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Joint Family Households and Rural Notables in 19th-Century Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Kenneth M. Cuno
Kenneth M. Cuno
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, 111. 61801, U.S.A.
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Extract

During the past thirty years, the study of the family in European history has developed with a strong comparative emphasis. In contrast, the study of the family in Middle East history has hardly begun, even though the family is assumed to have had a major role in “the structuring of economic, political, and social relations,” as Judith Tucker has noted. This article takes up the theme of the family in the economic, political, and social context of 19th-century rural Egypt. Its purpose is, first of all, to explicate the prevailing joint household formation system in relation to the system of landholding, drawing upon fatwas and supporting evidence. Second, it argues that rural notable families in particular had a tendency to form large joint households and that this was related to the reproduction and enhancement of their economic and political status. Specifically, the maintenance of a joint household appears to have been a way of avoiding the fragmentation of land through inheritance. After the middle of the 19th century, when it appeared that the coherence and durability of the joint family household were threatened, the notables sought to strengthen it through legislation. Their involvement in the law reform process contradicts the progressive, linear model of social and legal change that is often applied in 19th-century Egyptian history.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 1995 , pp. 485 - 502
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

Author's note: A very early version of this essay was presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting at Research Triangle Park, N.C., 1993. I am grateful to Beshara Doumani, the Social History Group of UIUC, and the anonymous readers for IJMES for their comments on successive drafts, although I alone am responsible for the content of this essay.

1 Two influential works published under the aegis of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure are by Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard, ed., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Wall, Richard, Robin, Jean, and Laslett, Peter, ed., Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An important volume that examines European family forms in relation to inheritance is by Goody, Jack, Thirsk, Joan, and Thompson, E. P., ed., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History devoted two issues to the family: 2, 2 (1971) and 5, 4 (1975)Google Scholar. Since its inception in 1976, the Journal of Family History has become the main forum for this field, although not the only one. Some recent assessments of trends and issues are by Stone, Lawrence, “Family History in the 1980s: Past Achievements and Future Trends,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12, 1 (1981): 51–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hareven, Tamara K., “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” American Historical Review 96, 1 (1991): 95–124CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rudolph, Richard L., “The European Family and Economy: Central Themes and Issues,” Journal of Family History 17, 2 (1992): 119–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A concise introduction is Anderson, Michael, Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Tucker, Judith, “The Arab Family in History: ‘Otherness’ and the Study of the Family,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, ed. Tucker, Judith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 195Google Scholar. Other recent studies of family history in the Middle East include Tucker, “Marriage and the Family in Nablus, 1720–1856: Toward a History of Arab Marriage,” Journal of Family History 13, 2 (1988): 165–79Google Scholar; Duben, Alan, “Turkish Families and Households in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Family History 10, 1 (1985): 75–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Understanding Muslim Households and Families in Late Ottoman Istanbul,” Journal of Family History 15, 1 (1990): 71–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerber, Haim, “Anthropology and Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History 14, 4 (1989): 409–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Duben, Alan and Behar, Cem, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

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6 See Goode, William J., World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 123 ffGoogle Scholar.; Petersen, Karen Kay, “Demographic Conditions and Extended Family Households: Egyptian Data,” Social Forces 46, 4 (1968): 531–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bates, Daniel and Rassam, Amal, Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 147, 196Google Scholar; Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and Family History,” passim; and Ahlawat, Kapur S. and Zaghal, Ali S., “Nuclear and Extended Family Attitudes of Jordanian Arabs,” Marriage and Family Review 14, 1–2 (1989), 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 The Census of Egypt Taken in 1917, 2 vols. (Cairo: Government Press, 1920–1921), 2:Table 28, 670–71Google Scholar.

9 A joint household can contain no less than four members, and the incidence of joint households is expected to have increased along with household size. A polygynous household with no more than one married male is not a joint household in the definition accepted herein. Such households may have been among the larger ones, although polygyny does not appear to have been widespread in the 19th century and has declined since 1900. In 1917, up to 4.8 percent of Egyptian husbands may have been polygynous, although Goode regards this as a “dubious” estimate because it is based on “the number of ‘surplus’ wives in the census—that is, the number of married women reported in the census as against the number of married men” (Goode, , World Revolution, 104Google Scholar).

10 See Marsot, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid, “The Revolutionary Gentlewomen in Egypt,” in Women in the Muslim World, ed. Beck, Lois and Keddie, Nikki (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 265, 275 n. 5Google Scholar; also Shafīq, Aḥmad, Mudhakkirātī fī niṣf qarn, 2 vols. (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Miṣr, 1934), 1:49–50Google Scholar. Nowadays urban extended families may reside in adjacent or nearby apartments, often within the same building, which they may own. Although a discussion of this is also beyond the scope of this essay, it illustrates the point that the members of a household live within a set of familial and other social relations extending well beyond formal household boundaries.

11 Brink, judy, “Changing Extended Family Relationships in an Egyptian Village,” Urban Anthropology 16, 2(1987), 137Google Scholar.

12 Cuno, Kenneth M., The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 85–99, 166–78Google Scholar.

13 Hekekyan Papers, 3, British Museum add. mss. 37450, 195.

14 Wallace, D. MacKenzie, Egypt and the Egyptian Question (London, 1883), 187–92Google Scholar.

15 Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 176–77Google Scholar.

16 Smith, Charles D., Islam and the Search for Social Order in Modern Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 33–34Google Scholar.

17 Wheaton, Robert, “Family and Kinship in Western Europe: The Problem of the Joint Family Household,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, 4 (1975): 610CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Bates, and Rassam, , Peoples and Cultures, 147–58Google Scholar; quote 151.

19 Al-Fatāwā al-mahdiyya fī al-waqāʾiʿf al-miṣriyya, 7 vols. (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿat al-Azhariyya, 1883–1886)Google Scholar (hereafter cited as FM, followed by vol. no.:page, and date of the fatwa. On al-Mahdi, see Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 8Google Scholar. On fatwas generally, see Hallaq, Wael B., “From Fatwās to Furūʿ: Growth and Change in Islamic Substantive Law,” Islamic Law and Society 1, 1 (1994): 1–33Google Scholar.

20 For a description of this source, see Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 6–7Google Scholar.

21 A note on the population registers is in preparation with Michael Reimer.

22 See Humphreys, Stephen, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 217–18Google Scholar; also Gerber, Haim, State, Society, and Law in Islam: Ottoman Law in Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), chap. 3Google Scholar.

23 See Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 8–9Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., 149, 157–65.

25 FM 2:439, 13 Muharram 1295; also ʿĀbidīn, Muḥammad Amīn Ibn, Radd al-muhtār ʿalā al-durr almukhtār ʿalā maṭn tanwīr al-abṣār, 3d ed., 5 vols. (Bulaq: al-Maṭbaʿat al-Kubrā al-Amīriyya, 1881–1882), 3:467Google Scholar. On the proprietary partnership, see Udovitch, Abraham L., Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 23–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 FM 2:322, 4 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1267; 390, 25 Rabiʿ I 1274; 397, 23 Dhu al-Raʿda 1274, and 4:581–82, 13 RabiʿI, 1270. Only the last of these cases involved land, which was not subject to Qurʾanic inheritance law until the late 19th century. Modern village women “may turn over their shares [of land] to their brothers. They do so as a means of social insurance against their husbands’ maltreatment, divorce, or old age” (Morsy, Soheir, “Sex Differences and Folk Illness in an Egyptian Village,” in Beck and Keddie, Women in the Muslim World, 606Google Scholar).

27 An example occurs in FM 2:301, 16 RabiʿI 1266.

28 Goody, Jack, “Strategies of Heirship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1973): 16Google Scholar.

29 Hajnal, , “Two Kinds,” 67, 99–100Google Scholar.

30 FM 2:303, 27 Rabiʿ II 1266; 303, 25 Rabiʿ II 1266; 69, 10 Jumada II 1266.

31 FM 2:322–23, 15 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1267; 388, 15 Dhual-Hijja, 1273. Other examples of this usage are FM 2:400, 13 Ramadan 1275; and 401–2, 18 Shawwal 1275.

32 FM 2:302, 4 Rabiʿ II 1266. Also see 301, 16 Rabiʿ I 1266; 303, 27 Rabiʿ II 1266; 304, 14 Rajab 1266; 316, 2 Rabiʿ II 1267; and 320, 20 Shaʿban 1267.

33 Brothers: FM 2:303, 21 Jumada I 1266; 312, 7 Safar 1267; 344–45, 1 Shaʿban 1270; 381, 16 Jumada II 1273; 389, 9 Rabiʿ I 1274. Nephews: FM 2:309, 6 Dhu al-Hijja, 1266; and 401, 18 Shawwal 1275. Fathers: FM 2:303, 25 Rabiʿ II 1266; 342, 23 Muharram 1270; 343, 6 Rabiʿ I 1270; 413–14, 21 Jumada I 1281; 420, 14 Jumada I 1282; and FM 4:550, 18 Rabiʿ II 1265. Grandfather: FM 2:440–41, 22 Safar 1295.

34 Outside property or work: FM 2:316, 2 Rabiʿ II 1267; 338, 16 Shaʿban 1269; 374, 30 Dhu al-Hijja 1272; 394, 20 Shawwal 1274; 385, 17 Shawwal 1277. Joint management: FM 2:82, 14 Muharram 1267; 120, 13 Rajab 1268; 129, 26 Shawwal 1268; 140, 19 Muharram, 1269; and 440, 15 Muharram 1295. See also Hajnal, , “Two Kinds,” 67Google Scholar.

35 On the history of this legal distinction see Cuno, Kenneth M., “Was the Land of Ottoman Syria Miri or Milk” An Examination of Juridical Differences within the Hanafi School,” Studia Islamica 81 (1995): 5–36Google Scholar.

36 I have found some exceptions in which mīrī land was divided in Qurʾanic shares: for an extensive discussion of peasant land tenure up to the 1850s, see Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, chaps. 4 and 8Google Scholar.

37 FM 2:123–24, 29 Shaʿban 1268.

38 FM 2:220–21, 27 Rabiʿ I 1272; 287, 7 Jumada I 1265; 315–16, 30 Rabiʿ I 1267; 322–23, 15 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1267; 402, 7 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1275; 416–17, 28 Muharram 1281; 421, 4 Ramadan 1282; 423, 15 Muharram 1283; 439–40, 13 Muharram 1295; 442–43, 15 Ramadan 1297.

39 FM 2:123–24, 29 Shaʿban 1268; 4:589, 6 Rabiʿ I 1271.

40 FM 2:123–24, 29 Shaʿban 1268; 190–91, 19 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1270; 281–82, 20 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1264.

41 FM 2:331, 25 Shaʿban 1268; 421–22, 6 Shawwal 1282.

42 FM 2:333, 29 Shawwal 1268; 344, 6 Jumada I 1270; 379–80, 6 Rabiʿ II 1273.

43 FM 2:282, 20 Dhu al-Qaʿ da 1264.

44 FM 2:421, 4 Ramadan 1282.

45 FM 2:322–23, 15 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1267.

46 FM 2:315–16, 30 Rabiʿ I 1267.

47 Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 67Google Scholar.

48 FM 2:421, 4 Ramadan 1282; 442–43, 15 Ramadan 1297. A third example is FM 2:402, 7 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1275.

49 FM 2:43, 5 Jumada II 1265; 123–24, 29 Shaʿban 1268; 190–91, 19 Dhu al-Qaʿda, 1270; 218–19, 3 Rabiʿ I 1272; 225, 8 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1272; 234–35, 9 Rabiʿ I 1273; 236, 16 RabiʿI 1273; 247–48, 20 Shawwal 1273; 421–22, 6 Shawwal 1282.

50 Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 75–76Google Scholar.

51 FM 2:350–52, 1 Rabiʿ I 1271.

52 Goody, “Strategies, ” 16. The number of female-headed households would also have been affected by such factors as divorce, the return of divorcees and widows to the household of a male relative, and the maintenance of joint households.

53 Lee, James and Gjerde, Jon, “Comparative household morphology of Stem, Joint and Nuclear Household Systems: Norway, China, and the United States,” Continuity and Change 1, 1 (1986): 92–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 FM 2:207, 24 Ramadan 1271. For similar cases, see FM 2:400–401, 6 Shawwal 1275 and 420, 20 Rajab 1282.

55 FM 2:421–22, 6 Shawwal 1282.

56 FM 2:403–4, 21 Rabiʿ I, 1276.

57 Anderson, , Approaches, 65 ffGoogle Scholar.; and Goody, Strategies,” 4.

58 Ammar, Abbas, A Demographic Study of an Egyptian Province (Sharqiya) (London: London School of Economics, 1942), 49Google Scholar.

59 In the terminology of Hammel and Laslett, one conjugal unit plus unmarried relatives other than children.

60 See note 28.

61 One indication of this is the greater care taken to document how women acquired their land.

62 Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 76.Google Scholar Some suits were raised many years after a woman inherited, probably due to the maturation of a son.

63 Goody, “Strategies,” 16.

64 Brink, , “Changing Extended Family Relationships,” 136Google Scholar.

65 Duben, , “Turkish Families and Households,” 83–84Google Scholar.

66 Cuno, , The Pasha's Peasants, 157–65Google Scholar. For data on land and estimates of population, see Baer, Gabriel, A History of Landownership in Modern Egypt 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 20 (Table 1)Google Scholar; and McCarthy, Justin, “Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Population,” Middle Eastern Studies 12, 3 (1976): 20, 25 (Tables 12 and 20)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Shafiq, , Mudhakkirātī, 1:49–50Google Scholar.

68 Wallace, , Egypt and the Egyptian Question, 176–87Google Scholar; Cleland, Wendell, The Population Problem in Egypt: A Study of Population Trends and Conditions in Modern Egypt (Lancaster, Pa.: Columbia University, 1936), 74 n. 5, 94Google Scholar.

69 FM 2:424–25, 4 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1283.

70 A son might inherit or acquire property of his own, however (FM 2:302, 4 Rabiʿ II 1266; 304, 14 Rajab 1266; and 316, 2 Rabiʿ II 1267).

71 Customarily, a man would pay part of the bridal gift to his wife when they married and owe her the remainder, which would be paid from his estate along with any other debts before its division (Tucker, Judith, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 45)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 FM 2:303, 27 Rabiʿ II 1266; 307, 27 Shawwal 1266; 313, 10 Safar 1267; and 324, 9 Muharram 1268. See also Tucker, , Women, 46–47Google Scholar.

73 Brothers: FM 2:312, 7 Safar 1267; 344–45, 1 Shaʿban 1270; 381, 16 Jumada II 1273. Fathers: FM 2:341–uharram 1270; and 343, 6 Rabiʿ Relatives: FM 2:325, 19 Muharram 1268.

74 FM 4:559, 13 Rabiʿ 565, 17 Safar 1267; 595, 25 Safar 1272; 595–96, 5 Rabiʿ I 1272.

75 FM 2:320, 20 Shaʿ ban 1267; 346, 7 Shawwal 1270.

76 FM 2:331, 11 Shaʿ ban 1268; 344– 1 Shawwal 1270; FM 4:601, 21 Muharram 1273.

77 FM 2:323, 15 Safar 1283.

78 FM 2:282, 20 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1264; 421–22, 6 Shawwal, 1282. See also the example immediately above and FM 2:304, 5 Rajab 1266; 399, 17 Jumada I 1275; and 424, 22 Shaʿban 1283.

79 FM 2:147– 48, 22 Safar 1269; 155, 18 Rabiʿ II 1269; 218–19, 3 Rabiʿ II 1272; 355, 25 Jumada I 1271; 387–88, 4 Dhu al-Hijja 1273; and 400–401, 6 Shawwal 1275.

80 FM 2:334, 10 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1268; 359, 11 Shawwal 1271.

81 FM 2:339–40, 13 Shawwal 1269; 340, 5 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1269; 353, 1 Jumada 1 1271; 362, 28 Dhu al-Hijja 1271.

82 FM 2:323, 1 Dhu al-Hijja 1267; 335–36, 3 Rabiʿ I 1269; 339, 10 Shawwal 1269; 346, 11 Shawwal 1270; 346, 4 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1270; 386, 4 Dhu al-Qaʿda 1273; 391–92, 9 Jumada I 1274.

83 During 1856–60 it was composed of eleven notables (aʿyān) and nine high officials (dhawāt), although the latter may also have included some men from notable families (al-Rāfiʿi, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, ʿAṣr LSMāʿil, 2d ed., 2 vols. [Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Nahḍa al-Miṣriyya, 1948], 1:46–47)Google Scholar.

84 Respectively, the governor of al-Buhayra province during 1856–58, and the governor of al-Daqahliyya province in 1858 and then of al-Jiza province during 1858–63 (Sāmī, Amīn, Taqwīm al-nīl, 3 vols. [Cairo: Dar al-Kutub, 1915–1936], 1, part 3:234)Google Scholar. On these and other notable families, see Hunter, F. Robert, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805–63, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), chap. 5Google Scholar.

85 On the membership of the Assembly during 1866–82, see al-Rāfiʿī, , ʿAṣr lsmāʿīil, 2:97–99, 130–41, 174–79Google Scholar; and idem, al-Thawra al-urābiyya wa al-iḥtilāl al-injlīzī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Nahḍa, 1937), 173–74Google Scholar.

86 The original and complete text of the 1858 law can be found in two printed sources, Mursī, Muhammad Kāmil, Al-Milkiyya al-ʿaqāriyyafi Miṣr wa taṭawwuruhā al-tārīkhī min ʿCahd al-farāʿina ḥatta al-ʿān (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Nūrī, 1936), 125—46,Google Scholar and Ḥunayn, Jirjis, Al-Aṭyan wa al-ḍarāʿib fi al-quṭr al-miṣrī (Bulaq:al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīlriyya, 1904), 388–412Google Scholar.

87 Cuno, , The Pasha’s Peasants, 172–78Google Scholar.

88 Gabriel Baer, “The Village Shaykh,” in idem, Studies in the Social History of Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 50–51Google Scholar; Davis, Eric, Challenging Colonialism: Bank Misr and Egyptian Industrialization, 1920–1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 12, 39–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cuno, The Pasha's Peasants, chap. 9.

89 Al-Rāfiʿī, , ʿ Aṣr Ismāʿġ, 2:122Google Scholar.

90 Al-Qawānīn al-ʿaqāriyya fi al-diyār al-miṣriyya (Bulaq, 1893), 17; Baer, Landownership, 38Google Scholar.

91 Artin, , La Propriété foncière en Egypte (Bulaq: Government Press, 1883), 108Google Scholar.

92 Ibid., 111.

93 Wheaton, , “Family and Kinship in Western Europe, ” 610–11Google Scholar.

94 Hajnal, “Two Kinds, ” 69. Goode also sees it as “likely that many Arabs have lived at some time in an extended [i.e., joint] family, ” but notes that “a survey of a given region would probably show that a minority of the families were joint ” (Goode, , World Revolution, 124Google Scholar; emphasis in the original).

95 Davis, , Challenging Colonialism, 64Google Scholar.

96 Ibid. Also see Cuno, , The Pasha ’s Peasants, 88–89Google Scholar.