Muhammad Ali (1805-2005) is a special series published fortnightly by Al-Ahram Weekly in anticipation of the international symposium commemorating the bicentennial of Muhammad Ali Pasha's acendancy to power, to be held in Egypt on 10 November. Contributions, proposals and letters on the subject should be addressed to the series editor Amina Elbendary [email protected] or faxed to +202 578 6089. Previous instalments: Muhammad Ali (1805-2005) On the eve of the international symposium to be held in Cairo and Alexandria beginning 12 November, Al-Ahram Weekly concludes the Muhammad Ali series commemorating the bicentennial of the Pasha's ascendancy to power The popular uses of Muhammad Ali The fields of popular and world history continue to place Muhammad Ali within the Oriental Despotism paradigm. Peter Gran* explains why the pasha is useful for such historiography Muhammad Ali was a great figure in the modern national history of Egypt. The Pasha also continues to be a very useful figure on the level of popularised world history, which is the subject of this essay. Overwhelmingly on this popularised level, authors use an "Oriental Despotism" model to characterise Muhammad Ali and, more broadly, Egyptian history. Yet, while no doubt elements of this popularised understanding exist in more serious work as well, the professional field of Egyptian history has gone significantly beyond the stage where this model can play any particularly ground-breaking role. In what follows I propose to outline the main features of the popular view and then conclude by speculating why this approach remains congenial to so many scholars. I will begin with a consideration of some of the implications of claiming Muhammad Ali to be a self-made-man, one springing from nothing, this being the way he gets inserted into the model, then turn to how the model explains his approach to governing and his achievements as a moderniser, reflecting on what is gained and what is lost by approaching these subjects in this fashion. SELF-MADE MAN: In popular writing, Muhammad Ali was a self-made man. This seems fair enough, as there were and are many adventurers then and now who play a role in the larger scheme of modern history. In this context, however, invoking the idea of "self-made" generally has the effect of obliterating any serious analysis of his roots in Kavala, or Albania, thus in a sense wiping out who he and his wife Amina were and what the dynamic was which brought him and later her to Egypt. He simply arrives. He works with the Albanians who came with him for a while but as the new army develops they are an inconvenience and he gets rid of them. By obliterating this background, Muhammad Ali's movements in Egypt and his connections to Bernardino Drovetti, the French proconsul, are made to appear as if they happened on the spot. Of course maybe they just did. Or, perhaps, there is a lot more to it. In any case, the French backed him and he rose to power. One has read different versions of how the Egyptian people came to side with him and how they celebrated his coming to power. Still, it is difficult, for me at least, to visualise someone who allegedly could not communicate in Arabic and who had been in the country a short while achieving this level of support. In any case, somehow he out-maneuvered a popular local figure: Umar Makram. As this too is hard to explain, some books lean back toward the factor of weapons and French backing. If the self-made man closes a lot of doors behind him, this is especially the case for the self-made man who comes and triumphs. History tends to side with the victor so, not surprisingly; little interest has ever been shown in Alfi Bey, the Mamluk who aspired to capture Egypt for himself and who happened to fail. Perhaps, however, one loses something always siding with the victor. We seem to know little about Alfi Bey's mysterious trip to England, his success in getting English and Ottoman support for his cause and, in light of this support, the reasons for his complete collapse in battles such as at Damanhur in 1807, opening the way for Muhammad Ali's take-over. Given that France was being beaten to its knees in this period and that England was the premier world power, the defeat of an English proxy at the hands of anybody anywhere ought to have inspired a huge body of scholarship. Curiously this was not the case in this instance. The one article about Alfi Bey dates from the 1920's; Muhammad Ali, it is reported, gave his daughter Zaynab Alfi Bey's house. Full stop. Turning now to Egypt, the question arises how would Muhammad Ali be made to fit Egyptian history? Here one encounters in popular writings two main variants of the Oriental Despotism model as it could be applied to answering this question. The first of these two variants is that although Muhammad Ali was an outsider to Egypt, he fitted perfectly into a very long tradition of the Oriental despot, a tradition going back thousands of years of which the Ottoman period was simply the last few minutes. The second variant is that Muhammad Ali differed from any and all of his predecessors in important ways; most notably in his openness to the West and in his modernisation, Muhammad Ali marking a decisive turning point in the history of Oriental Despotism. This variation in particular sees no value in the study of the Ottoman period except for the purpose of contrast. Other possibilities that perhaps exist but which don't fit the paradigm so neatly are not so commonly pursued; for example that Muhammad Ali was a part of some kind of political and economic evolution which had begun with Ali Bey and Carlo Rossetti and which was specific to a fairly short period of Egyptian history, one beginning around 1760 or, alternatively, that Muhammad Ali was a part of the age of enlightened despotism and mercantilism which was going on in his period in many countries. Neither of these latter two possibilities serves to build him up to be this unique watershed in history which the paradigm demands and perhaps for this reason they are of interests only to specialists. Moving from the idea of springing from nothing to that of how the Pasha ruled and what he accomplished, we find ourselves going over familiar ground which seems somehow no longer so familiar. How he ruled is assumed to be top down. As most of the upper and middle strata of the power structure have yet to be studied in great detail, there is no particular book to turn to which refutes the assumption of one man rule out of hand, but by this point there are at least inroads into this traditional position. Certainly, doubts about it have been expressed. At the very least, Muhammad Ali is known to have relied on merchants who funded and helped organise his campaigns and who doubtless profited from them and may even have encouraged them. It is possible that his rule was not necessarily all that despotic, this point has not been systematically looked into and certainly not looked into any comparative sense. We do know that many in the Azhar were clearly out of sympathy with his programme and that he simply co- existed with them. The question of how he ruled implies who his allies were. Those who take Muhammad Ali to be a product of the French cite the French who worked for the Egyptian government in the 1820's and 1830's and proceed to discuss Egyptian development as an achievement of French culture. Those who take this development more in the context of Arab history emphasise the role Egyptians were playing. In either case, however, something of a contradiction appears. Oriental Despotism is a model designed to explain stasis. It is not one set up to explain the rapid development that was taking place, whatever the alliances may have been. ALEXANDRIAN COSMPOLITANISM: The kind of industrialisation and other changes that were taking place therefore needed some kind of unusual explanation, one outside the usual logic of the paradigm, and indeed at this point one finds that an unusual explanation was ingeniously created by those upholding the paradigm. This explanation also appears in popular works; it is called Alexandrian cosmopolitanism. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Egypt developed because of the presence of a considerable number of foreigners who had taken up residence in Alexandria. Alexandria, as the explanation goes, was this remarkable ancient cosmopolitan city tied to Greece and which had nothing to do with the Orient and its despotism. Many foreigners lived there and their almost accidental presence in Egypt serves to explain how so much change could have taken place so quickly. Now this is not to say that Alexandria was not cosmopolitan, whatever that means, but simply to note that out of nowhere Alexander the Great had made a fairly dramatic comeback to help prop up the Oriental Despotism model, that in fact by the mid-nineteenth century, the Oriental Despotism model had taken on board the saga of a cosmopolitan Alexandria. Even this, however, caused problems for those upholding the paradigm. One finds that the term "cosmopolitanism" being adopted has been given an entirely non-standard and unexpected meaning; one associated with change and development as opposed to simply with a fascination with the world at the expense of one's own country. Whether the conventional meaning and the new meaning of the term cosmopolitanism fit together is an open question. BUILDING MODERN EGYPT: The Oriental Despotism model does of course focus on Muhammad Ali as the builder of modern Egypt. Three points about Muhammad Ali's development programme stand out, points commonly introduced by those who see Muhammad Ali this way. The first has to do with cultural modernisation, the second with industrialisation and the third with the army. No one disputes whether or not these are subjects of importance for the study of the period. The question that arises is to what extent does a great-man theory of history à la Oriental Despotism explain them and to what extent does it simply serve to obscure important features of these subjects? Cultural modernisation in Egypt in this period has traditionally centered heavily on the educational missions sent to France, on the translation movement and on the rise of the press and local education system. The development of the Arabic language as a vehicle flexible enough to receive a great deal of new technical vocabulary, allow for journalism or for the easy spread of education, does not receive as much attention. If it had, it would seem one would be focusing on the cultural revival of the late eighteenth century, on Al-Zabidi's dictionary and on the work of figures who transmitted this revival such as Shaykh Hasan al- `Attar as this was where the development of a modern type language seemed to have begun. What is defined as modern by the paradigm, however, is what is exogenous. Concerning the missions, the point of interest for modern scholars has always been the outcome. It is assumed that the mission was the only way to achieve this outcome. However, by the time these missions took place, Muhammad Ali could have bought copies of the relevant books, brought them to Cairo and had translators do the work of translating them, so one must consider the likelihood of calculations on the part of the French that this was a chance to influence Egyptian culture and that they put forth an attractive invitation and the likelihood of the calculation on the part of Muhammad Ali that the mission gave him a link to France. If true, this would explain not just the facilitation of the mission on the part of the French government but the time spent with Rifa'a al-Tahtawi by senior figures such as Jomard in Paris. From the point of view of the paradigm, Egypt was to be a blank slate. This was to be the dawn of modernity. The trouble is that the main document of the period, Tahtawi's own account of the mission, cannot easily be made to fit the paradigm. Consider how it begins. The author recalls arriving in Marseille and being greeted by one of his own family members from Upper Egypt who had been living in Marseille for some years as a Muslim. This is not the way the book is supposed to begin; it is supposed to begin as if it was written by someone discovering a new world. No doubt, if one reads it persuaded that Tahtawi is going to France to learn about the new world of parliaments and democracies, one slips by this perhaps without noticing it. The book however presents a number of other such conundrums. Still other conundrums appear when one considers how Muhammad Ali actually made use of culture. Muhammad Ali, to begin with, needed the clerks of his new bureaucracy to communicate with each other in understandable ways. The solution to this problem which one would have expected would have been the translation of a French bureaucratic style manual. But the solution in fact adopted was to make use of an adaptation by al- `Attar of the medieval heritage of Insha'. Muhammad Ali also needed the `ulama' to support and encourage students learning empirical anatomy so they (the students) could learn French medicine. Al-`Attar spoke about the importance of this new knowledge to the students and earned the praise of Clot Bey, among others. Perhaps he told the students about his own experiences in Istanbul witnessing the teaching of empirical anatomy or about his discovery of the empiricism of figures such as al-Razi as opposed to the logical deductive approach to medicine of Ibn Sina. Again, the issue was not merely one of access to new knowledge, but it was as well the creative adaptation to make it fit. Among the most important cultural insights one might take away from a study of the period of Muhammad Ali would be the idea that what rigidifies a language most is not whether it has to make greater or lesser use of loan words at a given point, but how it conceives its own grammar. For language to progress there needs to be a critical reassessment of what about the tradition of grammar that should be dropped as unneeded and what should be emphasized. This was the center point of al-`Attar's teaching and much of his writing. How many people today know of Al-`Attar's work in this area on the commentary on the text known as al-Azhariya ? The Oriental Despotism model proceeds differently as we have been showing on every single one of these points. All that is new or relevant to modernity, for it, is foreign. Internal adaptations and developments are scarcely worth mentioning. All that ever happens internally is a reaction to what is foreign and modern. Such definitions of modernity make the work of figures like Al-`Attar invisible and this is unfortunate and has other consequences as well. For example, such definitions explain the meaning and importance of the idea of nahda in Egypt and even give the nahda its meaning. Because of the Oriental Despotism paradigm, the nahda (modern Renaissance) is defined as a group made up of writers employing Western forms such as the novel or, alternatively, the nahda is what they produced. Emulation is what makes them modern. The nahda circa 1910 then is the culmination of what Muhammad Ali began in 1815. The question one might want to go back to is how much of virtually contemporary Egyptian culture gets explained by depending on this paradigm. In the manuscript catalogues for 1250- 1350 Hijri, there are hundreds of writers listed. The Oriental despotism/ nahda model seems able to make use of a handful of them until now. Industrialisation is another obvious theme for any student of the Muhammad Ali period. It does seem that Muhammad Ali had the idea of relative economic self-sufficiency as a goal in the 1820's and was moving in that direction. By the 1830's, this was less and less the case. By the end of the 1830's his mind was more on perpetuating the rule of his family than it was on industrialising and this, we learn from the treaties, was something acceptable to the leading European powers as well. It would seem to be the case when one reviews the treaties of 1838 and 1840, what one is looking at is more a matter of the Rise of the Rich than the Rise of the West. Class trumps nation. The world's ruling classes embraced Muhammad Ali. National development could be given up. Another feature of the way writers have looked at Muhammad Ali's industrialization -- again given the paradigm -- is in terms of its level and rarely in terms of its location, its politics and or who got the jobs. Such issues don't seem to writers on Egypt to be historically important; they are simply a part of the sociological background. Thus in a hazy way, we know that Muhammad Ali chose to put most of his industry in Cairo and the Delta and that this played into a pattern that was to lead to the hegemony of the Delta over the Sa`id in modern history. The location of industry in the study of other countries is a matter of central concern. It is assumed one can infer from it a good deal about who has power and who doesn't. A factory is an asset for a town. For Egypt, so far as one can tell, the question hasn't arisen because it has always been assumed that decision-making was so centralised that regional politics would not find its way into it. Given the problems of the Oriental Despotism model, it might be an interesting project to study the decision-making that surrounded factory-siting to see who was really involved. Muhammad Ali unquestionably developed a much more formidable army than the ones which had existed before and it is logical, if one's own theory of social change is a trickle-down, for one to look at the army. Many have. It seems clear that by relying on foreign officers and by making use of essentially defenseless peasants as conscripts, Muhammad Ali was able to impose something of the modern drill technique which had revolutionised the European armies of the later eighteenth century. It is also the case that this led to his empire building phase. What the impact of the army was on Egyptian society in a broader sense is more difficult to say. What is one to make of the mutinies and mutilations and other manifestations of dissent? What is one to make of the fact that Egypt by treaty agreement had only a skeletal army for a good bit of the century? Putting these concerns aside, it is not surprising to find that scholars who start from the premise that whatever Muhammad Ali did had to be new, meaning that it would have no precedent in the eighteenth century, naturally tend to emphasise what was new about the new army. While this is fair enough, armies, in fact, are almost inevitably neither one thing nor another. Thus we find that the end of the uprising of the Hawwara in 1857-8 in the Sa`id was brought about through a compromise on the part of the government in which the Hawwara serving in the army as tribal levies would keep their regalia and not wear the army uniform. Perhaps the study of national armies might better be presented as some kind of compromise between old and new. RETHINKING WORLD HISTORY: To conclude this essay, I return to the opening point that there seems to be a disjuncture between the technical writing on Muhammad Ali by students of Egyptian history and the popularised writing typical of fields such as world history among others. In the latter Muhammad Ali lives on serenely as this Oriental Despot and one wonders why. Why do we find this disjuncture? What appears to be going on which might explain the non-assimilation of new information is that fields such as world history are committed to upholding the "Rise of the West" paradigm while history on the national level in many places is more ambivalent about the need to do so. If one sets out to defend the "Rise of the West", one has to somehow show that the West keeps rising each century and to do this one needs to establish an Orient, that is a place which is stagnant and of course a place which will eventually be modernised thanks to Europe. The existence of the Orient makes the idea of an Occident make sense. When one needs to establish something as Oriental and despotic, Muhammad Ali has long been an irresistible choice. European travel books of the period play up these features if their authors were frustrated with their commercial dealings and they often were. Even al-Jabarti could be counted on to express his discontent. In more recent years many other writers have picked up on this theme and quoted these earlier books as their sources. Working from the perspective of specialisation, it is hard to know what to think when one's subject becomes so helpful to the whole world in its distortions of modern history that teachers everywhere have it memorised. One encounters world history teachers in the US. who know "all about" Muhammad Ali and his modernisation programme. It makes one quite uncomfortable. One might think all this development and learning is actually quite harmful, that it blocks Egyptians today in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences by leaving them marginalised if they choose to write about Egypt. Some such intuition is pushing me to see the need for the construction of an alternative approach to Egyptian history, perhaps one conceived in terms of a dual project of re-thinking both national and world history at the same time. * The writer is professor of history at Temple University and the author of Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840 (Austin, 1979, Syracuse 1998, and AUC, 1999) and Beyond Eurocentrism: a New View of Modern World History (Syracuse, 1996).
