The sources

The long rivalry between the Mamlūks and the Ottomans that led to war and conquest was a confrontation between two Muslim Sunnī empires, both governed by Turkish–speaking rulers. The predominant language in the central Ottoman provinces was Turkish; the Mamlūk state included Egypt and Syria, with the Hijāz – the central Arab lands of the Middle East – within its sphere of influence. In historical perspective, the struggle was over the hegemony of the Sunnī world, which was challenged by the new Shī‘ī Safavid state in Iran, and by the Portuguese naval, neo–crusading aggression in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. The military power of the Mamlūk state was based on the excellent Mamluk cavalry and auxiliary forces. Yet it conducted a fundamentally defensive and static strategy; its boundaries were essentially the same as they had been in 1250, when the empire was established. Conversely, the Ottoman empire was an aggressive and dynamic state, which devoted all its energies to conquest and expansion, skillfully integrating all its economic and human resources for further advancement. The outcome of the decisive war, that lasted from August 1516 until January 1517, was the fall of the Mamlūk sultanate.

The conquest of Syria and Egypt by the Ottomans is described in detail by a variety of sources – Arabic, Turkish, European and Hebrew. There are not many instances in which an occupation of one empire by another is recorded so accurately, sometimes day by day, giving a clear picture of confrontations of different traditions, mentalities and attitudes, describing how the Ottoman administration took over after the overthrow of the Mamlūk sultanate.

Egypt’s population in the early seventh century AD cannot be determined with any certainty, but it probably numbered less than the five million persons frequently attributed to the province at the height of the Roman Empire in the Early Principate. By the year 600, the population may have declined to three million; mortality resulting from plagues erupting during Justinian’s reign in the sixth century cannot be accurately estimated. Many Egyptians were designated “Chalcedonians” or “Monophysites,” but this distinction did not represent a genuine cleavage of ethnic identity in Egyptian society. An assumption that “Chalcedonian” referred exclusively to Greeks rather than to native Egyptians is erroneous. Greek remained an important spoken and written language in Egypt, although by the early seventh century Coptic was used increasingly in written records. Subliterary texts in Coptic dated back to the early third century.

Many other aspects of Egypt’s economy, social structure and spiritual outlook during Late Antiquity persisted into the early seventh century. But the privatization of public functions by owners of great estates intensified from the fourth century, a process that significantly altered institutional structures during the remaining periods of Byzantine administration. Members of the social elite could still acquire some familiarity with the repertory of Greek authors of antiquity, as testified by the writings of the poet Dioskoros of Aphrodito in the sixth century or the historian Theophylact Simocatta in the early seventh. Theatrical performances in Alexandria during the early seventh century continued to entertain audiences that included high officials.

During Egypt’s liberal age, between 1923 and 1952, European-style constitutionalism and political pluralism were incorporated into the country’s political landscape. The period witnessed genuine, though irregular, electoral competition among individuals and groups, cross-class participation in the process, and an operative, if imperfect, system of political and civil liberties. While elites controlled democratic practice, people from humble social classes also engaged in political activity.

Eager for independence from British control and for social and economic reform, the population considered competing ideologies for Egypt’s political and economic development including western-style liberalism, monarchy, Islamic fundamentalism, Marxism, feminism, and secular nationalism. Nonetheless, the excessive powers of the monarchy, the lack of an indigenous bourgeoisie with political strength, and the absence of a developed proletariat able to defend the liberal experiment combined to impede pluralistic democratic development.

Political parties during the liberal age

In 1922, Britain granted Egypt formal independence, limited by four British-imposed conditions: the security of imperial communications, defense of Egypt against aggression, protection of foreign interests and minorities, and continued British administration of the Sudan. The colonial authorities changed the title of Egypt’s head of state from sultan to king, and within a year sanctioned promulgation of a democratic constitution. With Egyptians assuming increasing control over their state, the age of liberal politics began.

The liberal era, which spanned the years between 1923 and 1952, featured a political system characterized by western-style constitutionalism and parliamentary government. Egypt’s constitution was patterned on western liberal documents, and drawn up by Egyptian legal experts sympathetic to the king and the British.

Introduction

Towards the end of the 1970s, as the opening up (infitah) toward the west and the liberalization of the economy were sharply criticized as “betrayal” of the 1952 revolution’s goals, as return of the exploitative bourgeoisie, and as abandonment of the Palestinian cause, certain observers, Egyptian and foreign, began to lay out a new “model” for the reading of contemporary Egyptian history. This model attempted to view Egypt’s various “experiments,” before and after the revolution, from a common perspective; it also made it possible to explain the “cycles” through which Egypt has ultimately failed to “modernize” and regain the place among nations that its millenia of history allows it to demand. Muhammad ‘Ali and Nasir, breaking with a past of national humiliation, both incarnated Egypt’s “will to power” by basing restoration of its regional and international role on a state economy heavily reliant on industry and the construction of a national armed force: the failure of both projects was brought about by conjunction of the “perverse” consequences of their own options and methods, and by the hostility from coalitions of external interests, alarmed by the regional role to which Egypt aspired. The successors of Muhammad ‘Ali and Nasir, Isma’il and Sadat, both betrayed or distorted their predecessors’ “developmentalist” aims and sacrificed the public good and Egypt’s independence to the mercantile interests of a class of speculators and unscrupulous businessmen that served as a wedge for foreign penetration. The crucial point here is the repetition itself and the way these successive “cycles” may be articulated: Nasir “repeats” Muhammad ‘Ali, precisely because, under Isma’il, the work of his grandfather had been swayed from its objectives; in the same way, if Sadat “repeats” Isma’il, it is because the conditions that had led to Muhammad ‘Ali’s failure were still in force, producing the same effects, and enabling the articulation of something that may appear as a “law” pertaining to the specific history of Egypt.

The period of Muhammad ’Ali’s reign, which started in 1805 when he was appointed by the Ottoman sultan as wali of Egypt and ended in 1848 with his deposition as a result of mental illness, offers one of the most interesting epochs of modern Egyptian history. During this period Egypt, while still forming a part of the Ottoman empire, assumed an increasingly independent stance, and was finally granted as a hereditary domain to Muhammad ’Ali by the sultan ’Abd al-Majid in 1841. The Pasha, as Muhammad ’Ali came to be known in Egypt (or the Viceroy, as he was commonly known to Europeans), managed in a long and effective reign to bring to an end Mamluk power in Egypt and to create in its stead a loyal elite composed of members of his own family, of friends and acquaintances from his home town of Kavalla, and of members of the expanding bureaucracy that he founded in Egypt. Moved by a desire to turn his tenure as governor into a more secure and permanent position, Muhammad ’Ali undertook various radical measures that changed Egypt’s position within the Ottoman empire, strengthened its economic ties with Europe at the expense of older links with other provinces of the empire, and radically changed its social and cultural map. Most significantly, by creating a massive naval and military force, the Pasha was able to expand Cairo’s control not only over the entire province of Egypt, but also much beyond the traditional borders of the province to include the Sudan, Crete, the Morea, the Hijaz, Yemen, Syria, and even parts of Anatolia, the heartland of the Ottoman empire.

Rising from obscurity to prominence in 1805, Muhammad ‘Ali actively sought to carve out for himself an empire in the eastern Mediterranean. He might have planned to revitalize the Ottoman empire under his leadership, and may even have nursed the idea of replacing the sultan as Universal Caliph of Islam. The Pasha’s stormy expansionism on both sides of the Red Sea – in Arabia and the Sudan – and in Greece, North Africa, and above all in Syria, should be viewed within a grand design of independence and regional hegemony. Since his other campaigns are dealt with elsewhere in this book (see chap. 6), we will concentrate here on the Pasha’s adventures in the Arabian peninsula and his and his successors’ drive into the interior of Africa.

Muhammad ‘Ali’s activities in Arabia

The Muwahidun movement – commonly known as the Wahhabis – originated and developed in the remote plateau of Najd in central Arabia, outside the sphere of effective Ottoman power. Its founder, Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92), was a puritan and steadfastly fundamentalist muslih (reformer) of Islam. An ‘alim of the strict Hanbali madhhab, the shaykh “rebuked the errors and laxity of the times,” and was in particular opposed to the European cultural invasion of dar al-Islam. He sought to eliminate the consequential bi‘da (objectionable innovations) that had distorted Islam, and he dogmatically interpreted it in his Kitab al-tawhid. He recalled the Muslims to the pure and unadulterated faith and practices of the ideal state of the Prophet and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs of the seventh century.

With the proclamation of his caliphate in January 910, al–Mahdī, the first of the Fātimid rulers, celebrated the culmination of a clandestine struggle that had deep roots and varying fortunes in many Islamic territories far from the north African scene of his ultimate triumph. His rise to power occurred not in the eastern areas of Iran and Iraq, where his immediate ancestors were born, or at his recent headquarters at the town of Salamiya in north central Syria, or in the Yemen or any of the other regions where his followers had been active. Al–Mahdī was already recognized as the supreme religious leader, the imam, of the Ismā‘īlī Shi‘ites by his loyal adherents, but he had not, until then, governed a politically defined realm; nor had there been in Islam as a whole another Shi‘ite caliph except for ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib two and a half centuries earlier. Al–Mahdī’s ascension was, in his own view and that of his followers, a restoration, a revolution in which the wrongs of 250 years were redressed by the combining at last of the divinely sanctioned imamate and the caliphate in one office. He would henceforth guide the Islamic community as God had always intended, and as his ancestors the Prophet Muhammad and Muhammad’s sole legitimate heir ‘Alī had done. His immediate goal was to return Islam to its true and proper form by bringing those who most loved the family of the prophet back into positions of authority. He would, moreover, fight against the enemies of Islam both abroad and at home; the ‘Abbāsid usurpers were thus served notice that their own claim to rule would no longer be without a rival.

The Christian community in Egypt between 641 and 1517 was an often divided population in a state of constant transition. At the time of the Muslim conquest, the great majority of Egyptians were Christians of some sort, Christianity having been the religion of the Byzantine rulers of Egypt for over 300 years. The gradual transition from majority to minority under Muslim rule was a complex process that had a lasting impact on most aspects of the Christian communities in Egypt. The traditional understanding of Egyptian Christianity after the conquest as being theologically and culturally fixed and moribund is far from the reality of the dynamic religious, social and cultural activities of the Egyptian Christians. Similarly, the traditional notion of the Christian population of Egypt being cut off from the rest of the world is misleading, since there was considerable interaction with the outside world, especially with other Christian populations under Muslim control. Although subject to varying degrees of pressure and persecution from Muslims, the Egyptian Christians suffered equally from internal divisions and sectarian infighting. In spite of their internal dissension and dwindling numbers, however, the Egyptian Christians managed to keep a distinctive culture and identity alive and active in the first nine centuries of Muslim rule.

According to later traditions, St. Mark the Apostle brought Christianity to Egypt in the mid-first century. The earliest documentary and archaeological attestations of Christianity in Egypt are considered to be from the second century, but such evidence does not become secure in date or common in occurrence until the third century.

“The economic, and perhaps even the political history of a country cannot be successfully investigated without a proper knowledge of the means of payment current in the period studied.” When it comes to Islamic Egypt, the sentiment behind these words has not fallen on deaf ears. Drawing upon sources – documentary, literary, and numismatic – that can only be described as rich, especially in comparison with other areas of the medieval Islamic world, much work has been produced about the monetary history of Islamic Egypt for the 875 years covered by this volume. Yet using this material is often fraught with difficulty. The research is scattered across the years and found in many journals – some well–known, some obscure – as well as in numerous monographs, collected–study volumes, encyclopedias and the like. Given the fragmented nature of this specialized scholarship, it is not unusual to find that even though many conclusions regarding various aspects of money in Islamic Egypt have trickled into the wider field of Egyptian history, others have remained in the preserve of numismatists. Furthermore, while limited narratives of Egyptian monetary policy – usually divided by dynastic period or type of coin – have been written, as yet no coherent narrative summary of Egyptian monetary developments from the Muslim conquest to the Ottoman takeover has been attempted. This should not be a surprise, for such an undertaking would be huge indeed. It would also be premature prior to the publication of the Fustāt–Cairo volume of the Sylloge Numorum Arabicorum, Tübingen What follows is necessarily only an overview of the monetary history of Egypt.

The Ayyūbid period was a turning–point in Egypt’s pre–modern history. During it Egypt regained the regional preeminence it had lost under the later Fātimids. The period also saw the first appearance of many of the institutions Egypt would maintain until the beginning of the modern era, and in some cases well into it. Yet Ayyūbid rule lasted only eighty years, under rulers whose interests were often elsewhere. Moreover, in spite of the importance of their institutional models for succeeding periods, the Ayyūbids imposed new institutions haphazardly, and Ayyūbid politics largely escapes study through the examination of its institutional structures. How did such a regime – one that was both shortlived and distant from its subjects – leave so lasting an imprint on an Egypt so rightly known for its continuity?

The Ayyūbids came to power in the long aftermath of the Second Crusade (1147–48). This crusade, having been launched to recover Edessa and fought in central Syria, had little immediate impact on Egypt. Its indirect consequences nonetheless represented a serious threat to Fūtimid rule. Perhaps the most significant outcome was the centralization of Muslim power in Syria and Mesopotamia. In 549/1154 Nūr al-Dln Zengī, whose father’s conquest of Edessa had set off the crusade, seized Damascus as a result of it. He then organized a state devoted to the prosecution of the war against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. At the same time Baldwin III asserted his power over his nobles, making the kingdom more dangerous to its rivals. With his new freedom of action Baldwin conquered Ascalon in 548/1153, a victory that gave him a short route to the Nile Delta.

The regime of the Circassian Mamlūks, or the “state of the Circassians” as contemporaries called it to distinguish it from the state of the Turks, formed a bridge between Egypt’s most brilliant medieval period and the beginning of the sixteenth century which we, in Europe, see as the beginning of modern times. The use of the ethnic criterion to designate this period shows that the change in the origin of the dominant class had been felt to be a major factor that had to be taken into account in explaining the political evolution. It might also be thought that this change did not explain every aspect of an ongoing process, some results of which were maintained under the Ottoman administration.

The general development

First we shall consider the major phases of this lengthy period (1382–1517), summarizing only briefly the military confrontations and international relations which, while not the subject of this chapter, cannot be overlooked when interpreting internal political changes. Four major phases of varying length are apparent.

This first period saw the restoration of the Mamlūk state under the amīr al–Malik al-Zāhir Barqūq (1382–1389). Barqūq, who contrived to impose his exclusive authority from 1378, under the sultanate of the two sons of al–Malik al–Ashraf Sha‘bān (al–Malik al–Mansūr ‘Alī and then al–Malik al–Sālih Hajjī, whose atābak he was and whose mother he had married) acceded to the sultanate as Qalāwūn had done in former times. Save for a break when he would have to accept the return to the throne of his ousted ward (in 1389–90), he would wield power until his death in 1399.

Ottoman transformation and Egypt’s changing role

The seventeenth century was an era of momentous change for all provinces of the Ottoman empire, as the empire came to the end of the phase of continuous territorial expansion that had stretched from the mid-fifteenth century through the late sixteenth century. The end of this phase of expansion has until recently been construed as the onset of the Ottoman empire’s decline. A critical reexamination of the so-called decline paradigm, however, has led some historians of the Ottoman empire to abandon the notion of an imperial golden age under Sultan Sulayman I (1520–66), and to recast the course of Ottoman history in terms of a late sixteenth-century fiscal and military crisis followed by an adjustment of imperial priorities.

The crisis of the late sixteenth century changed the character of Ottoman military manpower and land tenure. Confronted with massive inflation, thought to have resulted at least in part from an influx of Spanish American silver, the imperial treasury debased the Ottoman silver currency (aqcha) and delayed the imperial troops’ salaries; consequently, soldiery revolts, in particular among the imperial Janissaries, became increasingly common. In the countryside, inflation combined with overpopulation to force land-holding cavalry officers and peasants off the land in what was dubbed the Great Flight. This upheaval coincided with a series of costly wars against the Hapsburgs (1593–1606) that ended in stalemate. To counter the Hapsburgs’ firepower, the Ottomans had armed peasants with rifles; in consequence, firearms spread throughout the countryside, enabling dispossessed landholders to turn to brigandage and to offer their services as mercenaries.

The constitution of 1923 consolidated a new legal and institutional framework for the Egyptian state. Yet this political moment is an inadequate marker of the economic and social developments inextricably bound up with it. Changes in a society and its political economy are best analyzed in terms of long-term historical and structural tendencies that cannot be dated with precision.

The years between the accession of Khedive ’Abbas Hilmi (r. 1892–1914) and the election of the first Wafd government in 1924 in many ways delimit a single era. This conjuncture was formed by stabilization and subsequent frustration of British colonial rule; increased capital investment in agriculture, transport, commerce, and industry; and dramatic expansion, followed by sharp decline, in agricultural productivity. From this perspective, the popular reaction to the Dinshawai incident of June 1906 was not a spontaneous originary moment of nationalist mobilization, but a response to the developments that preceded it and informed its meaning. A reconfigured market; a reactivated political movement featuring a mélange of Egyptianist, Ottomanist, and Islamist discourses; new social groups; revised ideals of gender relations; and new forms of culture and politics elaborated and legitimized one another. After the First World War, the moral, economic, and political crisis of Anglo-French colonialism created an environment conducive to a new political order in Egypt.

The nationalist movement was an effect of urban middle strata educated in modern, western-style, schools – the effendiyya – and circles of large landholders simultaneously articulating and responding to collective anti-colonialist sentiment and action. This dynamic process reorganized the structural and discursive limits governing nearly every major question in Egypt until well after the military coup of July 23, 1952.

The death of Cleopatra the Great (VII) in 30 bc marked a pivotal moment in Egyptian history and indigenous culture. Long accustomed to foreign political domination after a succession of Libyan, Nubian, Assyrian, Persian and Macedonian rulers, Egyptian society had nonetheless proved remarkably resilient, assimilating its resident conquerors to varying degrees, while patiently enduring the brief ascendancy of those who ruled from a distance. When, however, the conquering Octavian “added Egypt to the empire of the Roman people,” Egypt was forever relegated to the periphery of political power, and pharaonic society could no longer command extraordinary accommodation from alien rulers. If the Ptolemies were compelled to mollify Egyptian sensibilities for fundamental reasons of national stability, the Romans might do so for mere political expediency.

Although there is now some dispute regarding the degree to which Egypt differed from other Roman provinces, certain unique features have long been noted. Octavian specifically excluded Egypt from customary senatorial control. Rather, he placed the province under the direct “dominion [kratēsis] of Caesar,” a phrase traditionally interpreted to indicate Egypt’s status as a “personal estate” of the emperor. Unlike other provinces, Egypt was administered by a prefect (Latin praefectus; Greek eparchos) of equestrian rank, accountable exclusively to the emperor, rather than by a proconsul of senatorial rank, with potentially divided loyalties. Indeed, senators or even prominent equestrians were formally prohibited from entering Egypt without the explicit approval of the emperor. As in the Ptolemaic regime, Egyptian currency remained a closed system, isolated within the empire. Until the reforms of Diocletian (AD 296), the export of Alexandrian coinage was prohibited, and the exchange of all foreign currency obligatory.