization- is met with
howls of outrage, threats of 'capital
strikes' and editorials about the evils of
the return to 'socialism'”.
To me, the biggest surprise regarding
the Omar Effendi deal remains the magnitude of commotion it stirred. I do not
recall similar unrest to have ever coincided with other successful privatization
deals. When the government decided
to withdraw and sell its share in strategic
industries and the subsequent infiltration
of Arab and European capital into the
cement, fertilizer and petro c h e m i c a l
industries, no one filed a formal complaint against the minister. When I saw
the tender offer for the privatization of
the Bank of Alexandria, in last week’s
issue of The Economist, I became quite
intrigued to witness how the public is
going to react to that news when it
becomes more widely circulated.
24
HISTORY
IN THE
MAKING
...Things to
note while you
a re reading
the ‘Financial
T i m e s’...
European Economic Nationalism
Taking the Lead
Wael Ismail, MA Candidate, The American University in Cairo..
T
he past couple of months
bore witness to a number of
changing variants on the
global economic level. After
a couple of years of economic growth especially in a number of
emerging markets, most prominently
China and India, new players are starting to emerge in spheres where their
p resence was not felt before. Larg e
conglomerates are expanding outside
their regional geographical territory in
the south into the north. For many years,
we have witnessed the advance of
large corporations from the developed
world to the less economically developed one. However, we are witnessing
now the advance of firms from China,
India, Egypt, and the UAE, only to name
a few. These companies, which are
amassing enormous amounts of wealth
in their respective regions, are taking
their cause globally, to the backyard of
large established multi-nationals.
Source: Financial Times Cartoons
25
HISTORY
This era is fertile in terms of economic
and business developments. We are
surrounded by debates on globalization, and how the world is becoming
one small electronic village, but only
with the third millennia, have we really
started to feel tangible manifestations
of these phenomena. For any observer who is intrigued by the business
world on a theoretical level, the
Financial Times is one of the best
chronicles in this field. Day to day
events that might pass us by unnoticed are numerous in the pages of
this “global” newspaper. Only when
these events are strung together can
we truly take a better look at the field
of international business. A number of
trends have started to take shape
over the last months, one of which is
the abovementioned emergence of
large conglomerates from the underdeveloped South to the global business arena; others include the rise of
economic nationalism in one of the
stalwarts of capitalism in We s t e rn
E u rope and the increased consolidation in almost all economic sectors
world wide. The latter has witnessed a
wave of mergers and acquisitions
deals (M&A), most prominently, in the
energy and telecommunication sectors. The most interesting of these
t rends is the encroachment of
“Southern” companies on “Northern”
markets. This unusual flight of capital
that is moving against the stream has
its repercussions. Most recently we
had just witnessed the debacle that
took place after the Dubai based
ports company; Dubai Ports acquired
the British P&O, only for the Americans
to wake up and find that 6 of their
ports, formerly managed by the latter,
will be managed by a Middle Eastern
country from the same Gulf re g i o n
that produced the architects of the
9/11 attacks. As soon as news broke
out, the American public and eager
Congressmen took what seemed to
be a simple political deal and turned
it into a national security issue. After
weeks of debates and negotiations,
the Dubai based company off e red to
sell the six ports it inherited from its
British predecessor. The outcome was
later seen as a disaster to the US’s
image as a patron of free enterprise
and markets by a number of its own
financial houses.
What happened in the Dubai Ports
case was a more publicized replica of
what took place earlier when a
Chinese company (Cnook) in the
e n e rgy sector off e red to buy the
American company, Unical. The latter
IN THE
was later sold to the American company Chevron at a much lower price.
The US was obviously weary of selling
American based petroleum companies to the Chinese. The two cases
clearly highlight that even preachers
of free market economies can not at
times practice what they preach.
A successful case of a “Southern”
“... we are
witnessing now the
advance of firms
from China, India,
Egypt, and the UAE,
only to name a few.
These companies,
which are
amassing
enormous amounts
of wealth in their
respective regions,
are taking their
cause globally, to
the backyard of
large established
multi-nationals..”
company breaching the line of
Europe was that of Orascom Telecom.
The CEO of the company, Samih
Sawiris, created an investment vehicle
called Weather and acquired Italy’s
t h i rd largest mobile operator. To many,
the deal is merely a step before the
regional company, with 50 million subscribers under belt, enters other
European countries such as France,
Spain, Greece, and the Netherlands.
Another family operated business,
MAKING
Mittal Steel, owned by the Indian family Mittal, has recently made an offer
to buy European steel manufacturer
A rc e l o r. The deal was met with
staunch opposition, especially by
L u x e m b u rg and France. Luxemburg’s
opposition was due to some sort of
romantic attachment to an industry
that once helped the country join the
ranks
of
Europe’s
advanced
economies. As for France, a large segment of Arcelor’s workers are Fre n c h
nationals. Neither the Indian off e n s i v e
nor the European opposition has subsided, with the issue taking a political
form after it was discussed by heads of
state in France, Luxemburg and India.
The main argument the European are
adopting is that the two companies
come form two diff e rent cultures and
b a c k g rounds and are primarily fearful
that the merger would only cripple the
newly created company. If the deal
goes through, the merger of Arc e l o r
and Mittal will create a world steel
industry, producing more than the
sum of its three closest competitors.
These deals do not highlight the rise of
just any Southern companies, but
rather companies with either stro n g
government backing, as in the case
of Dubai Ports, or multi-billion dollar
family businesses (India’s Mittal, and
Egypt’s Sawiris both members of
Forbes list of the top 100 billionaires). It
is obvious that the se companies come
f rom diff e rent backgrounds, never the
less they have operated under the
u m b rella of the capitalist system and
a re fiercely competitive in a formerly
“Northern” dominated terrain. More
over, the deals show a recent wave of
economic nationalism that has been
especially strong in France, even
though the French seem to object to
the labeling. France, in addition to the
A rcelor deal, has worked hard to stop
the sale of a number of companies,
especially in the energy sector, to foreigners and even European buyers.
The French Prime Minister appro v e d
the merger of two large utility companies (Gaz Du France and Suez) almost
over night after rumors of a takeover
f rom an Italian company loomed on
the horizon. The French legislators
have also recently passed a number
of new laws giving their own companies protections from any hostile
acquisitions in the future. The Italians,
in specific saw the move as a re g re ttable return to protectionism and as a
t h reatening move to the unity of the
E u ropean Union (EU) and its sacre d
values.
26
HISTORY
One cannot look at the return to the
principles of economic nationalism without noting the strong wave of consolidation taking place across the world. It
seems that every new day will witness
the creation of a business giant; with
M&A deals creating ever expanding
entities able to compete and afford the
challenges of an ever changing global
economy. This year the value of M&A
deals have reached US$10 billion/day
mostly in Europe and especially in the
utilities and energy sectors (1). Economic
nationalism, which has been predominantly apparent in the case of Arcelor
and the merger between Gaz du
France and Suez, rose to the forefront
precisely due to the ferocity of investors
under this economic outlook. Managers
are more eager now to carry out acquisitions, especially with the backing of
their investors who see the decline in
banks’ interest rates as the perfect pretext for more expansion. France, one of
the major pillars of the EU, seems steadfast in its attempts not to let its culture
and most importantly its language be
lost in whichever union. Recently,
President Chirac walked out of an EU
meeting simply because one of his
compatriots from the business sector
chose to speak in English rather than in
French, stating that it was the language
of the business. Economic Nationalism
has not only been seen in France but in
other countries as well, such as Spain,
where the country was determined to
maintain one of its utility companies in
the face of a possible merger with a
German company (2).
Consolidation seems to be the next logical step for many large companies,
even though it may differ from one sector to the other. But on the general
scheme, more and more companies
are opting for consolidation in pursuit of
cost reduction and synergy. Synergy is
the keyword of the era. Consolidate
businesses, cut back on costs of administration, and most importantly on labor,
is the adopted mode of operation. So
far, consolidation has become synonymous with labor lay offs.
The combination of most of these trends
that are starting to surface, shed more
light on the current state of the capitalist world system. Labor is no longer
bound to one country and is unlimited
now.
No
wonder
that
large
Multinational Corporations (MNCs) are
shifting their operation to the South. The
South has a comparative advantage in
the words of David Ricardo in the form
27
IN THE
MAKING
of cheap labor whether in China or
India for example. Recent protests in
France against a proposed new labor
law concerning the youth have clearly
shown that even in Europe capitalism
has many meanings. Labor is not willing
to relinquish the battle against the business world. According to one columnist,
the recent events reveal, “…[a] serious
gap in political and corporate understanding of the human consequences
of a capitalist model that considers
labor a commodity and extends price
competition for that commodity to the
entire world (3).”
“... These deals do
not highlight the
rise of just any
Southern companies, but rather
companies with
either strong government backing,
as in the case of
Dubai Ports, or
multi-billion dollar
family businesses
(India’s Mittal, and
Egypt’s Sawiris both
members of Forbes
list of the top 100
billionaires). ..”
Observations about the business world
cannot be confined to the pure logic of
numbers, figures, and stock market
trends. Businesses do not operate in a
vacuum and hence their consequences have re p e rcussions on the
entire global society. Consolidation
might mean more synergy, more profits
and less costs but it will also mean an
increasing burden on the classes that
create this profit. The fact that many
companies from the South are taking
their business to the North, does not
mean that their mother countries are
swimming in rivers of wealth. China’s
own miracle can not be perceived without looking at the social costs that certain classes bore so that the country
can record such growth rates in the past
years. The role of businesses has definitely risen to prominence in recent
years especially with their vast exposure
throughout the world; some have used
their image to create wealth for their
shareholders, whilst others are trying to
spread the wealth around, but the
world can not simply depend on the
benevolence of the few, while the rest
continue this selfish cycle of profit seeking. So next time you are reading the
Financial Times, or any other news
paper, look behind the numbers, look
behind the names and try to see the
people who will be living in a world
dominated by a few companies.
END NOTES:
1. Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Clients,
Once More.” The Economist, April 8th 2006.
2. Refer also to “Italian banking gambit
reveals Poland’s unease.” Herald Tribune,
March 25-26, 2006. The news piece reveals
Polish opposition to an Italian offer meant to
merge the country’s two largest bank’s
together.
3. Pfaff, William. “Capitalism Under Fire . ”
Herald Tribune, March 30th 2006.
BUSINESS
NOT AS
USUAL
“Please sir, I want
some more!”
Between War and Peace: The Dilemma
of Aid, Development and Rebuilding in Darfur
Lina Atallah, BBC producer, Darfur Lifeline Programme
Adam al-Tijani, a 14-year old internally
displaced person in one of Darfur’s
refugee camps, west Sudan, stood out
amongst the crowds of children surrounding him and shouting, Khawaga!
Dayrin Gyrush! ( F o reigners! We want
money!). In a stunning testimonial,
Adam spoke about his hopes for the
future. He said how much he wanted to
return to his original village, and find an
honorable job there, through which he
and his family can live properly. “The
bread of the khawaga will never be
enough for us.” He said. “We will have
to find our own bread.”
The khawaga is represented by international aid agencies, as well as United
Nations organizations, which have
come to offer an emergency response
to the Darfur crisis. The crisis has erupted
in February 2003, but its roots date back
to a more distant date, as there has
been an on-going conflict between
sedentary farmers and nomadic cattle
herders over water re s o u rces and
access to land. As the dispute was
brought into the realm of politicization
and the issue of marginalization of the
people of Darfur by the central government was brought up, severe fighting
took place in the region. The main
adversaries were government backed
militias, largely referred to as the
Janjaweed (Arab fighters on horses)
and the people of the region, who
lined up behind two main dissenter
movements, the Sudan Liberation Army
and
the
Justice and
Equality
Movement. The conflict was further
“... one of the most
effective
campaigns for
awareness on
HIV/AIDS in a
community that has
only been
stigmatizing the
disease and the
need for
knowledge about
it was led by the
Hakamat. The
Hakamat are traditional local singers
who enjoy an
incomparable
social authority in
Darfur ..”
given a racial connotation as the
Janjaweed are mainly Arab tribes and
the rebels come mostly from non-Arab
tribes. However, it is important to note
that the population of Darfur is quite
diverse, with no less than 36 Arab and
non-Arab African tribes, which have
given the region quite a hetero g eneous makeup. Meanwhile, this racial
connotation of the conflict still highlights an ostensible dilemma in
Sudanese identity.
OUTREACHING DEPENDENCY
Adam’s testimonial stands out as it
sounded different from all what one
can see or hear in Darfur in the aftermath of the conflict and the advent of
aid response. This advent has produced a classic case of dependency
amongst people. But international aid
versed into the region cannot be considered the sole contingent causing this
dependency, but it has brought to the
surface a profound problem of environmental devastation that has resulted
from a less than an appropriate relationship between the natural environment and the people of the region.
Continuous movements in search for
food mostly caused a jeopardized relationship between Man and nature
here, which has brought about tribal
conflicts, weakened basic services,
desertification and overc rowding
around fertile areas. The absence of
proper state support, as an institutional
resource that can enhance
28
BUSINESS
NOT AS
USUAL
this relationship through various programs, has only deepened the problem, while no alternatives were found.
craft a small enterpriseout of their property, while they benefit from the free
services offered inside camps.
scale informal trade activity inside the
camps, manifest in the opening of small
shops and restaurants.
A c c o rdingly, the growing culture of
dependency has not only being transfused amongst the direct beneficiaries,
namely the internally displaced (IDPs)
who live inside temporary refugee
camps, but also the hosting communities have been equally engaged in
what has become a radically distorted
economic environment.
AN EMERGING
SMALL ECONOMY
The miscommunication between food
donors and beneficiaries further complicates the problem. For example, those
donors are
strongly advised to
decrease certain portions of their distribution packages during harvest seasons. The trade activities performed by
IDPs in distributed food have been negatively affecting the normal economic
revival that comes after harvest and
which should be the basis of an incipient, more independent economy.
However, those calls find no avail, and
the goods distributed by the organizations stand in an awkward competition
with the local goods, most of the time
driving the latter out with their lower
prices and, often, better quality.
The reliance on the NGO’s presence
has hence created more than a situation of dependency, of which the
façade is one where people are persistently asking the khawaga for some
more. The emergent alternative ecoOne apparent example is the monthly nomic activities performed by beneficibasic food distribution, carried out by aries are another less apparent and yet
several aid organizations in all IDP existent component in the picture.
camps. Despite the organizations’ elab- Dependency here takes a complicated
twist with an emerging little economy in
which the prime aim is
survival. This economy is
based on aid and can
totally be reversed in its
absence. While it brings
people one active step
higher
from
simply
receiving the distributed
goods, it is still falling in
the framework of emergency response and
does not necessarily
contribute as a basis for
a stronger self-sufficient
economy in the future.
For example, the abundance of treated water
resources
inside
the
New arrivals in the Ottash IDP camp, due to the conflict in Darfur.
camps, in comparison
Courtsey of ©UNICEF/2006/Shehzad Noorani
with outside, has led IDPs
orate system of tracking down their to seek a source of income through this
beneficiaries through simple head free commodity. Instead of filling two
counts to complex registration cards jerry cans of water on a daily basis that
that are not easily issued, still a lot of should suffice their needs, they procure
unregistered members of the hosting additional amounts of water with which
communities manage to sneak in and they fabricate bricks that they sell in the
take a share in the cake. In fact, in local market outside the camps. In turn,
many cases, people from the hosting water remains a scarce commodity in
communities, leave their houses either the camps, causing a plethora of negain the main cities or in the villages and tive effects, such as disease.
opt to live inside the camps, so that they
can benefit from an economy that is
largely based on a one way flow of
goods. Besides food, water is a scarce
commodity especially in Northern
Darfur. But most of the camps’ needs
have been saturated by treated water
through hand pumps built by aid agencies, and hence the advent of people
from the city to share in this abundant
commodity in the camps and which is
of radical importance for livelihood.
Meanwhile, the deserted houses are not
simply left unattended. In fact, the presence of the NGO’s has increased
demand for real estate and rents have
reached sky levels. Hence, those who
leave their houses to live in IDP camps
29
The basic food distributed on a monthly
basis is yet another point in case. While
certain international donor agencies for
foods have monolithic policies regardless of the nutritional culture of their beneficiaries, a lot of IDPs end up with
wheat as part of their monthly package, an alien component to them, as
they are not used to it in their diet.
Moreover, most of them do not own
mills to facilitate the use of this wheat.
So, the emergent practice amongst
beneficiaries is to use this distributed
wheat as a purchasing commodity, in
exchange for which they can get other
more urgently needed goods. The practice has led to the creation of a small-
A PARTICIPATORY APPROACH
While it is hard to conceive of a means
to salvation, especially in a post-conflict
period, there is an imperative essence
that cannot be trivialized or neglected.
Working on enhancing community participation is probably the best
approach that an international organi
“... Continuous
movements in
search for food
mostly caused a
jeopardized relationship between
Man and nature
here, which has
brought about tribal
conflicts, weakened basic services, and overcrowding around
fertile areas....”
BUSINESS
“... the growing culture of dependency
has not only being
transfused amongst
the direct beneficiaries, namely the
internally displaced
(IDPs) who live
inside temporary
refugee camps, but
also the hosting
communities have
been equally
engaged in what
has become a radically distorted
economic
environment....”
zation can adopt during its brief operation in a conflict zone like Darfur. This
enhancement may seek a national
awakening at the grass roots levels as its
main goal and should stem its essence
from elements in the local culture as the
most guaranteed means of sustainability for this awakening.
A few organizations started working
around the goals of capacity building
and community participation, especially given the cutting of funds and hence
many operations, and the generally
decreasing international humanitarian
interest in Darfur in 2006. Utilizing the
native skill sets of IDPs in agricultural
activities as well as handicrafts (palm
weaving), some NGO’s have created a
few income generating activities.
Meanwhile, community participation
remains a tricky area.
There is a cultural background to community participation and collective
action manifest in harvesting and rehabilitating houses flushed away by floods
for example. While some endeavors
NOT AS
have been made to capitalize on this
culture, the reality of livelihoods inside
the IDP camps adds checks everyday.
Al-Fadil Ibrahim, an IDP in northern
Darfur camp, has been asked by the
UNICEF to guard one of the water
pumps the organization built for the
camp. The UNICEF, for its part, has been
trying to explain to Al-Fadil and his fellows that the water pump is their property and that they should dedicate time
for its maintenance and sustainability.
Al-Fadil is half convinced. He is happy to
think of the availability of a water pump
that can make his life easy, along with
his neighbors’, but he cannot avoid
wondering how he will earn his bread to
fulfill the needs of his family.
Still, the area of community participation remains a promising one. For example, one of the most effective campaigns for awareness on HIV/AIDS in a
community that has only been stigmatizing the disease and the need for
knowledge about it was led by the
Hakamat. The Hakamat are traditional
local singers who enjoy an incomparable social authority in Darfur. Only they
could send productive educational
messages through their improvised
singing, encouraging the community to
put hands together in fighting the growing disease. The organizing NGO’s role
has been little more than a small intervention in the process, thus emphasizing
the value of cultural heritage and
indigenous knowledge in leading an
effective developmental endeavor.
TOMORROW?
With the loss and fear that the some
1.86 million IDPs and the rest of the population of Darfur have suffered, an
inevitable sense of cynicism has grown.
This cynicism has been further intensified
by the lack of information or even misinformation. Pending question marks surround the status of humanitarian aid this
year- the reality is that many operations
have been terminated, funds have
been cut, and a lot of staff have been
asked to leave the area. Many relay this
cutting in funds to a UN strategy to force
the government to accept its presence
as a peace keeper by showing the
worst product of its absence. Still,
President Omar al-Bashir has vehemently rejected a UN military intervention. He
has said that “Darfur will become a
graveyard for any foreign troops venturing to enter,” in an attempt to sound
nationalistic. This rejection of the UN
peacekeeping forces is two fold, aligning itself with general public anti-western sentiments, which, given the inter-
USUAL
national state of affairs, is politically
rewarding
In any event the cutting of UN and other
NGO’s funds in Darfur is detrimental.
With an emergency and recovery situation that has not come to a settlement
yet, with the continuing of the fighting
on the ground and the slowing down of
peace negotiations in Abuja, a retreat is
definitely premature. Moreover, a more
delicate process of returns and resettlement will also kick off, which requires a
shift in emergency response approach
by the shifting NGO’s to a more development-oriented situation, at least to
reverse the negative effects of those
NGO’s presence and the re s u l t i n g
dependency. This is particularly needed
in the absence of a strong local national movement that can rally people
around the aspiration of reconstruction,
crushing fear and rebuilding hope.
Many hold an optimistic view vis-a-vis
the resettlement process in Darfur, given
the short period of displacement, which
has not been long enough to kill peoples’ skills or will to return. Yet, with the
gloominess that surrounds the question
of who will be the main player, and the
impossibility of only one power taking
over; be it the central government, the
SLA, the UN, the African Union or anoth-
“... Here in Darfur,
between conflict
and peace, displacement and
return, there should
be a pause for
thought....”
er party, people’s role becomes of ever
more important. A similar experience of
active community involvement in
rebuilding is just unfolding in the south.
Here in Darfur, between conflict and
peace, displacement and return, there
should be a pause for thought, a mental process, where actors are community members, led by a shared aspiration
to regain their shattered tranquility and
take another stab at life, perhaps a
braver one.
30
BOOK REVIEW
Running on
EMPTY
Financial Crisis and Political Power
in Mubarak’s Egypt
Mostafa Hefny, Project Officer, EBHRC
“Ana mashy fee milk el-hokooma” [I’m walking on the government property]
I
t is what a vagrant would offer in
defense of his unwelcome presence. The phrasing is so embedded in popular Egyptian discourse
that decades of repetition in
everyday life, cinema, theater and fiction have not prompted an examination of its implications. It seems an
innocent enough sentence. One
is just as likely to hear it
screamed in protest by a tramp
forcefully compelled to relocate
by stuffed henchmen in dark
glasses and suits, or hissed by a
slick male harassing at a passing female -both, incidentally,
increasingly
common
urban scenarios. But
recurrence has dulled
the critical faculties.
A stranger unfamiliar
with
the
Egyptian setting
is likely to make
two observations: First, the
citizens of Egypt,
both sinner and
sinned against,
exhibit an ina ppropriate identification with
vagrancy. Second,
Image courtesy of <www.opdebeeck.com/.../ large/mubarak.jpg>
31
and more significant, would be that
those same citizens are being careless
with their words. Surely they mean
public, rather than government, pro perty. Through the apparatus of the
state a government administers common property, the citizens’ property.
The language does not accurately
reflect their status.
The stranger would be wrong.
Rule in post-revolutionary Egypt has
been many things, but always authoritarian. Socialist discourse was not
prominent as the Free Officers consolidated their coup after 1952 and their
ideological and political leanings
were not immediately clear. In practice, authoritarianism preceded ideology. The military officers appropriated
popular action long before they
appropriated property. Pause now to
remember the occasion, and location,
of the free officer’s first authoritative
display of power in Egypt. Recall that
the occasion was the trial of labor
leaders Khamis and El-Bakry on the
factory site of Misr plants in Kafr ElDawar in 1952 in what was practically
a public execution – violence directed
against the watching laborers as it was
BOOK REVIEW
against condemned men. No such violence was directed against groupings
later marked as enemies of the regime
– landowners, capitalists and even royalists were spared a similar fate. There is
broad consensus that the presidency of
Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a period in
which the interests of laborers and
peasants were far prominently weighed
in the devising of policy then they were,
and are, in subsequent periods.
Violence against its own base becomes
understandable when we consider that
the maintenance of authoritarian rule
has always been a primary goal for the
regime. The regime will grant privileges
to patrons but would not answer the
demands of a political base.
Some of this must have seeped into the
dialect. Citizenry and vagrancy are
conditions interchangeable according
to the whims of the wielder of power,
the regime. The difference between
the rule of the majority of the people
and rule on behalf of the majority of the
people is fundamental and has been
recognized as such – “the government’s” ownership of everything in the
public domain is then symbolic of the
regime’s sustained grip on means of
coercive power.
This grip is at the center of “il-Nizam ilQawi wa il-Dawla il-Daifa” [The Strong
Regime and The Weak State], where
Samer Soliman illustrates how the
Mubarak regime [1981-] has fastened
its hold on Egypt even as the corporatist
system of patronage it had inherited
from Nasser and Sadat wilted and atrophied. There’s little consideration of the
verbal constructions of vagrants and
citizens; the book belongs to a dying
species of writings on political economy
when the collection, taxonomy and
analysis of facts preceded dramatic
conclusions – a temperate affair.
Soliman writes a history of the Egyptian
regime through the record of its declining financial position. It’s a documented narrative of how Mubarak’s men
were deprived of rentier resources to
p u rchase the acquiescence of their
bureaucratic political base, how they
attempted to reform the state’s financial apparatus, how they completely
failed to do so, and how they maintained their hold on the country regardless of that failure. It’s a success story.
An important distinction between the
regime and the state is made. The state
is the sum of institutions, charters, practices, laws [official and otherwise] and
possesses continuity beyond individuals.
The regime is the group of people that
administer this apparatus; an actor
steering an organization inside which
there are groupings, conflicts and contradictions. This demarcation is vital
inasmuch as writings on the state and
the Egyptian state in particular, have
enshrined it as a mythical being
endowed with permanent characteristics such as centralization, often
deemed an inevitable geographic
necessity exemplified by the rule of
Mohammad Ali and even the pharaoh
Mena. The divergence in terms is necessary to disperse this nonsensical mythical permanence. Conversely, focusing
on a political regime obfuscates the
fact that a ruling group is constrained
by cumbersome structures and institutions in its goals and maneuvers.
“... The idea of the
rentier state is big,
simple and of
seemingly infinite
explanatory
power....”
In 1981 Hosni Mubarak inherited a state
apparatus that had expanded under
the rule of Anwar El-Sadat. For his part
Mubarak allowed the expansive trend
to continue and, irrespective of the official pronouncements and new economic philosophies they justify, the
Egyptian state has continued to
expand in the last twenty-five years. This
occurred in a manner sometimes deliberately obscured by a regime mindful
of demonstrating a firm hold on spending to international agencies – which
from the late 1980s onwards held a
sway over the regime that no domestic
grouping ever peacefully achieved in
the post-revolutionary period. Soliman
writes of special funds through which
government spending was siphoned in
a manner that went undocumented in
the government’s national budget figu res. This temporary stitching of the
growing cleavages in the workings of
government is characteristic of the
regime’s way of doing things and is of
great and grave importance. First,
faced with a potential crisis, the government sacrificed the golden rule of
financial accounting in allowing the
sum of its revenues and spending to go
unrecorded in its annual budget. In
effect, the regime was ready to sacrifice the cohesion of state apparatus in
order to meet a short term need and
avoid a confrontation. Second, in
allowing for the creation of funds outside official government records rather
then amend the system, the Mubarak
regime is following a pattern it had diligently been stuck with over the quarter
century it has been in charge – a deliberate aloofness to pressure and immobility that has been the defining characteristic of its survival. One is generally
safe if one is entirely without initiative
and in studying the institutional lethargy
fostered by the Egyptian regime it
becomes clear that the principle
method with which the Mubarak
regime has ensured its survival against
incremental pressure has been a deliberate policy of doing absolutely nothing.
The reactive policy has been a point of
pride for the regime which has taken to
marketing its “caution” and “wisdom”,
particularly with regards to international
and regional issues. On the domestic
front, the stasis has been enabled by
the “rentier” character of the Egyptian
state.
The idea of the rentier state is big, simple and of seemingly infinite explanatory power. Rentier states accrue revenue
from resources in processes in which little productive economic activity is
required. The classic examples are the
oil-rich states of the Gulf in which a tiny
portion of the population, much of it a
foreign contingency, is employed in the
economic exploitation of a natural
resource – in this case oil. The wealth
generated is at the disposal of the state
which then distributes this income to
groups most loyal to the regime in control. It is a neat formula that explains the
political stagnation and endemic corruption in the oil rich Arabian Gulf and,
though scarcely acknowledged, provides commentators with moral satisfaction in pointing to the pitfalls of
“unearned” wealth – the curse of the
black gold. It is with this type of wealth
that
post-revolutionary
Egyptian
regimes have been able to patronize
or, bluntly, buy the support of potential
political opponents. For a regime
devoted to indolence and political
apathy of the population, the support it
required from its base – the bloated five
million strong bureaucracy – was merely a negative support in the form of
continued nonparticipation.
32
BOOK REVIEW
“... Citizenry and
vagrancy are
conditions
interchangeable
according to the
whims of the
wielder of power,
the regime. The
difference between
the rule of the
majority of the
people and rule on
behalf of the
majority of the
people is
fundamental and
has been recognized as such ....”
Egypt is not an oil-rich state. In his rich
theoretical introduction to the book,
Soliman cites important works on the
rentier state, including Hazem Beblawi’s
and Luciani Giacomo’s pioneering The
Rentier State in the Arab World published in 1987, and economist Galal
Amin’s application of the model to an
Egyptian context. Amin had argued
that Egypt of the 1970s fit the definition
of a rentier state because its economic
performance, indeed its political stability, was largely contingent on international aid, remittances from Egyptians
working abroad and funds from the
Suez canal – all sources to which
domestic productive activity is irrelevant. For his part, Soliman stretches the
rentierism back to the Nasser era
whence the regime used wealth
appropriated in the nationalization of
private capital to recruit and patronize
a growing bureaucracy. Nasser’s
regime was not lethargic, it attempted
an ambitious industrialization program
33
that was the centerpiece of its 19601965 five year plan. The plan however
was never renewed in 1965 and from
then on Egyptian regimes, including
Nasser’s which accepted donations
f rom Arab governments after 1967,
have been able to float on the still
waters of a patronized and hence placated bureaucracy.
Even as he sketches the skeleton of the
Mubarak regime as a lethargic overlord
of rentier/patron state, Soliman seems
to harbor some skepticism towards the
rentier thesis. His critique is indirect, rendered as it is in the benign dispassionate tone in which the study is written
and composed entirely of his citing of
doubts expressed by other writers. His
doubt is welcome and displays an
awareness of the implications of
accepting of what is ultimately a totalitarian theory that leaves little room for
nuance and subtlety; if the authoritarianism of the Mubarak regime can be
explained entirely by the rentier character of the state it administers, what
reason is there to study the changing
tactics of the regime which, however
important, must be subsumed into the
overall model. Indeed the very thesis to
which Soliman slowly builds is one in
which the regime triumphs over the
constraints of the rentier model. The
dictatorship of the wealthy patron within the framework of the rentier state
thesis is only possible as long the state’s
treasury can sustain the demands of
the patronized. As the stream of rentier
wealth dries up, the regime’s coercive
power, its autocratic character too
must diminish. This has not happened in
Egypt.
It is just as well that Soliman takes the
time to make the case for the resurgent
discipline of Political Economy that fine
fusion of political science and economics in which economic facts and political realities are constant restraints on
the tendency towards abstracted
whimsy of deceptively complete theories in either discipline. The Strong
Regime and The Weak State is political
economy par excellence in which the
regime’s political maneuvers are constantly cast against the annual “Final
Declaration” released by the Ministry of
Finance and other pertinent financial
data from international financial institutions and governorates. Political discourse is linked to annual revenues,
state violence to budget deficits, and
gradually a narrative of survival
emerges to which the rentier/patron
model had only been a gateway.
It always helps to be lucky. Soliman
cites a Reuters news story on the grim
prospects of the Egyptian government,
which had suspended payment of its
external debt. The story, written in 1990,
predicted the imminent bankruptcy of
the state. Two week later, Iraq invaded
Kuwait and half of Egypt’s external
debt was cancelled in return for its participation in a coalition to expel the
Iraqi army from Kuwait. But it hasn’t
been all down to luck – sometimes
clever, often obtuse and frequently violent, the Egyptian regime has clumsily
descended on a strategy for a survival
in a polity whence it is no longer able to
purchase apathy.
Consider the sophisticated manner in
which the judiciary has been treated (1).
In a country where the regime held a
firm grip on the legislative branch of
government, reducing it to little more
than a cosmetic role, it has granted the
judiciary a relatively large degree of
independence. This has in turn
siphoned off political protest to the
courts where angry citizens have sued
the government and often attained
favorable rulings. The executive branch
would then arbitrarily decide which rulings to put into effect and which to
ignore. Less clever has been the former
prime minister, Atef Obied’s decision to
rely on a hidden and regressive inflation
tax, which only put the government
into a hole it would eventually have to
find a way out of at a postponed date.
The strategy was indicative of behavioral pattern in which no decisions were
“... Political
discourse is linked
to annual revenues,
state violence to
budget deficits,
and gradually a
narrative of survival
emerges to which
the rentier/patron
model had only
been a gateway....”
BOOK REVIEW
groups in Upper Egypt throughout in
the 1990s.
“... Soliman writes a
history of the
Egyptian regime
through the record
of its declining
financial position.
It’s a documented
narrative of how
Mubarak’s men
were deprived of
rentier resources to
purchase the
acquiescence of
their bureaucratic
political base, how
they attempted to
reform the state’s
financial apparatus,
how they completely failed to do
so, and how they
maintained their
hold on the country
regardless of that
failure. It’s a
success story....”
taken unless absolutely necessary.
Violence on the other hand has always
been a tool to which the regime has
resorted with less hesitation than economic policy. No clearer example of
this exists than the low level war
between the Ministry of Interior’s security forces and Islamic fundamentalist
The Mubarak regime has hit upon a
strategy for survival, but its strategy has
never been part of cohesive plan –
indeed if anything it has leaned upon
this strategy after it failed, and failed
completely, to achieve its stated goals.
On the question of taxation, Soliman
documents the failure of the successive
governments to implement plans in a
1991 tax bill. Efforts in this regard are
continuing, and as of April, 2006, a new
law has come into effect and the
regime’s propaganda machine has
been working overtime on selling the
tax to the population. Yet many of the
factors behind the failure of the 1991
drive remain, namely lack of legitimacy
and credibility of the regime and the
arbitrariness with which laws are implemented- which, in effect, makes tax
evasion the rational choice even for
the risk averse. As for violence; the discourse and the intent had been to redirect state funds to the south, where the
regime had argued that poverty was
the root of widespread radicalism in
the region. In any case, as documented by Soliman, funds were never redirected to the south in any substantive
way – and it appears the regime has
relied only on violence to defeat radicalism that seemed endemic to the
region. Even the relative independence that the regime had granted the
judiciary now seems to be on the wane
as judges are currently embroiled in a
high-stakes propaganda war with the
regime over a new law on judicial independence.
All history is the history of unintended
consequences. It seems that all of the
Mubarak regime’s plans to face its
financial crisis and its ability to patronize
its base have fallen into disarray. And if
it could no longer placate its base,
then perhaps the fault lay with the
base – and just as Gabriel Marquez’s
patriarch sought a new people to rule,
here the regime came upon the strategy of shifting its political base to a new
group altogether.
It is in his discussion of this shift that
Samer Soliman’s adaptation of his Phd
thesis became a talking point in the
opposition press. The phrase he uses is
compelling and makes for a good
headline: he talked of the “Political
Purchasing Power of Private Capital”.
Observing that the majority of the ruling
National Democratic Party’s candidates in the 2005 elections were busi-
nessmen, opposition writers, such as the
liberal Ibrahim Essa in the widely read
anti-Mubarak weekly El-Destour and
leftist Nabil Zaki of the socialist AlTagamuu party, took to citing Soliman’s
book. For them the matter was one of
an unholy alliance between wealth
and power with which the state would
transfer public assets to the private
holdings of loyal businessman protected by parliamentary immunity. In truth
this not an altogether accurate representation of the picture the author
finally paints, which is perhaps more
intriguing. For Soliman, the 2000 parliamentary elections clarified matters for
the regime. Businessmen, running as
independents and often facing the
government’s candidates, most of
whom were bureaucrats, managed to
capture a 77 seats – more than double
what the political opposition managed
to capture (2).
What these parliamentary victories signified was that in an atmosphere of
political re p ression fostered by the
regime, and with state patronage on
the wane, it was capital, in its most
basic, monetary, form that secure d
political victory. Essa and Zaki maybe
correct in their reading of the alliance
of businessmen and regime as a generally opportunistic enterprise. What they
do not capture however, but what
Soliman hints at, is the very real fear
that must have gripped bureaucrats
inside the regime as they saw the rise of
businessmen, some of whom managed
to upset very strong government candidates. The Mubarak regime’s adoption of businessmen into the party in
parliament and at the ministerial level
maybe a marriage made with a more
sinister ethos; of keeping one’s friends
close, and one’s enemies, or potential
enemies, closer.
“... the very thesis
to which Soliman
slowly builds is one
in which the regime
triumphs over the
constraints of the
rentier model....”
34
BOOK REVIEW
“... One is generally
safe if one is entirely without initiative
and in studying the
institutional lethargy
fostered by the
Egyptian regime it
becomes clear that
the principle
method with which
the Mubarak
regime has ensured
its survival against
incremental pressure has been a
deliberate policy of
doing absolutely
nothing....”
The regime has survived its financial
crises. But its abandoning of a bureaucracy quickly slipping into poverty is
unlikely to pass without major political
repercussions. The prospect of domestic groupings effecting the machinations of power exposed by The Strong
Regime and The Weak State are what
make it such an exciting read. It is a
lean volume written in clear language
but makes for compulsive reading precisely because it reintroduces the
Egyptian population and domestic politics to the equation. There is a sense of
vitality absent in academic works that
have resorted to emasculated discourse of deceptively comprehensive
world-systems theories, and indeed the
rentier systems thesis. One senses that
traces of the daily news and tastes of
everyday life were high on the list of
ingredients that finally took shape with
this book. Then there’s another quality
that cannot be ignored – in spite of the
professionalism with which this study is
35
rendered, there is a moral argument
embedded but never stated in the thesis. One cannot help but sense a certain disappointment by the author at
the deal in which vast portions of the
Egyptian population gave up their
political rights in return for patronage
by a regime that would only adopt
their cause to the degree to which that
undertaking ensured its survival, and it is
survival now that represents the limits of
the ruling group’s ambitions.
The verdict that the regime has succeeded in facing an existential crisis
remains a qualified one. It has been
able to retain its authoritarianism even
as circumstances have forced it from its
stupor into a complicated series of
political gymnastics that have forced it
into a more hazardous alliance than
most observers suspect. In gauging the
dexterity of its recent maneuvers one
would do well to consider that the
regime’s authoritarian nature may well
come back to haunt it and its new ally.
This maybe an occasion to summon
the strange parable of the frog and the
scorpion:
On one bank of a wide river a scorpion
approaches a frog and asks for a lift
across the water.
“I can’t do that,” says the frog, “You’ll
sting me.”
“It is not in my interest to do that,” says
the scorpion, “for if I do that we both
will drown.”
Faced with the impenetrable logic of
the argument, the frog agrees to carry
the scorpion on its back. As they
approach the middle of the raging
waters the frog feels a sharp and
painful thrust into its back. The scorpion
has stung the unsuspecting frog.
“Why did you do that?” cries the frog in
despair, “now we both will die.”
“I can’t help it,” replies the scorpion as
they sink, “it’s in my nature.”
END NOTES:
1. Prior that is to the ongoing confrontation
with judges over alleged government instigated fraud in the 2005 parliamentary elections which were nominally overseen by the
judiciary but in which there was widespread
interference by the executive branch and
thugs. Judges have spoken out against several of the more outrageous instances of
fraud which has in turn led to a propaganda
war between the regime and an independ-
ently minded segment of the judiciary represented by the elected leaders of the
Judges Club.
2. Officially, opposition parties managed a
total of 16 seats between, but the figure
does not include members of the Muslim
Brotherhood who were forced to run as
independents because of their unoff i c i a l
status. The brotherhood managed to capture 17 seats in the 2000 elections.
“... there is a moral
argument
embedded but
never stated in the
thesis. One cannot
help but sense a
certain
disappointment by
the author at the
deal in which vast
portions of the
Egyptian population gave up their
political rights in
return for patronage by a regime
that would only
adopt their cause
to the degree to
which that
undertaking
ensured its
survival....”
EBHRC FORUM
THIRD AUC FORUM ON
ECONOMIC AND BUSINESS
HISTORY OF EGYPT AND
THE MIDDLE EAST
It gives us great pleasure to hold the ‘Third AUC Forum on Economic and Business History
of Egypt and the Middle East’, which our centre is organizing from May 4 to May 8.
This year’s Forum will have seven sessions as follows:
Three sessions in our ‘Guest Speaker’ interactive workshops with three distinguished
guests from the corporate community as well as the field of scientific research. Each will
be devoted to an overview of the life and career of the distinguished guest speaker, and
an attempt to place this in the broader social, political, and economic context. Each
testimony will be followed by open discussions. These sessions follow several hours of
recorded interviews.
Two sessions in our ‘Historical Workshop Series’ on the institutional history of the
Federation of Egyptian Industries and of scientific R & D institutions in Egypt. These sessions
will host distinguished keynote speakers who have played and / or continue to play a
leading role in either the Federation or R & D institutions. This comes as part of growing
interest at our centre to develop close documentation and studies on key institutional
bodies in the Egyptian economy and society.
A session in our ‘History in the Making Series’ which will be devoted to a discussion of
the impact of TRIPs on the Egyptian pharmaceutical industry. This session will host distinguished panelists from the Ministry of Economy, leading private enterprise pharmaceutical companies, concerned NGOs, and scientific research. This series reflects the interest at our centre in not confining our concept of history to past events, but extending it
to include contemporary developments of historical significance.
A closing session devoted to a discussion of Samer Soliman’s recent publication, alNizam al-Qawi wal-Dawlah al-Da’ifah. Distinguished Egyptian political economists will
comment on the thesis in this work. This comes within an attempt by our centre to keep
abreast of ongoing contributions to understanding Egyptian political economy, and
towards developing an agenda for research in the economic history of Egypt.
36
FORUM PROGRAM
The Third AUC Forum
on Economic
and Business History
of Egypt and
the Middle East :
May 4-8, 2006
THURSDAY, MAY 4
10.00 am -12:30 pm
Guest Speaker Series
Dr. Adel Gazarin: The Industrialist
between the Public & Private Domain
Ex-Chairman, Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI);
ex-Chairman, al-Nasr Automotive Co.
6th Floor, Hill House, Main Campus
3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
SATURDAY, MAY 6
Historical Workshop Series;
Institutional History
Institutional History of the Federation of
Egyptian Industries: Recalling the Past
12:00 pm - 2:30 pm
-Mr. Samir Allam, Chairman, Allam Contracting Co.; Chairman,
Chamber of Building Material Industries (FEI.).
-Mr. Abdel Moneim Seoudy, ex-Chaimran, Federation of Egyptian
Industries (FEI).
-Mr. Galal El-Zorba,, Chairman, El Nile
Co., Chairman, Federation of Egyptian Industries.
-Mr. Abdel Moneim Seoudi, ex-Chairman,
Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI)
6th Floor, Hill House, Main Campus
SUNDAY, MAY 7
9:30 am -12:30 pm
Guest Speaker Series
The Scientist in Public Office:
Dr. Mustafa Kamal Tulba [Founding Chairman,
The Academy of Scientific Research and Technology;
Founding Director, United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP)]
& Dr. Mohamed Kassas
[Professor Emeritus
of botany at the University of Cairo and
a member of the Egyptian Academy of Science]
Blue Room, Greek Campus
3:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Historical Workshop Series;
Institutional History
Research & Development
in Egypt: A Receding Horizon?
-Dr. Mohamed Bahaa Fayez,
Ex-Chairman, National Research Center.
-Dr. Mahmoud Barakat, Ex-General Manager,
Arabic Atomic Energy Authority.
-Dr. Hani El-Nazir, Chairman, National Research Center.
-Dr. Mahmoud Saada, Ex-Vice Chairman, Academy of
Scientific Research & Technology.
Blue Room, Greek Campus
37
Guest Speaker Series
Dr. Mohamed Taymour:
Between Professionalism
& Entrepreneurship:
Striking a balance?
Co-founder and Chairman of EFG-Hermes
Rare Books Library
4:00 pm - 6:30 pm
History in the Making Seminar Series
Egyptian Pharmaceuticals
& Intellectual Property Rights
-Mr. Hossam Bahgat, Director,
Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.
-Dr. Moustafa El-Hadari, Chair,
CBIC for Pharmaceutical Industries Support
-Dr. Mohamed Bahaa Fayez,
Ex-Chairman, National Research Center.
-Dr. Hisham Ragab, Deputy Minister of Trade
and Industry for Legislative,
Legal Affairs and Internal Trade.
Rare Books Library
MONDAY, MAY 8
7:00 pm – 9: 30 pm
Perspectives on Contemporary
Egyptian Economy
A Discussion of Samer Soliman,
al-Nizam al-Qawi wal-Dawlah
al-Da‘ifah (2005) – Towards a research
agenda on Egypt’s contemporary history
Discussants:
-Prof. Galal Amin, AUC
-Prof. Mostafa Kamel El-Sayed, AUC
-Dr. Dr Mohamed El-Sayed Saeed, Deputy
Head of Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies
-Amr Ismail Adly, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
-Mostafa Hefny, EBHRC
Blue Room, Greek Campus
OUR ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY
RECORDS:
OUR ARCHIVES...
T
he following are samples of the documents contributed to EBHRC
to be part of its archival depository. Donors of documents vary
from individuals to institutions. In addition documents received
vary from original to copy forms and some old documents were purchased from a collector of old papers and artifacts in downtown
Cairo. Donor name followed by a description of the documents will
be found below:
Aziz Sidqi:
Ministry of Industry Publications:
1.“al-Thawra al-Sina’iya fi ‘ahad ‘ashar
‘aman 1952-1963.” ( Eleven Years of
Industrial Revolution).
2. “Dalil al- Sina’a fi Misr fi thalathin sana
1952-1982” ( Guide to Industry in Egypt in
30 years).
Banque Misr Publications
1. Sixtieth Anniversary 1920-1980.
2.Diamond Jubilee 1920-1995.
3.Golden Jubilee 1920-1970.
4. Part 3 of Talaat Harb’s collection of
speeches 1939.
Café Riche Documents,
Official Douments:
1. Maslahit il-Dara’ib il-‘Aqariyya records
1905
2. Official copy of Maslahit il-Dara’ib il‘Aqariyya records 1907.
3. Récépissé de déclaration pour un établissement public: 16 October 1914.
4. Formal Declaration to the Office of the
Assistant to the Chief of Police: 9 May
1916.
5. Déclaration pour l’ouverture d’un établissement public: 9 May 1916.
6. Inspection Report: 16 May 1916: Chief
of Abdin Police Precinct.
7. Internal Note: Cairo City Police:
For/Commandant C.C.P.: 8 July 1919.
8. Internal Note: Confidential:
Commandant C.C.P.: For/Acting
Commandant C.C.P.: 20 July 1919.
9. Contract: 14 July 1921, Déclaration
pour l’ouverture d’un établissement public: 4 November 1942.
10. Petition submitted by Mr. Abdel Malak
Mikhail Salib: 22 May 1962, which cites the
transaction contract with Avayianos, registered in 1962.
11. Letter from Russell Bey to Camp
Commandant of the British Officers, Head
Quarters: 26 February 1918.
Mohammad AbdelAziz Zayed
Papers/Reports:
1. Muzakira bi-Sha’n ’usus al-Tijarah alDakhiliyya wa al-Kharijiyya fi al-Mujtama‘
al ’Ishtiraki al-Dimukrati al-Ta‘awuni
(Memo Re: Foundations of Internal and
External Trade in the Socialist Democratic
Cooperative Society 1959).
2. Bahth ‘an Wasa’il Tanmiyyat al-Tijara alDakhiliyya wa Mada al-Nuhud Biha
(Paper on the means for Developing
Internal Trade and The Extent of
Promoting It) 1961.
3. Taqrir ’an Rihlat Mohammad AbdelAziz
Zayed Ra’is Majlis al-’idara lil-kharij ’an
al’Mudda min al-’usbu’ al-’akhir min
’uktubar hatta al-’usbu’ al-Thalith min
December Sanat 1965 (Report on
Mohammad AbdelAziz Zayed’s
[Chairman of The Alexandria Commercial
Company] Trip Abroad [Duration: Last
Week of October 1965 – Third Week of
September 1965]).
4. Taqrir ’an Rihlat Mohammad AbdelAziz
Zayed Ra’is Majlis al-’idara ila al-Yaban
wa al-Wilayat al-Mutahida wa al-Miksik
(Report on Mohammad AbdelAziz
Zayed’s [Chairman of The Alexandria
Commercial Company] Trip to Japan, The
United States and Mexico [Duration:
October/November 1966]).
5. Taqrir ’an Rihlat Mohammad AbdelAziz
Zayed Ra’is Majlis al-’idara lil-’aswaq alQutniyya fi ’urupa al-Gharbiyya (REPORT
Mohammad AbdelAziz Zayed’s
[Chairman of The Alexandria Commercial
Company]Trip to The Cotton Markets in
Western Europe [Duration: June 1968]).
6. Taqrir ‘an Ma‘rad Suq Bari b-Italya
(REPORT The Bari Exhibition, Italy
[September 1970]).
7. MINESTERIAL ORDER: The order is the
permission granted to Zayed to attend
the Bari Exhibition as Deputy Governor of
the Central Bank. Dalil al-Wukala’ alTijariyyin bil-Iqlim al-Misri, 1960 (Directory:
Trade Agents in the Egyptian Province,
1960.) The directory is published by “The
General Union of Chambers of
Commerce”
Purchased Documents:
1. Land Contracts: Three land contract
registered in the court of Alexandria in
1889, 1890 and 1893 under the Khedives’
government.
2. Stock Certificates: Credit Foncier
Egyptien 1951, Societe de Biere “Les
Pyramides” 1956, Egyptian Federation for
Agricultural Products 1943. Receipts: Three
receipts from the Piastre Project for the
Revival of Egyptian Industries (mashru’ il
qirsh).
3. Letter from Michel Politis to Assistant to
the Chief of Police: 9 May 1916.
B
elow is a list of EBHRC’s oral
history interviewees. The list
excludes the interviewees of
theYoung Scholars projects.
INDUSTRY, OIL, AND PUBLIC POLICY
Eng. Mohammad Abdel Wahab
Eng. Fouad Abu Zeghla
Eng. Abdel Megeid Asal
Eng. Adel El Danaf
Dr. Adel Gazarin
Dr. Mahmoud Helal
Eng. Abdel Moneim Khalifa
Eng. Farouq Shalash
Dr. Rouchdy Said
Eng. Ibrahim Salem Mohamedein
Dr. Aziz Sidqi
Dr. Ismail Sabri Abdullah
Dr. Hasan Abbas Zaki
BANKING, INSURANCE, AND FINANCE
Mr. Mahmoud Abdullah
Dr. Salwa El Antari
Mr. Ali Dabbous
Mr. Mohamed El Barbari
Dr. Abdel Aziz Hegazy
Mr. Ali Shahin
Mr. Fouad Sultan
Dr. Bahaa Helmy
Mr. Hasan Hafez
PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
Mr. Mansour Hasan
Mr. Mohamed Taymour
Mr. Ashod Papazian
Mr. Adel To'ma
Mr. Henry Francis
Cheristo
Mr. Nadim Elias
Mrs. Laura Kfoury
Mr. Mounir Ezz El Din
Mr. Zeyad Nashef
Dr. Bahaa Raafat
Mr. Hasan Ragab
Mr. Louis Bishara
Eng. Ali Tawfik
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Dr. Mohamed Bahaa Fayez
Dr. Mahmoud Saada
Mr. Ali Hebeish
Dr. Mostafa Kamal Tulba
Dr. Mahmoud Barakat
Mr. Smaer El-Mofti
EGYPTIAN ECONOMISTS AND
INTELLECTUALS
Dr. Heba Handoussa
Dr. Galal Amin
Dr. Mohamed Duwaidar
Dr. Mahmoud Amin El Allem
38
Offices: Rooms 307, 313 A, 314, 315, Old Falaki
Telephone: 797 5603 / 5602
Email: [email protected]
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