Introduction

The only way that Muhammad All could make Egypt a modern state was not by innovation (as in Europe) but by imitation of the West. He was committed to a program of administrative, technological, and educational emulation (in Islamic terms, taqlid) which was the obverse of the modern spirit.
Without the independence and creativity which had become prized values of the West, how could a state like Egypt be truly “modern”? But Muhammad All had no choice. He introduced a Western-style administration, manned chiefly by European, Turkish, and Levantine officials, who formed a new class in Egyptian society. Promising young men were sent to study in France and England. A military college for 1200 students, who were clothed and maintained at the pasha’s expense, was established at Kasserlyne. Two other artillery schools, staffed by Europeans or by Egyptians who had studied abroad, were founded at Toura and Giza. The boys became the pasha’s personal property as soon as they entered college, and studied European languages, mathematics, and the Western art of warfare.
These colleges provided the country with a well-educated officer class.
But there was no primary education for the fellahin: they were more useful to Egypt in the fields, providing the country with its agrarian base. This again would have fateful consequnces. In a non-Western, modernizing country such as Egypt, the people who had the greatest contact with European civilization were in the military. The vast majority of the population were perforce excluded from the process. As a result, army officers would often become the natural leaders and rulers, and modernity would acquire a military emphasis that was different--again--from that of the West.
The army was Muhammad Ali’s chief concern. He needed it if he was to achieve his objectives, since throughout his career he had to hold his own against the British on the one hand and the Ottoman Turks on the other. The only way the Turks could tolerate Muhammad Ali’s creation of a semi-autonomous state was by calling on his superior fighting machine in Ottoman campaigns: against the Wahhabis in Arabia, or to quell the Greek revolt (1825--28). But in 1832, his son Ibrahim Pasha invaded the Ottoman provinces of Syria and Palestine, inflicting crushing defeats on the Turkish army and creating for his father an impressive imperium in imperio. The Egyptian army had, of course, been built on the French model. Muhammad All had tried to imitate the discipline and efficiency he had observed in Napoleon’s army, and he had indeed created a force that was able to cut through a numerically superior army with ease. But this achievement also involved a brutal assault upon his subjects. At first, Muhammad All had recruited and trained some 20,000 conscripts from the Sudan, whom he had housed in a vast barracks in Aswan. But the Sudanese simply could not adapt. Many turned their faces to the wall and died, despite the best efforts of the army doctors (trained in Muhammad Ali’s medical school in Abou Zabel) to save them. The pasha was thus forced to conscript the fellahin, dragging them from their homes, families, and fields. They usually had no time to make adequate arrangements, and their families were often left destitute, the women forced into prostitution. The possibility of conscription to an utterly alien military life filled many of the fellahin with such terror that they frequently resorted to self-mutilation, cutting off their own fingers, pulling out teeth, and even blinding themselves. An efficient fighting force was created, but at a terrible human cost. Not only were the fellahin themselves damaged by conscription, but agriculture suffered when the men were torn away from the land.
Every positive reform had a downside. Muhammad Ali’s economic policies encouraged European trade to penetrate Egypt, but at the expense of local industry. By becoming the sole monopolist in Egypt, the pasha virtually destroyed the indigenous merchant class. He invested a great deal on much-needed irrigation works and water communications, but the working conditions of the laborers in the corvee were so bad that 23,000 are said to have died. The old social systems were being brutally dismantled, yet the premodern, conservative lifestyle and beliefs of the vast majority of Egyptians remained unchanged. Two societies--one, consisting only of the military and administrative personnel, modernized, and the other un modernized--operating on entirely different norms, were gradually emerging in modern Egypt.
The ulema certainly experienced the dawn of modernity as destructive.
They had been a power in the land when Muhammad All became governor.
He wooed them, made them promises, and for three years there was a honeymoon period between the pasha and the clergy. In 1809, however, the ulema lost their traditional tax-exempt status, and Umar Makram urged them to oppose Muhammad All and force him to rescind the new taxes. But the ulema had rarely shown a united front, and the pasha was able to lure a significant number into his own camp. Makram was exiled and with him went the last opportunity for the ulema to oppose Muhammad All. His departure was also a defeat for the ulema as a class. As a Muslim, Muhammad All was careful to pay lip service to the religious scholars and the madrasahs, but he systematically marginalized them, and divested them of any shred of power. He deposed sheikhs who defied him and, as a result, Jabarti says, most ulema acquiesced in the new policies. He also starved them financially.
By seizing the revenues of the religiously endowed properties (awqaf), he took away the ulema s principal source of income. By 1815 a large number of the traditional Koran schools were in ruins. Sixty years later, the Islamic establishment was in desperate financial straits.
There were no stipends for teachers, and mosques could no longer afford to support their prayer leaders, muezzins, Koran reciters, and caretakers. The great Mamluk buildings had deteriorated, and even the Azhar was in a wretched state.
In the face of this onslaught, the ulema of Egypt became cowed and reactionary.
Their traditional consultative role in the government was taken by the new foreign elite of administrators, most of whom had little respect for local tradition. The ulema were left behind in the march for progress, and the pasha left them alone with their books and manuscripts. Since opposition had become impossible, the ulema turned their backs on change, entrenching themselves in their scholarly traditions. This would continue to be the chief ulema stance in Egypt.
They did not regard modernity as an intellectual challenge but experienced it instead as a series of odious and destructive regulations, as theft of their power and wealth, and as an agonizing loss of prestige and influence. When Muslims in Egypt came into contact with the new Western ideas, therefore, they would find no guidance from the clergy, and would look elsewhere for help.
For centuries, there had been a partnership between the ulema and the ruling elite in Egypt. Muhammad All had severed that relationship and abruptly inaugurated a new secularism. It had no ideological backing but had been imposed as a political fait accompli. In the West, people had had time to adapt to the gradual separation of church and state, and had even created a spirituality of the mundane. For most Egyptians, however, secularization remained alien, foreign, and incomprehensible.
There had been similar modernizing reforms in the Ottoman empire, but in Istanbul there was a greater awareness of the ideas that lay behind the great Western transformation. Ottomans became diplomats in Europe and mixed with European statesmen in the sultan’s court. During the 1820s and 1830s, a generation had grown up conversant with the modern world and committed to the reform of the empire. The father of Ahmed Vefik Pasha, who later became the Grand Vizier, had worked in the Turkish embassy in Paris; Ahmed himself read Gibbon, Hume, Adam Smith, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Mustafa Resid Pasha had also been trained in Paris and studied politics and literature there. He became convinced that the Ottoman empire could not survive in the modern world unless it became a centralized state, with a modern army and a new legal and administrative system, which recognized the equality of all citizens.
Christians and Jews must no longer be dhimmis (“protected minorities”), but must enjoy the same status as Muslim citizens. The prevalence of these European ideas made it easier for Sultan Mahmud II to inaugurate the Tanzimat (“regulations”) in 1826. These abolished the Janissaries, began the modernization of the army, and introduced technical innovations. At first, the sultan thought that this would be enough to halt the accelerating decline of the empire, but the relentless advance of the European powers and their economic and political penetration of Islamic territories gradually made it clear that more fundamental changes were essential.
In 1839, Sultan Abdulhamid, at the instigation of Resid Pasha, issued the Gulhane decree, which ostensibly left Islamic law intact, but made the absolute monarchy of the sultan dependent upon a contractual relationship with his subjects. It looked forward to a fundamental change in the empire’s institutions, which must be run more systematically and efficiently. Over the next three decades, central and local government was reorganized, and criminal and commercial codes and courts were established. In 1856, the Hatti Humayun decree granted full citizenship to religious minorities. But this inevitably led to conflict with the ulema, who saw these innovations as undermining the Shariah. Those who were committed to reform, therefore, increasingly had to wrestle with the question: how could Muslims become part of the modern world without jettisoning their Islamic heritage? Just as Christianity had changed and was changing under the impact of modernization and enlightened thought, so would Islam in the coming decades.
The question demanded urgent solution, because, as each year passed, the weakness of the Muslim world vis-d-vis the West was becoming painfully apparent. Muhammad All was able to withstand the sultan, but in 1840 he was forced by the European powers to relinquish his new territories in Syria, Arabia, and Greece. It was a bitter blow, from which he never fully recovered.
His grandson Abbas (1813--54), who succeeded him as pasha of Egypt in 1849, hated Europe and all things Western. He was a soldier and, unlike the Ottoman reformers, had not had a liberal education. For him, the West meant exploitation and humiliation: he loathed the privileges European administrators and businessmen had won for themselves in Egypt and deeply resented the way Europeans had urged his grandfather to take on impossible projects, for their own financial advantage. He abolished Muhammad Ali’s fleet, reduced the army, and closed the new schools. Abbas was, however, also unpopular with the Egyptians and was assassinated in 1854. He was succeeded by Muhammad Said Pasha (1822--63), the fourth son of Muhammad All, who was the complete opposite of Abbas. A Francophile, he adopted a Western lifestyle, relished the company of foreigners, and revived the army.
But by the end of his reign, even Said had become disillusioned by the sharp practices and dubious schemes of some European companies and entrepreneurs.
The most spectacular of these European projects was the building of the Suez Canal. Muhammad All had consistently opposed any plan to link the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, fearing that it would bring Egypt once more to the attention of the European powers and lead to a new phase of Western invasion and dominance. Said Pasha was fascinated by the idea, however, and only too ready to grant a concession to his old friend the French consul, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805--94), who convinced him that the Canal would enable Egypt to stand up to England and would cost Egypt nothing, since it would be built with French money. Said was naive; the concession, which was signed on November 30, 1854, was disastrous for Egypt.
It was opposed by the sultan and by Lord Palmerston of England, but de Lesseps pushed on, formed his own company, and offered shares to the United States, Britain, Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman empire. When these were not taken up, the pasha guaranteed them, on top of his own investment in the project. Work began in April 1859.
In the event, Egypt provided almost all the money, labor, and materials in addition to donating two hundred square miles of Egyptian territory gratis.
In 1863, Said died and was succeeded by his nephew, Is mail (1830--95), who was also in favor of the Canal, but submitted the concession to the arbitration of Emperor Napoleon III of France in the hope of getting a better deal for Egypt. In 1864, the company’s right to free Egyptian labor was withdrawn, and some of the territory was returned, but in compensation the company was to receive an indemnity of 84 million francs (over three million pounds) from the Egyptian government. Is mail had no option but to accept, and work resumed on the Canal. The grand opening was a glittering occasion. Visitors were offered a free passage to Egypt and free accommodation;
Verdi’s opera Aida was commissioned for the new Cairo opera house.
A special road was built to take visitors to the Pyramids. The object of this expensive outlay was to convince the international community of Egypt’s prosperity and to invite more investment. In fact, however, Egypt was on the verge of bankruptcy.
The Canal certainly helped to ruin the fragile Egyptian economy, but it was not wholly responsible. Yet again, the career of Is mail shows the immense cost of modernization in a non-Western country. Is mail wanted independence; his aim was to liberate Egypt from Ottoman suzerainty. He had the modern vision of autonomy, but all he achieved was a crippling dependency and, eventually, occupation by a European power. Muhammad All had been a soldier who tried to fight his way to freedom. Is mail tried to buy his liberty. On June 8, 1867, he bought from the sultan the right to the Persian title khedive (“great prince”) to distinguish him from the other Ottoman pashas. For this privilege, he paid an extra 350,000 in annual tribute to Istanbul. He also had to deal with the expenses of the Canal, cope with the sudden slump in cotton prices, which had soared during the American Civil War, and fund his own ambitious modernizing projects. These included the building of 900 miles of railways, 430 bridges, and 112 canals, which irrigated some 1,373,000 acres of hitherto un cultivable land. Under the khedive, Egypt advanced more rapidly than under any previous ruler: he also had plans for the education of both sexes, scientific research, and geographical explorations. Cairo became a modern city, with inspiring new buildings, wide boulevards, and pleasure gardens. Unfortunately, Is mail could not pay for any of this. To acquire money, he introduced a system of easy credit and borrowed vast sums, of which a considerable amount vanished into the pockets of European brokers, bankers, and entrepreneurs, who egged him on to further expenditure.
The khedive became prey to moneylenders and when Ottoman securities slumped on the London Stock Exchange in October 1875, taking Egyptian securities with them, it was the last straw.
The Suez Canal had given Egypt a wholly new strategic importance, and the European powers could not allow its total ruin. To safeguard their interests, Britain and France imposed financial controls on the khedive, controls which threatened to become political. Muhammad All had been correct in his fear that the Canal would jeopardize Egyptian independence. European ministers were appointed to the Egyptian government to supervise its financial dealings, and when Is mail dismissed them in April 1879, the chief powers of Europe--Britain, France, Germany, and Austria--united against him, and put pressure on the sultan to dismiss the khedive. Is mail was succeeded by his son Tewfiq (1852-92), a well-meaning young man, but it was obvious that he was a mere puppet of the powers. Hence he was unpopular with both the people and the army. When the Egyptian officer Ahmad bey Urubi (1840--1911) staged a revolution in 1881, demanding that Egyptians be appointed to more senior posts in the army and government, and managed to gain administrative control of the country, Britain stepped in and established a military occupation. Is mail had dreamed of making Egypt part of Europe; he managed only to make it a virtual European colony.
Muhammad Ali had been cruel and utterly ruthless; his successors were naive greedy, and shortsighted. But, in fairness, they were pitting themselves against insuperable odds. First, the type of civilization they were attempting to emulate was something entirely new. It was not surprising that these men, with their very limited experience of Europe, were slow to grasp that a few military and technological reforms would not suffice to make them a “modern” nation. The whole of society would have to be reorganized, an independent industrial economy set on a sure footing, and the traditional conservative spirit replaced by a new mentality. Failure would be expensive, because Europe was by this time too powerful. The powers could force Egypt to finance the building of the Suez Canal and yet deny it ownership of a single share.
The so-called “Eastern Crisis” (1875--78) had already shown that one of the great powers of Europe (Russia) could penetrate to the heart of Ottoman territory and be checked only by a threat from other European countries, not by the Turks themselves. Even the great Ottoman empire, the last stronghold of Muslim power, no longer controlled its own provinces. This became painfully apparent in 1881 when France occupied Tunis, and in 1882 when Britain occupied Egypt. Europe was invading the Islamic world and beginning to dismantle the empire.
Further, even without the disastrous mistakes of the Egyptian rulers, these weaker Islamic countries could not become “modern” in the same way as the Europeans or the Americans, because the modernizing process in these non-Western lands was fundamentally different. In 1843, the French writer Gerard de Nerval visited Cairo and noted ironically that French bourgeois values were being imposed on the Islamic city.
Muhammad Ali’s new palaces were built like barracks and furnished with mahogany armchairs and oil portraits of the pasha’s sons in their new army uniforms. The exotic, oriental Cairo of Nerval’s imagination lies under dust and ashes; the modern spirit and its exigencies have triumphed over it like death. In ten years’ time, European streets will have cut the dusty and drab old town at right angles.... What glitters and expands is the quarter of the Franks, the town of the English, the Maltese and the Marseilles French.
The buildings of the new Cairo, built by Muhammad All and Is mail, represented an architecture of domination. This would become even more obvious during the British occupation, as the embassies, banks, villas, and monuments built in parts of Cairo expressed European investment in this Middle Eastern country, exhibiting a jumble of styles, periods, and functions that would have been deemed incoherent in Europe. For, as the British anthropologist Michael Gilsenan points out, Cairo “was not passing through the same stages of a unilinear sequence of development that Europe had already passed through on the way to capitalism.” It was not becoming an industrial center, not moving purposefully from tradition to modernity, or acquiring a new urban coherence:
Rather, it was being made into a dependent local metropolis through which a society might be administered and dominated.
The spatial forms grew out of a relationship based on force and a world economic order in which in this case Britain played the crucial role.
The whole experience of modernization was crucially different in the Middle East: it was not one of empowerment, autonomy, and innovation, as it had been in Europe, but a process of deprivation, dependence, and patchy, imperfect imitation. For the vast majority of the people, who were not involved in the process, it was also an experience of alienation. A “modern” city, such as Muhammad Ali’s Cairo, was built on entirely different principles from those that gave meaning to the indigenous towns of Egypt. As Gilsenan points out, tourists, colonialists, and travelers have often found Oriental cities confusing and even frightening: the unnamed and unnumbered streets and twisting passages seem to have no order or orientation; Westerners get lost and can make no sense of their surroundings. For most of the colonized peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, the new Westernized cities were equally incomprehensible, and bore no relation to their instinctive sense of what a city should be. They frequently felt lost in their own country.
Many of these superimposed Westernized cities surrounded the “old town,” which, in comparison, looked dark, threatening, and outside the rationally ordered modern world. Egyptians were thus forced to live in a dual world: one modern and Western, the other traditional. This dualism would lead to a grave crisis of identity, and, as in other experiences of modernization, to some surprising religious solutions.
Iran had not yet embarked on the modernizing process, even though the arrival of Napoleon in the Middle East had begun an era of European domination in this country too. Napoleon had intended to invade British India, with the help of the Emperor of Russia; this gave Iran a wholly new strategic importance in the eyes of the European powers. In 1801, Britain signed a treaty with the second Qajar shah, Fath All (1798-1834), promising British military equipment and technology in return for Iranian support. Iran had also become a pawn in the power games of Europe, which continued long after Napoleon’s downfall.
Britain wanted to control the Persian Gulf and the southeast regions of Iran in order to safeguard India, while Russia tried to establish a base in the north. Neither wanted to make Iran a colony, and both worked to preserve Iranian independence, but, in practice, the shahs did not dare to risk offending either power, without the support of one of them. The Europeans presented themselves to the Iranians as the bearers of progress and civilization, but in fact both Britain and Russia promoted only those developments that furthered their own interests, and both blocked the introduction of such innovations as the railway, which could have benefited the Iranian people, lest it endanger their own strategic plans.
In the early nineteenth century, Crown Prince Abbas, governor-general of Azerbaijan, had seen the need for a modern army, and sent young men to study in Europe in order to acquire the requisite expertise. But he died in 1833 before ascending the throne. Thereafter the Qajar shahs made only sporadic attempts to modernize. The shahs were weak and so overshadowed by Britain and Russia that they felt no need for an army of their own: the Europeans would always protect them in an emergency.
The sense of urgency that had impelled Muhammad All was missing. But it is also fair to say that modernization would be much harder to achieve in Iran than in Egypt. The vast distances and difficult terrain of Iran, as well as the autonomous power of the nomadic tribes in the region, would make centralization well-nigh impossible without sophisticated twentieth-century technology.
Iran could almost be said to have the worst of all worlds. There was debilitating dependence, but none of the advantages of serious investment and colonization. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russia and Britain established in Iran the “capitulations” which had also undermined the sovereignty of the Ottoman sultans. The capitulations gave special privileges to Russian and British merchants on Iranian soil, exempted them from the law of the land, and fixed tariff concessions for their goods. This was deeply resented. It enabled the Europeans to penetrate Iranian territory, and the consular courts which tried their offenses were often so lenient that a serious crime could go virtually unpunished. The capitulations were also detrimental to local industry, as low-priced Western manufactured goods displaced Iranian crafts. Some goods did benefit from Western trade: