A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940

between the 1870s and the 1940s affected the people in the

Sex, Law and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011).

Middle East in profound ways. The basic questions such as where

Cyrus Schayegh is Associate Professor at Princeton

people lived and moved, what they thought, what they liked and

University, where he teaches Middle East history. He is the

consumed and how they communicated were all shaped and

author of Who is Knowledgeable is Strong: Science, Class

reshaped by the forces of globalization during these decades…

and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950

we learn that it was not only in the realm of politics but also in

(2009), and holds a PhD from Columbia University.

culture and society that this period was formative of the modern Avner Wishnitzer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of

Middle East; and that far from being external or marginal to

Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University.

global processes, the region was centrally involved in them.’

He is the author of Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and

Professor Reşat Kasaba, Stanley D. Golub Chair and Director of the

Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (forthcoming).

Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

‘A Global Middle East offers the first examination of how people, objects and ideas as diverse as bees and Islamic theology, and hailing from various Middle Eastern locales, were caught up in the flux of the first wave of globalization while at once putting it in motion. It… make[s] a compelling case about how the regional is anchored in the global and vice versa, never losing sight of how these scales are themselves moving targets. Focusing on movement

The start of the twentieth century ushered in a period

A GLoBAL MIDDLE EAST

of unprecedented change in the Middle East. These transformations, brought about by the emergence of the modern state system and an increasing interaction with a more globalized economy, irrevocably altered the political and social structures of the Middle East. As a result of these changes, there was an intensification in the movement of people, commodities and ideas across the globe: commercial activity, urban space, intellectual life, leisure culture, immigration patterns and education – nothing was left untouched. Even as the Middle East was responding to

Mobility, Materiality and Culture

increased economic interactions with the rest of the world by restructuring local economies and cultural, political, and

in the Modern Age, 1880-1940

social institutions, the region’s engagement with these trends altered the nature of globalization itself. This period has been seen as one in which the modern state system and its oftentimes artificial boundaries emerged in the Middle East. But this book highlights how, despite this, it was also one of tremendous interconnection. Approaching the first period of modern globalization by investigating the movement of people, objects and ideas into, around and out of the Middle East, the authors demonstrate how the Middle East in this period was not simply subject or reactive to the

rather than state, on becoming rather than being, this important

West, but rather an active participant in the transnational

dynamics of what its editors see as “globalization from below”.’ Dr On Barak, Senior Lecturer, Department of Middle Eastern

and Avner Wishnitzer

and African History, Tel Aviv University

Edited by Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh

volume gives a sensitive and multi-angled account of the

flows that transformed both the region and the world. A Global Middle East offers an examination of a variety of intellectual and more material exchanges, such as nascent feminist movements and Islamist ideologies as well as the movement of sex workers across the Mediterranean and Jewish migration into Palestine. This book emphasises these new dynamics by examining the multi-directional nature of movement across borders, as well as this movement’s intensity, volume and speed. By focusing on the theme of mobility as the defining feature of ‘modern globalization’ in the Middle East, it provides an essential examination of the

Edited by Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh and Avner Wishnitzer

formative years of the region.

Jacket image: Train cabin in 1930s Palestine. Image courtesy of the Aleksansrowicz family. Jacket design: www.paulsmithdesign.com

90

8

141

33

141

8

90

222

‘[T]his fine volume show[s] that the early wave of globalization

Jerusalem. She is the author of Policing Egyptian Women:

A GLoBAL MIDDLE EAST

and Middle Eastern Studies at The Hebrew University of

Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940

Liat Kozma is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Islamic

Liat Kozma is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011). Cyrus Schayegh is Associate Professor at Princeton University. He is the author of Who is Knowledgeable is Strong: Science, Class and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (2009), and Transnationalization: A History of the Modern Middle East (forthcoming). Avner Wishnitzer is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (forthcoming).

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A GLOBAL MIDDLE EAST Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880–1940

Edited by

Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh and Avner Wishnitzer

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Published in 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright Editorial selection and Introduction © 2015 Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh and Avner Wishnitzer Copyright Individual Chapters © 2015 Ami Ayalon, Avishai Ben-Dror, Yaron Ben-Naeh, Francesca Biancani, Elife Biçer-Deveci, Johann Buessow, Evelin Dierauff, Will Hanley, Valeska Huber, Uri Kupferschmidt, Joachim Langner, Tamar Novick, Haggai Ram and Cyrus Schayegh The right of Cyrus Schayegh, Avner Wishnitzer and Liat Kozma to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by the editors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. Library of Middle East History 50 ISBN 978 1 78076 942 4 ePDF ISBN 978 0 85772 511 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress catalog card: available Typeset by Newgen Publishers, Chennai

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Contributors

viii x xi

Introduction Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh and Avner Wishnitzer

1

Global networks, local networking 1. On scales and spaces: Reading Gottlieb Schumacher’s The Jaulân (1888) Cyrus Schayegh 2. The Emir and the sea: The rise and fall of ‘Abdullhi Muhammad b. ‘Al Abdaššakr, Harär’s last emir (1885–1887) Avishai Ben-Dror

19

55

People on the move 3. Education and mobility: Universities in Cairo between competition and standardisation 1900–1950 Valeska Huber 4. International migration and sex work in early twentieth-century Cairo Francesca Biancani

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5. Jews on the move during the late Ottoman period: Trends and some problems Yaron Ben-Naeh

134

A short piece 6. Global migration into late Ottoman Jaffa as reflected in the Arab-Palestinian newspaper Filastn (1911–1913) Evelin Dierauff

165

Objects and related practices on the move 7. Papers for going, papers for staying: Identification and subject formation in the Eastern Mediterranean Will Hanley

177

8. Travelling substances and their human carriers: Hashishtrafficking in Mandatory Palestine Haggai Ram

201

9. On the diffusion of ‘small’ western technologies and consumer goods in the Middle East during the era of the first modern globalization Uri M. Kupferschmidt

229

A short piece 10. Bees on camels: Technologies of movement in late Ottoman Palestine Tamar Novick

263

Ideas on the move 11. Re-imagining Islam in the period of the first modern globalization: Muhammad ‘Abduh and his Theology of Unity Johann Buessow 12. New practices: Arab printing, publishing and mass reading Ami Ayalon

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CONTENTS

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Short pieces 13. The movement of feminist ideas: The case of Kadınlar Dünyası Elife Biçer-Deveci 14. Religion in motion and the essence of Islam: Manifestations of the global in Muhammad ‘Abduh’s response to Farah Antn Joachim Langner Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTR ATIONS

1.1 The Jawln, including other places referred to in Schumacher’s The Jaulân and/or in this chapter 1.2 Bild al-Shm, the region of which the Jawln forms a part, including places mentioned in Schumacher’s The Jaulân and/or in this chapter 1.3 Gottlieb Schumacher’s world 2.1 A map of Ethiopia 5.1 Jewish communities in Anatolia, 1881–1914: Demography and spatial distribution 6.1 ʿs al-ʿs, director and co-editor of Filastn 6.2 Menashe Meirovitch alias Ab Ibrhm 6.3 Advertisements in Filastn for the Danish beer label Tuborg 6.4 Advertisement in Filastn for Swiss milk powder by Nestlé 7.1 Back of French passport, issued in Jerusalem in 1873 7.2 Residence certificate for the year 1894 of ‘Ali Muhammad bin ‘Ali 10.1 Bees on camels on their way to Jaffa in 1890 Palestine 10.2 The cover of Philip J. Baldensperger’s The Immovable East: Studies of the People and Customs of Palestine (1913)

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21

22 23 56 135 167 170 171 172 182 187 265 266

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LIST

OF

ILLUSTR ATIONS

11.1 The dramatic structure of Rislat al-Tawhd 13.1 Kadınlar Dünyası, N° 124, Saturday, 21 December 1913/ 3 January 1914 13.2 Kadınlar Dünyası, the French supplement of N° 123, Saturday, 21 December 1913/ 3 January 1914

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank The Israel Science Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem and the Authority for Research and Development of the Hebrew University for funding the Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation On the Move: The Middle East and the ‘First Modern Globalization’, held in Jerusalem January 16–19, 2012, which sparked the ideas which eventually would come to be presented in this volume. We also thank The Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem for their help in funding the production of this volume. We thank Leigh Chipman and Karen Abbou for their careful reading and copyediting of this work. Finally, we are mostly grateful to Sinai Aleksandrowicz and the Aleksandrowicz family for their permission to use an image from Ze’ev Aleksandrowicz’s work for our cover.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Ami Ayalon (Ph.D., Princeton, 1980) is Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University. His scholarly concern is the cultural and political history of Arabic-speaking societies in modern times. In recent years his work has focused on the history of communications, printing, literacy and reading in Arab countries. He is the author of, among other works, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (1995) and Reading Palestine: Printing and Literacy, 1900–1948 (2004). Avishai Ben-Dror is Research Fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the academic teaching staff, Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies, the Open University of Israel. He also teaches at the departments of Africa and Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion and Tel Aviv Universities. Yaron Ben-Naeh is Professor of Jewish History at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author of Jews in the Realm of the Sultans (Hebrew, English, Turkish); Turkey: The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the 19th–20th Centuries (Hebrew); Wills of Ottoman Jews: An Annotated Corpus of Wills of Jews from the Ottoman Empire, (forthcoming, Hebrew), Ibranice Anonim bir kronik, Ankara 2013 (with Nuh Arslanta); Everyday Life Realities in The Haskoy Quarter of 17th Century Istanbul (with Richard Wittmann, forthcoming), and over eighty articles on Ottoman Jewry.

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Francesca Biancani is Adjunct Professor of History and Institutions of the Modern Middle East at Bologna University. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2012 with a dissertation on the social history of sex work in colonial Cairo (1882–1952). Among her publications is “The Hierarchy of Prostitution in Colonia Cairo at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, in Amanda Phillips and R. Abu-Remaileh (eds), The Meeting Place of British Middle Eastern Studies (2009). Elife Biçer-Deveci is a PhD candidate at the Historical Institute of the University of Bern in Switzerland. She focuses on processes of exchange and the relationship between women’s movement in Turkey and international women’s organizations in the first half of twentieth century. She studied history, geography and philosophy at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. Johann Buessow is a historian specialising in the social and political history of the modern Middle East and intellectual history in the modern Islamic world. Since 2013, he has been a Professor of Islamic History and Culture at the University of TÜbingen, Germany. He is the author of Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem (2011). Evelin Dierauff is a PhD candidate, and will be teaching from April 2014 at the Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany. Will Hanley is Assistant Professor of history at Florida State University. He is working on a book called Nationality Grasped: Identification and Law in Alexandria (forthcoming). Valeska Huber is Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London. She is the author of Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (2013). Liat Kozma is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of Policing Egyptian Women: Sex, Law and Medicine in Khedival Egypt (2011).

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LIST

OF

CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

Uri M. Kupferschmidt is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. His main interest is the social history of the 19th and 20th centuries. His latest book is The Orosdi-Back Saga: European Department Stores and Middle Eastern Consumers (2007). Joachim Langner is a researcher at the German Youth Institute (Deutsches Jugendinstitut e.V.). He holds an MA in Islamic studies, political science and social anthropology from Martin-Luther-University in Halle (Saale), Germany. Tamar Novick is a PhD Candidate in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. She is completing her dissertation, entitled “Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land, 1890–1965.” Haggai Ram is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is the author of Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession (2009). Cyrus Schayegh is Associate Professor at Princeton University. He is the author of Who is Knowledgeable is Strong: Science, Class and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900– 1950 (2009), and holds a PhD from Columbia University. He taught at the American University of Beirut from 2005 to 2008 is currently writing his book The Emergence of the Modern Middle East: A Transnational History (forthcoming). Avner Wishnitzer is Kreitman Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and teaches at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Reading Clocks Alla Turca: Ottoman Temporality and its Transformation in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming).

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INTRODUCTION Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh and Avner Wishnitzer

This volume is an attempt to write the Middle East into the history of ‘the first modern globalization’ by focusing on one particular angle, that of movement.1 The period covered in the volume – c. 1880 to 1940 – witnessed an unprecedented intensification in the movement of people, commodities and ideas across the globe. Commercial life and urban space, reading habits and intellectual life, leisure culture and household appliances, immigration patterns and education – nothing was left untouched.2 But such seemingly uncontrolled movements and the relations that they created also triggered reactive efforts, by local, colonial and newly assembled international mechanisms, to inhibit, or at least limit and better control, movement. Indeed, the multi-directional nature of movement across borders during the first modern globalization, along with its intensity, volume and speed, helps explain the emergence of inter-state regimes that during this period hoped to help regulate movement.3 Last but not least, intellectuals tried to draw borders within the cultural realm, separating the foreign from the local, ‘ours’ from ‘theirs’. In sum, this volume focuses on the theme of mobility as a defining feature of ‘modern globalization’ in the Middle East. That focus has analytic benefits too. When concentrating on a particular polity, region, or city, we often miss causations and connections that lie beyond the borders of our units of analysis, causations that were nevertheless crucial to the processes we are trying to reconstruct. When taking movement rather than stasis as the main focus of discussion, seemingly stable categories and boundaries are blurred. We are sensitized to the constant and intensive flow through which

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these categories came into being. Borders become interfaces; movement emerges as a major factor of change, a factor worthy of study in its own right. The velocity of movement, its volume, direction and routes can be examined and compared across time and space. Actors and objects, too, are seen differently through this perspective. Rather than examining them at their point of origin as part of a story about ‘that place’, or their point of arrival as part the story of the ‘here’, a new line of narrative is created, one of movers and moved, a narrative that connects points of origin and destinations in intricate ways.

Historiography and the question of periodization While this volume is one of the first to broach globalization from a Middle Eastern perspective, the scholarly study of globalization is not quite new anymore. Its most recent wave started – as scholarly pursuits so often do – in reaction to changes in the ‘real world’. In the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War opened up that world. This process started in Europe, the continent most immediately and visibly affected by the collapse of the Iron Curtain in the two years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Moreover, one of its key elements, freedom of movement, applied with least restrictions to citizens of countries of the global West. Even so, that process was a fundamentally global affair. Just as the Cold War separation of the world’s most powerful states into two blocks also affected billions of people in the ‘Third World’, the end of that separation signified not only the economic re-entry of communist ‘Second World’ countries like Russia and China into a now truly world-wide capitalist market; ‘Third World’ countries like India also became more open than before to market forces. The strengthening of large corporations, especially, was felt around the globe; and in parallel, people felt that the nation-state was losing some of its luster in the face of that development. Moreover, migration streams, legal or otherwise, crisscrossed the world; many brought more people from the ‘global south’ to the ‘global north’ more rapidly. Truly new forms of communication appeared too: the internet, including most recently internet-based social media like Facebook, which now has more than 1 billion users.

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INTRODUCTION

3

It was against the backdrop of this changed world that the term ‘globalization’ gained traction in the press as the Cold War was ending in the late 1980s, and ‘skyrocketed to terminological stardom’ in the 1990s.4 As social scientists are more attuned to the here and now than historians are, they picked up and spread the term first;5 to some, it described a truly new reality that differed more or less radically from the past. Soon, however, historians started to catch up. They had intense internal debates. One such debate revolved around differences between older models of a ‘universal’ history and ‘global history’; another concerned possible distinctions between ‘world history’ and ‘global history’ (both have since died down). On a related note, today most historians see global history as part of, or even synonymous with, a transnational approach to writing history, which has been on an irresistible rise since the late 1990s.6 As for the relationship between social scientists and historians, the term globalization means different things to different people both inside and across these two communities. For instance, some hold that it involves the creation of a ‘single world society’, while others early on countered that ‘glocalization’ is a better description of the complex ways in which local and global processes increasingly interact without creating a single society.7 On the other hand, as Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson have recently pointed out, academics agree on key elements: ‘globalization is about the interconnectedness of different parts of the world. It is best understood as a process, or a set of processes, that compress time and space, and accelerate the “interdependence” of societies and state’.8 Most would also agree that this process is not uni- but multi-dimensional, ‘transform[ing] economic, political, social and cultural relationships’, and that it ‘stems from both national and international roots’, although they disagree on where the stress lies.9 Unsurprisingly, a most vital question that has occupied global historians from their emergence in the 1990s is periodization. Early on, they raised that issue to reaffirm their relevance to the debate about globalization, i.e. to show social scientists that most changes of the post-Cold War era were less radically new than at least some of them had thought, and why. But almost immediately, disagreements between historians came to the fore concerning the question of just

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when globalization did start, if it should be dated to an era before the 1990s.10 There are various approaches, with one, that of André Gunder Frank, dating the start of globalization back to the third millennium BCE. Rather than diving into a debate about right or wrong, it makes sense to second Peter Stearns’ judgment that ‘it is far more important to see the basic issues involved in assessing what globalization meant in any of its phases, and how it differed from previous phases ... than insisting on any single formula’.11 And to quote another global historian, John Darwin, what made one oft-cited, particularly novel stage of globalization, the second half of the nineteenth century, so special was that after 1880 there was ‘for the first time in world history a global hierarchy of physical, economic and cultural power. It worked through a set of institutions, practices and conventional beliefs that largely held sway until World War II. To an extent inconceivable as late as 1860, the world of 1900 was an imperial world’.12 This formulation is relevant for the present edited volume, not because it involves empires. Empires do not play a remarkable role in most chapters, but characteristically for how globalization unfolded historically in the later 1800s, some of its leading historians – e.g. John Darwin, Jürgen Osterhammel, or again in Britain, C.A. Bayly – started their careers as scholars of empire or colonialism. Nay: what is most relevant in Darwin’s quote for the overall conception of this volume is its claim that stage of globalization persisted until World War II. Put differently, globalization did not end in 1914, then to re-emerge after 1945 or even only after the end of the Cold War. While 1914 – a true watershed for some – is not a conceptual concern to any contributor to this volume. This volume as a whole adds a Middle Eastern perspective to non-Middle Eastern historians’ opinion that World War I did not cut globalization short, but rather gave it a powerful turn. There is no question that especially for Europe, 1914 was a watershed. As Eric Hobsbawm explained eloquently, the four-years-long horrors of static, industrial-style trench warfare terminated a hundred years of relative peace on the continent, ‘open[ing] the age of massacre’.13 Also, the high-speed economic globalization of the pre-1914 decades slowed down after 1918 and stuttered from 1929, a process helped

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INTRODUCTION

5

along marginally by the multiplication of new states in Eastern Europe and somewhat more seriously by the exit of Soviet Russia from the world economy; international investments were almost exclusively British and American in the interwar period; and various state security controls, e.g. concerning passports, that were introduced in World War I persisted thereafter. But there was another side to this picture. Although European in origin, World War I was global in scope, also including the Ottoman Empire. The peak of the ‘age of massacres’ that followed, World War II, was global in all aspects, including origins and military development, a change from 1914–18 that can only be explained by the expanding security and political intertwinement of various parts of the globe after 1918. Politically, and in various fields of technical cooperation, the post-war League of Nations was an unprecedented international institution of almost world-wide reach. Economically, although global trade expanded more slowly after 1918 than before 1914, by 1921 it had already bounced back to the level of 1913.14 Furthermore, while migration dropped, it by no means ceased. Last but not least, the impressive global, Western-led (but not Western-dominated) cultural mixity that went hand in hand with the global expansion of trade and communication before 1914, did not cease after 1918. It continued, and in some ways accelerated, with increased south-south a-colonial or anti-colonial ties that reacted to the simultaneous expansion of British and French imperial possessions and their incipient war-related weakening.15 All these continuities of globalization were visible in the Middle East too.

Movement: From the abstract to the concrete How, then, do scholars of the Middle East make sense of the first wave of modern globalization? Most who place the modern Middle East within a wider history of globalization focus on the economic sphere and demonstrate how local and regional economies were re-configured as a result of the intensifying interaction with an emerging global economy, dominated by Europe.16 It was only recently that social and political phenomena began to be examined as part of wider processes of globalization. Cemil Aydın examined modern anti-Western

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critiques in Japan and the Ottoman Empire through a global history perspective. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi analysed political radicalism in the early twentieth century in both regional and global contexts, in a way that integrates movement of both people and ideas. Julia ClancySmith traced European migration to North Africa beginning from the mid-nineteenth century, within the context of global migrations enabled by technological transformations and European hegemony in the Mediterranean.17 The global perspective in all these works is crucial since the objects of these studies cannot be adequately explained otherwise. Anti-Westernism, Middle Eastern radicalism and mass migration were phenomena that quite literally travelled across great distances, crossing borders and bringing together hitherto disconnected or loosely connected communities. Whereas in all these works the increased movement of the first modern globalization helps to explain other things, the current volume takes this movement as the main object of investigation. Rather than talking about ‘movement’ abstractly, the different studies collected here seek to identify the social and material networks that enabled it; the people who built and controlled, used or bypassed, these networks; and the items, lifestyles and ideas that were moved through these networks. Moreover, we examine the impact of this movement on existing structures, traditions and modes of life. We find it useful to think of movement under three different titles: people, objects and ideas on the move. In some ways, this division is artificial: moving objects, like books or periodicals, also carry with them ideas or fashions; people on the move bring along their life styles and world views. Even so, these three headings help, as emphases, to cast light on specific elements. First, the studies grouped under the heading ‘people on the move’ consider various human actors who were directly involved in the increased levels of movement that characterized the first era of modern globalization. Some were powerful enough to build new material networks, to affect existing ones, and to devise mechanisms to control the movement of users and commodities through the networks. Major power brokers, such as governments and international firms, gradually devised global arrangements that improved the surveillance and control of movement. These included new mechanisms of border policing

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INTRODUCTION

7

and travel papers, internal and international enforcement regimes, and enhanced censorship abilities. Clearly, when one is discussing the human element, considering builders and regulators of networks is not enough. After all, it was common people like merchants, refugees, work migrants, tourists and missionaries who were using these networks. The contributors to this volume explore the social background, education and interests of these individuals, and examine their interaction with other local and international factors, and their horizon of expectations. This type of traffic – ‘globalization from below’, as it were – was extremely important for the transfer of ideas, lifestyles and fashions from one area to another. This optic allows us to zoom in on the way actual historical actors related to big networks and the extent to which their lives were touched by the movement flowing through these networks. Second, under the heading ‘objects on the move’ contributors examine the traffic of substances and commodities. Here general – and often vague – discussions about ‘influences’ and ‘trends’ are translated into concrete questions about real objects, the meanings assigned to them, and the behavioral patterns and lifestyles associated with them. Singer sewing machines, drugs, books and newspapers were circulated throughout the region, bringing or assuming new meanings as they went. It was such objects that brought the world into the home – or the neighborhood coffeehouse – promoting greater uniformity across the region, but also accentuating differences between local and foreign. Textual objects, such as novels and periodicals, allowed reflection on the very flow of which they were part, suggesting ways to deal with the promise or threat of change embodied in these travelling objects. Third and last, under the heading ‘ideas on the move’, contributors examine texts and humans as carriers of meanings. Intellectual history has long been the interest of historians of late nineteenthcentury Middle Eastern encounters with the West. More often than not, ideas are discussed as if they were balloons flying high above the ground, carried to distant areas by unseen winds of change. Here intellectual and cultural production is presented as a product of concrete material networks, of adoption, adaptation and challenge. The

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various contributions ground the intellectual within the material and the social. The movement of ideas builds here on the movement of people and objects.

Chapter outlines The idea for this book, and the individual chapters, grew out of discussions during an international workshop held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem in January 2012. It is composed of eleven full-length chapters, and four shorter chapters. All of them revolve around the common themes of globalization and movement outlined above, while focusing on specific case studies. The shorter chapters were written by graduate students and reflect work in progress on the cutting edge of historical research. They are based on conference posters they designed and presented at the workshop, bringing to this volume aspects that are largely absent from the longer chapters, as well as visual representations of the period. This visual aspect is of particular importance since mass-produced images were crucial to the very processes we seek to illuminate. Through photos, postcards and illustrations in popular literature and newspapers, people throughout the Middle East learned of the latest fashions in Paris, the design of the Empire State Building in New York, or the street view in Vienna. The book starts with micro-histories of specific locales that experienced global and trans-regional movement, and then proceeds to three aspects of mobility: the mobility of people, of objects and of ideas. In the book’s first section, Cyrus Schayegh and Avishai Ben-Dror study the formation of global networks through the lens of two different localities. Schayegh uses a 1888 report on the Jawln Heights composed by a German-American engineer to demonstrate how global economic and Ottoman imperial actors in Bild al-Shm were channeled through, but also strengthened and reordered, extant translocal networks. The Jawln became better connected to a reconfigured Damascus-centered economic area, and served as a stronger translocal linkage between Damascus and Haifa. Additionally, while this and comparable translocal areas and linkages did not grow into a fully integrated regional unit, they were reoriented towards Beirut, the main global gateway

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of a reconfigured Bild al-Shm. Ben-Dror shows how in the 1880s the local history of the Muslim Ethiopian city of Harär was woven into the history of global developments through its contacts with cities on the Somali coast. The study of that interaction serves to reframe the short-lived reign of ‘Abdullhi Muhammad b. ‘Al Abdaššakr, Harär’s last emir (r. 1885–87). In particular, Ben-Dror focuses on the Emir’s problematic struggle with a ‘globalized sea’ and its manifold – Egyptian, British and generally European – agents of change. The chapters in the second section of the book concentrate on the movement of individuals, restrictions of this movement, and its impact on receiving and exporting societies. Valeska Huber traces academic migration to the newly established universities in Cairo during the first half of the twentieth century and examines how new global and regional networks exported to the Middle East not only European academic knowledge, but also European colonial rivalries. Francesca Biancani’s contribution sheds light on subaltern migrants at the other end of the social spectrum, that is, sex workers travelling between Italy and Egypt. Biancani shows how prostitution in Cairo during the second half of the nineteenth century was increasingly shaped by the global market, and in particular, by immigrant sex-workers and colonial attempts to control this movement. Yaron Ben Naeh traces the impact of late Ottoman migrations on the lives of Anatolia’s Jewish communities, and then focuses on its impact on those women left behind (‘agunot’) by husbands migrating to western Europe and the Americas. Reading halakhic sources, he traces these women’s personal plight, their attempts to rebuild their lives, and their new place in their communities. Will Hanley analyses hundreds of passports and residence permits issued by various states to individuals living or passing through Alexandria. He demonstrates the growing interest of contemporary governments in controlling movement across borders but also the haphazard nature of contemporary mechanisms of bordercontrol. The next four chapters – three long, one short – are united by the theme ‘objects and practices on the move.’ Haggai Ram uses the story of cannabis trade in mandatory Palestine to shed new light on transnational aspects of the Yishuv, especially illicit trade ties involving

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Jews both in Europe and in Palestine, and explores how Palestine became entangled in a web of the conflicting interests of the USA, the League of Nations and the British Empire, with regard to the nature and goals of global prohibition regimes. Uri Kupferschmidt shows how it was not only major infrastructures like railroads that were, in the age of globalization, adapted and adopted in the Middle East. ‘Small technologies’ like sewing machines, typewriters and cameras were being moved around, and, critically, came to hold new meanings and usages in their new environment. Tamar Novick looks at a ‘creole movement’: in 1880, two American explorer-beekeepers introduced a new, movable frame beehive to Palestine; soon, some Palestinian beekeepers started to move frames around the country, reaping more and better honey. Crucially, for several decades prior to the sustained construction of roads and the availability of cars in Palestine, that movement involved the ubiquitous camels. While a sweeping success, the spread, quite literally, of the new movable-frame beehive was not a unilinear story. Rather, it exemplifies how strongly the ‘new’ and ‘global’ relied on and intersected with the ‘old’ and ‘local’. In the last section of the volume, the focus shifts from moving people and objects to the ideas, ideologies and concepts they carry. Ami Ayalon studies the emergence of printing and mass reading in the Middle East from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century as an aspect of the grand cultural transformation prompted by globalization. He shows how key cultural instruments of adaptation were molded by foreign as well as local actors, and how that process was anything but smooth, spreading unevenly across the land and through various social strata, mediated by foreign and local agents and involving interim stages of development. Johann Buessow examines Muhammad ‘Abduh’s influential work, Rislat al-tawhd and demonstrates that it was written as an intensive – if not always explicit – conversation with dozens of American, European and Middle Eastern thinkers, from Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau and Darwin, to al-Hasan al-Basr, al-Jhiz and Jaml al-Dn al-Afghn. The Risla, argues Büssow, is a testimony to a turning point in the history of Egypt, and to some degree also in that of other Muslim societies, inasmuch as a growing number of people now began to perceive themselves as part of a global

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grand narrative with its culmination in the positivist West. Evelin Dierauff approaches the Zionist-Arab interaction from the perspective of globalization. Examining early twentieth-century Palestinian newspapers from Jaffa, Dierauff shows how a local national conflict was shaped by global movements of immigrants, ideas and technologies. Elife Bicer-Deveci examines the late Ottoman women’s movement and argues that its story can only be narrated from a trans-national perspective as the movement evolved through intensive and multi-layered interaction with contemporary European movements. Finally, building on Christopher Bayly, Joachim Langer argues that like other major religions, Middle Eastern Islam in the late nineteenth century was re-shaped by processes of globalization, forming a type of a religious ‘imagined community’ that defined itself vis-à-vis other equivalent communities. Although divided into categories of ideas, people and objects, these three themes recur in different sections. Thus, for example, we find missionaries in our discussion of beehives – the mobility of technology here is enabled by the mobility of individuals. Will Hanley’s discussion of passports focuses on migrants and those documents that confirmed their privilege, could easily be classified under ‘objects’, as it examines the development of identity papers and their diversity in the pre-war era. Valeska Huber’s discussion of travelling academics cannot be disconnected from the ideas they produced and disseminated; and Elife Biçer-Deveci’s discussion of feminist ideas in the Ottoman press cannot be disconnected from the individuals who felt at home both in Istanbul and in Paris. Several chapters examine gendered experiences of migration, of objects and of texts: Yaron Ben Naeh examines women who were left behind, with the mass migration of Jewish men, and Francesca Biancani – the experience of migrant women; Ami Ayalon’s readers are mostly men, while Elife Biçer-Deveci’s authors and readers are mostly women. Gender is not one of our main categories of analysis, but read together, it is clear that aspects of global movement were experienced differently by men and women. The products they consumed, the ideas they were exposed to and composed, and their own mobility across and within national borders, were not at all identical.

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Different chapters focus on the agency of individuals – Jaffa’s Jewish and Arab residents responding to Zionist immigration in Evelin Dierauff’s articles; or the Emir of Harär in Ben-Dror’s chapter who tried to resist and survive global powers beyond his control. Huber’s protagonists mediated Egyptian understandings of science and Western understandings of the Middle East; Muhammad ‘Abduh, in Johann Buessow’s work, is a nexus of ideas, who would later affect modern understandings of Islam. Last, most chapters focus on the major urban centers of the Middle East – Cairo, Beirut and Istanbul. Such a focus makes a lot of sense. Intellectual production took place largely in universities and publishing houses, located in the urban centers. Large cities attracted consumer goods, and port cities were entry points for legitimate and illegitimate products and for migrants. The different chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, that more peripheral regions – be it the Jawln or Upper Egypt, where Sayyid Qutb read his first Sherlock Holmes mysteries – were integral parts of globalization too.

Directions for future research Unfortunately, the protagonists in the above chapters do not interact with each other directly, nor do the practices and objects we described here. Did Ottoman feminist intellectuals also use Singer sewing machines or play the piano? Did they try to sew the kind of clothes featured in women’s magazines? What kind of papers did the Alexendrike carry, did they need them, could they read them? Who read Muhammad ‘Abduh’s writings, and how many of them could trace his cultural references? The following chapters describe multiple ways in which lifestyles, ideas, urban space and private residences were changing, but when we focus on our case studies, we lose track of the simultaneity of those changes – which were felt so intensely because they covered so many aspects of life. A potential direction to go from here would be to explore how these aspects interacted and were felt at the same time. Simultaneity can be traced not only in the combination of all these aspects in one scene, but also in the simultaneous (or gradual) arrival of texts, objects, practices or categories of immigrants. Such questions require a comparative approach. Marwa Elshakry’s work on Darwinism

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13

could be extended to a larger question of Arabic, Persian and Turkish readings of Darwinism, eugenics or sexology; one can also ask whether scientific knowledge was understood similarly in Beirut and in Cairo – and what kind of dialogue existed between these two intellectual communities. Fruma Zachs’s work similarly notes the different effects of feminist ideas on Beiruti and Cairene women, and then the effect of the migration of Lebanese intellectuals on their Cairene counterparts. Hashish consumption also benefits from a regional and comparative perspective, which follows the route of hashish soles from Mount Lebanon, through Palestine, to Cairo’s coffeehouses and police stations.18 Many aspects of Middle Eastern history could benefit from a global analysis, and from recognizing the global context that begot them. Thus, for example, we can read colonialism within this paradigm – as catalyzing or mediating the mobility of people, objects and ideas. Colonialism is present, for example, in Hanley’s foreign papers and foreign privilege. It also frames the experience of Italian women in Alexandria and of hashish smuggling in Palestine. While colonialism is not one of our main categories of analysis here, it, too, ought to be added to the pot. The role of the state – in mediating, restricting or facilitating movement be it through censorship, import quotas or immigration policies – leaves much room for study. Similarly, the Great War, the first global war, was experienced intensely in the Middle East, and one may ask how our analysis of the war might benefit from a perspective of mobility. After all, foreign engineers and experts; Ottoman, British and Australian soldiers; weapons, drugs and obscene publications all affected the region in multiple ways. In conclusion, it is hoped that this edited volume will give readers a taste of the broad range of Middle Eastern-related themes and topics that can and should be examined also from the perspective of globalization; that the historical study of globalization may draw some benefits from the Middle Eastern-related studies brought together here; and that those studies will add to ongoing debates about the deep ties that connect the Middle East to the other parts of the world. This may complicate widely-held notions about the exceptionality of this area and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the Middle East and its place in our shared planet.

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Notes 1. A trailblazing, early edited volume on globalization studies related to the Middle East was Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (eds), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); look also for a forthcoming edited volume by Nile Green and James Gelvin; on a different note, see Cem Emrence, ‘Imperial paths, big comparisons: The late Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Global History 3 (2008), pp.289–311. 2. Think of how Eric Hobsbawm opens his monumental Age of Empires: with a personal anecdote that relates how his Austrian mother and British father met in Alexandria in 1913, an encounter made possible because of the mobility of people and capital which marked this era. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London, 1987), pp.1–3. 3. See e.g. Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘Global movements, global walls: Responses to migration, 1885–1925’, in Gungwu Wang (ed), Global History and Migrations (Boulder, 1997), pp.279–307. For an overview of the issue of migration (emphasizing post-World War I change, however), see Adam McKeown, ‘Global migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15 (2004), pp.155–90. 4. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, 2005), p.1. 5. Overview: A.G. Hopkins, ‘The history of globalization – and the globalization of history?’, in idem (ed), Globalization in World History (London, 2002), pp.37n9–12, 38n29. 6. E.g. Manfred Kossock, ‘From universal history to global history’ in, Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens (eds), Conceptualizing Global History (Boulder, 1993); Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, ‘World history in a global age’, American Historical Review 100 (1995), pp.1034–60; Bruce Mazlish, ‘Comparing global history to world history’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (1998), pp.385–95; ‘AHR conversation: On transnational history’, American Historical Review 111 (2006), pp.1441–64; Akira Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future (London, 2013). 7. Two quotes: Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Globalization. Knowledge and Society (London, 1990), p.8; and Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London, 1995), pp.25–44. For the latter approach, see also the historical analysis in Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, 2004). 8. Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010),

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

15

p.2. For other definitions, see e.g. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (New York, 2009), pp.6, 12; Hopkins, Global History, p.3. Hopkins, ‘History’, p.16. Ibid, pp.21–33. Literature: ibid; Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation, p.3n12. Peter Stearns, Globalization in World History (London, 2010), p.4. John Darwin, After Tamerlane, p.298. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (New York, 1994), p.22. Chirazi and Menand, Histoire de la mondialisation capitaliste. 2: 1914–2010, p.14. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York, 2007). See for example Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800– 1914 (London and New York, 1981); Reat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany, 1988); evket Pamuk (ed), The Mediterranean Response to Globalization before 1950 (London, 2000). Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007); Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, 2010); Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 2011). Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago, 2013); Marwa Elshakry, ‘Knowledge in motion’, ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society 99 (2008), pp.701–30; Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, ‘From dif’ al-nis’ to mas’alat al-nis’ in Greater Syria: Readers and writers debate women and their rights, 1858–1900’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 (2009), pp.615–33; Cyrus Schayegh, ‘The many worlds of ʿAbud Yasin; or, what narcotics trafficking in the interwar Middle East can tell us about territorialization’, American Historical Review 116 (2011), pp.273–306; Liat Kozma, ‘Cannabis prohibition in Egypt, 1880–1939: From local ban to League of Nations diplomacy’, Middle Eastern Studies 47 (2011), pp.443–60.

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GLOBAL NET WOR K S, LOCAL NET WOR KING

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CHAPTER 1 ON SCALES AND SPACES: R EADING GOTTLIEB SCHUM ACHER’S THE JAUL ÂN (1888) Cyrus Schayegh

A year before the publication, in 2009, of the landmark Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, co-editor Pierre-Yves Saunier used an evaluation of the making, strengths and weaknesses of that particular tome as a springboard for the following reflections: [W]e historians have produced a set of tools that have conspired to consolidate [scalar] framework[s]. We have a yardstick that matches the quality of our research subjects with an extra bonus given to one of these scales: ‘local history’ is parochial, national history is the key factor, while ‘international or global’ developments are the big picture. We try to assess how individual and social life espouses ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’ processes, we tell the story of how social movements, ideas and goods ‘trickle up and down’ the levels. ... We also have an arsenal of metaphors at hand: we ‘zoom in’ to get ‘closer’, to approach the ‘local’, the best approximation of what

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is ‘particular’ and ‘real’; we ‘change the focal length’ to see different things in the background or foreground; we ‘zoom out’ to get the ‘macro’ and more ‘general’ aspects, moving to the ‘national’ or ‘regional’ level. We rely on an ‘in/out’ or ‘down here/up there’ perspective that builds on the double postulate that the basic framework of our research is a bounded territory identified with one of these nested scales.1 With this insight, Saunier built on an older interest by global and transnational historians in interactions, especially of the ‘localglobal’ sort. That interest – which in turn was partly inspired by social scientific analyses like Roland Robertson’s concept ‘glocalization’ – has been illustrated by edited volumes, highlighted in overviews, and methodologically enriched by global microhistory projects that ‘bring the individual back’ into an often process-oriented global history.2 At the same time, Saunier’s criticism adroitly sharpened the aforementioned interest in ‘local-global interactions’ in two ways. He explicitly went beyond the often implicit dualism embraced by global (but also other) historians who tend to think in terms, for instance, of the ‘global/local’ or the ‘national/ transnational’. More importantly, he directly questioned how we ‘identify a bounded territory with a nested scale’. In the process, he drew attention to the metaphors we so often use to maneuver between those scales, such as ‘zooming in and out’ or ‘trickling up and down’. One of the two goals of this chapter is an exercise: to think about the questions that Saunier posed through the story behind and the narrative of one text, Gottlieb Schumacher’s The Jaulân (1888), a survey of this rugged, volcanic plateau above and east of the upper Jordan River and the Sea of Galilee, which is about 1,450 square kilometer large, on average 1,000 meter high, and situated dead in the middle between Haifa and Damascus.3 (See map 1; see map 2 for Bild al-Shm, the region of which the Jawln forms a part.) I chose Schumacher’s The Jaulân because it illustrates that actions on various scales (here, socioeconomic ties and political setups operating on local, translocal, regional, imperial and global scales) did

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Illustration 1.1

The Jawln, including other places referred to in Schumacher’s The Jaulân and/or in this chapter

not simply happen in differently sized territories but constituted each other in one place even if that place was as peripheral as the Jawln was in the Ottoman Empire and even if it was as small as the Jawln.4 However, this does not mean that globalization – the topic and optic of this volume – did not matter. For one, Schumacher himself had globalization written all over him. He was born in 1857 in Zanesville, Ohio, to parents who had fled from southwest Germany during Europe’s 1848 revolution. In the USA they became adherents of the Tempelgesellschaft, a small pietistic-millenarian community born in the early 1850s in what now is the southwest German Land Baden-Württemberg and that became independent in 1861, two years after its eviction from the Lutheran Church. In 1868, some Templer emigrated to Palestine to expedite the second coming of Christ; they first settled in Haifa. One year later, Schumacher’s

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Illustration 1.2 Bild al-Shm, the region of which the Jawln forms a part, including places mentioned in Schumacher’s The Jaulân and/or in this chapter

family moved there too. In 1876, Schumacher left for the southwestern German city of Stuttgart to study engineering at the city’s Higher Technical Institute. Upon returning to Haifa in 1881, he became an engineer and builder as well as an archaeologist, and soon became known around Palestine. By 1885 he was made an Ottoman official, the road engineer of Acre, near Haifa; when his father, Jacob, died in 1891, he replaced him as the honorary U.S. consul in his town; and at the time he had also become a German community leader who, for instance, facilitated the German

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Emperor’s and Empress’ landing in Haifa during their visit to the Ottoman Empire in 1898. He lived in Haifa until 1918, when the new British authorities forced him to leave for Germany, from where he returned one year before his death in 1925.5 Schumacher lived an eventful life that kept him connected at the least to three countries on three continents, the Ottoman Empire, Germany and the United States (see Illustration 1.3). More generally, my exercise shows that globalization did not just somehow arrive in the Middle East (or, for that matter, anywhere else). It was bent and channeled by extant local and translocal structures and, crucially, by the geographical mold of those structures; and in the process, it helped to reshape those structures. ‘But is that not obvious?’: that question leads to my chapter’s second goal. That goal is to develop a historically specific argument concerning late nineteenth-century Ottoman Bild al-Shm: it was on the

Illustration 1.3

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Gottlieb Schumacher’s world

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local6 and the translocal more than on the regional Bild al-Shmwide scale that broad changes – including socioeconomic and political ones kick-started by external, global or imperial actors – were lived most intensely. To understand why this was the case, and how this view fits into current scholarship, I first, in sections 1 and 2, outline the current state of academic studies of late Ottoman Bild al-Shm; then, in section 3, lay out my argument in detail; and in the two main sections, 4 and 5, turn to a description of Schumacher’s person and of those parts of The Jaulân that are germane to the focus of my exercise, and to an analysis, respectively.

Nineteenth-century Ottoman state formation and incorporation into the world economy: a short historical note and a historiographic overview From the late 1600s to the early 1800s, direct Ottoman imperial control of Bild al-Shm was weak. This region was made up of several ‘local areas’: a large city – including Aleppo, Damascus and Nablus in the hinterland, and Tripoli, Sidon and Acre on the coast – surrounded by a substantial agricultural area.7 Each had its own local elite (some so-called ‘notables’), which brokered between ‘its’ population and Istanbul. Although undoubtedly part of the empire, these local areas were powerful units, not only administratively-politically but also socially and economically, and some, like Damascus, also in cultural and intellectual/religious production.8 From the very late 1700s, however, Istanbul slowly built up its administration and eventually also started changing its interactions with society. A reaction to increasing European pressure on the empire, this process gathered pace with the broader societal and legal reforms of the Tanzimat era (1839–1856), and peaked starting in the 1860s. As I will show in greater detail in the fifth section, ‘Analysis’, this happened also in the empire’s provinces.9 A zero sum game: this is how most Ottoman historians until the 1980s described this nineteenth-century process. The center’s gain was the provinces’ loss; its modernity stood in contrast with the peripheries’ backwardness.10 Since then, more integrative perspectives

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have gained ground. In The Empire and the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, for instance, editors Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber adroitly outlined the complex webs tying together Ottoman center and provinces.11 Schematically speaking, this scholarly trend has two entwined aspects. One side of the coin, as it were, are studies, like that by Eugene Rogan, that focus on practical tools that Istanbul used to strengthen its position in the societies of its provinces, and studies, for instance by Ussama Makdisi, that examine the cultural conceptual underpinnings of that process, what Makdisi calls ‘Ottoman Orientalism’.12 The reverse of this coin are works that focus on actors in the provinces. Take Hanssen’s Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital. Building on older studies on Beirut’s rise, it showed how persistently Beiruti merchants leveraged their city’s mushrooming power in order to lobby Istanbul to restructure Bild al-Shm administratively. (They succeeded in 1888 with the creation of the new vilayet [province] of Beirut.) Weber illustrated Damascenes’ tightened sociocultural ties to Istanbul, not the least by analyzing mural paintings in Damascene houses that depicted scenes from the modernizing Ottoman capital. This enriched earlier work, e.g. by Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher and Philip Khoury, who, building on Albert Hourani’s seminal 1968 article ‘The Politics of Notables’, had shown that when Istanbul reaffirmed its role in Damascus it had no other choice but to engage – with carrots as much as sticks – the deeply-rooted urban notable elite. Some families rose inside or into this elite and others dropped out of it. But as an elite it persisted, even became somehow more coherent, and – again the obverse of our figurative coin – was reshaped into a truly Ottoman bureaucraticlandholding class.13 In sum, ‘state recentralization’ in reality was a transformative renegotiating of ties between a strengthened Istanbul and an elite that, while not as strong, cashed in on two centuries of local dominance and on the fact that it was the only possible interlocutor of Istanbul, which certainly did not want to trigger a social revolution.14 As a matter of fact, the urban elite of every city at the core of a local area in Bild al-Shm was transformed that way, roughly simultaneously but separately.

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The second great change that affected Ottoman Bild al-Shm’s local areas in the nineteenth century was their incorporation into a flourishing Euro-centric global capitalist market, which gathered pace around 1840. The shmi areas contributed mainly cash crops and foodstuffs, most importantly silk and grains, respectively. In return they imported finished products, first and foremost textiles. As I will illustrate in detail in section 5, ‘Analysis’, this incorporation affected, and in turn was affected by, the set-up of local areas and their relationships. World systems analysis: this approach – pioneered in the 1970s by Immanuel Wallerstein, who built on the 1960s core-periphery model of economic dependency theorists15 – is how some scholars approached that process until the early 1990s. The empire became a peripheral part of that economy: politically, while remaining independent it was much more restricted by European interests; economically, it provided commodities for an expanding European industry and population; and in a variety of ways starting with economic development, port cities like Beirut became the new locomotives of change while the power of hinterland cities declined.16 Then again, already those scholars noted that European trade did not touch all regions at the same time or with equal intensity.17 From the 1980s, other historians probed deeper into this matter. Roger Owen raised first question marks in his 1981 The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914. On a related note, Alexander Schölch denied that it was European Zionists or the German Templer who modernized Palestine’s economy: internal agents had started responding to global economic demand decades before the last third of the nineteenth century. Since the 1990s a plethora of texts have followed – including an overview by Donald Quataert, a monograph by Bishara Doumani, and articles, for instance by James Reilly, Louise Schilcher and Sherry Vatter – that showed that Europe did not fully peripherialize late Ottoman Bild al-Shm’s economy, not even in the hinterland, and that local and even trans-regional networks survived, if in restructured forms.18 Just like scholars of nineteenthcentury Ottoman center-periphery relations, those scholars, while not denying power disparities, have also emphasized agency in the local areas of Bild al-Shm.

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A note on BilĆd al-ShĆm Bild al-Shm: this is a term I have used time and again in the above pages. Because I argued in the Introduction that it was on the local and the translocal more than the regional (Bild al-Shm-wide) scales that the broad changes of the 1800s – including socioeconomic and political ones kick-started by external, global or imperial actors – were lived most intensely, it makes sense to take a look at this term. Both Bild al-Shm and the homologous ‘Syria’ have existed for a very long time. The latter, a Greek word with probable Semitic roots derived from ‘Assyria’, was first used in the sixth century bce; the former Arabic word has been used since the seventh-century Muslim conquest. Both are first and foremost geographical terms. (Not by chance, al-Shm is often preceded by bild, ‘land’, or barr, ‘land mass’.) Both denote the region bordered by the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Anatolian high plateau in the north, the Arabian Desert and to its east Mesopotamia in the east, and the Sinai Peninsula and the Egyptian Nile Valley in the southwest.19 The inhabitants of that region had ‘the consciousness of belonging to a regional ensemble’:20 what French historian Dominique Chevallier said of the Middle Ages was true earlier and later too. By the mid-nineteenth century, some Arab intellectuals, and soon other strata and émigrés abroad, started talking of ‘Suriy’, influenced by Westerners who had never stopped using that geographical term. At the time, too, Suriy/Bild al-Shm received a political tinge, a Syrian form of early Arab nationalism, ‘Arabism’ (whose advocates remained loyal to Istanbul, however). In addition, Ottoman recentralization had the side effect of helping to connect Bild al-Shm’s various areas: some people born in different cities studied together and socialized in Ottoman state schools, mostly in Beirut and Istanbul, and some worked as bureaucrats in various cities of the empire, including Bild al-Shm. Together, these trends furthered regional contacts.21 Last but not least, from mid-century onwards the rise of Beirut initiated a process by which local areas around the region became more linked economically and culturally. On the other hand, Bild al-Shm’s character was blurry. For one, only twice in history was it used to denote a political-administrative

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unit, as ‘Syria’ in Roman times, from 64 bce to 194 ce, and as ‘Barr al-Shm’ during Egyptian rule, from 1832 to 1840: it really was in principle a geographical term. But even as such, it was not clear-cut. Its boundaries were fuzzy at second glance (the vilayet of Aleppo, for instance, reached deep into Anatolia), and defined differently by different scholars from antiquity to today. Similarly, it was not internally homogeneous at all.22 That Syria had dissimilar geographical components and – with the exception that almost everybody spoke Arabic – very varied populations: this was recognized even by the intellectual associated most closely with early Syrian Arabism, Butrus al-Bustn (1819–1883), who during sectarian clashes in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, in 1860–61, made the first public call in The Trumpet of Syria (Nafir Suriy) to all ‘Syrians’ to set aside their religious differences. In fact, al-Bustn explicitly built these geographical differences – which to his mind posed no security threat, very much unlike religious differences – into his very definition of the make-up of the homeland (watan). ‘The homeland resembles an uninterrupted chain whose links multiplied: one side is our house (manzilun) and our birthplace (masqat ra’sun) ... the other side our country (bildun)’. Similarly, he talked about various awtn, all included in Syria.23 As a matter of fact, not only ‘Bild al-Shm’ but also ‘Syria’, while certainly part of people’s vocabulary by the late 1800s, had little to do with their everyday life even at that point. Syria was and remained a ‘super-identity’.24

The argument But because Bild al-Shm is such an age-old term; because nineteenth-century state recentralization and the global economy had the knock-on effect of slowly bringing its local areas closer together; and because its modern Syrian avatar was important to Syrian Arabists and for present-day historians researching them: for all these reasons most historians take ‘the region’ as a given. They treat it something like the way historians treated age-old countries like ‘France’ for a long time: a unit whose borders may shift and whose inhabitants may contrast but that basically is set. As a result and secondly, while offering excellent

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studies of local/imperial/global interactions, most historians de facto treat local areas as a part of ‘the region’ without (a need to) showing their criteria.25 They often at first use ‘Bild al-Shm/Syria’ sensibly as a geographical descriptive term, but soon, unacknowledged, make it an analytical term and a de facto unit. Make no mistake. The aforementioned studies are broad shoulders on which to stand; without them this text would fall. Not only have I drawn much empirical material in this chapter from them, they also have analysed examples of the scales I am interested in. I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Rather, my argument grapples with the two silent assumptions present during its construction, as it were. Given that the local areas, i.e. their core cities, all dated back to antiquity and had been enjoying great powers from the late 1600s onwards, and given that in the late Ottoman period Bild al-Shm remained a super-identity, it is not surprising that those areas continued to be the epicenter of people’s life even when a new age started in the 1800s. Transformed as well as transformative, the local areas were the place in Bild al-Shm where people lived and experienced the great economic and political changes of that age. One of these changes – urban transformation – does not concern us here. It is two others that do. Firstly, the bigger core cities of the hinterland – principally Aleppo, Damascus and Nablus – extended the range and deepened the penetration of their respective local area to counterbalance the fact that their incorporation into the world market, while bringing some advantages, had also caused damages. For example, Damascene merchants started pushing into the Jawln. Importantly, Ottoman ‘recentralization’ followed the same spatial logic of greater penetration, by urban actors, of ‘their’ local areas. Thus, the Jawln came under greater central state control not from some random direction, but from Damascus. Secondly, local areas were strengthening translocal networks.26 For instance, established Damascus and up-and-coming Haifa became more strongly connected – and as it happened, the Jawln was situated on their way and hence affected. Crucially, these strengthened translocal networks helped channel global economic actors and their intermediaries who were pushing from the littoral into the hinterland. For example, when the leading

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Beiruti Sursock merchant family in the 1880s thought about a railway line via the Jawln to Damascus, they did so through a dependency in Haifa. Translocal networks did not melt into an integrated region, however. They remained a patchwork: its areas were not equally connected, and while economic, political and cultural actors from one area travelled to others, virtually no business or party and no newspaper built a unified, multi-branch, region-wide network.27 Certainly, that patchwork did have a gravitation point: the place in Bild al-Shm where global and local/translocal actors and forces met was the port city of Beirut. By the late nineteenth century, this city was on the way to restructuring translocal networks into a new regional whole. But it did not quite get there. I describe that ‘patchwork region’ elsewhere, not in this chapter that focuses on the Jawln.28 This much I need to say before moving on to the next section, however. Beirut’s powerful pull affected translocal networks the way a magnet affects heavy metallic objects: they reorient themselves towards the magnet, but their arrangement remains recognizable. This happened for three political, historical and sociogeographical reasons. Beirut was brash and wonderfully dazzling but lacked sovereignty and military muscle, and hence could not even try to force regional integration. Characteristically, in 1888 it was Istanbul that created the vilayet of Beirut, not the city’s merchants lobbying the capital; besides, it cut into but did not gobble up the old Ottoman vilayet of Suriy (before 1865, Damascus). Second, the local areas were heavyweights. Take Damascus. It was settled as early as the seventh millennium bce; became capital (of an Aramaic kingdom) for the first time in the eleventh century bce, and most famously, from 661 to 750, was the capital of the Umayyad dynasty; at the latest from its Aramaic days it was a powerful trade center; and, as mentioned earlier, from the late seventeenth century it, like other shm cities, was at the heart of a powerful local area governed by a specifically and exclusively Damascene urban elite. Last but not least, some areas included hills, if not mountains, that were difficult to access and whose inhabitants were rather willful. In the Jawln, for instance, many inhabitants were Bedouin, whom the Ottomans certainly ‘pacified’ but some of

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whose tribal leaders retained considerable power; and while there were Damascene merchants in its capital, Quneitra, by the 1880s, these by no means had a firm grip. All told, to return to the above image, some of the spaces around the metallic objects were treacherous; the objects themselves were heavy; and the shiny magnet was not strong enough to pull the objects all the way to itself. In the rest of this chapter, I use Gottlieb Schumacher’s The Jaulân to take an exemplary look at the local and translocal parts of the above argument. I show how a local area – the one centring on Damascus into which the Jawln was integrated more closely in the late nineteenth century – developed; how this local area built stronger translocal links; and how it channeled imperial politico-administrative and global economic actors and was itself reshaped in the process.

Gottlieb Schumacher and The Jaulân (1888) Schumacher had already been to the Jawln for short periods of time in 1883 and 1884.29 But it was in 1885 that he conducted a topographical survey of its places, including visible archaeological remains. All these he listed in what constituted the last, longest chapter of his book The Jaulân, which, taking up 208 of its 273 pages of text, was entitled ‘Names and Places in the Jaulân, in Alphabetical Order, with the number of Inhabitants over ten years of age’. In the preceding five chapters, he gave an ‘Introduction’, then described the ‘Position, Extent, Limits and Administration of the Jaulân’, ‘The Nature of the Ground, Plants and Animals, Irrigation and Climate, of the Jaulân’, ‘The Inhabitants of the Jaulân’ and ‘Roads Communicating with the Jaulân’. The book ended with an ‘Index to the Names’ and opened with a detailed map that Schumacher had drawn with his own pen – i.e. first carefully triangulated with a theodolite in the field, come rain or shine. Schumacher did not trudge around the Jawln simply for his own amusement, however. He conducted his survey for the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas (DVEP; in English, German Society for the Exploration of the Holy Land), founded in 1877, which in 1886 published his original German account. Equally important, in his tour

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he was supported by the Ottoman government. And his account was translated, with the DVEP’s permission, into English on behalf of the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF; founded in 1865), soon after the original German version appeared, in 1888.30 In sum, Schumacher’s survey and book became possible because several actors pursued various interests, whose nature I will discuss further below. (As I will show in the fifth section, ‘Analysis’, both survey and book were not unique but illustrative and de facto part of a larger survey endeavor in Palestine.) What did Schumacher find on the Jawln? First and foremost, Bedouins and peasants. The former – about 8,300 people, besides the 5,750 who camped in the Jawln only seasonally – ‘graze their cattle, churn semen [clarified butter] from the milk, which they sell for a good price to the dealer, or exchange for linen, spice, and coffee, carry on besides some cattle dealing and horse breeding, and cultivate as much ground as is absolutely necessary for existence’. The ‘mode of life’ of the latter – 11,200 people, including several Druze and Alawite villages – ‘is extremely simple: the necessary corn for bread he cultivates himself, as well as vegetables (cucumbers and tomatoes), and some watermelons. He places much importance on cattle rearing, by means of which he principally lives; inasmuch as they yield him milk which he uses in both a sweet and a sour form; and also makes into butter and cheese. Rice and meat are dainties ...’.31 But that was not all. In Semakh, on the southern tip of the Sea of Galilee from where the Jawln starts to ascend eastwards, most of the 330 inhabitants were ‘immigrants from Algiers [who] speak some French; ... one also meets negroes from the Soudan. ... The village, like the country round the Ghôr, is the property of the Sultan; it is thereby exempt from taxation, and under a governor, and, consequently, in a much better condition than the neighbouring places’.32 On the Jawln Schumacher met Circassians from ‘Bulgaria [who] ... by indomitable industry and solid perseverance ... obtained a certain amount of prosperity, built villages, cultivated the fields, dried grass for the winter, and drove the Bedawîn out of their neighbourhood’.33 Schumacher liked them: they kept busy, were tough, and their villages ‘cheer[s] the eyes of the stranger with [their] clean and wide straight streets’. In

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‘one of the largest and best’ villages, El-Breikah, he rejoiced that the ‘chief of the collective Circassian villages’, an ‘eminent educated’ man, ‘welcomes European action and ardently desires the construction of a railway’.34 This, indeed, was an important reason for Schumacher’s tour, which he addressed squarely in his entry on the ‘Wâdyes-Semakh’ that leads from Semakh in a north-eastern direction to the top of the Jawln plateau.35 (Archaeology was another reason; in the next section I will discuss a broader third one – surveying as part of an European imperialist drive that, however, could also benefit the Ottomans – because for obvious reasons it was not mentioned in The Jaulân and thus does not belong in this descriptive section.) It was explicitly because of the possibility of building a railway from Damascus through the Jawln to Haifa, too, that Schumacher’s topographical survey, while made on behalf of the DVEP, was backed by Ottoman officials, from the Damascus-based vali of the vilayet of Syria and the mutasarrıf of the sanjak (provincial district) Hawrn down to the kaymakam of the kaymakamlık (provincial sub-district) Jawln whose seat was Quneitra.36 That last name, and the Ottomans in general, had until recently made little impression on the Jawln’s Bedouins. But as of late, the Ottoman government had reasserted its presence, ‘threaten[ing] ... the fighting tribes with extermination, which was, in fact, partially effected’ and ‘subdu[ing]’ them in the Jawln or in neighboring ‘Ajln, today’s northwestern Jordan, to where some were pushed’.37 Schumacher, who as noted had in 1885 become an Ottoman official, was also on the Jawln more a government enforcer than an outside observer. Accompanied by Ottoman guards, he threatened locals with prison to obtain information and guides, and in Ajlun, he had a Bedouin sheikh arrested for slighting him in his capacity as a ‘Government officer’.38 On the other hand, the new Ottoman policy towards the Bedouin was not simply coercive: ‘the heads of the tribes receive annually a considerable sum from the Government, and bind themselves thereby to the preservation of peace. If, however, a blood feud breaks out, the contending tribes fight beyond the boundary of Haurân and ‘Ajlûn, in the Hamâd. If, nevertheless, one party retire [sic] to this district the

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struggle can only be continued by permission of the Government, and this is never granted – such a retreat signifies defeat’.39 The Jawlns did not need to wait for the Ottoman government to have contact with the world beyond, though. One of the seasonally migrating Bedouins, the ‘Arab Turkoman Suwâdîyeh’, spent parts of each year around Aleppo. Merchants from Marjayoun who traded in the Jabal ‘Amil and the neighboring Jawln, Galilee and ‘Ajln bought from Jawln Bedouins and peasants the milk products that the plateau – rugged and volcanic but hence also fertile, and never very hot or dry due to its height and springs – was famous for. And ‘the object of the Fellah’s desires is the produce of the markets of the markets of Acre and Haifa, the fruit transport of which he has occasionally seen’.40 Last, that connection with the Mediterranean was sturdy, from the sea eastwards into the hinterland and vice versa. Camel caravans loaded with Hawrn grain and other agricultural (and some artisanal) goods were sent often by Damascene merchants westwards via the Jawln down to Acre and Haifa.41 And the locality that the Jawln was tied to most directly and strongly was Damascus, to its east. Not only was the kaymakamlık of the Jawln an administrative part of the vilayet of Syria, with the vali of Damascus overseeing the recent strengthening of government rule. Merchants too had started arriving from Damascus. In Quneitra their ‘booths ... [on the] chief streets ... have for sale pretty nearly all that is required by an Oriental citizen household. Once, and sometimes three times, a week caravans bring wares and dried fruit from Damascus; here they rest for one day, crossing the Jisr-Benât el-Yakûb [a bridge over the Jordan River north of the Sea of Galilee] on the following day in order to reach Western Palestine’.42

Analysis So much for a strict description of Schumacher, his tour and The Jaulân. I now turn to an analysis that is guided by the general questions posed in the introduction – what scales were at play in the Jawln; how did they constitute each other? – and that, moreover, will substantiate my specific argument about the importance of local and translocal ties.

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First: the local. The overwhelmingly non-urban nature of the Jawln’s inhabitants in 1885 reflected the overall demographics of the Ottoman Empire and indeed most parts of the world.43 For some Jawln peasants and Bedouins, the limits of the Jawln were the limits of the world they had seen with their own eyes. And while the term ‘Jawln’ – or similar names in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek – had since antiquity persistently referred to the same geographical unit and was a local identity marker, ‘the limits of the world as seen with one’s own eyes’ may for some peasants have been somehow more confined, to their village and its surroundings. Characteristically, Schumacher had various local guides for different parts of the plateau. On the other hand, quite a few of the 11,200 peasants whom Schumacher counted in 1885 could not possibly have been born on the Jawln, where in 1868 a European visitor counted only 11 settlements. Rather, most arrived in the 1880s, which is when the government strengthened its presence.44 As for the Bedouin, some living on the Jawln before the government started to reassert its presence lived somewhere else by 1885, e.g. in the ‘Ajln, expelled. And a bit less than half the Bedouin, 5,750 of a total of 14,050, seasonally migrated beyond the Jawln. Translocal is how one may call this last sort of tie, connecting two or a few locations and sometimes restructuring the space between them. Some of these ties were well-established and ongoing, like the Turkoman Suwadiya’s migration between the Jawln and Aleppo, which however was too weak to structure the space in between. Others were really one-time events: the Jawln’s Druze had arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Alawites most likely in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.45 However, both continued to be in touch with members of their heterodox Muslim communities who were settled elsewhere, often in hard-to-reach mountainous zones. The Druze lived mainly in southern Mount Lebanon (the Shuf), the Galilee and parts of the Hawrn (and in the nineteenth century, due to migration, also overseas). The Alawites were fewer, poorer and weaker even in their own habitat, the Alawite Mountains (in present-day northwestern Syria) and to their south and north, in Akkar and Tripoli (Lebanon) and in Antakya (Turkey).46 Lastly, the arrival of peasants

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in the Jawln after the government started to improve security shows that peasants were not always stationary.47 In addition, certain translocal ties grew in the nineteenth century. For the Jawln, the most crucial one linked Acre/Haifa with Damascus. The increase of trade here had a global reason: the steadily increasing integration of Ottoman Bild al-Shm into a world economic system that now was led by Europe and that relied strongly on maritime transport. The Damascus-Haifa/Acre route was not the only east-west link between Bild al-Shm’s hinterland and its coast. Two other ones linked Aleppo to Tripoli and to Alexandretta; the principal one tied Damascus to Beirut. In fact, some merchants – especially those based in Beirut, since the later nineteenth century Bild al-Shm’s biggest port and trade hub – worked not only on their axis to Damascus but on other trade axes too. Thus, it was the Beiruti Sursock trading family that – with the encouragement of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) – first developed an interest in a Damascus-Acre railway through the Jawln to facilitate grain transports from the hinterland to the sea. Indeed, in 1882 the Sursocks received a concession from the Ottoman vali of Damascus. They lost it the following year – but not before, in all likelihood, sending Schumacher together with three Ottoman soldiers and their own representative on a first research mission to the Jawln.48 (This was very possibly the 1883 trip that Schumacher mentioned, without naming the Sursocks, in The Jaulân.)49 As for local areas, they were strengthened furthermore by local, Damascene, merchants reacting to the negative effects of the economic changes resultant from incorporation into the world market. In the Jawln this process was encapsulated by the arrival of Damascene merchants in Quneitra. This was a knock-on effect of the world market. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which shortened sea-based transport between Europe and Asia, hit Damascus’ timehonored long-distance land-based trade, which had started to suffer already earlier in the century. In part, this loss was irreparable. But some Damascenes reacted by tightening economic ties with their local area and by extending their radius.50 These zones were to Damascus’ north – where around Hama and Homs it started to overlap with the radius of an even bigger trade city, Aleppo, which had fallen on hard

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times too – and to its east, south and west, i.e. the Syrian Desert, today’s northern and central Jordan, and the Bikaa Valley and Jawln Heights. The greater presence of traders, as well as peasants, became possible when those areas became more secure, which, as we will see next, happened when and because the Ottoman government strengthened its presence. ‘Imperial’: this is what we may call that impetus. It was Istanbul that designed and ordered it. Starting with the military and administrative reforms of sultans Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and especially Mahmud II (r. 1807–1839) and continuing with the broader societal reforms of the Tanzimat era (1839–1856) and of the subsequent decades including the reign of Abdülhamid II, the Ottoman center strengthened first itself and eventually its ties with its people. To be precise, in Bild al-Shm it was Egypt’s Muhammad ‘Al Pasha (r. 1805/11–1849), whose son Ibrhm Pasha occupied it from 1831 to 1840, who made a first stab at reforms. Upon returning, the Ottomans soon started to assert themselves, first in cities and peasant zones, then in less accessible and/or strongly beduin parts like today’s Jordan, from the late 1860s, and the Jawln, from the early 1880s.51 All told, while the Jawln escaped strengthened Ottoman rule for a bit longer than many other parts of Bild al-Shm, it did not remain an exception, and the motor behind its transformation was clearly imperial. But why was imperial action necessary in the first place? And what did it look like on the ground? I will start with the former question, and conclude this last section of my chapter with the latter one. Imperial Ottoman action was ‘defensive developmentalism’, meant to fortify the empire against an expanding Europe from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.52 It had two signature successes. In an age of colonialism and after c. 1870 during the yet most far-reaching, truly global wave of European imperialism, it helped prevent total European conquest, at the time the lot of most of Asia and Africa. Also, in a slow process that peaked in World War I, it helped to transform Ottoman society. But it also was a double failure. Since the early nineteenth century, European powers (Britain, Russia and France and, from the 1880s, Gemany) had developed strong political, financial, economic and cultural interests in the empire, which breached its sovereignty.

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(As I will note below, however, originally European know-how and Europeans also helped Ottoman reforms.) Moreover, the Ottoman Empire shrunk. In its Balkan provinces Britain and France supported and indeed helped create ‘nation-states’ that, starting with Greece in 1829/32 and often with Russian military help, became independent. No doubt, territorial losses were mitigated by the European balance of power. Britain and France refused to allow Russia (which slowly drove the Ottomans out of their Balkan core and the Caucasus and repeatedly threatened their Anatolian core) to totally gobble up the Ottoman Empire and thus to become too great a Euro-Asian power. But, especially when after c. 1870 the balance of power degenerated into full-scale imperialism, it also added to Ottoman losses, though ‘only’ in the southern peripheries.53 Worse for the Ottomans, about three decades into that imperialist wave – when they were almost entirely driven out of (southeast) Europe and (north) Africa, and basically confined to (western) Asia – Britain and France too started to think that the empire should disappear. Imperialist European in nature and global in scope: this, in short, was the threat that spurred imperial Ottoman reforms. This threat showed up even in a place as small and peripheral as the Jawln – and did so in more than one way. First and foremost it took the form of the imperial drive into that place. The ‘pacification’ and partial sedentarization of the Bedouin population that Schumacher described – and that had parallels in other parts of the Ottoman Empire in the later nineteenth century – was a crucial part of that drive. But Schumacher also illustrated that that drive was not only coercive, but included a new power-sharing arrangement between the state and Bedouin leaders, two processes illustrative of general trends in the Ottoman nineteenth century.54 Second, the imperialist European threat to the empire manifested itself in Semakh’s Algerian community: these people were refugees from the French who had occupied their country in 1830. After Damascus, the Galilee was home to the second biggest rural concentration of Algerians in the Ottoman Empire, about 3,750 people in 1885, most arriving from 1860 onwards, with Ottoman government support.55 In fact, as mentioned, Semakh’s Algerians cultivated the

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Ottoman sultan’s private land, which in turn illustrates how imperialist European pressure interacted with Ottoman domestic policies. In 1879, Sultan Abdülhamid II turned the so-called Hazine-i Hassa – an institution founded in 1855 to improve care of the sultan’s private properties – into a ministry that immediately started a ‘systematic colonization’ of land. Perhaps in reaction to the Ottomans’ massive territorial losses in southeastern Europe in the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War, and certainly to preclude large-scale European land purchases in Ottoman Asia, the Hazine-i Hassa bought land mostly in Iraq and Syria. It turned some lands – including, as Schumacher’s account suggests, those near Semakh – into model farms to show how to modernize agriculture and hence increase taxes. That latter step was crucial because the loss of the relatively rich Balkan provinces and the costs of defensive developmentalism made the Ottoman treasury more and more desperate for revenue; more specifically, all Hazine-i Hassa revenues went straight to Abdülhamid II,56 who likely for that reason encouraged the 1882 Sursock railway concession that would have better connected also some of his lands to the Mediterranean. A third instance of how the imperialist European threat to the empire showed even in as small and peripheral a place as the Jawln was the Circassians. Like the Algerians, they were refugees from European expansion – but twice over. Russian pressure and Ottoman willingness to accept the Circassians made them, from 1860 onwards, move from the Caucasus to the Balkans. From there they were expelled during the disastrous 1877–78 war that resulted not only in grave Ottoman territorial losses but also initiated a long-term mass exodus of ‘as many as two million Muslims’ from the Balkans and the Caucasus to what remained of the empire. Judging the Circassians to be tough warriors, Istanbul resettled many of them in Asian zones it wished to control better, including the Jawln and Jordan. Here they clashed with beduins, and helped agricultural expansion.57 Finally, imperialist Europe’s presence in the Ottoman Empire showed in the very act of Schumacher’s survey of the Jawln; and that act also illustrates how the cast of European actors in the Ottoman Empire started changing in the late 1800s. (Besides, as noted above, Schumacher’s life exemplarily reflected the accelerating globalization

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of the nineteenth century.)58 Without Schumacher ever saying so in The Jaulân, his trigonometric survey de facto formed part of an endeavor that dated back to 1871. From that year until 1878, the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) conducted a massive trigonometric survey known as the Survey of Western Palestine (SWP).59 (Intriguingly, Schumacher likely knew the SWP team as it spent two months, from December 1872 to February 1873, at the German colony in Haifa.)60 The SWP shows that the PEF did not operate in a political vacuum. From its foundation in 1865 until 1885, the PEF was ‘a research body and learned society’ as well as ‘a tool for extending British imperial influence and as a cover for obtaining strategic information to support British military interests’ east of the Suez Canal, which as noted was opened in 1869. Indeed, War Office funding was crucial for the SWP, and the surveyors were British military officers – including Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who much later, during 1911–14, would be Britain’s Consul General in Egypt.61 The SWP of the 1870s was made possible by Istanbul’s consent. But when London started weakening its traditional support of the Porte during the 1877–78 War and the negotiations that followed, the Ottomans felt betrayed enough to start turning towards Germany.62 This was a slow process and by no means conclusive; but it did show early on. In 1881, a military-backed PEF attempt to conduct a trigonometric survey of land to the east of the Jordan River faltered when the Ottomans withheld their support. By 1884, the PEF took the drastic measure of surreptitiously surveying to the east of the Jordan. But this adventure was limited to only 500 square miles; and in the following year, the PEF lost all British government funding for surveying.63 It was into this void that the German Schumacher stepped. Still, his tours were not exclusively German-Ottoman operations. While Istanbul backed him, and while the Deutscher Verein zur Erforschung Palästinas was Schumacher’s main financer, the PEF still ‘gave him a retainer on a casual basis’ for his surveys, and as noted above, translated his work.64 Characteristically, the map of the Jawln attached to Schumacher’s Jaulân read ‘Palestine Exploration Fund’ in its top right corner and ‘Western Survey’ in its blank western part.

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Not only surveying but also interest in a railway from the Mediterranean through the Jawln and the Hawrn to Damascus was imperialist in nature. Indeed, railway projects were a staple of imperialist politico-economic penetration in regions under direct occupation as well as in states that managed to stay sovereign like the Ottoman Empire.65 And also in this case, in the 1880s British and German interests still did not clash too openly. In 1890, British interest in the track that Schumacher had talked about materialized, with Istanbul granting a concession to a British company. And already two years earlier – incidentally the very year that the English translation of The Jaulân appeared – German investors started investing in what would become the famous Baghdad Railway, which London started to see as a real threat by the later 1890s.66 But there is another side to this coin: the Ottoman government support of Schumacher’s survey. This illustrates something else, namely that non-Europeans, too, could and did profit from originally European technologies like the railway or surveying, for that matter.67 As I already mentioned, the Ottomans were seriously interested in a Damascus-Jawln-Haifa railway line. In 1882 Sultan Abdülhamid II encouraged the Sursock railway concession. And it was the Ottoman government – not British entrepreneurs who received a concession in 1890 – that finally built the track, in 1905, as a sideline of the Hijaz Railway that it was constructing from Damascus to Medina.68 Put differently, although in the nineteenth century European state interests curtailed Ottoman sovereignty – or rather because of the Ottomans’ weakening relative to Europe – Istanbul used originally European know-how to reform itself and strengthen its grip on its provinces. Although this adaptation of knowledge happened increasingly through the education of Ottomans, Schumacher’s case illustrates that cooperation with Europeans continued, too. In itself, this point is wellknown.69 But Schumacher’s case also shows how in the process, the line between who was Ottoman and who was non-Ottoman sometimes became a bit blurry. While American by birth and in his consular activities, and German by origin, community and education, he was also Ottoman, formally by occupational affiliation and informally by the fact that he lived for many years in Ottoman Haifa. Hence, one

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might want to think of him not only as ‘bi-national’ or even ‘tri-national’ but also as a counterpart (however strongly Western-inclined), in an Ottoman province, of the transimperial Malhamé family, in the Ottoman capital.70 Haifa-Jawln-Damascus: This translocal tie – about which we already talked earlier on, in the context of economy – comes to mind also when we think about the second question I asked above, ‘what did imperial action look like on the ground?’ There is no doubt that in the nineteenth century it was the Ottoman center that ultimately gave orders; also, in the second part of that century, technological tools like photographs and telegraphs gave Istanbul some remote control. But Istanbul did not merely devise those reforms in continued interplay with societal and state actors in the provinces. Neither did it directly run the implementation of its reforms on the ground. Reform strategies and tactics, the indispensable nitty-gritty, everyday implementation of policy in the form of a new politics, for instance in the Jawln: this was determined by its vali, in Damascus, and by its mutasarrıf and kaymakam and regular officials and rank and file soldiers on the ground – the very people with whom Schumacher worked.71 Also, in ‘our’ case, Istanbul did not parachute somebody from far away into the Jawln. Rather, Ottoman officials from the vilayet of Syria worked with Schumacher, a man who for years had been living near the Jawln, in Haifa, where he had a local official Ottoman function.

Conclusion This chapter has set out to do two things. I conducted a general exercise, demonstrating how actions on various scales constitute each other in one place, may it be as small and peripheral as the Jawln. And from within that general exercise I developed a historically specific argument about late Ottoman Bild al-Shm: that in that transformative age and place, it was on the local and the translocal scale more than on the regional Bild al-Shm-wide scale that broad changes – including socioeconomic and political ones kick-started by external, global or imperial actors – were experienced most intensely.

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Let me conclude with a quick glance to the future of the 1880s that we, with decades of hindsight, know happened: the end of the Ottoman Empire and the division of Ottoman Bild al-Shm into four countries, French Mandatory Lebanon and Syria and British Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan. As historians like James Gelvin have pointed out, the end of the Ottoman era was a severe break but did not mean that there were no continuities.72 One continuity, I would argue, was the persisting importance of local, translocal and regional scales of action for the development of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Transjordan. No doubt, national frameworks of action now arose, and these helped to reshape the content and meaning of locales, translocal ties and the region. But the reverse was true too, especially in the 1920s, but even thereafter. How to write a history of the post-Ottoman era that revolves around these changing entwinements and their Ottoman pasts: that is a question for another project.73

Notes I would like to thank Liat Kozma and Avner Wishnitzer for their close reading and constructive critique of multiple drafts of this article; Tsering Wangyal Shawa, of Princeton University, for the maps he drew; and Leigh Chipman for her editing. This chapter draws on my current book project, tentatively entitled The Emergence of the Modern Middle East: A Transnational History. 1. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by doing: Notes about the making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History 6:2 (2008), p.172. 2. Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London, 1995), pp.25–44; Antony Hopkins (ed), Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (New York, 2006); Sebastian Conrad and Andreas Eckert, ‘Globalgeschichte, Globalisierung, multiple Modernen: Zur Geschichtsschreibung der modernen Welt’, in idem and Ulrike Freitag (eds), Globalgeschichte (Frankfurt, 2007), pp.28–9; Sebouh Aslanian, ‘The Voyage of the Santa Catharina: A global microhistory of the early modern Indian Ocean’, book project. See also e.g. Bruze Mazlish, The New Global History (London, 2006), pp.66–79 (chap. 7, ‘The global and the local’). 3. Gottlieb Schumacher, The Jaulân (London, 1888). German original: idem, ‘Der Dscholan’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 11 (1886), pp.165–368,

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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and 22 (1899), pp.178–88. Jawln: average altitude: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Golan_Heights#Geography (accessed 13 June, 2012). Surface: I converted Schumacher’s number (560 square miles): Schumacher, Jaulân, 9. A detailed physical geography is Adib Bagh, La région de Djolan (Damas, 1961 [Paris, 1958]), pp.17–298. Characteristically, Schumacher’s text is the only nineteenth-century source in the bibliography of D. Sourdel, ‘Al-Djawlan,’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Brill Online, 2012, www.referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/ encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-djawlan-SIM_2038 (accessed August 24, 2012). Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832–1914 (Jerusalem, 1994), pp.120–22 (also noting that Jacob Schumacher became US consul in 1872 and Gottlieb gave up the post in 1904); Alex Carmel, Die Siedlungen der württembergischen Templer in Palästina 1868–1918 (Stuttgart, 1973), esp. pp.36, 115, 121, 199–201; Yossi Ben-Artzi, ‘Gottlieb Schumacher – Maps and plans for the development of Haifa at the close of the nineteenth century’, Cathedra 73 (1994), pp.82–6 (Hebrew). For ‘the local’ after the empire, see e.g. Cyrus Schayegh, ‘The many worlds of Abud Yasin, or: What narcotics trafficking in the interwar Middle East can tell us about territorialization’, American Historical Review 116 (April 2011), pp.273–306 at pp.277–85. Empirically rich and conceptually incisive: James Reilly, ‘Regions and markets of Ottoman Syria: Comparisons and transformations’, Chronos 10 (2004), pp.111–44. Thomas Philipp, ‘Identities and loyalties in Bild al-Shm at the beginning of the early modern period’, in idem and Christoph Schumann (eds), From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon (Würburg, 2004), p.9, very usefully speaks of ‘locally integrated regions – that is to say, subregions within Bild al-Shm which show greater economic political and social integration within themselves than with neighboring areas’ for the pre-1831 period. Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman reform and the politics of notables’, in William Polk and Richard Chambers (eds), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1968), pp.41–68. Also: Ehud Toledano, ‘The emergence of Ottoman-local elites (1700–1900): A framework for research’, in Ilan Pappé and Moshe Ma’oz (eds), Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from Within (London, 1997), pp.145–62. Examples: Thomas Philipp, Acre: The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian City, 1730–1831 (New York, 2001); Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine. Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, 1995); Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism. The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge, 1983). Overviews: Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.54–73, 89–109; ükrü Haniolu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, 2008).

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R EADING GOTTLIEB SCHUMACHER’S THE JAULÂN (1888) 45 10. See e.g. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber, ‘Introduction,’ in idem (eds), The Empire and the City. Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut, 2002), pp.10n27, 11n29. This reading was rooted in late nineteenth-century ‘Ottoman orientalism’ and also influenced Cold War modernization theory readings of Turkey versus the Arab world: Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107:3 (2002), pp.768–96; Nathan Citino, ‘The Ottoman legacy in Cold War modernization’, International Journal of Middle East Studies [IJMES] 40 (2008), pp.279–97. 11. Hanssen et al., ‘Introduction’, pp.1–25. In addition, other scholars have shown how people’s reaction to and action upon state reforms helped shape policy outcomes: e.g. Milen Petrov, ‘Everyday forms of compliance: Subaltern reaction to Ottoman reforms, 1864–68’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004), pp.730–59; also: Khaled Fahmy, ‘The police and the people in nineteenth-century Egypt’, Die Welt des Islams 39:3 (1999), pp.340–77. 12. Eugene Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 1999); see also Maurus Reinkowski, Die Dinge der Ordnung. Eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die osmanische Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2005). Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’; see also Selim Deringil, The WellProtected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London, 1998). 13. Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut. The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, 2005); Leila Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge MA, 1983); Stefan Weber, Damascus: Ottoman Modernity and Urban Transformation (1808–1918) (Aarhus, 2009); Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Wiesbaden, 1985); Khoury, Urban Notables; idem, ‘The urban notables paradigm revisited’, Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerannée 55–56:1–2 (1990), pp.215–28. Changes within the notable elite composition: e.g. Adel Manna, ‘Continuity and change in the socio-political elite in Palestine during the late Ottoman period’, in Thomas Philipp (ed), The Syrian Land in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century (Stuttgart, 1992), pp.69–89. 14. In the words of Elizabeth Thompson, ‘Ottoman political reform in the provinces: The Damascus Advisory Council in 1844–1845’, IJMES 25:3 (1993), p.472, ‘the Ottoman state [and] ... local elites ... were ... unequal parties to self-serving bargains’. 15. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System 4 vols. (New York, 1974, 1980, 1989; Berkeley, 2011). 16. Reat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany, 1988); evket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913 (Cambridge, 1987); two special issues of Review, the

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17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST journal of the Fernand Braudel Center dealt with world systems analysis: ‘Ottoman Empire: Nineteenth-century transformations’, in 11:2 (1988), and ‘Port-cities of the Eastern Mediterranean 1800–1914’, in 16:4 (1993). A strong statement that also highlights the resilience of hinterland (mainly Muslim) traders: Faruk Tabak, ‘Local merchants in peripheral areas of the Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the long nineteenth century’, Review 11:2 (1988), pp.179–214. Also: Kasaba, Ottoman Empire, 85. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (London, 1981); Donald Quataert, ‘Part IV: The age of reform, 1812–1914’, in Halil Inalcık with Donald Quataert (eds), The Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 1994), vol. II, pp.759–944; Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine; Reilly, ‘Regions’; Louise Schilcher, ‘The grain economy of late Ottoman Syria and the issue of large-scale industrialization’, in Çağlar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (eds), Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany, 1991), pp.173–95; Sherry Vatter, ‘Militant journeymen in nineteenth-century Damascus: Implications for the Middle Eastern labor history agenda’, in Zachary Lockman (ed), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East (Albany, 1994), pp.1–20. Lamia Shehadeh, ‘The name of Syria in ancient and modern usage’, in Adel Beshara (ed), The Origins of Syrian Nationhood (London, 2011), pp.17–21; Fruma Zachs, The Making of Syrian Identity (Leiden, 2005), pp.246–49. Dominique Chevallier, ‘Consciences syriennes et représentations cartographiques à la fin du dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècles’, in Syrian Land, 4. Arabism: historiographic overview: Rashid Khalidi, ‘Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria before 1914: A Reassessment’, in idem et al. (eds), The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York, 1991), pp.50–69. Students in Istanbul: e.g. from Damascus: Khlid al-‘Azm, Mudhakkirt Khlid al-‘Azm (Beirut, 1972), vol. I, pp.35–37; from Aleppo: Maktab al-dirst al-suriyya wa-l-’arabiyya, Man huwa fi Suriyy 1951 (Damascus, 1951), pp. 9–10, entry on Jamil l Ibrhim Bsh; from Tripoli: Fawzi al-Qwuqchi, Mudhakkirt Fawzi al-Qwuqchi, 1912–1932 (Beirut, 1975), vol. I, pp.11–12. Bureaucrats: e.g. Man huwa, p.364, entry on ‘Abd al-Rahmn Jalni who worked in Aleppo, Beirut, Damascus, Kirkuk, Deir al-Zor, Tripoli and Beirut, or ibid, pp.293–94, on Jamil al-Dahhn who worked in Ankara, Izmir and Libya as well as Damascus, Jerusalem and Aleppo. Shehadeh, ‘Name’, 17–20. Butrus al-Bustni, Nafir Suriyy (Beirut, 1990 [1860–61]), p.21. Examples of awtn: ibid, p.14. Arnon Groiss, ‘Communalism as a factor in the rise of the Syria idea in the 1800s and the early 1900s’, in Origins of Syrian Nationhood, p.39.

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R EADING GOTTLIEB SCHUMACHER’S THE JAULÂN (1888) 47 25. There are notable exceptions. One is James Reilly, e.g. idem, ‘Regions’, p.139, who shows up the economic resilience of local areas and argues that also by the late Ottoman Empire ‘Syria was developing into an interconnected market’ (my italics). The other is Thomas Philipp, ‘Bild al-Šm in the modern period. Integration into the Ottoman Empire and new relations with Europe’, Arabica 51:4 (2004), pp.401–18 at p.406 (covering the entire Ottoman period), who argues that it is ‘legitimate and meaningful to speak of the whole region of Bilad al-Sham as one entity’. My approach differs, but I think somehow less than on first sight. For Philipp (of course) notes that ‘Bild al-Šm had never during Muslim history been a political entity as such’ (ibid, p.406), and sometimes defines unity outwardly, i.e. through the difference between Bild al-Shm’s, Egypt’s and Mesopotamia’s integration into the Ottoman Empire (ibid, p.406), while my focus is region-internal. Still, following his above-mentioned outline of ‘locally integrated regions’ in the early modern period (Philipp, ‘Identities’, p. 9), he does (explicitly) assign more region-building power to the nineteenth-century transformations than I do. 26. For a different take on translocality, see Ulrike Freitag and Achim von Oppen, ‘Introduction: ‘Translocality:’ An approach to connection and transfer in area studies’, in idem (eds), Translocality (Leiden, 2010), pp.1–21. 27. For the Franco-British-owned, Istanbul-headquartered Banque Impériale Ottomane, see Christopher Clay, ‘The origins of modern banking in the Levant: The branch network of the Imperial Ottoman Bank, 1890–1914’, IJMES 26 (1994), pp.589–614; other than Beirut (1863), Damascus (1875) and Aleppo (1893), the other 12 shmi branches opened between 1904 and 1904; all together amounted to one-sixth of all branches: ibid, p.610. After 1908, the CUP had local shmi branches, but it too was headquartered in Istanbul. 28. Schayegh, ‘Emergence’, ch. 1. 29. Schumacher, Jaulân, pp.8, 40–1. 30. Such Ottoman backing was not unique: Hans-Jürgen Kornrumpf, ‘Zur historischen Kartographie von Anatolien im 19. Jahrhundert’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgendlandes 82 (1992), pp.235–44 at p.235, noted that Europeans who ‘carried out the [cartographic] journeys’ in the Ottoman Empire after around 1850 did so ‘often with the approval and also the support of the Turkish authorities’. Ottoman officials also conducted their own surveys; a known one – though a description, not a trigonometric survey – was Rafq al-Tamm and Muḥammad Bahjt, Wilyat Bayrt 2 vols. (Jdaydat al-Matn, 1979 [1916]). 31. Quotes: Schumacher, Jaulân, pp.53–4, 45. Population figures (only people from the age of ten): ibid, p.61. Schumacher included in the number of

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32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST Bedouins the ‘Ghawârneh’, whom he despised as ‘the gipsy tribe among the Bedawîn’, living right off the Jawln’s slope near the then still existing Lake Hula (a recent, fascinating article on them is Sliman Khawalde and Dan Rabinowitz, ‘The tribe that never was: Segmentary narratives amongst the Ghawarna of Galilee’, Journal of Anthropological Research 58:2 (2002), pp.225–43). Schumacher called the Alawites ‘Ansarîyeh’: idem, Jaulân, p.59. There also were some Arab-speaking Christians, and some Armenians, living in the Jawln at the time: Bagh, Djolan, pp.353–6. Schumacher, Jaulân, p.238. I have not been able to find secondary literature on the Sudanese population. Ibid, p.57. Ibid, pp.113–14. Its ‘importance for Jaulân has already been mentioned, and correctly recognized by Seetzen and De Bertou (1839); and is, indeed, of priceless significance for a plan of railway and carriage road. No other valley of the upper Jordan land is suitable for this in an equal degree, for all the others are either narrower, or have a too precipitous crossing up the plateau’: ibid, pp.266–7. Ibid, p.5. Ibid, pp.51, 49. Ibid, p.6; Gottlieb Schumacher, Northern ‘Ajlûn (London, 1890) pp.34 (quote), 33–7. For him and for the arrested sheikh Schumacher’s government, affiliation was intermingled with his Christian Europeanness: ‘I trust that [the sheikh] may have learned by this time to treat even the much hated European traveller with proper respect. ... [T]he Sheikh now declares that the “old times” are evidently past and gone, and laments that he has been compelled in his old age “to salute even a Franji’s hat”’: Ibid, p.36. See also Kornrumpf, ‘Kartographie’, p.238n9–10. Schumacher, Jaulân, p.52. Ibid, pp.55, 50. This was a time-honored route, known since antiquity as the via maris. Traces in the Jawln: ibid, pp.62–3. Ibid, p.208. Population: Donald Quataert, ‘Population’, in The Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. II, pp.777–97. 1868: Josias Porter, Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine (London, 1868), p.439. For certain – but by no means most – Bedouin tribes driving peasants away before the re-strengthening of the government, see Taysir Khalaf, Wath’iq ‘uthmniyya hawla al-Jawln (Damascus, 2006), p.56 (example: pp.96–106); ibid, pp.55–6, also states that peasants had

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45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

left because of the greed of some landlords, too (example: ibid, pp.58–62); ibid, pp.111–12, is a document about Quneitra being almost empty in 1850. Date of government strengthening (and the Jawln’s agriculture improving): ibid., p.126. Schumacher, Jaulân, p.59. Alawites’ arrival: Asher Kaufman, ‘ “Let sleeping dogs lie”: On Ghajar and other anomalies in the Syria-Lebanon-Israel triborder area’, Middle East Journal 63:4 (2009), p.541; Bagh, Djolan, p.345. A good example of these continuing ties is the (ultimately aborted) rallying of Druze in the (now Lebanese) Shuf when the Druze of the Jawln were attacked by Circassians and Kurds in 1895: Despatch No. 76 from Drummond Hay, Consul-General, Beyrout, to Sir Philip Currie, British Ambassador, Constantinople, 6 December 1895, FO195/1866, reprinted in Bejtullah Destani (ed), Minorities in the Middle East. Druze Communities 1840–1974 (London, 2006), vol. III, pp.192–4. Reat Kasaba, ‘Migrant labor in Western Anatolia’, in Keyder and Tabak (eds), Landholding, pp.113–21, esp. p.116. Idem, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, 2009), also shows that already in premodern times peasants sometimes migrated between regions. See also Amy Singer, ‘Peasant migration: Law and practice in early Ottoman Palestine’, New Perspectives on Turkey 8 (1992), pp.49–65. ‘Das Eisenbahnprojekt ‘Acca (Haifa) – Djisr elmedjâmi’a, Palästina’, Die Warte des Tempels (October 11, 1883), reprinted in Alex Carmel, PalästinaChronik (Stuttgart, 1983), vol. II, p.14. See also Yair Safran and Tamir Goren, ‘Ideas and plans to construct a railroad in Northern Palestine in the late Ottoman period’, Middle Eastern Studies 46:5 (2010), p.754, who quote the former source but only mention the Sursocks. For the early nineteenthcentury origins of this increase in trade, see Philipp, Acre. See n29. James Reilly, ‘Origins of Peripheral Capitalism in the Damascus Region, 1830–1914’, (PhD diss., Georgetown, 1987), 142. Also: Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 reprinted 2nd ed. (London, 2002), chaps. 3, 6, 10; Zouhair Ghazzal, L’économie politique de Damas durant le dix-neuvième siècle. Structures traditionelles et capitalisme (Damascus, 1993). Overviews: William Cleveland and Martin Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East 4th ed. (Boulder, 2009), pp.110–47; Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History (New York, 2011), pp.75–81. Case study overview: Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine (Princeton, 2008), pp.71–100. Jordan: Rogan, Frontiers. Jawln: Taysir, Wath’iq, p.126. James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East (New York, 2005), pp.73–87. Also: Cleveland and Bunton, History. Geo-strategic context and impetus for

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state reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Michael Reynolds, Shattering Empires (Cambridge, 2011). 53. Confined on the continent by the terms of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, post-Napoleonic France looked overseas to strengthen itself, conquering Algeria in 1830. In 1881, it conquered Tunisia; in 1912, Italy took Libya, the only part of North Africa still under direct Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century. Britain took control (and governed in various forms) Aden in 1839, Cyprus in 1878, Egypt in 1882 and Kuwait in 1899. 54. For ‘how tribal interests were integrated first into Ottoman state institutions, then [in the nineteenth century] into the reformed institutions, and ultimately into the early republican structures’, that is, for ‘the end of nomadism [and the] survival of tribalism’ in the nineteenth century, see Kasaba, Moveable Empire (quotes: pp.7–8, 116); also: Matthew Ellis, ‘Between Empire and Nation. The Emergence of Egypt’s Libyan Borderland, 1841–1911’, (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), pp.192–336; Yonca Koeksal, ‘Coercion and mediation: Centralization and sedentarization of tribes in the Ottoman Empire’, Middle Eastern Studies 42:3 (2006), pp.469–91. For the quasi-colonial nineteenth-century Ottoman attitude to Bedouin, see Selim Deringil, ‘ “They live in a state of nomadism and savagery”: The late Ottoman Empire and the post-colonial debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:2 (2003), pp.311–42 (for this aspect, see also Kasaba, Moveable Empire, pp.103–8, 113–4). A now classic study that focuses on the success of Ottoman recentralization in a tribal periphery is Rogan, Frontiers. Studies about the fate of Bedouin near the Jawln include Seth Frantzman and Ruth Kark, ‘Bedouin settlement in late Ottoman and British Mandatory Palestine’, New Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011), pp.1–22; Iris Agmon, ‘The bedouin tribes of the Hula and Beysn Valleys at the end of Ottoman rule’, Cathedra 45 (1987), pp.87–102 (in Hebrew); Rohn Eloul, Culture Change in a Bedouin Tribe. The ‘Arab of al-Hert, Lower Galilee, A.D. 1790–1977 (Ann Arbor, 2010). Conceptually interesting – tracing changes in Ottoman Bedouin policy from military (1860s) to infrastructural (1890s) tools, including the build-up of Beersheba – is Yasemin Avcı, ‘The application of Tanzimat in the desert: The bedouins and the creation of a new town in Southern Palestine (1860–1914)’, Middle Eastern Studies 45:6 (2009), pp.969–83. 55. Pierre Bardin, Algériens et Tunisiens dans l’Empire Ottoman de 1848 à 1914 (Paris, 1979), p.16. The main waves of Algerians into the Ottoman Empire: ibid, pp.5–8, 128–32. Two main concentrations in the Galilee: ibid, pp.15–17 (he does not mention Semakh, though). Other communities grew in Aleppo, Beirut, Haifa, Lattakiyya and Saida. See also Mustafa Abbasi, ‘From Algeria to Palestine: the Algerian community in the Galilee from the late Ottoman period until 1948’, Maghreb Review 28:1 (2003), pp.41–59.

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R EADING GOTTLIEB SCHUMACHER’S THE JAULÂN (1888) 51 56. François Georgeon, Abdülhamid II. Le sultan caliphe (1876–1909) (Paris, 2003), pp.164–9, quote p.166. More and more autocratic, Abdülhamid II needed massive personal revenue – which Georgeon, Abdülhamid II, p.169, estimates to have amounted to 6–10 per cent of the overall Ottoman state revenue – to tie the employees of his ballooning state apparatus to himself. See also Roy Fischel and Ruth Kark, ‘Sultan Abdülhamid II and Palestine: Private lands and imperial policy’, New Perspectives on Turkey 39 (2008), pp.129–166. For the question of how European pressure and Ottoman reforms interacted, see also the fascinating Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: FrenchOttoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle, 2008). 57. Quote: Kasaba, Moveable Empire, p.117. Clashes with Bedouins: Schumacher, Jaulân, pp.57–8. For a broader discussion of the Ottomans’ policy towards and use of refugees, see ibid, pp.108–16. (Some Circassians later also clashed with the central government, however: ibid, p.118.) For Jordan, see Rogan, Frontiers, pp.72–76. For the Tscherkess in particular, see Jawdat Hilmi Nshkho, Trikh al-tshirkiss (al-adigh) wa-l-shishn fi liw’ai Hawrn wa-lBalq’ (1878–1920) (Amman, 1995), esp. pp.39–60, and Kemal Karpat, ‘The status of the Muslim under European rule: The eviction and settlement of the Çerkes’, in idem, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History (Leiden, 2002), pp.647–75. For another case study involving Georgians, whom the empire indeed tried to attract in 1878, see Oktay Özel, ‘Migration and power politics: the settlement of Georgian immigrants in Turkey (1878– 1908)’, Middle Eastern Studies 46:4 (2010), pp.477–96. 58. The trans-continental moves that gave shape to Schumacher’s life exemplify how in the nineteenth century globalization sped up. As mentioned, Schumacher and his family made half a dozen life-changing moves: in 1848, his parents moved from Germany to the USA; in 1869, the family moved from there to Palestine; and in 1871, 1881, 1918 and 1924 Schumacher moved twice to Germany and back to Palestine. As interesting – and in its diversity illustrative of the broad overlap between ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’ processes – is the varied reasons for those moves. Some were political: in 1848/49, Schumacher’s parents were two of countless other Germans and Europeans who fled to the United States when the Völkerfrühling started to falter. Others were religious: the Templers’s decision to translate an old Christian fascination with the Holy Land into actual activities there – whether in the form of large-scale settlements and missionary activities – was part of a nineteenth-century trend (and of a more general European ‘peaceful crusade’ in Palestine that had strong political repercussions). Yet others were socio-educational (Schumacher’s study in Germany, a powerhouse of science from the late nineteenth century that attracted many foreign students), or as all-encompassing as World War I.

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A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST For European migrants and visitors in and following 1848, see e.g. Timothy Roberts, Distant Revolutions. 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville, 2009). For the ‘peaceful crusade,’ see Alexander Schölch, Palästina im Umbruch, 1856–1882: Untersuchungen zur wirtschaftlichen und sozio-politischen Entwicklung (Stuttgart, 1986 [English, 1993]). For Christian religious activities in Palestine, see Ruth Kark, ‘Missionary societies in the Holy Land in an international context’, in Jakob Eisler (ed), Deutsche in Palästina und ihr Anteil an der Modernisierung des Landes (Wiesbaden, 2008), pp.14–29 (and seven additional contributions on pp.1–101); Martin Tamcke et al. (eds), Christian Witness Between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East (Berlin, 2006); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, 2008). As for the Templer, they had from the start envisioned settlement in the Holy Land; already in 1858, an exploratory committee visited Jaffa, and in 1867, a few members made a badly organized settlement attempt. (Another unsuccessful religiously motivated settlement attempt was made by 170 Americans in 1866 in Jaffa: Christoph Paulus, ‘Die Tempelcolonien in Palästina’, Zeitschrift des deutschen PalästinaVereins 6 (1883), pp.32–3.) After 1868, the Templer also built communities near Jaffa (‘Sarona’), in Jerusalem’s Valley of Refaim, near Lod (‘Wilhelma’), near Sarona (‘Valhalla’) and in the Galilee (‘Betlehem of Galilee’). The community split in 1874; the Evangelical proselytes, who from 1878 called themselves Tempelverein, in 1907 built a separate settlement in the Galilee (‘Waldheim’). Overviews: Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘Templars as proto-Zionists? The German Colony in late Ottoman Haifa’, Journal of Palestine Studies 28:4 (1999), pp.40–54; Ruth Kark and Seth Frantzman, ‘Consuls, demography and land in Palestine: German-Americans in the Haifa Templar colony’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 126:2 (2010), pp.153–67; Carmel, Siedlungen; also: Yossi Ben Artzi, Mi-Germania le-eretz ha-kodesh (Jerusalem, 1996); older: Hans Seibt, Moderne Kolonisation in Palästina. 1. Teil: Die Kolonisation der deutschen ‘Templer’ (Stuttgart, 1933). On a related note, the complex local/national/trans-national nature of the Templer – southwestern Germans present also in other parts of Germany and beyond Germany, for instance in the USA – illustrates how much more (and less) than simply ‘national’ nineteenth-century ‘nation-building’ was. See Krista O’Donnell et al. (eds), The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness (Ann Arbor, 2005); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, 1997); Sebastian Conrad, ‘Globalization effects: mobility and nation in imperial Germany, 1880–1914’, Journal of Global History 3:1 (2008), pp.43–66.

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R EADING GOTTLIEB SCHUMACHER’S THE JAULÂN (1888) 53 59. It was published as the ten-volume Survey of Western Palestine, 1882–1889 (hereafter, SWP) (London, 1881–89), with volume 10 being ‘A Survey of Eastern Palestine, 1881’. Into the 1920s, PEF maps were ‘the most accurate and detailed existing’ for Palestine: Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine (London, 2004), p.135. 60. SWP, vol. I, p.25. Also, Schumacher’s Jaulân like the SWP included, as mentioned further above, information about topography, archaeology and hydrography. Various geographical surveys were conducted at the time, including Otto Ankel, Grundzüge der Landesnatur des Westjordanlandes (Frankfurt a.M, 1887). See also Dov Gavish, ‘French cartographers of the Holy Land in the nineteenth century’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 126 (1994), pp.24–31, which focuses on a 1870 map of Northern Palestine. 61. Quote: John Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (London, 2000), p.3. The PEF-military nexus: ibid, pp.95–128 (for the history of the survey see also: SWP, I:23–39). Hence, Schumacher, Jaulân, as much as the SWP obviously was not an objective, full mirror of the area it surveyed. As all official maps and surveys, it spoke ‘preeminently a language of power’: John Harley, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, 1988), p.301. 62. Very readable overview: Georgeon, Abdülhamid II, 79–123. Recent: Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express. The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (Cambridge MA, 2010). 63. Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem, pp.135–46, 150. At this point, it started focusing on archaeology. 64. Ibid, p.151. Only in 1896, when British-German rivalry intensified also in the Ottoman Empire, did Schumacher stop working with the British: ibid, p.151. For the DVEP, see Haim Goren, ‘Zieht hin und erforscht das Land’. Die deutsche Palästinaforschung im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2003), pp.317–44. 65. Classic: Daniel Headrick, Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York, 1988). Analysis of railways’ role and effects in the Ottoman Empire: Donald Quataert, ‘Transportation’, in The Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. II, pp.804–15. Detailed historic discussion of railway projects in the Ottoman Empire: Eleuthère Eleftériadès, Les chemins de fer en Syrie et au Liban (Beirut, 1944). 66. David Kushner, ‘The Haifa–Damascus railway: The British stage (1890– 1902)’, in Caesar E. Farah (ed), Decision Making and Change in the Ottoman Empire (Lanham, 1993), pp.193–213; Jonathan McMurray, Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire, and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway (Westport, 2001); also: McMeekin, Berlin-Baghdad Express; Jacob Landau,

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67.

68.

69.

70. 71.

72.

73.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST The Hejaz Railway and the Muslim Pilgrimage: A Case of Ottoman Political Propaganda (Detroit, 1979), including p.10n12 for older bibliography. For overviews, see the articles in the section ‘Highways, railroads, telegraphs and seaports: The physical means of integration’, in Thomas Philipp and Birgit Schäbler (eds), The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation (Stuttgart, 1998), pp.1–154. A particularly interesting study is Yakup Bektas, ‘The Sultan’s messenger. Cultural constructions of Ottoman telegraphy, 1847–1880’, Technology and Culture 41:4 (2000), pp.669–96. For how these technologies expedited the introduction of new time measurement, see Avner Wishnitzer, ‘ “Our time:” On the durability of the alaturka hour system in the late Ottoman Empire’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 16:1–2 (2010), p.50 (which, however, as the title suggests, focuses on the alaturka hour system). One reason why the project did not take off in the 1890s was that French businessmen and Beiruti merchants succeeded in curtailing it, fearing it as competition to the French-financed Beirut-Damascus railway built in 1895. Overview: Johnny Mansur, Al-khatt al-hadidi al-hijzi. Trikh wa-tatawwur qitr Dar‘–Haif (Jerusalem, 2008). See also: Linda Schilcher, ‘Railways in the political economy of Southern Syria 1890–1925’, in Syrian Land, pp.97–112; Landau, Hejaz Railway, p.12n14 for older bibliography. From the late nineteenth century, particularly important were German military missions, in the 1880s under Colmar von der Goltz and from 1913–1918 under Otto Liman von Sanders; for the latter, see his autobiographical Fünf Jahre Türkei (Berlin, 1920). Ottoman educational policy: Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2002). See Jens Hanssen, ‘ “Malhamé-Malfamé”: Levantine elite and transimperial networks on the eve of the Young Turk revolution’, IJMES 43:1 (2011), 25–48. Case study: David Kushner, To Be Governor of Jerusalem: The City and District during the Time of Ali Ekrem Bey, 1906–1908 (Istanbul, 2005). Technologies: see n67. Gelvin, Modern Middle East, pp.223–4. Example of continuities: Andrew Arsan, “ ‘This is the age of associations”: Committees, petitions, and the roots of interwar Middle Eastern internationalism’, Journal of Global History 7 (2012), pp.166–88. Incisive (but with a different geographical focus on Turkey/Greece): Christine Philliou, ‘The Ottoman Empire between successors: Thinking from 1821 to 1922’, in Jorgen Nielsen (ed), Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Leiden, 2012), pp.29–46. Schayegh, ‘Emergence’, chaps. 3–5.

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CHAPTER 2 THE EMIR AND THE SEA: THE R ISE AND FALL OF ‘ABDULL¯ AHI MUHA MM AD B. ‘ALI ¯ ‘ABDAŠŠAKU ¯R , HAR ÄR’S L AST EMIR (1885–1887) Avishai Ben-Dror

This chapter examines the short-lived reign of ‘Abdullhi Muhammad b. ‘Al ‘Abdaššakr, the last emir of Harär from 1885 to 1887, through the prism of globalization. Harär, one of the most ancient cities in East Africa, is located east of Addis Ababa, on the southeastern tip of the plateau that extends from the Rift Valley to the plains of the Ogaden Desert.1 The historical events that took place in the latter part of the nineteenth century turned the town into a cultural and religious meeting point of global powers and their ‘agents’ – Muslims and Christians from Africa as well as Europeans. I examine this episode drawing on African historian Fredrick Cooper’s view of how to study globalization in African societies: namely, to focus on something that is ‘more than local and less than global’.2 Consequently, this text weaves Harär’s local history during ‘Abdullhi’s reign into the history of global developments in a region to which the city has been linked since its founding in the thirteenth

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Illustration 2.1

A map of Ethiopia

century – the Somali coast and the cities of Zeila and Berbera. A focus on the interaction between the Somali coast – the portal for globalization trends that seeped in from ‘the sea’ – and the Muslim community of Harär can help us to better understand ‘Abdullhi’s reign and his struggle with ‘the sea’ and its agents of change. From the 1860s, the improvement of maritime transportation and the subsequent development of trade and transport routes in the Red Sea gave rise to a rapid increase in trade along the coasts of the Horn of Africa and more generally in the northwestern regions of the Indian Ocean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 expedited

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the development of global trade routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and between the European empires and their colonies along the coasts of Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The Red Sea, once a ‘side street of maritime commerce’, quickly became the ‘highway to the East’.3 Indeed, that body of water, and the northwestern regions of the Indian Ocean in general, became important regional centers for the now world-wide movement of capital and goods (including, here, human trafficking) and of workers and merchants, as well as for service providers who settled in the port cities of the Red Sea.4 These globalization phenomena were linked to increasingly acute colonial rivalries in the Gulf of Aden and the southern Red Sea, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Britain had been in control of Aden since 1839, France aspired to gain power in the area of Djibouti, establishing a foothold in 1883, and in 1869 Italy consolidated its hold on the port city of Assab. Another actor was Khedive Ism‘l, the ruler of Egypt between 1863 and 1879, who harbored his own imperial ambitions in Africa. Ism‘l’s armies deepened their control of the Red Sea through Sudan. In 1865, they occupied the port cities of Sawákin in Sudan and Massawa (in what is currently Eritrea). Ten years later, in 1875, Ism‘l also took control of the port cities of Zeila, Berbera, Tadjoura and Bulhar, as far as Cape Guardafui (Egyptian sovereignty over the ports of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden was ratified in an agreement signed between the British government and the Khedivate in 1877, and became a feature of the colonial map of the region).5 And finally, in October 1875, two months after the takeover of Zeila, an Egyptian force numbering 1,200 soldiers departed from the city to occupy the Emirate of Harär. The Egyptian occupation sped up Harär’s integration into the global system of commerce and transport that had begun enveloping the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, too, since the 1860s.6 This new global era in the city’s history involved new standards of government, society and religion. This included the influx of European merchants and missionaries who settled in Harär; at the same time, the Egyptians aspired to convert the Oromo people, who lived in the vicinity of Harär, to Islam and to spread what they called ‘the right Islam’ among Harär’s Muslim

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denizens. The Egyptians identified re-Islamization with modernization and with their vision of a ‘civilizing mission’, merging a hybrid message of ‘cultured’ Muslim colonialism and part of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman colonial ideas.7 The Egyptian occupation, which was the first phase in the process of Harär’s loss of sovereignty, came to an end on 20 May 1885, with the withdrawal of the Egyptian occupation force that had taken control of the city a decade earlier. Soon thereafter, in May 1885, Britain appointed ‘Abdullhi to the position of emir. He quickly became enmeshed in a series of political imbroglios, both inside and outside the emirate, that hastened the conclusion of his rule. In January 1887, an army led by Menelik, the sovereign of the Ethiopian kingdom of Shewa, defeated the Emir’s army. Harär was annexed by Ethiopia, and has since maintained its status as one of the country’s political and economic centers. The ‘Abdullhi Emirate period occupies a place of relatively minor significance in historical research on Harär.8 The period from 1885 to 1887 is generally thought of as a brief interim between the two ‘big’ events mentioned above, i.e. the Egyptian and the Ethiopian occupations of Harär in 1875 and in 1887, respectively, and the Emir’s name often goes unmentioned. Equally problematically, when scholars do refer to ‘Abdullhi, they do so mostly in negative terms, for example describing him as ‘weak’, ‘fanatic’, or as an ‘obsessive reactionary’.9 Moreover, scholars focus on ‘local’ history and tend to sever Harär artificially from the regional structures that tied it to the coastal cities of Zeila and Berbera on the Somali coast, as well as to the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. However, although the Abdullhi Emirate was a short interlude, and while its historians have focused on its local circumstances, it has considerable potential for historical analysis. Here, I focus on the fact that ‘Abdullhi’s story took place when, for the first time in the history of Harär, local and global processes interlocked. The outside actors of the globalization processes discussed here were the afore-mentioned ‘agents’ of African and European colonialism: Muslim Egyptian officers and preachers, European merchants and missionaries. These deeply affected the political, social and economic alignments in Harär and along the Somali coast from 1875.

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As I will show, this was the case all the more because ‘Abdullhi thought about Harär and its relationships with its African and Somali coastal surroundings solely through a ‘local’ and regional lens. To his great regret, the political and economic conditions that shaped the universe of his predecessors until 1875 had disappeared a decade later. But it was not only that ‘Abdullhi had to deal with globalization ‘agents’ in Harär and along the Somali coast: he underestimated and misread the transformative power of the outside forces that came from the sea, from beyond his local and regional horizons. This, in turn, led to his rapid political fall and to final destruction of the emirate’s sovereignty in 1887.

The first modern ‘global agents’ in Harär: the Egyptian Occupation (1875–1885) Since its founding as an urban center in the thirteenth century, Harär has enjoyed a unique political and religious status in the Horn of Africa. The city was considered a center of Islamic learning, combining a Shfi‘ educational system with Shar‘a courts and rituals associated with the graves of saints. From the fifteenth century onward, Harär ruled its environs, and especially its neighbors, the Oromo. The establishment of a dynasty of emirs in the seventeenth century, and Harär’s location in the center of the triangle formed by the Somali coast, the Nile Valley and the mountain kingdom of Christian Ethiopia, caused trade in coffee, khat leaves, skins, arms and slaves to gravitate towards the city. Thus, Harär became one of the most important cities in northeastern Africa.10 The occupation of the Harär Emirate by the Egyptians in October 1875 was a defining historical moment that ushered in the era of globalization in the city. It was the ‘flattening’ agent that linked Harär to regional and global economic circles in the late nineteenth century.11 The Egyptian occupiers exhibited military might and technological superiority on a scale hitherto unknown in Harär and among the nearby Oromo and Somali communities. They murdered Emir Muhammad b. ‘Al b. ‘Abdaššakr (‘Abdullhi’s father), took the local ‘mahlak’ currency out of circulation, initiated the rapid construction

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of public buildings and mosques, launched a cartographical project and took censuses in and around the city in order to take optimal economic advantage of the region and the communities that populated it. The Egyptians also replaced the mutual relationship between the city’s emirs and the Oromo elites, which had existed since the mid-seventeenth century, with political oppression, economic enslavement and a process of consolidation into easily controllable groups of towns. Another important dimension in the role of the Egyptians as agents of globalization was the religious one. The Egyptians forced many Oromo to convert to Islam as part of an effort to create a ‘new’, ‘cultured’ Oromo psyche that conformed to their ‘modern’ vision. This Egyptian mission civilisatrice included the creation of a new pattern of ‘civilized’ Muslims in Harär and its surrounding peoples. It demonstrates the flexibility of the terms of globalization and colonialism as trans-cultural and trans-religious phenomena. Thus globalization, which is almost instinctively associated with the ‘West’ and ‘White Europe’, is expressed here as intra-African and intra-Islamic. Egypt’s regime of political and economic oppression in the city began to decline in 1878 with the dismissal of Raf bš, the city’s first governor, by Charles George Gordon, the then Governor-General of Sudan. Once the British occupied Egypt in 1882, the removal of the Egyptians from Harär became merely a matter of time.12 The Egyptians encouraged European merchants to operate in the city, thus linking Harär’s economy to circles of global commerce. Certainly, Harär had never been really isolated; indeed it had played an important role in the Red Sea and Northeastern Indian Ocean trade and cultural networks as well as in the inter-African trade networks.13 But the Egyptians accelerated and modernized these networks, as it were. They did so not only by inviting Europeans into Harär, but also by seizing the area between the town and the Somali coast and securing its trade routes under their oppressive regime, which almost totally subjugated the Oromo and the Somali peoples. Last but not least, the Egyptians were the first in the history of the region to use telegraph lines and to improve the quality of the winding trade routes that linked Berbera and Zeila with the hinterland.

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Muhammad Nd bš, the third Egyptian governor of Harär (1880–82), was of the opinion that the city’s economic and political future would be determined by Europeans, particularly the French and Italian merchants who operated along the Somali coast, and the British merchants in Aden.14 In order to make it easier for European merchants to settle in the city, he installed a telegraph line between Harär and the Somali coastal cities of Zeila and Berbera. In August 1880, the French merchants Alfred Bardey and Henry Lucereau arrived in Harär from Zeila.15 Bardey, who had opened a coffee trading company in Aden, was invited to settle in Harär under the auspices of the Egyptian occupying force. It was the first time in the history of Harär that foreigners had settled in the city to trade. On the heels of the merchants, missionaries of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin arrived in the city from Zeila in April 1881.16 The success of the Egyptian initiative was reported in an article in the Italian newspaper L’Esploratore in May 1883. ‘The Egyptian government is inviting European travelers and merchants to a place where the fine weather, the fertile soil and the intelligence of the local residents bode well for the future’.17 Nd bš reported to his superiors that ‘[C]urrently, Harär has twenty Greek shopkeepers, French Jesuits, and salesmen representing a French company and an Italian company. We are happy to welcome travelers to Harär and assist them as we’ve assisted their predecessors: merchants and priests who’ve settled in the city’.18 However, a semblance of openness to the world and economic initiative could not save the Egyptian administration in Harär. In March 1884, the Egyptian government first offered to withdraw its forces from Harär. The British, who had occupied Egypt in 1882, considered this a positive development and appointed a military envoy, who came to Harär and Zeila from Aden in order to oversee the evacuation. The British representative, Major Hunter, concluded that the great admiration the city’s Muslims harbored towards the dynasty of emirs that had been in power before the Egyptian occupation was further cause to appoint a local to rule after the Egyptians withdrew.19 He suggested that the independence of the emirate in Harär be preserved ‘under the previous Ameer’s son. Each Gala (Oromo) and Somali tribe should

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keep within his own limits, acknowledging British supremacy, and protect routes to the coast, denying passage to slavers’.20

The process of appointing ‘AbdullĆhi While seeing Ibrahim and ‘Abdullhi, two of the sons of Emir Muhammad b. ‘Al b. ‘Abdaššakr, as potential candidates for the post of emir,21 the British had no interest in occupying Harär and the Somali coast. After determining their main objectives along the coast of Somalia during the 1880s, they considered Berbera to be the most important port in terms of exporting cattle and sheep to their colony in Aden.22 Fears, both of a military confrontation with France and Italy and of the emergence of a ‘new’ Mahdiyyah in Sudan, prompted the British to supervise the Egyptians in the process of withdrawing their forces from Harär, Zeila and Berbera.23 British involvement in the events in Harär and along the Somali coast threw into high relief the question of who would inherit Egypt’s assets in the area. Both European and African imperial forces were involved in the issue. The French and the Italians monitored Britain’s involvement in the withdrawal from Harär.24 At the same time – mid-1884 – the king Menelik of Shewa, fearing that the French were scheming to occupy Harär, deepened his ties with the Italians, whom he saw as potential supporters of his own drive to take control of the city.25 Rumors of the impending withdrawal of the Egyptian forces spread through the city and elicited reactions from both the residents of Harär and the foreign merchants. During the summer of 1884, the ‘esteemed Ulama, the residents and merchants of Harär’, expressed total solidarity with Egypt in a petition. They thanked Egypt for turning Harär into a ‘flourishing, safe urban center that attracted merchants from all over the world’.26 The French and Italian merchants living in Harär demanded that the Egyptians ‘guarantee the safety of foreign residents as is wont in the colonies of world powers all over the world’. They praised the Egyptian administration in Harär and noted that ‘until fifty years ago, Harär was ruled by petty kings and Berbers. The Khedive’s government turned Harär into a leading commercial hub and established security

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and order’.27 The Capuchin missionaries also expressed concern over their future status in Harär, which they anticipated would become ‘desolate and uninhabitable’ once the Egyptians left.28 October and November of 1884 saw the beginning of the Egyptian withdrawal from Harär, which took place in three main phases, with groups departing for Zeila and from there to Egypt via the Red Sea. The British, who closely supervised the process through its conclusion in May 1884, expressed a desire that the new emir restore the emirate’s hegemonic status vis-à-vis its neighbors, similar to the situation that existed until the early nineteenth century. Their military attaché in Harär accused the city’s foreign merchants of coercing the Egyptians into granting them special privileges. His vision was to see Christianity spread among the nearby Oromo, who were perceived as convenient ‘candidates’ for conversion due to the fact that they had only accepted Islam during the Egyptians’ rule.29 The testimonies of French merchants reveal the mood amongst residents of the city who learned that the British were ‘expediting the withdrawal from Harär in order to pass it on to some emir’. The testimonials also reveal the process of selecting ‘Abdullhi, which the British constructed in order to make the appointment seem like a reflection of locals’ will.30 The British ensured that ‘Abdullhi would be the sole candidate, banishing two other nominees, whom they feared would receive the support of the people of Harär, to Zeila and from there to Aden, and arresting prospective opponents of the appointment.31 Acting according to the ‘recommendation’ of the British, an ‘elections committee’ of fifty-five community luminaries – merchants, ‘ulam’ and heads of the Oromo and Somali tribes around the city – was convened in order to ‘select’ the new emir. The committee members also chose sixteen of their own to occupy key positions in the emirate’s new administration. Twelve of these officials were selected to serve on a ‘general council’ whose purpose was to assist the emir in matters pertaining to the judicial and law enforcement systems in Harär. Four additional committee members were appointed heads of police, treasury, customs and a new local militia. The sixteen members of the committee unanimously selected ‘Abdullhi as emir.

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The steps taken by the British implied that, although they were interested in officially restoring the emirate to Harär, in practice they wished to divest it of any true sovereignty. The emir was to become an utterly dependent puppet ruler. Alongside the emir, the British also wished to appoint qadis, ‘ulam’ and deputies to serve as advisors. They even wanted to establish an army for the emir – made up of locals as well as Oromo and Somalis – that would take up the arms and ammunition left behind by the Egyptians. The British representative also suggested that the level of taxation levied on all goods entering or exiting Harär should be determined according to the rates instated in Zeila – four percent on imports and five percent on exports. These he calculated according to the Indian rupee.32 The decision reflected the British policy of preventing the resurgence of one of the historical symbols of the independent emirate, preferring instead to perpetuate Harär’s reliance on regional and global economic forces.

‘AbdullĆhi and the bĆšĆ of Zeila: Localism versus glocalism ‘Abdullhi’s subservience to the British was one more stage in the process wherein Harär and its emirs lost their independence. He never wielded any actual political power. After his father’s murder at the hands of the Egyptians in October 1875, he relocated to Zeila, where he was sheltered by the governor of the city, Abu Bakr Ibrahim Shahim. The governor became his sponsor in Zeila, paying him a monthly stipend and maintaining his servants.33 Abu Bakr even mediated between the Khedival government and ‘Abdullhi, who traveled to Cairo and was promised that upon his return to Zeila, the Egyptians would show consideration for his status and take care of his family’s assets in Harär.34 The comparison between Abu Bakr and ‘Abdullhi sheds new light on the global processes that began in the Red Sea, as well as on the various ways in which they impacted Zeila on the coastline and Harär further inland. Abu Bakr Ibrahim Shahim, a member of the Afar people35 and a slave trader in the Zeila region, was the epitome of survival in the region from the early 1860s until his death in 1885.

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Abu Bakr’s personality, political acumen and knack for maneuvering between global forces in the Red Sea and the Somali tribes – all these made him a serious player upon whom the superpowers of Europe, Egypt and Ethiopia relied in their activities along the Somali coast. Despite the fact that his involvement in human trafficking was common knowledge, Abu Bakr was given French citizenship in the early 1860s in exchange for granting special privileges to French merchants in the Zeila region. When the Egyptians arrived in the area, Abu Bakr quickly became an integral part of their colonial enterprise, earning the title of ‘pasha’ in exchange for maintaining quiet along the coastal plain. He consented on condition that the Egyptians respected Zeila’s sovereignty and did not get involved in his personal appointments and the slave trade, a business he pursued until his death. When he noticed that Egypt’s control was flagging, he began to reinforce his political connections with the British, the Italians, the French and with Menelik of Ethiopia, becoming an object of political courtship.36 Abu Bakr’s status was earned not only by virtue of his political skill, but also due to the nature of the city he ruled. Unlike the inland city of Harär, the port of Zeila became a transportation hub for the global political and economic forces drawn to the southern Red Sea region. The tension felt in Zeila between ‘regional’ and ‘global’ may have contributed to the perception of Abu Bakr by present-day scholars as a ‘cosmopolitan’, an embodiment both of influences from ‘the sea’ (the imperial powers and global economic and commercial transformations) and of local influences from ‘the land’ (Somali tribal politics and Ethiopia). Furthermore, Abu Bakr mediated between politicalimperial circles and local forces. His status as arbiter between ‘land’ and ‘sea’ lent him power on both the ‘local’ and global stages.37 One could say that, in early twenty-first-century terms, Abu Bakr was a personification of the process known as ‘glocalization’. He succeeded in adopting various aspects of globalization in the second half of the nineteenth century in the southern Red Sea – especially the regional imperial discourse and its influences on the flow of capital and the rapid maritime traffic revolution – without forsaking his local distinction as a tribal leader and slave trader.

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‘Abdullhi, on the other hand, embodied the exact opposite of Abu Bakr. As a scion of the emirs of Harär, he had to shoulder the independent political heritage of his city, while dealing with an urban Muslim society that was still very much under the influence of the Egyptian occupation at the time of his appointment. He lacked any prior political experience and was essentially ‘parachuted’ into a position he was not qualified to fill. ‘Abdullhi grew up in Harär, which had not been exposed to foreign powers and the political, economic and commercial aspects of global processes until 1875. He was not versed in the esoterics of the new discourse between the imperialist forces, and did not comprehend the regional globalization processes. The sovereign dynasty of the Harär emirs built its political and economic strength over the centuries through interactions with ‘the land’ – the Oromo and the Somalis on the Somali coastal plain and the Ogaden Desert, who controlled the trade routes between Harär and the coast. ‘Abdullhi was the first emir required, as a protégé of the British, to contend with the new geo-political global conditions in Harär and in the Somali coast, which dramatically changed the traditional regional balance.

The ‘resurgence of radical Islamism’ in Harär: A reexamination On the eve of his official coronation, ‘Abdullhi informed the British that the Shar‘a – Islamic law – would be the sole law in Harär, and the basis for the treatment of the city’s residents, both Muslim and foreign. He affirmed his commitment to the wellbeing of foreigners and vowed to refrain from taxing them in manners that he deemed ‘superfluous’, due to ‘their importance to commerce in the city’.38 The Egyptians, who officially handed over control of the city to ‘Abdullhi, received promises to the effect that he would guarantee safety on the road from Harär to Zeila, shun the slave trade, include the ‘ulam’ in government, and adhere to Shar‘a law.39 The prospect of returning to Shar‘a rule was a source of profound anxiety for the city’s European merchants, who had become accustomed to freedom of religious expression and special trade privileges

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during the Egyptian occupation. They saw the Emir as a reactionary who ‘made it his goal to reintroduce Islam to the residents of Harär’, dangerous because ‘he scorned any possibility of a European occupation of Harär’.40 The Capuchin missionaries saw in ‘Abdullhi an ‘Islamic resurgence’ that harmed their conversion enterprise and threatened their life in the city.41 The import of such statements in the writings of foreign merchants has also been adopted in descriptions of the ‘Abdullhi era in the works of some present-day researchers.42 This picture is decontextualized in that it neglects the fact that deteriorating relations were the result of economic tensions and the merchants’ failure to respect the Emir’s sovereignty in the city. Still, testimonies of residents of Harär from that period can teach us something about the implementation of ‘Abdullhi’s policy. The new Emir put himself in charge of the city’s Shar‘a courts and commanded local women to dress modestly and wear veils. New mosques were built at his behest, both inside and outside the city. ‘Abdullhi also mandated the closure of cafés that had catered to the foreign residents and banned the consumption of alcohol in public spaces and in the home. All of Harär’s residents were enjoined to pray in the mosques during the day and adhere to the edicts of Islam. These were the practical manifestations of what ‘Abdullhi termed a ‘war against [the] wantonness’ that he believed had characterized the Egyptian occupation.43 It seems that the policy of the new emir was a reaction to global trends, brought about by the Egyptians and their European protégés and not necessarily the direct result of a policy of religious allegiance. Nevertheless, it is clear that the new policy marked a deterioration in the conditions of the Europeans, who had been accustomed to doing whatever they pleased in their religious and political activities. However, ‘Abdullhi did not directly target the foreigners in the name of some religious or cultural motive. Rather, although he conceived of them as symptoms of the ‘ailments’ of the Egyptian period, he had no intention of confronting them in the name of a religious ‘holy war’. ‘Abdullhi wished to redefine Harär as a Muslim regional religious and political center, restoring its pre-1875 status and undoing the effects of the Egyptian occupation. Presumably, it was lack of political experience that caused him to ignore the various global forces the

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Egyptians had introduced into the city and to assume he could restore Harär’s independence through religious policies.

‘AbdullĆhi and the merchants: The desire for economic sovereignty versus the global market During the summer of 1885, ‘Abdullhi was caught in the middle of a struggle between Greek merchants, who wished to obtain a monopoly on wheat trade in the city, and Italian ones. The Italians accused ‘Abdullhi of showing favoritism towards the Greeks, who were considered his confidants, and complained about him to the British. The British rejected the complaints of the Italian merchants, but nevertheless warned the Emir not to ‘listen to stupid advice provided by interested parties in the city’.44 Basing themselves on ‘Abdullhi’s struggle with the merchants, modern scholars have portrayed him as ‘a weak and indecisive man, almost fully controlled by his advisors, who advocated a strict Islam’.45 Like the above-mentioned argument that ‘Abdullhi’s cultural policy was simply religiously motivated, this assertion is inaccurate. It does not properly recount actual events and ignores the regional and global factors that ‘Abdullhi had to contend with. One facet of the new Emir’s strategy for restoring the city was to reduce the extent of foreign commerce in Harär. Ignoring the manner in which Harär’s economy had become enmeshed in global circles, ‘Abdullhi changed the taxation and customs rates that had been set by the British. He decided that the mahlak that bore his name would be the only acceptable currency in the city, superseding the Egyptian and Indian currencies that were used extensively in regional trade. The foreigners, however, ignored his new policy and continued to use foreign currencies – rupees and dollars. In response, ‘Abdullhi clamped down on the merchants, citing Shar‘a law to forbid loans with interest and imposing a steep tax on foreign currency used in the city.46 The attempt to impose a new-old currency associated with Harär’s independent past can also be seen as a part of ‘Abdullhi’s attempt to restore the city following the Egyptian occupation, rather than as a systematic policy aimed at harassing the foreign merchants. It was

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only after the merchants flouted his new policy that he penalized them. The religious and cultural biases that appeared in the merchants’ writings stemmed from their viewing the events in Harär through the prism of an inter-religious struggle. Although these views have been adopted by some scholars of the period, the facts appear to disprove them. Furthermore, in order to fully understand this development, one must examine ‘Abdullhi’s policy as the work of someone who was under pressure from both ‘the land’ and ‘the sea’, insisting on full sovereignty and yet unable to grasp that the changes brought about when merchants settled in Harär and the city was linked to the global economy, precluded the possibility of such exclusive control. When it came to his neighbors, ‘Abdullhi also adopted vigorous, reckless steps in order to eradicate all traces of the Egyptian administration. ‘Abdullhi tried to consolidate his power in the Oromo territories in early 1886 by deploying military force, and there are conflicting reports as to his success.47 His military campaigns can be seen as part of a larger attempt to secure the new emirate’s claim to the Oromo territories, which had been under its control before the Egyptian occupation, or at least until the beginning of the nineteenth century. ‘Abdullhi was not motivated solely by local objectives, however, and was also reacting to changes that occurred in the area between Harär and the Somali coast around the time of his election. The death of Abu Bakr in Zeila in 1885 and the involvement of Italy and France on the Somali coast improved the status and military might of the Somali tribal leaders. This development caused a gradual slackening of security along the trade routes.48 ‘Unlike the Egyptians, ‘Abdullhi was unsuccessful in his bid to buy the loyalty of the Somali tribal leaders, and did not possess the kind of military might required to bring them to heel’.49

‘AbdullĆhi and the Capuchin monks Throughout most of his time in power, ‘Abdullhi’s approach towards the missionaries was moderate. Contrary to the ‘fanatic’ label affixed to him in studies of the period, ‘Abdullhi did not expel them from the city after he rose to power. Nor did he incite against them or harm the

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mission stations they had established in the outlying Oromo regions during the Egyptian occupation.50 Rather, ‘Abdullhi only acted indirectly against the Capuchin missionaries in the Oromo territories. The rapid construction of mosques in and around the city after his appointment served ‘Abdullhi by hastening the closing down of mission stations in the Oromo territories. The Oromo tribal elders around Harär preferred to cooperate with the Emir and to sever ties with the missionaries who had once received the Egyptians’ blessing to be active in their territories. Missionary activity among the Oromo resumed with the start of Ethiopian Christian rule in Harär in January 1887.51 Inside Harär, the confrontation between residents and Capuchins was more pronounced after May 1885. Various testimonies show that some of Harär’s Muslims wished to compel the foreigners to convert to Islam and to harm them once the emirate was reestablished. ‘Abdullhi reined in the attempts at forced conversion and came out against harming foreigners in the city. He claimed that neither the Qur’n nor other Islamic legal sources justified such behavior.52 However, according to the testimony of an Italian merchant, despite explaining to the residents of Harär that there was no justification for harming unarmed Christians who posed no danger, Abdullhi did not respect the city’s Capuchins.53 ‘Abdullhi’s relations both with foreigners in the city and with Britain and Italy reached a nadir in April 1886. A deception that went wrong, conceived by an Italian merchant by the name of Pietro Porro, who led a trade convoy to Zeila, resulted in the slaughter of the members of the convoy at the hands of armed Oromo and Haräri men and the looting of the merchandise they carried. In an attempt to dissuade the Somali tribes from raiding the convoy, Porro had previously circulated the rumor that it was a military convoy. The rumor reached ‘Abdullhi, who, afraid that the Italians were plotting to attack Harär, saw the convoy as ‘an expression of Italian aggression towards himself and towards the residents of Harär’.54 Nevertheless, ‘Abdullhi did not command his men to slaughter the members of the convoy. That decision was made by the Haräri and Oromo commanders in the field. ‘Abdullhi was shocked by the results of the incident. According to local and European testimonials, he ordered the execution of some

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twenty of his soldiers, whom he considered responsible for the massacre, imprisoned some of his closest advisors, sank into depression, and fasted to mortify his body.55 The incident also had severe diplomatic repercussions that complicated the Emir’s position. In late April 1886, the foreign merchants became ‘Abdullhi’s ‘hostages’. Fearing an Italian reprisal, he reasoned that as long as Harär’s foreigners remained in the city, Italian or other European forces wouldn’t dare attack. Only some six months later were the foreigners allowed to leave, but not before they were made to sell their belongings to the Emir.56 ‘Abdullhi’s treatment of foreigners was not inspired by a systematic ideology, and the worsening of their conditions was the result of developments in the field rather than malice aforethought. It is important to emphasize that not a single foreigner was murdered within the city’s limits during the Emir’s time in power, and that murders of foreign merchants at the hands of Oromo and Somalis also took place during the Egyptian occupation and the period leading up to the reestablishment of the Emirate.

The end of ‘AbdullĆhi’s reign, January 1887 Despite ‘Abdullhi’s fear that the European superpowers would attack and remove him from power, his political demise was actually brought about by a Christian, African imperial force that came from the ‘land’. King Menelik of Shewa resolved to take control of Harär as soon as the Egyptians withdrew from the city. After Egypt pulled out of Harär and the coastal cities, and Italy occupied Massawa in February 1885, Menelik tried to convince the Italians to sign a pact that would guarantee an Italian takeover of Berbera and Zeila along with the occupation of Harär by the Shewans. The Porro incident had highlighted the issue of Berbera and Zeila, and Menelik was afraid that the Italians would use the incident as a pretext to gain control of the coast. Therefore, as early as the summer of 1886, he acted to bolster his military presence in the Oromo regions outlying Harär, his final objective being the occupation of the city.57

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‘Abdullhi was aware of the concrete Shewan threat to his city. The testimony of Haräri residents shows that it was not until December 1886 that ‘Abdullhi began to employ religious rhetoric, calling for a holy war in an effort to rally the city to face the Ethiopians in battle. When his advisors entreated him to consider yielding to Menelik, ‘Abdullhi replied, ‘Does the Koran permit us to surrender to the infidel?’ Some of the Oromo from the areas surrounding Harär did not join the Emir’s army in the name of a holy war but rather out of mercenary motives, having been promised large portions of the loot that would be taken from the Ethiopians and due to their wish to capture Ethiopian soldiers and sell them into slavery.58 On 1 January 1887, ‘Abdullhi massed his forces next to the town of

ällänqo, some eighty kilometers west of Harär.59 In a series of battles that began on 3 January and lasted until 7 January, the Ethiopian armies routed the Emir’s forces. The Ethiopians enjoyed an overwhelming numerical advantage. ‘Abdullhi’s army numbered some 4,000 men, only half of whom were armed with guns and properly trained. Menelik, on the other handed, commanded a force of between 20,000 and 25,000, 8,000 of whom carried firearms. The Emir’s hasty flight from the battlefield to the Ogaden Desert following the death of many of his troops, and the failure to rally groups of Oromo fighters that could make it to ällänqo in time, were among the factors that demoralized ‘Abdullhi’s remaining soldiers. They finally surrendered on 6 January 1887.60 The battle of ällänqo was a watershed event in the history of Harär, which had now become part of Menelik’s expanding Shewan kingdom.61

Conclusion ‘Abdullhi ruled in Harär for a total of 19 1/2 months. As soon as he entered office in May 1885, he was forced to deal with difficult conditions. The population of Harär and its satellite communities were still reeling from the blows the Egyptian occupation had inflicted on their military, social and economic systems. The Egyptian occupation of Harär and the Somali coast heralded the coming of the ‘agents of

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globalization’ – the European merchants and Capuchin missionaries – who were active in the area even after Egypt withdrew. ‘Abdullhi, lacking any real-world political experience, was ‘parachuted’ into the position of emir, and was unable to grasp the fact that the economic and political conditions that had prevailed in Harär on the eve of the Egyptian campaign had changed. ‘Abdullhi ignored Harär’s enmeshment in broad global circles during the Egyptian occupation, and was not fluent in the new ‘language’ required in order to converse with these forces. ‘Abdullhi conceived of Harär and its relationships with its surroundings solely on a ‘local’ level. But things that were true for his predecessors until 1875 were no longer relevant a decade later. His political failures, and the misreading of the changes and the import of forces that came from ‘the sea’, are especially salient in light of the survival and political success of Abu Bakr of Zeila. In contrast to ‘Abdullhi and his ‘local’ conceptions, Abu Bakr represented the process that came to be known in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as glocalization – a fusion of ‘global’ and ‘local’. Abu Bakr’s awareness of this trend allowed him not only to survive the currents of globalization, but actually to increase his political power while maintaining his human trafficking activities. ‘Abdullhi’s bleak personal story is a brief but tempestuous episode in the rich annals of Harär. After ‘Abdullhi’s departure, Harär’s adaptable political, economic and religious elite spearheaded the city’s integration into Christian Ethiopia. This elite succeeded in adopting glocal discourse, and towards the turn of the century, Harär became a powerful center in a country rife with ethnicities and religions. It kept this status throughout the political turmoil of the twentieth century, and maintains it to this day.

Notes 1. For more, see Belle Asante, ‘Harar: Introduction,’ in Encylopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2005), vol. II, pp.1012–1013. 2. Fredrick Cooper, ‘What is the concept of globalization good for? An African historian’s perspective’, African Affairs 100 (2001), pp.208–11.

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3. John F.E. Bloss, ‘The story of Suakin’, Sudan Notes and Records 20:2 (1937), p.247. (Sawákin is a Sudanese port city). 4. See, for instance, the case of the city of Massawa: Jonathan Miran, Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington, 2009), pp.33–65. Hence, these developments are consistent with the definition of globalization as an amalgamation of economic, technological, political, social, cultural and behavioral processes, along with increased participation in global commerce and an accelerated ‘flow of capital’: Toby Dodge and Richard Higgott, ‘Globalization and its discontents: The theory and practice of change in the Middle East’, in idem (eds), Globalization and the Middle East (London, 2002), pp.14–5. Globalization also impacted the region discussed in this article, appearing as a diverse phenomenon that ‘involve[d] both capitalist markets and sets of social relations and flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people across national boundaries’: Douglas Kellner, ‘Theorizing Globalization’, Sociological Theory, 20:3 (2002), p.287. 5. British Public Records Office (hereafter, PRO), Foreign Office (hereafter, FO) 78/3189: Draft (March 1877), Agreement between the British and the Egyptian Governments respecting the Jurisdiction of his Highness the Khedive over the Somali Coast; Draft (June 1877), Agreement between the British and the Egyptian Governments respecting the Jurisdiction of his Highness the Khedive over the Somali Coast. 6. See e.g. Ulrike Freitag and William Clarence-Smith (eds), Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden, 1997); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge MA, 2006). 7. For further details see: Selim Deringil, ‘ “They live in a state of nomadism and savagery”: The late Ottoman empire and the post-colonial debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003), pp.311–42. 8. See, for instance, a review of major periods in the history of the city in an album published in the last decade: Philippe Revault and Serge Santelli, Harar: A Muslim City of Ethiopia (Paris, 2004), p.17. 9. See, for instance (and in the order of the quotes), Richard A. Caulk, ‘Harär in the nineteenth century and the loss of its independence’, A Paper Prepared in Advance for the Interdisciplinary Seminar of the Faculties of Arts and Education, Addis Ababa 1967–1968, p.6; Emile Foucher, ‘Harär au temps d’Arthur Rimbaud, 1880–1891’, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, 1988), vol. I, pp.370–1; Muhammad Hassan, ‘The Relation between Harär and the Surrounding Oromo 1800–1887’, BA thesis (Addis Ababa University, 1973), pp.33–5. A more balanced approach by Ahmed

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12. 13.

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Zakaria, ‘Ábdullahi Muhammad’, in Encylopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2003) vol. I, pp.38–9, portrays ‘Abdullhi as ‘someone who tried to revert to Harär’s old system of government, which relied on a closed-door policy by limiting the presence and influence of foreigners in the city’. The traits ascribed to ‘Abdullhi and his religious Muslim ‘fanaticism’ were mostly based on a corpus of literature produced by European travelers – merchants and missionaries – who resided in Harär in the late nineteenth century. These documents were part of the Orientalist discourse in Western and Ethiopian Christian research, which were also brought to bear on Harär and the Muslim communities that resided in and around the city. Some of the studies that adopted this approach often couched encounters between the city’s Muslims and Christians in strictly polarized religious and cultural terms, disregarding the actual events that took place in Harär at the time. For more on various aspects of the political, historical, cultural and religious development of Harär, see Ulrich Braukämper, ‘Notes on the Islamization and the Muslim shrine of the Harär Plateau’, in idem, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia (Hamburg, London, 2004), pp.106–28; Patrick Desplat, ‘The articulation of religious identities and their boundaries in Ethiopia: Labeling difference and processes of contextualization of Islam’, Journal of Religion in Africa 35 (2005), pp.483–505; Camilla C.T. Gibb, ‘Baraka without borders: Integrating communities in the City of the Saints’, Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999), pp.88–108. For more on history as a ‘flattening’ agent that brings about the second – cultural and political – ‘flattening’ agent in the globalization process, see Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005). Jonathan Miran, ‘Harär under Egyptian occupation 1875–85’, in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2005), vol. II, pp.1019–21. For further details see: Hussein Ahmad, ‘Harar-Wallo relations revisited: Historical; religious and cultural dimensions’, African Study Monographs (March 2010), pp.111–7; Ulrich Braukämper, Islamic History and Culture in Southern Ethiopia – Collected Essays (Hamburg, 2002), pp.12–38; Ahmed Hassan Omer, ‘Some notes on Harar and local trade routes: A report on the view of ex-merchants of Shäwa (1839–1935)’, Annales d’Ethiopie 17 (2001), pp. 135–47. Avishai Ben-Dror, ‘The Egyptian Hikimdriya of Harr and its Surroundings: Historical Aspects, 1875–1887’, (PhD diss., Tel-Aviv University, 2008), pp. 188–92 (in Hebrew). Alfred Bardey (1854–1934) was a merchant from the French city of Lyon. In early 1880 he opened a coffee import company in the cities of Aden

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16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST and Zeila. Henry Lucereau was appointed French consul in Zeila in 1879. He arrived in Harär in September 1880 before moving on to the Oromo areas, where he was murdered in October 1880. For more on Bardey and Lucereau, see Jonathan Miran, ‘Bardey, Xavier Alfred’, in: Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2003), vol. I, p.476; M. Perret, ‘Voyage sans Retour: Henri Lucereau en Ethiopie, 1879–1880’, L’Africa ai tempi di Daniele Camboni (Rome, 1981), pp.194–201. Aleme Eshete, ‘The establishment of the Capuchin Catholic mission among the Qottu of Harär: 1881–1889’, Unpublished paper for the conference on Hatari Studies by the Historical Society of Ethiopia (Addis Ababa University, 1975), p.2. L’Esploratore (Milan), May 1883, year 7, p.432. ‘Exposé de Nadi Pacha à la séance du 23 Mars 1883’, Bulletin de la Société Khédiviale de Géographie du Caire, second series, 8 (1886), p.464. PRO, FO 403/82: Hunter to Baring: Memorandum Regarding the Proposed Restoration of Harär to a Member of the Old Ruling Family, Aden, 5 April 1884. PRO FO 403/82: Hunter to Egerton, Aden, 4 September 1884. PRO, FO 403/82: Egerton to Hunter, Cairo, 4 September 1884; Hunter to Egerton, Aden, 5 September 1884. PRO, FO 78/3725: Memorandum of Egyptian Coast Territory of the Red Sea (Admiralty, Foreign Intelligence Committee No. 28), 9 February 1884, p. 6. PRO, FO 403/82: Hunter to Baring, Aden, 5 April 1884: Memorandum Regarding the Proposed Restoration of Harrar to a Member of the Old Ruling Family. See, for instance, PRO, FO 633/55: Waddington to Granville, London, 5 March 1884; Granville to Waddington, Foreign Office, 10 March 1884, PRO, FO 402/82: Egerton to Granville, Cairo, 18 May 1884. A. Brockett, ‘Anglo-French rivalry on the Somali coast in the 1880s’, Proceedings of the 1968 Conference of the Historical Association of Kenya (Nairobi, 1970), pp.127–56; Richard A. Caulk, ‘The occupation of Harär: January 1887’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 9:2 (1971), p.4. Min al-a‘yn wal-‘ulam’ wal-ahla wal-tujjr al-wataniyyn il hukumdr umam Harär wa-mulhaqtih, 6 August 1884/14 Shawwl 1301, in ‘Atllh Shawk al-Jamal, al-Wath’iq al-Trkhiyya li-siysat Misr fi al-bahr al-ahmar 1863–1879 (Cairo, 1959), pp.329–30. Min al-tujjr al-ajanb il hukumdr umam Harär wamulhaqtih, 6 August 1884/14 Shawwl 1301, in ibid, pp.328–9. Archives des Capucins, Paris, Reg. 1241, 157: Letter from Père Pierre to T.R.P. Provincial de Paris, Harär, Gido-Lola?, 28 Aygust 1884.

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29. PRO, FO 403/82: Hunter to Baring, Aden, 24 November 1884. 30. Alfred Bardey, Barr Adjam – Souvenir d’Afrique Orientale, 1880–1887 (Paris, 1981), pp.333–4; Foucher, ‘Harär au temps d’Arthur Rimbaud’, p.371. 31. Hassan, ‘Relation’, p.33; PRO, FO 403/83: Baring to Granville, Cairo, 29 December 1884; Alfred Bardey, ‘Notes sur le Harär’, Bulletin de Géographie Historique et Descriptive 1 (1897), pp.147–8. 32. PRO, FO 403/82: ibid. 33. Min muhfazat Zayla, daftar 17 ‘arab – wrid al-ifda 65 raqam 323 min jihat al-aqlim wal-muhfazt, 13 April 1876/19 Rabi‘ I 1293, in al-Jamal, al-Wath’iq al-trkhiyya, p.307. 34. ‘Atllh Shawki al-Jamal, Siysat Misr fi al-bahr al-ahmar fi al-nisf al-thn min al-qarn al-tsi‘ ‘ashr (Cairo, 1974), p.214. 35. Afar peoples (known as well by the name ‘Danäkil’ in Arabic) live in the desert regions of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, from the Buri peninsula to the Tajura gulf and the Ethiopian plateau. Some of the Afar peoples live in the surroundings of Massawa and Asab, neighboring the Oromo peoples. For further details see: Didier Morin, ‘Danäkil’, in Encylopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2005), vol. II, pp.89–90; idem, ‘Afar’, in ibid, vol. I, pp.115–16. 36. Marc Fontrier, ‘Abu Bakr Ibrahim Sahim’, in ibid, vol. I, p.52. For an extensive political biography of Abu Bakr Ibrahim, see Marc Fontrier, Abou-Baker Ibrahim: Pacha de Zeyla – Marchand d’Esclaves (Paris, 2003). 37. For more on merchants as ‘mediators’ between occupiers and occupied, see Abner Cohen, ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’, in Claude Meillassoux (ed), The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1971), pp.266–81. 38. PRO, FO 403/83: Letter from Haj Abdillahi, son of the late Ameer Mahomed bin Ali bin Nasr Abd-Shakor, Harrar, to Hunter, 22 March 1885/5 Jumd II 1302. 39. al-Jamal, Siysat Misr fi al-bahr al-ahmar, p.249. 40. Phillipp Paulitschke, Harär: Forschungsreise nach dem Somal und Galla-ländern Ostafrikas (Leipzig, 1888), pp.192–3; Bardey, Barr Adjam, p.335. 41. Eshete, ‘The establishment of the Capuchin Catholic mission’, p.9. 42. See, for instance, Foucher, ‘Harar au temps d’Arthur Rimbaud’, pp.370–71; Hassan, ‘Relation’, p.34. 43. Undated Arabic manuscript, f.1, in Hassan, ‘Relation’, p.52. 44. PRO, FO 403/84: Egerton to the Marquis of Salisbury, Cairo, 1 September 1885: Précis of a Dispatch from Captain Sealy to Egerton. 45. Caulk, ‘Harär in the nineteenth century’, p.6. 46. Hassan, ‘Relation’, p.52; Paulitschke, Harär, p.390.

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47. Arabic manuscript, pp.2–3 in Hassan, ‘Relation’, pp.53–4. 48. Ioan M. Lewis, A Modern History of Somalia: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa (London, 1988), pp.45–9; PRO, FO 403/84: Egerton to the Marquis of Salisbury, Cairo, 9 December 1885. 49. Hassan, ‘Relation’, pp.37–8; Paulitschke, Harär, pp.397–404. 50. Eshete, ‘The establishment of the Capuchin Catholic mission’, p.9. 51. Eshete, ibid; Hassan, ‘Relation’, p.5. 52. Hassan, ibid, and also Arabic manuscript, p.52. 53. Carlo Giglio (ed), L’Italia in Africa (Rome, 1958), vol. I, pp.22–3. 54. For more on the Porro incident and its aftermath, see: Ario M. Amodeo, ‘I reporti tra Italia e Abissinia nel 1886 e nel 1889 in un carteggio inedito di Ottorino Rosa con Porro, Guasconi, Sacconi e Cecchi’, Gli Annali dell África Italiana 4:3 (1941), pp.905–22; E. De Leone, ‘La Prime Ricerche di una colonia e la esplorazione geografica, politica ed economica’, L’Italia in Africa (Rome, 1955), vol. II; Carlo Giglio, Ethiopia: Mar Rosso (Rome, 1958–73), Vol. I.V: Documenti 1885–1886; Paulitschke, Harär, p.388. 55. Paulitschke, ibid; Arabic manuscript, pp.2–3 in Hassan, ‘Relation’, pp.52–3; the Capuchins also testified that the Emir hadn’t given the order to murder the members of the convoy and the decision was made by the commanders in the field. See: Foucher, ‘Harär au temps d’Arthur Rimbaud’, p.371. 56. Archives des Capucins, Paris: Père Jarosseau Microfilm (Bobine I), 92. 57. Caulk, ‘The occupation of Harär: January 1887’, pp.6–8. 58. See testimonials of Haräris and Oromos regarding ‘Abdullhi’s efforts to recruit soldiers for a war against Menelik: Caulk, ‘The Occupation of Harär: January 1887’, p.13; Hassan, ‘Relation’, pp.42–3. 59. Sevir Chernetsov, ‘ ällänqo’, Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (Wiesbaden, 2003), Vol. I, pp.676–7. 60. For more on the battle of ällänqo and its progression, see Caulk, ibid, pp.14–17; Hassan, ‘Relation’, pp.43–4. 61. For more on the cooperation between the Haräri elites and Mäkonnen at the outset of the Ethiopian occupation, see Richard A. Caulk, ‘Menilek’s conquest and local leaders in Harär’, History Society of Ethiopia: The History and Culture of the People of Harär Province (June 1975), pp.1–15.

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PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

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CHAPTER 3 EDUCATION AND MOBILIT Y: UNIVER SITIES IN CAIRO BET WEEN COMPETITION AND STANDAR DISATION 1900 –1950 Valeska Huber

In the early twenty-first century, students and academics move in unprecedented number and over large distances for better educational opportunities. What is more, specific degree programmes as well as entire branches and campuses are exported abroad, for instance to the Gulf region.1 This chapter shows that the phenomenon is not entirely new, nor is it limited to the Gulf region. In Cairo alone, a large number of foreign private universities were set up between 2000 and 2006.2 They complement the more established institutions of higher education which were reformed or founded in the earlier wave of globalization in the first half of the twentieth century, complicating both our understanding of educational mobility and of the chronologies of globalization. This chapter demonstrates how different forms of mobility interacted and conflicted in the educational microcosm

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of Cairo during this period. What is more, the realm of education lends itself particularly well to demonstrate the intertwining of competition and standardization, which emerged as a central element of globalization. The mobilities connected to educational globalization are manifold and cause difficulties to the neat distinctions often drawn in recent research on global history, which frequently focuses on the mobility of one group of migrants or on a specific commodity on the move.3 While it is one of the aims of this volume to correct such artificial separations, more than most other contributions, this chapter serves to integrate the mobility of people, objects and ideas and to investigate their relation to each other. Of course people moved between the universities, both as academics and as students, but educational globalization also depended on the mobility of ideas, institutional models and bodies of knowledge connected to the movement of people. What is more, in the case of the Egyptian university, the mobility of the institutional structures (French or British) was integrally linked to the mobility of academic staff, but also to the mobility of objects, for instance library books. These movements were steered by very different aims and incentives, such as political competition or the allocation of resources. Connected to these literal and traceable movements were further metaphorical uses of movement that drew on education and its institutions, such as social mobility or political mobilization. Yet education and globalization are not only connected through the mobility of people, objects and ideas. Educational institutions emerged as global localities par excellence and at the same time became nuclei of debates around the diverging forces of competition and standardization and their relation to each other. This chapter makes the point that in the early twentieth century, education became an embattled territory connected with ideologies pointing to the formation of cosmopolitan citizens, yet also to institutionalized difference.4 Tracing academic migration to the newly established universities shows how global and regional networks exported European academic knowledge together with European colonial rivalries competing for hegemony in the field of education. As much as by mobility and flows of people and ideas, globalization was thus marked by the steering and control

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of movement, sometimes even its stoppage.5 While these were phenomena that could potentially be observed globally, the Middle East, more specifically Cairo in the interwar period, serves particularly well for this purpose. Here the conflict between traditional and modern institutions of higher learning was particularly virulent, as the area boasted an ancient tradition of indigenous universities such as al-Qarawiyyn in Fes or al-Azhar in Cairo. What is more, the competition between different empires, including European powers (particularly France and Britain), the Ottoman Empire and the United States emerging as a global power, was especially intense. As we will see, this competition also played out in the realm of cultural politics, for instance in education. In the debates of imperial agents, but also of Christian missionaries, Cairo emerged as a vanguard of Western influence that should spread from there both to the Middle East and Africa more generally.6 In order to substantiate these points, this chapter will look at the creation and reform of the three main universities in Cairo, al-Azhar, the Egyptian (later Cairo) University and the American University, at their recruitment policies as well as their attempts to attract students from abroad. It draws mainly on British archives, and particularly on the National Archives. This choice of archives to a certain extent shapes the findings, moving the focus to broader, yet still understudied questions of the relationship between cultural imperialism and globalization.7 The chapter is organized in three parts. It will first assess Cairo’s universities in the first half of the twentieth century as global localities, connecting many of the different kinds of mobilities under scrutiny in this volume. It argues that the field of education lends itself particularly neatly to demonstrating how globalization and mobility, or rather different mobilities, were intricately linked, and how universities were both imagined and lived as global localities. The second part shows the interwar increase of competition and standardization related to these universities and how they were connected to imperialism and globalization. Finally, a case study will serve to integrate educational mobilities of different kinds and the struggles described in Part II. Assessing the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s position at the Egyptian University and his vision for the social sciences in the Middle

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East demonstrates vividly how the movements of ideas, bodies of knowledge and institutional models built on the movement of people, objects and resources. His case sharpens the argument of the connection, interaction and conflict between different educational mobilities as well as the intricate entanglement of competition and standardization. It shows how knowledge was generated in the Middle East and transported back to Europe, as well as how educational mobility could serve as a stepping stone for the careers of young academics who saw the Middle East as a field for experimentation.

Universities in Cairo as global localities The first half of the twentieth century, and particularly the interwar period, was a phase of turmoil in Egypt more generally marked by the struggle over the extent of British influence. This struggle was fought in a particularly intense form within the universities.8 However, rather than focusing on Egyptian internal affairs, in which the universities played an important role, the following short overview of the three major institutions of higher learning in Cairo – al-Azhar, the Egyptian University and the American University – depicts them as global hubs that concentrated different forms of mobility. Of course, academic and educational mobility was nothing new to the region in the early 1900s. In this context, the centres of Istanbul and Beirut had played a particularly important role. But in Cairo, too, the foreign involvement in education had a long tradition: ‘Egypt’s experiment in borrowing Western educational techniques was nearly a century old when the Egyptian University opened’ in 1908.9 Yet the following observations show that movements between West and East were not unilinear. Both the mobility of people and that of knowledge and ideas tapped into regional networks established earlier. To a certain extent, and particularly obviously in the case of the American University, they represented processes that began in Lebanon and were then continued in Cairo.10 In the first half of the twentieth century, the city emerged as a node in educational networks that could compete with Istanbul and Beirut, not only in terms of traditional Islamic learning but also when it came to the propagation of modern

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knowledge.11 In this context, mobility seems a more suitable term than simple export from West to East. For one, the universities were imagined as global meeting points joining East and West. On a more concrete level, Cairo developed into a centre of educational export as well as import from where institutional models and trained personnel were dispersed in the region and beyond. Above all due to al-Azhar’s prominence in the Muslim world, Cairo had long been a point of reference for traditional learning in the Middle East. Al-Azhar in the eastern part of Cairo had been, since the late tenth century, a nodal point of traditional Islamic theology and scholarship. In earlier centuries, there had been many institutions of higher learning in Asia and Africa, focusing on philosophy, the sciences, bureaucracy, law and theology. By the early twentieth century, not many of these institutions had survived and so al-Azhar was one of the few institutions complementing the otherwise predominant European university model.12 What is more, while teachers at al-Azhar were mainly Egyptians, traditionally the institution had drawn Muslim students from as far away as Morocco and Java, thus coming to represent a global microcosm of the entire Muslim world. Travelling in the quest of knowledge was a well-established practice in this context.13 Yet after World War I, these mobilities were turned into increasingly complex undertakings with visa applications, for instance, becoming more and more complicated. Still, there were different sections of foreign students at al-Azhar, for instance the North African (‘Maghrabeen’) section, comprising 140 students in 1914, or the equally large Turkish section.14 Besides these well-organized groups of foreign students, there were also smaller expeditions, such as one of Chinese Muslims from Yunnan visiting al-Azhar in 1934.15 The British occupational authorities followed activities at al-Azhar particularly closely as it appeared to be a centre of political insurgency and uprising.16 The immediate post-war period indeed saw the politicization of al-Azhar and witnessed several incidents involving British troops. Political organization continued throughout the 1920s, leading the British to even closer observation of the institution. Of course, this was a concern primarily related to Egyptian internal politics, but

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it was also linked to the global connections of al-Azhar. Al-Azhar’s function as global microcosm thus also engendered fears of political corruption. For the British authorities, the dispersal of radical ideas throughout their empire via the nodal point of al-Azhar was a major concern. In 1925 it was noted in the Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence and communicated by the Colonial Office that ‘Young Malays of good standing are applying, in increasing numbers, for passports or for nationality-certificates to enable them to proceed to al-Azhar University, Cairo, there to pursue the course in Religious Education’. As al-Azhar was resented as a ‘hot-bed of anti-British and anti-Kafir propaganda’, yet the religious studies of Malayans were crucial since Malaya was in need of qualified teachers, it was ‘most undesirable that the applicants for such a course of tuition should be constrained to go, for lack of any suitable University, to an Institution where their political corruption is practically assured’. Therefore different solutions to circumvent their mobility to Cairo were discussed, including prohibition of travel or diversion to the British-run Gordon College in Khartoum.17 In the 1930s, such fears of anti-British and pan-Islamic agitation were complemented by worries concerning Soviet influences gaining ground at al-Azhar.18 Besides students and scholars who came to al-Azhar to study Islamic theology and carried their newly acquired knowledge, and perhaps also new political ideas, with them to their places of origin, the university also circulated its knowledge and institutional setting through educational missions. When looking at educational missions from Egypt, the focus is usually on those official educational enterprises aiming at the acquisition of Western knowledge.19 However, other educational missions, organised by universities rather than the government, had the aim of bringing educational expertise from Egypt to other countries. If their destinations were part of the British Empire, the British Foreign Office had to grant permission to travel and monitored their proceedings, such as in the case of the missions which al-Azhar sent to Nigeria, Kenya, Zanzibar and India.20 While the reported aim of these journeys of al-Azhar’s ‘ulama was to promote and supervise religious instruction in these countries, the British Empire officials

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also suspected political grounds for the missions. Therefore the trip to India in the late 1930s, which included visiting Gandhi, was especially closely supervised.21 Not only did the British Empire view critically such educational expansion on the part of al-Azhar, but the institution also came under pressure in Cairo itself. Whereas al-Azhar attempted to circulate sets of knowledge and possibly institutional structures to different locations, in Egypt, various parties voiced the need for a Westernstyle institution of higher education on site to complement al-Azhar. Already in the late nineteenth century, reformers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh had pressed for a national university.22 Since 1906 particularly the circle around the nationalist politican Sa‘ad Zaghloul campaigned for an Egyptian university according to Western models in order to educate Egyptian elites in Egypt and decrease the dependency on Western and more explicitly European institutions. Only after Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, had left Egypt, could a small private university be established in 1908. The university was explicitly envisaged as a necessary counterpart to al-Azhar. On the occasion of the groundbreaking ceremonies for the University’s new Giza building in 1914, Minister of Justice (and soon to be Prime Minister) Hussein Rushdi spelled out the relationship between this new and Cairo’s old university: On the eastern side of Cairo, al-Azhar has stood for nearly a thousand years. It has been a lofty beacon sending light in all directions and immortalizing the sciences of the Arabs and the civilization of Islam. Now here is the new university, which will be built in this age on the western side of the city to spread the Arabic sciences together with Western learning. These twin brothers will cooperate henceforth in enlightening both banks of the blessed Nile, from the right and from the left, in the things which will restore the people of the valley to complete well-being and full glory.23 Rushdi’s quotation is interesting for a number of aspects introducing the metaphor of al-Azhar and the Egyptian University as twin

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brothers and the geographical reference to the layout of urban space with the universities marking the East and West of the city. In terms of its architecture, the new university represented a clear break with the past, which found expression in the style of the buildings of the new campus but also in its location in newly-developed Giza, which Rushdi referred to. Rushdi’s quote sheds clear light on the idea of a fusion between East and West within the city of Cairo, which could only be complete with both institutions co-existing. In 1925, the Egyptian University became a public university, changing its name first to Farouq University and then to Cairo University. It defined its mission even more forcefully in relation to its rival, al-Azhar, aiming to represent the modern, secular and Western form of learning, while al-Azhar stood for the static and traditional. Of course the reality was much less clear cut as ‘Religion was never absent from Cairo University, and secular Western influences penetrated al-Azhar’.24 Also, it was not all that evident what Western influence would actually mean in the case of the Egyptian University. Here, Western influence was at least twofold: From the beginning, French and British ideals and programmes of education competed in this institution. Whereas the French system modelled on the Sorbonne was dominant in the Faculty of Law, British influences were particularly strong in the Faculty of Science.25 The Faculty of Letters became a bone of contention between the two systems and, at the same time, between the two spheres of cultural and political influence. As will become clear later when looking at appointment policies for chairs in this faculty, the British were anxious to guard the university in British Egypt against ‘latinization’ and French cultural imperialism, while showing at the same time difficulties in providing a viable alternative. Taha Hussein’s reflections on the import of Western models into Egyptian contexts in the field of education, for instance in his work Mustaqbal al-thaqfa fi-Misr of 1938, illustrate this challenge from an Egyptian perspective and provide a commentary on the opportunities and problems of the movement of Western culture and education into Egypt, which have been interpreted as efforts ‘to retain its authenticity while transforming itself in the image of an alien, mightier civilization’.26

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While the Egyptian University was thus perceived as representing the mobility of European institutional models with all its inherent dangers and opportunities, some envisaged the aim of this institutional mobility as preventing another kind of mobility, i.e. that of students moving to the West to study. If the educational missions mentioned earlier were steered by the Government and mostly represented circular movements with the participants bringing back valuable skills to Egypt, politicians of very different allegiances were critical of a ‘brain drain’ avant la lettre. Lord Cromer, albeit opposed to the foundation of an Egyptian university, valued the development of technical training in Egypt: ‘I did whatever I could to discourage young Egyptians being sent to England at all, the true solution being to improve higher and technical education in Egypt.’27 Despite its clear emphasis on technical education, which was opposed to the more humanistic approaches of Taha Hussein and other representatives of the Egyptian University, this statement still resonates with their broader vision of higher education in Egypt instead of abroad. There were of course different motives behind this, which could range from xenophobic approaches to keeping Egyptian elites from competing with European elites to the rhetoric of development and self-help. Whatever the motive, the anti-brain-drain argument illustrates how educational reform in an era of globalization could be connected not only with mobility, but also with its contrary – that is, strategies to avoid movement and keep people in place. Yet for this purpose, other kinds of movement were in fact necessary, such as the movements of books and staff, which will be assessed in a later part of the chapter. If one of the aims of the Egyptian University was thus to educate elites in Egypt rather than abroad, there was yet another form of mobility attached to it: institutionally the Egyptian University itself became an export article. Unlike other universities outside Europe and unlike the American University in Cairo, which will be reviewed in the next section, it was not founded by colonials or missionaries and therefore was a particularly good model for the setting up of indigenous universities in Africa and the Middle East. In this context, it became for some a symbol of the successful fusion of East and West and, through this careful adoption of certain Western educational

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elements, a tool representing not Western influence but rather emancipation from the West through careful and well-chosen adaptation of Western models.28 The Egyptian University, itself an example of the ‘borrowing’ of Western educational techniques, thus at the same time developed into an example for the establishment of new universities in the region. As mentioned, in 1914 the Egyptian University moved from the Eastern to the Western side of the Nile into its new campus in Giza, and its original building on Mdn al-Tahrr, the Khairy Pasha Palace, started to be used by an even newer university: the American University in Cairo (AUC), founded in 1919 by the Presbyterian American Mission.29 In the debates surrounding the foundation of the missionary university, the location of Cairo played a central part. At a 1914 meeting in Pittsburgh aiming at the creation of a new university, the missionary John R. Mott spelled out six ‘strategic centers of the non-Christian world’, namely Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, Constantinople and Cairo, arguing that if action was concentrated there, the missionary task would be much simplified. He continued: ‘Yet I go down to Cairo, this most strategic position of this Moslem power of 200,000,000, more important to Africa and Asia than any one of these centers, and here we have no Christian university.’30 In programmatic and justificatory statements by the founders of the American University, terms such as character formation, character training or character building played a central role, hence highlighting the Western heritage of middle class values to be inculcated into the students.31 The example of the American University makes the long-term effect of this kind of educational globalization particularly palpable: to this day the American University in Cairo plays a central role in Egypt and in the entire region. Regarding the student intake, it was conceived to be much smaller than al-Azhar and the Egyptian University – and also as aiming to attract a student body explicitly drawing on the Egyptian elite: ‘The most striking feature of the enrolment and one that was most gratifying to an institution which was seeking to influence the leadership of the country, was that the applications came from the most influential strata of society – classes hitherto unreached by any missionary institution for young men in

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Egypt – sons of pashas, Judges of the higher courts, Governors of the provinces, Mayors of cities and towns, and some of the wealthiest landowners in the country’.32 Just like the location of Cairo could serve as a nodal point from where Western and Christian influence would permeate the entire Middle East and Africa, it was the most important part of Egyptian society that should be reached by this institution in order to maximize its influence within Egypt and create collaborators for religion and trade alike. Just like the Egyptian University, rather than being an illustration of straightforward export and import, the case of the AUC provides us with an example of the interesting itineraries of educational mobility. On the one hand, the AUC obviously was an American institution. It was under a US advisory board, which granted its degrees. On the other, the institutional models were not drawn directly from the USA; rather, the university’s setting corresponded very closely to the American University of Beirut (AUB).33 AUC also partly linked up with the ideas voiced in connection with AUB, aiming to represent a synthesis of East and West as well as a global and mobile mission, as idealistically expressed by Howard Bliss, the son of AUB’s founder and its second president, in 1919: We are here to share with the people of the East the best things we have in the West, or rather to exchange the best things that East and West have received. For the whole world needs the whole world. We wish, moreover, to promote and not retard the native educational enterprises in the Near East. ... It is our purpose to render ourselves, not indispensable, but, as soon as possible, dispensable, and we shall go elsewhere as soon as the ideas of education and of life cherished by us are adopted here.34 In further parallel to the Egyptian University, the much smaller American University was equally legitimized as an anti-brain-drain measure: by transferring an institution into the region of the Middle East, elites would be kept from leaving the country while at the same time being formed as cosmopolitan citizens of the world.35 The idea of the world in a single location was in this case the transposition of

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a piece of America into the Middle East or rather fusing the two: ‘At one end of the Bridge stands Egypt and other Moslem lands eager for help in solving the new problems of this new day. At the other end of the Bridge is America, with its great resources of practical knowledge and Christian dynamic. The Big Idea is bringing the two together.’36 Again, the university was envisaged as a complement to the two pre-existing institutions: it had not come to the Arab world ‘merely to reproduce or parallel what an Egyptian institution can do’, but rather to add something to the pre-existing educational landscape.37 The quick snapshots of the institutional trajectories of the three major universities of Cairo show how, in the interwar period, these institutions developed into global spaces in more than one sense. They were global microcosms, for instance by attracting (or trying to attract) students and staff from different backgrounds and geographical origins. What is more, the universities also made the entire city of Cairo more global. The foundation of the universities transformed the city of Cairo and inserted it into new academic circuits, were they political or religious, connected with specific global ideas regarding ideal education and its personal and political objectives. All three universities were linked to certain global images relating to the fusion between East and West and to the mobility of academics and students to and from Egypt. Usually the mobility of people away from Egypt is highlighted in this context. Yet, as seen, different mobilities to Egypt played an equally important role when it came to the cultural imperialism connected to the Egyptian University. The institutional settings of al-Azhar, the Egyptian University and the American University thus show that mobility seems a more suitable term than simple export from Europe or the ‘West’ as it relates to the complicated processes of appropriation and modification. They also show that the mobility of institutions, but also of personnel and students, books and knowledge, were not frictionless but rather came under increasing supervision in the interwar period. Institutions of higher learning emerged as locations where European conflicts were exported overseas and became entangled with local conflicts, as the next part will show more clearly.

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Competition and standardization In the interwar period, the educational mobilities outlined in the first part of this chapter came under strain and became the target of imperial powers in an attempt to limit and steer them. The following part shows that this was, however, not a matter of counter-globalization or deglobalization but rather a form of intensified globalization, visible for instance in the global (or at least regional) competition for students and academics, which in turn resulted in the call for a standardization of degrees across borders. It illustrates how Cairo became a marketplace of education,38 shaped by intense and fundamental competition between institutions as well as political systems. This competition took concrete form in the conflicts between the three major institutions of higher learning, but also between those attempting to take charge of educational matters, among them European powers, particularly the French and British, as well as Egyptian and American agencies, Christian and secular forces. There was, of course, also competition between Cairo and other, more established, educational marketplaces such as Beirut or Istanbul. This competition for the ideal location of educational expansion became evident, for instance, when the foundation of a British university to complement the Egyptian and American ones was discussed. While upholding its traditional vision of Islamic education, there were significant reforms at al-Azhar in the period under scrutiny here: slowly, the courses of studies were standardized and a diploma was required for all teachers. Newspapers reported how Western styles of education found their way into al-Azhar.39 The payment of staff was regularized and by 1929, the dole of bread was replaced by a bi-annual ordinary payment, even if the level of pay was still not competitive. By the 1940s, degrees were standardized. At the same time, such reforms stayed within clearly defined boundaries: On several occasions, reformist sheikhs who wanted to go too far were dismissed as politically obstructive. Such measures of standardization also affected the mobility of students. In view of the heightened imperialism in the region, but also due to a more general shift towards standardization, the admission

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of foreign students to this institution became more complicated. Already in 1913, the foreign students at al-Azhar were unsettled by the stipulation to limit study to 11 or 17 years until reaching certain certificates.40 At least from 1914 onwards, different official documents such as a birth certificate, a ‘certificat de bonne conduite’ as well as a reference letter from a tutor if underage, and a declaration that they would submit to university rules, had to complement proofs of knowledge of the Qur’n and religious credibility.41 It was not always easy to assemble this necessary paperwork and some resorted to travelling clandestinely.42 Yet these occasional complications did not sever the university’s connections and the archives do not account for the numerous foreign students coming to Egypt without hindrance. What is more, the request to provide paperwork regarding final examinations and so forth could also be seen, not as an indicator of deglobalization, but rather as a part of wider-reaching global standardization efforts. The question of how to attract students from other regions to the Egyptian University, while at the same time securing an equivalent level of education from the different candidates, is perhaps one of the best examples to show how competition and standardization became connected. In the 1930s, there were efforts to regulate the admission and the educational requirements of foreigners who wanted to study at Cairo’s universities. This was on the one hand related to the stricter visa requirements mentioned earlier, but also to the dilemma of how to secure a similar level of education of all firstyear students. At the same time, there were active efforts to recruit students abroad, provided they possessed comparable certificates and final examinations. The Egyptian government used the official channels of the British Empire to correspond, for instance, with sultanates in the Hadhramaut, but the project did not seem to be too successful, due to a shortage of suitable candidates.43 In the Hadhramaut region, there was no unified curriculum at all: ‘teaching in Hadhramaut is now confined to local primary schools, since there is no ministry of education to administer educational affairs. A comparison of the itinerary of schools in Hadhramaut with the syllabus of the secondary schools in Egypt can

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only be made as regards religious and literary subjects’.44 In 1935 the Egyptian Minister in London sent the syllabus adopted in Egyptian primary and secondary schools to the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to be forwarded to the Kuwaiti government ‘for their acquaintance with the standard of education expected of foreign students desiring to pursue their studies in the Egyptian University’ although the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Colonies considered it ‘unlikely’ that there would be students who would be able to take up the offer.45 In order to be attractive to foreign and Egyptian students alike, the universities had to ascertain that their degrees were officially accredited. In the first decades after its foundation, the American University in Cairo had difficulties in obtaining recognition of its certificates by the Egyptian authorities: ‘as there is no unified examining board in the States, they carry little weight here, for they come from this University or that College, the standards of which are unknown to the Egyptian authorities’.46 The problems of the American University illustrate the difficulty of establishing an equivalence of degrees in an age of educational globalization. In 1934 these problems were solved by the British giving permission to grant the Oxford and Cambridge School Certificate Examinations and the London University Matriculation Examination to students of the American University. It was far from easy to decide where these examinations could be taken, as the only organization in Egypt where this was possible was Victoria College in Alexandria: ‘Victoria College occasionally admit one or two outside students to these examinations but would be reluctant to take candidates from a whole class at the American University.’47 The decision for officially recognized British degrees also implied a statement regarding political and cultural alliances.48 In the case of the American University, ‘Anglo-Saxon ideals of education’ were lauded, while at the same time French influences were seen as disruptive to the British project.49 Even more important than the (not always successful) recruitment of students abroad was the hiring of European lecturers and professors. As seen in connection with the missions of Azhars to parts of the British Empire, educational mobility could mean not only to receive but

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also to provide education. Appointments to chairs and lectureships at the Egyptian University were firmly linked with the cultural imperialism of European powers, for which the university became a major playing field. The British fight over cultural supremacy after Egypt’s nominal independence in the Middle East was thus also fought in respect to the steering of academic mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s it became a matter of particularly intense debates. These debates are instructive as they show how appointment proceedings could be turned into international political problems. They demonstrate, for instance, how King Fuad could ‘revive the old game of playing France off against Britain’ in the field of education, pressing for French, Italians or Belgians in the faculty.50 French cultural influence in Egypt dated back to the Napoleonic occupation and to the educational missions of Muhammad ‘Al to Paris.51 In line with these traditions of academic and political influence, France thus became Britain’s main contender in the cultural field. As the appointment of French academics coincided with those of Italian and Belgian background, the British stock phrase became the threat of the university’s ‘latinization’.52 The British administration openly deplored the presence of French professors by deriding the quality of their scholarship: In this University, which was founded only a few years ago, the teaching is largely in the hands of Frenchmen and Italians, who occupy the Chairs. The standard of work is low and it is very desirable on all grounds to get Professors from English Universities to go out to Cairo and, if possible gradually replace some of the French and Italian professors.53 The French and other ‘Latins’ were of course not the only non-British lecturers at the Egyptian University threatening British political supremacy. In the 1930s it became increasingly problematic if a German was appointed, as in the case of the archeologist Hermann Junker.54 An equally problematic issue was the Egyptianization of the faculty. Yet it was not clear whether these newly appointed Egyptians in every case held anti-British sentiments. A Foreign Office correspondence of 1930 pointed out that those young Egyptians who had studied at British universities and who had thus received their academic initiation

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through circular mobility, were ‘just as keen, or keener, on preventing the latinization of the University than Englishmen could be’.55 While Britain also worried about other competitors, for instance from Germany or the Middle East itself, the conflict over French influence in the Egyptian University thus took particularly heated and polemical forms. In 1930 La Semaine Egyptienne published an article titled ‘La Fin de l’Université Egyptienne’, elaborating on the French protests against the policy of giving priority to British candidates. On the British side, the question of the too limited appointment of British professors was even voiced in a Parliamentary Question on 13 May 1935.56 On another occasion Nevile Henderson, the Acting High Commissioner for Egypt, explained to Austen Chamberlain his view on the wider political implications of this development, depicting it as a clash of cultures: In conclusion I venture to invite serious attention to the real problem of this struggle between Anglo-Saxon and Latin cultures in Egypt. It is not by political pressure on the part of the Residency or by the chance co-operation of a friendly Egyptian Minister that Anglo-Saxondom can triumph. It is by our non-political works for Egyptian education that we shall succeed or fail. Hitherto, not only in Egypt but in the whole Near East our contribution to the cause of education has been inconsiderable as compared with the wide-flung effort of France. However purely nationalist the motive of French policy may be in this respect, it has yet created numerous educational opportunities for Eastern youth hungering for education. In a sense, therefore, French cultural predominance in these countries has been earned. It is for us to imitate France and by a concerted but gradual movement endeavour to gain positions which we have hitherto carelessly abandoned to our rivals. This would seem especially necessary in Egypt, where we are very generally accused of having purposely neglected education during the forty years of our stewardship.57 The quote shows how the field of education, connected to the formation of a collaborative elite, became embattled territory where the fight over political supremacy could be won or lost.

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Yet despite confident statements lauding the quality of British education as compared to the French or to others, it often proved difficult to attract persons of sufficient calibre for the posts who were neither too young nor too old. The very vocal British reactions sometimes led to the appointment of inexperienced young Englishmen over their more experienced competitors from other countries due to the pressure of the embassy and Foreign Office.58 Alternatively, it was debated whether to fill the posts with retired British academics. In 1933, the Resident in Egypt wrote to Maurice Peterson: ‘Do you really think that Griffith, who is seventy-one and presumably retiring from his Oxford Chair on account of old age, is really a good candidate for the Chair of Egyptology at the Egyptian University?’59 Other candidates were unsuitable on political grounds, such as C. R. Ashbee, a famous proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, who was refused a visa to travel to Egypt, let alone be appointed, as he had published a critical report on British educational efforts in Egypt.60 Again, these difficulties connected the themes of competition and standardization, as a sufficiently high level of academic expertise was necessary for the British candidates to compete with their French and Belgian colleagues. Reacting to the problem of increasing numbers of French or other non-British professors and of successfully recruiting suitable candidates in the UK, in the late 1920s, the Universities Bureau of the British Empire was commissioned to headhunt for the university.61 Vacancies were widely circulated and possible candidates interviewed in London and discussed between different departments, particularly the Education and Foreign Offices. The quality of British candidates, but also political and personal intrigues and the attempt to place Egyptian candidates, provided many problems for such recruiting processes. The archives contain large amounts of material on individual cases, including letters of recommendation as well as blackmailing.62 Competition was discussed in relation to the recruitment of students and staff, but also in relation to the institutional structures in Egypt or in connection with the mobility of objects such as library books, which in turn influenced much of what students would learn during their time at university. What is more, the case of the furnishing of

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the library shows how competition – but also the limits of resources in a time of globalization – could determine the mobility of objects and, connected to this, of sets of knowledge. While French, German and Italian governments and learned societies made gifts of books to the library of the Egyptian University in the 1920s, such requests were not met favourably in the British case, as too many libraries had recently been founded in the British Empire and the publishers were not willing (or able) to provide yet another non-European library with their material free of charge: ‘Oxford, who sent their reply to the Salonica Library through us, wrote expressing their regret that they could not comply with the request that they should present books. In consequence of the great increase in the number of libraries throughout the world, the University had been compelled a little while ago to abandon altogether their old custom of presenting books’.63 The reference to the creation of other libraries worldwide points to the heightened competition between different locations as a result of the globalization of education. There were several attempts to turn the Egyptian University at least partly into a ‘British University’; as seen, AUC also emphasized the Anglo-Americanness of its project, not least in order to secure British backing in terms of the granting of British degrees. Still, the plan of an explicitly British university in the Eastern Mediterranean was voiced on several occasions. It was again debated in the late 1930s, as the American University was ‘somewhat handicapped in Egypt by its missionary connexions, which are naturally not very popular in a Muslim country’.64 Furthermore, British observers perceived the Egyptian University as highly unequal in its standing, and particularly the Faculty of Letters was seen as deficient. Yet in Egypt, the political situation favourable to the founding of such a British university seemed to have passed as ‘Cairo itself was under Protectorate conditions the obvious centre for such an experiment, but, as a result of recent political changes in Egypt we are afraid the time has now passed when the experiment could profitably have been made’.65 Cyprus or Palestine were suggested as alternative locations. Still, official scepticism meant that the project was soon abandoned, as the position of Cairo ‘as the undoubted cultural, political, economic, and religious centre of the Arab World’ would have been greatly more attractive to foreign students than

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an ‘outlying British dependency’ such as Cyprus or Palestine. Hence, in order to anticipate the success of such a project, the mobility of students was once again invoked as central parameter.66

E. E. Evans-Pritchard at Cairo University Coming back to the mobility of academic staff, the case of the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, professor at the Egyptian University from 1932 to 1935, elucidates the implications of academic mobility as they related to people and their careers, but also to sets of knowledge and institutional structures. His case shows that the experience of living and teaching in Cairo could also in itself be educational, illustrating how the import of Western ideas was envisaged in the field of social science, but also how the Middle East and Egypt more particularly were seen as a laboratory, where this Western knowledge and methodology could be applied but would also be enriched or transformed.67 It also points to the conflict between American, British and continental social sciences, with Evans-Pritchard being involved in the battle over British predominance in the humanities and social sciences. What is more, it provides insight into the battle over resources and the competition between disciplines within the institutions themselves, with Evans-Pritchard hoping to secure a better share for his own field. From the outset, Evans-Pritchard was involved in the appointment haggling mentioned above, and in the restructuring of the social science section at Cairo University more generally. In a proposal of May 1933, he highlighted the possibilities of developing Cairo as a global, or at least regional, centre for the social sciences: ‘At present Cairo is not only the theological centre of the Islamic world but it is also technically the most advanced state and has the opportunity of becoming the centre of secular learning as well’. As a countermovement to the impending dismantling of this section, Evans-Pritchard proposed developing a Centre for Social Research and Training at Cairo University. As the social problems of adjacent countries were largely similar, they could be expected to send students to such a center. Western social science methods could thus be disseminated from Cairo as a ‘centre for teaching and training of students from neighbouring countries’. Again, the tapping of students as a resource was thus a major argument. These

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reflections demonstrate once again that already in the 1930s academic expansion was a question of supply and demand and of economic and commercial success. Evans-Pritchard justified the export of Western social science to the Middle East in a number of ways. Sociologically trained graduates were promising candidates for administrative and other positions in government departments, as they had developed a particularly clear understanding of how a state functioned and of the ‘moral bonds which hold society together’; they would thus provide a well-trained elite for (post)colonial bureaucracies in Egypt and the surrounding territories. Evans-Pritchard also took up the global trope of the contact between East and West for which Egypt and the Egyptian University would be the ideal interface. Culturally and historically Egypt has formed part of the East while in her aspirations and economic necessities she turns largely to the scientific and technical development of Europe. What is happening in Egypt today as a result of her contact with Europe and the Near East? How are all the new elements of thought, of machinery, of modes of education, of industrialization, of reliance on work market, etc., being incorporated into her native culture? Are they being harmoniously fused or are they leading to instability? His observations connect the level of the image ascribed to the universities and to Cairo more generally as representing the unification of East and West and the actual research they were meant to promote, since according to Evans-Pritchard, the social sciences were crucial to understanding this culture contact brought forth by colonial expansion: ‘Sociological research, and sociological research alone, can tell us exactly what is happening and suggest means of controlling social change and harmonious development.’68 In this context, according to Evans-Pritchard, Egypt was an ideal field of research: ‘From the purely scientific point of view Egypt presents an ideal area for solving problems of culture-contact. From the administrative point of view present conditions offer an opportunity of directing the cultural future of Egypt from a basis of sound knowledge of what is happening today’. The presence of different communities and the political and social consequences of this fact seemed unique.

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A further area would be thus the question of how to create a national sentiment and how these factors could be strengthened. Other fields that Evans-Pritchard identified for research were language and education. Evans-Pritchard urged historical and sociological research in this latter field, also looking at social mobility and its relation to education as an emerging phenomenon in Egypt. Evans-Pritchard’s proposal ties several facets of educational mobility together: First, Evans-Pritchard obviously moved to Cairo to take up a post there. He was thus one of the successful British hires. Second, he outlined the transfer of methods and knowledge from Europe to Egypt. Third, he depicted Egypt as a point of diffusion from where this knowledge would then expand, further mediated by students coming to Cairo to study. Fourthly and finally, knowledge from Egypt would also travel back to Europe, or in fact to other world regions, by serving as a field for experimentation in terms of the study of culture contact and national cohesion.

Conclusion Evans-Pritchard’s proposals and their reflections on educational mobility and ‘culture contact’ can serve to highlight the ambivalent image of globalization that comes to the fore when analyzing Cairo’s institutions of higher learning in the 1920s and 1930s. If the globalization of education has often been interpreted as the spread of Western models, in fact it was a much more complex phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s, combining import with adaptation and change. This chapter shows the connection of two very different versions of globalization, which could be termed horizontal and vertical. One relates to the formation of cosmopolitan citizens and the image of the universities as global meeting points, which were part of worldwide networks enabling the mobility and interconnection of people and ideas. The other was connected to a hierarchical world order with Britain and France at the helm, aiming to regulate flows of knowledge and the mobility of people. Here, the conflicting relation between the different educational mobilities emerged very clearly: Sometimes the mobility of institutions was aimed at hindering the mobility of elites; other

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mobilities, such as the attempt to attract students from different parts of the British Empire to Cairo, did not materialize; still other mobilities were to be tightly controlled and regulated. If, due to these attempts to steer mobility, the interwar period is often seen as a moment of deglobalization, this chapter shows instead that competition and conflicts were part of globalization and translated not into disconnection, but rather into specific types of connection. The example of the furnishing of the university library shows that educational mobility of different sorts also had an economic base and was marked by the battle over resources. These resources were connected to the global creation of student bodies that could be tapped and to the more general envisaging of education as a commodity that could be imported and exported. The mobility controls were thus connected to the limits of resources as well as to the (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to control the movement of political ideas, for instance in the space of the British Empire. In this context, competition and standardization could be thought of as mutually exclusive forces. Yet, they appear to be intricately linked to each other and to globalization. One feature of educational globalization was the coexistence of different types of higher education in the city of Cairo, which in turn engendered debates over the merits of the French, British and American institutional standards.69 In the sources, the creation of global standards thus appears as a highly political process, as does the global or at least regional competition over students and staff which in turn triggers debates about measurable standards applicable to all. To come back to the very beginning of this chapter, the discussion over the best form of education and the comparability of degrees even reminds us of the features of competition and standardization in the current phase of educational globalization.

Notes 1. The campuses of New York University and the Sorbonne in Abu Dhabi are perhaps the grandest examples, but they are complemented by many other ventures, Dubai International Academic City now counting 21 international branch campuses from 11 countries in a single location. See Frank Höselbarth, The Education Revolution in the Gulf: A Guide (Hildesheim, 2010).

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2. Among them are the Université Française d’Egypte (founded in 2002), the German University in Cairo (2003), the al-Ahram Canadian University (2005), the British University in Egypt (2005), and the Egyptian Russian University (2006). 3. For a critique of such monodimensional approaches, see Valeska Huber, ‘Multiple Mobilities: Über den Umgang mit verschiedenen Mobilitätsformen um 1900’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36:2 (2010), pp.317–41. 4. See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010): on the politics of difference see pp.11–3. 5. For acceleration and slowdown, see Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond 1869–1914 (Cambridge, 2013). 6. See David M. Ment, ‘The American role in education in the Middle East: Ideology and experiment, 1920–1940’, Paedagogica Historica 47:1–2 (2011), pp.173–89. 7. More generally on the connection of empire and globalization, see Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010). 8. See Ahmed Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923–1973 (Cairo, 2009); The National Archives London (TNA), FO 141/711 documenting the burning of European goods at the Egyptian University in the 1930s. 9. Donald Malcolm Reid, Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt (Cambridge, 1990), p.5. 10. See Fruma Zachs, ‘Cross-Glocalization: Syrian women immigrants and the founding of women’s magazines in Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, 50:3 (2014), pp. 353–69. 11. See, for instance, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism (Berkeley, 2010). 12. See Edward Shils and John Roberts, ‘Die Übernahme europäischer Universitätsmodelle’, in Walter Rüegg et al. (eds.), Geschichte der Universität in Europa, vol. III: Vom 19. Jahrhundert zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (1800–1945) (Munich, 2004), pp.145–96, at p.145. 13. See Carl Petry, ‘Travel patterns of medieval notables in the Near East’, Studia Islamica 62 (1986), pp.3–87. 14. TNA, FO 141/530/3: Situation at al-Azhar: Alleged Plot against Shekh Mohamed Hassanein, Director General of Religious Institutions. 17 November 1913. See also ibid: Foreign Students of Al-Azhar, 25 January 1914.

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15. TNA, FO 141/718/8: Report of an interview with M. I. Sha Kuo-Chen, Director of the Chinese Student Mission, El-Azhar University, Cairo 1934. 16. See for instance TNA, FO 141/530/3: Affairs of the Mahommeddan El Azhar University at Cairo 1912–1922. 17. TNA, FO 141/530/4: Malayan Bulletin of Political Intelligence, communicated by the Colonial Office, August–September 1925. 18. TNA, FO 141/708: Ministry of the Interior, European Department, 7 June 1931. 19. This is most famously personified by al-Tahtw’s sojourn in Paris in the 1820s. Yet such government-led missions were also a popular measure in the interwar period. During Fuad’s 19-year reign, the government sent as many as 1,794 students abroad on a study missions; another 444 went between 1935 and the outbreak of World War II (Reid, Cairo University, p.99). 20. TNA, FO/141/649/6: University of El-Azhar: proposal to send religious missions to foreign countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar and India) to assist in work of religious instruction among Moslem communities 1937. 21. TNA, FO 141/649/6: L’Azhar chez les Parias, La Bourse egyptienne, 22 April 1937. 22. Bayard Dodge, Al-Azhar: A Millenium of Muslim Learning (Washington DC, 1961), p.43; Haggai Ehrlich, Students and Universities in Twentieth Century Egyptian Politics (London, 1989), p.13. 23. Hussein Rushdi at groundbreaking ceremonies for new building of Egyptian University 1914, quoted in Reid, Cairo University, p.11. 24. Ibid, p.139. 25. See Rushdi Said, Science and Politics in Egypt: A Life’s Journey (Cairo/New York, 2004), p.29. 26. See Ehrlich, Students and Universities, pp.5, 77–86. For archival material on Taha Hussein, see TNA, FO 141/611/1. 27. Quoted in Reid, Cairo University, p.33. 28. Ibid, pp.197–200. 29. Heather Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, 2008), pp.149–78: ‘The Mission of the American University in Cairo’. More recently, the University has abandoned its central location and has moved out of the city. Now it is located 20 miles into the desert. 30. Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The American University Cairo University Archives. A.U.C. History. Articles, Book, and Notes Collection. Box 1: Robert McClenahan, ‘Another Strategic Center Occupied’, 1921, p.1. 31. See Lawrence R. Murphy, The American University in Cairo: 1919–1987 (Cairo, 1987), pp.24–5. A very similar vocabulary was used at the American

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32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

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University of Beirut: see Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (Austin, 2011), p.56: ‘Making Men: Religion, Education and Character Building’. For the ‘making of the middle class’ in the Middle East, see Keith Watenpaugh’s case study of Aleppo: Being Modern in the Middle East: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Classes (Princeton, 2006) and idem, ‘Being middle class and being Arab: Sectarian dilemmas and middle class modernity in the Arab Middle East, 1908–1936’, in Barbara Weinstein and A. Ricardo López (eds.), The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History of the Middle Class (Durham, 2012), pp.267–87. Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The American University Cairo University Archives. A.U.C. History. Articles, Book, and Notes Collection. Box 1: Robert McClenahan, ‘Another Strategic Center Occupied’, 1921, p.2. Anderson, The American University of Beirut; for the wider context see also Ussama Makdisi, ‘Reclaiming the Land of the Bible: Missionaries, secularism, and evangelical modernity’, American Historical Review 102:3 (1997), pp.680–713. Howard S. Bliss, ‘The modern missionary’, The Atlantic Monthly, May 1920, pp.10–1. See Özlem Altan-Olcay, ‘Defining “America” from a distance: Local strategies of the global in the Middle East’, Middle Eastern Studies 44:1 (2008), pp.29–52. Murphy, The American University, p.73. See also Sharkey, American Evangelicals, p.172. Murphy, The American University, p.106. See Ben Wildavsky, ‘The Great Brain Race: Rise of the global education marketplace’, lecture delivered at the London School of Economics, 21 October 2010. See also idem, The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World (Princeton, 2010), quoted in Tamson Pietsch, ‘Many Rhodes: Travelling scholarship and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880–1940’, History of Education 40 (2011), pp.723–39, at p.723. TNA, ED/121/228: ‘Reform Plan for Cairo University: Modern Teaching: Old System too Medieval’, Daily Telegraph, 25 October 1928. SEE TNA FO 141/530/3: Azharians, Cairo, 4 January 1913. TNA, CO 323/633/59: El Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt: guidance on procedures on the admission of visitors to university lectures. Original Correspondence from Foreign Office 1914. See, for instance, TNA, FO 141/594/8 for the passport problems of a Somali student, 1934.

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43. TNA, CO 737/70/5: Facilities for Admission of Foreign Students into Egyptian University. 44. TNA, CO 737/70/5: The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 April 1935. 45. TNA, CO 737/70/5: Letters 20 June 1935, 1 November 1935. 46. TNA FO 141/564/17: Minute Sheet, 11 April 1934. 47. TNA, FO 141/564/17: Minute Sheet, 21 August 1934. 48. TNA FO 141/564/17: Bourse Egyptienne, 15 August 1934. 49. TNA FO 141/564/17: Cornelius van H. Engert to Sir Miles W. Lampson, Cairo 5 August 1934; ibid, Statement concerning the American University at Cairo. 50. Reid, Cairo University, p.87. 51. Ibid, p.33. 52. See files on ‘latinization’ of Faculty of Letters: for instance TNA FO 141/656. 53. TNA ED 121/228, 2504: Board of Education: Minute Paper. Egyptian Appointments, 5 December 1927. 54. TNA, FO 141/760/4; TNA FO 371/63001. 55. TNA, FO 141/656: J. Murray to Sir Percy Lorraine, 13 November 1930. 56. TNA, FO 141/611/1: Parliamentary Question, 13 May 1935. 57. TNA, ED 121/228: Mr Henderson to Sir Austen Chamberlain, 21 October 1927. 58. Reid, Cairo University, p.94; for the many cases, see for instance TNA FO 141/760. 59. TNA, FO 141 760: Residency to Maurice Peterson, Foreign Office, 20 May 1933. 60. TNA FO 141/669: C. R. Ashbee, ‘Notes and Report on Egyptian Education’, 1917. Ashbee depicted the contact of Western and Eastern cultures in the field of learning as creating a central dilemma of colonialism – the teaching of British ideals of self-government and freedom without granting them – and thus saw the politicization of Egypt’s educated class as almost a necessary corollary of ‘culture contact’: ‘The recent explosion in Egypt, an Effendis revolution, seems to have justified my criticisms. A bankrupt education system has brought its inevitable consequences’. 61. TNA ED 121/228. On the Universities’ Bureau of the British Empire, see Tamson Pietsch, ‘Out of Empire: The Universities’ Bureau and the Congresses of the Universities of the British Empire, 1913–1939’, in Deryck M. Schreuder (ed), Universities for a ‘New World’: Making a Global Network in International Higher Education, 1913–2013 (London, 2013), pp.11–26. 62. For 1935, see TNA FO 141/611/1; for 1936, TNA FO 141/592, for 1937, TNA FO 141/643/3. There were also problems of promotions, pay raises,

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

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tenure, and illustrations of the personal networks of candidates. Once a ‘suitable’ person had been appointed, the contracts were often only for one to three years, meaning that renewal was always an issue. TNA, ED 121/228: Memorandum on the Proposal to promote the development of the English section of the University Library at Cairo, no date. TNA FO 141/677: Draft Letter Mr Roberts to K R Johnstone, 19 August 1937. TNA FO 141/677: Draft letter Mr Roberts to Mr K R Johnstone, 30 August 1937. Ibid. See Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (Stanford, 2007). See also Eric Linstrum, ‘The politics of psychology in the British Empire, 1898–1960’, Past and Present 215 (2012), pp.195–233, at p.196. TNA, FO 141/760: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Memorandum ‘Cairo as a centre for Social Research and Teaching’, attached to letter E. E. Evans-Pritchard to Dean Faculty of Letters, 7 May 1933. See Ehrlich, Students and Universities, pp.65–8.

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CHAPTER 4 INTER NATIONAL MIGR ATION AND SEX WOR K IN EAR LY T WENTIETHCENTURY CAIRO Francesca Biancani

After remarkable continuities in its development through Mamluk and Ottoman times, Cairo grew to become a global metropolis very rapidly from the 1860s onwards. While Khedive Isma‘il (1863–1879) was the first to launch an ambitious program of urban planning, rapid economic and social change boosted by the British occupation in 1882 and associated to what is known as ‘the first era of modern globalization’, radically transformed the city.1 Internal migration from rural areas was an important factor of change but it did not constitute the main reason for Cairo’s urban growth before World War I. The Egyptian capital was transformed primarily by the unprecedented concentration of foreign capital and cheap labor from Europe. Late nineteenth-century European migration to Cairo was part of a larger movement which saw 60 million people migrating from labor-rich but resource-scarce Europe to resource-abundant and labor-scarce nonmetropolitan areas, roughly between 1870 and 1913.2 While most of the available scholarship on global movements of people has looked

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either at European subalterns crossing the Atlantic or bourgeois imperial journeys,3 much less is known of Europeans who migrated to the Colonies not to serve as colonial officers or administrators, but to compete with local labor as unskilled workers. As Julia Clancy-Smith showed in her excellent work,4 thousands of ‘subsistence migrants’ or ‘white marginals’, driven by political upset, demographic imbalance, environmental crisis and boom-and-bust capitalism, crossed the Mediterranean in search of a living. The investigation of their lives and circumstances by historians contributed dramatically to the deconstruction of such a fundamental dualism informing the colonial discourse as the dichotomy ‘native/European’.5 White and local subalterns’ circumstances were defined mainly by the same material conditions, and subalterns’ ‘Europeanness’ was widely perceived as problematic. In the case of women, both local and foreign ones shared not only the experience of poverty and economic vulnerability but also the ways in which their sex was used to construct their social subordination by patriarchal forces. Although the gendered dimension of subsistence migration has been poorly studied so far, notable exceptions such as Clancy-Smith’s study have shown how consular authority over migrating capitulary female subjects worked to replicate patriarchal institutions, which could have weakened in certain phases of the migratory cycle.6 This chapter seeks to contribute to this body of literature by investigating the link between gender and international migration, focusing on a specific area of female subaltern agency which has been overlooked for a long time, that of foreign sex workers in early twentieth-century Cairo. I argue that change in sex work in the colonial period was a decidedly uneven and complex phenomenon. Transactional sex was restructured by different, complex interactions between the market and the state: sex work ranged from more formal and institutionalized brothel prostitution to more informal and casual clandestine or disguised prostitution in the expanding public entertainment sector. While sex work continued to be a choice women could make more or less deliberately to alleviate their harsh economic constraints, its structure and social meaning changed profoundly, due to its increasing integration within globalization, the market and the ways in which

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the state intervened to control flows of people and resources. Even if regulationism amounted to a failed policy and the bulk of sex work continued to be underground, sex became thoroughly commodified and its sale became more ‘exposed’, something of a visible feature in the urban space. Both colonial and local state authorities showed a new interest in quantifying sex workers, in a clear attempt to control them. A central aspect of sex work in the period under consideration, one that seems to have alarmed colonial authorities very much, was constituted by the major role in the trade played by female international migrants. After describing the Cairene socio-economic context and the ways in which urban change intersected with gender in the feminization of poverty, I will focus on the role of female migration in Cairene commercial sex. In Cairo, as in other cities of the so-called ‘white slave’ trade route, late nineteenth-century sex work was a decidedly urban and multicultural trade. Not only local women turned to sex work: thousands of Italians, Greeks, French, central and Eastern European Jews migrated to bustling overseas cities for the purpose of prostitution, a ‘world-wide camaraderie of pimps and women constantly on the run’.7 Hegemonic sources spoke of foreign sex workers in often contradictory and paradoxical terms: on the one hand, these women were seen as dangerous dregs, a stain on the colonizers’ reputation; on the other hand, they were also represented as innocent victims, prey to ruthless procurers. This was functional to maintaining a fiction of imperial racial superiority while pointing to the necessity of converting and correcting low-class female sexuality and ‘moral weakness’ in the context of metropolitan campaigns for moral purity and social regeneration that went global. In this chapter, cautionary narratives of exploitation are counterpointed by the scattered voices of sex workers themselves. Prostitutes, like other people of humble origin or illiterates, rarely recorded their lives and circumstances. Prostitutes’ social profiles or first-hand testimonies by sex workers must then be extrapolated from documents written by others, generally representatives of disciplinary systems, such as police officers, judicial officials, or social reformers. Although couched in a heavily standardized bureaucratic

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and patronizing language, court cases, police minutes and abolitionist papers can be used fruitfully to locate instances of prostitutes’ perceptions within the interstices of dominant normative discourses. I located a number of cases related to pimping and other crimes from the Italian and British consular courts, where sex workers figured prominently as plaintiffs, defendants or witnesses. In Egypt, the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children (henceforth IBS), an umbrella organization of abolitionist associations, established three branches, run by the British National Vigilance Association in Alexandria, Port Said and Cairo. They operated from 1920 to 1939 and their archives certainly represent a mine of useful information for studying the structure and nature of global sex traffic in and through Egypt. These sources are useful in investigating the lives of female migrants, whose individual agency, despite being narrowed by large global macrohistorical events, must not be eclipsed. They were not simply carried away by the tremendous trends of their times: while they certainly articulated stories of abuse and deprivation, sex workers did not represent themselves simply as victims, but as working women strenuously trying to defend their role as breadwinner, whether for their families or for themselves, showing how individuals actively manoeuvred within macro-structures of subordination, inhabited them, restructured and adapted them in order to fulfil their goals.

The emergence of modern prostitution: Urban change, gender and labor As urban historians have shown,8 all the trends that had marked Cairo’s development already during Isma‘il’s rule (1863–79) – expansion of built-up areas, urban planning, increasing Western economic and cultural penetration – were reinforced on an unprecedented scale after the British occupation of 1882. As Roger Owen remarked, before the British occupation 90,000 Europeans were already living in Egypt. This number greatly increased in the following decades, especially during the investment boom between 1897 and 1907.9 At that time, Cairo came to be known as some sort of ‘Eldorado’.10 The

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combined effects of the increase in agriculture output and confidence in the realization of high profits from various kinds of business related to rural land and urban properties generated a surge in investments that involved all types of companies, from mortgage and banking to transport. Colonial elites, a foreign comprador bourgeoisie and rich locals populated the wealthy quarters, which seemed to combine European high-society life with the exoticism of the Orient. Elizabeth Cooper, an American writer, thus described the exterior of the famous Shepherd’s Hotel, a veritable institution of cosmopolitan Cairo, in 1914: One does not pass at once to the Cairo of the Egyptians, but one lingers on the hotel terraces and studies the cosmopolitan life that is surging around him in this meeting place of East and West. During the season, that is from November until March, there is always a well-dressed crowd sitting around the little tables on the big verandahs of the hotels. One sees the French woman with her exaggerated styles, the American, looking as if she had just come from her Fifth Avenue milliner, the heavy but practical German frau with her heavier husband and uninteresting daughters, and finally the English woman with her blasé air and feather boa.11 Steady population growth resulted in the dramatic expansion of Cairo’s built-up area (from 1,000 hectares in 1882 to 16,330 hectares in 1937),12 accompanied by blatant speculation in the real estate sector. The urban landscape changed with the introduction of municipal utilities such as gas lighting and water piping in the rising middle class areas of Isma‘iliyyah, Faggalah and Tawfiqiyyah in the Gezirah, and Garden City and Qasr al-Dubbarah along the Nile. Between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Cairo’s space became increasingly sanitized, with the introduction of clinics and hospitals and, more importantly, of a drainage-sewage system. Unsanitary, narrow streets and old houses were demolished, making space for new, ambitious, European-style apartment blocks for the emerging middle class and the affluent expatriates. As a result,

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lower-class Egyptians had to move to the margins of the modern city, whose center now was Garden City, Qasr al-Dubbarah, Tawfiqiyyah, Azbakiyyah and ‘Abdin. During the period from 1897 to 1907, the proportion of people living in large towns was about 14–15 per cent of the total population, which demonstrates that a full-fledged rural-urban exodus had not yet started.13 Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest that already at this point there was substantial pressure on land in certain areas of the country. Peasants who moved to urban areas from 1882 to 1914 merged there with 200,000 foreigners, half of them coming from Europe.14 At first, males outnumbered females, but soon women followed; peasant families had always tended to preserve family unity, even in times when men abandoned the land because of corvées, army conscription or in search of new employment in the city.15 Internal (as opposed to foreign) women migrants generally moved to the city with their husbands or to rejoin them. Still, life in the city unsettled the previous relative self-sufficiency of rural families. Men and women were more directly exposed to the vagaries of the market, and especially to harsh competition for waged labor. Mostly unskilled and untrained as they were, women were extremely vulnerable in the job market and occupational options for them were limited. In 1907, 103,856 women in Cairo were unemployed as opposed to 32,843 men, while the largest female occupational group was constituted by unpaid laborers (domestic workers in their own households numbered 126,919).16 In the absence of a significant industrial sector in Cairo, the only locus of expansion for female employment was in the service sector, a poorly-paid field of activity.17 Poor wages and lack of occupational options might have determined the recourse to prostitution of a growing number of women. This was in a context where prostitution was promoted by Cairo’s unprecedented growth and an increasing demand for prostitutes existed due to the rise of a local middle class with greater purchasing power, massive imperial military presence, mass tourism and the emergence of new consumption patterns. The expansion of prostitution had much to do with the encroachment of the global economy and of state power on the lives of individual

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Egyptians, men and women, during the nineteenth century. Obviously, women shared with their menfolk the experience of economic restructuring. In fact, they had to face even greater difficulties in adapting to an urban job market that left them very few occupational choices outside the casual and informal sector. In such a context, not only women deprived of the support of a husband (i.e. divorcées and widows) might have had recourse to the selling of sexual services in order to sustain themselves and those dependent on them; women whose husbands were simply unable to provide effectively for their families may have done the same. In this sense, prostitution might not be considered as simply the labor of women with weak family ties, but, more accurately, as the labor of women coming from economically weak families.

Counting and regulating How many women living in Cairo at the beginning of the twentieth century were active as sex workers? As we will see, no definite answer can be provided for this question. Both local and colonial authorities tried to monitor and discipline sex work by turning it into a quantifiable phenomenon as much as possible. A few months after the British occupation, sex work became regulated, hence de facto legalized, by the state. Regulationism meant the institutionalization of prostitution through the establishment of state-licensed brothels in specific urban areas where both local and foreign prostitutes could work under medical surveillance. Egyptian subjects had to undergo weekly medical inspections at sanitary bureaus and report for treatment to the al-Hud al-Marsud Lock Hospital in Sayyidah Zaynab if found to be infected with venereal diseases. Capitulary subjects had to be examined by their doctors weekly and report to their consular authorities if diseased. Regulationism was framed by an extensive medical discourse on social hygiene, which reflected the emerging political priority of creating a normative corpus of knowledge concerning the biological as a means to exercise social control. This appears to have been a priority for British colonial authorities, which either condoned or introduced regulationism in the Empire, despite the fact that sex work was not licensed back in

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the motherland. Racist notions about the cultural inferiority and sexual primitivism of colonized people and bourgeois scorn of unruly popular classes combined with the paramount importance of colonial security. This determined a sustained recourse to regulationist practices also in British colonies: As historical geographer Philip Howell remarked, ‘in such places, State intervention into sexual relations (commercial and otherwise) was of signal importance’, as they ‘offer a counterargument to the notion that British liberalism was largely responsible for the limited engagement with regulationist practices’.18 Being a regulationist country from 1882 to 1949, Egypt produced a distinct type of documents concerning prostitution. Police and sanitary officials were instructed to collect specific information about sex workers, while brothel keepers were requested to keep registers with their employees’ names, provenances and ages. Licensed sex workers held ID cards, on which results of weekly sanitary inspections had to be recorded. Unfortunately, none of these materials seem to be available to researchers at the moment. While more aggregate data are available after World War I, for the period under consideration no statistics are available. The 1917 Egyptian census did, however, establish the presence of 1,395 prostitutes in Cairo (with greater concentration in the Bab al-Sha‘riyyah, Azbakiyyah and Sayyidah Zaynab neighbourhoods).19 The number was higher, in fact: artists, singers and dancers, who numbered 453 according to the census,20 in many cases had recourse to disguised prostitution in nightclubs and bars. Other contemporary narrative sources presented sex work as a thriving trade in Cairo, especially during World War I: Writing in 1915, Guy Thornton, chaplain of the Australian and New Zealanders Army Corps garrisoned in Cairo, referred to at least 2,300 native and 800 European women registered as prostitutes, ‘without considering clandestine prostitutes numbering in the thousands’.21 It could be that a major purification campaign, carried out under martial law in 191622 with the aim of keeping a closer eye on public order, had significantly reduced the number of prostitutes. However, without precise information on this specific episode we should limit ourselves to saying that despite the enforcement of state-licensed prostitution in Cairo, the number of prostitutes can be estimated only

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roughly. This is particularly true since it is commonly accepted that a decrease in licensed prostitution might translate into a significant increase in clandestine sex work. While the data we have at hand express well the anxiety of ruling elites about labeling and quantifying the presence of sex workers, they are far from allowing us to have a clearer picture of the quantitative dimension of the phenomenon, simply because the bulk of sex work in Cairo had always been and continued to be practiced as an informal activity, resisting all attempts at state regulation. What changed decidedly after 1882 was the extent to which state authorities resorted to disciplinary practices designed to control prostitution by the state, to the point of turning sex work into a main feature of specific areas in Cairo’s cityscape.

The geography of sex work Most Cairene sex work was practiced in the city center, in the Azbakiyyah area. Descriptions of the Azbakiyyah and its ‘red-blind’ district are easy to locate in old travel books, as it was considered a ‘spectacle’ of the city, one of the spots the tourists ‘did’ during their tours in Cairo.23 Cairo’s brothel area was divided into two zones, the Wagh el-Birkah, or Wish el-Birkah in local parlance (meaning the ‘front of the lake’), and the Wass‘ah. The Wagh el-Birkah concentrated most foreign prostitutes holding a licence. The street was lined by three-story-high buildings in a Mediterranean style with balconies stretching out onto the streets. Women would lean over the balconies wearing light dressing gowns, trying to catch the attention of those promenading the street. Off Wagh el-Birka, Shari‘ Bab al-Bahri and Shari‘ Clot Bey were a blaze of electric lights. The streets were full of music halls and caféchantants. Female entertainers, the vast majority of them European, sang and danced, and a number of native dancers performed some sexy variant of Oriental dance for the intoxicated and uproarious crowds. To the north of the Wagh el-Birkah, off Shari‘ Clot Bey, the quarter of indigenous prostitutes was located in the area usually known as the Wass‘ah, with an appendix in the Harat al-Ruhi and the proletarian Sicilian ghetto of Little Sicily.

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Cairo’s main commercial sex areas were thus placed a stone’s throw from the Azbakiyyah Garden, a fenced public park modeled after the Parisian Bois de Boulogne, which constituted the focal point of globalizing Cairo with its international big hotels, department stores, the Opera, cafés, taverns, restaurants and dancing halls which provided travellers, imperial soldiers and middle class locals with entertainment and leisure. Just as statistics about licensed prostitution represent the size of sex work only partially, the geography of sex work was not confined to licensed areas. Most Cairene sex work was informal and took place under the cover of bourgeois respectability in privately-owned maisons de rendezvous camouflaged in the urban fabric. First-class clandestine brothels could be found in districts such as Rod el-Farag and ‘Abdin, and often benefited from the patronage of influential members of the political and economic elite. The ‘awamahs, houseboats moored along the Nile, were known as places of debauchery where young girls would entertain upper-middle class and upper-class men.24

Prostitution, migration and the ‘white slave trade’ In both licensed and unlicensed prostitution the role played by migration, domestic and international, was crucial. The majority of both local and foreign sex workers were not native to the city, but migrants. Local woman were often from the countryside,25 while foreign women travelled from a number of European countries, most notably from Southern Europe (Italy and Greece), France, Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign women migrated through the procurement of international networks of pimps, working in collaboration with foreign brothel keepers in Cairo. These individuals, who enjoyed virtual legal immunity under the Capitulations, bought their ‘merchandise’ especially during the tourist season, when girls were in high demand. It seems that French procurers held the lion’s share of business, particularly in Cairo and Alexandria, since they controlled the main port of departure, Marseilles, and could count on the collaboration of stokers and chauffeurs working aboard the steamers to Egypt. Women travelled as stowaways on the Messageries Maritimes vessels and

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disembarked mainly at Alexandria, where ships were moored along the quay; this made it easy for women to go ashore, disguised as seamen or wearing army uniforms.26 Women were then sorted by local procurers, often through fake employment agencies, and directed to their destined workplaces. Other women reached Port Said on their way to Eastern destinations further afield. Older prostitutes who had been in the trade in Europe before being embarked to Egypt (usually via Marseille or Naples) would tend to be employed in local brothels, ending their careers there. More marketable younger women would spend some time in Egypt before being transferred to India and the Far East. Some girls were inveigled by international traffickers and eventually forced into prostitution. Many Greek girls, for instance, were said to be lured by the promise of a job or a marriage and were welcomed upon their arrival by local intermediaries disguised as the groom’s relatives.27 After a few days, women would be told to get ready for travelling to meet their future husband and eventually were taken to their destined brothel. Other Greek women were active in prostitution already in their homeland and migrated to Egypt as the country was considered a particularly lucrative spot: As a Greek prostitute told a League of Nations informant while commenting on two friends who had left for Egypt on forged passports because they were minors, ‘It is there one must go to make money. I should be going myself but it is too late in the season’.28 European prostitutes were known to local government and abolitionists as victims of the so-called ‘white slave trade’. This term referred to the massive smuggling of women from Europe to other parts of the world. The main routes along which women were smuggled started from Germany, Austria, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania and Turkey, heading to Latin America – Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay – on the one hand, and Egypt and Northern Africa on the other. The ‘white slave trade’ became a prominent concern of bourgeois reformers all over Europe from the end of the nineteenth century. Purity and abolitionist activists orchestrated a powerful propaganda campaign, publishing numerous pamphlets and publications that portrayed the commerce in the lewdest and flashiest tones. Wretched women and tricked silly girls, presumably living

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examples of ‘weak’ female and working-class morality and decency, were turned into symbols of a dangerous political and social disorder. As Judith Walkowitz puts it, they embodied a ‘cultural paranoia overtaking Britain in the late nineteenth century, as its industrial preeminence was seriously challenged by the United States and other new national industries, its military positions and imperial holdings by Germany, and its domestic peace and class structure by the spread of labor unrest and the growth of socialism’.29 On the domestic level, these concerns were finally addressed in the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1885. Supported by purity movements and a temporary alliance of abolitionist and feminist groups, the British raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and extended police powers to intervene with working women and minors who failed to abide by the standards of sexual behavior and decorum. The acts were in fact accompanied by a sustained effort at refashioning working-class culture and social and sexual habits by overt coercion and the imposition of bourgeois values and standards. On the imperial level, the existence of a large number of European working-class women being extensively exchanged and trafficked posed serious problems for the legitimization of the racial hierarchy on which the imperial ethos was based. This is why the international dimension of women’s trafficking and the struggle against procurement of European women was so high on the reformists’ agenda, especially from the last decade of the nineteenth century. Despite local authorities’ attempts at concealing the dimensions of the traffic,30 Egypt had been known since the end of the nineteenth century as ‘a country of large demand for women and girls of all nationalities for prostitution’.31 In 1905, a report on the ‘white slave trade’ was presented by a Greek subject resident in Alexandria, Madame Tsykalas, at the International Conference of the Union Internationale des Amis des Jeune Filles.32 According to the report, in the preceding twenty years, Alexandria had turned into the major international center of traffic in European women. This was due to Egypt’s economic and population growth and, more importantly, because of the Capitulation system and the structural weakness of the indigenous Penal Code in dealing with offences by foreign traffickers.33 Capitulations gave foreign

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communities a privileged fiscal and legal status, allowing foreigners to evade the native courts. As for cases involving offenders of several nationalities, it was occasionally possible for the Egyptian Parquet – the Native Court – to conduct the enquiry on its own after being granted a permit by the consulates at stake. The norm, in fact, was that the case was dismembered into as many trials as the nationalities of the offenders involved and they were tried by their consular authorities separately, in a way that was often ‘derisory’, according to Cairo City Police Chief Russell Pasha.34 Native Egyptian investigations were hindered by a number of caveats that amounted to a dual judicial system. Moreover, the efficiency of the security apparatus and its ability to bring criminals to justice were jeopardized by the lack of collaboration between the police and the judiciary. According to the Napoleonic Code adopted in Egypt, the police (which operated under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior) opened the enquiry at the scene of the crime, but then could proceed only with the authorization of the Parquet, which depended on the Ministry of Justice. In many instances, the police failed to bring offenders to justice because of the tense relationship with the Parquet authorities. Hence, criminals of every sort, women’s procurers, drugdealers and smugglers, especially if non-Egyptian, were free to ply their trades in a virtual legal vacuum.35 Reliable quantitative data about the dimension of the ‘white slave trade’ are not available, but Mme. Tsykalas, author of the 1905 report on traffic in women, estimated the number of foreign girls trafficked into Egypt via Alexandria that year at five hundred. They were mainly Rumanians, Austrians, Russians, French, Italians and Greeks.36

Beyond racialized representations of sex work: Exploring subaltern women’s agency As stated, most of the sources about prostitution were not written by prostitutes themselves, thus reflecting mainly the authorities’ concerns about sex work. In Cairo’s case, colonial sources seemed to reinforce racial boundaries by stressing fundamental differences between local and foreign sex workers. Prostitution in Cairo was extensively described

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in contemporary sources as a two-tier trade, where the hierarchical distinction between Europeans and their native counterparts was spatial, juridical and cultural. Discourse on the hierarchy of prostitution by colonial administrators and other Europeans represented foreign prostitution in Cairo as mostly coerced and deplorable, but still ‘civilized’ if compared to ‘Oriental’ abjection and squalor. Many accounts routinely stressed this point. Russell Pasha, head of the Cairo City Police for decades, wrote in his service memories that the Wagh el-Birkah, the area of European prostitution in the Azbakiyyah, was populated with European women of all breeds and races other than British, who were not allowed by their consular authority to practice this licensed trade in Egypt. Most of the women were of the third class category for whom Marseilles had no further use, and who would eventually be passed on to the Bombay or the Far-East markets, but they were still Europeans [emphasis added] and not yet fallen so low as to live in the one-room shacks of the Was‘a which had always been the quarter for purely native prostitution of the lower class.37 European observers were certainly more concerned with the existence of European women ‘selling themselves openly and unabashed to black, brown or white men for money’38 than with the plight of Egyptian sex workers, who were often described as rapacious, feral creatures,39 living instances of the inherent bestiality and lasciviousness of the Orient. European women, instead, were presented as victims of the ‘white slave trade’, as mindless or retarded girls whose typically low-class lack of morality or sound moral judgment would ultimately account for their present situation. Nonetheless, ethnicity as the sole criterion for the distinction between local and foreign sex workers is not only scarcely useful, but utterly misleading. Adopting class as a criterion for discussing similarities and differences among these groups would allow a more nuanced analysis that debunks the colonialist local versus foreign dualism and highlights how local and foreign Cairene sex-workers shared significant traits but also had important peculiarities.

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The similarities rested firstly in sex workers’ reasons for entering the trade, which was an extreme response to the social and economic instability afflicting lower-class women in general. Economic need, the erosion of support networks provided by the traditional extended family in the urban context and lack of occupational alternatives, pushed many women into prostitution. While it cannot be denied that many girls could have been lured into prostitution without their consent, certainly many others were not oblivious of procurers’ real business and tactics. Given also the pervasiveness of widely circulating stories of abduction and sexual exploitation, it seems highly improbable that girls did not have a clue of what they were going to find when they left their homes, or even emigrated abroad, following the promises of a casual male acquaintance. I claim that a study of foreign sex workers in Cairo as they emerge from a number of sources, in particular the records of consular courts, complicates the language of victimization and passivity used as a mantra in normative texts and illuminates possible sites for women’s agency and resistance. Furthermore, by investigating cases of migrant sex workers in Cairo, we get a sense of the ways in which real women tried to cope with multiple systems of economic and gendered subordination, reinforced by sweeping contemporary global trends. For instance, Augusta Pellissier was a 17-year-old French girl who was brought over from Marseilles under the pretence of finding her a partnership in a café. The man who smuggled her over from Marseilles was called Adé, alias Amédée Desanti, brother of Antoine Desanti. She had met him in Marseilles in July 1928 in a restaurant at which she used to lunch. Her story is so vivid and detailed that it is worthy of being reported at length. Augusta Pellissier told the authorities: My acquaintance with Adé grew closer and closer and he started making some proposals, like leaving for Egypt with him to open a ballroom there. Three weeks later, once I had decided to accept his offer, he asked me to go and live with him, at Rue de la Cathédrale 1, where we planned our journey. I went and lived with him for fifteen days all in all, during which it did not occur to me there was anything seedy with him. This is how we

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travelled to Egypt. ... Adé embarked our luggage the day before the departure. On that day, at 7 a.m. he got on board on his own. One hour later, I went to the ship with a certain M. Michel, who had lived with Adé and whose wife did some housework for him. I was given a small packet I was instructed to deliver to Jules Arency, a chauffeur on board, pretending I was his wife. When I got on the ship, I was taken to Arency’s cabin: he was there with Adé and another boy. Adé made the gesture of keeping my mouth shut. Arency went out of the cabin and took a look around. One hour later they took us down to the storeroom. They put us in a chest and put weights on top of it. Some hours later, when we reached the open sea, the storekeeper came and picked us up and we moved to his cabin. We spent all the crossing in there, except for some walks at night and a couple of times when we had to be hidden because the cargo was being inspected. The first time, we were hidden in a cabin, on the side of the anchorage, almost buried alive by canvas bags. The second time, they put us at the bottom of the bridge, among planks and one-ton iron rims. ... We reached Alexandria on the 28th of September on the Lotus. ... At 7 a.m. Adé set foot on land dressed as a chauffeur and came back with a friend of his to pay the storekeeper. He gave him 3,000 francs, then they drank champagne together to celebrate the arrival at Alexandria. And then a chauffeur called Joseph gave me an identity card. My picture was on it but the stamped papers accompanying it were in the name of a certain Virginia (I don’t remember the surname), Italian, housemaid. I disembarked around 7 or 8 at night. Three chauffeurs were waiting for me on the quay, a tattooed big man, Arency and Joseph. They told me to go through the customs on my own and that we would have rejoined after that, which I did. At customs, I was not checked nor searched at all.40 In Alexandria, Augusta was handed over to a woman who suggested she could make money as her ‘partner’, since Adé did not yet have sufficient capital to buy a ballroom. The girl objected and when persuasion failed, was beaten. She was then made to go on the streets

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from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., and again from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m., or later, and always with someone watching her. After a month in Alexandria, Augusta was visited by a woman, Jeanne Maury, alias Josephine Emilie Maury. She paid Amédée Desanti 7 Egyptian pounds on the spot and brought the girl to her clandestine brothel at 2 Sekkat al-Manakh in Cairo. Prostitutes were in a weak and subaltern position, but this does not mean they did not try to resist or renegotiate the terms of their exploitation. Strategies of resistance were multiple and related to the different brokers who controlled their work, whether brothel-keepers, state officials (policemen or public health officers) or pimps. Women who chose to resist unwarranted state intervention kept themselves to the informal sector instead of obtaining government issued-licenses. When sex workers attempted to subvert the power relations they had with their exploiters, their pimps, they did not hesitate to make use of the law system, as plaintiffs in courts. Among the consular minutes I researched, there are cases which provide interesting insights into the relationship between prostitutes and their pimps. In these cases, women were self-aware enough to sue their pimps and haul them before a court for their mistreatment. In February 1914, an Italian-registered prostitute, Francesca Collavita, sued the 21-year-old Maltese Giuseppe Vassallo for living off her earnings gained from prostitution, as well as repeatedly threatening her with a razor. The woman worked in the fish market under the name of Angiolina while she rented a ‘shop’ available for customers. In addition, she lived with Giuseppe in a small room nearby, in Darb al-Nur, where she paid for rent, food, washing and the man’s expenses. After she asked for assistance from the police and denounced him, Vassallo fled to Alexandria, where he was caught. Vassallo was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment with hard labor in Malta.41 Another interesting case is that of a 26-year-old Italian, Antonino Rizzo, and a 23-year-old Greek national from Smyrna, Maritza Vladi.42 Rizzo had migrated from Sicily in 1920 and had been working as a warehouseman until he met Vladi. They lived together for a few months before she decided to leave him and move to a place of her own.

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On 28 February 1926, while Vladi and her new flatmate Nazzarina Naser were returning home from the cinema, Rizzo ambushed the women at the house door, throwing vitriol in their faces and stabbing them with a knife. According to his testimony, Rizzo had known Vladi from a brothel. Having fallen in love with her, he claimed he had wanted to save her from the sordid life she led. They moved in together and lived as a couple; however, he soon realized that ‘the leopard cannot change his spots’. In a plea sent to the Italian Consul on 17 April 1926, he wrote: she kept on plying that vile trade when I was not around ... I suffered! I wanted to forget, to get away and escape from her, but passion enslaved me. I cried like a baby, begging her to give up those dreams her mother had inculcated in her young head: you are young and beautiful, she would tell her, you could find a bey or a pasha to maintain you, instead of ‘this Italian pederast’, words I heard myself, without rebelling because I was too in love with her. But Maritza followed her advice and she evicted me from our house. She said we would remain friends, until her husband, as she was not legally divorced, would return to her. It was not true: she just wanted to keep me quiet, while she was opening her arms to a new lover, to experience new embraces, satisfy her lust and destroy another man. Eventually I resigned myself, tried to forget by drinking, getting drunk to ease my pain: this was not a life, I felt doomed, I felt the dishonor I was bringing to my family. Maritza would keep on coming to see me from time to time: I was the object of her capricious pleasures, driven by the artificial dreams the injections of morphine and ether procured her.43 On the night of the incident, Rizzo claimed he had come to talk to her, although he was heavily intoxicated by alcohol. According to his testimony, Vladi drew a kitchen knife and stabbed him in the leg. At that point, Rizzo lost his temper and threw vitriol in the women’s faces while also getting hold of a knife and stabbing them. The letter he wrote from the European Lock to his consul was

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a desperate attempt to invoke passion as an extenuating circumstance for the crime he had committed; he depicted himself as the innocent victim of a ruthless she-devil. However, too many elements did not corroborate his version. Interestingly, Rizzo had resigned from his job precisely at the time he had met Maritza, a strange move for an individual beginning a happy cohabitation with a woman. Moreover, the fact he had a bottle of vitriol on his person on the night of the incident clearly did not corroborate any hypothesis of lack of intent in committing the crime. Perhaps more interesting than Rizzo’s staged persona, the brokenhearted lover distraught by passion, is Maritza Vladi’s own version of events. The tone and the language used to explain the nature of her relationship with Rizzo is very different from the sentimentalism evoked in Rizzo’s letter. In contrast, her language is more akin to a pragmatic estimation of gain versus losses. Vladi confirmed she had met Rizzo at the Pension Di Milano, which he used to frequent as a client. She accepted his courtship as he made her many promises: he told me he was working at Cohenca’s and that he earned 15 liras a month. He said he could have paid for any sort of luxury and that he would have married me. I trusted him and welcomed him in my house. Time passed and he did not do anything of what he had promised me. They lived more uxorio for eighteen months, during which she paid the rent and all other expenses. Maritza goes on telling her story: Since living in that way was not convenient in any way to me, and I clearly realized he just wanted to have fun and exploit me, I drove him out. He protested and did not want to leave me. I explained to him that I had to pay the rent for the flat and many other expenses, and since he was not in a position to help me, as he was unemployed, I could not keep him living with me any longer. I moved to my new flat in 3 Sharia Daramanli, Abdeen where I rent out two rooms. I use the money I get from the rent to sustain myself.44

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Rizzo and Vladi’s case shows well how bourgeois understandings of gendered decorum were in fact far removed from everyday subalterns’ politics of survival. Being kept as a lover outside the marital bond could provide women with a valid alternative to unemployment and starvation. Men, too, would actually give up their role as overseers of female honor and trade in their sexual work in order to secure a living.

Conclusions At the turn of the twentieth century, Cairo was described by observers through a recurring set of images. Cairo was both a ‘sin-city’ and an ‘Eldorado’, a place of incredible opportunities and a squalid den of sin and debauchery. Other teeming urban centers in the global South were described in the same way, as they were affected by the ‘first wave of modernization’. Cairo was transformed by rapid urban, economic and social changes from the 1860s onwards and it turned into a full-fledged global metropolis, a meeting point of international trade, finance, migration and tourism. In this context, sex work was re-shaped by the global market. It changed into a veritable commodity whose demand depended on the new purchasing power of rising local middle classes and resident expats, tourists and imperial soldiers. Regulated by the Egyptian state after the establishment of the British Protectorate in 1882, sex work became a highly visible feature of the Cairo urban landscape. The increasing vulnerability of both local and foreign women in Egypt pushed them to see prostitution as a viable strategy to earn a living and support their dependents. State regulation of prostitution was introduced in many parts of the Empire. As bio-political concerns and discourses of social control travelled to the colonies in order to safeguard imperial governability and economic profit, disciplinary systems did so as well, with the aim of controlling migratory masses and their activities. Unescorted foreign women in the colonies were considered living threats to the stability of imperial racial categories. Most of the mass hysteria around the so-called ‘white slave trade’ was connected to the danger that miscegenation and working-class

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women’s improper sexual conduct could pose to racial hierarchies in the Empire. Generally, structuralist macrohistorical readings of migration, whether inspired by conventional economics or Marxism, have overlooked individual agency. This chapter has sought not only to describe the ways in which sex work was transformed in early twentieth-century globalizing Cairo, but also to explore how individuals whose movement was the result of global phenomena inhabited these processes of massive social and economic change, thus exploring the link between macro-history and micro-history. In the interstices of discourses of social decay and venereal peril, dangers of Westernization and moral crisis, and within them, real flesh-and-blood women were trying to improve their working conditions and living circumstances. While hegemonic commentaries on sex workers constructed them in binary terms, dangerousness and passivity, evidence shows that sex workers’ responses to their circumstances were absolutely mixed and do not lend themselves to easy generalizations. Some sex workers were coerced, others were not and even thought of Cairo as a particularly profitable spot for plying their trade. They sued their pimps in courts, meaning they were fully cognizant of their rights, but they would not have objected to being kept by a profligate lover if that meant material security. They were no champions of feminism, but nor were they passive victims. They seemed able to manoeuver within the limits imposed by asymmetric gender relations in order to do what the vast majority of colonial Cairo’s population, regardless of their ethnic background, had to do: make ends meet.

Notes The author would like to thank Liat Kozma, Avner Wishnitzer and Cyrus Schayegh for their invaluable comments on previous drafts of this article. My deepest appreciation also goes to all the participants in the conference ‘On the Move – the Middle East and the First Modern Globalization’, held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 16–19 January 2012, where the first version of this chapter was presented, for providing me with useful comments and observations. 1. André Raymond, Cairo (Cambridge MA, 2000), p.318.

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2. Hatton and Williamson coined the term ‘age of mass migration’ for this period characterized by free trade, the gold standard and low tariffs. See T. J. Hatton and J. G. Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration (New York, 1998). 3. See Adam McKeown, ‘Global migration, 1846–1940’, Journal of World History 15 (2004), pp.155–89. 4. See Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans. North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, 1800–1900 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2011); idem, ‘Marginality and migration: Europe’s social outcasts in pre-colonial Tunisia, 1830–81’, in Eugene Rogan (ed), Outside In, on the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London, 20002), pp.149–83; idem, ‘Women, gender and migration along a Mediterranean frontier: Pre-colonial Tunisia, c. 1815–1870’, Gender & History 17: (2005), pp.62–92. 5. See Julia Clancy-Smith, ‘Changing historical perspectives on colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa, c.1900–present’, in Amy Singer, Israel Gershoni and Y. Hakan Erdem (eds), TwentiethCentury Historians and Historiography of the Middle East (Seattle, 2006), pp.70–100. 6. On the correlation between different phases of the migratory cycle and corresponding degrees of female agency, see Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–2001 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001) and Sarah Gualtieri, ‘Feminizing the chain migration thesis: Women and Syrian transatlantic migration, 1878–1924’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2004), pp.66–78. 7. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, the British Experience (Manchester, 1990), p.146. 8. My analysis here is based on two classical urban studies, Janet Abu Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton N.J., 1971), p.173–74 and Raymond’s Cairo. 9. Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy 1800–1914 (London, 2002), p.216. 10. Ibid, p.235. 11. Elizabeth Cooper, The Women of Egypt (London, 1914), p.32. 12. Raymond, Cairo, p.322. 13. Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, p.217. 14. Ibid. 15. Ehud Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge, 1990), p.197; Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt (Cambridge, 1985) pp.135–7.

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16. Of course numbers must be treated with caution as late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptian censuses are far from being considered reliable. On some of the difficulties encountered in taking the 1917 Census of Cairo, for example, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Technopolitics, Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), pp.111–12. 17. See Tucker, Women in Nineteenth Century Egypt, p.101. 18. Philipp Howell, ‘Historical Geography of the Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire’, http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/ projects/prostitutionregulation (last accessed on 27 June 2013). 19. Census of Egypt Taken in 1917 (Cairo, 1921), p.42. 20. Ibid, p.38. 21. Guy Thornton, With the Anzacs in Cairo: The Tale of a Great Fight (London, 1916), p.59. 22. N. W. N. Willis, Anti-Christ in Egypt (London, 1914), p.28: ‘tourists, young and old, go to Egypt “to do” the Pyramids, the Tombs, the Wells, the sacred places (and the places that are sacred only to Satan’s pimps) but they scarcely ever leave the Pharaos without seeing the abomination of all humanity, Ibrahim Gharghi [Ibrhm al-Gharbi was the most powerful pimp in the Wass‘ah, the segregated area for local licensed prostitution, F.B.]. In the season, guides make nearly as much money from showing globe trotters the infamous Ibrahim Gharghi, as they do from showing the Pyramids and other Egyptian sights’. See also Women’s Library 4/IBS/6/033. 23. Thornton, With the ANZACs, pp.77–8; see also Douglas Sladen, Oriental Cairo, the City of the Arabian Nights (London, 1911), p.60. 24. For a description of an ‘awamah-brothel’ see Marilyn Booth, ‘Unsafely at home: Narratives of sexual coercion in 1920s Egypt’, Gender and History 16:3 (2004), pp.744–68. See also Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/033. 25. It is more complicated to establish the status of Sudanese women. Formally, Sudan was united with Egypt in the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium from 1896 to 1955. Sudanese women in prostitution in early twentieth-century Cairo were thus, legally speaking, local subjects. Despite the fact that slavery had been abolished formally in 1877 and abolition was enforced by a Slave Trade Bureau created by the British in 1894, regional networks of merchants bringing slaves from Sudan and Ethiopia to Egypt were still active in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cairo. Black slaves were still in demand for domestic service in wealthy harems and sexual service in brothels. See Eve Troutt Powell, The Tools of the Master, Slavery and Empire in Nineteenth Century Egypt, unpublished paper, 2002; John Hunwick and Eve Troutt Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton NJ, 2002).

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26. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/034. 27. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/033 Report on the Traffic in Women by Madame Tsykalas, 1905. 28. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/033/ 1927 Report of the Special Committee of Experts on the Traffic of Women and Children. 29. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, 1982), p.247. 30. See Women’s Library, 4/IBS/5/2/040– ‘Licensed Houses – Abstracts of the Reports of the Governments on the System of Licensed Houses Related to the Traffic in Women and Children’, Geneva, 28 February 1929. 31. IBS, The International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, Its Works in Egypt (Cairo, 1902). 32. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/033. Report on White Slave Trade by Mme. Tsykalas from Alexandria. 33. An attempt at reforming the legal framework was made in 1928, when a proposal was drafted to extend the power of the Mixed Courts to deal with women’s traffickers. 34. Thomas Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service: 1902–1946 (London, 1940), p.26. See also Laurence Grafftey-Smith, Bright Levant (London, 1970), p.12: ‘... in one notorious case in Cairo, two Italians, a Greek and a young Egyptian Jew called Jacoel were involved in a pocket-knife murder, unexpected when they broke in to steal. The Egyptian was the only one to be hanged. The others, after condemnation in their consular courts and release on appeal to Athens and Ancona, were back in Cairo in less than three months, buying haberdashery from the Jacoel family shop’. 35. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/5/2/40. 36. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/033. 37. Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p.180. 38. Willis, Anti-Christ in Egypt, p.20. 39. Russell Pasha recalled that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a stroll through the Wass‘ah ‘reminded one of a zoo, with its painted harlots sitting like beasts of prey behind the iron grilles of their groundfloor brothels, while a noisy crowd of low-class natives, interspersed with soldiers in uniform and sight-seeing tourists, made their way along the narrow lanes’: Russell Pasha, Egyptian Service, p.78. In Sladen’s words, Wass‘ah’s women, ‘most of them appalling ... positively flame with crimson paint and brass jewellery and have eyes flashing with every kind of mineral decoration and stimulant, and far too much flesh’: Sladen, Oriental Cairo, p.6. 40. Women’s Library, 4/IBS/6/034.

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41. NA, FO 841/146 – Rex versus Giuseppe Vassallo for living wholly or in part on the proceedings of prostitution. 42. ASMAE, Casi Penali Regio Tribunale Consolare Italiano del Cairo, 1926, cases 1–65. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

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CHAPTER 5 JEWS ON THE MOVE DUR ING THE L ATE OTTOM AN PER IOD: TR ENDS AND SOME PROBLEMS Yaron Ben-Naeh

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent significant transformations in its political conduct, the cultural and religious life of its subjects, and material culture and consumption of goods, as well as important demographic changes (mainly fluctuating numbers, movement and migration of population). The urban landscape, economy, social hierarchies, religious life, culture and patterns of consumption all underwent dramatic change, not necessarily voluntary or resulting from the will of the authorities. Naturally, all these also had their effect upon the Jewish minority that resided in the cities. The editors of this book have wisely decided to pin down the rather evasive and diversified concept of mobility through articles focusing on singular aspects, to forego any attempt to seek out influences, streams and trends in favor of identification of networks and modi operandi, and how these movements were reflected in reality. While the presence of hegemonic western European forces was one of the most influential factors on developments in the Middle East since 1865,

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it was not the only one. Furthermore, the terms ‘modernization’ and ‘globalization’ signify much more than what is customary to associate with them. Relationships between cause and effect or between center and periphery are much more complex. Special note should be taken of the development of communication networks and means of travel, such as steamships, railroads, or the telegraph,1 during the second half of the nineteenth century, which undermined the traditional order and enhanced the influence of European colonialist forces. This chapter deals with the migration of Ottoman Jews, a process that had diverse results, and examines one issue raised by the emigration of Jews from Anatolia – that is, the deserted wives (‘agunot’) whose husbands had emigrated and were forbidden to remarry by Jewish law, thus creating a distressing problem. I shall first describe demographic changes undergone by Ottoman Jewish society during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909), under the regime of the Young Turks (1908), and in the first decade of the Turkish Republic (until c. 1930). Several characteristics of this process

Illustration 5.1 Jewish communities in Anatolia, 1881–1914: Demography and spatial distribution (created by Chaim Schwartz)

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can be discerned: economic growth, population increase, urbanization and internal migration in two stages. The first was marked by migration to cities in which Jews had not previously resided, for example in the provinces of Van, Diyarbakir and Aleppo in the east, Konya in the south, and Kastamonu in northern Anatolia. The second, later stage, especially during the second decade of the twentieth century (after 1911, the year of the census published by McCarthy), was marked by a move to the large communities already existing in western Anatolia and Edirne. The processes of economic growth, population movement (whether as a result of the initiative of the authorities or voluntary and independent action), urbanization (the result of internal migration from villages to urban centers of various sizes or from smaller cities to larger ones), and westward migration were common to all of Anatolia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were not unique to the Jewish population. What differentiated the Jews from the rest of the population was that demographic increase was speedier among them and that they migrated in substantial numbers, to the effect that by the end of the period under discussion, dozens of communities ceased to exist. It is also possible that the percentage of Jews migrating to other countries was greater than among other segments of the population, but we do not have sufficient statistics to corroborate that assumption. What caused the increase in population and why was it more rapid among the Jews? While most Muslims were a backward rural population, the Jews were urban dwellers par excellence. Thus the amenities of modernization were more available to them: better hygienic conditions, more advanced medical knowledge and greater success in the cure of disease through inoculation and new medications (all of which came gradually with modernization), implementation of a policy of quarantine in the ports, and elimination of some of the plagues of the past that killed thousands, at times tens of thousands, of people in a short time (though cholera was still widespread). Together, these resulted in a decreased mortality rate and a rise in the number of babies and young children who survived. To this should be added the fact that members of minorities were not conscripted for military service and did not suffer heavy casualties in the battles waged since the Crimean

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War. In addition to the natural increase of the local population, since the 1880s there was also immigration to the Empire, primarily from Eastern Europe. Various ethnic groups, Jews among them, flocked from Eastern Europe, but also from the Balkans – Romania, Bulgaria and Greece – to Anatolia, primarily due to the rise of nationalist movements in their former countries, but in the case of the Jews also due to anti-Semitism and blood libels. The opposite was the case in the second decade of the twentieth century, which was marked by a rapid and dramatic decline in the general population, with a similar trend among the Jews, as a result of the wars and hardships that accompanied them as well as widespread emigration, especially of young men. What factors enabled and encouraged migration? Among them are: the deterioration of security; blood libels instigated by Christians in various places; shortage of food and economic hardship; seeking a livelihood in the larger cities in which there already existed veteran Jewish communities that could help in the absorption of the migrants, offering not only better conditions and a higher standard of living but also more opportunities for employment, including new professions; and perhaps also the thought that the port cities of Istanbul and Izmir could be a point of departure for destinations farther removed, in Europe and the American continent.2 Seeking employment – even temporary – by young men who moved to the capital (not a new phenomenon) is reflected in their large numbers already in 1875, and again in the 1880s. Though later the numbers declined, these persons accounted for a significant segment of the labor force in Istanbul during the last quarter of the century.3 Moreover, the absolute majority of the hundreds of thousands of persons – not necessarily Jews – who emigrated from the Turkish territories to the New World were men, and the rate even increased after 1909.4 At least from the 1870s onwards, many Jewish young men were educated in the school network operated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. The education they received was pro-French and equipped them with important means for social mobility (professional training and languages) that also helped them to migrate to countries under European influence. To this should be added modern means of transportation and their declining costs that made migration and mobility

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increasingly available to more and more people. These were railroads for overland travel and steamships with which to sail the seas, either to Khedival Egypt, under British control, or westwards to France and the New World – whether to North America or to the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America (as many Syrians did), where they could avail themselves of the Judeo-Spanish in which they were fluent. Population movements are often the result of forces that push and others that pull, sometimes simultaneously. For example, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century there was much migration of Egyptian fellahin to areas in Palestine, which offered a better livelihood and less pressure from the authorities, as was the case in Egypt under the regime of Muhammad ‘Ali. The Ottoman state also encouraged the migration of Circassians to certain areas in Syria and Palestine, and exiled Armenians eastwards, as part of its efforts to distance suspicious elements from areas of strategic importance. Later, there were also expulsions and population movements with an ethnic-nationalist background. During the Balkan Wars, more than 400,000 Muslims were expelled from the battle areas into Turkey; during World War I more than 300,000 Muslims fled their homes in the southern Caucasus, and after the war nearly another 500,000 refugees, primarily from Greece, reached Anatolia and the Edirne region in Turkey. In addition to immigration, there was much movement of populations within the Empire in the aftermath of World War I and the War of Independence. Millions wandered or fled from one place to another under difficult conditions and many died of hunger and disease.5

An overview of the demographic transformations Natural increase There was a marked decrease in population in Anatolia in the eighteenth century, especially during its final decades,6 a tendency that continued during the first three decades of the following century. However, it seems that after the 1830s the number of non-Muslims

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increased at an accelerated rate of about 2 per cent per year while the percentage of Muslims remained static. Muslims suffered more than others from hunger, diseases (inter alia due to insufficient knowledge of how to prevent them), and the death of soldiers in the various wars. But there was also an important economic reason for demographic change: The opening up of the Empire to European capitalism brought with it significant opportunities and advantages, and it was mainly the non-Muslim minorities who first took advantage of them. In contrast, many Muslim men served for long periods in the military, preventing many of them – provided they survived their service – from establishing themselves financially, marrying and fathering children. The economic changes, therefore, resulted in demographic growth primarily among the minorities. Only after 1850 was there also an increase among the Muslims, both rural and urban. This was due to improved living conditions in the agricultural sector and the rise of a Muslim middle class that adopted some aspects and innovations of modernity and the modern lifestyle, including hygiene, inoculations, and more. This was also due to significant improvement in the level of public medicine, in sanitation in the major cities, and in hygienic norms in general. All these increased the life expectancy of Ottoman Muslims and their offspring.7 This does not mean that Turkey was no longer hit by many epidemics of cholera, the plague and smallpox, which killed tens of thousands, due to congested living quarters, deficient hygienic conditions and poverty which also meant poor nutrition and the inaccessibility of efficient medicine. During the epidemic of 1812, for example, 150,000 people died in Istanbul alone (other reports claim the number to have been between 200 and 300,000), while almost 200,000 deaths were reported in that city during the epidemic of 1833. Serious epidemics broke out in Izmir in 1827, 1849, 1865 and even 1904.8 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, epidemics, while less frequent, from time to time caused deaths, especially in poverty-stricken congested neighborhoods. Another reason for population increase and greater mobility during the second half of the lengthy reign of Abdülhamid was a sense of improved security, in addition to construction of roads and railways.

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Trade increased greatly due to these new opportunities for transporting goods, as well as men. The population of Anatolia increased during this period by about 50 per cent, a growth that was common to all ethnic groups. Apparently, in rural areas the average family was five to six persons, while in the larger cities, such as Istanbul, it numbered less than four. There was no great difference in family size among the various ethnic communities.9 This accelerated population growth was cut short by the succession of wars fought in the region between 1911 and 1922, and drops in population can be discerned in all ethnic groups even prior to World War I. Of all theaters in the Empire during the war, Anatolia was hardest hit. In the wake of that war and the armed conflict between Turkey and Greece, its population decreased by about 30 per cent: some 20 per cent died in the hostilities and another 10 per cent migrated. During this period, inter-ethnic tension reached new peaks: from the disappearance of the Armenians – its most dramatic manifestation – to the transfer that put an end to the Greek presence in Anatolia. The decline in the Jewish population was moderate compared to other ethnic groups.10 Migration Migration was the other dominant demographic element in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. This included internal migration, immigration from outside the Empire (to be discussed below), and emigration out of Anatolia. There was also a constant flow of migrants from rural areas to the major urban centers. Urbanization was characteristic of the entire Middle East at this time, as multitudes of villagers swept into the cities that became more important centers of production and trade. Much of the population increase in the major cities can be put down to massive migration. Thus, for example, Istanbul’s population, which numbered 359,000 in 1829, was doubled within fifty years; in 1877 600–700,000 persons lived within its limits, and in 1890 the number was around 900,000.11 By the end of the century, Istanbul had a population of more than one million, and estimates for the eve of World War I place it at about 1.6 million. The major cities were now cosmopolitan centers where one could hear diverse languages in the streets. Side by side with the Muslim majority lived other ethnic communities – Greeks,

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Armenians and Europeans of foreign citizenship. In 1885, 129,000 foreigners resided in the capital, alongside 385,000 Muslim and 359,000 non-Muslim Ottoman subjects.12 Istanbul’s population now included more persons who were born outside the city (406,000) than those born within it (338,000).13 Izmir grew from 100,000 around 1840 to 200,000 in 1890 and 300,000 in 1912.14 Demographic Changes in Ottoman Jewry In addition to internal population mobility, there were waves of immigration to the Empire as well as of those who left it, incoming immigration predominating. I shall now mention the major groups of newcomers: Europeans Agriculture continued to be rather primitive and large areas remained uncultivated. The Ottoman authorities aspired to upgrade agriculture and develop other sectors of the economy. To achieve this they were in need of experienced people who also had some financial means and were willing to invest them. An imperial firman promulgated in 1857 decreed that the gates of the Empire were open to anyone prepared to become an Ottoman subject and obey the laws of the land, provided he had a certain amount of capital. Such immigrants were promised religious freedom and exemption from military service and taxes. The decree was published in the European press, arousing much interest in Europe and even in the United States. However, restrictions were placed upon this liberal immigration policy when large groups of Bulgarians and Jews announced their intention to settle in the Empire. Muslims from the Balkans The Balkans had for generations been peopled by Eastern Orthodox Christians (Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and more) alongside a large Muslim population, some of whom were of Turkish origin. There were substantial economic, social, and cultural gaps between the Christians and the Muslims. During the nineteenth century, the Balkan Christians raised nationalist demands. The proponents and shapers of nationalism conceived of the nation as a homogenous ethnic, religious, and linguistic entity. Intolerance grew vis-à-vis the Muslim-Turkish population in the

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Balkans who were considered both foreign and a hindrance, forcing Muslims to migrate to Anatolia. Many had enough financial means to establish businesses of their own in their new places of residence, while others were employed in construction and farming, bringing with them modern methods of cultivation that advanced Anatolian agriculture. After the first wave of migration in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, a new one came following the Russo-Turkish War (1878) in the wake of attacks by the Russian forces against Muslims in Bulgaria and by Serbs in northern Macedonia. Mosques were razed and anything representative of Ottoman rule became a target. 250–300,000 Muslims, mostly of Turkish origin, were killed and about 1.5 million others were forced to move into the contracted Ottoman Empire which had lost some of its territory. There was another wave of migration in 1908–1909 that reached its peak in the coming decades, during the Balkan Wars and World War I, and when there was a population transfer with Greece in the 1920s. Circassians After their conquest of the Caucasus in 1862, the Russians tried to acculturize and assimilate the Circassians by obligating them to serve in the army and by efforts to convert them to Christianity. However, the Circassians, who preferred to maintain their ethnic identity, opposed the Russian invaders. When that struggle failed, many of them chose to leave the Caucasus in a migration movement that had begun in the 1850s, continued during the Crimean War, and now reached its peak in 1862–65. Waves of migrants from the Caucasus continued until the 1920s. While the Sultan did aspire to help his subjects, he also hoped that they would ameliorate the lack of manpower in the areas of road building, cotton growing (a profitable commodity) and military service. In 1860 the Ottoman authorities announced that they had reached an understanding with the Russians by which 40–50,000 Circassians would move into imperial territory, but the real figures were much higher, one estimate being 500,000 emigrants between 1858 and 1864. Another 700,000 to 1 million came in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War (1878), though many did not survive the difficult journey, about 20 per cent of them dying of hunger and epidemics.

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About another 500,000 Circassians left the territory of the Russian Empire between 1881 and 1914 and, together with other Muslims, settled in Turkey. Tatars Already in 1783–84 about 80 thousand Tatars came from the Crimean Peninsula to settle in Anatolia and Bessarabia. This migration continued throughout the nineteenth century, reaching its zenith during the Crimean War (1853–56) and after its conclusion, since the Russians doubted their loyalty and oppressed them harshly. It is estimated that the total number of Tatars who migrated to the Ottoman Empire between 1783 and 1922 was 1.8 million. Nomadic tribes Mention should also be made of the migration of Muslim nomads from the hilly and desert areas of the Empire to the fertile regions in Anatolia, Iraq, Syria and Palestine and their settlement there. Thus, the waves of immigrants were a decisive element in shaping the character of the Ottoman Empire and laid the groundwork for the rise of new nation states. Islam and the traditional political culture were what bound together Muslims of diverse nationalities (Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Arabs and others). On the other hand, the migration of Turkish peoples from the Balkans reinforced the Turkish element in Anatolia to such an extent that it enabled them to establish Turkish cultural and linguistic predominance there and to suppress nationalist awakenings among other ethnic groups. This process was completed in the 1920s, after which Turkey became a state with an overwhelming majority of Muslims of Turkish origin. Jews accounted for one of the largest and most significant ethnic minorities in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. According to Kemal Karpat, they formed the fifth largest group, after the Muslim Turks, Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians.15 The rest of this chapter will be devoted to the demographic changes undergone by Ottoman Jewry during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It should be borne in mind that from the standpoint of Jewish culture, Anatolia and the Balkans were effectively one

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area – or rather one cultural zone, that of the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)speaking Jews. Throughout this area Ladino-speaking Jews (mostly – but not exclusively – descendants of the exiles and immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula) predominated, and close relations were maintained between the various communities. This cultural area continued to exist until the destruction of a major part of it in the Holocaust, and the subsequent mass emigration of Turkish Jews to the State of Israel. A cautious estimate places the Jewish population in the eighteenth century in the area of present-day Turkey and Greece at about 120,000. The majority – c. 70,000 – lived in the four largest cities: about 30,000 in Istanbul, 25,000 in Salonica, 10,000 in Izmir, and a few thousand in Edirne. There were also a dozen or so mediumsized communities in smaller cities such as Bursa, Çanakale, Tire and Ankara in Turkey, and Larissa and Ioanina in Greece, in each of which lived about 1,000–2,000 Jews. In addition, there were small communities numbering several hundred, or even less than a hundred Jews in small cities and towns. During most of the nineteenth century, there was a moderate increase in the size of the urban Jewish communities. In the final decades of that century and in the early twentieth century the pace accelerated. In the Aydin district the number of Jews rose from 25,000 in the mid-1890s to 35,000 in 1914, while the increase in the county (sanjak) of Drama was even more dramatic, reaching 2,176 in 1907, fifteen times its size twenty years earlier. Jewish demographic increase was not a universal phenomenon; in fact, there were a few exceptions to the rule during the late nineteenth century. In the Adana district, for example, there was a drastic decline: whereas in the 1880s almost 2,000 Jews lived there, towards the end of the century the Jewish community had completely disappeared. It is difficult to know what caused this sharp decline; the reason may lie in an epidemic that broke out in the region. In the early years of the twentieth century, Jews began returning to Adana, but the community never achieved its former size. In 1914 there were only 23 Jews in the city of Adana and its immediate vicinity as compared to 636 in the 1880s, while the figures for Tarsus were 50 as compared to 182, respectively. Demographic increase was also the lot of more distant Jewish communities in eastern Turkey, in some of them even at a very accelerated

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pace. For instance, in the city of Diyarbakir the number of Jews rose from 285 in the 1890s to 520 on the eve of World War I, while in the entire Diyarbakir district the number doubled from 1,051 in 1894 to 2,085 in 1914. In Urfa, then belonging to the district of Aleppo, there was an increase of more than 100 per cent: from 359 in the 1890s to 817 in 1914. The speedy demographic growth that marked the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the following one came to an end due to the Balkan Wars that was soon followed by World War I. In the Edirne district, for example, in which there was an increase in the number of Jews from 13,721 in 1894 to 23,839 in 1907, not only did this trend not continue, but there was a decrease to 22,515 in 1914. The demographic decline was not necessarily typical of all cities in that district; the Jewish population of Gallipoli, for example, even increased somewhat. In the Çatalca district, the number of Jews, most of whom lived in the city of Silibri, declined from 1,766 in 1907 to 1,480 in 1914. This was the case with all other ethnic groups as well. The overall trend of population growth can be put down to natural increase, but its main impetus was the waves of migrants from areas of distress. There was a significant difference between Christian immigrants, on the one hand, and Muslim and Jewish ones, on the other. Whereas the Christians sought new economic opportunities and tried to benefit from the Capitulation agreements that Turkey concluded with the European powers, Jews fled to relatively congenial areas due to rising anti-Semitism in Russia and in southern European countries during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Side by side with migration of Jews into the Ottoman Empire, there was also movement in the opposite direction which accounted for the fact that population increase among Jews was slower than the general rate. Natural disasters also took their toll, such as the epidemics noted earlier, and serious conflagrations (like that in Izmir in 1841),16 leading to loss of life and the destruction of homes and communal institutions. Reaching a peak around 1906 (over 200,000), during the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and World War I, the Jewish population of Turkey decreased. The fighting, in addition to worsened sanitary conditions and food shortages caused by the hostilities, brought many deaths in its wake. Between 1914 and 1923, 20 per cent of Anatolia’s population

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died. However, the decline in the number of Jews cannot be blamed solely on a high death rate, since there were also waves of Jews who left the area. The Balkan War also brought geo-political transformations in its wake: Turkey was forced to give up much territory in Macedonia and Thrace in which there were many Jewish communities. The first census of the Turkish Republic, conducted in 1927, listed 81,872 Jews, most of them in Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne.17 This census was not very accurate, apparently not recording all the women and children. Another, more accurate, census conducted in 1935 listed Jews, but it no longer reflected the dramatic changes undergone by the Turkish state during the two previous decades.18 Turkish Jewry suffered from a decrease in number during the twentieth century, wars and political problems acting as catalysts to motivate Jews to leave the country. For example, during the 1930s Jews suffered from anti-Semitic attacks in European Turkey, causing a new wave of emigration, one of whose destinations was Palestine.19 Others moved into Asian Turkey: some 3,000 of the 13,000 Jews living in this area (mostly in Edirne) moved to Istanbul and other communities in Anatolia.20 In time, they concentrated in Istanbul. Geographic diffusion Another important demographic development of the early twentieth century is the expansion of the geographic diffusion of Ottoman Jewry. Unlike the Muslim Turks, the Greeks and the Armenians who settled throughout all of Anatolia, other minorities tended to concentrate in certain areas.21 The Jews lived primarily in the cities of western Anatolia, there being only a few thousand of them in the eastern regions at the end of the nineteenth century.22 Among the latter the community of Urfa is most notable, numbering about 1,000 Jews in 1912–13.23 Jewish life and even communities were established in places in which Jews had not lived previously. A possible explanation combines new economic opportunities and growing settlements, better transportation and perhaps also the winds of change that had swept through the area since the Young Turks revolution. The establishment of many new communities was especially evident in the Aydin district. The Kastamonu district, in which there were no Jews in the

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1890s, had a Jewish population of almost seventy in 1907, but by 1914 this had dropped to only eight. In the Denizli district, where no Jews had resided in the late nineteenth century, small Jewish communities were established in the cities of Denizli and Saraiköy in the first decade of the twentieth century. I shall now discuss the largest, most important communities in more detail. Istanbul At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Istanbul and Salonica were still among the largest Jewish communities in the world. By mid-century, Istanbul had a Jewish population of about 40,000 who accounted for about 6 per cent of the city’s total population, which at that time numbered about 720,000. Throughout the century the community grew as a result of internal migration from provincial towns, migration from areas in Greece in the wake of the Greek revolt, rising animosity towards Jews in the southern Balkans, and the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. While Istanbul underwent accelerated economic development and attracted many immigrants, the Jewish community increased at a much slower pace – by the turn of the twentieth century it numbered only about 50,000. This can probably be ascribed to migration of Jews from Turkey to the United States, Europe, Egypt, Syria and Palestine. This outward movement increased during and after World War I. In the 1920s many members of the Dönme sect (descendants of the followers of Sabbetai Zevi who converted to Islam) came from Salonica to Istanbul, together with Muslim Turks, in the framework of the population transfer between Turkey and Greece.24 At the end of World War II there were about 77,000 Jews in Istanbul. Izmir An Ottoman census conducted in Izmir in 1831 recorded 3,530 Jews in that city, but it is reasonable to assume that these results are only partial and do not include women and children. In 1856 Rabbi Hayyim Palache, chief rabbi of Izmir, reported to a traveler, Dr Ludwig August Frankl, that 15,000 Jews lived in the city.25 The number remained stable, and in the 1880s according to official Ottoman statistics there

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were still supposedly only 15,000 Jews, but the representative of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in the city estimated their number at 25,000. There was a large community of Jews in Izmir holding foreign citizenship, including about 1,000 ‘Francos’ under the protection of the Italian consul.26 Jacob Barnai believes that about 10 per cent of the 50,000 foreigners listed in the Izmir census were Jews, which would raise the number of Jewish residents to about 20,000 in the late nineteenth century. In a census conducted in 1906–1907 almost 25,000 Jews were recorded, and one scholar believes that this figure was also relevant on the eve of World War I.27 According to another estimation, the Jewish population of Izmir at that time was 42,500.28 Izmir, which fell to the Greek army in May 1919 and was then retaken by the Turkish forces, was set on fire and the battles left many dead.29 Due to the fighting and the economic decline that came in its wake, many left the city for Europe (France, Britain and Italy), the United States, South Africa, Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico and Cuba), and Palestine.30 The first official census of the Turkish Republic in 1927 listed 16,500 Jews in Izmir, but it seems that not all participated and that the number of Jews was higher.31 From this point on the number of Jews continuously declined. Edirne This was the largest and most important Jewish community in European Turkey. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, about 3,000 Jews lived in Edirne and the community grew continuously throughout the century. By mid-century there were already about 10,000 Jews, while the Alliance Israélilte Universelle in 1880 reported a Jewish population of 15,000 though an Ottoman census recorded a much smaller number – 9,000 – who accounted for 3.75 per cent of the total population of almost 200,000. The number of Jews continued to rise in the early decades of the twentieth century: there were 15,534 in 1906 and 15,685 in 1914.32 Due to the Balkan War many Jews left the city, a trend that continued unabated between the two World Wars, just as in other communities in Turkey. The demographic changes among Jews in the Ottoman Empire during the last century of its existence may be likened to a pendulum

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– in and out of the country. Waves of Jewish immigrants arrived from Greek territories during and after the Greek war of independence, taking up residence in the large urban centers – Salonica, Edirne and Istanbul – and along the western coast of Anatolia, especially in Bursa and Izmir. The number of Ashkenazim increased gradually until they became a significant community in Istanbul. Since they differed greatly from local Jews, it took some time until they intermingled with them. While thousands of Eastern European Jews engaged in tailoring, the Ashkenazim also achieved notoriety due to the white slave network some of them set up between Odessa–Istanbul–Cairo–Buenos Aires. They brought with them Hasidic music, alongside theatrical plays and their own language and customs. The more Orthodox among them looked down upon some of the local customs that were considered unacceptable to their conservative outlook. Matters of liturgy led to the establishment of at least two Ashkenazi synagogues in Istanbul alone. It took some time for these new immigrants to climb the social ladder and intermarry with Istanbuli Jews; this would only come about during the period of the Republic. The Ashkenazim played a central role in spreading Zionist ideas and were much involved in the stormy political life of the large Jewish community in Turkey’s capital city. The rise in the number of Jews in western Anatolia, the result of both incoming migrants and the natural increase that was typical of the time, caused population pressure in the existing centers. The search for a means of livelihood, in addition to the new opportunities provided by the Tanzimat reforms, led to a significant movement eastwards, to the interior of the country. Jews moved to cities and towns throughout all of Anatolia, generally those that were undergoing development and located on the routes of commerce, where they established new communities. Most of these were relatively small, numbering a few dozen families. Political developments in the Balkans – in Romania and Bulgaria – encouraged additional Jews to emigrate to within the borders of the territorially contracted empire. Another wave of eastward migration was caused by the Bulgarian and Greek conquest of Salonica in 1912. Construction of railroad lines throughout Anatolia eased travel and enabled people to move farther than in previous years.

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We should bear in mind that at precisely the same time Iraqi Jews, particularly from Baghdad and Basra, also began emigrating, but their destination was the Far East, where they established communities of Jews who spoke Arabic (and English) in India, China, Singapore and Japan. Syrian Jews migrated to the American continent, as did many of their countrymen. Several factors intensified the emigration: growing economic difficulties (as well as famine due to natural causes, that brought social unrest), especially after the state had gone bankrupt (1875), which had severe implications for the subjects; political tension during the reign of Abdülhamid with the intensified policing, severe censorship, and constant monitoring that he initiated. After the Young Turks revolution a new factor was added: obligatory service in the Ottoman army, in addition to the crushing military defeats suffered by the Empire one after the other, causing mass death and economic problems (poverty, lack of workers in the rural areas). All these induced many to emigrate, as people, many Jews among them, lost any hope for the change that the revolution seemed to promise. A most unusual source is very revealing about the disappointment among late Ottoman oppressed Jews: Jewish journalist Alexander Ben-Ghiat writes in his parodic haggadah for Passover from 1919 harsh things about the new rulers, referring in a denigratory manner to Rahmi Bey, the governor of Izmir, and Alanyalizade Mahmud [AKA Alayli] Bey, another local official, together with Enver Pasha, the war minister and Ottoman commander-in-chief during World War I, and Tala’at, the ‘postaci’ who was minister of interior affairs: Formerly we were slaves to [Abdül]Hamid in Turkey, and now our Creator brought us to ask its ruination [literally: ‘to ask its black day’]. Four damned ones we have experienced, one Rahmi, one Alanyali, one Enver (nicknamed ‘the German’ or ‘Enverucho the bastard’), and one Tal’at ... what does Enver say? ‘All shall be drafted to the army, all shall go to the war: Greeks and Jews, Armenians and Christians. All will be sent [to fight], apart from my friends’ ... and Tal’at the postman said ... .33

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Rahmi, who apparently confiscated the old Jewish graveyard and built a school upon it, is mentioned as being of Sabbatean origin (‘Dӧnme’ or ‘Selanikli’), an accusation that was resentfully refuted by Hilmi.34 Even another author, Eliya Algazi, who was a pro-Ottoman patriot, was critical of the hardships endured by the Jews during the second decade of the twentieth century, but was optimistic about the mutual future of Turks and Jews in the new era: Blessed be thy God who led us to run away from the enemy, and guarded us on the way, and although a one-day’s walk took us ten days, suffering killing, hunger, and thirst, and tiredness; we reached Istanbul alive ... we pray that the situation will improve, and we shall finally rest, and all Jews shall join forces to found an association for modern education ... and work loyally for the nation ...35 Papo stresses that these Jewish intellectuals became opposed to the regime, but by no means to Turkey and its people. However, others, such as Nissim Shemtov Eli, denounced the Muslim Turkish public as ‘edepsiz’ – uncivilized, illiterate, backward and cruel.36 Eli mentions, in his haggadah of 1921, forced conscription as one of the troubles inflicted upon native Jews, and prayed for revenge against Tala’at and Enver.37 Another indication of the deteriorating condition of the Jewish community was the gradual change in its leadership. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, changing conditions encouraged emigration from the Ottoman state and republican Turkey, these in addition to a shifting in Jewish public opinion towards the state and the prospects of being citizens with equal rights. Also evident is the collapse of the traditional social order and the weakening of communal institutions – paradoxically at the precise moment when the authorities lent their support to the elected leadership and created a constitution for the Jewish community. Social tensions, that first appeared in the last decades of the eighteenth century and reached their peak in the 1840s (in Izmir), the 1870s (in Salonica), and in the

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1880s (in Istanbul), did not disappear; on the contrary, they were continuously felt as an undercurrent. There were fierce confrontations at the turn of the twentieth century and during its first two decades over the levying of the gabella tax on kosher meat, traditional norms were pushed aside, the community came apart at the seams and its leadership was, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed, bereft of authority and the power to act.38 Another cause of conflict and tension in the large community in Istanbul was the Zionist movement and its ideology. The attitude towards Zionism, which became a significant issue among Ottoman Jews since the 1890s and even more so after the Young Turks revolution, enables us to appreciate the atmosphere among the capital’s Jews. Anti-Zionist polemics are reflected in the haggadah entitled La Haggadah Iskaldada, published in 1911. This work well testifies to the tensions aroused by Zionism, tensions that often paralleled strains between social classes or age groups, and even led to the destruction of communities. In addition, it reflects the opposition to Zionism, because it created tense relations between Jewish subjects and the Ottoman state, which no longer considered them loyal subjects.39 As noted, the great patriotism echoed in this haggadah was soon to be replaced by painful disillusionment caused by the events and terrors of World War I and its aftermath. In addition to conscription and forced labor, mentioned above, I shall mention two examples of blows suffered by the community, not by individuals: the destruction of the ancient cemetery in Izmir and of old synagogues in Edirne and Silibriya.40 Thus, during the final decades of Ottoman rule and the early republican period, the direction of migration changed: Jews now left the smaller communities in Anatolia and moved westward. This was first felt in the larger cities, primarily Istanbul, Edirne and Izmir, which were attracting many Jews and non-Jews. After that, young men, who often served as a vanguard for their entire family, and other single persons seeking to start a new and independent life elsewhere, turned to destinations even further west – Europe (first and foremost France, whose language many had learned in the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools), the United States (the important destinations being New York, Philadelphia and Seattle) – while others, together

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with many Syrian Jews, moved to the Spanish-speaking countries of Central and South America (Mexico, Panama, Chile and Argentina, as well as Brazil). Another community of Turkish Jews established itself in Egypt, particularly in Cairo and Alexandria, cities that flourished under the semi-independent rule of the Khedives. The last two communities attracted also a considerable number of Eastern European Jews from Poland and Czarist Russia. They existed until the Nasserist revolution in the 1950s.41 Migration to Palestine was negligible; the few Turkish Jews who came there at this time (pre-1900) were mostly elderly men and women, continuing the traditional pattern of ‘aliyah’ (literally: going up, ascending to the Holy Land). The decline in the number of Jews in the Anatolian communities continued during the early twentieth century. The historian Abraham Galanté still recorded dozens of communities, but reading between the lines of his description, one can sense that the end is imminent: schools are closing down and it is difficult to maintain communal administration and services, or even public prayer. We can summarize what has been outlined above in the following manner: migrations and population increases were not typical of the Jews alone. Migration to western Anatolia and the movement from villages and towns into the larger cities, which flourished as a result of natural increase due to modernization and migration, was a general phenomenon. As for migration to the Empire from outside its borders, various ethnic groups, including Jews from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, immigrated to Anatolia due to the rise of nationalism in their former homes, and in the case of the Jews, also because of antiSemitism and blood libels. The accelerated growth of Ottoman Jewry in the nineteenth century, replaced by a speedy and dramatic decline in their numbers during the second decade of the twentieth century, was matched by similar trends in the general population due to recurring wars, the suffering they engendered, and migration to the West.

The consequences of migration Many dozens of Jewish communities disappeared during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Istanbul and Izmir became the

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biggest communities in Anatolia, and now included many immigrants, some of whom stayed. The immigrants brought with them their names, as well as their customs, musical traditions and objects – both personal items and ceremonial objects, used in the synagogues they left behind.42 Even today one can find in Istanbul traces of this ingathering in ceremonial objects such as Torah scrolls (of the Oriental type, enclosed in solid cases), Torah finials, or plaques bearing dedicatory inscriptions from distant communities no longer extant. Synagogues were left behind, transformed into mosques (in the best instance), workshops, dwellings, or were completely destroyed. Cemeteries, too, were abandoned; in time the gravestones were uprooted and construction undertaken on the burial grounds which disappeared under the rapidly expanding cities. Unfortunately, the immigrants did not preserve the records of their former communities, and these apparently have been lost forever. Naturally, some socio-economic mobility also occurred – old elite families vanished or lost their fortunes, while others managed to gain money, at times considerable fortunes. Among the nouveaux riches were also some who had arrived just a few years earlier (either from Eastern Europe or from other parts of Turkey) and were fortunate enough to discover new avenues to acquire wealth.43 The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to one of the most difficult social problems raised by this westward movement. The Booklet of Conditional Betrothal (Mahberet Kiddushin ‘al Tenai in Hebrew), printed in Istanbul in 1924, is an important source of information on a difficult and turbulent period, a changing world that witnessed the fall of an empire and the birth of a new republican state. It dealt with a solution for ‘agunot (deserted wives who were forbidden to remarry by Jewish law) whose husbands had emigrated westwards and deserted them. The existence of ‘agunot, of course, was not new. Since the Middle Ages, the Hebrew sources provide information about wives whose husbands had disappeared, whether having drowned at sea or because they were murdered while travelling abroad, generally as merchants. Lengthy absence, at times for several years, was common, and considering the conditions of the times, letters or oral communications did not always reach their intended destinations. In some cases the men

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returned to their homes, but in not a few they disappeared without trace, leaving a wife who at times had to bring up children without a source of income. Jewish religious law on this matter was very clear: it demanded incontestable proof of the husband’s death in order to release the woman from the bond of marriage – an act that could not be done unilaterally, especially by the wife – and enable her to remarry. The responsa literature from the sixteenth century onwards evinces a wish to ease the situation and help, whether from true concern for those women or out of fear that their dire condition would motivate them to convert, to enter into illicit relationships, or engage in prostitution. What changed during the final quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century was the great increase in the number of ‘agunot, as thousands of Jewish men migrated westwards leaving behind young wives with no economic support. Even though this development occurred at a time when growing numbers of women began to work and the religious establishment did not oppose the public presence of women, it was a difficult time for the Turkish economy, enfeebled by the damage resulting from World War I and the War of Independence and the inability of the economy to attune itself to the modern age. Jewish women were not alone in coping with this situation; obviously there was much competition for every place of work and every occupation. For young unengaged women, prostitution was a relatively convenient occupation, especially in view of the growing number of foreigners in the major cosmopolitan cities – Istanbul, Izmir, and to some extent also Salonica – that generated a demand for satisfaction of their sexual needs.44 Apparently emigration, first and foremost of men, caused a dramatic increase in the number of deserted wives, which became a widespread phenomenon especially in big communities such as Istanbul and Izmir. The visibility of the problem and the ensuing outcome explains why the local rabbis had to address it in texts like The Booklet of Conditional Betrothal and the severe ordinance they promulgated to deal with this difficult and painful reality. The fact that the Booklet was printed only proves its relevance to a wide audience. Its introduction is most revealing. From it we can learn how the Jews of the Ottoman Empire felt in the modern age, as it draws a

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picture of chaos in the community that, inter alia, included emigration to America, the land whose streets were supposedly paved with gold. Its authors began with a description of the current times: In these days and in this time, days of liberty and freedom, political liberty and religious freedom, days which none desires, and good deeds are lacking, and everyone does what his heart commands. In these days, in which men travel and move about to foreign islands and to distant lands; in these days in which every male, whether a bachelor or married with wife and children, is obliged to do military service, especially during the times of war in the world ... (p.1). The migration of young men caused a significant decrease in the number of potential bridegrooms. Even worse, it left behind affianced or married women whose fiancés or husbands had vanished without leaving a trace. Even though the advanced stage of communications made it possible to send mail and telegrams, the emigrants were so engaged in building their new lives that they often ignored them, seemingly disappearing from the face of the earth. This was a serious situation from two aspects: economically, it left many women without a provider (therefore becoming a burden on their families or the community, or forcing them to turn to prostitution in order to survive). The second aspect was halakhic and social: the status of these women was ‘agunot, unable to free themselves from their state as affianced or married women, and even if they did find someone who was prepared to marry them, this was prohibited by halakhah. The authors of the Booklet referred to the dangers of prostitution, religious conversion, suicide and mental derangement among the deserted women: From this results, to our grief, one of two terrible and harsh things: If a woman is morally loose, and there is much immorality in this generation due to our iniquities, then she will stray from the path, the holy path, and will go, whether of her own

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will or against it, in wicked ways, and shall ... non-Jews, and she shall undergo baptism as our eyes see and our ears hear bad and ugly deeds, done in secret or in public, and foreign seed assimilates in the holy Israelite community, whilst we are unable to act; and if she is virtuous like virtuous women who will not let strangers violate them, then this poor creature will cry and weep and remain an agunah and lonely until her dying day, and then she will either choose to commit suicide or become deranged, God forbid, and there are many like that and no one can help them (pp.2–3). In order to find a solution for the dire straits of these women, rabbis in Istanbul, headed by Chief Rabbi Haim Bejarano, promulgated an ordinance that annulled marriages a priori so that a woman could remarry without a divorce or proof that her husband had died. This is the very deep and important question ... on which the land will mourn ... we can no longer remain silent ... and it is long known that the judges of Israel are obligated to promulgate ordinances to seal breaches in the wall of religion ... for many times the groom and the bride, because of their warm blood and youth, do not foresee the future and do not pay attention to the mishaps that occur all the time, especially among the poor masses, who do everything in haste and without sober consideration. And then, when time betrays their imaginary happiness the husband will also betray his betrothed wife and hate [her] and not divorce her and will abandon her and leave her deserted and forgotten ... (p.3). This being the case, the rabbis tried to find a solution for the problem, which they described thus: The condition of Jewish women who are deserted and forgotten by their husbands, because there are among them some whose husbands, due to lack of a livelihood in their city or in order to increase their capital and wealth, traveled to wherever the wind

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took them, in most cases to distant places in the countries of America and their like where there is gold, and when they find there what they lacked and [fulfill] their aspirations, they forget the bride who was the love of their marriage and the woman of their youth ... And it does not trouble their hearts that they left their wives as living widows and their children and offspring to suffer hunger, and they do not even think to notify them of where they are and what is their state ... And there are some who are forced to do military service and after some time, when they are officially discharged or in any other manner, they go to wherever they go never to return home, their whereabouts are unknown, and their wives are reduced to groveling in the dust with no one to support them, and these miserable women cry out, but no one answers them ... (p.1). This last passage also refers to cases in which the husband is obligated to pay alimony, but refuses to give his wife a divorce, and also does not pay the alimony. The authors are aware that under certain circumstances women might exploit these very stipulations to rid themselves of an unwanted husband. To prevent this they wrote: ‘Our objective in this ordinance is only to rescue Jewish women from the shackles of being an ‘agunah, and we have no intention, Heaven forbid, to do what no person should think of doing, to promulgate this ordinance in order to cause damage, to place a weapon in the hands of capricious women or the hands of irresponsible men to sever the ties of marriage between them by any pretext and in haste ...’ (p.9). *

* *

To sum up, this chapter has concentrated on human movement and the demographic changes which characterized Ottoman Jewish society in the Hamidian age as well as during the rule of the Young Turks and the first decade of the Turkish Republic. The accelerated growth in the number of Jews residing in nineteenth-century Anatolia was replaced in the second decade of the twentieth century by dwindling numbers: The population as a whole, including the Jews, suffered great losses

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due to forced conscription and harsh conditions, loss of assets and livelihoods, shortage of foodstuffs, poverty and hunger, all of which caused death and mass migration westward. Natural growth, urbanization and migration from inner Anatolia to its western shore characterized Muslim Turks, and Jews went through similar processes earlier, faster and more intensely – growth, urbanization and movement, especially to western Anatolia, either from the east, or those former subjects escaping from the territories in the Balkans that became new nation states. After 1909, and more so after 1917, many Jews realized that they had no future in Turkey, and the émigrés continued beyond its borders, immigrating to France or the Americas in search of a better life. A booklet titled Booklet of Conditional Betrothal, printed in Istanbul during 1924, is an important and rare source from a troubled era and a changing world. It provides the halakhic solution for the problem of the many women left behind by husbands who disappeared, either while in military service or by migrating to the West in search of better opportunities. In addition to the distress of individuals, the Istanbul community suffered from the financial burden and other difficulties it faced while trying to re-establish its life.

Notes 1. It is important to bear in mind these remarks when dealing with Jewish history. On the rabbinic confrontation and response to modernity, see Zvi Zohar’s works. 2. Donald Quataert, ‘Population’, in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert (eds), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge, 1994), pp.791–2. For a general article on Jewish demography in Turkey, see Dotan Arad, ‘Demography’, in Yaron Ben-Naeh (ed), Turkey (Jerusalem, 2009), pp.27–40 [in Hebrew]. For more on late republican Turkey’s Jews, see Shaul Tuval, The Jewish Community in Istanbul 1948–1992 (Jerusalem, 2004) [in Hebrew]. 3. Quataert, ‘Population’, pp.786–7. 4. Ibid, p.792. 5. Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of the Empire (London, 2001), pp.195–202.

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6. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge, 2000), pp.110–11; idem, ‘Population’, pp.783–4. For demographic data in the Hamidian period, see also Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (New York, 1983); idem, Population History of the Middle East and the Balkans (Istanbul, 2002); Stanford J. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York, 1991); Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison WI, 1985); idem, ‘Jewish population movements in the Ottoman Empire’, in Avigdor Levy (ed), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire (Princeton NJ, 1994), pp.399–415; idem, ‘The Ottoman demography in the nineteenth century: Sources, concepts, methods’, in idem, Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History: Selected Articles and Essays (Leiden, 2002), pp.185–201; Quataert, ‘Population’, pp.777–97. 7. Karpat, Ottoman Population, p.11. 8. Quataert, ‘Population’, pp.787–9; Avram Galanté, Histoire des Juifs de Turquie (Istanbul, 1985–86), vol. 3, p.157. 9. Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, p.112. 10. Shaw, Jews of the Ottoman Empire, pp.274–8. 11. Quaetert, The Ottoman Empire, pp.110–11; idem, ‘Population’, p.781. 12. Karpat, Ottoman Population, pp.103–4. 13. Ibid, p.105. 14. Quataert, ‘Population’, p.781. 15. See tables in Karpat, Ottoman Population. 16. Haim Gerber and Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Izmir in the nineteenth century: Ottoman Documents from the Shar’i Court (Jerusalem, 1984), pp.24, 25 n. 9 [in Hebrew]. 17. Shaw, Jews of the Ottoman Empire, pp.285–6. 18. McCarthy, Population History, p.145. 19. Avner Levi, ‘The Anti-Jewish Pogrom in Terakia, 1934’, Pe’amim 20 (1984), pp.111–32 [in Hebrew]; Arad, ‘Demography’, p.35. 20. ‘Turkey’, Encyclopaedia Hebraica, vol. 32, p.675 [in Hebrew]. 21. McCarthy, Population History, p.101. 22. Karpat, Ottoman Population, p.197. 23. McCarthy, Population History, p.252. 24. On this group, see Marc D. Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (Stanford, 2010). 25. Ludwig August Frankl, To Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1973), p.32. 26. Yaakov Barnai, ‘The Jews of the Ottoman Empire’, in Shmuel Ettinger (ed), The History of the Jews in the Islamic Countries 2 (Jerusalem, 1986), p.199. 27. Karpat, Ottoman Population, p.197; Barnai, The Jews, p.199.

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28. These are the figures of the Salnameh of ah 1331 (1912/13) as published by McCarthy. They relate to the Aydin district, but it is quite clear that the vast majority of the Jews in that district lived in its central city, Izmir. 29. McCarthy, Population History, p.119. 30. Galanté, Histoire, vol. 3, p.119. Galanté also notes the cities in which they took up residence: Britain – London, Manchester, Leeds and Bradford; France – Paris, Lyons and Marseilles; United States – New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere; Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In other countries the Jews generally settled in the capital city. 31. Barnai, The Jews, pp.199–200. 32. http://www.sephardicstudies.org./gallipoli2.html (accessed 25 November 2012). For a detailed description of Edirne during the siege of 1912, see Avigdor Levy, ‘The siege of Edirne (1912–1913) as seen by a Jewish Eyewitness’, in idem (ed), Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century (Syracuse, 2002), pp.153–93. 33. Eliezer Papo, And Thou Shalt Jest with Thy Son: Judeo-Spanish Parodies on the Passover Haggadah ( Jerusalem, 2012), vol. 1, pp.166–9 [in Hebrew]. 34. Ibid, pp.171–4. 35. Ibid, pp.164–5. For more on these two haggadot, see ibid, pp.128–97. 36. Ibid, pp.182–7. Eli uses the term ‘nuevos musulmanos’ to denote the Young Turks in order to emphasize the fact that Turkish identity in the nationalistic age is no longer possible for Jews and Christians; ibid, vol. 1, pp.194–5, vol. 2, pp.78–9. 37. Ibid, vol. 1, pp.135–44; vol. 2, pp.80, 87–91, 95–6, 100–2. The frequent references to conscription testify to its significance as an event that changed Jewish public opinion towards the state and their future in it. For a broad treatment of the subject, see David Ashkenazi, ‘Conscription of Jews to the Ottoman army in 1909–1910 as reflected in El Tiempo’, Pe‘amim 105–6 (2006), pp.181–218 [in Hebrew]. On the disillusionment with the prospect of equality and disappointment, see esp. pp.212–14. Our source, the haggadah, shows that Jews paid in order not to be recruited, paid once again, and then were forcibly conscripted; see, e.g. Papo, And Thou Shall Jest, vol. 2, pp.90–1. 38. Avner Levi, ‘Changes in the leadership of the main Sephardi communities in the nineteenth century’, in Minna Rozen (ed), The Days of the Crescent: Chapters in the History of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire (Tel Aviv, 1996), pp.237–71 [in Hebrew]; Minna Rozen, ‘A pound of flesh–The meat trade and social struggles in Jewish Istanbul, 1700–1918’, Pe‘amim 105–6 (2006), pp.120–2 [in Hebrew]; idem, ‘ “A pound of flesh”: Meat trade and social conflict among the Jews of Istanbul, 1700–1923’, in Suraiya Faroqhi and Randi Deguilhem (eds), Crafts in the Ottoman Empire (London, 2005), pp.83–126.

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39. Papo, And Thou Shall Jest, vol. 2, pp.134–69. On Zionism, see Natan Yeyni, ‘Zionist Activity’, in Yaron Ben-Naeh (ed), Turkey (Jerusalem, 2009), pp.207–22 [in Hebrew]; Yaron Ben-Naeh, ‘The Zionist struggle as reflected in the Jewish press in Istanbul in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution, 1908–18’, in Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal Ginio (eds), Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule (London and New York, 2011), pp.241–57. 40. Papo, And Thou Shall Jest, vol. 1, pp.137–8. The destruction of the old cemetery in Izmir is mentioned in the Ben Ghiat haggadah (1919), ibid, vol. 2, p.50, and that of the old synagogues (‘kales viejas’) is mentioned by Eli (1921), ibid, vol. 2, p.80. I presume these were not the only ones destroyed in the great turmoil of the Balkan War and World War I. 41. Barnai, The Jews, 204. 42. For some synagogues, see Izzet Keribar and Naim Güleryüz, The Synagogues of Thrace and Anatolia (Istanbul, 2008); idem, The Synagogues of Istanbul (Istanbul, 2008). The traces are evident in the eclectic collections of the Jewish Museum, Karakӧy, Istanbul. The Yedid Judaica collection in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, is an example of a collection of varied sources that was accumulated in cosmopolitan Cairo; see Rachel Sarfati, ‘The Yedid Collection – the story of a community’, Pe‘amim 122–23 (2009), pp.65–88 [in Hebrew]. Such collections also accumulated in Israeli synagogues in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and later on in Bat Yam, Yehud and Or Yehudah. 43. For a criticism of those Jews in Izmir who acquired wealth during the war, see ‘Haggadah por los Gevirim Nuevos’ (1920), Papo, And Thou Shall Jest, vol. 1, pp.527–603, vol. 2, pp.225–49. The author accuses them of criminal acts and mocks their behavior, using moral arguments as well. 44. Rifat N. Bali, The Jews and Prostitution in Constantinople, 1854–1922 (Istanbul, 2008); Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery 1870–1939 (Oxford, 1982). In recent years some research has been done concerning white slavery networks from Eastern Europe westwards, all the way to South America; see, for example, Haim Avni, The Unclean: Trafficking in Women in Argentina and in Israel (Tel Aviv, 2009) [in Hebrew]. It has also been the subject of a novel by Ilan Sheinfeld, A Tale of a Ring (Jerusalem, 2007) [in Hebrew].

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A SHORT PIECE

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CHAPTER 6 GLOBAL MIGR ATION INTO L ATE OTTOM AN JAFFA AS R EFLECTED IN THE AR AB-PALESTINIAN ¯N NEWSPAPER FIL ASTI (1911–1913) Evelin Dierauff

By the turn of the twentieth century, Jaffa was the most cosmopolitan city in late Ottoman Palestine. The economic rise of the Palestinian coast region during the Tanzimat in the second half of the nineteenth century had caused rapid demographic growth: the port city of Jaffa became a center for global migration attracting people with various ethnic and religious backgrounds from Arab countries, Asia and Europe.1 This short chapter discusses controversial views on migration into Jaffa – especially Zionist migration – as conducted in the Jaffan Arab-Palestinian periodical Filastn. It is based on 152 articles published in Filastn from 1911 to 1913 that debated the impact of Zionism on Palestinian society.2 Formulated as a national ideology in Europe, Zionism came into reality as a movement in late Ottoman Palestine. When Zionism is framed in the context of the global immigration of Europeans to the Eastern Mediterranean, but also within the Middle Eastern region, it is seen that modern Jewish immigration was not as unique as portrayed in Zionist or

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Arab historiography. Compared to other European subjects, the Zionists were most global ‘branch’ of all immigrant groups but still represented only one element of the multicultural kaleidoscope of Jaffa. Further, the discussion on Zionism in Filastn is to be understood as 1) an intra-Arab and 2) an intra-Ottoman debate. Thus, the present chapter contributes to existing literature that portrays the story of Zionist migration as a story of Arab-Palestinian-Jewish-Ottoman encounters directly intertwined with local economic powers and global political ideologies.3 Scholarly literature unanimously characterizes Filastn as a clear opponent of Zionist migration and stresses its role as the ‘pioneer’ of the anti-Zionist Arab press campaigns prior to World War I.4 Yet this chapter argues that its approach towards Zionism was much more ambivalent: Filastn provided a forum for a controversial exchange of views and shifted between critique, rivalry and admiration for the Zionist project in Palestine: In 1911, the paper launched a controversy to ‘open a space’ for its readers ‘to rebuke or approve Zionist colonization’.5 The debate incorporated a wide spectrum of opinions and actors.6 Yet, it became noticeably harsher with the international crisis preceding World War I. In general, Filastn discussed Zionist migration not as a Jewish but as a foreign migration movement and mostly linked it with the terms ‘colonization’ and ‘settlements’.7 Further, discussing Zionist migration in Filastn was not a debate about religion but focused on economics, particularly in the closer region of Jaffa.

The newspaper and its editors Filastn (‘Palestine’) was edited by the Greek-Orthodox cousins ‘s and Ysuf al-‘s in Jaffa.8 In spring 1911, the editors took advantage of the repealing of press censorship following the Young Turk Revolution (1908) to launch one of the most influential papers in Palestine. According to Ysuf al-‘s, editor-in-chief, the ‘mission of a journalist’ in Palestine was to create ‘public opinion’. In order to achieve this, the paper sought to provide a political platform that would invite its readers to participate actively in debates, and thus promoted a progressive concept of citizenship.9 In general, the editors of Filastn strongly advocated ideas of reform and progress. As for cultural identity, they supported the Arab

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Illustration 6.1

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‘s al-‘s, director and co-editor of Filastn (source: PASSIA)

Renaissance movement. Politically, they fostered Ottoman patriotism and the Young Turks ideology of a civic multi-confessional ‘unity’ and ‘brotherhood’ in Palestine.

Filast īn and foreign migration The discussion of migration in Filastn was naturally about integration and – as a matter of the global zeitgeist – about modernization. In the discourse of Filastn, migration was linked with the following ideas: 1) the growth of economic activity; 2) the importing of new technology; and 3) education and civilization. In an article on Zionist migration into Jaffa, the editors constituted demographic expansion as explicitly ‘beneficial’ for Jaffa and as proof of its ‘civilizational progress’.10 However, migration was appreciated as beneficial only as long as a group became an integral part of Jaffa’s economic structures, did not

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practise illegal activities and as long as its political ambitions did not challenge the vision of a civic Ottoman unity in Palestine. The definitions of ‘local’ and ‘foreigner’ were floating, but Filastn stressed the foreign origin of a group more when it evoked conflicts. It presented a group as ‘strangers’ especially when it evoked criticism from other groups or was blamed for disturbing social or economic balances.

Groups of migrants portrayed in Filast īn Since the 1830s, with the extensive agricultural cultivation of the Palestinian coast region, there had been increasing Muslim migration into the Jaffa district from Egypt, Northern Africa, Anatolia and Central Asia. Certain Muslim groups were unpopular in Jaffa because they had a reputation for short tempers and potential violence. The ‘ss attributed this particularly to the Moroccan and Afghan immigrants, who often were hired as guards in the district’s orange groves. Filastn reported on them only in connection with criminal acts and released urgent appeals to the local authorities to stop the mafia-like methods of Moroccan and Afghan ‘gangs’ who were accused of blackmailing local traders and land owners.11 The Sephardi Jews from Morocco and Tunisia who settled in Jaffa from the 1840s onwards and founded the first Jewish community were presented socially and culturally as an integral part of local ArabPalestinian society. In contrast to the Ashkenazi-Jewish immigrants, they were naturally Arabic speakers and mostly regular Ottoman subjects. As such, the editors of Filastn called them ‘Israelite citizens’ and often added ‘our Israelite brothers’, stressing the citizen status of the Sephardi Jews and the ideal of supra-confessional brotherhood.12 However, these Jews were also active supporters of a Jewish national renaissance in Palestine. For this solidarity with the Zionist movement, the Sephardi Jews were increasingly attacked in Filastn for being the ‘brokers’ of the Zionists, who ‘snatched up’ lands for them.13 Surprisingly, the Templar movement, a pietistic group of German Protestants who settled in the coastal region from the 1860s, were almost completely absent from the newspaper’s coverage – although they were very ‘present’ and successful in Jaffa’s economic life. The ‘German colonists’ were only mentioned in relation to Jewish settlements.

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Since the 1880s, increasing Ashkenazi-Jewish and Zionist migration from Eastern Europe had quickly reversed the former Sephardi domination and changed the character of Jaffa’s Jewish community. The Zionist immigrants had considerable impact on inter-communal balances in Jaffa. They attracted more attention in Filastn than any other group of immigrants: sometimes they were admired as agents of advancement while at other times they were portrayed as black sheep creating interconfessional conflicts and economic crisis in the urban life of Jaffa.

The Zionists between admiration and criticism Zionist migration was admired where it was linked with economic growth, modernization or a civilizing mission. Muhdi Bek, the Ottoman governor of the Jerusalem district, praised the Jewish settlers as ‘living books’ inspiring the rural Arab population to overcome their technical and cultural backwardness.14 The editors were impressed, as well, by the European effectiveness and ‘discipline’ they witnessed in the Zionist settlements. They expressed admiration for the variety and quality of their agricultural products, calling them a ‘sign of progress and growth’. In comparison, the products of the ‘local, poor and miserable farmer’ were indeed ‘puny’.15 Overwhelmed by the ‘awe-inspiring view’ of Zionist parades and sport contests held in the settlement of Rehovot, the appearance of the athletes reminded them of a very ‘disciplined army’, ‘well-trained’ in the ‘military arts’.16 There were also attempts in the paper to present Zionist immigrants as an integral part of local structures. In autumn 1911, Filastn reported on inter-confessional celebrations held in Lod (Lydda) on the occasion of the Tripoli War. The event included the Muslim and Christian population, as well as Bedouins and Jewish settlers, which was considered by Filastn as ‘a sign of mutual affection’ between the ‘different elements’ of society.17 It was surely a phenomenon typical of political crisis that Filastn called for a united society, but it was rare to include Jewish settlers in the concept of Ottoman civic unity. Throughout the period investigated, promoters of the Zionist movement were given enormous space to advocate their policy in the coverage of the newspaper. An example was the column entitled ‘Letters of a Farmer’. This was a series of 14 fictional articles published

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Illustration 6.2 Menashe Meirovitch alias Ab Ibrhm (Source: Rishon Le-Zion Family Album)

from 1911 until 1912. It was written by an anonymous author calling himself Ab Ibrhm, who presented himself as an Arab farmer. He repetitively praised the sophisticated standards of the settlement of Rishon le-Zion as a symbol of progress, effectiveness and prosperity. Apparently, the author was Menashe Meirovitch, a Zionist migrant from the Ukraine and one of the founders of Rishon le-Zion.18 Presumably an Ottoman citizen, he portrayed his support for Zionist immigration as being for the benefit of Ottoman integrity and as a form of Ottoman patriotism. Yet, his position was deeply influenced by the Zionist-European utopia of ‘civilizing’ Palestine. The editors never even commented on his articles. Obviously, the editors’ support for reform and progress overlapped with Meirovitch’s ideals. The main reason for Filastn’s criticism of Zionist migration was the growing economic competition in the district. Many authors of readers’ letters suspected the Jewish immigrants of aiming for a monopoly of regional resources. The editors especially accused them of ruining Jaffa’s socio-economic balance by maintaining an exclusive lifestyle

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and by boycotting local labor. It was their lack of integration that made the Zionists essentially different from other foreign immigrants in the eyes of the ‘ss: According to them, the latter had ‘fused’ with the locals as ‘one block’, while the new ‘Israelite immigrants’ erected ‘exclusive neighbourhoods, markets and conventions’ and established ‘a city within the city’.19 When neighboring Jewish settlements started to employ Jewish-Yemenite immigrants, the ‘ss fiercely protested: according to them, the Zionists had imported the Yemenites especially in order to replace former Arab agricultural workers with ‘Hebrew labor’.20 In another article, the editors urgently warned of a Jewish national youth organization situated in Jaffa that supposedly had carried out boycott actions and threatened Muslim and Christian citizens, as well as ‘Israelite’ ones, to push through their agenda of ‘Hebrew labor’. Here, the immigrants were portrayed as troublemakers dissolving civic unity in Palestine, which was unacceptable to the ‘ss as Ottoman patriots.

Illustration 6.3 Advertisements in Filastn for the Danish beer Tuborg 21

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Illustration 6.4 Advertisement in Filastn for Swiss milk powder by Nestlé

Filastn also linked the Zionist movement with political phenomena penetrating the Ottoman Empire. The exclusive conventions of Jewish-Ashkenazi immigrants were sometimes compared with the Capitulations. In this respect, Zionist migration was interpreted as a hidden form of European imperialism in the Middle East. In the light of the Ottoman losses in the Balkans at the end of 1912, Filastn linked Zionist migration even more with the idea of an expanding European nationalist movement threatening the integrity of the Empire. At the same time, Zionist associations purchased large agricultural areas in the Jaffa district. Both events affected the discourse on Zionist migration in Filastn tremendously. Increasingly, Zionism was portrayed as

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a territorial and demographic threat aiming at political autonomy in Palestine. Anonymous authors supposed the ‘annexation of Palestine village by village’22 or even the ‘exchange’ of the local population, to be the political agenda of the Zionist movement.23 Together, these examples show how much the debate on foreign migration in general, and Zionist migration in particular, revolved around the question whether a group was in social, economic and political aspects perceived as an inclusive or an exclusive movement and whether it seemed compatible with the Ottoman ideology of a supraconfessional and multi-ethnic unity in Palestine.

Notes 1. For information on the urban and economic development of the Jaffan region see: Ruth Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution, 1799–1917 (Jerusalem, 1990); Johann Buessow, Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem, 1872–1908 (Leiden, 2011), pp.211–305; and Muhammad Salim al-Tarawneh (at-Tarwina), Qadʾ Yf: Dirsa idriyya iqtisdiyya ijtimʿiyya, 1281–1333/1864–1914 (Amman, 2000). 2. Evelin Dierauff, ‘Die Zionismusdebatte in der palästinensischen Zeitung Filastn’ (unpublished MA thesis, Martin Luther Universität Halle, 2012). 3. For the social-economic ties of Zionists and local society in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region, see: Mark LeVine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880–1948 (Berkeley, 2005). For studies on inter-confessional relations in Late Ottoman Palestine, see: Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule (New York, 2011); and Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Early Twentieth-century Palestine, (Stanford, 2011). For early Jewish-Arab encounters, see: Yuval Ben-Bassat, ‘Local Feuds or Premonitions of a Bi-national conflict? A Reexamination of the Early JewishArab Encounter in Palestine, 1882–1903’ (unpublished PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007); idem, Petitioning the Sultan: Justice and Protest in Late Ottoman Palestine (London, 2014). For further literature on Filastn and Palestinian identity, see: R. Michael Bracy, Printing Class: ‘Isa al-’Isa, Filastin, and the Textual Construction of National Identity, 1911–1931 (Lanham, 2011). 4. See: Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley, 1976) and Rashid al-Khalidi, Palestinian Identity (New York, 1997). 5. (F, 04.11.1911: 83/2/1). All quotes used in this chapter are translated by the author. When quoting Filastn, the abbreviation stands for: Filastn, date: issue/page/column.

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6. Among the protagonists participating were Palestinian Greek Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Sephardi-Jewish Ottoman citizens and AshkenaziJewish immigrants. The Jews contributing to the debate had a more positive opinion of Zionism then the other protagonists. The editors sometimes merely mediated the debate and at other times actively interfered by running campaigns against Zionist policies in Palestine. 7. The Arabic terms istiʿmr and mustaʿmart were not used in an explicitly negative but rather in a neutral way. They were strongly connected with the concepts of ‘development’ and ‘civilization’. The same terms were applied to the German colonies of the Templar movement in the district. 8. As regards the patriotic name of the newspaper, Filastn referred to ‘Palestine’ as ‘homeland’ and to its inhabitants as ‘Palestinian citizens’ of the Ottoman nation. 9. F, 15.07.1911: 51/1/2. 10. F, 29.05.1912: 140/1/1–2. 11. F, 13.11.1912: 188/3/4. 12. According to the Ottoman ideology, they referred to them as a religious community and strictly refrained from applying the terms ‘people’ or ‘ethnic group’. As a matter of principle, the ʿss condemned religious ‘fanatism’ against any confession and emphasized their good relations with the Jewish milla. They never applied the term ‘Jew’ to Ottoman Jews but always used ‘Israelite’. 13. F, 28.12.1912: 201/3/3. 14. F, 17.08.1912: 163/1/5. 15. F, 03.05.1913: 233/3/2. 16. F, 03.05.1913: 233/3/3. 17. F, 04.11.1911: 83/4/2; F, 15.11.1911: 86/3/3. 18. Arthur Ruppin, head of the Zionist Palestine Office in Jaffa, claimed that in 1912. See: Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism, p.128, n.52. 19. F, 29.05.1912: 140/1/3. 20. F, 05.06.1912: 142/2/1; F, 12.06.1912: 144/3/5. 21. Note that the last page of each issue of Filastn served as a section for advertisements. Local and international companies made use of it. E.g. the Jaffa Sephardi family business ‘Chelouche and Brothers’ and the insurance company ‘Grisham’, directed by the Ashkenazi immigrant and journalist Abraham Lodvipol, regularly advertised in Filastn. Also a Jewish tailor from Tel Aviv, one ‘Madame Malamid’, advertised in the paper (F, 18.01.1913: 205/4/4). 22. F, 21.12.1912: 199/4/1. 23. F, 13.04.1912: 127/4/1.

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OBJECTS AND R EL ATED PR ACTICES ON THE MOVE

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CHAPTER 7 PAPER S FOR GOING, PAPER S FOR STAYING: IDENTIFICATION AND SUBJECT FOR M ATION IN THE EASTER N MEDITER R ANEAN Will Hanley

Various recipes for state formation converged in the years before World War I. It emerged that the modern state should express its sovereignty through positive law, within well-defined borders, over a well-defined population.1 Personal identification documents embodied this state formation process: they were portable signs of sovereignty, defining the human boundaries of the state and policing its geographic borders. As various studies of identification have shown, individual identity documents were crucial instruments for the formation of modern subjectivities.2 States used documents to render their populations into the new, singular categories of citizen, subject and foreigner. This chapter offers an in-depth examination of the documents that delineated the subjectivities of foreign residents in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century. At times, these residents relied on papers for residence, generated by censuses, naming practices, public health

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statistics, and birth and death records, which served to bind populations to the expanding states in which they lived. At other times, they used paper tokens of state affiliation designed for people traveling from their home states. The distinction between papers for going and papers for staying illustrates the distinction between the municipally constituted citizen and the internationally constituted national, two types of modern legal subjecthood that are often conflated and confused. The absolute number of identification documents in circulation ballooned in the nineteenth century, as a function of the expansion of the world economy, imperialism, literacy, governmentality and transportation technologies. This expansion peaked during World War I, which most scholars agree entrained a revolution in identification practices.3 The wartime emergency occasioned a dramatic increase of surveillance and monitoring of soldiers, aliens and civilians through personal documents, and these practices were extended and made permanent after the emergency ended. After World War I, expatriates became so common as to require fully bureaucratized routines, which fused the status of travelers and foreign residents. The novelty of this system is especially remarkable in light of the character of the preceding period, roughly since 1860, characterized as an ‘open world’, a ‘passportless regime’ of economic liberalism.4 Before the middle of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, the technologies of government enumeration were largely insufficient to the task of embracing the whole of their populations. With rare exceptions, identification was a personal undertaking rather than a paper procedure. This chapter focuses on the foreign resident, a figure that came to prominence in the late nineteenth century.5 This figure exercised a form of subjecthood that differed from that of the citizen in his or her home state and from the passport-bearing traveler.6 The foreign resident lived away from her or his home state permanently, but continued to exercise its subjecthood, typically through consular channels. The mobility boom of the late nineteenth-century globalization coincided with an expansion of the state’s reach, meaning that foreign residents were the object of new administrative procedures.7 The nature of identification documents changed, as translatable, mobile national status enforceable over a broad distance became desirable.

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The passport has attracted disproportionate attention in the literature on the history of personal identification documents.8 Mobile subjects are especially important characters in this era of globalization, and the passport seems their obvious identity document. The passport may also be privileged in analysis due to the life experiences of most members of the academy, for whom border crossing is the dominant occasion for identification documentation. But the passport is only one of many types of identification document in circulation. In many ways, passports are exceptional rather than normative identification documents. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, passports were the preserve of those whose ‘papers were in order’ thanks to their elite class status.9 Mobility did not require them – typically, it happened without documents, even in states (such as Britain and the United States) which enforced relatively strong territorial controls. A well-dressed white traveler did not need a passport. In general, identification documents supported claims that were less self-evident. Those who truly needed passports were those who feared being turned away. Migrants who did use documents could not rely on passports to certify their identity. As a result, there was surprisingly little overlap between the population that requested foreign residence (in the form of consular registration certificates) and those who required passports. A close reading of documentary practices reveals a distinctive subjecthood reserved for residents abroad. Whereas travelers used passports for territorial access, foreign residents used documents to win access to special privileges in the places where they lived. This figure calls into question the naturalized sense of uniform modern subjecthood with uniform domestic and international rights. The story of the foreign resident is set, as it must be, in a third place, neither home nor away. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the Eastern Mediterranean emerged as a proving ground for state-based membership regimes. Jurisdictional complexity and the capitulatory exemptions of foreign subjects in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt made identification papers a key medium and measure of subjecthood. Recent scholarship on mobility in the Middle East has established the enduring importance of moving populations for any study of economy, thought, or administration.10 Even in the early

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twentieth century, this work shows, mobility cannot be dismissed as an exception to the rule of settlement. But it is generally argued that the state considered its mobile populations troublesome, and sought to settle them; the state had a unified ideal of subjecthood, and that subject was settled.11 Multiple forms of mobility were at work in this place and time, however. Foreign residents were of a different variety, and were able to hold off these demands, at least for a time. This study draws on a collection of fifty different identification documents produced between 1860 and 1914. These documents appear in the archival dossiers of a wide range of official authorities operating in the city of Alexandria during this period.12 This collection reveals the radical diversity of identification practices before universal standards emerged. The documents differ according to content, form, function and issuing institution. The collection includes travel passes, population registration certificates and protection certificates. It also includes employment documents, police forms, certificates from sectarian authorities and private letters of introduction.13 In the eyes of issuing authorities, passports and residency permits were not simply two varieties of identification documents. They had different functions, and different status. The functional distinction between papers for mobility and papers for residence is complex, and does not map straightforwardly onto any particular type of document. Identification claims were made in every context, using every type of documentation. Outside of nomadic populations, (re)settlement and not transit was the essential experience of late nineteenth-century mobility.14 Documents were certainly used to win access to territory, but this function was fleeting. Identification – and migration itself – was more substantially about establishing residence and managing access to local authorities. In this chapter, I will try not to amplify the message of these documents by suggesting that they faithfully recorded the identity of the person they signified. I will consider them as specific bureaucratic maneuvers, meant to achieve particular procedural ends.15 According to this narrow reading, the distinction between mobile and resident foreigners stands out quite clearly. The chapter will treat these two types of identification documents, and the two types of subjecthood they entrained, one after the other.

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Papers for going Those who traveled with passports did so not to win access to territories (as passport-bearers do today), but to win privilege based on their status. Identification documents eased passage, but were not necessary to it. On arrival in Alexandria, a turn-of-the-century guidebook advised, ‘a few letters of recommendation can be very useful if one has no passport, which is never absolutely necessary (n’est jamais exigé). The traveler’s visit card is always collected at customs’.16 Passports did not yet have special status in the world of documents; absent a universal regime of identification, it was impossible to require one at the border. In the community of nations, it was considered bad policy to control freedom in this way.17 Borders were sites of surveillance but not yet exclusion. Often, one ‘visit card’ was as good as the next; only confirmed undesirables (the diseased, the poor, the recidivist, the mendicant) were excluded. Before World War I, most passports were single, letter-sized sheets of paper.18 Often, they were perforated along their left side, where they had been torn from a bureaucrat’s ledger. Their face was filled with prescribed fields, corresponding to the specifications of the ledger. This form listed name, profession, birthplace and date, destination, and the names of family members and servants. Some passports listed the evidentiary basis on which they were granted. Most gave a physical description of the bearer, though members of the elite were spared such an intrusion. In contrast to their faces, which specified a detailed and limited protocol of identification, the backs of passports were unconstrained spaces. Various markings, such as visa stamps, endorsements, and names written in Arabic and Hebrew clarifying the European-language transliteration on the face of the document, traced the practical work of international travel. In fact, it was the ink of visas, more than the paper of passports, that made mobility. This French passport belonged to ‘Aziza Cohen, an importer of curios (entrepreneur dans les affaires de curiosité) living in Jerusalem. She was given the passport in Jerusalem in 1873, and it was valid for a single voyage to Algiers. She was not a privileged subject, and

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Illustration 7.1 Back of French passport, issued in Jerusalem in 187350

she was given the passport for free. It had only one purpose: to get her back to Algeria, once and for all, freeing French authorities in the Eastern Mediterranean from her requests for charity. As the back of the passport shows, however, she traveled extensively between

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Palestine and Egypt in the years that followed on the strength of this passport. Two Ottoman visas from Jaffa gave her permission to travel to Alexandria, and French authorities in Jaffa confirmed the passport’s validity for trips to Alexandria in 1875 and 1878. The Alexandria consulate, meanwhile, confirmed its validity at least eight times. Annotations like those on ‘Aziza’s passport provided steady work for the consulate, which endorsed visit cards of various kinds, acknowledging arrivals and giving them permission to continue on their way. Backpage visa palimpsests were not restricted to passports; many other identity documents could and did bear the same mobility marks. If these endorsements offered travelers a measure of protection during their local sojourns, they did not correspond to strong protection. When ‘Aziza asked the Alexandria consulate for French support in 1880, she was refused, despite many previous endorsements. It was not at all unusual for bearers of French passports to be denied consular registration and the services that went with it.19 In the eyes of consular officials, travel documents were useful things because they alleviated burdens by sending people away. In any event, the undocumented could enter Egypt with ease. Outside of certain check points, such as Port Said on the Suez canal, local authorities showed limited interest in making the OttomanEgyptian frontier effective in practice.20 The Egyptian archives contain passenger lists of arrivals in Alexandria from Ottoman ports during the 1880s, which give the name, age, and residence of passengers (by boat and arrival date), as well as the date and location where their passports were issued. These large forms were printed in Turkish.21 Entries (which were in Arabic), though often incomplete, represented a preliminary step towards border control. By 1895, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior expected all Egyptian travelers to use passports. A regulation of that year stipulated that every local subject coming from abroad or the Ottoman Empire (de l’étranger ou des pays ottomans) who did not show a passport or permis de passage was fined twenty piasters (less than a quarter of a pound).22 The same law ended the requirement that locals present a guarantee when traveling, as one system of securitization replaced another.

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But the Egyptian border remained a permeable barrier, governed by half measures. Controls were not systematic. It was no difficulty for the banished to re-enter Egypt; the challenge was re-establishing residence. In 1910, a man arrested in Alexandria showed the police a certificate of identity from Quebec, and other documents, giving his name as Jules Desmet. This claim crumbled when one of the policemen recognized him – privileging personal over paper knowledge – as a Frenchman named Odile Gouin. Eventually Gouin admitted that the documents were false. He had procured them in order to return to Egypt, believing that (for unspecified reasons) he was forbidden entry there, or at best ‘unfavorably received under his true name’. The French consular court sent him to two months in prison for this fraud.23 Judicial and police archives overflow with cases of banished men, returning again and again, passing the frontier without difficulty but running into trouble once resident. Why, then, would anyone carry a passport? Most European travelers who used passports used a single, permanent document similar to those in use today – issued to an individual, who retained it for years. While Europeans traveled with permanent passports, many of their colonial subjects used transit passports, which specified destinations and were reissued or endorsed at each stage of a journey. Where destination was specified, visa patterns show that citizens could travel to the initial destination indicated on the passport, and there acquire a visa that would take them to yet another place, beyond their original destination. An Algerian traveling on pilgrimage to Mecca might need half a dozen passports, each for a specific leg of the journey. In these cases, the consulate retained the arrival passport, exchanging it for a new one that would carry the traveler to his or her next destination. Most of the passports in consular archives were surrendered by foreigners coming from elsewhere, rather than residents of Alexandria. Destination was usually specified on passports, but travel itineraries in the Mediterranean and Red Seas involved changes in plan and direction, and many passports in consular files were not issued for travel to Alexandria. This finding shows that, alongside those entering Alexandria without papers, many foreigners entered the city with the wrong papers.

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Although many foreigners surely traveled without passports, consular archives contain large numbers of them, suggesting that they were a useful and desirable tool for many more. The passport was free to those who could demonstrate poverty, so there was no great material barrier to its use. Few Maltese, Algerians, or Tunisians were able to make a convincing claim to protection by their empires without documentation. For this reason, they were more likely than their Europe-born ‘compatriots’ to use passports. British passports were used above all by those with a special need to demonstrate British nationality.24 The consulate produced perhaps one hundred a year. There were about eight thousand British subjects in the city at the turn of the century; this evidence suggests that only 1 per cent of them used a passport. In Malta, on the other hand, even though passports were not legally required until 1899, they were in common use during the 1880s.25 The lax control of borders, even while transportation controls formalized, eroded confidence in mobility identification systems. Yet despite their limited and debased use, passports were surprisingly valuable objects. Labor migrants, political exiles and pilgrims claimed certain positive rights of territorial access using passports.26 But late nineteenth-century mobility operated in a number of other, more compulsory modes, notably deportation, repatriation, evacuation, conscription and enslavement. Each of these modes employed documents for mobility that were markedly different from passports. Although many passports specified destination, generally they were documents addressed to a constellation of authoritative strangers. Compulsory movement, on the other hand, was accomplished with identification documents that resembled interior memos or shipping receipts, transferring migrants from one known set of hands to another, often under guard (bi-rifq al-rafq). These expulsion orders, condemnations, and draft notices spelled out individual identity in a far more purposeful manner than any passport. These mobility documents represented the strong face of state power, but they were uncommon. The most common identity document in the consular archives was the token of soft control to which we now turn: the residence certificate.

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Papers for staying Residents of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire who could establish foreign protection or subjecthood held numerous advantages over local subjects. They were protected from prosecution, conscription and search at the hands of local authorities. They were also exempt from many forms of taxation. In addition to these formal privileges, foreign residents could win informal advantages through their reputation. Foreign subjects had a reputation of impunity, for example, which discouraged locals from confronting them. Often, the same markers of national or class difference that won elites access to territory protected them from disputes. For foreign residents who did not look the part, that protection came in paper form. In many cases, papers presented only once could establish durable social credentials of foreign subjecthood. Sometimes, however, new administrative challenges required documentary reiteration of foreign status. That was the case for al-Haj ‘Ali Muhammad bin ‘Ali, a foreigner who might have passed as a local but for the residence certificate reproduced below. This residence certificate was issued in 1894, when ‘Ali, an Algerian French subject residing in Egypt, was about fifty years old. Born in Ouled Derradj, near Bou Saada (Algeria), he lived near the Egyptian delta city of Damanhour, where he was a farmer (cultivateur). He had come to Egypt from Syria, where he had lived for two decades. He first registered with the French consulate in Alexandria in 1884, in the turbulent early years of the British occupation of Egypt. This residence certificate is remarkably plain. Like a passport, it is a single, printed sheet bearing the name of the foreign subject, his residence, birthplace and date of birth. It specifies his status (Algerian national), his consular registration number and physical description, and bears the consular seal. Residence certificates were only issued to heads of households. ‘Ali’s children are named on the face of his certificate. Often, however, the names of these subsidiary subjects were listed on the back. The distinction between documents for internal use and those for external use is immediately apparent in their physical aspect. ‘Ali’s residence certificate employs none of the security features

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Residence certificate for the year 1894 of ‘Ali Muhammad bin ‘Ali51

current in nineteenth-century travel documents, such as elaborate engraved borders, complex emblems, or security paper.27 Its simplicity is a mark of its status as a document for local consumption, for residence.28 Migration historian Leo Lucassen makes the useful distinction between the function of documents for individuals and their function for the state.29 Documents for travel deployed much stronger symbolic discourse, in an effort to communicate to strangers. They carried emblems and seals, while their content was

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generally less detailed than their local-use counterparts. The traveler derived the power of subjecthood by virtue of his possession of the passport, rather than through the characteristics of his own person. Identification systems were reconfigured and centralized over the nineteenth century; whereas a letter of guarantee represented personal integration into the neighborhood community, a passport signaled impersonal affiliation with the state.30 As we have seen, identification was a secondary function of passports; their main purpose was signaling the respectability of the bearer and the symbols of the issuing state.31 ‘Ali’s residence certificate is in a very bad state. The document was folded and unfolded many times, until its paper failed along its quadruple folds and tore into sixteen pieces. At some point, it appears, the folded document met a flame. Later, the singed pieces were mounted onto the cloth backing which now holds them together. There are several problems with the reassembled document. The bottom left piece comes from another document altogether, issued by the ‘Oriental Steam Navigation Company’. The two pieces above it are out of place, having been shifted up and filling the gap left by a missing piece, which contained the greater part of ‘Ali’s physical description (signalement). These ‘errors’ in assembly were acceptable because the authority that issued it – the local French consulate – was the only authority that would be asked to evaluate it. Although most residents of Alexandria were migrants (both from abroad and from elsewhere in Egypt), migration to Alexandria required travel documents only once, if at all. Winning institutional access upon settlement and establishing a resident’s positive rights (such as civil standing) and negative rights (such as conscription exemption) was the hard part. Maintaining access was less challenging. Once established, local, informal status did not often need to be reconfirmed. As a result, most of the thousands of residence documents preserved in consular dossiers are pristine. It is clear that they were issued for foreigners who, having established their residence, did not intend to leave Egypt and did not have to prove their status again and again. It was unusual for an identity document to be as worn as that of ‘Ali. It is possible that he carried it with him, and found occasions to

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use it. It seems more likely, however, that it was damaged due to neglect. Although he was supposed to renew his registration annually, the records show that he requested residence certificates only four times: in 1884 (when he first registered), 1886, 1894 and about 1906. These were, it seems, the years in which he found a use for his French subjecthood. Ancillary documents in his registration dossier show that ‘Ali registered his large family, including four wives and a dozen children, with the consulate in 1906. For unknown reasons, his administrative situation required this step, and so he dredged up his well-worn certificate, now a dozen years old, and presented it to the consulate. This paper was a key that could unlock the consular registers and transfer his foreign residence to his children. Like ‘Ali, most Algerian and Tunisian subjects registered with the consulate appeared not to find regular use for the certificates to which they were entitled. Although 12 Tunisians and 24 Algerians in my sample renewed their certificates a dozen times or more, 169 Tunisians and 129 Algerians earned a dossier but never renewed the first certificate they received or did not request a certificate in the first place.32 Individuals would claim a certificate one year, wait five, claim another, wait seven, then claim another. This pattern suggests that these individuals found no regular need to confirm their foreign nationality. The pristine condition of rarely used certificates suggests that foreignness was an occasional convenience. The minority who renewed their certificates annually were often those who came into contact with people and officials whom they did not know, to whom they needed to demonstrate their foreignness. Many more foreign subjects lived in a world of familiarity and recognition, however. For these people, it was not necessary to prove their foreignness again and again. Once it had been demonstrated, to tax collectors or military recruiters, for example, it was established and remembered. This social dynamic explains why so many foreigners collected only one or two certificates in the course of their lives. Consular records contain few reports of the ways that these identity documents were used (other than collection and presentation at the consulate itself). ‘Ali used his certificate in a circular way, presenting

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it to the institution that had issued it in order to perpetuate his registration. There is also some evidence that residence documents could be used to support claims to estates or pensions.33 Above all, residence documents functioned as certificates of conformity, for instance through the paying of registration fees. They confirmed the resident’s good standing with the consulate, which gave them access to a variety of services. Poor relief (of the sort that ‘Aziza requested but did not receive) was chief among them.34 Foreign consulates attempted to limit the power (and proliferation) of registration certificates – and the services that went with them – through annual renewal. As we saw in the case of ‘Ali, most residents did not comply. The French consulate issued between one and two hundred of each series (Algerian and Tunisian), and a dozen or more special certificates for non-Maghrebi protégés. France’s registration certificates were used by subjects and not by citizens–as was the case with passports, they were favored by those with more tenuous claims for protection.35 As we have seen, during this period residents did not require passports: only two of the four hundred Algerian files I examined showed evidence of Alexandria residents requesting passports for brief trips away from Alexandria.36 The French consulate relabeled its residence document several times after 1880. It was called a ‘registration certificate’ (certificat d’inscription) until 1887–88, when it became a ‘residence certificate’ (certificat de résidence). This name change might be read as a tightening of procedures: whereas it had once been sufficient merely to be registered, it now became necessary also to be settled in Alexandria or its environs. In fact, however, the name change was merely semantic. The physical format and bureaucratic function of the certificate remained the same. In 1904, the document was given yet another name: ‘nationality certificate’ (certificat de nationalité).37 Each of these documents was called a carte de séjour in ordinary consular parlance, however.38 All three were printed expressly for the Alexandria consulate, in Tunisian and Algerian versions, in a style and layout that did not change over three decades. Under the 1873 Order in Council, registration with the British consulate was mandatory for all British subjects. Britons and British

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colonial subjects throughout the Ottoman Empire and Egypt used the same form of certificate, which listed name, city, number and date. These certificates were especially common because the British government did not issue passports. The large majority of certificates in Alexandria’s British consular archives were issued to non-Briton subjects of empire, suggesting that it was they who found the certificates most useful. Categories of subjecthood were often (but not always) specified. An ambiguous note at the foot of the certificate instructs the bearer to take care of the document ‘if he would avoid delay and inconvenience’. Like the French certificates, these cards were strikingly plain and casual in form, particularly considering the advantages that foreign protection could convey to residents of lands governed by the Capitulations. But while this plainness might appear to invite forgery, this was not in fact a serious concern.39 The registration document had no intrinsic force; it was only a key to access consular registration dossiers. For this reason, forgeries were largely futile, while flawed documents (such as ‘Ali’s) retained their usefulness. The British consulate issued more than a thousand registration certificates each year, but little more than one hundred passports. While it issued more certificates each year than the French, the British consulate kept (and its archives contain) fewer records of registration. Consular registration, though mandatory, was less expensive and arduous than the French procedure, and was far from universal. When the Foreign Office surveyed consuls regarding this practice in 1887, it found that a good number of subjects avoided registration and more still complained of the annual registration fee of five shillings (from which the poor were excused). In Istanbul, the consul found that three-quarters of the Maltese known to the city’s Maltese priest were not registered with the consulate. The Alexandria consul admitted, ‘it is difficult to estimate exactly what proportion of British Subjects are not registered’. His efforts to induce registration, especially among the poor, had netted no great increase in numbers. The response of the Smyrna consul was most pointed of all. Rich and poor subjects alike, he wrote, complain about the fee, ‘because the Certificate is found to be perfectly useless in the Ottoman Empire ... the fact being that the Certificate is not recognized by Turkish Authorities as establishing

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the holder’s nationality to be British’. British subjects wishing to prove their nationality in an Ottoman court required a special certificate from the consulate and those wishing to travel required a different consular permit (tezkere), both of which carried a fee. ‘No wonder then that the Registration Certificate, which confers no advantage whatever on the holder, is regarded as a Capitation Tax, and is consequently unpopular’.40 This stark expression of the uselessness of residence certificates helps to explain evidence of non-registration, non-renewal and non-use of the documents. Despite sweeping statutory claims, nationality was an inchoate characteristic of personal identification before World War I. State and consular authorities often demanded it in order to access their facilities, but outside those facilities (and after an initial demonstration of foreign residence) other markers of status were more useful. I have argued elsewhere that Egypt’s multiple legal institutions functioned as a fused justice system during this period.41 Within that system, it was institution-to-institution documents that established identification; personal certificates of identification were ignored. Nevertheless, in the hierarchy of documentation, residence certificates were superior to passports. Passports were easily obtained, and were a weaker form of identification as a result. A consular historian relates the story of a group of French/British/Russian gypsies in Turkey, who, ‘as in so many [cases] where foreign nationality was claimed’, held passports that British consular officials believed ‘had been through a dozen different hands and were useless as a means of identity or as a guarantee of nationality’.42 Generally speaking, officials issued passports more easily and received them more skeptically than any other identity document. The incentive for this liberal treatment is clear: mobility documents worked to externalize administrative burdens. Almost a fifth of Algerians registered with the consulate were merely passing through Alexandria, and required passports rather than registration certificates.43 They moved from port to port on that weaker document. If they did not have their passport stamped at the consulate or turn it in within three years, they lost consular protection.44 In issuing a passport to a dubious candidate, a local authority might

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reasonably hope never to see him again.45 Residence documents, which entailed an ongoing obligation, were another story altogether.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the documentary practices of European subjects resident in Egypt. Although Ottoman and Egyptian identification documents have not attracted much research attention, what little we know suggests a murkier distinction between mobility and residence. Preliminary evidence suggests that the two classic state forms of identification in the late nineteenth century, the mürur tezkeresi (internal travel permit) and the nüfus tezkeresi (census registration document), were not simply mobility and residence documents. Despite its name, the internal passport was as much a residence document as it was a mobility document.46 From the 1820s to the 1870s, Egyptian authorities issued tezkeres to those who responded to the census.47 These internal passports were a key administrative tool in the decades of conscription and taxation before the British occupation. Ottoman tezkeres, too, were about settlement. The back of 1880s Ottoman tezkeres featured the fourth article of the Sicil-i Nüfus Nizamnamesi (Regulation for Population Registers) of 1881.48 ‘The significance of the Population Certificate was that no one could buy or sell property, appear in court, travel within or outside the Empire or have any dealings with the police or municipal officials without producing the document’. This assertion, featured on the document itself, suggests the non-observance of the rule. It seems that locals were even less likely to carry and use identification than foreigners. It was of little value in everyday life, and state institutions made their own decisions without recourse to personal tezkeres. Whether Ottoman or European, the imperial systems in place by the end of the nineteenth century used law and bureaucracy to distinguish between different categories of human beings. Each great power enforced differences between subjects and citizens in the domestic space of its own metropole and colonies. In places like Egypt, which lay outside of any one imperial power’s full

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sovereignty, various empires developed consensual systems of population regulation. These systems, which prefigured the emergence of a universal sense of private international law, aimed to process in-between subjects, such as the Algerians and Maltese discussed in this chapter, with as little effort as possible. Residence certificates and passports were useful tools for reluctant consular administrations willing to shoulder their part of the international burden of mobile imperial subjects. Bureaucratic experience with these mobile subjects informed identification procedures that flourished in Europe after World War I, as identity documents became part of life for those residing in their home states. More and more people required paper keys in order to access the state institutions that governed the obligations and privileges of state subjecthood. Local subjects of Egypt were also drawn into this process, as they began to expect their state to dispense services. This twentieth-century standardization of subjecthood feeds into a certain twenty-first-century logic, according to which identification documents and the persons they represent belong to a fairly uniform genre. The individual legal subject – the person – has become a universal fact, and identification documents derive their status from that individual. Just as humans are all of a type, the documents that attempt to fix their identities are also comparable and commensurate. From this perspective, the historical documents discussed in this chapter are reassuringly straightforward: the data they offer are terse and specific, and generally unburdened by context. This sense of uniformity is enhanced by the materiality of the papers themselves. They were mass-produced objects that varied only slightly from one to the next. They contain standard categories. For their users, however, these documents were talismans of status and recognition, and they retain that power in the hands of historians. Although we might read them burdened by our sense of their function as a key site of governmentality, we must look carefully for the stories that their individual personalities can reveal. Identification documents are dauntingly numerous and resistant to close reading, and their plain, apparent meaning is a methodological challenge. But the subtle stories

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told by these documents can be found. The archives contain more residence documents than travel documents, showing the greater value of residence rights. Travel documents were liberally distributed but of limited strength; residence documents were controlled but could better reproduce themselves. The experiences of travelers and foreign residents in the turn-of-the-century Eastern Mediterranean prefigured new forms of subjecthood for Egyptians and metropolitan European subjects alike. Mobile populations relied on paper technology to make both meager and robust rights claims. Even in the present day, mobile populations are at the forefront of citizenship experimentation.49 As in the past, their paper markers of status reflect and create new lines of distinction between state subjects.

Notes 1. See the classic accounts of Eugen Joseph Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London, 1991). For the purposes of this chapter, Anderson’s most interesting recent critic is Manu Goswami, ‘Rethinking the modular nation form: Towards a sociohistorical conception of nationalism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44:4 (2002), pp.770–99. 2. The major history of identification is an edited collection of considerable range: Jane Caplan and John C. Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton NJ, 2001). Other notable contributions include James C. Scott, John Tehranian and Jeremy Mathias, ‘The production of legal identities proper to states: The case of the permanent family surname’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44:1 (2002), pp.4–44; Claude Moatti and Wolfgang Kaiser (eds), Gens de passage en Méditerranée de l’antiquité à l’époque moderne: procédures de contrôle et d’identification (Paris, 2007); Gérard Noiriel (ed), L’identification: genèse d’un travail d’état (Paris, 2007). An excellent bibliography is hosted here: http:// identinet.org.uk/bibliography/. 3. The clearest statement of this view is John C. Torpey, ‘The Great War and the birth of the modern passport system’, in Jane Caplan and John C. Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton NJ, 2001), pp.256–70.

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4. Alan Dowty, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement (New Haven, 1987), p.54. Quoted in Torpey, ‘The Great War and the birth of the modern passport system’, p.256; Leo Lucassen, ‘A many-headed monster: The evolution of the passport system in the Netherlands and Germany in the long nineteenth century’, in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, p.246. 5. Before this time, formally sanctioned foreign residence was rare and tenuous enough to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. 6. On the related figure of the emigrant, see Nancy L. Green and Franҫois Weil (eds), Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation (Urbana, 2007). 7. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008), chap. 2. 8. Notably, John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York, 2000); Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York, 2010); and several essays in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity. For the extra-European context, see Radhika Viyas Mongia, ‘Race, nationality, mobility: A history of the passport’, Public Culture 11:3 (1999), pp.527–55; Radhika Singha, ‘A “proper passport” for the colony: Border crossing in British India, 1882–1920’ (presented at the Colloquium series, Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale, 2006), http://www.yale.edu/agrarianstudies/ papers/16passportill.pdf. 9. Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Stroud, 2003). 10. Resat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, 2009); Julia Ann Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 2011); Selim Deringil, ‘ “They live in a state of nomadism and savagery”: The late Ottoman Empire and the post-colonial debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45:2 (2003), pp.311–42. Several works tie Indian Ocean migrations to the Middle East: Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, 2011); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, 2006). 11. Generally, James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, 2009). For the Middle Eastern context, see Kasaba, A Moveable Empire; Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge, 1999); Deringil, ‘Nomadism and Savagery’.

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12. I collected these items from various files in the Dr al-Wath’iq al-Qawmiyya, Cairo (DWQ), the Foreign Office records, National Archives, London (FO), the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN), and National Archives of the United States, College Park, Maryland (USNA). 13. Compare John Torpey’s study, which focuses on documents for movement, offering a simple three-way distinction between international passports, internal passports and identity cards: The Invention of the Passport, pp.158–67. This rather narrow set of types privileges the role of the state (as does Torpey’s study as a whole). A preferable typology for a study of documentary practice appears in Lucassen, ‘A many-headed monster’, p.247. He distinguishes between eight kinds of documents: travel, work, certificates of nationality, ‘identification documents’, population registration, military passports, miscellaneous, and (crucially) no identification. He usefully traces shifts in their use in Amsterdam registrations between 1850 and 1905, drawing on a sample of more than two thousand items. 14. Here I differ somewhat with Kasaba’s provocative recent study, which sacrifices important distinctions between different modes of mobility in the interest of its (admitted quite convincing) general insistence on the normative nature of mobility in Ottoman history. Kasaba, A Moveable Empire. 15. Like Bhavani Raman, I find that the authority of the papers consists in the procedures that produce them. It is perhaps a mark of the inferior status of the Egyptian residents I discuss that their papers triggered comparatively little anxiety over procedural forgeries, however. Bhavani Raman, ‘The duplicity of paper: Counterfeit, discretion, and bureaucratic authority in early colonial Madras’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:2 (2012), pp.229–50. 16. Georges Bénédite, Égypte (Paris, 1900), p.27. 17. McKeown, Melancholy Order. 18. The modern booklet form of passports came into use after World War I. Lloyd, The Passport. 19. See, for instance, the dossier of Hadj Abou-Chééb ben Abdul-Gélil. The Alexandria consulate gave this man a passport in 1878 for travel to Algeria. Four years later, when he tried to use the document to win registration, he was rejected: ‘these documents are insufficient; the claimant must produce authentic documents proving his Algerian identity (ces pièces sont insuffisantes, l’intéressé doit produire des documents authentiques prouvant son identité d’algérien)’. CADN-RA 47/1127. CADN-RA 46/1058 tells a similar story: Dimitri Gregoriadis received a passport to travel to France in 1877, but was refused a registration certificate three years later.

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20. See Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge, 2013), as well as Matthew Ellis, ‘Between Empire and Nation: The Emergence of Egypt’s Libyan Borderland, 1841–1911’ (Ph.D. diss, Princeton University, 2012). 21. DWQ Muhfizat Iskandariyya series, passport volumes. 22. 26 June 1895 legislation in Gouvernement Egyptien, Ministère de l’Intérieur, Législation administrative et criminelle: recueil des lois et règlements en vigueur intéressant le Ministère de l’intérieur, vol. 2 (Cairo, 1906). 23. CADN-AJ 536/p57 (d’office c. Jules Odile aka Desmet Souin, 2 July 1910). 24. Foreigners did not need passports to enter Britain until 1905, and before 1915, the government issued passports to Britons only in special circumstances. Torpey, ‘The Great War and the birth of the modern passport system’, p.258; Mark B. Salter, Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder, 2003), p.26. 25. Passports were obtained quickly and for free, and (according to one historian) were often required on arrival at a port. Charles Archibald Price, Malta and the Maltese: A Study in Nineteenth Century Migration (Melbourne, 1954), p.222. He surveys 1826–80. 26. See, for instance, Radhika Singha, ‘Passport, ticket, and India-rubber stamp: “The problem of the pauper pilgrim” in colonial India c. 1882–1925’, in Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tiné (eds), The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region (New York, 2009), pp.49–83; Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, 2010). 27. For a brief discussion of these features, see Andreas Fahrmeir, ‘Governments and forgers: passports in nineteenth-century Europe’, in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, pp.225–8. 28. Fahrmeir makes a similar observation concerning the simplicity of local papers in early nineteenth century German. Ibid, p.225. 29. Lucassen, ‘A many-headed monster’, p.237. 30. For an argument for the critical role of impersonal legal and financial instruments, see Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton NJ, 2011), chap. 12. 31. The work that documents do for the state is not the focus of this study. But in considering the materiality of documents, it is worth nothing their flexible, even uncertain, work in symbolizing the state; in this sense, they resemble nationality itself. 32. Those Tunisians who renewed their certificates at all renewed an average of four times, and a median of two. When those who never received or renewed are included, the average drops to 2.15, and the median to one. For Algerians

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who renewed, the average was 6.2 and the median four. For all Algerians, the average was 3.5 and the median one. At the end of an letter to the consul asking for the estate of her estranged husband, a British subject wrote: ‘PS I should be very obliged if you could let me have my certificate of registration’. FO 847/42/26 (Estate of Francesco Panayotti, 1909). In a global context, poor relief was the leading motive for registration. Lucassen, ‘A many-headed monster’, p.253. Citizens may have used some sort of identity document, but I found no evidence of this. CADN-RA 49/1229, 50/1288. CADN-RA 47/1107, for example, contains a few of each of these certificates. Nationality had a pointed meaning in the context of the French Empire. Those who received this certificate were not French citizens (who had no need of such a document), but French nationals, a term reserved for colonial subjects. In his comprehensive history of French nationality, Patrick Weil asserts that these certificats de nationalité were only used after World War II (How to Be French: Nationality in the Making Since 1789 [Durham NC, 2008], pp.245–7). Here as elsewhere, the metropole was last to introduce technologies of rule developed in the colonies. The certificates themselves were called cartes de séjour during the 1860s. See an example in CADN-RA 46/1017. This in contrast to the situation described in Raman, ‘The duplicity of paper.’ FO 78/4115, ‘Respecting the working of the compulsory registration of British Subjects in the Ottoman Dominions’ (1887–8). Will Hanley, ‘The 1876–83 reform and its implementation: Many institutions or one?’, in Khaled Fahmy and Amr Shalakany (eds), New Approaches to Modern Egyptian Legal History (Cairo, forthcoming). D. C. M. Platt, The Cinderella Service: British Consuls Since 1825 (London, 1971), pp.137–8. Only a handful of Tunisians asked for passports. This is probably because French affiliation was a new and unfamiliar procedure. See bilingual notice on back of passport in CADN-RA 46/1005. Often the authority also paid his (one-way!) passage. In this it resembles the internal passports of tsarist Russia. Charles Steinwedel, ‘Making social groups, one person at a time: The identification of individuals by estate, religious confession, and ethnicity in late Imperial Russia’, in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, pp.67–82.

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47. Kenneth Cuno and Michael J. Reimer, ‘The census registers of nineteenthcentury Egypt: A new source for social historians’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 24:2 (1997), p.198. 48. Servet Mutlu, ‘Late Ottoman population and its ethnic distribution’, Nüfusbilim Dergisi/Turkish Journal of Population Studies 25 (2003), p.6. 49. Craig Calhoun, ‘The class consciousness of frequent travelers: Toward a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002), pp.869–97. 50. CADN-RA 46/1054. 51. CADN-RA 48/1167.

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CHAPTER 8 TR AVELLING SUBSTANCES AND THEIR HUM AN CAR R IER S: HASHISHTR AFFICKING IN M ANDATORY PALESTINE Haggai Ram

It is a known fact that the sale and consumption of drugs (opium and to a lesser extent cannabis) was widespread in the Ottoman Empire and did not elicit repressive measures such as those adopted against wine, coffee and tobacco. Not unlike European rulers and statesmen of their time, Ottoman sultans indulged in the pleasure of opium, which was also consumed by various Sufi orders in their rituals and ceremonies.1 These recreational and devotional practices were by no means confined to the upper echelons of the Ottoman state, however. Indeed, European and Ottoman travelers from the fifteenth century onward regularly reported on the proclivity of ordinary ‘Turks’ to consume humongous quantities of opium,2 similar to the situation that prevailed in Europe from the fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.3 Drugs were widely available in the empire for those seeking psychoactive bliss, but these very same substances, at least until the mid-nineteenth century, were also available for medicinal purposes.4

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As there were really no legal restrictions on the sale of medicine-cumdrugs, they could be purchased from any shop and street vendor, especially from herbalists (attar). For instance, pastes, pills and syrup containing opium and prepared by herbalists and other artisans ‘were common remedies resorted to by mothers for soothing infants’.5 Incidentally, the same can be said more or less about Western Europe, where sedative substances were ‘transmitted to the infant along with the milk’ so that ‘from infancy to old age narcosis ruled supreme’.6 In the mid-nineteenth century the Ottoman state, with an eye, among other things, to appeasing European critics of alleged Ottoman incivility,7 carried out legal reforms to control and regulate the flow and use of drugs.8 Still, as old habits die hard, these (piecemeal) measures fell short of enforcing a complete ban on drugs. What is more, the Ottoman Empire kept up its opium trade to feed the consumption of the Europeans themselves (e.g. England and France) or of their colonial domains (e.g. French Indochina).9 Drug trafficking and consumption in the Middle East thus had to await the post-World War I period to become a problem, a problem that local and international enforcement agencies tried their best to prevent and drug traffickers and users tried in earnest to keep alive. Several circumstances coalesced in this period to make this transformation happen: first and most obvious, it was in the interwar years that governments began to take concrete and meaningful measures to curtail the flow of drugs within but especially between national boundaries by outlawing and criminalizing drug traffickers and drug users. Efforts to establish a system of international drug control started well before the Great War but the founding of the League of Nations in 1919 brought a new sense of urgency to this dynamic. The League began as an institution for promoting peace among nations, but became increasingly focused on issues of crime, particularly traffic in women and traffic in drugs. Within a few years, crime prevention became the primary rationale for the League’s relevance to international affairs.10 The League’s member states differed on the desired ways and means to prevent international drug-related crimes, and a few of the old colonial powers, despite their newfangled prohibitionist discourse, refused to end their opium monopolies in the colonies.11 Despite these thorny

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issues, about which I will say more later on, the League of Nations signaled a first significant step toward identifying crime (and drugs) as an issue meriting coordinated action by the nations of the world. The League’s resolve to function as a body coordinating the fight against crime worldwide was, in and of itself, a product of the changing nature of criminal activity in the period rendered here as the first modern globalization. A world of newly-demarcated nation-states threatened by the crisscrossing mass movement of ‘alien’ ethnic and religious groups, as well as the rise of new technologies which made such movement easier and faster, combined to produce an intimidating notion of ‘international crime’. Border-crossing drug-traffickers exploiting advances in transportation and communication to move and conceal their illicit commodities were especially singled out as new types of criminals. This chapter is primarily concerned with the criminal activities of hashish traffickers in Mandatory Palestine (1920–48). This story has not been told before.12 Although we know quite a lot about hashishrelated activities and attitudes in other parts of the British Empire, most notably India and Egypt,13 we know very little about them in Mandatory Palestine. This study aims to fill this lacuna. By drawing on archival documents, press reports/commentaries and police and trial transcripts from the period, Section 1 examines the history of hashish trafficking in Mandatory Palestine within the prism of the changing nature of criminal activity in the period of the first modern globalization. In keeping with a global perspective, this section eschews the notion of the ‘nation’ as the sole, given and inevitable terrain of analysis. Although demonstrating that hashish-trafficking in Mandatory Palestine is intriguing in its own right, Section 1 argues that such activity cannot sufficiently be understood unless we connect it to a to-and-fro movement of hashish commodities between Palestine, Europe and North America – a phenomenon unheard of before the technological breakthroughs of the period. Section 2 shifts the focus of attention from drug offenders in Mandatory Palestine to those international forces and authorities whose duty it was to suppress drug trafficking. Specifically, it demonstrates

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one emblematic, yet not necessarily dramatic, aspect of the entanglement of interwar Palestine in the web of conflicting views of the USA, the League of Nations and the British Empire with regard to the methods required to suppress the flow of drugs worldwide. While the USA would be satisfied with nothing less than outright prohibition, Britain – itself involved in the drug trade to and from its overseas possessions – sought a middle way that would look after the interests of such producing countries as India.14 Based on British and American archival documents, I examine how the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in the US Treasury Department, through its network of overseas spies, agents and informants, attempted to bypass the Mandatory authorities in their narcotics prevention activities. As will be seen, these rivalries turned some of the very local activities of hashish traffickers in Mandatory Palestine into objects of international attention. Coupled with the dwindling economic resources of the British Empire, these rivalries also ensured that efforts to stamp out illegal drug activities and interactions in Palestine would remain largely ineffective.

Hashish smugglers in interwar Palestine It was during the early interwar years that Palestine emerged as a major transit route in the region’s now illegal drug trade between Lebanon-Syria and Egypt. Before that time, the main source of hashish for Egyptians was Greece.15 However, as prohibition efforts on the part of the Greek government intensified in response to British pressures, Egyptians turned to Syrian- and Lebanese-grown cannabis to satisfy their demand for the drug.16 Shortly after, in 1925, hashish (or Indian hemp) was added to the League’s International Opium Convention list of dangerous drugs. The convention, which went into effect on 25 September 1928, outlawed the exportation of hashish to countries that had formerly prohibited its use (e.g. Egypt).17 This restriction seems to have put pressure on the very people whose livelihood depended on the trans-regional trade in various merchandise, including in such substances as hashish (and opium) that were henceforth outlawed. They had to work their way through and overcome multiple challenges: First, as people who had regularly

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crossed territories in relative ease, the political borders enforced by the French and British mandates – separating Lebanon from Syria, and Transjordan from Palestine and Iraq – restricted their free movement. Customs and police outposts, too, which were erected along these borders, meant that they could no longer expect their (illicit) merchandise to go undetected. In addition, once passing through Mandatory Palestine’s territory, these people were, from this time on, considered criminals. This, in turn, required them to carry their merchandise with great caution and develop the necessary skills to outmaneuver the monitoring and surveillance devices of the governing colonial power, Britain. I will get to that issue in a moment. In the meantime, it is essential to consider briefly how British colonial officials on the ground perceived the problem at hand. To begin with, they ranked hashish as the number one illicit drug transported to Egypt through Palestine. A 1947 British report put it is as follows: ‘Hashish [is] ... the main drug illegally transported through Palestine for the onward passage to Egypt, [and] in the majority of cases ... hashish [is] arriving from Syria and the Lebanon’.18 However, because hashish trafficking in Palestine was (and to an extent still is) almost wholly a transit trade in nature, only a small fraction of this and other psychoactive substances made their way to local markets for ‘home consumption’.19 To the British, this meant that there was no real ‘drug problem’ in Palestine in terms of drug use and abuse.20 Throughout the interwar years the British colonial authorities in Palestine impressed upon their superiors in the metropolis reassuring assessments regarding this situation. Successive reports in the 1930s and 1940s by the Government of Palestine concluded unambiguously that drugs have ‘so far not been a serious problem in Palestine, where there is only a very limited market for narcotic drugs of any kind’.21 This circumstance may provide yet another reason, aside from lack of resources, why the British were generally lax in their pursuit of drug offenders in Palestine. Even if no major markets for hashish developed in Mandatory Palestine, its unique position as a transit route ensured that drug traffickers would be involved in a variety of illicit activities across its territory. In 1936, Joseph F. Broadhurst, a retired Assistant

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Inspector-General at the Palestine Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID), lamented: Palestine herself has no dope problem, but unfortunately the land lies between Syria, where large quantities of hashish ... are grown, and Egypt, which up till recently was one of the world’s largest customers for the drug. By every manner of trick hashish is smuggled over the Syrian-Palestinian frontier, through Palestine, across the burning Sinai Desert, over a lonely part of the Suez Canal and up to Cairo.22 Who, then, were the human agents who carried out these criminal activities? Jews, either native-born or immigrants, were usually absent from these activities. In later years some observers would recall that ‘there were some Jews [in Mandatory Palestine] ... who jointly with the Arabs smuggled drugs’,23 but they were the exception to the rule.24 More ordinarily, Jews kept away from hashish because they considered it a serious impediment to modernity and civilization. Not unlike Europeans and indigenous elite classes in other colonized countries at the time, Jews in Palestine adapted Orientalist images of hashish users that European travelers had been popularizing since the Middle Ages – especially the Assassins (Hashishin) myth, which the French Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy had resuscitated in the early nineteenth century.25 Accordingly, they saw Arabs as delirious, lazy, undisciplined, fanatic and uncivilized people, and identified hashish as a marker of Arab otherness, a strictly ‘Oriental potion’, alien to the disciplined, civilized and lawful European self and threatening the future of the Jewish nation and humanity writ large. This view comes out most clearly in a 1938 editorial published in the daily newspaper Davar. The unnamed commentator begins by opining that the ‘culture of drugs’ in Palestine is strictly an ‘Oriental problem’. S/he explains: ‘Among the factors working in favor of [drug] gangs in this country ... is Oriental intoxication or poisoning, a massive and longstanding poisoning of the mind and the body through Oriental drugs’.26 The Arabs’ attraction to hashish, s/he explains, accounts for much of their violent, irrational and erratic behavior ‘throughout

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history’. Hashish ‘stupefies’ their minds, reducing or eliminating their ‘capacity to recognize reality’, and it also increases their ‘sexual drives and sexual activities’. In the process, they are transformed into creatures ‘devoid of any will’, ‘blind tool[s] in the hands of those who will it’.27 In sum, much like Europeans at the time, Jews in Mandatory Palestine failed to adopt hashish because its use as a drug was associated with an Oriental potion used by murderers, specifically with the Assassin legend, in which hashish appeared as an agent of violent frenzy and brainwashing.28 Whereas pre-1948 Jews in Palestine usually distanced themselves from hashish, a plethora of other groups and individuals were not at all averse to participating in hashish trafficking and smuggling operations to and from Palestine. First and foremost, hashish traffickers in Palestine can be identified as ‘ordinary’ Palestinian Arabs – taxi drivers, garage owners and mechanics, tradesmen, peasants, etc. – or otherwise Arabs of neighboring countries such as Egypt, Lebanon-Syria and even Iraq.29 As I will demonstrate below, British servicemen and British colonial officials stationed in Palestine and Egypt also joined the hashish trade with an eye to boosting their income. Next on the list of hashish traffickers across Palestine were those termed ‘international gangs’, composed of criminals from many countries around the globe (Egypt, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, to mention but a few). Significantly, the term made its first appearance in Europe in the early interwar years to denote a new generation of criminals who were skillful in escaping across national borders and maintaining a wide-scale trade in illegal merchandise.30 Hashish traffickers who belonged to this group were notoriously known as brutal and coarse. Henry de Monfreid, an early twentieth-century French adventurer and hashish smuggler en route from Greece to Egypt, provides an amusing description of the manners of one such international gang member, a Greek national: He washed down his salad with great gulps of black wine out of a skin, and when he saw me coming he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He glowered sullenly, stuck his pipe insolently

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in his mouth, and sent forth a jet of saliva which nearly fell on my feet, just to show me how welcome I was.31 Ploys and deception were an indispensable part of the business which hashish smugglers operated.32 As noted above, drug traffickers in the interwar years had to overcome formidable obstacles in order to have their illegal merchandise cross safely from Lebanon-Syria to Egypt, via Palestine. Passport controls and customs checkpoints along borders, police activities within and across colonial states – these and other novel barriers unique to the period of the first modern globalization called for equally creative solutions. In 1936, Joseph Broadhurst, a former senior officer at the Palestine Police, recalled his exasperation with the ‘immensity of the smuggling problem that faced the Palestine Police’, and the so-numerous ‘smugglers of originality’ who had ‘played so many tricks’ and ‘gave us endless trouble’.33 Some of these smugglers, he says, carried hashish ‘in shoes with thick hollow soles and heels’, others carried them ‘in hollow slabs of chocolate’ or in ‘small hollowed crucifixes’, and still others concealed their illicit merchandise in ‘thin bags tied to [a human’s] thighs’ and ‘in the turnups of ... trousers’.34 According to Paul Knepper, the distinguishing mark of the emerging generation of criminals in Europe in the period discussed here was their capacity to use, for their own advantage, the very new technologies employed by the modern and/or colonial state to clamp down on crime. Knepper writes: Technology was thought to have empowered criminal activities stretching from country to country and continent to continent. ‘Motor bandits’ made the most of the new motorways for burglary and theft. Traffickers in drugs and women used cars, even airplanes, to ferry their illicit merchandise across borders.35 My sources corroborate Knepper’s assertion with respect to Palestine: To evade the checks instituted by the state to control the flow of people and commodities, hashish smugglers used trains, motorcars, ships and airplanes, as well as other means of modern technologies

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and communication. Note a 1929 controversy, apparently embarrassing to the British authorities, in which 24 slabs of hashish were seized on a train carrying the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Sir George Ambrose Lloyd, from Syria, across Palestine, back to Egypt. The illicit commodity was found in a search conducted on the train after it stopped over at al-Ludd (Lod). The suspected smugglers were identified as ‘Egyptian guards and servants’ accompanying Sir George on his trip to and fro.36 This was not an isolated event. A few days later, a similar incident occurred at the Jerusalem train station, where hashish was found in the car of a British official of the Palestinian Railways. Here, too, the culprits were the ‘car’s workers’.37 Smugglers also used automobiles to transport and conceal their illicit merchandise. The Hebrew and Arabic press of the period provide many reports of cases in which opium and hashish, hidden in various parts of cars, were apprehended by customs and police officials at several border checkpoints.38 The more daring and ingenious traffickers employed a combination of ‘world shrinking technologies’39 simultaneously – such as cars and trains at the same time – to smuggle hashish and opium. Thus, a ‘member of a well-known Jaffa family’ who had ‘ordered a special railway van’ to ship his car to Qantara, the northeastern Egyptian city on the eastern side of the Suez Canal, was arrested following a discovery of ‘a great treasure of hashish and opium’ concealed in the car’s wheels.40 One of the most bold, ambitious and complex (albeit utterly unsuccessful) operations, involving multiple means of transportation (a train, an airplane and a car), was carried out in 1937 by an international smuggling gang.41 In July that year, a certain Egyptian narcotics smuggler came into agreement with an Italian pilot, Gaitano Scotto, to smuggle hashish and opium from SyriaLebanon, through Palestinian territory, into Egypt. Two Greek nationals (Minas Catreftis and Fotius Cominos) joined them in this agreement. Subsequently, Catreftis and a certain Ali al-Matari (a resident of Jaffa and ‘one of the great merchants of narcotics’ in Palestine)42 jointly travelled to Aleppo to purchase the drugs and ‘ascertain the good quality of the narcotics and their weight’.43

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Having concluded the deal to their satisfaction, the two boarded a Qantara-bound train with the illicit merchandise. Meanwhile, Cominos joined the Italian pilot in a flight over the Sinai Peninsula along the route of Palestine Railways. Their plan was to follow the train with Catreftis and al-Matari on board, waiting for them to drop a ‘valise’ containing the drugs at an agreed upon point, about 12 km south of Qantara. ‘At this place Cominos and Scotto will have been there with the airplane under the pretense that they are fishing in that zone’. In reality, however, the two picked up the valise, loaded it on the airplane and flew with the drugs supply to a certain location in the Sinai Peninsula, where a car was waiting for them to carry the supply to Port Said. Unfortunately for the gang, the ploy failed thanks to the activity of undercover agents of the Narcotics Intelligence Bureau under the command of Russell Pasha. Hashish arrived in Egypt, via Palestine, by car, by train, by plane, but also by sea. As Liat Kozma observes, ‘By 1924, hashish arrived in Egypt ... on steamers coming from India and passing through the Suez Canal; on steamships arriving in Alexandria from various ports in the Eastern Mediterranean; on small sailing boats coming from Greece, Syria or Palestine’.44 Aware of the fact that ‘certain ship crews were notorious smugglers’,45 the British authorities in Palestine were not indifferent to ships passing through Palestinian ports on their way to Egypt, particularly Alexandria. For example, in 1933 the British Vice-Consulate at Constanta, Romania, reported the seizure of 400 kilos of hashish on board the S.S. George Mabro, a ship flying the Egyptian flag, which sailed to Alexandria via Haifa and Jaffa.46 In the same year, British officials in Constanta once again warned against ‘a consignment of drugs’ taken on board a Greek-owned ship, the S.S. Danubian, sailing from Constanta to Haifa and Jaffa, and from there to Alexandria.47 As noted above, British military personnel stationed in Palestine and Egypt also took an increasingly active role in drug trafficking operations during the interwar years. One contemporary (about whom more will be said below) wrote that ‘narcotic drugs – mostly hashish – have been smuggled from Syria and the Lebanon to Egypt, mostly with the help of army personnel, who have been tempted by promises

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of big rewards or directly by high profits’.48 The Hebrew press of the period, too, told stories about British servicemen in Palestine who were either directly involved in the hashish trade to Egypt or allegedly refused approaches by local drug smugglers to actively participate in smuggling operations.49 Additional sources from the period provide a glimpse into the precise nature of these military servicemen’s hashish offenses. In 1947, for example, five British servicemen, members of the ‘Juke Box’ entertainment road show – which was performed in ‘almost every camp in Palestine’ – were sentenced to varying prison terms following the seizure of more than 300 kilos of hashish (and a little less than 250 kilos of opium) from their overturned military vehicle in Gaza.50 In the same year, an RAF sergeant from Qalandia airfield (in the Jerusalem district) was arrested on account of two suitcases packed with hashish that were seized from one of the airfield’s hangars.51 A UN report on drug addiction in Israel, published in 1962, also recalls that ‘during the Second World War the smuggling of drugs [in Palestine] increased considerably with the aid of soldiers of the various armies at the time stationed in the country and deriving a rich source of income from this activity’.52 Emphatic denial was the preferred strategy to escape punishment of many a local hashish offender. Indeed, in going over trial transcripts and protocols from the period the one thing that immediately comes to mind is the defendants’ ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ approach, as though they were utterly uninvolved in the crime or at least unaware of the immorality of their actions. All defendants, young and old, women and men, peasants and urbanites, denied (whether personally or through their attorneys) any connection to the charges leveled against them. Their simplest method was to deny any knowledge, even if indirect and circumstantial, of the drug concerned. Consider defendant Ahmad ‘Id Abu Dahir’s testimony in his 1943 trial, held at the District Court of Jerusalem sitting in Beersheba. Abu Dahir, a peasant from Gaza, was charged with unlawful possession of dangerous drugs after a substantial amount of hashish and opium was found concealed in his watermelon shed in the Beersheba vicinity.53

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Presented with the exhibit of the seized hashish and opium, Abu Dahir said the following in his defense: I don’t know what this is. I don’t know the substance hashish which is smoked. I have never heard of people smoking hashish. I have never heard of opium. I have not heard of anybody smoking opium, or chewing hashish. I live in Beersheba. I have been to Gaza – to the market. I have not heard of al-Arish. I have never been to Egypt. I have no identity card. I have no passport. I don’t know what a passport is ... .54 Sometimes, too, the defense arguments echoed Orientalist descriptions of Arabs as passive, immature infants unable to reach European-style civilization, the set telos of the maturation process. Hence Abu Dahir’s attorney used the following rationale to convince the court to mitigate his sentence: The responsibility lay with the man who bought the stuff. [Abu Dahir] did not prevent the tins from being left on his property. He was somewhat negligent in allowing people to trespass on his land. But in fact ... [he] did not bring the tins, and was not consulted about them, and did not give his approval. [It should be borne] in mind that he is a Bedouin, and has no education or broad-minded mentality to foresee what the results of such negligence would be. He is an old man ... . [Therefore, Abu Dahir] is to blame for simple negligence. I ask that [he] be fined.55 On the face of it, these testimonies and other of their kind56 bring to mind the oft-quoted catchphrase, ‘I know nothing’ of the character Manuel, the well-meaning but disorganized and constantly confused waiter from the legendary 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers. Yet, a closer look suggests that defendants were not necessarily as clueless and unsophisticated as they would have their judges believe; that even in their seemingly acquiescent ‘public transcripts’57 they consciously strove to subvert and resist the new invasive surveillance and control

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mechanisms of the ruling colonial state. Abu Dahir, a ‘simple’ peasant from Gaza, says to the prosecutor, ‘I have no identity card. I have no passport. I don’t know what a passport is’, thereby openly refusing to submit to the very barriers that were put up during the period of the first modern globalization to control border-crossing criminals such as himself. As we have seen, hashish traffickers in Mandatory Palestine did not wait until such unfortunate occasions as standing trial in order to subvert modern state surveillance methods. By drawing great sustenance from the technological innovations of their time, hashish smugglers in Palestine tailored their criminal activities in ways that were designed to evade these methods in the first place. By doing so, hashish smugglers in interwar Palestine fitted well with what contemporary Europeans described as ‘an emerging generation of border-crossing criminals empowered by advances in transportation and communication’.58 In the period under discussion, the League of Nations and the USA began to take an increasingly active role in identifying crime in general, and international drug trade in particular, as issues meriting coordinated action by the nations of the world. To be sure, this state of affairs impacted hashish smugglers’ operations in and across Palestine. At the same time, it also transformed these smugglers’ specifically local activities into stories of global resonance, as I will demonstrate below.

Spy wannabe: Interwar Palestine and the fight over international drug control regimes Hashish trafficking in Mandatory Palestine also provides us with a site for viewing the extent to which its territory became entangled in the web of international smuggling routes and global prohibition regimes. Arguably, it was precisely in the interwar years that the USA, despite its withdrawal from international affairs, began to push for a dynamic, if not overly aggressive, global engagement with drugs prevention. At the same time the fledgling League of Nations, too, attempted to assert its role in international anti-narcotics affairs.

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The League and the USA were in agreement that the international traffic in cannabis and narcotic drugs had in fact proliferated to such an extent that only coordinated actions by all concerned nations could bring about effective solutions to the problem.59 From their very inception, however, the relationship between them was fraught with difficulties. Although agreeing on the most essential problem – the unruly global proliferation of ‘dangerous drugs’ – the League and the USA differed on the methods required to control the flow of these substances. The bone of contention between them can be summed up as follows: The federal narcotics establishment in the USA believed that only prohibition would dry up drug supplies around the world.60 On the other hand, for the British, who welcomed the League’s intervention in international control of drugs but at the same time continued to finance colonial ventures on production of opium, this was not possible.61 The figure who most vigorously pushed for an unyielding global system of prohibition, to the chagrin of the League and Britain, was Harry J. Anslinger, the ambitious first director of the FBN from 1930 to 1962. Much has been written on Anslinger’s character, motivations, objectives and achievements, as no figure was more representative of the twentieth-century US global war on drugs.62 Egotistical, authoritarian, energetic, brutal and unscrupulous, Anslinger was the first American to be dubbed a drug ‘czar’.63 To monitor the movement of drugs below the radar of governments that refused to abide by his firm demand for prohibition, Anslinger started an international intelligence network. Stationed in Paris, his narcotics agents had regular contacts with both European law enforcement agencies and an array of local informants and undercover spies.64 Mandatory Palestine was caught up in these US espionage activities, which were part of the rivalries between the US, the League and the British Empire over the nature of international drug prevention policies. These Palestine-centered global spy games become accessible to us through a critical file which I came across at the National Archives in Washington, DC.65 This file contains messages exchanged between Anslinger and a certain Dr Zdenk Frank König. König, a Czechoslovakian-born Jew, immigrated to Palestine in the 1940s. Soon after he set out to offer Anslinger his good services as an FBN field

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agent to supply the organization with information about narcotics movement in Middle East in general and Palestine in particular. In his letters to Anslinger, König does not provide any concrete explanations about his enthusiastic approaches to the FBN. His motivations remain unclear, but it is likely that, far from a genuine desire to help in the creation of a narcotics-free humanity, he hoped to gain personal reputation or an additional source of income. Similarly, the documents do not supply much information about König’s background prior to his immigration to Palestine. In his introductory letter to Anslinger,66 König establishes himself as a chemist by training and calls attention to his past experience in the battle against narcotics. At the same time, he portrays himself as something of a daring adventurer. Hence, he testifies that in 1934 he had ‘cooperated with’ the FBN’s Paris branch and the Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau (CNIB), established in Egypt in 1929 and headed by Russell Pasha. Upon concluding his work there, in 1942, König briefly joined the Czechoslovakian army in the Middle East. By König’s admission, since that time and until the end of 1946, he was in charge of the Chemical Section of the Controller of Heavy Industries in Jerusalem. ‘After 1946 I have started business of my own – i.e. importing of chemical products to Palestine’, he notes. König immediately takes care to add, apparently so as to convince Anslinger to take his application letter seriously, that during that time ‘I have kept my eyes open as far as narcotic drugs [in the Middle East] are concerned’.67 It appears that Anslinger first waited for a background check on König to be completed before making any decision about employing him as an agent. Hence, initially he sent König a polite, succinct and noncommittal reply letter, thanking him for the ‘very interesting information’, but not much more than that.68 König, it seems, was not disheartened by Anslinger’s lukewarm reception. Although he did not hear from Anslinger for nearly two years after his initial proposition, he kept sending the drug czar letters on a regular basis, proposing to work with the FBN but also disclosing information about the ‘narcotics situation’ in Palestine. In January 1950, after nearly two years of silence, Anslinger replied to König. Though still noncommittal, in the letter Anslinger lays out the FBN’s supply-demand strategy of

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prevention and identifies the Levant (including Palestine) as a crucial zone in the intricate web of the international drug trade: We are very much interested in the narcotic situation in the Middle East, this being potentially one of our most dangerous situations from the standpoint of sources of supply for illicit narcotic drugs in this country [the USA]. Therefore, we should greatly appreciate any information on the general picture as well as on particular situations which may have come to you[r] attention.69 In March 1950, Anslinger received confirmation of König’s reliability and trustworthiness in a form of a letter penned by König’s alleged Paris operator during the 1930s, Charles B. Dyer. Dyer claims to have known König as a chemist living in Sofia, Bulgaria, and acknowledges that he had supplied the agency with ‘some useful information’ about narcotic producers and narcotic smugglers in that country. Dyer also mentions in passing that König spent some ‘rough years’ in China and Greece (doing what exactly, we don’t know) and concludes: ‘He is a man of good ability and reliable, but not too persevering owing to a morose and melancholy disposition which the past ten years may not have improved ... Bearing that in mind, I recommend taking him on’.70 Anslinger was apparently satisfied with Dyer’s positive appraisal and decided to recruit König to the FBN’s international intelligencegathering network. He inquired with the State Department into the possibility of offering König ‘remuneration for any services he may render’ and requested that that the Consul General in Jerusalem ‘would have someone orally pass on’ the decision to him.71 Yet, Anslinger’s change of heart about König proved to be short-lived and, sadly for the latter, eventually nothing came of it. Ultimately, the State Department ruled against König’s recruitment ‘because of fiscal and other reasons’.72 In the meantime, too, Anslinger received notice of ‘allegations that, in China in the 1930s, König may have been acting as a Soviet agent’.73 Consequently, Anslinger was instructed to ‘withhold any further direct correspondence with König’.74 With the FBN’s ‘König option’ aborted, Cold War interests proved to be far more important to the USA than Anslinger’s anti-narcotics (and anti-cannabis) global crusade.

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What can we glean from König’s string of messages to Anslinger on the matter of the movement of hashish and other drugs through Mandatory Palestine? I have already noted in the previous section that König was aware of the proliferation of hashish trafficking in Palestine with the help of British troops stationed there and in Egypt. In another message to Anslinger, in early 1948, he also warned against an expected upsurge in hashish-related activities in Palestine due to an increase in the cultivation of hashish in Syria and Lebanon; and in another message he names a certain Syrian who ‘is making frequent trips from Syria and Lebanon [to Palestine] and acts as carrier of hashish and opium’.75 On the whole, then, it appears there is nothing exceptional in König’s disclosures about hashish trafficking in Mandatory Palestine and the information he reveals to Anslinger is trivial and anecdotal at best. Even so, it demonstrates that local actors were involved in the workings of global prohibition regimes, just as local actors figured in translocal and even global networks of drug trafficking. The whole game between drug traffickers and drug prevention authorities was now played on a much larger board, with those moving the pawns sometimes sitting thousands of miles away.76 The König-Anslinger correspondence is important in yet another respect: it brings to light the possible role that Jewish immigrants to Palestine played in the production and smuggling of narcotic drugs (as distinguished from cannabis). In his messages to Anslinger, König mentions a few pharmaceutical industries operating in Palestine, such as Teva, Zori and Assia.77 He claims that these factories were producing ‘several hundred grams of opium alkaloids monthly’ to use for their own legitimate drug-manufacture. Yet, these factories, he alleges, have also ‘partially’ sold these alkaloids to ‘travelers to the USA’. König qualifies this allegation by stating that ‘these are only rumors and I never tried to have them confirmed or denied’.78 Even so, he restates the same allegation in subsequent messages to Anslinger – for example, ‘it is rumored that at least 20 kilograms [of Teva alkaloids] have found their way to USA via American ships coming to Haifa or Tel Aviv’.79 I have not yet been able to confirm these allegations. On the one hand, they appear outlandish and perhaps designed to lure Anslinger

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into believing that König was a valuable and knowledgeable informant. On the other hand, it is not at all unreasonable to suspect that some of the Zionist organizations that had fought the British during the Mandate years were involved in narcotic trafficking operations to fund their covert armed activities, and that these pharmaceutical industries provided them with some of the commodities and the expertise to do so. Several national liberation movements and espionage agencies in other times and other places are known to have resorted to drug trafficking,80 and there is no reason to believe that Zionist organizations in Palestine should have shunned such covert activity.81 It is not an easy task to link the above-mentioned pharmaceutical industries and their personnel to any possible dealings of Zionist groups with illegal drugs. However, it should be borne in mind that among the European immigrants to Palestine in the period were scientists, chemists and technicians, and they were those who ultimately founded these pharmaceutical companies. It would not be farfetched to imagine that some of the immigrants identified strongly with the objectives of these Zionist groups and supported their cause in any way possible. As a matter of fact, in his messages to Anslinger König alludes to this likelihood: ‘There are many chemists [in Palestine] with good experience in organic chemistry, and it is very easy to obtain opium from Tur[k]ey or even Syria’.82 Gerald H. Williams, FBN District Supervisor in New York, who reviewed König’s correspondence with Anslinger, made the point even more strongly. He urged Anslinger to make use of König so as to Develop some information concerning the narcotic situation in Israel as that country probably has many of the old-time narcotic traffickers from other European countries now resident there. It will not be long before these persons begin to use the easily available Turkish and Iranian opium to produce narcotic drugs for the illicit traffic.83 A single, albeit still uncorroborated, document from the British Foreign Office raises additional suspicions concerning the involvement of European Jews in smuggling narcotic drugs into Palestine: In April 1933, the British Vice-Consul in Constanta, while briefing the

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British High Commissioner in Cairo on Egypt-bound ships suspected of carrying drugs, briefly noted, ‘I am told that cocaine is introduced into Palestine by Jewish pilgrims from Poland’.84 Note that the official did not refer here to European Jews holding legal immigration certificates to enter Palestine but rather to ‘Jewish pilgrims’, i.e. those Jews living in Eastern Europe who embarked on periodic pilgrimages to Jerusalem and returned to the continent upon completion. Obviously, it would be terribly imprudent of me to draw sweeping conclusions from this brief, anecdotal statement. Still, it may open up at least two possibilities for further productive research: It calls for an investigation of the movement of narcotics from Europe to Palestine (and not the other way around), a movement whose human agents were European Jews; and of the relationship between Mandatory Palestine and the Eastern European Jewish underworld. Indeed, after the Great War, Jews arrived in Vienna from Galicia, Ukraine and territories under Austrian authority, where they found the drug trade a profitable business.85 That these Jews may have been involved in various criminal activities, including drug trafficking, in Mandatory Palestine is not implausible, despite the tendency of modern historiography to idealize and romanticize pre-1948 East European Jewries. In the 1930s, Russell Pasha’s CNIB agents broke up a smuggling ring made up of Jews from Poland, who had established themselves in the Viennese underworld and cultivated links to drug smuggling operations in Egypt. (Paul Knepper, who cites a contemporary observer, says that the names of members of the gang ‘read somewhat like the cast at one of the offerings of the Yiddish Theater’.)86 There is no reason to dismiss the possibility that such East European Jewish gangs were also active in Mandatory Palestine. As drugs are hidden but always present props in history,87 additional research may uncover networks of illicit commerce that linked Mandatory Palestine to the East European Jewish underworld.

Conclusion A brief examination of Hebrew-language detective fiction, which first appeared in Palestine in the 1920s, should provide a convenient site for

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demonstrating the main arguments of this study. Hebrew-language detective fiction is usually considered a direct extension of European (including Yiddish) and North American sleuth literatures.88 While these external influences cannot be denied, considering them the sole reason for the rise of this literary genre in Palestine may be tantamount to a ‘denial of coevalness’, to use Johannes Fabian’s useful terminology. For contrary to these conceptions, the onset of detective fiction occurred more or less simultaneously all over the world, including Mandatory Palestine, and may have been a common reaction to the internationalization of criminal activities and their spread across many nations at the same time. Much like its counterparts in Europe and North America, then, Hebrew-language detective fiction presents a dramatization of actual criminal activities of global resonance that surged in, and connected, many parts of the world in the latter part of the first modern globalization. A case in point features David Tidhar, a real-life character – initially an officer in the Mandatory Police and later a private eye operating from Tel Aviv – who became the fictional protagonist in a highly popular series of detective booklets published in Palestine throughout the 1930s and 1940s.89 Known as ‘the first Hebrew detective,’ (ha-balash ha-ivri ha-rishon), Tidhar embarks upon far-reaching crime-solving adventures connecting Palestine – through ships, trains, cars and airplanes – to Beirut, Alexandria and several other European ports and capitals.90 Significantly, in one booklet Tidhar confronts and vanquishes an international gang of hashish smugglers (of the type described in Section 1). Three mutilated bodies found in Haifa lead Tidhar on an intricate trail to this gang. Among other places, the trail takes Tidhar to the infamous ‘hashish dens’ (me’urot hashish) in the lower city of Haifa – where he is introduced to ‘Orientals’ ‘smoking hookahs’ or ‘lying motionlessly on the floor ... their lips mumb[ling] broken words and syllables’.91 Thanks to his and/or his aide’s subsequent excursions to Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut, Tidhar uncovers the international criminals who had been using technology to escape across national borders and maintain a wide-scale trade in illegal merchandise: ‘With the help of Mr Tidhar the police imprisoned the entire group. They will be put on trial for smuggling hashish into Syria and the Land of Israel and to Europe as well’.92

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The very Palestine imagined in these texts was not inhabited by, say, passionate pioneers and middle class Zionist intellectuals alone, but also by ‘gangsters from Chicago and New York, drug traffickers and women kidnappers from Alexandria and Beirut, archaeologists haunted by curses, and fortune hunters and refugees from all over the world’.93 It was, in short, ‘a cosmopolitan Eretz Yisrael with a rich and stormy underworld ... an underworld inexorably tied to the ... crime capitals of Los Angeles and Shanghai. Its geographical range stretched ... between Alexandria and Beirut and, in this sense, it was part of the Levant’.94 As mentioned, Hebrew-language sleuth literature did not invent such an (under)world from scratch. Rather it focused, albeit in amplified form, on concrete circumstances and events that displayed the darker aspects of everyday life in Palestine. For obvious reasons, Zionist historiography has tended to belittle or otherwise ignore these aspects. The fact remains, however, that Hebrew-language sleuth literature in the interwar years verifies the main findings of this study. In the first place, it demonstrates the extent to which local crime and local crime control became, by virtue of new technologies, entangled in global networks of illegal commerce and enforcement regimes that drew Palestine and the world beyond closer together. Moreover, it illustrates the porous and permeable nature of shared borders, however hard the mandatory authorities strove to make them hermetically sealed. In spite of new mechanisms of border policing, goings-on across these borders were likely to be carried out anytime. Criminals carrying illicit merchandise made border-crossings possible by subterfuge and the use of transportation technologies such as cars, ships and even airplanes; and for ordinary people, border-crossing seemed natural and obvious. Many of them, Jews and Arabs alike, seemed to feel at home in Cairo and Beirut no less than they did in Tel Aviv and Haifa. To sum up: in 1933, A. E. Harwich, an officer at the Palestine Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID), explained that, ‘By virtue of its geographical position Palestine is the overland highway for the smuggling of hashish from Turkey to Egypt. The long PalestinianEgyptian frontier in the Sinai desert makes a complete control by contraband officers practically impossible’.95 Harwich admits that the magnitude and intricacy of illicit hashish-related activities in Palestine

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make the fight against them a hopeless battle. He is particularly frustrated with the fact that these activities have shown the resilience of the interpenetration of Palestine, the remaining Mandatory states and Egypt, despite the demarcation of national boundaries among them and the formation of state-cum-colonial mechanisms of border policing. However, Harwich does not mention the global networks of illicit commerce that may have governed these activities during the latter part of the first modern globalization. Indeed, these seemingly local and/or regional activities may have been part of a more protracted journey in which hashish and other illicit merchandise were carried to markets farther than the countries of Middle East, extending, as we have seen, even to Europe and the US.

Notes 1. See e.g. Mehrdad Kia, Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (Santa Barbara CA, 2011), pp.244–5. 2. Richard Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics (New York, 2004), pp.57–60; Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage (Seattle, 1985), pp.110–1. 3. Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 1989). 4. The same can be said more or less about Iran under the Qajar dynasty (1785–1925); see Rudi Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton NJ, 2005), especially pp.97–116; Ram Baruch Regavim, ‘The Most Sovereign of Masters: The History of Opium in Modern Iran, 1850–1955’ (PhD diss., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2012). 5. Ebru Aykut Türker, ‘Alternative Claims on Justice and Law: Rural Arson and Poison Murder in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire’ (PhD diss., Boaziçi University, 2011), p.233. 6. Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, p.25. 7. Indeed, ‘the Image of the dissolute Asian addict, or the helpless African or Australasian lost in alcohol, was a recurring theme in the “Orientalist” construction of Western superiority that legitimated empire; it was also at the center of debates about the “civilizing” nature of imperialism as liberals and missionaries decided that these victims were in need of salvation’; James Mills and Patricia Barton, ‘Introduction’, in: idem (eds), Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, 1500–1930 (London, 2007), p.1.

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8. See e.g. articles 193–5 of the 1858 Ottoman Penal Code and these articles’ subsequent amendments, in: John A. Strachey Bucknill and Haig Apisoghom S. Utidjian (trans. and annot.), The Imperial Ottoman Penal Code (London, 1913), pp.147–8. 9. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (London, 2009), p.82. 10. Paul Knepper, International Crime in the Twentieth Century: The League of Nations Era, 1919–1939 (London, 2011), p.85. 11. Mills and Barton, ‘Introduction’, pp.1–17. 12. With the exception of one thought-provoking article by Cyrus Schayegh – ‘The many worlds of ‘Abud Yasin: or, what narcotics trafficking in the interwar Middle East can tell us about territorialization’, The American Historical Review 116:2 (2011), pp.273–306 – which examines narcotics trafficking in the interwar Levant and deals with Palestine only partially, no such study has been undertaken. 13. On India see e.g. James Mills, Madness, Cannabis and Colonialism: The “Native Only” Lunatic Asylums of British India (London, 2000); idem, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928 (Oxford, 2003); and idem, Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain, 1928–2008 (Oxford, UK, 2013), pp. 43–61. On Egypt see e.g. Liat Kozma, ‘Cannabis prohibition in Egypt, 1880–1939: From local ban to League of Nations diplomacy’, Middle Eastern Studies 47 (2011), pp.443–60; James H. Mills, ‘Colonial Africa and the international politics of cannabis: Egypt, South Africa and the origins of global control’, in Mills and Barton, Drugs and Empires, pp.165–84; and Gabriel Nahas, ‘Hashish and drug abuse in Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 61 (1985), pp.428–44. 14. William B. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (London, 2000), p.81; Mills, Cannabis Nation, pp. 5–6. 15. A lively (but highly racist) account of the hashish trade between Greece and Egypt is provided in the following memoir, penned by an early twentieth-century French adventurer and hashish smuggler: Henry de Monfreid, Hashish: A Smuggler’s Tale (London, 1946). 16. Kozma, ‘Cannabis Prohibition’, p.453; Mills, Cannabis Nation, p.38. 17. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy, p.41; David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp.184–185. 18. Israel State Archives [hereafter ISA], M 24/322, ‘Report by the Inspector General of the Palestine Police for the Calendar Year 1947 on the Traffic of Dangerous Drugs’. 19. A. E. Harwich, ‘A method of detecting hashish’, The Palestine Police Magazine 1:1 (1933), p.14.

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20. This comes through most vividly in a 1962 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which was penned by Z. W. Jermulowicz, Tel Aviv district psychiatrist at the time. As Jermulowicz recalled, ‘In Palestine, during the period of the British Mandate until the end of the war of liberation of 1948, neither drugs nor alcohol constituted a social or medical problem ...’; see Z. W. Jermulowicz, ‘Control and treatment of drug addicts in Israel’, UNODC, 1 January 1962. 21. ISA M 24/322, ‘Report by the Government of Palestine for the Calendar Year 1946 on the Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs’. See also ISA, ibid, ‘Report by the Government of Palestine for the Calendar Year 1944 on the Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs’; ISA, M 16/322, ‘Traffic in Opium and other Dangerous Drugs’. 22. Joseph F. Broadhurst, From Vine Street to Jerusalem (London, 1936), p.194. 23. Jermulowicz, ‘Control and treatment’. See also David Ginsburg and J. L. Kaufman, ‘Problems of drug addiction in Israel’, UNODC, 1 January 1955. 24. So too was a piece in the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth (10 June 1947) reporting on the arrest of one Avraham Biur, ‘the king of Jewish robbers in the Land of Israel’. Reportedly, Biur ‘specialized in smuggling arms and intoxicating drugs’. I have not yet been able to obtain more information about the acclaimed ‘king of Jewish robbers’. 25. On Europeans’ views of hashish in the long nineteenth century, see Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Sawtry, 2011), pp.73–104; Marcus Boon, The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp.123–32; and Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York, 2003), pp.79–92. On the Egyptian elite’s views of hashish consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Kozma, ‘Cannabis prohibition in Egypt’. On elite views of hashish use in colonial India, see Ronen Shamir and Daphna Hacker, ‘Colonialism’s civilizing mission: The case of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission’, Law and Social Inquiry 26 (2001), pp.435–61. 26. ‘Gangs in the country and hashish’, Davar, 30 March 1938; italics in the original. 27. For similar Jewish conceptions of hashish as a Muslim-cum-Arab disease stretching back to the time of the Assassins, see Dvora Ayalon-Sireni, ‘Hashish’, Davar, 21 June 1942; and ‘Hashish Menace a Thousand Years Old’, Palestine Post, 18 September 1947. 28. Jay, Emperors of Dreams, p.76. 29. The names of hashish offenders in Palestine were provided each year in annual British reports on ‘important seizures of narcotic drugs’. The bulk of those arrested and/or indicted in hashish-related cases had Arabic names.

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30. Knepper, International Crime, p.6. 31. de Monfreid, Hashish. 32. Schayegh, ‘Many Worlds’, p.293, describes how professional smugglers either outsmarted, or failed to outsmart, the mandatory authorities ‘by using fake identity cards, hiding cars beside the road, driving off-road at points, deliberately turning off their lights at night, or using secondary roads’. 33. Broadhurst, From Vine Street to Jerusalem, pp.193–5. 34. Ibid, p.198. 35. Knepper, International Crime, p.166. Likewise, James Mills (in Cannabis Nation, p.13), demonstrates that reports on hashish smuggling into Britain in the interwar years ‘conjured up tales of motorboats connected with the cannabis trade appearing off the South Coast, or airports being watched, and of “gangs who attempted to Americanise crime in this country”’. 36. ‘Hashish in the High Commissioner’s train car’, Davar, 1 July 1929. 37. Al-Karmil, 12 July 1929. Additional incidents of smuggling hashish on board railway trains going from Syria-Lebanon, through Palestine, to Egypt are not lacking. See e.g. Filastin, 11 June 1936. 38. See e.g. ‘Opium, hashish, a pistol and bullets discovered inside an automobile’s wheels’, Davar, 25 April 1937. 39. Knepper, International Crime, p.1. 40. ‘Alleged Smugglers of Opium Arrested’, Palestine Post, 25 April 1937; ‘A treasure of hashish and opium in an uutomobile’, Davar, 27 April 1937. 41. The story of this gang’s failed attempt to smuggle hashish from Lebanon to Egypt, via Palestine, comes through to us from the many documents collected for a request to have the gang’s Palestinian member, one Ali alMatari, extradited to Egypt. The documents pertaining to this affair were collected from ISA, P 9/195, ‘Henry Cattan – Smuggling of Hashish’. 42. Ibid, Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, Port Said (Branch), 20 October 1937. 43. ISA, P 9/195, Confidential record of proceedings, 26 July 1937. 44. Kozma, ‘Cannabis Prohibition’, p.452. 45. Schayegh, ‘Many Worlds’, pp.291–2. 46. Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 141/764, Telegram to the High Commissioner for Egypt, 5 April 1933. 47. FO 141/764, H.G. Jakins, British Vice-Consulate, Constanta, 11 April 1933. For a report on a failed attempt to smuggle hashish on board a ship arriving in Jaffa, see ‘Hashish on a ship in Jaffa port’, Davar, 15 February 1938; Filastin, 18 February 1938. On an additional operation to smuggle hashish into Palestine and Egypt on board a ship, see Palestine Post, 18 April 1938; ISA M-29/1950, Jaffa Urban Division, 3 June 1933.

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48. U.S. National Archives (hereafter NA), 0660 Palestine, König to Anslinger, 1 February 1948. 49. See e.g. ‘How to smuggle hashish’, Davar, 29 August 1934; ‘Hashish’, Davar, 23 November 1937. See also Mills, Cannabis Nation, p.29. 50. ISA M-24/322, Important Seizures of Narcotic Drugs Effected during 1947; ‘Accident Reveals Smugglers Ring’, Palestine Post, 9 March 1947; and ‘The Juke Box Trial’, Palestine Post, 1 June 1947. 51. ISA M-24/322, Important Seizures of Narcotic Drugs Effected during 1947. 52. Jermulowicz, ‘Control and Treatment’. 53. Concealing hashish (and opium) in watermelons was also common among local drug smugglers in interwar Palestine; ‘the experienced eye of the customs guards will never notice it’, as a reporter explained in ‘How to smuggle hashish’, Davar, 29 August 1934. See e.g. Palestine Post, 6 June 1936; Al-Karmil, 25 April 1937. 54. Case no. 594/42, ISA P 11/181, Henry Cattan: Possession of Dangerous Drugs. 55. Ibid, my italics. Abu Dahir was ultimately sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. 56. Hence Latifah bint al-Hajj Hassan of Jaffa, charged with the possession of dangerous drugs, claimed in her testimony: ‘[I] Don’t know what hashish is; never seen any. [I] had no knowledge about hashish. This hashish [is] not mine. [I] didn’t know it was in my house ... My husband didn’t tell me about the hashish; he didn’t know about it’. See ISA, Possession of Dangerous Drugs, P-19/179, hearing of 15 September 1943. 57. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990). 58. Knepper, International Crime, p.35. 59. Liat Kozma, ‘The League of Nations and the debate over cannabis’, History Compass 8 (2010), p.3. 60. H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800–1980 (Syracuse, 1981), p.121. 61. Indeed, as the British developed India’s export trade toward the East, cotton, silver, and above all opium reached a growing number of consumers in China and South-East Asia. ‘In several years of the 1830s and 1840s opium sales exceeded £5m and, alone, were worth over 40 per cent of the total value of India’s exports. Leading British-Indian spokesmen fully acknowledged this fact and demanded greater power and freedom to exploit it’. See D. A. Washbrook, ‘India, 1818–1860: The two faces of colonialism’, in Andrew Porter (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), p.403. And regarding cannabis in particular, the British in India ‘insisted on the continuing right to allow cannabis consumption in

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62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

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their South Asian territories and enjoy the revenue from taxing it’; Mills, Cannabis Nation, p. 48. See e.g. John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930–1962 (Newark, 1989). Ethan A. Nadelmann, ‘Global prohibition regimes: The evolution of norms in international society’, International Organization 44:4 (1990), p.507. Morgan, Drugs in America, p.121. NA 0660 Palestine. Unless indicated otherwise, the following analysis draws on documents collected in this file. I would like to thank Ram Baruch Regavim for bringing this file to my attention. König to Anslinger, 1 February 1948. Ibid. Anslinger to König, 5 March 1948. Anslinger to König, 3 January 1950. Dyer to Anslinger, 1 May 1950. Anslinger to George Morlock, 1 May 1950. Morlock to Anslinger, 8 May 1950, my italics. M. L. Harney to Anslinger, 15 May 1950. Ibid. König to Anslinger, 1 February 1948, 24 February 1950. I owe this last formulation to Avner Wishnitzer. During World War II, these small pharmaceutical plants in Palestine became the sole source of medicines for the local market, neighboring countries and British troops stationed in the area. In 1976, Teva, Zori and Assia merged into the modern Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. König to Anslinger, 1 February 1948. König to Anslinger, 5 March 1948. See e.g. Svante Cornell, ‘Narcotics and armed conflict: Interaction and implications’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30 (2007), pp.207–27. A 1964 editorial in Yediot Ahranoth alleged that Lehi – a militant Zionist group commonly referred to in English as the Stern Group or Stern Gang, whose avowed aim was forcibly evicting the British authorities from Palestine – ‘had been involved in smuggling hashish to Egypt so as to pay for its war [against the British]’. See Aviezer Golan, ‘Those who drug their brains out’, Yediot Ahronoth, 8 May 1964. König to Anslinger, 5 March 1948. And in another message to Anslinger (24 February 1950), König describes these Jewish chemists now residing in Israel as ‘old-timers [who] might have arrived with the [European] immigrants’. Williams to Anslinger, 17 January 1950.

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84. FO 141/764, Jakins to the High Commissioner for Egypt, 4 April 1933, my italics. 85. Knepper, International Crime, p.133. 86. Ibid. 87. Here I paraphrase Marcus Boon in Road of Excess, p. 6. 88. Zohar Shavit and Yaakov Shavit, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), The Return of the Hebrew Sleuth: An Anthology of Detective Stories (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp.i–ii [in Hebrew]. For a more recent introduction to the history of Hebrew detective literature, see Eli Eshed, From Tarzan to Zbeng: The Story of Israeli Pop Fiction (Tel Aviv, 2002), pp.15–30 [in Hebrew]. 89. The creator of this series was a journalist named Shlomo Ben Israel. Based on his familiarity with the market of Yiddish literature and the relative popularity of detective literature in that language, Ben Israel believed that Hebrew readers would welcome this genre as well. 90. For a sample of Tidhar’s exploits, see a collection of this series in Shavit and Shavit (eds), Return of the Hebrew Sleuth. 91. Shlomo N. Gerfel, The Blue Crosses (Tel Aviv, 1932), pp.25–6 [in Hebrew]. Shlomo N. Gerfel is the pseudonym of Shlomo Ben Israel, the creator and writer of the David Tidhar detective series. 92. Ibid, p.30. 93. Shavit and Shavit, ‘Introduction’, p.iii. 94. Ibid. 95. Harwich, ‘Method,’ 14.

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CHAPTER 9 ON THE DIFFUSION OF ‘SM ALL’ WESTER N TECHNOLOGIES AND CONSUMER GOODS IN THE MIDDLE EAST DUR ING THE ER A OF THE FIR ST MODER N GLOBALIZATION Uri M. Kupferschmidt

The first wave of globalization was characterized by the intensified and accelerated movement of ideas, commodities and technologies between Europe and America on the one hand and the countries of the Middle East on the other. The technological, scientific and industrial revolutions, the ensuing mass production and mass marketing, steam navigation, new and faster communication networks and the development of the private press, had, at least for the new era, made the transfers one-directional.1 It was the age of accelerated chains of new inventions – indeed few were the result of one brilliant eureka! – many of which soon became available in the sense that powers, rulers or elites were able to acquire and use them, for better or for worse, and subsequently individuals could purchase them and benefit by them.

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The region of the Middle East was not part of an organic chain of inventions, but discovered them one by one, sometimes through cultural journals and translated textbooks, by description rather than by commercial publicity, and more often than not – after their physical arrival. ‘Technoscapes’, which in principle flow in two ways, became, on the whole, one-directional in this period.2 There could be occasional skepticism, satire, or criticism, but the flow of new technologies could hardly be halted. Not even by ‘ulama, supposedly a conservative element both in the establishment and in opposition to it (e.g. al-Afghani): most, as a matter of fact, took an instrumentalist stand, convinced that new technologies could advance their causes.3 Rather, one may find reservations about Western innovations in the realm of material culture and luxury commodities. Most studies have placed their emphasis on what we call ‘big technologies’, those which were often connected with imperialism. Steam navigation, railways, telegraph networks and electric power grids have received most attention. In this sense, ‘big’ is defined as moved by regimes, rulers, foreign entrepreneurs or by dependent or related indigenous elites, and operated by them to their particular advantage.4 Current literature tends to view such technologies critically, as embedded in colonial or imperialist power structures and working in their interest, which is the reason why some nationalists (Arab, usually not Turkish) entertain criticisms. Such technologies arrived often ‘turn-key’, in certain cases even accompanied by (invited) foreign experts or technicians. By ‘big’ we do not primarily refer to a physical dimension or a large capital investment, though they mostly were, but to an infrastructural system or grid, and centralized management of personnel. Think of railways and telegraph lines. The new technologies excited certain segments of the indigenous populations, as evidenced by the discussion in cultural and scientific magazines which added didactic illustrations, and later also photographs. Over time, wider populations, short of owning them, could also take part in or even benefit by them. One case would be the telegraph which was introduced into the region by Britain for its imperial

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interests, and was adopted by the Ottoman government as a means of control, but which at a certain point began to serve merchants, bankers, journalists and others, followed by travelers, relatives and friends in different locations, or even petitioners and complainers.5 Similarly, the ‘common man’ could travel on (at least, third class) trains, though railways had been constructed primarily for larger economic or commercial purposes. Thus, where governments initiated and dominated the ‘big’ technologies, the individual could nevertheless have a ‘small’ share in them.

‘Big’ and ‘small’ Yet we suggest making a schematic distinction between ‘big’ and ‘small’ technologies. The idea occurred to me when reading SrebernyMohammedi and Mohammedi’s book Small Media, Big Revolution.6 Their study showed how crucial the spread of audio cassettes, a media both accessible and not controlled from above, among the population had been in the making of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran against the background of the last Shah’s grip on the ‘big’ mass media.7 Some of the recent new communication technologies play a similar role. Many ‘small’ technologies, depending on one’s vantage point, may also be called consumer products, consumer durables, or dry goods. They were adopted, acquired, or appropriated as commodities on the market, initially by elites, but gradually trickled down to lower strata, according to their means, needs and desires. This overlap between ‘technology’ and ‘consumer goods’ needs clarification. We are dealing here with different aspects of the same thing. ‘Technology’ is usually understood to include not only materials and tools, but also know-how, especially ‘what for?’. Thus, a ‘small’ technology is more than merely an object. Think of automobiles, which need drivers who have undergone training (or even a specialist chauffeur), suitable roads, gasoline and supply stations, tires and spare parts, garages, as well as a servicing environment with experienced personnel. I argue that many of the objects which form the practical application of technological innovations are more than simple ‘black boxes’ in the user-friendly sense of Bruno Latour.8 At least at the beginning,

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they require the user’s familiarization and sometimes guidance, e.g. sewing machines, cars, electrical devices. Thereafter, more significantly, they generate new social relations and habits, or create new professions. Local individuals or groups with the capacity or ability to acquire the tools or appliances as commodities at their initiative, and at an affordable or equitable price, used them to their own benefit. Rather than Michel Foucault’s heavy emphasis on power structures, or older theories on the compulsive consumption of luxury goods put forward by Thorstein Veblen or the Frankfurt School, we discover consumers possessing a measure of agency with regard to free acquisition. Undeniably, some wished to appear ‘modern’ (or ‘civilized’), at par with their European counterparts. Elsewhere we have described the advent of a host of such new commodities in the countries of the Middle East. Department stores and specialized agencies and dealers offered nouveautés or articles de Paris, from clothing and bonneterie to fezes, and from costume jewelry to umbrellas, watches and children’s toys, but also sewing machines and musical instruments, which are the more typical ‘small’ technologies.9 Many, maybe most, of the technological innovations appeared on the market as mass-produced consumer goods and their impact soon began to affect millions of lives.10 In the imagination of a world market, it would at first glance seem that the USA took a leading position with regard to mass products, and often it was one firm which dominated: McCormick reapers (before 1858 when they registered a crucial patent), Singer sewing machines (1853), Remington typewriters (1873, following successful arms manufacturing), General Electric incandescent light bulbs (1879), Kodak roll-films and cameras (1888), Gillette safety razors (1902), Ford Model T cars (1908), Waterman and Schaefer fountain pens (1912)11 and Frigidaire refrigerators (1918), to mention but a few. The fact is that all of these had competitors, and cheaper European brands often competed successfully for the Middle East, as can also be seen from advertisements.12

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Diffusion and the process of acquisition There is good reason to make a distinction between dates of invention or first patenting of the technologies we are talking about, and their coming into common use. The time lag between their invention abroad and their first demonstration in the Middle East, however, was continuously diminishing, and could ultimately be a matter of a few years. That process, however, was uneven for different technologies and goods.13 Everett Rogers posited a determinist S-curve that passes through the phases of knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and at last, confirmation.14 The American model is not wholly applicable to the countries of the Middle East. One reason is that the said technologies were not invented or developed within the region, but were for the first time noticed or described when they had already gained mass acceptance in North America or Western Europe, and were for that reason adopted after some more time had passed. Within the region, as it was around 1900, we have to consider the role of the colonial and the so-called foreign residential elites as models. Secondly, it cannot be ignored that many other layers of the indigenous populations were too poor to afford them. It is difficult to trace exact import trade statistics. They are often too general (‘iron ware’, ‘instruments’, etc.), or confound weight, volume, value and quantities. Reports by foreign chambers of commerce are often biased. Only few large industries have kept business records relevant to the Middle East. Besides, commercial trade catalogues (where they were published at all – there were debates on their utility) have survived only in small numbers, and most were probably thrown away. As a consequence, insight in the diffusion of ‘small’ technological consumer goods suffers from generalizations. On the other hand, the discourse in the journals of the time, and all concomitant publicity, e.g. advertisements, are a relatively useful window on the process of diffusion, at least insofar as powerful manufacturers and agents persisted, e.g. Singer, Kodak and the major car manufacturers, though one has to take into account that even so they cannot serve as proof of wide diffusion.15

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About use and need Not everything could be sold, or mass-marketed, or diffused at the same speed: let us begin illustrating this with two older examples, namely reading glasses and mechanical clocks. Eyeglasses were developed in thirteenth-century Italy and, since the Renaissance, widely marketed by colportage all over Europe.16 Some researchers have connected the post-Renaissance ‘reading revolution’ not only to education but also to the use of reading glasses. It would seem that the process in the Middle East was quite different. Remarkably, the Middle East had seen a few outstanding scientists learned in optics (e.g. Ibn Firnas in the ninth century and above all Ibn al-Haytham in the eleventh century), as well as great clinical ophthalmologists, and the region also possessed a renowned glass-making tradition. But this never led to a local craft of manufacturing reading glasses, or even to imitating known types from Italy. According to one source, thousands of pairs of eyeglasses were exported from Italy to the Ottoman and Moghul Empires.17 We have a few rare references to reading glasses in medieval Muslim historiographical and poetic sources, as well as an occasional image.18 We also know that in 1532 the Ottoman defterdar requested the Venetian bailo to procure him a set of spectacles, and we have seen at least one later case of reading glasses in an inheritance list of an Ottoman scribe (1755).19 Only by the end of the nineteenth century do we find local professional directories, of the sort that mostly catered to foreign and other elites, which began to list opticians and carried their advertisements. One French manufacturer, Lamy at Morez in the French Jura, where close-by watch production was another specialization, multiplied its trading partners in the Ottoman lands from 21 in 1887 to 243 in 1914.20 It would seem that there is no evidence of them having spread massively till the beginning of the twentieth century, or even later. We cannot completely exclude the possibility that the incidence of presbyopia was lower than in Europe, but the most plausible explanation is that the low rate of literacy retarded the demand for eyeglasses, the reverse of Western Europe where their diffusion enhanced reading habits.21

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The other instance are pocket watches (after World War I: wrist watches), the sort of personal timekeepers one carries.22 Our understanding of their diffusion is still impressionistic. Evidence for the sale of watches by means of advertisements is there, but no reliable statistics.23 Lately, several excellent studies on temporal culture and on the long surviving ghurubi (sunset) time tradition have been done. We know that by the end of the nineteenth century personal watches were worn in Mecca, but still set to the azan of prayer time.24 Cesar Zivy, a Jewish dealer in Cairo, regularly advertised watches with a strong recommendation by the muwaqqits of the al-Azhar and Husayni mosques.25 One Western observer remarked on the Islamic aspect, ‘it is to know the exact time for prayer and just as an ordinary compass is known by the name of “Mecca pointer” (Kibla) ... At the beginning of Ramadhan, for example, there is often a brisk and increasing trade in timepieces of every description ...’.26 Possessing a modern watch thus preceded alla franca time-keeping, with its secular social rhythms and obligations. We don’t know to what extent the transition to modern time-keeping around 1910 stimulated the purchase of personal watches.27 Indeed, mechanical clocks are one of three examples adduced by Fatma Müge Göçek, in her East Encounters West, by which she illustrates delays in the pace of diffusion and adoption of certain Western technologies in the Ottoman Empire.28 In fact, she cites mechanical clocks as the first case. Such clocks had allegedly been exhibited for their decorative value, as she concludes from the many timepieces in the Topkapı collection.29 Printing, her second case, was held up for over three centuries owing to various inhibitions (which are still under academic debate in our literature). At the beginning of the nineteenth century – we may add – the declining costs of acquiring second-hand, compact, iron Columbian and Stanhope presses gave a boost to private printing, and thus turned printing into a ‘small’ technology.30 A third case shows how certain superior European weaving techniques could, for some time at least, be barred by the authorities, while they were trying to improve their own. While her account may need some refining, we do take up her point of diversity in the pace of diffusion. Not all devices could be

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marketed successfully or instantly in the region, even though a US trade consul in Beirut in 1913 proudly reported on a Syrian visitor, ‘who wore American shoes, American rubbers over them, carried a Chicago fountain pen in his pocket, had shaved with a New York safety razor and had just dropped in ... to listen to some Arab songs of the late lamented Cairene singer, Sheikh Yusuf [al-Manyalawi] on an Edison phonograph. Probably this is quite as convincing as long statistics would be!’. However, further reading in US trade reports shows that this was not at all a foregone conclusion. A propos, Western shoes, while competing with local footwear, at the time sold mostly to certain westernized segments of the population.31 We have no specific data on fountain pens but may assume that they were mostly in demand as prestige objects by westernized elites. Safety razor blades, which recently had come into widespread use elsewhere, were allegedly delayed, as many Middle Eastern men were in the habit of shaving their heads (often still with sharpened irons on a wooden handle or straight blades) but not their beards. Anyway, Gillette had to compete with European brands and even with counterfeit imitations.32 Consider also doorbells and door locks where urban stores were closed with shutters and padlocks, and houses had doormen guarding the gate. An equally telling example is the (somewhat debatable) comment of a certain Istanbul merchant who annually imported 60,000 dozen spoons, but 40,000 dozen forks, ‘because the Turk of the interior often uses the former only and dispenses entirely with the latter, using his fingers instead’.33 But let us give a few more specific examples of larger items to support our main argument on the differential pace of diffusion.

The sewing machine34 Of all the ‘small’ technologies, it seems that the sewing machine has received a place of honor in our secondary literature. Despite a pedigree of unsuccessful earlier machines, it was the Howe-Singer model, as well as later ‘Singers’, which led the conquest of world markets from the 1860s onwards.35 It was followed by competing brands from the USA and Europe. Mention of its invention can be found in al-Muqtataf

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from 1883 onwards. Business historian Andrew Godley has calculated that by 1920, 12 per cent of Ottoman households had acquired a sewing machine.36 Karl Marx had been suspicious of the new invention, as he foresaw its use in factories leading to more exploitation of women and children. Surely, the sewing machine did enter Middle Eastern workshops and factories, and it may even have had positive significance for the faltering textile and garment industry, but this is not our concern here.37 Marx, however, failed to see its overall benefits in domestic environments; in fact the sewing machine ‘came home’. There, it proved its potential to add income and savings, and very clearly could empower women. Many women could now make a living, working from their homes, or save money by making clothing for their own children. The rapid spread of sewing machines, especially the Singer manufactures, can therefore be called a success story in Middle Eastern societies (as it was in the USA and numerous other countries too). This was also due to innovative hire-purchase schemes which overcame purchasing thresholds. The operation of the machine itself was easy to learn, and it could be carried around. Besides, Singer maintained an efficient service and guidance system. Sewing machines thus became eminently useful in a region where cultural factors often inhibited women from working in factories. It would take a long time before (some) Middle Eastern countries would witness the mass employment of seamstresses as had developed in the United States and in some Western European countries by the end of the nineteenth century. Nor did this happen in our region with regard to typical ‘pink collar’ occupations such as typists, stenographers and secretaries in general,38 at least not until recently.

The typewriter39 One may call the typewriter the younger sister of the sewing machine. Here as well, we discover the initial dominance (not monopoly) of one American firm, Remington, an erstwhile arms manufacturer, which was able to make the essential commercial breakthrough in a long series of more or less experimental machines (1868).40 In the USA,

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half a million typewriters had already been sold by 1900. In a society which believed in the motto ‘Time is Money’, they became the preeminent office machines. But writers, too, such as Mark Twain, were already known to use them.41 We find early descriptions of typewriters and of their advantages in al-Muqtataf from 1884 onwards, as well as advertisements, albeit mostly in the local foreign-language press. But it is clear that in comparison to the USA or Europe, the introduction of the typewriter was delayed in the Ottoman lands and in Iran.42 One might ascribe this delay to the differences between Roman and Ottoman-Turkish, Arabic and Persian scripts. But this could only be a minor factor. Obviously the adaptation of the keyboard was a technical hurdle to be overcome. It had to be re-aligned from right to left and from 23 Roman characters to 28 characters for Arabic and a few more for Ottoman script. More complicated were the necessary initial and final forms and the different width of the ligatures in cursive script, which added up to over 70 characters.43 This in itself was a fascinating challenge. None other than Theodor Herzl may have been a catalyst. As a journalist, knowing the advantage of this innovative tool, he decided to present Sultan Abdülhamid with an Arabic-Ottoman typewriter, in the hope that this miracle of technology would facilitate obtaining of a Zionist charter for Palestine. While no such machine existed at the time, Herzl asked Remington to design one, and even enlisted the help of the orientalist Richard Gottheil in New York. He had, however, not reckoned with the Hamidian prohibition on importing typewriters, which remained in force till 1908.44 This Ottoman Remington machine (model 7) somehow disappeared till it was rediscovered during a thorough search of the Sultan’s belongings at the Yildiz palace following his dethronement.45 Remington had been very proud of its new product; in fact the very first issue of its journal Remington Notes in 1907 opened with a description of it.46 But theirs was not the only attempt to produce a typewriter for the Middle Eastern market. Somewhat earlier, around 1898, Philippe Wakid and Salim Haddad (two Lebanese living in Cairo, the latter a painter of some fame too) had started working on an Arabic typewriter, which was duly patented in the USA in 1901.

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It would seem that it came into production in 1904 (by Smith apparently). Also, no less than Edward Said claims that his father later designed the Arabic keyboard for the Royal firm.47 Still, the typewriter made no headway. Even before World War I, while the new implement came increasingly into use by government offices and commercial firms in America and Europe, it would seem that in the countries of the Middle East it was still a rarity. At the Sublime Porte there was maybe one in use, and a few more at official agencies around the empire, such as the customs in Alexandria. The Khedive was advertised as having one, along with other royal and noble figures, though owning a typewriter and actually using it might be two different things. On the whole, in the region the typewriter remained restricted to Western-oriented businesses. And almost all of these used French and English. Explanations are not difficult to find: The (male) scribal occupational conventions of the time, the limited usefulness in small businesses, let alone in private homes, and restricted literacy in general. For decades to come, no Arab or Turkish writer of fame can be mentioned who prided himself on using a typewriter. Also, only few local commercial schools taught typewriting and stenography. No office culture, in the American sense, existed. Besides, as a technology derived from the typewriter keyboard, linotype machines were not turning up in large numbers either. In Turkey, typewriters became more utilized with the transition to the Latin alphabet in 1928. Turkey even designed a ‘national’ keyboard of its own, recalculated after the qwerty pattern.48 But in spite of all the official encouragement, it took a relatively long time for typewriters to conquer a significant place in Turkish society or business, and even longer in the Arab countries.49 Egypt enacted legislation in 1942 to make Arabic compulsory in commercial dealings.50 The region of the Middle East remained, by and large, an unmentioned or minor consumer in the world trade of typewriters.51 While this falls outside the scope of this first period of globalization, we have here an interesting example of ‘leapfrogging’. From the 1990s, the PC jumped, as it were, over the typewriter, though the keyboard in essence persisted. Remarkably little has been written on

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the transition from typewriters to personal computers (and word processing) in general, let alone in Middle Eastern countries. The process now became swift and logical.52 Nowadays, typewriters have become museum objects.53

Photographic cameras Photography qualifies to our mind as a ‘small’ technology, too, but the phases in the introduction of the various categories of cameras to the Middle East still need to be unraveled.54 Photography as such has enjoyed increasing interest from researchers of the Ottoman and Iranian lands, and a considerable literature on pioneers of landscape, urban scenes and object documentation, as well as on studio photography, has sprung up. From the fact that, initially, mostly Christians engaged in this new field, and hardly any Muslims (and few Jews), it has sometimes been concluded that there were religious inhibitions, and even today there are communities and individuals who refuse to be photographed.55 Indeed, there had apparently been fatwas against photography, e.g. by Rashd Rid and the eyhülislam, but they were eclipsed by religious endorsements, and as probably happened so often, by the irresistible success of the technology. The Damascene salafi ‘lim Muhammad Sa‘d al-Qsim, though a conservative in spirit, mentions the professional photographer positively among the very few modern occupations in his compendium.56 Around the date of his writing, the first photographs must have appeared in the vernacular press, and supposedly added to a greater awareness of the technology, as did postcards and visiting cards (which used to be photographs).57 Landmarks of actual use in each of the various places would be the discourse in the indigenous press and the first advertisements there.58 The aspect that concerns us here is therefore not the actual arrival of photography – the first photographs of this or that place – or studio photography, but the wider familiarization with and affordability of the technology, in short: amateur photography as it diffused from the elites to middle class youth and beyond. This is a process that evolved over several decades, and not only in the Middle East. It had everything to do with

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technological advances. In the USA, amateur photography can be said to have begun with roll films and hand cameras, which hit the market in 1888. It was suddenly not too difficult or too expensive to purchase a one-dollar Brownie box, and as Kodak advertised: ‘You push the button, and we do the rest’. Individual foreign travelers, ‘Kodakers’, now appeared in our region too. Kodak opened branches in Istanbul, Cairo and elsewhere, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, amateur pictures could be developed and printed in many a city and tourist resort. There was an aspiration to modernity, which translated into a strong connection with photography, as Steven Sheehi has shown, albeit without clearly distinguishing between studio and amateur photographs.59 To the extent that they could (begin to) afford a camera, Middle Eastern populations, like others elsewhere, could bring it into their homes, into family celebrations, or weddings.60 Even though amateur photography remained long only in the upper bourgeois sphere, a breakthrough in its spread to a somewhat wider public occurred around World War II.61 We have a few family albums, which give us more insight into that development.62 Fortunately, some institutions in the region, such as the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, have begun to collect the evidence.63

The piano Another fascinating case, to our mind, concerns the piano, an instrument that may not immediately be identified as being on par with the previous ‘small technologies’, but we see it as such. Though ‘invented’ around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Northern Italy, it became a highly sophisticated instrument, due to a series of improvements, only during the nineteenth century (frame, hammers, strings all evolved alongside technological advances in production methods and materials). By the end of the century, pianos consisted of some 2,500 different parts. From an artisan craft, piano making became a fully-fledged mass producing industry.64 Pianos were much in demand and manufactured in Austria, Germany, France and Britain, and also in the United States.65 The output worldwide was impressive. It is estimated that it

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increased from 50,000 a year in the 1860s to 650,000 in 1910, grands as well as uprights, and that production remained rising till about the 1920s.66 Unlike the sewing machine and the typewriter, pianos did not contribute to labor productivity or to the acceleration of life rhythms, but their mechanical development can be said to have influenced the refinement of European music. This included (imagined) alla turca modes by eminent composers; hence, for some time, a so-called Janissary stop was installed, a pedal to sound drums or bells.67 However, this short-lived addition had never been intended to conquer a Middle Eastern audience or clientele. It has been said that the first piano arriving in the Middle East was one donated by Napoleon to the Shah of Persia. Such royal (in fact national) gifts were often pretentious exercises in superiority. The said instrument remained an orphan, as nobody at that time was capable of playing it. This would take time. A tile at the Golistan Palace shows Shah Nasr al-Dn (1848–96) Shah listening to a piano performance.68 Meanwhile, at the Ottoman court, a few more imported first-class grand pianos had appeared, and remarkably, all latter-day sultans were able to play them, and they even composed music for the piano.69 By 1901, one could find at least two Italian piano makers and five tuners in the Ottoman capital (1901).70 In Egypt, ever since the inauguration of Khedive Isma’il’s opera house, the Khedivial, and later royal, household imported several pianos from Germany.71 Even the Hashimite court seems to have owned at least one piano.72 Royal courts thus appear to have played a role with regard to further diffusion.73 Pianos gradually made their appearance in literary salons of the late nineteenth century and in bourgeois circles of the Middle East.74 Manuals on the ideal (upper or upper-middle class) household recommended them.75 Piano lessons became a must, especially for girls, exactly like in bourgeois circles of the West, and we hear not a few of them complain about the discipline it required.76 In the main urban centers, we find specialized stores advertising the most notable manufactures.77 Little systematic data on sales to the countries of the Middle East is available, but we know that in Egypt, for instance, in 1923 over 3,000 pianos were sold.78

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Europe saw a few attempts to construct quartertone pianos. They ensued from avant-garde experimentation with new musical modes, notably by the Russian-French musicologist Ivan Wyshnegradsky and the Czech composer Alois Haba. The innovative instrument was never meant to bridge the divide between the musical traditions of Europe and the Arab world. Actually, the building and playing of intricate quartertone pianos was never successful anywhere.79 Pianos could produce quartertones, somehow characteristic of Middle Eastern music, but merely in a mechanical way, not in an endearing musical or melodious mode. Still, the development of an ‘Oriental’ (quartertone) piano was sometimes discussed also in the Middle East.80 Four or five models were demonstrated at the 1932 Arab Music Congress in Cairo, a major event in the history of oriental music, attended by outstanding regional musicians as well as European composers such as Bela Bartok, Paul Hindemith and Alois Haba himself.81 But even the young Umm Kulthum failed to harmonize her singing with the innovative instrument. Decisions of that congress also left the adoption of the conventional piano in suspense.82 In the next decade, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhb, who had participated in the congress, would include the piano, along with some other Western instruments, in a few of his cinema productions but this remained a limited experiment.83 The qnn, the santr, the ‘d and other traditional instruments continued to reign supreme. We conclude that the piano, though not completely absent from the regional musical culture, remained limited to the higher classes. It never gained a popular foothold in the region nor became integrated into local music.84 However, modern synthesizers, which can produce quartertones, created new challenges, and may therefore be seen as another technological leapfrog. We may raise two comparisons here. The Western-type violin, in its ultimate form made primarily by Italian craftsmanship that could hardly be improved by new technologies, gradually began to appear or replace, at least in part, the traditional Middle Eastern kemence or kaman. Strangely, little has been written on this acculturation, but it is clear that violin strings could be tuned to Arab music in a fairly simple way. It suffices to have a look at Umm Kulthum’s usual takht to grasp

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the Italian-type violin’s success. The transition is sometimes ascribed to nineteenth-century Balkan or gypsy musicians coming to perform in the Ottoman center. In the first decade of the twentieth century, we find renowned Aleppan musicians of the Sawwa family arriving in Egypt to play the violin.85 The second point concerns the gramophone (the successor of the cylinder phonograph), which can certainly be considered a massproduced technological device – a medium, as well as a musical instrument.86 It made its appearance in the Middle East only in the first decade of the twentieth century, but very soon, recordings of local music gained great popularity and were made in large numbers.87 The new device was, at first, played in coffeehouses and in public at large, and owner-operators also went around with it, but it was not long before it reached the private homes of whoever could afford one. It gave rise to an active indigenous recording industry and frequent advertising in the press, which also attests to its diffusion.88 It has been said that the gramophone changed Arab music, and possibly Turkish and Persian music as well, shortening the duration of songs, and also elevating the zajal genre from its lower class status.89 Above all, it created a new market and a wider celebrity status for local singers such as Yusuf al-Manyalw, and somewhat later, Umm Kulthum and other famous artists.90 As in America and in Europe, gramophones were considered domestic musical instruments. This may also be concluded from a few divorce cases in Beirut, in 1910, in which the female partner received the gramophone, it being identified as an instrument of pleasure, for music had no specified value, while the male would take the household utensils.91 Though the gramophone continued to play its own role, it lost ground to the radio, which we must leave to a discussion of the postWorld War I wave of globalization.

Incandescent light bulbs and electric household implements Marc Bloch once chided historians for not taking up electricity.92 Our research agenda on ‘small’ technologies ought therefore to comprise

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electrical implements as well. Electricity is generally thought of in terms of power grids, and the books which tell us exactly how many plants were erected, when and where, or how many kilowatts were produced, are legion.93 But we are interested in additional aspects. Street lighting enabled nightlife, and electric power made night shifts in factories possible. The illumination of mosques for festivals and public celebrations in general (often ‘from above’ or by interested commercial parties) was intended to impress.94 However, there is hardly any profound study on the application of electricity in ordinary Middle Eastern homes.95 The use of electricity in the personal environment, including the gradual transition from oil and gas lighting, has, thus far, remained a step-child in our social history. Al-Muqtataf published several articles on the usefulness of kahrab’ (the neologism for electricity, possibly introduced by al-Tahtawi) from the 1880s onwards (e.g. on lighting in 1881, cooking in 1906, the household in 1915).96 There is a story which comes to mind about Sultan Abdülhamid’s alleged opposition to electricity, said to have developed out of his paranoid fear of attempts at his life, confusing ‘dynamite’ and ‘dynamo’.97 The importing of all electrical apparatus, including electric bells, was repeatedly prohibited.98 Whatever the origins of the story, or indeed the myth, it did not last. Paul Fesch writes that the turnaround came in 1906, and indeed, the remnants of a small power plant can still be seen at Yildiz palace today.99 We have to distinguish between fully-fledged power plants and batteries or generators, which reflect the narrative ‘from below’. By importing private generators, one could get around whatever prohibition there was: A British trader in Istanbul acquired an installation at the cost of £5,000, and it was said that the German consul could do ‘something’ for him on the condition that the equipment was bought from the German Electric Corporation.100 In Palestine, the Rothschildowned Rishon le-Zion winery had already installed lighting in 1890, fed by an array of batteries. The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul too imported ‘batteries de cuisine’ clandestinely, around 1906. Some of the Sultan’s higher servants had already brought electricity into their own homes. One of them was Uryanzade Cemil Molla, a

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former governor of Anatolia, who defiantly lighted his own mansion – seizing the occasion of the Sultan’s anniversary of accession to the throne – by means of a secretly installed generator. Reportedly, he was summoned to the Palace but convinced the authorities of its usefulness.101 Around 1906 we hear of a concession given to Zaki Pasha, a former artillery officer, as well as to Abdülrahman, a former Grand Vizier.102 Said Bey, the public servant in Istanbul made famous by Paul Dumont and François Georgeon due to his notebooks, was apparently also among the first in the city to enjoy electricity from 1908, even before the Silahtaraa plant had been opened.103 In a few places we have some data on the rise in numbers of ‘subscribers’ (abonnés), albeit mainly for the interwar period, but our questions here are of an anthropological nature rather than inspired by business history.104 Domestic use of electric light would change sleeping hours and daily schedules, as well as reading habits where the new lamps gave more comfortable light than candles and gas.105 Light bulbs (greatly improved by Edison in 1879) were, indeed, the first home application.106 But it would help to know more about uses other than lighting, namely consumer devices. What application came second after the light bulb: electric irons, as was often the case in Europe or the USA, or, electrical fans or stoves?107 In this respect, one should not forget the mediating, but often ignored, invention of plugs and sockets (patented by Hubbel in 1904).108 In short, there is still a considerable research agenda before us.109

The automobile With our focus on accelerated movement of technologies and commodities in the first era of globalization, the diffusion history of motor vehicles in the region calls for more research.110 We ought to be aware that the world automotive industry from the beginning of the twentieth century was dominated by the United States, and less so by Western Europe, which is also reflected in our secondary sources.111 Around 1922, when the USA probably already had over ten million officially registered motor vehicles, a mere 4,000 may be estimated to have been registered in Turkey proper, some 2,800 in Egypt, 2,100 in

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Syria, 800 in Iraq, 700 in Palestine, and far fewer in other countries of the region. The automobile made its first sporadic appearance in the urban centers of the Middle East in the first decade of the twentieth century, only a couple of years after the manufacturing countries. Not a few local chroniclers marked its first appearance in their cities. The military powers of World War I brought more motor vehicles to the region, and some were even left behind after the war. There is nothing exceptional in the fact that motorcars soon played to local curiosity and imagination (caricatures, literature, movies), but also aroused criticism (accidents, speed). However, diffusion in the region at large and especially beyond the cities was slow, not only because of the relatively high price to be paid for a motor car, but owing to the lack of suitable infrastructures: a lack of paved roads, of a higher quality than desert ‘pistes’, and usable the year round. Even in cities and towns, with their narrow streets and cobblestones, improvements were necessary, as they had been when horse-drawn carriages became more numerous some half-century before. Because of the lack of suitable roads, even where railways and coastal shipping operated, cargoes had to be transported from the station on camelback to its destination. Most indicative is an anecdote related by Amin al-Rihani to the effect that a new Ford car, ordered by King Ibn Saud, allegedly had to be towed by camels all the way from an Eastern harbor to the Palace in Riyad.112 Of course, highways and gas stations were then still absent in later oil-rich Saudi Arabia. Yet camel transport, although in decline all over the region, held out till mid-century. Evidently, the spread of motor vehicles suffered a delay but could not be stopped. This is also clear from legislation and taxation being brought into line with the new means of transport.113 There is still much to be mapped out in order to understand the process. Roads are one factor, but capital is another. The persistent advertisements of major car manufacturers in the press, however, seem to prove that there was to whom to sell.114 We know little about the preferences of those who bought automobiles. That there emerged a critical mass of owners

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from the 1920s onwards may be proven by secondary commercial publicity for tires and lubricants, occasional handbooks and magazines and exhibitions; it would also not take too long before second-hand cars were offered.115 Secondly, we note the differential rate of diffusion of private cars, trucks, buses (to which motorcycles and tractors may be added) in the various countries of the Middle East, which is another relevant but lacking aspect. Rarely do our secondary sources go beyond the statistical evidence. In a laconic but inspiring paragraph, a Syrian economist named Rizkallah Hilan has aptly summed up the economic and social effects of the new automotive ‘industry’ which comprised garages, gas stations, commercial and maintenance networks and road construction. It generated a new professional category of mechanics (at the time mostly for motor vehicles), but, in his view, also enabled faster exchanges of goods and ideas, agricultural development, Bedouin settlement – in short, regional and national integration. Learning to drive and making car trips added social prestige.116 We may consider the automobile as a rather unique case, as it is almost the only technological device, discussed here, which ultimately led to a local industry in Turkey, Egypt and Iran.117

Some conclusions118 With reference to those ‘small technologies’ here discussed, we have attempted to show that not all were imported wholesale or blindly imitated from the West: While some were speedily adopted and diffused in one or more Middle Eastern societies, others were delayed, or, in one exceptional case, even rejected. It might be useful to think of a schematic model of the kind which has been used to explain the diffusion of communication technologies, namely in parameters of ‘four Cs’: Culture, Competence/Capacity, Control and Capital.119 Thus, the temporary prohibition on the import of typewriters would come under Control, and the slow acquisition of automobiles under Capital and Competence, the need for reading glasses under Competence, but Culture would seem to us to be a predominant factor at play for most.120

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Notes 1. The absoluteness of this direction, as reflected also in our secondary literature, needs some caution. One example which comes to mind is the adoption of local techniques of vaccination, propagated by Lady Montagu, and later scientifically developed in Britain by Edward Jenner (see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters (Aix, 1796), vol. I, pp.76–105. The principle of the IUD, also, which had been practiced by Bedouins for their camels was taken up and refined first in in Europe and later in the USA. Even in the nineteenth century, there still were instances of local individuals who tried to compete with Europe. In 1855, a mechanical reaper, developed in Algeria, competed at an exhibition in Paris with other models from the United States and Britain, but it lost out: Edward W. Byrn, The Progress of Invention in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1900), p.201. The Armenian engineer Serkis Balian, of the well-known family, exhibited an agricultural machine at the National Ottoman Exhibition in Istanbul in 1863: Empire Ottoman, Coup d’Oeil Général sur l’Exposition Nationale á Constantinople, 1e Octobre 1863 (Istanbul, 1863), pp.166, 176. Similarly, a certain Iskandar Ilyas Nasru in Egypt was reported to have developed new agricultural mechanical devices, albeit with German help: al-Muqtataf 20 (1896), pp.662–9. 2. In Arjun Appadurai’s spectrum of finanscapes, mediascapes, ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, and technoscapes, the latter refers to ‘the global configuration, also ever fluid, of technology ... both high and low, both mechanical and informational, [which] now moves at high speeds across various kinds of previously impervious boundaries’: see Modernization at Large (Minneapolis, 1996), p.34. Regarding uni-directionality, consider also the international patent system, which started in 1883 and was from the beginning dominated by the USA, with few patents from European and smaller industrial countries. This continues to this day. While in 1975 in Egypt, for instance, 396 new letters of patent were registered (of which only 18 by Egyptians), this figure was 36,992 for Japan, and 46,603 for the US. See Dorothee Greans El Sirgany, Les Brevets d’Invention en Egypte (Cairo, 1978). 3. Cf. a rare opposition tract in Rudolph Peters, ‘Religious attitudes towards modernization in the Ottoman Empire’, WI 26 (1986), pp.76–105. In fact, fatwas against new technologies which became accepted may have become redundant and were lost. 4. E.g. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress (Oxford, 1988) and his other works, lately Power Over People, Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton, 2010). Some of the systems could be locally adopted.

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5. Among others, Yuval Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan, Protests and Justice in Late Ottoman Palestine (London 2013), 34–35, 42, 57 et passim. In Iran, there were local protest actions in which telegraph stations turned into bast (refuges). 6. Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammedi and Ali Mohammedi, Small Media, Big Revolution (Minneapolis, 1994). 7. The authors also used the term ‘small’ ‘to denote ‘horizontal’, for people-topeople communication. One hardly needs to elaborate on a similar dynamic process with regard to the use of new mass media evident in the latest developments in the Middle East. 8. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope (Cambridge MA, 1999), p.304 and passim, uses the verb blackboxing for ‘... when a machine runs efficiently ... one needs focus only on its inputs and outputs, and not on its internal complexity’. The term probably derives from the idea of a camera obscura. 9. Uri M. Kupferschmidt, European Department Stores and Middle Eastern Consumers: The Orosdi-Back Saga (Istanbul, 2007), pp.37–40. 10. Europe may be said to have already had mass manufacturing, e.g. of print, for a long time, but now the Taylorist-Fordist mode was adopted. See Carolyn Marvin When Old Technologies Were New (New York, 1990) to sense the fast impact of newly introduced devices of the late nineteenth century such as the telephone, the gramophone, electric light and the cinema. 11. Like other ‘inventions’, it is claimed that the idea of fountain pens originated in the Muslim world (tenth century) but it did not lead to diffusion. Cf. C.E. Bosworth, ‘A mediaeval prototype of the fountain pen?’, Journal of Semitic Studies 26 (1981), pp.229–34. 12. This was not only a question of relative poverty, geographical distance and imperial leverage, but, judging from US trade reports, also because of the American unwillingness to supply credit terms as European manufacturers and agents did (Singer is an exception, see below). Certainly, American goods were less triumphant in the Middle East than in Europe, cf. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge MA, 2005). 13. Cf. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old (London, 2006), pp.31–3. The ‘indigenation of modernity’ still calls for a deeper investigation. See Frank Dikötter, Things Modern (London, 2007), on the diffusion and adoption of various consumer goods in China, as a case in itself. 14. Everett Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations 4th ed. (New York, 1985), pp.10–1 et passim. 15. There is also good reason to search personal memoirs and literary works for reminiscences of newly acquired technologies and consumer items. What used to be very time-consuming is coming within reach in our era of digitization.

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16. Cf. my ‘From Ibn Haytham to Abu Nazara’, in preparation. Cf., on China, Dikötter, Things Modern, p.64 et passim. See also idem, ‘Objects and agency, material culture and modernity in China’, in Karen Harvey (ed), History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London, 2009), pp.158–72. In China, spectacles were often acquired to display wealth and education rather than to help vision. 17. Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2011), pp.120–22, 130, 206; Vincent Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (Philadelphia, 2007), pp.117–25. 18. Chiara Frugoni, Le Moyen Âge sur le Bout du Nez (Paris, 2011). Later than paintings of persons – often monks – wearing glasses in Europe (e.g. Jan van Eyck in the fifteenth century), we have a painting of Rid al-’Abbs (ca. 1635) and a few others. Also there is a cryptic poem on glasses by a certain Ahmad al-’Attr al-Masr and a reference by al-Sakhw to the fifteenthcentury calligrapher Sharaf Ibn Amir al-Mardan wearing glasses. See Huff, Curiosity, see above. A. Mazor and K. Abbou Hershkovits, “Spectacles in the Muslim World: New Evidence from the Mid-Fourteenth Century”, Early Science and Medicine 18/3 (2013), pp.291–305. 19. Bernard Lewis, The Middle East, 2000 Years of History (London 1995), p.232; idem, What Went Wrong? (Oxford, 2002), p.127; see further Joel Schinder, ‘Mustafa Efendi: Scribe, gentleman, pawnbroker’, IJMES 10:3 (1979), pp. 415–20. 20. Of the latter, 66 were in Beirut, 50 in Alexandria and 27 in Istanbul. See ‘Des Lunetiers Moreziens’, p.10, in www.hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ ... /Des_ lunetiers_a_l_echelle_du_monde.pdf (accesssed 1 July 2013). 21. The stereotype Misri Effendi of editorial cartoons always wore glasses, supposedly to emphasize his intellectual status. 22. The Islamic world had sundials and water-clocks. 23. Orosdi-Back had its own factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds that was primarily geared to the Japanese market but was closed in 1903. Kupferschmidt, Orosdi-Back, p.40. 24. Christian Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the Latter Part of the nineteenth century (Leiden, 1931; repr. 1970), pp.71–2. Wearing a watch could be a ‘symbol of modernity’ among dignitaries, also in Iran. See photograph (c. 1890) discussed by J. J. Witkam in Journal of the International Qajar Studies Association 1 (2001), p.54. 25. Al-Muqtataf 26 (1902), following p.576. 26. S. M. Zwemer, ‘The clock, the calendar and the Koran’, The Moslem World 3 (1913), p.273.

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27. Cf. Roni Zirinski, Ad Hoc Arabism. Advertising, Culture, and Technology in Saudi Arabia (New York, 2005), pp.23–45. 28. Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West (New York, 1987), pp.103–15. 29. There was a community of Western clock makers in Istanbul. Typically, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s father, upon presenting a special clock to the Sultan, was asked to maintain the timepieces in the palace. 30. Nile Green, ‘Journeymen, middlemen: Travel, trans-culture and technology in the origins of Muslim printing’, IJMES 41:2 (2009), p.211; idem, ‘Persian print and the Stanhope revolution: industrialization, evangelicalism, and the birth of printing in early Qajar Iran’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30:3 (2010), pp. 473–90. 31. Nancy Reynolds, A City Consumed, Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford, 2012) has a fascinating chapter (pp.114–44) on shoes and socks. It is not surprising that an American trade report mentions that sock-suspenders were no article for the region. 32. Sidney E.P. Nowill, Constantinople and Istanbul, 72 Years of Life in Turkey (Kibworth, 2011) pp.104, 108, 119–36, 166; Gordon McKibben, Cutting Edge: Gillette’s Journey to Global Leadership (Boston, 1998), pp.359–60. Typically, this semi-official Gillette history mentions India and China more elaborately. We asked the firm for past sales figures in such different societies as Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, but have not yet received them. 33. G. Bie Ravndal, Turkish Markets for American Hardware, Special Consular Reports, no. 77 (Washington, 1917), pp.22–3. Numbers may be multiplied by five for the Istanbul district at large. 34. For a more extensive discussion, see Uri M. Kupferschmidt, ‘The social history of the sewing machine in the Middle East’, WI 44:2 (2004), pp.1–19. 35. The Singer factory at Clydebank, Glasgow, manufactured a total of 36 million sewing machines between 1884 and 1943, and at its high point it employed 11,000 workers. We may also think of Enfield-Martini rifles (1895) and Mauser revolvers (1870), Philips and other light bulbs (1892). 36. Andrew Godley, ‘Selling the sewing machine around the world: Singer’s international marketing strategies, 1850–1920’, Enterprise and Society 7:2 (2006), pp.266–314. This estimate is lower than the quarter-to-third for European households, but higher than in India and Japan. 37. Donald Quataert, Manufacturing and Technology Transfer in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul and Strasbourg, 1992), pp.22–5. 38. By the 1880s in the USA women typists had already overtaken men. 39. For details see Uri M. Kupferschmidt, ‘Leap-frogging from typewriter to personal computer in the Middle East’, paper presented to the Eighth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, Montecatini, Italy, 2007.

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40. In fact, 1873 is the initial date of the Sholes-Glidden model with qwerty keyboard; typewriters became more or less standardized in 1910. 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, is among the many users always mentioned, and world literature abounds with references to typewriters. Arab writers, however, emphatically continued to write in longhand (e.g. Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris). Apparently this began to change only in the 1960s, e.g. the Iraqi writer Najm al-Wali who acquired a typewriter in exile. (Private ownership had been prohibited for some time.) 42. This is also true for Thai, Japanese and Chinese typewriters, which had to overcome linguistic barriers as well. 43. The qwerty keyboard which made the Remington-Sholes machine superior, remains controversial. Note, however, that presently ‘Arabic’ numerals have replaced traditional ‘Indian’ ones. 44. Heavily criticized by The New York Times, 19 and 20 May 1901. 45. Remington Notes 2:5 (1908), p.14: ‘The gift of this Remington – which was certainly unusual, since the Arabic Remington was then a novelty of novelties – was duly accepted by the Sultan, but it is not on record that it was effective in helping the Zionists’ cause. Indeed, the former Sultan is reputed to have been unfriendly to the typewriter, even as he was notoriously hostile to the printing press.’ 46. Remington Notes 1:1 (1907), p.1. The Persian Ambassador in Washington too had presented the Shah with a model. The former Shah had used an earlier model, allegedly, not before first cleansing it in boiled water to drive out evil spirits. Another prototype in simplified Japanese Katakana script was donated by the Remington Company itself to the Mikado. Soon, Remington regularly advertised that it supplied machines in over thirty different languages. 47. The Phonographic Magazine 17:3 (February 1903); The New York Times, 21 August 1904. Descriptions of western typewriters can be found in al-Hill from 1897. Haddad’s invention was first noticed in the issue of 15 May 1901 (vol. 9, p.470), but only on 15 May 1904 (vol. 12, pp.502–5) did the magazine offer a detailed description, and advertising apparently started in 1908 (in binding). Cf. Edward Said, Out of Place (New York, 1999), p.94; his father owned well-known office supplies stores in Jerusalem and Cairo. 48. Turkey reverted to qwerty in the 1980s under the impact of Microsoft. 49. From 1956 a specialist magazine, Sekreter Daktilograf, briefly appeared in Istanbul. (The terms daktilo and sekreter were, of course, taken from the French.) There were also frequent speed-typing competitions. 50. Floresca Karanasou, ‘Egyptianization, the 1947 Company Law and the Foreign Communities in Egypt’ (PhD diss., Oxford, 1992), pp.53–4.

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51. US Department of Commerce, World Trade in Typewriters 1948–1958 (Washington, 1959), pp.20–2; George N. Engler, ‘The Typewriter Industry: The Impact of a Significant Technological Innovation’ (PhD diss., University of California, 1969), who emphasizes the declining US-American share of world production. 52. The phenomenon of leapfrogging, that is, skipping a ‘natural’ phase of development or drastically shortening it, applies in parts of the Middle East also to the transistor radio jumping over the immobile home radio and the cellular telephone over the terrestrial telephone. We find some similarity to the Dutch historian Jan Romein’s perceptions on ‘the dialectics of progress’ (his so-called Law of the Handicap of a Head Start). Recently, the International Herald Tribune (29 December 2011) remarked on the lack of a researched history of word processing. 53. The Koç museums in Istanbul and Ankara, and also the Safir Office Machine Museum in Tehran show old typewriters as if they were intensively used there (with thanks for the Tehran reference to Willem Floor). A last typewriter factory that had survived in India closed in 1991. 54. Walter Benjamin opens his famous essay on the history of photography (1931) with the phrase that it is clouded in comparison with the history of printing, but he does not distinguish between technological invention (known dates) and artistic or literary application (‘in-use’). 55. On opposition in Egypt, see Maria Golia, Photography and Egypt (London, 2010), pp.15, 55. Muhammad Ali was not the only one to call it ‘the work of the Devil’. There must have been ‘ulam’, too. The question is, however, whether it was simply greater familiarity, which gradually achieved the breakthrough, or certain populations becoming convinced of photography’s benefit. 56. Dictionnaire des Métiers Damascains (Paris, 1960), vol. I, p.445. 57. Before, engravings had been drawn after photographs. On the beginnings of press photography, which does not fall into this framework, more ought to be said, but see for Egypt, Golia, Photography, p.74. 58. Mona Russell, Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922 (New York, 2004), pp.68–9, with a deep analysis of an adapted Kodak ad from the early 1920s. See also Beth Baron, Egypt as a Woman, Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley 2005), pp.82– 101, especially. on the popularization of photography. 59. Stephen Sheehi, ‘A social history of early Arab photography or a prolegomenon to an archaeology of the Lebanese imago’, IJMES 39 (2007), pp.177–208. 60. Roger Allen (ed.), Muwaylihi, A Period of Time. Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham (Oxford, 1992), pp.281–2, whose satire makes fun of cameras brought into wedding parties and photographs subsequently shown and sold to outsiders.

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61. While the new 35mm cameras such as Leica (1925), Contax (1935) and the like, were affordable only for the rich, we have to look at the sale of cheaper roll-film (120–127 types), box cameras (Kodak, Brownie, etc.), and similar less expensive cameras. 62. Rifat Chadirji, The Photography of Kamil Chadirji (Surbiton, 1991). 63. Akram Zaatari, The Vehicle. Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernizing Society (Beirut, 1999), published by the Arab Image Foundation. Lucie Ryzova has described private albums with photos by young Egyptian efendis which she found at flea markets. Idem, ‘My notepad is my friend. Effendis and the act of writing in modern Egypt’, Maghreb Review 32 (2007), pp.323–48. See also idem, ‘I have the picture: Egypt’s photographic heritage between digital reproduction and neoliberalism’, part 1 and 2, in www.photography. jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8297 and 9725 (accessed 1 July 2013). 64. Sonja Petersen, ‘Piano manufacturing between craft and industry: Advertising and image cultivation of early 20th [century] German piano production’, ICON, Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 17 (2011), pp.12–30. 65. Steinway started in Germany but became a leading manufacturer in the USA after 1860. 66. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford, rev ed. 1990), p. 108 et passim. 67. Edwin M. Good, Giraffes, Black Dragons and Other Pianos (Stanford, 2nd ed. 2001), pp.136–7, 182, 267. 68. Jennifer Scarce, Domestic Culture in the Middle East (Edinburgh, 1996) p.54. The said tile was made from a photograph and installed on a frieze in 1887. 69. Aye Osmanolu, Babam Sultan Abdülhamid (Hatıralarim), (Istanbul, 1984), pp.119–20; Leyla (Saz) Hanimefendi, The Imperial Harem of the Sultans (Istanbul, 1955), passim; Vedat Kosal, Western Classical Music in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 1999), passim. (Thanks to the Istanbul Stock Exchange for providing me with the book.) Pianist Vedat Kosal has recorded composition by Sultans Abdülaziz and Murad, along with Donizetti and Guatelli Pashas: idem, Ottoman Court Music, 2003. 70. Daniel J. Grange, L’Italie et le Méditerranée (1896–1911) (Rome, 1994), p.486. Local piano manufacturing is also mentioned in the Exposition Nationale de Constantinople, p.121. 71. For a Weissbrod piano imported by the Hugo Hach firm for the court around 1909, see http://egyptianroyalfurniture.blogspot.fr/ (accessed 6 July 2013). 72. Thanks to my former student Carmel Gal, who related that Emir Abdallah donated a Schimmel baby grand to his chief veterinarian Haim Appelboim, upon his retirement from the British army (it is not clear whether it had

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73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78.

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become redundant at the Palace); it later ended up with relatives of hers in Binyamina. See also Cyrus Schayegh, ‘Connecting the Dots’, paper submitted to the conference ‘On the Move’ (Jerusalem, January 2012), pp.1–2, on the second hand frigidaire that Cecil Hourani in Lebanon obtained from Haifa Missionaries also brought pianos along, e.g. to Lebanon, and sometimes over long distances, and not without some damage. An example is the Labaree family to Urumia in 1894 (thanks to Robert Labaree for the information). It is difficult to assess their impact. E.g. the salons of Maryan Marrsh (Aleppo), Mary ‘Ajam (Damascus), Hud al-Sha‘rw Cairo) and the princess-novelist Nazli Fdil. See ‘Women’s Literary Salons and Societies in the Arab World’, in www.en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Women%27s_literary_salons_and_societies_in_the_Arab_world (accessed 7 July 2013), and Joseph T. Zeydan, Arab Women Novelists, the Formative Years and Beyond (Albany, 1995), p.51, quoting Sufuri (a pseudonym) from al-Muqtataf 72:6 (1928), p.686. In Cairo, the Ramatan Museum exhibits Taha Husayn’s reception hall as it was with a piano, as well as a gramophone with western records. See also the images of home interiors on the website of the Arab Image Foundation. Mona Russell, ‘Modernity, national identity, and consumerism: Visions of the Egyptian home, 1805–1922’, in Relli Shechter (ed), Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East (New York, 2003), p.48, quoting from Francis Mikha’il’s advice manuals. Mona N. Mikhail, Seen and Heard: A Century of Arab Women in Literature and Culture (Northampton, 2004), pp.7–9. On Randi Abou-Bakr in Egypt, see Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (ed), Remembering Childhood in the Middle East (Austin, 2002), pp.350–4; Frederic Lagrange, ‘Musiciens et Poètes en Egypte au Temps de la Nahda’ (PhD diss., Paris, 1994), p.96. Boys also played. See Said, Out of Place, pp.96–7, who received lessons from the famous Ignaz Tiegerman, and became – less remembered – a music critic in his own right. Prince Farouk also took piano lessons from him. E.g., A. Comendiger (Istanbul) who also published note music, and J. Calderon (Cairo). Jacques Berque, Egypt, Imperialism and Revolution (London, transl. 1972), pp.332–3, is one of the few historians to have mentioned pianos. Some models, by the way, had decorations to suit local taste. Wyschnegradsky ordered a quartertone piano from the famous French manufacturer Pleyel, which disappointed him. Later, the Czech-German firm Förster built a few quartertone pianos in cooperation with Haba (my thanks to that firm for information). The Pleyel piano was noted in the

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81.

82.

83.

84.

85. 86.

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Egyptian press and appeared with a photograph in al-Lat’if al-musawwara, 11 September 1922. The musicologist Alberto Hemsi in Egypt referred in 1928 to various local experiments with the ‘oriental piano’ but concluded that it would remain without a repertoire, and that Eastern and Western music had to be taught in parallel. See idem, La Musique Orientale en Egypte (Alexandrie, 1930), pp. 11–4. A few other contemporary Western composers – e.g. Bela Bartok in a few pieces and the American Charles Ives – used quartertones. (Bartok may have been inspired by Arab music.) Linda Fathalla, ‘Instruments à Cordes et à Claviers dans les recommendations du Congrès du Caire’, in collective volume of CEDEJ, Musique Arabe. Le Congrès du Caire de 1932 (Cairo, 1992), pp.99–103 with relevant figures. Al-Lat’if al-musawwara, 4 April 1932, carries a story on the piano ‘invented’ by George Shaman. Experiments with regard to producing a quartertone instrument continued in the 1940s. See Abdallah Chahine, whose family still owns a large music store in Beirut. Occasionally new types emerge in the West, but not for Eastern music. During the phase of the silent cinema, pianos accompanied movies. After 1917 Istanbul saw the influx of a number of refugee pianists from the Soviet Union. See Jak Deleon, The White Russians in Istanbul (Istanbul, 1995), pp.63–6 (Thanks to Canan Balan for the reference). See further Nabil Salim Azzam, ‘Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab in Modern Egyptian Music’ (PhD diss., University of California, 1990), pp.137–8, 260. He employed a Greek pianist. In Lebanon, the Rahbani brothers used the piano in some of their arrangements. Local conservatories do teach the piano. But as a whole, the region, with the relative exception of Turkey, has few performing artists, especially in comparison with the Far East. Cf. Richard Kurt Kraus, Pianos and Politics in China (New York, 1989). China is a major piano producer today. Lagrange, ‘Musiciens’, pp.73, 85, 92, 124, 129, 133, 149. For an image of musical instruments sold, see Kupferschmidt, Orosdi-Back, p.65. Thibouville, the largest violin factory in Mirecourt, France, began marketing gramophones as well; see their catalogues on the web. Edison’s phonograph (1877) and more so Berliner’s gramophone (1887) gained wide popularity in the USA, later in Europe, especially due to the transition from cylinders to disks. In 1880 al-Muqtataf was still skeptical, writing that it first had to see and hear the new invention before believing it. We do not know what Western music was initially played, but original American records were advertised and probably were soon superseded by local taste.

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88. Ali Jihad Racy, ‘The record industry and Egyptian traditional music, 1904–1932’, Ethnomusicology 20:1 (1976), pp.23–48, and other articles by the same author; Pekka Gronow, ‘The record industry comes to the East’, Ethnomusicology 25:2 (1981), pp.251–84. 89. Ziad Fahmy, ‘Media-Capitalism: Colloquial mass culture and nationalism in Egypt, 1908–18’, IJMES 42:1 (2010), pp.83–103; cf. idem, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, 2010). 90. Orosdi-Back also jumped at the market and recorded al-Manyalw; see Kupferschmidt, Orosdi-Back, p.40. 91. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, ‘Taste and class in late Ottoman Beirut’, IJMES 43:3 (2011), pp.485–6. The qadi even declared that the gramophone and the records deserved to be broken. This gender point needs further research, e.g. against the background of Victoria de Grazia and Ella Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things (Berkeley, 1996). 92. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953), p.66. 93. Istanbul was the first large city to get a power station, the well-known Salihtaraa station near Eyüp coming into operation in 1910 (later than most cities in western Europe); it closed in 1983 and has recently been converted into a museum. Davis Trietsch wrote in 1910 that power plants had ‘till recently’ been prohibited, but now Damascus, Beirut, Medina (the Holy Mosque), Constantinople, Salonika, Smyrna and Bursa have them. Idem, Palästina-Handbuch (Berlin, 1910), p.217, cf. idem, Levante-Handbuch (Berlin 1909), p.197, and idem, Levante-Handbuch (Berlin, 1914), p.407–408, on the expansion of electrical grids, also in Egypt. 94. The big mosque in Mashhad was illuminated in 1900 by a generator imported from Russia. Mecca began using illumination around 1926. 95. Duygu Ulas Aysal is presently working on a PhD dissertation at Bilkent University regarding government-consumer relations after the introduction of electricity in Istanbul. 96. Obviously, electricity was part of other technologies, e.g. the telegraph or telephone or somewhat later the cinema and, more conspicuously, of tramways (and their concessions to foreign companies). 97. Sir W. M. Ramsay, The Revolution in Constantinople and Turkey: A Diary (London, 1909), p.241. 98. The weekly Electrical Engineer 25 (1900), p.645. Exceptions were apparently made for medical and mining equipment. 99. One contemporary source explicitly writes ‘He is not wary of innovations such as electricity or the telephone’. See Jacob M. Landau, ‘An insider’s view of Istanbul: Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi’s Ma Hunalika, WI 27 (1987), p.80 (quoting pp.234ff); Paul Fesch, Constantinople aux derniers jours d’Abdul-Hamid (Paris, 1907), p.146.

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100. Ramsay, Revolution, p. 242. 101. New Istanbul Times, 20 February 2009, see www.newistanbultimes.com/ mansions-18h.htm (accessed 3 July 2013). 102. Fesch, Constantinople, p.146. 103. Paul Dumont, ‘Said Bey – The everyday life of an Istanbul townsman at the beginning of the twentieth century’, in Albert Hourani et al. (eds), The Modern Middle East (London, 1993), pp.271, 284. The Silahtaraa plant was built by the Hungarian firm Ganz and opened in 1914. 104. No doubt, consumer bills, etc., can teach us a lot. It may also be useful to ask, for the Middle East, the questions raised e.g. by Dominique Desjeux et al., Anthropologie de l’électricité. Les objects électriques dans la vie quotidienne en France (Paris, 1996). 105. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (New Haven, 1997), p.89. Some conservative ‘ulam’ (even Sha‘rw in the 1970s) saw lighting the night as an unwarranted interference in the Order of Creation, disturbing sleep and upsetting the morning adhn. 106. In the USA by the turn of the century, 18 million light bulbs had already been sold. Advertisers in the Egyptian press (probably also the Turkish press) were Osram, Philips-Argenta, Tungsram etc. We do not know what quantity has been marketed in the region. Ultimately, Turkey started producing light bulbs itself. 107. Davis Trietsch, Levante-Handbuch (Berlin 1914), p.384, gives an indication of the increasing imports of Beirut: cables (0.25–4 mm.), light-bulbs (of 16–200 ‘candles’), switches, transformers, and, owing to the high summer temperatures, ventilators of different sizes and types. The refrigerator came later and washing machines even longer after (needing electricity, water and sewerage). 108. This is important for hooking up electrical devices other than for lighting. Also, sockets could be used to tap electricity from lamp fittings, 109. This includes the emergence of specialized stores and electricians. See Rizkallah Hilan, Culture et devéloppement en Syrie et dans les pays retardés (Paris, 1969), p.155. 110. Literature on America is wide and diverse, complemented by studies on Western Europe. Lewis H. Siegelbaum (ed.), Cars for Comrades: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc (Ithaca, 2011), for instance, shows the need and potential for research on other societies. 111. The USA in 1922 had 84 per cent of the world’s motor cars, a rate that declined to 68 per cent in 1939. 112. Amn al-Rihn, Trkh Najd al-Hadth (Beirut, 1928). 113. For Iran, see Willem Floor, ‘Les premières règles de police urbaine à Téhéran’, in Chahryar Adle and Bernard Hourcade (eds), Téhéran: Capitale

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115.

116. 117.

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A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST Bicentenaire (Paris and Teheran, 1992), pp.173–98. This is also true for the Ottoman Empire/Turkey and other states. The aspect of legislation on new technologies in this first era of globalization is, of course, not limited to automobiles, and needs systematic consideration. This applies also to international conventions to which the Ottoman Empire, including Egypt and Iran became parties. In 2012, the Ford cars importer in Israel re-issued a trade catalogue from the 1930s, which was at the time translated from an Arabic original into Hebrew (the regional dealer worked from Alexandria). It left the pertinent publicity images of the Egyptian countryside and the pyramids intact. Some advertisements also specified prices, which was usually not the case for other commodities. An American trade report asserted that closed sedans and limousines sold better than open cars, as they could withdraw women from sight. Some European producers (Citroen, Fiat, Austin etc.) may have done better business owing to price and credit. Hilan, Culture, pp.154–5. Ford started assembling cars in Istanbul in 1928 with the support of the Turkish regime, but gave up in the 1940s. Other manufacturers came much later. Of the consumer goods we discussed, sewing machines ‘Cleopatra’ were for some time manufactured in Egypt and light bulbs in Turkey. Many ‘small’ technologies still have to be mapped out. A case, also for an earlier period, is the acquisition of rifles as personal arms, not primarily for defense or hunting, but as a status symbol (e.g. beduins). Much attention has been paid to large weaponry for armies including local production. It is equally surprising that the so-called Primus stove, now a generic term but a technological implement developed and marketed by the Swedish firm Hjort & Co. has not received the attention it deserves, as it probably changed home cooking (where kerosene became available). This lacuna also applies to the transition of combustion engines to diesel. We know little about the purchase of different categories of steam engines and generators by private persons, but the number of diesel engines (from combustion engines, the next stage) in the countryside rose sharply from the 1920s. There are several such Four Cs models, we slightly adapt here ‘Assessing the impact and technology drivers in region’ (which discusses present day NIC aspects): www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cia/nic2020/nov6_panel4.pdf (accessed 22 February 2013). While not adopting a rigid deterministic pattern (but working closer to a ‘soft’ determination model), we remember Robert Heilbroner, who answered the question ‘do machines make history?’ with the qualifying statement that ‘certain cultural aspects’ ought to be taken into consideration.

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A SHORT PIECE

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CHAPTER 10 BEES ON CA MELS: TECHNOLOGIES OF MOVEMENT IN L ATE OTTOM AN PALESTINE Tamar Novick

Like many European and American travelers, honeybees began to travel throughout Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many of them gathered the nectar of the orange blossom on the coast for the first time. Through this encounter, as I argue elsewhere, they became secret contributors to the gradual Jewish domination of the booming citrus industry.1 While nothing is surprising about bee flight, late nineteenth-century circumstances created a new type of movement for the bees. Beyond the local ‘Holy Land’ tourism frenzy,2 bee travels were part of the extensive exploration projects in all European colonies. In particular, they related to contemporary global attempts to find ‘the ultimate race of bees’.3 The transformation in the movement of bees, which was local just as it was global, ultimately depended on old forms of movement. New experiences were entangled with ‘creole technologies’.4 Until the late nineteenth century, bees in Palestine were familiar with a limited variety of flora, with whatever they encountered in a

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radius of about two miles of flight. They created honey during a short period of the year, and if they lived in human-made hives (which were made of clay), they built the honeycomb anew after every swarming season, since beekeepers had to break the hives in order to extract the honey. Honey was valued by the people of Palestine as a foodstuff, and was often thought to hold medicinal qualities; it was usually consumed locally, and at times sold in nearby markets. By the early twentieth century, the life of bees in Palestine, as well as the honey they produced, were already utterly different. Bees continued to fly and collect nectar and pollen, and made honey for humans to enjoy, but their labor and behavior changed. A new type of hive – the movable frame hive – arrived in the area with two North American beekeepers, and in exchange, several bees and at least one Palestinian queen were sent back to North America.5 As part of their journey to find the ultimate bee for honey production and fertilization of plants, these two explorers, D. A. Jones and Frank Benton, reached Palestine in 1880.6 After evaluating the local breed of bees (which some argued should be called ‘Palestinian bees’ and others – ‘holy bees’), Jones and Benton also trained a few local beekeepers in the use of these new, expensive wooden machines.7 No longer did beekeepers have to break the fixed clay hives in order to extract the honey. They could now remove each of the many frames from within the square boxes, and the honey would flow with the use of a centrifuge. In the new hive the honeycomb would stay intact, so the bees did not need to build it anew anymore. Bees could now spend more of their time making honey. As a matter of fact, not only each movable frame but also the entirety of the new beehive was now mobile. Together with many other new technologies like trains, sewing machines and electricity that had to do with movement in the Middle East, these new hives were built to move. With pastoral beekeeping, bees in boxes were moved throughout Palestine in sync with blooming plants, so that the bees could make honey yearlong. The new movement of bees was part of a newly emerging wide-scale technological system that included, among others, honey-making machines, irrigation pipes, roads and cars, as well as different kinds of workers.8 The American explorers left the region shortly, and the global beekeepers’ community promoted the Italian bee as the best of breeds.

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But the Western way of keeping bees gained prominence in Palestine: long-distance travels became part of the lives of bees in Palestine, and their honey reached European markets, its flavors now alternating between thyme, prickly pear and citrus fruits.

Illustration 10.1 Bees on camels on their way to Jaffa in 1890 Palestine. Source: Phillipe Marchenay, L’Homme et l’Abeille (Paris, 1979), p.100.

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Illustration 10.2 The cover of Philip J. Baldensperger’s The Immovable East: Studies of the People and Customs of Palestine (1913). Baldensperger and his family were SwissFrench Christian beekeepers in late Ottoman Palestine.

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The success of the movable-frame beehive was sweeping – indeed, to this day beekeepers throughout the world use this nineteenth-century technology. But in Palestine, at least for a short while, and prior to the widespread construction of roads and the availability of cars,9 bees lived inside new movable hives but traveled via old transport technologies (see picture 1). While the fixedness of the traditional hive fitted the Western image of Palestine as The Immovable East, as one beekeeper called it,10 movement existed all along in various, often forgotten, ways. This shift from static to movable hives depended on older, local forms of movement. Illustration 10.1, from 1890, illustrates how for a brief moment in time the new movement of bees was made possible by the old movement of camels. This image of bees traveling on other animals captures a ‘creole technology’ in the midst of change, where new technologies of movement were combined with existing local ones. In addition to camels, according to one account, movable beehives were also carried on the heads of women across the country, one hive at a time.11 Together with the anonymous figure on the right, camels and local women were essential for the abruption of new movement. Beyond the new technology, therefore, this picture exhibits some of the actors, human and non-human, that remained an invisible force of change in the East. Such new technologies as the wooden hives were successful in Palestine not because they were successful everywhere, but because they became intertwined with old, local (and often living) ones. Furthermore, long after camels were deemed unnecessary for (or even interfering with) moving bees, back-stagers continue to be locomotors; all technologies are ‘creole technologies’.12

Notes 1. I develop this argument about the meeting of bees with the oranges of Jaffa in ‘Bible, bees, and boxes: The creation of “the land flowing with milk and honey” in Palestine, 1880–1931’, special issue ‘Food, Power and Meaning in the Middle East’ in Food, Culture and Society 16:2 (2013), pp.281–99. On the history of the citrus industry in Palestine, the interrelation between Palestinian and Jewish techniques, and the role of Palestinians in the

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gradual Jewish domination of the industry, see Nahum Karlinsky, California Dreaming: Ideology, Society, and Technology in the Citrus Industry of Palestine 1890–1939 (Albany NY, 2005), and Eyal Sivan’s 2009 film Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork. For the Holy Land in British culture and the British in Ottoman Palestine, see Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005); for Americans and the Holy Land, see Lester I. Vogel, To See Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (University Park, PA, 1993). Frank Benton, ‘The new races of bees’, The American Bee Journal 20:3 (1884), p.38. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of extensive attempts to locate the best breed of honeybee. Many kinds of bees were considered according to quality and amount of honey produced, character, and resistance to diseases. Already at the turn of the century, the ‘Italian bee’ established itself as the preferred breed in most parts of the globe. See Eva Crane, The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (New York, 1999), p.369. Historian David Edgerton examines the Old that is part of the utilization of new technologies, as well as the change in technologies over time. In so doing, he argues against the centrality of inventions and inventors in historical analysis, as well as the equation of technology with progress. Edgerton also coins the term ‘creole technologies’ to refer to the technologies of the poor, to the creative utilization of whatever parts are available for making technologies work – technologies of making do. Using the broader meaning of ‘creole’, I adopt the term to analyse technologies of mixture. See David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (Oxford, 2007). Andrew H. Diven, ‘First queen by mail from Jerusalem’, The American Bee Journal 20:51 (1884), p.809. James P. Strange, ‘A severe stinging and much fatigue – Frank Benton and his 1881 search for Apis dorsata’, American Ethnologist 47:2 (2001), pp.112–6. Frank Benton, ‘A bee-convention in Syria’, The American Bee Journal 21:35 (1885), p.551. For the analysis of technologies as systems see Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1993). On the interactions between various kinds of workers, both Jews and Arabs, in the construction of railways in British Palestine see Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley, 1996), p.812. Lockman focuses on railway workers in order to challenge the ‘dual society’ paradigm in the historiography of British Palestine, which separates between the Jewish and Arab communities.

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9. Beyond Lockman’s book, little work focuses on railroads in Palestine throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Yair Safran and Tamir Goren, for example, write about railroad planning in ‘Ideas and plans to construct a railroad in northern Palestine in the later Ottoman period’, Middle Eastern Studies 46.5 (2010), 753–70. Furthermore, almost no work focuses on other transport technologies. Several popular accounts mention that cars were an extremely rare sight in Palestine prior to World War I, but that they became more prevalent with the progression of the war. According to the written media, cars were owned by a rich few in the 1920s, but became increasingly common in the 1930s. In 1933, for example, there were approx. 6,000 cars in Palestine and 10,000 in 1935. See ‘A car for every one hundred thousand people in the Land of Israel’, Doar Hayom, 25 February 1935, p.1. Lockman argues that ‘motor transport had developed very quickly in Palestine during the late 1920s and the early 1930s as the government built new roads and improved existing ones’: idem, Comrades and Enemies, pp.186–7. On the emergence of the Jewish flight culture in British Palestine see Yossi Malchi, ‘Modernity, nationality, and society: The beginning of Hebrew flight in Palestine 1932–1940’ (MA thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2007) [in Hebrew]. 10. Philip J. Baldensperger, The Immovable East: Studies of the People and Customs of Palestine (Boston, 1913). 11. Saleh Merrill, ‘Honey production in old Palestine’, The American Bee Journal 40:23 (1900), p.356. 12. A letter sent by the Lydda District Engineer to the Chairman of the Soil Conservation Board of the British Mandate in Palestine discusses the problem of camels and other animals disturbing the movement and functionality of trains and railroads. See ISA/M-13/5109, Sgd. F.H. Taylor to Chairman of Soil Conservation Board, 11 July 1942.

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IDEAS ON THE MOVE

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CHAPTER 11 R E-IM AGINING ISL A M IN THE PER IOD OF THE FIR ST MODER N GLOBALIZATION: MUHA MM AD ‘ABDUH AND HIS THEOLOGY OF UNIT Y 1 Johann Buessow

In 1884, the Egyptian Muslim scholar and journalist Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) was invited by the British writer and anti-imperialist activist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt to visit the House of Commons in London in order to give members of parliament a first-hand report on the political situation in Egypt. By that time, ‘Abduh had spent about two years in forced exile in Beirut and Paris, following his involvement in the aborted ‘Urb revolt of 1882. Blunt reports that he, in the run-up to the visit, and eager to make the most of his Egyptian guest in the framework of his lobbying attempts, was concerned about ‘Abduh’s ‘somewhat Europeanized’ appearance which he had acquired in Paris. ‘Abduh had grown long hair and instead of the traditional turban he wore a fez – the headgear of the Ottoman and Egyptian middle strata with modern secular education. In the House of Commons, however, ‘Abduh, encouraged by Blunt, decided to present himself in ‘his blue jibbeh [gown] and white turban’. This, according to Blunt, gave him

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a more persuasive appearance as a speaker for Egypt and the Muslim world. Blunt noted later on with satisfaction that ‘Abduh’s appearance ‘created quite a sensation’ in the lobby of the parliament.2 In this episode, Blunt and ‘Abduh, a British Christian and an Egyptian Muslim, jointly engaged in an activity that might be termed ‘the performance of authenticity’.3 During his years in exile, ‘Abduh lived a cosmopolitan life as a high school teacher, journalist and intellectual.4 By his own standards, his secular attire was certainly no contradiction to the universalist spirit of Islam. However, in front of British parliamentarians he felt compelled to wear clothes that made him appear an ‘authentic’ representative of the Muslim world, true to the ‘identity’ of Islam. It is also significant that a non-Muslim, Blunt, took part in this act of Islamic identity-construction. This chapter argues that the emergence of a modern concept of ‘religions’ with particular identities and symbolic codes of distinction – as it appears implicitly in ‘Abduh’s and Blunt’s joint performance – gained currency in the Middle East during the first modern wave of globalization.5 Building on recent studies, I will argue that this specifically modern concept of religions followed a ‘Protestant template’ and that it was transmitted to Middle Eastern Muslim scholars mainly through printed publications and through personal interaction with European thinkers. I will also argue that a ‘globalization perspective’ helps us to develop a more adequate understanding of cultural transfers6 in modern Middle Eastern religious thought, which so far have mostly been studied within the paradigm of ‘Westernization’. The chapter attempts to substantiate these claims through an exemplary study of one text, Muhammad ‘Abduh’s Rislat al-Tawhd, commonly translated as ‘The Theology of Unity’. It contains a concise presentation of Islamic theology that originated from ‘Abduh’s teaching during the 1880s, but was only published in 1897 in Cairo.7 In contrast to previous scholarly readings of ‘Abduh’s life and work, which were principally interested in questions of intellectual genealogy and taxonomy, this chapter considers ‘Abduh as an author of the late nineteenth century who dealt with issues of his period, and who mobilized in this process what he found useful among the intellectual resources at his disposal.

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Religion and globalization It is beyond doubt that religion was part and parcel of the mobility of people, goods and ideas during the first modern globalization wave. However, until recently, the process by which ‘Abduh as well as other Muslim scholars of his time re-interpreted the Islamic intellectual heritage has usually been described within the paradigm of ‘Westernization’.8 According to this paradigm, Muslim scholars and intellectuals adapted their religious concepts in response to the challenge of ‘Western’ norms, which became dominant through the imperial expansion of the European powers in the nineteenth century. Scholars arguing from this perspective could feel vindicated to some extent by prominent Muslim intellectuals who around 1900 described their situation exactly in those terms.9 However, more recently scholars such as Christoph Schumann have criticized this perspective as ‘a crass oversimplification’ because it not only does not correctly grasp what Muslim or Christian reformers in the Middle East actually did, but also presupposes an untenable idea of a monolithic ‘Western intellectual tradition’.10 The ongoing globalization debate in the humanities and social sciences has sparked attempts to gain a more comprehensive picture of intellectual transfers between religious actors in the modern age. There is general agreement that, similarly to states and other social institutions, religions around the globe became more uniform during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that local religious diversity was increasingly embedded in globally dominant templates.11 Scholars arguing from a globalization perspective have thus, at least partly, replaced the paradigm of a bilateral, unequal, relationship between the cultural blocs of ‘Islam’ and the ‘the West’ with a paradigm of global convergence. Recently, Christopher Bayly, Jürgen Osterhammel, Dietrich Jung and Reinhard Schulze have proposed various models for the way this convergence came about. According to Bayly, convergence resulted from ‘emulation and borrowing’ between different actors, religious as well as non-religious, on a global scale.12 Osterhammel suggests that convergence might either be the result of ‘entanglement’ between

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connected world regions or of an ‘analogous transformation’ in parts of the world which had only loose interconnections.13 Schulze sees mainly the second sort of dynamics at work and proposes the model of a ‘convergent evolution’ in which independent religious concepts converged because they were exposed to increasingly similar environmental conditions.14 Speaking of ‘convergence’, however, should not make us overlook the fact that globalization itself, like any other historical process, was constituted by a multitude of individual actions in specific geographic locations, which led to the emergence of ever-new hybrids between global and local trends. Roland Robertson and others have characterized this aspect of globalization with the term ‘glocalization’.15 On the other hand, for Middle Eastern thinkers, the rapidly increasing mobility of people, goods and ideas simply was a given fact. Globalization gave their period a specific signature and opened specific avenues of action and closed others, whether they liked it or not. In this sense, ‘globalization’ was both a product of, and an environmental condition for, intellectual production during the late nineteenth century. The notion of convergence should also not make us forget the fact that European thought had a special prominence since the midnineteenth century, and not only due to the imperial expansion of the European powers.16 Europe was the first world region that experienced the deep social transformations brought about by political revolutions and industrialization. An intellectual answer to this experience was the invention of the social sciences, the paradigms of which were soon used to make sense of social transformations worldwide. In addition, European thought was most widely diffused through modern institutions and media. Another characteristic of the period is the increasingly prominent role of the urban bourgeoisies,17 who also became prominent driving forces behind religious renewal.18 Much of their activity for renewal was spurred by similar challenges, especially those posed by secular ideologies and scientific theories.19 At the same time, their religious thought was influenced by contemporary bourgeois discourse in general, with an emphasis on values such as morals, education, health and individual achievement.20 For non-Christian religious communities, the activity

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of Christian missionaries was a major challenge that created the need to ‘reformulate themselves’.21 With the increasing activity of demarcating religious boundaries, an abstract and universally oriented concept of ‘religion’ began to gain worldwide currency.22 Various communities of faith now strove for a clearer profile as ‘religions’ in contradistinction from other religions.23 Dietrich Jung, building on the work of Peter Beyer,24 observes that the concept of ‘religion’ as a functionally differentiated system next to other systems such as that of the state, science, law, or education, forms part of the ‘cognitive deep structure’ of a global public sphere which began to emerge during the late nineteenth century.25 Reinhard Schulze argues that for Muslims – as well as for Jews – in the late nineteenth century, the most important template for such an abstract concept of religion was Protestantism. According to Schulze, the core features of a ‘religion’, in the contemporary Protestant understanding of the term, can be summed up by three notions: ‘religious belief as an individual and interiorized experience’, a ‘reinterpretation of statutory law as practical ethics’, and a conceptual ‘separation of belief and history’.26 In Western Europe, the modern concepts of Protestantism and of religion in general emerged in parallel between the 1770s and the 1820s.27 In the Middle East, I would like to argue here, the modern notion of religion seems to have gained currency during the first modern wave of globalization. How does the assumption of a ‘Protestant template for religion’28 fit together with the idea of a convergent evolution of religious concepts? For most Middle Eastern Muslims, it seems that the ‘Protestant template’ became available not through direct contact with Protestant thinkers29 but through other channels, mainly through printed texts. This leads to a last point of special relevance here, namely that religious communities tapped into the period’s new technologies for administration, travel and communication. Print technology deserves special mention here.30 Printed texts in Arabic, French and English, made ideas of various origins available for Middle Easterners, without necessitating personal contact with the authors and social milieus from which they originated. For example, The Life of Jesus, the controversial study of the ‘historical Jesus’ by the German Protestant theologian David Strauss,31

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could be read by Middle Eastern Muslims educated in one of the main European languages, without being subject to the direct ‘influence’ of Protestant circles.32 Certainly, diffusion of thought over long distances had been possible already in the age of the manuscript,33 but mass print and mass transportation accelerated and expanded such diffusion at an exponential rate. Muhammad ‘Abduh indirectly testified to this when writing full of enthusiasm to Leo Tolstoy: Although I have not the pleasure of being personally acquainted with you ... the light of your thoughts has shone upon us, ... making a bond of friendship between the minds of the intelligent here [in Egypt] and your mind.34 Thus print created the possibility to put one’s own religious concepts in new contexts. This, in turn, helped to ‘reload’ these concepts with new meaning. For example, as we will see below, the ideas of ‘evolution’, ‘maturity’ and ‘masculinity’ in the works of Auguste Comte and other contemporary authors enabled ‘Abduh to reformulate an argument of Islamic religious apologetics which had been handed down among Muslim scholars at least since the ninth century ce. Print technology also had a unique potential to foster and sustain ‘imagined communities’, as Benedict Anderson has observed.35 In fact, the first printing of Rislat al-Tawhd coincides with a boom of the Egyptian print industry, with the newspaper being its most prolific format.36 Reading printed texts in newspapers was a shared experience that made it possible to feel connected to those contemporaries who were confronted with the same ideas at the same time. For Muslim readers, the consumption of printed texts and images created the possibility to imagine a Muslim world community in much more concrete terms than before.

Muhammad ‘Abduh The Muslim world community and its collective destiny is a leitmotif of Muhammad ‘Abduh’s work. Scholarly studies regularly refer to ‘Abduh as a founding father of modern reformist Islamic thought, and

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he remains an authority for many Muslims today. His life and work have been the objects of several major studies,37 but there is a growing sense that both merit to be re-examined from various angles.38 So far, ‘Abduh has mostly been portrayed as an outstanding individual writer; not much attention has been paid to his immediate context. In terms of content, many, if not most, studies have focused on his political and legal ideas.39 If ‘Abduh’s religious writings have been examined, then this has been almost exclusively with an eye to uncovering his relation to certain intellectual trends, such as Islamic rationalist theology,40 Sufism,41 the traditionalist current of Salafism,42 or agnosticism.43 In short, the main prism through which ‘Abduh’s religious oeuvre has been viewed so far is that of intellectual genealogy and taxonomy. In contrast, this chapter considers ‘Abduh as an Islamic reformist author44 who grappled with the public issues and conflicts of the period.45 ‘Abduh’s Theology of Unity lends itself well to such an analysis. It is one of ‘Abduh’s most popular works and has seen numerous editions and translations.46 Certainly, the Risla – a book of 134 pages in its first edition – does not cover all of ‘Abduh’s interests, and it should not be overrated at the expense of ‘Abduh’s more substantial scholarly works.47 It is a textbook, written with the explicit aim of giving students and educated lay readers an introduction to Islamic theology that would be comprehensible and relevant for contemporary students.48 Thus, in contrast to those among ‘Abduh’s theological and mystical works that are written for specialist audiences,49 the Theology of Unity addresses a wide readership and explicitly aims at demonstrating Islamic theology’s relevance in the modern age. The first section of this chapter situates the case study in the historical context of the first modern globalization by showing how the intensified mobility of people and ideas influenced ‘Abduh’s working conditions as a scholar and journalist. Two aspects will be considered here: ‘Abduh’s travels and personal networks on the one hand and the places in which he worked on the other hand. The second section provides an introduction to Rislat al-Tawhd and asks in how far we can trace the mobility of ideas in the text itself. As will be shown, under the surface of Islamic discourse there lay themes that were typical of contemporary bourgeois discourse. The third and last

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section asks to what extent ‘Abduh had started to think in a global perspective.

New working conditions: an Islamic scholar and journalist during the period of the first modern globalization Among Muslim scholars, a ‘global’ outlook was nothing entirely new in the late nineteenth century. Certainly, not every Muslim scholar was able to travel to faraway places or to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, but as a cultural ideal ‘the travel in pursuit of knowledge’ (al-rihla li-talab al-‘ilm) had been present for centuries,50 and Islamic institutions such as pilgrimage and scholarly networks sustained wide-ranging trans-regional linkages. Muhammad ‘Abduh formed part of such traditional networks. An example is the Madaniyya Sf order, where he first got in touch with Islamic reformist thought. The Madaniyya, a branch of the Shdhiliyya order, originated in Morocco and, during the nineteenth century, gained numerous adepts in Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Fezzan, Tunisia, Egypt, the Hijaz and at the Ottoman court in Istanbul.51 Also, individual Muslim scholars had always been able to build wide-ranging personal networks of friendship and scholarly exchange.52 Compared to earlier examples, Muhammad ‘Abduh’s life bears witness to the increasing mobility of people, goods and ideas during the late nineteenth century. His travels led him through a good part of the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and Europe. His first journeys outside Egypt were due to his forced exile between 1882 and 1888. During these years, ‘Abduh spent extended periods of time in Damascus (1882), Beirut (1883–84; 1885–88), Paris (1884) and London (1884).53 In all these places, he frequented cosmopolitan circles of political émigrés, anti-colonial activists and religious enthusiasts.54 After his return to Egypt and after he had acquired prestigious official positions – notably that of the Mufti of the Egyptian Realm (muft al-diyr al-Misriyya), which he gained in 1899 – ‘Abduh travelled to Istanbul (1901), Algiers (1903), Sudan (1905), as well as to several European countries.55 He now belonged to a different category of travelers, combining private and official functions. Especially during

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his well-publicized visit to Algiers, he resembled a missionary for the Islamic reformist school of thought that had begun to coalesce around him.56 During the following months, he planned a grand tour through the Eastern Muslim world, including India, Iran and Russia, in order to gain first-hand insight into the living conditions of Muslims in these countries.57 From the 1890s onwards, travelling to Europe, especially to Switzerland, became increasingly important to him. In 1894, for example, he spent holidays in the health spa of Evian-les-Bains. Here he combined recreation with visits to the University of Geneva, where he sought to familiarize himself with the latest intellectual trends in Europe.58 The transport networks on which ‘Abduh relied were mainly of two kinds: first, Ottoman networks between Cairo, Istanbul and the Maghreb,59 and second, European networks between Cairo, metropolitan France and French Algeria. In addition, ‘Abduh’s travels were facilitated by personal ties, including friends and family in Egypt, his friend Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in England and those Algerian scholars, intellectuals and dignitaries who hosted him in Algiers. In Beirut, where ‘Abduh spent most of his exile, he married a wife from a local notable family and taught at an Ottoman government high school, al-Madrasa al-Sultniyya (‘The Sultanic School’).60 This detail is of some importance in this context, because Rislat al-Tawhd is based on notes of ‘Abduh’s lectures at the Sultniyya School, which he writes were taken by his brother, Hammda Bey ‘Abduh.61 In sum, ‘Abduh actively and enthusiastically made use of various infrastructural networks that were established during his lifetime, most notably railways, steamer lines and the telegraph. He thus participated in what is referred to in the introduction of this volume as ‘globalization from below’.62 Considering ‘Abduh’s itineraries mentioned above, the ‘first modern globalization’ appears to have supplemented longestablished scholarly networks across Asia and North Africa with an orientation to Europe. However, there are other aspects of ‘Abduh’s life and work that need finer elaboration and that might counterbalance this assessment to some extent. Perhaps the most remarkable is ‘Abduh’s close connection to Jaml al-Dn Asadbd al-Afghn’, an Iranian-born scholar and intellectual who during a long stay in Cairo

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between 1871 and 1879 introduced ‘Abduh to the traditions of philosophy and rational theology in Iran.63 This newly established link between the intellectual traditions of Sh ‘  Iran and the Sunn Arab countries has rarely been mentioned.64 It needs to be considered as part of the increased connectivity inside the Muslim world during the period. ‘Abduh’s knowledge of French and Persian enabled him to engage with the work of authors of various religious and philosophical backgrounds.65 Osman Amin, who was able to inspect ‘Abduh’s posthumous library, reports that it contained over 2,000 volumes. Many of them, writes Amin, contained annotations or citations from other authors in ‘Abduh’s own hand, showing how avid a reader he had been.66 According to Amin, there were several manuscripts of scholarly works, some of them copies made by ‘Abduh himself.67 Among them were tracts by the philosophers Ibn al-‘Arab and Ibn Sn,68 by rationalist theologians of the Ash‘ar tradition and by the mystic and moralist al-Ghazl.69 Among the Persian works in the library was a tract on astronomy by al-Jaghmn (d. 745/1344–45).70 There were only a handful of works pertaining to Greek philosophy and pre-modern European thought, Amin informs us.71 Much greater was the number of works by modern authors, among them the European philosophers Auguste Comte (1798–1857), René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, the French historians François Guizot (1787–1874) and Hippolyte Taine, the Austrian social critic and Zionist Max Nordau,72 the above-mentioned German theologian David Friedrich Strauss and the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.73 Next to ‘Abduh’s travels and reading, his social networks were another crucial avenue for intellectual exchange. Membership in several Masonic lodges provided ‘Abduh with contacts into the ruling elite as well as into the Christian and Jewish communities in Cairo and Beirut.74 ‘Abduh’s personal ties to friends, colleagues and students were instrumental in popularizing his thought in other parts of the world. It testified to his far-ranging reputation, for example, when in 1903 Muslims from South Africa solicited a fatwa from him.75 Further indications of his wide-ranging personal ties and his prestige in Muslim communities worldwide have been collected by Rid in his biography of ‘Abduh. These include ‘Abduh’s correspondents,76 the letters of

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condolence which reached his family after his death in 1905,77 as well as obituaries in Arabic newspapers from Sao Paolo and New York.78 ‘Abduh’s systematic and innovative use of print media guaranteed his writings an unparalleled dissemination in Muslim communities worldwide.79 His journalistic career started with several articles for independent newspapers and journals. Between 1880 and 1882 he served as editor-in-chief of the Egyptian government gazette al-Waqʾi‘ al-Misriyya (‘The Egyptian Events’), and during the year 1884, he and Afghn co-edited a controversial political journal, al-‘Urwa al-wuthq (‘The Firmest Bond’). From 1898 onwards, ‘Abduh’s views were promoted in a new journal edited by Rashd Rid, Al-Manr (‘The Lighthouse’), which reached a small but well-educated Muslim readership in diverse locations between Europe and Southeast Asia.80 The places in which Muhammad ‘Abduh worked were important nodes in the regional and global flows of peoples, goods and ideas. ‘Abduh wrote his Risla in Beirut and published it in Cairo. Next to Alexandria, these two cities were the foremost places where the Arab world met global trends, from economy to culture. Both thrived on globalization.81 Foreign trade is estimated to have constituted close to one half of the Egyptian Gross National Product at the beginning of the twentieth century. Egypt in general was an Eldorado for international investors and migrant laborers. Despite widespread poverty and political crises, this situation inspired an optimistic mood in many Egyptians from all strata.82 The 1880s and 1890s, when ‘Abduh wrote and published his Risla, were marked by strong hopes that the country’s economy was gradually catching up with the wealthy European countries.83 Egypt’s economic boom and its relatively liberal political climate under British occupation triggered a considerable influx of people into the country, among them close to 200,000 immigrants from Europe84 and about 30,000 Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Syrian lands.85 As Thomas Philipp and Fruma Zachs have shown, the Syrian immigrants in Egypt, men and women, were crucial agents of cultural change. ‘Abduh and other Egyptian intellectuals and scholars who left the country in the wake of the failed revolt of 1882,86 are examples of a reverse movement from Egypt to the Syrian and Palestinian

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regions.87 This reciprocal mobility of persons and ideas between Egypt and the Levant is another instance of increased connectivity within the Muslim world during the period. It eventually laid the foundations for the emergence of an Arabic media space during the twentieth century. In sum, the intellectual milieus in Cairo and Beirut resembled intellectual entrepôts, in which elements of recent international trends and of the regional heritage came together and were disseminated again through teaching, scholarly work and journalism.88

Fusion, joint development of concepts and resonances: Risaˉlat al-Tawhıˉd as a document of the mobility of ideas The preceding section of this chapter has enumerated some features of the first modern globalization that shaped Muhammad ‘Abduh’s working conditions. To what extent can we identify traces of mobility of ideas in ‘Abduh’s Rislat al-tawhd? Before going into detail, a short introduction to the Risla is in order. The book can be characterized as a catechism (‘aqda) of Islamic theology (‘ilm al-tawhd or ‘ilm al-kalm),89 which is framed by a historical introduction (chapter 1) and an apologetic final part (chapters 13–17). Two aspects set Rislat al-Tawhd apart from previous works in Islamic theology: The first aspect is ‘Abduh’s consistent use of arguments derived from history and the social sciences. The second new aspect is ‘Abduh’s way of presenting his material in a language replete with rhetorical figures and in a plot-structure of decline and revival which is reminiscent of what nineteenth century European theorists of drama called anticlimax and climax.90 The ‘dramatic structure’91 of the book, as it were, is represented in Figure 11.1 and in the discussion below. The book opens on a solemn note with the entire first chapter of the Qurʾn (Srat al-Ftiha). After a few preliminary explanations comes a historical part, which exposes the main problem of the book, namely the fact that the Muslim community has been divided into different schools of thought and belief (chapter 1). The historical account breaks off with a lamentation on the weakened state of the Muslim community at the time it was confronted with the challenge of the rising

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Chaps 16–17: refutation of polemics [dénouement]

Chaps 7–11: The prophet Muhammad Chap. 6: Human nature and ethics

The history of Islam’s decline [anticlimax]

Figure 11.1

Chaps 3–5: Proof of God’s existence Chap. 2: Principles of logic [turning point]

The dramatic structure of Rislat al-Tawhd

European powers. Here ‘Abduh’s narrative has reached its anticlimax. Now that the problem has been exposed and the urgency of a new understanding of Islam has been established, ‘Abduh continues with a very sober chapter in which he expounds principles of logic (chapter 2). This is a turning point, insofar as the logical principles become the starting point for a summary of Islamic theology, which proceeds from the proof of God’s existence to the divine attributes, the foundations of ethics, the mission and message of the prophet Muhammad and to the nature of the Qur’n (chapters 3–12). The language of these chapters becomes more and more emphatic from chapter to chapter, preparing the reader for three chapters of a truly novel kind that top ‘Abduh’s carefully constructed edifice: The first of these (chapter 13) is entitled ‘The Islamic Religion, or Islam’. Here, Islam is defined by a catalogue of principles that according to ‘Abduh characterizes the true ‘spirit’ (rh) of the message of Muhammad.92 Then follow two chapters (chapters 14 and 15) which aim at proving that human progress in the future can reach its culmination ‘within Islam’. These chapters are the triumphant antithesis of the first chapter, which detailed the misère of the contemporary Muslim world. At this point, ‘Abduh’s narrative has reached its dramatic climax. What remains is a brief part providing the reader with guidelines of how to defend Islam in polemical discussion (chapters 16–17). Here the imperiled state of contemporary Islam

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is again brought to the readers’ mind. Now, however, the solution to the problem has been made clear, and so the book ends on a hopeful note.

Fusion To what extent did the Risla form part of an intensified mobility of ideas? The most obvious traces of such mobility are the text’s manifold sources. ‘Abduh does not mention any intellectual debt in the Risla, but by comparison one can identify a number of texts that most likely served him as sources.93 The chapter on logic (chapter 2), for example, builds on the works of the North African scholar Muhammad b. Ysuf al-Sans (1435/36–1490),94 while ‘Abduh’s summary on the dogma of the ‘inimitability of the Qurʾn’ (i‘jz al-Qurʾn) (chapter 12) draws on ‘Amr b. Bahr (Ab ‘Uthmn) al-Jhiz (d. 869).95 A passage in which he depicts the crisis of the Muslim community by the allegory of a sick man in need of medicine (chapter 17) bears close resemblance to allegories used by Ab Hmid al-Ghazl (1058–1111) to describe what he perceived as the Muslim predicament of his days.96 Among the European authors to whom ‘Abduh makes indirect reference are liberal and utilitarian thinkers who were much en vogue during the period, most prominently the French Protestant historian François Guizot,97 the pioneer of sociology Auguste Comte and the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Their theses and arguments are skillfully interwoven with theses and arguments made by various Muslim scholarly authorities. A good example is a passage dealing with the evolution of religions (chapter. 13).98 Al-Jhiz, the famous Arab-Muslim author of the eighth century, had stated in his tract ‘The Proofs of Prophecy’ (Hujaj al-nubuwwa) that while Moses had impressed the eyes of the Israelites by the miracle of cleaving the sea, Muhammad had impressed the intellect of his contemporaries by the ‘inimitability’ of the Qur’n.99 Al-Jhiz, and later generations of Muslim scholars after him, then took this comparison further by adding that the idea that God had endowed each prophet with precisely that faculty which was most valued in a particular age and among a particular people. Thus, Moses

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surpassed the magical practices at the Pharaonic court, and Jesus revived people from the dead at a time when medicine was most highly valued. Muhammad, finally, was the prophet of a people who excelled in poetry, and accordingly his prophetic sign was a linguistic one.100 ‘Abduh presents his readers a revised version of al-Jhiz’s argument, whereby he adds a temporal dimension to it and combines it with evolutionary thought in the spirit of Auguste Comte’s ‘law of the three stages’.101 Comte’s model stipulates that humankind develops through three intellectual stages, which he likened to the stages in the development of the individual: a ‘childlike’ theological stage, a ‘youthful’ metaphysical stage and a ‘mature’ positive stage.102 Following Comte’s model, ‘Abduh presents Judaism as a religion fixed on rules as it befits the mind of a child. Then Christianity is introduced as a religion full of ‘youthful’ emotions,103 and finally Islam as a ‘mature’ system of belief and the only one fully compatible with modern science. It must have been truly exciting for ‘Abduh and his circle to see classic arguments apparently being vindicated and filled with new meaning when he combined them with arguments made by scholarly authorities from those powerful and successful countries which were currently gaining control over much of the globe. Obviously, for ‘Abduh, European scholarship possessed an authority as such. Thus, in one passage of the Risla he simply states that ‘Western scholars’ (ahl al-nazar min bild al-gharb) had confirmed his observations about the historical development of Islam.104 Historians, especially François Guizot, were among the foremost authorities for ‘Abduh, who was convinced that history could be used to prove facts of universal validity. Thus, writing about the spread of Islam in its early centuries, ‘Abduh remarks that his argument would be ‘understood by everyone who studies ... those facts on which the historians of this age are in agreement’.105 Taking European thinkers as authorities has a logical foundation in ‘Abduh’s thought. ‘Abduh, similarly to Guizot, firmly believed that the success of a community or nation (umma) rested on its intellectual and moral development or ‘spirit’ (rh).106 In reverse, the fact that a community or nation was successful was a proof for the soundness of its ‘spirit’. Thus, according to this argument, intellectual authorities of the successful European nations were necessarily authorities for all

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humanity, since the soundness of their thought was proven by their nations’ unparalleled success in the modern age, much as the soundness of true Islam was proven by its early successes.107 Yet, evidently the European intellectual scene was not monolithic and one needed to distinguish between those ideas truly linked to success and others that were not. This distinction is not made very clearly in ‘Abduh’s book. However, ‘Abduh indirectly discards some lines of European thought, which according to him could not have anything to do with the success of the European powers. Among them, apparently, are the skeptical philosophy of Empiricism,108 and, most importantly, Christianity109– with the notable exception of Protestantism.110 In sum, Rislat al-Tawhd bears witness to a situation in which the availability of literature enabled authors like ‘Abduh to fuse well-established tropes of classical Muslim scholarship with state-ofthe-art arguments by philosophers and social scientists from modern Europe.111 It testifies to the openness of this historical moment that ‘Abduh felt able to put both traditions of thought into a conversation and to treat his sources on the same level, apparently without being much bothered by the idea that he might be criticized for judging Islam by a ‘foreign’ yardstick.112

Joint development of concepts In another case, such intertextual interaction can be related to personal interaction between ‘Abduh and one of his interlocutors. In Beirut, ‘Abduh was in contact with Isaac Taylor (1829–1901), an Anglican clergyman and noted philologist.113 Reportedly, Taylor became a member of a society established by ‘Abduh during this time, the ‘Society of Friendship and Union’ ( Jam‘iyyat al-Taʾlf wa-l-Taqrb), which was dedicated to fostering understanding and rapprochement between the revealed religions.114 In 1887, Taylor gave a speech at an Anglican Church congress in Wolverhampton, in which he dealt with the competition between Islam and Christianity in Africa. Taylor created much sensation by stating in his speech that Islam needed to be considered a ‘civilizing force’ in Africa and that it was more successful there than Christianity, because it was easier to comprehend.115

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According to the London Times, Taylor stated that Islam’s ‘civilizing effects’ were ‘marvellous’, adding: ‘How little have we to show for the vast sums of money and all the precious lives lavished upon Africa! Christian converts are reckoned by thousands, Moslem converts by millions’. We know that ‘Abduh appreciated many of Taylor’s ideas,116 but he certainly did not share all assertions made by Taylor in this speech. In fact, he was likely to be appalled by other statements which Taylor made in the same speech, for example that Islam was ‘an imperfect Christianity’ and that Africans were more open to Islam than to the ‘more spiritual’ teachings of Christianity because of their ‘low moral and cerebral development’.117 However, some of Taylor’s ideas might have been taken up by ‘Abduh and vice versa. ‘Abduh writes, for instance, in Rislat al-Tawhd that ‘in ten centuries the sword [of the Christians] was unable to lead as many people to the faith as Islam was able to do within less than one century’, even though, ‘the sword did no step in advance without missionaries following it’ with religious ‘zeal’, ‘eloquence’ and ‘money’ to influence ‘the weak’.118 It seems likely that Taylor would not have subscribed to such a general statement and he would have limited his negative assessment of Christian missionary activity to the African case. However, both authors clearly made use of the same figure of thought. In another passage ‘Abduh writes that the human beings’ natural disposition (fitra) lets them ask for religion. This natural disposition also demands that religion is in accordance with their elementary interests. ... A religion of such character finds its way into the hearts and minds, without need for missionaries (du‘t) ... .119 One can hardly avoid the impression that Taylor had these ideas in mind when he stated in his lecture that Islam ‘gave recognition to the fundamental facts of human nature’.120 Taylor also mentions as specific virtues of Islam that it had ‘abolished drunkenness, gambling and prostitution – the three curses of Christian lands’. Only slightly differently, ‘Abduh states in his Risla

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that Islam ‘shut the sources of corruption for spirit and wealth by putting an absolute ban on wine, gambling and usury’.121 Most likely, the similarities between these two texts have their origins in the personal exchange between ‘Abduh and Taylor during the 1880s. Both authors took up arguments developed in the course of their debates and adapted them to their own purposes. Similar to the joint performance of ‘Abduh and Blunt mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, I would like to argue that the parallels between ‘Abduh’s Risla and Taylor’s speech can be regarded as a direct testimony to globalization in Middle Eastern religious thought.

Resonances Finally, Rislat al-Tawhd is replete with references to contemporary concepts and discourses, which, however, cannot be linked to any specific avenue of transfer. Two prominent clusters of such concepts and discourses in the Risla concern time and self-discipline. References to time and time-management can be found interspersed in various chapters of the Risla.122 In addition, several passages of Rislat al-Tawhd show a strong attention to the specificity of historical periods, including ‘Abduh’s own. ‘Asr (‘age’ or ‘period’) is a key term in ‘Abduh’s depiction of Muhammad’s prophethood and message. As in the case of the evolutionary model of religious history mentioned above, ‘Abduh combines an examination of the ‘occasions of revelation’ (asbb al-nuzl), a method of Qur’nic exegesis, with an approach reminiscent of nineteenth-century historicism.123 In this vein, he states repeatedly that Muhammad’s message was directed to the Arab population in his direct vicinity and thus can only properly be understood if one knows the characteristics of their culture and social organization.124 By the same token, he states, only the first generation of Muslims, until about the end of the second caliph’s rule in 644, were able to understand the Qur’n without explanation. Speaking about introductions to Islamic theology which were available in his own time, he remarks that students found them quite incomprehensible, since they were ‘written for a time which was not their own’.125 The ‘spirit of the age’ or ‘zeitgeist’ (rh al-‘asr) also comes in as a factor in ‘Abduh’s

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analysis of Islamic history. He says that ‘zeitgeist’ drove philosophers in the Middle Ages to interfere in the debates among rational theologians, whereby they unwisely upset ‘the souls of the general public (nufs al-kffa)’ with bold statements about their scholarly findings, and provoked a conservative backlash in religious thought.126 The virtue of self-discipline is invoked in the Risla’s chapter on ethics (chapter 6). ‘Abduh provides examples of human actions ‘that stir displeasure in human soul’, whereby he enumerates the following: ‘the uncontrolled movements made by weak minds when in panic, the howling of professional female mourners and the screaming of people tormented by fear’.127 What these images have in common is that they represent unrestrained behavior and the inability to rein in one’s emotions. The Egyptian tradition to have professional mourners at funerals was sharply criticized by many Islamic reformists.128 The particular sensitivity of modern authors towards this topic probably has to do with the fact that the female mourners were seen to represent a number of negative clichés about ‘the Orient’, such as poverty, affected behavior and hypocrisy. The positive counter-image presented by ‘Abduh in the same paragraph emphasizes discipline, professionalism and ‘manliness’: Freely chosen acts provoke the same delight in our soul which is produced by the beauty of creation. Examples for this are the movements of a well-trained military unit, the skillful twists of those who practice those games that we call ‘gymnastics’ today, or the expert interpretation of the rules of music in the melodies of a masterly singer.129 Here ‘Abduh clearly has recourse to cultural ideals of the urban bourgeoisie. Unintentional emotional movements contrast with military discipline and skillfully controlled bodies, and the wailing of female mourners with the performance of a professional male singer. ‘Abduh’s ideal is that of the physically strong, psychically stable, well-disciplined and robust man, similar to the images in which many political activists worldwide liked to describe the nations or movements they adhered to.130 Conversely, they often described those they wanted to

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dissociate themselves from, be they marginalized groups, military foes or colonized societies, with images of physical weakness and femininity.131 The positive image of sports was more than a literary trope for ‘Abduh. As he himself reported in an autobiographical sketch, he enjoyed horse riding and shooting in his youth,132 and his pupil Mustaf ‘Abd al-Rziq mentions that ‘Abduh practiced sports up to old age.133 The fact that military discipline134 is mentioned first in this list ties in with other parts of Rislat al-Tawhd, which invoke the struggle for existence as constitutive to every aspect of life. Characteristically, ‘Abduh mentions as the first task of the sensory apparatus of any living being ‘to be able to use them for the maintenance of its existence and to assert itself against its enemies’.135 ‘Abduh’s depiction of the struggle for survival as the prime fact in human existence is close to the thought of Herbert Spencer, who coined the expression ‘the survival of the fittest’.136 In conclusion, this brief foray into the conceptual world of Rislat al-Tawhd has shown that the text advocates ideas and notes practices that were becoming more prevalent across the globe during the late nineteenth century, especially among the urban bourgeoisies. Among them is a moralistic strand emphasizing self-cultivation and self-improvement, next to a strand of statements extolling strength and masculinity.

Between convergence and competition: re-imagining Islam as a world religion Like many of his contemporaries around the world, ‘Abduh considered religious problems in a global perspective. Several religious thinkers of the nineteenth century advanced the idea that all religions shared one true essence and would be united one day. Among the foremost proponents of this idea were the new religious movements of the Baha’i and the Theosophical Society. ‘Abduh was in touch with both of them,137 and he seems to have shared their belief that humanity would eventually be unified by one religion. In particular, he was convinced that a very far-reaching convergence already existed between Islam and some forms of Protestantism. In a chapter of Rislat al-Tawhd devoted to Islamic history (chapter 15), he writes that

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... a group arose from among them [i.e. the European Christians] which called for reform (islh) and for taking religion back to its original simplicity (sadhja). Some reformist sects (tawʾif al-islh f l-‘aqʾid) have indeed reached articles of faith that agree with those of Islam. ... What they [these Protestant groups] believe, distinguishes them from Islam only by name and by certain rituals, but not by meaning.138 Here, Protestantism is represented simply by the term islh. Thereby it becomes almost indistinguishable from Islamic reform, for which ‘Abduh and his circle used the same term.139 ‘Abduh’s conviction about the closeness between Protestantism and Islam had probably grown in his exchange with Isaac Taylor in Beirut during the 1880s.140 According to Taylor’s account of these conversations, ‘Abduh had come to the conclusion that the day would soon come when there would emerge ‘one pure faith which all will be able to accept’.141 Taylor’s above-mentioned speech of 1887 provides evidence that he shared these ideas to some extent. At the same time, a concept of several co-existing ‘world religions’ emerged, which were defined as competitive missionary religions on a global scale, in contradistinction with folk or local religions.142 Islam was relatively well equipped for such competition. Already the Qur’n contains a terminology for comparison between various religious communities.143 Judaism, Christianity and Islam here are both referred to by the Arabic term dn, a term, which can generally be translated as ‘religion’.144 In his Risla, ‘Abduh uses ‘religion’ (dn) in three different ways: first, religion as an empirical phenomenon that is elaborated within particular societies and that has various manifestations in time and space; second, religion as the true monotheist faith that was preached by all monotheist prophets and found its final confirmation in the message of Muhammad; and finally, religion as an ‘anthropological constant’, complementary to reason. The first aspect of the term dn in the text, the existing plurality of religions, appears as an unquestionable fact throughout the text. ‘Abduh several times describes Islam as one religion among others. Thus he writes about Islam: ‘This religion (dn) began with propagation (da‘wa),

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as did other religions’,145 and later he mentions ‘freedom of religion in the countries of Islam’.146 Elsewhere, even ‘people without religion’ are mentioned.147 Each religion has ‘religious authorities’ that intend ‘to protect and to promote’ it.148 In these passages, dn appears as a neutral overarching category, which allows for comparison between different religious traditions. This use of the term dn is equivalent to the common use of ‘religion’ in contemporary European usage. As we know from Osman Amin’s description of ‘Abduh’s library, ‘Abduh was certainly aware of the main scholarly positions on religion during his period. For example, he possessed a book by the British anthropologist James George Frazer (1854–1941),149 most probably The Golden Bough (1890), which had a defining influence on scholarly debates on religion and which, incidentally, presented the historical development of religion modeled according Comte’s three-stage law.150 The idea of a true essence of all monotheist faiths is an old and well-established trope in Islamic apologetics. In polemical texts, Jews and Christians are often charged with ‘distortion’ (tahrf) of the original message. In contrast, Islam is portrayed as the final and perfect embodiment of this essential religion. It is in this vein that ‘Abduh writes: ‘The Qur’n came and took religion by a new road’151 and that ‘for the first time religion and reason fraternized in a holy book proclaimed by a God-sent prophet’.152 Both a comparative and an exclusivist concept of religion had existed side by side in Islamic literature since its inception.153 However, as we have seen, ‘Abduh departs from the line of classical apologetics by conceding that Islam, too, has suffered from decline, which has obscured its true ‘spirit’ (rh). In a second step of the same argument he argues that Islam’s ‘spirit’ enlightened the European nations by helping the Protestant reformation to overcome the obstacles to intellectual development posed by the Catholic Church. ‘Abduh’s idea of a timeless ‘spirit’ of true religion might have been inspired by the concept of a timeless ‘civilization’ advanced by François Guizot, who likewise assumed that this quintessential ‘civilization’ was handed down throughout history, while various regions and nations were at its forefront at various periods.154

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Finally, there is the third aspect of the term dn in Rislat al-Tawhd, religion as an ‘anthropological constant’, i.e. the idea that religion is a basic characteristic of human existence.155 ‘Abduh introduces this concept by posing the provocative question whether reason could not entirely replace religion. Reason, answers ‘Abduh, can lead humankind a long way towards happiness, but reason alone is not enough to attain this goal. He continues to define religion as ‘a general “sense” which helps to discover those among the means of happiness which are hidden to reason’.156 This understanding of dn as a ‘sense’ inherent in every human being, betrays a notion of belief as an individual interiorized experience. This becomes even more obvious in another passage, which gives revelation (‘irfn) an interior sense. ‘Abduh writes: ‘For our purposes, we define revelation as such knowledge that man finds in himself, together with the utter certainty that it stems from God’.157 These passages resonate with what Reinhard Schulze calls, with regard to the nineteenth-century Protestant notion of religion, ‘a definition of belief as interiorized experience with unconditional certainty’.158 Do we also find such resonances with regard to the two other characteristics of religion according to the ‘Protestant template’– ‘the reinterpretation of statutory law as practical ethics’ and ‘the conceptual separation of belief and history’?159 With regard to Islamic revealed law (al-shar‘a al-islmiyya), ‘Abduh writes that, apart from giving certain prescriptions on how to worship God (‘ibdt),160 it only ‘confirmed’ what man was able to discover himself.161 Otherwise, in the Risla, ethical issues are developed within an argumentative framework grounded in what ‘Abduh calls ‘rational intuition’ (badhat al-‘aql), not divine commandments.162 Judaism, in contrast, is portrayed as a religion based exclusively on divine commandments, which need to be blindly followed. This resonates with Kant’s description of Judaism, according to which Judaism was a collection of ‘merely statutory laws’.163 As we have seen, ‘Abduh dismissed this type of religion by arguing that it represented a ‘child-like’ stage of morality which did not befit the modern age.164 Is there also an idea of a separation of belief and history in ‘Abduh’s Risla? ‘Abduh’s position seems ambiguous here. His above-mentioned idea that the soundness of true Islam is

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proven by its early successes seems to rule out such a separation. On the other hand, there is the fact that ‘Abduh, while making much recourse to history in his Risla, never mentions a direct link between the prophet and contemporary Muslims through the faithful transmission of hadiths, as classical Islamic scholarship does.165 Early Islamic history has exemplary character for ‘Abduh, but by way of providing his Muslim contemporaries with examples showing how Islam, rightly understood, brought the Muslims success and prosperity. However, he does not describe early Islam as an age of a particularly virtuous Muslim community, as do advocates of a ‘golden age’ of early Islam.166 In fact, his chapter on the historical development of Islam (chap. 2) shows that internal controversies and civil strife set in already shortly after the death of Muhammad.167 In sum, the term dn in ‘Abduh’s Risla indeed denotes a concept which bears close resemblance to the ‘Protestant template’ of religion.168

Islam as a charter of principles Despite ‘Abduh’s vision of a convergence between Christianity and Islam, questions of identity and boundary-drawing were also part of ‘Abduh’s thought. In order to have an ‘identity’ of its own, a religion does need clear boundaries and some degree of internal integration. While classical Muslim authors would have referred to the consensus (ijm‘) of the scholars as a guarantor of integration, ‘Abduh repeatedly tries to identify beliefs that are shared among all Muslims, no matter where they live and what specific rite or creed they adhere to. In this context he repeatedly uses formulas such as: ‘It is testified by all Muslims that ... (tuqarrar bayna l-muslimn kffatan)’.169 Unity is no longer a responsibility of religious authorities but a matter of consensus between the believers. In order to understand the centrality of this idea in ‘Abduh’s Risla, it is worthwhile to take another look at the dramatic structure of the book (see fig. 11.1). The way ‘Abduh dramatizes his subject underscores the paramount value of unity. After describing the imperiled state of the contemporary Muslim world community (chapter 1), he reconstructs the edifice of Islamic theology (chapters

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2–12) and tops it with an enumeration of abstract principles that all Muslims should be able to agree to (chapter 13). Among them are: Human beings are responsible for their deeds170 and free from all bondage except to God;171 Islam is opposed to prejudices and racism of any kind;172 there is no way to salvation but to strive for the betterment of this world.173 ‘Abduh suggests that not only every Muslim, but ‘every human being endowed with a sound mind’,174 should be able to follow the path of knowledge described in his book and thus accept these principles consciously and wholeheartedly. If they would do so, ‘Abduh is convinced, all historically accreted religious hierarchies will become meaningless and ‘true Islam’ will become a historical reality again. Thereby the foundations of an individualized idea of religion are laid. Each Muslim can now ‘own’ his or her creed without being subject to the interpretation of religious authorities, and at the same time he or she can feel a member of a Muslim world community.

The Muslim world: rediscovery of the peripheries How does ‘Abduh portray Islam as a historical phenomenon in physical space? ‘Abduh does not elaborate this aspect systematically in his Risla, but several passing remarks give an insight into his worldview. The term ‘Muslim world’ (al-‘lam al-islm) occurs only once in the treatise.175 More frequent is the notion of ‘the Muslim lands’ (bild al-Islm).176 Even more common is ‘the Muslim community’ (al-umma) or simply ‘the Muslims’ (al-muslimn). What all these concepts have in common is that they can be understood both in social and in geographical terms. ‘Abduh’s ‘Muslim world’, understood in geographical terms, has several important political and religious centers, such as Mecca, Medina and the ancient caliphal capitals Damascus and Baghdad. These, however, are mentioned only on a few occasions. Instead, the author often directs his readers’ attention to the periphery. Thus he remarks that communities stemming from the Khrij movement of the first century of Islam were still to be found ‘in some African regions and in a part of the Arabian Peninsula’. Later, he writes that the theological teachings of al-Ash‘ar (d. 324/935–6) prevailed

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in most of the medieval Muslim world after fierce disputes, and that only a few opponent groups, most notably the Hanbals, were left ‘in the margins of the Muslim lands’ (f atrf al-bild al-islmiyya).177 This indirectly groups the Hanbals’ historical stronghold – the Arabian Peninsula, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina178 – among the ‘marginal’ parts of the Muslim world. In general, ‘Abduh gives much attention to the Muslim world beyond the Arab countries. As virtually everything in ‘Abduh’s book is presented with an educational aim in mind, it seems significant that on several occasions he explicitly praises non-Arab Muslims for their virtues. Thus he states that they adopted Islam early on in great numbers and out of ‘conviction’ and that they ‘served it with greater zeal than the Arabs themselves’.179 In ‘Abduh’s presentation, the non-Arab population groups who converted to Islam during the first centuries are given the status of witnesses to the universality of Islam’s message. He mentions that ‘despite its neglect by Muslims ... the spread of Islam, especially in China and Africa proceeded relentlessly’.180 He continues: After only a little time had passed one saw great groups belonging to various peoples adopting its teachings, in full consciousness ... , simply from reflection on its teachings and a little intellectual engagement with its laws. From this you may learn that the speed of the spread of the Islamic religion and its reception through people from every religious community was rooted in its easy comprehensibility, the simplicity of its rules and the justice of its laws.181 It was the people ‘outside the center’ of the great inner-Muslim controversies, ‘Abduh writes, ‘the people of Persia, the Syrian lands, of Egypt and North Africa’,182 who at the time of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) sustained Islam and helped to work out the foundations of Islamic theology and law. ‘Abduh continues to say that al-Hasan al-Basr (642–728), one of the luminaries of early Islam mentioned in the historical chapter of the Risla, collected these converts in ‘a study circle in Basra, to which students came from far and wide’.183 It seems quite likely that ‘Abduh himself identified with this mission and that he intended to encourage his Arab readers to take notice of the other parts of the Muslim world.

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It is noteworthy that ‘Abduh does not claim a special role for the Arab people within the Islamic oecumene. This sets him apart from contemporary Muslim reformists in Syria, such as ‘Abd al-Rahmn al-Kawkib (1849–1902) or Jaml al-Dn al-Qsim (1866–1914), and also from the Salafiyya movement of the 1920s, to both of which he is often linked.184 In conclusion, ‘Abduh’s attention to the peripheries of the Muslim world – which is also documented in his travels through North Africa and in his above-mentioned plan to travel to Muslim communities throughout Asia – appear to be a novel phenomenon. Apparently it was part of a strategy to gain a more comprehensive vision of the Muslim world.

Islam and its others When ‘Abduh moves to the history of the early Islamic empires in Rislat al-Tawhd, the Muslim world is often defined in contrast to its neighbors or invaders. Thus, in a short passage, the Mongol invasion under Genghis Khan is mentioned as an attack on ‘the Muslim lands’.185 As ‘Abduh moves on to the conflict between Muslims and Crusaders in the Eastern Mediterranean, Christian Europe becomes the defining other of the Muslim world. In these passages, the ‘East’ or ‘Orient’ (al-sharq) stands for the destiny of all Muslims, while Africa and Southeast Asia move out of sight. ‘Abduh writes that ‘the West’–i.e. the Crusaders–‘undertook a campaign against the Orient’ and continues to say that the wars between ‘Westerners and Orientals (al-gharbyn wa-l-sharqyn)’ endured for more than two hundred years.186 The pre-modern Christian world is referred to as religiously intolerant, whereas the Muslim world is described as a safe haven of religious freedom. ‘Abduh writes that ‘the fame of religious freedom in the Muslim lands was so great that the Jews migrated, together with their religion, from Europe to Andalusia and other Muslim countries’.187 Here, the text adopts the terminology of contemporary political debates. While the parts of the Risla on the earlier centuries show a desire to integrate the peripheries, here we see the tendency of boundary-drawing at work, partitioning the world into an Islamic Orient and a Christian West.

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However, ‘Abduh does not use ‘East’ and ‘West’ in any passage dealing with his own period. In such passages, the ‘West’ is substituted by ‘Europe’ (rp [sic]).188 European imperialism and colonialism are not mentioned in the book. Only two of their intellectual underpinnings, anti-Islamic stereotypes and racism, are referred to in the book’s apologetic parts (especially chapters 16–17). In ‘Abduh’s view, Europe was the ‘repository of modern civilization’189 and the world’s hope. He was convinced that if the Europeans would acknowledge that Islam was the real cause of their ascent to freedom, wealth and power, a great dialectical process would come to its logical conclusion.

The promise of globalization Globalization obviously carried the dual promise for ‘Abduh that old cleavages within the Muslim world community as well as between the religions could be overcome. It needs to be stressed that ‘Abduh does not take much time to explain what held the Muslim world together, except common fundamentals of belief. The two great unifying institutions of the Muslim world community, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina and the Caliphate, which captured the attention of other contemporary Arabic authors,190 are mentioned several times in the Risla. However, they are not explicitly presented as unifying factors. With his vision of a unifying world, ‘Abduh could feel in accordance with those of Europe’s early social scientists who expected a further integration of the world under the auspices of bourgeois societies and liberal democracy. ‘Abduh expected growing individual demands and, resulting from them, an economic division of labor to be the driving forces of a nascent world society: Species doubt, each member of any community is dependent on the other members. As the individual’s demands in respect to his standard of living are growing, so is his dependence on the work of others. Thus grow the demands, and in their wake the social ties, from the family to the tribe, then to the nation and to the species as a whole. Our present shows clearly that these ties ... have already embraced the entire species.191

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However, ‘Abduh continues, ‘[t]his demand exists first and foremost among the nations and especially among those that truly merit this name, and it creates ties and relations which distinguish them from other nations’.192 This statement betrays a tension between a cosmopolitan paradigm on the one hand, and a nationalist paradigm on the other. While the cosmopolitan paradigm considers every human being as part of one global family, the nationalist paradigm emphasizes differences between human collectives and establishes a ranking between nations which ‘truly merit the name’, and those which do so only to lesser degrees. This paradox reflects the discourse of contemporary international law, according to which countries had rights only if powerful European states recognized them as being ‘civilized’ enough to belong to the ‘Family of Nations’.193 In other words, one could only become a member of world society through membership in a recognized nation. In a more abstract perspective, it may be said that such passages in Rislat al-Tawhd support both tendencies of integration and differentiation, which were simultaneously at work in the globalizing world of the late nineteenth century.194

Conclusion For Muhammad ‘Abduh, the period of the first modern globalization was a most crucial one for Islam and the world at large. ‘Abduh perceived the Muslim lands of his time in a situation of a most fundamental misère, but at the same time the apparent possibilities of the new age inspired him to millenarist expectations.195 He was not alone in such expectations in his period. They resonate with Hegel’s notion that the ‘aim of history’ had realized itself in his own lifetime,196 Comte’s conviction that his generation had reached the culmination of human intellectual evolution197 and Marx’s idea that he was witnessing the ‘closing chapter of the prehistoric stage’ in the history of mankind.198 For ‘Abduh, the ‘aim of history’ certainly had not yet been reached as long as Islam had not found its rightful place as the moral guiding principle of the modern world. However, he assumed this stage to be imminent.199 Not everything in ‘Abduh’s thought was new or a direct comment on the specific circumstances of the period in which he lived.200 However,

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it can be stated with confidence that Rislat al-Tawhd is a testimony to a turning point in the history of the Middle East, inasmuch as a growing number of people now began to perceive themselves as part of a grand narrative with its culmination in Europe,201 for the time being, and with the perspective of a future culmination in a new sort of world society.202 Simultaneously, a growing part of the population understood itself as forming part of a global struggle in which Islam had to fight for survival, and this feeling also finds its expression in several passages of ‘Abduh’s Risla.203 The first wave of modern globalization helped to create a universal repertoire of intellectual concepts during the late nineteenth century – and thus far earlier than is often asserted.204 However, Europe’s role as ‘first exemplar and controller of modernity’, as Christopher Bayly puts it,205 seemed so overpowering to many that for critics and apologetics of Europe alike, ‘Westernization’ seemed to describe the situation most aptly. However, seen from today’s vantage point, the Westernization paradigm is too simplistic and too narrow to grasp the complex web of intellectual transfers leading to an increasing entanglement between the Middle East and the wider world. Instead, it seems more fruitful to think in terms of an emerging global public sphere, which was constituted by the rapidly increasing mobility of people and texts, promoted by individuals such as ‘Abduh, and consolidated by institutions such as modern-style educational institutions, publishing houses, journals and newspapers. Elements from the shared repertoire of ideas were integrated in the conceptual toolboxes of individual writers in various ways. In religious discourses, the same elements could be used to propagate both a convergence of religions and a sharpening of boundaries, be they religious, national or cultural. In Muhammad ‘Abduh’s ‘kaleidoscopic intellectual universe’,206 the two tendencies were present. His Risla presents Islam, on the one hand, as a quintessential ‘religion’ according to the Protestant template with the perspective of a convergence with a reformed Christianity. On the other hand, the book portrays Islam as an empirically existing ‘world religion’, which stands in a global competition and must assert itself through a clearer definition of its identity. The tension between these two perspectives seems unresolved.

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The examination of Rislat al-Tawhd has allowed us to describe two modes of the transference of ideas on the micro level. The first mode is the fusion of concepts and arguments from the Islamic tradition with other contents, as seen in the passage on the evolution of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The second avenue of transfer is the joint development of concepts through personal interaction, as in the case of ‘Abduh’s and Taylor’s exchange on Christianity and Islam. In addition to these we have identified passages which resonate with global discourses, but which cannot be linked to any specific way of transfer. Finally, the globalization perspective helps to formulate a number of desiderata for future research. Most importantly, the many local and individual processes that constitute globalization need to be traced in their concrete courses. So far, the idea that a universal repertoire of concepts for describing religion emerged from the 1870s onward remains a hypothesis. Comparative studies of other scholars would be needed to test this assumption. A closer examination of ‘Abduh’s library might also reveal more of his sources, especially from the Islamic tradition, perhaps also from the generations of scholars immediately before him, about whom we know very little. The transfers between various centers of intellectual productions within and beyond the Middle East also need a more careful reconstruction. Likewise, many of the hypotheses advanced here, based on the study of one text, need to be tested on a broader scale of literature. So far, we know much more on transfers from Europe to the Middle East than vice versa. It seems likely that future work, taking the globalization perspective seriously, will discover more intellectual transfers going from the Middle East to Europe, such as Taylor’s speech of 1887, which transported several of ‘Abduh’s ideas to Wolverhampton and, through the press, to a wide English reading public. In addition, almost the entire dimensions of transfers within the Middle East, and between the Middle East and the non-European world, still wait to be discovered.

Notes 1. I would like to thank the editors as well as Ammeke Kateman, Astrid Meier and Fruma Zachs for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapters.

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2. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Gordon at Khartoum: Being a Personal Narrative of Events in Continuation of ‘A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt’ (London, 1911), p.272. For more details see Mark J. Sedgwick, Muhammad ʿAbduh (Oxford, 2010), pp.46–7. 3. For the concept of the ‘performance of authenticity,’ see David Grazian, ‘Demystifying authenticity in the sociology of culture’, in John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff and Ming-Cheng Lo (eds) Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Abingdon, 2010), pp.191–200. 4. For biographies of ʿAbduh see Muhammad Rashd Rid, Trkh al-ustdh al-imm al-shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh, second edition, 3 vols. (Cairo, 1908); Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt: A Study of the Modern Reform Movement Inaugurated by Muhammad ʿAbduh (London, 1933); Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh. 5. By this I mean the rapidly increasing mobility of people, goods and ideas, which began in the 1860s. This wave of increasing global interconnectedness was not the first one in history. It is called ‘modern’ here because it was the first wave to occur during the modern age. For a more elaborate definition of ‘globalization’ see the introduction to this volume. 6. On the concept of cultural transfers, see Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Transfer und Vergleich im Fernverhältnis’, in Hartmut Kaelble (ed), Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geistes-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), pp.439–68. 7. Hereafter quoted as RT, translated into English as Muhammad ʿAbduh, The Theology of Unity, transl. Ishaq Masaʿad and Kenneth Cragg (London, 1966). 8. For examples of works following these paradigms, see H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East (London, 1950–57); Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jaml ad-Dn ‘al-Afghn’ (Berkeley, 1968), p.43; Gunnar Hasselblatt, ‘Herkunft und Auswirkungen der Apologetik Muhammad ʿAbduhs (1849– 1905), untersucht an seiner Schrift: Islam und Christentum im Verhältnis zu Wissenschaft und Zivilisation’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Göttingen, 1968), pp.7–164; Dietmar Rothermund, Aneignung und Selbstbehauptung: Antworten auf die europäische Expansion (Munich, 1999). 9. For examples of such voices in the Arabic Islamic journal al-Manr, see Stéphane A. Dudoignon et al. (eds), Intellectuals in the Modern Islamic World: Transmission, Transformation, Communication (Abingdon, 2006), index, p. 372, headword ‘Westernization’. This shared discourse of academic scholars and Islamic intellectuals is similar to the shared discourse on the ‘modern essentialist image of Islam’ as it has been reconstructed by Dietrich Jung. See

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

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Dietrich Jung, Orientalists, Islamists and the Global Public Sphere: A Genealogy of the Modern Essentialist Image of Islam (Sheffield, 2011). Christoph Schumann, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed), Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean: Late Nineteenth Century until the 1960s (Leiden, 2008), p.9. Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, 2004), pp.20, 336; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009), pp.1239–44; Reinhard Schulze, ‘Islam und Judentum im Angesicht der Protestantisierung der Religionen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit (eds), Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts (Munich, 2010), p.139. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p.10. Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, p.1240. See Schulze, ‘Protestantisierung’, pp.139, 148. Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization: Time, space and homogeneity-heterogeneity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London, 1995), pp.25–44. I would like to thank Fruma Zachs for pointing me to this reference. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p.12. For a succinct definition of ‘bourgeoisie’ see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), p.37 n.1. For a comparative global survey of bourgeoisies or ‘middle classes’ in the nineteenth century, see Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, pp.1079–104. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.325, 334. Ibid., pp.325–9, 363. On openness towards the sciences as a criterion for ‘religious modernity’ see Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, p.1272. On the worldwide spread of middle class values during the nineteenth century, see ibid, pp.1085–104. For a succinct list of typical elements of a nineteenth-century middle class worldview, see John L. Comaroff, ‘Images of empire, contests of conscience: models of colonial domination in South Africa’, in Tensions of Empire, pp.169–70. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.330–1. For some remarks on the emergence of this concept, see Hans-Michael Haußig, Der Religionsbegriff in den Religionen: Studien zum Selbst- und Religionsverständnis in Hinduismus, Buddhismus, Judentum und Islam (Berlin, 1999), pp.50–4. Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, p.1243. Peter Beyer, Religion and Globalization (London, 1994); idem, ‘The modern emergence of religions and a global social system for religion’, International

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

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Sociology 132 (1998), pp.151–72; idem, Religion and Global Society (London, 2006). Jung, Orientalists, pp.88–93. Schulze, ‘Protestantisierung’, p.149. Ibid, p.139. Religion thus is one of the large number of notions that were invented or redefined during what Reinhard Koselleck has identified as the ‘saddle period’ (Sattelzeit) for modern social and political concepts in Europe. See Reinhard Koselleck, ‘Einleitung,’ in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhard Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 2004), vol. 1, p.xv. My summary of Schulze’s argument. In Muhammad ʿAbduh’s case, however, independent reading was supplemented by personal interaction with several European scholars and intellectuals. On the example of Isaac Taylor, see below. On the relatively late introduction of print technology in the Middle East, see Lutz Berger, ‘Die Problematik der späten Einführung des Buchdrucks in der islamischen Welt’, in Ulrich Marzolph (ed), Das gedruckte Buch im Vorderen Orient (Dortmund, 2002), pp.15–28. Dana Sajdi rightfully criticizes several ways in which the effects of print technology per se have been overrated in the historiography of the Middle East as well as in Europe. See Dana Sajdi, ‘Print and its discontents: A case for pre-print journalism and other sundry print matters’, The Translator 15:1 (2006), pp.105–38. As shown by Ayalon in this volume, it was the combined effect of mass print, mass schooling and new transportation technology during the period of the first modern globalization, which eventually led to far-reaching changes of the conditions for intellectual production in the Middle East. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu: kritisch betrachtet (Tübingen, 1838– 9); French: La vie de Jésu, ou éxamen critique de son histoire, transl. Emile Littré (Paris, 1839 [vol. 1] and 1853 [vol.2]); English: The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined, transl. George Eliot (London, 1846). Osman Amin reports that Strauss’ book formed part of ʿAbduh’s posthumous library (Osman Amin, Muhammad Abduh, essai sur ses idées philosophiques et religieuses [Cairo, 1944], p.34). On the attractiveness of Strauss’ thought for ʿAbduh, see Jung, Orientalists, p.230. See, for example, Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The GraecoArabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbsid Society (2nd– 4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London, 1998). ‘The Grand Mufti of Egypt to Count Leo Tolstoi, Ain Shems ... , April 8th, 1904’, in Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of

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35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

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Events 1888–1914 (New York, 1922), p.437. For a reproduction of the letter’s original Arabic version see Rid, Trkh, vol. 2, p.547. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). While Anderson describes national imagined communities replacing religious ones (ibid., pp.12–22), both coexisted parallel to each other, and as a rule, nationalist reading communities were dwarfed by much larger circles of people consuming religious literature (Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.333, 357; Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, p.1277). On the emergence of mass printing in the Middle East, see Ayalon in this volume. For a selection in chronological order, see Max Horten, ‘Muhammad Abduh 1905 †: Sein Leben und seine theologisch-philosophische Gedankenwelt. Eine Studie zu den Reformbestrebungen im modernen Ägypten’, Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Orients 13 (1915), pp.85–114 and ibid, 14 (1916), pp.74–128; Adams, Islam and Modernism; Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1962; 2nd ed. 1983); Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh. For an overview of the literature see Anke von Kügelgen, ʿAbduh, Muhammad’, Encyclopedia of Islam 3 , accessed 1 July 2013. Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp.vii-ix (preface to the 1983 reissue); Mohamed Haddad, ‘Relire Muhammad ʿAbduh (à propos de l’article ‘M. ʿAbduh’ dans l’Encyclopédie de l’Islam)’, IBLA 63 (2000), pp.61–84; Henri Lauzière, ‘The construction of the Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the perspective of conceptual history’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010), pp.369–89. See for example, Andreas H. E. Kemke, Stiftungen im muslimischen Rechtsleben des neuzeitlichen Ägypten: Die schariatrechtlichen Gutachten (Fatwas) von Muhammad ʿAbduh (st. 1905) zum Wakf (Frankfurt am Main, 1991); Malcolm H. Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida (Berkeley, 1966); Jacob Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: Muftis and Fatwas of the Dar al-Ifta (Leiden, 1997). Horten, ‘Muhammad Abduh: Sein Leben und seine theologisch-philosophische Gedankenwelt’; Mohamed Haddad, ‘Essai de critique de la raison théologique: l’exemple de M. ʿAbduh’ (PhD diss. Sorbonne, 1994); Thomas Hildebrandt, ‘Waren Gamal ad-Din al-Afghani und Muhammad Abduh Neo-Muʿtaziliten?’, Die Welt des Islams 42:2 (2004), pp.207–62. Oliver Scharbrodt, ‘The Salafiyya and Sufism: Muhammad ʿAbduh and his Rislat al-Wridt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations)’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70:1 (2007), pp.89–115.

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42. Lauzière, ‘The construction of the Salafiyya’. 43. Elie Kedourie, Afghani and ʿAbduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London, 1966); Werner Ende, ‘Waren amladdn al-Af n und Muhammad ‘Abduh Agnostiker?’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, Supplement 1 (1969), pp.650–9. 44. I use the adjective ‘reformist’ here to describe a general orientation towards renewal of religious practice and social order in light of an idea of progress. ‘Islamic’ is taken here to describe ʿAbduh’s approach of mobilizing various resources from the patrimony of Islamic literature with the ambition to provide guidance to his contemporaries. In other words, ʿAbduh was not only a Muslim thinker, but also an Islamic thinker, who re-imagined Islam as a totality in an era that created grounds for talking about religion in terms of commonality and spirituality. On the distinction between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamic’, see Gudrun Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik: Reflexionen zeitgenössischer Muslime zu Islam, Demokratie und Menschenrechten (Baden-Baden, 1999), p.32. 45. I do not use the term ‘Islamic modernist,’ because it raises the association of Catholic modernism. For a critical survey of the genealogy of the scholarly concept of ‘Islamic modernism’, see Itzhak Weismann, ‘The sociology of “Islamic modernism”: Muhammad ʿAbduh, the national public sphere and the colonial state’, The Maghreb Review 32:1 (2007), pp.104–21, esp. p.107. 46. The reception history of Rislat al-Tawhd still needs to be written. The book has continuously been reedited and reprinted from 1897 until today. For a selection of translations into other languages, see Muhammad ʿAbduh [Cheikh Mohammed Abdou], Rissalat al Tawhid: Exposé de la religion musulmane, transl. Bernard Michel and Moustapha Abdel Razik (Paris, 1925) [French]; idem, The Theology of Unity, transl. Ishaq Masaʿad and Kenneth Cragg (London, 1966) [English]; idem, Risalah Tauhid, transl. H. Firdaus (Jakarta, 1975) [Bahasa Indonesia]; idem, Tevhîd Rislesi, transl. Sabri Hizmetli (Ankara, 1986) [Turkish]. According to Rashd Rid, an Urdu translation of the book was used as a textbook in Islamic educational institutions in India, among the famous college of Aligarh. See Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.101. 47. Here one needs to point to ʿAbduh’s mystical tract Rislat al-Wridt and his commentary on al-j’s al-ʿAqʾid al-‘Adudiyya. Both works still await scholarly attention. For an argument in this direction see Haddad, ‘Relire Muhammad Abduh’. 48. RT, 2. 49. Most prominently Al-Taʿlqt ʿal sharh al-Dawn li-l-ʿAqʾid al-ʿAdudiyya (Glosses on Dawn’s Commentary on the ʿAqʾid al-ʿAdudiyya), published

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51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

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as Muhammad ʿAbduh, Al-Shaykh Muhammad ʿAbduh bayna l-falsifa wa-l-kalmyn, 2 vols. (Cairo, 1958); Rislat al-wridt f sirr al-tajalliyyt (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations), published as Muhammad ʿAbduh, Risalat al-waridat fi nazariyyat al-mutakallimin wa-l-ṣfiyya fi l-falsafa al-ilhiyya; wa-yalh al-ʿaqda al-Muhammadiyya, second edition (Cairo, [1925]). For Rislat al-Wridt, see Oliver Scharbrodt, ‘The Salafiyya and Sufism: Muhammad ‘Abduh and his Risalat al-Waridat (Treatise on Mystical Inspirations)’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70 (2007), 89–115. Many collections of Prophetic Traditions (Hadith) contain a chapter devoted to the rihla f talab al-ʿilm. See for example Ab Dwd, Sunan (Beirut, n.d.), vol. 3, p.317. On Abduh’s initiation see Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.4–5. On the Madaniyya see F. de Jong, ‘Madaniyya’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 5, pp.948–9. The order’s role in Abduh’s intellectual biography needs further study. A recent study of Murtad al-Zabd (1732–91), a prominent scholar of the late eighteenth century, provides a case in point (Stefan Reichmuth, The World of Murtad al-Zabd: Life, Networks and Writings [Cambridge, 2009]). Zabd’s personal ties encompassed scholars and friends between Fes in the West, the Volga region in the north, India in the East and Aden in the south. The majority of them travelled to Cairo to meet him there (ibid, pp.149–222; map opposite p.170). The networks and scholarly interests of Zabd and ʿAbduh would make a good comparison across periods, as both scholars were based in Cairo. An indirect connection between the two is the fact that Zabd’s dictionary, Tj al-ʿArs was published by one of ʿAbduh’s disciples, Ibrhm al-Muwaylih (Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.211). Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.65. The condition of the Egyptian exiles in Beirut and Syria is described in a travelogue by one of Abduh’s Egyptian pupils, Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawwd al-Qayt. See Muhammad ʿAbd al-Jawwd al-Qayt, Nafhat al-bashm f rihlat al-Shm (Cairo, 1319/1901). Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.46–7. Trkh, vol. 2, pp.421–58; ibid, vol. 3, p.84. See Rashid Bencheneb, ‘Le séjour du šayh Muhammad ʿAbduh en Algérie ˘ (1903)’, Studia Islamica 53 (1981), pp.121–35. Al-Manr, vol. 8, p.896, cited from Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.91. ‘Abduh also planned to write a history textbook (Al-Manr, vol. 8, p.899, cited from Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.91). The project of a book-length study of the history and present conditions of contemporary Muslims is alluded to in RT, p.128. These plans did not materialize before ʿAbduh’s early death.

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58. Al-Manr, vol. 8, p.465, cited from Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.67; Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.76–7, 101. 59. See Andreas Tunger-Zanetti, La communication entre Tunis at Istanbul 1860– 1913: province et métropole (Paris, 1996). 60. On Beirut’s Madrasa Sultniyya see Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, 2005), pp.171–8; Sedgwick, Muhammad ʿAbduh, p.60. 61. See Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut, pp.174–7. Mark Sedgwick suspects that Hammda Bey was in fact ʿAbduh’s brother-in-law in Beirut (Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, complementary ‘Source notes’ in www.abduh.info, accessed 10 February 2010; printed in chap. 5, n.6 of the AUC Press edition of Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh). However, this seems entirely unlikely as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, in his published diaries, refers several times to Hammda Bey Abduh (see Blunt, Diaries, pp.35, 40–1). Blunt also mentions that Hammda Bey worked in the legal profession (ibid, p.40). I would like to thank Ammeke Kateman for pointing me to these references. 62. See the introduction to this volume. 63. On Afghani see Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jaml ad-Dn ‘al-Afghn’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). For his Iranian background, see ibid, pp.5–11. 64. For some theses regarding ʿAbduh’s reception of theosophical thought from the School of Isfahan, founded by Mull Ṣadr (1571/2–1640), see Scharbrodt, ‘The Salafiyya and Sufism’, pp.102–103, 112–13. Al-Afghn’s most important biographer, Muhammad ʿAbduh, downplayed al-Afghani’s philosophical inclinations (Keddie, Islamic Response, pp.16–17). ʿAbduh’s most influential biographer, Rashd Rid, in turn, had an interest in downplaying al-Afghn’s Sh‘-Iranian background. In general, the internal relations and networks within the modern Muslim world still are a severely under-researched topic. 65. For lists of ʿAbduh’s readings, see Amin, Muhammad ʿAbduh, pp.28–39; Jung, Orientalists, p.230. The extant scholarly literature tells us more about ʿAbduh’s readings in French than about those in Arabic and Persian. For general observations on the mobility of texts during the period see Ayalon in this volume. 66. Amin, Muhammad ʿAbduh, p.28. 67. Ibid., p.33. An example of a work copied by ʿAbduh mentioned by Amin is Ibn Sn’s al-Ishrt (ibid., p.36). 68. Amin, Muhammad ʿAbduh, p.36. 69. Ibid., p.35. 70. Ibid., p.31. 71. Ibid., p.33.

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72. Ibid., p.38, n. 2. 73. Ibid. 74. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.19–21. For details see A. Albert KudsiZadeh, ‘Afghani and Freemasonry in Egypt’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 92:1 (1972), pp.27–8; Karim Wissa, ‘Freemasonry in Egypt, 1798– 1921: A study in cultural and political encounters’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16:2 (1989), p.155. 75. For the so-called Transvaal fatwa, see Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.97–9. For more references to ʿAbduh’s fatwas see Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.100. 76. See the compilation of references in Adams, Islam and Modernism, p.100, n.3. 77. Ibid., p.100. 78. Ibid., pp.100–1. 79. On the emergence of mass reading in the Middle East during the period, see the article by Ami Ayalon in this volume. 80. Jacques Jomier, ‘Al-Manr’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 6, pp.360–1. 81. The roles of Cairo and Beirut as the Middle East’s main centers of publishing and as mediators of globalization is discussed in the contribution by Ayalon in this volume. On the ascent of Beirut to a major urban center in the Levant during the second half of the nineteenth century, see Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut. 82. Alexander Schölch, ‘Der arabische Osten im neunzehnten Jahrhundert’, in Ulrich Haarman (ed), Geschichte der arabischen Welt2 (Munich, 1991), pp.365– 431, esp. pp.387–416. 83. Roger Owen, ‘The Eastern Mediterranean during the first wave of globalization, 1870–1914’ (= Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, IIIrd Mediterranean Programme Lecture) (San Domenico di Fiesole, 2001), p.11. 84. Ibid., pp.11–3. 85. On the Syrian community in Egypt, see Thomas Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt 1725–1975 (Stuttgart, 1985). 86. Some of these immigrants are portrayed in al-Qayt, Nafhat al-Bashm. 87. In addition to political émigrés, these regions also received Egyptian newspapers. See Johann Buessow, Hamidian Palestine: Politics and Society in the District of Jerusalem, 1876–1908 (Leiden, 2011), p.469. 88. It seems promising to pinpoint the concrete infrastructure of this network, including urban centers, institutions of learning and travelling routes in order to better understand Islamic knowledge production during the period. The lives and works of several of ʿAbduh’s students at the al-Azhar college throw spotlights on this issue. Some of their trajectories are mentioned in the following articles: Jamil Abun-Nasr and Roman Loimeier, ‘The independent

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89.

90. 91.

92. 93.

94.

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states of sub-Saharan Africa’, in Werner Ende and Udo Steinbach (eds), Islam in the World Today: A Handbook of Politics, Religion, Culture, and Society (Ithaca, 2010), pp.415–30; Bencheneb, ‘Le séjour du šayḫ Muhammad ʿAbduh en Algérie’. For a presentation of two influential theological textbooks taught at alAzhar during the nineteenth century, see Max Horten, Muhammedanische Glaubenslehre: Die Katechismen des Fudl und des Sans (Bonn, 1916). For the classical theory of dramatic structure see Gustav Freytag, Technik des Dramas (Leipzig, 1863). The loose way in which I use Freytag’s concept here is similar to the use of ‘emplotment’ in Konrad Hirschler’s analysis of mediaeval Arabic chronicles. See Konrad Hirschler, Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (Abingdon, 2006). RT, pp.97–116. ʿAbduh’s most obvious source among the Islamic theologians was Jall al-Dn al-Dawn (d. 1407), since he wrote a supercommentary on Dawn’s commentary on ʿAdud al-Dn al-j’s al-ʿAqʾid al-ʿAdudiyya (ʿAbduh, al-Taʿlqt ʿal sharh al-Dawn). So far, only little is known about Islamic theological scholarship and teaching in ʿAbduh’s own generation and in those preceding him. On Sans’s life and oeuvre, see H. Bencheneb, ‘Al-Sansi, Ab ʿAbdallh Muḥammad b. Ysuf’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 9, pp.20–22 and Sabine Dorpmüller, Religiöse Magie im ‘Buch der probaten Mittel’: Analyse, kritische Edition und Übersetzung des Kitb al-Muǧarrabt von Muhammad ibn Ysuf as-Sans (gest. um 895/1490) (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp.11–22. Sans is the author of five prominent works on Islamic dogma (ʿaqʾid), al-Kubr, al-Wust, al-Ṣughr, Ṣughr al-sughr, and Muqaddima. These works were studied at Cairo’s al-Azhar college and in many other parts of the Muslim world during Abduh’s lifetime. For Sans’s textbooks as part of the curriculum of the ‘Umayyad Mosque in Damascus around 1850, see Alfred von Kremer, Mittelsyrien und Damaskus: Geschichtliche, ethnografische und geografische Studien während eines Aufenthaltes daselbst in den Jahren 1849, 1850 und 1851 (Vienna, 1853), p.138. ʿAbduh cites Sans in other works (e.g. Muhammad ʿAbduh, ‘Al-Islm al-yawm wa-l-ihtijj bi-l-muslimn ʿal l-Islm’, in idem, al-Aʿml l-kmila, vol. 3, p.334). With high probability, it was Sans who provided ʿAbduh with the three modalities of judgment necessity (al-wujb), impossibility (al-istihla) and possibility (al-jawz), which form the basis of chap. 2 of RT (Osman Amin, Muhammad Abduh, p.38; a similar vocabulary is also employed by Ibn Sn [d. 1037], see Scharbrodt, ‘The Salafiyya and Sufism’, pp.99–100). According to Bencheneb, ‘Al-Sansi’, the way ʿAbduh refers to the Muslim community of believers in RT also betrays similarities to Sans.

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95. See ʿAmr b. Bahr al-Jhiz, Rasʾil al-Jhiz, ed. ʿAl Ab Milhim (Beirut, 1987), vol. 3, p.153. For an analysis of al-Jhiz‘s positions on the subject see Matthias Radscheit, Die koranische Herausforderung: Die tahaddi-Verse im Rahmen der Polemikpassagen des Korans (Berlin, 1996), pp.1–7. 96. See al-Ghazali [al-Ghazl, Ab Hmid], Deliverance from Error [al-Munqidh min al-Dall]: Five Key Texts Including His Spiritual Autobiography and al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, transl. R.J. McCarthy (Louisville, KY, 1999), pp.70, 87. 97. On Guizot and his reception by Afghn and ʿAbduh see Jung, Orientalists, pp.240–42. 98. RT, pp.106–8. 99. Al-Jhiz, Rasʾil, vol. 3, p.153. On the Islamic dogma of the inimitability of the Qurʾan (iʿjz al-Qurʾn) see Angelika, Neuwirth, ‘Das islamische Dogma der “Unnachahmlichkeit des Korans” in literaturwissenschaftlicher Sicht’, Der Islam 60 (1983), pp.166–83. 100. Ibid, p.156. See Navid Kermani, Gott ist schön: das ästhetische Erleben des Koran (Munich, 2000), pp.22–3. 101. Albert Hourani already had the general impression that ʿAbduh’s historical thought might have been inspired by Comte (Hourani, Arabic Thought, p.139). 102. On maturity see Auguste Comte, Auguste Comte on Positivism: The Essential Writings, ed. G. Lenzer (New Brunswick, 1998), pp.34–42. 103. According to Adams, ʿAbduh’s view of Christianity as appealing to emotions is reminiscent of discussions in Protestant circles during the nineteenth century (Adams, Islam and Modernism, pp.174–6). 104. Ibid, p.125. 105. Ibid, p.84. 106. ʿAbduh writes ‘[t]his spirit is the peoples’ source of life. ... If it is weakened until it vanishes altogether, happiness and serenity will leave in its wake’ (RT, p.112). 107. RT, pp.116–23. 108. RT, p.57. 109. On ʿAbduh’s verdict on Christianity as an ‘immature’ religion, see above. 110. RT, p.124. For more on Protestantism, see below. 111. RT does contain very few direct quotations. This probably is due to the book’s format as a textbook. In many of his other texts, ʿAbduh makes reference to specific authors. For examples, see Amin, Muhammad ʿAbduh, pp.36–8. 112. On such debates during the twentieth century see Krämer, Gottes Staat, pp.17–20. ʿAbduh, during the last years of his life, was indeed criticized for a

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113.

114.

115.

116.

117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST ‘Westernizing’ attitude. See Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.103–107. The contemporary critique of ʿAbduh’s work still awaits more detailed study. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, pp.61–2. On Taylor see Anon., ‘Taylor, Isaac (1829–1901)’, rev. C. E. A. Cheesman, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36433, accessed 1 February 2013. Kateman, ‘Theology of Unity’, p.92. Taylor had travelled to Egypt, as evidenced in one of his publications (Isaac Taylor, Leaves from an Egyptian NoteBook [London, 1888]). However, it still needs to be established whether Taylor and ʿAbduh met in person. The only documents on their intellectual exchange known to me are two letters from ʿAbduh to Taylor, edited as Muhammad ‘Abduh, ‘Risla il l-qiss Ishq Ṭaylor’, in idem, Al-A’ml al-Kmila, vol. 2, pp.357–8; and idem, ‘Risla thniya il l-qiss Ishq Ṭaylor’, in ibid, pp.359–60. Another member of Jamʿiyyat al-Taʾlf wa-lTaqrb was the Arab Jewish physician and intellectual Shimon Moyal. See Lital Levy, ‘Partitioned pasts: Arab Jewish intellectuals and the case of Esther Azhar Moyal (1873–1948)’, in Dyala Hamzah (ed), The Making of the Arab Intellectual: Empire, Public Sphere and the Colonial Coordinates of Selfhood (London, 2013), p.154, n. 24. The Times (London), 8 October 1887, p.7. I owe this reference to Ammeke Kateman, ‘Time unites, time divides: Muhammad ʿAbduh and Isaac Taylor on progress and religion’, unpublished paper, presented at the symposium ‘Giving meaning to the passage of time: Discourses of history and progress in Beirut from the nineteenth century to the present’, Orient-Institut Beirut, 18–19 September 2012. ʿAbduh assured Taylor in one of his letters to him that he sympathized with his public statements on Islam (ʿAbduh, al-Aʿml al-Kmila, vol. 2, pp.357–8). Ibid. In RT, p.110, ʿAbduh explicitly dismisses racist thought as contrary to the spirit of Islam. RT, p.122. RT, p.121. The Times (London), 8 October 1887, p.7. For ʿAbduh, the similarity between the Islamic theological concept of fitra and the notion of a ‘natural religion’ (religio naturalis), as worked out in Europe since the sixteenth century, probably was another inspiring discovery. On religio naturalis see Haußig, Religionsbegriff, pp.50–51. RT, p.115. Time management is a concept that is evoked already on the first pages of the Risla. In the introduction, ʿAbduh mentions that he had to realize

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124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

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the plan to publish a popular exposition of Islamic theology in his ‘spare time’ left to him by his other work (RT, p.2). Missing his lecture notes from Beirut, he explains that ‘in order not to lose time which I urgently needed elsewhere, I decided to write to some pupils and to ask them to send me their notes from my dictations’ (ibid, p.3). Elsewhere, ʿAbduh dismisses metaphysical speculation into the essence of things as ‘a waste of time’ (idʿa li-l-waqt) (ibid, p.29). These formulations seem to resonate with Protestant moralistic literature such as Benjamin Franklin’s widely-read book Way to Wealth (first published 1758), which emphasized the dangers of wasting one’s time (Benjamin Franklin, Way to Wealth, or, Poor Richard Improved [London, n.d., probably 1839], pp.5–7), and Samuel Smiles’ bestseller, SelfHelp, which praised an ‘economical use of time’ as a means of ‘self-culture, self-improvement, and growth of character’ (Samuel Smiles, Self Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct [London, 1860], pp.214–15). The book was translated into Arabic by Yaʿqb Ṣarrf as Sirr al-Najh (‘The Secret of Success’) and was first published in Beirut in 1880 and Cairo in 1886. For its reception in Lebanon and Egypt, see Gudrun Krämer, Hasan al-Banna (Oxford, 2010), p.109. I use the term ‘historicism’ here in a broad sense as indicating a conviction that different historical periods have specific characteristics, which create a continuous need for the reinterpretation of religious and other concepts. It would need an analysis of more texts by ʿAbduh in order to decide how close his thought was to specific variants of historicist thought. RT, pp.83, 86, 94. Ibid, p.2. Ibid, p.13. Ibid, p.43. See e.g. Evelyn A. Early, Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing with an Egg and a Stone (Boulder CO, 1993), p.57. Pre-modern Muslim authors had already criticized this practice as ‘an illicit innovation’ (bidʿa), often by pointing to a Prophetic tradition which denounced lamenting the dead as a pagan custom. See T. Fahd, ‘Niyha’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 8, pp.24–5; Susan Jane Staffa, Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo AD 642– 1850 (Leiden, 1977), p.37. RT, p.43. For more on the cult of masculinity in Egypt around 1900, see Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham NC, 2011); for similar ideas in Palestinian contexts, see Johann Buessow, ‘Children of the revolution: Youth in Palestinian public life, 1908–14’, in Yuval Ben-Bassat and Eyal

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131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

137.

138.

139. 140.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST Ginio (eds), Late Ottoman Palestine: The Period of Young Turk Rule (London, 2011), pp.71–2. On the ‘feminization’ of the Orient in Western discourse during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), p.5. On Egyptian reactions to this discourse during the early twentieth century see Jacob, Working Out Egypt, pp.16, 19 and passim. Rid, Trkh, vol.1, p.21. ʿAbduh, Rissalat al Tawhid, transl. Bernard Michel and Moustapha Abdel Razik: p.x. The discipline of European-style military units was regarded as the epitome of discipline by many Middle Eastern writers of the period. For the example of an anonymous Syrian chronicler, see Johann Buessow, ‘Street politics in Damascus: Kinship and other social categories as bases of political action, 1830–1841’, History of the Family 16:2 (2011), pp.108–25, esp. pp.117, 123. On military discipline in Egypt see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, 1988), pp.37–40. RT, p.23. See also ibid, p.44. Albeit ‘struggle for existence’ seems to evoke the idea of natural selection developed in Darwin’s On the Origins of Species (1859), Spencer, as well as ʿAbduh, was probably closer to the evolutionary theory of Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) than to Darwin. ʿAbduh read Spencer in French, and in 1903 he worked on a translation of Spencer’s Education from French into Arabic. During the same year he visited Spencer in the latter’s house in Brighton. For the ‘battle of life’ as a topos in Palestinian literature of the early twentieth century see Büessow, ‘Children of the Revolution’, pp.72, 78 n. 73. On the case of the Baha’i see Oliver Scharbrodt, Islam and the Bahaʾi Faith: A Comparative Study of Muhammad ʿAbduh and ʿAbdul-Bahaʾ ʿAbbas (Abingdon, 2008); on the Theosophists see Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, p.62. RT, p.124. The same vision can be found in ʿAbduh’s apologetic tract of 1902, Al-Islm wa-l-Nasrniyya maʿa l-ʿilm wa-l-madaniyya (Islam and Christianity in relation to science and civilization). There, however, ʿAbduh added a negative assessment Protestantism in history (Muhammad ʿAbduh, ‘Al-Islm wa-l-Nasrniyya maʿa l-ʿilm wa-l-madaniyya’, in idem, al-Aʿml al-Kmila, vol. 3, pp.360–3.) On al-Islm wa-l-Nasrniyya, see the contribution by Langner in this volume. Ibid. On the concept and its connotations see A. Merad, ‘Islh’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 4, pp.141–71. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, p.62. ʿAbduh further pursues this idea in al-Islm wa-l-Nasrniyya maʿa l-ʿilm wa-l-madaniyya. There he also mentions

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145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

155.

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a ‘Protestant spiritual leader’, probably Taylor, who allegedly advanced a similar opinion. See ʿAbduh, ‘Al-Islm wa-l-Nasrniyya’, p.363. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh, p.62. See Osterhammel, Verwandlung der Welt, pp.1243–4; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p.338. Haußig, Religionsbegriff, p.194. See L. Gardet, ‘Dn’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 2, pp.293–6. For a discussion of the uses of dn in the Qurʿn see Haußig, Religionsbegriff, pp.216–36. Ibid, p.116. Ibid, p.118. RT, p.10. Ibid, p.4. Amin, Muhammad ʿAbduh, p.37. See for example Rev. Joseph Estlin Carpenter, ‘Religion’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh edition, vol. 23, pp.61–76 (New York, 1911). RT, p.5. Ibid., pp.5–6. See Haußig, Religionsbegriff, pp.194–243. François Guizot, Cours d’histoire moderne: Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (Paris, 1828), 1ère leçon, pp.7–8; 2ème leçon, p.4. For a popularized application of this concept in the Arab press, see an article in the newspaper Filastn (‘Palestine’) from Jaffa, in which the author, the Muslim poet ʿAl al-Rmw, describes how the ‘light of science’ (nr al-ʿilm) had wandered throughout history from world region to world region, first from Greece to Rome, then to the Islamic Orient and from there to the West. Filastn, 16 July 1913, p.2. The concept of religion, or religiosity, as an anthropological constant was developed in scholarly debates after ʿAbduh’s lifetime. However, the concept seems quite apt to capture ʿAbduh’s characterization of religion as a ‘general sense’ of human beings. For a brief summary of the discussion in sociology, see Gert Pickel, ‘Contextual secularization: Theoretical thoughts and empirical implications’, Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe 4:1 (2011), pp.3–20, esp. pp.7, 12. RT, p.83. Possible sources for this last aspect are less obvious than in the case of the first two aspects. RT, p.69. Schulze, ‘Protestantisierung’, p.149. Ibid. Ibid, p.49.

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161. RT, p.38. 162. See ibid, p.36. 163. Immanuel Kant, ‘Die Religion in den Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft’, in idem, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt, 1981), vol. 7, p.789, quoted in Schulze, ‘Protestantisierung’, p.157. 164. See above. 165. Compare Schulze, ‘Protestantisierung’, p.159 for similar thoughts, albeit without relation to ʿAbduh. 166. See Merad, ‘Islh’. 167. Rotraud Wielandt, in her work on the historical thought of modern Muslim authors, comes to a different conclusion. See Rotraud Wielandt, Offenbarung und Geschichte im Denken moderner Muslime (Wiesbaden, 1971), p.71. 168. See above, p.277 169. E.g. RT, p.6. 170. RT, pp.109–10. 171. Ibid, p.100. 172. Ibid, p.110. 173. Ibid, p.113. 174. Ibid, pp.36, 110 and passim. 175. See RT, p.13. 176. E.g. ibid, pp.118, 123. 177. RT, p.12. 178. Next to India and North Africa; see H. Laoust, ‘Hanbila’, Encyclopaedia of Islam 2, vol. 3, pp.158–62. 179. RT, p.119. 180. RT, pp.120–21. In this context, ‘China’ probably stands for East and Southeast Asia. 181. RT, p.121. This resonates with Isaac Taylor’s statement that Islam was so successful in Africa because of its easy comprehensibility. See The Times, 8 October 1887, p.7. 182. RT, p.8. 183. Ibid, pp.8–9. 184. On the Salafiyya as a problematic category, see Henri Lauzière, ‘The construction of the Salafiyya: Reconsidering Salafism from the perspective of conceptual history’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010), pp.369–89. 185. RT, p.123. 186. Ibid. 187. Ibid, p.118.

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188. Europe is mentioned three times in the Risla: once, neutrally, as the origin of Jews emigrating to Muslim lands and twice very positively, as the place of the Protestant reformation (RT, pp.102, 118, 124). 189. Hourani, Arabic Thought, p.348. 190. See, for example, ʿAbd al-Rahmn al-Kawkib’s fictive description of a panIslamic congress held in Mecca in the year 1902. The text was first published in Al-Manr. For a later edition, see ʿAbd al-Rahmn al-Kawkib, Umm al-qur, wa-huwa dabt mufwadt wa-muqarrart muʾtamar annahda al-islmiyya al-munʿaqid f Makka al-mukarrama sanat 1316 (Cairo, 1350/1931). 191. RT, p.61. 192. Ibid. 193. Kurzman, ‘Weaving Iran’, p.154. 194. Compare Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp.1–2. 195. On millenarianism and messianism in ʿAbduh’s early thought, see Scharbrodt, Islam and the Bahaʾi Faith, pp.1–56. 196. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte (= G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, vol. 12) (Frankfurt am Main, 1986 [1845]), p.141. 197. For Comte’s view on world history as culminating in the ‘positivist’ West, see Comte, Auguste Comte on Positivism, pp.33–4, 496–7. 198. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (= Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 13) (Berlin, 1961 [1859]), p.10. 199. One may ask whether the idea of an ‘end of history’ in itself is not a typical intellectual response to a wave of globalization, but this question is certainly beyond the range of the present chapter. Compare Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History, which appeared in the context of another wave of globalization in 1992 (Francis Fukuyama The End of History and the Last Man [New York, 1992]). 200. We still need more studies of mental maps and historical perspectives in the generations of Arab and Muslim authors preceding ʿAbduh. What has been established so far is that the worldviews of individual authors varied greatly. For relevant case studies see Dyala Hamzah, ‘Nineteenth-century Egypt as dynastic locus of universality: The History of Muhammad Ali by Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Rajabi (d. 1829)’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27:1 (2007), pp.62–82; Kurzman, ‘Weaving Iran’; Astrid Meier, ‘Ein Teppich als Denkmal: Historische Repräsentation in Westasien und Nordafrika um 1900,’ in Michael Mann (ed), Globale Geschichtsschreibung um 1900 (= Periplus 18 [2008]), pp.43–67; Dana Sajdi, ‘Peripheral Visions: The Worlds and Worldviews of Commoner Chroniclers

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201.

202.

203. 204.

205. 206.

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant’ (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002). Bernard Cohn, ‘An anthropologist among the historians’, in idem, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), pp.228–9. A similar teleological view of world history is found in the monumental history of the Ottoman Empire between 1774 and 1825 by the Ottoman court historian Ahmed Cevdet, the last volume of which was published about one decade prior to Abduh’s Risla. See the analysis in Christoph K. Neumann, Das indirekte Argument: ein Plädoyer für die Tanzimat vermittels der Historie: Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Paas Ta’rih (Münster, 1994). Many Ottoman thinkers of the time shared similar ideas, combining positivist thought and various Islamic elements. The shift to universal grand histories in the Ottoman Empire already began in the eighteenth century. See Özgür Türesay, ‘Le temps des almanachs ottomans: usage des calendriers et temps de l’histoire (1873–1914)’, in François Georgeon and Frédéric Hitzel (eds), Les Ottomans et le temps (Leiden, 2012), pp.129–58. See, for example, RT, pp.30, 125–8. Aziz al-Azmeh observed in the 1990s that ‘[T]he tropes and notions of political and social thought available today form a universal repertoire that is inescapable ... ’ (Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities [London, 1996], p.33). I owe this citation to Ammeke Kateman, ‘Theology of Unity: Muhammad ʿAbduh’s (1849–1905) Reformist Islam and His Interpretation of “Authenticity”, “Civilisation” and “Religion’ ”’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2010), p.24. It seems that later conflicts over national and religious identities have made most historians overlook the remarkable easiness with which concepts of the European social sciences could be put into a conversation with Islamic religious traditions in the late nineteenth century. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p.12. Jung, Orientalists, p.230.

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CHAPTER 12 NEW PR ACTICES: AR AB PR INTING, PUBLISHING AND M ASS R EADING Ami Ayalon

Sayyid Qutb, who is well known to readers of this volume in another context, recorded the following charming recollection in his childhood memoir, around World War I. For three or four days every year, he recounted, a book peddler popularly known as Uncle Slih (al-‘mm Ṣa¯lih·) would come to his home village of Msha (Asyt province), shouldering a sack full of books. ‘He would place himself in the small village marketplace, and after emptying the sack would sit cross-legged on it, spreading the books for sale in front of him, some twenty or thirty of them, arranged in rows by price or subject’. Among them were works of poetry; prose classics such as the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ and the epics of ‘Antar and Amra Dht al-Himma; tracts on astrology, magic and medicine, by Muslim scholars; and translated detective stories (al-kutub al-blisiyya) such as Sherlock Holmes and Upton(?) Sinclair. ‘These valuable books would start at one millieme and go up to two qurush apiece, rarely beyond that’. For the author, the few days of Uncle Slih’s visit to the village were the happiest time of the year. He used to save up for them from the modest allowance his father gave him, cutting down on his other meager expenses.

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The ten-year-old Qutb and his friends, schoolchildren like him, were Uncle Slih’s best customers. ‘They would buy from him what their budget allowed. In addition, for a deposit of one millieme they would be permitted to read other books on condition that such borrowing was “local”, that is, on the spot beside Uncle Slih’. The peddler, then, served as a book-lender as well as bookseller. The lively reading activity would continue after his departure: ‘For another while, the readers would exchange among themselves the books they had purchased, until everyone had read everything. By then the time for his return would already be near’. Over time, the young Qutb acquired a local reputation for his reading habits and book collection, which gradually ‘became the source of continuous cultural activity. He treasured valuable books and everybody borrowed them from him’.1 Vividly reflecting the dawn of publishing and mass reading in the Arab Middle East, such a sketch would have been unimaginable half a century earlier. Classics in print, Sherlock Holmes in Arabic, books for a pittance, countryside diffusion, children reading and building their own libraries, these were all novelties unknown just a few decades earlier. They were borne by the grand historic changes that affected Arabic-speaking societies from the mid-nineteenth century onward, bringing in new objects, technologies and ideas and transforming social and cultural life. Many changes were introduced in the society’s view, and practice, of writing and written texts: the printing of thousands of books on every subject; the advent of a vibrant press; the rapid proliferation of bookshops, libraries and stationers; the growing ubiquity of written signs in the public domain; and, last but surely not least, the formation of reading publics that came to consume these writings in mass quantities. It was a multifaceted process that progressed from center to periphery and percolated to remote places such as the village of Msha. This study explores the emergence of printing and mass reading in the Middle East as an aspect of the grand cultural transformation prompted by globalization. The influx of foreign people, ideas, technologies and practices pulled the region into a largely unfamiliar compass, entailing adjustments unprecedented in scale on many planes. Here I look at the ways in which key cultural instruments

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of adaptation were molded by foreign, as well as local, actors. As we shall see, the process was anything but smooth: It spread unevenly across the land and through various social strata, mediated by foreign and local agents and involving interim stages of development. The focus is on the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire, examined here as a case study of changes that also took place in the Turkish-speaking parts of the Empire and in places beyond the Middle East. The story began in earnest around the mid-nineteenth century, following some previous modest beginnings, and gained considerable momentum during the last third of that century and the beginning of the next. The discussion addresses the formative phase of the change, namely, roughly the last half-century of Ottoman rule in the region.

Apathy, false start, true start For hundreds of years prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Arabicspeaking societies had little use for writing and reading. Few practiced them: men of religion, in charge of retaining and transmitting the community’s rich spiritual and legal heritage; state officials, entrusted with a rainbow of administrative duties; private scholars, engaged in writing chronicles, history and geography books, philosophical tracts, poetry and more; and sometimes common people – farmers, soldiers, a barber – who had enough curiosity in them to engage in reading and even writing.2 Recent scholarship has suggested that this last group was slowly expanding already before the introduction of printing.3 Yet, even if such was the case, this could not significantly change the overall scene, in which reading and writing people made up a rather thin layer of society. The rest remained beyond the circle of such activities and were essentially illiterate. Far from being deemed problematic, this division was viewed as the right order of things: knowledge was the territory of particular groups – not quite exclusive yet distinct; and those outside their ranks had no need for it or for the skills to acquire it. Most habitual public functions were performed by oral/aural channels, from communicating information from rulers to the ruled and across society to leisure-time activities, based as they were on listening, not reading.

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When printing was invented in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, inducing notable changes in much of the continent, Middle Eastern societies reacted to it with marked indifference. The new device for multiplying written texts seemed at best irrelevant to their needs; at worst – and there might have been some concern about this – it could endanger the social order. Either way, they turned their backs on printing. What were the deeper roots of this attitude, and why it persisted for centuries – long after Europe had done away with whatever misgivings it had about printing – are questions more complex than they seem at first glance. Scholars have offered various explanations, none of them definitive, partly so because the Muslim sources themselves are strikingly silent on this issue: they do not explicitly reveal the motives behind this avoidance. The reasons for the late entry of printing into the Middle East and its implications are, of course, a matter for another study.4 For our purposes suffice it to note that the basic Ottoman and Arab aversion to mass production of books continued till the second half of the nineteenth century, when it began to give way to a different outlook.5 Between the initial disinterest in printing and the starting point of our story some four centuries later, two events took place which may be described as instances of a false start. The first of these occurred in the early-eighteenth century, following some shifts in the Ottoman Empire’s international position and in its self-image. In 1727, Sultan Ahmet III issued an edict officially permitting printing in the languages and script of Islam, namely Turkish and Arabic, subject to certain limitations on contents.6 The act was no doubt an important historic event and a portent of future change. But in itself it failed to alter the customary public view of books as circumscribed objects. Unlike fifteenth-century Europe – where many millions of book-copies were produced within the first half-century after Gutenberg – the Ottoman printing venture more than two centuries later still generated scarce public attention: During a comparable period in the eighteenth century, no more than 24 volumes were printed in Istanbul with a total print-run of c. 12,000 copies, and only a part of that number was actually sold. The technology, a state license, and an entrepreneurial initiative were all there; demand was not. People continued to adhere

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to the time-honored perception of wisdom as exclusive. Public curiosity was still in the future.7 About a century later, a similar public response met the printing initiative of Mehmet Ali (Muhammad ʻAl) in Egypt. This time the state not only permitted printing, but also initiated it. Impressed by the potential of the foreign device, Mehmet Ali established the famous Blq press and several other such plants, launched an ambitious translation plan, and issued the very first Arabic newspaper. He also built a schooling system along modern lines and provided its students with textbooks produced in his printing shops. The output of the country’s presses in his time was impressive: According to one credible study, by the mid-nineteenth century 867 book titles had been printed in Egypt in 724,000 copies8 – a far cry from the humble endeavor a century earlier in Istanbul. Here too, however, the public impact was minimal. The bulk of this yield, over 85 per cent, was school texts and manuals for army and state officials, and only some 100,000 copies were designated for the general public, a minuscule quantity for a community of ca. five million.9 More important, many of the volumes were reportedly left unwanted, ‘piling up in the warehouses’ and gathering dust.10 Though more spirited than the eighteenth-century undertaking, this effort, too, fell short of stirring a mass interest in books. Printing became significant in the Middle East only after the middle of the nineteenth century. What caused it to succeed this time around, after having failed in the past? This is a key question to which we shall return shortly, after laying out the main contours of that development. This time the effort came from below, from ordinary residents inspired by foreigners. Protestant and Jesuit missionaries, who came to the region to evangelize and educate, also brought with them printing gear to facilitate on-the-spot publishing of their written propaganda. Being themselves products of modernity, they imparted worldly ideas as well as pious ones. They also offered a model of routine reliance on written texts for every purpose. Their more gifted local pupils, impressed with the great potential of printing, soon began to set up presses and issue their own books and journals. The hub of this activity was in the Lebanon area, but before too long historical circumstances

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moved it to Egypt, which was undergoing an accelerated process of reform from the early 1860s onward. There, away from the Ottoman government’s suspicious eye and heavy hand, Lebanese immigrants pioneered publishing and other cultural activities, and were followed in that by graduates of the Egyptian schooling system.11 The shift was remarkable. In sharp departure from past torpor, both production and consumption of Arabic printed texts now advanced briskly and assumed mass proportions. Thousands of Arabic books in millions of copies appeared in a vigorous bout during the last third of the nineteenth century, covering every topic of human interest. Hundreds of Arabic newspapers and journals, durable and ephemeral, were issued during that period in comparable quantities. In Egypt, the printed output of the Mehmet Ali era, impressive as it had been for its time, was dwarfed by a far more ambitious publishing enterprise: More than 7,700 book titles were printed there in over 6 million copies during the century’s last three decades, including some 2,300 titles in 1.2 million copies that were intended for the general public. Nearly 400 Egyptian journals and newspapers had appeared by 1900, circulating throughout the Arabic-speaking provinces in, roughly, 100,000 copies.12 Similar developments took place in Lebanon, the second major publishing center,13 and after 1908 in other Arab provinces as well. Rapid production was accompanied by an equally swift growth of diffusion channels that brought the printed items to the customers, from transportation and postal services to bookshops and newspaper agents – vital mediation mechanisms to which we shall return below. The dynamic expansion of production and distribution was associated with another, equally important change: the emergence of Arab mass reading. The scope and modes of reading are seldom documented14 – in the Ottoman provinces we hardly have any data on them – and we learn about them mostly from indirect evidence and haphazard clues on which we base our inferences. The publication figures quoted above represent such indirect evidence, which unmistakably attest to an increasing public market for printed works. Hitherto overwhelmingly illiterate, Arab societies of the late-nineteenth century were slowly moving toward functional literacy. More and more people were benefitting from the institutions of learning that sprouted in the

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region, receiving training in reading, and joining the pool of the new industry’s customers. It is impossible to quantify this development: not only do we lack credible data on the progress of Arab education and literacy before World War I, but also – and this is no less problematic – both ‘education’ and ‘literacy’ are lax notions, each meaning a range of situations depending on time and place.15 Data on book printing and journal circulation are likewise of little help in this because, as we shall see below, we have no way of knowing how many people were exposed to a single published copy. But if attempting to assess the size of the Arab readership would be foolhardy, we may at least note that literacy and reading were on the ascent, spreading like concentric ripples around a stone thrown into a pond. We may also assume that on the eve of World War I, the Arab readership was many-fold bigger than it had been half a century earlier, apparently reaching tens of thousands of independent readers throughout the Middle East. Notably, however, even at that later date readers still made up a small fraction of every Arab society, the majority still remaining outside the circle. An important aspect of these changes was the strikingly plentiful knowledge now offered to the public. Obviously, not everything was new: a sizeable part of the printed works was drawn from the classic heritage that had previously existed in hard-to-access manuscripts. Quite a few others were works of similar contents authored in Arabic after the entry of printing. These included religious writings, both official and popular (e.g. Qurʼns, prayer booklets, Sf tracts); books on history, geography, philosophy, science (e.g. Khwrizm’s Maftih al-‘ulm, Ibn Khaldn’s Muqaddima); epic literature and poetry (e.g. Qissat ban hill, Kalla wa-dimna, al-Harr’s Maqmt) and more.16 They were printed as books or serialized in the leading journals. More significant, however, were works containing hitherto-unknown knowledge and ideas. In the periodical press such knowledge appeared from the very outset: newspapers reported events not merely in near and far parts of the Empire but also in other countries, in Europe and elsewhere. They exposed the readers to a wealth of intelligence on those remote places that previously had been beyond their vista. Cultural, scientific and literary journals carried information on wider areas of

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human activity, regularly drawn from European sources. Data on the history, culture and politics of foreign countries flowed in with unprecedented regularity. Journal accounts were complemented by ample information in books – travelogues, translated scholarly and literary pieces, compendia of general knowledge (such as Butrus al-Bustn’s D’irat al-Ma‘rif) and more. There were also works of practical advice on every daily activity: a book on pregnancy and childbirth, a work on plantation pests, a manual for tailors, a guidebook for chess players, a treatise on modern manners and etiquette, a cookbook covering ‘foods and drinks of the East and West’, and so on.17 The appearance of the latter genre is especially instructive, in that it highlights the inclusion of down-to-earth concerns among matters that could be gainfully accessed with reading skills. If the concept of practical guidebooks was not in itself new (pre-modern Arabic texts addressed such matters as archery, falconry and cooking), their appearance in mass quantities and diversity surely was. Such books enhanced the popular habit of relying on the written medium for just about every purpose. Thousands of books in millions of copies, hundreds of journals where none had previously existed, a wealth of new contents hitherto beyond most readers’ horizons – this was an historic development that may perhaps be termed revolutionary. An elaborate network of diffusion agents and reading publics that comprised tens of thousands of independent consumers likewise signified a dramatic change, given the short period of their formation. Returning to the essential question raised above, we may now ask what accounted for such revolutionary changes and what can explain their conclusive success in the late nineteenth century after past attempts had failed.

Reading to quench a thirst and to other ends One aspect of the exposure to outside influences stands out for its overriding import: the appearance of an intense, almost existential, public need for information in view of the rapidly changing scenery. After mid-century, the physical surroundings in many parts of the region, mostly in the larger cities and primarily those by the Mediterranean, were undergoing visible transformation. The influx of merchants,

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missionaries, diplomats, tourists, adventurers and occasionally foreign troops, the scheduled movement of trains and ships, the construction of new urban neighborhoods, as well as various state-initiated modernization projects, all rendered the once-familiar environment less and less so. A Cairo resident in, say, 1870 would have witnessed a long string of visitors flowing into the city following the recent launching of the Suez Canal, setting up businesses and agencies for many purposes; fast increasing local colonies of foreigners (which had multiplied eightfold over the previous decade);18 urban quarters with a different architecture and street lighting in the city center and suburbs; expanding roads, railroads and telegraph lines in and around Cairo; new public institutions such as a parliament house, opera house, theaters, a Khedivial library, banks and so on. All of these amounted to a real makeover of the visible landscape. It was not just the familiar environment that metamorphosed: the changes also upset the balance between the pace of events and the ability to report them. The old ways of circulating news and views were becoming inadequate. And as always in times of quick change, these developments stirred up an urgent need for information that would facilitate navigation in the changing waters. This was not the first time in the region’s history that major changes were affected by the massive arrival of foreigners. But for the first time now, the foreigners also brought with them guiding devices for the changing reality: printing presses, publications and especially newspapers. These were available to anyone possessing the access code to them, literacy. Non-news journals addressed another vital need, that of explaining the broader implications of the changes and providing a channel for their public discussion. Quenching the thirst for news and orientation was perhaps the most important drive for adopting technologies that were not needed in the past. Newspapers and journals would play a central role in instilling the habit of drawing wisdom from printed items and, in turn, in enhancing the incentive for acquiring reading skills. The quest for information, then, was greatly responsible for the remarkable success of Arab printing in the late-nineteenth century. But it was not the only kind of motive to contribute to that success. At the time when Arab publishing began, a class of mostly urban educated people who read and collected books already existed. Their ranks were

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slowly expanding, thanks to the educational schemes initiated by the state and, simultaneously, by missionaries.19 Having received training in reading, these people usually responded to the new ideas that became available to them with much curiosity and displayed passion for more. For many of them, knowledge – not only imported ideas but also the rich Arab written heritage – was a key to new cultural horizons and socioeconomic betterment; and printing was a superb device for reproducing and disseminating it. Journals and newspapers were particularly useful vehicles to these ends, due to the relative ease of producing and distributing them. The educated stratum had basically two kinds of motivation for embracing the new technology. One was forthrightly elitist: knowledge was traditionally a territory of the learned and the ability to retrieve it entailed significant social credit. Among them were members of families who had long cherished education, and people more recently drawn to it by the new schooling projects. Printing amplified that advantage, not least by bringing those exposed to secular knowledge within the folds of modernity. Printed products also facilitated a discourse among consumers of the imparted wisdom, who could now voice their own views and respond to those of others. The fact that belonging to this class required skills that the bulk of society did not have generated a sense of group exclusivity. An elitist tone is amply evident in many of the exchanges among the educated in early Arabic periodicals: they often saw themselves, and treated each other, as udab’ (pl. of adb, a cultured man), implying a gulf between themselves and the uneducated masses.20 (In the twentieth century, especially after World War I, members of this class would seek to stress this gap still further, purporting to ‘be modern’, to use Keith Watenpaugh’s concept.)21 The other kind of drive, indeed quite the opposite of the exclusivist motivation, was a desire to edify the entire community by employing the new tools for diffusing knowledge as widely as possible. Pioneers of the Arab literary-cultural nahda sought to draw their compatriots into what they regarded as a ‘civilizing’ process (tamaddun) by expounding its benefits through printed publications, mostly though not solely through periodicals. They believed that, for the country’s good, everyone should be educated – the ‘mma, abn’ al-watan – and

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not just specific groups; the whole of society must rise to the standards presented by the ‘civilized world’.22 This idealist universal message was a hallmark of their writing, and they labored to propagate it by publishing and by encouraging the market to access their works. Whether driven by motives of the former or latter kind, members of the educated class made up a powerful dynamo that pushed the process of integration into the modern world from below. They and the wider, largely illiterate, public that was thirsty for news had their respective objectives, and in every case the new technology was given a high priority. In view of the extensive foreign-inspired changes, the tool that had once been unappealing thus became most attractive.

A mediated process An essential trait of globalization in the context discussed here is its evolving as a mediated process. It was through agents of various types that new ideas and practices reached Arab societies, both vertically and horizontally. To start with, there were, of course, the foreign transmitters of the imported ideas, commodities and technologies already mentioned above: merchants, missionaries, diplomats and other outsiders. They came for short or long periods, or settled permanently in colonies while remaining attached in myriad ways to their origins. Beyond blazing the trail of publishing and reading by importing printing machines and setting up most of the earliest presses in the area, foreigners also served as a model of the routine utilization of printed pieces. The diverse colonies in Alexandria and Istanbul had newspapers in their respective languages long before the birth of the Arabic or Turkish press there,23 which would serve as an example for emulation. Such was also the case in education, in which foreigners set standards and introduced methods that were adopted in local ventures.24 Foreign agents of many kinds served as intermediaries between the region and the outside, in these as in all spheres of global influences. More important for our discussion was mediation by local players, who were indispensable in enabling the process. One form of it was the mediatory role played by urban centers vis-à-vis the countryside, and by big cities versus smaller ones. For economic, technological and

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cultural reasons, publishing was typically an urban phenomenon. The material conditions for launching printing ventures existed in cities, as did, especially early on, the prospective market for their products. Village people could access books and journals that connected them to the modern world (or to their literary legacy) because these were printed for them in cities: on its way to Msha in the Asyt countryside, Sherlock Holmes passed through Cairo or Alexandria where it was translated into Arabic, printed and published in an affordable edition. The small village of Msha was situated around the remotest end of the chain of diffusion, a chain with big and small towns at its origin. The various stages of production – selecting the texts, editing the drafts, printing, binding, advertising and dispatching the items to the market – were executed mostly in a few central cities: Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria, as well as Istanbul. Smaller towns, such as Tripoli, Tanta or Jaffa, relied on supplies that came in from these big centers and, in turn, mediated their diffusion to the rural hinterland. It is worth noting that, in this process of hierarchical mediation, printed items had a special feature that set them apart from other modern commodities. Hierarchical mediation typified that phase of the process in which printed items flowed from publishers to customers. But since these items were conveyors of news and ideas, the contents they carried continued to circulate among consumers, stirring reactions that unfolded without any such hierarchy. Readers engaged journal editors with queries and comments on what they had read, and exchanged views with other readers, without any mediation. A reader’s letter to a Cairo-based journal, whether sent from a remote Egyptian village or from a faraway place such as Basra, would reach the editor as directly as the one sent from Cairo itself, and they would be treated in an equal manner. It seems, then, that the circulation of printed news and thoughts was a top-down practice at its outset, but then proceeded as a fluid and hierarchy-free process. The story of the rural countryside teenager Sayyid Qutb highlights another important form of mediation: middlemen, an essential link in the process. Mediators of various stripes always operated in a chain that permitted the move of books and journals from printer to reader: binders, movers, advertisers, wholesale and retail sellers, street

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vendors, reading-room foremen and so forth.25 Sources from the premodern Middle East tell us of bookshops and book markets in the region’s central cities (Cairo, Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Istanbul), of wandering manuscript dealers, of professional book copyists organized in guilds, and of madrasa and public libraries that allowed access to books without buying them.26 Such agencies of book diffusion proliferated or shrunk at different times, according to the fluctuating public interest in writings. The impression one gets from the scarce sources at hand is that, on the eve of the developments examined here the presence and activity of such mediating agents were scanty, reflecting a low level of general interest. A small number of manuscript dealerships operated in several central cities, and those apparently sufficed for the limited supply and demand of books before printing. Once written texts became mass-produced, these limited conduits could not contain the flow. The few existing dealerships now boomed into extensive networks of mediators on a scale unknown in recent times. No fewer than 130 book-selling businesses had appeared in the region by 1914. Some of these grew into big enterprises, with large stocks of local and imported literature, sales catalogs and sometimes even printing and publishing facilities. Most others were humble ventures that popped up in big cities, where they often sprouted in close proximity to each other, as well as in small towns from Suez to Ladhiqiyya. At a level below them in the distribution pyramid were street vendors, mostly of newspapers, and countryside travelling salesmen, Uncle Slih and his likes.27 Other diffusion mechanisms also proliferated: newspaper sale agents (wukal’), who represented publishers to the readers in remote places, and an array of distribution workers who delivered books and periodicals to subscribers’ homes. Mediation by dissemination is an aspect of our story that needs more exploration; but there is no mistaking the increasingly vital role it came to play in the process. The mushrooming diffusion agencies reflected the complex nature of the change as well as its dynamic pace. Other forms of mediation were of a more temporary kind and were needed mostly during the initial phase. The most obvious example of these was a mediatory practice employed at the onset of Arab mass reading. From the start, there was

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a marked gap between people’s desire to obtain the news circulated in print and their ability to access it independently. Such ability was a function of literacy, whose attainment entailed a lengthy process.28 A provisional solution to this problem was by resorting to a time-honored form of mediation: those already educated read out loud to those who were not. The society fell back on the habit of collective listening to the literate person, the Imam, the mund, the storyteller, the school shaykh. This familiar ritual was now applied to printed texts carrying news and other useful intelligence – newspapers, placards, manifestos and the like, and to those that elucidated the changing realities more insightfully, such as journal essays. Group reading occurred within the family, where one educated member read out to the rest, as well as in places of public gathering: the marketplace, the café, under the village mulberry tree, or near the mosque doors to which written notices were affixed. There are numerous accounts on this practice from every province, leaving no doubt as to its prevalence. To give an example, here is an eyewitness description of common people in Cairo relying on those with reading knowledge, around 1900: You could see them in the streets of Cairo and the old city, crowds of them, gathering around a man or a schoolboy who could read to them the translation of a piece by the publisher of the London Times, the French Le Débat, or another foreign newspaper, while they clamor and praise God. The routine became common among the riffraff and men of low trades, such as the dyers, oil dealers and barbers. One day I saw a boy in a greengrocer’s shop holding an Arabic newspaper. A large group of rabble crowded in front of the shop around the boy while he read the text to them.29 The resort to collective transmission served as a bridge across the gap between desire and means, an interim solution until the newly-built schooling system would impart reading skills to all. Unwilling to wait for the completion of that lengthy process, society temporarily overcame its handicaps by adhering to the traditional dependence on local intermediaries. One copy of a text and one literate person sufficed to

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enlighten a group of untold size, as small as a couple of people or as big as a massive crowd. All the activities considered above represented at once change and continuity. Big cities mediating for smaller ones and for the remoter periphery, diffusion agents delivering commodities from makers to customers, the educated few transmitting written information to the rest of the community – in all of these Arab societies drew on old communication and socialization modes while adapting to the new needs. Globalization fostered change; but in adjusting to it the society relied on past habits, sometimes in a modified version, at other times in the very same old one.

Asymmetrical development Unlike those ripples in the pond, the emergence of Arab publishing and mass reading did not occur in symmetric circles. Across the Arab provinces and through the different layers of society, changes were uneven: Production projects were centered in certain loci to the exclusion of others; and some sectors of the community were affected faster and more profoundly than the rest. The effect of globalization was first felt where foreign agents were most active, the urban centers in which they pursued their diverse interests, as well as in places where local rulers mediated the influx of external ideas and practices. Most of the activity in printing, publishing, book selling and education, was centered in two main locations, Egypt (primarily Cairo and Alexandria) and Lebanon (primarily Beirut). These were the region’s two beating hearts, if such a metaphor is permitted, from which diffusion arteries stretched to the Egyptian and Lebanese periphery and to other Arab provinces, reaching beyond cities to the rural fringe. That Cairo and Alexandria would become foci of cultural activity was predictable, given their leading role in so many other areas at least since the onset of the century. The case of Beirut was somewhat different: Beirut had not been an important regional center before mid-century, when it started gaining prominence as a site of commercial and diplomatic action. Its most visible role, however, evolved in the field of literary and journalistic production; in

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that it assumed a leading position from the start.30 This was largely the result of the high priority accorded to education and book-making on the agenda of the foreigners (mostly missionaries), and to the remarkable drive of Lebanese Christians who managed to translate that priority into a viable industry. Beirut became a publishing center whose commodities reached the remotest corners of the region, and a source of talent for the other important center, Egypt. Beirut’s growing importance due to its excelling in a modern kind of activity embodied, if we will, the effect of globalization in modifying local center/periphery relationship. This scene – two main centers of creativity catering for the whole region – was replicated in the uneven emergence of Arab mass reading, for similar reasons: the same forces that encouraged book and journal making in these places also promoted learning and literacy there. During the period examined here, Lebanon and Egypt had the biggest concentrations of people able to read in the region. Let us look at a few illustrations of this uneven outspread of activity. When Butrus al-Bustn launched his multivolume universal encyclopedia D’irat al-Ma‘rif in Beirut (from 1876 onward) – the archetypal product of the Arab cultural nahda – it immediately attracted many customers from that city and its surrounding neighborhood. Out of 514 subscribers during the project’s first six months, 174 (approximately 34 per cent) were from Beirut and from other locations in Mount Lebanon (e.g. ‘Abeyh, ‘ leyh, Wd Shahrr, Jizzn, Dayr al-Qamar, Ghazr). The rest were thinly spread out all over the region: Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, Aleppo, Tripoli, Tunis, Baghdad, Mosul, Salt, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Acre, Nablus, Lidd, Ramla and several other places. The farther the place was from the production center, the scantier the number of consumers in it.31 In the same vein, the Cairo-based journal al-Hill (1892) circulated broadly in Egypt and had sales agents in no fewer than 42 Egyptian locations, densely covering the area between Kafr al-Shaykh and Luxor, by the third year of its launching. It also had agents in Syria, Palestine and Iraq, 16 of them in all, thinly spread out in various towns.32 Finally, the editors of the monthly al-Muqtataf (Beirut 1876, relocated to Cairo in 1884) received readers’ letters from its inception: readers residing in places near and far were curious enough to approach the editors with inquiries and comments.33 Such

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letters arrived from everywhere, from Marrakesh to Basra, but their great majority came, again, from the two main centers of consumption, Lebanon and Egypt. The written exchanges between authors and readers symbolized the link between center and periphery with its vivid pulse as well as patently uneven spatial outspread. There was another reason for the asymmetric distribution of Arab publishing, a reason unique to these particular types of activity: government suspicion of the independent voicing of ideas in the provinces under its rule. Ottoman legal and administrative restrictions on printing were decreed already in the 1850s, but they assumed a particularly tough form under Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909), who became notorious for his mistrust of private publishing and the harsh measures he employed to suppress it.34 Abdülhamid stifled the press that had blossomed in Lebanon before his ascent to power and strangled all private printing initiatives throughout the provinces of the Fertile Crescent by censorship and punishment. He also tried to check the flow of such items into the Arab provinces, with partial success. His policies were an important reason for the mass emigration of Lebanese writers to Egypt and other destinations (a few brave publishers stayed and carried on with their endeavors), and for the near-complete absence of publishing elsewhere in the region. Egypt, beyond his effective reach, flourished as the main center of activity. Asymmetry was social as well as geographical. For reasons that are all too obvious, the vast majority of those affected by the changes were men. Women had seldom been involved in, or exposed to, public affairs or scholarly concerns and only a few of them received any form of education. The introduction of news reporting, communication and discourse media remained for the most part beyond their horizons, and their overwhelming majority was untrained to access them in any case. Only very few women took interest in books and journals during the formative phase, as consumers but also as printers;35 their ranks would slowly grow in later years. On the whole, the world of print remained a man’s territory. The region’s integration in the circles of global activity through publishing and reading did little to modify this imbalance in gender relations, certainly during the early phase.

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As against this, another social imbalance, Muslim–Christian relations, was tangibly influenced by the late-nineteenth-century changes. In general, the arrival of Europeans and their protection of Christian minorities provided the latter with a political and economic safety net, a development of major import. More specifically, the foreigners’ promotion of printing and education granted the Christians a means of great potential. As a segment of a society that cherished religious affiliation, they had hitherto held an inferior position by definition. A common way of reducing this inferiority had been by acquiring education and various skills and excelling in public jobs. The introduction of printing and of modern education, both more readily available to Christians, gave them a mighty tool to further promote their communal standing. Using it could upgrade their quality edge in the community. Leading Christian-Lebanese intellectuals also saw in it a further advantage: printing could serve to propagate ideas that would eliminate the old minority handicap, by emphasizing unifying values such as patriotism and Arab culture in lieu of the religious division. Located at the forefront of the Arab encounter with global forces, Christians were the first to adopt printing and turn it into an educational implement. Nearly all important publishing businesses and journals in nineteenth-century Lebanon were owned by Christians, as were most such enterprises in Egypt until close to the end of the century. Likewise, the Christian share in the reading public anywhere in the area was markedly larger than their demographic weight. One distinctive illustration of this is the pool of subscribers to al-Bustn’s D’irat al-Ma‘rif, just mentioned, the great majority of whom were Christians from every corner of the region – as one can readily tell from the 1,022 customer names that have come down to us.36 Whether or not the Christians’ efforts actually altered their overall social status is a valid question, which, however, we do not need to address here. But it is clear that local social division and uneven group involvement in the process greatly influenced the assimilation of printing in the region. Finally, there was another kind of disparity in the way publishing and mass reading were introduced in the Middle East, reflected in the story with which this chapter begins. The young Sayyid Qutb and his schoolchildren friends, he tells us, were the local book dealer’s best

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clients; they, and not their parents or other village adults. Schooling projects naturally targeted the young and left the older generation basically out of the scene. This always happened when new educational systems were founded where none had previously existed. Consequently, reading audiences had a sizeable segment of young people. As we have seen in the example quoted above, it was often young boys who mediated printed texts to the old, who had been beyond schooling age when education reached their neighborhood. This was another aspect of the overall lopsided cultural development, and one that had important social repercussions.

Conclusion The forceful arrival of global actors in the Middle East rendered printing attractive to Arab Ottoman societies, after centuries of benign disregard for it. These societies now adopted it as a promising key to modernity, and embarked on the long course of training their members in using it, through education. The advent of Arab publishing and mass reading epitomized the effects of the first modern globalization in more ways than one. The entry of foreign forces in many forms portended grand changes: novel ideas and customs, remodeled environment, faster pace of action. The local response to it, informed as it was by assorted constraints, interests and age-old concepts, inevitably unfolded in an uneven manner. Lebanese Christians, enjoying an edge in learning from the start, were most ready to embrace the changes and especially eager to adopt printing, which would further boost their standing in the community. They were followed by newcomers to the practice, products of the recent progress in education, who likewise became avid consumers. Last to enter the process were the grassroot sections of the populace everywhere, which craved for news in the face of rapid changes. Their mass joining was crucial to the success of the process, as they made up the bulk of the consumer market that rendered the process viable. Yet another weighty constraint was political: the state’s wariness of free voices, which banned such activity beyond limited parts of the region.

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The outcome of all these local trends was an unbalanced process, spatially and socially. In this uneven scene, the movement of published goods across the area and down through the different strata of society was mediated by an elaborate network of agents, alien and local, who made up an indispensable interface between printer and reader. Indigenous middlemen sometimes continued the role of the foreigners and worked in smooth collaboration with them, and at other times operated independently, forging their own mediation niche. The layer of intermediaries, from booksellers to readers to the illiterate, perforce grew thicker with time, and new occupations (e.g. newspaper street vendors) were formed in the process. As they all had to make a living and sought to boost their businesses, they became active contributors to the trade’s expansion. This was a typical instance of the bottom-up facet of the change: Local residents joining the new game and then playing it by modified rules that suited their agendas. Globalization brought printing and the quest for literacy into the Middle East. It thereby permanently eradicated the old equilibrium between a small educated group and the illiterate majority, based as it had been on the traditional social order. The new reality rendered the need to be informed, and the independent ability to retrieve information, a priority markedly higher than it had once been. Did it also alter, more broadly, the attitude of the local society to all knowledge that could be accessible through books and reading skills? Did it attract that society to the vast treasures of wisdom accumulated by those who had invented printing and eventually inspired Arabs to embrace it? These are important questions that still remain open.

Notes 1. Sayyid Qutb, Tifl min al-qarya (Cairo, 1973), pp.110–14. More details on the culture of books and reading in the village appear later in the chapter. Qutb speaks of himself in the third person. 2. See the fascinating story of the Damascus barber who ventured to write a history book in the eighteenth century: Dana Sajdi, ‘A room of his own: The “history” of the Barber of Damascus (fl. 1762)’, The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 4 (2003), pp.19–35.

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3. Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands (Edinburgh, 2012); Dana Sajdi, ‘Print and its discontents: a case for pre-print journalism and other sundry print matters’, The Translator 15:1 (2009), pp.105–38; Nelly Hanna, In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairo’s Middle Class, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (Syracuse, 2003). 4. For recent discussions of this issue, see: Lutz Berger, ‘Zur Problematik der späten Einführung des Buchdrucks in der islamischen Welt’, in Ulrich Marzolph (ed), Das gedruckte Buch im Vorderen Orient (Dortmund, 2002), pp.15–28; Metin Kunt, ‘Reading elite, elite reading’, Journal of Semitic Studies, Suppl. 24 (2008), pp.89–100; Orlin Sabev, ‘In search of lost time in waiting for Godot: How “late” was the introduction of Ottoman printing?’, paper presented at the Third International Symposium on the History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (Leipzig, September 2008); Sajdi, ‘Print and its discontents’. 5. This norm did not apply to non-Muslim minorities in the Empire, which ran licensed printing businesses in their respective languages: Jews in the fifteenth century, Armenians in the sixteenth, Greeks in the seventeenth century. 6. Whether or not printing had been formally banned by earlier sultans remains an open question. No document to that effect has been discovered so far, and the oft-quoted reference to a 1485 firmn by Sultan Byezid I prohibiting printing might well be based on a myth. See J.–P. Ghobrial, ‘Diglossia and the “methodology” of Arabic print’, paper presented at the Second International Symposium on the History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East (Paris, November 2005). For the circumstances of Sultan Ahmet III’s 1727 edict, see Kunt. 7. Orlin Sabev, ‘The first Ottoman Turkish printing enterprise: Success or failure?’ in Dana Sajdi (ed), Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2007), pp.63–89; Maurits H. van den Boogert, ‘The Sultan’s answer to the Medici Press? Ibrahim Müteferrika’s printing house in Istanbul’, in Alastair Hamilton et. al. (eds), The Republic of Letters and the Levant (Leiden, 2005), pp.265–91. 8. ‘ yda Ibrhm Nusayr, Harakat nashr al-kutub f misr f al-qarn al-tsi‘ ‘ashar (Cairo, 1994), pp.78, 90–93. 9. Nusayr, Harakat nashr al-kutub, p.93. 10. Jamml al-Dn al-Shayyl, Ta’rikh al-tarjama wal- haraka al-thaqafiyya fī misr fī ʻasr muhammad ʻalī (Cairo, 2000), pp.200–201. 11. Ami Ayalon, The Press in the Arab Middle East: A History (New York, 1995), pp.28–46. 12. Figures for books are calculated from data in Nusayr, Harakat nashr alkutub, pp.79–80, 94–7. For newspapers, see Flb d Tarraz, Ta’rkh al-sihfa

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14.

15.

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18. 19.

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al-ʻarabiyya (Beirut, 1933), vol. 4, pp.162–78, 214–22, 274–88, 324–26. Over 400 additional journals and newspapers appeared in Egypt between 1900–14; ibid, pp.178–96, 222–42, 288–306, 326–46. We know less about the printing industry in Lebanon than we do about Egypt. See Ls Shaykh, Ta’rkh fann al-tib’a f al-mashriq (Beirut, 1995), pp.43–149, for a partial list of books printed there, comprising over 1,500 entries, most of which appeared after mid-century. About 250 newspapers were issued in Lebanon from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, with an estimated circulation of 30,000–40,000 copies by the end of the period. Tarraz, Ta’rkh al-sihfa, pp.4–14, 24–40, 106–14, 118–26; Nissim Malul, ‘Ha-ʻitonut ha-ʻaravit,’ Ha-Shiloah 31 (1914), p.449. Modern states gather information on their citizens’ consumption of books and journals, which helps historians in assessing the size and socioeconomic profile of the reading audiences, if not quite the effect of this pursuit. For an illuminating example, see James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940 (Princeton NJ, 1991), especially Part 1. This is as true universally; see e.g. Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, 1987). Many titles appear in Shaykh, Ta’rkh fann al-tib‘a and in Ysuf Ilyn Sarks, Mu‘jam al-matb‘t al-‘arabiyya wa’l-mu‘arraba (Cairo, 1928). Ads in the Arabic press of the time also abound in such titles, and the websites of leading libraries contain additional titles, accessible by using city/publisher names of the period as keywords. For the first four of these examples, see: Hadqat al-akhbr, 30 October 1858, p.4; al-Ahrm, 12 August 1895, p.2; Lisn al-hl, 4 January 1897, p.8; al-Hill, 1 October 1892, p.94. The books on modern manners (al-ʻdt f al-ziyrt wa’l-wal‘im) and cooking (Mukhtasar ustdh al-ṭabbkhin) are both by Khall Sarks (Beirut, 1911 and 1905, respectively). P. J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, 4th ed. (London, 1991), p.468. Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2000), esp. Chapter 2, and passim; Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford, 2005), pp.163–89. For a few examples, see: an ad in Hadqat al-akhbr, 16 April 1859, p.4; a book ad in al-Jaw’ib, 3 September 1860, p.4; a book ad in al-Muqtataf, March 1885, p.383; a bookshop ad in al-Hill, 1 October 1896, pp.119–20; ads in al-Naf’is al-‘asriyya, January 1911, p.47, August 1911, p.376.

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21. Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, 2006). 22. See e.g. al-Bustn’s statement to this effect in al-Jinn, 1 November 1870, inside front cover. 23. M. A. Ubicini, Letters from Turkey (London, 1856), Vol. I, pp.246–53; L. Lagarde, ‘Note sur les journaux français de Constantinople à l’époque révolutionaire’, Journal Asiatique, 236 (1948), pp.271–6; Selim Nüzhet Gerçek, Türk Gazetecilii (Istanbul, 1931), pp.10–21, 31–8; Philip Sadgrove, ‘Journalism in Muhammad ‘Al’s Egypt’, Culture and History 16 (1997), pp.89–99. 24. E.g. Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut, pp.164–8, 171–8. 25. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the history of books’, in his The Kiss of Lamourette (New York, 1990), pp.107–135; idem, ‘ “What is the history of books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History 4:3 (2007), pp.495–508. 26. Hirschler, The Written Word, Chapter 5; Hanna, In Praise of Books, passim; Flb d Tarrazi, Khaz’in al-kutub al-’arabiyya f al-khafiqayn (Beirut, 1948), pp.909–17; Youssef Eche, Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semi-publiques en Mésopotamie, en Syrie et en Égypte au Moyen Age (Damascus, 1967); Ömer Faruk Yilmaz, Tarih Boyunca Sahhflik ve stanbul Sahhflar Çarısı (Istanbul, 2005), pp.11–31, 71–89. 27. Ami Ayalon, ‘Arab booksellers and bookshops in the age of printing, 1850– 1914,’ BJMES 37:1, (2010), pp.73–93. 28. Access to printed information also depended on economic means and affordability, an essential factor in an indigent society. See Ayalon, The Press, pp.190–5. 29. Mikh’l Sharbm, al-Kf f ta’rkh misr al-qadm wa’l-hadth, Vol. 4 (Cairo, 1900), pp. 258–9. 30. Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut, Introduction, Chapters 1, Chapter 8. 31. Al-Jinn, issues of 1 July to 15 December 1874 – lists by name and location, usually published on the front and back covers of each issue. Of these, 95 were from Beirut and 79 from other places in Lebanon. Customers began subscribing long before the beginning of publication, and al-Bustn used to publish lists of his subscribers as a means to promote the project. 32. Al-Hill, 1 March 1895, outside back-cover. 33. The authenticity of such correspondence is ever problematic. Presumably not all published letters were genuine; some or many of them may have been modified or altogether fabricated to various ends, but not all of them. Leading journals (al-Muqtataf, al-Hill) had special sections which regularly addressed readers’ letters from many places, attesting to what appears to have been a lively interactivity between journal and readers.

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34. Ayalon, The Press, pp.110–15. 35. See e.g. Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt (New Haven, 1994); Fruma Zachs, ‘Cross-Glocalization: Syrian women immigrants and the founding of women’s newspapers in Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, 50:3 (2014), pp. 353–69. 36. Ami Ayalon, ‘Modern texts and their readers in late Ottoman Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 38:4 (2002), pp.23–6.

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SHORT PIECES

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CHAPTER 13 THE MOVEMENT OF FEMINIST IDEAS: THE CASE OF K ADINL AR DÜNYASI Elife Biçer-Deveci

The Ottoman women’s journal Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World), published between 1913 and 1921, was the official organ of Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i Nisvan Cemiyeti (The Association for the Defence of Ottoman Women’s Rights). It is known as the first women’s journal to raise radical demands for women in the Ottoman Empire and has been characterized as the culmination of the Ottoman-Turkish women’s movement in the Second Constitutional Period.1 It also defined itself as a feminist journal and as part of a general international women’s movement.2 In this article, I discuss this journal as an outcome of the processes of globalization of feminist movements in the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. I will likewise demonstrate the transnational connectedness of the Ottoman-Turkish women’s movement. Through an examination of Kadınlar Dünyası and the participation of Ottoman women’s movements in international congresses, the mutual influences between international women’s organizations and the Ottoman women’s movement in the early twentieth century can be observed and investigated. I will do so from the perspective of ‘entangled history’, i.e. a historical perspective which

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concentrates on transnational interrelations, interactions and networks which go beyond the nation state, to examine personal contacts and social groups as well.3 Feminist historians of the Ottoman-Turkish women’s movement have overlooked its interrelations with the international women’s organizations, and tended to focus on its nationalist aspects.4 Transnational entanglements are crucial for understanding the development of the feminist debate and movement in the early twentieth century. The system of education in missionary schools for girls, used mostly by Christians but also by upper class Muslims, is an example of these factors, because their curriculum was geared towards women’s education.5 Another important aspect is the interaction of Ottoman women with Western feminists, through both Kadınlar Dünyası and international congresses. The development of feminist ideologies must therefore be seen in the framework of interrelations with the West, and not only in the framework of nationalizing processes. For the purpose of my analysis, the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the republic do not constitute points of rupture. Both traditional gender roles and women’s demands to reform them endured after the formation of the Republic.6 The development of the Turkish women’s movement, moreover, was based on earlier interactions between Ottoman feminists and international women’s organizations. *

*

*

Kadınlar Dünyası had a dual role in mediating the mobility of ideas: in Ottoman Turkish, it translated Western ideas to Ottoman audiences, while in French, it exposed European audience to the lives and struggles of Ottoman women. Kadınlar Dünyası served as a platform for different groups of Ottoman women in the Ottoman Empire and enabled them to participate in debates on modernization and to question traditional gender roles. All of the journal’s authors were women. Most of them were Turkish, but several writers were European, Armenian and Kurdish.

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The content of the journal appear to be Western-oriented. Already in its first issue, its editors committed themselves to adopting Western feminist ideas in their struggle for women’s equal rights in the Ottoman Empire, especially access to academic education, employment and reform of outdoor clothes. The authors discussed the situation of Ottoman women in comparison with their European counterparts, and defined the latter’s status as progressive and modern, since European women enjoyed equal rights in education and in public life. They used this comparison to raise demands for similar rights for themselves and equated women’s rights with national progress and modernity. By highlighting women’s life in Western countries, these writers thus developed deep critiques of gender relations in their own society in the public and religious spheres. Europe and the West appeared as key elements in the legitimations of women’s demands and in their critiques of gender roles. In the first years of the journal’s publication, beside the OttomanTurkish edition, the editors published and distributed a French supplement, in order to try to counter prejudices prevalent in Europe that Muslim women were merely oppressed beings, veiled and caged in harems. The issues 121–128 of 1913–1914 reported on the situation of women in the Ottoman Empire and drew the attention of international women’s organizations to their plight. The first issue included articles about the foundation and gains of the Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i Nisvan Cemiyeti (The Association for the Defence of Ottoman Women’s Rights), about the first flight of an Ottoman woman in Istanbul in 1913, and included letters by Jules Bois and Vera Starkoff. It further highlighted the collaboration of the Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i Nisvan Cemiyeti with Baronne D’Ange D’Astre. Other articles argued that the Islamic religion accords women more rights that they enjoyed at the present time, for example, that polygamy is restricted by conditions, that female scientific activities and employment are not forbidden, and that religion does allow progressive interpretations and practices. Furthermore, the French supplement emphasized that Ottoman women had the same demands as their Western counterparts, and that their situation must be changed. The supplement thus endeavoured to create a platform for the communication between Ottoman-Turkish

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Illustration 13.1

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Kadınlar Dünyası, N° 124, Saturday, 21 December 1913/ 3 January 1914.

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Illustration 13.2

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Kadınlar Dünyası, the French supplement of N° 123, Saturday, 21 December 1913/ 3 January 1914.

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women, Western feminists and international women’s organizations. They specifically targeted, I believe, the International Council of Women, whose head office was located in Paris, and networked with several women’s organizations in other countries. The direct interaction of Ottoman feminists with international women’s organizations is also reflected in reports of international women’s congresses. Such congresses invited women from multiple countries, and particularly endeavoured to reach women in the East. By the beginning of the twentieth century, representatives of Ottoman women participated in the conferences of the International Congress of Women and reported on the situation of women in the Ottoman Empire. The participation of Ottoman women is documented, for example, at the 1900 Deuxième Congrès International des Œuvres et Institutions Féminines in Paris, at the sixth congress of the International Women’s Alliance for Suffrage in 1911 in Stockholm, and at the eighth Congress of the same organization in 1920 in Geneva.7 International women’s organizations, such as the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women (IAW) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, understood themselves as global movements and aimed to create a universal sisterhood on the assumption of the ‘global suffering of women’.8 They invited women from the Ottoman Empire to their congresses, and sent them their journals and information about their activities. The work of these organizations could successfully construct a transcultural feminism with which several female activists for suffrage could associate themselves. At the same time, as Charlotte Weber demonstrates with regards to the IAW, Western feminists were not free from orientalist assumptions, ethnocentric attitudes, and from the belief in their own cultural superiority. In their discussion about Middle Eastern women, the veil had a great significance as a symbol of ‘tradition’ holding Muslim women back. In the 1920s, unveiling became a primary goal of the IAW.9 *

*

*

To conclude, transformations of gender relations in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey were linked to the process of

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globalization of social movements and of notions of modernity, and especially of women’s organizations and their international networks. These networks did much to empower women’s organizations, which used them to change the balance of power and gender roles in their society. Ottoman feminists in Istanbul saw themselves as part of the international women’s movement and framed their ideology accordingly. The international women’s movement helped legitimize Ottoman feminists’ activities and publications in Istanbul. In this process, they adapted Western feminist concepts and transformed them according to the requirements of their national ideology regarding nationalism and motherhood. The gender norms, which Western women’s organizations tried to negotiate on an international level, were internalized and transferred by the women’s movement as ideological sources at the national level. This was an unequal exchange, characterized by the dominance of Western discourse and political power. This Western dominance can be interpreted as an empowerment factor, enabling women in a Middle Eastern state to enter the public sphere and to deal with social conflicts. What is more, the development of the Ottoman women’s movement, as outlined above, explains certain later developments. The Türk Kadınlar Birlii (Union of Turkish Women),10 founded after the formation of the Republic, was transformed into the national section of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in 1926. The interaction between Ottoman-Turkish feminists and international women’s organizations reached its peak at the Twelfth International Congress for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship in Istanbul in 1935, in which the introduction of women’s suffrage in Turkey was celebrated as a success of the transnational women’s movement.11 Two weeks after the conference, the Türk Kadınlar Birlii was dissolved because of the pressure of the Turkish state.12 The Turkish women’s organization was accused of being in contact with Western pacifist movements and therefore with enemies. Furthermore, the Kemalist regime forbade any organization of women, with the argument that equal citizenship between men and women had been obtained. The achievements of the Republican era, however, can be attributed to these earlier precedents.

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Notes 1. While earlier journals like Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (1895–1908) (Women’s Journal) demanded some reforms of family laws, Kadınlar Dünyası went further and argued for equal citizenship, equal access to education and employment and reform of women’s clothes. See Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı kadın hareketi (stanbul, 2010), pp.164ff. 2. The term ‘international women’s movement’ is based on the self-qualification of international women’s organizations and their vision of ‘international sisterhood’. See Charlotte Weber, ‘Unveiling Scheherazade: Feminist Orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950’, Feminist Studies 27 (2001), pp.125–57; Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton NJ, 1997), pp.107–29, ‘Forging an international “we”’. The writers of Kadınlar Dünyası also dealt with the international/global women’s movement in their articles. 3. For the concept of ‘entangled history’, see Shalini Randeria, ‘Geteilte Geschichten und verwobene Moderne’, in Jörn Rüsen, Hanna and Leitgeb Norbert Jegelka (eds), Zukunftsentwürfe (Frankfurt-New York, 1999), pp.87– 96; Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander Martin, ‘Entangled histories in the Age of Extremes’, Kritika 10 (2009), pp.415–22, at 421. 4. See the survey article by Ellen L. Fleischmann, ‘The other “awakening”: The emergence of women’s movements in the modern Middle East, 1900–1940’, in Karen Offen (ed), Globalizing Feminisms, 1789–1945 (Abingdon, 2010), pp.170–92. 5. For the influences of missionary schools on women’s status, especially in minority groups in the Ottoman Empire, see Nikki R. Keddie, Women in the Middle East (Princeton NJ, 2007), pp.65f.; Flora A. Keshgegian, ‘ “Starving Armenians”: The politics and ideology of humanitarian aid in the first decades of the twentieth century’, in Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (eds), Humanitarianism and Suffering (Cambridge, 2008), pp.140–55, pp.144f.; see also pek Çalılar, Halide Edib (Istanbul, 2011), pp.28f. For organized Armenian women, see Victoria Rowe, ‘Three literary views of Armenian Constantinople and its inhabitants’, in Richard G. Hovannisian and Simon Payaslian (eds), Armenian Constantinople (Costa Mesa CA, 2010), pp.243–64; Lerna Ekmekçiolu and Melissa Bilal (eds), Bir adalet feryadı (Istanbul, 2006). 6. See Elif Ekin Akit, Kızların sessizlii (Istanbul, 2005). 7. The first participation in an international congress was in the 2e Congrès International des Œuvres et Institutions Féminines of 1900. See Compte Rendu des Travaux (Paris, 1902): Selma Riza, ‘Condition Légale des Femmes Turques’, pp.393ff.; F. Berberoff, ‘La Femme Arménienne’, pp.398ff. Representatives of Ottoman and Turkish women participated in, and reported from the

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following international congresses: Sixth Congress of International Women’s Alliance for Suffrage (Stockholm, 1911), the General Assembly of International Council of Women (Rome, 1914), Eighth Congress of International Women’s Suffrage Alliance (Geneva, 1920), and in subsequent congresses until the Twelfth International Congress for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (Istanbul, 1935). Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 82f. Weber, ‘Unveiling Scheherazade’, p.141. Some members of Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i Nisvan Cemiyeti and of other women’s associations helped to found Türk Kadınlar Birlii in 1924, which in 1926 became the Turkish section of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance. International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, Report of the Twelfth Congress Istanbul. April 18–24, 1935 (London, 1935), p.12. Zafer Toprak, ‘1935 Istanbul Uluslararasi Feminizm Kongresi ve Barı’, Toplum – Düün (Society and mentality) (1986), pp.24–9 (at p.29).

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CHAPTER 14 R ELIGION IN MOTION AND THE ESSENCE OF ISL A M: M ANIFESTATIONS OF THE GLOBAL IN MUHA MM AD ‘ABDUH’S R ESPONSE TO –N FAR AH ANTu Joachim Langner

The role of Islam and Christianity in the development of modern science and civilization was the subject of a debate in Egyptian newspapers in 1902.1 The Christian-Lebanese journalist and publisher Farah Antn started the debate with an article about the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes; 1126–98) in his journal al-Jmi‘a.2 He argued that Islam was generally repressive towards science and knowledge and therefore was an obstacle to civilization, in contrast to Christianity, which, due to its separation of religious and worldly powers, was tolerant and fostering of the development of modern scientific thought. None other than the Mufti of Egypt, who then was the well-known scholar Muhammad ‘Abduh, felt the need to reply, which he did in a series of six articles published in the Islamic journal al-Manr, thereby largely increasing the paper’s print run.3 Each of the authors published his collected articles on the matter as a book later on.4

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In many ways, this was a local debate: two intellectuals – both living in northern Egypt – discussed issues that were rooted in their experience, claiming that Egypt (and the Ottoman Empire) doesn’t have ‘the fruits of modern civilization that the Europeans enjoy’.5 While al-Manr ‘was the work of one man’,6 ‘Abduh’s friend Rashd Rid, al-Jmi‘a was Farah Antn’s personal fiefdom. (The two publishers were friends as well; both had grown up in the same town, Tripoli in Lebanon.)7 After Antn’s article was published, ‘Abduh went to Alexandria to discuss with him whether a repudiation could be placed in al-Jmi‘a.8 Put differently, a very limited and very local circle of people was actively involved in this debate – but as will be seen below, the debate also unfolded in a larger, indeed global, framework.

The debate’s frame of reference The debate between Antn and ‘Abduh referred to a set of debates among French intellectuals. An important part of the latter was a lecture by Ernest Renan at the Sorbonne in 1883,9 to which ‘Abduh devoted a whole section in which he quoted Renan freely but at length, commenting on the Frenchman’s positions.10 Another part concerned the positions of the former French foreign minister Gabriel Hanotaux. In 1900, an article by Hanotaux was published in translation by an Egyptian newspaper and ‘Abduh wrote a response to it. Two years later, ‘Abduh informed the readers of his response to Antn about a change in Hanotaux’s position from criticizing Islam to proclaiming tolerance. He quoted from a speech that Hanotaux had given ‘on a geography conference in March of this year (1902)’11 and asked whether ‘the French government followed his demands’.12 These examples offer a glimpse of the text’s interconnectedness with France’s public space and Western intellectual discourses in general. In what follows, however, I will focus on ‘Abduh and argue that his arguments themselves may be considered as a local manifestation of global processes. The issues at the heart of the Antn-‘Abduh debate – a lack of certain features of modern civilization, which ‘Abduh represents as ‘European’, and most of all as ‘English’13 – could be approached in a manner that discusses questions of local Egyptian or Ottoman public

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policy. However, both authors extended the categories of Egyptian/ Ottoman and British/European to all of Islam and Christianity. ‘Abduh presented these two groups as entities that have a specific nature or character (tab‘a) as a stable and homogeneous essence. He outlined this nature by stating each religion’s most basic principles (usl).14 For Christianity, he determined those principles to include the belief in miracles (as proof for the religion’s authenticity),15 the rule of the clergy over matters of dogma and conscience, abstinence from worldly matters, giving priority to belief over reason (‘aql), and the belief that the Bible comprehends knowledge about every possible aspect of human life, amongst others.16 Islam’s principles, on the other hand, are the preference of rational interpretation over literal observance of the texts, the ban on charging others with unbelief, founding religious beliefs on proof (as God did by providing his creation with the laws of nature), the eradication of religious rule (sulta dniyya), prevention of internal conflict (fitna), as forgiveness was in the nature of Islam, and the priority of matters of life over those concerned with the afterlife and scriptural obedience, amongst others.17 In ‘Abduh’s eyes, Islam was based solely on proof and rationality. Since it is the pure message of the one God, it must be congruent with His one creation. Accordingly, imn (belief) actually equals ‘ilm (knowledge/ science) in Islam.18 Although there is a certain degree of polemics embedded in this characterization of Islam and Christianity, it presented two principles present throughout the text. The first was the comparability of religions by a certain set of features. Those entailed the basic principles, as described above, or having a founder and a time of foundation,19 involving a certain set of practices (prayer, pilgrimage, etc.)20 or comprising a distinguishable number of adherents.21 ‘Abduh’s obvious intention, to prove that Islam is more tolerant (tasmuh) towards science than Christianity, expressed the idea of several legitimate and comparable religions next to each other (though one may be considered to be superior to the other). The second principle was the conceptual homogenization of each religion following a clearly definable, never-changing essence. Employing a markedly rational and scientific line of argument, he

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presented his specific idea of Islamic dogma as an undeniable fact. Although this was part of disputes about the right to interpret Islam, it presented a strong claim for unity. ‘Abduh praised unity in other sections of the text and complained about conflict (khilf) and separation (tafrq) that weakened Islam22 – and hence stressed Islam’s internal unity and homogeneity. He also stated that ‘the religion ... is one religion from the first [forefathers] to the last [of who will come], and ... it doesn’t change’, and that ‘I haven’t seen a religion that has conserved its founding principles (usl) ... like Islam’.23 Unity was a topos found throughout his text. ‘Abduh also addressed possible objections about plurality. He stated that Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic Christians share their essential principles and have been equally cruel when it comes to treating those who disagree with their dogmas.24 In Islam, he disqualifies any plurality as customs that were actually not a part of the religion, that Islam had been misused as ‘a tool’ (la),25 or that ‘most of which the ordinary people (al-‘mma) call Islam, isn’t of Islam. It kept from the acts of Islam an image of the prayer (salt), fasting (sawm) and pilgrimage (hajj) and some of its words while distorting their meaning’. Therefore, a religion’s basic principles (usl) have to be as pure and authentic as possible: ‘Looking at any religion to find a judgment for or against it on any issue, it is necessary to clear it from what it shows in its people’s customs (‘dt) and innovations (muhdatht) that may have come from another religion’.26 With its specific character, ‘Abduh even portrays religion as a person who sanctions those who deviate, saying that Islam would ‘smile in bewilderment while he is in the heaviest grief about the disobedience of his sons’.27 This idea of religions as never-changing entities allowed ‘Abduh to explain contemporary situations in a local realm by giving examples from the history of Spain, Switzerland, England, Greece and other places that he included in the Christian World,28 and various Islamic lands29 in Asia, Africa and Europe and their past. He wrote of Christians showing intolerance towards science during the Crusades and the Inquisition; conversely, he wrote of Muslims striving for knowledge, cherishing books and supporting scientists in various times and places; and finally, he also wrote of scholars, astronomers

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and philosophers affiliated with either religion to make an argument about their general nature. What we’ve seen so far is the extension of a local argumentation to include large groups of people – all Christians or all Muslims – as distinguished entities, which are imagined to be homogeneous and unchanging in their essence; and we have seen that the composition of that essence is clearly delineated and stressed by a claim to truth opposed to other interpretations. In the last part of this chapter, I shall put the case of ‘Abduh’s arguments in the context of recent secondary literature on religion around 1900.

The concept of ‘religion’ Recent literature about the late nineteenth century in a global perspective30 describes a ‘rise of a new-style religion’31 that can be summarized in the following three points: (1) the creation of the idea of ‘a religion’ as part of a global system of religions as comparable equals. As ‘religions’ they went through a process of ‘reconstruction, re-imagination and thereby (renewed) differentiation, and created a standard for what a religion is and has to include.32 Religions gained more internal integrity. Their organizational structures evolved and became standardized in many aspects. Religious education, buildings, dogma, etc., became more and more alike in different parts of the world. (2) Religiosity did not wane, as the secularization thesis implies.33 To the contrary, it became much more powerful by gaining thorough access to every individual’s actions and thoughts in ritualizing their lives and demanding increased loyalty and devotion. Part of that process was growth in ritual practice such as pilgrimage or the celebration of religious holidays. (3) Hence, religions became the ‘institutionally and dogmatically palpable ensembles that we know today’. ‘[R]eligion ... has been gaining increasingly in contour and strength since 1820. Religion ... becomes religions (plural) in the sense of strong and influential institutions’. A palpable part of that trend was the creation of the concept of ‘world religions’, expressed in the Parliament of World Religions that was held in Chicago in 1893.34 Scholars have argued that this process

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resembled the development of nationalism and the nations. Bayly and Beyer propose that globalization is at the core of these developments, with an increasing global movement of goods, people and ideas, and an increasing global interconnectedness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitating a redefinition of individual and group identities. These theories connect very large lines of diverse and partially scattered evidence. They lack depth at some points, but we may see the picture they draw as an approximation, and an inspiration for further research. Crucially, this is very reminiscent of ‘Abduh’s view of religion. First, it involves a concept of religions as entities marked by certain comparable features that clearly make each of them ‘a religion’ (having a founder, a countable number of adherents, a certain set of practices and rules, etc.). Second, there is ‘Abduh’s contrast of ‘real’ Islam versus nonIslamic practices and dogmas; his emphasis on the unity of Islam; and his claim that this unity, or homogeneity, is provable by rational facts. Third and last, the above two points show that ‘Abduh had a strict idea about who is (and is not) a Muslim and that he made a strong claim for truth. What emerges here is a picture of differentiation of an established plurality between religions, which in turn necessitates the conceptual unity and homogeneity of each religion and its individuals’ thorough membership. In short, ‘Abduh makes a claim for standardization. That this related to changes in dogma and practice becomes apparent if we consider that ‘Abduh was a driving force in the reform of the al-Azhar University. His first proposals in that regard date back to 1876. In 1895 he became a member of the al-Azhar’s administrative counsel where he was responsible for a reform that entailed the setting of standards in curricula, examinations, entering criteria for students, and establishing ‘a centralized bureaucracy, with the Shaykh al-Azhar as chairman of an administrative body that was to oversee teaching, student affairs, exams, the hiring of staff, and general administration’. And as Mufti of Egypt from 1899 to 1905,35 Muhammad ‘Abduh’s immediate task was the reform of the Sharia Court system. His claims about, and concept of, religion give us an insight into the ideas and discourses that underlay these reforms.

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Conclusion The Antn-‘Abduh debate unfolded in a local realm and on local issues, and involved local actors and networks. Even so, its intertextuality and the frame of its argumentation also related to a larger, indeed global, context. ‘Abduh’s arguments and claims for tolerance towards science and a homogeneous essence of Islam expressed a concept of religion that resembled what others observed to be a globally developing idea – and hence made manifest a local negotiation of a global discourse.

Notes 1. I would like to thank Johann Buessow, Cyrus Schayegh, Astrid Meier and Maria Friedmann for their comments on earlier drafts of the article 2. For the debate cf. Anke von Kügelgen, Averroes und die arabische Moderne: Ansätze zu einer Neubegründung des Rationalismus im Islam (Brill, 1994), pp.77ff.; Paola Viviani, Un maestro del Novecento arabo: Farah Antun (Rome, 2004), pp.188ff.; Gunnar Hasselblatt, Herkunft und Auswirkungen der Apologetik Muhammed ‘Abduh’s (PhD diss., Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen, 1968). 3. Mark J. Sedgwick, Muhammad Abduh (Oxford, 2010), p.89. On ‘Abduh, see the contribution by Büssow in this volume. 4. Cf. Muhammad ʿAbduh, al-Islm wa-l-nasrniyya maʿa al-ʿilm wa-l-madaniyya, ed. Muhammad Rashd Rid (Misr, 1905); Farah Antn, Ibn Rushd wafalsafatu-hu (Alexandria, 1903). 5. Muhammad ʿAbduh, ‘Thamar al-madaniyya al-hadtha’, in idem, al-Islm, p.12, cf. ibid, pp.180–1. 6. J. Jomier, ‘al-Manr’, in C. E. Bosworth et al. (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New edition (Leiden, 1991), vol. 6, pp.360–1. 7. Alexander Flores, ‘Modernity, romanticism and religion: Contradictions in the writings of Farah Antun’, in Christoph Schumann (ed), Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East: Ideology and Practice (London, 2010), p.115. 8. Cf. Muhammad ʿAbduh, al-Aʿml al-kmila li’l-Imm Muhammad ʿAbduh, ed. Muhammad ʿImra, (Beirut, 1972), vol. 3, pp.243–7; Hasselblatt, ‘Herkunft’, pp.169–70. 9. Cf. Sedgwick, Abduh, pp.36–42; I. Goldziher, ‘DJ aml al-Dn al-Afgh n, ― ― al-Sayyid Mu ḥammad b. Ṣafdar’, in B. Lewis, C. H. Pellat and J. Schacht (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden, 1965–91), vol. 2, pp.416–9.

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R ELIGION 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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ʿAbduh, al-Islam, pp.119–21. Ibid., p.178. Ibid., p.180. Cf. ibid., pp.180–1. Cf. ibid., pp.23–4. Ibid., pp.24–5. Cf. ibid., pp.24–32. Cf. ibid., pp.62–75. Cf. ibid., pp.62–4, 136–8. Ibid., pp.24, 82. Ibid., p.126. Cf. ibid., p.24. Ibid., p.130. Ibid., pp.54, 122. Ibid., pp.48–53. Ibid., p.111. Ibid., p.24. Ibid., p.112. Al-ʿalam al-mash, as in ibid, p.105. Misr bild islmiyya, as in ibid, p.10. Cf. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780– 1914 (Malden MA, 2004); Peter Beyer, Religions in Global Society (London, 2006); Gerald Faschingeder, ‘Religionen. Die Wiedergeburt des Religiösen im globalen Austausch’, in Reinhard Sieder and Ernst Langthaler (eds), Globalgeschichte 1800–2000 (Vienna, 2010), pp.503–27; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt (Munich, 2011); Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter (Munich, 2004). Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter, p.330. Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), pp.1–2, 174, traces this concept’s creation to the Enlightenment period, but sees an entirely new quality and differentiation in the nineteenth century. Cf. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, 2001). Cf. Dorothea Lüddeckens, Das Weltparlament der Religionen von 1893, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten (Berlin, 2002). Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London, 1967), p.134.

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INDEX

‘Abduh, Muhammad, 10, 12, 87, 273–320, 356–363 ‘Abdullhi Muhammad b. ‘Al Abdaššakr, 9, 55–59, 62–78 Abolition(ism), 112, 119, 120, 131 n25 Abu Bakr Ibrahim Shahim, 64–69, 73, 77 n36 Acre, 22, 24, 34, 36, 336 Addis Ababa, 55 Advertising, 242, 244, 253 n47, 332 Afar people, 64, 77 n35 al-Afghn, Jaml al-Dn Asadbd, 10, 230, 281, 283, 310 n64 Age of consent, 120 ‘Agunah, ‘Agunot, 9, 135, 154–158, see also Women ‘Ajln, see Jordan Alawites, 32, 35, 48 n31, 49 n45 Aleppo, 24, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 46 n21, 47 n27, 50 n55, 106 n31, 136, 145, 209, 256 n74, 333, 336 Alexandria, 9, 13, 14 n2, 95, 112, 118–121, 124, 125, 132 n32, 153, 180–184, 186, 188, 190–191, 197 n19, 210, 220, 221, 239, 251 n20, 260 n114, 283, 331, 332, 335, 357 Algazi, Eliya, 151 Algiers, 32, 38, 181, 280, 281 Alla turca, 242 Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), 137, 148, 152

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American University in Cairo, 9, 83, 84, 89, 90, 92, 95, 99 American University of Beirut, 84, 91 Anatolia, 27, 28, 38, 143, 145, 149, 246 Greeks in, 140 Jewish community, 9, 135–139, 146, 149, 152–154, 158, 159 Muslim migration to, 142, 159, 168 Anslinger, Harry J., 214–218 Anthropological constant, 293, 295, 317 n155 Anti-Semitism, 137, 145, 153 Arab Image Foundation, 241, 256 n7 Arab Music Congress, 243 Armenians, 138, 141, 143, 146, 150, 341 n5, 348, 354 n5 disappearance of, 140 Ashkenazim, 147, 149, 174 n6 migration of, 168, 169, 172 Asyt, 321, 332 Automobiles, 209, 231, 246–248, 260 n113 Azbakiyyah, 114 Garden, 118 prostitutes in, 116, 117, 122 al-Azhar, 83–88, 90, 92–95, 235, 311 n88, 312 n89, n94, 361 Baghdad, 41, 297, 336 book market, 333, see also Book(s) Jewish community of, 150

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Balkan, 38, 39, 137, 149, 172, 244 Jews in, 147, 153, 159 Muslims in, 141, 142, 143 Wars, 138, 142, 145, 146, 148, 162 n40 Bartok, Bela, 243, 257 n80 Basra, 298, 332, 337 Jewish community of, 150 Bayly, C. A., 4, 11, 275, 302, 361 Beersheba, 211, 212 Bees, beehive, 11, 263–269 Beirut, 8, 12, 13, 25–27, 30, 36, 84, 93, 220, 221, 236, 241, 244, 251 n20, 257 n82, 258 n93, 259 n107, 273, 280–284, 288, 293, 309 n53, 311 n81, 315 n122, 343, 50 n55, 54 n68 as a publishing center, 311 n81, 332, 335, 336 Ben-Ghiat, Alexander, 150 Berbera, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 71 Bild al-Shm, 8, 9, 20, 22–30, 36–37, 42–43, 44 n7, 47 n25, see also Syria Bio-politics, 128 Bliss, Howard, 91 Bloch, Marc, 244 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 273, 274, 281, 290, 310 n61 Bois, Jules 349 Book(s), 99, 117, 248, 324, 325, 328, 359, see also Baghdad, book market; Cairo, book market; Damascus, book market book diffusion, 6, 7, 89, 92 booksellers, bookselling, 321, 333, 335, 338, 340 bookshops, 322, 326, 333 collection(s), 322 consumption, 342 n14 marketing, 336 production, 324 Borders, 2, 93, 153, 159, 177, 184, 187, 207, 220 border policing, border control, 6, 9, 181, 183, 185, 208, 209, 221, 222

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crossing, 1, 9, 179 criminals crossing, 203, 208, 213, 221 Bourgeois discourse / values, 120, 276, 279, 291, 292 Brain drain, 89 anti-brain drain, 91 Britain, 4, 37, 38, 40, 43, 50 n53, 57, 58, 62, 70, 83, 96, 97, 102, 120, 148, 179, 198 n24, 204, 205, 214, 225, 230, 241, 249 n1 British Empire, 10, 86, 87, 94, 95, 98, 99, 103, 203, 204, 214 British Occupation (1882), 85, 109, 112, 115, 186, 193, 283, see also Egypt Broadhurst, Joseph, 205, 208 Brothel(s), 110, 115–119, 125, 126, 131 n25, 132 n39, see also Prostitution Blq press, 325, see also Printing Bulgaria, 32, 137, 142, 149, 207, 216 Bustn, Butrus, 28, 328, 336, 338, 343 n22, 343 n31 D‘irat al-Ma‘ rif 328, 336 Cairo, 12, 64, 87, 129, 256 n74, n77, 103, 113, 162 n42, 238, 241, 253 n47, 274, 281, 282, 283, 309 n52, 315 n122, 329, 332, 334 Bab al-Bahri street, 117 book market, 333, 336, see also Book(s) British High Commissioner in, 219 brothel in, 125 Cairo City Police, 121, 122 Clot Bey street, 117 communities in, 149, 153, 282 Faggalah, 113 Gezirah, 113 hashish smuggling, 206, 220, 221, 235 intellectual milieu, 13, 284 job market, 114 publishing center, 311 n81, 335

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INDEX sex work in, 109, 115, 116–118, 121–123, 128, 131 n22 Shepherd’s Hotel, 113 universities in, 9, 81, 83, 84, 87–95, 99–102 urban planning, 112, 128

ällänqo, 72 battle of, 72, 78 n60 Camel, 10, 34, 247, 249 n1, 263, 265, 267, 269 n12 Camera(s), 10, 232, 240, 241, 250 n8, 254 n60, 255 n61, see also Photography Capitulations, 118, 120, 145, 172, 191 Cemetery, 154 in Izmir, 152, 162 n40 Censorship, 7, 13, 150, 166, 337 Census, 60, 116, 131 n16, 136, 146–148, 177, 193 Central and Eastern Europe, 111, 118 Jews in, 219 Check points, 183 China, 2, 150, 216, 226 n61, 250 n13, 251 n16, 252 n32, 298 Christians, 93, 137, 141, 142, 150, 161 n36, 169, 171, 174 n6, 274, 275, 282, 287, 293, 294, 296, 299, 302, 303, 348, 356–360, see also Lebanon in Africa, 55, 59, 63, 70, 71, 73, 91, 288, 289 and Capitulations, 145 in Lebanon, 336, 339 missionaries, 83, 277 -Muslim relations, 338 and photography, 240 university, 90 Circassians, 32, 33, 39, 49 n46, 142–143 migration of, 138 Citrus industry/market, 263, 265, 267 n1 Civilization, 88, 167, 212, 294, 300, 356–357

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of Islam, 87 modernity and, 206 Clocks, see also Time keeping; Watches makers, 252 n29 mechanical, 234, 235 water, 251 n22 Cocaine, 219, see also Drugs Coffee houses, 7, 13, 67, 117, 118, 123, 244, 334 Cold War, 2–4, 45 n10, 216 Colonialism, 4, 13, 37, 58, 60, 107 n60, 300 Communication, 2, 5, 156, 203, 213, 250 n7, 335, 337, 249, see also Technology networks, 135, 154 technologies of, 208, 229, 231, 248, 277 Comte, Auguste, 278, 282, 286, 287, 294, 301, 313 n101 Congrès International des Oeuvres et Institutions Féminines, 352, 354 n7 Constanta, 210, 218 Conversion, 51 n58, 63, 67, 156 forced, 70 Cooper, Fredrick, 55 Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, 120 Cristofori, Bartolomeo, 241 Cromer, Lord, 87, 89 Cultural transfer, 274 Damascus, 8, 20, 24, 25, 28–31, 33, 34, 38, 42, 258 n93, 280, 297, 312 n94, 336, 340 n1 book market, 333, see also Book(s) railway, 33, 36, 41, 68 Darwinism, 12, 13, 316 n136 de Monfreid, Henry, 207 de Sacy, Sylvestre, 206 Department stores, 118, 232 Detective fiction, 219, 220

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A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST

Diffusion, 102, 229, 233, 234, 235, 236, 242, 244, 246–248, 250 n11, n13, 278 of books, 322, 326, 328, 332, 333, 335 geographic, 146 Djibouti, 57, 77 n35 Dönme, 147 Drugs, 7, 13, 203, 205, 207, 226 n56, see also Cocaine; Hashish; Opium consumption of, 201 control of, 213 culture of, 206 dealers, 121 purchase of, 209 trade, 204, 213, 216 trafficking, 202, 208, 210, 211, 214, 217–221 Druze, 32, 35, 49 n46 Dyer, Charles B., 216 Edison, Thomas, 236, 246 Education, 1, 7, 82, 88, 92, 94, 97, 101, 167, 212, 234, 276, 277, 330, 331, 339 Arab, 327 and books, 335, 336, 338 mobility, 81, 83, 84, 91, 92, 95, 102, 103 modern, 105, 273, 302 Ottoman, 41, 349 reform, 89 religious, 86, 93, 360 system(s), 59, 339, 348 Western, 90, 96, 98, 100 women, 337, 348, 354 n1 Egypt, 27, 37, 65, 84, 85, 109, 114, 177, 183, 184, 186, 191, 194, 246, 273, 278, 283, 291, 356–362, see also British Occupation and passing British presence in, 40, 50 n53, 60, 186 drug trade in, 203, 204–222

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globalization, 12 higher education, 86–87, 93, 95, 102, 107 n60 migration from, 168 migration to, 147, 153, 179, 188, 283, 284 music in, 242, 244 occupation of Somali coast, 58, 59–62, 63, 64, 66–71 printing in, 325–326, 332, 335–337 sex work in, 9, 112, 114, 115–128 typewriting trade, 239 under Ism’l, 57, 112, 138, 242, see also Ism’l, Khedive University of, 82, 83, 87–92, 94–101, 104 n8, 105 n23 Electricity, 117, 230, 232, 244–246, 250 n10, 258 n93, n94, n99, 259 n107, n108, n109, 264, see also Technology Entangled history, 347 Epidemics/plague, 136, 139, 142, 144, 145 Ethiopia, 9, 56, 58, 59, 65, 70, 72, 73, 75 n9, 77 n35, 131 n25 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 83, 100–102 Evolution, 276, 277, 278, 287, 290, 316 n136 Eyeglasses, see Reading glasses Fabian, Johannes, 220 Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), 204, 214–218 Feminist movement/groups, 120, 347–353, see also Globalization, of feminist movements; International women’s congresses; International women’s movement; Ottoman women’s movement Fesch, Paul, 245 Filastn, 165, 166, 168, see also Newspapers and journals; Palestine Ford, Henry, 206 n117 Model T cars, 232, 247, 260 n114

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INDEX Foucault, Michel, 232 Fountain pens, 232, 236, 250 n11 France, 28, 37, 38, 43, 50 n52, 57, 62, 69, 83, 96, 97, 102, 190, 197 n19, 241, 257 n86, 281, 357 consulate, 183, 185, 188, 190–191 drug trade, 202 education, 82, 88, 93, 95, 96–99, 103, 239 French, 5, 32, 38, 43, 54 n68, 62, 65, 76 n15, 137, 189, 277, 281, 282, 357 mandate, 205 merchants, 61, 63 migration, 138, 148, 152, 159, 161 n30, 181, 183 newspaper, 334, 348, 349 sex work, 111, 113, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125 Frankfurt School, 232 Frigidaire (refrigerators), 232, 256 n72 Galilee, 34, 35, 38, 52 n58 Garden City, 113, 114 Gaza, 211–213 Gender, 11, 110–112, 123, 128, 129, 258 n91, 337, 348, 349, 352, 353 General Electric, 232 Geneva, 352 University of, 281 German Society for the Exploration of the Holy Land, 31, 33, 40 Germany, 21, 23, 40, 41, 51 n58, 97, 119, 120, 241, 242 Baden-Württemberg, 21 Stuttgart, 22 Global microcosm/global locality, 19, 20, 29, 30, 73, 82–86, 92, 99, 112, 263 Globalization, agents, 55, 59, 73, 339 from below, 7, 281 counter, 93 drug prevention, 213, 214, 216, 217

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economy, 64, 65, 69, 114 of feminist movements, 347, 352, 353, see also Feminist movement/ groups market, 9, 20, 57, 68, 128 migration, 6, 165 movement, 8, 11, 109, 279, 283, 322 powers, 12, 83 standardization, 94, 103 Glocalization, 3, 20, 65, 73, 276 Godley, Andrew, 237 Golan, see Jawln Heights Gordon College, 86 Gottheil, Richard, 238 Gramophone, 236, 244, 250 n10, 256 n74, 257 n86, n87, 258 n91 Greece, 38, 118, 137, 138, 140, 144–148, 204, 207, 210, 216, 317 n154, 359 Greeks, 61, 68, 111, 119–121, 125, 141, 142, 149, 150, 166, 174 n6, 209, 257 n83, 282, 341 n5 Guizot, François, 282, 286, 287, 294 Gulf of Aden, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63 Gulf region, 81 Haba, Alois, 243, 256 n79 Haddad, Salim, 238, 253 n47 Hadhramaut, 94 Haifa, 8, 20–22, 23, 29–30, 33, 34, 36, 40–42, 50 n55 hashish trade, 210, 217, 220, 221, 256 n72 Hama, 36 Harär, 9, 12, 55–66, 69–71, 73 radicalization in, 66–68, 72 Harwich, A. E., 221, 222 Hashimite, 242 Hashish, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, see also Drugs; Opium consumption, 13 trade, 211 trafficking, 201–205, 207, 213, 217, 220–222

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A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST

Hashishin myth, 206, 224 Hawrn, 33, 34, 35, 41 Herzl, Theodor, 238 al-Hill, 253 n47, 336, 343 n33 Hindemith, Paul, 243 Historiography, 2, 219, 268 n8, 306 n30 Arab, 166 of late Ottoman Empire, 24–26 Zionist, 166, 221, see also Zionist movement Homs, 36 Honey, 10, 264, 265, 268 n2 Hubbel, Harvey, 246 al-Hud al-Marsud Lock Hospital, 115, 126 Hussein, Taha, 88, 89, 256 n74 Ibn Firnas, 234 Ibn al-Haytham, 234 Ibn Khaldn, 327 Ibn Saud, King, 247 Ibrhm Pasha, 37 Identification papers, 179, 180, see also Nationality certificate; Registration certificate Illiteracy, illiterates, 111, 151, 323, 326, 331, 340 India, 2, 64, 68, 86, 87, 105 n20, 119, 150, 196 n10, 203, 204, 210, 224 n25, 226 n61, 252 n32, n36, 254 n53, 281, 308 n46, 309 n52 Indian Ocean, 56, 57, 60, 196 n10 International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children (IBS), 112 International crime, 203 international gangs, 207, 220 International Alliance of Women, The, 352, 354 n2 International Council of Women, The, 352 International Opium Convention, 204 International women’s congresses, 352, see also Feminist movement/groups; Ottoman women’s movement

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International women’s movement, 347, 353, 354 n2, see also Feminist movement/groups Inventions, 229, 230, 250 n11, 268 n4 Investment boom (1897–1907), 112 Iran, 218, 222 n4, 231, 238, 240, 248, 250 n5, 251 n24, 260 n113, 281, 282 Iraq, 39, 143, 150, 205, 207, 247, 253 n41, 336 ‘s and Ysuf al-‘s, 166–168, 171 Islamic reform, 279, 280, 281, 291, 293 Ism’l, Khedive, 57, 109, 153, 239, 242; see also Egypt, under Ism’l; Khedive Ism’liyyah, 113 Istanbul, 11, 12, 24, 25, 27, 30, 37, 39–42, 47 n26, 84, 137, 139, 140, 144, 191, 236, 241, 245, 246, 258 n93, 260 n117, 280, 281, 324, 325, 331–333 educational center, 84, 93 feminists, 349, 353 Jews in, 146, 147, 149–154, 157, 159 Pera Palace Hotel, 245 sex work, 155 Italy, 9, 50 n53, 57, 62, 69–71, 118, 119, 148, 207, 234, 241 Jabal ‘Amil, 34 Jaffa, 12, 183, 265, 267 n1 Christians in, 52 n58 hashish trafficking, 209, 210, 225 n47, 226 n56 Jewish community in, 169–172, 174 n23 migration to, 165, 167–168 newspapers published in, 11, 166, 317 n154 printing and publishing, 332, 336 Jawln Heights, 8, 12, 20, 21, 29, 30–54 Java, 85

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INDEX Jerusalem, 8, 46 n21, 52 n58, 162 n42, 181, 209, 211, 215, 216, 253 n47, 336 Jewish migration, 169 Jesuits, 61 Jewish communities, Adanan, 144 Aleppo, 136 Anatolia, 9, 135, 140 Balkan, 146 Beirut, 282 Cairo, 282 Denizli, 147 Diyarbakir, 136 Edirne, 146, 148 Gallipoli, 145 Istanbul, 144, 146, 147, 149, 153 Izmir, 146, 147, 151, 153 Jaffa, 12, 168–171 Kastamonu, 136, 146 Konya, 136 Salonica, 144, 151 Saraiköy, 147 Van, 136 Jews, 240, 268 n8, 277, 294, 341 n5 Eastern European Jewish underworld, 219 gangs, robbers, 219, 224 n24 hashish trade, 10, 206–219, 221 migration of, 111, 134–162, 168, 174 n6, n12, 299, 319 n188 Jewish press, 162 n39 Sephardi Jews, 168, 174 n6, n23 Jordan River, 20, 34, 40 Jordan, 33, 37, 39, 40, 48 n35 ‘Ajln, 33, 34, 35 Journals, see Newspapers and journals Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World), 347, 348 Kafr al-Shaykh, 336 Kemalist regime, 353 Kenya, 86, 105 n20 Keyboard, 238, 239, 253 n40, n43

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Khartoum, 86 Khedive, 62, 72 n5, see also Ism’l, Khedive; Libraries, Khedivial Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 40 Knepper, Paul, 208, 219 Kodak camera, 232, 233, 241, 254 n58, 255 n61 König, Zdenk Frank, 214–218, 227 n82 Kuwait, 50 n53, 95 League of Nations, 5, 10, 202–204, 213 Lebanon, 13, 43, 252 n32, 256 n72, n73, 257 n83, 315 n122, 357, see also Christians, in Lebanon education in, 84, 325 hashish trade, 204, 205, 207–210, 217, 225 n41 Lebanese immigrants in Egypt, 326 Mount Lebanon, 28, 35, 336 publishing center, 326, 335–338, 342 n13, 343 n31 Levant, 216, 221, 223 n12, 284, 311 n81 Libraries, book collections, 82, 98, 99, 103, 282, 294, 322, 333 Khedivial, 329, see also Khedive Lidd, 336 Linotype, 239, see also Technology Luxor, 336 Madaniyya (Sf order), 280 Mahdiyyah, in Sudan, 62 Mahlak, 59, 68 Malaya, 86 Mandate, 43 borders, 221 in Lebanon and Syria, 205 in Palestine, 218 Al-Manyalawi, Sheikh Yusuf, 236, 244, 258 n90 Marjayoun, 34 Marrakesh, 337 Marseilles, 118, 122, 123, 161 n30

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372

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST

Marx, Karl, 237, 301 Marxism, 129 Masculinity, 278, 291, 292, 315 n130 Mass production, 229, 324 McCormick, Cyrus, 232 Media, 231, 269 n9, 276, 283, 284, 337 mediascapes, 249 n2 mass media, 250 n7 Small Media, Big Revolution, 231 Mehmet Ali, see Muhammad ‘Al Pasha Messageries Maritimes steamers, 118 Middle class, 90, 113, 114, 118, 128, 139, 221, 240, 242, 305 n19, 305 n20 Migration, 1, 2, 5, 35, 136, 137–143, 153, 159, 180, 187, 188, 215 academic, 9, 13, 82 certificate, 219 emigration, mass, 337 European, 6 gendered, 11, 110, 111, 155 global, 165 Jewish, 11, 12, 134, 135, 144–153, 166, 167, 169–173 Muslim, 168 and sex work, 109, 118, 128, 129 Missionaries, 7, 11, 89, 222 n7, 256 n73, 329, 330, 331, 336 Capuchin, 63, 67–70, 73 Christian, 83, 277, 289, 325 European, 57, 58, 61, 75 n9 Mobility, 1, 8, 13, 83, 86, 89, 103, 134, 178, 179, 180, 181, 276, 279, 280, 284 documents, 183, 185, 192, 193 educational, 81, 84, 91, 95, 96, 98 ideas, 81, 286, 348 objects, 99, 302 people, 11, 14 n2, 82, 92, 93, 100, 139, 141, 275, 302 social, 82, 102, 137, 154 students, 92, 93, 100 technology, 11 Morocco, 85, 168, 280

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Mosul, 336 Motor vehicles, see Automobiles Mott, John R., 90 Muhammad ‘Abduh, see ‘Abduh, Muhammad Muhammad ‘Al Pasha, 37, 96, 138, 325, 326 Muhammad b. ‘Al b. ‘Abdaššakr, 59, 62 Muhammad Nd bš, 61 Muhammad Raf bš, 60 Mund, 334 al-Muqtataf, 236, 238, 245, 257 n87, 336, 342 n20, 343 n33, 278 Mürur tezkeresi (internal travel permit), 193 Muslim world, 85, 250 b11, 274, 278, 281, 282, 284, 285, 296–300, 310 n64, 312 n94 Nablus, 24, 29, 336 Nahda, 330, 336 Napoleon, 96, 242 Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, Egypt’s Central, 210, 215 Nasr al-Dn, Shah, 242 National Vigilance Association (NVA), 112 Nationality certificate, 86, 190, see also Identification papers; Registration certificate Newspapers and journals, 6–8, 11, 30, 93, 230, 233, 278, 283, 302, 311, 325–338, 329–334, 340, 341 n12, 342 n12, n14, 343 n33, 352, 354 n1, see also Filastn; Jews, Jewish press; Print industry; Printing agents, 333, 336, 340 Arabic, 283, 317 n154, 330, 325, 326 Egyptian, 356, 357 foreign, 334, 61 Hebrew, 206 Nigeria, 86 Nissim Shemtov Eli, 151

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INDEX Nüfus tezkeresi (census registration document), 193 Ogaden Desert, 55, 66, 72 Opium, 201, 202, 204, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218, 226 n53, n61, see also Drugs; Hashish International Opium Conventions, 204 Orient(al), 34, 122, 206, 207, 212, 220, 291, 299, 316 n131, 317 n154 exoticism of, 113 piano, 243, 257 n80, see also Piano and sex, 117 Oromo people, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77 n35 Osmanlı Müdafaa-i Hukuk-i Nisvan Cemiyeti (The Association for the Defence of Ottoman Women’s Rights), 347, 349, 355 n10 Ottoman Empire, Ottoman(s), 5, 6, 21, 23, 25, 35–43, 47 n25, 50 n55, 53 n64, n65, 134, 140, 142, 143, 145, 172, 179, 183, 186, 191, 320 n201, n202, 349, 352, 354 n5 as a global power, 83 government, 32–34, 37, 38, 41, 231, 281, 326 hashish consumption, 201 hashish trade, 202 Jews in, 148, 155 modernity, 357 printing and publication in, 323, 324 technology, adoption of, 235, 260 n113 Ottoman women’s movement, 347, 348, see also Feminist movement/groups; International women’s congresses Palestine Exploration Fund, 32, 40 Palestine, 9, 10, 21, 22, 26, 32, 34, 43, 51 n58, 99, 100, 138, 165, 167, 168, 170–173, 182, 245, 247, 336, see also Filastn hashish trafficking, 201–228

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honey in, 236–269 Jewish migration, 143, 146–148, 153 Palestine Police, 206, 208, 221, 336 Zionist project in, 166, 174 n6, 238 Pan-Islam, 86, 319 n190 Paris, 8, 11, 96, 105 n19, 161 n30, 214, 215, 216, 249 n1, 273, 280, 352 Passport / travel papers, 5, 7, 9, 11, 86, 106 n42, 178–201, 208, 212, 213, see also mobility, documents forged, 119 Periodicals, see Newspapers and journals Personal computer (PC), 240, 252 n39 Phonograph, see Gramophone Photography, 240, 241, 254 n54, n55, n57, n58, see also Camera(s) Piano, 12, 241–243, 256 n73, 256 n73, n79, 257 n83, n84, see also Oriental, piano Pimping, 112, see also Prostitution Port Said, 112, 119, 183, 210 Poverty, 110, 111, 139, 150, 159, 185, 250 n12, 283, 291 Press, see Newspapers and journals Print industry, see also Newspapers and Journals Egypt, 278, 329 Lebanon, 342 n13 Printing, 10, 235, 278, 321–343, see also Blq press; Newspapers and periodicals introduction in the Middle East, 277, 306 n30 printing press, 253 n45, 329 Procurers, 111, 118, 119, 121, 123 Progress, 8, 166, 167, 169, 170, 268 n4, 285, 308 n44, 327, 339, 349 Prohibition regimes, 10, 213, 217 Prostitution, 155, 156, 289, see also Brothel(s); Pimping in brothels, 110, 115, 118, 119, 131 n25 casual, 110, 123 disguised, 110, 116

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374

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST

Prostitution – Continued regulated, 115, 128 sex work, 9, 109–133 Protestantism, 277, 288, 292, 293 Protestants, 168 Publishing, 321–344 publishing houses, 12, 302 Qantara, 209, 210 al-Qarawiyyin, 83 Qsim, Muhammad Sa‘d, 240 Qasr al-Dubbarah, 113, 114 Quartertones, 243, 257 n80 Quneitra, 31, 33, 34, 36 Qur’n, 70, 94, 284, 285, 286, 290, 293, 294, 327 Qutb, Sayyid, 12, 321, 322, 338 Rabbis, 155, 157 Railroad, 10, 135, 138, 149, 269 n9, 269 n12, 329 Railway(s), 30, 33, 41, 48 n35, 140, 230, 231, 247, 281 Baghdad, 41 Beirut-Damascus, 54 n68 Damascus-Acre, 36 Damascus-Haifa, 8, 29, 30, 33, 41 Hijaz, 41 Palestinian, 209, 210 Ramla, 336 Razor(s), 125, 232, 236 Reading glasses, 234, 248, 251 n16 Readers, 1, 166, 278, 285, 297, 333, 337, 340 mass, 10, 321–344 reading rooms 333 readers’ letters to journals 170, 332, 343 n33 Red Sea, 56, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 184 Registration certificate, 179, 180, 190–192, 197 n19, see also Identification papers; Nationality certificate

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Regulationism, 111, 115, 116 Religion/s, 11, 57, 73, 88, 91, 157, 166, 274, 275, 277, 285–363 Remington, 232, 237, 238, 253 n43, 253 n45, 253 n46 Rida, Rashid, 240, 282, 283, 308 n46, 310 n64, 357 al-Rihani, Amin, 247 Rishon le-Zion, 170, 245 Riyad, 247 Rogers, Everett, 233 Rothschild, 245 Royal typewriters, 239 Rushdi, Hussein, 87, 88 Russell Pasha, 121, 122, 132 n39, 210, 215 Russia, 2, 5, 37, 38, 39, 145, 153, 199 n46, 281 Said Bey, 246 Said, Edward, 239 Salt, 336 Sawwa family, 244 Sayyidah Zaynab, 115, 116 Scales, 19, 20, 24, 27, 29, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43 global, 275, 293 Schumacher, Gottlieb, 19–54 Script (Arabic, Ottoman, Persian, Latin), 238, 324 Sea of Galilee, 20, 32, 34 Second Constitutional Period, 347 Self-discipline, 290, 291 Semakh, 32, 33, 38, 39 Sewing machine(s), 7, 10, 12, 232, 236, 237, 242, 252 n35, 260 n117, 264 Singer, 7, 12, 232, 233, 236, 237, 250 n12, 252 n35 Seyhulislam, 240 Shdhiliyya (Sf order), 280 Shewan kingdom, 71, 72 Sidon, 24 Silahtaraga, 246, 259 n103

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INDEX Social sciences, 83, 100, 101, 275, 276, 284, 320 n204 Spanish, Ladino, 144 Spencer, Herbert, 286, 292, 316 n136 Starkoff, Vera, 349 Steam navigation 188, 229, 230, 281 Stockholm, 352 Storyteller, 334 Sublime Porte, 239 Subscribers, 246, 333, 336, 338, 343 n31 Subsistence migrants, white marginal, 110 Sudan, 32, 57, 60, 62, 131 n25, 280 Suez Canal, 36, 40, 56, 183, 206, 209, 210, 329 Suicide, 156, 157 Sultan Abdülhamid II, 36–41, 51 n56, 135, 139, 150, 158, 160 n6, 238, 245, 337 Sultan Ahmet III, 324 Sultan Byezid I, 341 n6 Sursock, 30, 36, 39, 41, 49 n48 Survey of Western Palestine, see Palestine Exploration Fund Synagogues, 149, 152, 154 Syria, the Syrian lands, 27–29, 33–43, 47 n25, 138, 143, 147, 186, 204–210, 217, 218, 220, 225 n37, 247, 283–284, 298, 299, 336, see also Bild al-Shm Suriy, vilayet of, 27, 28, 30 Tanta, 332 Tanzimat, 24, 37, 149, 165 Tatars, 143 Tawfiqiyyah, 113, 114 Taylor, Isaac, 288, 289, 290, 293, 303, 314 n114, 314 n116, 317 n140, 318 n181 Technological system, 264 Technology, 41, 59, 74 n4, 167, 178, 208, 220, 230, 231, 238, 241, 248, 249 n2, 250 n15, 254 n54,

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263, 267, 268 n4, n8, 324, 331, see also Communication; Electricity; Linotype adoption, 329, 330 ‘big’, 231 Creole, 263, 267, 268 n4 diffusion of, 233, 246, 248 mobility of, 11 modern, 208 new, 167, 203, 208, 221, 230, 243, 249 n3, 260 n113, 264, 267, 268 n4, 277, 322, 330, 331 paper technology, 195 print technology, 277, 278, 306 n30 ‘small’, 10, 231, 232, 233 235, 236, 240, 241, 244, 248, 260 n118 tools, 42 transport, 6, 178, 221, 267, 269 n9, 306 n30 Western, 235 Technoscapes, 230, 249 Tel Aviv, 162 n42, 174 n23, 217, 220, 221, 224 n20 Tempelgesellschaft, 21 Thornton, Guy, 116 Tidhar, David, 220, 228 n90 Time keeping, 235, see also Clocks, Watches Tourists, 7, 117, 128, 131 n22, 132 n39 Transit route, Palestine, 204, 205 Transjordan, 43, 205 Translation, 41, 279, 308 n46, 316 n136, 325, 334, 357 Tripoli, 24, 35, 36, 169, 332, 336, 357 Trucks, buses, see Automobiles Tunisia, 280 Tunis, 50 n53, 168, 336 Türk Kadınlar Birlii (The Turkish Women’s Union), 353, 355 n10, see also Turkish women’s movement

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376

A GLOBAL MIDDLE E AST

Turkey, Turks, 35, 119, 138–140, 143– 151, 154, 159, 192, 201, 221, 239, 246, 248, 253 n48, 257 n84, 259 n106, 260 n113, n117, 352, 353 Turkish women’s movement, 347, 348, see also Türk Kadınlar Birlii (The Turkish Women’s Union) Turkoman, 34, 35 Twain, Mark, 238 Typewriter(s), 10, 232, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 248, 253 n40, n41, n42, n45, n47, 254 n53 Umm Kulthum, 243, 244 Union Internationale des Amis des Jeune Filles, 120 United States, USA, 10, 21, 23, 51 n58, 83, 91, 120, 141, 147, 148, 152, 161 n30, 179, 204, 213, 214, 216, 217, 232, 236, 237, 238, 241, 246, 249 n1, n2, 252 n38, 257 n87, 259 n106, n111 Zanesville, Ohio, 21 Urbanization, 136, 140, 159 Uryanzade Cemil Molla, 245 Veblen, Thorstein, 232 Venereal, diseases, 115 peril, 129 Violin, 243, 244 Visa, 85, 94, 98, 181, 183, 184 Vitriol, 126, 127 Wagh el-Birkah, 117, 122 Wakid, Philipppe, 238 Wass‘ah, 117, 131 n22, 132 n39 Watches, 232, 235, see also Clocks; Time keeping Weaving, 235 Westernization, 129, 274, 275, 302, 304 n9 White slave trade, 111, 118–128, 132, 149, 162

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Women, 13, 67, 110, 117, 121–133, 147, 153, 159, 211, 237, 260 n115, see also ‘Aguna, ‘Agunot agents of cultural change, 383 beehives on, 267 education, 337, 348 employment, 112, 114, 115, 120, 155, 237 journal, 347, 354 n1 migrants, 11, 114, 118 organizations, 352, 353, 354 n2, n5, 355 n10 readers, 11, 12 rights, 349 status, 354 n5 trafficking, 202, 208, 221 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, The, 352 Women’s movement, 11, 347, 348, 353, 354 n2 Work, domestic, 114, 131 n25 fake employment agencies, 119 hire purchase schemes, 237 seamstress, 237 World systems analysis, 26, 46 n16 World War I/the Great War, 4, 5, 13, 14 n3, 37, 51, 85, 109, 116, 138, 140, 142, 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155, 162 n40, 166, 177, 178, 181, 192, 194, 197 n18, 199 n37, 202, 219, 235, 239, 244, 247, 269 n9, 321, 327, 330, 342 n13 World War II, 4, 5, 105 n19, 147, 199 n37, 211, 227 n77, 241, 244 Yildiz palace 238, 245 Young Turks, 135, 146, 150, 152, 158, 161 n36, 167 Zaghloul, Sa’ad 87 Zajal, 244 Zanzibar 86, 105 n20

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INDEX Zeila 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 75–76 n15 Zionist movement, 26, 152, 165, 166, 168, 169, 172, 173, 174 n6, 221, 238, 253 n45, see also Historiography, Zionist

LiatKozma_17_Index.indd 377

377 anti- Zionist polemics, 152 -Arab interaction, 11 ideas, 149 immigration, 12, 171 migrations, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172 organizations, 218

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